Category: Community

Does your business have vision? Do you have a goal for your career beyond stepping up a pre-determined corporate ladder?

Today I want to talk about the difference between having vision, and management.

Last week, I listened to Tim O’Reilly speak at a Publishing Point meetup in New York. He made a point about the need to be a visionary, and used Walt Disney as an example. That one’s business will always do well and adjust to the market if you are following a vision, not just protecting an established business model.

He was speaking to a room of publishers, but I think the point goes well beyond this one industry. For them, focusing on saving the existing book sales process may be a dead end. But if they follow a vision that focuses on writing, knowledge, sharing, and connection – they have a vibrant future regardless of form and business model.

When I was a teenager, I became obsessed with Walt Disney. I read every biography I could find on him, and remember scanning old articles on those horrible microfiche machines. So today, I want to explore the concept of why being a visionary will lead to business success, and do so by recounting a pivotal moment in Walt Disney’s career.

If you have 20 minutes, watch these two videos. They are the second & third parts of a three part series in which Walt Disney explains his plans for the Walt Disney World project in Florida.

Several things to notice:

1. He describes EPCOT as the hub of the entire 27,400 acres. The Magic Kingdom amusement park is shoved into a corner compared to EPCOT.
2. EPCOT as we know it to day is NOTHING like what Walt Disney planned. He envisioned a true working city of the future. Celebration Florida even pales in comparison to what he had in mind.
3. EPCOT stands for Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow
4. He expected 20,000 people to live there, and industries to be centered there, all testing the latest technologies and innovations constantly.

Walt Disney was a visionary. He didn’t create a product, a business model, and then work hard to expand and protect it. He gave that task to managers. He looked at deeper reasons and further into what could be. He was always changing, always evolving, always growing. He pushed the Disney company into new territory.

He started in animation, moved to feature films, to television, to theme parks, and finally envisioned how we lived as a culture via EPCOT. At each step, he challenged us and created something of dramatically higher quality than we had come to expect. Theme parks were usually dirty places prior to his opening Disneyland. He received a great deal of resistance when he decided to open a theme park, people couldn’t imagine why he would want to open a place like that. They had no idea how far his vision went – how it eclipsed what we had come to expect from an amusement park.

Likewise, EPCOT was a bold enterprise – attempting to solve the problems of our cities. He would start from scratch, and build something entirely new. A living blueprint of the future that was always in the state of becoming.

Walt was focused on helping, not on entrenching. On expanding what Disney could do with their resources, not worrying about how to shove another Mickey Mouse doll into people’s lives.

This is how people grow, and ideally, how companies should grow. Not to think of ways to eek out another dollar from their customers, but think of new ways to help – to expand upon what was before, and move into new areas.

In some ways, once Walt Disney passed away, the company stopped growing. Sure, it EXPANDED, taking its intellectual property and expanding it into new markets and new products. They worked to integrate themselves into our lives, but in the same ways they always have. The Disney of today wants to change the way we live by putting a Mickey Mouse logo on everything you own. The Disney from Walt’s era wanted to change the way we live in ways that had nothing to do with cartoon characters.

Walt would have been pushing beyond toys and theme parks and TV shows. The closest comparison I can find today is someone like Richard Branson who is trying to create a consumer space airline. Disney would have been doing similar things – thinking so far beyond our expectations, that he challenges not only us, but his own company. I imagine Richard’s company gets worried when he has a new idea.

Why is Steve Jobs such a success? Because he scares the living daylights out of his own company. He pushes them, challenges them so much further than they ever would have on their own. Inherent in this is risk, and most companies try to avoid that.

Visionaries see the opposite – they see risk in standing still, in not growing. Not just personal risk, or financial risk, but cultural and human risk. That we – as human beings – are at risk when we stand still. We need to grow. It is what we owe our ancestors and future generations.

“Leadership” is a buzzword nowadays. When I say we need visionary leaders, I don’t just mean we need those with ideas to make speeches and motivate others. We need people who will get their hands dirty to build these things as well. That they will be as involved in tactics as well as vision. That you will see them in the mud creating the future for our culture.

Visionaries elevate us. Here’s a simple representation that I came upon while coming into New York City yesterday:

Penn Station, original:

Penn Station, today:

Which elevates us, and which merely manages us?

