Here is the second part of my conversation with Scott Heiferman, Founder and CEO of Meetup. In this part we talk about the roles of different social platforms (such as Facebook, Twitter etc), and the kinds of relationships that bind people to communities.

Douglas: So what do you thinks makes for a stronger kind of community: one based solely on pre-existing personal relationships. Like the majority of Facebook connections, or one based on passions and interests and causes, like Meetup or Ning? In Meetup Groups, people have bothered to get out of their homes and meet people around a shared need or cause, like being a military wife or just enjoying playing chess. It’s a more palpable reason for coming together, if you like.

So which is stronger, or is that a daft question?

Scott: I think life calls for different kind of relationships, different kind of communities and that, ultimately, you’re friends and the family networks are the strongest. It’s like saying is your circulatory system or your nervous system more important?  Well, it’s all part of a functioning ecosystem of life.

For example, I have a friend who’s part of a book club for some years. She has that monthly ritual, she devotes many hours to it, dozens of hours of reading every month and she looks forward to it.

But she doesn’t hang out with the people from book club outside of book club. I asked, “Don’t you consider them friends?” And she says, “Well yeah, but no, they’re my book club.” And this book club is focused on a topic. She’s got her friends, but then her    book club is something different and she considers the book club something very important, but it’s not friends exactly.

Douglas: So you can have segmented communities?

Scott: Yeah.

Douglas: There are communities which may or may not overlap within your life, some of which are based on a passion, interest, need, or cause, and some are just accidental, like you met these friends at college and you developed relationships with them, or you have this family you certainly didn’t elect to have.

Scott: Sure.  And I can’t say what’s more important.

Douglas: Maybe there’s another way of cutting it. There are communities that you elect to join and co-create within. Are they stronger communities than the ones you just happen to find yourself in?

Say you grow up in a small town or suburb. What’s your affinity to that town, really?  You didn’t elect to be there.  But you elected to be part of this co-creating local community around saving the environment or whatever. Which one do you really identify with and which one is strongest?

Scott: Well, I mean you gotta be a really cold person to not have warm, warm feelings for that town you grew up in.  I mean I’m sure when you head back to where you grew up, but there’s a part of your heart which is still there.

I see what you’re asking: do the things that you choose make you more committed to them?

Douglas: Yeah.

Scott: I don’t know. I do know that there’s a sense of relief when people find ‘the others’, as Douglas Rushkoff quotes Timothy Leary.

Douglas: In the research I did on cult-like organizations, I found that the root of it all was that everyone is trying to find the like-others. Somewhere where you can relax, create a safe space and become yourself.

Scott: Yeah.

Douglas: ‘Like-others’ can be defined in many ways. But I found that if you share the same values, that lent itself to the greatest stickiness. Because, generally, an individual defines themselves to themselves and others by describing their values: “I believe in this.  I think this is important.”  So if you find others who define themselves in the same way, that’s a profoundly strong tie.

Scott: Yes.  But you know, where it breaks down and where you see organizations like communes and collectives and intentional communities falling apart is when there’s a presumption, there’s an expectation, that all the values are going to be the same. But inevitably it’s going to translate to, “Well, you’re not exactly like me.” And I think that’s where, perhaps, more explicitness about the goal comes in.

Douglas: Yes, because you can unify around a goal but accept each other’s differences outside of the goal.

Scott: Right.  Right.  Like when the community says more explicitly that “here’s why we exist as a community and here’s where we’re not necessarily gonna agree.” It’s like saying, “Here’s why we exist and anything outside of this is – we have a tolerance for,” I think that’s really important.  Because when you have that degree of explicitness, all the things in a contract, it’s more likely to work.

History says it breaks down when there’s an intolerance for anything outside of it, as opposed to saying, well, this is the most important thing and other things are less important.

Douglas: So here’s a question I’m asking visionary founders like you of social platforms. Facebook, Ning, Twitter, Meetup. In five year’s time, what are the three or four left standing and why? Do they satisfy different needs or overlap? Is there a need that isn’t being satisfied?

Scott: Well, I think very strongly that some version of each of those is going to sustain – some version of each of those is going to be needed and become more and more and more important in the world. Like, I have my family and friends, I love what Facebook does for that.  And whether it’s Facebook or something else, that’s going to be a part of things.

Scott: That and that what Ning does is absolutely vital, and going to be part of the world forever. Which is that not-geographically specific common interest.

The idea of how do you spark real dynamism in that kind of geographically spread community is still to be figured out.

And then the role of Twitter, which I think is more about broadcasting, it’s about following, but is not about relationships. But that’s needed too.

I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t say that I think that Meetup or something like it is going to be the surprise strong player. For one reason. I’ll put it this way, that which elicits a community with roles and responsibilities, and interdependencies and relationships is just going to be a big winner.

Douglas: Right.

Scott: That’s what’s happening with Meetup period – because it pushes you. The Meetup is just a means to an end, which is to get the relationships and interdependences going. And the roles and responsibilities going within something that is not an audience, but rather is a true community.

Then from there, watch out.  You hear in the technology world the word platform a lot, and that the masters of the platform are the developers.  Developers are iPhone app makers, and Windows app makers.

Well, the platform that enables real people, not engineers, but real people to make applications, to be developers, is the formula for a big winner. When people are building a Meetup Group they’re being developers on a platform.  They are making something, like you make an iPhone app.  It needs to be a lot of people making it together.

And what we’re seeing is the more Assistant Organizers you have, the more successful the Meetup group is.  What is that saying?  It’s saying these people are taking roles and contributing.

Douglas: When I was at Meetup HQ we talked about how the investment it takes to participate in a Meetup Group is extremely high. It’s not just about a mouse click or posting a photo. It’s about showing up and more. That’s good and bad.

