Event Review - Web Content Mavens on NOT Creating Communities
November 25, 2008 :: Joe LoongLast week, I went to the monthly meetup of the DC-based Web Content Mavens. It’s a good group, centered around people who work on all aspects of Web content. Members include people who deal with the nuts and bolts of Content Management Systems (applications for managing and publishing stuff to the Web — popular CMSes include SharePoint, DotNetNuke, and Drupal, and in fact, even your typical blog platform can be seen as a specific subset of CMS), to designers, editorial programmers, policymakers, community managers, and other assorted hangers-on.
Though they often have some technically-oriented CMS sessions, Web Content Mavens also cover a wide range of social media topics. Last week’s session was a blend of both, entitled, “Why Every Organization Should NOT Focus on Creating Communities.” (Full disclosure: I got to the meeting a little late. Oh, and none of my photos came out very well.)
Now, to someone who’s constantly looking for ways that organizations can (and should) incorporate community to support their goals, this title is practically a dare - it’s like waving red flag in front of a bull. (Though only the most “community Kool-Aid”-soaked social media evangelist would say that community is always the answer.)
As it turns out, the title was something of a misnomer — the primary issue of the evening, as presented by Kevin Novak of the American Institute of Architects, was whether organizations should build try to build their own social media platforms, or instead, engage them where they are on existing social networks.
In other words, the “community” for any organization is out there (and not something that needs to be “created”) — instead, it’s deciding on what tools you should use to bring them in. And the answer, of course, is “it depends”: on where your audience is, and what you want to be able to do.
Kevin’s first example was the AIA, which tried to roll its own community for architects, associated with its existing Web site. After a bunch of money spent, some shifting of requirements, and a general lack of success getting participation from their desired audience, they shifted to a quick, low-cost implementation of a group on LinkedIn, that’s gotten a pretty good response thus far.
By going with an existing third-party community, there are, naturally, some trade-offs: You probably won’t get all the functionality you wanted, and you do give up a measure of integration and control. However, you do get the benefit of using an existing platform, and you’re glomming onto their existing behavior — in the case of LinkedIn, networking and professional affiliation. So, for a professional organization, it’s a case of making your organization relevant to what your members are already doing, instead of trying to get them to join another social network and do something new.
Kevin’s second example was with the Library of Congress’s pilot test on Flickr, which was a way to expose the Library’s extensive collection of public domain photos to an interested audience, for low effort and comparatively low cost ($30 for a Pro account vs. oh, $7 million for building their own system). By all accounts, it’s worked pretty well.
Despite my quibbles with the name of the session, it’d be hard not to agree with the presentation. By engaging with your audience on an existing third-party social network, your barriers to entry and participation are lower; you can leverage their existing user base and behaviors; and you can focus on doing whatever it is your organization does (instead of trying to have to cook up and maintain your own social network).
Still, it might not work for everyone — there may be groups that have to build their own community play — it all depends on where your audience is, and what you want them to do. But even in those cases, you should still find out ways you can reach across to people on other social networks (via APIs, feeds, widgets — whatever), to get the best of both worlds.
Anyway, it was a good event — I’ll be talking more about the DC tech and social media community, and suggestions for ways you can use networking and social media opportunities in your own neck of the woods.
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