The Importance of Community in WordPress in 2022?

With Special Guest Michelle Frechette Director of Community Engagement for StellarWP at Liquid Web

In addition to her work at StellarWP, Michelle is the Podcast Barista at WPCoffeeTalk.com, cofounder of underrepresentedintech.com, creator of wpcareerpages.com, the president of the board for BigOrangeHeart.org, Director of Community Relations, and contributor at PostStatus.com, author, business coach, and a frequent organizer and speaker at WordPress events. Michelle lives outside of Rochester, NY where she’s an avid nature photographer. You can learn more about Michelle at meet Michelle. online.https://twitter.com/michelleames
https://www.linkedin.com/in/michellefrechetteames/
https://www.facebook.com/michellemariefrechette
https://www.instagram.com/michelleames/
https://profiles.wordpress.org/michelleames/

This Weeks Main Questions

#1 – Michelle how did you get into the crazy world of WordPress?

#2 – Can you explain some of the key things you do connect to being the director of community engagement for StellarWP at Liquid Web?

#3 – What do you see as some of the key challenges and opportunities that WordPress faces in the next 12 to 18 months connected to building up the community?

#4 – Community seems to have become a semi buzzword in the world of SaaS and platforms like WordPress, would you agree with this statement, and what do you think “community in 2022” really means when it comes to WordPress and similar online platforms

#5 – In the world of semi post-COVID-19 people are speculating on how the real physical and the online worlds will work together and I feel you can clearly see this in the WordPress community what treads do you see building momentum connected to this question?

#6 – What are some of the biggest mistakes you see people making on semi-regular basics connected to failing to build real community?

This Week Show’s Sponsors

Castos: Castos

LaunchFlows: LaunchFlows

Focuswp.co Focuswp

Bertha.ai: Bertha

Episode Transcript

(00:00)

Intro: Welcome to the WP-Tonic this week in WordPress and SaaS podcast, where Jonathan Denwood interviews, the leading experts in WordPress, e-learning, and online marketing to help WordPress professionals launch their own SaaS.

(00:15)

Jonathan Denwood: Hi there, folks. Welcome back to the WP-Tonic this week in WordPress and startups, we have a great guest; I’ve been really looking forward to this interview. We’re going to be talking everything about WordPress and community, and we have Michelle Frechette. I’ve just butchered her.

(00:35)

Michelle Frechette: Frechette.

(00:35)

Jonathan Denwood: That’s not too bad for me because of the listeners.

(00:38)

Michelle Frechette: Not bad at all.

(00:39)

Jonathan Denwood: The listeners are very used to my total butchery of our guests’ names; don’t take it personally, Michelle. I also have an old co-host returning, he’s been busy running his own business, but for this week and occasionally through the months, he will be coming back on the show. I have Steven back, so, Steven would you like to quickly introduce yourself to the tribe again, Steven?

(01:04)

Steven Sauder: Yeah. My name is Steven Sauder from hustlefish.com. We’re an agency that focuses primarily on WordPress.

(01:12)

Jonathan Denwood: And, as I said, I have Michelle and Michelle is the director of community engagement at StellarWP, better known as the hosting company Liquid Web. But Stellar deals with everything around StellarWP, which is the company that has all the plugins and other things focused on WordPress, which Liquid Web owns. So, Michelle really knows her stuff about community. So, Michelle, do you want to also give a quick 10 seconds, 15 seconds intro about yourself, and then we’ll go into the main part of the interview, Michelle?

(01:46)

Michelle Frechette: Sure. Well, as you said, I work at StellarWP, which is the plugins part of Liquid Web. I am also the podcast barista at WPCoffeeTalk, and I am half of the podcast and project directors of underrepresentedintech.com, which works to help people who are in the underrepresented parts of technology find space at the table, as we say. I’m also the director, sorry, the president of the board at Big Orange Heart, which is a non-profit around the mental health challenges that we sometimes face as independent and remote workers.

(02:31)

Jonathan Denwood: I thought I was busy, Michelle, but you’re a busy, busy lady, to say the least.

(02:36)

Michelle Frechette: Yeah. And I also write and I’m on the staff at Post Status, so if you’re familiar with Post Status.

(02:42)

Jonathan Denwood: Oh, well, I’m not going to go there. I’m going to be nice to Post Status; it’s like kicking a dead cooked dog. So, there we go. So sorry. Before we go into the main part, I’m going to get in trouble for that remark, before we go into the main part of this great interview; I have a message from our major sponsors. We’ll be back in a few moments.

