[Editor's note: Noah Kagan is one of those young guys who always seems to know what is going in Silicon Valley. He's given a lot of thought about community building. He recently left Facebook, is working on various projects, and writes a blog at Okdork.com.]
There are two white families on my block in Cupertino, CA out of a sea of Asian families. It is almost uncommon for me to be around white people and whenever I leave the Bay Area it always fun to remark that my high school (Lynbrook High, go Vikings) was nearly 70% Asian and that my college (UC Berkeley, go Bears) is around 50%. White people are foreign to me! How did this happen?
It is about community. A question I have thought about since my days before Facebook. Why does it matter? Who cares about it? Why do we sometimes want diversity, but somtimes want be among our own? How did this one group of people get so large in that area? Why do they congregrate together in the China towns of SF, LA, NYC and other major metropolitan areas?
Think about if someone were to randomly drop you in a foreign country, Los Angeles (just kidding), or a place like Vietnam. You’re at the airport, it is hot and gorgeous. Most of us, without being consciously aware of it, find a taxi and ask to go somewhere where “our kind” is. We’ll tend to go to where the other white, Asian or whatever race you are congregate. We go to where people speak our language, look like us and eat food we are comfortable with. Increasingly, in diverse societies such as our own, where we mix freely, the division is still there — only along socio-economic lines. This idea of Community still matters. It is nice to be around people we think of as part of our foundation.
So what does this have to do with the web? It has to do with building a community How do you make it authentic, and how do you make it prosper? There are no perfect solutions, but there are great ways to start.
- Be involved with it already. Don’t go creating the LaCrosse social network if you don’t even know how to play.
- Understand the community. At Facebook vs. MySpace, the younger users care much more about coloring background images to define themselves, while college students prefer to do it with photos and text.
- Listen to them. You already know this. When you are involved in the process you care more about the outcome. Just make sure you do it with your members.
Community building will determine the success or failure for many online businesses. Realize, there is no way you can replicate what MySpace did for your business and there is no cookie cutter formula for making a community. Just consider that the best way to get started is to a) get together a small group of people around a relevant subject, b) allow it to control and direct where that community should go and c) provide the group with tools to help make the community grow.
For example, anyone can have a blog on Xanga, but Daily Strength provides a lot of community tools so that people can anonymously help each other with different problems (breast cancer, ms, etc…). This will be the future destination where people go for support. Figure out your position, start it extremely small (light the kindling) and get the big logs ready for roasting.
I want you to finish reading this post and think about two things: 1) Are you involving or considering your community members when you move forward with your business and 2) Are you making an effort to strengthen, empower and/or possibly create your community?
14 Comments
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Pran said:
Point well taken. But there are simply way too many communities these days. How many communities can an individual be part off and contribute meaningfully. The exit in the community business idea is still dependent on being acquired by Google, Yahoo, MSN etc. Is there a viable business model out there besides ads?
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noah kagan said:
Pran,
Thanks for the comment. There are a ton of communities not being acquired by a large company that are thriving today: deviantart.com, threadless.com, dogster.com, suicidegirls.com and tons more. The reason we don’t hear about them is we are not involved in them. The main stream ones which make big bucks are what most people hear about.
There are tons of viable business models besides ads:
1- Social Capital/Gifting: Let people through the use of money give to one another virutal goods.
2- Recommended products and services through a community portal.
3- Membership fees to be a part of a community like meetup.com
4- Community donated. This will not bring significant revenue but at least makes the site sustainable like wikipedia.
There are tons more… I think it is just finding out the right balance and value for the members.
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Joe Suh said:
Good thoughts Noah… and thanks for forgetting to plug us :)
I’m curious about how important you feel face-to-face interaction is for building community. The obvious core strength of vertical social networks is the tighter, more intimate community. Yet the very nature of a niche also limits the network effects needed to remain sustainable.
It seems to me that face-to-face interaction isn’t that important anymore. Dogster and Daily Strength users are fine with virtual interaction only.
If thats the case, social networks seem like nothing more than Forum 2.0
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noah kagan said:
Joe,
You are welcome about not being mentioned;)
I feel face-to-face interaction depends on the organization. Some communities are built from a face-to-face group wanting to have an online presence. Whereas, Daily Strength’s success is from the anonymity they provide online.
I don’t think niche limits the network effects, I just think it reduces it to a smaller exponential growth and that saturation will happen sooner.
Social Networks are definitely a derivative of forums and just provide an easier way to express yourself and communicate with others beyond just a message board.
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Joe Suh said:
That seems paradoxical to me - anonymity versus more ways for self-expression.
Seems to me forum software can very easily convert itself into a social network. Forum members already have their own pages (aka profiles), mailboxes (aka private messaging), and a photo (aka avatar). Let them add each other as friends and presto, social network!
So I think the niche social networks that will thrive have to either:
1) Center around an affinity where there is not a good forum already (looks like Dailystrength is taking that approach)
2) Provide a level of online interaction for a community dynamic that is not content with a simple message board. This is where face-to-face interaction is key IMHO…
Just my 2 cents from the social network that will remain unmentioned by The Noah :)
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People Finder said:
Some interesting truths to online community building in our Web 2.0 world.
