Build what you need, not what you want

I met a writer the other night who has spent months freelancing for a prominent national magazine.  The magazine had enjoyed a reasonably popular web audience, including a community of frequent posters to its bulletin board.  The community was mostly middle-aged, middle-American women who used the magazine’s online space to chat and bring up issues that were loosely related to the magazine’s content.

It was an open question how best to take advantage of this community to benefit the magazine.  But instead of starting with obvious questions — Who are these users? What do they care about?  How can we increase their enthusiasm for our brand? — someone high up in the magazine’s interactive food chain had a classic technological panic. The panic took this form, probably late at night:

What about social networks?  What about Facebook?  What about Twitter?  What about blogging?  Everyone’s doing it but us!  We need to catch up.

So the magazine built a social network.  It probably hired an agency that affirmed the magazine’s fears of obsolescence and charged them an outsized fee to build every last microblog and Twitter integration, user profile, friend-manager, minifeed, video uploader, and widget that they could imagine in their darkest nightmares of media isolation.

The magazine launched their Spanking New Social Presence and, to their shock, lost all of the users who had made their old bulletin board such a lively place.

That’s how this writer I met, a young, urban, male Brooklynite, got his job: every day he logs in as five different women and maintains their ghost user profiles.  He simulates social activity on a social network that was conceived in panic, cost the magazine a good deal of increasingly scarce resources, alienated the community it was supposed to engage.

Instead of starting with open questions, this online initiative started in a panic.  And now they have a structure that requires them to lie through their teeth just to present a semblance of activity.

Don’t let this be you!  Start with the right questions about your situation, and be open to the answers that you’ll find.  For some organizations, blogging, Twitter, and a Facebook presence are just what the doctor ordered.  Those who are  lucky enough to have an existing online user base need to start with their users.  Users are the lifeblood of a participatory web.

And remember this: the structure you build brings with it a certain infrastructure, and that infrastructure must be maintained.  If you create employee blogs, you better make sure that your employees have something to say, and are trained to publish on a regular basis.  If you push your staff to sign up for Twitter, you need to make sure that they’re actively writing — and, I hope it doesn’t need to be said, that they want to write.  And if you let users create profiles and write blog entries, you need staff to review those profiles and posts on a regular basis.

An empty social network is just like bad standup comedy: nobody wants to be in the same room.  Make sure that your room, regardless of its size, makes your audience want to come back.