Me.Tech()

Everybody’s writing about the new social organizer phenomenon, So I thought I could add my two cents to it.

What if you want to hire someone to build an online community? Somebody to create and maintain a virtual world in which all the players in an industry feel like they need to be part of it? It would help if that person understood technology, at least well enough to know what it could do. They would need to be able to write. But they also have to be able to seduce stragglers into joining the group in the first place, so they have to be able to understand a marketplace, do outbound selling and non-electronic communications.

Seth Godin writes about the Online Community Organizer as the job of the future.

I agree with Seth on this point. Apps are becoming more and more social. The social product is only as good as the hype it creates. Take Kevin Rose’s Pownce or Guy Kawasaki’s truemors , these sites generated enough hype prior their launch because of their high profile entrepreneurs. Almost every person wanted to take a peek at these products when launched. Aren’t these people organizers in their own ways ? Marketing a product has been closely associated with getting Techcrunched or Read/Written, its word of mouth marketing at its best and these people are the ones that are drawing audiences and giving them reason to stay.

Even Joshua of Social Design vouches by it. After a certain point, it will be people who will influence the audience of a social app. I sure as hell would join a social network where I could find the Real Bill Gates, if he can be there, so can I, thats the idea. An Online community organizer will have to be one with an impeccable reputation and a neat resume, one that can turn heads. He/she must be able to talk people into joining a product and using it and even deliver the promise of a fruitful app. Its not enough having high profile people in your Organizers list, you need to a have a good product. Marketing will only take you half the distance, the product has to endure the other half of the audience’s prejudice. Its a tricky predicament to let people from all walks of life into a product that was never meant for them; your organizer must have been a patron of the genre or must be at least influential enough to draw audiences of the right kind.

Its indeed a job for the future.