Gaining Critical Mass Is Increasing In Difficulty

A very common question I get is how to gain users, and more importantly, how to get to that point of critical mass where a community becomes self sufficient in viralness. This process has never been easy, and contrary to popular belief, most successful communities did not grow organically.

As time has passed, and the number of web 2.0 companies and social networks has increased rapidly. This has increased the difficulty of gaining critical mass for a couple reasons:

1. The amount of noise in the market is much greater. More noise means that it is tougher for your social network to gain visibility above all of the others.

2. Related to number one, more noise means more crap. More crap means your social network is more likely to be thrown into the same bucket as the crap, eventhough it might be slightly different and better. It is the YASN (”yet another social network”) syndrome. For example, launch a professional social network with a much different spin, and you will always be compared to LinkedIn…no matter what.

3. The markets are increasingly segmented. When there are ten social networks among a niche vying for an audience, the audience is split between the ten. This makes it exponentially more difficult for any one out of the ten to gain critical mass.

Due to these reasons, I now think think that a crucial component of starting a social network or online community, is having a way to shorten the critical mass curve that your current/competitors don’t have. The most common method to do this is leveraging an existing community or audience. Cafemom has done this with thierr ClubMom property, OurChart.com (lesbian social network) is leveraging their popular TV show “The L Word”, and Digg did it with Kevin Rose’s popular cable TV show.

This may have a couple effects. Mainly, that this could be an argument for why existing companies who have been around for awhile have a clear advantage over others in starting a community. I think this could also mean that it will take more marketing dollars for a community to put the wheel in motion.

In the end, the market is following general economics. The space is segmented among a lot of different properties. But at some point they will start to aggregate in order to survive.

[tags]Social Networking, Social Network, Online Community, Critical Mass, LinkedIn, CafeMom, OurChart, Brian Balfour[tag]