This past year for me was all about trying new services and technologies to solve core business problems for a changed consumer culture.

I downloaded scores of mobile apps. Participated in scads of betas for cool new products. Used web-based solutions for every possible thing I needed to know, do, purchase or share.

But the number one source for information, places to travel to, wines to drink, marketing tips or referrals wasn’t any of these new services, individual apps or even search.

It was my broad social networks and a few powerful vertical blog communities.

I have strong connections around my friends’ blogs and my own, but most of the information I get still comes from my social networks, especially the big three–Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.

When I was in need of a new restaurant or wine bar in Paris, some consensus on whether social TV is a myth, data on vineyards in Friuli, Italy, the best source wasn’t Q & A services (there are many), or travel or wine apps, it came from my extended friend networks.

And if you are a business, you really have little choice but to look to these social networks as well to find customers.

Quite a surprise actually. Disappointing to discover that the deepest contextual connections are still within the broadest most horizontal platforms.

The irony is that a multitude of the smartest entrepreneurs are parsing the world of information, commerce and socialization to verticalize our life experiences with the intent of building more focused and efficient communities of interest.

The human experience has been dissected into atomic pieces and there are seemingly endless apps and community platforms targeting each one.

But few of them really worked for me.

I’ve got to wonder whether I’m the odd person out here. But I don’t think so.

Some of the verticals themselves aren’t a true standalone social behavior with community chops. Check in apps for movies and TV are for me a case in point. I’m a serious movie geek and share info often, but have not been able to use any of the many media community apps with any consistency.

Some are interesting but are missing the transactional piece as an offshoot of information. Wine communities (and there aren’t really any of import) have not solved the ‘how to buy’ piece and to hear about wine that you can’t find or buy is a non-starter. You end up with flash sales (Lot 18), media sites (Snooth) and a plethora of blogs with a lot of info but little sense of engagement.

Some are perpetually stuck in the chicken-and-egg state. They have no real value until they enough people and just can’t draw enough of a crowd to matter to the participants.

And many, as smart as they may be, are more product idea than market reality and are churning to find users without understanding their core promise or a sense of how community can inform their business model.

And some may be just too early to tell.

There are of course, a few that really work and set the bar high. But very few.

Look at Fred Wilson’s avc.com as an ideal. It’s a place with loose structure, deep context and strong leadership. It’s a magnet for the intellectually curious around the entrepreneurial endeavor. One of the real ‘places’ to hang out online. Arguably the most dynamic community on the web today. It truly adds to my life off and online, friendships and business both.

Small, still new, but with a more focused and smaller niche, for authors there are places like Wattpat. For knitters, Ravelry. For developers and programmers quite a few.

Music is a community vertical with deep success. Turntable.fm, exfm and Soundcloud are all remarkably exceptions, each in their own way. They really get who they are.

And on the marketplace side, Etsy and Polyvore stand out as communities driven around commerce.

What makes them all work, as different as they are from each other, is a sense of community.

Conversation and engagement are the key connectors. They may spawn commerce but they certainly forge a connection with real life. Friendships really do happen. As well as customers.

I’ve blogged on this theme of context as a filter and community as the core of commerce all year. It’s true and I’m convinced of its validity.

Yet it is just at its early beginning stages. There are remarkably few great examples. Maybe the time for them is just in front of us…like 2012.

Facebook and Twitter are powerhouses of connection, though not suited for conversation or engagement. Wildly heterogeneous and useful for certain of my vertical interests like marketing and wine, it’s just a matter of time before the communities relocate. This is a population without a base using Facebook as a proxy.

On Facebook connections do broaden but it is more exception than rule. You bump into interesting people then move the conversations elsewhere. You just can’t get to know someone there. It’s a nod of the hat, not a handshake.

Dynamic communities, many of them blogs are where life and business connections happen. There’s been a buzz that blogging is dead. Just plain wrong in my opinion.

The past week I’ve been reading all the year-end predictions. There are many. Endless lists of what will be hot and what not.

Mobile end points. Tablets. Cloud based portability of data. Personal empowerment. The driving force of individual passions. All very good and true as themes for the future.

For me though, the business landscape for next year is not about tools or new markets or waiting for the market to catch up with your innovation. It’s more about bridging the self evident market gaps.

Gaps between a population that has shifted in its consuming habits and businesses that are seemingly clueless in how to connect with them. Huge gaps in the platforms for referrals that really work. Gaps in financial services, travel, wine and community access to local services.

Not all of these are new. Many just don’t work yet. And almost all of them have tried to exist on Facebook. They are invariably the right idea in the wrong place.

We are at a time where community and marketplaces are both possible and needed. For information. For friendships. For business. And for social change.

We are at this unique, and very cool place where culture is changing, online and offline are no longer distinct, access to markets democratized, and technology a vastly powerful, affordable tool available to everyone.

This is all upside and possibilities.

And the simple truth is still key, that the web is not about commerce or information or things. It is about people. And that commerce and community will follow if you discover the right connection in a viable context for the people themselves.

This is nothing but opportunity for businesses and benefits for the consumer. The problem is  not scrambling for ideas but focus on which ones to pick.

2012…bring it on. I’m ready!

Conversations are what make the social web work.

For me personally. For communities. For businesses.

There are large gaps between the conversational dynamics of Disqus-powered and WordPress blogs, posts on Facebook, comments on G+, remarks on FourSquare, Tweets on Twitter.

Each of them is useful. Though on their own no one is enough.

I’m increasingly isolated in these conversational silos. I’m stymied by the need to manually connect conversations between communities. It’s counterproductive and usually the true value of the social data is lost.

Links may be the universal currency of the web but they are more like monopoly money, less like value to me. I care what you think about something you share as much as what gets shared. Most of what we share is without useful context cross networks.

The handful of communities that have dynamic conversations are still uniquely separated from each other. We all spend hours following links, book marking them and bouncing around from referral to referral.

I so want the process of discovery to be fun. I’m fine with working hard at it but it feels random and primitive and somewhat arbitrary.

A few years ago, I wrote a blog post on the community potential of Disqus. How it could change how we find and interact with information and people. I was (and still am) inspired by this grand idea although less patient than I was then.

