What the ‘buzzword brigade’ talks about when they talk about ‘community’:
What communities actually look like (sometimes):
or
or any other number of combinations.
I hear it all of the time. Hours and hours of thought put into creating some sort of fictional ‘community profiles’ and/or snapshots of ‘who they are and what they like’. I take a look at these assessments and try not to whince openly…especially when it: a. doesn’t represent a single person using their service and/or b. the research is based on an individuals assumptions about a certain group of people they know nothing about.
Think about it. If you use Flickr, do you think that you have alot in common with all other Flickr users? Or is the only assumption you can make is that you all get some sort of benefit out of using Flickr…which is different from person to person (and I’m not counting those who have joined but really found no benefit out of using Flickr). Obviously everyone’s views on Twitter differ, even those using Twitter. MySpace? My son still thinks it’s cool to check his email there, but others observe it heading in a too heavily commercialized direction. I’m a member, but I have never really seen the point. I prefer Facebook, which I use for very different reasons than my friends do.
I always found it odd to hear certain special interest communities being described as one big blob of sameness. “Feminists are all anti-porn” or “Catholics are all against abortion”. When we use sweeping statements to describe an ethnic group, we call that racism. When we make generalizations about a gender, we call that sexism.
Community is not a buzzword to describe a monolithic mass of marketing data. Communities are made up of people with endless motivations, hopes, dreams and goals and all have unique personalities. Darnit, even wider customer ‘communities’ that subscribe to a blog, use an application or otherwise interact with a product or a service take on different personalities. Sure, there are some archetypes that emerge from the way we interact and there are some similarities and crossovers between various customer communities.
But we should never make assumptions about how people will ‘behave’ or react or what they want. The best hope you have is to be part of your own community, because then you may be able to anticipate what may be positively received, but don’t be surprised when a portion of your customers hate the change.
It is my personal goal to completely and utterly confuse my readers this year. I want to make no sense, take away all sense of knowledge and challenge anything you may hold sacred or true. I’m going to stand in front of audiences of people paying perfectly good money to hear me tell them the answers to everything and deliver the EXACT OPPOSITE. And some will hate it, others may even like it.
2007 is a year of chaos for me. Community is about chaos. I know we are predisposed to want to find answers for our questions and classifications for our chaos, but everytime we move in that direction, I see us make bigger mistakes and alienate more and more people.
The other night, we were talking about trends. It seems that every time a term or trend is recognized by a the popular media, that term or trend is on its decline.
Times shift. Things change. Our invididual interests change. The environment around us influences us differently. We have different experiences, different emotional makeups, different aesthetic preferences…
So, why would we think that we could neatly wrap up people into a monolithic idea of their motivations?
Oh yes…that’s right….now I remember: certainty.
The sooner we can learn to let go of that, the better.
It seems like your reading my mind. I just open my RSS reader and an incredibly relevant post pops up.
About 8 months ago, I proposed the idea of starting a developer community for my company’s CMS. We built this big over complicated site with 4 different blogs, 4 different news streams, a filesharing system and finally a poor-excuse for a forum.
After 2 months, there were no comments on the blogs, almost no files shared and 2,000 posts in the forum. Rather than put work into the forum, my boss asked me to boost interest in the other parts of the site.
A few months later, the forums are still crazy and nothing else gets any traffic. So, my boss makes the logical marketing decision, ignore the forums and work on those blogs more.
Now the only posts on the forum are complaints, the site traffic is way down and my boss just met with me to tell me the community idea was awful. A perfect example of how try to force a community into a mold ended up killing it.
Glad you can relate. So sorry to hear about your boss. Man, I’ve been there before. Talk about cramming the wrong solution into the right idea and wrecking everything.
Tara, you are absolutely right about how you visualize and think about community. It is not a homogeneous collective of individuals that share a demographic/psychographic slice of a market pie. It’s amazing how many people don’t understand that these are complex ecosystems.
However, I would caution on bewildering people too much with the message “community is about chaos”. It is provocative and partly true, but not terribly helpful to understanding.