-Dan

Today I want to share an example of what is possible in building community online, but I also want to consider the limitations of online community. This discussion will be framed within an online community I have been researching recently: the LEGO community, and in particular adult fans of LEGO who collect and build some amazing creations.

LEGO has a thriving community of fans of all ages, and in the past decade, LEGO has really embraced this. The web has been an incredible gift to these fans, and they are now able to share their creations, information about new sets, chat with each other, and purchase rare pieces. I think it’s a great microcosm of what we mean when we talk about online community, so let’s use it for our example here.

But first, I want to share some original LEGO creations by members of the community, to illustrate how detailed and inventive their ideas are:

Unbelievably, this is entirely made out of LEGO.

A scene from the movie Logan’s Run, in LEGO.

A castle.

Star Wars chess set.

But these are just images of THINGS. What is far more interesting is what goes on behind the scenes that drives the interest, passion, and creation of them.

Here is a sampling of the online LEGO community.

Blogs:

• The Brothers Brick
• Gimme Lego
• A Modular Life
• Toys N Bricks

Forums

• ToysNBricks Forum
• Eurobricks Forum
• Tabletown Talk
• Classic Castle Forum

Third-Party Resellers & Marketplaces

• BrickLink
• BrickArms
• BrickForge
• BrickMania

Directories & Groups

• Brickset
• MOCpages
• LUGNET

Flickr

• Dunechaser
• *Nobodycares*
• [PhiMa]
• brickplumber
• Brick By Brick 97

The Strengths of Online Community

• Power is Disseminated Across a Wide Network
  Notice how many links there are above? This is just the tip of the iceberg, there are so many other blogs, websites and individuals in the online LEGO community. No one person or entity makes the rules, creates limitations, chooses direction. This is particularly important in niche markets. In the past, you may have a few magazines that cover a community like this (and there are LEGO magazines), but there is always the chance that they close down or are merged with another magazine, changing the focus. A community can’t go out of business as a media brand would. Now, the “audience” is also the content creators. It is a subtle but powerful shift, and one that cannot be undone.

• The Community is Inclusive
  The LEGO community online knows no boundaries. It is diverse in terms of age, ethnicity, region, and by most any other measure. Clearly, LEGO has a huge following in the US, Europe, and Asia, but that hardly matters anymore – regardless of where you live or who you are, you can now be an active member of the community.

  Because of this, every member of the community comes to understand the worldwide LEGO community, not just their local market. You constantly hear news about international set availability & prices, and I’m always amazed to see original creations from people around the world. It’s so easy to meet someone from across the world, and immediately have a conversation. In a funny way, it tears down boundaries.

• The Community Breeds Acceptance and Validation
  Being able to connect with other fans of LEGO online turns a basement hobby into something that is okay. Instead of being the lone nut in someone’s real-world community who collects LEGO, suddenly there is the realization that there are thousands of these lone nuts all over the world. In fact, this obsession is celebrated and encouraged. Most adult LEGO fans don’t get that in their everyday lives.

• It Expands Creativity of the Form
  Flickr has been a boon to the LEGO world, where people regularly share some amazing creations. For the community as a whole, this helps to push the limits of what one can do with LEGO bricks. It becomes a forum to not just consume, but to create, constantly challenging every member of the community to be more inventive. In the past, I never had any idea how amazing these models could be. With the web, people now have a public gallery – a reason to create and share their own ideas of what to do with the bricks.

• New Art Forms Are Created
  The capabilities of the web expands the uses of the bricks even further – into video and movies. BrickFilms are basically stop motion movies created with LEGO bricks. You can check some out here: BrickFilms.com or with nearly any search of the term LEGO on YouTube.
  Some recreate famous movies, others create their own storylines, scripts and films.

• Online Extends to Offline
  This weekend is an in-person LEGO meetup, BrickCon in Seattle. Here, fans come to share ideas, their creations, and chat, and go shopping. Even though I’ve never been to a LEGO event, I’ve heard tons of people making plans for this event – all because of the online forums and blogs. They are extending the value of in-person events via online means. It’s so easy to coordinate like-minded people, create subgroups, and to publicize events. Here is a list of “collaborative displays” at BrickCon, meaning members have coordinated to each brink smaller sets to combine to make a huge display based on a certain theme.

