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How Marketers Can Use the Clubhouse App – Mike Stelzner
The Agents of Change

How Marketers Can Use the Clubhouse App – Mike Stelzner

Curious about this new Clubhouse platform, we decided to dig a bit deeper into it and find out just what it was all about and why so many business professionals – and well-known names – were flocking to it.

We reached out to Mike Stelzner, from Social Media Examiner, to get his take on this since he’s always ahead of the curve. And he did not disappoint. In this episode, Mike gives us the quick and dirty lowdown about what Clubhouse is, how it works, who’s hanging out there, and the many ways you can be leveraging the platform for your business.

Rich: My next guest is probably my most frequent guest on this podcast, and for good reason. He’s kind of like the Tom Hanks of SNL, he just keeps on coming back because the audience loves him. When he speaks, marketers listen.

He’s the founder of Social Media Examiner, the voice behind the Social Media Marketing Podcast, and the brains behind the annual – when there’s not a global pandemic – Social Media Marketing World, probably the best social media or content marketing conference in the world.

I call him a friend and a mentor, and he’s really one of the reasons I am who I am today, Michael Stelzner. Mike, welcome back to the podcast.

Mike: Rich, you are the master of writing introductions of people. I just got to say, that was well done.

Rich: Well, the first time I’ll take somebody’s stuff, but when they come back, I can’t just say the same thing over and over again. And you know, I speak the truth and I think a lot of people in the social media realm, in the marketing realm, we do look to you as somebody who walks the walk and really understands things and really loves the different platforms and the whole social media thing. That’s who you are, and you’re so good at running a business that I – and a lot of us – look up to you in the way that you’re running your business today.

Mike: Thanks, man.

Rich: All right. So today we’re here to talk about something relatively new, and that’s the social media platform Clubhouse. In fact, you’re the reason I’m on Clubhouse, and probably the reason why hundreds if not thousands of other marketers have flocked to the platform. So let’s start with the most basic question, what is Clubhouse?

Mike: I think the easiest way to think about clubhouse is to think about Facebook Live. Everybody knows what that is, right? You go on there and you push a button and you’re live in front of an audience. The difference is this is only audio. So, this is what I call live audio.

You have an opportunity on this new platform, and it only launched in April 2020, so it’s definitely young. You have an opportunity to get in front of your ideal customer and prospects, and to basically do what we used to do when we would come to Social Media Marketing World, right? You can get up on a stage, you can bring other people up on the stage, you can have a rich dialogue, and it’s great for developing business opportunities. I mean, that’s kind of my easiest way of describing it at a high level. It is an audio only platform. And when I say audio only, I mean it. There is no private messaging. There’s no chat. It is purely an audio platform.

Rich: All right. That makes a lot of sense. So of course, social media platforms before marketers came to them, they’re meant to be fun. They’re meant to be social places, to connect with friends and family, share ideas. But as marketers, we’re also looking for other outcomes related directly or indirectly to our business. So what should a marketer or entrepreneur expect to get out of using Clubhouse?

Mike: Well, it’s really fascinating because some people that go on Clubhouse, they don’t know what to do and they’re like, “Ah, it wasn’t really for me”. Other people go on Clubhouse, like me and some of my friends and they’re like, “This is one of the coolest things I’ve experienced literally since Twitter was invented or since Periscope came out”.

So I think what you can expect, first of all, it is very, very addictive. And the reason why it’s addictive is because it’s really fun. It’s absolutely fascinating. There’s two factors to it. There’s the consumer side of it, which is like a live podcast you can listen to when you’re in your car or doing the dishes. But there’s also a content aspect of this.

The fascinating thing about Clubhouse is that if you can envision a bunch of people’s pictures on the screen, whether they’re talking or not, you can click on their picture and you can see their profile while you are listening to someone talk. You can go directly over to Instagram and you can message them on Instagram. You can go over to Twitter and tweet them. You can follow them. There’s all these fascinating social dynamics that are there. A lot of people that I know that have gone all in on this thing have found it to be the fastest way that they can develop leads, quality leads, and prospects. So people that are coaches, people that are consultants, people that are specialists.

