When all channels were brick and mortar, all communications print and even electronic media had a cardboard package, there was this marketing thing called a ‘launch’.

I spent two years of my early career on the road doing launches–over and over, city by city, by country by channel rolling out tech and computer game products across the globe.

I had online communities of enthusiasts and developers who fed a hybrid model, but offline distribution was king and set the rules and schedules.

This was the rolling ‘big bang’ theory of marketing in its heyday.

Companies today still fabricate availability, date and time scarcity models. And if you sell flowers, Valentine’s Day is still your season for roses. But for the most part, the ties to the physical channel are gone.

Consumer status quo today is all about democratized distribution and customer choice. Online is the new norm and niche marketplaces are steadily becoming ubiquitous.

Yet somehow this idea of a ‘formal launch’ trapped in time and space has a resiliency against change. It’s a misunderstood idea misapplied to today’s market realities.

Every day, smart innovative companies with amazing social pedigree or game changing products ‘launch’. They formally come out of Beta and push frantically for coverage in the handful of tech publications. They may have a product but they are missing the point mostly. It’s not just about the product. It never really has been.

Something is out of whack and most of the sense is getting lost.

My takeaway from hundreds of launches, and why I still love orchestrating them, is that they are a focused, collaborative effort between sales, marketing and product . Integrated at their core. It’s a runway for market discovery.

This was true whether the event was a folding table at the Kansas City Marriot or two double-trailers full of booth paraphernalia rolling across the country from one convention hall to the next.

Sales, marketing, distribution and product were all part of a selling effort to build brand, communicate value and pound a hole in the din of the convention hall to get heard.

And online today, with a serious consumer attention deficit syndrome running unchecked and the one-click power of buying anything most everywhere, this integration and iteration is more critical than ever.

But somehow the popular (and quite brilliant) idea of a minimum viable product usually stops at product alone. Collaboration with marketing, sales and even customers is often a second thought. Launch is a baton handoff from product to market building with seemingly little foresight.

It just doesn’t work that way.

Real world, brick and mortar analogs of doing this right.

This idea of ‘always at launch’ is not a hothouse, online, techy fabrication. I keep running into gyms, restaurants and even food trucks that seem to get this idea of iterative product and community development innately.

A friend of mine opened up a new restaurant a few years ago. I got to watch this non-tech, brick and mortar example of always at launch up close and it exemplified brilliantly to me the dna of this idea.

The restaurant rolled out slowly to enthusiast groups.  The first were closed, friends and family. Free meals. Limited choices. Restricted serving times. The goal was to iterate and build a community base of customers and get the menu and service right. Then expand the groups to an ever-larger public over time and test new menu assumptions.

Social media loops were opened up and expanded naturally as the fan base grew. The menu was finalized and data gathered to figure out the margin nits of whether lower mark ups on wines lists drew more revenue per plate with less turns. Lots of  market data gathered and tested out a little at a time. There wasn’t so much a formula to follow but a trend to discover.

And oh…the restaurant while open and a huge success is still not officially launched.

Or rather, it is still at  launch every day, changing, getting more focused and better with each iteration.

What struck me was that in the brick and mortar world it was doing such a great job of iterating product, building community groups and exemplifying the reality that great food is in the mind of the customer not just the pots of the cook.

This is a telling example of ‘always at launch’ and relevant whether you are selling ribs on the corner or job referrals or artisanal wares online.

Why does this matter to web-based businesses?

The greatest scarcity on the web is customer attention. It’s without a doubt the new currency as it is in short demand.

Success is always just a click away and failure to engage, a click to leave. You have a second to capture that attention and create value and lay the seed for customer belief and eventual loyalty.

The idea of always at launch today needs to start with this respect for the scarcity of consumer’s attention. And the understanding that getting traffic is a lot easier than getting engagement and usage. In fact, traffic with a bounce doesn’t’ matter at all.

A focused complete response to a customer’s interest is as germane to a startup slowly moving out to the public from a base of loyal enthusiasms, as to a campaign for larger companies leveraging their existing customer base.

What works for me?

I’m asked everyday to try new products and participate early in product tests. I’m a tough Beta guy as my attention span and tolerance for boring are both very low.

Certain general ideas though are just ‘Must Haves’ for me and generally, I think,  for any mass market.

Launch Must Haves:

1. Make every day, launch day, for every new person who hits your site.

Engagement is an earned vote of confidence at that moment. Whenever I show up I want it to be special, interesting and all about me.

2. Connect your customers to each other, not just the company, as key to building community.

Your job is to connect me to likeminded others. Opening up a site publically until you have the kernel of a community is a certain recipe for a very slow climb, if not failure. In restaurants that may be friends and family. Online the idea still holds.

There’s nothing cosy about an empty room.

3. Inspire me.

Sell me on your promise and the excitement of the future. Your product is early and incomplete. It’s a mini version of your big vision. Get me to see and feel it.

Don’t ask me what I want. Show me what makes a difference.

4. Be there and lead.

If there is no new content. No connections. Not an intuitive next step for me. Or a blog post with an active comment stream that hasn’t been updated in a week, ask yourself, “Why should I be there?”

If you can’t answer that you don’t deserve my attention.

5. Understand why I should care and why I should share with my friends?

You don’t ask the customer what they want. You learn by making the leap, providing something and interpreting their response. You need to sell value. That’s what companies do at launch and every day onward. I posted on this a while back: “Why care? Why share?”.

This is not easy.

It’s part aspirational, part reality.

From a customer view, if you were the customer, there’s no argument. This is what they need. If you want their time, make it so.

From a company view, it means a refusal to accept putting outmoded and misconstrued modes of market building for a new market and new consumer behaviors. And an insistence that you put yourself in your customer’s shoes and understand their point of view, every day.

Everybody loves the idea of big bang. Of your logo on seat cushions at the Super Bowl. Or the wacko idea that somehow you just do this one thing and it all falls into place and starts a chain of events that ends up in success.

It’s just not so. We earn our customer’s attention, one engagement at a time.

This past year for me was all about trying new services and technologies to solve core business problems for a changed consumer culture.

I downloaded scores of mobile apps. Participated in scads of betas for cool new products. Used web-based solutions for every possible thing I needed to know, do, purchase or share.

But the number one source for information, places to travel to, wines to drink, marketing tips or referrals wasn’t any of these new services, individual apps or even search.

It was my broad social networks and a few powerful vertical blog communities.

