The New Community Rules

Foreword

Dave McClure

Startup Investor and Tech Blogger, 500 Hats LLC

Your lights are on, but you’re not home
Your mind is not your own
Your heart sweats, your body shakes
Another kiss is what it takes
You can’t sleep, you can’t eat
There’s no doubt, you’re in deep
Your throat is tight, you can’t breathe
Another kiss is all you need

Whoa, you like to think that you’re immune to the stuff (oh yeah)
It’s closer to the truth to say you can’t get enough
You know you’re gonna have to face it
You’re Addicted to Love

—Robert Palmer, “Addicted to Love” (1985)

Hello…my name is Dave, and I’m a Facebook-aholic (“hi Dave, keep coming back!”). The rest of you may not be addicted to social media the same way I am, but I guarantee you it’s only a matter of time. Now that Oprah and CNN have become run-of-the-mill street-corner pushers for social media crackpipes like Facebook and Twitter, you can bet the rest of the consumer mainstream ain’t far behind. Mark my words, folks: we’re all being seduced by a dangerous and sexy online mistress named Social. If you haven’t fallen for her yet, you will.

If you have ever read a blog, visited a MySpace page, watched a YouTube video, checked out a photo on Flickr, or clicked on a link in Twitter, then five hours later, looked up to check the clock and realized it was 4:00 AM, you know what I mean. Admit it, you’ve been there: heaven help me, the baby is screaming and needs a diaper change, but gimme a sec, I just need to click on one…more…link…aaah. Now doesn’t that feel better?

You might be a teenager on Hi5, profile-hopping all the hot girls in your freshman class at high school, or a grandmother anxiously checking YouTube to see if your daughter has uploaded the latest video of your three-year-old grandson. You might be a punk rocker adding a new song to your band’s MySpace page or a Harvard grad surfing LinkedIn to see who you know at Google who’s hiring. You might be the Real Shaq Daddy tweeting out nightly box scores and a slam-dunk on Yao Ming, or Barack Obama rallying the faithful to get out to vote via SMS on the eve of the most historic election in American history. From the largest to the smallest, from the youngest to the oldest, the world has become engrossed, enthralled, and addicted to social media.

Unless you’ve been in a coma for the last five years, your behaviors and interactions with social media have changed dramatically. We now spend more time connected—both literally and figuratively—than ever before. Our offline-online existence is fused together into an electronically enhanced experience that would have seemed unbelievable just over a decade ago, but now seems almost second nature. One wonders how people ever managed to make plans to meet up for dinner or a night out on the town before everyone had email, eVite, Yelp, or text messaging. Our fascination and fastened-nation with all things digital has been both a blessing and a curse, allowing people to communicate whenever and wherever they please, even if that means listening to the sales guy in the bathroom stall next to you talking to a customer and wondering if you should wait ’til he’s done before you flush.

The first 10 years of the Internet Revolution were all about getting computers connected to the World Wide Web. But the next 10 years are going to be all about getting people connected to one other. There are now over 1 billion people online across the globe, and over 3 billion people with mobile phones who can send a text message. Imagine how much time we can all waste poking one other on Facebook!

More seriously, this sea change in how people spend their lives and leisure hours has created a challenge for those in traditional marketing roles. As with the explosion of cable television channels in the 1990s and subsequent fragmentation of mass market media and advertising, online behavior in the 21^st century has been moving away from large portal mass-produced websites like AOL and Yahoo!, and toward a world filled with search engines, social networks, millions of tiny blogs and “long-tail” websites, user-generated content sites, news feeds, apps, widgets, RSS, email, SMS, IM, chat, Twitter, bookmarks, etc, etc. Finding ways to effectively reach customers in the world of Web 2.0 has become a Sisyphean task, requiring a wide variety of online marketing skills and an endless number of communication channels.

And yet there also exists the everyday miracle of one clever, creative individual who executes a very cheap, viral, word-of-mouth campaign that reaches millions overnight. How can this be? We are both powerless and powerful at the same time. We are fragmented and yet unified. We are solitary shut-ins glued to our computers, but we are powerfully and instantly connected to thousands of others all over the Earth. We are billions of people on the World Wide Web, and we are a billion people blathering on in a billion and one tongues.

This is social media. And like the social beings who create it, social media is messy and confused. It was in the middle of that mess that my personal journey began. Let me explain….

Back in late summer 2001, I had the good fortune of accepting a job offer at PayPal, while the rest of the dot-com world was crashing all around me. Little did I know the towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan would also come crashing down my first day on the job. While still in shock at a changed world offline, I began putting my toe in the waters of a brave new world online as well.