I would say that community EMERGES FROM chaos, but that it is actually a kind of order. Some describe it as “order for free”. The best ideas that connect to this sense of community are those from the science of complexity, emergence and self-organization. Complexity is the state that lies on the edge between chaos and order.
I read At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity which provides a great introduction to the science of emergence and complexity that is very helpful to better understand how these laws apply to social systems like communities. It’s not as easy read, but provides a solid scientific grounding for this idea.
Good luck smashing the old paradigm in 2007!
Nice OpenID implementation by the way. Fixed my profile.
Tara
I am about to try and drag …uh…coax my organization down this trail. I a big organization like mine it is easy to fall into the “grouping” trap. I want to try and keep this post in mind whenever they start talking about cohorts and target audience. Thanks.
Couple thoughts:
Community is as community does
You can lead a person to a website but you can’t make them do anything
You can make an online community, but it probably won’t be used by the community you expected in the ways you expected … if it becomes one at all.
While I mostly agree with what you’re saying, and while I agree that marketing folks tend to try to group and categorize to make things easier to put into an Excel spreadsheet, there’s one main thing I’ll push back on.
Generally, communities aren’t based in total chaos. They’re based on some type of shared similarity or connection. This means that there’s more often than not methods of grouping certain things. Sure, not everyone is going to fall into two main marketing demographics. But generally, you can find similar characteristics that bind the communities together.
The binding attributes tend to overtake significance beyond other criteria. For instance, users of a knitting community might come from all physical locations, ages, economic status, etc. But the love of the needles (or whatever the appropriate term) tends to bind in a significant, tangible, documentable way.
Out of chaos comes order…in a chaotic way.
Hope I’m making sense.
They say that the maximum number of individuals in a meaningful community is 150 people – i.e. you’d happily join them for a beer if you spotted then in bar as you feel comfortable about them, remember attributes and characteristics of them. Tipping Point say’s companies such as Gore (Gore-Tex) split teams up if they go over the 150 number. Anything bigger is impersonal, a contradiction of community?! or the Niche ear you talk of too.
Interesting thoughts on community. I think that community is not about chaos but shared interests. Society is more about chaos, especially where there are increased amounts of competing ideas of “normalness”.
BTW, an interesting interpretation of my painting: “spiral Universe”
Raysto
Jake, I think you and I have a similar perspective on this; see my comment as “Remarkk” above.
In complex natural systems (including social systems), order emerges out of chaos based on the laws of self-organization. Understanding that process is difficult work…some people seem to have an instinct for it. You need to understand how each individual acts in relation to other individuals.
Through “gardening” of the community petri dish, you can influence the system towards a state that is more or less stable and net energy positive, which benefits all the members of the community.
Finding words to explain chaos, complexity and order in community to a traditional marketing or corporate audience in straight-forward language…that I’m having problems with. This thread is a helpful in thinking about it.
I didn’t say that communities operate in total chaos…I said that there isn’t a singular, monolithic thread that they are all united on…all communities operate differently as well, so we shouldn’t fall back on:
“(communities) are based on some type of shared similarity or connection.”
For instance:
- Mac Community -
Shared similarity = love of mac? Well, there are varying degrees of that. And, there are varying degrees of what that means.
- Feminist Community -
I’ve written about this before, I’m sure, but I can guarantee you that if you line up 5 feminists in one room, they will all disagree on what they believe in. One will believe in equal rights for everyone. One will believe strongly in exhaulting the position of women. One will be a pro-sex feminist. Three will be an anti-porn feminist. One will believe that men are programmed to be aggressive. Two will believe that women need to act more like men. Etc.
- Flickr Community –
Don’t even get me started on how many interests weave throughout this community. And their reasons for using Flickr are all quite different. Some are totally zealots, others find it the best of the tools available, but aren’t jazzed. Some like to watch other’s photos. Others want to show their own and be watched…etc. etc.
I can go on. This is the chaos I’m talking about. Let’s step back and stop trying to classify groups of people.
Oh…and Raysto:
LOVE your stuff. It’s amazing. Is it for sale anywhere?
