BretWagner.com

The future of busi­ness is sell­ing less of more. This accord­ing to Chris Ander­son, author of The Long Tail. Ander­son looks at why the future of com­merce and cul­ture isn’t in hits, the high-volume head of a tra­di­tional demand curve (and what is still dri­ving the motion-picture and music indus­tries). He makes the case that the future is now in what used to be regarded as misses– the “long tail” of the same demand curve.

Rise and Fall of the Hit

Remem­ber when Brit­ney Spears was known as a pop artist rather than a freak show? The com­mer­cial suc­cess of teen pop hits like Spears is best demon­strated by the group NSYNC. On March 21, 2000, Jive Records released NSYNC’s lat­est album No Strings Attached. The album sold 2.4 mil­lion copies in its first week… 11 mil­lion by the end of the year.

Ander­son argues that this will never hap­pen again. So what hap­pened to the hit parade? The indus­try blamed piracy. Ander­son states it was choice. Not only were users able to down­load music freely on such ser­vices as Nap­ster and Limewire, but they were given unprece­dented choice in what music they down­loaded. Today’s iTunes model uses this same choice to cre­ate a legal sys­tem for access­ing mil­lions of tracks, from the hits to the obscure.

So what’s the take home here? If you don’t have the resources to cre­ate a big hit social net­work like Face­book or Net­flix, don’t worry. With the right niche and the abil­ity to offer infi­nite con­tent within that niche, you can build a strong brand by sup­port­ing and encour­ag­ing the right users. What’s more, with tech­nol­ogy advanc­ing to a point where any­one can be a media pro­ducer, you can offer it faster than any of the hits could hope to.

Niche Cul­ture

Amer­i­can polit­i­cal and cul­tural writer Vir­ginia Postrel observed that the pop­u­lar­ity of niche is noth­ing more than a reflec­tion of the diver­sity inher­ent in any pop­u­la­tion distribution:

“Every aspect of human iden­tity, from size, shape, and color to sex­ual pro­cliv­i­ties and intel­lec­tual gifts, comes in a wide range. Most of us clus­ter some­where in the mid­dle of most sta­tis­ti­cal dis­tri­b­u­tions. But there are lots of bell curves, and pretty much every­one is on the tail of at least one of them.”

Ander­son observes peo­ple reform­ing into thou­sands of what he calls tribes of inter­est, con­nected less by geo­graphic prox­im­ity and work­place chat­ter than by shared inter­ests. You can find the niche for your social net­work by hav­ing a tightly defined pur­pose and audi­ence.

Long Tail Rules

The book is well sum­ma­rized by the last chap­ter, where Ander­son states the secret to cre­at­ing a thriv­ing Long Tail social net­work as

1. Make every­thing available
2. Help me find it

Seems sim­ple enough. The first part can be a chal­lenge, as copy­right may be an issue, as well as dig­i­tiz­ing some con­tent. But with the cost of stor­age and band­width decreas­ing rapidly, it will con­tinue to get eas­ier to offer every­thing within a niche.

The sec­ond point is mov­ing quickly with the rise of pow­er­ful search engines act­ing like fil­ters. Pro­gram­ming an effec­tive search fea­ture on your social net­work, as well as per­form­ing appro­pri­ate search engine opti­miza­tion, will drive traf­fic down the long tail and to your net­work. Remem­ber– the power of the rec­om­men­da­tion trumps all, so be sure to include some type of rat­ings sys­tem within your website.

Over­all, The Long Tail was a quick read, well worth a trip to your local library. If you are short on time, you may con­sider check­ing out this book for the last chap­ter alone. Anderson’s nine long tail rules are crit­i­cal for any social net­work being considered.

Every party needs a host. Like a good host, your com­mu­nity man­ager should be your most active, high-profile mem­ber– account­able to every­one and respon­si­ble for set­ting the tone for the com­mu­nity expe­ri­ence. Because your com­mu­nity man­ager will have spe­cial pow­ers and insider knowl­edge, you’ll need to take extra care in choos­ing some­one to fill this role. Step one in the screen­ing and selec­tion process — locate qual­i­fied candidates.

