Social Media and “The Plausible Promise”

Clay Shirky’s three rules for successful social media starts with the “plausible promise” – and frankly there is no point in considering the other two until you have this one right!

“The problem of getting the promise right is unlike traditional marketing, because most marketing involves selling something that will be made for listeners rather than by them. The second proposition is complicated by the “paradox of groups” – there can be no group without members, but there can be no members without a group, because what would they be members of?”

This conjures up the circular reasoning posed by the great Goucho Marx  ”I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as a member”

More accurately (though less amusing) this is akin to the challenge of the empty restaurant in attracting diners…

So the users of social tools are making two related judgments:

- Will I like using this tool or participating in this group?

- Will enough other people feel as I do to make it take off? (the empty restaurant dilema…) 

Of course, there is no simple answer to this but there are a few clues. Shirky observes that ”the original message inviting people to work on the Linux operating system was neither too provisonal (“Let’s try to see if we can come up with something together”) nor too sweeping (“Let’s create a world-changing operating system”). Instead, Linus’s proposal was modest but interesting – a new but small operating system, undertaken principally as a way to learn together. Just right.”

And even when you get the plausible promise right – don’t imagine that the community will automatically assemble as though by divine decree. By and large, we find that it occurs through a fair degree of fumbling (trail and error in relation to content) and hard work in ”priming the pump”.

Catriona Flake, one of the founders of Flickr, said she’d learned from the early days that “you have to greet the first ten thousand users personally.” When the site was small, she and the other staffers would not just post their own photos but also comment on other user’s photos, like a host circulating at a party. This let the early users feel what it would be like to have an appreciative public, even before such a public existed.

This certainly aligns with our experience. To complete our circular reasoning - online communities are “living, breathing” things that require the constant attention of living, breathing things!