Disqus held the keys to the conversational kingdom with the data for some 1M blogs, 10s of millions of power commenter’s and innumerable comments across the web.

Disqus put granularity and detail on a dream world where each URL is its own community connected by threads to others. Some known, some in the process of being discovered.

Underneath this ecosystem of Disqus data lies an implicit future where a universe of suggestions could be fed to me just by understanding my interest footprint.

The more I express myself, the more I find what I want without asking.

Disqus may or may not be working on this. I don’t know. But regardless, Disqus alone is not comprehensive enough on its own.

Each of us has networks on other commenting systems and a multiplicity of social nets. These communities aren’t merging any time soon. Centralization needs to happen between communities, not within any one of them.

I’m dreaming hard for a conversational-based reality online.

I want to parse my world by conversations by topic by trusted connections daily.

I want a dashboard that lets me search:

-By topics by blog communities ranked by dynamics and engagement.

If I start the day on avc.com, for example, in a sub-string on Apple Airplay, I want to find out where there are dynamic conversations happening across the web on Airplay and connected TV.

-By trusted friends who are subject matter experts.

Something breaks around certification of organic wineries in Europe and percent of sulfites allowed for exported wines. Where is ‘the Crazy French lady’ commenting? Where are my wine expert friends from London and Portugal commenting? Where can I see this at a glance?

Google is useless for this. So is Disqus. Facebook is actually the best.

-By implicit generated interest graphs.

Look at any of your last 100 comments and a pattern of interests will arise. For me it will be on community, marketing, wine, travel.

Where is my daily leader board of what’s interesting for me without explicitly searching for it? Where is my recommended interest report?

Where is my listing of dynamically generated wine tastings that I would like in NYC this week with friends already signed up to attend? Or in London or Paris when I’m traveling.

I probably get 60% of the above in a couple of hours work each day.

The data is there. It’s just disparate, not mashed together in a human consumable form that is palatable for me. Or anyone.

Many companies are trying to solve this.

The launch of my friend William Mougayar (@wmougayar) Engagio alpha this morning is a great example. They are very early but they get the discovery/aggregation piece well. The code to get in the alpha of Engagio is engagearnold.

I want broad access to a human web interlaced by conversations connected by implicit suggestions.

So do many others I believe. Understanding social data is the Lingua Franca of the future. It needs to be understood between networks, not within any one of them.

The large social networks need to open their data to developers to build this in a multiplicity of shapes. For each of our needs. The networks don’t own the people but they do own the data. They need to learn to share more through their APIs.

Social data sharing will be better for me, better for everyone and equally, better for the networks themselves.

When I’m the center of the world, not the networks, I’m glad to participate in the ones that matter. I’m centered and flexible and easy.

When the networks are the center of the world and I’m a club member, I’m always looking for another club that will do what five of the others are trying to. I’m a migratory social animal always on the move and ready to jump. No allegiance at all.

Ok. Fun rant. Feeling better already.

Remember when niche used to mean a market too small to matter?

Not any longer.

The flatter the connected world gets, the more relevant and attractive small and focused seems over broad and general.

A niche market approach is not only a valid business strategy, but a potential antidote for business ADD.

A redefining of the term ‘niche’ where too small to matter may very well mean focused enough to win.

A great post by Om Malik, “Dawn of the micropubs”, brought some granularity to this idea of a niche being a business model of choice rather than a market too small to care about.

Om’s point of reference is viable publishing micromarkets defined by passionate founders around focused content categories. Aggregated free communities supported by affiliate and advertising revenue. It’s a quality traffic play.

His data point that almost 50% of niche micromarket traffic sources are keyword searches is a reminder to all of us about the dynamics of search. The more specific the content, the more valid and useful the search results. This is an old SEO and SEM truth that plays well here. And for the business model, the more contextual and relevant the community that gathers around those interests, the more valuable lead gen and advertising eyeballs become.

Om’s thesis around micropubs, and one I’ve been applying to my accounts for awhile, is that a highly verticalised, independent model is not only workable, but often the best response to a broadly horizontal and unsegmented social world. Or simply, the social graph, Facebook defined, is really challenging to build a business or brand on. And it’s a mistake to make the center of your business anywhere but your own URL.

The sharp focus of a niche approach to business both deepens and broadens your market. A finer net captures more of the higher quality users rather than a larger sieve, which is forever churning for meaningful connections.

As Seth Godin said in his post today, “Products and services succeed one person at a time”. The more specific that connection, the more clarity you have on how to make that interaction successful.

I’m a big proponent that you get farther faster by focusing narrowly with intent as a starting point. This may seem obvious but whether you have an early product for which you haven’t discovered the customer connection, or at a later stage noodling over how to expand faster, singular, passion-point focus on single-need, customer connections just works.

Connecting broadly isn’t the challenge on the web.

Quality connections around relevant and personalized information and products is. A niche approach to market development focuses on this above all else. Boiling the ocean doesn’t work. Spamming your networks is not only ineffective but somehow rude.

I’ve blogged on the power of the niche community as a filter. Om’s post made me think about that this more broadly, as a model in its own right. A focus in market terms and a different perspective on vertical segmentation.

We’ve all done the vertical segmentation whiteboard planning drill.

You line up product specs and benefits, market size and customer acquisition costs, and create a tangled web of how you get from a product capability to a customer base. The narrower the customer focus, the crisper the message and the easier it is to target that market. The broader the target, the mushier the value prop becomes while the abstract value of the market increases. The balance between market size and acquisition cost and viability are the rules of that game.

Honestly, I worry little about projected market size and more about tangible customer connections.

Size matters surely–it just matters a lot less. It’s an abstraction not a goal.

This niche approach focuses on core market questions without interference or ambiguity:

Who are you and what do you have to offer?

The value chain is crisp and clear as there are fewer moving pieces.

You need to create the environment to discover what the core behavior is that binds your product value to customer desire.

How will you get found?

This is a natural search, keyword and category-centric based approach.

Search, direct and referrals are the funnel. This is not a revelation certainly but if these pieces are out of whack, the formula is broken somewhere.