(03:10)

Ad: Hi there, folks. I just wanted to tell you about our major sponsor and that’s Castos. If you’re looking to get into podcasting for yourself or for clients, you need a top-quality podcasting platform, and that’s what you get with Castos. It has a superb interface, is really easy to use, and you’re not penalized for success, they have a flat-rate pricing structure, it doesn’t matter how many podcasts you make, how many downloads you achieve. You’re just pray at one fixed rate with Castos, plus there’s support and just the quality of the people is just amazing.

(03:58)

Ad: Hi there, folks, I want to tell you about one of our great new sponsors and that’s BlogVault. If you’re a WordPress professional you know the importance of having backup, I know that many hosting providers provide a great backup service, but normally they only provide 30 days of backup. And if the client site is hacked, it might be hacked for months before you or your client realizes that you have a major problem. So, what is the solution? Well, I use this product myself, I use BlogVault, BlogVault is the Rolls-Royce of backup solutions.

You do one full website backup, including the database, and that is stored offsite, so you’re not using any hosting resources, and then any updates to the website are backed up, and not the whole website or the whole database, only the changes. So, that really reduces bandwidth and hosting usage of your backups. It also is superb, great interface, great support, you get a three-stage insight with it as well, and migrations; moving your client’s website from one hosting provider to the other is just simple and flawless. I’ve been using BlogVault for years, myself, you should be using it, it is the best solution when it comes to WordPress backups. I’ll see you soon, folks. Bye

(05:45)

Jonathan Denwood: We’re coming back. I have some great offers from Castos and also BlogVault, our new major sponsor, plus all the other sponsors, and I have some recommendations around plugins services that I use myself. You can get all these goodies and they’re all free, tribe, by going to wp-tonic/recommendations, and you’ll find all the goodies there, and being that you’re WordPress startup people, you love your goodies, don’t you? So, I’ve already got myself into trouble for my previous comment, so I need to go into this interview straight away.

So, let’s start off, Michelle. How did you get into the crazy world of WordPress? You seem like such a calm, nice lady. How did you get into this crazy world, Michelle?

(06:43)

Michelle Frechette: It has something to do with non-profits and spaghetti, believe it or not, but I was in higher education for 25 years. And at the time I was running a massage school that was in two cities, and my best friend was a graduate of the massage school, and one of the things she said is people graduate and they have this, a thousand hours of education, but they have no idea how to be business owners and the things that they need to be successful.

So, she wanted to start a non-profit to support massage therapists in our state, and so she and I partnered up on that and her husband built us a website in WordPress. He gave us logins and we started sending him the content and his response was, hold up, ladies, I built the site, you get to populate it. I gave you the login, figure it out. So, I logged into the website and I was like, two things happened; first, I was afraid I was going to just crash the whole thing by pushing a button, I didn’t know whether or not I should push, that did not happen thankfully.

But the other thing that happened was like, wow, I could push publish, and my thoughts appeared instantaneously in the world for other people to read and see, and that was heady, that was just something.

(08:03)

Jonathan Denwood: The power, Michelle, you have the power.

(08:05)

Michelle Frechette: Right? Seriously. Nobody knew the site existed and, literally, only the two of us were reading it, but the potential was there.

(08:13)

Jonathan Denwood: Oh, yeah. That’s the word I use with all my clients, there’s potential there. You have to be very diplomatic haven’t you, there’s potential there.

(08:21)

Michelle Frechette: There’s potential. And so, I liked working with WordPress and I thought this is something that I might be able to do for other people, a little business on the side, or at least helping out people with marketing. Because I have an MBA in marketing and believe it or not eCommerce, but they.

(08:37)

Jonathan Denwood: I’m sorry to interrupt, I’m sorry, Michelle. But I’m just getting the impression that you’re a little bit of an overachiever.

(08:43)

Michelle Frechette: Well, I am the oldest child; I think that comes along with that. But it was exciting, the thought of being able to actually use the education that I had, but still, we learned everything about eCommerce, but we didn’t learn how to build websites. And so, I said to her husband, I said, would you be up to, I would pay you for your time, but would you teach me how to go from owning a URL, a domain name to actually having that be something on the web.

