Web Social Architecture

How Twitter Promotes Quantity to the Detriment of Quality, And Why Twitter Matters Nonetheless

My Twitter experiment was a “successful failure.”

I started an experiment a few weeks ago, basically using Twitter differently than I had previously. Until then, I'd only followed people I know personally--friends, family, colleagues, and professional acquaintances. But a couple weeks ago, I decided to try following everyone who follows me.

This is not a large number of people by Twitter standards (a couple hundred), but I was immediately annoyed with Twitter, and I stopped looking at it for a while. The people I was using Twitter to keep tabs on were simply drowned out by the deluge of incoming tweets, which I found almost entirely uninteresting and not at all useful.

I didn't give up. I created a group in TweetDeck for people I know personally, so I could follow them separately from my full collection of tweeters. That kind of worked on my computer, but it didn’t work on my phone--I never used poor, neglected Twidroid any more. I had to turn off the updates.

I started sort of hating Twitter. What I thought was interesting, though, was people sending me messages thanking me for following them. "You're... uh... welcome...?"

That was what raised the question:

Why do people on Twitter care how many people are following them?

The answer is, because Twitter wants it that way. The affordance for social capital on Twitter is all about quantity: How many following, how many followers, and how many updates posted. The measure of a person, in Twitter, is all about the total amounts accumulated:

The display of these measures represents just a fraction of the text on a Twitter page, just a few pixels of space—but they’re critical, because they are the attributes attached to the representation of my identity. Effectively, they are me, and I am valued on the basis of their accumulation. Other people, at a glance, get a sense of who I am that’s based on the amount of stuff I have, and not what kind of stuff, and not on the value of that stuff.

This is a bad thing. As Twitter’s massive increase in number of users the last few months has started to illustrate, an increase in users also increases the breadth of topics, decreasing the signal to noise ratio. Six months ago, when Twitter was populated mainly by a relatively narrow group of social software and Web aficionados, there was a stronger sense of Twitter being a community. Today there’s much less topical focus, and Twitter’s limitations as a social tool have become much more readily apparent.

The fix: Build quality-based social capital.

What if, instead of showing, underneath my photo and name, the number of people I follow, the number of people following me, and the number of times I’ve posted, Twitter showed data that reflected the value of my activity? For example, what if my Twitter identity were associated with the percentage of my posts replied to, favorited, and re-tweeted by others?

I’m going to go ahead and suggest that this tweak would substantially alter the way people use Twitter—for the better. Because the measure of a person would be their ability to consistently create value, people would be encouraged to be more interesting. But notice that the measures I’m suggesting don’t reflect the number of people finding any particular tweet valuable, only the percentage of tweets found interesting by someone. That’s an important difference, because it says you don’t need to play to the crowd—that one-to-one value counts the same as one-to-many value. So you don’t have to be interesting to lots and lots of people, only interesting to a single person.

And there’s more here yet: Because the social capital of the system would be tied to recognition by others, the system would encourage connections that were active, and based on mutual attention and interest. “Capital” here works in the sense of “currency.” We’d pass it back and forth—if I like your tweet, I reward you with a reply, a retweet, or a favorite. My doing so counts for you. You look for an opportunity to reciprocate.

Quality and value, when rewarded, are fundamentally self-reinforcing. So if Twitter supported quality and value, great ideas would be passed along more, reaching more people. Reputation and credibility would flow from meaningful contribution. Relationships grounded in mutual helpfulness would flourish.

Now, as Twitterers like the prolific Nancy White illustrate, quality and quantity are not mutually exclusive. And it’s certainly better to have more good stuff than it is to have only some good stuff. So a shortcoming of my suggestion is that it doesn’t reward the consistent creation of value over time, or put another way, the creation not only of consistent value but of a LOT of it, consistently.

