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.
Related Stories: | Topics:Innovation, Technology, Design, web strategy, social media, web marketing, analyst, Fast Company Magazine, Conclusions Fast Company, Edward Sussman, Opportunity Fast Company, Objectives Fast Company |
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Recent Comments | 1 Total
February 25, 2008 at 3:10am by Edward Sussman
Hi Jeremiah,
I'm the president of Mansueto Digital and built the new FastCompany.com along with several dozen extremely talented strategists, IAs, developers and designers. A true team effort of more than a year.
Now that we have a couple of weeks under our belt, I thought I'd take a few minutes to reply to your thoughtful post. First, many of the day one performance issues and bugs you reported have been fixed -- it's not often that a new, innovative platform gets tried out by so many hundreds of thousands of people from day one, but we're a popular brand. Intense scrutiny from day one isn't a problem that the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Digg and LinkedIn had to contend with, but I'm not complaining -- we're glad to be popular. We have loads more fixes and features to iron out still, but from a technical perspective, the site is overall doing very well given we're in month one.
From a business and editorial perspective we're doing great also. We've signed up sixteen thousand new members since beta lauch, joining our existing ranks of tens of thousands of business professionals interested in engaging in a dialogue about business. And we've continued our tradition of world-class journalism at the same time.
I think this connection between our journalism and our community isn't something you fully picked up on in your analysis, perhaps because it was done on day one when the site was full of commentary about, well, the site. So the day you wrote your post, it was a bit hard to see where we would be on day two, three, four and on...
Let me set the record straighht: it is not true that community on FastCompany.com is a "full replacement" of edit content, as you said. Actually, pretty much the opposite. The intent of the community is to amplify the discussion about business that our dozens of professional journalists and Fast Company experts spend their professional lives reporting and writing about. We are not slowing down our journalism at all on FastCompany.com.
You may have missed this because slot one of the hompeage on day one was my essay about the new site. On every day since slot one is a feature story from our writers. But slot two is a member micro-blog based on an answer to a daily "Fast Talk" question we pose. We then feature a member blog, before returning to our professionally produced staff blog and expert blog.
All in all, about half the stories come from our writers and experts, and half from members, although the member pieces are mostly based on questions and ideas posed by our editors. This is how we maintain consistency with the brand: we only ask questions and select member content to features about the FastCompany core themes of innovation, technology, management, careers, leadership, design (in business), social responsibility (in business) and work/life balance.
The same is true on the eight topical index pages built around these subjects -- about half the content is from our professionals and half of it curated from members. I think this is pretty clear to people reading the content.
Devoting this much space to the members -- and what's more, giving them editorial prominence from a design standpoint that signals equality with the professional journalists -- may have been so overwhelmingly different from what you've seen from other professionally-produced editorial websites, that you surmised we were just becoming a community site.
But we're not -- we're a fully blended journalism/community site. And three weeks in, rather than just be hypothetical about what might happen, I can give you some concrete examples. Again, we are only three weeks in:
-We are approaching 1,000 reader posts a day about business topics raised by our journalists.
-Members have set up more than 500 blogs about business.
-We released our annual special edition about the most innovative companies in America, including Google, and featured profiles of dozens of leading executives.
http://www.fastcompany.com/fast50_08/index.html
These stories will form the basis of a Q&A with our readers for the next month, which will extend the life of the stories and the conversation far beyond what we ever were capable of before.
-All of the content produced by the members is being stored on their public profiles (even if it isn't highlighted by the editors on our homepage), so we have hundreds of thousands of readers now able to connect with the readers based on what they are writing about business.
That doesn't happen on other professional journalism sites, and it doesn't happen on pure social media sites either. So, for example, take Jeremiah's blog on the other site where he posted this --
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/02/09/an-initial-analysis-of-the...
Some people had some really interesting stuff to say. But I have no idea who they are, how to reach them, and what else they may have written recently. If Jeremiah were to become a FastCompany.com blogger (we have some fancier RSS tools debuting soon to satisfy sophisticated bloggers) and I wanted to get to know any of the people who wrote comments on the post, I'd be just a click away from their profile and their contributions to the site -- blog post comments like this one, comments to professionally written articles, blogs posts, answers to daily editor questions, a list of the feeds the member subscribes to, articles they recommend, and more.
We think it's a better model for serious conversation than anything out there. We still have a lot to improve -- our interface is pretty elegant, we think (thanks in large part to the very fine folks at Bond Art & Sciences, especially Razorfish's former lead information architect, Karen McGrane) but we want to make it even better. Improved navigation of for logged in members is coming, as is improved functionality on groups (one feature in particular, due in about six weeks, will be pretty exciting).
Here's a prediction: not only will other media companies evetually follow some vriation of our model, I bet some of them will partner with us to directly join our blended journalism/community network. I have a great few weeks of meetings planned to try to make this a reality.