I said, I understand how to buy hosting, and I understand how to buy a domain. What I don’t know is how I get the domain on the host with a website that I can start to build in. And so, she works nights, they had five children between them. And he said, if you come over and feed the kids, I’ll teach you how to do that. So, I went over, we made spaghetti, that’s where the spaghetti comes in. The kids cleaned up the plates and we pulled up our laptops side-by-side, I purchased a domain, which I’m not even going to tell you what it was now because it probably still exists on the way back machine and I would be embarrassed if anybody saw it.

Because it was one of the first sites I ever built on my own, but it wasn’t just straight HTML, but I was just smitten with the idea, he refused to teach me one button install. He said, one-button install exists, you will use it, I know you’ll use it, but I want you to understand how the process works. So, we went to wordpress.org, we downloaded the files, we uploaded, and he taught me how to change salt keys, I still don’t understand what they mean. I understand what they do, but the idea of changing the salt keys and understanding what the WP config was.

I, literally, had one piece of paper with four points written on it. I went home and redid that process for myself so that I would understand how to do it, and so I built my first website that way. And then I built a website for somebody else and somebody else, and over the last, now it’s been 10 years, I’ve built over 300 different, one-pagers to multi-pagers to whatever, different websites. And by no means, am I the guru of design or the guru of development because I have very little development chops, but over the years I’ve been able to figure out how to help other people grow their businesses.

And as a result of that, ended up in the WordPress community by wanting our local meetup to be able to do more and help more people. And so, I took over organizing the local meetup that turned into, Hey, Rochester should have its own word camp. So, I had the first-word camp here, I started speaking at word camps. From that, I got a job as the first director of customer success at Give WP as you probably know, Give WP was purchased last year, acquired last year by Liquid Web, and that put me in the Liquid Web family, which is how I ended up at StellarWP.

So, it’s one of those things where the more you get involved, the more you put yourself out into the community and really seek to build those relationships with people, the greater opportunities you have in the community. And that’s kind of how I ended up where I am.

(12:04)

Jonathan Denwood: Here we go. The star is born, as they say. That was one of my twits to you; actually, you’re saying that a star is born.

(12:12)

Michelle Frechette: I think so.

(12:13)

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. So, Steven, over to you.

(12:16)

Steven Sauder: Yeah. So, what was being involved in the WordPress community and starting a word camp and stuff, in conversations that I’ve had with other people in the WordPress community and even just internally with myself. It feels like to be actively involved, one should know how to code or know more of the underline of WordPress, was that hard to get the courage to be like, no, I can meet at word camp, but I don’t need to be able to get into the code and know exactly how WordPress works under the hood? Or was that a very easy transition for you?

(12:54)

Michelle Frechette: There was definitely some of that, what do they call the imposter syndrome at first? Because you’re like, ugh. And you sit down at this, what do they call it, the happiness bar? You sit down at this table and you’re listening to people, helping people, and it’s like they’re speaking Greek because it’s all of this, oh, I see you did this array, and I’m like, what’s an array, and all these other things that I have no clue about. So, there was a little bit of that. Before I even did anything really, I kind of pulled the band-aid off and applied to speak at a word camp.

And my topic was the hidden secrets of WordPress. Little things that people don’t understand, like your screen options and things like that, that nobody thinks to look at those places, you kind of get in and there’s this huge dashboard in front of you, and you kind of figure out how to work through it. But there are a lot of things that could help you. So, I gave a talk and I stood up in front of that room full of people who probably had been WordPressing way longer than me, thinking, I don’t know if I can swear on here, but thinking, oh, shit, these people are going to know way more than me, and they’re going to be like, that’s not true.

No, no, no, you have that wrong. And instead, what happened is, I finished that talk, I went out to the happiness bar and I had a line of people ready to talk to me and pick my brain. And I thought, well, by golly, I do know what I’m talking about if other people are wondering and wanting to know more. And so, from there, I don’t know, I like the spotlight a little bit, I’m not going to lie. I also like helping people, and I think if you look at the body of that I do, and the things that I do, and look at my bio and things like that, you’ll see that the majority of what I have done in WordPress is because I really do want to help other people be successful.

(14:47)

Steven Sauder: Yeah. I think that’s amazing, that’s one of the amazing parts of the WordPress community is that there’s space for everybody, no matter where your knowledge is. And somebody who’s probably been coding WordPress forever can learn tons of stuff from somebody that just is an admin guru that just knows everything on the admin dashboard. And it’s a very beautiful, sort of interplay of relationships and stuff within the WordPress system.

