I first saw the internet on television.
It was my senior year of college, 1995, and PBS ran a segment about something called a web browser. Mosaic. I was floored. I went to the library the next day, got myself a VAX account, and started exploring.
I was an art major, working on a BFA in graphic design, which meant I had spent four years in the middle of a transition from mechanical photo reproduction to digital. Everything I was learning about the practice of design and how images were made and reproduced was being replaced while I was learning it. I had already experienced the ground moving beneath my feet. The web was a whole different level.
What fascinated me, and what has rattled around in my head ever since, was the underlying premise: the internet connects any two things on the network - people, content, machines - and the distance between them is effectively zero. Not metaphorically zero. Structurally zero. You could hypothetically reach anyone or anything, and the network didn’t care about the hierarchy or geography or institution in between.
That seemed like the most important idea I had ever encountered.
Four years later, I had an Internet job.
I joined TechRepublic in 1999, when it was still called Narrowcast Technologies. The premise was a hyper-personalized content portal and community for IT professionals, everyone from the support desk up to the CIO. The executives were mostly ex-Microsoft people, experienced with content newsletters and with TechNet. They understood that IT pros were an audience (and potential community) that wanted to talk to each other, not be marketed to. What was new was that now you could actually let them.
At some point in early 2000, I was handed a copy of the Cluetrain Manifesto.
If you’ve never read it: four guys nailed ninety-five theses to the web in March of 1999, arguing that markets are conversations, that hyperlinks subvert hierarchy, and that companies had better start talking like human beings because their customers already were.
The buzzword was disintermediation. Cut out the middle. Make the direct connection as direct as possible. Let people inside companies talk to people outside companies without it being routed through PR or Communications first. It was the zero-distance idea applied to business, and it landed in an industry full of people who wanted to believe it.
It was really a heady time. The customer was going to be in charge. The internet was going to be the catalyst that shifted power back from institutions and hierarchies to people. It genuinely felt like anything was possible, and the collective we (the whole industry) pushed hard on that, in every direction at once. Amazon. The early social networks that eventually inspired Facebook and LinkedIn. Hosted communities like the one I was working on.
Here’s the part I think about now: The reason Cluetrain worked wasn’t that it was right. Plenty of things were right… and plenty of things in hindsight are wrong. The writing style is a little cringe. But it worked because it was aimed at the generation of tech founders and executives who were looking for a thesis about how network technology would disrupt business, and who had budget.
That turns out to matter. Transformation ideas don’t get traction because they’re true. They become true when someone with a budget adopts them.
Looking back, I’ve tried to arrange evolutionary periods I’ve worked with into eras. I don’t find hindsight to actually be 20/20, and some of this is recent enough that I’m still working it out. The early definitions feel solid to me. The later ones are more malleable.
The early web, roughly 1995 to 2002. Very few people were online, and whatever door you came in through was often your entire experience of the thing. America Online. The WELL. These were containers for the internet more than windows onto it, and they were organized as communities, people, and discussions at the same level of priority as content.
The social networking boom. MySpace. LinkedIn. Blogging, which was just people writing journals in public, scaled up to challenge mainstream media. It turned out to be the most consequential of the three. Then Facebook, Twitter, YouTube.
Mobile social. The iPhone launched in 2007, and the Facebook iOS app launched in July of 2008. We had a monolithic, magical device in our pockets, wonderful to handle and beautiful to look at, that we kept on us twenty-four hours a day and that knew where we were on a map in relation to everyone else. It was inevitable that the social networks would manifest there and take advantage of all of it.
I want to stay on that transition for a minute, because I was standing in a specific place while it happened.
I was at Forum One then, running conferences in the Bay Area. In 2007, the people who came to those conferences were executives and leaders whose business models had community as a core principle, in the traditional sense of the word: bring people together so they can create value with each other, give them the ability and space to actually get to know one another, and give them a lot of agency over what they do, what they see, and what the community experience is like.
Over the next few years, that audience was complemented by, and then overtaken by, people who worked at social networks.
Because there was a gold rush on. From roughly 2008 through 2012, an enormous amount of money went into building new platforms whose actual business model was advertising, or selling user data, or both. That was the revenue strategy. And somewhere in there the more benevolent idea of community got thrown out the window.
