I had a migraine. It was a thumper. Pills weren't shifting it and there was no way I could cancel the gig. Firstly, there was no DJ in reserve who could play the same music. If I didn't turn up, the club would be forced to bring in one of their mainstream DJs and the crowd would go somewhere else. Secondly, if I didn't turn up I didn't get paid, and there was rent to pay.

So turn up I did. Pump up the volume, flick on the lights, on with the show.

Anyone who has ever suffered a severe headache knows that flashing lights and loud music is like salt on an open wound. My girlfriend at the time (oh god, don't ask me her name, please don't...) was the only one to know I was in pain in the DJ box, running to the bar to fetch water for me and giving me pitying looks as I switched the strobes on again.

You might be thinking; couldn't I just have avoided certain flashy lights or lowered the volume just a little? Sorry, not how it works. The crowd doesn't know or care how I'm feeling. They've paid their money, bought their drinks and are looking for a good night. How can I place my own comfort above a couple of hundred or so others expecting a show of a certain standard? I was being paid to put on the best show that I could and that's about pride as much as it is about money.

Social media works exactly the same - it is about the audience and not yourself. You can't switch off when it becomes uncomfortable or inconvenient for you. If a particular social strategy turns negative for whatever reason, you can't decide to sit it out, only coming back on board when it's fun and positive again.

Once your social media strategy has created expectations - for example, prompt replies or regular blog posts - you had better be on your death bed to muck around with that schedule. Once lost, it will be much harder to get the crowd back.

How many blogs have one of those posts that are all about "Sorry I haven't posted much lately. Been ill, work's been tough, family issues getting in the way. I promise to blog more regularly." Do readers ever care when reading something like that? Usually, whenever I see a post like that, the blog doesn't become more regular. If anything it is usually one of the last posts ever to appear on the blog and signals the end - a loss of interest and commitment.

Commitment is the key word here. If you have a social media strategy, either a personal hobby or a business marketing campaign, you need to be able to carry on even when it isn't fun. You need to push through the pain barrier. You need to deliver and keep delivering. After all, that is the implicit promise you made when you invited others to follow, subscribe, friend, fan or whatever.

So stiffen up. Have a backup plan; some posts in reserve or someone else capable of moderating the Twitter feed or Facebook page seamlessly on your behalf if you fall under a truck. Otherwise grin and bear it, because the show must go on.

Rock DJ Part 1: You don't build communities

Rock DJ Part 2: Free is better than a cover charge

The club was packed. That first year was the best we ever saw in five years of running The Pit and it became the place to be every Thursday night. We weren't the only free venue, but we were the only one that provided that particular music. Free just helped the new night grow and spread that much quicker.

After a year or so, the manager wanted a change. He had noticed that some were coming every week but weren't buying drinks. He wasn't making any money off some of the crowd that came through the door and they were enjoying dancing to a DJ he still had to pay. Remember, he's never made so much money off Thursday nights before, but the thought of some people getting a free ride was too much.

So the manager added a door charge. Two dollars at first, it had grown to five dollars by the end. It might not seem like much, but it was enough to see the crowd start to drift away. Those who would casually come in on a Thursday for a free bit of fun - cashless students and bear-footed hippies - no longer came. And so their friends who had been buying drinks didn't either. Less people in the club meant less atmosphere and buzz meant less people came back every week and less new people discovered the club.

The difference wasn't huge and it wasn't overnight, but the door charge was the clear before-and-after point that marked the downturn. As the crowd declined the door charge increased to offset the difference and eventually the night was finished.

Placing any obstacle to admission, no matter how trivial, can dramatically reduce numbers. David Meerman Scott talks frequently in books and talks of how Mailer Mailer multiplied downloads of their ebook - The Email Marketing Metrics Report - twenty times, merely by removing the need to enter an email address. That's right, even entering an email address - significantly less hassle than paying two dollars - is enough to prevent people from accessing your content.

The Mailer Mailer website is now listed at number one in Google for the valuable keyword phrase email marketing metrics, their industry. Now, you can't tell me there's no financial return on being the top listing in Google for your industry.

Free is the greatest acquisition tool you can have. Even if you can't convert a return out of every crowd member you acquire this way, chances are you're still making more than if you charged a couple of bucks at the door.

Rock DJ Part 1: You don't build communities

I lived for the decks and strobes and bass bins. I lived for the smell of stale beer in sticky carpet and tales of bouncer trouble from the door. I lived for the too loud music and the crush on the dance floor. Sure, my hearing suffered and I now have asthma from all the then legal cigarette smoke, but it was a fantastic period of my life.

The Pit was a regular Thursday night in the imaginatively named DJ's Nightspot in Gosford - a small club not significantly unusual or different to any other small club in the 'burbs. Yet, over ten years since the last CD faded out, there is still a Facebook page set up by the Pit regulars where they swap photos and stories and arrange occasional reunions. The Pit was responsible for a number of meetings that later became weddings. Bands formed over beers and a few months later would have their first gigs there as well. A community formed around those Thursday nights. Yeah, that's pretty cool.

