Sun Tzu – The Art of Community

Posted by Howard
on June 27th, 2009

At Stocktwits , we have pretty much two camps…Soren and Marissa who read my tweets (religiously :) ) and cringe. After the initial shivers I will get an email with a quote from Sun Tzu – The Art of War and why the tweet was a possible mistake.

Phil on the other hand laughs and sends me three more that if ungoverned would get us thrown off Twitter.

I am not a Sun Tzu guy. I am a lover, not a fighter :) .

A huge majority of the great businesses since the beginning of time have likely benefitted from Sun Tzu style and tactics.

My question though is this…In the day of the Social Web and now microniche communities, is Sun Tzu thinking a hindrance?

Take this Sun Tzu quote:

“What the enemy doesn’t know about, they can’t fight.”

If your enemy is kept in the dark these days, it’s likely your community and potential customers won’t know either.

I hate spam and I don’t think Twitter is even close to dealing with the issue. I wonder if they even care some times. All I think about is spam. The problem of Twitter as a platform is defining all the boundaries of spam.

At Stocktwits, the team and core community have pretty much decided what we think is spam and we want to do everything we can to stop it.

Therefore, do we let everyone know we hate it and are implementing ways to beat it down or do you keep your mouths shut because if the spammers know you are implementing the filters, they will try harder to beat it?

Love to hear everyone’s thoughts….

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