Like, for example, let’s say you’re a real estate agent or let’s say you’re an interior designer. Even if you’re just in a local area like Maine, you could go on there and you could do a Maine-only interior design thing. And you could answer questions about interior design, and then all of a sudden rapidly you’ve got people that want to work with you.

Rich, you and I know that on the other social platforms, you have to work really hard to get in front of an audience because the algorithms stop you. You’re not allowed to really, it’s a short form, medium, right? All these other platforms. So you’re literally for seconds in front of people. What’s unique about Clubhouse is when it’s done, it’s gone forever. There is no recording. So it’s got that FOMO effect, right? So people don’t want to leave the room. They stick it out when it’s something interesting to them. And this ability to capture attention during weird times, evenings, weekends in the morning, and if you can use your voice and deliver value, it just develops that relational capital that normally would only happen at a trade show.

You know this, you’re a speaker. You go to a show, you get off the stage, people line up and want to talk to you. Well, the exact same thing happens with Clubhouse. If you can provide value, whether you’re the host of the room or whether you’re called up on the stage, all of a sudden people check you out and they look at you in a different light. And that allows you to develop “know, like, and trust” really, really rapidly. Which is why so many people, especially in the business and marketing side of things, see this as a rapid accelerant for business.

I’ve been told by so many of my friends, Cliff Ravenscraft is one of them, that this is the primary way he’s building his business. And so many other people are going all in on this platform as the primary vehicle. Now he’s a coach, and they’re using this platform as the main vehicle because they’ve never in their life experienced something that has grown their business as fast.

Rich: I do want to talk about how different people are using it, but you’ve mentioned the word “room” a couple of times. I’ve been on the platform a number of times now, I’m starting to get more familiar with it. I know that you have a really great tutorial over at Social Media Examiner, very granular, we’re going to link to it in the show notes. But I’d still love to get kind of an overview of the pieces that make up the platform. Things like hallways, rooms, clubs, and so on. Can you kind of explain that to the people who haven’t been on the platform yet?

Mike: Sure. You open up the app and instead of calling it a” feed”, they call it a “hallway”. So if you think about Facebook, when you scroll down and you see everything that’s going on, that’s the feed in Facebook. They call it the “hallway” in Clubhouse. And as you’re scrolling down, you’ll see rooms. And the room will have a title and it will show you the faces of people that are in the room.

So the title might be like “Social Media Marketing Tips – Everything you Need to Know”. Or it might be, “Cryptocurrency – Here’s How to Get Started”. You know, it could be a million different things, right? It’ll show you how many people are in the room. You click into the room and it’s instantly like walking into a conference room and you just begin to hear whoever’s talking.

And then if the hand raising feature is on, you can get into queue just like in a conference and you can raise your hand. You’ll be called up on the stage and you get a chance to talk. And if you do a great job, they might want you to stay up on the stage because maybe you’re an expert. And what’s great about rooms is it’s not about one person speaking like it is in a conference. It’s more of a collaborative environment where you’ve got a series of experts, more like a panel, that’s up on the stage in many of these experiences. So that’s what a “room” is.

Now everybody has a profile and the profile is your unique user identity that’s tied to your phone, but you can also apply for something called the “club”. So for example, if you look for Mike Stelzner on the app, you will see my profile. But if you go all the way to the bottom, you’ll see that I have a club called Social Media Examiner. And a club is kind of like a Facebook group meets a Facebook page. So you can have followers of a club, and that’s like a page. And then you can have members of a club, which is like a group.

And when you go live into a room or you start up a room. You can start up a room for anyone, you can start up a room for just members of a club, you can start up a room for just people that follow you. You can start up a room for all sorts of different things. So the club dynamic just allows you to kind of have your business, if you will, or have a concept. And whenever you host a room, like when I host a room it’ll say Social Media Examiner at the top – because that’s my club hosting the room – and then it will have the title underneath it. So a club is just like a functional dynamic that allows you to have followers and members.

