I just wrote the following frenzy of text after reading this on Kevin Gamble’s blog:

“It’s not a community if everyone doesn’t feel free to participate as an equal. As soon as you make this someone’s job you devalue the contributions of everyone.”

I think the heart of Kevin’s post is in the exact right place. However, I think it’s entirely incorrect to say that making community work someone’s job devalues it; it doesn’t change the value at all, it just focuses it in a more useful way for the company.  While Kevin’s “conversational” aspiration is fantastic (and I think can be part of the community job), I think it’s idealistic to think that almost any company can have their best possible relationship with their community without someone focusing on it, at least part time.

For the record, a few things: I work at Flock as a Community Ambassador.  I am certainly biased.  I will refer to the position that we’re discussing here as Community Ambassador, but it has also been called Community Advocate/Evangelist/Manager (I’ll state my take on the “Manager” title later in the post).  I think Kevin’s heart is in the right place, but I truly believe in this position.

Here’s why this job is important:

Community is important
I don’t think Kevin denies this, but I think it’s important to state: your community is what keeps your company afloat, and (hopefully) the goal of your company was and is to make the lives of your community better in some way.  If you don’t listen to your community, you are either going to fail or you will have to get very lucky.  Methods may differ, but for the most part you’ll find that successful companies listen to their community.

Companies are not inclined to state what they’re doing
Companies like to have big unveilings, to surprise their audience, and (frankly) to keep their ideas secret so they don’t get ripped off. Communication between releases is not in their nature. However, it is part of human nature to want to know what’s going on and part of human nature to talk about things they’re excited about.  I know people who are just short of physically upset when they don’t know what Flock is up to, even if it’s as simple as “planning our holiday party”. I mentioned our new Twitter account on our blog last week and within 5 hours more than 70 people had started following it. People want to know what’s going on, and employees want to talk about it…but companies are built by default not to do this. Unless you’re blessed with an executive staff that is open-minded AND takes the initiative to make the time to write and/or approve posts, this isn’t going to happen on it’s own.

Customer feedback is, by it’s nature, raw and biased
Of course my feedback about a product I use is going to be biased…I bought it for me, and it should work for me! But how is Apple supposed to treat my feedback that the new iPod Nano doesn’t fit in the mini-pocket of my jeans? Alongside (probably) millions of other pieces of feedback, where does this factor in? Again, time becomes an issue: does Jobs have time to read and absorb all this feedback and do his regular work?  Unlikely. While I’m fully in support of employees at all levels of a company reading community feedback (which we do at Flock, from QA to CEO), it’s unrealistic to count on this. Having a Community Ambassador to absorb, categorize, and interpret this feedback is key. Nobody at Flock would have guessed that Picasa was important to our community, but through gradual collection of votes (on our site, blogs, and via direct feedback) it became clear that Picasa integration is much more important to our existing community than any other service.

That said, I totally agree that the Community Ambassador should not be the single point of failure. Going back to the point about feedback being biased….even if 20 angry people like me write to Apple asking for iPod Nanos that fit our mini-pockets, that’s ignoring the millions of people who don’t care or even like the size. Both the Community Ambassador and the company they work for must take this all into consideration. User testing should be done, and ideas from directly within the company shouldn’t take backseat to community feedback…they should ride together, as equally viable ideas.

People like to get pumped
I understand where the inclination to stay “hands off” of evangelism comes from. Nothing is grosser than an employee (especially an executive!) putting on a big fake smile and blabbing on about how great the latest product is. However, I think that if you accomplish what Jeremiah suggests in his post on the topic, you are part of your community as much as your company. Once you are a legitimate part of your community, you are taken seriously by them (though you can easily compromise this by not being honest). If you truly are excited about your product (which you should be, or you should get a new job), you should express this to the people whom you know are excited about your product. If I care about, say, the band Queens of the Stone Age, I might join their Street Team or mailing list. If their Community Ambassador then contacts me telling me about how awesome the new album is (especially if it’s “insider” news), I’m going to be stoked! If he tells me they’re going on a new tour that is going to be wild and crazy and gives me the link to buy tickets, I’m not going to feel advertised to…I’m going to click that link and look at the tour dates! It’s all about being honest and genuine and only evangelizing to those who opt-in in some way.

Everybody should be part-time Community Ambassador
I agree with Kevin…the position of Community Ambassador absolutely does not absolve anyone in the organization of interaction with the community. As we do at Flock, the executives should blog, read feedback, respond to customers, and meet the community. This is essential to your organization, and the position of Community Ambassador should not affect this one way or another.

In the end, I understand where these anti-Community Ambassador posts come from. The position is often called Community Manager, which is a gross mischaracterization and invokes scary undertones. Many people claim to be interested in “community”, but describe it as a sort of asset (“Oh yeah, we got one of them community things. I hear they’re good for business.”) And the intrusive, look-we’re-cool-too style of advertising is so pervasive that it makes me physically angry when I hear a 40-year-old on the radio talk about how “sweet” and “stylin'” you’ll be with some “urban groove” on your “sweet mp3 player”. That is not community work…that is lame, dishonest advertising. The Community Ambassador is not an advertiser…he/she is simultaneously a member of the company and the community, and the guide for communication between them. He/she is not the be-all, end-all. He/she is not the single point of communication. He/she is not always right. He/she is just helping the flow of communication between those who make and those who use a product.  And if that’s not an important role, I don’t know what is.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: CommunityAmbassador, community, “Community Manager, Flock, “Jeremiah Owyang, “Kevin Gamble, customer, “customer feedback

Why haven’t I been blogging? In short, Twitter.