Batting average only counts beyond a threshold of at-bats. Total home runs matters only relative to years played. If Ichiro goes 4-for-4 in the season opener, he’s batting a thousand, but that doesn’t yet qualify his season for any discussion of the all-time best. So the real answer, if we’re going to get serious about it, is for Twitter to create a quality algorithm and use that as the measure of an individual’s contribution.

Twanalyst is a gesture in the right direction. It’s a service that analyzes Twitter accounts across a number of quality-focused dimensions, resulting in a (sort of cheesy) personality test: I am very pleased to tell you I am a “chatty coherent guru.” Yes!

Kind of fun, but what I actually really like about Twanalyst is that it’s looking primarily at the nature of what you’re doing on Twitter, rather than the amount of it. That, I believe, is the future on an increasingly noisy web.

Speaking of the future, what about Twitter’s future?

At this point, it’s kind of common knowledge that Twitter has passed a… can I say… Twipping point. As Twitter gets huge, and as the purchase offers get bigger, which direction it takes—toward signal or noise—will help determine its fate as a social application.

Will Twitter end up yet another spammy channel, a trivialized feature of a larger social network, under pressure to monetize? Or will it add a valuable layer of ambient awareness to rich, multi-channel online relationships? I’m rooting for the latter, not just because I’m a fan of Twitter (I am), but because I want to live in a digital future where quality, meaning, order, and value trump unwanted noise.

 

But what I’ve said here is also kind of wrong. The story (like stories always are) is more complicated.

Despite all that—despite the shortcomings of a system that rewards meaningless connections, high volumes of worthless posts, and claiming to listen to more people than anyone possibly could—the truth is we can’t ignore Twitter.

And there’s a reason it’s hard to get comfortable with that truth. Twitter, in the midst of its deluge of valueless tweets, also produces a kind of magic: The collective value of all the noise has a tremendous potential to add up to something meaningful—something with a value beyond what any particular contributor can produce. As the Moldova uprising most recently illustrated, and as did the presidential election and Katrina did before it, Twitter, at its best, is a powerful venue for the expression of real-time collective intelligence. And that’s where businesses need to stand up and pay attention.

Tweeting about the Weather Isn't Lame

I can't remember where I read this, but someone (with some time on their hands?) figured out that some higher-than-you'd-expect percentage of posts to Twitter are about the weather. Seriously, the weather!

I myself have done this. And the past month in Seattle, with the crazy snow and now rain we've had, my PNW-centric personal Twittersphere has been all abuzz about sledding, traffic, holiday travel hassles, snow, snow, snow, and now the road-salting controversy in the City Council. (Salting! What is this, Wisconsin? It snows like twice a year here.)

I have to say, the volume of weather-related tweets this holiday season has been marked. And this has made me wonder what's going on. Why would anyone go to the trouble to broadcast a stray water cooler comment out to the world?

On the one hand, this sudden flood (ahem) of banal weather tweets might seem to confirm once and for all the uselessness of Twitter. I see it a little differently, though. What I think is actually happening is that people are creating a layer of light conversation around a synchronous shared experience. It's the equivalent of a water-cooler chat, yes--but I've started to think there's something important about the shared aspect of that experience. If there's one thing we have in common, after all, it's the weather.

Though other smart folks (including, most vehemently, my psychotherapist / wife) disagree, I'm starting to think experiences don't have to be meaningful to be important, as long as they're shared, and especially when the sharing is synchronous with the experience.

So no, tweeting about the weather isn't lame at all. I'd rather think of it as a social gesture acknowledging commonality, strengthening bonds, and maintaining connectedness.

But do all our random followers on Twitter, or even our followers who (are lucky enough to) live in other climates care about this kind of stuff? In many cases, clearly not. For me, this points to Twitter's shortcoming as a social network. Twitter, I'd even say, is not an appropriate tool for relationship-building. It's not, in other words, a social network in its own right.

