Long Tail, Long Silence
It's hard to tell that I've been thinking hard lately about
what it takes to build a viral blog, since I violate all the rules I'm
pulling together: no posts here since Jan Searls' great
article on membership on 3/22, and just one post by your
humble proprietor over the last month. I've been doing a lot of
writing, but most of it has been to define and extend ORGware. You
remember ORGware, right? It's the "Dean Done Right" platform, our
campaign-in-a-box, or "Moveon Done Right", as a knowledgeable friend
advised me to label it.
I owe you an explanation. Rodger Desai and I formed
Open Resource Group, LLC (ORG) 14 months ago, based on real research, a
sound vision and a reasonable expectation. Here's the 10-point combo
backgrounder and what actually happened:
- In 2003, the Dean campaign sought to develop a
comprehensive web platform.
- Constrained by time and budget, the campaign could only
support the illusion of a platform.
- The campaign's tools were a cobbled-together set of
databases and services.
(about 3 dozen tech-savvy volunteers maintained the appearance of a web
platform)
- No one has developed a unitary web kit to help member-based
campaigns get what they seek:
a. Buzz
b.
People
c.
Money
- In the summer of 2004, I designed the Spirit of America
(SoA) architecture.
- In 2005, Rodger and I hoped to extend the SoA platform as
our core product.
- The Perl-based platform proved to be too specific to SoA
and too brittle to rely upon.
- In January, 2006, we re-started from scratch using Ruby on
Rails, with which we launched PodSlam.org.
- Last month, having learned so much from PodSlam, we started
over, again.
- We're about 66% finished with ORGware 1.0 and we're more
excited than ever. Go figure.
The Plan
Member-based organizations need, and many deserve, a
comprehensive open-source kit they can use to grow their three sources
of energy: Buzz,
People and Money.
If we can help them grow those three flowers in their garden, we
prosper and the world gets better (because member-based organizations
are forced to be clued).
Member-based organizations must be, by definition, blog-based. The
great thing about blogs is that they present potential authors
(members) with a sensible entry point to contribute their individual
gifts to the commonwealth of ideas: a Title
and a Body.
Members' posts are a grace to their community. Our straightforward
obligation is to transmute members' contributions into a coherent
archive and a foundation for a community's future.
So let's deconstruct those needs into straightforward and
achievable mechanisms that an organization can achieve by focusing
their intentions. (Disclaimer: not all organizations can do this. You
need to be worthy of attention, which means you need to exhibit a kind
of, uh,
tension. Howard Dean could attract attention by being
sensible and
controversial; John Kerry could not because he's wooden. The iPod
commands attention, Wendy's does not. Mini-Cooper, yes, Buick no.)
Newsflash: there's an essential XYZ axis for blogs
that get traction:
X=
the number of posts per day
Y=
the number of comments per post
Z=
the number of external links per day
If an organization's blog posts per day exceed a certain
minimum X,
and those posts attract a satisfactory number of Y comments
per post (correlating to Z
external links per day), then the blog will hit a tipping point that
means it has achieved traction.
A further objective is that a site should earn a reasonable
distribution of links from the three nodes of the
blogosphere that Technorati
tracks: bloggers with 1) a
lot, 2) some,
and 3) a little
authority.
The catalyst for this reflection is that I've been designing a
client dashboard for ORGware.
ORGware Client Dashboard
The purpose of ORGware's Client Dashboard is to focus our
clients' attention on the extreme simplicity of being disciplined
enough to prevail in the Age of the Blogosphere. Our clients need to
reach out and purchase the X and
the Y and
the Z of
success. It doesn't matter if an organization happens to have a crew of
great writers on staff (unlikely) or if their existing community
includes a raft of ready, willing and able writers (also unlikely) or
if, instead of paying its employees to blog, it hires outside experts
(what's the difference?), the organization has a primary obligation to
be interesting to its community.
Among the Open Resources™ the world needs is a guild
of skilled bloggers who can work this magic. ("Open Resource" is a
registered Trademark of Open Resource Group, LLC)
To be Interesting is to be Successful
That's it. You're done. The only variable any organization can
control is the number and quality of posts it puts up each
day. The number and quality of posts dictates the number and quality of
comments attracted. A lot of quality comments = external links. Again,
any organization is limited by the character of its mission, but that
is a variable beyond your control.
Look what Doc
has done with rocks.
Any organization can be interesting, and we can help with that.
12:45:59 AM 
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