It means the barrier to entry is really high, but if they do show up, then there’s a strong possibility that the sense of reward could be equally high.

So, because Meetup is local and face-to-face, and if you’re co-creators and co-makers then the investment and reward is at a much higher level than if you’re simply in front of your computer.

Scott: Yeah.  I mean you could argue – and I’d be lying if I thought of this ahead of time, – but it’s like local isn’t even the point.  The point is co-creation and collaboration, and codependency, interdependencies and roles, and that that’s just more likely to happen locally, and face-to-face.

My recent conversations with marketing people brought this home to me. They tend to refer to Facebook, Twitter, Myspace et al as social media.

The people who build these things call them social platforms or utilities. The people who work at Ning, Meetup, Facebook etc see them as new social infrastructure where the Internet can remove the friction that impeded social interaction and community-building in the analog world.

You might think I’m parsing this too fine, but I believe that what they’re called is indicative of how they’re used.

For many marketers, these tools are simply media. They’re another way to reach a target audience. Not only that, they use them akin to the old broadcast media. Twitter and Facebook Fan pages are there to blast ‘messaging’ to their audience. (Not all marketers…the smartest brands use them as part of sophisticated community-building or customer service strategies).

The builders of Meetup, Ning, Facebook, Twitter etc see them as platforms on which people self-organize to form relationships and communities, often in ways they never envisaged.

They’re not ‘channels.’ They’re the new town halls, or social mixers, or forums or village squares.

Or are they? I could also argue that Fan pages are like the old media. They have an audience that receives updates and can respond in a limited fashion. But the degree of interaction between others on the Fan page is rudimentary at best. It’s not a real community.

Likewise with Twitter. Each person or organization or brand is broadcasting a point of view or an interesting link. Again, there’s limited functionality for interaction. And that’s just fine. It’s there as a personal radio station if you like with limited ‘call-in’ ability.

What do you think? Do you call them media or platforms, and why?

In this part we cover tips for community leaders on Ning, how the Ning platform has evolved, the importance of customization and Gina’s views on which social platforms will survive.

Top tips for successful Network leaders

Douglas: What are the top five things that Network Creators [the founders and leaders of Ning Networks] should know when they start out?

Gina: I wrote a blog post when we first launched Ning Networks about what a Network Creator needed to know when starting out: http://blog.ning.com/2007/03/eight_steps_to_creating_a_grea.html. I came up with eight steps then – and they remain the same success factors two plus years in – so don’t make me choose five

What I think is fascinating is that a different combination of features and design are important when you’re first launching a Ning Network. For example, photos, videos and blogging are the best features to use to get a new social network off the ground. Later, discussion forums or events may make a ton of sense, but keeping it simple upfront and investing in only a few features and great design is the greatest indicator of success.

Once you have that, launching with a small, initial set of members and a focused answer to “what should I do first?” by your new members should get you on your way.

Community and leader lifestages

Douglas: The community leaders I’ve interviewed have said that there are lifestages in community-making. What’s more, they grow and change as their community grows. They evolve into different types of leader, as their social network evolves.

Gina: Exactly. The other thing, especially in the early stages of a Ning Network, is it’s really important for the Network Creator and core members to be actively involved.  You can’t just throw up a Ning Network and let it run itself before it’s developed its own norms and rhythms.

It’s like being a host or hostess of a party.

For example, one of our Network Creators, Chris Anderson talks about how at the beginning of creating his Ning Network, DIY Drones [about creating your own Amateur Unmanned Aerial Vehicles] he needed to contribute photos, videos and blog posts every single day.  As the social network grew to 150-200 people, he could take a step back. Now that it has over 1,000 people, it runs itself.

This is only one example of what we see across our 2 million Ning Networks that have been created in terms of how Ning Networks grow and evolve through a healthy ecosystem of different types of members or roles within a Ning Network.

By looking at the commonalities across what are otherwise very distinct social networks on the Ning Platform, we can build into Ning Networks smarter and better ways for Network Creators to accelerate the growth and ongoing management of thriving, rich, immersive social experiences.

Evolution of Ning

Douglas: It sounds like you’re creating the infrastructure for high functioning organizations.

Gina: That is our mission.  So, hopefully, the answer to this is a very loud, “heck, yes!”

Douglas: And the software you’re creating is enabling the leadership to identify where they need to focus. And it’s recognizing that each social network has slightly different needs at each stage of its life?

Gina: Absolutely.  We can see, for example, the portfolio of features used by active social networks versus those sets of features that are used on Ning Networks used for experimentation or never take off. We can take that small but critical insight into defaults for new Ning Networks and give the Network Creator as much help as possible to create something special and successful.

Douglas: So you’re identifying the behaviors that are predictors of success and then developing software that predisposes other social networks to do the same thing?

Gina: That’s the goal. We want to help each Ning Network be as easy and compelling as possible based on the data we have across over two million Ning Networks created.

Douglas: So what are the top things that you might see in an early stage of a community that you’d like to help optimize?  What can you can help them do?

Gina: Stay tuned.

Douglas: Fair enough!

You might have already answered this, what’s missing that you wish you had built on Ning?

Gina: That’s a tough question just because, as a perfectionist, product-oriented founder and CEO, I could probably spend the next two days telling you all the things that I can’t wait to build or that I wish we could get out next week.

Engagement vs. page views

What I would say is that the biggest thing that has evolved in social technology since we launched Ning Networks almost three years ago is the transition from thinking about success and the product in terms of feature-driven pageviews to member-driven engagement.  Member engagement is this notion of identifying who your members are, what roles they are playing on your interest-driven social network, and how you drive deeper engagement from there.

