“Twitter doesn’t speak to conversation, it’s just notifying,” said music mogul Jermaine Dupri who is passionate about turning his social network into a larger community that promotes conversation. “All bloggers do is post something on their blog and they don’t comment back and forth to you. That got boring to me to, because I couldn’t talk to the people, I wanted to have dialogue,” says Dupri. His website already has over 21,000 members and growing. However, he stresses that it’s important to realize his network does more than just allow you to follow him. “People follow superstars because all they want to know is what {they’re} doing. Celebrities talk to the fans but they don’t specially talk back to everyone individually. Not that there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s just the opposite of Global 14. Global 14 is directly a community of people that wants to talk about the same thing.”
Dupri says he’s not trying to duplicate any other social network, “I’m not copying Twitter and I’m not copying Facebook, I’m actually just giving my generation a place where they can really live, it’s not an all black site, it’s a very open diverse group of people on the site. No one knew who Mark Zuckerberg {creator of Facebook} was until he created Facebook. People know who I am, my style, the music I make, that should make you want to be apart of the company more than anything. I bring the technology and the knowledge of every other website but I also bring that swag that all those other sites don’t have.”
Dupri feels his past reputation of being able to connect with the youth can drive more attention to his network than others. He gave me this scenario to consider, “If I put 10 kids in a room with me and Mark Zuckerberg before people knew who he was, and you allow them to sit at my table or Mark Zuckerberg’s table, I personally think people will come to my table, because people know who I am and I’m more interesting. He is smarter than a motherf*cker and he probably knows more stuff than I do, but we’re living in a swag driven world and kids want to be around that, they don’t like you just because you’re creating, they want to be around that swag.” Continue reading