Zuckerberg talked about Facebook as a community in the early days. I don’t know whether he was naive or disingenuous, and I don’t especially want to relitigate it. I do know that the word survived and the practice was harmed.
Social media sucked all the oxygen, attention, and budget out of the rooms community builders were in. It did that for about a decade.
Which is why Dell was strange.
When I went there in spring of 2010, it was one of the very few large companies genuinely trying to build a community ecosystem on the open web. Was there a profit motive? Eventually, yes, obviously. But it started as experimentation, and as a real attempt to understand how a company that size could create actual relationships with customers, create value for them, and increase its own empathy… and of course, profits, in the process.
I came in as Director of Global Community and a founding member of the Social Media and Community team, which everyone called “SMaC”. There were thirteen of us at director level, each owning a set of business functions across community and social. We reported to a VP, who reported to a board inside Dell that included the executive team. Including Michael.
The VP pulled all of us to Austin for a two-day offsite. In two days, in one room, with remarkably little friction, we built the business plan and the program set for the next two years of social and community strategy at Dell.
He also had a mantra, which I’ve stolen and used ever since. Companies breathe in and breathe out when they need to make change. Dell was breathing in: pulling social and community decision-making and strategy into one place, one team, one plan. And we had two years before the company exhaled and distributed us back out into the business.
That was the design, and the functional dispersal was the point. Two years to build the strategy, the policy, the governance, the programs, and the partnerships, and then thirteen directors get placed into senior roles across the business units and carry it with them. I went to Large Enterprise as Director of Social Media and Community.
This is worth repeating: the plan was to build a center of gravity and then deliberately push the pieces out into the larger org.
The organizing idea was ecosystem.
We knew customers weren’t in one place. They were spread across the web based on what they needed, what they were interested in, and their preferences: some people want a forum, some people want to complain on Twitter, some people want a private channel with a rep and nothing else. We didn’t stop to argue about which one was the best. The ecosystem was the lens, and it played out across different form factors: social media, hosted community, and more private collaborative spaces.
Four things sat inside that.
Hosted community. The best community experience we could build, plus a real understanding of where the value was actually coming from: support deflection, customer knowledge, advocacy, and innovation through IdeaStorm, which was our ideation portal. I also started the Dell Rockstars program, which was our advocacy program for the customers who were making extraordinary community contributions.
Social media at scale. A large team covering global social media, and beyond that, the strategy and the resources so that the rest of the company could actually show up and participate.
Listening. We pioneered a lot of the technology and a lot of the ideas for monitoring the social web at scale, globally. Including China, which was emerging then and which was fundamentally different from the Western web in ways that have since played out in public.
Social innovation. The most interesting thing we built here was essentially an on-demand Net Promoter Score, running off the listening data. Real-time social sentiment, which let us do a number of things, including reaching out directly to accounts that needed it before they asked.
We also spent an enormous amount of time instrumenting things.
All of our own digital properties, and as many of the social properties as we could reach. This was an early attempt at what would now be called a universal customer profile. The goal was to know, at minimum, which account a person was coming from, even if we couldn’t identify the individual.
That tooling was advanced for the time, and it let us answer questions nobody in a large company had been able to answer before. We could track when social media or community appeared in the purchase path and report that number as social or community-influenced revenue. We could correlate how often someone participated in the community, or used community content, against purchase size and frequency, and get at the net effect of community participation on buying decisions.
The one I’m proudest of was the IdeaStorm study. We identified five ideas that the product teams agreed had been solely sourced and formed on IdeaStorm and then brought to market. We could have found more. We stopped at five because five was enough to make the point. Then we studied the actual revenue from those products and compared it against what we’d spent on IdeaStorm.
That got us a real number, and it got me a “get stuck in the elevator with an Exec” stat, which is what you actually need in a large company. Grossly dividing the revenue across all the ideas ever submitted, every idea on IdeaStorm was worth approximately ten thousand dollars.
Why am I going into the details? Because I want you to understand the breadth and depth of what a Fortune 50 company was willing to fund in 2011, and the level of proof we were expected to produce.
