A Minnow on a Mission

Recently Franny Armstrong, director of the superb climate change documentary Age of Stupid, announced that she was flying to the States:

Three hours sleep, then I’m off to conquer America… Yes, I am feeling suitably guilty that I will be setting foot in my first aeroplane in two years (the last being to film that scene where Jeh the Indian airline dude is flying the simulator at Airbus HQ).

It’s a common dilemma, especially as practically everything we do in our fossil-fuel powered world contributes to climate change.  Other pro-environment thought leaders such as Al Gore, Prince Charles and President Obama have been accused of being hypocrites for flying around the world telling others to take action on climate change.

The rational opinion is probably to turn a blind eye, because their personal CO2 footprint is small when compared to the amount by which they are (presumably) reducing society’s emissions as a whole.  But that’s a tough pill to swallow emotionally.  It’s difficult to sit in the audience and be told about the dangers of runaway climate change, when the speaker has just flown there to tell you it.

Here’s my response to Franny:

Thousands of people have good reasons to fly across the world.  Births.  Marriages.  Funerals.  Things that nobody would like to miss, yet the pressures of other commitments make it hard to take a couple of weeks out to take the boat.

I understand your dilemma and honestly feel sorry about the barrage of personal hate mail you must be receiving right now.  But the truth is that whether you like it or not, you are now something of a role model for the rest of us.  If you can find excuses to fly, so can we.

A painful dilemma, I agree - and you’ve taken the rational decision.  But don’t think it doesn’t make the rest of us sick to watch you do it.

Although the book opens with a gripping and slightly unusual tale of how a lost phone was recovered through the power of social media, the vast majority of the examples cited in “Here Comes Everybody” are significantly more mundane.  This is a good thing.  Instead of proposing some abstract and fantastic theory that you’d struggle to bring back down to earth, Clay Shirky simply finds the common thread in lots of everyday online communities you’re already familiar with, like YouTube, Flickr and Wikipedia.

In short, that common thread is “ridiculously easy group forming”.  Forming groups on the internet is a lot more like the spotaneous crowds that form in the street when something interesting happens.  Or indeed, the audience at Clay Shirky’s recent talk at LSE (audio recording) who themselves were a fascinating cross-section of London’s digerati.  On the internet, becoming part of a group is so easy that you might not even realise you’re in one - think about tagging your photos on Flickr for example.

That’s all very interesting, you might think, but not exactly life-changing.  Actually it is.  Companies, he argues, exist as a way of remunerating employees without having to constantly negotiate contract terms as you would have to if everyone worked freelance.  This is termed the “transaction cost”.  Online communities are able to reduce the transaction costs to practically zero, meaning that great things can be achieved through relatively small contributions from thousands of people who care - as we’ve seen with Open Source software and Wikipedia, for example.

Although it’s an easy read and distinctly unsensational, I’d recommend this book, because Shirky manages to put his finger on exactly why and how the Internet revolution is happening, and how virtually every profession will become amateurised.  Now all we have to do is figure out how to pay the rent.

I guess that “Smart Start-ups” is a good example of what you get if you ask an entrepreneur to write a book.  It’s a mess.  David Silver starts with loosely connected essays sharing his thoughts about online communities, littered with unwarranted superlatives and fundamental misunderstandings about Internet technologies. Towards the end, the book turns into a mishmash collection of random business ideas.  His wild predictions  about how much money can be made by starting an Internet forum almost makes me believe that David Silver is experiencing the .com bubble seven years after the rest of us watched it burst.

I’m particularly sceptical of his repeated assertion that people are prepared to pay membership fees for online communities. I think that many of us expect now to be able to communicate online free of charge, and it’s likely to be hard to persuade us to stump up any significant membership fee. I think the only online community I have ever paid a membership fee for is Flickr. I think the major factors in persuading me to subscribe were that I could get sufficiently involved in the community using a free account, and also that the subscription fee gave me additional storage space, something that is perceived to have a real, non-marginal cost. Lastly, it’s only $25 per annum, which won’t exactly break the bank.

That said, there are some valid ideas hidden within this chaotic mess of a book that I’d like to pick out and share with you.

This book talks quite a bit about the relationship between a community’s founders and its users. I agree with him that many people are more willing to trust seemingly honest amateurs than dehumanised corporate brands. That’s something to keep in mind when staring wide-eyed at the likes of Google or Facebook -  they try quite hard to keep that fresh entrepreneurial image, but in truth we all know that they’re multi-billion-dollar corporations now, mining your data to give you ever more personalised advertising.

Silver recommends wearing old clothes, not getting your hair cut too often and not shouting too loud about your achievements, particularly financial ones. Looking too successful makes you seem less needy, so your community will support you less and your competitors will pay more attention. Other good ideas for building your community’s loyalty include giving members unexpected rewards and listening to their feedback.

He also highlights how people enjoy telling stories.  This got me thinking about how some of my projects could be re-framed as storytelling, instead of the more transactional approach that tends to develop as a result of software design.

In conclusion,  I think that David Silver underestimates the amount by which the Internet changes everything.  Some of his suggested revenue streams seem viable, for example those that have  physical elements (e.g. a user group meeting) or time investment (e.g. a new feature).  People don’t want to pay to be members of online communities, and levying a subscription charge risks harming the network effect that makes these online communities useful in the first place.

It’s not going to be easy to make money from online communities, and the only sensible approach seems to be to try to eek out little money wherever you can. There will certainly be opportunity for plenty of financially sustainable online communities, but it’d be foolish to think that there are  fortunes to be made wherever you look.