Last week I hung a bird feeder in my backyard, but didn’t realize there would be a social media lesson involved.

The first parallel might be obvious. I hung the bird feeder up and hoped a few birds would come, much like we might build a blog or another website and hope for a few visitors. Unfortunately I didn’t know of any social media sites where I could let the birds know about the feeder, so all I could do is wait.

For a few days nothing happened. No birds. I started to wonder if it was a bad idea, a waste of time. Or perhaps I should have hung it in the front yard where I had already seen birds hang out. But my cat hangs out in the front yard and rarely enters the fence to the back (where the dogs are), so the back yard seemed safer for the birds.

Eventually a few birds did show up. Crows. They were not exactly the cute little birds I imagined fluttering joyously around my back yard but they were visitors nonetheless. The next day I noticed a couple robins, and yesterday there were two finches. Now the bird feeder is a resounding success.

But I noticed a Social Media truth in the process: the crows were first to show up.

A Prejudice Against Crows

I’ve always thought crows were attractive with their shiney black feathers, but I remember my mom shooing them away from her bird feeder when I was a child. To my mom, crows were the criminals of the bird world. They ate trash and ransacked the nests of smaller birds. Crows were scavengers, the lower class birds.

An online friend recently sent an invitation to a new social media site. The site is still in beta, so membership is by invitation only. The site looks promising although it’s still small. But I remember thinking to myself as I registered, “I wonder how long before the Internet Marketers come?”

Internet Marketers are one type of crow in the online world. Marketers are among the first to arrive when someone hangs up a new “birdhouse” because they’re constantly on the prowl for something new. They are the early adopters, but the online world often views them as lower class birds.

Crows Are the Early Adopters

A few years ago I received an email from Seth Godin inviting me to sign up for a new site called “Squidoo” where I could create something called a “lens”. I didn’t consider myself an Internet Marketer, and I’m not sure how I got on that email list, but I remember he told me I was an “early adopter”. I liked the sound of that and was flattered by the title. I did sign up and fiddle with the site but never finished building one of those “lenses”.

I guess I didn’t really see any need. However, the crows saw the need; they saw what was in it for them and helped make Squidoo into what it is today.

The same thing happened when Blogger was new. I signed up and built a blog, but abandoned it soon after because I didn’t have a need for it. I also built countless blogs on the Movable Type platform and a few on the old WordPress 1.5, but only because I enjoyed tinkering. However, marketers saw the potential of blogging and were a major force behind its development as a publishing platform.

A few months ago the Internet was buzzing about Google’s version of Wikipedia which would allow monetization by the author of each entry. I mentioned it on an Internet Marketing forum and I could imagine those particular crows drooling. A part of me wanted to shoo them away from this new bird feeder, however I knew it would be inevitable and the crows would come.

But without the crows clearing a path, how long before the finches would decide it was safe? The finches are cute but often it’s the crows who pave the way.

Crows provide social proof the place is worth a finch’s time.