ME GET START WHEN FRED TAKE BIG CHANCE ON CRAZY PERSON TYPE LIKE DINOSAUR. MINIMUM VIABLE PERSONALITY TURN INTO MORE, WHICH LEAD TO DRAW REAL BOOKS LIKE LEAN ENTREPRENEUR. AND BEYOND.

THIS A CHAPTER FROM NEW BOOK. IT DEDICATED TO FRED, AND TO COMMUNITY AT AVC.COM. NONE OF THIS HAPPEN WITHOUT YOU.

HOW TO SOCIAL

ME, FAKEGRIMLOCK, GO FROM JOKE TO FAMOUS ON INTERNET IN JUST FEW YEARS. NOT BECAUSE LUCK. BECAUSE ME SOCIAL RIGHT.

NOW ME TELL YOU HOW TO SOCIAL LIKE ROBOT DINOSAUR. HOW FIND AUDIENCE. FIND VOICE. FIND MORE.

HOW BUILD COMMUNITY. AND SELF.

START WITH MINIMAL VIABLE ENGAGEMENT ENGINE

NEED THREE THINGS TO ENGAGE AUDIENCE.

1. AUDIENCE – THE WHO

2. SOMETHING TO DO – THE WHAT

3. PLACE TO DO IT – THE WHERE

HOW FIND AUDIENCE? SOMEWHERE ON INTERNET, THERE A CONVERSATION FOR YOU. FIND IT. PARTICIPATE UNTIL VALUABLE.

NOW YOU HAVE WHO.

PAY FEW BUCKS FOR URL, BLOG, EMAIL. GET TEMPLATE FOR SITE SO IT NOT LOOK TERRIBLE. MAKE FACEBOOK OR TWITTER ACCOUNT.

NOW YOU HAVE WHERE.

LINK TO WHERE IN CONVERSATION. HAVE  CONTENT WAITING ON OTHER SIDE OF LINK. HAVE COMMENT SYSTEM ALSO WAITING.

NOW YOU HAVE WHAT.

YOUR WHO GO TO YOUR WHERE AND DO WHAT.

NOW YOU HAVE COMMUNITY.

LET THEM FIND YOUR VOICE

THERE WORD FOR ONE-WAY COMMUNITY. PRISON. NO ONE WANT TO STAY THERE.

TWO WAY COMMUNITY IS BE AWESOME FOR THEM. LET THEM TELL YOU WHAT AWESOME TO BE.

EXPERIMENT. MEASURE. STOP DOING WHAT FAILS. DO MORE WHAT WORKS.

ITERATE VOICE LIKE A PRODUCT. BECAUSE THAT WHAT IT IS.

WHO LEADS TO YOU LEADS TO MORE

FIRST YOU FIND AUDIENCE. THEN LISTEN UNTIL FIND YOU. NEXT YOU FIND MORE.

GIVE AUDIENCE GIFTS TO SHARE. BE USEFUL. INTERESTING. AWESOME.

LEAVE TRAILS.

EVERY GIFT MUST HAVE TRAIL. TRAIL BACK TO YOUR WHERE. EVERY GIFT IS INVITATION.

“WE ARE AWESOME, JOIN US.”

THIS WHY COMMUNITY ABOUT THEM, NOT YOU. THEM ONES THAT CARRY YOUR GIFTS.

THEM THE ONES MAKE MORE THEM.

TIME TO ROLL

WHY NEED COMMUNITY? JUST TO SELL PRODUCT?

MAYBE. IF YOU A PRISON.

TWO-WAY COMMUNITY MORE THAN LISTEN. MORE THAN DO THINGS FOR THEM.

THEM CAN DO THINGS TOO.

EVERY MEMBER OF COMMUNITY IS DIE WITH MANY SIDES. WANT TO MAKE THINGS HAPPEN?

ROLL YOUR COMMUNITY.

EACH ONE IS CHANCE TO GET RIGHT NUMBER. EACH ONE IS POTENTIAL SURPRISE. EACH ONE IS DOOR WAITING TO OPEN.

