Reply to Philipp von Plato’s email where he asks how he can improve his elitist social networking site called Inter Nations

Back in 2004 when Eric Wachtmeister started asmallworld.net he was onto something unbelievably powerful. He founded an elitist invitation only online community. I was lucky enough to join it in 2005 and at the time it really was amazing (not that I am very elite btw) – people were sharing information and building networks within networks like crazy. It did not take very long before other communities copied this phenomenon in order to get their share of the pie. Schwarze karte in Germany, Internations – the list goes on and on.

Then came facebook – open to everyone and soon you realized that it was all happening there…it is by no means elitist, but you as user choose who you want to share information with and who not. So that takes the ‘elitist’ part out of the equation. It is no longer some selected people within the community who chooses who is elite enough to get to you, but users themselves who choose who in their eyes is worth (or elite enough) to share information with. On top of that, facebook is just a much better platform from a usability point of view. We’ll get to that later.

Now these ‘elitist social networks’ are all struggling in their own way.
asmallworld sold out a large chunk to the weinstein brothers who wanted to grow the userbase – which results in the community no longer being as elitist as it initially intended. Schwarze karte is a german speaking community – so by default it is doomed in a globalized world (especially as ‘elitist’ people have global networks). Internations were too late at the mill but they have at least taken the step of asking people ‘why do you not use the network?’ in a general email to its users who has not logged in (and opened their emails) over a longer period of time. It is actually that email which made me write this post.

I think it comes down to one simple and easy explanation. Usability and reach.

Usability:

People are lazier than ever before when sitting in front of their computers. Something as simple as a login prompt triggers the thought: ‘what’s my username and password for this again? – oh fuck it – nevermind’ and make people go back to their email platform and one social network they really use and trust (most of the time facebook). The business minded people behind the elitist networks simply don’t understand this and retreat to the desperate mean of getting users back to their community: Emails – Lot’s of emails. ‘What happened this week in the community’ and ‘We now have many new interesting people in your area who joined the network’. BULLSHIT guys – it is just a desperate attempt to re-animate something that is close to death.

Now let’s get to the point of this post. Asmallworld, internations etc were all built by business people telling geeks what to do in order to monetize their platform in one way or another – facebook is the opposite. Geeks building a platform and then asking business people how to monetize it. The key here is that the geeks understand how to use technology and business people often don’t. Sending out more spammy type emails in hope of getting your online community back to life is not the way to go in my eyes.
A social network that has understood how to spread is twitter. It has done so through its application programming interfaces (APIs). Do not think that heavy twitter users go to twitter.com and use the service from there. What the heavy users do, is use software that gives them a great overlook on what is going on. Look at tools like tweetdeck and seesmic. They use social networks’ available APIs to create one tool – through which you manage all their social networking activity – even for multiple profiles.

Reach:

Facebook now has 400 million active accounts. That is a serious reach and you are very likely to find people on there. Again, remember that the elitist part of the equation is out – so people will go to the large network to find people.

That means that the power of an elitist network does not lie in who knows who and who is connected to who – it lies in the discussions and offline activities that you can trigger with the people in your community. If you really want to be elitist then you need to play on that – we are past the bragging of ‘I know this many people’. I am sure many very good discussions and events take place in the elitist communities of which I am a member, but I never get to them as I cannot be bothered to login and start looking for them. On the other hand, if you present them to me in a one tool interface next to my facebook activity, I am much more likely to engage in the content and take part – and thereby re-adding value to the elitist network in question.

Conclusion:

So here it is – create an API so that people can add your social network through ‘one-tool’ applications. Secondly, put more emphasis on making your users discuss with each other as well as use your platform to do off-line things together.

But it sure doesn’t end here. Now it is your job to educate your users on using the one tool. It will be a long and hard process – and definitely not necessarily a successful process – but in my eyes, it is the only thing you can do unless you wish to continue to watch your elitist social network slowly die.