Lately, explaining dailymile to non-dailymilers has felt a little like selling a religion. I’ve been thinking about why this has happened–what have I changed about the way I think about dailymile.com in the last few weeks/months? The answer is that I’ve become personally interested in the success of the company because of my involvement with the dailymile team.

Being a member of the team has two meanings for me. First, I get to go about doing what I’ve already been doing, posting funny stories about my workouts, found images and videos related to running or training, and organizing meet-ups throughout San Francisco and the Bay Area. These things are fun, but they’re all linked to one medium, people already involved in the dailymile.com community. There’s something missing in the way I want to approach my new role as a dailymile team member.

That gets me to the second meaning, which is actually a challenge: How do I involve people outside of the community in an effort to help dailymile.com lose its “dot com”? What we have on dailymile.com is this amazingly powerful internet community which is spreading the love of running, cycling, and swimming all over the globe. But it’s constrained to actions that users can only take while they’re online. Sure, when I’m out experiencing the tangible world I think about what I’m going to write on dailymile.com later, but where I really find meaning from the site is when I get to make a human to human connection about this abstract thing.

This brings me to my recent delema. Talking about dailymile face to face with people who are already the online community is easy. How do I talk about dailymile.com with people going the other direction and not sound like I’m trying to get all my friends to join a cult? Well, I found an explanation from Fast Company that helps identify what makes an innovation amazing and I think it’s going to help me with my problem:

So here we go: (anchor) Dailymile + (anchor) Facebook ~ (twist) but for runners.

Hey, at least it’s a start!

(http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/dan-heath/switch/anchor-twist-how-sell-new-innovations)