I see Twitter, instead, as a powerful feature of social networks. Standing alone, it's a feature of existing distributed social networks--and a great reminder that social networks are made of people, not web pages. Fed into Facebook, Twitter becomes a more-powerful status communicator, a feature of Facebook. And with Twitter's open API, endless possibilities exist for layering meaningful triviality into social network-driven web experiences.

Twitter: Trivial. Beautifully So.

I wrote a post a year and a half ago on Twitter in which I identified two types of use for it. This was at the height of the initial buzz about Twitter, and while some folks were really excited to finally see an HTML / SMS / IM social application, others worried aloud that Twitter, for the same reasons it offers such a low threshold of entry, would also tend to erode the quality of social relationships online. The thoughtful anti-Twitter point of view was that it encourages triviality, and the gist of my post was that while that may be true, there are times when trivialities are useful.

Since I wrote that post, I've become an avid Twitterer, and I have to say my perspective on Twitter, and indeed on triviality, has changed. I now see triviality as maybe the critical element of truly meaningful relationships, online and off, and Twitter has accordingly become one of the cornerstone services of my personal and professional social lives.

That sounds crazy, I know, and while it may be true that I am prone to crazy-sounding declaratives, I'm actually not kidding about this. I now use Twitter at work very frequently, mostly within my team, and it has improved our functioning and, dare I say it, made us closer, more personally connected.

Let me float an assertion: The deeper the relationship, the greater the proportion of it dedicated to triviality; and beyond, say, 90% triviality, the relationship isn't a relationship at all. And likewise with meaningful interactions--if everything is meaningful, it's not a relationship, it's therapy.

So here is my Bullseye Diagram of Love, illustrating the way I'm starting to envision online social systems supporting healthy relationships:

So I'm arguing for Twitter, or an analogous triviality service (ha!) as a supplement to existing relationships, not as a full-fledged social channel in and of itself. As a social network, I actually do think it's useless, or worse. And you can take that as a caveat.

But I am saying I think triviality in general and as supported by Twitter, in both personal and professional settings, is indispensable--that we can and should deliberately design it into social systems.

Nancy White on Slow Community

Nancy White spoke at ZAAZ last week at our social media event. Her talk, titled Slow Community, was wonderfully ironic coming from the most prolific online participant in THE ENTIRE WORLD. And as usual, Nancy has her finger on an important pulse. Her (she credits others as well) notion of slow community is an exploratory gesture toward solving an emeging crisis in our online lives: social overload, or if you like, information overload 2.0. Ha!

Who doesn't have trouble these days, tracking professional, avocational, personal, and informational relationships across sites, services, and devices? Social network fatigue is here today--and tomorrow promises a truly overwhelming inundation of social and relational input across many channels.

Here's Nancy's 15-minute talk:

Here are the slides:

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Nancy wrote a follow-up post here. There are some great comments on her post--check them out.

For more on Slow Community, start here, then go here.

 

Justin Marshall on Social Media Marketing

Here is the video of Justin Marshall's talk last week, titled Money, Media, and Your Mom's Peach Cobbler: Social Media Marketing Done Right. Justin is a colleague of mine at ZAAZ and a major contributor to our efforts in social media.

Justin's take on social media revolves around 3 critical points: Find your customer's shared passion, build value through community, and focus on strategic objectives. His talk includes some great stories and examples, including a sample concept for a social media campaign done right. (Are you listening, Whole Foods?)

Here's the 15-minute video:

 And here are the slides, so you can follow along:

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I'll be posting the other presentations from the event as I get them ready. Video processing, especially at my novice level, takes forever.

Web Professionals: Social Media is about to Change Your Job. Are You Ready?

Let me set the stage for what I mean to discuss here by sharing Ryan's Two-Minute History of Web Marketing:

The web has been defined by three revolutions over the past 20 years.

Prior to the involvement of business, the web was a connected ring of online communities. People interacted with each other and shared information. But the threshold of entry was relatively high, and there was no business model in place to drive innovation. The web kind of stayed the same for a long time.

