• Some of you said, “Well, of course you did. That’s where people go for food reviews.”
• Some of you said, “What’s yelp?” and maybe clicked the link.
• Some of you said, “Oh yeahhhhhh, Yelp. I haven’t used that in a while.”

This post isn’t specifically about Yelp. It’s about the side streets of the Internet. Yelp is my example of this. It could be any site that you’ve not visited in a while.

But my point is this: there are tons of hidden communities all over the Internet. When I talk to marketers about finding new potential buyers, this is what’s on my mind. Because we’re learning to grow bigger ears, and we understand how to follow along with a Twitter search, but there are still plump, ripe, juicy hidden communities that are of value to you and your interests.

Though this is more easily explained for business-to-consumer, this actually points out an opportunity to business-to-business sellers: if there’s not a hidden community, maybe you could make them one.

A Checklist for The Side Streets

• Ask yourself weekly how you’re growing your community base, or your prospect base, or both.
• Ask yourself right afterwards where you haven’t thought of as a good place to explore that’s not the normal places?
• Take 30-40 minutes investigating a few places that you’ve forgotten about (Yahoogroups? eBay? Craigslist?)
• Learn and understand their norms (how they interact in this space, so that you don’t step on any sand castles)
• See if there isn’t some non-spammy crossover way to interact with that community and introduce yourself.
• Do something to bring value to this community that could potentially lead to new business.
• Repeat

Opportunity Is Everywhere

On days when I’m feeling pessimistic, a line like that would make me crazy/angry. On most days, I feel surprised by how many people waste calories complaining or blogging negatively or griping on Twitter when they could be building opportunity for their projects or businesses.

Know who taught me that in spades? The moms I met at the Disney Social Media Moms event in Orlando. People like Molly Gold, and Sarah Pinnix, and sisters Susan and Janice from 5 Minutes for Mom. They look for opportunity and work on ways to improve their business. There are tons more like these.

We can all find opportunity in these side streets. I hear about new ones every few days in Third Tribe Marketing, the private marketing community I started with Brian and Darren and Sonia.

Where are the side streets taking you?

Note: the picture above isn’t where I ate. It’s just a creative commons photo of a cafe.
Photo credit vmiramontes

It’s amazing what we do when the half hour seems free or extra. Instead of just throwing it away, here’s a list of things you could do instead that might improve your business relationships.

If You Have an Extra Half Hour

Perform a few of the following tasks.

1. Write two recommendations on LinkedIn for people’s work you can vouch for.
2. Read and comment on five blog posts(especially if they’re up-and-coming bloggers vs the pros).
3. Go to search.twitter.com, put in a few topics you’re interested in, and comment on a few conversations.
4. Go to Alltop.com and discover some new blogs in a category that matters to you.
5. Read and Stumble a few good blog posts. Share them on Twitter and Facebook, too.
6. Write a list of blog topics to come up with in coming weeks.
7. Reply to the five oldest emails in your inbox. See if any of the replies would be better as blog posts to help more people.
8. Investigate two new websites or technologies that might or might not impact your work.
9. Teach one person you know about something you know about social media.
10. What would you add?

You probably have a few more ideas for what to do with a half hour. Let’s list them here.

Photo credit lepiaf.geo

We ask people all the time how they’re doing, and rarely do we really want the deep story. But when we’re among people who care, when we’re among people who know about us, or people like us, then things change a bit. Right?

There are languages we use with these different communities. If I’m talking with Star Trek folks, I can talk about red shirts and they’ll smirk appropriately. If I talk to business people about company valuations, they know what’s what. My Dad talks poker so well that I have to ask him to educate me on the phrases from time to time, but then I can use that language when I talk with other poker folks.

There are ways we react and treat each other. In skateboarding communities, scars and scrapes are treasures to talk about. Failure is all part of learning to them. In San Francisco startup culture, failure’s a badge, too. But in New England, we treat things a bit more cautiously.

One thing’s for certain: you can’t fake community, and you can’t force it, either.

Just because I just bought the Panasonic DMC-LX3K (amazon link) doesn’t immediately mean that I want to join a community for that particular camera. But then, if I do, it’s hopefully to talk with other enthusiasts who are then going to encourage me or grow my skillset or provide some other value.

We don’t just join communities because we like a product or service or thing. We gather around people who feel what we feel, and we share passion for things that bring us some sense of pleasure or joy, or even healing.