I learned many things in my ten years as a DJ; from the novice being taught how to beat mix vinyl in my UK student days to the club DJ looping CDs, sliding faders and flicking lightshows without missing a beat. Yet it has occurred to me that some of those lessons are relevant when talking about online communities as well. So I thought I'd share some of those lessons over the next few days.

Here is the first and most important of those lessons.

1. You don't build a community

Communities already exist - you can't make them. They already know what music they want or how they want to entertain themselves. Before The Pit came along, the same people were meeting in smaller groups at each other's houses to listen to music and drink beer. The Pit brought all those small communities together as one big one, but it didn't create the communities in the first place.

To place ourselves at the centre of those communities, we need to provide the content they're looking for - even if it isn't our first choice. And we need to do it better than anyone else. There's another nightclub just around the corner and another blog, forum or Twitter feed a mere click away.

Providing the right content to bring those communities to you requires a few things:

• Understanding the content (in this case the specific music choices) the crowd wants to access
  
• Ensuring this content isn't already provided perfectly well elsewhere. Is there a need? If there were already clubs providing this music it would have been far harder for me to break in. Niche is always better.
  
• Providing this content better, and more efficiently, than the competition if and when it comes along (and it did)
  
• Being consistent - that meant being there every Thursday, no matter what. Or blogging regularly. Or replying promptly on forums.
  
• Letting the right people know how to access the content. As this was the age before home internet, this involved a lot of leafleting, posters on poles and adverts in Drum Media. It also involves a large amount of word of mouth without which no community can survive.
  

This may all seem pretty obvious to many, but I saw too many DJs, nightclubs and bands over the years unable to grasp how to build a community around themselves.

How many Twitter feeds have you come across that are just too self-centred but still wonder why no one follows them? How many businesses have started forums or blogs to preach their products and their agendas only to watch them whither and die because the community doesn't exist that would be interested? How many campaigns fail to grasp that word of mouth is the most important component and a massive advertising blitz means nothing if you can't harness buzz?

Not as easy as it sounds, is it!

I know I posted this video on my blog last year, but it's highly relevant to this discussion. It may be a couple of years old, but it remains the best illustration of how the web is a human - and not technological - construct.

What is interesting is that the video wasn't produced by a computer scientist or web programmer. It was produced by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. That's right - anthropology: the study of human behaviour.

The web is about people. Web 2.0 is even more about people. Web 3.0 will be even more about people. Technology isn't making success push-button easy - it's allowing people to share and collaborate in increasingly ingenious ways. People are the engine of the web. If you don't account for how they behave, it is like driving a car without ever realising there's powerful machinery under the hood.

And that doesn't mean the way you would hope they behave, or the best case scenario you told the board of directors. It doesn't mean the way a marketing manual from twenty years ago promises you they'll behave in a time when the internet and mobile devices hadn't redistributed communication power. It is the way people genuinely do behave; often surprising, often ingenious, sometimes even stretching legality (such as with copyright). Anthropology blurs such rules.

An understanding of human behaviour separates those businesses who seem to effortlessly flow through the web attracting an audience of loyal customers and those still looking for the bit of script or neat piece of software that will automise success. They understand what people want to achieve. They genuinely listen and interact. They realise that websites, blogs, Twitter and other networks are just tools, not golden eggs, and any tool used badly won't achieve anything. They are ANTs.

The ANTs will rule - those who remember:

Anthropology,
Not
Technology.

...and assess every business decision through that principle and not based solely on whatever shiny new toy just came out. If your strategy fails the ANT test - meaning you can't answer how it taps into true warts-and-all human behaviour - then drop it. It's a dud.

We see these sugar cave dwellers everywhere: company bulletin boards that no one visits; blogs that are ignored because they never write what people want to read; Twitter strategies that say 'look at me' without ever giving a suitable reason why anyone should; websites that look fantastic but fail to help the customer buy a product in the way they want to.

Are you an ANT or do you need to learn how to collect sugar in the dark?

Dictionary.com describes it thus:

Borg

n. In "Star Trek: The Next Generation" the Borg is a species of cyborg that ruthlessly seeks to incorporate all sentient life into itself; their slogan is "Resistence is futile. You will be assimilated." In hacker parlance, the Borg is usually Microsoft, which is thought to be trying just as ruthlessly to assimilate all computers and the entire Internet to itself (there is a widely circulated image of Bill Gates as a Borg). Being forced to use Windows or NT is often referred to as being "Borged". Interestingly, the Halloween Documents reveal that this jargon is live within Microsoft itself. (Other companies, notably Intel and UUNet, have also occasionally been equated to the Borg.) See also Evil Empire, Internet Exploiter.

Who is the Borg?

