Don’t Give Community the High Hat 

Big conferences don’t necessarily bring big surprises, especially in these days of geek overload and marketing hyperbole. But if you look hard enough you can find a few real gems of insight here and there.

Case in point: the Web 2.0 expo in San Francisco last week. A solid show, to be sure, with lots of heavy-hitting keynoters and sharp-eyed exhibition-hall pitch-masters (as a well as a few characters, like The Human Creativity Project’s Julian Cash, at right). But the most practical tips for publishers were to be found in the sessions and workshops, and in the special and semi-spontaneous un-conference called Web2.0pen that went on in the wings.

While there were a number of good panels and presentations, a few stood out as exceptional.

The first was Media 2.0: How Web 2.0 is Transforming Traditional Media. This panel discussion was moderated by one of our favorite bloggers, Charlene Li from Forrester Research, joined by Gabe Rivera from TechMeme, Ted Shelton, who went from Personal Bee to Technorati just before the Expo, and Rich Skrenta of Topix.

Li opened the proceedings asking the now seemingly age-old question, “Whither traditional media?” Shelton offered that we are entering an era in which anyone can be a web publisher, and that as publishers we’re more often curating rather them developing or even aggregating content that appeals to users, whether it is user-generated or generated by other publishers. “Mobile Internet,” Shelton added, “will put the final nail in the coffin of print newspapers. Once you have a good reading experience, print will be done.”

All the panelists agreed that “audience aggregation” has surpassed content aggregation in importance. “Build your audience by focusing on their content needs, and everything else follows” was the mantra. The key? Curate your content from enthusiastic providers such as bloggers and users who are keen on your subject, and write about it for the love of it and for the glory of being heard.

 Meanwhile, the session entitled, The People Formerly Known as the Audience, with husband-wife digital duo, Heather Champ (Flickr) and Derek Powazek (Blogger, Technorati), focused on developing community around user-generated content. A community cannot be “built,” they said, but is fostered more organically. At Flickr they used a number of community-fostering strategies, both online and off, that contributed to the online photo-sharing service’s success:

• Engaging JPG Magazine—Users were solicited to submit photos for possible publication in this independent, popular quarterly print and online magazine. They were then asked to vote on their favorites, the top vote getters moving on to editorial review. Flickr essentially let the community do the sorting work for them, going through the mass of submissions and helping determine which would be published.
• Interestingness Algorithm—Flickr employs a special algorithm that determines a photo’s “interestingness.” It uses a number of user-generated metrics including the number of times a photo is selected as a “favorite” and the number of comments and views it receives.
• Groups—Flickr users made extensive use of the service’s groups tools to build their own tightly-knit communities within the greater community. 

Also compelling was Community Evangelism: Tools & Techniques with Tara Hunt from Citizen Agency, Anil Dash from Six Apart and independent consultant Deborah Shultz. This session was about developing community around your offerings and turning your community members into evangelists, word-of-mouth influencers who need to be engaged. Axioms to live by include:

• Web 2.0 is about people, and one of the key concepts is what’s called the “relationship economy,” by which you build relationships not only with your users, but enable community among your users.
• Web 2.0 also brings more decentralization as media fragmentation increases. It used to be that the medium was the message, now people are the message.
• Learn to reach out and connect with your community, and learn to listen to them.
• Always be a part of the ongoing conversation.

Web2.0pen—in which anyone could sign up and give a presentation on just about any relevant topic—was a real breath of fresh air. Among the impromptu presenters was Isotope Comics’ Jeff Sime, who started a small comic book shop in a bad part of San Francisco about six years ago. Since then, he’s used the Internet, including blogging and social media tools such as Flickr, video services and Yelp to drive traffic to his site (and customers to his store). He recently moved his shop to one of the edgiest boutique shopping areas in the city (Hayes Valley), where it acts as a beacon for comic book enthusiasts from around the world. Sime himself has become a force to be reckoned with in the comics industry. He’s a walking case study of how, with enough energy and the right online tools, almost anyone can turn an enthusiasm into a successful business. Sime offers this advice:

• Make sure you plan well so that your business can be integrated with the Web: Mix online and offline worlds.
• Change up every time. If you plan events, make sure each is unique and interactive.
• Get involved with as many online communities as you can.
• Being audacious draws links and attention. When the singer Pink did what Sime thought looked like blatant rip-off of a comic book heroine’s look, he blogged it with the title “Up Yours, Pink,” which drew lots of attention. (See our post on Linkbaiting.)
• Try to turn every accident into something cool. When an inebriated comic book artist graffitied his toilet seat during a party, Simes hung it on the wall. Soon other comic book artists were clamoring for their own toilet seat—essentially offering original art for free. Today he’s got an entire Comic Rockstars Toilet Seat Museum.
• Most importantly, a web presence must promote your personality. “It doesn’t matter if it’s cool or lame,” says Sime, “people just like people and they want you to be you.”

Talk about personality. Sime has it in spades. And anyone who has cajones enough to stand up in front of a tough net-savvy crowd in a zoot suit, Cosmo Kramer hair and a pair of black sneakers gets our vote any day. (Giving away free comics doesn’t hurt either.)

The overall message of Web 2.0 is that community matters, and that building community around your offerings involves you getting involved with users—and enabling users to get involved with one another. It seems pretty simple once it’s been said, but for some reason it’s still a hard sell to some “traditional” companies with control issues. We say, let it all hang out!

Further Reading

Sean Bohan’s Live Coverage
Live Coverage from Marketing Nirvana on Community Evangelism
Flickr Photostream

Ian Kennedy’s Take

—Michael Mattis, Marc Levin and Roger Park