Find­ing the com­mu­nity manager.

The most impor­tant lead­er­ship role in your com­mu­nity is the com­mu­nity man­ager. This per­son is ulti­mately respon­si­ble for keep­ing the com­mu­nity run­ning smoothly. I would sug­gest recruit­ing a small pool of 3–5 active par­tic­i­pants drawn from your forum or pro­fes­sional expe­ri­ence. Develop a rela­tion­ship with each of these poten­tial can­di­dates, through email or over the phone. Get to know each so that when it comes time to select­ing your man­ager, you feel con­fi­dent that you have made the best choice.

Defin­ing the manager’s responsibilities.

The goal isn’t for this per­son to con­trol the com­mu­nity, but to curate it, and the work done up front will pay off later. Defin­ing respon­si­bil­i­ties up front will help. Accord­ing to Amy Jo Kim, author of Com­mu­nity Build­ing on the Web, here are some impor­tant respon­si­bil­i­ties the com­mu­nity man­ager must take on:

• Defin­ing key lead­er­ship posi­tions and recruit­ing indi­vid­u­als to fill these positions
• Cre­at­ing a social and legal policy
• Set­ting up a train­ing pro­gram for lead­er­ship positions
• Over­see­ing the cre­ation and main­te­nance of a lead­er­ship manual
• Defin­ing com­pen­sa­tion (finan­cial or oth­er­wise) for com­mu­nity leaders
• Cre­at­ing feed­back mech­a­nisms for eval­u­at­ing the effec­tive­ness of other com­mu­nity leaders
• Train­ing and man­ag­ing a com­mu­nity staff

Whew! That is a lot to chew on for one per­son. If you are run­ning a small com­mu­nity, your defined roles may be dif­fer­ent in that you are the com­mu­nity man­ager, and it is your job to recruit and train other com­mu­nity lead­ers. In this case, you may want to trans­fer some of these respon­si­bil­i­ties to the other leaders.

Train­ing the com­mu­nity manager.

Once you’ve selected the com­mu­nity man­ager and defined their respon­si­bil­i­ties, you need to teach them how to per­form their new role. Set­ting up an online meet­ing space will give you a chance to present the train­ing pro­gram and encour­age the par­tic­i­pant to ask ques­tions through direct con­tact. Small com­mu­ni­ties just start­ing out will likely have small, infor­mal train­ing ses­sions. As the com­mu­nity grows, it is impor­tant to start to develop more for­mal train­ing pro­grams with writ­ten doc­u­men­ta­tion to serve as a ref­er­ence. The online com­mu­nity Well has an excel­lent exam­ple of a writ­ten man­ual they pro­vide to all new hosts.

Sup­port and compensation.

If you’re a larger com­mu­nity, and have a steady rev­enue stream, you may decide that finan­cial com­pen­sa­tion is appro­pri­ate. In this case, you should look for some­one who is capa­ble of per­form­ing most if not all of the above tasks, and be pre­pared to reward them for all their hard work.

For many large com­mu­ni­ties, man­ag­ing can be a full-time job. How­ever, as your com­mu­nity flour­ishes, other hosts will emerge from your mem­ber base to share the work. With the right mix of paid lead­ers and vol­un­teers, you should see results in increased mem­ber­ship and traf­fic, as well as in the loy­alty of your mem­bers and par­tic­i­pa­tion in the community.

Why do peo­ple inter­act online? Are these the same rea­sons for inter­act­ing face-to-face? These are two ques­tions I’ve been ask­ing myself while con­sid­er­ing a redesign of my social net­work­ing site, Sci­ence For Amer­ica. These are ques­tions you should con­sider before cre­at­ing your social net­work­ing space. By hav­ing a clear pur­pose that makes sense to you, the space designer, and the mem­bers, you can give your­self a head start in design­ing and run­ning a suc­cess­ful online inter­ac­tion space or community.

What I’m hop­ing to accom­plish with my social net­work is moti­vat­ing teach­ers to col­lab­o­rate online and share sci­ence teach­ing strate­gies. They are going to have to over­come time and tech­ni­cal bar­ri­ers to do this. I’m work­ing to demon­strate to poten­tial users how par­tic­i­pat­ing in the space will ben­e­fit them. Two of the best strate­gies to accom­plish this is defin­ing who exactly I’m going after, and what will be our community’s purpose.

