Originally Posted on HHCC.com on March 12th, 2007
Craigslist pretty much defines the concept of “online community”. It is also the seventh most visited site on the web, with an employee headcount three orders of magnitude smaller than any other company in the top ten. If you’re trying to build your own online community, and want to take one lesson from Craigslist, it’s this: design does not build community.
That Craigslist has succeeded with a minimalist design is no secret to anyone who’s been around the net for a while. But could Craigslist have done as well if it had a slick, flashy design? Even if you discount practical issues such as load time and usability, the answer is an emphatic no.
The entire concept of “design” runs counter to the idea of community. Well, that’s not entirely true. Literally, design takes many forms - such as usability, universality, and affordance. All of these are important in any creative endeavor. What I’m talking about is — you know, Design — the kind of stuff that evokes such adjectives as “bold”, “edgy”, and “daring”.
Design tells users “this is who we are”, “this is what we believe in”, “this is how we want you to feel about being here” — all valuable messages for web sites looking to sell a product or an idea. But a true community should be deciding these things for themselves.
Think about where community “happens” in real life. It happens in church basements, school gymnasiums, and dilapidated town halls. It does not happen in art museums or casinos. When the venue screams “Look at me! Look at me!” people start paying more attention to it than to themselves, and the community becomes far less authentic.
Community happens when someone says “I matter here - what I do can make an impact”. MySpace succeeds because of its amateurish design, not in spite of it. It succeeds because someone looks at it and says, “I can make something that belongs here”. This is not the feeling you get from a site like MTV.com
So, what should you do when adding community elements to your web site — fire all your Photoshop and CSS gurus and build a Craigslist clone? Absolutely not. If you’re reading this blog, chances are you’ve got something to sell to someone. Your web site needs just the right amount of branding to keep people at least partially focused on that. Craigslist doesn’t need any branding because it’s a community about being a community — it has absolutely no other reason for being. Your site (presumably) does. But your design should subtly nudge your vistors into what you want them to focus on, not beat them over the head with it.
Don’t let this “no design needed” idea fool you into thinking that building an online community is easy — it’s extremely difficult. Especially because it involves skills that marketers tend to find very challenging — the ability to listen and adapt to what your community wants (eBay is extremely skilled at this) and the patience to let your community grow organically. Community requires culture, and culture takes time to develop. Compare the quality of the commentary on Flickr, which grew slowly, to the infantile gibberish found on YouTube, which skyrocketed to success overnight.
If building online community is important to you — and it should be, if you want to remain relevant in 20XX — check your ego at the door and remember that you’re building your brand’s church basement, not its church.
Filed under Marketing, The HHCC.com Posts, The Internet Biz, Web 2.0
If you’d like to give it a try, there are plenty of vendors who want to help you get there. KickApps offers instant gratification in the form of a free ad-supported MySpace/YouTube clone, which you can upgrade to a paid version. Customers include TAG Body Spray and National Lampoon. Vitrue offers a slicker interface, more clearly focused on consumer generated video, but doesn’t offer any free or trial versions. Vitrue powers sites from TBS, Lance Foods and the Cincinatti Bengals. ONEsite rounds out the trio, with solutions ranging from free to $1000/mo. iVillage, ClearChannel, and Sprint head up their roster.
