We should encourage ourselves to ponder problems beyond the scope of one person. We should be thinking of not only what we lack, but what our society lacks, and how we can build those things.
With large teams and important business goals to lead, Heads of Community will earn a rightful place on the executive leadership team. Community leaders will no longer be embedded inside other functions — they will be valuable enough to stand alone and to build large, high functioning teams.
Now the question is: What will private traffic look like in the U.S.? I don’t know the answer yet because email marketing is still so prevalent. (And, yes, at least it works great.) But I do know that one-way blasts can’t compete with real-time, two-way messaging, especially when Gen Z’s on one end of the conversation.
I now consider in-person references with someone who knows the candidate well 5x more valuable than an interview. They can be 10x more valuable when you are already in a high-trust relationship with the reference-giver, and the reference-giver is in a position to see the candidate clearly, with no agendas and few blind spots of their own.
The next wave of social systems will likely emphasize breadth and depth differently than the last–and may not look much like social networks at all. With the current networks, the horizontal nature of the platform is the product. Users come for the community. But it may be that with the next, the community is what keeps users long term engaged but... See more