How does the genetics look that makes it desirable for others to help you help each other build a successful online and offline catalytic community with the potential for shared revenue?
In our personal experience with developing communities, offline first and now online, we found one of the biggest hurdles people have with the internet is the “comfortable” factor. A large percentage of Americans and first world Europeans are comfortable using the web, but even these individuals are not power users. A very, very small percentage of the rest of the world are even using the web and some never heard of the internet.
For some of the latest Internet stats – follow this link
What is the challenges here? I see three:
- Get people connected
- Help people to feel comfortable on your Internet
- The challenge of the Catalytic Flow
The TOC
- Get people connected
- Help people to feel comfortable on your internet
- The push model
- Catalytic Flow
- The YouTube factor
- The genertics of a perfect catalytic community
- Useful links for futher reading
Get people connected
Luckily, there are great people and organizations out there working hard to make this a reality. We collaborate with Joy Tang from the Onevillage Foundation; she is one of our links into this world of global players. Locally, in South Africa, we are developing a program called Ebio to achieve the “comfortable connection” goal in our local communities. We hope to reach 12 million households over the next years. We develop with people like Prof. Kroon from the Northwest University and we get advice from different and diverse group. We are in the process of building a community around the Ebio and Treetops projects at TreeTopSouthAfrica.com, please let me know if you want to join this community to stay up to date. Because we are still developing, I do not advice signing up for a profile just yet, but we will keep you up to date.
Help people feel comfortable on your internet
I use the phrase “Your Internet” because I feel if I do not see it as my Internet, how will I add my positive to this infant world of words and links and videos and soon virtual interactivity. The Internet belongs to everybody. If everybody do not take responsibility for what they add to this everyspace we will continue to feed a very cripple beautiful monster. When we decide to take responsibility for what we add to our Internet, we will give the warmth to help a stunningly beautiful monster hatch. Some create the space for participation, others help to grow the space, how do we make it a good, easy, profitable, fun and positive space? Read this article by Joshua Porter – he does seem to have his finger on the pulse of the Social stuff 
The catalytic flow
I am not going to talk in detail too much detail on this topic. I plan on writing more about this in future posts. The gist of the matter is that if you have the ability to facilitate catalytic flow between big bodies or network – let’s go way out and suggest you were able to find the magic golden thread between Google and Facebook, as Christina suggests in her article, what would you call this flow that is created? As I suggest later, such a community or flow or whatever you want to call it cannot belong to a single entity. More on this topic later.
The push model
Make it desirable and anybody will participate. Even better, help a person earn money for participation or save money participating and it is easy to facilitate flow. This is a push model, creating small nudges to make it easy and clear how to participate. With Ebio, we are developing towards a model where participation will save money, possibly earn money and open access to job opportunities among a list of value add possibilities.
Take for example the new website – Yuwie (the link goes via my profile) Andrew Visagie sent me the site very recently and I have not had time to build a real profile yet, but have a look at it. The site owners promise you participation in the money flow for every page-view. This is model could work, they are definitely not the first, Squidoo and many others follow the same basic model. The problem with this model is you have to advertise your poor visitors to death! The main earning potential for these types of communities are advertising. As always, it is easy to see the problems with what already exist and comment on that, but I did not develop and sponsor the project, thank you very much to all those that develop and try new ideas and projects, you have my respect and admiration.
My all-consuming question is “How does the genetics look that makes it desirable for others to help you help each other build a successful online and offline catalytic community with the potential for shared revenue?”
My definition of success in this case:
- Draw people with a quality mindset
- Create a space with clear value-add boundaries
- Add amazing, clear, clean value to your mutual visitors
- Earn money and share the money
- Do not smother visitors in advertising (None if possible)
I would prefer to have zero advertising on such a community. Creating a self-contained flow of “advertising” for those that participate, I know such a model has obvious and big challenges. As we ask the questions, we move closer to answers, out of complixity slowly shifting into simplicity and application…
The YouTube factor
Do not forget the fact that we humans are rather lazy… Most do not like to read, we like to watch and listen. We like the road of least resistance to reach the end-goal. Why do you think YouTube is such a hit? The thing they did right was to make it very easy for people to participate, to vote, to comment and to add their own videos for scrutiny – it feels good and is fun. It is just a sad thing that so many people on YouTube are just venting personal frustration on perfectly lovely videos, using bad language and the like, but that is a whole-nother bundle of complexity looking for simplicity! Some more reading – Facebook is the next Google (unless they mess up) – Christina Wodtke – I do not agree with some of what is said in the article, but it is a very interesting read.
What would be the genetics of the “perfect” catalytic community?
- Quality minded people
- Constant participation
- Revenue flow
- Quality, focused content
- Conversation and Humor (not “jokes” humor)
- Easy interface
- Feel-good environment
- Personal growth for collaborators
- Clear boundaries and control
- Community belongs to collaborators, everybody’s business
I am positive the list can be very long, but these are the most important factors from personal experience.
This article is a work in progress; I do not mean to suggest answers, but to create flow towards answers.
What do you think?
Some useful links:
Ebio – Communicate and be Productive
Elegant Hack – Christina Wodtke