Stripping everything away, putting aside gaming search and focusing on the ‘why’ will open the discussion of ‘how’.

What’s your true expertise and value?

Information is everywhere. Finding context to attach your needs to useful information in language you can understand is the kicker.

From healthcare. Legal questions. Travel. Diet. Exercise. Love even.

You personally don’t need to be the expert. Expertise may simply exist at the community level. Ask yourself what it is that your customers get from being at your site, in your community?

This is your customers bullshit filter. Authentic passion is the product of the niche marketplace. Knowledge and relevance are the language you communicate in.

No niche is an island.

Who are your natural partners?

There is interconnect between niches. Sometimes they are extensions of your product. Think about niche sports manufacturers invariably partnering with clothing and nutrition companies. They often end up developing their own branded products.

This raises the partnership discussion. Who can you partner with? Who will become your channel? Where is the best marketplace for your traffic?

On the web, proximity is not an issue.

Connections that matter are. Referrals that broaden your network are key.

In building the market for your product, there are no formulas. No boilerplates for success. No definitive lists of to-dos. But there are useful ideas that surface interesting questions that provide guidelines that help figure this all out.

I’m drawn to this niche approach to market making as one of the best.

Think large. Focus small…is my way of thinking about this.

It’s a minimal viable product approach but for the barest, most essential touchpoint. User value, customer wonderment or sometimes just pure fun is that connection to capture.

Find that for one customer and you’ve got a great start and a direction to find the next one.

__________

If you have examples of niche communities that are doing something right or just something interesting, please share in the comments.

I’m not a big believer in the easy one-liner.

They are often overly clever and skirt the details rather than encouraging us to dive in.

This one does ring true to me. It’s become a personal mantra as I reexamine my online presence this holiday season.

I’m prodded to think smarter about what authentic value I bring to my clients, blog readers and friends. To stretch beyond just being good at what I do. It questions not my worth but the value that others perceive in me.

When I push on this thought, I end up thinking about personal referrals as the true standard of trust, the currency of my business life. Figuring out how to crack shareability, it comes down to the value of what I do in my community’s eyes. A plunge of self-discovery from my network’s point of view.

Asking ‘why my customers care and why they share’ speaks to why I create content for my blogs, Facebook wall and Twitter streams. It’s the intersection of self-expression and market perception.

It focuses me personally in a positive way.

I’ve taken it to my accounts, looking at clients’ product and community designs as a metaphor to understand why people in a community engage. As an actionable understanding behind the traffic numbers and analytics that we pound on daily to grow our businesses.

It’s just not enough to be excellent. You need to discover a community that inspires as well appreciates.

Your customers demand trust and want to value your interactions with them. The true connection exists more between you and them, more in the comments and the process, than in what they receive and consume.

If your customers feel connected, they will become your channel and support you through good times and bad.

Look at the chatter around Gary Vaynerchuck’s winelibrary.com credit card security breach. It’s all over the net. A nightmare for everyone, especially us, the customers.

My wine networks and Facebook pages have been abuzz about this. Not abuzz with anger at GaryV. The opposite. The community, rather than balking, are collectively aghast and supportive, not collectively angry at winelibrary.  They feel that the attack is on them and they rallied together.

People seriously like winelibrary.com. The business will live through this just fine. Other businesses would have folded. They may even grow as a result.

This highlights the truism that if your customers are there just to buy, you don’t have a social problem, you have a significant business one. You won’t get found. Your networks will never be enough. Your customers will simply not tolerate mistakes or appreciate your foibles.

No one is selling anything that can’t be bought somewhere else. From wine to cars to cold-pressed green smoothies, it’s all a commodity. Your business and your brand exists in the community space, the dynamic connection between your customers and you as a person or a brand.

Certainly, I’m a realist. We don’t love Amazon, but they treat the consumer really well. They are easy and personal to deal with. We don’t love Netflix either and they treated the customer like a line item on a profitability spreadsheet and every customer will be unconcerned if they vanish. No one will care.

“Why care? Why share?” is worth asking yourself. Especially in the face of what feels like an anti-social, back-to-basics business backlash lately.

In blog discussions and most conferences, there’s often someone with a rebel poise (usually young and successful) who reminds us with a smile that business is all about money.

True…but that’s not how you create value. Money is the offshoot of value, not the cause of it.

Customers and transactions are not the same thing. In almost every case, the customer is worth more than the sum of their transactions. This is true for almost every business, from yoga gear to running shoes to classic sports cars.

Every community will be different but the human touch is always its indelible fingerprint.

Before we earn our customer’s dollars, we need to earn their sense of belonging and astonishment, their satisfaction, and their finding value great enough to act as a leverage point to their networks.

We want them to care enough to share.

@dpinsen, a friend, entrepreneur in financial services, and brilliant pragmatist started a great comment string in my last post. At the core of the discussion is whether community and social loops are applicable across all verticals and types of products.

We are on opposite sides of this debate. He makes a strong argument that community is tied to passion and passion is not equal across all types of groups. He’s right to a degree, but I just don’t believe there is a business that can exist without the extended good will of its customers. And that good will is enough spark to build community on.

Community is an ideal with pragmatic hooks that are applicable to every business in every possible sector. Commerce isn’t about goods, it’s about people. It always has been, and the measure of value is somehow wrapped in customer’s intent to care enough to share.

Are the needs of my dentist, my vet, my doctor and my local wine shop all the same? No question.

Customer acquisition cost and churn is the largest expense and the biggest worry for all of these business. And these businesses couldn’t be more different.

Do I share a great wine on sale at my local shop 10X more than my satisfaction with the other services? Certainly. But social loops are core, without exception, to every branded service and product  I consume.

And even though the cost of services is completely different for every one, the value of a referral is paramount. To the vet where I bring my cat to the wine I’m having at the Thanksgiving table…referrals within a scale of relevance matter.

The “Why care?” “Why share?” phrase came from a presentation by Facebook’s Kay Madati at the socialtvsummit in New York last week. He was lecturing big media brands on how to effectively advertise to Facebook users. It was a salesperson’s ‘We are the platform’ version of ‘Think differently’.