Communities are diverse and rarely fit nicely into our definitions, no matter how hard we struggle.
What I read in your musings, Tara, is the recognition of different community patterns. Belongingness. Shared passion. Random-turned-meaningful connection. Bounded. Open. Agreement. Shared disagreement (aka your feminist example).
The pattern that really strikes me when you talk about chaos is for me, something different. I’m not quite sure how to talk about it in words, but I feel it. (I work from sensing to explaing slowly).
* community in a networked world is different in that we belong to many more communities than we used to. Managing our multimembership is THE KEY ONLINE COMMUNITY ISSUE for me in 2007. Your implementation of Open ID is a perfect technological example. But there are clearly social/process elements as well.
* internet mediated community forming is different than F2F. Things like swift trust, nodes aggregating into a community from a network with people who would otherwise never encounger each other, the ease of joining and leaving — all make the social acts of community formation, membership, belonging, outsiderness, periphery/core –> much more complex. Sometimes chaotic, but complexity is the flavor for me.
* the line between being in a group/community/network/the world is hard to discern – fuzzy boundaries. How does that impact our relationships within those formations?
So many interesting things. So little time to talk about ‘em! See, it took me weeks to even read the post!
Oh dang, one more thought.
I learned this from Etienne Wenger, the godfather of the concept of communities of practice.
He says (and I paraphrase)- It doesn’t so much matter if a group is a CoP or not. What matters is looking at it with a CoP perspective.
Same goes for communities. Thinking about a COMMUNITY PERSPECTIVE can be more useful than a definition.
I don’t believe we live in a completely postmodern environment where life is more rehashed “chaos” than not. Trends or not, we should observe, draw from, and research what is occurring.
So one area I will “push back on” (as Mark says) is the benefit of predictive research. The effects of technology have a long and storied history of being wrongly interpreted (e.g. De Sola Pool’s exhaustive examination of predictions about the effects of the telephone). However, this should not mean as observers, as researchers, and participants we should simply give up and agree to watch the cards fall as they may.
People are different, but on the average they are certainly similar in many ways. For instance PEW (and my thesis) found that on the whole more females use social networking than males, and are motivated to do so for different reasons. Differences can be baffling when you get too close and put each individual under a microscope. I think there is that inherent desire to get as high a degree of accuracy to describe each individual as possible. But I submit that this is a sisyphisian goal.
Which is a good place to segue into Nancy’s post, where she brings forward the question of “chaos” vs. “complexity.” I realize the initial post was a little tongue-in-cheek (at least I hope so). Even so, I would agree with Nancy that what is seen in social networks is more complexity than chaos. (see Waldrop for rather longwinded definitions in two books titled with these very words) Regardless of your opinion of how aware individuals are, they must be making decisions for certain reasons, even if they are great in number and difficult to observe. The question becomes, how do we properly and objectively observe these interactions? What are we even looking for that will be meaningful distinctions for participants?
There are indeed differences in certain types of CMC compared to F2F. For instance, see Walther’s “hyperpersonal” communication effect – this is related to the “swift trust” Nancy mentions. Moving forward, the key phrase I bring from Walther is that interaction online is “highly situational.” From this I start asking questions such as, who is using the resource? What is the power structure? What are the interactions occurring here? How many cues are presented and of what type?
We should not abandon predictive thought and specificity because of the scope of the task at hand. Online social networking is an extremely new area of research and industry. Unless we start addressing certain questions though synergy with different domains, we will not be capable of moving forward in this young field.
Right.
“Complexity in action is a hundred, no, a thousand, no, a million times greater than complexity in theory.” -Paraphrase of an old Taoist meditation saying (from here)
That’s where the chaos comes in. Interesting story…on the second day I lived in the SF Bay area, I was waiting for a Caltrain to come take me from Redwood City, where I worked, to San Francisco and was rather impatient for the train, which wasn’t on time (in fact, there were problems that made it 45 minutes late).
The only other person on the platform was this old hippie dude, who offered me a beer and started chatting me up all about chaos theory.
