Craig Newmark's Keynote Unlocks the Secrets to Building a Community
In an era where user generated content is changing our entire culture, rare is the company that can successfully harness the collective creativeness of its community, cultivate loyalty, make money consistently, and continue to flourish. Enter Craigslist. Listed as the tenth top site in America on Alexa and with close to 50 million unique visitors a month according to Compete, Craigslist is one of the few companies that appears to have worked it out.
Yesterday, at the User Generated Conference in San Jose, CA, founder Craig Newmark gave us an insight into what has and what hasn't worked for the privately held company.
Recognize the Importance of a Feedback Loop
It all began in the fertile dot com era when Newmark, while working at Charles Schwab, realized the time was ripe to begin something of his own.
In early 1995 he started sending out a simple CC list, e-mailing arts and tech events to a small group of interested subscribers. Very quickly, people started e-mailing him with news about jobs and apartments in the hope he would add them to his mailing list.
"From the very beginning," Newmark said, "I was involved in talking to people; listening to people. And it hasn't stopped. The idea was that people send me information; I'd ask them about it, listen, try to do something about it - and then ask for more feedback."
Get Out of The Way
Borrowing from a sixties phrase "lead, follow or get out of the way," Newmark pointed out that while you may have a great idea, it doesn't necessarily mean you have the skills to manage it or nurture its growth.
After Newmark had about 240 addresses on his list, it started breaking. He needed a list server and began thinking of ways to move his email folders onto the Web, but what to call it? Anthony Batt, the man behind Buzznet, and clearly part of the original Craigslist community came to Newmark's rescue. "Hey, we already call it Craigslist, may as well call it that and start building a brand."
The year was 1995 and Newmark began migrating his email folders over to the new Web site. The move instilled a new drive in Newmark who chose to keep the site personal and quirky. With the support of his loyal community, Newmark ran the site by himself for the next few years.
But by the end of 1997 Craigslist hit three milestones.
- Craigslist hit one million pageviews
- Microsoft approached Newmark with an offer to run banner ads (he said no)
- People began approaching Newmark wanting to help with the site on a volunteer basis
While he tried letting people run the site on a voluntary basis, in 1998 he realized it wasn't working: "mainly because of lack of leadership on my part," Newmark explained.
Craigslist was incorporated in 1999, when Newmark decided it was time to make "this thing" into a company. By the end of that year he stopped coding and moved onto customer service and corporate governance full time. "Frankly, as a manager, I kinda suck," Newmark explained, "but fortunately Jim [Buckmaster] didn't." By the end of 1999, Buckmaster was Craigslist's CEO.
"Getting out of the way is really important," said Newmark. "A lot of people talk about customer service and staying involved," he said, "but they don't keep going."
Newmark, like others before him, recognized the need to move away in order to see the company succeed. "People that start companies, and lack management skills, they fail."
Understand We Live in a Culture of Participation
In 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck the New Orleans area with devastating effect. It was reported that more than 1,800 people lost their lives, and damages exceeded $81 billion dollars.
The tragedy was a somber reminder to Craigslist and its founder that getting out of the way didn't only apply to the internal dynamics of a company; it must also be applied to the community.
New Orleans survivors started repurposing Craigslist. They began to use it to let their friends and family know where they were at the height of the confusion. Within days the site was being used to offer jobs and housing to those who suffered loss during Katrina. "We didn't care that the site wasn't being used how we had imagined," Newmark explained.
It's this keen understanding that we're living in what Jay Rosen has dubbed the culture of participation that makes companies like Craigslist so successful.
During a recent interview with The Daily Beast, Jeff Jarvis, author of the recently released What Would Google Do?, nominated the Craigslist philosophy as a key rule of the Google age:
"As Google built the most powerful tool imaginable--the entire world of digital knowledge revealed behind a simple search box--so did Craig build a simple tool that changed society (and newspapers and real estate and more) without prescribing how we should use it. They create platforms to enable us to do what we want to do and then, instead of giving us rules about their use, then they stand back and put us in charge."
"The Internet is about inclusion," Newmark said, "on the Net, no one should be left out."
The lessons Newmark painted yesterday are vivid; no matter how much you may think you know, you'll never master everything, surround yourself with good people and let them do their job, be ready to step back if you're hindering the process, and don't just talk about building community, immerse yourself in it and let them participate in growth. You never know, you just may learn something new.
Of course, we would be remiss if we neglected to add Newmark's parting words: "Live long and prosper."
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"...We didn't care that the site wasn't being used how we had imagined," Newmark explained. "The Internet is about inclusion. On the Net, no one should be left out."
Please forward that quote to Facebook and all the other walled gardens. KTHXBAI
Props to Craig Newmark for what he's accomplished. But let's keep him honest--and Jeff Jarvis too, while we're at it. When both of them preach the gospel of openness, they only mean it as a one-way street.
Have we forgotten the way Craiglist blocked Oodle from scraping their listings?
http://battellemedia.com/archives/001930.php
Or that Google believes in transparency for others but not for themselves?
http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/02/05/what-would-google-do-what-does-google-do/
Craigslist and Google are, on balance, a major net gain for the web and for the world at large. But their ideas about the "culture of participation" are very asymmetric, if not quite as extreme as Facebook--or AOL's--walled gardens.