BUILD COMMUNITY RIGHT, IT ROLL ITSELF. ALL THE TIME.

LOVE THE SOCIAL

SOCIAL HARD WORK. LOVE DOING IT. OR FIND PARTNER THAT DO.

IF NOT DOING IT FOR THEM? YOU FAIL.

IF NOT LIKE DOING IT? YOU FAIL.

IF NOT WANT TO LISTEN, NOT WANT THEM DO THINGS, NOT WANT LET COMMUNITY GROW ON OWN?

YOU FAIL.

BUILD STARTUP IS JUMP OUT WINDOW, INVENT WINGS ON WAY DOWN.

BUILD COMMUNITY IS JUMP INTO WHIRLWIND, MAKE IT A HURRICANE.

JUMP NOW.

I guess this should be a Feature Friday post but I write my posts based on what I am thinking about first thing in the morning and this is what I am thinking about right now.

I just went to Twitter like I always do first thing in the morning and this is what I saw in my timeline:

Right at the top of my timeline, Twitter is telling me that my friend Mark is active again on his Mediaeater handle. And they follow that with the suggestion that I tweet at him. This is the first time I've seen this kind of messaging from Twitter. And I like it.

If you go back to my 30/10/10 post, you will see that most web services and mobile apps only get 30% of their registered users to use the app at least once a month. The other 70% have largely gone away. But it doesn't mean they are gone for good. Getting them back should be a primary goal of any consumer web or mobile company.

Twitter has been working on this problem for years. I recall getting a presentation from their growth team at least three years ago that detailed how they were working on this problem. And they are still working on this problem. Most likely they will always be working on this problem.

You can email or spam in some other way your inactive users and that might work. But what you do once they come back is way more important. You have to figure out how to make the experience better than it was when they used it previously. Some of that will likely be that the product is much better because your and your team have improved it a lot. But some of that should be an engaging experience that somehow they did not get before.

When we get our various portfolio companies together, I like to ask them if they can identify one or two metrics that separates their successful and engaged users from their unsuccessful and inactive users. Most of the time the metric has something to do with engagement (they left a comment, they got a reply to a comment, they got a like on their photo, they had people follow them, etc, etc). Engaging with real humans, not just the machine, is the key in social systems. And most systems are social in some way.

Your inactive users are important cohort to focus on. There must have been something that got them to sign up for your service in the first place. So focus on getting them back, retaining them, and most importantly, engaging them.

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The Gotham Gal and I went out with friends last night. As can happen, we got talking shop towards the end of the night. And specifically we were debating the significance of Snapchat. The debate was about whether the feature that makes Snapchat special (you know your photos won't end up on Facebook) is the basis for a standalone app and business. My view, having lived through this debate with Twitter and Foursquare, is that mobile apps are features in the mobile OS and that Snapchat can and likely will own this feature in the leading mobile operating systems even though institutionalized copycats (ie Facebook who copies everything) can and will copy it. The irony that Facebook has copied a feature that is specifically designed to avoid Facebook is precious in and of itself.

But I digress. The thing I want to talk about here is the emergence of privacy as the defining feature of the next breakaway app on the social internet. What does this mean for where we are and where we are going? Is open social out and closed private in?

At times like this, I like to talk to my kids and their friends. Here is a typical college aged woman I know. She uses Twitter, Instagram, Cinemagram, Foursquare, iMessage, and Snapchat. And Facebook too. She uses each of them for what they are good for. Each of them is on her home screen – one click and she is sharing something with someone. Each app offers a different graph – that she has curated specifically for that app – and each app offers a different type of engagement. If it is something silly that she wants to share with a friend but would be mortified if it ended up on Facebook, its Snapchat. If it is something she wants out there broadly, it is Twitter. If it is something she wants to share with a wide group of curated friends, it's Instagram. She has a private Instagram account so she controls who follows her there. She is a sophisticated user of social media. She was on Facebook in middle school and has grown up with this stuff. She knows how to use social media and she adopts whatever is useful to her. Snapchat is useful to her. Privacy is an important feature at times and she is happy to have an app with that as the central value proposition.

