What makes an online community successful and why do so many fail?
Take the do-it-yourself social network Ning. With 1.5 million networks and 33 million members, why are only a handful of Ning networks widely popular while about 80% of the networks fail?
According to Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, almost everything on the social Web fails. But because “failure is free” or low risk, he says, failures are necessary to allow for the few successful communities. Ning, with its low barriers to entry, has not only a shear critical mass of participants to glean the rare successes, but its creators can continually learn from the network’s failures to find evidence of what works and what doesn’t.
Shirky says it’s only when a technology becomes normal and ubiquitous that the really profound change can happen, and change, even more than we have seen already, is coming. He likens the advent of social media and the internet to a new media revolution more significant that the printing press, the telephone, or broadcast media. The largest increase in human expressive capability in our history, he says, is a result of social technology that allows two-way conversations and the ability to create groups.
Our species, natively good at group action, is using our new two-way group forming social tools as an extension of those capabilities in ways varying from the open source movement, to Flickr, to Twitter.
But, before we get into some tips for creating successful online communities, let’s review a little history.
Groups are complicated, and become more complicated as they grow. Double the size of a group and you quadruple the size of the connections among the groups. The more connections, the more costs. This is why we need organizations, whose roles are to lower the transaction costs of large groups. In fact, if an organization cannot handle the exponentially increasing communication associated with the growth of its network, it will break down at large scale, known as Coase’s ceiling. The typical approach has been to deal with this based on organizational hierarchies.
What we are seeing now is that instead of hierarchy, we have tools that make larger groups ad hoc and lightweight. We have the ability for “ridiculously easy group forming,” which Shirky quotes from computer scientist Seb Paquet, significantly reducing the transaction costs of group forming and threatening the established structure of organizations.
Shirky claims that a medium such as social media that is available easily, accessible, and group forming, is a medium with the potential to change society. He describes a ladder of behaviors to explain how much an individual needs to work to coordinate action with groups, steps through which aggregated individual action leads to coordinated group change.
The steps are sharing, conversation, collaboration, and, the toughest, collective action, in which the fate of an entire group become important to all members.
Tips for creating an online community
So what did I learn from Shirky’s book about how to create a successful online network? If I were recommending one to a client, here’s what I’d say:
· Provide value. Members should know what they can do with the site from the outset. Simply tell people what your site does and how it can benefit them.
· Make it easy to join. High barriers to entry and excessive effort to join a network make success difficult.
· Understand your audience. Go beyond market research and get at the real needs of your audience in a media environment based on two-way conversations and group forming.
· Expect two-way conversations; embrace them. The top-down one-way communication approach is over. Don’t try to employ this communication in a social network.
And this all only the touches the surface of where you can go.
What do you think about Shirky’s ideas? Have you found them relevant to your work?
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