I have strong connections around my friends’ blogs and my own, but most of the information I get still comes from my social networks, especially the big three–Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.

When I was in need of a new restaurant or wine bar in Paris, some consensus on whether social TV is a myth, data on vineyards in Friuli, Italy, the best source wasn’t Q & A services (there are many), or travel or wine apps, it came from my extended friend networks.

And if you are a business, you really have little choice but to look to these social networks as well to find customers.

Quite a surprise actually. Disappointing to discover that the deepest contextual connections are still within the broadest most horizontal platforms.

The irony is that a multitude of the smartest entrepreneurs are parsing the world of information, commerce and socialization to verticalize our life experiences with the intent of building more focused and efficient communities of interest.

The human experience has been dissected into atomic pieces and there are seemingly endless apps and community platforms targeting each one.

But few of them really worked for me.

I’ve got to wonder whether I’m the odd person out here. But I don’t think so.

Some of the verticals themselves aren’t a true standalone social behavior with community chops. Check in apps for movies and TV are for me a case in point. I’m a serious movie geek and share info often, but have not been able to use any of the many media community apps with any consistency.

Some are interesting but are missing the transactional piece as an offshoot of information. Wine communities (and there aren’t really any of import) have not solved the ‘how to buy’ piece and to hear about wine that you can’t find or buy is a non-starter. You end up with flash sales (Lot 18), media sites (Snooth) and a plethora of blogs with a lot of info but little sense of engagement.

Some are perpetually stuck in the chicken-and-egg state. They have no real value until they enough people and just can’t draw enough of a crowd to matter to the participants.

And many, as smart as they may be, are more product idea than market reality and are churning to find users without understanding their core promise or a sense of how community can inform their business model.

And some may be just too early to tell.

There are of course, a few that really work and set the bar high. But very few.

Look at Fred Wilson’s avc.com as an ideal. It’s a place with loose structure, deep context and strong leadership. It’s a magnet for the intellectually curious around the entrepreneurial endeavor. One of the real ‘places’ to hang out online. Arguably the most dynamic community on the web today. It truly adds to my life off and online, friendships and business both.

Small, still new, but with a more focused and smaller niche, for authors there are places like Wattpat. For knitters, Ravelry. For developers and programmers quite a few.

Music is a community vertical with deep success. Turntable.fm, exfm and Soundcloud are all remarkably exceptions, each in their own way. They really get who they are.

And on the marketplace side, Etsy and Polyvore stand out as communities driven around commerce.

What makes them all work, as different as they are from each other, is a sense of community.

Conversation and engagement are the key connectors. They may spawn commerce but they certainly forge a connection with real life. Friendships really do happen. As well as customers.

I’ve blogged on this theme of context as a filter and community as the core of commerce all year. It’s true and I’m convinced of its validity.

Yet it is just at its early beginning stages. There are remarkably few great examples. Maybe the time for them is just in front of us…like 2012.

Facebook and Twitter are powerhouses of connection, though not suited for conversation or engagement. Wildly heterogeneous and useful for certain of my vertical interests like marketing and wine, it’s just a matter of time before the communities relocate. This is a population without a base using Facebook as a proxy.

On Facebook connections do broaden but it is more exception than rule. You bump into interesting people then move the conversations elsewhere. You just can’t get to know someone there. It’s a nod of the hat, not a handshake.

Dynamic communities, many of them blogs are where life and business connections happen. There’s been a buzz that blogging is dead. Just plain wrong in my opinion.

The past week I’ve been reading all the year-end predictions. There are many. Endless lists of what will be hot and what not.

Mobile end points. Tablets. Cloud based portability of data. Personal empowerment. The driving force of individual passions. All very good and true as themes for the future.

For me though, the business landscape for next year is not about tools or new markets or waiting for the market to catch up with your innovation. It’s more about bridging the self evident market gaps.

Gaps between a population that has shifted in its consuming habits and businesses that are seemingly clueless in how to connect with them. Huge gaps in the platforms for referrals that really work. Gaps in financial services, travel, wine and community access to local services.

Not all of these are new. Many just don’t work yet. And almost all of them have tried to exist on Facebook. They are invariably the right idea in the wrong place.

We are at a time where community and marketplaces are both possible and needed. For information. For friendships. For business. And for social change.

We are at this unique, and very cool place where culture is changing, online and offline are no longer distinct, access to markets democratized, and technology a vastly powerful, affordable tool available to everyone.

This is all upside and possibilities.

And the simple truth is still key, that the web is not about commerce or information or things. It is about people. And that commerce and community will follow if you discover the right connection in a viable context for the people themselves.

This is nothing but opportunity for businesses and benefits for the consumer. The problem is  not scrambling for ideas but focus on which ones to pick.

2012…bring it on. I’m ready!

Conversations are what make the social web work.

For me personally. For communities. For businesses.

There are large gaps between the conversational dynamics of Disqus-powered and WordPress blogs, posts on Facebook, comments on G+, remarks on FourSquare, Tweets on Twitter.

Each of them is useful. Though on their own no one is enough.

I’m increasingly isolated in these conversational silos. I’m stymied by the need to manually connect conversations between communities. It’s counterproductive and usually the true value of the social data is lost.

Links may be the universal currency of the web but they are more like monopoly money, less like value to me. I care what you think about something you share as much as what gets shared. Most of what we share is without useful context cross networks.

The handful of communities that have dynamic conversations are still uniquely separated from each other. We all spend hours following links, book marking them and bouncing around from referral to referral.

I so want the process of discovery to be fun. I’m fine with working hard at it but it feels random and primitive and somewhat arbitrary.

A few years ago, I wrote a blog post on the community potential of Disqus. How it could change how we find and interact with information and people. I was (and still am) inspired by this grand idea although less patient than I was then.

Disqus held the keys to the conversational kingdom with the data for some 1M blogs, 10s of millions of power commenter’s and innumerable comments across the web.

Disqus put granularity and detail on a dream world where each URL is its own community connected by threads to others. Some known, some in the process of being discovered.

Underneath this ecosystem of Disqus data lies an implicit future where a universe of suggestions could be fed to me just by understanding my interest footprint.

The more I express myself, the more I find what I want without asking.

Disqus may or may not be working on this. I don’t know. But regardless, Disqus alone is not comprehensive enough on its own.

Each of us has networks on other commenting systems and a multiplicity of social nets. These communities aren’t merging any time soon. Centralization needs to happen between communities, not within any one of them.

