Getting to the Tipping Point with Social Media

I’m seeing a common theme across a number of social media communities about moving beyond the early adoption phase and into the mainstream. In the spirit of the new age of media, I’d like to offer a mashup between two of my favorite market theories: Crossing the Chasm and The Tipping Point.

A Quick Brief on the Theories

Crossing the Chasm

In Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore proposed that disruptive innovations faced a significant gap, or chasm, between early adoption of an idea by innovators/visionaries and subsequent adoption by the mainstream marketplace. He then spends a lot of time discussing strategies for moving products across the chasm, including marketing, distribution channels, etc., but the important point for our discussion: Traditional market forces only apply to disruptive innovations after they have crossed the chasm into the mainstream. By implication, this means that traditional marketing methods (advertising, branding, etc.) cannot and do not increase adoption for disruptive innovations prior to entering the mainstream.

The Tipping Point

If mainstream market forces don’t apply to a disruptive innovation before it “crosses the chasm”, then what market forces actually determine an innovation’s success or failure? Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point documents the well observed phenomenon when a disruptive idea/innovation crosses the chasm, it will suddenly grow explosively in the mainstream. Gladwell then proposes that this tipping point moment is a culmination of the interactions between a tiny portion of the early adopter market referred to as Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen (although I prefer the term Evangelist). He also proposes that successful disruptive ideas have a thriving community that forms around the “stickiness” of the idea while remaining small in population - under the Dunbar’s Number of 150 people*.

For our discussion then, the keys to shepherding an idea to it’s tipping point is the Reaching the tipping point requires Connectors, Mavens and Evangelists collaborating in a small community formed around the core stickiness of the disruptive idea.


*- Dunbar’s Number probably deserves a post of it’s own. I’m amazed at how many Twitter users with hundreds of friends find themselves downsizing their lists to somewhere between 100-150 people, mostly by intuition.

Getting Beyond the Fishbowl

Now that we have a grounding on the theories, we can start applying them to our favorite disruptive social media ideas. My guess is each cool but struggling idea (like say, podcasting, vlogging, etc) is lacking in one or more of these critical factors:

  • Is there a small but thriving core community that shares a common context and forum for communication?
  • Who are the key Connectors, Mavens and Evangelists?
  • Are the Innovators iterating through development cycles based on feedback from those key Connectors, Mavens and Evangelists?
  • What is the sticky feature that attracts people to keep using the idea?

If you have a passion for a cool idea, take some time to objectively evaluate the state of the idea against these criteria. - and then publish your thoughts! Hopefully this post can serve to help frame the discussion on growing some of these ideas.

4C Social Media Business Model

As I’m writing a business case for a social media startup, the thought occurs to me that there’s a pretty standard business model that every social media startup needs to address. I’m calling it the 4C Social Media business model:

First, there is the landscape on which you will build your business:

  • Content. Is Still King (anyone else tired of hearing that yet?). Yet it is more true now than ever before.
  • Consumer (or Citizen, thanks Mark Nathan!).
  • Commerce. Contrary to naive opinion, having a business plan that includes revenue streams is a Good Thing.
  • Community (or Conversation if you will). If Content Is King, then Community is Queen. A fickle, hard to please queen at best. Easy to plan and support with technology, extraordinarily difficult to nurture and grow.

Your product must then create connections between each of these C’s:

  • Media Platform How will you deliver your content to Consumers?
  • Social Network What tools will you use that allow Consumers to create a Community through conversation?
  • Events Communities thrive by coalescing around events, which in turn create common stories. What kinds of events are strategic to your business?
  • Marketplace Enabling Producers to easily connect and offer their content to Consumers is a critical component if you want truly want a venue for professional grade content in addition to the hobbyist/free/amatuer content.

I’m going to continue to flesh this out, but I wanted to put the initial concept out into the sphere to spark some discussion

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A Too Short (or Too Long) Biography

Chris Brogan inspired a great meme this morning: writing a short backstory or biography about yourself. I think this is a great idea for the 99.999% of us who aren’t tech celebrities.

My First Alpha Geek Moment

In the summer of 1977 my parents moved our family from Chicago to Denver. I was about to turn thirteen and it was the perfect excuse for me to indulge in that stereotypical adolescent “Why does the world hate meeee?!?!?!” tantrum. I guess I made things miserable enough around the new house that one of the new neighbor lady’s took pity on my mom and offered to take me to work with her one day.

I don’t remember what she did for a living, something medical/scientific, but in the corner of their lab was this machine with a tv screen and a keyboard. My neighbor asked me if I wanted to see it. She turned it on, we waited for a couple of long minutes (yeah, some things never change) and then she typed on it, selecting something called G)ames from what I would later learn was called a “menu”. She sat me down in front of the keyboard and I read the following on the screen:

You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building.
Around you is a forest.  A small stream flows out of the building and
down a gully.
⟩_

By the end of the day I had a small crowd of people behind me watching me wend my way through the Colossal Cave, going farther in one afternoon than anyone else had gotten in weeks of playing. That magical afternoon is when I first knew that these incredible machines called computers were made for me to tinker with.