How to Avoid an Online Ghost Town… Have a Well-Defined Purpose!

The pur­pose of your social net­work helps you decide both its struc­ture (what tools to use, how to apply them), and what resources (time, infor­ma­tion, and exper­tise) you will need to sup­port and facil­i­tate it.

To help you artic­u­late and clar­ify your pur­pose, you should ask your­self the fol­low­ing ques­tions (I’m cred­it­ing Full Cir­cle Asso­ciates for com­ing up with these):

• Does your com­mu­nity have a mis­sion or a vision that you can com­mu­ni­cate to poten­tial members?
• Are the ben­e­fits mea­sur­able and vis­i­ble to mem­bers and poten­tial members?
• Is the out­come deter­mined by the orga­nizer? Group mem­bers? Both?
• If the group is part of a larger orga­ni­za­tion, is it con­sis­tent with orga­ni­za­tional goals and culture?
• Is the group’s pur­pose some­thing that can only be done/accomplished online? Will it replace some­thing offline? Or is it some combination?

Pur­pose helps you artic­u­late your com­mu­nity story which helps attract and draw mem­bers in. It sus­tains inter­ac­tion. I’ve men­tioned the impor­tance of story in a pre­vi­ous post review­ing Daniel Pink’s book A Whole New Mind.

As far as Sci­ence For Amer­ica goes, our pur­pose follows:

“To empower edu­ca­tors as teach­ers and learn­ers as they develop and imple­ment new themes, ideas, and cur­ricu­lum. Edu­ca­tors are given the oppor­tu­nity to learn and build net­works with lead­ers, experts and each other.”

I believe our pur­pose is artic­u­lated well in these two sen­tences. Our story is in our empow­ered mem­bers. Ideas to make this story stronger might be to include quotes from teach­ers who have used the web­site to make a dif­fer­ence in their class­room, or show a pic­ture of the net­work of teach­ers who have con­nected through the site.

Sight­ing in your Tar­get Audience

A tightly defined tar­get audi­ence will make it eas­ier when devel­op­ing con­tent for your site. You will be able to look at every­thing through a lens, ask­ing “Is this what my com­mu­nity mem­bers want?” While defin­ing the tar­get audi­ence for Sci­ence For Amer­ica, I found that defin­ing a sin­gle tar­get audi­ence was actu­ally impos­si­ble. Instead, I had to focus on two audi­ences– a group of expe­ri­enced sci­ence teach­ers (5 or more years in the class­room) and a group of inex­pe­ri­enced teach­ers ( 5 years or less in the classroom).

Here are some ques­tions to help guide you (from Full Cir­cle Asso­ciates, with some mod­i­fi­ca­tions by this author):

• How would you describe the website’s vis­i­tors? It may help to artic­u­late the dif­fer­ence between a vis­i­tor vs. participant.
• How moti­vated are your vis­i­tors to participate?
• What is “in it for them?”
• Do they have ade­quate com­puter equip­ment and Inter­net access to have a sat­is­fac­tory expe­ri­ence on your system?
• Do you tell them the min­i­mum require­ments up front?
• Do you want your com­mu­nity to be pub­lic or private?
• If pri­vate, what deter­mines eligibility?
• What is the ideal size for your group?
• Is there a limit to how many mem­bers can participate?
• Do you have a sense of how your com­mu­nity can expand if there is greater interest?
• Where might you find poten­tial participants?
• How might you com­mu­ni­cate with your par­tic­i­pants to mar­ket your online inter­ac­tion space? (If you build it, they may not come!)
• Are you build­ing from an exist­ing pool of par­tic­i­pants, or draw­ing in new people?

Of these, I believe the “What’s in it for me?” ques­tion should drive every­thing you do. Ulti­mately, all vis­i­tors, whether they are just pass­ing through or return­ing par­tic­i­pants, have come to your site with a pur­pose. Whether that pur­pose be to con­nect, or learn, or down­load or sub­mit con­tent (we’ll look at defin­ing WHAT your vis­i­tors do once they arrive at your site in a later post), the closer your site’s pur­pose is to their pur­pose, the more likely they are to become loyal participants.