I’m dreaming hard for a conversational-based reality online.

I want to parse my world by conversations by topic by trusted connections daily.

I want a dashboard that lets me search:

-By topics by blog communities ranked by dynamics and engagement.

If I start the day on avc.com, for example, in a sub-string on Apple Airplay, I want to find out where there are dynamic conversations happening across the web on Airplay and connected TV.

-By trusted friends who are subject matter experts.

Something breaks around certification of organic wineries in Europe and percent of sulfites allowed for exported wines. Where is ‘the Crazy French lady’ commenting? Where are my wine expert friends from London and Portugal commenting? Where can I see this at a glance?

Google is useless for this. So is Disqus. Facebook is actually the best.

-By implicit generated interest graphs.

Look at any of your last 100 comments and a pattern of interests will arise. For me it will be on community, marketing, wine, travel.

Where is my daily leader board of what’s interesting for me without explicitly searching for it? Where is my recommended interest report?

Where is my listing of dynamically generated wine tastings that I would like in NYC this week with friends already signed up to attend? Or in London or Paris when I’m traveling.

I probably get 60% of the above in a couple of hours work each day.

The data is there. It’s just disparate, not mashed together in a human consumable form that is palatable for me. Or anyone.

Many companies are trying to solve this.

The launch of my friend William Mougayar (@wmougayar) Engagio alpha this morning is a great example. They are very early but they get the discovery/aggregation piece well. The code to get in the alpha of Engagio is engagearnold.

I want broad access to a human web interlaced by conversations connected by implicit suggestions.

So do many others I believe. Understanding social data is the Lingua Franca of the future. It needs to be understood between networks, not within any one of them.

The large social networks need to open their data to developers to build this in a multiplicity of shapes. For each of our needs. The networks don’t own the people but they do own the data. They need to learn to share more through their APIs.

Social data sharing will be better for me, better for everyone and equally, better for the networks themselves.

When I’m the center of the world, not the networks, I’m glad to participate in the ones that matter. I’m centered and flexible and easy.

When the networks are the center of the world and I’m a club member, I’m always looking for another club that will do what five of the others are trying to. I’m a migratory social animal always on the move and ready to jump. No allegiance at all.

Ok. Fun rant. Feeling better already.

Remember when niche used to mean a market too small to matter?

Not any longer.

The flatter the connected world gets, the more relevant and attractive small and focused seems over broad and general.

A niche market approach is not only a valid business strategy, but a potential antidote for business ADD.

A redefining of the term ‘niche’ where too small to matter may very well mean focused enough to win.

A great post by Om Malik, “Dawn of the micropubs”, brought some granularity to this idea of a niche being a business model of choice rather than a market too small to care about.

Om’s point of reference is viable publishing micromarkets defined by passionate founders around focused content categories. Aggregated free communities supported by affiliate and advertising revenue. It’s a quality traffic play.

His data point that almost 50% of niche micromarket traffic sources are keyword searches is a reminder to all of us about the dynamics of search. The more specific the content, the more valid and useful the search results. This is an old SEO and SEM truth that plays well here. And for the business model, the more contextual and relevant the community that gathers around those interests, the more valuable lead gen and advertising eyeballs become.

Om’s thesis around micropubs, and one I’ve been applying to my accounts for awhile, is that a highly verticalised, independent model is not only workable, but often the best response to a broadly horizontal and unsegmented social world. Or simply, the social graph, Facebook defined, is really challenging to build a business or brand on. And it’s a mistake to make the center of your business anywhere but your own URL.

The sharp focus of a niche approach to business both deepens and broadens your market. A finer net captures more of the higher quality users rather than a larger sieve, which is forever churning for meaningful connections.

As Seth Godin said in his post today, “Products and services succeed one person at a time”. The more specific that connection, the more clarity you have on how to make that interaction successful.

I’m a big proponent that you get farther faster by focusing narrowly with intent as a starting point. This may seem obvious but whether you have an early product for which you haven’t discovered the customer connection, or at a later stage noodling over how to expand faster, singular, passion-point focus on single-need, customer connections just works.

Connecting broadly isn’t the challenge on the web.

Quality connections around relevant and personalized information and products is. A niche approach to market development focuses on this above all else. Boiling the ocean doesn’t work. Spamming your networks is not only ineffective but somehow rude.

I’ve blogged on the power of the niche community as a filter. Om’s post made me think about that this more broadly, as a model in its own right. A focus in market terms and a different perspective on vertical segmentation.

We’ve all done the vertical segmentation whiteboard planning drill.

You line up product specs and benefits, market size and customer acquisition costs, and create a tangled web of how you get from a product capability to a customer base. The narrower the customer focus, the crisper the message and the easier it is to target that market. The broader the target, the mushier the value prop becomes while the abstract value of the market increases. The balance between market size and acquisition cost and viability are the rules of that game.

Honestly, I worry little about projected market size and more about tangible customer connections.

Size matters surely–it just matters a lot less. It’s an abstraction not a goal.

This niche approach focuses on core market questions without interference or ambiguity:

Who are you and what do you have to offer?

The value chain is crisp and clear as there are fewer moving pieces.

You need to create the environment to discover what the core behavior is that binds your product value to customer desire.

How will you get found?

This is a natural search, keyword and category-centric based approach.

Search, direct and referrals are the funnel. This is not a revelation certainly but if these pieces are out of whack, the formula is broken somewhere.

Stripping everything away, putting aside gaming search and focusing on the ‘why’ will open the discussion of ‘how’.

What’s your true expertise and value?

Information is everywhere. Finding context to attach your needs to useful information in language you can understand is the kicker.

From healthcare. Legal questions. Travel. Diet. Exercise. Love even.

You personally don’t need to be the expert. Expertise may simply exist at the community level. Ask yourself what it is that your customers get from being at your site, in your community?

This is your customers bullshit filter. Authentic passion is the product of the niche marketplace. Knowledge and relevance are the language you communicate in.

No niche is an island.

Who are your natural partners?

There is interconnect between niches. Sometimes they are extensions of your product. Think about niche sports manufacturers invariably partnering with clothing and nutrition companies. They often end up developing their own branded products.

This raises the partnership discussion. Who can you partner with? Who will become your channel? Where is the best marketplace for your traffic?

On the web, proximity is not an issue.

Connections that matter are. Referrals that broaden your network are key.

