Backfence and the Social Tipping Point
I haven't weighed in all the management shufflings at Backfence, the hyperlocal social media company, but now that it's turning into more than an internal squabble and looking more like a meltdown, I will.
[from For Local News Site, Model Just Didn't Click by Kim Hart / Washington Post]The company had planned to roll out at least three more sites by the end of 2006, but the management team reached an impasse with investors regarding the best way to enter new markets. Susan DeFife, who co-founded the venture with Mark Potts, resigned last week after a "difference of opinion about the strategic direction of the company," she said. DeFife said she and former Backfence vice presidents Amanda Graham and Bob Kelly are starting a consulting firm to help local firms reach potential customers through the Internet. Mark Potts, a former Washington Post staffer who left Backfence in October, has returned to temporarily run the company.
"It always ends up being so much different than the way you imagine it to be," Potts said. Over the next three months, he said, Backfence will add more features, such as social networking, online video and mapping. "We haven't rolled out as quickly as we'd wanted to. But we think the basic concept we went after is absolutely still the right place to be."
I have written a number of pieces in recent months warning entrepreneurs not to roll out solutions before the essential social elements are baked in. (See A Change Of Environment: More Time (And Money) Are Needed and Releasing Too Early, Reprise.) In this case, Potts states that the thing I believe to be most critical to uptake of social applications were there things they deferred. They opted to roll out a journalistic user experience just about as social as the local paper sitting in a puddle of water in your driveway.
People are the center of the universe. One of the central benefits of going on line is that you can engender many-to-many communication: not just a slightly better letters-to-the-editor mechanism. Backfence threw away these advantages in favor of a watered down soupçon of local news, views and ads.
By the sounds of the comments Bonsal and other investors are making, this is going to be the Newton of hyperlocal artisan (or citizen) journalism: they were one of the first, but no one can make the damn thing do anything useful.
The complaints I have about Backfence are simply errors of omission in the user experience. The world is full of people, but Backfence is full of disembodied stories. What people are seeking online is connection and meaning through self-expression. Personal profiles and social networking should be the number 1 and 2 elements built, not an afterthought months later.
The Post Story goes on, laying out what is inevitably going to become the received wisdom about the Backfence mess: it's too early, it's going to take a decade, people aren't ready, etc. Pundits like Crosbie are missing the point: Backfence was not too early into the market, but it did release its offering before it had the necessary social architecture to break through.
Media analysts agree that many readers are looking for hyperlocal content, but they say most citizen-journalism sites aren't mature enough to tap into the lucrative local advertising markets."Realistically, it's going to take close to 10 years for the business models to be there and for there to be enough advertisers willing to give money to hyperlocal start-ups," said Vin Crosbie, managing partner of Digital Deliverance, a Connecticut media consulting firm. "Backfence's problem is that it was too early."
Internet advertising revenues reached $4.2 billion last summer, a 33 percent increase over the revenues earned during the same period a year earlier, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
DeFife said Backfence sites had sold 550 ads to local businesses since April and got 2 percent of community members to register. "We were making significant strides," she said.
Others say the company has a long way to go to make a dent in its targeted local markets.
"They haven't really been able to capture the genuine interest of local residents on passionate issues like crime," said Peter Krasilovsky, a consultant who has been following Backfence's development. Community news sites have to invest in the quality of the content before advertisers will take notice, he added.
Josh Grotstein of SAS Investors said Backfence is still trying to find the most efficient way to bring new sites to more communities. "We remain very upbeat on the whole face of citizen journalism," he said.
Some investors, however, aren't as confident. Frank Bonsal, one of Backfence's local angel investors, said arguments between backers and founders has "destroyed the company."
"It's downsized to a modest team of people and they're out of money," he said. "At this point, I don't look for any return or any prospect of recovery."
The blunt truth is that the Backfence team shipped too early, leaving out the most critical features -- those unfamiliar to them in their experience -- and have paid the price that many other have, and others will pay in the future. But it doesn't mean that this couldn't have been done right, or that someone else won't crack the code. Even this mess could be turned around, potentially, with the right relaunch, with the right redesign.