And some people charge to belong to clubs. So you can start to think about how this could be an interesting opportunity if you have a paid membership kind of a thing, right? Maybe only people that are in your club or people that pay to belong to your club. And eventually they’re going to allow the monetization on the platform as well, and they’re going to pay people to create content on the platform in the same way Tik Tok does.

Rich: Interesting. Interesting. So the club is more about branding. Like you’re able to basically put your company name or your entrepreneurial name up there, and it’s usually around a theme. Like yours would obviously be social media, somebody else’s might be – as you mentioned – interior design.

Mike: But there’s a directory of clubs. There’s a directory of clubs, which is important to understand. So if people don’t know who you are, but maybe you’re the first one to start a club on copywriting and everybody sees that club and it’s not about your personal brand, it’s more about the concept. You can grow a following because there’s a directory of clubs and maybe they just identify with that club and they’re going to follow that club. And as a result, whenever you go “Live” to your club, all those followers get notified.

Rich: Ok, so there is some sort of awareness there as well. I wanted to ask you, so when people are onboarding, when they’re first getting into Clubhouse for the first time, how can they find things that are going to be interesting to them? Because I know there’s a wide variety of different topics well outside of marketing and business. So if I’m interested in things like comic books or video games or cooking, how do I discover those kinds of things on the platform?

Mike: So when you first register your identity and you get into the Clubhouse, they’re going to ask you what your interests are, and you can push a bunch of buttons. But in addition under your personal profile, when you click on your profile there’s a little gear in the upper right, and you can go later and you can add more interests. And they’ve got like 75 to 100 different interest categories.

So the way the Clubhouse works is it decides what to show you in the hallway, what rooms to show you based on your interests, based on the clubs that you follow or belong to, and based on the people that you follow. So it’s an algorithm. Because there’s thousands of rooms going on at once, but they don’t want to show you everything because they only want to show you the things that they think you would be interested in.

So to your question, when you first join it’ll ask you what your interests are. But there’s also a search button in the upper left-hand corner, and it allows you to go through the directory and look at all these different interests and clubs, and it’ll show you people in clubs. The key thing is to follow people in clubs in order to have the best experience on the platform.

Rich: So right before we jumped on the call, I was actually doing a LinkedIn audit for a local company. And one of the things I was kind of trying to get across in this audit is that you need to really bolster your profile if you want to get found. So you have a profile on Clubhouse as well. Give us some tips on how we can make our Clubhouse profile more attractive, more findable, given this algorithm.

Mike: It’s really, really important. I’m glad you brought this up because when you’re in a room, if you happen to be connected to someone up on the stage, you’re kind of in the front row of the room. So if you’re in a really big room and you’re kind of automatically followed by the speakers, you’re brought to the front and everybody clicks on those profiles because they’ve got nothing better to do. They’re in the room and they’re listening. “Oh, who in the world are these speakers following?”

So when they click on your profile, you want to have it built out in such a way that it looks compelling enough that people would want to follow you back, because the follower thing is super important on the platform. Because every time you go live, your followers get notified. So first you have to think strategically, what can you put inside your profile? You should definitely have it be keyword rich, because there’s also a search engine on the platform. And if you are a specialist in mobile marketing or SEO, you’re going to want to put those words in there because then that will also potentially come up in the search. But you’re competing with everybody else who has those search words as well, so you just kind of want to try to… and by the way, what’s cool is you can update your bio as much as you want and you can literally go instantly and search it and see whether or not you go up in the ranks based on how your keywords are.

So that’s really important is to describe what you do. It’s also recommended that you get a little braggy, not a lot braggy, but a little braggy. Because I know so many of us are super humble and we don’t want to kind of talk about all the amazing things we have accomplished. But you only have so long to have a first impression and you don’t have to say anything about yourself. You just let your bio do it for you.

So just like Rich, you know, you have people on your show and they give you a bio and sometimes you have to pump them up a little bit. Right? So that bio is really important. Like “founder and CEO of this company”, or, “one of the largest marketing podcasts”. That’s the stuff I put in my bio because I want people to know that about me. Because sometimes when you go into a room, they’ll check out your bio and they might decide to just invite you up on the stage, just because of your bio.