In building the market for your product, there are no formulas. No boilerplates for success. No definitive lists of to-dos. But there are useful ideas that surface interesting questions that provide guidelines that help figure this all out.

I’m drawn to this niche approach to market making as one of the best.

Think large. Focus small…is my way of thinking about this.

It’s a minimal viable product approach but for the barest, most essential touchpoint. User value, customer wonderment or sometimes just pure fun is that connection to capture.

Find that for one customer and you’ve got a great start and a direction to find the next one.

__________

If you have examples of niche communities that are doing something right or just something interesting, please share in the comments.

I’m not a big believer in the easy one-liner.

They are often overly clever and skirt the details rather than encouraging us to dive in.

This one does ring true to me. It’s become a personal mantra as I reexamine my online presence this holiday season.

I’m prodded to think smarter about what authentic value I bring to my clients, blog readers and friends. To stretch beyond just being good at what I do. It questions not my worth but the value that others perceive in me.

When I push on this thought, I end up thinking about personal referrals as the true standard of trust, the currency of my business life. Figuring out how to crack shareability, it comes down to the value of what I do in my community’s eyes. A plunge of self-discovery from my network’s point of view.

Asking ‘why my customers care and why they share’ speaks to why I create content for my blogs, Facebook wall and Twitter streams. It’s the intersection of self-expression and market perception.

It focuses me personally in a positive way.

I’ve taken it to my accounts, looking at clients’ product and community designs as a metaphor to understand why people in a community engage. As an actionable understanding behind the traffic numbers and analytics that we pound on daily to grow our businesses.

It’s just not enough to be excellent. You need to discover a community that inspires as well appreciates.

Your customers demand trust and want to value your interactions with them. The true connection exists more between you and them, more in the comments and the process, than in what they receive and consume.

If your customers feel connected, they will become your channel and support you through good times and bad.

Look at the chatter around Gary Vaynerchuck’s winelibrary.com credit card security breach. It’s all over the net. A nightmare for everyone, especially us, the customers.

My wine networks and Facebook pages have been abuzz about this. Not abuzz with anger at GaryV. The opposite. The community, rather than balking, are collectively aghast and supportive, not collectively angry at winelibrary.  They feel that the attack is on them and they rallied together.

People seriously like winelibrary.com. The business will live through this just fine. Other businesses would have folded. They may even grow as a result.

This highlights the truism that if your customers are there just to buy, you don’t have a social problem, you have a significant business one. You won’t get found. Your networks will never be enough. Your customers will simply not tolerate mistakes or appreciate your foibles.

No one is selling anything that can’t be bought somewhere else. From wine to cars to cold-pressed green smoothies, it’s all a commodity. Your business and your brand exists in the community space, the dynamic connection between your customers and you as a person or a brand.

Certainly, I’m a realist. We don’t love Amazon, but they treat the consumer really well. They are easy and personal to deal with. We don’t love Netflix either and they treated the customer like a line item on a profitability spreadsheet and every customer will be unconcerned if they vanish. No one will care.

“Why care? Why share?” is worth asking yourself. Especially in the face of what feels like an anti-social, back-to-basics business backlash lately.

In blog discussions and most conferences, there’s often someone with a rebel poise (usually young and successful) who reminds us with a smile that business is all about money.

True…but that’s not how you create value. Money is the offshoot of value, not the cause of it.

Customers and transactions are not the same thing. In almost every case, the customer is worth more than the sum of their transactions. This is true for almost every business, from yoga gear to running shoes to classic sports cars.

Every community will be different but the human touch is always its indelible fingerprint.

Before we earn our customer’s dollars, we need to earn their sense of belonging and astonishment, their satisfaction, and their finding value great enough to act as a leverage point to their networks.

We want them to care enough to share.

@dpinsen, a friend, entrepreneur in financial services, and brilliant pragmatist started a great comment string in my last post. At the core of the discussion is whether community and social loops are applicable across all verticals and types of products.

We are on opposite sides of this debate. He makes a strong argument that community is tied to passion and passion is not equal across all types of groups. He’s right to a degree, but I just don’t believe there is a business that can exist without the extended good will of its customers. And that good will is enough spark to build community on.

Community is an ideal with pragmatic hooks that are applicable to every business in every possible sector. Commerce isn’t about goods, it’s about people. It always has been, and the measure of value is somehow wrapped in customer’s intent to care enough to share.

Are the needs of my dentist, my vet, my doctor and my local wine shop all the same? No question.

Customer acquisition cost and churn is the largest expense and the biggest worry for all of these business. And these businesses couldn’t be more different.

Do I share a great wine on sale at my local shop 10X more than my satisfaction with the other services? Certainly. But social loops are core, without exception, to every branded service and product  I consume.

And even though the cost of services is completely different for every one, the value of a referral is paramount. To the vet where I bring my cat to the wine I’m having at the Thanksgiving table…referrals within a scale of relevance matter.

The “Why care?” “Why share?” phrase came from a presentation by Facebook’s Kay Madati at the socialtvsummit in New York last week. He was lecturing big media brands on how to effectively advertise to Facebook users. It was a salesperson’s ‘We are the platform’ version of ‘Think differently’.

He was selling an advertising platform. I heard a refrain on how to think about the culture of commerce in my world.

Understanding is iterative at its core. Ongoing and daily a new revelation. It’s been a great gift to have a question broad enough to frame the discussion each day in a new way.

It’s been really useful. I thought I’d share it forward.

I heard a speaker at the socialtvsummit talking about how we were moving from the invention to the application stage of the social web.

Oy!

Although well intentioned, the phrase is indicative of a big miss and a big misunderstanding of today’s market and what social media as a way of communications is all about.

Culture–not technology–is the magic and DNA of the social web.

We are not moving along a product continuum of market acceptance. Just the opposite.

Somehow this idea has cropped up that the social web is a science project for the technologist and a tool for marketers.

It’s as if product designers and web companies think that cultural and behavioral evolution is part of their product roadmap.

The big social nets today are prime examples of core cultural and human behaviors that found expression in a social platform. The potential of the tools are not ahead of the behaviors. They are not the drivers, but the recipients of a cultural shift.

The old adage of whether Facebook invented sharing or created a platform to capture the pent-up need of the mass market springs to mind.

There has been a market shift. Not yesterday, but over time and it’s now the norm. The powerful tools that we connect and navigate with are getting confused with the market itself.

