I appreciate Ryan Carson, although I wish he’d drop the fedora from his shtick. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but the fedora fills me with cynical, existential dread.
Anyhow, about a month ago Ryan posted “building a community from scratch”. This is a topic which I have a fair amount of experience with! I’m the survivor of being in a rock band and I do my part to encourage a really amazing Ruby community in Toronto. It’s fairly safe to say that I disagree with several of his major points.
While I agree that we have to be willing to put ourselves out there and be somewhat transparent online, his suggestion that the road to success involves accepting every Facebook friend request is completely baseless and probably quite harmful.
I should explain that I’m actually kind of uptight about semantics; I’m passionate about very specific UX details (for reasons which most of the human population would find quite inconsequential). For example, I was horrified when people would ignore the Facebook “is” in status updates. As in, “Pete Forde is Wheeeeere’s the beef?!”
I found this to be a horrible abuse of a clever nuance which was obviously intended to force people to think before they robbed two seconds — from hundreds of their friends — without guilt or consequence. It’s a hinting; an affordance. It’s magic if it works, and insipid when it doesn’t. Some people loved is while others hated is. I saw one comment refer to “is” as being “just like fascism”. I’m sure that it’s actually nothing like fascism, but I appreciate their enthusiasm regardless.
I was also really big on Poking for a long time, as those around me would attest. Sadly, Poking seems to have become a 2nd class citizen in Facebook-land, because I think they were really on to something. I called Poke the first genuinely new form of social interaction since the advent of ICQ instant messaging. It isn’t just a creepy euphemism; it’s a way to cross a communication void in a truly passive way. It allows me to tell someone that I am thinking about them, even if I don’t have anything important to say. This is a gift, as we live in a world of unlimited information inputs which scream at us to respond all day long. A poke doesn’t alert you, or sound a bell, or distract you. Most importantly, it doesn’t imply that you are waiting for a reply.
It’s come to this: we’re at war with information overload. If you love someone, you won’t needlessly send them things which will distract them without just cause. Therefore any medium which allows us to communicate our affection passively is truly a medium for the times. Anyone who has spent time as a teenager talking to their love on the phone late into the night understands what it means to prostrate themselves for another — speaking between the lines, through the ether.
Approving every friend request on every social medium completely dilutes any value that these networks offer as a positive force in our lives. The social web can quickly become a pathetic race to the bottom… nothing more than a place to receive product recommendations from complete strangers. The only people who could possibly enjoy having everyone on the Internet in your flist are people selling server RAM and people with few real world friends in the first place. What possible use is having thousands of “friends” that you don’t know on Facebook?
On Twitter — I get that… barely. I am a low follow count kind of guy, but I think Twitter is a fundamentally different medium.
Does adding everyone you meet casually build a community? Not in my world it doesn’t. In fact, it seems fundamentally disingenuous, unless you’re trying to build a fake community of incredibly shallow “relationships”. BudCamp might arguably be shallow, but it’s very hard to argue that the Bud Fans which attend are anything except incredibly passionate fans of Bud.
Does inviting a whole bunch of people with like interests out for a monthly pub night build a community? You bet your ass it does! And apparently, Kathy Sierra agrees with me:
Important topic, and I agree — building community is both tricky and time-consuming. But if you’ll forgive me for using lolcatspeak– if it takes 2 years, ‘ur doin it wrong’. The painful, least-effective way to “build community” is to hire a Community Manager who tries to connect users with the company. Far quicker/better to hire a “Director of Kicking Ass” whose sole job is to help users get better and better at whatever it is you can help them do, and to connect users to other users who share that passion and can help.
A look through Gary’s WineLibraryTV comments shows why he is so successful… it’s not because Gary is the guy everyone wants at their dinner party–it’s because he helps his viewers become the guy everyone wants at a dinner party.
Some community managers appear to have a strategy modeled after: “Get users to want to party with you.” More sustainable (and do-able) might be: “Give users a reason to party… without you”
Meetups and beer are awesome — especially when they’re about connecting users with other users. Our job as community builders is to not so much to connect with our users, but to give them more and more compelling reasons to connect with one another. And the best way to do that is through helping them learn and grow and ultimately–kick ass. The “at what?” doesn’t matter nearly as much.
I agree that the marketing budget could be far better spent on community–especially when community means putting the user–not the company–at the center of a passion-fueled ecosystem. Even things like openness/transparency matter only to the extent that they dramatically support (or potentially harm) our users’ ability to do whatever it is we’re helping them do.
Think about some of the things that truly make your life more interesting, engaging, productive, etc. — and most of us can find things where the product, service, support, user community is so damn useful that we really don’t even notice (let alone care) that the company isn’t “engaged”. In the end, we’re just not that into The Company. And a community manager that tries to change that is in for a long, painful, ultimately disappointing journey.
We are “into” our own journey, and any company that helps us do it–either directly through products/services that help us kick ass — or indirectly through sponsored community efforts that help us learn/grow/kick ass at something (even entirely unrelated)– will win our hearts. Excitement for a company/product is simply a wonderful side-effect of a company/product that helps us do something amazing. When a community manager makes passion for the company as a goal, two years or even ten will likely never be enough.
God I love this topic, Ryan. Thanks.
So there you have it folks: don’t set out to make people want to party with you when you could enable them to party without you. Jazz hands!
My advice is to guard your friends list, jealously. If we can’t control our computers, shouldn’t we turn them off?