Posts Tagged ‘building community’

I’ve thought about this quite a bit lately. I’ve actually come to wonder if they do help build community at all. I seem to experience less community now than I did before I had a Myspace, Facebook, or Virb membership. I think part of this is because of the isolation that telecommunications seems to foster. Talk is cheap, we can talk with anyone we want to any time we want. Since supply is so high, we value people’s words and opinions very little.

Community, real community that matters, that has the power to change who you are for the better (or worse), requires something that technology seems to make difficult. Community requires communication. For all the advances in ‘telecommunication’, worthwhile communication seems to happen less and less. I might make several phone calls a day, talk with someone on instant messenger, send a couple quick emails, or post a note on someone’s Facebook wall. At the end of the day I haven’t really said anything that matters, I haven’t left any impact on anyone, and no-one’s left an impact on me.

I spent a year playing World of Warcraft, the quintessential digital community. I was an active member of a guild raiding through end-game content. I had a great time for about 10 months, then started to get bored with the game. I cut back my play time, and found out how little I knew the people I played the game with. We had a good time together, but I didn’t know any of my guildmates. Two members of the guild actually used to be my co-workers, I hadn’t spent any time with them in real life since I started playing the game. I started spending more time with people in real life, and regained something I’d lost: meaningful community.

“Hey this is Marshall! Just returning that voicemail, where you were returning that voicemail. Uh, yeah, so call me back when you get this!”

I’ve really left voicemails similar to that. Reflecting on it, I sicken myself a little.

How does beer build community?

Try going out for a drink (or to lunch) with someone: a co-worker, family member, a bum off the street. Then have a conversation. Skip the small talk, find out what’s going on in their life. Ask about what makes them afraid, what gives them hope. Leave some of who you are with them, take something of them through the rest of your day. I guarantee that you’ll discover new ways of looking at the world, make closer friends, and have a deeper appreciation for people if you try this often enough. You may even get your toes stepped on by someone’s opinion, a more valuable experience than we like to admit.

Telephones can be great for setting up dates. E-mail is great to communicate with friends who live somewhere else in the world, or to convey business ideas. Instant messenger tends to be good for little in my experience. I abhor the Facebook wall, or Myspace friend comment features: what exactly are you going to put into a completely public bulletin on someone’s profile page? Nothing that matters. (I hope.)

Websites like meetup or eventful are pretty cool to me. It’s technology actually encouraging community, rather than limiting it. I’d like to see more of it.

Is there anything else out there that encourages meaningful interaction between individuals? How can we make technology friendlier for community? How do you minimize the isolation that tends to occur from living in a digital world? These are the things I want to know.

99% of your social network’s current and/or future users are what I call “reactive users.” This group is content to read and accept, but isn’t the group that is going to customize their profile to an extreme, contribute blog posts, upload videos, spread the word virally, etc… I’m not saying that this group won’t do these activities, just that they will approach these activities with a limited amount of energy and commitment as well as a different paradigm.

The 1% left are the “proactive users.” Seth Godin in his new book Meatball Sundae (highly recommended) contributes the following:

“Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba’s book Citizen Marketer proves that in just about every community, 1 percent of the people are givers. In Wikipedia, for example, about 1 percent of the users create and edit articles. Same goes for Microsoft’s Channel 9 Web site. They get four and a half million visitors a month, and almost exactly 1 percent of them contribute comments. The same math works for Digg, Reddit, and YouTube. One percent of blog readers are blog writers. One percent of talk-radio listeners are callers. The thing is, you don’t know who they are. You don’t know which 1 percent of your customers and prospects are the ones who need to, love to, and want to post about their experience. It’s like Russian Roulette. You have to assume that every chamber is loaded, that every interaction is an interaction with a critic.”

What does this mean to a fledgling social networking website or to the likes of even Facebook or Bebo? IMO, there are several take-aways:

• You can try to figure out a way to increase the 1% to 2% or maybe 5%, maybe even 10%. Possible? Maybe. How? Make it easier to contribute, quicker to spread the word, more rewarding to post content, etc… It’s like our national voting problem: many people don’t vote simply because they feel, at least internally, that their vote doesn’t count. The same rings true on the web; if users don’t feel like their vote (or post, or video, or profile, etc…) doesn’t count, they won’t bother to show up and they certainly won’t wear the “I Just Voted” sticker (or, in terms of the web, they won’t spread the message virally if they themselves don’t buy into it).
• You must treat every interaction with a user as if they are or can be part of that proactive 1%.
• Appealing to the 1% is more important than anything in terms of marketing, yet appealing to the 99% is crucial for obvious reasons. Without the 1%, you won’t have the 99% and reverse. And just as passionately as the 1% can involve themselves into your social networking website can the 99% devolve themselves if rubbed the wrong way.
• If you thought you needed 1,000 users or 50,000 users for your community to be considered a success, think again. A threshold in terms of users doesn’t mean anything if only 10 out of the 1,000 are the proactive users or if you’ve discovered a way to increase this percentage. A passionate group of 100 users can be much more beneficial than a laid-back group of 10,000.

-RB