I have been insanely busy. Too busy to deal with the strange invisible rule telling me that I have to write long, profound blog posts.

I know, it’s silly. It’s my blog. While I’d love to inspire a few minds, this is my mental output. I don’t have to do anything but what I want to. So why do I feel like I can’t write a paragraph-long post about my day?

At the Social Media Club Workshop I attended on Monday, there was much discussion about why blogs did not become “the next big (social) thing”. Experts had predicted blogs would rise up as the predominant online social tool…and then they didn’t. After the surge in popularity, blogs became a common sight on the social web…but not a soaring, viral phenomenon like everyone expected.

Why did this happen? Where does this leave predictions about the next big thing? I think we sabotaged ourselves (I use “we” loosely as I only recently began doing what would officially be called “blogging”). And I don’t think it’s bad. Let’s look at the elements that contributed to this.

1. Tools
The blogging tools that exist do not lend themselves to short, light writing. Even Flock’s delightfully simple and usable blog editor has options for formatting, photos, html, tags, and more. And we still have a laundry list of advanced options that our community requests daily (Tony Fardon’s BlogPlus Extension fills this gap nicely). Even the themes surrounding many blogs makes a single paragraph look overwhelmed (Example Here). This is not welcoming to the kind of people who avoid word processors as much as possible or don’t know what html is.

2. The Over-hyped Decline of Traditional News Media
At the same time that blogging became a rising star, traditional news media began a noticeable decline. Did blogging cause this? No. It may have contributed. But what I feel was more of a factor was that people wanted (and could finally get) fast, visual, and relevant news. The proliferation of high-speed internet (fast), the rise of YouTube (visual), and the introduction of user-rated news like Digg (relevant) all hastened the decline of the 5 o’clock news hour. Those seeking the fast/visual/relevant combo discovered that “the next big thing”, blogs, didn’t always provide this. And so these people pushed blogs aside in favor of piano-playing cats.

3. Community
Again, this isn’t a bad thing. This is a great thing. The people that eventually became the blogging “community” are the people that stunted it’s growth. In the blogsphere, there is an emphasis on readers, not “friends” (including a lack of “collecting friends” mentality), and on colleagues/contemporaries rather than hookups (ignoring the rule of successful social apps: get people laid). Very few us of are friend whores or glitter graphics lovers, and thus we turn those people off. The fact is, there are a lot more of these glitter graphics kids than there are writers with the interest, talent, and focus to write several paragraphs of intelligent text for a dubious number of internet readers. We drove away the MySpace crowd.

Don’t fret! This is fantastic! We live in an idyllic community because we didn’t become “the next big thing”. We don’t have to deal with the pressure of having new companies riding their money on our success every day. We don’t have to deal with millions of “omg i luvz the blogz yo” posts or serious lawsuits. Bloggers, rejoice in not being the next big thing.

What is the next big thing? For now, Twitter and nanoblogging/microblogging/tumblogging/whatever it’s called this week. There’s much less of a barrier here. All I can do is customize my background, add a few tiny notes about myself, and write 140 characters. And sometimes, at the end of the day, it’s all I can do to write 140 characters about what I’m thinking. Is this bad for blogs? Who knows. I doubt it. After all, it says something that what began as a short excuse for not writing blogs became a whole blog post about the matter.

I had the pleasure of attending the Community Next conference at Stanford this weekend.  The following is my story.

(cue Law and Order orchestra hit)

Community Next was organized by the (in?)famous and high-energy Noah Kagen.  Sadly, I didn’t get to chat with him for very long, but he graciously cleared up some registration problems (not their fault) quickly for me, so he gets points for that.

Squeezed into Stanford’s Annenberg Auditorium, Community Next was definitely underestimated.  As I heard it, the waiting list was 3x the size of attendees…not a bad feat for a first-time conference.

After some cute “social networking” activities that didn’t quite catch on (finding the attendee with your “weird fact”, signing “Hello, my name is” shirts) and a generous collection of Noah’s Bagels, the varied group of Web2.0ers shuffled their way into the auditorium.  This was defintely the right crowd for this conference: strangers meeting left and right, reluctant to move from the idea-riffing of the hallways into the confines of the presentations.

After the somewhat appropriate notes of The Who’s Baba O’Reilly (“The exodus is here/The happy ones are near/Let’s get together/Before we get much older”) faded out, Noah briefly introduced the conference (saying something about cheating girlfriends and the Amish) before giving the floor to Josh Spear and Aaron Dignan.  As would become the standard, the two presenters ran down a quick list of their top rules and were shuffled offstage before they could go into much depth.

