Shared Visions
Last week I had the pleasure of sitting down with Chris Anderson the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and the author of The Long Tail. As most of you know, The Long Tail first appeared in Wired in October 2004 and was also recently published as a book. His thesis about the Long Tail touches many of today’s industries, marketing strategies, technological developments, even culture and politics, and is the basis for the KickApps business model. I hope this guy knows what he’s talking about…:-).
The catalyst for us getting together was a blog post that he wrote in late September entitled, “Social Networking is a Feature Not a Destination.” It’s a very interesting read but the point that resonated most with me was his closing paragraph:
“I think focused sites that serve niche communities will extract the best lessons from Facebook and MySpace and offer better social networking tools to the communities they already have. I’m sure huge and generic social networking destinations will continue to do well, but I’m placing my bet on the biggest impact coming when social networking becomes a standard feature on all good sites, bringing community to the granular level where it always works best.”
When we met, we naturally talked about KickApps and I was delighted to hear that he shares much of our vision when it comes to how we see the world and social media. KickApps’ raison d’être is to eliminate barriers to entry for any web publisher and developer wishing to create online communities using social media applications on their existing website. Social media is an audience engagement engine and there are few things in a web publisher’s arsenal that can deliver audience growth and engagement the way social media can—according to comScore the fastest growing website in August 2007 was a niche user-generated video site called GodTube.com (1.7M visitors in its first month!). From a publisher’s perspective the “biggest impact” comes from audience engagement on ‘niche’ sites which translate to highly targeted and desirable advertising inventory. A Long Tail advertising network, so to speak. We call our version of this the KickApps Intelligent Ad Network.
Another thing we talked about was that there are a few fundamental features that a hosted white label solution like ours should have to enable publishers to create a social media powered community that plugs right into their existing websites. The obvious ones are to provide a platform that our customers can use to deliver a branded experience to their community, these ‘baseline’ features include brand look and feel, DNS masking, and contextual integration of community content within their existing site using things like Widgets. Other important features include giving traffic attribution to the site owner and total ownership of content and member data.
There’s also a fundamental philosophy that a ‘white label’ provider needs to be able to deliver upon. The value of a white label platform like KickApps’ is that it’s ‘your’ community, ‘your’ content and ‘your’ brand; we’ve created KickApps to meet those guidelines. Our client’s audience shouldn’t have to sign on to someone else’s network—you might as well create a group on Facebook or MySpace if you had to do that. Instead, we’ve architected KickApps to enable our clients to create ‘silo’d’ networks of their own that allow their members to have a single sign-on throughout.
This is particularly interesting for our larger media and entertainment clients who have a network of properties, each with a separate community that link to an ‘uber’ site and with it each other, a parent-child relationship if you will. Many of our current client base who initially started with just one site community are now looking to utilize KickApps’ ability to support their own social media network of sites and I learned that this is a feature desired by Chris.
All this to say, I really enjoyed my time with Chris and I look forward to engaging more with him as one of our industry’s leading thinkers.