I kept protesting, but he kept repeating this to me:
“Man, things rarely turn out the way you expect them to, so I just say, drop the expectations and learn to just be. This way, no matter what happens, stuff is cool.”
It really set the stage for my entrance into SF life and, a month and a half later, when I met Chris and he told me to ‘embrace the chaos’, I revisited this.
I’m not saying to dispense with research and study, but the issue is that, when we do that, too many people take that as undisputable truth. Personally, the less I need answers and a security blanket, the more I learn.
Complexity…yes. That’s a nice way of putting it (and I believe Waldrof kind of interchanges complexity and chaos, but I could be wrong). But chaos isn’t a negative term. It’s a freeing term.
Feel free to stick with human behaviour patterns and theories if you wish, but I’m going to get a little more fluid than that over the next year.
I think it is useful to be clear on labels a bit. What do you mean by human behavior patterns and theories? I’m not sure it is the same thing I was thinking of when I suggested we watch for patterns in the communities we live within. Especially if we can then talk about them and compare what we see.
For example, one pattern I see in a lot of the communities of practice I participate in is this sense that many people feel like outsiders, even as others see them as insiders. When you notice it, you can bring it up and it can trigger REALLY interesting conversations about community and identity and the role it plays in our learning.
Now this is completely different from a flickr based community, but there is something in the nubbins of the pattern that relates. It goes to that moment when someone FIRST comments on one of your pictures. All of a sudden you go from being a user of a utility to a member of a network of connected human beings. Your identity changes. Your degree of sense of belonging or insiderness changes.
That’s a community indicator to me. (Did I mention that you might enjoy tracking the del.icio.us tag community_indicators?)
For me, there is a very rich intersection between the action research we do LIVING in communities and then looking at it with someone exploring it from an academic perspective. Sometimes this gives me more language to describe what I sense or feel, but which I have not yet been able to articulate. It allows me to learn in the way I best learn. Experience. Do. Study what others have said (including academics).
Is that fluid?
Yep. and I’ll bet almost everyone who has commented here is fluid. Patterns and transitions and rites of passage, etc. are all very useful. Heck, I’m a researcher at heart and am still dying to go back and do a post-graduate degree so I can spend more time studying intricacies and uncover some beautiful qualitative research…but the issue is that, quite often, the research that is released gets distorted as truth and answers…usually distributed by the press or bloggers as some sort of golden key to “success”.
I come at it from the perspective of someone who has spent alot of time cringing in conversations when someone suggests that “Because people use MySpace because of blah, blah and blah, we should do blah, blah and blah to become the next MySpace”. So, I suppose I want to avoid that totally and start uncovering different ways to look at things. Instead of “Formulas for Success”, which lead us down a path where measuring sticks aren’t community health (which is a complex measurement), but shear growth, I’d like to just do. Like you, Nancy. I like that. Do. How about: be?
I can’t resist. DOO BE DOO BE DOO!
LOL! That should be our theme song!
I don’t know why this topic is so much fun, but I simply can’t resist!
Tara, I totally get your point about “chaos”, and completely agree. One thing I often find myself telling traditional marketers is “stop reading your research results and get out there and live the research instead”. They regularly got so caught up in wanting to ensure “success” for community involvement (not even necessarily community building) efforts that without the sacred ROI, they wouldn’t act. When I’d show them the results a community can have they’d be amazed beyond words, and suddenly the discussion of ROI falls away.
But in general, here’s one of my community definition pet peeves….
A “community” is something more than JUST a group of people with a single shared interest. Feminism, Flickr Usage, Apple enjoyment – these are not communities inherently. You hear this all the time – “The black community”, the “Dallas community”, whatever. But community, in my opinion, requires something more than simple identification.
How much more is a question of great debate…
does anyone out there in this community know of anyone in canada with lots of experience building online communities willing to chat to a start-up business?…….email me sbenson@rethinkcan.com..cheers my dears
@Jake – awesome assessment. It is also one of my pet peeves that ‘minority’ groups and ‘special interest’ groups are lumped into a single ‘community’.
thanks. It’s all a bit chaotic but, I’m working on selling pebble-faces and dots at the moment.