http://inthefieldonline.net/blog

The title says it all. To add on to that: Community sites are tools for communities not the other way around. These are probably the biggest misconceptions I face when discussing social media, and community building. The later the paradox in itself as the community is formed by the community not by persons. A community is a collection of individuals, that can be guided by individuals but only with the consent of the community.

You can trigger community by pushing it along but you as a person, company cannot per se build it. Yeah I know it is a pretty bad deal. :-) “Igniting” an unstable community usually creates a really poor community if any, and most likely chaos will appear. This chaos can be pretty unpredictable and the community takes all possible twists and turns.

For instance look at dictatorships, even though they might not be considered as true communities as they are artificially created. What happens when the control over these are lost? Look at what happened to Balkan, the former Soviet Union and other examples throughout the world. The moment the stronghold dictators started to erode the community exploded. However in the vacuum of leadership and any kind of structure (which should not be mistaken for strict hierarchies) the chaos began, bad elements took the opportunity and it is only now when we see something good is happening.

I wrote 2005 a piece based on the blog “The Group is Its Own Worst Enemy” by Clay Shirky. I will take a quote from the blog to exemplify:

“Someone built the [social software] system, they assumed certain user behaviours. The users came on and exhibited different behaviours. And the people running the system discovered to their horror that the technological and social issues could not in fact be decoupled…. As a group commits to its existence as a group, and begins to think that the group is good or important, the chance that they will begin to call for additional structure, in order to defend themselves from themselves, gets very, very high.”

Even for the artificially created communities you will see this. The group accepts the boundaries, it forms from it but however tries to change and push them. (Some very funky, funny yet graspable analogies can be made with the entropy concept in chemistry and physics, but I will leave those out.) The change of the boundaries is the tricky part here. The community is constantly evolving, and is very fluid in its nature. Try to control it and you will most likely create a chain of reactions that you didn’t have the slightest clue could happen.

Maybe the best analogy here is to consider the power of the ocean. You can as a sailor only embrace the power of the ocean. You can sail the ocean but you can never control it. The sea is in command and you can but only just adapt to it. Still you will be able to take out a bearing and after you have accepted the power of the ocean you will be able to navigate over the ocean. Not always is the straight course the best way to go here. :-)

What can we learn from this?
A community site is driven by the community but the actual site is but yet only a way for the community to express itself. For the social media company, the site becomes what the ship is for the sailor/captain. A tool and only a tool. The ship can only be prepared for the ocean. Do not in your wildest imagine try to shape the ocean after the ship you built or the community after the site for that matter.

Remember that communities are built up by the dinner conversations. The disagreements The agreements. The issues. All emotions - happiness, sadness, anger, frustration, apathy. Every emotion out there. This is what the true citizen media should be about. It is the personal accounts. It is the mosaic of personal views. It is the emotional content. It is the view into the life of people, but not in the silly reality shows we see on TV but real life. It is the instant capture of emotions. The capture of the personal views in context is the key. Technology have now made it possible to capture this in real time and organize it. That is what is so cool.

For instance. I got an email as part of an email group by a person. (I will not go into the content of the email as it is not important. Basically it was a personal account of friend disappointed in one of his friends. Also I will not go into whether he should or shouldn’t have sent it as I do not think it is important and not a matter for me comment on.) Nevertheless I was struck by the personal nature of the note as so was I struck by the discussion that followed. The amazing part is that he by that email created a sub-community around that email which spread out throughout the relevant resources online. He for a brief moment of time built a content-based community around that particular topic or an event. The cool thing is that this can be replicated over and over again… I will soon tell you how.

These are the conversations and personal reflections that are completely lost in traditional media which still struggles to adapt to the new distributions channels we have at hand not to mention the mechanisms to cover events around the world. The moment they have bubbled up into the news story they have been filtered by a selected set of eyes (often too influenced by their biasses and backgrounds as so am I) and too often the context is totally lost.

(Also as a blog entry at http://www.sundelof.net)

A good friend gave me a book with a collection of chronicles of Hans Bergstrom, the former editor-in-chief at Dagens Nyheter - one of the biggest daily morning news papers in Sweden. I read several of the chronicles and one struck me as very on point about where the web, media and the world is heading. He wrote it around 99’ and mentioned that it is as important to write as it is to read.

