Stowe Boyd

Anne McCrossan on Social Value and Social Fees

Anne McCrossan makes some valid points about the power inherent in social belonging, and the challenges of creating for-fee walled gardens:

The Synaptic Fluid Of Social Business

Technology is a finite game. It will ultimately solve all the problems it’s capable of addressing, now matter how shiny and new it seems now. What’s a more infinite game are the opportunities of human connectivity, all the shades of creation that are possible to conceive collectively.

A very modern form of disenfranchisement, being denied a networked identity, may become the ultimate social sanction of this century. That kind of ban from the cloud may have the same tarnish as the casting out of convicts to the far flung reaches of Australia two hundred years ago, as just as far an isolation away from the heart of a new civilization. Do we want that especially at a time when of the biggest risks we create as we emerge from seismic change is a lack of education literacy that leads to us creating two societies, not one?

To help answer the question, Chris Brogan’s ‘The Third Tribe’ community launched this week. Chris Brogan, the man behind the move towards more human business, has a price for connectivity and membership to his tribe in the form of a monthly subscription. Subscription however doesn’t create a community, it creates a service, and with it comes a different ambience.

My friend Ed Brenegar’s put it like this ‘popularity in a free environment does not necessarily equate to value in a paid one’ and social connectivity means cost equations have changed. Purchase and purpose are more related, they come together via shared commitments, and purchase might take many forms and currencies – time given, attention focused, contributions made, as well as cold, hard cash.

The old school calls to consume don’t count for as much as they used to, whilst generative connections are growing in value.

I’ve paid upfront sight unseen for the value of being part of collaborative initiatives I believe in. There are causes that are redefining what participation in not-for-profit initiatives can mean and what it’s capable of achieving, and there are communities worth investing in heavily simply because of the quality of the leadership and freedom of connection.

Trust is the synaptic fluid of social business. In that context I think Chris Brogan, as a Trust Agent and because his stock in trade is his humanity, has erred. Trust is an intimate thing and monthly subscriptions are what we do when buying a network utility.

[…]

There are a number of industries where liberating co-created value is an increasingly important item on the agenda. The government burden of management in face of budget cutbacks, the healthcare requirement to develop insights that can make R&D cheaper, all business that benefits from streamlining business processes that can remove overhead, that knows that pump-priming marketing an increasingly expensive activity.

Old business models are yielding fewer returns. Generative listening is an antidote to the velocity of today’s overloaded information flows. The action potential contained within committed, visceral and trustworthy human relationships, that’s at the heart of the social connections, has never been more important. It’s the synaptic fluid of social business.

People have to make a living, and I see the justification for charging people to participate in online communities. And anyone with finely tuned sensibilities will heed whaat McCrossan is getting at, and would obviously not be seeking to ostracize or penalize those that couldn’t afford entry. That’s one reason that I think $27/month to join the ‘Third Tribe’ might be the wrong way to go. Perhaps they should adopt the Radiohead model, and let people pay what they want/can afford.

McCrossan’s point, however, doesn’t seem to be the size of the threshold to participate, but that change in social dynamics when there is a threshold at all, and the community is divided — polarized — into those that are paying to be there and those that are paid to be there. If this is all handled adroitly, it may not be much of an issue, but McCrossan seems to suggest that a subtle change is involved, one that could change everything.

The larger issue, to me, is one of appropriating social scenes. If Brogan and his partners pull themselves and their cadre of followers out of the open social discourse of the web and behind a paywall, what happens out here? What if hundreds of thought leaders opt to do the same? Would we have a fracturing of the web into pieces? Like a community that broke into hundreds of gated commmunities?

I understand that Chris & Co. want to make a living, and I do too. I have, for example, set up private blogs here on /Message that are invisible to the average person, but which are accessible to client companies’ staff. I write supplements to the public topics, and interact with my clients on private matters, relating to their products, competition, and business plans. But I don’t think that appropriates open social discourse, since so much of what goes on there is information that is sensitive or confidential: it is not pulling something out of public discourse, and charging a fee for it.

In essence, Brogan and ‘The Third Tribe’ site is an acho of the paywalls that traditional media companies — like the Wall Street Journal and the NY Times — have in place or are planning to put in place. But the failure of large traditional media companies to provide a context for open social discourse is why we invaded the web in the first place.

So perhaps this is a natural progression. Brogan has become so large a force that he can act like a media company, and to be able to turn that into money he either has to charge for access or sell ads, or both. Totally understandable, but if enough of the bright lights on the web are pulled behind locked doors, it could be a much darker place.

Update on Monday, February 8, 2010 at 11:00AM by Stowe Boyd