The Social Wave Blog by Sheldon Chang

Although Social Wave is far behind where I had hoped it would be at this point, I have to admit that it has enjoyed some mild success. A few emails that I got recently were indirect signs that the public perception about Social Wave's presence as a community network had grown. They came in the form of complaints that were submitted like filed grievances.

I've been through this rite of passage once before as a student leader. As an undergraduate at Boston University, it took two years of very active involvement in campus life before some people stopped addressing me as a person and started addressing me as someone who might be able to do something with their grievances. I'm older and wiser now and it looks like I've managed to halve the amount of time that some people have decided to stop addressing me as another human being.

There are other parallels between what happened to me as a student leader in 1994 and what is happening to me as the developer and founder of a growing community network dedicated to making Silicon Valley a more familiar place to live. Unfortunately, it's also an unpleasant one. As a student leader, around the time that I stopped being a person to some people, I started losing friends. They started judging me far more critically than they had judged me when I was unknown, mostly harmless, and amusing in my drive. I stop getting away with having personal faults.

I'll need a team of psychologists to understand why I've had to go through the problem of friends becoming hypercritical and unforgiving once my work has begun to succeed, but my intent with this entry isn't to talk about me. It's to point out an unusual issue that probably faces almost any project that's powered by a personality.

The precursor to the Social Wave program was 100% me and when I started to convert that program into today's Social Wave, I made myself as anonymous as possible on the site. After three months of distancing myself from my creation, Social Wave was a mess. Nobody showed to events and nobody visited the website.

After I got some feedback from people who said they liked it better when I acted a "lot less corporate" in how I managed the site, I started putting my name on things again and engaged with people on the site as myself and not some anonymous admin. Things turned around, but now the problem is the opposite. To some people I am now synonymous with Social Wave and any personal judgement they make against me is automatically being applied to Social Wave.

In success as well as in failure, you find out who your friends are. I have no problem with these difficult revelations, but for the sake of my work, I'd rather be able to keep my illusions of camaderie intact until Social Wave has one or two more prominent personalities who can share the spotlight.

The lesson learned here is to make every effort possible to weave at least two or three high profile personalities into a community site while the site is still flying under the radar. This is generally accepted as no-brainer kind of advice under the rationale that you need some engaging people to "seed" the activity while things are slow, but I'm pointing out that having more people in the main spotlight is even more important when the site is succeeding. One person can make a site interesting without help if that person is driven enough, but one person alone cannot prevent perceptions about him from being translated into a general spite for the entire community.

There seems to be a common ethic among people who run or use social networks and community networks. A lot of them believe it should be done out of a general desire to help people lead a more rewarding life with a wider network of friends and an expanded community. Empowering people to take charge of their own social well being is a noble task and I’m all for making sacrifices to help my community and the people in it, but after a year of trying to make my community network (Social Wave) work as a free service, I question the popular belief that these services should not make any money.

Whenever I bring up my doubts with the free usage service model, people are quick to point out the open source movement as a shining example of what loose controls and free usage can do for a person’s creation. I believe in open source, but open source is a model that works well under ideal circumstances when we’re dealing with intellectual property. It’s a much more challenging model to follow when we’re dealing with services because individuals who wish to provide services have a finite ability to provide service to all who wish to support the service by using it or even by promoting it. Remember, open source means loose restrictions on use and the freedom to contribute. It doesn’t mean that everything should be free.

I’m amazed at how some services similar to Social Wave proudly advertise that they’re not out to make money. To the ones that have the financial support to afford such generosity, I applaud and admire their noble intent. To the ones who are idealistic enough to believe that free is the best usage model to go by, I ask them how they’re going to ensure that they have the resources to stay competitive against other services like theirs, some of them run by huge companies who have the ability to make “free service” pay off for their shareholders in the long run.

In one of my previous blogs, I wrote about my experiences in working with organizations run by volunteers. Most of them follow a predictable path. They have a heyday, but once a few of the key volunteers are pulled away by other pressures of life, they start slipping into irrelevance. To all other developers of independent community networks, I advise you to find a revenue model to sustain your service if you want it to be alive and kicking five years from now. We could all be mere speedbumps for the likes of MSN and Yahoo Groups on their way to owning our social lives and online community interaction. Also please please please knock it off with slogans like "We're in this to make friends, not money." It's a little dishonest and it makes life tougher for those of us who need to make sure we can get enough income from our services to pay our expenses.