In the early 90's, businesses started to get involved with the web, and driven by advertising dollars, they applied the same approach to the web as to broadcast media: This was the Broadcast Web. Web as TV commercial, billboard, brochure.

In the late 90's, e-commerce emerged. Amazon started kicking peoples' butts. The web was now a storefront (minus most of the customer support, but that's another story), complete with data-driven pages and integration with business and financial channels. Give me your credit card number, and I ship you a book: This was the Transactive Web. Remember? The one with the bubble.

We're now at the flashpoint of another revolution, driven by the convergence of three forces: Widespread availability of broadband, the lowering of thresholds of entry to publishing (especially for photos and video), and popular awareness of social media (especially MySpace and YouTube). We're only beginning to see the impacts of this change. We're at the bottom of the curve of the Participatory Web. In some ways we've come full circle, returning to a web of connected people sharing information. But in other ways, the emerging web is a new beast entirely: Bigger, faster, with exponentially more people and institutions involved, and with more at stake.

My point with all that is to suggest that most of the way we do our work today in the web-site-making profession reflects the demands of the Broadcast and Transactive web ages. Our planning, processes, tools, and tasks are undergoing a shift—and we’ll be well-served to get out in front of the demands of the Participatory Web.

So what's changing? Most obviously, a greater proportion of the total work of the web site happens after launch. And in a world of limited budgets, budgets built on the idea that the site is mostly done at launch, we're challenged to be faster before launch and smarter after.

Here are some ideas about the disciplines of the people I work closely with day-to-day at ZAAZ. I'm not an expert in all of this, but I sent an early version of this post internally as a memo and got some great feedback. And I'd really love to hear what you think. What have I got wrong, or missed entirely?

Client Services will shift toward helping clients plan for ongoing engagement with customers through the web channel. We’ll be supporting policy development, leadership, and moderation, and we’ll be helping clients transition over set timeframes to self-sustaining community management. We’ll be scoping and planning iterative work responsive to user communities.

User Research professionals will shift toward working to understand issues like value, trust, identity, reputation, motivation, and social ecosystems--online and off. 

Information Architects will shift toward organizing user-generated content; participatory interaction; and emergent and self-organizing content.

Designers will shift toward faster prototyping, with an emphasis on developing brand-aligned affordances for social and participatory spaces.

Developers will shift toward increased reuse and customization of third-party tools, vendor assessment, portability standards, and integration with third-party sites. We’ll be supporting prototyping and iterating live sites. Standards will become more important for client work.

Search professionals will be supporting on-site metadata definition for user-generated content and driving awareness beyond the site. Findability is a key differentiator in the crowded social media marketplace.

Web Site Analytics will shift toward measuring engagement, affinity, and cross-domain activity. Analytics reports will become thermometers for measuring the health of communities and guiding site iterations. The convergence of ad network power and data portability will have huge impacts. It's not about what happens on only your own site anymore.

Web Site Optimization folks will work in closer partnership with analytics, design, and UX to improve engagement, raise trust, and build motivation to participate--conversions that address customer lifetime value. It’s no longer going to be all about pushing more purchasers through the funnel.

Every web discipline is affected by the revolution at hand. To be successful, we need to define how to talk about our capabilities in that light, to frame up those capabilities as offerings, and integrate them into an overall story about our ability to execute social media--because clients are asking, and very soon they're going to want proof.

 

I've got plenty of ideas about this stuff, but I'd really love to hear from you and write a follow-up post summarizing your perspectives. Do share your thoughts about your discipline and how you see it changing in the next few years!

A Conceptual Map of the Social Web

Here's a take on the idea of the social web and how it differs from page-based and broadcast conceptions of web space. The fundamental difference here is that where broadcast thinking envisions a web of HTML pages connected by hyperlinks, social thinking envisions a web of people, relationships, and content created by people.

The individual is at the center of the social web experience.