The Internet is moving from a race for eyeballs to a race for engagement and, while it is too soon to tell where this is all going, I think it’s a fantastic, dynamic trend that we love.

Douglas: So, as Ning has grown, you’ve realized what you’ve got is an enabler of a range of different relationships around a series of passions and interests?

Gina: Absolutely.

Douglas: And you want to evolve the product to enable these relationships to work better. One of the ways to do that may be identifying the different roles that the different members play and helping them play those roles more effectively.

Gina: Well, we’re already doing this. These are the things that people are starting to see pop up on their Ning Networks and will only get more pronounced from here.  That’s the thing that’s also really fun about this kind technology is that because it’s the Internet you can get things out the door quickly.

Douglas: So we talked a bit about what you want to do in the future. But how is Ning designed right now to enable high-functioning communities? What do you think you got right?

Customization

Gina: The thing that we did and continue to do differently – and better –than anybody else is develop features for extreme flexibility and uniqueness.

We think about everything in the context of how can our Network Creators and their members customize what we’re about to put out. How can our Ning Networks take a feature and put their own unique spin on it?

We are constantly looking for ways for our Network Creators to take a standard feature like photos or even virtual gifts and make it uniquely their own in a rich, immersive experience that is only limited by their creativity and the market for members joining.

It is not the kind of thing that most people wake up in the morning and think about in software development and design and yet it’s fundamental to everything we do.

Douglas: So why do you think customization is so important?

Gina: There are multiple reasons. First, because we love to see what happens when you give creative people the opportunity to take an idea and turn it into a totally new reality. Second, customization is critical to support distinct interests and identities from veterans to offbeat brides and zombies. You can’t have The Hook without customization and, as we talked about earlier, The Hook is what makes a Ning Network different from every other Ning Network or any other social platform out there.

For people to find their community and know whether or not it’s the right place for them, customization is a prerequisite.

Douglas: I’ve been talking to two big Ning Network Creators: Steve Ressler who runs Govloop and Joseph Porcelli who runs Neighbors for Neighbors. They seem to be trying to customize all the time.

Gina: Yes.  And our job as a partner and a social platform is to take the things that people like Steve and Joseph and their members are doing on our service and make it easier and faster to customize those things.

Which social platforms survive?

Douglas: Great.  So here’s another big question: if you were to imagine the world in five years what would community platforms look like?  Who survived?  Who didn’t?  How are they being used?

Gina: So on one level I think that the social technologies that are here today have staying power and are poised for continued explosive growth.  That’s because this stuff is actually quiet hard to do and network effects are alive and well. It’s why, for example, there isn’t a number two to Facebook, Linked In, Twitter, or Ning. Different social networks have carved out their area and are rapidly innovating to deepen their relationship with people for that particular area of their life.

I also think that the ways people use and connect across different social technologies will only get more sophisticated, richer and more immersive on the web while being connected everywhere via mobile experiences.

What this should mean in practice is that every person on the planet will have an opportunity for a richer life because of what they are able to access from a simple mobile phone. The political, economic and social ramifications of this are profound.

Douglas: So, coming back to today, if you had to advise anyone…ordinary people…to pick just three pieces of social software, what would they be and what needs would they satisfy?

Gina: So I think Facebook because they will continue to do the best job of connecting people that you already know and everyone went to school somewhere.

I think Ning would be the second one because I think we will continue to give people a more and more compelling way to express and connect with other people around the things they care about the most in their lives.

Tied for third place is Twitter and Linked In. Twitter is an amazing service in terms of providing a real time stream of interesting news and events.  I’m finding that I can rely on Twitter for my news today in a much more compelling way than reading a news site online.

And then I do think there will be always a need for professional identity online. I think Linked In is going to continue to dominate professional identity.  They’re going to do more and more interesting things around people’s professional identities and I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes.

That would be my answer although I recognize I chose four not three.

Douglas: That’s fine.  I just wanted to see which ones you picked and what you think distinguishes them.

So here’s a personal question.  What is the most useful or satisfying community you’ve belonged to and why?

Your most satisfying community

Gina: I came from a family of teachers. I knew nothing about business when I came to college. Through the help of friends and mentors, I got a job at Goldman Sachs right out of college and drank out of the firehose of new professional experiences.

I was incredibly fortunate to start out on this adventure with 70 other 21 year-olds of varying backgrounds, degrees and personalities who became some of my best friends to this day. Fortunately for me, California has better weather than New York, so many of these colleagues have since moved out to Palo Alto, CA, so my social world came with me.

Without this set of friends and support network, I’m not sure I would have built the expertise or confidence to start a social technology company and create a service used by millions of people every day in the expression of who they are as people.  That’s the power of community and something that I hope Ning can continue to provide people across all walks of life.

Following on from the previous post that attempts to distinguish between fan, follower and community member, here’s a brief and imperfect review of the major platforms that we generally consider as suitable for community building.

Bear in mind that each of these do some of the other (and increasingly so as they develop more functionality). But this is a broad-stroke review designed to help someone who’s considering how to create an online platform for community (if they’re not custom-designing their own).

Facebook isn’t designed to create distinct communities. Its main function is to distribute information amongst people who already know each other (or are separated through a few degrees of separation if they’re friends of friends).

Its brilliance is that it removes the resistance to communication within a network of strong and weak ties that geography, time, telephone, mail or even email represent. It’s as its makers describe it: a utility, one that enables things to be shared by people who already know each other, and as such it likely makes those ties a little stronger.

But you can’t say the majority of relationships on Facebook are defined by buying into a common goal, doing things together, having complex interactions, being distinct from other communities because of their values or goals. It’s about fast and seamless information-sharing, whether video, photos, messages or status updates.