Sci­ence For Amer­ica empow­ers edu­ca­tors as teach­ers and learn­ers as they develop and imple­ment new themes, ideas, and cur­ricu­lum. Edu­ca­tors are given the oppor­tu­nity to learn and build net­works with lead­ers, experts and each other.

The web­site is built upon the belief that edu­ca­tors can only facil­i­tate the devel­op­ment of ana­lyt­i­cal rea­son­ing and problem-solving skills when these same pro­fi­cien­cies are used to resolve the issues con­fronting sci­ence edu­ca­tion today.

The Sci­ence For Amer­ica web site offers resources for plan­ning and imple­ment­ing instruc­tion, devel­op­ing project-based learn­ing cur­ricu­lum, and col­lab­o­rat­ing with col­leagues. Unlike other teaching-related web­sites, which fre­quently pro­vide large lists of unranked, unsorted links and resources, the Sci­ence For Amer­ica web­site pro­vides sub­mis­sion, rat­ing and dis­cus­sion tools to allow the best resources to sur­face near the top of the list. This saves teach­ers time, and allows the best resources to develop into excel­lent tools which all edu­ca­tors will want to imple­ment in their classrooms.

If you build it, they will come. A state­ment ingrained in America’s psy­che thanks to the 1989 film Field of Dreams. But while the film gar­nered numer­ous awards and acco­lades from crit­ics and movie­go­ers alike (three Oscar nom­i­na­tions alone, Best Pic­ture, Best Music, Best Writ­ing), not even Kevin Cost­ner can save your social net­work­ing site from fad­ing into obscu­rity with­out the right stuff.

If you build it they will come works well for build­ing base­ball dia­monds in Iowa corn­fields, but when it comes to social net­work­ing sites, it takes a con­certed effort of seed­ing, pro­mot­ing, and man­ag­ing to get things off the ground.

I’ve been scour­ing the web for other authors and orga­ni­za­tions who have addressed steps to build­ing suc­cess­ful online com­mu­ni­ties. Aside from a hand­ful of per­sonal blogs dis­cussing this issue, there isn’t a whole lot of offi­cial research on what fac­tors are nec­es­sary for suc­cess­ful social networks.

I did, how­ever, find an excel­lent resource from the Kick­Apps team. Kick­apps recently pub­lished a whitepa­per titled “Nine Steps to a Suc­cess­ful Online Com­mu­nity.” They’ve put together a list of guide­lines to help social net­works reach their fullest poten­tial. The nine steps nec­es­sary to pro­mote good plan­ning and best practices?

1. Define your community’s pur­pose and audience.
2. Get a Com­mu­nity Manager.
3. Choose the tech­nol­ogy that’s right for you.
4. Seed your com­mu­nity with great content.
5. Cus­tomize your community’s look and feel.
6. Pro­mote it!
7. Encour­age active participation.
8. Man­ager your com­mu­nity with fair-mind consistency.
9. Lis­ten and optimize.

I’ll be writ­ing about each one of these in sep­a­rate blogs in the next few weeks. In the mean­time, read up for your­self here and also check out some of these links.

Inter­ested in learn­ing more about mar­ket­ing and the art of brand­ing? Check out Seth Godin’s web­site at http://sethgodin.typepad.com/.

Believe it or not, Sci­ence For Amer­ica was my first web­site. I’ve cre­ated four now– def­i­nitely still a new­bie– but I’ve come to appre­ci­ate the rel­a­tive ease of cre­at­ing web­sites and appli­ca­tions using tech­nolo­gies like con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems, blog­ging plat­forms and devel­op­ment frameworks.

While I think the design of Sci­ence For Amer­ica is strong, and the plat­form I built it on is even stronger (Joomla! CMS), I’ve learned a few things about try­ing to cre­ate a social net­work that I’d like to share with you.

