The unstoppable power of online communities
Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on March 26th, 2007
Tagged as: Gab Gab Gab, Internet Marketing, Long Tail, Social Media
My last post spoke about not going back.
I wrote it very late at night (for me anyway) and it was a groggy description of where my world was heading.
Two days and as many nights have passed and if anything the weight of change described in that post is even heavier today. An old saying goes: When the student is ready, the teacher will come. I like to think of it as the moment your mind is open, clarity comes.
I am beginning to see the power of long tail communities.
I’m not speaking of empty forums set up to discuss the pro’s and con’s of a single idea but communities where the collective knowledge, emotions and feelings of millions of users is shared. In his book “The Long Tail: How Endless Choice Is Creating Unlimited Demand
Wikipedia is of course the flag bearer for this medium, but there is an increasing amount of interest in this means. Take Imagine, a site that infuses the mechanism for people to self-organize get togethers such as the one’s introduced by Meetup.com with the passion of idealistic activists around the world.
Imagine’s vision is deceptively simple:
We want to live in a world where all people can live free and dignified lives, where any person who wants to help another can do so, and where no opportunities for action and collaboration are missed or wasted.
The strength of purpose of this kind of initiative is phenominal, with thousands of people worldwide dreaming, planning, doing what they want for their own communities, shifting power from institutions to people at the edges.
Or even the Personal Democracy Forum 2007 coming soon to New York, starring some of the online world’s biggest movers and shakers that aims to address:
- How is voter-generated content changing election campaigns?
- Why should advocacy groups adapt to the connected age?
- What new technology tools and practices are on the horizon?
- How are new technologies democratizing the political process?
- Which political leaders “get it”?
OK, political motivations aside, what do communities like this offer for business and marketers in particular. The possibilities are endless, once the insights and mindsets of your target audience has been fully understood. Once you accept that the many can be smarter than the few (The Wisdom of Crowds
Look at what happened over on Dell’s Ideastorm site, which uses a combination of blog user interaction with a Digg-style voting mechanism to give public weight to the unthinkable.
Going back to Wikipedia, and to one of my projects in particular, what would happen if you focused the probabilistic systems used to build an unstoppable collection of online reference material on a “massive-scale” towards instruction? Could the web be left in charge of its own education? Could its millions of users teach themselves?
Like the guys at TTeach, I believe they could and am working on a means to prove it.
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