Fanpages are slightly different. They can be used to create a community of sorts around an idea, person or thing. At least, it’s a group of people distinguished from the larger Facebook population by putting up their hand up to say I’m a fan of x.

But it’s not really designed to create real community. Co-creation is very limited. There are discussion boards, if enabled, and even some offline functionality. You can receive updates from the fan-object. You can post your own updates (if the administrator enables that).

At the end of the day it’s designed for an audience, not a membership. It’s no accident it’s called a fan page. Fandom normally means a two-way relationship between the fan and the fan-object. Actually, on Facebook it’s often only one-way and used as simply another broadcast medium for distributing information from the fan-object to the fan. It’s not designed for relationship building between members, co-creation or any of the other markers of true community.

Meetup is completely different. It’s almost the reverse of Facebook. Where Facebook is about information-distribution amongst people who already know each other, wherever they are in the world, Meetup’s single-minded focus is creating local, sustainable community around interests, passions, needs and causes amongst people who were initially strangers. It creates a framework for strangers to become friends through successive Meetups, co-create and do stuff together.

Its software is designed for people to find each other and share common interests, easily organize events, appoint responsibilities, create economies within the groups (via fees and sponsorships) and recruit. It’s a reinvention of local community predicated on shared interests (not just proximity), using the Internet to get off the Internet.

Ning is like Meetup, in that it is also designed to create community around shared passions and interests amongst people who were initially strangers. But the focus is not on local, face-to-face community. Its Networks (its name for its communities) can be huge and are normally global. If you’re into zombies you can collaborate with other zombie-lovers globally and make a movie together.

If you’re into reinventing government both federally and locally, join the 24k plus members who belong to Govloop. You can create more specialized communities within the Meta-Network (say, of Federal Recruiters), and they can meet locally (although that’s not a frequent thing). Ning has a selection of tools that enable interaction and co-creation: blogs, discussion boards, groups, status updates etc.

Both Ning and Meetup are in the community business. They have software platforms that recognize the need for a strong community to define its purpose, recruit people who buy into that purpose, enable rich interactions between members and encourage co-creation and participation.

Now Twitter. Is Twitter a community-building platform? I would say not. Yes, people can have tweet-ups and spontaneously show up for an event. You can have lists that are predicated on common interests. But in essence it’s a broadcast medium to followers that you normally don’t know, and never will. They’re an audience, or sometimes a fanbase.

Twitter is really the status-update feature of Facebook without the network of pre-existing relationships. It’s being used by some people as a sort of proto-community of similar values and interests that enables peer-reviewed and distributed information. I’ll read x article because y person who I respect and follow recommends it. It’s sort of a select crowd-curated information source if used this way (versus broadcasting your teeth-flossing schedule). But basically it’s a stripped-down broadcast medium, with some direct messaging functionality.

Summary

So, if you’re not building your own custom-designed site for community creation, Meetup and Ning are really the only platforms out there that have robust functionality to enable communities of shared interest. Then you have to decide if you’re creating a local or global community.

If you’re custom-designing and want access to the crowd, you can go where the crowd is, or fish where the fish are and create an outpost on Facebook. But it really should be recognized for its limited community functionality. It’s often used as a feeder into the main community site. Twitter is a great communication device to broadcast to your community and beyond, and a great intelligence-gleaning device if you’re monitoring what people think of your fan-object or community-leading skills, or you want recommendations on what to read, see and attend from people you respect.

This is the first of two parts of a conversation I had with Gina Bianchini. Gina is CEO and Co-Founder (with Mark Andreessen) of Ning.

Ning is a social platform that enables people to form communities of interests and passions. Well, you’ll see what it is and why Gina thinks it’s different from other platforms in this conversation…

This part covers why Ning was founded, what makes it different from other social platforms and what defines a successful Network.

The next (to be posted in a few days) will cover the evolution of Ning, it’s next significant development, what social platforms will be around in five years time and what Network Creators need to do to ensure success.

Douglas: Gina, why did you start Ning?

Gina: We started Ning with a simple premise: what if we gave everyone the opportunity to create their own unique social experiences online?

We saw early on that the native behavior on the web – or what people wanted to do on the web differently from any other medium before it – was connect people with other people. Looking at eBay, Craigslist, chat and discussion boards, it was clear to us that people wanted to connect and engage online in a fundamentally social way that the Internet and no other media type enabled.

With this as our foundation, we sought to create a social platform for people to create rich, immersive social experiences for the things they cared about the most.

Ning vs. other Social Platforms

Douglas: So what distinguishes Ning from other social networking sites?

Gina: We are focused on enabling unique social experiences for people’s interests and passions.

The fascinating thing about how social technology platforms are evolving today is that each social platform focuses in on a specific area of the human experience. It’s a bit like the five families actually. You have Facebook for connecting you to people you already know; Twitter for news and real-time events; Linked In for your professional identity and Ning is designed for meeting new people around your interests and passions.

For example, the IAVA (The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America) has created a private social network on Ning for returning veterans to be able to find and talk to other returning veterans in a safe place and share their experiences.

Or TuDiabetes (http://tudiabetes.com), which has over 10,000 members touched by diabetes who are there to dive deep and build strong relationships online with others affected via videos, blogs and discussions around topics critical to living with diabetes.

From the politically important to the emotionally critical, Ning is the broadest platform for unique social experiences on the Internet today.

Douglas: So do you think online relationships based around a passion or a need are inherently stronger than, say, those that are on Facebook?

Gina: I don’t know if they’re stronger, they are just different. There will always be a place for you to have a relationship with the people with whom you grew up or went to college. That is one of the things that makes Facebook special.