One…

Cre­at­ing social net­works takes time. Both time on a day-by-day basis, and also time in the sense of build­ing up the site and brand to get pas­sion­ate vis­i­tors who come back for more. I would attribute the rel­a­tive suc­cess of Sci­ence For Amer­ica to its tenure on the web, now 18 months. I found that ini­tial traf­fic and get­ting the word out was crit­i­cal in the begin­ning, but that after this had started, it sim­ply took time for traf­fic and users to arrive at the site.

Two…

Cre­at­ing social net­works takes plan­ning. I used a 20 Ques­tions doc­u­ment to develop the under­ly­ing prin­ci­ples for the site. Who are we tar­get­ing? What are the sites’ com­peti­tors? What type of con­tent will be included? All of these were impor­tant in decid­ing the direc­tion of the site.

Three…

Cre­at­ing social net­works takes orga­ni­za­tion. Proper lay­out is crit­i­cal, because you want your user inter­face to be intu­itive. Where can I find sci­ence work­sheets? Where do I go when I want to find links to sci­ence web­sites? All of these ques­tions should really be answered BEFORE you start on the site and through­out the beta phase of devel­op­ment. There are many plat­forms out there– Joomla! and Word­Press to name a cou­ple– that make it rel­a­tively easy to rearrange con­tent and links on web­sites, but it is still a crit­i­cal step to develop at least a rough sketch, wire­frames maybe, of where you are going to have vis­i­tors click to nav­i­gate cer­tain parts of the site.

This is sim­pli­fy­ing things a bit, but I believe if you focus on these three areas, you’ll have a solid site ready for visitors.

Where are all the sci­ence teach­ers? It seems log­i­cal that those who teach tech­nol­ogy should be using tech­nol­ogy to con­nect and share ideas on the web. I’ve been reflect­ing on why, after 18 months on the web, my web­site Sci­ence for Amer­ica only has 350 reg­is­tered mem­bers. While the site gets 200 vis­i­tors PER DAY, really only about 5–7 peo­ple will sign up per week. (more…)

One of my favorite reads this fall is Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind. Besides being an excel­lent read on design and devel­op­ing your cre­ative side, it is a quick read well worth your time. I read it through once, then skimmed it again look­ing for ideas to incor­po­rate into my weekly rou­tine– things like keep­ing a design note­book, read­ing my wife’s Real Sim­ple mag­a­zine, and check­ing out var­i­ous right-brain games on the Internet.

Daniel Pink’s ele­va­tor speech…

The future belongs to the per­son with a very dif­fer­ent kind of mind– one that empha­sizes cre­ation over rep­e­ti­tion, rec­og­niz­ing and draw­ing mean­ing from pat­terns rather than merely fol­low­ing them. While the log­i­cal, left-brain abil­i­ties will con­tinue to be nec­es­sary for suc­cess in one’s career, they are no longer suf­fi­cient. When choos­ing a career path, one must con­sider the fol­low­ing questions:

1. Can some­one over­seas do it cheaper?
2. Can a com­puter do it faster?
3. Am I offer­ing some­thing that sat­is­fies thenon mate­r­ial, tran­scen­dent desires of an abun­dant age?

Abun­dance, Asia and Automation…

These three fac­tors are chang­ing the world in which Amer­i­cans live. For exam­ple, take abun­dance. Self-storage is a bil­lion dol­lar busi­ness and promises to only grow into the future. Think there were self-storage facil­i­ties in the Great Depression?

Asia is chang­ing the face of the work­force because of the inex­pen­sive, well-trained labor wait­ing to draw repet­i­tive and pro­gram­matic jobs in India and China. Rou­tine func­tions and pro­gram­ming have been turned over to com­put­ers and robots. Indeed, much of the work per­formed by doc­tors are fol­low­ing deci­sions trees when diag­nos­ing patients, some­thing slowly be turned over to the likes of the web­sites Web MD and some 23,000 other med-related sites.

Pink’s Six Senses…
The book does a great job dis­cussing each of Pink’s sug­gested senses– design, story, sym­phony, empa­thy, play, mean­ing– then list­ing ideas in his port­fo­lio sec­tion where you can develop each of these skills in your own life.