Where are your communities? Where do you belong? What do you get from there? And finally, what would you tell the company who seeks to participate in a community with you?

photo credit wili_hybrid

In. That’s the powerful word. It helped Red Hat earn a billion dollars while they gave away free software for a living. Yep, Red Hat is free (most of it, anyhow). They’re a billion dollar – B-billion dollar – company who gives their product away for free, and the way they power this growth and success is by being in communities. They don’t own communities. They’re in them.

Other Words of Power

Us.
We.
Our.

But only if you mean “one of us” and “we of the ____ community” and “our community’s ideas.”

Communities do have leaders, but that’s not always you. Communities have active participants. That one, you can do.

A simple post, but ask yourself this: would the senior team at your company accept this?

Once, at an event in late 2005, the CEO of a very up-and-coming company met me at a conference. I shook his hand and told him how much I loved his company, and how his efforts had really changed the way I looked at the tech space, and media making in general. He sniffed, said thanks, and asked what I do. I didn’t have a great answer at the time, and he sniffed again, and moved on, not that interested in me. I remember how much it bothered me, that I’d given him a very warm compliment and that he responded coldly. (This could happen online without either of us knowing it, but in this case, it was face to face, and he could’ve been a lot more polite.)

Two years later, his company was sold for pennies on the dollar and I was deep into my own career. He knew my name by now, knew what I represented, and found himself needing my support for a project that was important to him. I smiled briefly at the request, and then, I did what I would always do: I offered to help.

This one can’t be faked. This one isn’t something that many companies can pull off. This whole idea, that communities are powerful, either is or isn’t at the core of your belief system. And I know within a few sentences of talking community with people what side of the fence they’re on. Some see “community” as synonymous with “group I can milk for my profits.” I know about you, too.

But oh, the people who live for community, the ones who know that the human-shaped web is much more powerful in the longer run than any technology out there today, those are the ones to watch. If you run across someone who feels that strongly about community, and who knows what to do with those feelings (because remember: execution is everything), make friends, build a relationship at once, and work forward into what you can do together.

Community is at the very core of everything I’ve done successfully since I started. Every time I find a way to involve a circle and then grow that circle, I learn another way that people can win over systems. I learn of other currencies of exchange (like bartering) that convey with them much more than just a simple transaction (what’s the difference between doing a favor vs paying for a service?).

And community is also not a lot of things. It’s not static. It’s not single-minded. It’s not an unending resource. It’s not self-sustaining. It’s not orderly.

Think about this. Decide whether your projects and your goals and your worldview revolve around community (or more realistically, many communities) and then whether you understand how to work with that force for your own goals and aspirations. Is community part of your vocabulary? Is it in your blood? And how will you interact with the systems and forces that make a community?

Oh, and thank you for being part of this community. It matters to me. YOU matter to me.

Now here’s the thing: if this person knows most of these people in the room, he or she suddenly has an equation to work out FAST: should he or she introduce you, and if so, how will he or she do so? What’s the appropriate level of social capital that will become exchanged in the process? Does he or she endorse you, or just know you?

This is difficult in the face-to-face world, but it’s even harder online.

Let’s look at LinkedIn: officially, the service suggests that you have a strong professional relationship with everyone you connect with on the service. I disagree. I’m a promiscuous connector. I invite people to connect with me on LinkedIn via Twitter all the time. The reason is this: I don’t consider friending (the act of adding a connection to you on a social network) the same as endorsement.

How I’m Managing This

I like to friend with people on social networks. I don’t consider these connections as automatic endorsement. Instead, I feel like a phone company employee, threading up new connections, building new dialtone, so that you can reach out to me in different ways.

On services like LinkedIn, I will connect with anyone, but I will only write recommendations for people whose professional work I can vouch for myself in some capacity. To me, this is a matter of how much of my reputation I’m willing to extend to the other person.

During a recent conversation, someone said to me, “I just follow who you follow on Twitter.” I said, “Oh no! That’s not necessarily a good idea. For a long time, I used a tool to follow back anyone who followed me, because it was easier than manually parsing through the multiple requests.” The person didn’t realize that a “friending” or “following” did not equal an endorsement of that person. Or at least, that’s not my interpretation.

How YOU Might Interpret Friending, Endorsement, and Reputation

First, don’t get caught up on the term “friend.” It’s just what the software calls the connection between two people. Most reasonable humans realize that the word doesn’t exactly mean the same thing as it does in the face-to-face world. And let’s just use the word “friend” to mean “connect with people on a social platform” and accept that there are somewhat different terms on all the networks.

