It was good timing. I'll agree with that. Thanks for listening to my demo!

[...] LiveBlog: What’s Wrong with the White Label Social Networking Industry? The funny thing with unconferences is you never know what subjects the crowd is going to come up with. Jeremiah Owyang came up with a very polite version of the session title, which originally was “are social platforms shit?” (tags: software business socialnetworking SocialNetworks whitelabel enterprise2.0 socialmedia socialnetwork) [...]

Quality of the service, price/quality of the goods, portions of the goods, wine selection, overall atmosphere, location and ease of parking, placement of the clientele (Odorfific Car Mechanics not near the Suits). time to wait, cleanliness of restrooms, general politeness of the staff, following instructions and cooking to your preferences, having a certain ‘brand’ universally liked (i.e. corn feed Midwestern quality beef over leather chew-toy West Coast beef). But even if the restaurant does everything right, having some crying kid at the next table can ruin it all. Like everything in life, it’s complex, and differing for every person, fingerprints really.

By recognising a value chain for information, companies compete on different aspects in the chain which currently in the web economy are lumped as one – the generation of what a consumers interests are, where that data is stored, the application of those interests to a catalog of products – are all different functions that different companies provide.

So it’s not so much about stealing unique information for a restaurant, as it is having access to it. That restaurant with the recipe doesn’t lose anything by sharing your preferences, because it makes its money on the quality of the service – a different stage in the chain.

[1] http://liako.biz/2008/05/the-value-chain-for-information/

Glad to have the old Chris back, the one I prefer, you’ve always got a place here bud

If you force it’s creation, it’s not even real. Just make great products, let the community take care of itself, planned economies never work out well, history is filled with such examples.

So you know Chris’s background, he’s my online version of Triumph the Insult Dog. A former colleague of mine, he’s a nice guy in person.

Online however, he loves to stir it up as a troublemaker.

http://www.ddmcd.com/managing-technology/theres-nothing-wrong-with-the-social-networking-industry-tha.html

But how long will that take, and what do we do in the meantime?

But then again, as my wife walks past me and says, “Oh God, are you on the computer again?” I remember that I, web surfing, Web 2.0 loving, marketing strategist AM NOT the majority.

The average person doesn’t spend their time running around online joining a bunch of communities.

Exceptions to every rule.

But on topic, you can’t apply vague generic solutions, for something that really needs to be internally customized, as the law of unintended consequences is always king, and then, add in a lack of results and no real effective metrics, companies will just end up throwing money away at whatever is the hot buzz of the moment. Flipping a coin would work just as well.

It’s very hard for someone trying to sell software to tell a customer that they aren’t prepared to buy it.

If you can’t make it easy or workable enough for them, you aren’t prepared to SELL it. Don’t make the software fit your needs and then go all blame-the-customer, you-aren’t-ready.

I’m not really impressed by any of the commenters.

This space really is in its infancy. We are watching the evolution of how we all become part of and expand our own ‘communities’.

Those who understand and are able to commit the non-technical resources to community success are successful today and will continue to be in the future.

This is about people.

And on the business side, it is about metrics and ROI. Marketers love the digital channel because it is measurable…digital communities and conversations are too.

My sense is we interact with a wide range of real communities on a daily basis: work, personal, private (on the micro level) and: HOA, City, etc. (on the macro level). But, in general we don’t necessarily feel exhausted from these interactions.

Or maybe we do.

My questions:
Is Community Fatigue a symptom of a larger real world fatigue? Is it manufactured through poor information architecture and bad user experience? Or is it simply a function of far to many choices and ways to split our online focus?

Community Fatigue –I think thats the big big big huge issue. Thanks for saying it Julie. Us early SM adopters are feeling it now, it will be felt by the rest within 1-2 years. I’d love to know what SN platforms builders think about this topic.

[...] analyst Jeremiah Owyang has a recap of a panel yesterday on what’s wrong with white-label social networking industry. Other players in the [...]

I think it says a lot about the state/stage of the industry that most of participants would make that assumption. It tells me that we are still at an early stage where most people in the space are idealists. Social media’s Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have yet to show up (or show their colors, if they’re already there).

Combining Metcalfe’s Law (the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes) with the notion of Community Fatigue cited by Julie Gomoll, I’d think we’ll end up with a few big winners and many also-rans. That’s similar to any maturing market.