Does this matter?

Yes, a lot. It is not just semantics.

With the exceptions of a few marketing thinkers, like Brian Solis in his new book, this very old post that he shared with me, and Gary Vaynerchuck’s core approach to markets, many in the business world appear to be looking through the wrong side of the lens.

There is an epidemic of tool and platform worship. A looking at the social web as a product and a unique gateway to a niche marketplace.

I think action and understanding gets diffused and misdirected if you consider the message within the media, Marshall McCluhen style. It’s simply not true at this stage of evolution.

Look at the big brands as an example. At first they needed to be convinced of the value of social media. That it was real. They balked and balked, then acquiesced. Then they ran scared and jumped hard on the need to engage.

But they–for the most part–are embracing the tools not the audiences.

Huge brands who are embedded in the very fabric of society are acting like nervous children who understand neither themselves nor their value nor their audience. Often the results are off target and mostly just boring. Push advertising in a social guise. Cause marketing as masquerade at times.

I’ve never bought into the myth that social tools are the new marketing. That new measurement system to understand social cues was a necessary component of business ROI. And least that the focus on tips and tricks and endless lists of must-do’s and how-to’s warranted focus.

Do a test.

Talk to any one camped out at their local Starbucks, working on their laptops or iPads. Facebook, Twitter, turntable.fm, Foursquare and a few vertical communities are their connecting threads to work and play online and off.

Now approach this as a company wanting to connect with them as customers. My bet is the first circle on your whiteboard at the office will be the network of connections channels you need to work in, not the why of what you are trying to do.

This is the epitome of the misunderstanding. The misguidance of many marketing and business plans today. Certainly you want to take the message to the place, the community. But the message? The meaning as distinct from just ‘sharing’?

The power of these new tools are immense. Distractingly so. But that is not the big change.

The market itself is. Culture in today’s connected world has shifted, even evolved, and our behaviors and the intricacies of our beliefs along with them.

This is not a lab where we are collecting data beyond our ability to interpret it.

Just the opposite. The world has already turned a corner and the majority of businesses are simply looking past the reality of the marketplace. They are focused on tools and tactics rather than the ‘why’ of this. The needs of their customers.

A few weeks ago on Fred Wilson’s avc.com, commenter @substrateundertow, in a conversation thread with me on education that ‘people & culture are the bedrock platform’. Well said and so true, now and always.

Marketers have just lost sight of this. Blinded by the wonders of the tools and the pure power of the platforms.

A while back I posted on my experiences with early communities with Atari and their BBS system. The value was in the community and culture, not in the connecting thread of the system itself. Tools have changed dramatically; core values of culture and behavior are still the basis for business success.

The connection gap, the knowledge chasm between brand and fan, lies somewhere in this realization.

Many, myself included,  have posted about the shift that occurred when the “C” in the traditional marketing planning bulls-eye changed from being ‘Company’ and became ‘Customer’. This is not rhetoric. It’s a reality that has shifted the core of commerce and communications. It’s not about technology, it’s germane and core to culture and behavior.

It feels somewhat trivial to rant on the obvious but the gap between companies and their customers looms large and a huge market frustration point. Most companies play on the social nets. But most are focused on the tool. On measurement systems to determine whether the tool is effective. This is  misfocused thinking from the  marketers point of view.

If you for a second forget about the Internet. The social web. And just think about the culture changes of the last decade.

A global consciousness across all age and economic groups. A necessity for transparency in all aspects of social and business life. An innate cultural disdain for lies and bigotry and inequality. Unlimited choice of where to buy most anything. The end of consumer goods scarcity as a value scale. The reality of the global local.

Huge changes.

Age, country, geography, culturally agnostic. The world has moved up an evolutionary notch.

If you are a company selling a product, stop and consider. Don’t think Twitter or Facebook. Think about this new customer in a new world social order. Figure that out. Tools will be easy to navigate. Messaging and value within these places and communities will become clear.

Asking questions is sometimes most of the way to the answer. Especially in a world where pivoting is akin to planning and iteration often the best strategy.

These three  are the ones I ask most clients and plan on examining in future posts:

-Why care? Why share?

If you can’t answer this about your customer, you are not ready to take any step towards your market place. [Please see my post "Why care? Why share?". Be sure to check out the comments.]

-Is excellence enough?

Build a great product and the market will find you is not unquestionably true. Can you build your community and your channel into your product?

-Does your community want to talk about you, or to you? Or about something else?

Companies aren’t people. Your customers, if you are lucky, want to talk about the value of your product and it’s impact. To each other most likely. Are you self aware and self assured enough as a company to let this happen? To sponsor this? Figuring out the dynamics of your particular community is key and requires an open perspective.

Grab a whiteboard and map these out. Share what you discover and the new questions you come up. Let me know if they help.

It’s challenging to find a great company name.

Choices are difficult and often expensive. Coming to grips with what ‘great’ really means is never definitive. And for early stage companies, we have little more than gut belief and pure inspiration to guide us.

No product. No market. No early community. Nothing but a silhouette of a big idea.

Naming at an early stage is like building the transcontinental railroad with only one directive–head west. This is as close to zen as marketing can get.

The naming process is a wacky anomaly. There is no scale for right or wrong. No data to guide you. You labor to an end result that is completely subjective, arbitrary by nature, yet critical in ineffable ways.

It’s not quite free-form imagination but the rules are squishy, advice overly plentiful and the logic of one choice over another, often questionable.

Some marketers claim that the importance of the naming process is inflated. You ‘fix’ the name as you grow with it. This is the ‘money equalizes all problems’ babble. Some say that your future is determined by your birthright. Nonsense both.

Names are important. They are an outline and language for the future. There is brand sense in the sound of the name even at first blush. Discovering the right name is marketing at a symbolic level. Defining in halftones and creating a shape for an idea and giving that shape a name and the customer something to hold a memory in.

I’ve been creating company and product names throughout my career. I’m back in the name game recently with a number of personal and client projects.

Every naming project is unique. Each one is difficult and inspiring. I’ve never done this well where the vision of team and the company didn’t grow and become more self cognizant during the process.

This time, I decided to poll my networks for new ideas and guidance before I started. Very little came back.

The following thought categories are the ones I created as guidelines, very minor epiphanies that made the process more intelligent and focused, and seemingly less random.

All names are not created equal, but none are great at inception.

