Web Strategy by Jeremiah by Jeremiah Owyang

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An Initial Analysis of the Fast Company Community

THE ORIGINAL POST IS HERE: Please visit

 http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/02/09/an-initial-analysis-of-the-fast-company-community/

As an analyst, I watch the online community space very closely, and
am always interested in seeing how traditional institutions and
organizations approach, adapt, succeed or fail in adopting social
tools.

Fast Company, a forward
thinking business publication has revamped it’s corporate website to
now be an online community. Their initial three page announcement
written by Edward Sussman: “The Media is Social”

[Fast Company, a traditional publication, has featured community as
it’s primary focus. But success isn’t guaranteed as: innovating without
a clear objective is dangerous, the bottom-up approach must cascade to
the whole organization, and they must rapidly make course corrections]

Opportunity
Fast Company is the first, but certainly not last, of a mainstream
publication to integrate the majority of their site as a social
community. The starting page of their website isn’t the magazine, or
it’s articles, but is the community site. In many other cases, websites
have bolted on social forums around content, this is clearly a full replacement of community over Fast Company content.

Objectives
Fast Company is attempting to involve readers and the market to be
involved in creating content. We’ve listed out there are five major
social computing objectives, (listening, talking, energizing,
supporting, embracing) and this one could fall under embracing, where
customers and employees collaborate to build next generation products
and services.

Challenges
Once the initial buzz wears off, we’ll have to see who will remain
leading the and joining in the conversations. Will the lines between
professional created editorial and community continue to be blurred?
How will high quality content be elevated so usefulness is found? Most
importantly, with the many reports showing that advertising on social
networks is ineffective, how will Fast Company monetize?

Initial Analysis of the Community, Fast Company should:

Determine a Goal
Being creative for the sake of innovation isn’t enough. It’s great to
see that they are trying something new, but what is the end goal? How
will they measure results? Does the team know what success looks like?

Quickly Squash Bugs
I noticed a few hiccups that aren’t uncommon on a launch. 1) Site error: the site was not available for some time, Chris Brogan has screenshots
2) I tried to message Edward, but it got stuck in an endless loop of
clicks to add him as a contact before messaging him, confusing. While
all excusable the first week, this needs to quickly be resolved.

Focus on fewer features
The community site launched with too many features, as a result, the
initial interface is overwhelming. I encourage clients to launch with
only three major features, (such as a profile, forum, blog, media,
q&a, etc), unfortunately, Fast Company launched without all of those

Elevate Fast Company Editorial
The professionally created content that we seek from Fast Company is
hidden, which is too bad, as that’s why we come to them in the first
place. There’s currently a saturation of online communities on every
given subject on Ning, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo and Google groups. How
is this different? I think the order is backwards: Lead with the
editorial, attach the social features second, the social features
should orbit (in context) the articles.

Clean up the Interface
The interface is crowded and unclear, resembling enterprise software,
there are too many options and tools. I’m not the only one, I received
feedback from some of my 3000 followers in twitter: “@jowyang I agree, the site was bewildering at first”
The deployment looks like the features were determined by the
developers and not a user experience designer. Let tools be hidden, and
show more on a mouse over or let them cascade out. Think Zen, articles
first, social second, features and tools third.

Start with a tour
Develop a quick and dirty walk through video or animation that
highlights how the website will serve the users, and how they can be
involved and contribute. Highlight at the lead in video, and have your top bloggers post quickly.

Community must become a core ethos of company
Being first has it’s advangtes, you get the buzz, but there’s also
disadvantages: the path has not been cleared before, and innovators
must quickly course correct when mistakes happen. Editors, writers,
journalists, management and support must all be involved in the
community, taking input, talking, and discussing. For success, Fast
Company will need to involve a social way of thinking in everything
they do, this can’t simply be a flash or wine thrown in the pan by
management.

The Big Picture

Can a business publication blend journalism and online community to create something better than either by itself?
This is the ‘fast’ question posed in the community, and there were a
myriad of responses, most positive. My response was the following:

“Yes it can, and it can also learn more from it’s audience, fuel
research, ideas, and stories. The successful business will learn how to
get the community to be part of the content creation, and how to
monetize on top of this.”

The Future
Expect this to be a success for Fast Company, but they’ll need to act
on the previous recommendations. Expect other business publications to
quickly launch similar communities, and soon the industry will be
inundated with ‘me toos’. The savvy publications will still realize
that the web is distributed and won’t limit their community efforts to
their corporate domains, but will also spread to where the people are. The savvy fishermen, fish where the fish are.

Conclusions
Fast Company has launched an innovative community site, unseen by most
mainstream publications. When the shinyness wears off, the company will
need to involve community in every aspect of it’s strategy for it to
thrive. Certainly a website and community to watch, I’ll post
additional analysis in a few months, and hope to get some numbers from
the team.