His crunchiness points out what seems to be less than desirable results from the recent relaunch of USAToday.com with Social tools. This isn’t much of a surprise by my estimation. The fact is this broad social experiment only lends to disinterest and mediocrity. The trick is to narrowly focus many communities around common interests. Then create publish/subscribe relationships where contextually relevant between these communities and editorial content. Context is king (nods Chris–comments #28 and #29, and more on Chris’ blog). Context rules not just in creating the pub/sub relationships, but in getting me interested in contributing. I’m not the most out-spoken and rambunctious when I’m in a room full of button down suits as I am when surrounded by people more like me. The larger the crowd, the more diverse and dissimilar the backgrounds from my own, the less inclined I am to putting myself out there by sharing my opinions. Ok, if you know me you know this doesn’t really apply to me, but it does apply to the majority of folks and you do get my point.

Bottom line: if you’re a media company wanting to be successful in the social media game you should be creating highly targeted communities of interest then pub/sub-ing where it’s relevant across communities and editorial content. And another thing, for heavens sake, don’t flood the community with dang ads before the community even has a chance to take root! This is like tilling the soil with salt. Especially if you’re using non-targeted run of site ads. These aren’t going to pay off anyway, why bother?