A Conceptual Map of the Social Web

Here's a take on the idea of the social web and how it differs from page-based and broadcast conceptions of web space. The fundamental difference here is that where broadcast thinking envisions a web of HTML pages connected by hyperlinks, social thinking envisions a web of people, relationships, and content created by people.

The individual is at the center of the social web experience.

There are a lot of ways, obviously, you might draw this picture, and a lot of things you might include on it. For example, you could group the social web into communities, contacts, and content. But I've done it this way partly to offer a typology of social web sites.

Here's a take on six important types:

 

Social networks are about individuals.

Social networks are sites primarily structured to support pages about individuals. Those pages become collectors of relationships. For example, on my Facebook profile, you can see links to the people I know, and I can interact with those people through a variety of tools.

Communities are about groups.

Communities are different than social networks in that they are built primarily around groups of people, rather than individuals. Another way of saying it is that the group is the point in communities, whereas the individual is the point in social networks.

Blogs are about a singular perspective or subject.

Blogs are structured around individual posts that typically have in common either that are are written by a single person or that they are focused around a single subject. The content is the point, and individual pages on blogs reflect that focus--they are structured around individual blogs posts and meaningful collections of blog posts (e.g. category pages, time-based archive pages, and, on group blogs, author pages).

Social media services store, edit, and share content.

"Social media" is a term that gets used to mean all media through which people interact--as a stand-in for the equally vague "Web 2.0," for the blogosphere, or for online communities. Here I mean it in the more specific sense of socially-enabled web sites used primarily to share personal content, such as photos, videos, or slideshows. Flickr, Vimeo, and SlideShare are good examples. Of course, you could argue that these sites have aspects of social networking or community, and you'd be right. But I say if the primary purpose is media sharing, it's a social media site.

News sources are about timely or topical content.

Much has been made of the demise of traditional media the past couple years. Flava says, "Don't believe the hype!" Traditional media isn't going anywhere, but it is adapting to emerging complementary sources of news, information, and commentary. News sources are diversifying--many more people are publishing content, and content is now both participatory and socially vetted.

Popularity engines capture a collective sense of their users' preferences among resources, usually web links, and they present those resources in ranked lists that are normally designed to be dynamic, reflecting an up-to-date view into web content people find to be of interest.

There are two main types of popularity engine: Social bookmarking applications and collaborative filters. Social bookmarking applications, such as del.icio.us, value resources on the basis of individuals "saving" links to them. Users have individual collections of links, and those links acquire value when many individuals save them. Collaborative filters, such as Digg, are a little different: Users submit links for collective review, and the links acquire value based on a voting system of some kind.

The difference is important, because the types of content collected tend to be different. Social bookmarking sites tend to value resources of lasting value that users want to be able to find again, and collaborative filters tend to favor resources of short-term interest, such as timely news, and one-time interest, such as funny videos.

Marketplaces are about the exchange of goods and services, and information about good and services, among people.

The emerging marketplace is not about e-commerce web sites per se. We work on plenty of e-com sites, and I love them. But what we learn over and over again in the usability lab is that real people, especially making a purchase decision that involves more than a few bucks, use many web sites to gather information. There's a complex web ecosystem that supports purchase decisions, and strategists for individual web sites need to understand those ecosystems to plan effectively.

The new marketplace is about more than the site, more than the message, more than the differentiating feature. The marketplace is a cluster of interrelated sites, and the seller is regarded with what can only be described as a healthy suspicion. Caveat emptor is the online rule, but the news is that the emptor has some serious caveats to pay attention to. Customer reviews on sellers' sites are a new norm, and expert reviews from third-party sites play a critical role, especially for complex or technical products. And beyond expertise, trusted relationships are key information sources.

So transactional sites matter, but in a new way: The seller / manufacturer is regarded as having authoritative factual information about the product, but the expert or the existing customer is regarded as having the authoritative opinion or valuation about the product. And the closer the relationship, the more trusted the opinion. Get used to it.

But don't just get used to it, learn to facilitate it: If you've got a great product, you want people to know. If you don't, find a new job.

 

There's plenty of gray area between these types I'm putting forward. In fact, you might even say social space on the web is mostly gray area--and the overlap among types seems to be increasing rather than decreasing as the large sites add features. It's more and more common for social media sites to include communities (e.g., groups on Flickr), for social networks to include media hosting, (e.g. MySpace videos), and even for popularity engines to include blogs (e.g. Newsvine's "greenhouse").  People instant message links to product views, solicit advice from their contact lists, and so on.

You might even say the gray areas between sites and between types of sites hold the real opportunities for marketers to develop services that matter, create value, and drive engagement.

But I think it's still useful to think about think about these sites in terms of types, mostly as a way of focusing attention on the features you care about. Because while these things are not necessarily strictly distinct as types of site, they are distinct in terms of their uses.

Marketers wanting to engage with the social web need to know the differences in order to engage in ways that meet goals. To me, this is the essence of strategy: Know precisely what you want to accomplish, and craft approaches that rigorously focus on accomplishing it.