My father just sent this to me from Sunday’s paper…
How many online social networks do you belong to? MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, Yahoo Geocities, on and on. I can’t find the quote now, but someone wrote recently about a desktop littered with passwords from various social networking sites. For the heavy user of this stuff, the question becomes… which networks are worth it and which should I drop?
Richard Siklos has an interesting piece in the New York Times (fee) yesterday about this. After outlining some of the recent deals where big media companies are buying surging social networking sites (e.g., Sony bought Grouper.com, a video-sharing site, for $65M) as the established media buys its way into this new world, Siklos writes of the challenge of readers evolving from consumers to members:
Social networking… represents a way to live one’s life online. Know this: if you are part of the social networking wave, you will have all the “friends” you can handle. The invite is the new handshake. Get ready for a lot of opportunities to join all kinds of networks – and, one hopes, some appropriately Webby new way to politely say, “No, thank you.”
Front Porch Forum is part social networking. But it’s different than most. Instead of pulling people together around an issue, hobby, desire, etc., our neighborhood forums pull together… well, neighbors. Simple.
The Local Onliner reported recently about major changes at the Los Angeles Times:
The LA Times Online will roll out two new, ecommerce-oriented verticals in the midst of a ripping internal report that says the paper’s online strategy is nowhere near where it needs to be for the paper to have a future… The article also cites a new internal report finding that the online division only has 18 employees, compared to 200 employees at WashingtonPost.com and 50 at nytimes.com. The understaffing has lead to a poor quality website that, in part, accounts for users only staying 11.9 minutes on the site, compared to twice that long on nytimes.com.
The internal report goes on to cite a debilitating philosophical clash between GM Rob Barrett and Joel Sappell, and online executive editor Joel Sappell. Barrett wanted the site to focus on “hyper-local” reports to deliver SoCal readers information about their communities. Sappell argued for building “communities of affinity” rather than geography. [Sounds like the GM’s approach won out.]
So as social networks multiply and people start to get choosy, many, if not most, I think, would want to keep plugged into their neighborhood forum. They can swim in a near-endless ocean of “communities of interest,” but options for connecting with their neighbors online are scant.
I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. This is a national bestseller that’s been in circulation since 2000. From the back cover: “The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire,” like an epidemic.
I can draw many parallels to what we’re seeing with the growth of Front Porch Forum’s membership. It’s fascinating to watch as neighborhoods “tip,” one after another. A few dozen have passed the threshold already… now they have enough members and enough message traffic to sustain their neighborhood-wide conversation.
I also just read The Accidental Influentials in the latest Harvard Business Review about the work of Peter Dodds and Duncan J. Watts. They offer a different view of the mechanics of a social epidemic:
… Gladwell argues that “social epidemics” are driven in large part by the actions of a tiny minority of special individuals, often called influentials, who are unusually informed, persuasive, or well connected. The idea is intuitively compelling—we think we see it happening all the time—but it doesn’t explain how ideas actually spread.
The supposed importance of influentials derives from a plausible-sounding but largely untested theory called the “two-step flow of communication”: Information flows from the media to the influentials and from them to everyone else…
In recent work, however, [we] have found that influentials have far less impact on social epidemics than is generally supposed. In fact, they don’t seem to be required at all.
… marketing dollars might better be directed toward helping large numbers of ordinary people—possibly with Web-based social networking tools—to reach and influence others just like them.
I’m not sure which social theory best explains what we’re witnessing with the spread of Front Porch Forum. It’s not unlike a dry forest… lighting strikes one neighborhood and its forum bursts into a flame of activity. Other neighborhoods (parts of the forest) smolder for weeks or months before igniting a slow burn. Hmm… I’ll have to work on that comparison.
The Local Onliner reports today:
Gannett, via its Planet Discover subsidiary, says it will start providing its newspapers and TV stations with search marketing help… In the last six months, newspapers have begun to really embrace search and extending their marketplace to the small businesses, he [Planet Discover Head Terry Millard] notes.
The end goal, Millard adds, is to expand the advertiser base. While Planet Discover’s local search guides compete with Yellow Pages, “it isn’t all Yellow Pages,” he emphasizes. There is a layer of media below that: the community shoppers, things like that. There is a huge market of businesses that aren’t going to spend $3,500 a year,” the average for Yellow Pages buys. “But they’ll spend $100 a month.”
Millard says the effort starts with Gannett, where Planet Discover has already launched search efforts for it 110 newspapers, and is now gearing up to convert its 21 TV stations. Other Planet Discover clients are also being asked to participate. They are mostly newspapers but also include some verticals such as travel.
It will be interesting to watch how this plays out at our local Gannett outlet, the Burlington Free Press.
Ghost of Midnight is an online journal about fostering community within neighborhoods, with a special focus on Front Porch Forum (FPF). My wife, Valerie, and I founded FPF in 2006... read more