Highlights (paraphrased):
“Be authentic…your social networking site should be built by lovers.”
“Let community create you (integrate, don’t infiltrate)”.

Tara Hunt ran into the same time constraints, making it very obvious that this conference should have been two days long (and probably will be next year, if this year’s success was any indication).

Next was a very interesting panel discussing “creating, analyzing, and marketing your own online community” featuring Hiten Shah of Crazyegg, Matt Roche of Offermatica, Mike Jones of Userplane (who looks like Jason Statham in The Transporter but is actually less terrifying), and Joe Hurd of VideoEgg.  A much more business-minded group than the semantic openers, the highlights of this discussion included the suggestion to build one user at a time…literally.  MySpace and Friendster, one of the panelists pointed out, started adding their friends one by one.  “I would see Tom on IM at 3 in the morning, plugging away”.

“Ask your users about advertising” was another theme (reiterated by Heather Luttrell of 3jam and indieclick later in the conference); they know you have to pay the bills, and they’d rather have input than have it sprung on them.

And one of the best quotes of the conference came from Matt Roche: “MySpace is a massive popularity contest…like digital binders covered in stickers.”  So true.  What does that make Facebook?  A pretentious art student’s portfolio?

I won’t go much into his presentation, but Nikhyl Singhal of SayNow has an amazing product that links fans and artists by voice…they sent my band, Monsters are not Myths an invitation a few weeks back, and now I’m fully convinced.

Lunch was delicious Hawaiian BBQ and a significant amount of social networking.  I felt really dumb not having any business cards yet (that’s definitely on the list for today).  Oh well.

Things got much more exciting after lunch, as we were treated to the best presentation of the conference: “The patent-pending skinnyCorp method for creating online awesomeness and other cool stuff” by Jeffrey Kalmikoff and Jake Nickell of Threadless.  These guys could go into stand up comedy if they weren’t making tons of money from Threadless, Naked & Angry, and Extra Tasty!  But they weren’t just funny: they were right.

Jeffrey and Jake hammered in this major point:

“Your Project Is Not Good Enough”

No, they weren’t trying to get us down.  Their point was that you are never “finished” with your product unless you’re shutting it down.  They’ve started a number of projects because they wanted to use them (iparklikeanidiot.com being my favorite), and every time one of these projects became stupid/useless/uninteresting,  they shut them down.  The ones they didn’t shut down they continue to expand and enhance (and they’re making a lot of money from it).

Their four commandments (“We figured out that because we have four commandments, it means each of our commandments are 2 1/2 times more powerful than each of Moses’ Commandments”):

1. Allow your content to be created by it’s community
2. Put your project in the hands of it’s community (actually, not just pretending)
3. Let your community grow ITSELF
4. Reward the community that makes your project possible

I would have loved to chat with these two later, but they were swamped with questions.  Truly the best work of the conference.

We were swung through a couple short presentations next: Heather Luttrel spoke about monetizing with ads (and not pissing off your audience), Fred Stutzman of claimid gave us some figures about social networks, and Jake Mckee emphasized how important even a small but evangelical percentage of your community can be.

Ted Rheingold, John Vars, and Steven Reading of Dogster (and Catster) went through a (slightly too long) discussion of how they started the two sites.  It was very impressive, offering a few relevant points and one slightly painful statement: “I’m so sick of everything being beta”.  Flock 1.0 is coming soon, I promise!

Lastly, we had an interesting panel moderated by the funny and incredibly intelligent Guy Kawasaki.  Akash Garg of hi5, Sean Suhl of Suicide Girls, James Hong of HotOrNot, Markus Frind of PlentyOfFish, Max Levchin of Slide and Drew Curtis of Fark meditated on how they reached 5 million members.  The answer was mainly: right place, right time, a concept they would enjoy, and a lot of experimentation.  Also, the best quotes of the conference:

Curtis: “Basically, we’re a complete waste of time.”

Suhl: “I was working for a big sportswear manufacturer in Portland…”
Guy: “And you decided to ‘Just Do It’?”

Hong: “How HotOrNot started…I was drinking.”

Curtis: “Actually, I could have flipped a coin…and had a Curry Recipe Database instead of Fark.”

My conclusion: Community Next, while a bit rough around the edges, is definitely Hot.  It’s great to see so much emphasis placed on community and so many minds thinking about it.  Here’s hoping we see an expanded conference next year with more presenter time, more space, more organization, and more Hawaiian BBQ.

-Evan

Blogged with Flock

Tags: community, communitynext2007, CommunityNext, Evan Hamilton, Erwan Loisant, Tara Hunt, Baba O’Reilly, The Who, Noah Kagen, Aaron Dignan, Josh Spear, Crazyegg, Hiten Shah, Offermatica, Matt Roche, Userplane, Mike Jones, VideoEgg, Joe Hurd, Guy Kawasaki, Akash Garg, hi5, Sean Suhl, Suicidegirls, James Hong, hotornot, Markus Friend, plentyofish, Max Levchin, slide, Drew Curtis, fark, Heather Luttrel, Fred Stutzman, Jake Mckee