The Paradox of Social Business

Let’s say you have a business idea that involves building a community.  (Think Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or, more recently, Foursquare.)

To succeed, your idea must attract an audience, but the type of audience your idea will attract is self-selecting based upon the idea itself.  This means you’re not really building a community; you’re simply providing a service to a specific group of users most likely to need it.

Therefore, your paradox is this:

In order to “build” your community, you actually have to be discovered by an existing community… who will ultimately reject you once you succeed.

Allow me to explain.

When Is Success Not Really Success?

A community-driven site works best when a lot of people are using it.

This year’s SXSW seemed to be an ideal breeding ground for Foursquare, but as Mark Hopkins explains, Foursquare’s success for 10 days in Austin may be more of an aberration than a proof of concept.

In Austin, everyone had smartphones, and everyone was interested in finding everyone else who was also in Austin during those 10 days.  As Jeff Pulver noted, Foursquare and Gowalla became the tools of choice for that task, not Facebook or Twitter.

But apart from tech-heavy conferences, where else is Foursquare likely to find huge throngs of target users, all needing to use their service on a regular basis?

They’re not.

But if they can keep enough of those users talking about their service while they add broader value, they may survive long enough to attract the kind of wider audience that actually pays the bills.

If You Build It, Scoble Will Come

When Foursquare debuted, Robert Scoble bought into it.  And because Scoble is hugely influential within the tech and social media communities, his acolytes followed suit.

Getting Scoble’s attention was key.  Without him, Foursquare’s adoption rate would be an even steeper challenge.

But getting Scoble’s attention also triggered a certain domino effect, in that the next wave(s) of adopters were all people who are, generally speaking:

• Familiar with social media
• Smartphone multitaskers
• Endless oversharers

Target audience?  Yes.

Representative of a larger community?  Not necessarily.

The only people who voraciously embrace social media are the media.

The only people who live and die by their mobile devices are businesspeople on the go.

And the only people besides social media practitioners who share this much information about themselves on a daily basis are teens, and there’s a built-in legal bias against teens sharing their GPS whereabouts publicly.

Thus, while hooking Scoble’s audience was an early boon for Foursquare, it also means that the users most responsible for growing the platform will be using it differently than most “normal” people would.

Isn’t that counter-productive?

Only if it’s unprofitable.

The Bottom Line

Users won’t use a community site if there’s no community there.

By default, the early adopters have a disproportionate amount of control over the future growth of the site, in terms of direction, aesthetics and meaning, than they would with a product or service whose value is self-evident.

So: your community-based business needs to attract the best possible early adopters.

You’ll want to empower them… as long as they’re empowered to build your community in a direction that you feel comfortable managing and which you believe will be profitable.

And, if possible, you may want to include them personally in your growth plans — perhaps not as literal partners, but certainly in terms of rewarding them for helping your site achieve liftoff.

For example: years ago, a vocal group of Twitter dissenters nearly abandoned the platform entirely and switched to Jaiku.  Had Jaiku managed to pry the Scobles and Brogans away from Twitter 3 years ago, and kept them away, the web might look very different today.

And Yet, Here’s the Irony…

If you’re good at what you do, your enclave of social media users will eventually raise the profile of your service to the status of being “news-worthy” to the general public, or to actual celebrities.  That’s when CNN, Ashton Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey will take notice, and encourage their own audiences to jump in.

And that’s when your service stands a chance of becoming profitable, rather than burning through investor capital while catering to a small group of vocal early adopters.

But once the mainstream arrives, your service will change by necessity, both to meet the needs of new users and to scale in support of their increased demands on your system.

And that’s when your early adopters will start moving on, looking for the next undiscovered country (or service) where they can congregate, explore, tinker and empire-build, all without the notoriety that comes with being “mainstream” — which is what you, the business owner, are ultimately pursuing in the first place.

Welcome to life on the Internet, where everybody uses everybody, as long as someone else is paying to keep the lights on.

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Tags: audience, Business, Foursquare, networking, perception, Social Media, Sociology