Category Archives: Social Media
Jitter Fingers takes aim at Girls
The Local Onliner reports today about…
Jitter Fingers, a social network for teen and “tween” girls looking for a secure and focused environment (i.e. away from the predators that lurk in MySpace), has launched a local beta version in Los Angeles. It expects to eventually launch up to 300 localized versions.
Founder Allen Esrock, a longtime tech headhunter – and the father of two girls in the targeted demo — notes that girls “place their friendships above anything else. Within their private (and verified) ‘Jitter Friends’ club, girlfriends can chat, share secrets, horoscopes and photos….leave messages for each other.“
Local is a huge part of Jitter Fingers’ equation. [And] “Our ability to push hot national content such as celebrities, movies, and fashion into the girls’ locally created marketplaces creates a female national/local advertising platform,” says Esrock.
Esrock adds that the website is “the first plank” in a cross platform product that will leverage multiple revenue streams from marketers who eager to reach targeted, local girls.
Well, I’m all for creating safe places for kids (of whatever gender) to socialize online (or maybe not, come to think of it). But it seems that this site wants to block one type of predator so that they can sell access to another type of predator… “marketers who [are] eager to reach targeted, local girls.” Call me old fashioned, but my daughter will not be using this service.
Friendliness makes the neighborhood
Front Porch Forum operates under the assumption that when neighbors communicate frequently in civil, constructive ways with all parties clearly identified, that over time all those exchanges will add up to a stronger sense of community. So while FPF members partake in many of the wonders of contemporary online social networking (buy, sell, trade, free, referrals, politics, organizing, reviews, news, advice, etc.), it all adds up to a more neighborly place to live… because all those folks coming at you through your computer are nearby neighbors who will be seen next time you walk the dog, sweep the walk, check the mail, etc.
Now this from Kevin Harris in the land of “Neighbourhoods” discussing a new report in the U.K. that…
… appears to suggest that the most important factor for people who expressed satisfaction with their area, was that ‘people are friendly.’
The negative factors were all about disorder… The implication seems to be that if you invest a lot in helping local people to get involved… you still cannot necessarily expect them to feel more satisfied with where they live.
Whereas, it would seem, were you to invest in people being friendly to one another (and get results from that investment), you could expect that to show up in your satisfaction survey in a couple of years time. Yet another argument for more street parties and new ways of promoting neighbourliness. [emphasis added] It does seem as if social relations and behaviour at local level are gradually coming to be perceived as being of significance.
Backfence Looking Back
Mark Potts, co-founder of Backfence.com, offers an overview of the experience today…
I thought it would be helpful to discuss some of what we learned from Backfence–and why I’m still very optimistic that a similar model can and will succeed. Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen the appearance of a large number of different variations and models for creating and operating user-generated, citizens’ media or hyperlocal sites. Like Backfence, all of these nascent efforts are fascinating laboratories—and also like Backfence, none has yet proven to be a successful, sustainable long-term business model. So it’s difficult at this juncture to say what’s “right” and what’s “wrong.” But based on the Backfence experience, here are are a few things I believe are essential for success of a user-generated hyperlocal site:
- Engage the community. This may be the single most critical element. It’s not about technology, it’s not about journalism, it’s not about whizbang Web 2.0 features. It’s about bringing community members together to share what they know about what’s going on around town. A top-down, “if you build it, they will come” strategy absolutely does not work.
- It’s not journalism—it’s a conversation.
- Hyperlocal content is really mundane.
- Trust the audience.
- Focus on strong, well-defined communities… It’s possible to argue, in fact, that a hyperlocal site ideally should operate at the neighborhood level—that even a town is too big.
- Leverage social networking.
- There is most certainly a robust hyperlocal advertising business.
- Keep costs down.
- Partner with a media company or some other distribution source.
- Hyperlocal works.
- Hyperlocal is really hard.
The full piece is certainly worth a look. Almost all the points made here jibe with what we’ve seen with Front Porch Forum since our beta launch last fall, and since our initial flagship neighborhood forum got underway in 2000. Some additional points from Mark…
- [Content] varied from community to community—McLean was heavy on youth sports; Reston had a lot of discussions about local politics. These reflected the interests in those towns.
- Some of our best content was long, back-and-forth discussions about local issues, where the meat was in the discussions. We also had a number of stories from the community that were picked up a few days later by local media.
- We had a lot of posting of announcements and press releases by local organizations, which generally didn’t foment much discussion, but often received a lot of page views as the community checked to see what was going on around town.
- Least expected: The success of our user-generated event calendar, in all communities. It was deep, it was comprehensive, and it was entirely user-contributed.
Topix Forum Posting Pattern
Digging a little deeper into the MediaShift piece about Topix providing small town forums…
We found that in most places in this country, we are the only high-end news site. What happens is this odd pattern where a news event happens, and they find our site online and they like it and stick. One of the more dramatic cases was when two tornadoes struck Caruthersville, Mo. Up to that point, we had a little activity there but it was pretty low. That day we had 600 posts about the tornadoes
, and it was astonishing, there were first-hand accounts and people were asking if so-and-so was OK. People in the town were responding and saying, ‘yes, they’re OK.’ A few months later, a lot of the people had stayed in the forums.
There’s a lot of local gossip and chit-chat. Will it pass a test for being journalism or not? Well, a lot of important issues would pop up, like about the police chief or a sex scandal at the high school. The traffic is sustained by the gossip and chat, but from time to time, they want to talk about important civic issues, and because we’re the only site that offers that, this is where they do it.
