Nothing is personal anymore
posted by pete on May 19th, 2009
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?
May 19th, 2009 at 05:27 AM
You’re “uptight about semantics” yet you pretentiously misuse existential dread— as if the sight of a fedora has anything to do with existenitiality and the fear of being your own possibilities.
In our media saturated massified culture there is something of a law of inverse proportion: with more information comes less meaning. The internet enables the communication between scores of people… but when the vast majority of us are ignoble and uncreative wankers, the result is this hemorrhaging of inanity and bathos that make up the everyday idle chatter of blogs, twitter, and the rest of the garbage that poorly passes for communication on the internet. In fact, the internet is the zero degree of communication: there’s no meaning, it’s just the stupid discharge of words, signs, information, that serve no other purpose besides the authors narcissistic enjoyment. What else is facebook but a new panopticon for the dumb masses that like being surveyed?
And yes, I recognize the irony. I myself am narcissistically amused.
May 19th, 2009 at 08:31 AM
Glad someone agrees with me about his fedora. Nothing against fedoras, but making a point to never be seen without one bothers me in some indescribable way (“cynicism” is definitely a shared element) as well. It’s something to do with the posed “Haha, look at me being so carefree whilst wearing a fedora” pics that bug me the most.
He’s trying to make it his brand, but we all know he’s no Carmen Sandiego and Carsonified isn’t his band of V.IL.E. Henchmen.
May 19th, 2009 at 09:23 AM
Yes! Building a community takes presence – presence of mind, of reply, of attention. For myself, I find a lot of my social networks are like having a bunch of kittens climb my legs – I can feel that I’m being clawed, but have trouble identifying the individual claw. I can’t – won’t be bothered to – give it the time and attention it needs to make a community out of the people who follow me. I have better things to do, and would much rather meet these people in RL – or have them meet without me! I dream of the social network around, say, the festival spontaneously banding together to become a community force. Unfortunately, I learned a lot of lessons about controlling my networks too late in the game to save my Fb account; I have ‘way too many “friends.” I can’t place the name or face of about 20% of them. Initially, I added people because I couldn’t remember if I knew them or not (I’m really bad with names) and didn’t want to offend anyone. Now I just add everyone, because I use it mostly for work, and because so many of the people requesting that I add them are people who don’t get it and would be pretty offended in RL if I didn’t add them – older folks, people I sit on Boards with, fans of the various orgs I’m involved in. Fb is pretty much a lost case for me, in terms of being actually useful for anything other than adding my brief and annoying communications tot the pile of brief and annoying communications that people receive.
And pretty much no one can really pull off a fedora. I mean, I get it – how many people at conferences/etc. remember me because of the gap in my teeth, or have approached me because of it? But if nature didn’t give you something, it usually looks disingenuous to throw a hat on your head and shout “branded!”
May 19th, 2009 at 12:01 PM
Hey Victor, I know you!
You’re that guy at parties that everyone loves to talk to.
May 19th, 2009 at 11:07 PM
The real world is where it’s at. Being someone who just can’t stop starting bands, I’ve learned a lot over the last few years. I don’t know that I’d call myself a “survivor,” perhaps, “late-term addict” is more apropos. In any event, the thing that’s always emerged in trying to build an audience, and community of other bands and supporting artists is that it requires a lot of personal investment, and that mass communications are like those surveys people used to fill out as myspace bulletins – everybody wrote them, but did anybody ever read them?
And so, no, I won’t friend every joker I don’t know, every rube I used to know in high school, every crappy band I don’t like. I actually want to see what my real friends post, what the smart and creative people are sharing.
Don’t accept every friend request, don’t message everybody in NJ about a show in NYC, expect most mass communications to go in the bit bucket.
Building a community means taking the time to actually communicate with people, and staying out of their face when making information available. Especially in Brooklyn, where everyone and their mother is trying to get you to come to their opening/show/stand-up/burlesque. Not that it’s a bad thing! Just makes you more realistic.