(15:15)

Michelle Frechette: And one of the things that’s important to me to tell, I tell this to everybody. I don’t think of myself as a WordPress celebrity. Of course, I think of other people that way, but every person that you think of as a WordPress celebrity in the space is just a person who goes to bed at night, wakes up, tries to figure out what to have for breakfast, sits in front of a laptop, doesn’t know what they’re going to write or do first thing in the morning, we’re all just people.

So, whether you are somebody who truly has that imposter syndrome, afraid to talk to people, or you have all of the hubris in the world, the first time that somebody that I had thought of as one of my celebrities talked to me as an equal, like, Hey, Michelle, I saw something that you did, blah, blah, blah. And I was just fangirling over the fact that these people were talking to me and knew who I was. But realistically, everybody has to deal with kids with snotty faces and everybody has to deal with like, oh my God, it’s raining out, and I forgot my umbrella, and whatever.

And, oh, I shouldn’t have eaten that shellfish last night, whatever it is, we’re all just human beings, and I think that’s the beauty of the WordPress community.

(16:20)

Jonathan Denwood: So, Michelle you have an impressive title, director of community engagement. So, what does that, basically, entail, what do you see as your two to three key things that are on top of the list that you see as being the most important elements of this title?

(16:49)

Michelle Frechette: So, a lot of what I do as the director of community engagement is taking a look at what our different plugins are and find ways that I can help them help people in the community, whether that’s finding people that can give a talk somewhere, finding somebody at, let’s say, at LearnedDash that can do a talk at a local meetup. Who’re people are asking about doing courses or somebody who needs more ideas on how to use WooCommerce.

And I can connect them with Iconic or, Do the Woo, so that podcast; I have made lots of opportunities for people within all of our plugins that are using WooCommerce or have integrations with WooCommerce to be able to get out in the community. And it’s not just to promote ourselves, of course, I’m in marketing, of course, I want to promote ourselves, I’m not stupid. And I’m not going to try to pull the wool over anybody’s eyes. But the reason that we exist is that all of our plugins and all of our software help people achieve what they want to do, so I was with Give WP for over four years.

At Give WP, we help non-profits raise money to do the good that they do in the world, so if the local dog shelter to the biggest Ronald McDonald house can use Give WP to raise money to help make a difference in whatever their community is. So, if I can get somebody from Give talking and highlight them out in the world, that in turn helps more people learn about Giving to do better in their communities. And so, that is my goal, is to integrate us into the community as helpers, as people that can elevate other businesses and other non-profits and organizations, to be able to do better at what they do.

(18:40)

Jonathan Denwood: Just a quick follow-up question before we go for our break. Basically, and I don’t think it solely relates to Stellar and what you’re doing, I think this is a general observation is you seem like in the WordPress community, you seem to have really two distinct audiences. You have the kind of quasar power implementer, graphic designer developer. That’s part of the ego system, as I call it, that go to work camps, and then you have the end-user that might do a search on Google, might be looking to build a membership site, a course, and they’re used to WordPress.

They like the idea of keep utilizing WordPress, and they just buy your plugin, but they have no real idea what they’re going to do with it. How do you satisfy those two groups? And have you thought about it, I’m sure you have, and what are some of your insights about how you deal with these two very distinct groups if you agree with my outline?

(19:56)

Michelle Frechette: Sure. So, the people who are in the know, the WordPress users that understand WordPress and they understand their websites and they buy a plugin and we reach out to them and we’re like, Hey, do you need any help? They’re like, listen, lady, back off, I have got covered. So, there’s that group. And what we do is we just supply information. I think knowledge is based on websites, whether you call it documentation knowledge base, whatever it is, keeping that as up to date as possible, and then being responsive to people’s needs.

I think that really satisfies a lot of the people who are kind of in the know the designers, the developers. The other side who are, let’s say it is that dog shelter, and they’re like bootstrapping and they found WordPress because WordPress is cheap and they want an events calendar, or they want a fundraiser on their website. Those are the people that they’re like, oh, well this will work, and they buy it and they’re like, oh my gosh, there are so many buttons, there are so many settings, what do I do? So, for those people, not only is the knowledge base there because anybody can access knowledge base and documentation.