And when you get up on the stage, all of a sudden your voice is now being heard by everybody who’s inside of that room. So it’s really, really important. In addition, if you have a club, describe that if you have a club so that they can follow that in the bio. There’s no hotlinks at all in this app, it’s just like Instagram but w worse, there’s no links at all. So you can type in your URL. Like I have socialmediaexaminer.com in there.

You also need to link up your Instagram account and your Twitter account, even if you do not really ever use Instagram, because there’s no way to chat on this platform at all privately yet. So Instagram is the easiest way for people to send you DMs. Because you know, with Twitter, you have to have your account set up to have non followers message you, but not with Instagram. So for a lot of people, Instagram is the primary way they’re sending private messages back and forth.

And you know, when you’re in the room with someone, you could just send them a message because they might be on Instagram while they’re listening because it’s audio, so it allows you to multipurpose.

Rich: And I just want to kind of give people a visual of it. The hallway and the rooms are definitely a good analogy for what’s going on in this. So you’re walking down the hallway, so to speak, which is the feed. You pop into a room that seems interesting to you, and then there’s basically these tiers. So the speaker is up on top that you can immediately see, they’re always at the top of the screen. And then there’s this VIP section. And if you are connected to a lot of people, the chances are greater that you’re going to be connected to one of the speakers. And basically if one of the speakers follows you – the concierge, if you will – brings you right up to the front of the room, so more eyes are going to be on you, even if you weren’t planning on talking.

So this happened to me just the other day. I popped in because I saw somebody I knew who started a room and I was curious. I went in and listened to him talk about podcasting and he’s like, “Oh look, The Rich Brooks is in the room”, and he pulls me up on stage. So this is one tactic to gain visibility is to be well connected because the speakers are more likely to see you. And like Mike was saying, other people are more likely to see you as well.

Mike: Well, and it’s even more fascinating than this, Rich, because when you are a speaker up on the stage and I’ve done a lot of this, and someone that I’m following pops into the room – like Damon John, or Grant Cardone or whatever – I get a little blink right at the top, “so-and-so has come into the room”, and it literally is like an instant little message right up at the top. 

And sometimes you’ll hear speakers pause for a microsecond when they’re speaking, it’s because someone important that they follow just came into the room and it’s just really, really, really cool that they don’t even have to notice that you came in the room because it tells them that you came into the room.

Rich: So Mike, tell me a little bit about how you’ve been using it as a podcaster or as somebody who is running Social Media Examiner, what’s your day-to-day like on the app?

Mike: First of all, it’s extremely addictive. So I’ve had to pare back a little bit because I was putting in like 10 hours on a weekend on the thing.

Rich: Oh my God.

Mike: I mean, I’m not even kidding you. When you look at screen time on your phone, it’s almost always the number one consumed app from everybody I know, because it’s just so sticky.

So in the beginning I was a lurker, and I was just checking out what was going on and watching what people were doing. And then eventually I just kind of randomly would spin up a room, like, “Let’s talk social media marketing”, or “Social media marketing trends, let’s talk…”. I would spin up a room and I would wait and see what happens. And then as people would come in the room, I would just greet them and I would just say, “I’m trying this thing out”. So I just tried it out as a speaker, and then eventually I got really strategic and I messaged out to a bunch of my friends and I said, “Hey, Chalene Johnson and Joel Comm and all these people, are you guys going to be around?” And it was, I think it might’ve been New Year’s Day. “Are you going to be around to meet me at nine o’clock in the morning on New Year’s Day?” So I scheduled a room and had a whole bunch of my speaker friends in there and they loved it. And we went for about an hour and 45 minutes. Then when I got the club, I started doing it as well.