I started to write this blog Sunday evening, but didn’t get far as things got in the middle. I am however glad they did as it will now get I a slightly different touch.

Hans Bergstrom is right in a way, and wrong in another. What he is right about is that we all have a right to speak our mind and opinion. (User generated media is giving a majority of the internet population the right tools to express themselves, yet we have a long way to go when it comes to organizing this material.) Back to the points by Hans Bergstrom. However I would still claim that the most important thing is to listen, rather than to express your opinion or proclaim your excellence. Some of my Swedish friends will now say. “Erik, you are talking about the law of Jante, and that is something we all are not that fond of.” I am not sure though that it is purely a bad thing. I do think it is over-exaggerated in Sweden though.

The same good friend and also mentor who gave me the book said the very obvious to me last year when we worked together: “The most difficult thing is to listen.” It may seem like a very trivial task but most people only hear or read what they want to. The importance of this becomes more important as your responsibility and need for leadership grow.

I usually recall that moment often these days mainly as part of my work.

The hardest thing is to listen. To really listen. Wise words.

In a way I wonder why, and in a way I understand completely why. What amazes me is that it seems to me that people who claim to feel for others and would like to get their voices heard have a hard time to really listen. Or maybe it is me who is not really listening here. I guess it is as simple as the more you care about something, the harder it is to really see that thing in different lights, in the “true” lights, whatever “true” lights means.

The most important thing is to learn to listen and probably also when not to listen. Interesting enough this is a very important element in all stages of creating social media.

I met Marko Ahtisaari, former manager for Design Strategy at Nokia but now part of Blyk, in early October 2005 as he was a guest speaker at my fellowship at Stanford. He had written a blog about Blogging over Las Vegas which brings up the future challenges for the next generation of cellphone technology. The blog is still very much well-worth reading. Interesting enough I stumbled upon a blog entry by Justin Oberman. The blog entry points to a Forbes article “Can you hear me now?”.

My personal opinion is torn here. I do believe technology can solve a lot of issues and be an incredible tool when executed well. I however do believe that we sometimes rush into the solutions and do not well enough specify the problem we aim to solve. I daily see a lot of startups here in the valley with solutions that I cannot imagine we need. I see people who get almost obsessed by Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and the very much over-hyped Twitter. In Sweden, there has been reports of teenagers showing signs of depression and stress symptoms because of social communities.

Is this really sane? Not at all. Who is to blame? We all are. We let the technology control our lives. I can just look at myself. I spend way too much time in front of the computer (even though there are obvious reasons for it). I have begun to more frequently call the person up rather than to email or IM him or her. I very early wrote two longer pieces on the subject in October 2005  - Going offline with future cellphones and Romeo and Juliet - the virtual version :).

I think we all should try our best to take the control back from our technology intense society.

Ken Banks, an old friend, send me a Skype message tonight that he had mentioned me in his blog. Thanks Ken! You can read his entry here.

It got my mind starting to think about technology and the impacts of technology on communities. Is all technology socially disruptive in a bad way?

The importance of interfaces between humans and technology has grown tremendously lately and, regardless how strange it might sound, in some ways too much. Everyone is talking about the user centric design. Companies are popping up all around the globe specializing in this very mysterious design. As with Web 2.0 I think this is hyped and the term is overused, but maybe there is a need for this hype. I don’t know. What I do know is that very few really fully grasp what it is all about. Drawing cool diagrams on a whiteboard and using hyped language don’t count, nor does only talking about it. It is simply to provide a solution that makes sense to a human being and not the technologist solely.

Yee, wiz. Not that chocking right?

Anyhow…

For me the more important aspect is that the (technology) society is starting to realize that the any technology introduction into any community is disruptive to the social pattern in whatever shape or form you introduce it. Here the community aspects of the social web has had good impact and accelerated this discussion. To make a very long story short: We should always try to foresee parts of the disruptive behavior or make the technology as adaptive as possible for the end user (community). The importance of this only becomes more important when talking about introducing technology in the less fortunate societies of this world.

