Cocktail party by Mike Jones

When you’re at the pub, what do you talk about?  Your car? Your weekend?  Your golf game?  Your new tasty favorite indie band?  FSM help you if you talk about work– boring.  When you’re online, what do you chat/write/blog/tweet about?  Sure, we geeks talk about the biz and tools and sites and Steve Jobs gossip– but that’s part of our job.  If it really were free time, what would you really write about?  And where would you write it?

Watching the online online communities mature, I’ve noticed that people progress along a path:

• First, they blabber anything just for the sake of blabbering.  This is really just experimenting with the toolset for most.
• Second, they share everything they see and read and link, until they realize that everyone else is linking/sharing the exact same stuff.
• Third, people settle into their “thing”: constant updates of their children, their home business, political rants, mindless blogospam.  Here’s where people’s idiosyncrasies start to show up.  To quote John Worfin, “Character is what you are in the dark.”
• Eventually, people resort to the same topics they like in the pub: politics, their children’s sports, luxury vacations, and making up historical  facts.

That covers Facebook and twitter for most people (twitter is more gossip-y, but whatever).  But what about an online community based on a catalog ecommerce site, or a specifically-themed site?  The one thing all the visitors to that site is the stuff that’s for sale, so this becomes the dominant topic for the online community.  At some sites, this works, other sites bomb miserably.  Why?  What is the difference?  Where is that line?

Likely:

• Woot.com – wins because all visitors are bargain hunters, and are happy to share juicy details on the deals.  We see this in real life where people brag about the coupons they clipped or the steals they got at Try-n-Save.
• SteapandCheap.com – wins because of the same reasons that woot.com wins, but even better because these people all share a leisure activity: they ski (or snowboard or hike… er… they go outdoors)
• Any catalog that is basically a technical sale: consumer electronics, exercise equipment, software, new cars, gardening tools.  If you think you’re the neighborhood expert, congratulations on becoming the new King of the Online Community.  Online dashboards are great for this.
• Politico.com – wins because all those ranters who alienated their friends on facebook with their hatred of Presi-senato-gressman Blankenstien now have a home where they can win Free Internets with the other crazies (just like the bars in Dupont Circle)  Online dashboards are also great for this, but only to show who is the biggest d-bag.

Not Likely:

• VictoriasSecret.com – Who wants to brag about their lingerie?  TMI.  Questions & Answers generally wouldn’t work for personal apparel.  The most obvious question “will this fit me?” has the most obvious answer: “I have no idea who you are, so how the hell would I know?”
• Vehix.com – mostly used cars, which means that deals are not repeatable– it does no use bragging about your good deal, no one cares. The same goes for any one-off item.
• fandango.com – tickets to movies (which people _do_ discuss at length in pubs), but Fandango is a ticket site– nobody has seen these movies yet, and they certainly don’t want to hear the ending.  BTW, Inception is all inside Leo DeCaprio’s head because he’s insane!!

So, will your website be able to build a community successfully?  Will you really be able to plug it back in to increased user-generated content about your products?  I would suggest that the ‘tell’ is rather simple: would people talk about your goods in a pub?  Would they mention your stuff at a cocktail party?