He was selling an advertising platform. I heard a refrain on how to think about the culture of commerce in my world.

Understanding is iterative at its core. Ongoing and daily a new revelation. It’s been a great gift to have a question broad enough to frame the discussion each day in a new way.

It’s been really useful. I thought I’d share it forward.

I spend my professional hours meeting with entrepreneurs, consulting on projects and advising at a board level to companies across a deep band of online commerce and community, market development and branding.

It’s taken me a career of experiences to be effective advising executives and stepping in as a leader with impromptu teams. It’s a delicate poise between listening and advice, directing and doing, jumping in and stepping back.

With my work, I have vested interest in the success of my clients. Pride. Friendship. Re-upping the work. Equity. I win when they do.

Mentoring is a completely different ballgame.

The process and the end result are unique unto themselves.

This summer, I worked as a mentor to newquill, a band of four, super-sharp thinkers out of the Annenberg Lab in Los Angeles: Michael Morgan, Ryan Harper, Robert Harkness and Chi Qi.

They were accepted into the Startl educational program in partnership with the Dreamit venture incubator in NYC. I worked with them there.

Dreamit as an organization is a well-honed incubator. It has its own cadre of professional advisors and mentors. Legal, accounting, equity pool advice, market segmentation are all available for the start-ups. The professional mentors and advisors provide the core knowledge base that the teams need. Smart, experienced, tough and empirical in their advice.

My role was different.

I came in through a friend whose son was one of the team. They got to know me and my ideas first through my blog.

I was blown away by their diverse backgrounds, raw energy and talent. And as an English major, their visceral connection to literature, language and understanding of ideas like ‘marginalia’ as common metaphors for learning made it a no-brainer for me to volunteer my time.

“Friday sessions with Arnold” happened over a few months at the Dreamit workspace and random coffee shops.

The sessions were focused (and often intellectually exhilarating) brainstorms to find direction over learning behaviors, market dynamics, product design, business models, clarity in communications, market discovery, and getting focused and prepped for the incubator-ending Dreamit funding pitch.

Newquill originally started with the idea of collaborative elementary and middle school education on the iPad. Shared marginalia in a controlled and creative process to bring dynamics to the learning process was the starting vision.

The team had a core belief in disrupting education through storytelling. Significant expertise in ePub3 and HTML5. And a flexible, dogged determinism. They dreamed a new vision of education.

That’s not where they ended.

Limited market sizing of the iPad in public education prompted a shift. A huge one.

Nine weeks later in an almost Incredible Hulk-like pivot they emerged as Re-Vinyl.it. A merchandising and fan platform with serious potential to disrupt music merchandising and band/fan communities for the music industry.

Look at the final pitch video here. It’s clear and inspiring. This is also where to get to know the team members.

David Cohen recently posted the Mentor Manifesto. He lists what it means to be a pro mentor and what you need to pay attention to.

For me though, the learnings are more focused and personal.

Mentorship is commitment with no investment in the company’s success. Doing a great job challenging and encouraging them was my intent and payback.

The long view is my domain. The team was in their early 20s, less time than I’ve been working in my career. But my goal was not to get them to the goal post. Far from it. My role was to guide them on a path not yet determined. If we found a runway, to help them to make it their own

When I started, I thought of mentorship simply as giving back. Sharing my knowledge and passion for the social web with those who were equally inspired but with less real-world business, marketing and product experience.

Certainly, this is about sharing knowledge to a new generation of entrepreneurs, but this is a two-way path with value moving in both directions.

The exuberance of this team inspired me (and themselves daily). They were learning machines, gobbling up new technical languages and approaches daily, naturally. Change was par for the course to them, exhilarating yet rarely debilitating.

I never said to the team–“This is what I would do”. I often said–‘think of it this way’ or ‘that doesn’t work for me’ or ‘there is a huge difference between what you are thinking and saying and what people are seeing and hearing’.

And most surprisingly, I found myself pushing them back to their core passions and belief. They had so many inputs. So many talented people giving them good advice that it daunts…and I think it can dull.

I believe that passion is more important than preparation or professionalism. And that core entrepreneurial beliefs often trump established logic or business models. I took it as my role to channel that passion back to the center.

I also learned a lot about ePub and HTML5. They learned from my experiences and thinking about how to create something unique for a mobile, social, always connected population. And how to discover a market for it.

As a team and as the sum total of all of the mentors, Re-Vinyl was created.

Passions. Wisdom. Knowledge from experience all are important. The way they get mixed up together as a creative team discovery process is key. Especially in a mentorship relationship.

I relished this experience. I learned a lot. I challenged and was challenged. It was fun.

The team did as well.

And when I look at the pitch video ( Re-Vinyl Pitch ) and see ideas and direction, phrases and graphics that grew out of our Friday sessions. I’m super satisfied.

The Re-Vinyl team are out looking for funding now. If you are interested, please contact the CEO, Michael Morgan at michaellawrencemorgan@gmail.com.

I hope (and I’m nudging them) that they keep at it and find the funds to take Re-Vinyl to market. They already have a few bands signed. The idea is a good one. The team is wondrously diverse.

These guys have the juice and I expect to see Re-Vinyl live and one of the change agents in the reinvention of the music industry.

For me, I’m certain that mentorship will be part of what I do from now on out.

Community is both an aspirational goal and a pragmatic design element for building businesses and brands.

I came on this belief early.

I remember walking into the noisy and overheated BBS room at Atari Inc., my first marketing job some 25 years ago and seeing the frenetic flashing lights on the servers that housed the 2M+ members of the Atari User Group.

I was instantly struck…and inspired…that this is what marketing was all about.

Many user groups, developer organizations, open source communities, vertical market places and niche communities of interest later, I believe this more than ever.

The power of today’s social web lies not in counting likes or taking twisted paths to measure reputation, but in the evolution of social behaviors that these new platforms give expression to and the possibilities of creating infinite variations on the theme of community and commerce.

Everything certainly has changed.

Today, we don’t need web traffic as much as engagement. Nor contextual search as much as connections and community. Nor certainly new measurement systems or influence scales.

We simply need to connect with customers and build common value and brand trust. Not simple to do certainly but this is the new (and true) business mantra for today’s world.