As Social Wave gets into its second year, we're regrouping to tighten its definition now that its structure has become more stable. We also plan to use the term "Social Enterprise" more noticeably even though it has been a Social Enterprise from the start. One of the reasons why we need to adopt this label is to address the clashing ideals that residents have for Social Wave vs. the ideals that businesses have for Social Wave.

Residents want everything to be free and businesses want to make sure that you're making enough money to provide good service and so that you can stay around. We can almost resolve this clash of ideals by elaborating on what it means when we say that Social Wave is a social enterprise.

Mission Statement

Social Wave is an online service designed to help Silicon Valley develop stronger communities by creating opportunities for residents get to know other locals, businesses, and their area both online and in person.

Social Wave's Business Structure and Goals

Social Wave is a Social Enterprise

A Social Enterprise is a business whose operational goal is to achieve financial sustainability while serving the common good by using innovation in business to address a sociological problem that negatively affects the community. Social Enterprises do not have to be non-profits, but any surplus generated is returned to the community through additional services or direct contributions. The purpose of a Social Enterprise is defined by the problems that it's designed to address. In the case of Social Wave, the problems addressed are social isolation and its role in the decay of sustainable local economies.

• Society has become highly mobile in all aspects, leading to the degradation in the quality of traditional community life because natural social networks require stability and take time to form. Radical changes in industry as we've seen in the past two decades produce large scale economic migrations which negatively impact the quality of community life in places where people leave and in the places where people follow jobs to.
  
  
• Sustainable locally owned businesses are more difficult to operate in fractured communities because natural social networks are part of the economic relationship people have with the businesses around them. While price competition pressure is likely the most significant factor in explaining the troubles of small locally owned businesses, it does not account for the entire range of challenges facing them. Any expert online shopper knows that large online retailers have great expertise in making buyers pay for their discounts in the long run.
  
  
• Information networks such as the Internet were once hailed as the great equalizer, but end up serving the purposes of dominant brands instead of local economic interests. Without focused application, Internet services tend to favor entities with the most marketing power, the farthest reach, or the loudest voice because the Internet is completely geographically agnostic.

Social Wave operates under the belief that problems with fractured communities and weak local economies are highly related and the best way of solving them is to address them together. A highly fractured community will be less engaged with local merchants because small locally owned businesses traditionally rely on social connections such as word of mouth or reputation to survive. In a fractured community, strong corporate branding becomes a surrogate for the trust relationship that people may otherwise develop with local businesses. This relationship can be developed through direct experience or through word of mouth.

In another time, there was a direct relationship between social interaction and the local economy. The need to go downtown for goods, services, and information was a primary driver of community interaction. Downtowns (and similar districts) have since become obsolete as essential commercial hubs, but still possess high potential to be the centers of social interaction that help make real communities possible. Information tools can help direct residential attention toward community centers, but so far has not served the interest of the local community well.

It was once believed that the Internet would level the playing field between big and small organizations because it amplified the power of word of mouth. Years after the euphoria that led to this utopian proclamation, the Internet seems to have ultimately tipped the balance of power further to the side of large corporations that have unmatchable resources to spend on reinforcing the power of their brand. Because the Internet as it exists today is a decentralized medium with no bias to geographic location, it is less a conduit for traditional word of mouth (which is based on social connections) than it is a revolutionary conduit for large scale phenomenon.

The problem is compounded by the fact that many locally owned businesses do not even have a website and the ones who do often don't have competent sites. With high quality local information so difficult or impossible to get online, people will be reluctant to test the potential for using the Internet to find information that they need to connect with their community economically and socially. A focused service like Social Wave can help repair fractures in the community by facilitating the development of social connections between people and by making more high quality local information accessible online.

Many services have been launched that help people develop their social lives. There's hundreds upon hundreds of them in the form of online dating sites and social networking sites, but none of them tie in directly to the local economic infrastructure. Without a socioeconomic connection, these services can at best succeed in benefiting a small percentage of participants, but will never be an effective way of achieving broader community. By unifying a range of popular types of online information and networking services with an innovative approach toward supporting locally owned businesses, Social Wave hopes to improve upon the efforts of its social networking service siblings and stimulate long lasting improvements in the overall quality of community life.