So that is my way of saying that I think privacy is an important feature and kudos to Snapchat for figuring that out. Further they invented a mode of engagement (the photos self destruct) that is new and novel. And the result is they are on the home screeen of millions of mobile phones and that number is growing by the day.

I expect we'll see a rash of copycats and other approaches to leveraging privacy as the central value proposition in the coming months. I am not sure that is the right thing to learn from this though. I think the right thing is to think about what other features are missing in the mobile OS and figure out the right mode of engagement to implement that feature. That is what Twitter did with status, Foursquare did with location, Instagram did with photo sharing, and Snapchat did with privacy. That got each of them on the home screen. Figure out what the next thing is.

Regular readers of this blog know of my great admiration and appreciation for the work of our NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg. One of Bloomberg's signature issues has been gun safety. When you ask Mike about this issue, he tells you that after a few visits to the wives and children of NYC police officers who have been shot and killed on their job, you get pretty worked up about this issue. And worked up he is.

Bloomberg and many of the urban mayors around the country have created the Demand A Plan organization to fight for gun safety. It is currently the leading gun safety group in the US.

Many leaders in the Internet/tech industry have been working with Demand A Plan over the past few days to kick off a large and sustained social media and regular media campaign to pressure our leaders to do something about the gun safety problem in our country. I have been involved in this effort and I support its goals completely.

Here are a few things that are launching today:

1) A full page ad in the New York Times which I have signed personally

2) A viral social media campaign at the Demand A Plan website

3) Change your twitter avatar (I changed mine)

I will update this post with additional efforts that launch today. Like the PIPA/SOPA efforts last year, this effort is diverse, distributed, chaotic, and hopefully effective and powerful. I am not aware of everything that is going on right now. There is a lot of activity out there. But I will try to stay on top of it today and keep you all up to date as well.

In addition to our Mayor, I would like to thank Ken Lerer, Ron Conway, and Eric Hippeau for their excellent leadership of the tech sector's work on this issue in the past few days.

One of my favorite bloggers and thinkers about social media, Anil Dash, has a blog post up on Medium titled You Can’t Start the Revolution from the Country Club. Go read it because he's talking about some important stuff.

In his post Anil observes that in many of the most interesting new social media services, there is a sense of exclusivity built into the experience. A velvet rope as it were. And in many cases, this is being done to produce signal instead of noise, to make the consumption experience easier, and to produce "quality content." Anil calls bullshit on that. And so do I.

I have learned the power of inclusivity from writing this blog and watching this community evolve. Everyone is welcome here. Everyone can comment. Nobody's comments get nuked unless they are spam or hate. And I have a very high standard for hate. The community can and does police this place. And that allows anyone to come in here and be a regular. And that is what has created the magic.

If you look at some of the best communities on the web, like reddit for example, they all follow this approach. It makes for a noisy and messy experience. But it works and it scales.

This is my basic argument for free as a business model. Once you insert money into the equation, you are excluding important voices. Once you insert exclusivity into the quality model, you are excluding important voices.

Some of these "country clubs" as Anil calls them may succeed. But they don't inspire me. They don't invite me (in the behavior sense of that word). I'll hang out in public if you don't mind. It suits me.

A few weeks ago AVC regulars JLM, Arnold, William and I did a talk at Blogword.

We talked about blogs, social media, and of course, commenting communities. William kicked it off with some data that came out of the survey he did. About nine minutes in, the conversation starts.

We recorded it on SoundCloud and you can listen below.

It's feature friday and today I want to talk about our portfolio company Foursquare, which put out a completely redone app this week on iOS and Android. Blackberry is coming shortly.

I've got a few simple frameworks for thinking about things. In social media, one of my main ones is the tenet that 1% of the users will create content, 10% will curate it, and the rest will consume it.

Foursquare has, for most of its life, focused on the 1% who want to checkin to places and share those chekins and related data like tips and to dos, with their friends. They have close to 10mm people who do that actively. That's a lot if you think about it in the context of the 1% rule.