One of the primary concepts of the fictional Borg was that connecting people via technology into one hive-mind was a distasteful and horrific fate. Hence why the threat of 'assimilation' was a threat and not an invitation. In the Star Trek universe, connecting a population together as one collaborative entity was a direct challenge to the idea of freedom and individuality. The Borg are portrayed as soulless zombies sharing one mind. Yet the Borg saw this connectiveness as good and wished to assimilate other races, learning from their experience and knowledge to the betterment of the whole.

Yup, you can see where I'm going already, can't you. We are the Borg - and by jimminy, we want to connect everyone on the planet.

1989 - Year of the Borg

But let's skip back to a different time, when the Borg were created. Why did the writers of Star Trek see the concept of connectivity and hive-mind as so horrific? What world created the Borg?

Back in the late '80s and early '90s there was no home internet and no social networking (well, not of the type we now refer to as social networking - people did still talk to each other). Mobile phones were still bricks held by smarmy CEOs rather than teenagers. Text messaging, instant messaging and online communities were ideas from sci-fi. Virtual reality was virtually non existent. Mail was still handwritten and posted. International communication could take days, not seconds. The typical office desk did not have a computer.

Although a technologically primitive time in comparison with today, the pervasive ideology of society was "me - me - me!" The '80s were a time of record prosperity and materialistic consumerism. Yuppies were on the march. Every transaction started with "what's in it for me?" and finished with "gimme!". Society was about individual prosperity, individual wealth, individual achievement and climbing over the person next to you to get to the top. Bush Snr was in the White House, Maggie was in Number 10, after lengthy periods for both parties holding onto government.

It isn't surprising to me that, in this self-centred world, there was fear that collaboration into a larger community could remove those personal achievements. It is exactly the same fear that fuels distrust of socialist ideals. Why share for the goodness of the whole? This stuff is mine - my ideas, my creative property, my money, my taxes, my everything.

Technology would change all that.

2009 - The Borg is here

Today, the internet has created a social(ist) web. The fundamental principle behind the creation of the internet was the sharing and collaboration of content. Putting that facility into the homes - and even the palms - of the average person allowed a cultural and societal shift greater than anything else in centuries - perhaps ever. In 2009, we embrace the hive-mind. We thrive on collaboration. Wikipedia, Digg, Twitter, online communities, forums and more - are all hive-minds. Wikipedia entries are produced by numerous anonymous contributors; correcting, adding and enhancing the content with no expectation of something in return. Smaller hive-minds exist within the larger ones in the form of company intranets, Facebook groups or niche wikis. The web is a hive-mind and we are all connected. We are the Borg.

And we want to be. We choose to be. In fact, we continue to find ways to make those connections stronger, more pervasive.

But this shift from "me-me-me" to willingly contributing to the greater good has not been accompanied with a loss of identity or individual worth. The hive-mind respects each component. The technology actually allows us to break down faceless corporations and humanise them. We even reward those businesses that do so with more business, as was revealed in a report this month by Altimeter and Wetpaint. CEOs are now blogging in a human voice. Major brands are now engaging with their customers in genuinely human relationships. Instead of stripping away identity and humanity, the hive-mind technology has given it back!

What the hive-mind doesn't respect is individual materialism, particularly when it comes to creative property. Once assimilated into the hive-mind, your creative property no longer belongs to you. You can still be recognised as the originator of the content - but you gradually lose control over distribution. The hive-mind won't let you plug in and still operate a "me-me-me" economy where you charge for access. This is the biggest hurdle facing old business models as we move from one world to the next.

What is also interesting is that, just as we have had a mental shift from the individual to the collaborative model, so have our products. Increasingly, products are created that can collaborate with each other. Your GPS plugs into your car to help get you from A to B quicker. Your TV collaborates with your computer to access content and stream video. Your phone collaborates with a bluetooth billboard to download a movie promotion. We are now building devices that work well by themselves, but work even better when collaborating with other tech. How Borgy.

Plus, the obvious collaboration of open source software and the incredible number of apps created by third party enthusiasts for the iPhone continue this trend. Collaboration and interconnectedness now exists at every level of our society, right down to the technology itself.

Don't be afraid of the Borg!

The transformation of the fictional Borg into the conceptual real-world borg is based on the original idea of faceless, soulless entities (the corporations) seeking to assimilate more and more people. In fact, the fear of Borg turns out to be an outdated paranoia of times past irrelevant to today's society.

Technology has freed society from an individualist into a collaborative society that views the world very differently. We now increasingly contribute to the whole and greater good, no longer in it for ourselves and may the best man win. Borg is probably not an apt title for those faceless and tyrannical corporations any more. Those corporations betray old-world thinking - refusing to open up to the hive-mind, refusing to be assimilated into our network. If they're not part of the hive-mind, working alongside us, how can they be borg?

I am borg. If you're reading this, you are borg. We are borg. Resistance is futile. Lets go do some assimilating!

(Picture is copyright Paramount Pictures. No infringement is intended)