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.

Related articles

Meet Retention Score, the new metric that predicts your customer churn

Think Tracking DAUs Is Enough? Then You're Not Getting Your Whole Mobile Story

What Twitter can teach you about growth hacking

I've thought this for a long time but never really articulated it publicly until the Q&A session at ad:tech last week.

There are a ton of social services that sit on top of the world of e-commerce and allow users to curate items they like and may want to buy in the future. These experiences can be highly social. And there are services that allow for transacting and payment inside of large social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. They bring commerce to social platforms. This entire category of services is called Social Commerce.

I have not been particularly bullish on these services because I think social commerce is most naturally e-commerce with a well implemented social layer built natively into the commerce platform. When you look at conversion rates in e-commerce broadly what you see again and again is that the more friction and overhead there is between discovery and transaction, the lower the conversion rate. Something as simple as logging into a commerce platform to complete a transaction can lower converstion rates by an order of magnitude.

Conversion rates are critical. They tell you what systems perform best for the end user. When a system converts north of 5% of users visits to a transaction, it is working extremely well for the end user. When a system converts 0.1% of user visits to a transaction, it doesn't work as well for the end user.

When a retailer or e-commerce service implements a highly social layer into their service with hooks into the major social platforms, the conversion rates can be significant. I have seen this first hand. This is an indication that users enjoy and benefit from social commerce when it is built into a native e-commerce service.

When users start in a social system that is divorced from the e-commerce platform, I believe the conversion rates are significantly lower, often by an order of magnitude or more. This, to me, suggests that the overhead of multiple systems reduces the effectiveness of the experience for users and is suboptimal.

So this is the thinking that led me to say what I said on stage at ad:tech this past week. I've felt this way for a long time and I am glad that I got the question and had an opportunity to address this issue publicly. I am eager to hear the discussion of this issue in the comments.

Google Analytics has a relatively new feature that allows you to look at your "social sources" of traffic. According to Google, about 27% of the vists to AVC in the past month came from social sources. For those who are curious about the rest of the traffic, 30% is direct, 15% is search (much of which is really direct traffic), and of the rest, about half is from social sources.

Here are the top social networks that drive traffic to AVC:

Twitter and Hacker News have been the mainstays of the social traffic to AVC for a long time. Last year, StumbleUpon was driving a ton of traffic to AVC, but that waned early this year and it is much less of a factor today.

Facebook, Techmeme, and Disqus are the other big social drivers of traffic. 

And the traffic that Disqus drives is markedly different than all of the other social sources. These folks hang around longer, read more pages, and engage more.

If you have a blog or some other form of online media and have a Google Analytics tag on your pages, I suggest you take a look at your social sources. I think you'll find it interesting.

I just read that a lot of the social news reader traffic publishers like Washington Post and The Guardian were getting from Facebook has dropped off dramatically.

Next we will read that the traffic social video apps get from Facebook has dropped dramatically.

All of this reminds me of the big drop in traffic SEO driven sites deal with every time Google does an algorithm change.

SEO and Facebook timeline integration is "best practice" on the Internet. You should do both. They can be great free acquisition channels. But they are not great retention channels. Because easy come easy go.

Be your own bitch.

By now, regular readers of this blog should be pretty familiar with USV’s investment thesis centered around investing in large networks of engaged users that have the potential to disrupt large markets. I’ve mentioned it frequently here and my colleagues have also blogged regularly about it.

Today I got a tweet from Jon de la Mothe about the growth of professional networks on Facebook:

Professional Networks Built On Facebook Are Growing Like Crazy zite.to/H9KjuP via @fredwilson

— Jon de la Mothe (@delamothe) March 27, 2012

And I replied with this tweet:

@delamothe are they networks if they are built on top of another network?

— Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) March 27, 2012

I think it is possible to bootstrap a network on top of another network. Stocktwits did this on Twitter and Zynga did this on Facebook. But both of them eventually built their own networks directly on the web and mobile. Zynga still gets a ton of game play on Facebook and Stocktwits continues to benefit from tweet distribution on Twitter, but they have made the necessary investments to operate their businesses in such a way that they are not entirely dependent on other networks. In the case of Stocktwits, they did this early on. In the case of Zynga, they waited for a while to do this.

But my question to Jon is a bit different. I didn’t ask if you can build a network on top of another network. I asked if it is a network if it is built on top of another network. I think in that case, the answer is no. 