• It Creates Room for a Secondary Market
  The web has become a big marketplace for LEGO fans to buy and trade pieces and sets. Need 10 of a very particular piece? No problem, go to Bricklink and purchase them from thousands of individual sellers. The LEGO company does sell individual pieces, but they offer a limited selection. When you crowdsource this and create a marketplace, suddenly, every piece ever created is now available for purchase. Likewise, third-party manufacturers have popped up to create new pieces that LEGO hasn’t. One of them is BrickArms, who creates little weapons and accessories for LEGO figures.

• This Expands What the Mothership Can Do
  Because the LEGO community has been so passionate and organized themselves online, the LEGO company is able to learn more about their fans and what to create for them. In the past decade, LEGO has embraced their adult fans, creating some of their largest and most complex sets ever:
  • A 4,200 piece Tower Bridge set for $240
  • A 3,800 piece Star Wars Death Star set for $399
  • A series of modular buildings, each priced at $150 each
• The Community Empowers Every Individual Member
  The information stream in the online LEGO community tends to go from forums to blogs. This is truly bottom up from reports in the field to break news on LEGO set availability, pricing and other LEGO news. You see it happen every week in the forums, something is first reported by one person in a random corner of the world, it is quickly confirmed by other individuals in other corners of the world, and once validated, it makes it’s way across the major LEGO blogs where others can now comment and learn.

These are incredible benefits. But there is a flipside, where the term “community” is stretched to its limits. Let’s explore that as well:

The Limitations of Online Community

• There is No Individual Identity
  In forums and blogs, you don’t know who anyone really is. Everyone has a username and avatar, not a real name and face. This puts some very real barriers up in terms of solidifying a community. People are largely nameless, faceless, ageless and placeless. It’s hard to form real human connections with that.

  Likewise, we learn very little about people’s lives outside of their LEGO hobby. That too limits the connection. We know nothing of their other interests, their job, their friends and family, their life experience. These are the building blocks of relationships.

  If someone stops posting to a forum, they will never be found again. We only knew them as a username, and have no idea where they went. They are ghosts.

  This was really brought home to the LEGO community when one of its members was killed in a car accident:

  Farewell to a Legend: Mourning the passing of Nate “nnenn” Nielson

  No one in the community ever met him in person, it took his wife reaching out to the community to learn of the news. They held a memorial for him online, and later at an in-person event. It was incredible to see this, and it made me realize how lucky the community was that Nate’s wife let everyone know. 308 comments on that blog post alone, and another 208 on the last image he uploaded to Flickr.

• The Fragmentation of Community
  For those who participate in the community, your identity is not pervasive, it is fragmented across dozens of websites. Not only do you have to create usernames on each site, but some people participate on some sites, but not others. Voices are spread too thin. It becomes hard to identify who is the same across different websites.

• It is Hard for Loose Connections to Become Strong Connections
  With online community, we miss the emotional connection with physical space and objects. Most members of the community remain persistent loose connections, there is little evolution as there would be in real-life. When one member stops logging in, the entire relationship is over.

I read three other things this week that relate to the possibility and limits of online community:

This week, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a piece for The New Yorker about the limits of social change using social media. Anil Dash gave a counterpoint, explaining that social change may look different today than it did in the 1960s.

The blog TechCrunch was sold to AOL this week, and in a post, they describe itself as a community:

“In the end that’s true. TechCrunch is a community. A community of great writers, great employees, and great readers.”

I understand why businesses feel that way, they are in the bubble – they are honoring the fact that without their audience and without people, that the business wouldn’t survive.

But clearly, the community had no say in the ownership, in the decision to move to AOL. The community is on the receiving end of the blog, their power is that they decide to comment, decide to buy tickets to TechCrunch events.

TechCrunch just sold their community for $25+ million. The current CEO of AOL supports editorial independence. Will the next? The one after that? What about when AOL merges, or changes direction, and their next CEO isn’t so content focused? Community is a long term commitment to it’s members, and deals like this remind me that the “value” of it often manifests itself in financial terms, with a few key players profiting from the collective efforts on a “community.”

But the best post I have seen on the topic is a post by Mark Schaefer this week. He tells a very compelling story which I highly recommend you read. Here is the key insight he shares from it:

“I lost sight of what it means to be a friend. It’s a word that has been social-media-cheapened and distorted for a new generation and I got caught up in it too. While many of us pontificate and debate about the heralded Age of Conversation, I’m realizing we’re not having conversations at all. Twitter is not a conversation. Commenting on blogs is not a conversation — it’s usually just a comment. We see these little smiling avatars each day without really having a clue about the person behind the picture.”

