Social Networks

Creating Communities – Online and Offline

Ashish says that you “enable communities” and I think you “create” them. And since it’s a serious challenge to my understanding of social behavior, let me defend my position.

By the very definition,

a community is a group of individuals who are brought together by force or they come together because they share a common interest.

Classic examples are community of slaves working on erecting pyramids and users flocking pluggd.in because they are interested in start-ups in India.

Keywords in the definition are group, individuals and together. A group that is useful to the individual and together the group and the individual make it worth sticking to.

When I say that you create communities, it implies that you bring all these people together (by force, by coercion, by advertising, by showing them advantages of being a member, by hook, by rewarding participatory behavior or by showing that everyone but you is a member, or any of million other ways). Once there is a group, you share ideas and vision on what could become of this group if everyone participates. And when they start participating and everyone is in sync with the collective vision, the group become a community.

For a community to thrive, there needs to be a connecting thread – a reason for members to believe in. A selling proposition. An answer to “Why this community” question. This reason can again be provided by force (if you don’t work, you will be killed) or by prestige associated by just being a member (I am member of AsmallWorld.net – are you? I have access to GMail – do you have it? Etc.).

Second part is that the community as a whole should be useful for the members. No one would want to just give and not take anything in return. People don’t join communities. People join groups hoping that the group would be useful to them. Moment a group becomes useful for individuals, or that user, the group transforms from a group to a community.

When you are starting a community, you HAVE to bring together people. You will have to hand pick people who are committed to this binding thread with or without the usefulness of the community. These are the people whose actions would make the community useful for subsequent members. In case of pluggdin, for example, Ashish would have started writing about start-ups in India. He would have posted the link at relevant places, would have sent emails to friends and family who are interested in start-ups and slowly and gradually people starting coming in. He thus created a community. One member at a time.

On the other hand when you talk about enabling a community, you assume people already know why they are there. You assume that they

know what is common between all of them.

know why are they not a directionless herd.

know what is purpose of their group.

can see a larger picture.

know how is group useful.

This all might happen in an ideal world and I refuse to agree that any heterogeneous or even homogeneous group of people can answer all the above-mentioned questions. And if you are just enabling the community without holding their hand, telling them what to do and what actions to take. In my humble opinion, they will be as lost as kids in the topless bar :D.

And with this your-honor, I rest my case.

Regards,
Saurabh Garg
www.saurabhgarg.com/thoughts

P.S.: And I agree that your group/community should be empowered enough to recommend and make changes. They should be empowered to remove things that they don’t like. They should be empowered to freely add on to the community. They should be allowed to explore. They should be given the tools to be themselves and create new things for the community. 😀

Image Credits: Sifah via Flickr.

Logon to Internet to meet your neighbors

IndiaPRWire reports that a website is being launched in Bangalore that would allow users to “… know each other in a better way and expand their network. On your CommonFloor, you can celebrate festivals, organize parties, meet people who share your interests, make your interaction more open and friendly and make your real life as vibrant as you can imagine.”

I love the business model. After all I have been advocating all my life that social networks focussed around common interests and activities are far better and are expected to be more successful than “friendship” networks.

But the point is not the success or failure of this particular website. The issue at hand is larger and deeper. Portals like this simply imply that as some places (like Bangalore) we have reached a point where I need an Internet portal to speak with my neighbors.

We as Indians have our roots in things like choupals, community kitchens and joint families. Entire families, clans and villages loved personal connections and spent time with each other. They would care for each other, spend time for each other and if need be die for each other.

And now we have evolved to a society where we have to logon to Internet to speak with our neighbors. People dont have the time to know their own neighbors. How many of us know the names of our next door neighbors? At least I dont.

I am not against the advancement of culture and society but this is totally unacceptable. We have reached a point where the sense of community and belonging is loosing out fast. And moment people loose out on this sense of belongingness, the home stops being a home. It becomes a house with four walls. Everyone seems to be in a constant state of flux. People are just drifting from one city to another and eventually end up with lots of addresses and no homes.

I know I cant force anyone to go meet their neighbors or get involved in the community but in the end everyone losses out. And without realizing everyone becomes the part of the rat race.

Thoughts anyone?

Social Networks – The Future

I posted an answer on Social Networks on LinkedIn.

Hi,

Looks like no one can have enough of Social Networks.

In my opinion, the entire wave of networks would keep on flooding the Internet. Pertinent question would be which network would survive in the long term.

Lets not even go into reasons why these networks are created in the first place.

Things that would keep one social network ahead of another are

1. Network Effect: The network with most number of people would eventually win. People would have to join the network with most people and most people would join a network because the network has most people on it. Saw this in action with Orkut in India.

2. Repeat Visitors: Once a social network grows beyond its novelty factor, a lot of people simply stop coming back. Network should have something that attracts people back. LinkedIn: Professionals. Facebook: Applications.

If I need to talk to my friends and other random people about something, I can create a blog, I can comment on other blogs. I can send SMS, emails, call for real. The utility of a social network for daily chores is simply absent. Networks would have to offer more than just dating, friendship, music etc.

3. Offering: A network should give me something that is hard to find (or do) in real life. For example LinkedIn. This is something (access to people with IQ :D) that I cant get in real life. No popular network apart from LinkedIn offers this to me.

Apart from these three, if few networks have to emerge as winners, they need to take care of following

1. Regional networks: Even though Internet does not have any boundaries as such, currently we have different networks dominating different geographies. Friendster – Asia, mySpace – US, Orkut – India and Brazil.