There is a third way, which are networks of networks. My partner Albert has blogged about this and I am 100% in agreement with him that this is the way the market should evolve. I believe that the Internet is an operating system and the networks that operate on the web and mobile via the Internet should interoperate with each other, share traffic and distribution with each other, and act as peers with each other. This is in keeping with the architecture of the Internet and is the most sustainable model and the one I am betting on in the long run.

Back in early December 2011, I wrote a blog post about Engagio, a new web service launched by our very own William Mougayar. For those who didn't read that post, Engagio is a service that aggregates your comment activity across many of the major social platforms and gives you a gmail style dashboard to see them and reply to them.

A lot has happened in the past 45 days since that post and I wanted to bring everyone up to speed on this project.

First, and most importantly, Engagio is now open to everyone. Every few days, I'd send an email to William saying "you have to open it up". And he'd reply, "we can't scale it yet". Now they think they can scale it, so it's open to everyone. If you didn't or couldn't check it out back then, you can now.

There are a bunch of new features, large and small. Most of them are pretty useful. A good example of that is social profiles. Here's Fake Grimlock's social profile, for example.

There is even a "fred wilson feature." At Disqus, the "fred wilson feature" was the ability to get an email for every comment and the ability to reply to the email and post it to the comment thread. At Engagio, the "fred wilson feature" is the ability to "mute a site." I get so many comments on AVC that my Engagio inbox is filled with them and I see nothing else. When I mute AVC, I see all my other commenting activity on the web, at Twitter, at Foursquare, at other blogs. This single feature has made Engagio way more useful to me. To "mute a site", you go to the Sites page via the left nav section, and click on the icon next to the site name.

Finally a disclosure. Engagio did a small seed round to given them runway to execute the "build the user base" stage of the business. My wife and I made a small angel investment in this round. I've been encouraging William to do this project since he first mentioned it to me in the fall. It seemed only right to encourage with both words and capital.

Please let William and me know what you think of the progress Engagio has made since it launched 45 days ago in the comments.

I was at a meeting yesterday regarding the ongoing online piracy discussion and the conversation turned to search as a source of traffic to sites with pirated content. I stopped the conversation and noted that search isn't what it used to be and pointed out that many websites get more traffic from social than search.

Here at AVC, it is no contest. Here's the top ten traffic sources to AVC in the past thirty days:

Google/organic is search. Direct and feedburner are regular visitors. Everything else (Stumbleupon, Twitter (t.co), Hacker News (news.ycombinator), Techmeme, google/referral, Facebook, and Linkedin are social. So if we break the top ten into three categories, direct is about half of the top ten's traffic, social is 40%, and search is 10%.

This blog isn't normal in a few ways. The fact that Twitter generates 13x Facebook in traffic is one example of that. And the very high level of direct/regular readers is probably a bit unusual too.

I'm curious if anyone is aware of a broader study of traffic sources on the Internet and how search and social compare these days. I suspect that they are neck and neck across the entire Internet or possibly that social has surpassed search. But I have not seen that data and I'd love to.

Last month, I participated in a PII event and sat on a panel (a format I dislike and try to avoid) moderated by Kara Swisher. Kara posted a video of the panel on ATD a few days later.

Sometimes when you are in a public setting you say things that have been coming together in your mind but you have never articulated before. That happened that day. I said the following about 40 minutes into the panel:

Twitter is default public and everyone knows that's what it is. Your Twitter identity is the lightest weight, most public, and therefore the best identity on the web.

Many other online identites we are all developing are heavier weight. They have more private information about us in them. When the companies that operate those identity services share our information with others we get nervous, upset, and anxious.

Twitter and other default public identities (like my daughter Emily's "Things I Like" tumblog) contain only the information we are willing to have the whole world know about us. And therefore they are better identities. They can be portable without our permission. They are crafted by us with the full knowledge that they will be seen by others, potentially many others.

We just completed a long and taxing hiring process. We had over 250 applicants to our analyst position. We asked each and every applicant to share their online profiles with us. Most shared default public profiles like blogs, twitters, tumblrs, etc. We learned so much about each of the applicants through reviewing those public identities. Default public online identities are very powerful and very revealing about people, maybe more so than default private identities. They can be used for almost anything that default private identities can be used for. But they can be used without asking for permission from the owner of the profile because the information is public already.

This is counter intuitive for many. But I'm pretty sure that default public identities are the future for most things (maybe not healthcare and personal finance and the like) and that they are the best form of online identity.