I think relationships built around interests and passions are typically about meeting new people who have a shared love or identity to you. Where you can’t control where you are born or who you went to school with, what you care about – your favorite music, your critical causes, the reason you get out of bed in the morning – is what makes you uniquely you.

Connecting people around the things they care about requires a different approach than Facebook or Twitter, which are really set up for a different purpose. Interests and passions require context for that particular topic and the ability to go deeper with a smaller set of people filtered for the truly engaged.

Douglas: I agree.  I was talking about this to Linda Stone. We discussed what needs were being satisfied by which social networks.  Twitter versus Facebook versus Ning versus Meetup and so on. The only two that lean into the passion/interest/ cause/needs area effectively are Ning and Meetup.  Except there’s a fundamental difference between the two. Ning is enabling people to cluster around these things online…not necessarily anchored by geography. Meetup is at the intersection of passions and local.

Gina: Yeah.  I think they’re very complementary actually.

Douglas: I do too.
So here’s another big question.  What is community exactly?

What is Community?

Gina: A community has historically been defined as a group of people organized around common values and social cohesion within a shared geographical location.

With the Internet, you don’t need the geographical location, so the opportunity for community has increased exponentially with the types of communities expanding in ways that have no analog in the real world. From offbeat brides to steampunk aficionados, entirely new communities can emerge in minutes around interests that may only exist or be possible in an online world.

Ingredients of a successful Network

Douglas: What constitutes a successful Ning Network?  What are the ingredients?

Gina: Our successful Ning Networks share one thing in common and that’s “The Hook.” Regardless of topic, category, or member base, when a Ning Network has a Hook you know immediately what the social network is about, who it targets, why you should be there, and whether you belong in this contextual world.

How is the Hook communicated? The Hook is communicated via the name of the social network, the brand, the visual design, the features, and the layout. From these small sets of levers, we’ve seen tremendous diversity in the rich, immersive social experiences on Ning.

For example, when you show up at the Offbeat Bride Tribe, it’s got a Goth boot – like a Doc Marten boot – under a wedding dress.  In a split second, you know this Ning Network is about brides who want a wedding that doesn’t conform to the traditional.

Or Lost Zombies, which is a Ning Network creating a crowd-sourced documentary of people who are contributing themselves as the majority of the zombie army.  You immediately know when you’re on it that it’s about zombies: the look and feel, the photos, the videos and overall design tells you immediately what it is about.

These different Ning Networks are really clear about why they exist and why you should join them. They make their case immediately when you first land on the homepage and it goes from there.

Difference

Douglas: One of the things I wrote about in the Culting book is the ‘Four D’s of Difference’. It’s about how effective communities must communicate their difference to potential recruits. Everyone is trying to find their tribe.  We have a profound human need to be amongst ‘like-others’.  The successful cult-like communities…the ones that generate enormous stickiness…are the ones that telegraph their difference to those that are the most likely ‘match’. They say: “you’re different and we’re different in the same way… so come on in.”

Gina: Exactly.

Douglas: And they can do this in a number of ways.  But they absolutely must declare their purpose very clearly.  It could be in a Manifesto. By the way the membership behaves, maybe how they dress, the design of the site, the church, the meeting place, how they talk to each other.

And what’s equally important is to communicate not just to those who could belong but also to those who shouldn’t.  It needs to say, “Hey, you’re not like us. That’s cool but you probably don’t belong here so find the place where you do and you’ll be more comfortable”.

In other words you need to be very clear about who you’re appealing to and who you are not. And be very clear about what you get, and what you don’t if you join.

Gina: Absolutely. And I think that that’s going to get more and more obvious as we move forward.

Douglas: Why?

Gina: Because people are becoming more sophisticated in how they use social technologies and, especially, how and where they define what they stand for and who they want to stand with online.

If people want to be one of many in a rigid, uniform social network, they have that option with where social networks have been, not where they are going.

As the number of options for social experiences continues to grow exponentially, social experiences must both be unique and interesting, but they also must telegraph who belongs and who doesn’t. And they need to do it quickly and effectively on the first impression or they may not get another chance.

We see this playing out everyday across hundreds of thousands of active Ning Networks and it’s absolutely critical in separating out the successful from those that merely exist.

Caterina Fake is co-founder of Flickr and Hunch.

This is the second part of an conversation we had about the nature of community.

Douglas: What do you think are the key ingredients of a high-functioning community?

Caterina: Well, obviously I think that there needs to be a reason for people to get together, and that can be an affiliation or an interest or proximity or some kind of common goal or need.

And I think that there needs to be people that care deeply about the purpose of this community. You see many examples of this not being the case online. Like corporations, for example, will say, “Oh, we are Cottonelle toilet paper.  We wanna form an online community around our toilet paper.”

And it’s a bit ridiculous.  There’s that famous case of L’eggs pantyhose wanting to create an online community.  This was back in the late ‘90s.

Frankly, you can’t imagine the conversation could sustain itself for very long.

They expected a bunch of housewives discussing the merits of different kinds of pantyhose. Well, they did get a passionate community, just not the one they were expecting. It was the cross-dressing and fetish community that latched onto L’eggs.

Douglas: Ha! I love that example, because what they did get is valuable…people using the community as a form of self-definition, It just wasn’t the one L’eggs was looking for. I would have been hilarious to see the brand managers’ face. It’s what happens on the self-organizing Internet I guess.

Caterina: Yes, exactly.

I think that community is – well, you know, my area of interest and study has been online communities.

But, I think that we’ve taken a lot of our cues from offline communities. I do think that there are certain kinds of fundamental principles of human sociality that do not vary between online and offline.

Douglas: So, what are those commonalities between online and offline?

