Mediaboss Marketing

Four years ago, I wrote about a toolcalled Drund,which at the time aspired to be a web application management system, a virtual desktop that would cut through the clutter of your daily life. This month, Drund is going to launch for the public again, but this time instead ofmanaging web systems, the company is betting on managing social systems.

The social media sites we think about most often Facebook, Twitter Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest have found their business model works best in a system of dispersed control and either publicness or semi-privacy. It makes sense, especially when you consider the word most important during the rise of those companies: Scale. Its hard (impossible?) to scale when there is a central control system.

The problem for a lot of groups think school districts, leadership teams, private clubs is that dispersed control can mean putting out too many fires. For these groups,scale is not the goal but identity might be. There are ways to be pretty private on Facebook, for instance, but its a little harder to filter a conversation before it has started and its even less likely you can build a social brand that doesnt feel like Facebook.

Drund has a different way to approaching these needs. The slogan does a nice job of explaining it: Real ownership, easy to use controls and the tools you need to get the results you want from your community. Scale is not the goal for Drund, at least not for any one social site. They are building sites that have dense value, or enough value to the group that they are willing to pay for the ownership, privacy and control. These group decides whether its site will have ads (Drund does not sell data) they willearn revenue from the sales. These sites might allow for unfiltered posting, but they could change that later. Some aspects of the content might go public, some might never see past the walls.

Founder Lee Yi has been the driving force behind both launches and he says hes learned a lot in the past four years, but the lessons have encompassed less about technology and more about human nature in digital spaces. So when he launchesthe new product this month, dont expect a turnkey experience. Yi wants to train users how to create this kind of community, because he says the technology is only the beginning of the process.

It has been my goal the past few years to avoid talking to leaders about their products, and focus instead on users. I dont claim to know whether Drund isa solution for real ownership of social media, but in our conversation, Yisinsights into a shifting social media foundationwere too valuable to pass up. In this Q&A (developed iteratively on a shared document) we discuss the difficulties of building a community, how different needs shape technology and vice versa and what success looks like early in an entrepreneurial endeavor.

You mentioned in our talk that building a community is extremely difficult and I wonder if you could talk about what the main barriers are to that.

We learned that building communities meant dealing with groups of people not individuals. That means a lot of different motivations, passive and active resistance, agendas, timelines, personalities, levels of technology comfort, and cultures. One of our first large communities was a public K-12 school district, where you have many different cultures within one organization. Public schools have so many different responsibilities and influences that it is very hard to provide a single solution for so many different needs. They have a complex and difficult communication environment because they are dealing with other peoples children, diverse economic and cultural backgrounds, tax levies & budget issues, federal and state mandates and many other issues. Public education communities presented us with a significant challenge because building one district level community to centralize all of the different locations, cultures and people while working with limited time availability was extremely difficult.

Read the original:
Invite-Only: Drund Sees A Future In Social Media 'Ownership'