Blog Talk Radio - Building Community Around Addiction

It may not have been as clear as I’d hoped, but one of the major initiatives I’ve been working through is to achieve a “community” of sorts. As I see it, bringing Changed Life Ltd to the market on the Internet is mainly an exercise of community building. The audience for such a community is all over the Internet. There are addicts that flock to Google and Yahoo Groups for all sorts of contact with each other. Some tell their story of relapse and recovery others are looking to score in a city they are traveling. There’s more than 3000 signed up members to just in the groups related to heroin. Then there are the blogs of people that are confronting various forms of addiction that range for knitting to War Craft or even blogging itself.

So finding people that are involved in some form of addictive behavior is huge – more like infinite. The trick nonetheless is attracting some identified number of people that share or want to be educated in your addiction.

The issue of finding community has been made much easier over the past couple of years. What was once a task for mail/TV/media companies has become so granular to the point that any individual with time and a range of skills can get noticed by a very large group of people for free or very low cost. In fact, if you look at Google you learn that most of its products are free to the content producer. Why – advertising $$$!! The same is true all across the board especially in the subcategory of web2 applications. There are much smarter people than I who I learned this.

I am going to these lengths describing all this so as to tell you that starting Sunday Feb 18^th at 8:30am CST I’ll host on BlogTalkRadio for Brother Blur's Addiction Channel a radio call in show. The name of the show is “Drop the Act - The Happiness Addiction Show”. I’ve taken the title from the resource lens I built on Squidoo.com. These and a few more sites that I’ve mentioned in other post or are noted in my blogroll constitute my community building vehicles. My intent to develop another one of those applications like YouTube or Myspace that goes from a small group of early adopters to become a potent force to be contented with across many lines of commerce, politics, and celebrity - in fact to change the world of addiction.

It’s not so much that early adopters won't lament their earlier special status - they will. Just listen to these comments from horsepigcow regarding a post on some change in Flickr - now that it is own by Yahoo.com

A lot of those sites don’t have a community because there’s no user interaction. On MySpace your interaction is limited to people you have on a friend list. Even more for Facebook. Wikipedia is largely a read-only affair for nearly all its users. There’s a very tiny minority of people who do nearly all the editing. YouTube video producers often mean “the YouTube community” but really I think they only mean other people with a lot of subscribers.

In fact I don’t think any of the websites you talk about have a real community per se.

I was on a Quake 2 mailing list in the late 90s. We all knew each other personally, played games together all the time, talked about all kinds of stuff. I still talk to a few of them regularly and kept in touch with many of them for years after no one played the game anymore. That is community. I haven’t found it since anywhere else. Not on reddit (the only intelligent site of its kind) or any other so-called social/community site.

I don’t see how you can take a condescending, confrontational tone when the stuff you’re talking about doesn’t even matter to most web developers (although it probably should) or people somehow involved in running a website, which itself is a very specialized fraction of the population. If you have unpopular ideas you can’t act like they’re so ridiculously a priori clear.

What is clear in this comment is someone feels hurt because they lost something valuable: that sense of community is what grows and pulls in the casual passer-by like most others that use the internet. That fits just fine with web2 building because as they see things.

Predictably, the BlogTalkRadio business model is ad-supported. Display space on the site will be sold, but more innovatively, radio advertising targeted to the audience of each show will be inserted into broadcasts, which of course is where Chris Anderson rears his ugly long tail. Levy said: "On one level I don't care how many people are listening to a show; it can be 10 or it can be 10,000, there's still money."

So for someone like me that is trying to build a market with little cash to invest – "thank god". It puts me in the mode to create content and build an audience for the clinic, both its online patients as well as those near the clinic site. Our business model is helped in both regards: addiction discussions that educate and as well as it provides asynchronous educational materials that I can use in pod casts, blog post, ezine articles, videos, lens, rss feeds and all of these in the many new applications that mix them into other application outputs. The real magic is that it starting now – new applications are coming out in beta every day - looking for the person that wants to build a small but special community of early adoption.

So that is where Changed Life comes in – we have content – addiction therapy – looking to build a community.