Caterina: I think that every community needs rules of behavior. They may vary depending on the type of community. So, if you have a bunch of monster truck aficionados and their interests lie around monster trucks awesomeness, crushing their opponents, beer drinking and swearing, you have a very different set of worries and rules from say, The Ladies Christian Knitting Society.

But there do need to be rules that enable sociality to function.

This is the kind of thing that’s not allowed or discouraged or, you know, not welcome here, and this is the kind of thing that brings us together.

Community failure

Douglas: What are the characteristics of communities that fail?

Caterina: Well, I think that the main reason that communities fail is through lack of interest, like the pantyhose community.

Or lack of oversight by somebody.

That doesn’t necessarily need to be the software developer themselves, because there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of groups that are being formed on various pieces of social software.

But there needs to be somebody who cares sufficiently well and sufficiently enough to make sure that the trolls and the spammers stay away from the community.

I think that most communities fail due to lack of oversight and lack of care and maintenance and feeding.

Leader as guardian, nurturer and welcomer.

Douglas: That’s interesting.  So, are you saying that every sort of community needs a leader, and part of their role is to be a guardian or parent or nurturer?

Caterina: Yeah. They could also be the role of party host, where they introduce people that don’t know each other to each other and, you know, take the raincoats and offer them drinks and give them food. And they have to simultaneously, especially if this an online example, kick out the haters and make sure that everyone’s having a productive conversation.

Good and bad members

Douglas: I’ve found it interesting that after a while, new community leaders can’t love all their members equally. Whether it’s online or offline, they come to realize that there are good members and that there are bad members and that part of their role is to not only encourage the good members, but they really have to deal with the bad ones.

It’s a really an important responsibility to cull: basically get rid of the flakes and socially toxic members.

Caterina: They can actually destroy a community. For example, I belonged to a flourishing book club, and everybody was very engaged and enjoyed the group.  It was a great book group.

And at one point, somebody had invited a friend of theirs to join, and this person became this sort of obnoxious know-it-all. He started jumping in when other people were talking and correcting them and basically just being very offensive.

And within two meetings, the book club, which had flourished for two years previously, within two meetings of the introduction of this guy, who nobody stepped forward to get rid of – completely disbanded.

It was tragic because nobody had the cojones to say, “Thank you.  Please don’t come again.”

Douglas: Communities can be fragile things, and if people are breaking the rules, new community leaders have to learn very quickly that you have to be tough to be kind and get rid of those people.

Caterina: Yeah, yeah.

The future of community

Douglas: If you were to imagine the world in five years, what would community platforms look like, and how are they likely to be used?

Caterina: You know, I do think that the world kind of goes between promiscuous connection and expansion and then a kind of social contraction.

And I think that over the past several years, and even the past 10, 15 years, we have been socially expansive. Now there’s a general trend towards realizing that all of this promiscuous friending did not actually increase our sense of connection to other people and that we should actually spend more time concentrating on the small number of people with whom they have actual relationships.

Douglas: Is this something you kind of get a feeling about, or have you seen some data about this?

Caterina: One of my friends is a researcher on this topic, Linda Stone and her research has shown that now people are having fewer more meaningful connections.

Douglas: Interesting.  Is that within online community, or also offline?

Caterina: I do think that these things are pretty standard over time.  You have the Dunbar number, which is 150 people I think, that you can really only know reasonably well. You have your basic family unit, like 8 to 12 people that you keep in touch with on a constant basis in the course of, you know, a month. And these have seemed to be pretty standard in all kinds of human interactions over a period of time

Is community making a comeback?

Douglas: Part of the thesis of The Glue Project is that we’ve gone through several decades of the decline of community, whether it’s unions, social associations or whatever else. And it’s happened for all kinds of reasons, like sprawl, commuting, relocating, the culture of fear of strangers, whatever.

Caterina: Like the Robert Putnam Bowling Alone kind of thing.

Douglas: Yes, exactly. The thesis is that we are rediscovering the power of community. In a way, sites like Flickr and hunch and Facebook are introducing people back to both the fun and essentialness of association.

Is this something that you think is true from your own experience?

Big influence

Caterina: I do.

One of the driving forces of my life is that I was a miserable and lonely teenager growing up in Reagan-era suburbia and felt very isolated from likeminded people and friends and places that people could group.

And, you know, we would kind of get into our car and we would drive to our grocery store and have anonymous interactions with checkout cashiers and never actually speak to another human being for weeks at a time.

I found this to be just a horribly alienating experience. And I loved it when I went away when I was a teenager to a boarding school in Connecticut where everybody was living on campus in the same tiny little dorm rooms.  We were like rabbits piled on top of each other, and it was just this great Petri dish of human interaction. It was a thing that I had craved as a lonely preteen, you know, like preteen eccentric in a very homogenized community.

Douglas: And you said that was a big influence on what happened later?

Caterina: Yes. It was one of the driving forces of my life. I wanted to find context in which meaningful connections could take place.

Douglas: Suburbia is increasingly being criticized as a place that, although created with the best intentions, has actually driven community out. There’s no center, no locus, no equivalent of the forum, which enables accidental and purposeful interactions.

Caterina: Yeah, I remember some friends of mine were visiting from England, and they were in Santa Clara in California for a conference, which is like a big sprawly kind of town in Silicon Valley.  And it was nighttime, and my friend, Fiona, said, “Okay, we’re gonna go to the center and go out and have a drink and walk around and see people,” And then, she drove around for a good two hours.  She said, “There’s no center. Where do I go?”

Douglas: It is truly baffling to Europeans, actually.  That’s why they gravitate to New York and San Francisco and Boston, because they’re recognizable as communities.

Caterina: Yeah, exactly, exactly.  You know, I think that one of the things that’s happened is that, things like the suburban mega-churches become the center of community, and the schools become the center of community.

