Four is the new Three

In the last post I spoke about the three different types of people there are in the world in regards to conversations; the creators, the commenters, and the consumers.  I spoke about how each of these groups scale on logarithmic rates of 1, 9, 90.  I also mentioned that you will need to fill each of those roles at different times.  So what’s next?  Lets look at how we move people from one category to another.  What are the tools available to us. 

I’m going to start out by being honest.  I lied to you.  There are not three separate categories of people, there are four.  This last category is the people who don’t know about your conversation.  Lets call them the clueless.  These are the people who were not invited to the party.  The best way to increase the size of your entire pyramid is to increase the number of people involved.  This is the invitation.  

However, there is a problem with sending an invitation out to a party if the venue for the party isn’t ready.  You will not get that many people to show up to an empty lot, and those that do show up, few will stay.  You need a way to turn those clueless people into consumers, and to do this you need something for them to consume.  You need content.

This isn’t all you need.  You also need a way for those consumers to turn into commenters.  Are there any tools associated with your content that allows them to leave comments?  Are you inviting them to leave comments?  What are the barriers you are putting in a consumers way to make them into commenters?

But this also isn’t all you need.  You need a way to turn commenters into creators.  What are the tools you are giving people to allow them to create their own conversations?  Again, are you inviting them to create their own conversations?  What are the barriers, technological or philosophical, are you putting in the way of consumers to create their own conversations?

This also isn’t all you need.  If you have all the above you will have a great party, but you will not have all the pieces in place you need for a complete package.  You need to put something in place that will allow your content creators to invite their own friends to the party.  Ask yourself what barriers are you putting in place that don’t let your content creators to invite others.  Are you even helping them, or are you thinking that this is their problem to deal with?

Next time we will talk about the tools in each of these areas and the strategy you can use to create each of these tools for different media types.

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[Nuclearwarm]

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