This makes it seem like Craig was the only one smart enough to know these trivial "principles". This is baloney. There were plenty of other sites who listened to their customers.
The secret to Craig's community-building exercise was the following: in the late 90's he realized nobody would be too excited to help promote a service by a corporation. So he registered 2 companies - one non-profit and the other one for-profit.
When he expanded out of his SF base - specifically to NYC, he approached a variety of local groups and organization through his non-profit arm, selling the idea of a community web site and ask for their support in promoting it. He did not say anything about the other entity. When the traffic started flowing, a couple of years later, the "other" craigslist stepped in a cashed in.
This was brilliant but just a little sinister. Craig is a shrewd businessman, but please spare the b.s. about community-building principles. His top principle was "bait and switch".
No doubt craigslist is state-of-the-art in vertical search in many domains (including apartments, jobs, used car).
However, its popularity is more of a shame for search industry than a mark of achievement. A user has to pretty much click on every (unstructured) listing to see if it meets his search requirement.
At Cazoodle, we believe user experience in vertical search must be improved. As our first product, Cazoodle apartment search engine, crawls indexes thousands of websites, and allows user to search through the hundreds of thousands of listings, much more humanly:
http://apartments.cazoodle.com
CL need to upgrade... Seriously, I know simplistic is what made CL popular, but in ease of use, they need to spend some of the millions they make to make a more user friendly site. They can keep the look and feel (branding) but with all the innovative features of web 2.0, why not move forward.
Start with thumbnails on the posts. Let the user turn if off if they like.
I'm all for a culture of participation, but what Craigslist and Google *do* isn't exactly what Craig Newmark and Jeff Jarvis *preach*.
Was it open for Craigslist to stop Oodle from scraping them?
http://battellemedia.com/archives/001930.php
Or that Google want transparency for everyone but themselves?
http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/02/05/what-would-google-do-what-does-google-do/
I'm not attacking either company or any of their advocates as evil. I'm just trying to keep folks honest, especially when they're up at the pulpit.
not rocket science, but then the best and most successful ideas come to fruition often are simple common sense applied thoughtfully. Listen to your users and build what they what you to build, not what you think they want.
This may be unpopular but I would question Craigslist as the key to community building. When I think of online communities, I don't think of Craigslist. Not saying it doesn't have some aspects of community, but are people coming there daily to share the nuances of their daily lives? I'm writing a book about online communities and i haven't mentioned Craigslist and don't think I will. Not that it would matter to Newmark or anyone else, but I feel like we're starting to throw that word around in ways that don't necessarily fit.
Lidija,
Here is someone's actual experience with craigslist -- great reading on the topic that would have probably made this article much more balanced. Take care!
Delia
http://craigslistcriticism.blogspot.com/2009/02/hmmm-how-do-i-get-michael-halligan-to.html
Peter,
I'd be interested in more details (basically, documenting what you said in you comment). Feel free to email. Thanks!
Delia (d p e r i o d @ c o m c a s t . n e t),
without the spaces, of course
I absolutely agree with Govind Kabra's comments. What is Craig's list, just a vertical directory with sub sections making a never ending hierarchy of links and millions of people who do not want to change the way they explore information. What do call it ? Legacy; I know I may seem funny to you but seriously do you call it innovation in this era when User Experience has the utmost importance for every web application. Something which is so popular doesn’t essentially means it’s perfect, you need to change with innovation. Today’ I want to get the desired information with just a click of mouse or with just a short keyword and need only specific information. I do not backup google’s idea as well because being an end user I am only looking for a specific information. I am not expecting the search engine to return me 1 million results just because the keyword that I entered is present in the document or the web page. That may be crap for me, Instead of having 1 million results I will be very much satisfied with just 100 with the most related and specific results based on some content priority.
thanks.
I certainly didn't expect to see such disdain for CL in these comments.
I know I've had my issues with CL as a buyer, and the best thing I ever did was to use the RSS feed generated from my searches and utilize Y! Pipes, then take the feed and put into my feedreader. From this point on, I will be using a private FriendFeed room (instead of feedreader) where I can make comments and notes.
‘Designed for Audience’
This post of Gregor Hochmuth http://www.dotgrex.com/dsp/2008/08/3-loops-of-designing-for-audience/ ‘The 3 Loops of Designing for Audience’ gives a very useful view on communities and the importance of feedback loops. I use this article to judge the many Web 2.0 systems that are out there.
To give you an idea of this article, the following quote:
‘I claim that Twitter has been so successful because it gives users a concrete model of who is listening to them — it gives them a sense of Audience. (…) ‘A system that wants to tap the power of Audience like Twitter needs 3 important feedback loops:
* Users building a model of their audience
* Audiences giving feedback to the people who post content
* Users giving feedback to the system about the people and content that are important to them.’
http://www.flickr.com has one of the best systems 'Designed for Audience', according to Gregor Hochmuth. From my own experience, I fully agree with his view!
I agree with the previous posters. Craigslist's interface is a nightmare. Having people to spent hours trying to find stuff or apartments on craigslist is a shame.
That's why there's always a demand for sites like searchallcraiglist.com, http://craiglook.com and craighelper.com which bring usability to the 90's craigslist interface
Cheers,
-Darrell
This is great, thanks so much!