Cogitare

Building Better Industry Communities (and Conferences)

Seth Godin has a post on his blog about building better hallways to build communities among "tribes" of individuals with common interests.

What would happen if trade shows devoted half a day to 'projects'? Put multi-disciplinary teams of ten people together and give them three hours to create something of value. The esprit de corps created by a bunch of strangers under time pressure in a public competition would last for decades. The community is worth more than the project.

He's absolutely right. Many trade shows include a social activity or competition (the iMedia Summits are great for this) that put small groups of attendees together for activities like sailing or skiing or mountain biking, affording everyone the opportunity to get to know each other better, and knit the community together with shared experiences.

Wouldn't it be infinitely more interesting and valuable to put those groups together to accomplish something useful and at the same time really learn what makes each individual so good at what they do? I spoke at a small conference in NY organized by Lennart Svenberg on mobile marketing that included just such an exercise. We divided into small groups for an hour and created innovative marketing campaigns for a fictional service, then presented them to the other attendees. It was an enjoyable and rewarding experience, and I learned more about my fellow group members than I would have from casual conversations over drinks or golf.

At an internal conference at Yahoo we spent an afternoon in small interdisciplinary groups coming up with the next great Yahoo property. A few were good enough to warrant further exploration, but everyone made new connections within the company that I'm sure contributed more to the company's success than did the projects we worked on that afternoon.

Wouldn't it be even more interesting to do the same thing, but have non-profits apply to supply the exercise and be able to use the results? I agree with Seth that the experience is more important than the outcome, but why waste the output?

The wrong kind of community

A post on Brad Beren's blog reminded me of something I came across while researching online TV shows. I was checking out an episodic web TV show with about 17 episodes, done by Vuguru, which is the new media studio owned by Michael Eisner's The Tornante Company. The show seems to have recently wrapped up, but the website is active, and there's a big "Community" link at the top. So I click on Community and I get a phpBB-driven, generic looking forum page with exactly one topic. OK, so that's pretty cheesy right there, but I click through because it shows that there's a very recent post. Inside there's nothing but spam postings, most for erectile dysfunction medications and porn, and a few for incest porn sites. Incest. From Michael Eisner?

Now none of this should surprise any of you from a technical standpoint--if you don't really know what you're doing, your forums are going to be loaded with spam. But for goodness sake, this is a real production from a major player (albeit a few steps removed) in Hollywood! Did someone have a checklist that said "Create Community around Show" on it? BB launched, check!

Moral of the story: pay attention to your own stuff, and if you don't have the bandwidth, take it down! Hmmm, better check the comments on this blog now....

Focus Groups

This is great. Now to be fair, the greatness of the original Mac ad was somewhat a product of the times. It may be hard for people to grasp why a computer commercial would use the imagery that Apple used back then. In 1984, you got it. But it's still a great exercise and reminds us that great things come from great minds, not focus groups and demand analysis.

Word of Mouth vs. Viral Marketing

Seth Godin blogged on the difference between word of mouth and viral marketing, and since the misuse of the term "viral marketing" has bugged me for a long time, I think it's worth commenting on. While I know Seth can talk for an hour (or write a whole book) about viral marketing, I think he shortchanged the explanation in his post. The basic difference, as Seth explains, is that word of mouth decays and viral marketing compounds. This isn't exactly right, I humbly submit, because both word of mouth and viral marketing can involve compounding, and they both can and will eventually decay. The difference is in the method of transmission of the idea and the source of the energy used to propogate it.

So here's my take on it, perhaps influenced by my distant pre-med past. A virus is characterized by the ability to get a cell to make copies of the virus instead of itself, by injecting a genetic package into the cell. Thus the cell becomes the energy source for creating new viruses. (Unlike other types of cells which use their internal energy to reproduce.) Once a whole bunch of new viruses have been created, they bust out and infect new cells, compounding the growth and spread of the virus. Hence the term "viral marketing" for something that creates this compounding effect by getting "infected" people to reproduce something that in turn infects others.

Too often, however, the term is applied to phenomena that are simply really good word of mouth. Someone tells you to visit a great website with hysterical pictures on it, and you do, and you like it, and you tell 5 friends to visit that website. They tell 5 friends, and so on, and pretty soon the website has a $15 billion valuation. But there's no viral marketing going on in that example. Just good word of mouth. The interaction between infected "cell" and a new host doesn't involve the transmission of the virus itself from one to the other.

On the other hand, if I visit that website and there's this app that helps me make a really funny picture, and I click a button that says "send this image to 5 friends" and I do, and in that email my friends see the image and after laughing their asses off notice that below the image it says "Jeff made this image on ROTFLMAO.com, and you can too!" and they not only forward the email I sent them to 5 more friends, but visit the site, make their own images and forward those to 5 friends, you've got a real viral marketing engine going there.

The difference, to me at least, is that in the first example the thing that you're trying to increase isn't transmitted to others. They just hear about it, and have to go see for themselves before becoming "infected" by the brilliant website. In the viral example, the act of telling the friends about it "infects" them. Some of the infected ones will successfully reproduce the virus and infect others.

Why does this difference matter? Well, like Seth says, good word of mouth is great, but tends to dissipate as it gets further from the source of energy, the person that had the original experience. Eventually the experience has lost too much energy to inspire anyone to pass it on. "My friend's cousin's girlfriend's sister's niece's babysitter saw this great website" Yeah, whatever.

A real viral campaign carries the original, infecting experience to each person it touches. Everyone gets hit with the *original* level of energy, and the likelihood that the virus will be passed on doesn't change as it spreads further from the original source.

There's nothing wrong with good word of mouth, it just ain't a virus.