Some names are really clever right off. Some just sound right. But all of them are somewhat meaningless and devoid of impact until you give them legs and the market embraces them as an icon for your company’s value.

We forget that the names on our Bookmark Bar–Google, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Skype—are anything but overnight successes. We’ve been working with them for years. We know what they stand for, when to use them and for what.

They aren’t perfect now, any more than I bet they felt perfect back when. Just today, our history with them gives them meaning. They just work.

Compare these name brands with any group of cool start-up names. The best of the new are sassy and compelling, flexible shells awaiting gravitas from our experience with them.

The difference between, say Tumblr and a great name like Jig is just that–years of exposure, gazillions of link shares, billions of personal experiences from a global population. Tumblr has evolved into a brand; Jig is just a name.

Names do really matter even before they mean anything.

How valuable is your company name before it becomes an icon for what your product and your company stand for?

I think, very valuable.

We need symbols and words to wrap our ideas around. That name is the first piece of language that articulates what your company could be. Try pitching without it.

I’m a believer in words as maps for ideas and guidelines for creativity. Names to me are a visualized idea, a synthesized composite that you layer with meaning over time.

You need to be comfortable without reservation, putting your heart and soul behind what the name represents in a word. The initial word on the slide to gather your first early community around it, find funding and establish partnerships.

It’s a giant step towards articulating and in some ways defining the future.

You can’t outsource the process of self-discovery.

This is not a popular idea.

I believe that no one can tell you who you are or what the core of your company is about.

You can hire someone with naming chops to help tease the vision out of you and into a name that works. It’s a hard process and having a pro as your partner can help. But ultimately, their job is to find voice for what you believe. They can’t find the vision for you.

My advice is to listen to everyone, internalize, then decide yourself. This is not a democratic process.

You are the one who will sweat it into meaning through endless conversations, pitches, interviews and decisions. Your opinion is the one that matters.

This is important stuff to find the time to make right. Do it with a partner as needed but make this process your own.

What you call yourself, what you do and where you live are the same.

We are not choosing a name as much as drawing a map of connections to being found by our future customers and the place where community will be built. We are in a sense, also designing the first word of a new language of expression.

The compromise between the sense in the sound of the word that we love and the availability (and cost) of the URL is always uneasy.

The flexibility of having more than .com at your disposal is however, a creative gift from today’s social web.

If you are building a destination site, the .com designation still seems to have meaning to the mass market. A straw poll of my marketing networks came back unanimous on this.

If the activity is centered around ‘me’, and mobile, then each of us is their own center of the connecting social net. Then .com seems wrong and .me may be a strong contender.

If the service is a verb, an action, then .it as in ‘name.it’ makes sense. Domains are a new global language with very few rules. We have immense freedom to craft new language structures as long as we are not cute for cute’s sake and forget about how this will play with the customer.

With mobile devices as the new desktop, you need to rethink how important correct spelling really is. We download an app once, use it forever. Think about whether you will live in a app-based world or one where typing in your URL will be commonplace. Being remembered as a sound may be the most important criteria.

Naming is an exercise in compromise. I find that the more puzzle pieces I have to play with, the better the result.

And of course, core company value will trump everything else. Having a great name to build that value around is a huge asset.

The domain name moat.

The web world is incessantly changing and domain strategies are in a constant state of flux. A number of entrepreneurs I spoke with are targeting a .com, .it, .me, and sometimes, .tv moat strategy.

The idea is to lock in a destination site .com, a mobile .me,  an action .it and video, .tv domain family. It is a broad idea, hard to accomplish, but worth considering.

Some names really do suck and win anyway.

del.icio.us is the best example of a terrible name for a great service that was hugely successful.

I use the product incessantly and always misspell it.  It has no sound and sense logic to me. No real connection to anything.

But delicious rocked my world when I adopted it for my bookmarking platform. I’m still using it today.

The sound and sense puzzle

I needed some way to parse the infinite naming possibilities and tackle this process conceptually.

The sound and sense puzzle stack was my solution:

• The literal layer. Names that describe what you do as a verb (foodspotting, blogger, drynks) or as a place or noun (think Cartoon Network). Great for known brands. Good for keyword based traffic strategies.
• The metaphorical layer. Names that exemplify what your brand is about. Tumblr, Flickr, Stumbleupon, Re-Vinyl, maybe even Twitter, all jump to mind. These are all the rage and create some killer names.
• The meta layer. The interface as a defining behavior. Think of games, like Doodle Jump. Concepts wrapped up as reflex actions.
• The Sound before sense layer. Names that just sound right. Seemingly random and unconnected in any tangible way. Yelp and Jig are examples.

There are as many of these layers as there are different ways of thinking about your brand. Moving these puzzle pieces around can make the universe of choices more manageable.

I went through this naming process a bunch of years ago when I started my blogs. I came up with some cool names for my social web and wine blogs that are still cool today, but filed away (for now)

.

At the end, I chose what it is today: arnoldwaldstein.com.

No symbology. Hard to spell. No sound over sense. Nothing meta. Only myself as the brand and the container to build a community of discussion around.

I am what I sell and this container is the most flexible and fits like it’s mine.

It just feels right and for naming and building a brand, that’s the most important thing.

I spend my professional hours meeting with entrepreneurs, consulting on projects and advising at a board level to companies across a deep band of online commerce and community, market development and branding.

It’s taken me a career of experiences to be effective advising executives and stepping in as a leader with impromptu teams. It’s a delicate poise between listening and advice, directing and doing, jumping in and stepping back.

With my work, I have vested interest in the success of my clients. Pride. Friendship. Re-upping the work. Equity. I win when they do.

Mentoring is a completely different ballgame.

The process and the end result are unique unto themselves.

This summer, I worked as a mentor to newquill, a band of four, super-sharp thinkers out of the Annenberg Lab in Los Angeles: Michael Morgan, Ryan Harper, Robert Harkness and Chi Qi.

They were accepted into the Startl educational program in partnership with the Dreamit venture incubator in NYC. I worked with them there.

Dreamit as an organization is a well-honed incubator. It has its own cadre of professional advisors and mentors. Legal, accounting, equity pool advice, market segmentation are all available for the start-ups. The professional mentors and advisors provide the core knowledge base that the teams need. Smart, experienced, tough and empirical in their advice.

My role was different.

I came in through a friend whose son was one of the team. They got to know me and my ideas first through my blog.