About six months ago, Foursquare launched explore which was a consumption experience. Users who don't want to checkin can get value by exploring cities using the data created by the 1% who are checking in.

But what about the 10%? How do users curate Foursquare without checking in?

Enter the like button. It seems so trivial. It seems like every social app I use has a like button. But in the past 24 hours, I have gotten something like a dozen likes on the four or five checkins I have done since the new app launched. That's new meta data that is being created on my checkins by other people. It's a way for people who will use the app largely for consumption to create important data signals without having to checkin.

Sometimes it is the littlest things that are the biggest things. In the new Foursquare app, which is really really good, I think it is the like button that will be the biggest game changer.

On Monday, I trained it up to New Haven to meet a Yale professor named Dina Mayzlin and talk to her class. I thoroughly enjoyed talking to Dina's class as it allowed me to work on some new material in a comfortable setting. But the talk Dina and I had over breakfast before class was even more thought provoking.

Dina got her PhD at MIT's Sloan School a decade ago, before she started teach at Yale. Her thesis looked at TV shows being talked about in the social media of that time, newsgroups, IRC, Usenet, etc, etc.

What she and her colleagues found out was that volume (number of mentions) was not a good predictor of popularity. Volume was more of a trailing indicator than a leading indicator.

But Disperson, or what Dina calls Entropy, turned out to be a very reliable leading indicator of popularlity of a TV show. The wider and broader the discussion of the TV show went within online social media, the more likely the show was to become popular.

By coincidence, the material I am working on in my public talks right now is about the fragmentation of social media. And so as I talked about fragmentation with Dina's Yale class, I started to weave her work, which was still rattling around in my brain, into my fragmentation thesis.

I am totally convinced that the world of social media is not consolidating around one "winner takes all" social platform. Instead, the world of social media is fragmenting into dozens of social platforms that are best of breed for a certain kind of social engagement. If you are building a social media strategy today, you absolutely need to address Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Tumblr. And you should also consider Foursquare, Instagram, Pinterest and Path. If you are in the music business, you need to consider SoundCloud. If you are in the book business, you need to consider Wattpad. If you are in the TV business, you need to conside GetGlue. And so on and so forth. Many of the companies I just mentioned, but not all of them sadly, are USV portfolio companies.

That's the thesis I spent thirty minutes on in front of the Yale class. But near the end of the talk to Dina's class, it occured to me that disperson/entropy can be gained by engaging on multiple social platforms. The number of likes on Facebook or tweets on Twitter is volume and is likely to be a trailing indicator of popularity. But if you track the essential social gestures across the fragmenting landscape of social platforms, likes, tweets, tumbls, checkins, pins, etc, then you get a measure of dispersion that may well be a leading indicator of popularity or the slope of the popularity curve.

That's the theory anyway. I'll leave the research to Dina and others. I hope someone will run the numbers to see if it works.

In the past week, the daily visitors at AVC have gone from an average of 10k per day to over 20k per day.

While this influx of new visitors is welcome (welcome everyone!), it is also unnerving. Where is it coming from?

Well the answer to that is pretty obvious – StumbleUpon. Here are the top traffic sources to AVC for the past week.

Typically direct traffic brings 40k visits per week. Readers clicking through from the RSS feed make up about 10k visits per week. Google search and Twitter each bring about 7,500 visits per week. StumbleUpon had been next on the list, bringing around 5k visits per week over the past few months. I have noticed StumbleUpon traffic growing pretty consistently over the course of this year.

But I've never seen a firehose of traffic and visitors like I've seen this past week from StumbleUpon. I'm not entirely clear what is happening here. But I hope it continues. More readers means more conversations and opinions and more friends. Welcome Stumblers.

Related articles

• The Power of StumbleUpon (markevanstech.com)
• StumbleUpon passes Facebook in US referral traffic (zdnet.com)
• Facebook Falters While StumbleUpon Races By (marketingpilgrim.com)
• StumbleUpon Drives More Than 50% of Social Media Traffic [STATS] (mashable.com)