Marketing, at its best is the architect of this and bridges company value with customer need. It is all about channeling people and communities, no longer simply clicks and traffic.

These are not just easy phrases but business realities.

I look to community as a broad avenue into the intersection of consumer behavior and business intent. It’s a directed goal to create early momentum or overcome later business inertia. It’s always served me well. It’s more powerful and utilitarian today than every before.

Community though is an idea of engagement that finds itself in many guises.

Whether you are figuring out how to attract the first group of early users for a marketplace. Or creating a platform for people to share ideas around fashion or wine or travel. Or building a fan base for your restaurant or non-profit organization. Or designing a flash communities built around a transaction or check in.

Starting with community as the social (and business) dynamic is a always a natural place to begin. It’s a chess game of people and value and product with group behavior as the game board.

Community as an ideal is rarely obtainable. It’s pure social magic at its best. As a sieve for finding customer connections, it rarely fails.

This is not new news of course.

The idea of the Interest Graph is a proxy for communities of interest. This grew out of the discontent about the friendship graph being too nebulous, too friend based and too noisy to be useful. Friendship is simply a bad filter. One-to-many is a poor design compared to the natural many-to-many that community can offer.

Social web thinkers have been evangelizing context and curation as the pathway to make all of this powerful social data actionable. Myself included. And certainly ‘Context not content is king” and “Context is a better filter than friendship to filter the social web’ are true to a point.

But neither are the end game.

You can keep connecting and reconnecting, sharing and pushing everything forward, but at the end, it’s like two lines streaming towards the horizon but never connecting.

Context is a step, community is where the lines intersect.

There are as many definitions as there are bloggers as what the next step for the social web and commerce and marketing will be.

Some call this smart commerce. Many speak to the connection between data and action. Most all see it as a algorhythmic parsing of the world of social inputs. A leap beyond explicit requests to implicit suggestions in an off/online continuum. A mash up of real-time, geo-aware, mobile and cloud-fed breadcrumbs for every part of our lives.

These are all correct but simply directional. To me, they are outlining a community-centered era with true social commerce and marketplaces to follow.

This is a both a pragmatic reaction to both the possibilities and the frustrations of the social graph and just a basic behavioral drive towards people aggregating naturally around shared passions and interests.

At the intersection of web and social evolution, we’ve moved from the commerce of clicks to social nets of friends to what will become a landscape of communities of interest as dynamic filters and aggregators. Commerce will be the spinoff, the exhaust of community not the reason for it.

The drive for specific connections and the dynamic power of the underlying connectors of the web is creating a network of vertical interests. A new slant on the power of the niche.

Not just a sports community but specifically kayaking or rock climbing. Not travel but adventure or wine or philanthropic travel. Not deserts but raw deserts. Not restaurant referral platforms but a useable local reality in all locales.

When you add global and mobile and real-time to this equation, there is almost no niche community that can’t have membership group that is too small to still be dynamic and viable. You can build a quorum base for a community across a global population for almost any area of interest.

This web of connected communities is centered around the individual. The customer. It’s a graph of ‘me’ connecting to a variety of ‘us’ communities. Rather than a big bland platform, we will be a member of many communities all connecting back to me and spreading out in a molecular social pattern. Like people and societies in our daily lives.

This ecosystem of communities is somewhat of an analog to what Fred Wilson refers to as ‘communities of engaged users’. An investment thesis that is the corollary to my market and brand building musings.

You can extrapolate this further and break down all the old channel constructs around business-to-business and business-to-consumer models. It’s all about Cs, about customers and now community. People migrating and connecting into groups around interests.

This also ameliorates one of the large disconnects for brands in a social world. They can stop struggling to be a person to their customers and find (sponsor and lead) communities of interest around connected topics. Yoga info exchanges and courses for yoga apparel makers. Developer communities for open source platform vendors. Sports medicine for athletic product manufactures.

This is an oversimplification of course.

But an opening direction. A first volley of how community, so powered and powerful on the social web is a metaphor and behavioral roadmap for business design. It’s a design thesis, not a prescription or a list of to dos.

From my first experience at Atari with the BBS community, through tectonic technological change, the core value and power of community holds…in fact, has increased.

Take people online or off, let them gravitate freely towards their interests, build a dynamic gathering place and provide leadership. Conversation and common ground and community and commerce may just happen.

The give and take between explicit requests and implicitly inferred assumptions is the natural state of how we live.

Offline we don’t really think about this.

Face-to-face with family, friends and tight-knit interest groups we accept that serendipity just happens, more often than we expect. The sum of explicit and implicit requests and assumptions is what make human dynamics what it is.

This dynamic is also the core DNA of community, online and off.

Given the right environment, this interplay of explicit demands providing keys to implicit inferences just surfaces naturally. This is why community works and very much why it matters.

As marketers and business owners, this is key to what we do and why community dynamics are both marketing goals and a gauge of the health of a growing business.

This is a simple and basic truth, yet bears repeating.

Great companies learn from what our customers ask for explicitly and listen hard to what they infer implicitly. This listening is a core competency of marketing and business development, interpersonal and inter-customer communications.

This is true not only of companies built on the ‘network effect’ of spiraling interconnected customer growth, but all business that gather their customers around each other, and themselves, to continually recreate their market dynamics.

Yet, as marketers, we spend a lot of time reconceptualizing the value of community. It’s a never-ending process. A healthy discussion certainly but ultimately a conclusion you need to accept without pure data as proof.

The exploded focus on what is referred to as the ‘implicit graph’ and the power of implicit data over the last few months has by default shined a brightened light on the value of community. What the curation segment and social networks call the implicit graph has no greater proof point than the dynamics of a successful online community.

Community is the sandbox for the power of implicit connections and test bed for how to use that data.

This is what a community platform like Disqus, the socialization around video in Google+ Hangouts, the inference-based connecting power of Foursquare and personalization of Hunch are all getting at.

Community is hard to make happen. But the pieces that marketers move around in social design are the people themselves. We resift the sand in the sandbox till it works.

In social communities online and off, implicit connections are a function of human behaviors, encapsulated in conversations.

