Duncan Watts of Yahoo! takes Malcom Gladwell’s Tipping Point thesis to task in Clive Thompson’s FastCompany.com article today. In particular, he goes after the notion that a small number of people carry extra weight in igniting trends that spread exponentially… influentials. Rather, its society’s readiness for a trend that matters most…
“If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one–and if it isn’t, then almost no one can,” Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it’s less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public’s mood. Sure, there’ll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts’s terminology, an “accidental Influential.”
Perhaps the problem with viral marketing is that the disease metaphor is misleading. Watts thinks trends are more like forest fires: There are thousands a year, but only a few become roaring monsters. That’s because in those rare situations, the landscape was ripe: sparse rain, dry woods, badly equipped fire departments. If these conditions exist, any old match will do. “And nobody,” Watts says wryly, “will go around talking about the exceptional properties of the spark that started the fire.”
Also noted today is this tidbit from Kevin Harris…
I was talking to a group of community workers today, getting their views on the use of community centres and ways of getting people through the door. Most of the way through a 12 month funded programme, they told of an influx of new people coming in. This is in an area of low expectations and high needs.
The explanation is that ‘word-of-mouth takes 8-9 months…’
‘It’s about people having the courage to act on what they’re hearing. It can take you a year to get confidence in the community, that there’s something new for them to try and to trust it. It takes time for the confidence to work through.’
Reaching people is hard work. About 30% of our pilot city subscribes to Front Porch Forum and I’d guess that almost that many are familiar with the service and are open to signing up… just haven’t gotten around to it or don’t quite understand or trust it yet.
Congratulations to Justin (Front Porch Forum member) and his MocoSpace team. From Erick Schonfeld on TechCrunch…
Mobile social networking startup MocoSpace raised a $4 million B round from existing investors General Catalyst, Bob Pittman’s Pilot Group and former eBay exec Michael Deering. The previous A round was $3 million in January 2007. MocoSpace is a mobile-only social network with two million members and serving one billion pageviews a month (from mobile phones). When we last wrote about MocoSpace in August, it had half as many members and pageviews.
From Praized…
Graham Hill of TreeHugger.com fame offered 9 lessons web entrepreneurs should take heed of.
- The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Humans don’t really change. If something feels wrong, it probably is.
- Incentives drive the world. For employees, for business development, etc.
- Truth is told at cash registers and not in focus groups. Look to the data and test a product by selling it.
- Listen to Fred Wilson.
- The network is the computer. It has to be open and all about online applications. Think Gmail, Last.fm, Mint.com.
- Think product first, marketing later. This new connected world takes care of a good portion of marketing if you have a great product.
- Barely enough money is a good thing. It keeps you hungry and makes you focussed. Helps you find what’s the core of your business.
- Companies are bought not sold. It might be a clich© but it’s true. Play hard to get.
- Good guys win in a connected world. Media has been democratized and spin control does not exist anymore.
VC Fred Wilson wrote this week about his Outside.in and Everyblock.com. The comments are interesting too. Fred wrote…
Techcrunch calls outside.in a competitor of EveryBlock. I think collaborator is more like it. It’s going to take more than one company to rebuild the local newspaper from the ground up.
Amen. Front Porch Forum is very different from either of these efforts, but plays in the same space. With 30% of our pilot city subscribing and a large percentage posting, we’re definitely well beyond just the heavy web users that dominate much of Web 2.0.
Marc Andreessen (go UIUC engineering!) writes today about a group of neighbors in Seattle creating an online social networking using Ning to address concerns over a recent crime wave…
From Bill Gossman and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
“I’ve lived here 11 years and never seen anything like this,” said Bill Gossman, a Magnolia resident who about two weeks ago started a neighborhood Web site [on Ning] that he dubbed sleeplessinmagnolia.ning.com.
The social network, Gossman said, has received 55,000 page views and brought together 550 block-watching neighbors to share information, tips and experiences…
That’s great. It’s an example of the kind of thing that people are doing with Front Porch Forum all across our pilot city of Burlington, VT (30% subscribe already). Crime and neighborhood watch activities are common… as well as lots of other uses.
Ning, in addition to having amazing resources, provides “white label” social networks… that is, build your own. While Front Porch Forum provides the network/forum for 100% of the neighborhoods in its service area… and it’s designed to address the real problems of isolation and individualism by helping nearby neighbors connect.
Congratulations to the Everyblock team… they just launched this new service in Chicago, New York and San Francisco…
EveryBlock filters an assortment of local news by location so you can keep track of what’s happening on your block, in your neighborhood and all over your city.
Powerful stuff. I might subscribe to an RSS feed of my neighborhood if I lived in a large city… but I doubt I’d visit regularly. Also I wonder if the info flow will be appropriately scaled. That is, if Everyblock delivers a phone book worth of minutia every day for one neighborhood… that’s too much. And too little info flow doesn’t work either.
Looks like they’re on to something powerful. They seem to be making good use of the free $1.1M gift given by the old newspaper money people at Knight.
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