Josh Sternberg is the founder of Sternberg Strategic Communications and authors The Sternberg Effect. You can follow him on Twitter.

Every time I watch Rick Sanchez on CNN or every time I get a new follow update from someone I know in real life, who 12 months ago made fun of me for being on Twitter, I question its value over time: are Twitter and other social networks destined to niche status or are they so embedded in our lives that they are now an indispensable part of our society?

To answer, we can take a look at some other community-based cultural phenomena as a way to shine a light on whether or not social networks will survive to the next iteration of the web.

Unlike most Internet people, when I think of Phish, I think of music, of road trips, of community, and not the scams that have co-opted the name. Phish the band has been around since 1983, just a bit before the idea of a phishing scam. Yet, there is a kernel of history set aside for Phish as pioneers in both music distribution and in creating a web community. When we look at bands and artists that foster community (and sometimes endless jams), we can see parallels to the rise of social networks.

The Soundtrack (and Memoirs) to Our Lives

Indeed, music can be argued as a universal language where you don’t need to know the vocabulary to still understand the content. So is the case for social networks. Each social networking site has its own terminology and its own etiquette, but you don’t need to understand all of it to get value from it; you can understand and find value in the site — much as you can with music — in any way you want and it is still a valid idea.







If music plays the soundtrack to our lives, these days, for many of us, social networks act as our memoirs. But our embrace of sites like Twitter and Facebook is more about how we use the site, as experiencing a Grateful Dead or Phish concert is more about how we interpret the music.

Music, because of its seemingly infinite ways of being interpreted, is an emotional product. Music makes us laugh, it makes us cry, it makes us feel; but most importantly, music connects people. Think of your closest friends and odds are they share similar musical tastes as you. Maybe you’ve even met some of your friends as a result of your love of the same type of music. In other words, music creates community.

Fan Communities are About the Fans

There are certain bands that are defined by their community and the jam-band scene has produced two massive sub-cultures: Deadheads and Phisheads (just don’t compare them to each other in front of fans, because as they will heatedly tell you both bands are intricately different, yet intrinsically conjoined). Each of these bands has a rabid fan-base that were early adopters of technology, evangelizing the music and spreading the gospel of front men Jerry Garcia or Trey Anastasio. Sounds a bit like the early adopters of Twitter, peddling the service to friends, family and clients, while at the same time praising Ev and Biz and Jack as the Internet version of The Beatles, right?

The parallel goes farther than music to the cultural phenomenon created by all dedicated fan communities. Star Wars, Harry Potter, Twilight to name a few, all have fans that are devoted to these products. While these examples are part of the popular culture and have received tremendous amounts of, for lack of a better word, fanfare, the communities that have popped up around them are still niche. Let's look at Harry Potter more closely.







The Harry Potter series – both book and film – is a once-in-a-generation kind of occurrence. The books caused people to read – amazing but true – and spawned a community of wizard and muggle lovers who would congregate to read the story or act out the plot. This community also used the online forum to help solidify their presence. Sites like Mugglenet.com and The Leaky Cauldron are centered on the fans as much as they are on the Potter story. These sites built a community for Potter-lovers to visit and share information. In fact, the creators of each site have been able to publish best-selling books of their own about their experiences in and with the greater Harry Potter fan community.

The Grateful Dead and Phish have similar sites. Dead.net and Phantasy Tour (a site that started out as a play on another niche community, fantasy sports) enabled ‘heads’ to meet and talk with one another before, during and after shows. They were (and continue to be) places where like minds could congregate to discuss their favorite music, favorite films, favorite books and how the influence of the Dead or Phish led them to where they are. These sites were the precursors to social networks; people created meet-ups at rest stops along the band’s touring schedule; people traded music and ideas. In fact, Phantasy Tour, which initially sprang up for Phish, now has communities for several bands, such as the Disco Biscuits, Umphrey’s McGee and solo efforts of Phish’s front man.

Both Harry Potter and social networks are wildly popular at the moment, but the Potter series is at once finite and immortal. Finite in that there is no new content coming and immortal because books and film live on forever, especially when there’s a cult audience. The same can be said of music — Rick Astley may not be putting out any new singles, but we're still being Rickrolled all these years later. Twitter and Facebook aren’t finite or immortal, they are evolutionary; they will shape-shift in how they are used by different (read: larger) communities, but will be where we get our information.

Adapting with the Community

In the end, though, many of these thriving niche-oriented cultural communities are destined to adapt as their fans continue to evolve with the product. If the fans didn’t push the product, Phish or The Dead (and to a different extent, films like “Star Wars” or “Star Trek” where the audience literally dictated the earnings potential) wouldn’t have been able to evolve. In the cases of Phish and the Dead, the bands were propelled by the way the audience recorded shows and how those recordings were distributed, and the bands adapted along with their fans.

The Grateful Dead has always been known as a band that wanted the free flow of their music to pass from fan to fan. But once technology dictated that they could make money off better quality sounds, they took a step back and wanted to charge fans for music they had previously obtained for free over the decades. Obviously, this didn’t go over too well with the fan base, and the Dead compromised by allowing the site Archive.org to stream high-quality (soundboard) shows and let fans download audience recordings (“the taper” is an entirely separate community within the jam-band scene) for free, which are usually of a poorer quality.

Phish, too, has been at the forefront of "community-based" technology and the fans are able to influence how the band uses technology. The band created LivePhish.com earlier this decade, where fans can purchase high-quality audio of that night’s concert for a low price, because the community (especially those who weren’t able to attend a specific concert) was clamoring for the band to use the Web.







