I have a good friend who I give marketing assistance on a pro bono basis. I've convinced her to blog, set up the blog for her and turned over the keys and she's blogging, but we still get into discussions about "why do people do this social media thing?" Recently, she helped me rediscover an obvious truth as we discussed why some social media is just not worth participating in.
"It's the community, Stupid." (My words, not hers.)
As I prepare to set up the B2B Expert's Forum, it's something I need to pay attention to all over again.
Over our weekly pro bono coffee (we go dutch and I give her free advice) I was waxing eloquent about how I found most people I came across in the social media world very thoughtful and responsible. But her experience has been very different and she referenced running across "whackos, nutcases and browbeaters." What explains our opposite experiences? It turns out she's reading the blogs on major media sites and her experience tracks with feedback I've gotten from my big media journalist friends who would not dare go near responding to comments they receive on their stories posted on the web for fear of being inundated by email wank they don't have the time to delete from their inboxes.
My friend and I are operating in totally different online communities and the more we talked, the more it became clear to me that the sites she frequents were using social media technologies (namely, blogs) but are serving such vast audiences that they really weren't all that social. This allows for the participation of the Anti-Social Web 2.0 participant who spouts off without any real personal accountability to other participants who, if they really knew them, they might feel the pressure to exhibit basic manners around. This "mass social" phenomenon explains why so many in my offline circles don't get social media because they haven't been caught up in a true social network yet, where people know each other by name and interact on a personal basis. A blog is not a social media phenomenon, it's just a web site that's got a nifty built-in content manager and that makes it easy to post frequently, organize your content and reference other people's sites. It's a great soapbox to yell from and/or be yelled at, but it's not inherently social unless you use it to carry on your part of a larger conversation.
And that's when it hit me. For the four hundred thousandth time in my 20something year career in technology marketing, I said to myself, "it's not the technology, it's what we do with it!"
This thought would have gone into the total "duh" category until it also occurred to me that in starting up the B2B Expert's Forum I was going to be confronting the challenge of actually building one of those "larger conversations" that I so enjoy in other realms. We expect to grow it past the "everyone knows everyone" stage and this may present us with challenges as we exceed the size that is relatively easy to keep civil due to basic tribal laws of human behavior.
Based on my experience in other communities, I plan to closely monitor the Forum in order to make sure people are getting value out of it and can easily participate in the conversation. I don't intend to do any censorship, but I expect my moderation activity will put me in the position to know if there is any abuse of our Terms of Use (based on Ning's) or other questionable behavior. It's a community of business professionals so I don't expect many issues like my friend encounters at the anti-social big media sites, but it's also a community of human beings and we all know what that means.
I've participated in groups on professional groups on LinkedIn, Facebook and Ning but I'd like to learn from others as well. What works for you in a professional social network? Anyone out there had success or failure already in building professional communities? Advice to share? Bring it on, please!
