Community Evolution??

It’s a good time to be in social media, not just because it’s a hot field but also because there are fundamental changes going on in terms of how organizations view innovation and community dynamics.  One of the things I find interesting is in the race to monetize interactions and content, communities are “morphing” from large uber-communities to specialized expert communities.  In the early days of social networks, we had  classmates.com and Friendster, which had a simple mission to connect folks for conversation.  Facebook became the place to not just connect but also place photos, links, videos and promote parallels between connections as well as increase engagement through applications. These communities then spawned communities of intent and communities of interest.  Let me clarify, if you and I are wine enthusiasts, we could be linked on sites like cellartracker.com or snooth, which cater to this interest.  I’m sure there are wine lover pages on Facebook but the previous are solely dedicated to all things wine, so engagement, interaction and content accelerate.  Communities of intent are like-minded folks looking to get information and provide assistance around natural disasters (Haiti action, crisis wiki, etc.); learn, connect and affect change around disease states and conditions (My Cancer Place) or potentially affect the political process (MoveOn.Org).

Recently, we are seeing the introduction of the expert community.  I believe these are appearing more readily in part because of the conversation index but also there is a clearer path to monetization.   Now the definition of “expert” can be a little loose but I like to think a good general definition is a community where members have credentials to become a part of the community.  A perfect example is Sermo where they have 100k+ certified physicians sharing information continuously on everything from hospital conditions to effectiveness of treatments, medications and devices.  Since Sermo is designed exclusively for physicians, there is an extremely high level of content fidelity.  In addition, by segmenting along different specialties, subscribers looking to mine information can pinpoint surveys targeted into the right community population.  I think we are going to see many more of these types of communities be developed in the near future.

You can imagine a community for engineers separated into sub-disciplines (structural, electrical, mechanical, etc.).  A mechanism to promote information sharing could be valuable for the internal community in setting up bid teams with specific skill set and meeting needed bid requirements while the information exhaust (content to be mined) could be valuable for any number of groups (agencies, regulatory bodies, municipalities, vendors, etc.).  Many communities control quality of content by having the community self police itself; so if someone is contributing garbage or what the community perceives as garbage they will receive consistently low rankings while someone who contributes insightful content time over time and develops influence within the community will rise to the top.  There are some great analysis packages and tools to filter and analyze content against subject, frequency, source, sentiment, (just take a look at Scout Labs, Sysomos, and Jodange) but for my money nothing beats starting with high quality data