The rise of Social Networks such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace has generated new possibilities for marketers and organisations in general. It opens up whole new communities of people to whatever the organisation is offering. It also opens up avenues of communication to a lot of people.

Community is now the focus

When you look at the rise and rise of Social Networks, there are many that would point to the technology as being the key. This is why there are serious numbers of competitor social networks out there that in essence copy the technology. However, Technology is and was never the key.  The key is Community.

Community in it’s loosest sense is just a group of people. What they are grouped around joins up members of that community. Not every person will be joined to each other and a person may be more involved or less involved in a community and often it is their choice how involved they are.  Communities will also overlap. One or more members of a community will be part of another community and so there loose joining between both people within a community and other communities that is very important.

Building a Community

It’s very difficult to build a community from scratch. Unless you have a highly charismatic leader who is able to inspire large numbers of people into a community by sheer force of personality, you will likely need to build upon an existing community. Building on an existing community or getting involved in another community gives you a starting point. Which community to build on and why to build on that community is very important.

It’s not simple (if it was, this company probably wouldn’t exist)

There are many companies and organisations out there that think that “If we build it, they will come”. It’s just not true. Matt Mullenweg created a highly successful business based on online communities called Wordpress (this blog is a Wordpress blog). He has talked about how to build communities, as that is essentially what a blog can do for a person or organisation, and he says in a presentation he does on getting your first 100,000 users:

• The first [users] are the most passionate and unique users, and the hardest to get. After that, you’ve got enough momentum – chances are, you’ll coast.
• It’s easy to call something an overnight success – it’s never true – there’s always time, blood, sweat and tears poured into any major success – you just never hear about it until it’s big.
• Your first users should be your friends, your family, and those people who don’t like you – they’ll give you the honest goods on how to improve the experience you’re creating for your (hopefully) [next group of] users!

Community isn’t simple but it is Everything

Not every community needs 100,000 users to work. Some only require 5 or 10. But, once you have a community, you have an opportunity. Let’s rephrase that quote from earlier:

“If we build the community, they will come“

Twitter has been riding the crest of a wave for the best part of 2 years and the most interesting question on most people’s lips about twitter has been “what is it for?” and the second most interesting question is “what’s the business model?”

We at Aristos Social are very excited by Twitter as we believe it has huge potential to build communities around it, and as such, can help clients to generate some very interesting propositions.

Well, now we’ve had a sneak preview of the answer:

This apparently was a release that “slipped through the net” (thanks to ReadWriteWeb for publicising the page) and shouldn’t have been displayed, because it’s no longer up there as of now. However, it’s enough to make us all realise what they are going to do.

Business Model

Twitter has gone down the route of sponsoring/advertising on the front pages of the site, and this is to be expected, but has taken an inordinately long time to come together.

However, have they missed something here? They have an API and have built a very strong community around the product. This community has utilised the service through clients, much like email, and as such, has taken a lot of the traffic away from the site. It could be argued that without the clients, twitter would be nowhere as popular as it is today. Are they starting to advertise on the website where most people don’t use twitter?

How this can help organisations

Sponsorship and advertising will definitely produce a revenue stream, and it will generate some traffic.The difficulty will be in which adverts get placed on which profiles. This will require some interesting technology, as what do you display for? Do you display:

• according to the tweets a user is following
• according to the tweets a user is creating
• a mixture of the two
• trending topics on twitter at the moment
• randomly
• some other combination of the above

The most valuable opportunities are not in advertising, but in getting a community’s users to be advocates of an organisation/campaign/product. We wonder if the best solution is to generate a social advocacy campaign, which would partially remove the need for advertising anyway.  We’ve done that kind of thing before here, so we could do it again.

Interesting to watch Twitter’s Strategy

We’re going to be watching with interest as this unfolds. Twitter has some interesting challenges to face over the next few months as it tries to justify it’s valuations and will this year be the subject of a lot of interested parties wishing to buy the service.

It used to be that everyone was available via just their postal address. You could send out any information you wanted to their address and you could buy their details from marketing companies. Then a large proportion went to email and most people have an email address now, so that’s where a lot of marketing went.

Then, web 2.0 came along with it’s making friends and throwing sheep. Everyone had lots of fun (at least, all the techies and “young people” did) in seeing who could get the most friends and building their social network. However, this change and the social changes that have come with it, mean that Social Media has changed everything.

Youtube, Facebook and Twitter are not the only networks out there

Take a look at the image above. The Web Trend Map shows some of the major sites out there when it comes to interaction and community. Not all of them are “Social Networks” but all engage their community to generate interest and often revenue.

The Social Revolution and the social networks that feed it means that a person is much more choosy about who they listen to and when. It means that they are less susceptible to marketing messages that come from brands, but more susceptible to marketing messages from their friends and people they choose to listen to such as celebrities.

This has a profound impact on marketing, but also on product design, customer support, PR, internal collaboration and many other aspects of a business or organisation. It’s not enough to just create and distribute information in the same ways as before and get ever diminishing returns. People want to be engaged where they are, and that includes where they are on the internet.

Finding your community is the first step

You’re community is out there. They are talking about you on social networks and if they aren’t talking, then you are almost invisible. There are ways of finding and engaging with them online, but these are no longer as simple as geographical area or age range. Demographics of communities are changing and more and more communities are having to find new ways of interacting and engaging with each other because of the new technologies.

Once you have a community, then you need to engage. Engagement is more about conversation and personality than it is about messages you want to put out. It is often dangerous to enter into a community without knowing how they interact and what the etiquette is, and also how they feel about you or a brand. Going in with your eyes open can create a very positive impact.

This isn’t the whole story

But it’s a start. Social Media means that we have to engage, cultivate and grow communities. Engagement means that a message can be delivered in a positive, community oriented way, and this is much more valuable for both the community and the organisation.