Power to the People in Online Communities

Soon, a small group of us will celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the birth of the first public-access ISP in Asia. The ISP was the result of the Twics online community in Tokyo, Japan. In mid-September of 1993, Tim Burress connected a VAX VMS system in Tokyo to the public Internet and in doing so, brought a vibrant community of hundreds of people online to the world. Oh, and what a world it was, a freewheeling frontier of cyberspace being built by the most interesting people in the world moving at the speed of a rocket.

Although it is true that the real action was happening in the United States and that most of the Internet innovation at the time sprang out of the US networks, it is also true the the work of small organizations like Twics was critical to make the Internet a truly global network, not one that was isolated to the US and some research posts in Europe. With the ubiquity of the global Internet today, its hard to imagine that at one point, countries were very much isolated from each other with groups of people that were not able to communicate easily with people in other countries. The global spread of the Internet was a dream. It was a dream of a global community of people. The slogan of Twics, the first public-access ISP in Japan, didn't relate to networks, performance or connectivity. The slogan was, "The People are the system."

I remember talking to people like Jeff Shapard of PSINet, John Savageau of Sprint, and Nori Nishigaya of Cyber Technologies about the dream of a global online community, a place where people could freely share information. In many ways, we could say that the dream has blossomed. People are sharing information freely, across country boundaries, with little regard to race, age, gender, or experience. People in the community are judged on the power of their ideas.

The creation of information has moved from a centralized group of publishers to the thousands of people in the community. In many cases, government censorship has eroded in the course of a decade.

There seems to a grand proliferation of new tools for social networking that appear to me to be tools to foster online communities. However, I'm an old-school online community evangelist and I wonder if I'm viewing the world through a biased eye. When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I still hang out on brainstorms run by Howard Rheingold and team. I still think back to the days when he was writing the book The Virtual Community. I still get excited, raise my voice, and make wild gestures with my arms when talking about the changes to society driven by the new freedom all people connected to the Internet have found of being able to express thoughts and ideas.

I still believe, as I always have for the last 15 years, that the time of the online community is now.

What do you think?

Social Media and Measurement

I feel a common bond with my chiropractor. We're both in a profession with a bad rap. There's a lot of information out on the Internet about how bad chiropractors are. There's also quite a bit of negative baggage with the PR profession. One of my favorite films is Days of Wine and Roses, a movie that tells the story of Joe Clay, a San Francisco PR man with ethical struggles and a drinking problem.

Personally, I think that both my chiropractor and me are doing a great job. He documents the pains that go away and I count clips. We're using metrics to show the value of our work, something that Joe Clay in the movie wanted to do, but was never allowed to.

I think that Joe would have liked social media. It's all about metrics. This is something I didn't understand until a few months ago. Social media tools are like a dream come to reality for marketers. Unlike traditional advertisements or story placements, social media tools can provide clear metrics for media consumption. While traditional advertising and PR relies on number of placements and reach of circulation, social media tools rely on actual views.

YouTube videos have a number of metrics that can be counted. The most important metric is video views. Subscription, number of raters, rating and various responses can also be measured. Views on Blogger can be analyzed in great detail by integrating Google Analytics into the blog template. Twitter subscriptions can be counted and there is a ton of information on each invidual subscriber by going to their Twitter feed.

The tools of social media all come with great ways to measure metrics. This doesn't mean that social media is better than advertising or traditional print and online PR. It does mean that it is easier to show the value of a piece of work to skeptical people. This is something that not only Joe Clay, but also my chiropractor would appreciate.

IPOs Plummet as Venture Capitalists Cry

IPOs are plummeting and the venture capital community is whining about a crisis in the capital market. There were no IPO's in Q2 of 2008, the big goose egg. There were only five IPO's in Q1 of 2008, still grim.



The National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) even issued a press release to make it clear that we're in a crisis. I say, "we," because I view our type of PR business as a supporting service of venture capital ecosystem. Ultimately, a lack of IPO's has got to hurt PR companies, right?

Well yes, but we haven't felt it yet. The demand for PR services in Silicon Valley remains strong. I'm not just pounding the chest here. It appears that PR agencies in general, our esteemed competitors included, are expanding and doing well. Is this the last hurrah before the fall? Somehow, it just doesn't feel that way. I've watched technology cycles in Silicon Valley for 20 years. There are always the predictors of gloom at the end of each cycle, the bust after the boom. Somehow, people just keep working and inventing cool technologies.

To me, it's the most exciting time in Silicon Valley in the past five years. I see real applications of technology, not just the vision. There are a gazillion, real and valuable services and apps in the cloud. Every day there seems to be more.

I think that the slack in the IPOs is due to the changing taste of people for IPO investment. People want real businesses to invest in, not just vision. All that energy that went into painting grandiose visions is being put into usable products, not slideware.

A shout out to my friends in the VC community, don't cry, the party will be raging in the second half of 2009.

Social Media Business Growth

Thinking of joining the wave of businesses offering social media services? It's still early days, which could be a good sign for social media surfers searching for uncrowded career spots to claim as their own. This could be the career equivalent of buy low and sell high. Time spent now developing social media skills and a personal brand might lead to big returns in the future.

A quick look at revenue numbers shows that the leading firms are in the $5 to $10M range in annual revenue, a small fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars that traditional PR firms can make.

Of the companies listed above, Shift Communications, FutureWorks, and Voce have the strongest focus on social media. Although the numbers are small, they are growing rapidly and are significant enough to prove that viable businesses can be built around social media.



Interested in riding the social media wave? Contact me.

Dawn Patrol in Capitola

I paddled out to the surf at Capitola at dawn, still dark, before the sun peeked above the horizon. The ocean surface was glassy. There were only two guys out surfing, trading waves and engaged in the light conversation of the line-up that allowed anyone to leave the talk without having to acknowledge a goodbye. Flocks of seabird, pelicans and commorants, skimmed the surface of the water in graceful formations, The waves were good.

Ocean waves are started by storms far out to sea that create dips and peaks in the ocean surface that we can swells. The swells travel hundreds of miles before reaching shore and transforming into waves.

As a public relations man, I often think about waves of communication, trends in the public interest that ebb and flow, seemingly random like the waves breaking at Capitola, but often generated by events distant in both time and place. Each event or action by an organization creates a ripple in the stream of public communication. Like a pebble thrown into a pond, the actions of organizations expand out in concentric circles, interfering with and adding to the millions of other actions out there.

I watch waves for hours while sitting on my surfboard, waiting for the good waves that I can launch myself into. I watch them with fascination and intesity. I also watch the interaction of media events, the technologies that sometimes change the world, and above all the great people that make for fascinating stories.

In my job as a partner at a Silicon Valley PR, I've been trying to catch the new wave of Social Media. I've been paddling hard, taking videos, using Twitter, and experimenting with blogs. I've yet to get in the groove and be able to nurse the wave for all its worth.

I've started to watch the new Social Media waves and intend to catch and successfully ride my fair share. I'm hoping that you'll decide to come along for the ride.