Keep the good info coming.

Dr. Dave Hale
Internet Marketing Professor
http://www.drdavehaleonline.com

An online community is not useful if there is only one person in the community I want to share information with. It becomes much more useful if there are 10 people and many time more useful if there are 10,000. But a huge membership, with only a few people you are personally interested in, is not very useful.

The LinkedIn group for 100,000 people is not useful if nobody in the group uses it as a communications tool.

That said, Alin, I really want to see where MH Connected goes over the next year. Given that it’s gaining traffic much faster than the other exclusive legal sites, is under the tremendously valuable MH brand, and is backed by the ample resources of Reed Elsevier, I’m excited about its future prospects (as I’m sure you are as well).

Doug, thanks for the Metcalfe’s Law reference, I’ve been meaning to look it up since reading it on another blog recently.

I was thinking about network effects earlier today when commenting on the TechCrunch article about Prezi getting VC funding (http://bit.ly/1NSLF).

Have either of you seen Prezi? It’s breakthrough presentation software that is much more impressive and visually arresting than Powerpoint. Here’s a presentation I created: http://prezi.com/37972/

I noted that the ultimate challenge for Prezi is the network effect issue. When I showed up to give this presentation at the IACCM convention in Orlando, the laptop to be used was set to go with Powerpoint, but, sadly, was not connected to the Internet, so I could not access my Prezi cloud presentation file (luckily they paid an extra fee to the hotel to go on-line). This underscores Doug’s point and goes to show that the most valuable thing about Powerpoint is that it’s ubiquitous.

As I pointed out in my first comment, both group types and sizes can work for you – all depends on who and what you are looking for: just as an example, If you are aiming for a specific job in Microsoft, will it be more beneficial to meet all Microsoft employees or just the person participating in making the decision of hiring you?

* latest forum discussions about social media marketing (http://community.martindale.com/forums/t/5379.aspx),
* In house counsel survey about billable hours (http://community.martindale.com/forums/t/6402.aspx)
* new great blog by Bradley Clark (http://community.martindale.com/pages/ViewProfile.aspx?uid=1739195)

There is also a lot of activity that is happening in the private and confidential groups – where people feel secure and safe to discuss their matters freely. Which is an interesting topic in its own right given the other comments here around closed vs open communities.

Yes, I agree, these are all new conversations. I agree, we could definitely enjoy more of these and put our main focus with encouraging engagement. If you compare these to conversations we had in Connected 2-3 months ago, I hope you agree there is a major difference in variety, pace – and existence – of conversations. Every community, like a plant, needs time to ‘bake’, and grow, and I can see the Connected seedling quickly coming out. Is Connected noisy of conversation – not quite. Is it heading there – absolutely. I, like you, am eager to see more activity, but a plant is a plant is a plant – I am not going to pull it to grow, but I am sure watering it with the right discussion will make it as amazing as it can be [I am getting all Rheingold here, I know.]

To me these are actually the finest moments of a community – where people are discovering it and each other, when the core community is formed, a moment before it becomes a place of busy conversation, and 2 moments before it becomes so popular that people start longing for the times ‘when it was just us’.

Regarding the 1% rule and the Social Media Policy week: the main goal is to come up with a repository of content that law firms and companies could use later on, that is built on community perspective, experience and thoughts. My hope is that as a result of this week there will be some buzzing conversation in the community, one that can be seen and read.

Even if not, I know many people, as you have indicated, are still reading and following the conversation – passively involved in it. Unlike the real world, this impact is hard to feel and gauge, but more often than not, it has immense impact on the community later on. The contribution, the collaboration, has started – visible or not. Of course I’d like it to be visible – and I also deeply appreciate the less visible impact. Companies and Law Firms still struggle with the if’s, what’s and how’s of social media policy, and if we could offer them a repository of reference for that – well, that would be great won’t it?

Secondary purpose is to get the community itself to think about what these social media guidelines mean for us. I am hoping that discussing social media policy will also clarify rules of engagement for those still uncertain of what to say – but want to participate, those that can be converted into active users.

Time for some theory on the network effect. As a communications platform, any of these sites will fall under Metcalfe’s law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law. Since they are social, Reed’s law may be applicable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law.

To sum up the theories, the more people that use the tool, the more useful it is. Membership is not the key, use is the key.

The classic example for Metcalfe’s law is the fax machine. The first person with a fax machine was very bored. At the other extreme, email has become ubiquitous because it is ubiquitous. Everyone has an email address.

These platforms get more useful as more people use them. Joining is merely the first step. You actually need to use it for them to useful.

The benefit of a closed group is that you can see who else is using it and create more connections with those you know or share interest. The downside of a closed group is that there are fewer members and therefore fewer people you know or share an interest.

The conversation and content is going to come from a smaller subset of those that contribute. As you point out, that leads to a lot of navel-gazing conversations on Legal OnRamp. Same as the most popular conversations on Twitter seem to be about Twitter itself.