There are a lot of ways, obviously, you might draw this picture, and a lot of things you might include on it. For example, you could group the social web into communities, contacts, and content. But I've done it this way partly to offer a typology of social web sites.

Here's a take on six important types:

 

Social networks are about individuals.

Social networks are sites primarily structured to support pages about individuals. Those pages become collectors of relationships. For example, on my Facebook profile, you can see links to the people I know, and I can interact with those people through a variety of tools.

Communities are about groups.

Communities are different than social networks in that they are built primarily around groups of people, rather than individuals. Another way of saying it is that the group is the point in communities, whereas the individual is the point in social networks.

Blogs are about a singular perspective or subject.

Blogs are structured around individual posts that typically have in common either that are are written by a single person or that they are focused around a single subject. The content is the point, and individual pages on blogs reflect that focus--they are structured around individual blogs posts and meaningful collections of blog posts (e.g. category pages, time-based archive pages, and, on group blogs, author pages).

Social media services store, edit, and share content.

"Social media" is a term that gets used to mean all media through which people interact--as a stand-in for the equally vague "Web 2.0," for the blogosphere, or for online communities. Here I mean it in the more specific sense of socially-enabled web sites used primarily to share personal content, such as photos, videos, or slideshows. Flickr, Vimeo, and SlideShare are good examples. Of course, you could argue that these sites have aspects of social networking or community, and you'd be right. But I say if the primary purpose is media sharing, it's a social media site.

News sources are about timely or topical content.

Much has been made of the demise of traditional media the past couple years. Flava says, "Don't believe the hype!" Traditional media isn't going anywhere, but it is adapting to emerging complementary sources of news, information, and commentary. News sources are diversifying--many more people are publishing content, and content is now both participatory and socially vetted.

Popularity engines capture a collective sense of their users' preferences among resources, usually web links, and they present those resources in ranked lists that are normally designed to be dynamic, reflecting an up-to-date view into web content people find to be of interest.

There are two main types of popularity engine: Social bookmarking applications and collaborative filters. Social bookmarking applications, such as del.icio.us, value resources on the basis of individuals "saving" links to them. Users have individual collections of links, and those links acquire value when many individuals save them. Collaborative filters, such as Digg, are a little different: Users submit links for collective review, and the links acquire value based on a voting system of some kind.

The difference is important, because the types of content collected tend to be different. Social bookmarking sites tend to value resources of lasting value that users want to be able to find again, and collaborative filters tend to favor resources of short-term interest, such as timely news, and one-time interest, such as funny videos.

Marketplaces are about the exchange of goods and services, and information about good and services, among people.

The emerging marketplace is not about e-commerce web sites per se. We work on plenty of e-com sites, and I love them. But what we learn over and over again in the usability lab is that real people, especially making a purchase decision that involves more than a few bucks, use many web sites to gather information. There's a complex web ecosystem that supports purchase decisions, and strategists for individual web sites need to understand those ecosystems to plan effectively.

The new marketplace is about more than the site, more than the message, more than the differentiating feature. The marketplace is a cluster of interrelated sites, and the seller is regarded with what can only be described as a healthy suspicion. Caveat emptor is the online rule, but the news is that the emptor has some serious caveats to pay attention to. Customer reviews on sellers' sites are a new norm, and expert reviews from third-party sites play a critical role, especially for complex or technical products. And beyond expertise, trusted relationships are key information sources.

So transactional sites matter, but in a new way: The seller / manufacturer is regarded as having authoritative factual information about the product, but the expert or the existing customer is regarded as having the authoritative opinion or valuation about the product. And the closer the relationship, the more trusted the opinion. Get used to it.

But don't just get used to it, learn to facilitate it: If you've got a great product, you want people to know. If you don't, find a new job.

