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One way to view methods of driving and sustaining online engagement is through the lens of education reform. Interestingly, many current theories on education revolve around emulating models of online engagement, mimicking successful virtual communities, particularly gaming communities, in order to structure better classroom behavior and performance. But perhaps we should flip the script and try to understand what we, as developers of online communities, can learn from successful educational models.

A recent article in Wired provides (loose) analogues in promoting online engagement. In it, the author notes how traditional barriers to educational success can be overcome through policies of inclusiveness and mandatory participation, leveling cliques and inverting schoolyard power structures. What is left is a world in which geeks rule the classroom and achievement is cool. The general method is to force students into the same constituency regardless of socio-economic standing or past achievement (and including the teachers in the flattening of the power structure), thus creating a single, all encompassing clique in which being smart is equated to being cool, and who doesn’t want to be cool?

Online communities rise and fall with breathtaking speed, oftentimes largely based on how "cool" they are, and the exercise of keeping a brand relevant can really be equated to keeping a brand cool. The precipitous decline of MySpace is instructive on so many levels, but one of the more underexposed reasons is that the community was structured in a manner that reinforced a schoolyard hierarchy that extended to every member of MySpace. Not cool. However, while the relative “coolness” of Facebook is highly debatable, the hierarchy within Facebook is much more localized and flat, and constituencies on Facebook are closed and consist of equivalents. Thus, Facebook may not be cool, but a circle of Facebook friends is -- and always will be -- cool to each other because they are not stacked up against the impossibly large pool of all Facebook users.

This would indicate that the idea of social capital can be counterproductive in maintaining online communities, especially when those communities achieve a terminal size. Social capital relies on a vertical hierarchy, and brands that constantly pursue the affections of "tastemakers" inevitably exhaust what they can offer this constituency. Instead, communities (or sub-communities) that are localized and small enough to avoid the formation of cliques operate through much more organic interactions that speak to basic human impulses of communication and connection. As well, flatter social structures keep barriers to participation lower, and rather than maintaining engagement by feeding the beast of novelty and exclusiveness, users stick with an online community through comfort and habit. Call me lazy, but that sounds pretty good to me.