I mean, you know, the human will to form community is unquenchable. And so, even in suburbia people are very social. It’s just that it’s not nearly as easy to encounter people on the street as you would in a large city where you know your grocer and you are given the opportunity to kind of run into and see other people on an almost constant basis.

Enabling interaction=stickiness

Douglas: Here’s a more personal question. What’s the most useful or satisfying community you’ve ever belonged to, and why?

Caterina: Oh, that’s a really good question. I do think that some of the most, wonderful and gratifying communities were, as I mentioned earlier, boarding school and college. And I think that the reason that those were such gratifying and wonderful experiences was that there were so many people together.  We all had the common interest that we were all getting an education together.  We were, you know, young, open to new ideas.  We were present.

We were in the kind of the phase of maximal sociality that you go through in your life, which is when, between the ages of, I don’t know, I guess about 12 or 13 through the age of, like your 30s when you’re in your peak social phase of your life.

That period of time was truly a wonderful time. You had everybody living in close proximity to each other and all kinds of different people from different parts of the country and different parts of the world I was meeting for the first time.  All of those things, I think, conspired to make it a very gratifying kind of community experience.

In my conversation with Linda Stone, she brought up an interesting exchange she had had with a younger woman. It was about how two generations derived a sense of protection from two different sources. Linda paraphrased the young woman’s view this way:

“Protection to my baby boomer parents and protection to me are completely different things. For my parents they feel protected when they have paid off their house. They feel protected when they have money in their 401k. For me, I feel protected when I have a rich social network. I just left a high paying job and I’ve taken a month and a half to be with my parents and I know that even in this economic downturn I’m going to be ok, because I have this rich authentic network of online and offline connections. People are willing to help me, I’m willing to help them.”

Community is there to catch you if you fall.

There are some interesting implications here:

1. The daughter’s view about community is older and more in tune with the human condition than her parents’.

Community as a source of protection goes back to our species’ dependence on it to survive attacks from predators. Even nowadays, the ancient wiring still works. You are more likely to be protected from the dire effects of an acute medical condition (like a heart attack) if you have a supportive social network. You heal faster and avoid death to a significantly greater degree than if you you’re not part of a community with strong social ties. And the recent science of Happiness is showing that there is a strong relationship between community, happiness and longevity.

2. Successful communities provide protection when their members are under threat.

The cults and cult-like communities I researched tended to marshal significant resources to support their own when needed.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (The Mormons) has a veritable care-machine that fires up when you’re ill or lose your job. Peg Fugal, a convert I spoke to in Utah, describes how it works:

“If you’re not in Church on Sunday, your home teacher is going to notice, your     visiting teacher is going to notice, the bishop is going to notice, and somebody’s going to call you, and somebody’s going to visit with you.

And if they discover you’re sick, they’re going to bring meals in. And if they discover your marriage is in trouble, they’re going to find you a counselor. And if they discover you’re out of a job, they’re going to refer the church employment specialist to you, and get you a job. And if they discover you’re out of groceries, they’re going to write you a welfare slip to go to the Bishop’s storehouse to get groceries…There isn’t a Mormon on the planet on [Government] welfare.”

Christianity may never have made it out of minor-cult status if it hadn’t been for how the community dealt with two devastating plagues that struck the Roman world in 165 AD and 251 AD. Unlike the rest of the population who’s habit in the face of plague was to literally run for the hills and leave the infected behind, the early Christians stayed in the cities and applied their ideology of care.

According to Rodney Stark in his book The Rise of Christianity, modern experts estimate that conscientious nursing care could have cut mortality rates two thirds or more: “love and charity had…been translated into the norms of social service and community solidarity. When disaster struck, Christians were better able to cope and this resulted in substantially higher rates of survival.” Before the first plague, Stark estimates the Christian population to have been circa 0.4% of the total. Post-plague it had bounced to one Christian to four pagans.

Incidentally, this had a very interesting multiplier effect. Higher rates of survival increased the ratio of believers to non-believers. This in turn increased the number of interactions between Christians and non-Christians. Increased rates of contact between the two are highly likely to have increased the rates of conversion (see the ‘rubbing together’ posts on this blog for the power of frequent social interaction in creating social glue).

This, plus other factors, contributed significantly to the religion’s penetration of the Roman culture to the point that, sociologists estimate, it represented 50% of the population by 300 AD. Its status as State Religion conferred by Constantine The Great was more likely a result of political wisdom than a vision from God, as Christian mythology claims

3. Boomers’ reliance on personal resources (money) as a source of protection is yet another symptom of the me-generation’s posture of self-reliance vs. group-support.

We’ve (I’m one too) dominated the culture’s attitude to community for several decades. It’s not exactly one of contempt, but it’s been a ‘nice if you can get it…but it’s not that important at the end of the day, because I’m the source of my own happiness.”

I, and many of my friends reflect a general trend amongst our generation to now seek a greater sense of place and connection. We have a profound sense of dissatisfaction with what our furious pursuit of careers and personal satisfaction has delivered, and are now expressing more desire to be involved in neighborhoods, spend more time with our family, put down roots, and stop moving so fast.

4.   The daughter’s use of technology as a builder of protective social networks has interesting implications for her and subsequent generations’ product demands. What could Facebook, Meetup and LinkedIn develop to really lean into these generations’ needs for social network support functionality?

Community is higher than food and shelter on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. But clearly it’s a fundamental need, and one that’s primal in its relationship to protection and survival.

For Linda Stone’s full interesting analysis on Boomer’s and Millenial’s differences in attitudes to community, check out her post on her new site.

Caterina Fake is co-founder of Flickr and Hunch. The latter is a decision-making tool that uses the collective intelligence of its members. It launched in June this year.