So right now there’s two main ways that I’m using the platform. Way number one is, I’m using it as an opportunity to try out new ideas. So for example, I was working on a webinar on email marketing, and I decided to spin up a room called “email marketing”. And all of a sudden, all these people interested in email marketing came in the room and we just started talking. And then I said, “Let’s take your questions”, and we started taking questions. And all of a sudden I realized, “Oh, there’s more stuff I need to add to my webinar I hadn’t even considered, even though I know it.” So I used it as an opportunity to kind of like try out a concept.

Rich: And market research.

Mike: Exactly. And then another time I said, “All right, I’m recording this for an article that I’m writing. Tell me why you like Clubhouse”. And I recorded it and then I wrote the article and it was called, Why Clubhouse Might be the Next Major Social Media Platform. So I used it to actually gather content.

I also see a lot of people going on there when news breaks. So I went on there when Twitter had dropped something called “Spaces”, which was a competitor to this app. And I just popped into a room and I listened to engineers from Twitter and Facebook talk about what “Spaces” was. And so I used it to kind of see what the trending news topics are that people were talking about. So you can kind of see what’s trending because if someone wants to spin up a room to talk about it, and there’s 50 – 100 people in there, this might be some news that I just missed. And sure enough, I did miss it. So I used it as a news discovery platform.

I also use it to kind of nurture relationships with people. So it’s just kind of a fun way, since we can’t meet in person, to kind of get my friends together and to just do something that kind of honors and respects them a little bit.

I’m thinking about using it as a regular Saturday morning kind of Friends of Social Media Examiner Special Experience, where every Saturday at maybe 7:00 or 9:00 Pacific I’ll just spin it up and invite some of my speaker friends, and we’ll just talk about whatever the trending topic is.  I did one last week on Clubhouse. I did the one the week before that on specifically, social media trends for the future and what everybody thought. So those are the ways that I’m using it.

I’m using it as a way to nurture my community and to really learn more about the platform. I’m kind of in learning mode. And as soon as I learn, I teach. That’s why I published a video on YouTube that’s been watched 10,000 times and it’s only been out for like four days, at socialmediaexaminer.com/ch if you want to see that video. So I’m just using it kind of, I don’t know, for me I’m an extrovert. Rich, are you an extrovert?

Rich: I’m an ambivert. So sometimes I’m an extrovert, and other times I’m an introvert.

Mike: Sometimes I’m bored and I just want to talk to people, you know what I mean? And it’s like late at night, my kids are in bed and I’m like, I’m just going to go on there and just hang out. So there’s a little bit of that going on, too.

Rich: So you mentioned a few things I want to talk about. One is, earlier on, I thought you said something about basically when it’s gone, it’s gone. But then you said you were recording it. So how are you recording these conversations? And is there any kind of concern you have about people who are expecting that whatever they say there is going to disappear into the ether, that suddenly they’re being recorded?

Mike: So first of all, there’s some terms of service you have to understand. You have to be very clear that you’re recording it. So there are some people that do live podcast interviews on there and they’ll say, “Hey, we’re going to open it up to Q&A at the top of the hour”. So, and you’re going to want to put the word “recording” in the subject line, so everybody understands.

In my particular case it was called, “Help me write an article for social media examiner”. So everybody knew what it was for, and I specifically said every like 10 or 15 minutes, “Hey everybody, I’m recording this. Don’t raise your hand if you don’t want me to be recording you”. And that way everybody kind of knew what was going on. Did that answer your question? Oh, how did I do it? I have a RODEcaster, which is how I did it. So a RODEcaster is a hardware device that allows me to Bluetooth sync right into the device that allows me to record the audio.

Rich: Okay. Cool. Also, I’m just curious about scheduling. So it sounds like sometimes you’re just spinning up a room, which I assume means starting a room and you’re not pre-planning it. But other times maybe I see in the calendar such and such a room is scheduled to start at this time. So is there a preference here? Does it really matter?

Mike: Most people in the beginning don’t even know they can schedule a room and they just decide to spontaneously open a room. But as you get a little more sophisticated, you realize, “Oh, there’s a calendar. Hmm. Maybe I ought to get on that calendar”.