On social nets the behavior become data. The networks need to collect and sort through an ever-growing matrix of social data and algorithmically connect implicit input to explicit inferences.

There is a core connection between the gestalt of community and the data driven power of the implicit graph as a tool for social discovery. This started to come together for me last month when I participated in two workshops around “Social Discovery and the Implicit Graph.” Eric Friedman from Foursquare wrote a post on the workshops that is worth a read.

They were group brainstorms organized and led by Disqus, Hunch, Foursquare, StumbleUpon and Tumblr. Each of these companies has a business interest in figuring out how to drive implicit recommendations that are personalized for each individual over time.

Nothing was decided. Much was discussed. The standing room only crowd was inspiring.

The following from the conversation stuck with me:

-People expect the benefits of implicit suggestions on their social nets.

It’s not creepy that Foursquare should suggest things that we want to do when we are somewhere in NYC, it’s what check in-apps should be doing.

Having to explicitly ask for everything we want is both unnatural and boring. It belies the value of connecting and the power of the networks themselves.

People want to get suggestions on what they want without asking for them.

-People expect companies and brands to know them personally and implicitly.

Each of us invests time in sharing our thoughts forward and chronicling our lives as they happen online. This is public information and companies have access to this.

Translated…there is a market for Hunch in my opinion, big time.

-People want implicit discovery as a personal tool.

Search is not enough. Inferred info streams ala Facebook news feeds are not adequate. People want searchable context and companies like Disqus with the implicit data of 50M commenters in their database that can provide enormous value for discovery. The market appears to want it. I certainly do.

When I think about Foursquare in this context, what they are really doing is creating a social, inference-based platform that creates micro-flash communities on demand, one implicitly value-based connection after another, check in by check in.

You can build an analogous map for StumbleUpon, Tumblr and Hunch.

This is very cool stuff. Powerful, heady and just plain hard to do. A bold attempt to build social consciousness into artificial intelligence, code-driven algorithm that spits out time sensitive, personalized implicit suggestions.

I think this is still all about community.

Community works, my bet is that the implicit graph will also.

The social web has a connection conundrum.

Our own enthusiasm with the democratization of expression has created the very noise that is making it hard for ourselves to be heard clearly–or even found.

The antidote to social noise, the key to finding connections around interests lies somewhere in the interest graph and the choice of context over friendship as a filter for relevance. I blogged on this here.

This is a real problem for everyone on social web. It’s a gotcha built into the fabric of social ecosystem itself, not an isolated bubble nor a mass hallucination of the uber tech aficionados.

Finding real connections with like-minded individuals and for businesses, connecting with their marketplace requires a fresh look at the social infrastructure, with a new lens…or maybe the current one turned inside out.

Social media logic says to keep creating interesting and honest content, keep recycling and resharing links and this will create intersections of value. This brute force approach is too haphazard and works less well daily. We need to understand how social design intersects with businesses needs; where context connects with customers.

And how it becomes actionable—how do you find and have conversations with people who are interested in both sports and raw foods? How does your company connect with people who are trying to solve a problem that your company’s product is built for? Actionable context is the goal.

Think of the filtered web as a mesh of layers getting finer and more finely tuned as you surface from the amorphous friend’s graph to discover interest connections and context for conversations. You need to pop out value connections from the social graph, not just add to it with more content and noise. This is not a science but it is marketing with focused social intent.

Harnessing interest and context is the realm of the curation tools and platforms. There are scads of companies in a race to win our attention, capture our network data, discover context and build new communities of interest at the intersection of these social graphs around our specific needs.

This is just really hard to do and today, more promise than reality. Filtering relevance and connection out of broad-based social networks is non-trivial but key to discovering business utility within the wondrous social framework of the real-time web.

I believe that you need to focus on context over friendship and discovery not just curation as the goal. That’s the end game and the fuel behind the race. I’m positive that every curation platform, especially the more aggressive ones like Summify and XYDO and the scrappy smart ones like Eqentia, are all chasing this.

I search for contextual connections every day for my own and my client’s businesses and have tried many of the platforms. This is my wish list to make curation useful and discovery tangible for both individuals and businesses.

‘Good enough’ curation filters are neither good nor specific enough to be useful

Curation is in some ways just smart search with an intent to aggregate and share.

The same problems that plague search plague curation as well. What I see in Summify or XYDO, I’ve already seen in my Facebook wall or Twitter streams. And most of what I see isn’t that contextual, it’s simply a garden-variety search result with social plugins as a layer.

Two ideas jump to mind that may help to remedy sameness by building context around more unique information:

-Broaden the input stream

The world is not just Facebook and Twitter. Few (maybe no) curation engines import Tumblr content. And none have found a way to work with Disqus to plumb the massive implicit data that resides in their comment systems.

35 million Disqus commenters having conversations on over 750,000 blogs is a global pool of connection value that is untouched. That’s an ocean of context to channel.

-Self-tuning and personalized curation controls

When most players in a new segment are building the same thing, something is amiss. Curation tools are essential but they mostly seem generic and force context based on link popularity. This is both a yawn as a social play and non productive as a business solution. The curation process needs to be personal, customizable and adjustable in real-time.

The hierarchy of curation terms would be a good start, like you adjust bid terms in a pay-per-click ad campaign. These are personal filters, your screens with different mesh densities, that need to move from the very specific (rarely used) to the general (everybody uses).

Being able to parse and rearrange streams of information by keyword lets you define your own context.

For example, my list of curation keywords for natural wines (general to specific) is: Artisanal-> Natural->Organic-> Biodynamic-> Region-> Vineyard->individual vintage.

I want to pull the adjustment levers at will, adjusting the search as I refine the information and the context I think is most promising.

Check out Eqentia’s dashboard for this. It’s a good one, letting me curate by type and sort by a variety of factors, not just popularity.

Sharing is not contextual by definition

A Facebook ‘Like’. A link ‘Share’, or a ‘Follow’ are not delimiting factors and while they inform, they don’t really guide finding information or context.

Think about what happens on a comment string of Fred Wilson’s or Mark Suster’s blogs. These guys are master curators of focused and topical communities. Both are the epitome of context and a bright spotlight on the interest graph for technology and start-up discussions.

