Gestures are the body language of the web.

The equivalent of the power of a glance. The roll of an eye. The shrug of a shoulder. The accents to talking and the rhythm to our words.

Facebook understood this early. They built a platform that encapsulated gestures as expressions through liking and sharing. Pure utterances of ‘yes’ around objects, mostly photos. Or cheerleading causes.

Brilliant actually. But their promise was bigger.

They understood the power of gestures as a dataset of engagement itself. As a variant of language.

The act of liking across the sweep of your interests was a funnel for personal information. The data fed the implicit social inference engine that personalized your news feed, hand delivered you ads and recommended people you should meet.

I buy into this idea of an implicitly road-mapped future completely– but it’s gone very stale.

Maybe there’s just too much noise but I think the problem goes deeper. Facebook’s taxonomy of gestures were too light and the data too devoid of context to really matter. The brevity of the expression isn’t the issue, it’s the limitation and core inflexibility of the gestures themselves.

The act of being liked today, to me, feels like a generational secret handshake from the past. Facebook is showing cracks and hints of mortality as the gestures themselves are trivialized and outdated.

My friend William Mougayar (@wmougayar), CEO of Engagio wrote a post this week on gestures as the lighter end of the hierarchy of engagement syntax on the web. It’s a great read. He sees the Facebook Like and a 1000-comment thread as the opposite ends of the engagement scale.

This is true certainly, but what’s true today for gestures may well be different tomorrow. Gestures as  the body language of the social web are being reinvented as a key part of language with import, not just exclamations of core emotions.

Our canvas of gestures today, mostly Likes, thumbs up and emoticons, as cute as they are, are just too simple for the complexity of emotions and thoughts we need to express. New gestures are needed.

At a basic level, Disqus’s new Beta software is a step in this direction. The removal of ‘likes’, replacing them with ‘voting up’ comments within a conversation string, addresses this head on.  It brings context to the gesture and makes the individual utterance part of a community action to vote rather than simply a back slap. It seems to be working.

Broader, more strategic strokes are looming in at least three areas.

1. Sharing 2.0

Mark Slater, CEO of Getabl talks about ‘Sharing 1.0” as the commoditizing of sharing as a gesture. When it becomes ubiquitous and simply a reflex, it is trivialized. Both less viral and less data viable. This is reality today.

My sense is that Sharing 2.0, will roll action and transactions into shares and links. Gestures, like shared links, will become social objects with transactions embedded. This could be the missing (transactional) link to  the idea of social commerce.

It’s easy to imagine a shared commercial object, like an article of clothing from an apparel brand, being transactable wherever it is clicked. A shared gesture as commercial object redefining the idea of what channel means for retail. The store will simply be wherever the object is shared.

2. Gestures as shorthand for a language of engagement

Limited input devices, like mobile, will no longer restrict either the richness of the data captured or the value of the output.

I believe that within a few years, a natural Morse code will surface as a mobile syntax of the future. Just because the input is micro-sized doesn’t mean the conversation or engagement should be lessened.

The idea of big data pools driving implicitly driven lifestyles from a population using mobile devices feels imaginable and concrete.

3. Horizontal networks will stop masquerading as contextual communities

The old truism in marketing is that whenever you go from a general to a specific you usually fail. Those of us who have engineered brand and product line extensions know this to be true.

The dearth of context on the horizontal social graph, the thinness of gesturing as a language and the transactionless nature of Facebook specifically, have pushed the emergence of niche communities of interests and marketplaces like Etsy, Ravelry, even Wattpad. More are coming.

My belief is that as mobile-base gestures are devised, communities that are mobile first, that exist wherever you are will begin to develop.

This is all about technology catching up with human behavior.

In real life, gestures are key to communications.

Great communicators, sales people and performers are as much artists of presentation as of content. Watching a movie without sound or people on the street in a different country tells this story well.

The crux of this stems from the reality that the web is about people. Not people online in some virtual world. Just people with extended behaviors from everyday life.

The more the on and offline borders blur, the more true this becomes. And the more there is a pent up need for companies and apps to crack the gesturing code.

This is not an idea in search of a market. I think very much a market in need of an means of expression.

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!

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.