Yep, It’s official. After this last class I’ve finally realized that this course has ruined me. After our class with T.A. McCann and Gina Neff, I can honestly say it is by far the best class I have taken at UW, and it has ruined me because all others will inevitably pale in comparison.
What classes will be as interesting as this? How am I to register for classes now that the bar has been set so high? Am I to settle for the irrelevant, “ivory-tower-esque,” courses that are irrelevant and ten years behind?
This last class fantastic in that its topics: social networks, motivation, findability, monetization, viral communications & marketing, etc., are so relevant to effectively communicating in the digital spectrum. I don’t know how many times I’ve told clients and colleagues that the “build-it-and-they-will-come” scenario of the Web pre-2.0 is gone.
Now we must come to them. We must engage in the dialogue that is currently emerging on the social web. Conversations are happening about products, political views, and personas in the Blogosphere and beyond. Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn have allowed us to become more modular and multifaceted. It is astounding to me that people are just starting to catch up.
Yet, out of all the beauty that was last Tuesday, there was one slide that T.A. presented that unsettled me. It was the slide that showed the 90-9-1 ratio of users, leaving the point that a succesful social site should drive everyone (the 90%) to being active participants (the 1%).
Now, I know I’ve been going on and on about this (it seems to be a theme running throughout all of my written work in this class), but I think this is absolutely wrong. Actually, it’s this type of thinking I have to fight every day.
A successful social web presence doesn’t drive everyone to be active participants. Instead, a successful social web presence <em>provides value</em> to the 100%, no matter how active or inactive they are. No one would call YouTube an unsuccessful site, right? No. That’s because it provides value for everyone. It’s fun to watch, participate, and upload content. Yet, only 1% of all users actually take the time to capture video, compile and edit it on their machine, create a profile, and upload the video. Still a fantastic site.
August 4, 2007 at 5:55 am
I am so glad that you enjoyed these two presentations. It was serendipity that they both picked this evening as the “best” for them — and I guess fate killed my voice, too.
I’ll argue that all classes can’t be “cutting edge” — there are fundamentals in every field that, while less exciting in the moment, are very important for understanding and future analysis. But thanks.