The Early Days

I spent the rest of my teens and twenties totally absorbed in the Golden Age of Geekdom: Dungeons & Dragons, science fiction/fantasy books, programming, hardware hacking, computer games, phone phreaking, rebelling against all authority, etc. It wasn’t all roses though, the 70s-80s was a hellish time to be a young computer geek/nerd. You were pretty much doomed to be poor, misunderstood and written off by society at large, especially - it seemed at the time - the female part.

After drifting through any number of what we call McJobs today, I decided that earning money would actually let me buy more toys, and that conning people into letting me play with computers was just the ticket. I worked my way through several programming jobs, making lots of mistakes and learning over the shoulders of older/wiser mentors.

In the early 90s I was working at a programming job with Peter Girard, a fellow computer geek/nerd. He turned me on to this kind of super-BBS called “Internet”. A year and a half later some really smart folks NCSA pushed the idea of hyperlinking hypertext documents over the tipping point by releasing an application called Mosaic.

I also got married to my beautiful, wonderful wife Patti and then Pete married Michele a few years later. We’ve all remained close friends through the years - he’s my eldest daughter’s godfather and I was his best man. Along the way, we continued to explore the possibilities of this cool new thing called The Web, and while at ProCard, a small software company in the credit card industry, we wrote what is widely believed to be the first online credit card system that allowed employees to log on and review their corporate card transactions.

Web Boom 1.0 - Credit Cards and the Net

A couple of visionaries at TSYS, one of the worlds biggest credit card processors, saw our online application and approached me with a job offer be a part of a newly forming Electronic Commerce team. The only catch was that we’d need to relocate from Denver to Columbus, GA. My role would be to lead the technology development team in designing and delivering the products the bus-dev folks dreamed up. Those first years were pretty difficult - we had a lot of resistance from ultra-conservative banker types who didn’t understand that we saw a revolution coming. And then the Boom happened. And what did every startup use to conduct business? That’s right, credit cards.

Our team went from pariah’s to golden children in a heartbeat. I went from leading a small team of code jedi to being a road warrior on the leading edge of every startup deal the company was involved with. As the team continued to grow, I took on the role of Chief Architect for the E-Commerce team. In addition to absorbing every new technology innovation under the sun, I also had to learn how to be a leader, diplomat, politician, project manager, salesman, accountant and strategist. That was a pretty rocky time, filled with lots of mistake learning opportunities.

After piling the whole Y2K industry crisis on top of the Net Boom, I was burned out and ready for a change. I parted ways with TSYS, and we packed up and moved back to Denver, ready to be home again

Bringing the Digital Age to Healthcare

By the early 2000’s, most industries had a solid internet strategy and with the beginning of the end of the first web boom, I didn’t see a lot of innovation happening in most of the places I looked. Then, from my network of contacts I was introduced to a healthcare company called McKesson (actually McKesson/HBOC at the time). The management team in a small business unit was frustrated that the healthcare industry had still not adopted internet technologies and was looking for a Chief Architect to help pioneer their online strategy. I think I locked up the job when I said “Yeah, I’m sure we can use the web to deliver better healthcare. We probably can’t fix it, but we can definitely make healthcare suck less.”

We make healthcare suck less became our unofficial motto. Again, in a matter of right place/right time, I grew from being responsibile for managing the technical architecture of four products to over a dozen as the business unit grew into an entire division. We designed systems that won some of the largest government healthcare contracts in history. The penalties for being successful were painful as politics, meetings and administrivia began to consume all of my time - leaving me no cycles for maintaining my technical edge. What this really meant was that I’d spend my nights and weekends hacking away at whatever caught my fancy.

Along the way, my two girls grew old enough that Patti was ready to do something besides be a stay at home mom. At first, she figured she’d start looking for a job. I was incredulous. Not that she wanted to go back to work, but with the idea that she would settle for taking a 9-5 job when she had the opportunity of a lifetime - actually, an opportunity few of us really see in our lifetimes. She could literally pursue whatever dream she wished and we could make it work. I challenged her to spend some time thinking about that and coming up with a gameplan. So, two years ago she opened a store in downtown Longmont called the Bead Lounge. The store has been wildly successful, attracting a dedicated community of artists and hobbyists.

Today and the Future

Patti’s success with the Bead Lounge increasingly led me to think about what I really wanted to do with my career. At the end of the day, I still have that same sense of joy and wonderment for technology that I did when I was thirteen and I’m not really happy unless I’m building applications from new technologies that make people say “Whoa, that’s cool!”.

I recently realized that all of these experiences, how to lead innovation, managing relationships, business/finance, knowing your industries, have all prepared me to strike out on my own. As I recently posted, that’s exactly what I’ve decided to do. For those of you who’ve made it this far with me, stick around. I’m a late bloomer who is just now coming into his own. This is going to be great!

Reason #672 to live in Colorado

We stepped out the front door this morning and waved hi to one of the hot air balloonists we see a few times a week.

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