I was blown away by their diverse backgrounds, raw energy and talent. And as an English major, their visceral connection to literature, language and understanding of ideas like ‘marginalia’ as common metaphors for learning made it a no-brainer for me to volunteer my time.

“Friday sessions with Arnold” happened over a few months at the Dreamit workspace and random coffee shops.

The sessions were focused (and often intellectually exhilarating) brainstorms to find direction over learning behaviors, market dynamics, product design, business models, clarity in communications, market discovery, and getting focused and prepped for the incubator-ending Dreamit funding pitch.

Newquill originally started with the idea of collaborative elementary and middle school education on the iPad. Shared marginalia in a controlled and creative process to bring dynamics to the learning process was the starting vision.

The team had a core belief in disrupting education through storytelling. Significant expertise in ePub3 and HTML5. And a flexible, dogged determinism. They dreamed a new vision of education.

That’s not where they ended.

Limited market sizing of the iPad in public education prompted a shift. A huge one.

Nine weeks later in an almost Incredible Hulk-like pivot they emerged as Re-Vinyl.it. A merchandising and fan platform with serious potential to disrupt music merchandising and band/fan communities for the music industry.

Look at the final pitch video here. It’s clear and inspiring. This is also where to get to know the team members.

David Cohen recently posted the Mentor Manifesto. He lists what it means to be a pro mentor and what you need to pay attention to.

For me though, the learnings are more focused and personal.

Mentorship is commitment with no investment in the company’s success. Doing a great job challenging and encouraging them was my intent and payback.

The long view is my domain. The team was in their early 20s, less time than I’ve been working in my career. But my goal was not to get them to the goal post. Far from it. My role was to guide them on a path not yet determined. If we found a runway, to help them to make it their own

When I started, I thought of mentorship simply as giving back. Sharing my knowledge and passion for the social web with those who were equally inspired but with less real-world business, marketing and product experience.

Certainly, this is about sharing knowledge to a new generation of entrepreneurs, but this is a two-way path with value moving in both directions.

The exuberance of this team inspired me (and themselves daily). They were learning machines, gobbling up new technical languages and approaches daily, naturally. Change was par for the course to them, exhilarating yet rarely debilitating.

I never said to the team–“This is what I would do”. I often said–‘think of it this way’ or ‘that doesn’t work for me’ or ‘there is a huge difference between what you are thinking and saying and what people are seeing and hearing’.

And most surprisingly, I found myself pushing them back to their core passions and belief. They had so many inputs. So many talented people giving them good advice that it daunts…and I think it can dull.

I believe that passion is more important than preparation or professionalism. And that core entrepreneurial beliefs often trump established logic or business models. I took it as my role to channel that passion back to the center.

I also learned a lot about ePub and HTML5. They learned from my experiences and thinking about how to create something unique for a mobile, social, always connected population. And how to discover a market for it.

As a team and as the sum total of all of the mentors, Re-Vinyl was created.

Passions. Wisdom. Knowledge from experience all are important. The way they get mixed up together as a creative team discovery process is key. Especially in a mentorship relationship.

I relished this experience. I learned a lot. I challenged and was challenged. It was fun.

The team did as well.

And when I look at the pitch video ( Re-Vinyl Pitch ) and see ideas and direction, phrases and graphics that grew out of our Friday sessions. I’m super satisfied.

The Re-Vinyl team are out looking for funding now. If you are interested, please contact the CEO, Michael Morgan at michaellawrencemorgan@gmail.com.

I hope (and I’m nudging them) that they keep at it and find the funds to take Re-Vinyl to market. They already have a few bands signed. The idea is a good one. The team is wondrously diverse.

These guys have the juice and I expect to see Re-Vinyl live and one of the change agents in the reinvention of the music industry.

For me, I’m certain that mentorship will be part of what I do from now on out.

Community is both an aspirational goal and a pragmatic design element for building businesses and brands.

I came on this belief early.

I remember walking into the noisy and overheated BBS room at Atari Inc., my first marketing job some 25 years ago and seeing the frenetic flashing lights on the servers that housed the 2M+ members of the Atari User Group.

I was instantly struck…and inspired…that this is what marketing was all about.

Many user groups, developer organizations, open source communities, vertical market places and niche communities of interest later, I believe this more than ever.

The power of today’s social web lies not in counting likes or taking twisted paths to measure reputation, but in the evolution of social behaviors that these new platforms give expression to and the possibilities of creating infinite variations on the theme of community and commerce.

Everything certainly has changed.

Today, we don’t need web traffic as much as engagement. Nor contextual search as much as connections and community. Nor certainly new measurement systems or influence scales.

We simply need to connect with customers and build common value and brand trust. Not simple to do certainly but this is the new (and true) business mantra for today’s world.

Marketing, at its best is the architect of this and bridges company value with customer need. It is all about channeling people and communities, no longer simply clicks and traffic.

These are not just easy phrases but business realities.

I look to community as a broad avenue into the intersection of consumer behavior and business intent. It’s a directed goal to create early momentum or overcome later business inertia. It’s always served me well. It’s more powerful and utilitarian today than every before.

Community though is an idea of engagement that finds itself in many guises.

Whether you are figuring out how to attract the first group of early users for a marketplace. Or creating a platform for people to share ideas around fashion or wine or travel. Or building a fan base for your restaurant or non-profit organization. Or designing a flash communities built around a transaction or check in.

Starting with community as the social (and business) dynamic is a always a natural place to begin. It’s a chess game of people and value and product with group behavior as the game board.

Community as an ideal is rarely obtainable. It’s pure social magic at its best. As a sieve for finding customer connections, it rarely fails.

This is not new news of course.

The idea of the Interest Graph is a proxy for communities of interest. This grew out of the discontent about the friendship graph being too nebulous, too friend based and too noisy to be useful. Friendship is simply a bad filter. One-to-many is a poor design compared to the natural many-to-many that community can offer.

Social web thinkers have been evangelizing context and curation as the pathway to make all of this powerful social data actionable. Myself included. And certainly ‘Context not content is king” and “Context is a better filter than friendship to filter the social web’ are true to a point.

But neither are the end game.

You can keep connecting and reconnecting, sharing and pushing everything forward, but at the end, it’s like two lines streaming towards the horizon but never connecting.

Context is a step, community is where the lines intersect.

There are as many definitions as there are bloggers as what the next step for the social web and commerce and marketing will be.

