I took the time to watch the CommunityNext presentation from the Threadless founders. While the video has a lot of good things in there, there was one point that I thought was above and beyond the rest. An online community is all about fun. When dealing with consumers, if using and interacting with your website and community isn’t fun, then people won’t stick around. Take a look at some of the most successful online communities. Myspace is a piece of shit, but users have fun making their profiles look like pink barf, posting wacky pictures, and setting Celine Dion as the music...

In my last post I discussed the importance of ignoring the common total registered users statistic, and paying attention to a couple different active user stats. When evaluating the value of a community, it definitely doesn’t stop here. For me, I place extra value on site activity ratios. Why Ratios? Site activity ratios are statistics such as average posts per user, or average comments per user/post, etc. But why ratios? Just like total registered users, total numbers for different activity points on a site are useless. A site that has 10,000 posts in a given time frame with 20,000...

This is the first of hopefully a few posts about different stats that social networks, investors, and entrepreneurs should pay attention to. While a lot of the value in a social network is subjective, I personally believe there is a lot to be said for close tracking and analyzation of an entire range of statistics and numbers. For the first post, I wanted to discuss the most basic, but probably most important statistic, Active Users. Many social networks publicize/boast how many total registered users they have. Unfortunately, this is the most misleading statistic of them all. There are many...

One of the most valuable online professional communities out there has only 400 members and is barely known by anyone. Recently the VP of Products and Marketing at ZoomInfo told me about Creative Good. The community reminded me of one of my previous posts, An Inefficency of Professional Social Networking. I was impressed by Creative Good due to the number, and quality of responses to a thread that was forwarded to me. The question posed by a member: “We are looking for a tool to measure the end-user experience of loading a web page. Can anybody recommend specific tools to accomplish this?” The...

Fantasy betting sites around pop culture have been becoming a popular new social networking niche. These types of sites let you bet with friends or others of the communities around things like “How many people will Jack Bauer kill in season 6 of 24?” or “Another Paris Hilton sex tape will be released by June of 2007.” I think these types of sites which include Fafarazzi.com, PicksPop.com, and GottaBet.com have interesting potential. They cover topics that draw in the average person and appeal to the masses. But the most promising aspect is that most open the door to...

Everyone knows that YouTube recently announced that they will soon be sharing revenue of in-video ads with users. While most people think it is a bad move for YouTube, I think it could be great if they execute it correctly. Yesterday I talked about how Money As A Motivator is ineffective in building a dedicated community. However, YouTube already has built the community to a critical mass. Just as we have seen with Myspace and Facebook, as long as you have critical mass, you can implement features that piss off your users (aka Facebook feed), and still be fine. Despite this, I think the smartest...

I have seen a lot of business ideas lately using money as a way to motivate users to submit content and participate in the community. But I keep asking myself, is money really a viable option to build a social network or online community? Here are some examples of companies that are using, or have used, money as a motivator: Revver and MetaCafe – Advertising sharing based on the number of views a users video gets. Dovetail.tv – Pays $.10 every time someone downloads a users video. Yelp – Paid users $1 per post at the beginning. No longer do...

UPDATE: Some really interesting conversation about this is taking place in the comments. Anyone else who has an opinion, please chime in! I have stated a few times that without Facebook I probably wouldn’t still be in contact with half of the people I currently am from college and high school. It provides an easy and informal way to stay up to date with friends. Despite this, I sometimes just can’t comprehend the way that some people interact with Facebook. Take for example this post I found on someone’s wall readable to hudreds of people: “[Name], Dont forget to always...

I am a huge fan of local review site, Yelp.com. I have been amazed at how active and dedicated Yelp’s community is. A good portion of the members have each written hundreds (even thousands) of reviews, posted numerous threads in the forum, created multiple lists, and continually give “compliments” to other members. I can honestly say it is one of the most active online communities out there. This fascination lead me to a question that I was dieing to answer. Why in the world do so many people contribute so much to Yelp? But instead of making conjectures based on my experiences...

KanTalk is a social networking site that targets those learning a second language. Simply put, the general concept behind KanTalk is that a person would rather learn how to speak a second language by having real conversations with people of similar interests that going through the same learning process. I certainly know I would have been more motivated to learn spanish back in college if I was talking to a good looking girl. Users can sign up with KanTalk and through the traditional social networking model find someone who is has the similar interests and is learning the same second language....