How to moderate meaningful conversations on Clubhouse
You have an important role in the Clubhouse moderator’s seat. So many decisions to make: When do you interrupt, when do you move a topic along, who do you call on to respond to a question, how long do you let silence sit before jumping in?
What’s unique about Clubhouse is you’re probably not too familiar with the speakers on your stage. So, how can you drive those conversations? And, what do you do when someone hijacks your conversation topic?
We’re in the early days of Clubhouse. Now is the time to set a standard on what GREAT moderation looks like…Oops — sounds like.
The origin: As the host of the First Time Facilitator podcast, I’m fascinated with how we can create meaningful and exciting group experiences. I’m obsessed with group dynamics, what voices are heard, and how powerful questions can change our focus, and ultimately — our life experience.
The challenge: I’ve spent 11 days on Clubhouse. As it’s a new app, in beta mode and currently only available for iPhone users, now is the time we can onboard and set a great culture of moderation and facilitation. I’ve been in rooms which were moderated beautifully, and others — well, not so much. Solid moderation creates a great group conversation, and in this article, I share what works (and what doesn’t), and specific statements/questions you can ask, to keep conversations moving strongly.
A quick win: “The standard you walk past is the standard you set”. If you’ve clearly stated upfront that people can share a one sentence introduction before they ask your panellists a question, and they’re in their third sentence… You must unmute yourself, interrupt them, re-iterate that standard, and ask them to jump to their question. The moment you let them continue, is the moment you set a new standard (that old chestnut: Actions speak louder than words).
I’ve joined some excellent, thought-provoking rooms on Clubhouse with incredible, focused conversations.
I’ve also been in rooms where there’s been potential for a great conversation, but it all seems a little messy, disjointed and a race to unmute yourself before the current speaker completes their sentence, so you can get some air-time.
The good news is, there are simple strategies you can have in your toolbox as a moderator to create an epic room.
Caveat: There is absolutely a time and place for free-flow conversations, where you’re simply there to chew the fat. However, this article focuses on rooms where you want to explore a specific topic, or you have time constraints.
Before we talk strategy, why do conversations go off-track?
I don’t think there’s a sinister reason here. It happens for a variety of reasons, including:
We enjoy sharing our experiences…all of them!
We’re unclear on the room/conversation’s purpose
Someone may ask a question which spins the conversation off-course
Hearing other’s discuss a topic, spurs on idea generation somewhere else
Sometimes we don’t realise we’re doing it
Okay, we may be doing a bit of self promoting :)
Our story sharing skills aren’t sharp(stories aren’t a series of events/itineraries that you reel off. If you want to get better at telling stories, check out the book StoryWorthy by Matthew Dicks — or you can listen to my conversation with Matthew here).
Your role as a moderator is to do two key things:
Know and communicate the purpose/intent of your Clubhouse room (like you would with any great meeting)
Protect the purpose and intent of your room (Guide, target certain speakers to contribute, reinforce great behaviour, interrupt when necessary, let people on stage / bring them back to the audience)
If you don’t like sounding school-teachery, prevention is always better than cure.
I’ve broken down my key moderation strategies in these two sections:
Preventative strategies to put the odds in your favour (key decisions)
Cure strategies that you can use in the moment (delivery techniques)
1. Preventative strategies to put the odds in your favour
There are some key decisions to make upfront, before you launch your live room.
Decide on the structure of your Clubhouse room
Last weekend, my friend (let’s call him Bob) joined Clubhouse. I decided to throw him a welcome party to share the features and how to get the most out of the app. I invited a mutual friend to co-host it, we set a time, and I thought we were good to go!
We’re on the live call, and other people arrive to say hi. I invited them up as speakers to share their tips and experiences with Bob.
Bob didn’t realise a welcome party was open to the public. He assumed it was only going to be a three-person room. My assumption was the more the merrier! Let’s open it up. Bob wasn’t comfortable with having a public conversation that day.
He left his own welcome party earlier than anticipated.
I stuffed up. Moral of the story? Assumptions are dangerous.
As you go through these decision prompts, make sure you share them with your co-hosts.
Your Clubhouse room can have the following structures (and the more I play on the app, the more structures I see!) — let us know in the comments what structures you’ve seen.
Speaker only — sharing a topic (lecture style)
Facilitated Panel only: Moderator asks the speaker questions
Educational and Q&A weaved in: Sharing a topic (for example, “The 5 things most entrepreneurs do wrong”), and anyone in the audience can ask the speakers questions / leave a comment
Pure Q&A: Open topic; invitation to chat (look for subjects like: Open Mic! Jump in!)