I first met Caterina at her beautiful house in San Francisco where she had invited Scott Heiferman (CEO and Co-Founder of Meetup) and myself for tea. I have a lot to thank her for because she was indirectly responsible for my ending up at Meetup. She had read my book about cults and recommended it to Scott. And that ultimately led to an excellent chat over tea and a game of Wii tennis on the way to my first Meetup Board meeting.

This is the first of two parts of the conversation I had with Caterina this month.

Is Hunch about community?

Douglas: How would you say community works on Hunch?

Caterina: So, Hunch is an interesting thing, because I would say that Hunch is not a true community website or product, but it’s a collective knowledge system, and what people are doing on Hunch is creating decision trees.

And it operates in a similar way to Wikipedia, where people will contribute about a topic that they know something about.  So, for example, if I’ve spent some time doing research on which hotels to stay in Los Angeles, I can contribute to that topic.  And so Hunch is a different kind of social software.

People are not necessarily going there to interact with one another or to make connections or talk with one another. It’s more of a place where people can share their knowledge with one another.  It’s a kind of a culture of generosity and a way of showing your expertise on a certain topic.

Douglas: So it’s a crowd, not a community.

Caterina: Yes, that’s true. I would say that’s accurate, yes.

Role of Creator.

Douglas: How involved in the community should the creators of social platforms be? Like any community creator, should they be in there interacting and nurturing it, or just let whatever emerges, emerge?

Caterina: I think one of the things that’s very important when you’re building an online community is for the creators of the community, the company in this case, to be very present and interact directly with the people that are contributing to the system.

On Hunch we have a very strong presence. We’re all interacting directly with, and commenting on, responding to and basically helping coach, encourage and reward and cultivate the community that exists there.

Douglas: And is that something that you think is more important when the community starts and you can pull back later, or it’s something that’s continuously required?

Caterina: It’s very important at the beginning, because you’re establishing what the rules and expectations and parameters of this particular community are.

If you’re a monster truck community and swearing and trash-talking is part of the game, then you establish that at the outset.

Douglas: Right.  So that’s important for the platform builders, like when you start a Hunch or a Flickr. But it’s also important for people who create their own communities on those platforms isn’t it?

Every community needs to establish norms of behavior and rules of the road.

Caterina: Yes, and I find that if you model that behavior early on in the process that it carries through.

I call the founder of an online community the “Abraham.” You know, Abraham begat so-and-so, who begat so-and-so, who begat so-and-so The Abrahams of the community are generally the founders of the company or the person who first creates the social software and whatever their wishes and nature tend to follow through organization-wide.

Douglas: That’s something that’s a lot of community leaders that I’ve interviewed also say, whether they’re Meetup Organizers or Ning Network Creators. Inevitably the character of the community is a reflection of the character of the leader. And that’s OK.

Hunch’s potential for community

Douglas: One of interesting things about Hunch is that you’re aggregating huge amounts of rich data about what people have in common.

The dictionary definition of a community is a group of people who hold things in common, whether it’s monster trucks or beliefs in a particular god.

You’re collecting commonalities. So the overt purpose for Hunch is to enable decision-making, but you’re also sitting on a huge amount of data that would be an incredible platform for people to start creating communities on the basis of commonalities.

Caterina: I agree, and I do think that there is untapped social potential that we’ve got in Hunch that will reveal itself over time.  We’re in the very first phase.  We only launched three or four months ago, and so we are just on the verge of being able to see likeminded people emerge, people who share your aesthetic, or politics, or your interest in bird watching etcetera.

And so, there’s an emergent community that’s latent and unexpressed. But there’s definitely that kind of potential in the future.

Douglas: And is that something you want to do?  If you look two years ahead, will Hunch be enabling those kinds of connections so that people can form communities?

Caterina: That is TBD.  It’s not clear that people need to connect with each other directly. For example, say you’re somewhere in a small town in Michigan and you wanted to know where someone like you would have dinner. You don’t necessarily need to know the person who is making the recommendation.  You just need to know that you have tastes in common and therefore they would make a good recommendation for you.

Douglas: So you’re going to wait and see whether that’s a direction Hunch will take?

Caterina: Whether or not there’s an opportunity for sociality, that remains to be seen.  That said, there’s certainly things that Hunch could potentially catalyze. For the special snowflakes of the world to find one another!

Strategic Direction

Douglas: Do you think if you started to enable people to start forming groups, would that be a strategic distraction from the main purpose of Hunch, which is to enable decision-making?

Caterina: Yeah, when you’re building software, you have to constantly return to what are your founding principles, and whether we are we giving people the thing that we think that they most want.

That certainly can change.  You can discover things in the course of building software that you had not thought people wanted, but it turns out that they do.

Douglas: As a user experience of one, I found Hunch enormous fun. It’s not only that the questions are fun but it seems to be getting to know me in quite a profound way. I found myself thinking “I never really knew that about myself.  It’s forcing me to think about who I am and what I believe and what I like.”

I don’t know of any other platform that does it quite the same way, that’s capturing so much – that knows me so well and clearly knows other people as well, and identifies similarities.

It’s like a dating site that’s done well, richly profiling people like you on the basis of personality traits and interests. I want to get to know those other people! Especially when I can find them when I hit a tab called ‘Community’!

Caterina: Yeah.  I mean, I do think that we are still just scratching the surface of the possibilities that we’ve got for this particular kind of software.  And we may very well find that its use-case par excellence is in connecting other people to each other.

Douglas: Right.

Caterina: So, this is all – it’s all very early stage, and that’s why I enjoy being an entrepreneur, because you have no idea what’s down the road, and that’s what makes every day exciting.