 

There's plenty of gray area between these types I'm putting forward. In fact, you might even say social space on the web is mostly gray area--and the overlap among types seems to be increasing rather than decreasing as the large sites add features. It's more and more common for social media sites to include communities (e.g., groups on Flickr), for social networks to include media hosting, (e.g. MySpace videos), and even for popularity engines to include blogs (e.g. Newsvine's "greenhouse").  People instant message links to product views, solicit advice from their contact lists, and so on.

You might even say the gray areas between sites and between types of sites hold the real opportunities for marketers to develop services that matter, create value, and drive engagement.

But I think it's still useful to think about think about these sites in terms of types, mostly as a way of focusing attention on the features you care about. Because while these things are not necessarily strictly distinct as types of site, they are distinct in terms of their uses.

Marketers wanting to engage with the social web need to know the differences in order to engage in ways that meet goals. To me, this is the essence of strategy: Know precisely what you want to accomplish, and craft approaches that rigorously focus on accomplishing it.

How to Give Customers a Say in Community Policy and Moderation

Here's an anonymized approach from some recent client work, in which we're developing a global branded community. Questions around policy and moderation have raised a bunch of interesting issues around how to manage brand in a large-scale user-generated content environment, where there's significant variation among "local" or micro- communities within the community at large.

The approach we're recommending hinges on top-down / bottom-up approaches to both policy and moderation. Let me explain.

When you define a community policy, there are three broad concerns you need to address: appropriateness of behavior, brand-relevance of content, and legality. Legality is something your lawyers need to work out, and in my experience there's a great deal of variety in terms of corporate comfort levels with legal risk. All I can say is, get Legal involved early. But appropriateness and brand-relevance are less clear-cut. A number of parties within the organization need to weigh in--and so does the community itself. Here's a picture from a recent presentation that illustrates the concept:

 

 

Here's some of what's going on in the diagram: The idea of social contract has to do with the appropriateness dimension of community policy. You can think of it this way: The policy makes explicit the unspoken agreement between you and your customers, and among your customers, about how it's ok to behave in the community. The social contract gets communicated implicitly by example and through social feedback and captured explicitly--defined--in the community policy. Legality and brand-appropriateness are likewise defined at a corporate level. And those three elements taken together are the policy. The policy is defined, in other words, centrally.

But policies need to be interpreted in actual practice and scrutinized as they are applied. Moderators need to apply it as a guide for their work, community managers apply it as they engage with the community, and individuals within the community apply the policy through self-moderation--moreover, the community itself responds and reacts to the applications of the policy.

So how does this work in practice? Here's one way.

 

 

The key here is that the site includes two separate content domains. Think of them as sets of pages that hold content related to local areas only, and pages that hold content of global relevance. Individual content objects might belong to one or both of those domains, but  they're managed, in effect, separately.

The way this works, basically, is that there are two sets of moderators--global moderators, who manage content on pages relevant across all areas, and local moderators, who manage content on pages relevant only to a local community. These sets of moderators include both corporate staff and individuals within the community.

At the local level, local judgements trump global judgements. So content that's inappropriate for the broader audience on the global level might still be appropriate at the local level. And the opposite holds true as well. In each case, the policy defined at the corporate level is interpreted and applied at the local level, enabling the community to hold together within the structure of a common policy while accommodating a degree of difference within local contexts.

This is just one approach, but I think it's pretty interesting. The real challenge, I believe, arises inevitably as businesses engage users in interpretation and enforcement of brand-appropriateness as expressed through on-topicness. Is it ok to talk about snowmobile apparel on a site about cross-country skiing? In some communities, probably. But, but! What are the ramifications for the brand?

Yes, engaging users exposes the brand identity itself to scrutiny by its customers. What a challenge! But who better to have that conversation? I'm fascinated--but it's a topic for another post.

Have you had experience with defining, interpreting, or enforcing a community policy, online or off? I'd love to hear what you learned.

