The Social Web

THE SOCIAL WEB: HOW TO BUILD SUCCESSFUL PERSONAL AND BUSINESS WEB SITES BY RICHARD SELTZER

Copyright 1997, 1998

Published by Seltzer Books

established in 1974, as B&R Samizdat Express

offering over 14,000 books

feedback welcome: seltzer@seltzerbooks.com

Books by the Richard Seltzer available from Seltzer Books

The Name of Hero

Ethiopia Through Russian Eyes (translation from the Russian)

The Lizard of Oz

Now and Then and Other Tales from Ome

Saint Smith and Other Stories

The Gentle Inquisitor and Other Stories

Echoes from the Attic (with Ethel Kaiden)

Web Business Bootcamp (2002)

The Social Web (1998)

The Way of the Web (1995)

Heel, Hitler and Other Plays

Dryden's Exemplary Drama and Other Essays

Preface From Flypaper to Social Web

Introduction Let People Find You: Putting Flypaper to Work 

Chapter 1 Basic Building Blocks of the Social Web

Chapter 2 How to Design Web Pages Without Learning HTML

Chapter 3 The Content Question

Chapter 4 Who Owns What? 

Chapter 5 Build a Personal Web Site: Implications of Search Engines 

Chapter 6 Publicize Your Web site Over the Internet

Chapter 7 Making Your Site Global: Free Translation at AltaVista

Preface: From Flypaper to Social Web

When old friends whom I hadn't been in touch with for ten and up to thirty years started sending me email -- about half a dozen of them each month -- at first I was flattered. Isn't it amazing that all those people would be looking for me?

Then it dawned on me -- why should they look for me? They probably each have a hundred or more people who they once were close to (old roommates, business associates, etc.) whom they've lost touch with. And why, out of all those others, should they actively come looking for me?

With a few quick queries I soon established that they weren't looking for me at all. They were looking for themselves. They had gone to search engines like AltaVista, Excite, and Hotbot. There they had done what most people do at those sites -- they had entered their own name as the query. And since I have a lot of content at my Web site -- including lots of my writing -- many of my old friends are mentioned somewhere there, typically in the list of thank you's at the end of a book. Searching for themselves, they chanced upon me; and, delighted at that unexpected occurrence, they sent me email.

If I had wanted to find them, I could have spent a lot of time looking and might never have succeeded. But because I had my own Web pages and, by chance, those pages had the right kind of content, and that content was indexed by search engines, the old friends found me instead.

I soon realized that what I had done by accident, others could do deliberately for personal or business purposes -- setting out flypaper rather than going hunting with a fly swatter. While hyperlinks are a way to point people away from my Web pages to other resources on the Internet, flypaper provides a way to draw people to my pages and encourage them to get in touch with me directly. We'll deal with that technique in the Introduction, and then discuss other aspects of the Social Web and it's importance for individuals, organizations, and businesses.

The term Social Web is not a synonym for virtual community. Rather it refers to structural elements of today's Web -- such as personal Web pages, full-text search engines and Web-based forums and chat -- which you can use to help people connect to people and hence to foster the birth and growth of communities.

At its simplest level, as the flypaper described above, the Social Web just links two people together. They may or may not choose to make a habit of staying in touch.

But if you have rich content and engaging activities at your site which draw people to become involved and to link to one another, your site could become a nexus on the Social Web -- a place where many threads of people-connection cross and where people of like interest are likely to chance upon one another. Once the people links are made, relationships may develop independent of the Web site -- using email or any other person-to-person utility or even face-to-face and non-Internet communication.

Recently, community has become the Holy Grail of Web business. Virtual Community by Howard Rheingold (published by Addison-Wesley in 1993) provides an excellent grassroots, pragmatic view of on-line communities before the dawn of the Web. And Net Gain by John Hagel and Arthur Armstrong (Harvard Business School Press) makes an eloquent case for the theoretical importance of communities for building profitable businesses. But it is not easy to create a community on the Web today. It's not like building a physical structure -- a town hall or an entire town -- where all you have to do is hire experts to follow blueprints. Many chat rooms and discussion areas on the Web are virtually empty. Numerous fledgling community-based businesses, which looked great on paper have failed.

The Social Web of today is in many ways quite different from the pre-Web experiences of the Well, bulletin-board systems (BBSs), and on-line conferencing systems inside major corporations like Digital Equipment. When you connected to those systems you already knew a lot about the people there and perhaps even trusted them, to some extent. Even newsgroups were relatively small, and you soon became familiar with the active participants. You typically only belonged to one such community -- because of where you worked or because you chose to pay a fee. And once you joined, you had a finite number of choices -- there might be many topics of discussion but there would only be one place to talk about that topic, and it would be relatively easy to find that place if and when you were interested. Now the Web is totally open. Anybody and everybody is out there. And there are an enormous number of choices -- millions of Web sites, many of which would like you to feel like you are a member of their community. It is a much more elastic and competitive environment, which presents new kinds of challenges and new opportunities.

