The Facebook story of April 2010 got my tongue wagging:
- What is the value of generalist and bigger than life communities?
- Is Facebook shimmying to the monopoly corner?
- The advertising model #AdMad is broken, what does the right one look like?
- What does this all mean to us 12 months from now?
The enemy of community is noise (some refer to this as a lack of quality)! It happens the moment the community loses its focus, its purpose. Typically wanting to be more to more people or by not keeping focus and quality at the forefront of all they do.
The social landscape has become so big <and fragmented> that I no longer consider myself informed on it all. I recognize that I have two choices: remain a generalist with a shallow knowledge of a whole lot, or pick a corner of the landscape and own it.
Generalist vs. Niche – there is a glaring <and I’d bet, welcome> opportunity here. Drop the 50 different RSS feeds, multiple social alerts and the constant monitoring mode and take five steps back. Scan both the social landscape and the market to find your niche. Is your portfolio diverse but your target customer specific? Or is your product or service niche and your customer base diverse?
If you are already finding your community with too much noise, then you need:
- a plan
- a collaborative approach
- to be OK with your community numbers dropping – giving you less noise and more quality not to mention the ability to attract more likeminded types who are looking for a niche just like yours to embrace.
It’s no surprise to any of us, I’m sure that this year will see a significant increase in niche communities – what I can’t be sure of is how we will make use of the noisy generalist communities in the same time frame.