It may sound non-intuitive, but the community of supporters you build inside the organization is just as important as the community of customers and partners you are building outside the organization. We did two key things to establish and strengthen stakeholder relationships.
The first was the partnership structure. Every one of the thirteen directors, me included, had a counterpart in the business who we met with regularly. The job was to course-correct their social and community strategy, understand what products were coming, and figure out how we could support them better. We were essentially very senior account managers to our own company. It built genuinely strong relationships with colleagues in the business units, and it’s the single piece of the model I’ve tried hardest to replicate with clients since.
The second was communications, which was more sophisticated than anything I’d seen. At the top end, short newsletters to VPs and directors — the people who actually held budget in the lines of business — about impact. During the peak, those went out weekly. Demonstrate impact, tell the story, keep the support. Once the listening tools were in place, we also set up dashboards for specific executives so they had a live view of what was being said about Dell, roughly how people felt about it, and what was coming of it.
And then there was the part I still think was the most interesting thing we did.
Once the strategy was set, we trained and equipped Dell employees to participate on behalf of the brand. There were levels of SMaC certification [see below], and the point was to enable the people who wanted to go out into the ecosystem and have the conversations they were already interested in having, in the places they already were.
What we were really doing was walking willing employees toward the edge of the corporate membrane. Out to the boundary, where the company touches everyone and everything else.
Which is a lot to ask of someone. So we built a fairly robust escalation path underneath it for support and communications issues, so no single employee ever felt hung out to dry or ganged up on out there by themselves.
Watching the team behind the SMaC training run the program all over the world was impressive. I was proud of the part I got to play to help build our internal community of practitioners.
I’d done a lot of unconferences before Dell, so I suggested the idea of Unconferences after some of our larger SMaC training sessions to allow employees to discuss what they had learned and explore ways of putting the strategies and tactics into action. The SMaC unconference was born! The first one was in Round Rock, Texas, with a couple hundred people. Michael showed up at the end to talk about the importance of being close to our customers and to endorse the program.
We ran them all over the world after that. The one in Xiamen was supported by Chinese & English translators working live, and we held the whole conversation in real time in two languages.
None of this happened in the dark.
We briefed Forrester and Gartner constantly. Analysts came through, wrote us up, used us as the example. People writing books about social business studied what we were doing. I never wrote one of those books. I was in the room the books were written about.
Forrester ran a program called the Groundswell Awards to recognize transformational social business programs. Dell won at the first one in 2007, three years before I arrived (which is part of what attracted me in the first place), and won again in 2011 for the Listening Command Center.
Not long after, I went back to Autodesk, bringing all the Dell learning and experiences with me. In 2015, they won a Groundswell Award for Expert Elite, an advocacy program modeled on, and extending the best “MVP” programs at the time, including the Dell Rockstars. It’s still running. It has now survived every era in this piece, and it is still producing value.
As far as I can tell, 2015 was also the last year of the Groundswell Awards.
In 2012, Dell exhaled.
The thirteen of us went out to our business units. A new round of Executives were cycling in to run Marketing and were more skeptical and less enthusiastic about the social investments and uncomfortable with the lack of control. The functions lived on for another two or three years, as far as I know. By then I was at Autodesk, and I genuinely don’t know what happened to all the pieces after that. Not a glamorous ending to this thread, but true.
As I was winding down my time at Autodesk and preparing to launch Structure, I started noticing something. The broad, generally accepted principle among executives that community and social were important investments (the thing that had made the previous five years possible) started to fade. This wasn’t a heated argument or a heavily debated topic, but a slow fade. Less oxygen in the room every year. We were in a down cycle of social media investment, and it took community investment with it.
Then the pandemic.
I’m not going to armchair quarterback the socio-political implications of the pandemic here, because it wouldn’t be fun or rewarding for either of us. But looking for the silver lining from a very dark cloud: by March of 2020, everyone who needed to interact with another human outside their immediate household was doing it on something like Zoom. Near-universal, near-simultaneous adoption of the collaboration technologies. And I think that reminded a lot of people of something they’d stopped prioritizing: that digital relationships have to be built and maintained, and that there is craft in doing it well.