Over the last four years I've talked and written a lot about community, defining it as a loyal audience for a Web site, and recommending that businesses focus first on building their community and then on developing the services that audience would be willing to pay for. Now the Internet has grown and evolved to the point where an audience isn't necessarily a community. There are many competing places to discuss the very same kind of content. It is now very difficult to inspire the kind of fierce loyalty and sense of belonging that members of the Well felt and to grow a community of that kind, with the kind of long-term business potential described in Net Gain. Yes, you feel some loyalty to sites that you return to frequently, but it's the kind of loyalty you may feel toward a gas station you patronize, not the loyalty of a church congregation or an Elks Club.

Community implies a tight-knit membership -- people who would go out of their way to help one another, people who would proudly identify themselves as members. What we see instead is far looser, more elastic, and dynamic -- a matter of habits, tendencies, threads of connection among people -- where some sites in fact grow to become important nexus points; but where true communities are the exception rather than the rule.

Fortunately, however, the opportunities opened by the Social Web are not all-or- nothing -- there are many steps you can take to improve your Web site and your relationship with your audience, even if these steps do not lead to the growth of a full-fledged community. As with a garden, you are not totally in control. There are no magic Jack-in-the-Beanstalk seeds that are certain to produce high profits. But you can prepare the soil and plant the seeds, and work hard to nurture the seedlings that may appear. Yes, you can increase the likelihood that a true community of interest will arise around your Web site and the activities and events which you create and foster there. But, falling short of that lofty goal, you can still get people to contribute interesting content for your Web site, to make contact with people of common interest at your site, and to build relationships with your business,

Before launching such a effort, you need

1) to populate your Web site with interesting and useful content and let the world know about it;

2) to understand and take advantage of the business dynamics of the Web; and

3) to focus the Social Web characteristics of your content and your activities so your site becomes a nexus of interpersonal activity.

In the Introduction, we'll take a closer look at elements essential for success of the flypaper approach:

o personal Web pages

o how search engines work,

o how people use search engines, and hence

o what is the right kind of content if you want to be found.

And we'll look at the kinds of unexpected personal and business benefits that can come from this approach.

Then, we'll cover other low-tech tactics that are important in building a nexus on the Social Web, including step-by-step details on simple ways to create your own Web pages and to publicize your own Web site. We'll also discuss the unique dynamics of business on the World Wide Web, how, on a shoestring, you can take the next steps to grow your audience and build a business or organization around your Web site.

Next, we'll look at the role of Web-based on-line discussions (forum and chat) to attract valuable content, build your relationships with your audience, and try to grow your site into a true community.

Finally, we'll take at look at key trends -- in technology and in behavior -- and how they are likely to impact the Social Web over the next 5-10 years.

This book is an attempt to arrive at practical, pragmatic knowledge. It results from discussions I've been carrying on with thousands of people on the Internet over the last five years, and yet it's still just a starting point. Hopefully, print publication will help draw into the discussion more people with more varied viewpoints.

Introduction: Let People Find You: Putting Flypaper to Work

The Internet began as a way of connecting computers to computers, for sharing files and resources. It soon became a way for people to connect with people, through email, newsgroups, and chat.

In 1993, software known as Web browsers and Web servers made accessing files over the Internet much easier -- a matter of point-and-click, rather than having to type in abstruse commands and lengthy addresses. At the same time, it made the look and feel of the information more appealing -- with easily readable text and attractive graphics. The early Web was a simple and effective way to connect people to documents and documents to other documents.

But now the Web has evolved back toward the people-to-people origins of the Internet. You could say that we are moving from the Document Web to the Social Web.

Yes, the documents and the pictures of the Web are still there -- with lots of new fancy special effects. But the main attraction of the Web today, as it had been for the original Internet, is connecting people to people.

This change was made possible by personal Web pages and search engines. Ordinary individuals can now quickly create and post their own Web pages and find pages created by anyone anywhere else in the world. As a result, plain-text Web pages can now be either static -- like the pages of books in a library -- or dynamic -- inviting discussion and connecting people to people. The technology is the same in either case. The difference is the intent of the author and the author's understanding of the needs and behavior of other people on the Internet.

Yes, you can use the Internet to publish traditional material, producing electronic analogs of magazines and newspapers, where trusted authorities expound their view of the world -- one-way communication. But the real power of the Internet comes into play when you invite