-Dan

Today I want to talk about the value of media – especially the long-term cultural value of things like books, magazines, and newspapers. There is so much talk about how “newspapers are dying” and “magazines are irrelevant” or that “books are merely a souvenir of an idea” and all kinds of other ideas.

We talk about media in dollars and cents, with big words showing the grand economic scale of it all. How many page views does Huffington Post have vs The New York Times? How many downloads did a book app receive? How many fewer ad pages did this month’s magazine have over a year ago?

It’s almost shocking that this is a predominant way that we judge the value of media. There is an elephant in the room, but we are all playing at being adults too much – trying to find some arbitrary and quantitative way to measure value, ignoring the long-term cultural value – of how these forms of media shape our lives. Of how media builds and shapes communities, not just bank accounts.

The Family That Lived in the Same House Since 1928

When I lived in Montclair, New Jersey, there was always this one house that intrigued me. In the middle of a wide tree-lined block packed with million dollar homes was this anomaly. House after house are these manicured lawns, well taken care of facades, and Audis, Volvos and BMWs in the driveway. Except this one house – this mystery house – covered with brush and trees in the front, obscuring the house itself. The driveway is often filled with 3-4 cars, older Toyotas or Hondas or Fords. It’s as if time had forgotten this house – forgotten to tell it that it is meant to be a trophy of dual-income six figure families with kids in private school.

Driving by this house the other week, I noticed a for sale sign in front of this home. To me, this was an open door, my way in to the mystery. When I got home, I checked the real estate listings. Below is a photo of the house from 1929, one of it today, and one of the neighbor’s house as comparison of other houses on the block:

When I clicked into the listing, I was amazed at the photos of the interior. The furnishings, possessions and room decor looked as though it was decorated in 1928, and left since then, unchanged:

The light switches were the push button type you last saw a half century ago, the wall-paper was clearly 50+ years old as well, and there was little sign of modern life.

I had to dig deeper:

• I Googled the street address of the house.
• Almost randomly, I came upon an estate sale website, that coincidentally listed an estate sale for this property, even though the address wasn’t listed.
• There were 150 photos of items for sale. One of them was a clock that had an engraving on the back, commemorating 25 years of service for someone who was the head of a bank in New York. I Googled the name of that person.
• I found out that this was the former owner of the house who purchased the house in 1928. I even found a photo of him from the 1950s in Life magazine.
• Continuing in Google, I found a New York Times article about the house from April that told an incredible story – the house had been in the same family since 1928.
• The article gave the current owner’s name, so I Googled him.
• I found a listing for a company he owned, but couldn’t find an email address.
• I searched the company name on LinkedIn, and found the owners name. I asked to be ‘connected.’ 12 hours later he accepted my request on LinkedIn.
• His email address was in his LinkedIn profile, so I sent him a note telling him I was fascinated with the history of this house, and asked if we could chat. He invited me over to give me a tour and talk about his family’s history.

The Thursday evening before the estate sale, I visited the house for a couple of hours, learning of it’s history from the current owner – that six generations of his family were raised in this house – and how his family and this house – experienced major events of the 20th century. I met members of his family, wandered from room to room, and tried to live in their story as one would a movie. This is what the end of that movie looks like:

Several lifetimes worth of possessions spread out around the house, each with a price tag. Six generations of stuff, 1928-2010, being liquidated at the same moment.

The original stove.

It took every ounce of self control to not purchase the sad-eyed dog photo.

Some of the paintings on the ledge were painted by the wife of the original owner, clearly very personal stuff.

The main hallway in the center of the home.

The office of the original owner, largely unchanged through the decades. Honest Abe still looking on.

Classic radios were scattered throughout the house, not because they are part of a collection, but because they were an essential form of media when placed in each room.

A newspaper from January 1941 lying around, just as yesterday’s paper might be lying around your home.

Many of these objects that have sat on this desk for decades, including monogrammed items.

Doilies and linens. I can’t imagine the last time these have seen the light of day.

