#15 Listen To Your Community, Serve Them Creatively
At Creator Economy Expo (CEX) 2023 Jesse Cole was the closing keynote and one of the best speakers I’ve ever seen. He is the founder of Fans First Entrainment and owner of the Savannah Bananas— an exhibition baseball team with a mission to “make baseball fun” — and they certainly do with dancing baseball players, kilts for uniforms and the Banana Nanas dancing team.
Jesse shared his company ethos of “listen carefully, respond creatively” referencing the creative strategies of innovators like Walt Disney as inspiration in his way of thinking about rapid experimentation.
Rapid experimentation is core to building a community-driven business. I had the opportunity to speak at CEX as well where I shared design-thinking strategies and specifically the idea from Tim Brown that before we make choices in our businesses we need to diverge our thinking and create choices.
Ann Handley gave a keynote about writing in an AI world where she shared that writing is about thinking. Creativity is human and requires infusing your personality that only you have. Your uniqueness (and everyone is unique) is your competitive edge in creativity.
Ann Handley also shared the writing strategy to carry an idea to its ridiculous conclusion. This is similar to a principle in improv comedy to take your ideas to the extreme. The only way to innovate in your business is to let your ideas get wild.
Jesse Cole reinvented the “typical” in his world— the experience of going to a baseball game— and continues to do so with rapid experimentation. What can you reinvent?
Fostering a community builds relationships that are greater than short-term profits. It’s always going to move the needle in your business positively when you serve your community with integrity.
One week after attending a Savannah Bananas baseball game you receive a video to your inbox recapping the experience in an entertaining video with the overall message “thank you” — Jesse Cole shared at CEX that this email has an 82% open rate. 82 PERCENT.
Every touchpoint with your community is an opportunity to create an incredible thoughtfully designed experience.
What can you reinvent to WOW? This could be anything from a post-purchase email to creating a product that doesn’t exist yet.
Take a few moments to reflect:
Are you making time to create ideas regularly?
Are you listening to your community?
Are you spending time connecting with them?
Create unique experiences in your business through experiments. Try this exercise to develop an experiment you can run:
Identify an area of the business to analyze and innovate. This could be an onboarding sequence, digital product, post-purchase process, sales cycle, etc.
Connect with your community. Get feedback on this area of the business and identify opportunities for improvement. Make sure to pay attention to where you can go above and beyond
Analyze the insights and feedback you got. Make sure to look for a correlation across all your datapoints— what story is your data telling you? Where do you see opportunities to make the community experience better?
Create ideas. How can you make this area of the business better based on all of the insights you’ve reviewed? Let all guardrails down here and get ridiculous with your ideation process.
Identify an experiment to try. Start with one experiment and then the rest will snowball from there. The more you experiment in your business, the more you’ll improve and grow.
Let me know what you come up with when you try this exercise!
And if you want some help with this process I would love to. In fact, I have a workshop service specific to help you with steps 4 & 5.