Squidoo - A Word of Mouth Case Study

I was catching up on my Seth Godin posts and noticed his post 1 year observations on Squidoo - his brainchild of a social network.

Some background - Squidoo's goal is to bring the power of recommendation to search; as a co-op it pays  money to its group of enthusiasts (lensmasters) and to charity - it's also a chance for visitors to meet new ideas and the people behind them.

Critics have had no shortage in taking jabs at some of the hiccups of this launch but as the saying goes "slow and steady wins the race".

Having now accelerated past 135,000 lenses and over 50,000 lensmasters, its has been more a story of pioneering a new approach and ramping up linearly vs. exploding virally -  here are some Squidoo hints to take with you when your founding any people-marketed proposition.

• It takes longer than you think it will. Daily traffic is 10 times higher than it was a year ago. That's a huge number. Seduced by the legendary stories of overnight web successes, we thought it would happen in a month. Patience is a virtue.

• People learn by example. As the lenses getting built get better, it inspires others to do better stuff too. Highlighting great work is a critical step for any community.

• Bad actors are everywhere. And most of them will go away if we focus on eliminating anonymity.

• Google matters. Yahoo and Ask too. Not manipulative SEO, but honest pages that benefit users if they get found.

• The community is smart. Really smart. They run large parts of the site, and they do it beautifully.

• You don't need VC money if you plan around it. The emphasis is on the second part of that sentence. Other than attending a small trade show, we didn't spend a penny on outbound marketing, nor did we flog it far and wide.

• You don't need many people, but is sure helps if you hire people who are brilliant, honest and passionate.

• Temptation is everywhere. Temptation to artificially boost traffic or revenue or some other metric. It might work in the short run, but when you're done, you don't have much to show for it.

• Bizdev is dramatically overrated, either that or we're bad at it. The growth of Squidoo has come from individuals (99%) not corporate partners.

• What you start with is wrong. At least what we started with was. Fortunately, we planned on being wrong, and have revamped most aspects of what we built. Tomorrow I'll be posting on our new ad approach.

Look forward to our own populated Squidoo lense over the next month supporting a thorough rundown of the facts, stories, myths and  insights behind our word of mouth community  The Influencers.