Sunday, February 11, 2007
Community Next Reactions
As I type this, my wife and I are still in San Francisco. We’ve had about enough of parking on hills in the rain and are heading down the coast back to flat Long Beach, where the parking spaces stretch far as the eye can see and rain sends people scattering in terror.
Here I’m going to extrapolate a few commonalities from yesterday’s Community Next conference. The presentations fell under a few general categories:
The monetization discussions were helpful on a practical level. In contrast, the product demos were probably the least memorable because they were so similar, and all seemed to work off the MySpace idea but with a niche community. The exceptions to this rule were device-based software/sites such as Jingl and Loopt. Generally I found the more freeform discussions the most interesting because they offered a greater variety of perspectives and ideas. The ones I tuned in for centered around one or more topics:
The 4-person panel in the first half was excellent, even under time constraints; Hiten Shah, Matt Roche, Mike Jones, and Joe Hurd responded to audience questions with concise and resourceful suggestions. Hurd in particular had helpful comments about the use of advertisements to monetize (there’s that word again) online video.
The presenters leading off from lunch were in my opinion the strongest: Jake McKee (Big in Japan), Heather Luttrell (Indieclick), and Fred Stutzman (UNC/Unit Structures). McKee is best known for his work at Lego, but these days consults at Big in Japan. Luttrell brought her experience in a successful online advertising company, Indieclick. Her powerpoint was compelling, as were honest answer to questions such as (paraphrased) “how many monthly hits do you need to have a service such as Indieclick consider me as a client?” (answer: in the ballpark of 2 million) Improved transparency among professionals is ultimately not desirable under most circumstances, but it’s what people flock to conferences for to get that edge.
Stutzman is a Ph.D student at UNC who has contributed heavily to the (surprisingly scant) quantitative research on social networking online. Although he focuses on Facebook many of his ideas, such as “social objects,” can be extrapolated to other online communities. He was also one of the only people to question how many more golden eggs the online community goose can lay – the elephant in the corner of this whole discussion. After all, how many more niche audience websites can the world support?
Here I’m going to extrapolate a few commonalities from yesterday’s Community Next conference. The presentations fell under a few general categories:
- Simple, practical suggestions for increasing monetization
- Product demos & histories
- More freeform discussions of online communities
The monetization discussions were helpful on a practical level. In contrast, the product demos were probably the least memorable because they were so similar, and all seemed to work off the MySpace idea but with a niche community. The exceptions to this rule were device-based software/sites such as Jingl and Loopt. Generally I found the more freeform discussions the most interesting because they offered a greater variety of perspectives and ideas. The ones I tuned in for centered around one or more topics:
- Increasing user experience
- Authenticity
- Involvement
- Niche audiences
- Monetization (this must have been a buzz word because it is shorter and sounds better than “make your online business profitable”)
- Device-based development (cell phones, PDAs, etc.)
- Branding and other marketing concerns
The 4-person panel in the first half was excellent, even under time constraints; Hiten Shah, Matt Roche, Mike Jones, and Joe Hurd responded to audience questions with concise and resourceful suggestions. Hurd in particular had helpful comments about the use of advertisements to monetize (there’s that word again) online video.
The presenters leading off from lunch were in my opinion the strongest: Jake McKee (Big in Japan), Heather Luttrell (Indieclick), and Fred Stutzman (UNC/Unit Structures). McKee is best known for his work at Lego, but these days consults at Big in Japan. Luttrell brought her experience in a successful online advertising company, Indieclick. Her powerpoint was compelling, as were honest answer to questions such as (paraphrased) “how many monthly hits do you need to have a service such as Indieclick consider me as a client?” (answer: in the ballpark of 2 million) Improved transparency among professionals is ultimately not desirable under most circumstances, but it’s what people flock to conferences for to get that edge.
Stutzman is a Ph.D student at UNC who has contributed heavily to the (surprisingly scant) quantitative research on social networking online. Although he focuses on Facebook many of his ideas, such as “social objects,” can be extrapolated to other online communities. He was also one of the only people to question how many more golden eggs the online community goose can lay – the elephant in the corner of this whole discussion. After all, how many more niche audience websites can the world support?
Labels: online networking social communitynext
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Thanks for the write up. That's interesting about the demos cause some people said those were the highlights. I appreciate you coming and hope you had a great time!
Noah
Community Next
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Noah
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