Now, I know to some of you, this is all just someone’s junk, and the fact that it has been collecting dust for 80 years doesn’t give it any additional meaning. And maybe you’re right, perhaps I am too sentimental about things like this. But I’d like to take this a step further (if that’s possible)…

Commodities Are Not the Story of Our Lives

As the photos above show, during my visit, I was surrounded by objects, many with blue price tags. When most people see this house – they see a price tag – a financial opportunity. A 13 bedroom house on over an acre in Montclair. All these houses have property taxes between $20,000 – $30,000 per year, and they are all worth around $1 million. In some ways, this house is a commodity, a chunk of someone’s financial portfolio. This is how the world tends to view this property (from Zillow):

Last weekend, people came to the house for the value of objects at the estate sale. As the clock hit 10am on Saturday morning, people streamed in, eyeing objects they desired, doing quick calculations in their head as to what was collectible, and what wasn’t. They grabbed, they took ownership, they traded dollars for objects.

And in an instant, these things were turned from a collective history into a commodity – scattered – bound for other lives, or to be eBay’d at a higher value.

Spending time in the house talking with the owner and his family, my view of the house and objects changed. And I realized something:

The most valuable thing in the house is the story.

This value will never be realized at an estate sale, it will never be calculated into a Zillow ranking. But what this place and these objects were a part of – what they helped represent – is something of a time, of a moment, of a family, of a community. Something unique that identifies who we are as a culture.

Our lives – our culture in the long run – is not measured in finance and scale, but in story.

So here we are trying to understand the value of media in 2010. What is the value of a newspaper, a magazine, a book, a blog, a Tweet? And we tend to focus on the scale and the money, when really we should be considering how these forms of media shape our culture, and bring our communities closer.

In many ways, the future of media is exactly the same as the past of media – the story is what matters. How we package and monetize that is what changes.

Many people have become interested in Demand Media – a company that is finding online success partly because they are matching Google keyword searches with an efficient content creation system. But much of this content is merely a commodity supporting a financial model of the moment. What will that create in the long run?

Likewise, we are enamored with Gawker Media, and it’s founder Nick Denton. Now, there is A LOT to be learned from Nick – a polarizing figure whose confident decisions set trends in the media world. But he too has focused on scale, quickly cutting a brand if it doesn’t receive a huge number of page views or unique visitors in a short period of time. His efficiency and focus have brought good financial footing to his company. But is that enough?

I think it’s a shame that media brands often talk about the quantity of their web traffic, not the quality of content & relationship with readers. When they do talk about quality, it is often in vague terms, almost more as a branding effort.

Sure, we get wrapped up in the glamour of it – the scale of media and the dollars that flow through it. Therein lies power, and it is a rare person who cannot appreciate that on some level.

But we need to be asking this question more often: How do we serve our communities? When we judge the value of media, and the future of it, we should focus not only on the numbers, but on the story – on how these brands shape our culture, and create the story of our lives.

-Dan

How do we measure success? By sales? By revenue and profit? Sure, that makes sense, but I’d like to explore some other options today. Sometimes I feel like we pick the easy measures, and that does a disservice to our brands and our customers in the long run.

A lot of brands are embracing social media nowadays, but the way they talk about it is kind of odd – that it is a new thing to actually consider talking to customers; To treat them like a community with its own power, instead of a list of demographics in a buying cycle.

All too often, I feel that businesses are very concerned with what happens BEFORE they buy a product, and not very concerned after as to its impact. So we measure sales, not effectiveness.

Maybe a brand follows up with a survey with questions such as “would you recommend this product to a friend?” But I’m not convinced that this is an effective measure either. We often answer questions like that to validate our behaviors and choices.

In education, we do similar things. We measure a student’s retention of facts in the short term, not their knowledge in the long term. And more importantly, we don’t measure IMPACT at all. So, if a student gets good grades in history and economics, we measure them mere seconds after they memorize the material, not years down the road to see if they used that knowledge to help society or build value for a business they work for.

There’s a lot of talk about “community” and how we have to be community managers. I think part of what people mean here is that we have to stay engaged with our audience AFTER the sale. That if you sell a Star Wars novel, that you need to constantly engage with those fans in order to understand how good the product is, and where it needs to go. What was the effect of that book beyond the number of copies sold?

To better serve communities, and grow strong brands, we need to measure our impact in the long term, not just the next financial quarter or bonus cycle.

We call people “consumers” partly to justify our reliance on the point of sale as the key measure of success. But I can’t help but feel that people don’t want to consume, they want to become. And that by focusing on how we impact their ability to do so will make us stronger both individually and as a society.

-Dan