Preface: From "Flypaper" to Social Web

by Richard Seltzer , seltzer@samizdat.com, www.samizdat.com

Copyright ©1997, 1998 Richard Seltzer

This is the preface of a book entitled The Social Web. Permission is granted to make and distribute complete verbatim electronic copies of this item for non-commercial purposes provided the copyright information and this permission notice are preserved on all copies. All other rights reserved. To correspond with the author, send email to seltzer@samizdat.com Comments welcome.

My Internet: a Personal View of Internet Business Opportunities by Richard Seltzer, on CD, includes four books, 162 articles, and 49 newsletter issues that will inspire you and provide the practical information you need to build your own personal Web site or Internet-based business, helping you to become a player in this new business environment.

When old friends who I hadn't been in touch with for 10-30 years started sending me email -- about half a dozen of them each month -- at first I was flattered. Isn't it amazing that all those people would be looking for me?

Then it dawned on me -- why should they look for me? They probably each have a hundred or more people who they once were close to (old roommates, business associates, etc.) who they've lost touch with. And why, out of all those others, should they actively come looking for me?

With a few quick queries I soon established that they weren't looking for me at all. They were looking for themselves. They had gone to search engines like AltaVista, Excite, and Hotbot. There they had done what most people do at those sites -- they had entered their own name as the query. And since I have a lot of content at my Web site -- including lots of my writing -- many of my old friends are mentioned somewhere there, typically in the list of thank you's at the end of a book. Searching for themselves, they chanced upon me; and, delighted at that unexpected occurrence, they sent me email.

If I had wanted to find them, I could have spent a lot of time looking and might never have succeeded. But because I had my own Web pages and, by chance, those pages had the right kind of content, and that content was indexed by search engines, the old friends found me instead.

I soon realized that what I had done by accident, others could do deliberately for personal or business purposes -- setting out "flypaper" rather than going hunting with a "fly swatter." While hyperlinks are a way to point people away from my Web pages to other resources on the Internet, "flypaper" provides a way to draw people to my pages and encourage them to get in touch with me directly. We'll deal with that technique in the Introduction, and then discuss other aspects of the "Social Web" and it's importance for individuals, organizations, and businesses.

The term "Social Web" is not a synonym for "virtual community." Rather it refers to structural elements of today's Web -- such as personal Web pages, full-text search engines and Web-based forums and chat -- which you can use to help people connect to people and hence to foster the birth and growth of communities.

At its simplest level, as the "flypaper" described above, the Social Web just links two people together. They may or may not choose to make a habit of staying in touch.

But if you have rich content and engaging activities at your site which draw people to become involved and to link to one another, your site could become a "nexus" on the "Social Web" -- a place where many threads of people-connection cross and where people of like interest are likely to chance upon one another. Once the people links are made, relationships may develop independent of the Web site -- using email or any other person-to-person utility or even face-to-face and non-Internet communication.

Recently, "community" has become the Holy Grail of Web business. Virtual Community by Howard Rheingold (published by Addison-Wesley in 1993) provides an excellent grassroots, pragmatic view of on-line communities before the dawn of the Web. And Net Gain by John Hagel and Aruthur Armstrong (Harvard Business School Press) makes an eloquent case for the theoretical importance of communities for building profitable businesses. But it is not easy to create a community on the Web today. It's not like building a physical structure -- a town hall or an entire town -- where all you have to do is hire experts to follow blueprints. Many chat rooms and discussion areas on the Web are virtually empty. Numerous fledgeling community-based businesses, which looked great on paper have failed.

The Social Web of today is in many ways quite different from the pre-Web experiences of the Well, bulletin-board systems (BBSs), and on-line conferencing systems inside major corporations like Digital Equipment. When you connected to those systems you already knew a lot about the people there and perhaps even trusted them, to some extent. Even newsgroups were relatively small, and you soon became familiar with the active participants. You typically only belonged to one such community -- because of where you worked or because you chose to pay a fee. And once you joined, you had a finite number of choices -- there might be many topics of discussion but there would only be one place to talk about that topic, and it would be relatively easy to find that place if and when you were interested. Now the Web is totally open. Anybody and everybody is out there. And there are an enormous number of choices -- millions of Web sites, many of which would like you to feel like you are a member of their community. It is a much more elastic and competitive environment, which presents new kinds of challenges and new opportunities.