Their dynamic encourages sharing, learning, friendships, communities of extended interest and even new customers and partners. They are a wonder and but very much the exception.

Few of the curation platform players seem to understand that content without dynamic context is really neither interesting nor that valuable. The mix of search and social is uncomfortable and bolted on, like Google trying to integrate social data into search.

Interest footprints are complex and multifaceted, like people themselves

When I decided to hang my business and wine blogs off of the same URL, a couple of friends thought I was wacky. But that is my interest footprint and my personal passion graph and just who I am. Today over 90% of my business connections converse with me about wine. That intersection of wine for me, is a shared footprint along with business needs.

Follow any comment string on a dynamic community. If the commenter is from Colorado in the winter, skiing comes up. If from Spain, Mencia and Galica surface. If from London, the Tate Modern. This is human nature. The platform needs to encourage and support conversations as they naturally occur.

Human nature is telling us something about social business design. We want to have interests intersect even as we are searching for just one. Few of the curation platforms seem to be listening.

Discovering context is the end game of curation

The need to filter social networks to create value is a natural reaction to the raw value and size of the networks themselves.

Social nets like Facebook and Twitter need to figure this out for their own models. The rest of us do it for pursuit of interests, business connections and enlisting customers. It’s a real problem with no apparent nor pat solution.

Some niches have developed communities around rock star bloggers. But there is an infinite yearning for groupings around informational needs in travel, arts, sciences, crafts and on and on. On my list of have-to-finds, very few are located. And just putting out more and more content to create a magnet for context is a non-answer.

Businesses fall into that same need to discover these groupings to find new interest for their products. They need to channel the contextual exhaust from these communities of interest into commercial connections. They are looking for these informational-sorted, socially-fueled links in their sales and community funnels.

It’s this commerce piece of the search for context that is the Philosopher’s Stone of the social web.

The market leading solution will be some variation of a B-to-C-to-B curation paradigm. People want to connect socially, create communities of interest with new friends, share information and refer each other to products or vendors or destinations.

When this happens, not only will individuals have dynamic channels for connections but businesses will have a new customer acquisition pipeline from these communities of curated interests.

And the platform that figures out how to go beyond friendship-based communities and referrals to context and interest-based commercial traffic aggregators will have solved both the value for their network users and the business model for themselves at the same time.

The promise of the social web is juicy and inspiring and confounding.

Be interesting. Be smart. Work like a maniac. Create value and your customers will find you.

It’s a socially brushed off sequel to “Build it and they will come”.

But even interesting becomes noisy and ineffective without context and connection. The truly great promise of democratizing access for all is eating its own tail as more and more noise creates less and less connections that lead to value.

This problem seems endemic of late.

We all use filters to personalize information to our own needs. A few dynamic blog communities and early smart curation platforms like ensembli and eqentia start to make sense of the noise and put immediacy and relevance into the social information stream.

As a business owner and marketer, pinpointing context creates value and connections. Firehosing information is akin to interrupt push advertising, spraying the already noisy world and creating social spam as exhaust.

All businesses and brands are faced with the same drive to rise above the noise, create connections and build momentum. And all of us are finding ourselves at communications crossroads.

What do our Facebook fans really want when choosing to ‘like’ us? Is this content or friendship? Many ‘friends’ with good intentions and divergent interests ask me to ‘like’ their causes. I do more than not, and each ‘like’ creates noise and spam.

Many of us are shyly guilty of the pure adrenalin approach to social communications where marketers and community managers are treating the world as an open Facebook page, equating coy with clever, chatter with info and volume with value.

And generally, across brands big and small, there is a misconstruing of the applause for the real connection. Mistaking supporters for true early adopters and fans as a contributing community.

It’s not really all that easy to sort out.

Companies need to connect with their customers. Want to be interesting to their fans. Want to be ‘liked’ and shared and rise on the positive strength of their customers and fans good will.

Almost as if in the drive to have conversations, we put chatty conviviality before context and interest. It’s just easier…but it’s noisy and unfocused.

Part of the problem is the power of the social medium itself, so fraught with democratizing empowerment that we live in a more aspirational reality and busyness is masquerading as focus and market intent.

So…what to do?

Business owners and marketers need to rethink how the social web intersects with value creation and marketing. It’s not one or the other, it’s an interlaced new order.

Two ideas help me navigate the always murky intersection of social web savvy and market building intentions.

Focus on the Interest not the Friend Graph

There are lots of ways to parse the internet. Most focus on friends’ connections. I like to focus on the superset of this, the interest graph.

On all social nets, metadata becomes valuable as more friends vet it. The crowd is the curation principal.

For example, coffee shops on Foursquare rise to the top of the list as ‘recommended’ because your friends went there and checked in. The equivalent of liking in a geo-connected world.

There are two inherent gotchas with this approach.

You need lots of friends to make the sample data valid. And while potential relevance and context is created, the byproduct is a roar of social noise.

Our ‘friends’ are friends for a multiplicity of reasons, not always because they are experts in everything we are interested in. They may have no taste buds for coffee or palate for wine even though we may want to meet to drink coffee with them or enjoy a flight of natural wine.

That’s the friends graph crowd sourcing point of view. That’s also its basic fallacy from a marketing perspective. The friendship graph is broad and narrow and noisy and anti-contextual by nature. This is the social web equivalent of ‘boiling the ocean’, the perennial marketing non-starter.

The interest graph takes the polar opposite starting point.

It begins with common interests (wines of Arbois, raw desserts, travel in Paris) and builds friendship under them, because of them, around them. It is grounded in contextual information that connects through interests. Not expertise necessarily but common passions around pursuits.

‘Like’ a fan page on Facebook sponsored by an organic wine zine or travel club. If I get real information, for example, an app for finding organic wine bars in Paris and NYC with tasting meet-ups highlighted, this is spot on. I’ll find new places, make new friends, and create a new contextual network around a common interest thread. Virality is given. Context and interest in this case is the superset of the friend networking machine.

So…businesses need to find those target connections, those alpha sharers and dream early customers.