Obviously the reason for this spatial distribution is real connections (you invite, join and interact with social networks where your real-life friends are and most of your real-life friends live close to you)

2. Interest Areas: End of the day you join a network and stay there because you are interested in something and you want to connect to people with similar interests and want their opinions.

Myspace could connect all musicians, Linkedin could connect all professionals etc. The social network that can do this first would end up as a winner in my opinion.

If I was to compare professional interests, FaceBook with its applications is a move in that direction but it still lacks seriousness for a QnA network and more importantly it does not have the kind of people LinkedIn has. Similarly if I was to compare music interests, Myspace and FaceBook are still not there.

In my opinion, social networks are like any other commodity. In the long run, we would have one or two major players with chunk of the market share. And the networks that can aggregate interest areas and geographic spread would emerge as winners in long term.

Regards,
SG

Ever Elusive Users

Definition: User is a person at the core of the business. User should ideally bring revenue to the company. In some cases, if he is not bringing in the money, he should participate.

A lot of new start-ups and websites boast about million users in few months of operation (and in some cases, existence). They say, they have “almost reached” the critical user mass from where they can take-off to the next paradigm of web enabled services that will enable them to harness the collective intelligence that will empower businesses and solve intricate business problems in a cost effective manner. Sounds like Dilbert Mission Statement Generator at work.

Every successful and not so successful business (especially of the online variety) talks about number of users they have and the percentage of market they command. Ironically, they never talk about number of users actually bringing in cash to the business. Everyone seems to be pushing it under the carpet.

The numbers although are very important, they are more likely to be abused and misused. Every time someone says that they have 20 million of the 40 million Indian Internet Users (or half the universe), there should be questions like

How many use the service on a regular basis?

What is the percentage of repeats?

How often do repeat users come-back?

How many actually contributed to the revenues in last one month?

Obvisouly most of the times, answers are as elusive as the users themselves. It is very very easy to get someone to a website but the hard part is to get the user come back again and again and again. The hardest part, is to get the user to interact with the business. And this interaction actually makes the money for the website. The hook, the stickiness factor, the tipping point is very important.

E-commerce Websites
This is especially pertinent for rapidly springing ecommerce websites. mylatestonlineshop.com might have 100,000 users but

What is the actual number of people who place orders?

How many of these orders are being fulfilled?

Do these users come back with more orders?

Collaborative or User Generated Content
Collaborative websites are growing at the speed of mushrooms in India. With ease of implementation of Web 2.0, increasing bandwidths, and lots of time to spare, quite a few user generated websites (obviously operating in their beta modes) have come up. USP for most of these websites is user reviews, user written articles, user made videos, user stories, user this and user that. The biggest question here is

What percentage of users is actually creating the content?

And how many actually come back on a regular basis (with a frequency of at least once every two days)?

Finally, next time someone comes up with a fancy number for their user base, ask them about their revenue per user. If at all they have a revenue stream (apart from monetizing with Google Adsense), answers would be really surprising.

Someone once said, “With fools and tools anything can be proved”. Next time someone pitches a beta version web 2.0 website with 2 million users, please be skeptic before pumping in the money behind the idea and ever elusive users.

Comments? Thoughts? Views?

Related Links
eBay admits they over-paid for Skype (Business Week, Oct 1, 2007)

Comments on Microsoft and Facebook

I sent this email to a friend in response to his views on Microsoft and Facebook. I have repalced names and email addresses with *****

Hi *****,

I also have my two cents on Facebook deal and why I think MS paid that kind of money.

To start with, it is not about the advertisement at all. It is also not about buying a stake in the company. 1% is too less a stake to have any meaningful say in the company. Ok, it is meaningful but if I was serious about partnering someone, I would rather take 10% odd stake and make meaningful suggestions to the overall vision of the company.

With 1% MS is saying that they are confident about FB and they like the business and want to be partners.

The reason could be psychological too. May be after Steve Balmer’s announcement last month about getting 25% of MS revenues from advertising, they had to show something to the world. May be they wanted to prove something to Google .. ? Who knows. Men do funny things to prove themselves are superiors. Envy and Jealousy are two of the most potent forces in the universe.

As far as exclusive advertising rights, MS already had exclusive rights on FB. This deal just extends those rights to international markets. One might argue that 60% of FB traffic is now international and deal makes more sense, I would say that in web environment, national and international segregation dont really make a sense. If I am in Antarctica and want to advertise about the latest Igloo design, I dont have to advertise from Antarctica, I can advertise from US also.

Now if I was Bill (I hope I was), I would have thought that the entire Social Networking thingy has gone past me without me making any serious inroads (ok, Windows Live was for sometime making people happy but all it has got is measly 10 mn users), how about getting a piece of the pie?

There are more things that aren’t really in public domain as yet. Like they have said they would have other partners. They also said that they would not disclose the exact terms of technology exchange that they would have. May be it includes access to user preferences? May be it includes MS and FB’s entry in to Software as a Service space? With this they can take Google head on. May be FB will now truly become a platform rather than just a website where you upload pics and poke at firrends?

And did you notice that share price of MS jumped after FB deal was announced .. ?

Regards,
******

P.S.: You have said that it makes “FB, a 100 million OTS website” .. what is an OTS.. ?
P.P.S.: Please share this with your friends also. I want to see if this makes any sense to them. Thanks 🙂

He had sent his comments on Microsoft’s recent stake in Facebook