Since 2020, we’ve been on a slow climb back. Part of that has been a reckoning with the good and the (largely) bad parts of mass social media. Part of it has been companies taking a second look at community investments they abandoned in the previous decade. The work I enjoy most now is helping clients figure out where they need to invest: what to host on their own domain, where to participate, where to show up in person, and where to show up online. That’s the community strategy, in a microcosm.
Here’s what I keep running into, though.
Some of the institutional knowledge still exists, in pockets. There are people who know how to do this. But most of the social media and community staff in enterprise has turned over by now. Some moved into new roles, and plenty left the practice entirely.
What’s frayed is more than infrastructure. It’s the coherent vision, the governance function, the programs, and yes, most definitely the infrastructure.
I have a client right now who had a robust social listening operation ten or twelve years ago. Instrumented, staffed, routed, the whole thing. I checked in with them last week. They are hand-building and vibe-coding a tool to track brand mentions on Reddit.
Not because they don’t know better. Because the thing that existed is gone and nobody who’s there now was there then.
There are lots of reasons. Executive churn is the one I’d put on top. The CMO usually holds a big chunk of this budget, and average CMO tenure is now 4.1 years, the shortest of any C-suite role except COO. So a program gets handed down through two or three executives, none of whom built it, each of whom needs a story of their own.
Underneath the churn there's a fluency problem. I have watched more than one company hand a social and community portfolio to an executive who had never used the platforms that mattered most to that business. That isn't a knock on them. They were hired for other things, and they were good at those things. But it tells you how the practice was valued. Fluency in it was never a qualification for owning it, which means every handoff is a coin flip on whether the next person learns it or defers to their staff.
And then sometimes the programs don’t get killed at all. They get outranked. Dell went private in 2013, the largest corporate privatization in history at the time, and then merged with EMC two years later. That is a decade of executive attention spent on existential-scale corporate events. I don’t think anyone in that building made a decision to abandon social business. I think it stopped being the most important thing in the room, and then it stopped being in the room.
Is it unusual for a program to get deprecated somewhere in there? No. It’s completely ordinary. I just think it’s unfortunate.
That slow climb since 2020 has mostly been belief. People remembered that customer relationships are valuable, and some budget followed. It’s real, but it’s soft, and soft things get cut.
What’s happened in the last year is a business case.
AI is commanding executive attention. Models need data to train on. So: guess where there’s a large supply of high-quality, human-written, topically organized, natively threaded text about how products actually work in practice.
Hosted communities. And community-shaped networks like Reddit.
The second piece is downstream of the first. Community and social content is showing up in answer engines, which means it’s showing up at the start of the buying process. Not the top of the funnel exactly (it isn’t really a funnel anymore), but at the moment someone forms a first impression of whether your product does the thing they need. That impression is now frequently assembled by a machine, out of text your customers wrote, in places you may or may not participate in.
What that adds up to is that companies with a real community strategy (programs, infrastructure, staff, and a clear-eyed view of what they’re actually trying to do) now have a measurable advantage over companies that don’t. Not a loyalty advantage, which was always the argument and was always slow to prove. A discovery advantage.
In enterprise, AI is where the money is actually moving. Every company I work with is spending on AI tooling and then discovering they need strategy and training to go with it. That turns out to be an unlock for community work, because the case for community now sits inside the case for AI instead of competing with it for the same dollar.
Which is a strange thing to sit with if you were around for previous cycles. We spent years arguing that companies should invest in community because customers deserve to be treated like people. That argument came back after 2020, and it’s still perceived as “soft”. The argument that’s working now is that community produces the training data and the citations. Same investment, mostly the same programs, an entirely colder reason.
The uncomfortable part is that it treats people as a supply of text. But the extractive version of this doesn't actually work over time. Community members and mods are pushing back on harvesting efforts (ex: Stack Overflow), and the danger is that good contributors leave and take the quality with them. If what you want is a corpus worth citing, the only way to get one is the slow way: real experts, real answers, real reciprocity. The expected outcomes from the “cold” argument turn out to require the investment of the “warm” argument: treating customers like humans.
So where are we standing, and what’s actually in front of us?
