Community lives where engagement happens. Specific to place and time.
We know this by just hanging out, bumping into serendipitous conversations or cruising for connections on whichever networks or blogs we frequent.
Earlier this week, my buddy Charlie Crystle and I jumped on a Facebook string about this very topic. On my request, we airlifted the conversation to my current blog, and it simply wilted away. It was false and stilted out of context. We reengaged later on the original string, where the dynamic was real for that topic at that time.
This happens all the time.
We want to force connection to our URLs as the center of our world. We want to push conversations to Disqus where interaction is just more natural.
It just doesn’t work.
We know this intuitively, but our misguided sense of centralized platform order is simply at odds with the messy synergy (and power) of community and the social web itself.
Think across the networks you frequent: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest or Tumblr.
Each is completely different. Groups and communities exist within them all. Different audiences in each, and, more important, different dna for what we personally want from each of them. Different ways that we want to digest information.
When you dump info from Instagram to Facebook with hashtags embedded, you are just creating noise, spam actually, and polluting your stream.
When you dump info from Tumblr to Facebook, the same.
It’s somewhat irrelevant whether the same individuals are in different places. Not only do you want to take your message to your customers, you need to speak to them in the language of where they are.
How I communicate in Tumblr, surfacing the graphic icon of the idea, even if it is a post or a quote, is key. It’s a graphic scrolling vernacular. But a tweet on your Facebook stream—Oy! A Facebook personal photo on your Twitter stream—you get the message.
I sent a DM to a friend whose Twitter stream I really like, to let her know that it was polluted with ‘X posted a photo to her Facebook page” over and over again on her stream as an auto push from Facebook. Her response was that it’s too time intensive to work these nets one at a time.
My response was that I unfollowed her. Really enjoy her thoughts, just don’t want bot-generated flotsam (or is it Jetsam?) on my feed.
This is just community common sense.
A huge Aha for me a few years back was looking at Kickstarter and realizing that there was no community there at all.
Regardless of their adding ‘Follow’, they were a service to the broader world, handed off from individual to individual within different communities, across the web. A link in the shape of a baton, across every possible network. The idea that community needed to be onsite was irrelevant. The goal was to spread the word of things that touched you wherever you had conversations. Contiguous network connections mattered not. This was more akin to pebbles dropped in the pond than a spider web of attachments.
This relates back to my experience with Charlie above, and some thinking about Disqus.
Disqus imagines a world where community exists between communities as well as within them. Intra-community glue in the form of their platform. Where having a central sign-on, the ability to ring tone others to join conversations and to follow commenters across conversations intimates that community exists within the connecting threads itself.
I’m starting to question this as a concept.
Questioning it because there will obviously never be just one platform. And because time and place trump platform protocol every time. As much as I want one language, one ramp, it’s not the natural state of the web.
What Kickstarter showed is that the only thing that matters is what is shared. It will find conversation in every possible corner of the web. Therein lies its power.
When a project touches me, I bring it to a network that would be interested, or I blog on it and share it that way. It’s the core idea, the call to action that transports and crosses the network chasm.
Or maybe the network chasm is simply a mental fabrication. Some silly “Like” within Facebook stays there because it doesn’t matter anywhere else. Some Tumblr photo of the Statue of Liberty at first light easily pushes to Twitter, and inevitably ends up in other spots in different formats as well.
We all get lazy and dump content. We think that community and connections are part of the platforms themselves. We do this because the web is just there and it’s easy.
It’s always a bad idea.
Bad because stuff thrown against the wall is disrespectful to those you are communicating with. And bad, because community is specific—and unique– to where it lives and when you touch it. Random and spattered broadcasting is a function of TV, not of community and conversation.
Some food for thought…
