–

Natural-born videographers

MM: On the second time out — when you went to vendors and/or shops that were part of the community — for the most part, we’re talking about… I won’t call them “amateur,” but we’ll definitely call the “low-production-value videos. They kind of had the home-movie, home-video flavor to it.

RT: Absolutely. One of the reasons why we picked skateboarding as our primary targets is that skateboarders are natural videographers. They’re always out there taking videos of their friends doing tricks. They’re just natural-born videographers. They want to see how everybody else does a particular trick.

They’re going to tape themselves doing it. They’re going to review it and watch it. We needed to understand the dynamic of how rich media content was consumed and successfully embedded in the community.

Also, the technological challenges of uploading video and converting video to Flash, and doing all that good stuff — which we’ll get into later on.

MM: That reminds me of a conversation I had with a VP of research at MTV in Europe. He called these things, “Games of Cool.” It was all a matter of how well you played this particular game of cool.

Again, in your skateboarder community, you’ve got one dimension that is just plain skill. Quick, cool moves. The other one is, of course, what you look like in terms of both the hardware and the shoes, the look, and “How do I make myself look like that?” Therefore, a member of that community.

RT: Right.

MM: There are really two dimensions. One’s skill and the other one’s basically “cool” identity. That lends itself perfectly to video.

RT: Yes. It does. Those two dimensions are identifiable characteristics for commonality within communities.

Shared vocabularies

MM: One of the things that we’ve understood now from the cognitive research and cognitive science of community building is that almost always, it entails communication, interaction and collaboration among peers. There’s no kind of authority by which to intimidate people.

It develops a kind of common vocabulary and a common way of relating. Thereby reinforcing a ritualized way of communicating, interacting and collaborating. Does that make sense?

RT: I agree with that. Yes.

MM: Would that include blogs and wikis? Take me through some of the tools that a client might provide a sponsor.

RT: Yes. Blogs, forms and groups are the three primary places where they can interact.

MM: For the context of this interview, could you explain the difference between a forum and a group?

Sure. A forum is what we call a site with a monitored topic. We’ll give special permissions to actually moderate a forum. They’ll create the forum and the topics for the forum. Then members will interact with the topics, the descriptions and the conversation about that topic.

MM: Essentially, a moderated special-interest group.

RT: Yes. And a group is really more member-driven. A member can create a group around a specific topic, and they can be the center or focal point of that group. It’s more free form, and not as shaped of a conversation as a moderated forum.

MM: The content of a group is on the site? Or is it circulated by e-mail?

RT: It’s all on the site. Yes. It’s contained within the site. And groups can be private so you have to have special invitation to be a member of that group. Forums are always public.

–