I am always extremely chocked when I hear people talk about the mobile web in the developing world. Of many reasons of course but two main ones can be identified: first there is no mobile web (yet), and secondly people discussing the mobile web don’t talk nor invite people from those regions to seminars and conferences on the same. I have written about the first aspect before and please read my friend Ken Banks reflection on the absence of a whole continent in the discussions on the mobile web.

The people I have met so far who grasp the social disruptiveness of technology the best have all done something in the real world whether that is built houses in their spare time, taken care of real animals on there own 24/7 365 days per year, or lived in a developing country. Pick your flavor there. Just do something that is real. Be a farmer for one day and learn from the experience. The importance is that they have experienced the reality, not read about it in a book…

It shouldn’t be a surprise… It just shouldn’t. 

I have of various reasons had a lot of discussions lately on viral marketing and stickiness. It is interesting to look around on the web these days and you find numerous examples of sites claiming to be viral and using these techniques to build their communities. Very few seem to have thought it through though.

I think viral marketing is conceptually simple yet it requires some fingertip feeling to do it successfully. It is something we all can relate to, something that is personal and something very intuitive and thus you just want to and can share it instantaneously with your friends. It sticks to your mind like glue to your finger. You just remember it without taking notes. You might forget a few details but the concept is never lost. The best examples are urban legends. We have all heard about the lady who tried the dry the cat in the microwave. I haven’t met a single person who doesn’t instantly start to discuss it. In music it is these annoying phrases and melodies, which just doesn’t go away (even though you sometimes want them to).

Anyhow, I sometime ago spoke to one of the professors at Stanford on another matter. We were talking about water issues on the border between Mexico and USA. He said that one of the main problems they faced when solving the issue was to explain the abstract law. The moment they started to explain the situation in personal stories they reached success. He explains the concept as embodying thoughts, giving the story legs. The impersonal abstract thoughts transformed into something simple, relatable and credible. It was not big, difficult words anymore. I got another example in a speech by another Stanford professor on environmental stability; he used an analogy to explain child mortality in Africa. It all came down to, maybe not that surprising, the availability of water. Sounds simple right? He put it like this to exemplify the complexity of the problem: “How would you prioritize 4 liters of water per day? You need it to cook and you need to drink it. Would you prioritize your personal hygiene? If so, what would you choose?” The effect got bigger as he took four of our water bottles and put them in front of him. Instantaneously, everyone realized the problem and the issues faced.

Viral marketing is about the same. You package your message to something everyone can relate to and the word will spread. A pretty package is not necessary. It is the message which should stick, not the presentation of the message even though it might help. I did my own little viral marketing example last summer during the last conflict in Lebanon. I sent out an email, to be honest not very polished, that I wanted people to start sharing their stories via cell phones to a blog I have set up. It took only 1.5 days before I got the first reports from Haifa and Beirut and the readership grew beyond my wildest expectations. The email was sticky as we all could relate to the message in it. It was simple. “Please tell people in Lebanon and Israel that they can tell their stories to this blog simply by sending one SMS or MMS.” I haven’t met anyone who hasn’t wanted to hear what the people felt and experienced there or anywhere else in the world where conflicts are or closeness in the society rules. There is the need for the emotional element of the messages, but also further exemplifies the need of simplicity.

A Stanford Graduate School of Business Professor Chip Heath talks about branding stickiness in his book “Made to Stick” and he concludes the key attributes (my comments after the dash) to be:

• Simplicity – simple messages are more easily remembered than abstract equations if anyone doubted that.
• Unexpectedness – who doesn’t remember the first Matrix-trailer? Who didn’t just want to see the movie just to get that answer: What is the Matrix?
• Credibility – If the message is not credible, why would anyone pass it on? Please do remember that it is the current credibility that matters.
• Emotions – We are emotional creatures and want to see especially emotional or even controversial material regardless if we agree or disagree. Even if you hate the reality show, you will watch it, just so that you can tell everyone else why it is so bad.
• Stories – messages gets passed on by people to people everywhere. You just don’t have the time to tell an introduction, method, results, conclusion and discussion over a beer or a coffee. Your friends will most likely go to sleep or start to play with their cellphone and there goes that evening.