Now, some ideas:

• Friend people you find interesting.
• Friend your customers.
• Friend your prospects.
• Friend your competitors (why not?)
• Search for friends based on interest (easy on Twitter, by using Twitter Search.
• Unfriend spammers.
• Unfriend folks who bother you.
• Unfriend people who talk too much if they’re swamping your stream. (I swamp people often.)

Endorsement and Reputation

Your reputation is one of the biggest assets you have, especially in this online space. Endorsing someone in any fashion is a withdrawal from your own reputational store with others. Meaning, if you vouch for someone and that person turns out to be not as respectable or reliable or civil as you originally thought, and this is all experienced by others in your various circles, your reputation (potentially) takes a hit for the other person’s efforts.

If the person you recommend turns out to be a stellar performer who really delivers for the people you referred her to, then your reputation for being a connector adds interest back into your account.

Gambling in the online reputation space is not a good recommendation.

So, what happens when someone who you list as a “friend” seeks out a recommendation or endorsement?

• Thank them for asking.
• Write a very brief and simple note that explains your position on referrals and endorsements.
• Sample: I’m very thankful that you connected for a recommendation, and I appreciate the opportunity. I have some very tight rules about who I recommend online, and I just don’t feel comfortable endorsing you, as I don’t know enough about your work history or your reliability. You’re probably amazing, but I can’t provide my recommendation at this time. I’m sorry.
• If they press for more, it’s your choice whether you want to open up and provide constructive feedback, or whether you want to simply restate your statements above.

Your Take

I’m curious what experiences you’ve had with this, and what it means to you, this whole friend situation.

Has your mileage varied? Do you have any questions from examples that have happened to you or a friend?

Let’s open this up and talk about it.

Photo credit C.C. Chapman

I’ve been listening to the Collision Course (amazon link) mashup album with Linkin Park and Jay-Z so much that it’s become something of an obsession. There are lots of reasons. One, I like the music. Two, I appreciate the mastery of the collaboration. Three, there’s this Mike Shinoda moment that I love so much that it makes my heart pop every time. I have to share that with you.

That Moment of Love

I met Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park very briefly at Blog World Expo, and at the time, I didn’t really have much to say. I mean, I like their music, but I didn’t know what to say. What a waste. Because now, after watching this a million times, I want to ask him about this moment at the end of “Izzo / In the End” :

Look at that love. Look at the feeling he exudes here. Mike has this attitude throughout the video.

When I started watching the videos, I was studying Jay-Z. Thanks to Justin, I have this appreciation for Jay’s business acumen and his drive. But now, I think I want to be Mike. No doubt, Jay-Z feels love for his audience, but Mike exudes it.

I feel that kind of love when I’m around the other people I’ve met coming up in new media. I love Chris Penn and C.C. Chapman and Julien Smith and a gazillion other people I’ve met along the way. I need to keep that in mind. I need to keep that feeling in my heart. Because otherwise? I’m just doing work.

In another post some time soon, I’ll write about how Tim Sanders demonstrates this kind of love.

For now, hats off to you, Mike. I want that moment.

Get the music and the DVD here:

My favorite part is when Brad Pitt and Edward Norton start shifting from just fighting into putting together a nationwide (international?) presence. Wherever you see a black eye or a missing tooth, it’s someone involved with Fight Club, and they all treat each other a little more special than they do the general public, because they’re in something together. It’s a movement of sorts, and that’s what author Chuck Palahniuk was exploring at some parts: how group activities for men have changed (evaporated!) in more recent years.

Here’s the thing: in some ways, what we’ve got going with social media feels like that secret club. It feels like we’re part of something.

The guy in the picture is Steve Wright, VP of marketing (or something like that) up at Jay Peak Resort in Vermont. When he caught some of my tweets that I was in the area, he dropped me a line and said I should swing by for a ride on their tram, and a little lunch.

Steve was so friendly, and so kind, and the ride in the tram (up 4000-ish feet into the heavy clouds hugging the mountain) was a blast. Lunch was very kid-friendly (important to parents on the road), and it was just a fun, unplanned adventure.

The Secret Fight Club

Basketball professional and businessman Shaquille O’Neal ( @the_real_shaq on Twitter) tweeted this message out famously many months back: “To all twitterers , if u c me n public come say hi, we r not the same we r from twitteronia, we connect.” Other celebrities like MC Hammer are so real that when you finally meet and spend time with them (I’ve hung out briefly at TechCrunch40 and also at CES in Vegas), they’re just as human as anyone else.