Over the last four years I've talked and written a lot about "community," defining it as a loyal audience for a Web site, and recommending that businesses focus first on building their community and then on developing the services that audience would be willing to pay for. Now the Internet has grown and evolved to the point where an audience isn't necessarily a community. There are many competing places to discuss the very same kind of content. It is now very difficult to inspire the kind of fierce loyalty and sense of belonging that members of the Well felt and to grow a community of that kind, with the kind of long-term business potential described in Net Gain. Yes, you feel some loyalty to sites that you return to frequently, but it's the kind of loyalty you may feel toward a gas station you patronize, not the loyalty of a church congregation or an Elks Club.

"Community" implies a tight-knit membership -- people who would go out of their way to help one another, people who would proudly identify themselves as members. What we see instead is far looser, more elastic, and dynamic -- a matter of habits, tendencies, threads of connection among people -- where some sites in fact grow to become important nexus points; but where true communities are the exception rather than the rule.

Fortunately, however, the opportunities opened by the Social Web are not all-or- nothing -- there are many steps you can take to improve your Web site and your relationship with your audience, even if these steps do not lead to the growth of a full-fledged community. As with a garden, you are not totally in control. There are no magic Jack-in-the-Beanstalk seeds that are certain to produce high profits. But you can prepare the soil and plant the seeds, and work hard to nurture the seedlings that may appear. Yes, you can increase the likelihood that a true community of interest will arise around your Web site and the activities and events which you create and foster there. But, falling short of that lofty goal, you can still get people to contribute interesting content for your Web site, to make contact with people of common interest at your site, and to build relationships with your business,

Before launching such a effort, you need

1) to populate your Web site with interesting and useful content and let the world know about it;

2) to understand and take advantage of the business dynamics of the Web; and

3) to focus the Social Web characteristics of your content and your activities so your site becomes a nexus of interpersonal activity.

In the Introduction, we'll take a closer look at elements essential for success of the "flypaper" approach:

o personal Web pages

o how search engines work,

o how people use search engines, and hence

o what is the "right kind of content" if you want to be found.

And we'll look at the kinds of unexpected personal and business benefits that can come from this approach.

Then, we'll cover other low-tech tactics that are important in building a nexus on the Social Web, including step-by-step details on simple ways to create your own Web pages and to publicize your own Web site. We'll also discuss the unique dynamics of business on the World Wide Web, how, on a shoestring, you can take the next steps to grow your audience and build a business or organization around your Web site.

Next, we'll look at the role of Web-based on-line discussions (forum and chat) to attract valuable content, build your relationships with your audience, and try to grow your site into a true community.

Finally, we'll take at look at key trends -- in technology and in behavior -- and how they are likely to impact the Social Web over the next 5-10 years.

This book is an attempt to arrive at practical, pragmatic knowledge. It results from discussions I've been carrying on with thousands of people on the Internet over the last five years, and yet it's still just a starting point. Hopefully, print publication will help draw into the discussion more people with more varied viewpoints.

Introduction
The rest of The Social Web by Richard Seltzer

My Internet: a Personal View of Internet Business Opportunities by Richard Seltzer, on CD, includes four books, 162 articles, and 49 newsletter issues that will inspire you and provide the practical information you need to build your own personal Web site or Internet-based business, helping you to become a player in this new business environment.

Web Business Boot Camp: Hands-on Internet lessons for manager, entrepreneurs, and professionals by Richard Seltzer (Wiley, 2002). No-nonsense guide targets activities that anyone can perform to achieve online business success. Reviews.

Can we help you build an Internet business? Richard Seltzer is an independent Internet writer/speaker/consultant. Click here for details. or send email to seltzer@samizdat.com

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