This has very high relevance for building online and real communities, viral brand building and social media. Community building is easier online as the sharing of information is much faster. (Of course there are cases where you have communities supported by real communities, or vice versa.) Why is stickiness the central component of any social media site? It really is pretty simple. Communities are about people, and then I am not talking about the creators. My good friend Tom Calthrop once said to me when we started to discussed the permission system inside AroundMe: “Erik, social communities is about what your members want, not what you want”. I do think it is one of the main wisdoms of the online media of today, but very often forgotten. The community will tell where you want to go and especially social media sites such as MySpace, YouTube but let us not forget the very often forgotten amazing social media channel email has been formed by the users. It also opens up for viral marketing.

Communities are about people. People easily relate to other people. Moreover the ones who can convince you the best are your friends and family. Why not use them to market your site or help you build your community? (It is very much like recursion in computer science yet simpler. You only need to worry about the first step, then pass it on!) Now we come to a piece that is very central in viral marketing and why the simple and relatable message is so important.

Let us step back and think of a well-known psychology phenomena.

Many have done the experiment of the 10 people chain where the first person tells a story to the second, the second to the third and so forth. Most of the times, the story the 10^th person hears has very little to do with the first person story. Why? We usually don’t put so much care into telling stories to be passed on to multiple people, and thus it seldom is simple and contains too many details. The key is to tell the story where the listener relates to the story regardless of who that is, the persons background or education.

Even if you know how your friends and family will be convinced, you need to make sure that the message sticks well-enough for them to be able to pass it on where the important pieces are there. A good friend of mine told me recently: “Stick to one message, not several. Erik, you can handle many messages, most people cannot.” So true.

So how do you do this?

What I have realized lately is something very simple. You as a viral marketer must know your business or objective that well that your misconceptions and uncertainties are not passed on to the rest of the chain. Misconceptions and uncertainties propagate, just like the errors in numerical solutions of equations. If you have misconceptions or uncertainties make sure that your message doesn’t contain even pieces of them or almost worse will change when you get the answer to them. The later is the main challenge, but the successful sites on the web have all these elements. Look at Google who basically said “Here you can search” and their UI was matching the message. I can still remember when I got the link to Google over ICQ then from a friend. (The same friend convinced me that MSN messenger was better. More viral marketing.) When I got to the site it was impossible not to realize what to do. I do still doubt this was an intentional UI. I think it is more an artifact of the fact that Google was more focused on the backend rather than the front end simply based on the fact that they developed algorithms for the ranking of pages. A textbox and a button with search was the only thing needed to as fast as possible get to the list of search entries. Looking back, it is a brilliant UI yet not planned as far as I believe.

It brings up to another attribute of the message. It needs to be consistent with the rest of your organization, the content of your website, the behavior of your staff, your user interface, your technology solution and so forth. Don’t tell the user something you are not as you will not keep misguided users, and even worse from a business perspective. They are very less likely to come back again. If you tell the users you are something you better be that to. The ultimate example of successful viral marketing YouTube basically said: “Hey guys, here you can upload videos…” again with a matching, simple UI. They never told you which videos to upload, just videos and that is the brilliant move. They could adapt to their users whatever they chose to and the success is then history. They also listened to the users as they enabled sharing via email and related videos, which really created their explosive growth. What I am missing in the attributes for sticky messages by Professor Chip Heath is the consistency of both your brand and message. It can be claimed to be covered by the credibility, but I do think it is a separate attribute.

You can say that all messages you send out from your organization must be packaged exactly as your viral marketing message. We all are aware the key in branding is the consistency in your interaction with your users, or else your users get confused. Viral branding is about letting you users build your brand. If you are uncareful when you specify your “viral message”, they might build a brand you didn’t intend. The main problem with viral marketing is that you cannot really prove success nor check if your message sticks before you try it out.

Viral marketing is the future yet it is completely different from regular marketing. The success rate is much higher than normal marketing if done correctly though.