This past tour, UStream was flooded with Phish fans because someone figured out how to stream content via his iPhone, potentially ushering in a huge moneymaker for the music industry. Imagine, for example, that Phish and their record company strategically placed high-def cameras around the stage and broadcast it over the Internet for $10 per show. How many fans would pay for the right to watch live, high-definition streaming concerts, instead of poor-quality, handheld, fan cams? My guess is that especially for deeply community-oriented bands like Phish, where each show is something to dissect and discuss with others, many fans around the world would purchase.

Thousands of people watched this tour (the first in 5 years) and it’s easy to think that because the fans (and thus, the band) believe sharing content (through tapes, then CDs, then MP3s and now Ustream) is how to keep the community strong that this same philosophy can be attributed to social networks.

These major developments – and yes, they are major, as a band needs to view themselves not solely as artists, but as a business, and these actions help propel the business – of forcing the band to adapt to both technology and its fans came from the community. We see time and again on Twitter and Facebook how the community pushes the brand. We now have tweets instead of updates on Twitter because the community called postings tweets and rejected Twitter's original terminology. The company eventually caught up and adapted.

By paying attention to how their users are actually utilizing the service, sites like Facebook and Twitter may be able to find those elusive business models. Just this week, for example, Twitter redesigned their homepage to put a focus on news, trends, and cross-cultural sharing. None of these were likely envisioned as uses of Twitter originally, but sharing news and non-trivial information is how many people have begun to use the service. In continually adapting to their community, Twitter might be paving the way to future potential profitability.

Will Social Networking Remain Niche?

So, taking all this into consideration, are Twitter, Facebook, and the rest destined to ultimate niche status or are they vital to our culture?

Before we discuss the position in our culture of social networks, let’s quickly look at how Phish and the Dead fit into our culture. While many will argue that Phish and the Dead are the ultimate niche bands, the bands (and subsequently their followers) are actually cultural indicators. Synonymous with the "hippy" lifestyle and Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, the Grateful Dead helped spark the counter-revolution of the late 1960s. Members of the community that emerged around the Dead fill every walk of life in America and can be seen from the NBA to the most trusted anchor man of his time.

Phish, on the other hand, has become a long-running joke of sorts within the pop culture crowd. They have their own Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream flavor (as does the late lead man of The Grateful Dead) and have even appeared on The Simpsons. Yet even though their mugs have graced the cover of Rolling Stone, they have appeared on Letterman, and feature-length articles have been written about them (and their fans) in Entertainment Weekly, they still are not considered part of the mainstream.







Think about this: the Grateful Dead never had multiple number one hits yet sold out 70,000 seat venues like Giants Stadium. Phish never had heavy rotation on MTV or the radio yet they are able to hold festivals for 80,000+ fans in the swamps of Florida or the mountains of Vermont.

But all of the above would not have happened without the fans.

General society can learn about culture as a whole from the bands’ followers – from how group think works, to how messages spread and how economies will arise within groups. In our society, we’ve seen time and again how the minority drives the majority until the majority embraces the minority. It comes incrementally, like women’s suffrage or civil rights for blacks or the current gay rights movement. Social networks are now straddling the line between minority and majority. There just needs to be some push, and it’s happening.

Recent studies suggest that 10% of Twitters account for 90% of the activity. Clearly, these evangelical users cannot sustain the Twitter brand, but we’re now starting to see pop culture take the baton. We're starting to see the early adopter minority influence the mainstream majority.

Twitter has entered our cultural consciousness. Athletes tweet, rock stars tweet, actors tweet, reporters tweet, teachers tweet, doctors tweet, lawyers tweet. Kids, teens, college kids, graduate students, parents, grandparents all tweet. Even politicians tweet! If all these groups tweet, how is it not embedded in our culture? The technology and the service are both affected by and adapt to the communities that use Twitter. Hell, there’s a whole economy surrounding Twitter.







Facebook has also crossed the proverbial chasm and affected the mainstream consciousness. The site has expanded from the college student community to the college students' parents and Facebook has changed the way we view and understand content sharing. According to AddtoAny, more people use Facebook to share links than any other service. Indeed, 24% use Facebook compared to 10% for Twitter and 11% for email.

But as the mainstream audience catches on to these niche/sub-cultural groups, there are lessons to be learned. Most abundantly (and perhaps, lucratively, too) is how brands (both large and small, personal or corporate) should be using these sites.

Conclusion

Last week, I was having a conversation with someone in the PR field and he said that his client was asking if they should spend time and money learning about Twitter if the next big thing (whatever it may be) is right around the corner. My friend had no idea what to say. My response, though, was simple: yes. If the client put the time in to learn about how blogs could be useful to its brand, they wouldn’t be asking about Twitter (or other social networks), because they would have the fundamentals in place and could explore on their own or with a guided hand. They would understand that community propels brands in multiple directions and users are their best salespeople. We saw it with the Dead, we saw it with Phish, we even saw it with Michael Jackson.

Which brings us back to the original question: are Twitter and other social networks destined to niche status or are they so embedded in our lives that they are now an indispensable part of our society?

Social networks are still new, but they are much more than fads. They will continue to evolve as we become more dependent on them for information – from where we get our news to sending pictures from your honeymoon. User generated content, whether through blogs or microblogs or status updates or whatever, is what shapes a community, and which in turn, shape society. Social networks played a large part in our political game this past cycle in the US and elsewhere, and will also continue to play its role in shaping how companies participate in the conversation and how they can use social networking as a great customer service tool. In short, social networking, like rock and roll, is here to stay.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, njmcc