It's not about getting the right angle on issues that people are passionate about, like crime or whatever. People are passionate about people, so the most important thing on the front page of Backfence should be people. Instead of being modeled around a failing, old timey model -- newspapers -- drive hyperlocality into a winning model, like Facebook profiles and Google maps.
They should call me up. I am even sitting in Reston VA as I write this, just a few miles from Backfence HQ.
Hi Stowe,
I've been doing a lot of thinking since I wrote this post on "citizen shovelware" and this post on Backfence...the thing is, those models aren't too early-but too late. People are becoming more cautious about what they put online. Stories of identity theft, online predators, and employers ferriting out negative info, are contributing to that. Also, some people don't believe they should put info on a site that, perhaps, no one will read when they can have their own hyperlocal blogs and link them back to the local paper? (at least that's how things are out here in Western Mass.) I give a lot lip to Masslive.com, but if you have a decent blog, you can easily get listed in their blogroll. and Masslive.com is read by local folks--I get a number of hits from them on a daily basis.
The feeling is that if it's listed on Masslive.com, it's a "trusted" blog. People are concerned about whom they can trust in the blogosphere.
Essentially, people no longer need third party carpetbagger sites to get out info about town goings-on. We have blogrolls on local papers. We have small local papers that get wide community circulation that are very good at providing info. We also have mailing lists that keep the info about orgs and events confidential and tons of other citizen-generated blogs on all kinds of thingsa.
As for advertisers--I've had a lot of contact with local busnessmen and ad folks recently. Many don't belive that internet ads are the right way to reach the folks who will need their services or products. In many cases, they're right. For the ones who would benefit, it becomes a cost issue. They have an advertising budget, but don't think in terms of a media budget--which is how they think of online. And if you, the online ad person, can't present them with very solid info on the ROI, they're not going to bite. (also, bad w.o.m. from other online businesses who's online ads haven't worked can put a serious kabosh on the idea for others.)
So, there are so many reasons why Backfence-ish stuff just won't cut it the way it may have in 1999 (when its precursor, AmericanTowns, was founded.) Thing is, no one, as usual, is talking to the people. They're working in their own little hermetically sealed executive bell jars and missing the mark completely.
T
Posted by: tish grier | January 28, 2007 at 08:59 AM
I too was a part of a flawed effort to roll out a series of local sites -- Microsoft's Sidewalk. As the cliche goes, you learn more from setbacks and failures, so I thought you and your readers might be interested in what I believe is the first real story of what happened to Sidewalk vs. what was spun to the media as well as twisted for the benefit of Sidewalk's newspaper competition.
After reading an interview with Steve Ballmer expressing regrets and chatting with the founder of Citysearch about Sidewalk, I thought people might find it interesting to hear the real story in my post "Sidewalk: Insider's view of why & how it was killed (aka sold) and why Steve Ballmer now regrets it" at
http://marketvelocity.blogspot.com/2007/02/sidewalk-insiders-view-of-why-how-it.html
Happily I'm now a part of a hyperlocal effort that has become a great success both in terms of readers and advertisers. Some of the lessons from the Sidewalk experience have been applied as well as from the citizen journalism movement. I've found the debate/comments on social networking interesting on your blog. We haven't gone as far as you've recommended yet have built a very loyal and rapidly growing audience. We do have lots of community involvement (submitting articles, classifieds, bloggers & blog commenters, wiki, phot submissions, etc.) but not some of the social networking stuff that I perceive (perhaps mistakenly) as most popular with the under 30 set. Since we serve a boomer laden market (Sun Valley), the jury is out whether they'd bite on the social networking stuff but it's something we'll experiment with. Our experience is that traditional journalism was the initial hook that got people reading the site and we progressively layered in more community tools which is what has really ignited the growth of the site.
Posted by: Dave | February 23, 2007 at 05:02 AM