Some call this smart commerce. Many speak to the connection between data and action. Most all see it as a algorhythmic parsing of the world of social inputs. A leap beyond explicit requests to implicit suggestions in an off/online continuum. A mash up of real-time, geo-aware, mobile and cloud-fed breadcrumbs for every part of our lives.

These are all correct but simply directional. To me, they are outlining a community-centered era with true social commerce and marketplaces to follow.

This is a both a pragmatic reaction to both the possibilities and the frustrations of the social graph and just a basic behavioral drive towards people aggregating naturally around shared passions and interests.

At the intersection of web and social evolution, we’ve moved from the commerce of clicks to social nets of friends to what will become a landscape of communities of interest as dynamic filters and aggregators. Commerce will be the spinoff, the exhaust of community not the reason for it.

The drive for specific connections and the dynamic power of the underlying connectors of the web is creating a network of vertical interests. A new slant on the power of the niche.

Not just a sports community but specifically kayaking or rock climbing. Not travel but adventure or wine or philanthropic travel. Not deserts but raw deserts. Not restaurant referral platforms but a useable local reality in all locales.

When you add global and mobile and real-time to this equation, there is almost no niche community that can’t have membership group that is too small to still be dynamic and viable. You can build a quorum base for a community across a global population for almost any area of interest.

This web of connected communities is centered around the individual. The customer. It’s a graph of ‘me’ connecting to a variety of ‘us’ communities. Rather than a big bland platform, we will be a member of many communities all connecting back to me and spreading out in a molecular social pattern. Like people and societies in our daily lives.

This ecosystem of communities is somewhat of an analog to what Fred Wilson refers to as ‘communities of engaged users’. An investment thesis that is the corollary to my market and brand building musings.

You can extrapolate this further and break down all the old channel constructs around business-to-business and business-to-consumer models. It’s all about Cs, about customers and now community. People migrating and connecting into groups around interests.

This also ameliorates one of the large disconnects for brands in a social world. They can stop struggling to be a person to their customers and find (sponsor and lead) communities of interest around connected topics. Yoga info exchanges and courses for yoga apparel makers. Developer communities for open source platform vendors. Sports medicine for athletic product manufactures.

This is an oversimplification of course.

But an opening direction. A first volley of how community, so powered and powerful on the social web is a metaphor and behavioral roadmap for business design. It’s a design thesis, not a prescription or a list of to dos.

From my first experience at Atari with the BBS community, through tectonic technological change, the core value and power of community holds…in fact, has increased.

Take people online or off, let them gravitate freely towards their interests, build a dynamic gathering place and provide leadership. Conversation and common ground and community and commerce may just happen.

The give and take between explicit requests and implicitly inferred assumptions is the natural state of how we live.

Offline we don’t really think about this.

Face-to-face with family, friends and tight-knit interest groups we accept that serendipity just happens, more often than we expect. The sum of explicit and implicit requests and assumptions is what make human dynamics what it is.

This dynamic is also the core DNA of community, online and off.

Given the right environment, this interplay of explicit demands providing keys to implicit inferences just surfaces naturally. This is why community works and very much why it matters.

As marketers and business owners, this is key to what we do and why community dynamics are both marketing goals and a gauge of the health of a growing business.

This is a simple and basic truth, yet bears repeating.

Great companies learn from what our customers ask for explicitly and listen hard to what they infer implicitly. This listening is a core competency of marketing and business development, interpersonal and inter-customer communications.

This is true not only of companies built on the ‘network effect’ of spiraling interconnected customer growth, but all business that gather their customers around each other, and themselves, to continually recreate their market dynamics.

Yet, as marketers, we spend a lot of time reconceptualizing the value of community. It’s a never-ending process. A healthy discussion certainly but ultimately a conclusion you need to accept without pure data as proof.

The exploded focus on what is referred to as the ‘implicit graph’ and the power of implicit data over the last few months has by default shined a brightened light on the value of community. What the curation segment and social networks call the implicit graph has no greater proof point than the dynamics of a successful online community.

Community is the sandbox for the power of implicit connections and test bed for how to use that data.

This is what a community platform like Disqus, the socialization around video in Google+ Hangouts, the inference-based connecting power of Foursquare and personalization of Hunch are all getting at.

Community is hard to make happen. But the pieces that marketers move around in social design are the people themselves. We resift the sand in the sandbox till it works.

In social communities online and off, implicit connections are a function of human behaviors, encapsulated in conversations.

On social nets the behavior become data. The networks need to collect and sort through an ever-growing matrix of social data and algorithmically connect implicit input to explicit inferences.

There is a core connection between the gestalt of community and the data driven power of the implicit graph as a tool for social discovery. This started to come together for me last month when I participated in two workshops around “Social Discovery and the Implicit Graph.” Eric Friedman from Foursquare wrote a post on the workshops that is worth a read.

They were group brainstorms organized and led by Disqus, Hunch, Foursquare, StumbleUpon and Tumblr. Each of these companies has a business interest in figuring out how to drive implicit recommendations that are personalized for each individual over time.

Nothing was decided. Much was discussed. The standing room only crowd was inspiring.

The following from the conversation stuck with me:

-People expect the benefits of implicit suggestions on their social nets.

It’s not creepy that Foursquare should suggest things that we want to do when we are somewhere in NYC, it’s what check in-apps should be doing.

Having to explicitly ask for everything we want is both unnatural and boring. It belies the value of connecting and the power of the networks themselves.

People want to get suggestions on what they want without asking for them.

-People expect companies and brands to know them personally and implicitly.

Each of us invests time in sharing our thoughts forward and chronicling our lives as they happen online. This is public information and companies have access to this.

Translated…there is a market for Hunch in my opinion, big time.

-People want implicit discovery as a personal tool.

Search is not enough. Inferred info streams ala Facebook news feeds are not adequate. People want searchable context and companies like Disqus with the implicit data of 50M commenters in their database that can provide enormous value for discovery. The market appears to want it. I certainly do.

When I think about Foursquare in this context, what they are really doing is creating a social, inference-based platform that creates micro-flash communities on demand, one implicitly value-based connection after another, check in by check in.

You can build an analogous map for StumbleUpon, Tumblr and Hunch.

This is very cool stuff. Powerful, heady and just plain hard to do. A bold attempt to build social consciousness into artificial intelligence, code-driven algorithm that spits out time sensitive, personalized implicit suggestions.

I think this is still all about community.

Community works, my bet is that the implicit graph will also.