Flickr's Inclusion of Video Ignites Rebellion

Here’s something fun from the last couple days: Flickr launched a new video feature this week. It’s the first time the site has deviated from its focus on photographs, and the change has sparked a mini-rebellion:

 

But actually, the rebellion isn’t that small. The We Say No to Videos on Flickr group has grown to over 22,000 members in the past two days, and another similar group has over 8,000 members.

 

 

 

A small percentage of Flickr’s community, to be sure, but these are also the most hard-core Flickr fans. So far I haven't seen any response from the Flickr folks, but I'm sure it's forthcoming, and I also expect it'll reflect their typically thoughtful and sophisticated approach. Can't wait to see.

So a couple things are interesting here:

1. What happens when your hard-core community members get mad at you?
2. How will the Flickr team respond?
3. Is the addition of video a benefit to users, or is it a loss of focus that dilutes the meaning and identity of the site and community?

The moral of the story, for me, is that for communities, doing one thing well, being about one thing people care about, is in some situations more important than adding capabilities or features, even useful ones. To the extent Flickr benefits from its character as a community of photographers, the video feature is a mistake.

Still, there's clear value in a high-quality platform integrating photo and video content. Nobody likes having separate accounts to manage on separate platforms hosting content that's functionally very similar. What's the benefit to me of having to use both Flickr and Vimeo? Flickr's clearly creating value here. And folks on this side of the issue are even spoofing the anti-video crowd!

And still, the uproar. However you slice it, the sheer passion of the debate is a great sign for Flickr. Choose fury over apathy any day! And another benefit to Flickr is the coverage of the debate. Earned media anyone?

It’ll be interesting to see whether the needs of casual users who might appreciate the ability to share photos and videos in one integrated setting will outweigh the sense of community Flickr has created among its tier of hard core community members.

What do you think?

Getting It Right: Designing Community to Support Your Core Offering

These days, there's a huge amount of interest among corporate marketers about how to "tap into," "harness," or "ride the wave of" online community, Web 2.0, and social technology. And, despite the metaphors, despite the herd-like hype-chasing, rightly so. ("Herd-like," by the way, isn't a metaphor; it's a simile. A world of difference, if you're asking.)

The truth is, the widespread adoption of social technologies, including on the Web, are absolutely changing the game and creating new markets. Companies getting left behind on the Web are getting left behind in market share. For that reason, one recent survey indicates 90% of businesses will add Web 2.0 features to their sites in the coming year. (See Burby's ClickZ article for some caveats about that survey.)

But social technology is tricky to get right for companies who aren't selling social technology. The tendency is to implement a community that's either trivial, fails to produce business value, or simply fails altogether because nobody wants to use it. And failure hurts: Just ask Wal-Mart.

 

No, I Don't Want to Be Your Friend

There's an assumption out there that people "want to connect" with each other online. After all, people are increasingly connecting online, discussing topics of shared interest, getting dates, keeping in touch with friends and family. But on sites offered by companies that aren't in the business of connecting people online, in highly branded spaces in particular, this couldn't be further from the truth.

We do a lot of user research at ZAAZ, an increasing amount of it around social technology. Participants, when asked whether they want to connect with their fellow customers online, collectively say something along the lines of "absolutely not, no way, what do you want from me, what a creepy idea."

But changing the question changes the answer. When asked whether information or content provided by other customers in the context of a specific need would be of interest, the answer is, increasingly, yes, I must have it, it's crucial.

So what's the difference? Simply put: People aren't on your web site to make friends. They're there to get something done, and using community to help them get that thing done is a huge value, because it promises responsiveness, detail, honesty, and affinity.

 

Don't Just Build Community for Community's Sake

If you're in, say, the sailing equipment business, selling boat parts, life jackets, apparel, accessories, navigational charts, electronics, and so on, it might be tempting to create, say, a discussion board for your customers. Don't do it. It will fail.