But those people are also very active in our Facebook group, so almost every one of our products has a Facebook group where people help each other, they ask each other questions, they ask for best practices, they ask for people’s feedback on what they’re building. Whether it’s a course, whether it’s a site, whether it’s a fundraising page, whatever that is. We really do those kinds of things plus webinars; we’re running Twitter spaces in some of our plugins. So, we’re trying to make us as accessible as possible so that whether you have a ton of knowledge and one question or no knowledge and a million questions, we can meet your needs. And that’s what our community’s about.

(21:40)

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. So, what I get from that is, and I totally agree with what you’ve outlined, is that building community is not only solely about building community in the word camp kind of developer power professional. But it’s also utilizing community to build resources that help the non-member of that larger WordPress community that are just looking to use LearnDash because they have a specific need. Would I be right about that?

(22:17)

Michelle Frechette: Yeah, I think that’s pretty accurate. Yeah.

(22:19)

Jonathan Denwood: Here we go. I got something, right. That’s a rarity, isn’t it, if you’ve been listening to this. We’re going to go for, I like the show already, we’re going to go for our break, folks. We’ll be back in a few moments.

 

(22:34)

Ad: Hi there, folks, are you looking to build modern shopping cart landing pages using the power of WooCommerce for yourself or for clients, and you want to do that quickly with little need to know about hand-coding? Well, if the answer is, yes, and it should be, I have the perfect answer for you and that’s LaunchFlows. LaunchFlows is the most modern and easiest way of building modern landing shopping pages for your clients. It also works natively with Gutenberg and the leading page builders like Elementor or Divvy; it’s really flexible, and really powerful.

(23:25)

Ad: Hey, tribe, are you trying to scale your agency, but struggling to find time to work on your business because you’re always stuck working in your business? Head over to focuswp. co, where you can subscribe to an instant team of white-label geeks and creatives to delegate to; use code WP-Tonic for a special discount just for the tribe. With FocusWP, you don’t have to worry about hiring, firing, or any other HR nightmares, just submit a ticket and your new team will dive in. Focus on what you love, outsource the rest.

(23:55)

Jonathan Denwood: We’re coming back. We’ve had a feast, a feast about community. I just want to point out, I do a fantastic newsletter. It has all the great weekly and news stories about WordPress and startups. It also has recommendations from the panel on the Friday show. Plus it has an editorial that I, myself, write, and I have a sarcastic dig at many things or people in the WordPress community and they love me for it, and I love them back. It’s hilarious. Please sign up for it. How do you obtain this great newsletter, you might ask yourself? Well, go over to wp-tonic/newsletter and you can sign up for that free.

So, Michelle, what are some of the key challenges and opportunities? Unless you’re talking about death, normally in your challenges, there are also opportunities, you don’t normally see it at the time, but that’s how it normally pans out. What do you see as some of the challenges, but also opportunities in WordPress in general in the next 12, 18 months?

(25:22)

Michelle Frechette: I think one of the biggest challenges will be dealing with a post or almost post-pandemic community. I know that in the height of what we considered lockdown and pandemic panic, we were doing absolutely no in-person events, and that was mostly because of federal and state mandates and area mandates around the world, globally. And there’s still some of that, and there’s still a fear, and my mother was just diagnosed yesterday with COVID, and so it’s still a reality. I think we’re dealing with it better and we know what we’re doing better now, and the strains are better, et cetera. But when we were in the lockdown-type situation, everything was online.

And so, all of our word camps, those were subsidized to be online, now that we are starting to return to in-person camps, for example, Porto, word camp Europe is coming up in June.

(26:23)

Jonathan Denwood: I’m going. Are you going, Michelle?

(26:24)

Michelle Frechette: I’m not; my father’s funeral is actually at that same time.

(26:28)

Jonathan Denwood: So sorry.

(26:28)

Michelle Frechette: Thank you. So, I won’t be able to attend, I was planning to, but he had to go, and just do what he did. But the next one is Montclair.

(26:40)

Jonathan Denwood: I’m sorry. I’m coming across as a bit of a twit here, aren’t I? Right, sorry.

(26:47)

Michelle Frechette: It is what it is, and he was a good man, but I can’t be in two places at once. And so, word camp Montclair will be my first in-person word camp, will be at the end of June in Montclair, New Jersey, and as somebody who is a word camp mentor as well as somebody who attends and speaks and also sponsors word camps through my work. I am looking forward to that first in-person word camp, but I also know that it’s not a possibility with the money that you raise to do both in-person and have that also be a hybrid event and be online.