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Colin McDougall said:
Noah - Great article!
One point I would like to make for those building community for their online business.
When is the last time you called members of your community to get their personal thoughts?
Yes, your online success can be propelled by spending a few minutes everyday making phone calls to members of your online community.
Quite often things get lost in the written word and thoughts are not fully captured.
Think about this for a moment:
The internet is constantly moving at lightning speed and we (and our community members) are still moving at human speed.
When is the last time you slowed things down to the human pace and really learned what your community wants?
Yes, it’s a time consuming thing to do but serves very well in gaining an understanding of what your audience really wants.
I have had huge success by focusing in on one person at a time and allow the snowball effect to kick in.
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dave mcclure said:
nice piece noah… i rate it aok (dork!)
as for me, i’m regularly involved in these communities:
* geeks / entrepreneurs / internet startups
* microfinance / social entrepreneurship
* ultimate frisbeein addition to the above, i’ve gradually become semi-adopted by several asian & south indian communities due to many family & friends, and i find this diversity of bay area community to be one of the things i value most about living in california.
what’s interesting to me is that as technology advances, i find myself participating in MORE, rather than LESS offline & online communities… it seems like the internet helps connect people with smaller & smaller niche communities of more specific interest, and help bring them closer together.
now isn’t that special :)
- dave mcclure
http://500hats.typepad.com/ -
Brij Singh said:
Great post Noah,
People tend to underestimate the effort required to build and nurture quality community site.
Also information architecture (UI) issues of community sites are hard to nail down.
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Mehul Patel said:
This is a Brilliant post from one of the most vibrant and highly confident guy in whole of Bay ‘Noah Kagan’
Noah I agree with this totally and like Seth G says Small is the New Big or Small is beautiful, also strong focus and constant efforts is something which will definitely pay off, the idea is simple dont work for or towards the pay off, but work for passion or anything you love and add a lil effort to it each day and you are Home!
As You have mentioned Daily Strength I would like to mention http://www.Minti.com a site run and managed by and for Young Parents all over the world it started small and now its a Awesome new age Smart Wiki on Parenting very Hip too!
Thank You Noah and Venture Beat :)
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Jitendra said:
Noah,
Great article…Online communities allow people to converse without any regard to geography…Of course we pay for this ease of use in terms of making it easy, for a few bad actors, to try and make money from such communities via spam and other unsavory schemes. If we are able to get a system to identify and root out some of these bad actors, the on-line communities have a chance to be a whole lot more vibrant and useful.
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Sundar Krishnamurthy said:
I don’t think communities like Cupertino happened because people chose to be among “their own”.
There is a single driving force behind high concentration of Chinese and Indians (both are Asians in my book) in Cupertino and that is the school district. This is really a network effect where other Asians moved in because of the perceived value of the schools and ended up making it real.
Online communities however differ in one respect. Even the best site for any topic is not guaranteed to have the largest community because (a) it is easy to create similar sites and (b) there is no real effort to switch from one to another.
The value delivered by the site to a participant has to be more than the effort to participate in order for an online community to be successful.
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noah kagan said:
Sundar,
Great remarks. I 100% agree that Cupertino has a huge draw because of our remarkable school system. Your second sentence is right on point with my arguments. There is a community that built around an initial base of people who came for the schooling.
I think overall there needs to be an initial reason for the communities to form. For that to happen there needs to be an immediate benefit for themselves.
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Geoff Dodd said:
I found Noah Kagan’s article to be extremely positive :) and it struck a chord with me as I have two beautiful nieces from Thailand living with us as they undertake High School studies here in Perth, Western Australia.
We were in Bangkok recently and the language barrier really got to me. People do flock together from commonality of language and culture. Online communities then need to OVERdeliver more, possibly offering language translation by machine? so finally we’ll be able to, say, chat in Mandarin? Thai? Vietnamese? (With quick simplified machine-driven translation.) There’s a task for Silicon Valley, Noah.
Thanks, Geoff Dodd Perth, Aust.
4 Trackbacks
3:47 pm
Social Degree » Who cares about community? said:
[...] My friend Noah Kagan from OkDork.com has a good post over at venturebeat on community. Go read it. [...]
4:38 pm
Who Cares about Community? at Okdork.com said:
[...] My post today is featured at VentureBeat: Who Cares about Community? [...]
5:18 am
watchingnow » Blog Archive » links for 2006-12-14 said:
[...] Venture Beat Contributors » Who cares about Community? Some good questions about community (tags: community socialnetwork) [...]
1:05 am
How will the internet change social networking? « iBjorn said:
[...] I believe while the internet has certainly opened up many new social networking opportunities with the development of new social software like social networks, blogs, photo-sharing, link-sharing apps, they only help in initiating communication and not necessarily connection. But the internet has certainly disrupted social networking by drastically shortening the time cycle of the communication process. This is accomplished by the ease and immediacy of information representation between people. Getting people to be aligned along interest groups and online activities that facilitate shared experiences will be the interesting areas to look into for effective networking and also community-building. For a good article on community-building, read my friend Noah Kagan’s article here on VentureBeat. [...]