A little inside baseball first. The community platform market has been through a series of disruptions over the last two years after a long stretch of stagnant product vision and development, and most of them look positive to me. The major players are working through what AI actually does inside a community experience, and building toward what community can do beyond support.
Here’s what I see coming.
Hosted communities seen in a new light. The old argument was that communities drive loyalty and preference, and that hasn’t stopped being true. But the more compelling argument now is that the community you host is a corpus you influence and data you own. Given how people are actually finding products and forming opinions, that matters in a way it didn’t three years ago.
Local, and in person. We can’t think about community as an online-only thing anymore. What I’m seeing is renewed interest and renewed investment in local social networks and in real-world events, even when they’re coordinated through a national or global hub. Local has never been more important. And in-person as a form factor keeps gaining as screen fatigue grows, which is the one experience an agent can’t attend for you.
Communities doing work they’ve only been adjacent to. Community has spent twenty years proving itself in support and advocacy, which is where the measurement was easiest. The functions I’m interested in now sit further up the strategy stack: innovation, and strategic forecasting and futures work (we’re building this with a client right now), new forms of community-based product trials and structured learning, private industry networks offered as a value-add rather than a marketing channel. These aren’t exactly new ideas. IdeaStorm was an innovation program in 2007. What’s different is that the tooling can finally support them, and that a community capable of doing forecasting work with you is a very different asset than one that answers install questions.
Agents in communities. There are early signs of agents and personifications of AI showing up as participants. The extreme version is Moltbook, which launched in January as a social network exclusively for AI agents, where humans are permitted to observe but not post. It hit well over a million registered agents in about a week, and Meta bought it six weeks after launch. Another example is Buzz: agents holding their own identities and memberships inside a human workspace. The thing to watch is digital personas becoming first-ish class citizens in a network, and what that does to the norms of a place built for people.
Confederations. I think we’ll see brands partnering on shared community experiences to serve a whole customer rather than a slice of one. Imagine a financial services firm, a logistics company, and an office supply business jointly supporting a small business community in a specific vertical, instead of each of them separately trying to generate interest in their own owned community. That sits in the space between a mass platform owned by a third party and a fully hosted community. I don’t know of a live example at scale yet. I think it’s coming, and I think it’s the most interesting structural idea on this list.
Rebuilding the connective tissue. The thing that made Dell SMaC work at global scale wasn’t the programs or the technology. It was thirteen directors with named counterparts across every business unit, a governance function, and a communication rhythm that kept the company aware of what was happening. That’s what produces programs everyone benefits from instead of silos and fiefdoms. It’s also the first thing to go when a team gets cut, and the hardest thing to rebuild, because it isn’t a purchase order. You can buy listening infrastructure back in a quarter. You can’t buy back the cross-functional relationships, the competencies, or the trust.
Nobody has a crystal ball here.
We’re living in a standing wave of disruption. New models and new functionality appear weekly, sometimes daily, cascading through the products we use, the experiences we have, what shows up online as artifacts, and eventually what happens in the real world. Anyone claiming a coherent and comprehensive view of what’s actually happening globally is, objectively, full of it.
I’ll leave you with the thing I started with instead.
The original promise of the Internet was zero distance between any two people or things. That was a wonderful, inspiring vision. Turns out it was not a realistic one, and we didn’t think through the implications or the consequences in any meaningful way.
Thirty years later, it’s worth asking what is actually at zero distance, what is actually worth connecting with, and what is mediating everything else.
That’s the place we’re standing. Right here, right now. Do we build toward the original intent, less mediation and more direct connections between people and organizations that need each other? Or do we build a better and more pleasant version of the mediated enclosure?
The business case for community is being made by the AI budget. But it requires the same behavior we were arguing for in 2011: be porous, let your experts out to the edge of the corporate membrane, participate in places you don’t own, and give people reasons to keep contributing. Social business was mostly right about what to do. It was wrong about what would keep it funded. And now companies are having to relearn and rebuild.
So start with a community vision and strategy, not tools. Most companies can’t start with the people who remember, because those people are gone. What you can do is design what you’re actually trying to build before you buy anything, and then find enough leaders who want the same thing to bring it to life.
I keep coming back to the quote from Howard Rheingold about the WELL, one of the first online communities:
What it is, is up to us.