Tolles: If you look at the curve of posts [click graphic on left], you had this initial burst of posts with the tornadoes, and then the daily chatter in the forums. But somewhere along the line, there was this unpopular police chief and government, and now the post volume is higher than it was during the spike around the tornadoes. It’s got to the point where I sent a person from my staff out there and he’s videotaping the town, making a mini-documentary, and everyone there knows Topix. People in this little town know us.
This posting pattern is similar to what we’re seeing in Front Porch Forum‘s various neighborhood forums. Low level chatter as people join and it slowly builds. However, in a neighborhood with a galvanizing event (unwanted big box store, crime wave, etc.), we seek a spike. Post spike, however, the plateau is raised. Then, the second big issue (that is, in the neighborhoods that have had two big issues so far), message traffic gets big and stays there.
Yelvington on Backfence and Front Porch
Steve Yelvington writes about Backfence‘s recent closure…
We still don’t know the right scale for doing this sort of thing, and that scale may actually be shifting as more people sign up for cheap broadband and become comfortable with creating and not just consuming content. Backfence cofounder Mark Potts once speculated in a conversation that the right physical community size is under 50,000. We’ve had great debates about that where I work; one point of view says a local high school district can serve as a useful proxy for defining a natural community, but your mileage may vary.
People settle into community levels… think concentric circles. Maybe 150 friends in the inner circle. More like 2,000 in the neighborhood… the elementary school district. Maybe 50,000 is the next hop… the high school level. And so on. Capital wants to centralize and standardize across as many people as possible… think USAToday. People tend toward decentralization and diversity… think distinct neighborhoods or yore with their own corner stores, clubs, ethnic flavors, etc. Front Porch Forum is designed for the neighborhood level.
A successful community model and a successful business model are not the same thing. The tricky part is going to involve finding the intersection. Something like Front Porch Forum might have a great community model but never be able to make a significant profit, or vice versa. Or the right business model might involve delivery of a print component, something many Web-centric developers might overlook or avoid.
With 20% of our pilot city subscribing in our first half-year via word-of-mouth, I remain optimistic about FPF’s evolving business model. Time will tell!
Everybody underestimates how hard and how expensive it is to build a powerful brand at a geographic community level. If you went down the street in one of Backfence’s markets and knocked on doors, how many people would have a strong, clear, positive notion of what Backfence was all about and why they should use it? This is one place where incumbent, offline media may have a great advantage, although in many cases it can’t deliver the message to the targets of greatest opportunity (nonconsumers).
Good point.
Zillow launches neighborhood pages
Zillow.com, a big real estate site, today launched its new Neighborhood Pages…
We’ve created more than 6,500 new Neighborhood Pages in 134 cities across the country (with more to come). We’ve seeded these pages with some pretty amazing demographic data—including telling characteristics about the residents of these neighborhoods. However, the bulk of the content on the Neighborhood Pages we have left up to you, the Zillow community. Use the neighborhood discussion forums to meet your neighbors, talk about local news, publicize events like garage sales and get the inside scoop by asking questions of residents who know the area best. You can also share your photos of the neighborhood and check out the real estate in your area – from homes for sale to local Make Me Move prices to the most talked-about homes. To find a Neighborhood Page, you can access via any one of the 70+ million Home Detail pages and look for the link right beneath the address.
Bloggers tracking this kind of thing question whether people will come and populate the site with their postings. Time will tell. From The Real Estate Bloggers…
Now the problem with all forums or microsites that require user input to thrive is gaining that critical mass. There is no way Zillow is going to be able to staff people to manage each locales page without throwing big money at it. And Topix has the automated local news side of hyperlocal figured out and they are muddling along.
What will determine the critical mass is if enough people will come and stay to discuss local issues on a regular basis. Some real estate agents will, but to be honest I am not sure that homebuyers want to sit around and watch real estate agents talk shop. And for the real estate agents to come to Zillow and change their voice so what they write is a big leap, if they wanted to do that they would have a blog and be dominating the local SERPs that way.
Topix focusing on local forums
Fascinating interview today by Mark Glaser with the leadership of Topix and how this online news aggregator is now focusing on local forums.
When local news aggregator Topix decided to set up online forums last December for every city and small town in America, they figured the forums would be a loss leader. After all, online forums have a bad reputation for unfettered discussion, gossip and slander, leading most news organizations to abandon them altogether online. And people on forums are usually more focused on the discussion than on clicking on ads.
But for Topix, the forums have transformed the site from a simple search engine and news aggregator into a series of online water cooler discussions that riff off the news of the day. And with the popularity of forums, Topix has a more engaged audience that stays on the site longer. Plus, Topix is bringing in even more money by serving up forums to newspaper partner sites and sharing ad revenues with them.
Clay Shirky and software development
I had the pleasure of chatting with Clay Shirky about Front Porch Forum after a talk he gave a couple months ago. Now, I just watched the video of his presentation at Supernova 2007 and the following quote struck me…
Standing from today, looking towards the future, you will make more accurate predictions about software, and, in this web-driven world, about services, if you ask yourself not “what’s the business model?” but rather “do the people who like it take care of each other?” That turns out to be the better predictor of longevity.
Now, he was talking mostly about open source software development, but I find encouragement for our efforts with Front Porch Forum too. In fact, the people who like FPF do often take care of each other… as neighbors supporting neighbors. In a way, this cuts to the core of our early success.
About Blog
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
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