The cost and the sheer number of people it takes to do either one or the other is ridiculous, and to double or triple that, to have both of those. So, I think the challenge is going to be, especially, for people in remote areas who don’t have the ability to travel or who are either compromised physically or afraid of travel, in a coming out of COVID kind of thing, will be the isolation that hits those people when they can no longer be attending all of those events online and the comradery.

The world felt a little bit smaller when we were all doing online events together, and I spoke at word camp Taiwan, I spoke at word camp India because I didn’t have to get in a plane and go to those places. And I was able to interact with people who are all the way around the globe, from where I live. That’s not going to be possible.

(28:20)

Jonathan Denwood: Do you think there’s the possibility of hybrids where you might have one live event, but a short, maybe one day, and then you have a virtual element? I suppose it’s difficult because, I suppose this is the thing that people are just going to have to feel out, aren’t they? How they deal with hybrid events, keep on doing online and doing live; it’s just going to take a while to get a feel for it won’t it?

(28:52)

Michelle Frechette: Yeah. The hybrid events are just too expensive, they really are. So, you’re not going to see word camps in hybrid unless they are the flagship events, which are word camp Asia, word camp Europe and word camp US, but there are organizations like Big Orange Heart who have word fest, so we do two word fest lives a year and that is a global event, 24 hours; it’s not easy to stay awake for that 24 hours. I have to pick which continent I’m sleeping through by the way, because I can’t stay awake for 24 hours anymore. Because let’s face it, 24 hours is not 24 hours, it’s 24 hours of conference with a good 12 hours being awake before it.

(29:27)

Jonathan Denwood: You’re doing better than me, Michelle, I’m lucky to keep awake for 2 hours, let alone 24.

(29:35)

Michelle Frechette: But those kinds of events, I think webinars word fest, making sure that we still have a way for people around the world to be able to participate in community type events like that is going to be paramount to us continuing to have the kind of tight-knit community that we’ve really developed over the last few years.

(29:59)

Jonathan Denwood: That’s great. Over to you, Steven.

(30:03)

Steven Sauder: As you’re thinking about, I don’t know, the transition and the pros and cons. You mentioned all the Facebook groups and stuff, and I noticed this huge bump in just people talking, collaborating on Facebook during the pandemic and stuff, just out of necessity. And I think we all just leaned into that because that’s where our communities were and stuff. But when you’re thinking about these plugins that do have these communities that span geographic regions and time zones and stuff, do you think Facebook will still be a primary place for people to get on and collaborate around?

Or do you think we’ll start seeing people go in different directions and maybe that being broken up a little bit?

(30:53)

Michelle Frechette: So, I’ve actually thought about this a lot because a lot of other software solutions have tried to take the place of Facebook groups, Circle or Circles or something I know, it looks like Facebook, it acts like Facebook, but it’s an additional login, that’s something that I haven’t seen be very successful yet, anyway. Clubhouse, I had that on my phone for a hot minute and then I was like, I’m done with this, I don’t want to listen in to all these conversations.

And then there are the Twitter spaces, which are good for event-type things, but it’s not really building community, but now Twitter has this whole idea of this communities too, which is interesting because you still have to participate in 280 characters or less, so you can’t really post the problems and questions that you can in a Facebook group. I haven’t seen anything yet as ubiquitous as Facebook that makes it as easy to participate, so I’m going to guess that at least in the next several years, it’s still going to be Facebook groups that are going to be the primary places that we look to for these kinds of things.

(32:06)

Jonathan Denwood: What’s your attitude toward Discord?

(32:10)

Michelle Frechette: Discord is interesting. So, Discord has the possibility, but again, it’s one additional place. People are already logging into Facebook, they already have Facebook accounts, they’re connected to their friends and family there, they’re connected to their high schools and the people they went to summer camp in 1982 with. God, I just aged myself really bad with that comment. But anyway, the idea of having one more thing. So, if you’re already a Discord user, that’s great, am I logged into discord?

Yes. Do I pay attention to it as often as I should? No. Am I logged in because of a certain community that I want to stay connected with? Yes. And so, there are the possibilities. We use Discord for word fest actually, on the day of word fest that’s our behind the scenes communication, that’s our walkie-talkies to each other. The rest of the months, the rest of the year, the other 363 days a year we’re not using discord for that. So, I think it has some potential, but I think it really has potential, I’m going to say it, it has potential for people who are younger than me who are in there anyway.