(1) Design. Pink brings up an impor­tant point in this sec­tion… we all start out in child­hood as design­ers. We are not afraid to make mis­takes and fol­low wher­ever our imag­i­na­tion takes us. It is through the often­times mind-numbing expe­ri­ence that is high school and col­lege that we lose this ini­tial courage to design. Says Pink– “Design is a high-concept apti­tude that is dif­fi­cult to out­source or auto­mate. Some of my favorite sug­ges­tions to grow your design apti­tude– visit a design museum (Pink lists 10) and check­ing out open houses for design ideas and elements.

(2) Story. There’s a rea­son why you can remem­ber the sto­ries your grandpa would tell around the fire­place 20 years prior but have trou­ble remem­ber­ing your combo to the lock at the gym. Our minds are wired to make as many con­nec­tions as pos­si­ble, and sto­ries fit much bet­ter with this model that rote mem­o­riza­tion. But while remem­ber­ing sto­ries may be every person’s forte, telling them is a bit trick­ier. So how do you develop this skill? Pink sug­gests writ­ing a mini-saga of your life, whip­ping out a tape recorder and inter­view­ing a rel­a­tive or friends, and turn­ing your cell­phone into the story teller by snap­ping a pic­ture story of your day (I plan on devel­op­ing this one into a post in the near future). Story is impor­tant with social net­work­ing (have you heard how Face­book got started ?!?!)

(3) Sym­phony. This could be one of the most under­rated skills on this list. Pink calls sym­phony an “essen­tial apti­tude” for a grow­ing pop­u­la­tion of work­ers. While entre­pre­neurs and inven­tors have tra­di­tion­ally done a good job at incor­po­rat­ing this into new ven­tures, those who want to stay ahead must see sym­phony for what it is– devel­op­ing rela­tion­ships. Some advice– keep a metaphor log (and read this book) and prac­tice good brain­storm­ing habits. That is:

• Go for quantity.
• Encour­age wild ideas.
• Be visual.
• Defer judg­ment.
• Take one con­ver­sa­tion at a time.

(4) Empa­thy. Many of us can boost our pow­ers of empa­thy. Doctor’s are tak­ing class to help put them­selves in the posi­tion of the patient, lawyers are try­ing to warm up to their clients (hard to believe, huh?) and yes, women still take the cake when it comes to empa­thy. So how can men get a leg up on their com­pe­ti­tion. Vol­un­teer at a local char­ity and eaves­drop at the local cof­fee shop.

(5) Play. Hap­pi­ness is an excel­lent stim­u­lus for the brain. Amer­i­cans have seen a shift in the work­place from a rigid place where busi­ness does not get mixed with plea­sure, to one where, work and play are inter­twined to cre­ate a more invig­o­rat­ing envi­ron­ment where work­ers are happy and yes, more effec­tive in their jobs. Look at Google as a shin­ing exam­ple. Employ­ees enjoy mid-afternoon sand vol­ley­ball, ping pong, and video games, and still man­age to con­tinue to take over the world. Look for a laugh­ter club near you to stim­u­late your brain with the fun stuff.

(6) Mean­ing. Aren’t we all look­ing for mean­ing? Vik­tor Frankl went look­ing for mean­ing while impris­oned in a Nazi con­cen­tra­tion camp and devel­oped his the­ory of logother­apy– an influ­en­tial move­ment in psy­chother­apy. Mar­shalling the ele­ments of hap­pi­ness and spir­i­tu­al­ity may even­tu­ally help find that mean­ing, but these books could help you get there faster: Man’s Search for Mean­ing by Vik­tor Frankl, What Should I Do with My Life? by Po Bron­son, and The Art of Hap­pi­ness by His Holi­ness the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cut­ler, M.D.

Design. Story. Sym­phony. Empa­thy. Play. Mean­ing. Devel­op­ing a higher facil­ity in all of these will not guar­an­tee suc­cess, but they will cer­tainly move you closer to becom­ing bet­ter pre­pared for the next decade two years. Our world will only con­tinue to change faster. Will you be ready?

Author: Daniel Pink

Pub­lished: 2005, updates in 2006

My Rat­ing: 3.5 out of 4