Some of the common problems I get from clients and the like:
- We’re not really having a conversation online with people.
- We post stuff on our blog / Twitter / Facebook page but it just seems to go into the ether.
- We ask questions of our audience but no-one answers.
- etc.
It’s a tricky one but I think I might have found an answer. Bear with me as I spend a few hundred words getting to the point as usual.
A few months ago I came across a group blog called Clusterflock and it quickly became one of those blogs I keep around in case I run out of things to read or when insomnia strikes. But there was something different about Clusterflock compared to the other rivers-of-stuff blogs I keep around the place. The Daily What is a great digest of Internet culture but it feels like a magazine or television channel. Here’s a bunch of things we’ve prepared for you to consume. Clusterflock, on the other hand, is like finding yourself sitting at a table with a bunch of people who are telling stories and sharing stuff. Strangers are welcome but you get the feeling they’ve known each other for a while. There’s in-jokes and things you think might be in-jokes but you can’t be sure and other potentially alienating phenomena that usually gets groups labeled as cliques, and yet I found myself drawn to it.
I’ve been wondering for a while what it is about this blog that I like. Sure, the stuff that’s posted crosses over with my interests and aesthetics – these seem, on the surface, to be my kinds of people, but there was something else. And then it struck me.
They’re not addressing an audience. They’re addressing the group. It’s not a broadcast model. It’s a group discussion that happens to be public.
It’s surprising how linear people’s attitude to online activity has become. Maybe it’s because the great “crowdsourcing” experiments didn’t really pan out but stuff seems to be very being publisher – audience driven right now. There are authors and there are commenters and there’s not much else going on. There’s nothing wrong with this per-se (my blogging is very soapbox-oriented, as you might have noticed) but it’s very one way.
What’s intriguing about Clusterflock is the contributors are talking to each other. The people in the comments are frequently other contributors and if they’re not they can use the Christopher Walken account to post.
Everyone is an equal at the table, if they want to be. You know what this reminds me of? Metafilter, the granddaddy of community blogs. Or, if you prefer, a forum.
No-one recommends a forum these days. The memories of empty phpBB boards with two welcome posts and no activity whatsoever are too raw. But the forum model is still an interesting one even if the tools can be a little all or nothing. It’s a level playing field with a low barrier to entry where the the community is in charge.
So, how can you use this newfound knowledge to solve your social media woes? How do you build a community that shares amongst itself and welcomes newcomers? My answer would be you don’t build a community. You take the community you already have – yourselves.
I’m going to do something I don’t normally do and pick on a real world example. We Are Eastside is a campaign to unify and promote various arts and culture businesses that reside in the Eastside/Digbeth area of Birmingham. I’ve worked with a fair number of the organisations involved and care what happens culturally in that area. I think the We Are Eastside notion is a good one. Most of these people and organisations are friendly with each other and working towards similar goals. It makes sense to create some sort of loose collective and punch their collective weight. The We Are Eastside booklet was a lovely thing giving a great snapshot of activity in the city most would be unaware of. The blog, however, has been a bit of letdown.
The diagnosis from this blog doctor is clear. The contributors, if they post at all, merely post press releases or duplicate their own blogs. The former, frankly, is a crime while the latter begs the question, what is this blog for? Is it just an aggregator? A Google News for Eastside? There’s nothing wrong with that of course and it might be neat to see a cleverly aggregated snapshot of the news from that district. But it’s not very interesting.
Howabout this. The blog is where the participating organisations share things with each other. In public. And have a conversation about them. In public. No press releases, no commissioned pieces, no duplicating blog content, just things of mutual interest.
Obviously this is easier said than done. People who’ve spent years seeing media as a one-way tool to can be uncomfortable having conversations about their businesses in public and some of the organisations (naming no names) might not be fit for such as challenge. Above all, there has to be need for this. It needs to solve a problem even if that problem is something as simple as “we don’t chat as much as we should”. Often it’s the simple things that create the bonds of community after all.
So let’s say there’s a need for a site where the various cultural and creative companies of Eastside can post anything they think is of interest to the others. And let’s say it’s a success. What benefit does it have to the bottom line? (I’m assuming that We Are Eastside got City Council support to increase the economic development of the area.)
Firstly there’s the obvious advantage of having businesses in the same sector connecting with each other, sharing resources and discussing them. This raises the intellectual capital and promotes collaboration and so on.
Secondly it demonstrates activity. People often say that walking around the Custard Factory complex you have no idea what’s happening in those offices and converted warehouses. This is a way of lifting the veil to all manner of people. Businesses looking to move to the area, customers looking for new suppliers, suppliers looking for new customers, people wondering what’s going on in the city.
Thirdly it’s a way of engaging with the audience on a level playing field. Remember Clusterflock’s Christopher Walken account which anyone in the world can use? Have a similar function where people who aren’t established on the scene can get involved. Sure, put in place moderation as required but set the tone yourselves first. Demonstrate what this space is for by using it in that way. Lead by example.
It’s never easy to throw a new form of communication onto an existing network, especially one as complex as a group of companies who happen to share a business classification and geographic location. The reason I picked We Are Eastside was because it’s a challenge and I’m not sure getting that bunch to run a group blog on top of everything else they’re doing is a reasonable request.
But it could also apply to a smaller group. Let’s say you’ve got 5 or 6 people in the office, a couple more on the road and a handful of freelancers. Would something like Clusterflock work for you?
I sublet a desk from Substrakt and have been keeping an eye on their company blog. As I understand it all of the team have to write for it as part of their job and what they write tends to be of a high quality. I can see why this post is a good thing – it shows them to be experts in their field and contributes to the developer community. Should this post become a valuable resource it will bring much Google traffic. But it’s very one way. It’d be interesting to read it as a discussion between Lee and Mark with space for others to get involved. Whether that would be as effective in promoting the company as the articles is debatable, mind you, but if you’re not in the position to produce a blog of the caliber of Substrakt then it’s something to consider.
“It’s all about the conversation” we say. And yet we build online platforms that look like this:
forgetting the conversations tend to look more like this:
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Well said. I know Clusterflock, and your pictures at the bottom make a good point.
Very relevant to a meeting I attended last night. I’m gonna link to this from an invitation-only Facebook group so you won’t be able to check it out, but basically it’s the focal point for planning a start-up community newspaper in deepest south-east England.
Update: Clusterflockers talk about me talking about them talking to each other.
Very interesting and thought-provoking post.
If I stretch my imagination a fair bit, it’s possible that I might be starting to understand the broader discussion that you’re referring to. I have not long left an architects practice where it took me 4 years to convince them to have a website. Blogging et al would have been a step too far. But personally I’m really enthused by how the idea of discussion may be more relevant to me and my world than perhaps i realised. Very useful post, thanks for inspiring me……