Gail Williams: I see the words friend and community used to describe database divisions.

Shannon Clark: People in online communities who are bound together will almost inevitably reach out on other levels. The ones that last are the ones where there’s at least one in-person interaction. People you’ve had a meal with, whose house you’ve slept in are the ones you can build that relationship with.

Paul Clegg: Some email mailing lists simply have a friendlier tone, where it’s accepted that you can be off-topic once in a while, without getting slapped down.

Nevio: Five minutes with someone on the phone can be electric and I can feel completely understood. Because we talk about the things that really matter to me.

Susan Kuchinskas (Me): It’s about disclosure. If I tell you something personal and you accept it, I feel closer to you. Whether it’s me posting something dumb on a technical mailing list and others kindly answering my question instead of being snarky or saying something more personal.

Heather: When I do comedy and I do something to make someone shy open up, that opens up the room faster. Intentional sincerity.

Al Chang: Lightweight connection tools like LinkedIn or MySpace are a nice and easy way to maintain contact. MySpace provides a low-cost way to check in with someone, give them a light touch, let them know I was thinking about them.

Gina: I think it needs to be a private space, one where I know that not only will I be accepted and not slapped down, but also where I know that everyone in the world isn’t going to read it.

David: I’ve never had a close relationship with someone I haven’t met in person. It will never happen.

Gail: I have.

Gina: With Post Secret, I feel like I’ve had intimate experiences with people just by looking at what they made.

Paul: The failures in the last few years are the companies that think social networking is an application. LinkedIn is successful because it has a layer of jobs, it uses social networking to achieve a goal.

Heather: We have such a commercialized life, and the web is amplifying the idea that it’s only specific connections that link us together. I’d like to connect across differences.

Paul: People go to these sites for affirmation.

Heather: People can get more affirmation from their personal relationships.

Gail: Yes, but some people may have all the intense personal relationships they need, and they go online for something a little lighter.

Nevio: Some people love the lightweight connections because it’s too heavy to have this friendship workload.

Heather: We’ve forgotten the reason we talked to each other was to know each other.

– Susan Kuchinskas

Technorati tag: web22

Kim is the marketing person for PhotoBucket. Hilton and Prasad are from WDFA Marketing, an ad agency. Kim says, “Marketing, evangelizing is the same whether it’s for your company or you’re on your first date.”

How do we do no-bullshit marketing, both traditional and non-traditional?

Kim: “Our market is young, non tech-savvy, using MySpace. When we understood our market, we changed the product from a widget to a slideshow, and our usage base doubled. Trigger point was messaging, reminding ourselves that our user base is used to a certain kind of language.” That is, they don’t want a bunch of buzzwords.

Marketing is any time you’re talking to a user, from giving out t-shirts on the street to customer service.”

Question: What about the social media folks who say, “If you have to market, you’re doing something wrong.”

There is a shitload of clusterfuckery that happens in web 2.0.

Al Chang: A lot of people make the mistake that you need mass. But it’s hard to do that really well. What VCs are talking about is, when you start out ,you only need some people to like you. You need proof that someone likes you. If you can’t find 5,000 people to show up and use your product, maybe you should rethink your product. I think that’s the expectation.

Prasad: You can make a lot of money off a little group of people, or lots of money by charging less to a lot of people.

Audience comment: I wanted to find out how to embed a video in my blog, and I found a post telling how to do it on YouTube. I think that’s how they got so much attention.

Chang: A lot of the web 2.0 companies success has more to do with anthropology than computer science. YouTube made it really easy to upload videos, and then it has these things to get attention and promote your video.

Kim: The jobs of marketing are getting them to your site, keeping them there and retaining them.

Comment: Good content gets you there, usability and tools will keep you there.

Prasad: It’s needs recognition, filling the need, identifying the people who need it. Then the viral process can begin.

Chang: It’s easier to know people now. You can find the person with the well-read blog and email them. But you do have to spend the time to make it really personal. Still not easy but easier than before.

Q: We get competing advice as a startup. Some people say, get out there right away. The other say, it’s all about the experience.

Chang: Go out with half a product, but not a half-assed product.

Kim: Some companies’ philosophy is, “Every day, we try to suck a little less.”

Comment from SimplyHired: If you have something no one else has, it can be pretty alpha. We had a couple competitors so we wanted to get out there. We did something slightly different by adding social networking component with LinkedIn. You have to understand your audience’s tolerance for crappiness.

Kim: Don’t trust a marketer who won’t be held accountable for the value they’re adding to your company.

Prasad: Eventually all marketing efforts run themselves out, and consumers start responding. One non-traditional campaign for Budweiser, they hired people to stand in upscale bars holding a bottle of beer.