Podcasters and bloggers regularly reach out and do great things for each other. They share expenses to attend conferences. My friend, Zane Aveton famously tweeted her way into a ride and lodging to attend SXSW this past March.

This is really astounding, if you think about it, the amount of good will that we pass around in this space. And it’s not relegated to “big names,” whatever that means any more. It’s everyone. People DO things for each other in this space. They give first and give often.

(That last part is the secret sauce: fail to give and you’ll find yourself in a karmic imbalance that usually corrects itself quite obviously.)

I, for one, am always excited about it. I love contributing in my own special ways to the secret fight club. I love giving to causes, helping raise for other causes, and finding ways to get more and more people into jobs that build this space up.

Are You Part of the Secret Fight Club?

Think about it. Are you giving to the secret fight club? Are you building small powerful networks? Are you helping others find work, or sharing whatever your professional cool offering is? Are you the Adam Wallace or Brian Simpson of your organization, offering a plate of free bacon at the bar?

It’s SO easy, so rewarding, and a hell of a lot of fun. Join in.

What’s your contribution?

The Secret Bonus Round

(I added this in after the first push of the post, so folks who only get one RSS copy might not even SEE this.)

What if YOU started something that identifies you as part of the SFC? What if YOU figured out a way to pass around the symbol, such that others knew you were contributing? Maybe it doesn’t have to be as explicit, but then again, wouldn’t a secret signal, sign, symbol, whatever, be cool?

Blog some ideas, and let’s pass this “secretfightclub” tag and idea around a bit. Cool?

It’s okay to want an audience. When we’re trying to build awareness, we want an audience. We create things to get people’s attention. For some, the creation is advertising. For others, it’s face to face events. For others, it’s content (like this blog post). If you’re clever, you create in a variety of formats.

This builds audience. Audiences are those folks who gather to hear what you have to say. But that’s not a community.

The difference between an audience and a community is which direction the chairs are pointing.

A community looks to each other to sustain the relationship and some of the interactions. Communities don’t gather without a purpose, and so building an audience that you then convert into a community is certainly one method to get that experience going, but it doesn’t just happen.

Community happens when people feel they’re among like-minded others and when they feel their contributions matter. I consider myself part of the podcasting and media making community. I feel an affinity through PodCamp. Other groups of podcasters and media makers exist as well. I’m thrilled to be attending and participating in Podcasters Across Borders.

You can have community around products if everyone feels empowered through using them. I could see people gathering around Flip video cameras, for instance, insofar as talking about creative ways to use them. Will that work for all products? I don’t think so.

But again, if all you’re hoping to achieve through building community is to sell more products, that might not be the best way to consider the problem. Communities don’t sell product. Communities empower users of products or services, or people with like-minded interests to interact.

Communities Do Have Leaders

And yes, it can be a standalone focal leader, or maybe it can be a diversified bunch of leaders across various slices of the pie. For instance, US President Barack Obama’s campaign for election (and most campaigns) paid great care and courtesy to local leaders. Each area’s leaders were empowered, were given the reins, were given the sense that they controlled the passion for change that the larger campaign wanted to own as a message.

Is the leader always directly related to the larger movement? No, not always.

Gary Vaynerchuk has quite an active and passionate community around wine. He doesn’t make himself out to be the wine guy. He simply pushes a strong opinion forward and serves his community, who then has their own opinion on everything except for the fact that they all love Gary.

Never be afraid to be the community’s leader. Just be sure you’ve earned it. If you’re the product or service’s maker, and you’re trying to build a community around that, you might not be the leader. It might be your most passionate users/customers/clients.

Communities and Audiences Want Something

You have to feed the system to keep either an audience or a community alive. If the band doesn’t come out to play, the fans don’t stick around for too long. If the band doesn’t engage the crowd, you feel a bit more like an audience. Think about the difference between The Grateful Dead and Britney Spears.

At the bare minimum, audiences want recognition that the leader or focal point is grateful for their interaction. At the most, a community wants to own the experience every bit as much as they can. This is important to consider.

**Update: Due to Kathy Sierra and several others reminding me of a missed point, I’ll add something in.

A large percentage of people come to the community to absorb the rewards of that community without contributing back in. Meaning, for every million people reading Wikipedia, there are only 10 or so editing and adding to it. The same is true with many communities. Charlene Li talked about this in her slides from the Forrester days with regards to the ladder of participation. Meaning: some people come to the community to set up their chairs like an audience.