Round roulette: You have a set number of speakers on stage, and you invite members of the audience to jump on to ask one question. Once they’ve asked their question, they go back to the audience (note: Decide with your fellow speakers on whether you’ll pick people in order, or at random).
Open forum: Anyone can jump in as a speaker
Once you’ve made a decision on your format, include this information in the title/description of your room.
If you’d like to encourage anyone to jump on stage and contribute, I suggest weaving a question in is as part of your topic, for example: Podcasting: How has it changed your life?
This was a session on Clubhouse recently, moderated by the brilliant Cliff Ravenscraft. He set the room perfectly, and advised all speakers that they would have 2 mins or less to share their podcasting story, in the order they arrived onto stage.
Decide on your start time and the end time
There’s a reason everyone is likening Clubhouse rooms to crack — it’s addictive! Before you start, make a decision on how long your session will go for, or what you’ll do if your conversation goes overtime, who will take over? Who has to leave?
Reiterate this in your moderation messaging, for example:
“It’s great to have you here! We’re in the room for another 30 mins…”.
As we’re working with folks all over the world, state your time in terms of hours/minutes, rather than saying, “We’ll be wrapping up at 9pm”.
Decide on the contrast of speakers
The fastest way to bore your audience members? Invite speakers on the stage who all agree with each other. Yawn fest. You want your speaker’s to challenge one another. That’s exciting.
I interviewed Kjell Lutz (listen to our conversation: Getting your foot in the door as a moderator) and he said this one the #1 thing that makes a discussion engaging is you have diversity on your panel.
Decide on the purpose for your room
To do this, reflect and answer the following questions:
“The reason we’re here is to [insert reason here]
“The reason this topic is so important right now, is because [insert reason here]”
When you invite speakers to co-host with you when you’re scheduling your event, I suggest sharing your responses to these questions, to help them understand the intent of the conversation.
Once you have your purpose set, it helps create boundaries. As a moderator, you can then assess what is on vs on-track vs off-track.
Reasons can vary. It all depends on what you want!
“The reason we’re here is to share stories on how podcasting has changed our lives.”
“The reason we’re here is to discover the 5 strategies that scaled my business from a 6, to a 7-figure business.”
“The reason we’re here is to meet new friends with similar values around the world.”
Create your rules of engagement:
If there is Q&A involved, with rotating members of the audience come up to the stage, define what good looks like: “Now’s the time to raise your hand if you’d like to ask a question. We’ll welcome you on stage. Please share a one sentence introduction — we can look at your bio if you’d like to know more, then ask your question”.
Decide whether you’ll allow follow-up questions. Depending on timing and the amount of people lining up to ask a question or contribute, you may need to also make this explicit up-front (“We have dozens of people raising their hand, so we’d love you to ask one question, and after you’ve had your response, please move yourself back to the audience”).
Remember, questions direct the conversation.
If a question is off-topic, again depending on timing and relevance, you can interject using a phrase like, “Thanks for your question. As we’re here to discuss [insert topic / purpose], I was wondering if you had a question that was more relevant to the conversation?”
I was in a room last week about podcast trends for 2021. We spent 15 minutes talking about one specific podcasting platform. The conversation went so narrow, that I jumped out.
2. Cure strategies that you can use in the moment (delivery techniques)
Room Reset using the WIPR framework
Think of your Clubhouse Room like a radio show.
Listeners come… Listeners go.
That’s the biggest difference with facilitating and moderating in Clubhouse. You’re working with a dynamic audience. It’s unlike an in-person or virtual event, which usually happens in a linear fashion: Everyone arrives on time, everyone receives the same briefing note/expectations, then we leave at the same time.
People jump into your room because they’re attracted to the title of your room, of the speakers, of the number of people in the room.
So, how do you continue to let them know about your room’s intention?
If you listen to radio, you’ll notice that after a segment, when they come back from an advertisement, they’ll say things like: “Hey, thanks for joining us! I’m here with special guest Cameron Smith and we’re talking about last weekend’s match between the Broncos and the Storm. We’d love you to dial in and let us know what you thought about the referees performance.”
In Clubhouse land, we call that statement a Room Reset.
A room reset is where you clearly explain to anyone new to the room who you are, the purpose of the room, and how to engage while you’re there.
A good framework to reset your room is WIPE FM (I liked throwing in FM to remind you it’s like we’re on the radio!).