So there’s two parts to the calendar; “upcoming for you”, and I think the other one is called “upcoming all”, or something like that. But you click on that calendar at the very top, the little calendar.  So “upcoming for you” is the apps curated list of things that it thinks you’re interested in based on how it knows the rooms that you’ve gone into, how long you’ve spent in those rooms. “Upcoming all” just opens you up to the entire calendar. But again, I believe most people do not use the calendar, so the benefit to having the calendar is that someone can follow an RSVP for that, and then they can get a link for that. And you can share that link on Twitter, or you can put it on your calendar. So it just maybe gives you a little bit of a boost because people can look at the calendar and see the upcoming events that are going on. And if you don’t have a huge following, that’s advantageous. You know what I mean?

Rich: So it it’s interesting. So up until now, I kind of thought Clubhouse by design was its own little island, you know? Yes, you can DM somebody, but you have to use a different platform to do it. Now though, is what I’m hearing that you can actually create clickable links to take people to specific conversations within the app?

Mike: Kind of. So if you go ahead and you open up the app and you look at any of these upcoming things and you click on it, they give you the opportunity to share, tweet, copy link, or add to calendar. But all that does is give you a link back to the invitation itself. So it doesn’t pop you right into the room.

So the key to the way the scheduling works is, it notifies you if you’re in the app that it’s about to start, and you still have to basically go into the room, if you follow where I’m going with that.

Rich: Absolutely. Is this app only available on Apple or is it also Android as well?

Mike: It is only available on the iPhone and the iPad. So a lot of people that are Android users either have gone out and bought iPads. Billy Gene went out and bought an iPad, and I know some others that have gone just so they can be on there. They are going to have Android eventually, but they’re a very small team of just nine people.

They’re still working on a lot of the kinks and they have a lot of very, very high-profile individuals on there. You know, I got a chance to actually talk to Grant Cardone, and I got a chance to actually talk to Damon John from Shark Tank. And there’s a lot of these huge celebrities that are on there that you normally would never be able to talk to. And when they come on, sometimes these rooms can have 5,000 people in them. And before you know it, it takes the app offline. So they’re not quite infrastructurally ready to open it up to Android, but it’s coming. It’ll probably be a couple of months, is my guess.

Rich: And obviously there’s no desktop app for this. This is strictly on the iOS, correct?

Mike: Correct. The only desktop component is the links to the calendar stuff, which is also on desktop.

Rich: And people should know that not everybody gets in right away. There is a queue at the door and sometimes you and I, now that we’re in, have invites. And when you see somebody who is waiting at the door, you can kind of lift the velvet rope, so to speak, and let them in. And that doesn’t count towards your limited number of invites, but just because you want to get in you can’t. And I guess that’s in part so that they can scale up in a more healthy way.

Mike: Yeah, but let’s be honest, it’s a smart marketing ploy for them, because everybody wants something that can’t have.

Rich: Right. Exactly.

Mike: So I would tell everybody who’s listening, if they happened to have an iPhone or an iPad, go ahead and just register your user identity. Because if your phone number is in somebody else’s phone and they happened to be on the app, it will notify them, and they might give you the free “get in instantly” kind of a situation.

Rich: Yeah. I have a friend of mine who I just happened to see. He was waiting and I gave him access and then like five minutes later he texted me and goes, “I’ve been waiting outside that place for two weeks and nobody would let me in”.

Mike: One other thing I would say is post on your profile that you’re looking for an invite, because they have recently given out a ton of invites. And a lot of people now have these extra invites that they didn’t have. So they’ll ask you for your phone number and that’s generally how the whole thing works.

Rich: All right. So I’m always painfully aware of how much time I have in the day for marketing and social media, along with all the other responsibilities I have as a boss, a dad. So you already told me how many hours you’re spending in Clubhouse, at least over the weekend. You said you’re paring it down, and you’re not actually being super purposeful, you’re becoming more purposeful about it. How much time do you recommend that marketers devote to Clubhouse when they’ve got all these other platforms, like, how does this fit in?

Mike: Well, here’s the good news, I’ve only spent an hour and a half this week on Clubhouse starting on Sunday.