The difference between an audience and a community is which direction the chairs are pointing.

What say you, people that I call the community? What do people need to do to engage you? How do you move from being part of the audience, or just a customer into being part of a community? Is it always necessary?

She has started a tribe. What I’m excited about is how some new technologies (and some that we’ve already been using) will enable even more useful interactions. I’m particularly excited by what Nine Inch Nails have done (more below).

Last week, I saw community building in Detroit. The week before, I was at the heart of it in Southern California. In all of these places, little tribes formed around thoughtful leaders. They are intentional communities. Seth taught me a bit about the leader’s role in all this. In fact, while reading the advanced copy of Tribes on the side of a lake while my daughter took swim lessons, I read the part where Seth told us that all tribes needed a leader. It was the subtitle of the book, actually: “we need you to lead us.”

True story: when the point Seth was making sank in, I emailed him and said something very much like, “You bastard. You’ve just explained several of my own personal failures of the last few years.” He did.

The thing was, I was trying to build autonomous communities, where I felt they could run themselves. I tried it with several of my projects starting in 2006. I’d build something, get a bunch of people excited, and try to let it go to the wild. Every time, it would falter almost at once, no matter how passionate people were. Transferring ownership was never the same as finding a leader. (Again, nothing bad about the people involved, and everything bad about my inability to understand this point).

What’s Next: nin:access

I am blown away by nin:access, the iPhone application for Nine Inch Nails fans. On the surface, it’s not immediately obvious why it’s sexy. Here’s what they say about it:

• Exchange messages and photos with other NIN fans in your neighborhood and around the world

• Access NIN news, photos, custom wallpapers, and your nin.com inbox

Here’s a few screen captures:

Look at that second one. Location-based. It is a listing (opt-in) of fans of Nine Inch Nails geographically, so that you can, should you wish, connect up with other fans in an area. (Yes, I know that the example text isn’t all that enlightened, but think beyond what you see.)

You Can Have It All

Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails have it figured out. Empower fan-to-fan interaction. They’ve had that with their message boards, with their nin.com mail service, with all their other actions over the last years. But with the location-enabled iPhone app, it just feels even more super powered.

You can do this, too. There’s not a lot of super high end tech in what they did (not dissing NIN). It’s just good marketing for a great community. Not ready to plunk down some money on an iPhone app that will do this? You could always use BrightKite as a starting point to understanding what it’ll do for you. (If you want to build an iPhone app that does this, I could get that done for you.)

Location plus peer-to-peer interactions = a huge win.

A Quick Community Checklist

What if you’re Siobhan Bulfin or someone else looking to empower a little community of intent? What would be a way to do it? Here’s a quick little roadmap that might be useful:

• Name the Community Something Inclusive. (In the case of Nine Inch Nails, they’ve self-selected to gather around the band. Sometimes, it’s not as easy to make it about a product or company. Find a name that folks feel like they can own, something they can put on a flag of their own and hoist high (if that makes sense).
• Buy the URL for that name or something close.
• Make sure you understand the value to your prospective members for joining the community. Are you an information-sharing site, a business networking group, a creativity group? What are the ways in which everyone will be able to participate and contribute? What’s the “fire” that you’re gathering around? ( This is the “Channels vs. Communities argument that Stephen Saber makes.)
• Start with a simple Ning community, if you expect your group to be fairly small and if you don’t need high end power community tools.
• Put up a Flickr group so that there’s a place to put community photos.
• Think up a few meaningful tags that people can apply to any media, should they want to write about your group, the events, whatever as it relates.
• Start an email list by asking folks to opt in. Email marketing is still very successful in building community and driving relations. If you want everyone to have the ability to mail the group, consider using a simple service like YahooGroups for people to opt into to receive messages.
• Would a location-based tool like BrightKite be useful?
• Should you hold Tweetups?
• Do people want to publish a shared list of users on other social services, like Twitter and/or LinkedIn?
• Find ways to deliver value.
• Find ways to deliver more value.
• Find ways to encourage participation (another blog post in its own right).
• Find ways to gather the tribe around your various issues of interest.
• Find ways to facilitate peer-to-peer sharing, as well as member-driven media making.
• Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

I’m encouraged by the “nin:access” application released by Nine Inch Nails. It points towards another way to enable communities of passion. I think there’s great value in building around these ideas, and that there’s much more to be done here in this space.

What’s your take? Does the above list help? What other elements have you built into your community building?