I think it’s people who have adopted it for gaming and things like that. I’m 53 years old, Discord was like, ick, I signed up for Twitch too, and I was like, oh, I don’t even remember what my login for Twitch was now. But there are all these different areas and different ways to be connected with one another. I still think though, that because of the age range that’s still using Facebook, that is going to be the number one area for a while, anyway.

(33:41)

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. Because, obviously, as you know, Michelle, I’m doing a virtual summit at the end of September and I’ve decided that our community chat and community-building platform is going to Discord. Because I think there’s a lot of, for a live summit using Facebook is probably not appropriate anyway, and there’s a lot of baggage around, especially, in the WordPress community around utilizing it. And so, I’ve been doing a big dive and Discord has its own history and problems around security and all these platforms have their pros and negatives, don’t they? A lot of them.

(34:37)

Michelle Frechette: I think for an event, something like Discord or Slack or one of those things is perfect because it’s real-time communication conversation. And it’s actually one area that you’re looking at; you’re not distracted by all the other things happening on Facebook. I think for community building over time, you want something where people will continue to log in and contribute.

(34:57)

Jonathan Denwood: Exactly. Over to you, Steven.

(34:59)

Steven Sauder: Have you guys started talking about meta-verse type stuff in community building or is that still like, yeah, it’s too bleeding-edge, let’s wait years down the road before we even tackle that?

(35:13)

Jonathan Denwood: You can tell Steven’s a nerd, can’t you folks?

(35:20)

Michelle Frechette: For me personally, meta-verse is behind NFTS and crypto and I’m not touching those with a 10-foot pole yet either.

(35:27)

Steven Sauder: Fair enough. Yeah. It’s still early days and who knows how that’s all going to shake out.

(35:33)

Michelle Frechette: I don’t even have an Oculus, Steve.

(35:35)

Steven Sauder: Fair enough.

(35:38)

Jonathan Denwood: Alright. I think we’re going to wrap up the podcast. I can’t talk again. Podcast. That’s a popular video podcast host, isn’t it? You can’t talk, tribe, but you got used to it, haven’t you? I think we’re going to wrap up the podcast part of the show, folks. Michelle’s agreed to stay on for bonus content. How do you listen to the whole interview plus the bonus content and see the glorious Steven looking as good as possible? Well, you can see all that on the WP-Tonic YouTube channel, which you need to go to, and please subscribe to it, and we have a ton of bonus content on that channel.

Plus, you’ll be able to see a recording of the live show that I do every Friday with Spencer Forman, which is all about building funnels and giving you breakdowns of your ones, and it’s hilarious. You definitely want to see that. So, Michelle, how do people find out more about you and what you’re up to, Michelle?

(36:46)

Michelle Frechette: Sure. The best place, I love the idea of a link tree, but I hate giving somebody else my traffic, so I created my own. So, I’m at meetmichelle.online, use Cadence, by the way, Cadence and page builders to be able to do that, which any page builder is phenomenal for that kind of thing. So, meet Michelle.online, that’ll get you all my socials, that’ll get you on my website, everything else. In one place, a one-stop shop, you can find out everything you need to know.

(37:15)

Jonathan Denwood: Yes. And it’s been a pleasure talking to you, Michelle, and hopefully, you will agree to come back on the show later on in the year.

(37:22)

Michelle Frechette: I would love it.

(37:24)

Jonathan Denwood: Steven, how can people, your fanbase, I’ve had emails about where’s Steven, where’s the good-looking, charming in co-host? I take that on my sharp, broad-shoulders, Steven, but I knew my place. So, Steven, how can people find out more about you, Steven?

(37:43)

Steven Sauder: Yeah. Head over to hustlefish.com, and you can see what we have going on over there.

(37:48)

Jonathan Denwood: Right. That’s great. We have, as I said, we have some fabulous guests coming on the show in the next couple of months, folks, I’m amazed at the standard, just like Michelle. We’ll be having some great conversations that are focused at you, the WordPress professional, and you that are starting a startup. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.

(38:11)

Outro: Hey, thanks for listening, we really do appreciate it. Why not visit the mastermind Facebook group and also to keep up with the latest news, click wp-tonic.com/newsletter. We’ll see you next time.

Sign-up For The WP-Tonic’s Weekly Newsletter

Sign up For WP-Tonic’s Weekly Newsletter Where You Read The Latest WordPress News & The Best Deals! Join The Tribe?

NEWSLETTER
#687 WP-Tonic This Week in WordPress & SaaS With Guest Michelle Frechette was last modified: by