Hilton: The basic stuff is identifying who you’re going to talk to and how you’ll talk to them. Messaging and frequency is important.

Chang: Barat (the movie) did a promotion with MySpace. You had to add Barat to one of your top eight friends. Then, you printed out your list and you could get into the movie. Now your face is sitting next to this thing, declaring it’s your friend. This is not just passive. Every screening got 2,000 or 3,000 people, over 100,00 people added it as a friend. Ideas are cheap, and they keep working for you. If you need millions of people, this won’t work. But if you can get 500,000, that’s pretty good in the web 2.0 world.

–Susan Kuchinskas

Technorati tag: web22

Cahan introduced the idea of the Means Meter. How do you know you’re creating the good? How do you now what social values you’re either enhancing or impeding? How do you translate social values to the monetary economy?

For example, if you offer poor people healthcare, you’re bettering their lives, but also, if a disaster happens, you already have an infrastructure in place. But it’s hard to put a value on that.
What if you had a Means Meter connected to your PDA or cell phone? You could go to Home Depot to buy light bulbs. You aim the meter at the GE display. It says “This was made in a child labor factory in China.” The meter tells you another brand urns more inefficiently than the average light bulb.” You can walk on and use the meter to find the product that best implements your values. It will give you feedback that’s valuable to not only you but the manufacturers, the retailer and governments. We can use web 2.0 to aggregate your personal affinity characteristics.

Audience question: are there metrics for this, so that the problem becomes simply building the software and device?

A: There are vast volumes of disconnected data sets that this could unleash.

Al Chang: It’s about the decommodification of products by adding inefficiencies back in. It starts to become possible to have the child labor free light bulb. Good means different things to different people, and this might be enough to enable smaller companies and niche products that appeal to fewer people.

Jones said, “We could vote with our dollars for the kind of world we want.”

Cahan: “The platform would have to be agnostic, do a good job with web 2.0, because my values are not your values.”

Chang: “It’s about making information and connections dead cheap and holding that community together. Five years ago we weren’t doing conferences for $35 a person.”

Do there need to be reputation systems and ratings? Yes, along with easy icons like red and green dots. Maybe an agent or layer that aggregates your actions and gives you your own score.

Jones: Working on an initiative to help a consortium of Mennonite organic farmers. Their costs are higher, so it’s hard for them to get loans. Bankers don’t understand the social value they provide and don’t take that into account.

Gail Williams of The Well said not everyone would care about the social value, but if you could get some kind of “karma point” that you could redeem, that could make it more appealing to the mainstream. And what about something like tagging, letting a subset of people who care about one little issue put tags on real-life commodities?

Challenges: The amount of noise in the system. Too many data points and different values. Also, it’s a supply chain, so there are a lot of variables in there aside from the product itself.

Jones: Start with some true believers and go from there. For example, hook up the Slow Food people with those farmers.

Cahan: Ways of calculating total cost of ownership could apply here.

–Susan Kuchinskas

Technorati tag: web22

From the blog: ” Social Media Club is being organized for the purpose of sharing best practices, establishing ethics and standards, and promoting media literacy around the emerging area of Social Media. This is the beginning of a global conversation about building an organization and a community where the many diverse groups of people who care about social media can come together to discover, connect, share, and learn.”

Heuer said, “The big challenge is in connecting the structured world with the ad hoc, do it yourself world that’s emerging and find a balance between the two. In different situations, you need one more than the other. We’d like to bring a bit of light structure to the grassroots, ad hoc stuff that’s going on.”

Anyone and everyone is invited to be co-founders and co-creators. “We want to figure it out together.” To become a cofounder costs $250; standard membership is $100. The money will be used to build a central administrative core, said Howard Greenstein, one of the Social Media Club originators. Greenberg formed the first Web Artists Consortium (WAC), which spawned the original digital agencies including Razorfish.

“In order to build this kind of thing, typically you go to Microsoft and ask them to be a platinum sponsor,” Greenberg said. “We believe there’s a community here, we’re asking the community to contribute to seed the funding for it.”

Meetings already are happening regularly in ten cities around the world.

“The idea is to connect with people with shared values and passions around the world — who’d like to see things get better in the world,” Heuer said. Social Media Club is a refocus of his nonprofit Brain Jams on social media. “Our first thinking is the promotion of tech literacy, helping the ‘dead tree people’ understand what we understand.

“When we say co-creators, we mean it,” Heuer says. “We’ll have our business plan in a wiki that’s available to all the co-creators.”

–Susan Kuchinskas

Technorati tag: web22, “social media club”