Live Audio Rooms

Have you attended or run a user group? If you aren't familiar with them, user groups are amazing high-energy events where the focus is to connect with others and share strategies, best practices, and solutions to problems. They are usually hosted by software companies, but can also be customer-community driven.

They do an amazing job at strengthening customer relationships, highlighting key customers and their success, instilling a culture of customers helping other customers as a community and can even help convert prospects into customers. ‍

With COVID, we did realize that even though they are “fun” in person, we don't always need to be “in-person” to run or participate in a great user group session that adds value to customers. Many turned to zoom to run these virtual events, but you could only attend if you had the meeting link.

With “in-person” no longer a requirement - What if you made it easy for prospective customers to discover live user group events that were open to not only existing customers but also them? These prospective customers are thinking about becoming a customer, so by opening these user group events to them, you expose them to your engaged and satisfied customers, you show that you value customer relationships and the customer community, you increase trust and confidence that you’ll be here for them when they need help.

What is Live audio? Live Audio is audio-first (and often only) content that is created and distributed at the same time. More than that, Live-audio allows for your listeners to participate in the creation of the content, without having to turn on video or worry about their appearance, as they join the "stage" and lend their voice to the experience.

But is live audio any good and do people want that experience? After speaking with hundreds of people about the Live-Audio experience, we found folks keeping coming back for the same reasons:

It gets the audience involved. Folks can actively jump in and out of the conversation with a bit of insight or a quick question. The room flows and folks can interact with hosts and the guests in real-time.

The talks are incredibly easy to join. Guests can listen in from any device and be free to do other things while listening. (Walk the dog, drive their car, do the dishes, etc.)

Personal and humanizing. By hearing the unedited voices and unproduced conversations taking place, we found that very quickly, audience members formed deeper connections and had more authentic experiences with the folks who hosted the conversation. It's easy to forget that there are people at the other end of the messages on something like text-based conversations, so audio is a welcome way to connect.

People are more authentic. We don't know what it is about the audio-only experience but people are more likely to think out loud, share real and meaningful insights, and be themselves. Maybe it's because they aren't concerned with the lighting, their hair, or whatever, but it's a better experience all around.