I'm not saying nobody will use it. Sailors, after all, probably have stuff to talk about with other sailors. They might show up, possibly even in numbers to sustain a thriving discussion setting. Properly managed, a nice little community could emerge.

More likely, however, usage will be sporadic, volume low. You won't have the level of value needed to encourage repeat and sustained use. Your logo in the upper left-hand corner of the page will reduce the sense of authentic passion behind the community site, and users will wonder what your motives are. You'll moderate and be called a fascist. Threads will veer off course, so to speak, and topics will list hard a-starboard. You'll spend money keeping the thing afloat for a while, then late some Super Bowl Sunday, when nobody's looking, you'll quietly jettison the whole thing.

At best, your thriving discussion boards will give you a little brand boost. At worst, you'll end up a cautionary tale on some consultant's blog.

 

To Win with Community, Support the Core Offering

So instead of simply throwing open the gates to a discussion forum, think carefully about your real offering. How might your customers create more value around that offering?

Step 1: What do you sell?

Sailors, all of them, are gearheads. They love their gear, and because boats need a lot of maintenance, they're constantly tinkering with their gear. They read your catalog in the evening after work. They talk gear with their sailor friends. Other than sailing, talking about sailing gear is their favorite thing to do.

And hey, you sell sailing gear. So creating a venue for sailors to talk gear has the potential to not only appeal to your customers' enjoyment of gear talk, it also can drive sales. So create discussion forums, yes, but structure them around a taxonomy of sailing gear, and most crucially, tie them into your product pages. Excerpt discussions about products on product pages, and link to products from pages where people are discussing them. Add ratings and reviews for your products. Invite outstanding community content contributors to write posts for a group customer blog.

If your products are complex or require special knowledge to use, provide space for customers to support each other.

Step 2: Is what you sell the real offering?

If you're in the sailing equipment business, your offering might not be gear alone. Do you sell, for example, gear of a certain quality, at a certain price? What's your real brand promise? It's probably not "We sell sailing gear." It's probably something more like "We take the hassle out of boat maintenance, so you can get out on the water."

Another way of saying this is, What differentiates you from your competitors?

Step 3: How do you improve the core offering?

Without losing sight of the thing you're actually selling, think about the core offering of the business, and architect community to do more of it, extend it, complement it, enhance it, improve it, or fix what's broken with it. Providing highly-responsive technical support through community is sometimes a no-brainer, but there's always more you can do.

Imagine, for example, your sailing community offering a space for sailors to share their efficiency tricks. If your brand is about making sailing less fussy, you can offer a community site that promises not just gear, but the collective knowledge of the sailing community about how to get out there more and fuss with gear less.

Step 4: Tie Your Community to Your Product or Service

Remember, the core offering isn't always the thing that's getting sold, but that doesn't mean you can ignore the need to sell. And you don't have to feel bad about it! It's really tempting to want to adopt a perspective along the lines of "It's not about selling, it's about people." The truth is, it can and should be both. People aren't going to hate you.

I've been surprised many times by community participants' willingness to accept. selling within the community, as long as it's done right, without hard sells, and the community is providing value. Your customers know you need to make a living, and they'll find it perfectly normal for you to see a direct business return on your community site.

Think of it this way: If you were hosting a speaker at your sailing gear store presenting a slide show about a solo voyage around the world, folks wouldn't resent the visible presence of your products at the event. In fact, they'd appreciate it. You could even announce an upcoming sale or special deal for attendees, if you did it with taste and sensitivity, respecting the fact that people came primarily to hear the speaker and only incidentally, and only in some cases, to shop. Doing something analogous in your online community space is perfectly acceptable.

Don't be afraid to be in business. And don't be afraid to measure your community effectiveness in dollars--after all, if you're making money, you must be offering something of value! Without a doubt, branded communities require a different kind of thinking. But it's worth the investment. When community is working for you, you're not only running a cool web site that brings you cachet--you're co-creating, in partnership with your customers, a stronger realization of your brand promise.