I had always been a geek of some kind—music geek in grade school, math major in college, computer programmer after graduating, and a small-time Internet entrepreneur in the mid-1990s until my company got acquired in 1998. However, my new job at PayPal was in (developer) marketing—pretty unfamiliar territory for a geek. I wasn’t even sure how I got the job; a friend who was a PayPal angel investor had referred me, since he knew I’d been organizing several Silicon Valley tech and entrepreneur user groups for many years. I guess PayPal figured that was as close as it could get to someone who knew how to market to developers, so it gave me a chance.

Now just to be clear, there is nothing more anathema to geeks and programmers than someone who has a business card with a marketing title, except perhaps someone in sales, but at least geeks understand salespeople are necessary to make money that pays their salaries. So basically, as far as developers are concerned, marketing folks are the absolute bottom of the food chain—they’re assumed to be both clueless and useless, and liars to boot. As a former developer myself, I realized my job was going to be all about marketing our services to repressed loner, smart-ass geeks who thought I was a dumb, incompetent liar. Great.

Given the humbling and humiliating task ahead of me, and given my dirty little secret of not knowing one damn thing about traditional marketing, I realized I better come up with some pretty creative tricks/hacks…and fast. Hack #1: change the official job title on my business card from “Director of Marketing” to “Director of Geek Marketing” (disguise and subterfuge, become part of the community). Hack #2: stop trying to sell developers on PayPal, and just focus on helping them use the product and provide tech support, listen to what they were asking for, and see if I could get the product team to fix bugs and build something geeks would use. Hack #3: since they probably knew more than me, appeal to developers to help answer questions, and recruit geek advisors and promote them as experts to the rest of the community. Hack #4: get all of our technical documentation and code samples out in the open on a no-login-required site, without requiring anyone to create a PayPal account to learn. Hack #5: start a message board and blog (had to bend some rules and avoid corporate bureaucracy, but I did it), and get an open channel of publishing and communication to the community.

I could go on, but I think you get the picture—let’s just say I did some very nontraditional marketing in the first year or two. And I really had to change how I thought about marketing in order to reach the people I was going after. In fact, much of my success was due to subverting, bending, and even breaking the normal rules of corporate marketing to do what I needed to get done. And finally, I had to become part of the community itself, and I had to create some nontraditional publishing and communication models to engage the community to help me do my job.

Along the way in becoming a mole in the machine, I also discovered a number of other important new trends and techniques in online marketing: search marketing (both organic and paid), email newsletters and distribution lists, blogging, mini-apps and widgets, message boards and forums, RSS, screencasts, instructional video, social networks, and many, many other geeky pursuits that consisted mostly of me goofing off online and somehow getting away with saying I was doing real work. While it may have seemed like I was screwing around wasting a lot of time (cough, cough…nothing could be further from the truth!), it turns out I was getting some world-class on-the-job training in social media marketing. Who knew?

As I spent more time diving deep into this Ocean of Social, I realized something important was happening and changing how people were communicating. Starting somewhere between 2001 and 2005, a whole bunch of non-geeks were getting computers, getting digital cameras and mobile phones, getting broadband connections, and getting online. The Internet and the browser were just the beginning; by the time YouTube arrived in 2005, the Internet had already been taken over by the masses. By 2008, your mom or grandmother were probably stalking you on Facebook and trying to find out who you were hooking up with.

This was not your geeky old Internet—this was the glory of the World Wide Web, and people were doing a whole lot more of the following:

• Browsing the World Wide Web (from iPhones as well as computers)

• Using search engines (aka “The Google”) to find all kinds of stuff

• Reading blogs, looking at pictures, listening to music, and watching videos

• Creating profiles and browsing and flirting and “poking” on social networks

• Sending messages and links via email, text/SMS, and Internet Messaging (IM) systems

As each of these activities in turn spawned entirely new ecosystems and communication channels dedicated to legions of fans, online populations similarly dedicated themselves to the creation and consumption of new media/social media in these online environments. Not only had we become addicted to the Network, we had become the Network:

We The People,

In Order to Form a More Perfect Platform,

Establish Internet Equality,

Ensure Domestic Social Connectedness,

Provide for the Creative Commons,

Promote the General Web-fare,

and Secure the Blessings of Liberty

to Our Blogs and Our Friends and Followers,

Do Ordain and Establish this Network

for the .COM, the .NET, the .ORG,

and the Entire World Wide Web!”

Well, maybe it didn’t happen quite like that…but I bet you in a hundred years, people will look upon the creators of the Internet, search engines, social networks, and some of the more famous websites akin to the way older generations think about our founding fathers. I mean, didn’t Al Gore invent the Internet? I rest my case.

And as we begin to explore what social media is about in the Second Age of Aquarius, I can think of no one more qualified to bring you kicking and screaming into the 21^st century than Tamar Weinberg. Tamar is a friend, guru, and colleague who has been swimming in the ocean of search engines and social media for over 10 years, and her annual “Best Of” list of Internet marketing articles is a must-read for all things search, social, and beyond.

With no further ado: I bring you Tamar Weinberg, and the Social Web.