If it’s me, focus with intention on intersecting interests and context. Offer interesting info in digestible bites. I’ll share it forward and connect the string from your business to my interest network.

Sharing it forward is not a phrase; it’s a behavioral reality

The need to share value forward is the behavioral key to channel social connections…and create community.

Sharing is not a platform derivative of Facebook or Foursquare; the platforms gave expression to this behavioral drive. They made it easy and ubiquitous and the common language of our connected lives.

The drive to share value forward is the core tenet of the social web.

Sharing is power pulse, the passionate heartbeat that makes social a transformation, a complete game changer for everything from commerce to education.

Our incessant need to check in on our nets, looking for push out stuff we like and think is important, is not lip service to a trend. Sharing makes people feel good.

Sharing is the social change agent of our times.

Wrapping up

I’m really inspired by the business possibilities of the social web and humbled by the challenges to harness it. It’s replete with potential but elusive to grasp.

Figure it out (with a lot of luck) and the marketplace is truly your oyster.

Approach it from a distance without understanding its unique social gravity and you create noise and spam and just churn.

It is powered by honest communications. Fueled by the passion of people to connect with ideas and product and causes, and share that connection forward.

Can these really be the guidelines for a business platform?

Absolutely.

Some truths bear repeating and this is certainly one. A number of events over the past week inspired me to write this post.

First some context.

Discovering the value chain between customer and company is what successful business people do every day. They fill endless whiteboards, figuring out who they are, what their customers value and how to deepen this connection.

Pre the real-time web, this process was predominantly company centric. The center of the marketing bullseye was the company or product, with circles of distribution, partnerships and campaigns pushing the customer touch points out to the store or marketplace or channel.

This was a loud world of exported interrupt messages. It was difficult and expensive to manage.

The game has changed; so have the rules. The customer, empowered by the breadth of purchasing choices and the power of personal referrals, is at the center of the commercial world and the marketing bullseye. Winning, of course, is still measured the same way, but the path to get there is strikingly new and uncharted.

I’m frequently in discussions around social media and commerce and regardless of context, the crux is always connected to this power shift. Once you acknowledge that the nexus of power has jumped from the company to the customer, all the permutations and the logistical noise around social tools fall into place. Referral-based selling, community dynamics, customer support morphed into sales, and social commerce all stem back to this core shift of control and value.

Realistically, does the customer control the company and dictate pricing?

Not overtly of course but pragmatically and directionally, most certainly. With unlimited access to products though an endless array of channels, the customer has the choice to buy wherever and from whomever they want, to tell their friends to buy or not, and publish their impressions and recommendations to the world. Social nets are the amplifiers for both customer satisfaction and discontent.

If you want to build and grow your business, whether you are a start-up or a global brand, you need to pay attention and pay homage to your customer as key. You need to hand them the microphone. And you need to listen hard.

The benefits embracing this are significant when they work. The best example of doing this right from a customer centric support perspective is Apple.

One of the jokes in the blogs is that Apple makes crappy products but has the best support on the planet. I disagree but it makes a point.

I think Apple makes life changing products but their support in store, on the phone on and online is part of the product experience and unchallenged as the best. We like to buy their products, line up to buy new ones at premium prices. Stopping at the Apple store to resolve an issue and shop is part of life. Apple customers are their marketers, their sales force and their brand ambassadors.

One of the rules of marketing is that you can never stop communicating the most important facts. The realities of a customer-centric world prove this well.

A few examples.

A comment string on AVC.com about the new Gary Vaynerchuk book the other day found me in debate with Phil Sugar, a sharp marketing and business veteran who was quite vehement that companies who cared about their customers always provided a call in number with a human being to talk to.

Yes, it’s great to call the company, not so much if it’s a call center in Asia with an hour wait time and untrained employees. This is not about phones. Nor social tools to communicate. We don’t need to call the company; we need support and a system that respects the consumer pre and post sales.

You need an ecosystem of product and support that starts with a customer-centric premise. With this as the golden rule, not only do product and support exist on the same continuum, but also customer support and the customers themselves become the sales force for the company at their Apple-style best.

Phil and I were agreeing at the core but from different vantage points.

Donna White, a top tier and category-defining executive recruiter on the same comment string, reported that at a tech pitch event in Los Angeles she attended, there were a handful of startups whose disruptive strategy was by “being user/customer-centric”. Who would have thought that viewing the world as customer driven was disruptive? Proves that what you thought everyone understood simply isn’t and still new in many places.

And the next day at Media Summit 2011 in New York , media execs from Verizon, Starz and HBO on a panel argued about whether the pendulum of control in TV today was swinging toward content owners or distribution.

I asked whether the customer wasn’t in control? Whether the population growing up with webTV not cable, who never had a landline and just want to buy and watch what they want whenever they want to didn’t hold the true baton of power?

Their answers were “Yes, but…”. Big media certainly loves their fans and provides them a social playground of Twitter feeds and Facebook pages. But their model is stuck in the past and they can’t see past it. Social, for them, is a campaign, an ameliorator and a pacifier. Eventually this lack of a customer centric strategy will backfire.

The publication of Gary Vaynerchuk’s new book “The Thank You Economy” corresponds perfectly with this idea. Not only is his book a manifesto of the seismic shift—amongst other things–towards a customer-centric society, but Gary himself, his story and his business success is a living, breathing exemplar of this idea.

Business is complex. Understanding the social web is inspiring but dauntingly interconnected and overwhelming at times. And building a communications platform for your customers is non trivial.

But if you push the complexity aside, rise above the tactics and objections and start with the value chain of customer not company as key, things fall into place.

How you communicate. How you sell. How you determine pricing and support. Think customer first and you have a point of view to make decisions against .

There’s no guarantee for business success. Building community. Empowering your customer. All this is hard. Even when everything is perfect, there is luck and magic that can’t be planned for nor bought nor bet on.

But I can’t imagine any successful business starting today that doesn’t embrace this reality of a customer-centric world. Nor any successful company looking for expansion that doesn’t surface their customers themselves as the key to growth. Putting the value on what you provide to your customers and letting them speak for themselves, is no guarantee, but the best bet on the future of your company that you can make.