WIPE stands for:
W: Welcome
I: Introduction
P: Purpose
E: Engagement (Rules of…)
Here’s an example of a WIPE FM reset I used this week:
W: Hey, thanks so much for joining us! [In smaller rooms, call out the names of people who have recently joined in. Everyone loves hearing their first name].
I: My name’s Leanne Hughes, and you can view what I’m up to by clicking my bio.
P: The purpose of this call is to share our predictions on what podcasting looks like in 2021.
E: Our speaker panel will start by sharing our predictions over the next 10 mins. Following that, we’ll invite you to raise your hand and join us on stage if you have a question about podcasting in 2021, or if you’d like to share one prediction. As we only have 30 minutes, I’d love you to share your question on stage, and when you’re done, please click on your profile image to return to the audience.
Have the WIPE FM formula handy, and tweak it for every room you moderate.
Your job as the moderator is to protect the space.
How can you protect the space? You do that by providing stage directions. Seal the Exits is one of my favourite chapters in Michael Bungay Stanier’s latest book, The Advice Trap.
In this chapter, he uses the term stage directions to describe how to keep things on track when you’re having a coaching conversation. We can apply some of his brilliance to our Clubhouse chats.
Here are some excellent phrases, taken directly from his book to help you seal the exits in your Clubhouse rooms, particularly if you feel the conversation is drifting off topic:
“I’m just going to interrupt you here…”
“Let me ask you a question…”
“Let me jump in and add my idea here…”
“We’ve got # of things to cover, can you please share the #1 tip you have for [insert topic here]?
Ok, I’m just going to jump in here so I can ask a question
Other helpful phrases to get your conversation back on track include:
“Thanks for sharing your story, we’re limited with time, would you mind sharing your #1 tip?”
“That’s a terrific point! It reminds me / is different to a time when… “ [segue back to main topic]
“Given how much time we have, I’m going to have to move this conversation along”
“It’s great we’re talking about this specific topic, however I think this may only apply to a small number of people in this room. How about we broaden the conversation to include [restate the purpose of the room]”
Of course, more important than what you say is how you say it — your delivery matters!
I suggest using a lower, tone (more authoritative) that also sounds friendly, when you bring one of these phrases into the conversation. This one takes practice.
Questions direct the conversation
The quality of the questions in your room will direct where the attention goes. The easiest way to keep a question on track when someone raises the end is to use this little ninja method:
Instead of asking: “What question do you have, Leanne?”
Ask: “What question do you have about [insert room topic], Leanne?”
A slight shift in your question by adding the room topic, is a subtle reminder of the room’s purpose.
Weave in your speaker’s bio where you can
If you don’t know your speakers personally, at a minimum I suggest you check out their bio to discover their expertise. Share some of this information when you cross to them to respond. This also helps you direct a question to the right speaker.
Encourage healthy debate
From my experience as an audience member, I prefer when there’s a difference of opinion between speakers. It’s a quick road to Dullsville if all of your speaker’s agree with each other on
At the end of the day, you can mute other speakers!
Let’s say you’ve set the room up beautifully, you continue to reset the room using WIPR. You’ve used a nice, low, authoritative voice to keep things on track.
If that all fails? Just simply mute the speaker!
Other quick tips for Clubhouse moderators:
Your two non-verbal cues are a) Changing your profile photo and b) Unmuting yourself. Unmuting yourself provides a strong signal that you’re about to interrupt/have something to say, and could also be used as a tactic before you need to interrupt someone at the end of their sentence.
Have fun with humour and timers. If you give constraints and allow someone 2 mins to respond, if they go overtime, play a funny sound effect, or ring a bell.
Engage early, engage often: Sometimes it’s nice to give a shout-out to the people who are listening to the conversation / in the audience. From time to time, randomly acknowledge them, and thank them for showing up.
An amazing book to read on the purpose of gatherings is: The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker
Create a metaphorical parking lot (I’ve used Parking Lots in my face to face workshops. It’s a piece of flipchart paper you have on a wall — when someone draws the conversation outside of the topic at hand, you note that on the parking lot and make a plan to address it later on). When a topic goes off-topic, you can say, “This is interesting, I’ll note this topic down, and once we’ve covered the main purpose of being here, let’s explore this in more detail”.
Questions? Other ideas? I’d love to hear from you
I’d love for this article to be helpful for all the newbie Clubhouse moderators out there. The tools mentioned in this article also apply for your virtual events and face to face panel sessions, too!
I’m happy to update it to add your ideas, any corrections, and make this article as helpful as possible.
Let’s connect on Clubhouse! You can find me on there @leannehughes
Feel free to contact me directly through my website: LeanneHughes.com, or leave a comment below.