Rich: My name is Mike and I’m a Clubhouse addict.

Mike: Yeah, I think that here’s the important part, are you seeing declining returns on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram? Do you feel like you’re just doing it, but it’s not really leading to leads and prospects and opportunities? If so, then maybe it’s worth just going on here, especially if you’re selling anything that involves your voice. If you are someone who sells information, for example, somebody who has a course or anything like that, this could be a huge opportunity for you.

Or if you’re an agency like you are Rich, right? This is a huge opportunity for you to find prospects. And it gets really easy for a lot of people to use this platform when they see an almost instant ROI on something like this. So I would just say it kind of depends on honestly, what your goals and objectives are.

So if you really have been struggling to grow your business and you fall into that camp that I just said, well, this might be a really, really smart investment of your time and effort. Because it might take you forever to write a blog post, or it might take you forever to do a podcast interview or get on a podcast. But all of a sudden you can start getting podcasts. If podcasting is an important part of your strategy, man, I got to tell you, there’s a lot of podcasters on here that are creating content and that are looking for talent on here. And I’m getting more invitations to podcasts than I’ve ever had in my life just because I’m showing up on here.

So you just have to like work it into your strategy. And one thing to know is that most people use this platform in the evenings and in the weekends, because it’s mostly used by professionals. So you just have to ask yourself, is there a day of the week when I don’t have a lot going on? And maybe rather than watching Netflix, maybe I’ll spend an hour or a couple hours in the evening doing this instead. I think that’s where a lot of people are finding value on this platform.

Rich: Excellent. Like what’s one feature that you wish Clubhouse had that it doesn’t yet?

Mike: Well, when you’re brought up on stage you’re un-muted, which is something that is a surprise to a lot of people. So you have to mute yourself or someone has to mute you for you. And it’s really frustrating when you’re moderating in a room and people come up and you hear the kids yelling in the background, someone say, “Oh my gosh, I’m up on stage!”, and they didn’t realize that they were un-muted. So that’s the one feature I wish people would not be muted when they were brought up on stage.

They’re also, I know for sure, coming out with the direct messaging thing, which I think will be kind of cool. That way you won’t have to connect another account to it, but these guys, these guys have town halls every, um, Sunday at 9:00 AM Pacific. And they also every Wednesday at 6:00 PM Pacific, they have a new members kind of onboarding kind of thing, which I wish other platforms did. I think it’s so cool at the founders of this are listening to the community and rapidly innovating.

I’ve only been on here since early December, and I can tell you, I’ve seen the app go through massive iteration. So I don’t really know what more I could ask for, because I think the beauty of the entire thing is how simple it is.

Rich: Awesome. Mike, this has been great. I’m sure there’s going to be a lot more people wanting to get on the platform. For people who want to learn more about you, where can we send them?

Mike: You can go to Social Media Examiner. And if you go to Social Media Examiner and you type in “clubhouse” in the search query, you’ll see that I’ve got a podcast episode, I’ve got two articles, and we’ve got a YouTube video, and we’re just trying to help the marketing community understand how to use this darn thing.

You can also find me on Instagram, I’m @Stelzner on Instagram. Oh, and most importantly on Clubhouse, search for Stelzner, that’s my user identity. And also search for the Social Media Examiner Club and be sure to follow that club. So you can kind of see how our business is using this, because I think the key to the entire thing is experienced in it to understand what it could do for your business.

Rich: That’s good advice. And everybody, if you haven’t yet, you should absolutely be checking out Mike’s podcast, his Social Media Marketing Podcast. That’s just the perfect podcast for when you’re trying to learn, go deep on any single platform or any strategy. So, Mike, thanks for everything you do, and I appreciate you stopping by today.

Mike: Thank you, Rich.

Show notes:

Mike Stelzner’s name is synonymous with “social media marketing’, and he continues to shape the everchanging landscape of the industry. If you’re not already following his podcast or blog, you’re missing out on all the latest marketing trends. And his annual conference is a veritable “who’s who” of industry thought leaders and innovators.

Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 20+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.