Web Social Architecture

On Blogging

After nearly a year at Razorfish, I’m resuscitating my blog. Why? Because blogging gets me out of the weeds and makes me smarter. In a way, I kind of think blogs are dead. Or more realistically, they’re just not as important as they were 6 or 7 years ago, when self-publishing was a transformative facet of the online experience. But for me, the practice of blogging is so very useful—it wakes me up to the interest and meaning of day-to-day things, and not doing it for the past year has made me dumber and less happy.

Here are a couple tidbits about how I approach blogging in a way that really works for me:

 

Never mind the audience.

If you’re trying to get famous blogging, you’re wasting your time. 99% of famous bloggers didn’t get famous by blogging—they have popular blogs because they’re famous, not the other way around. So don’t write for your audience. Write for yourself!

Nobody’s going to care. But more importantly, writing for yourself means no apologies and no excuses. You’re accountable to yourself alone for the quality of your thinking and for deciding what’s interesting and valuable to pay attention to. You’re the one who decides what matters—avoid trying to be popular and you’ll avoid the echo-chamber.

I’m not saying disrespect your audience! Don’t publish junk. Take pride in what you write, but take pride in how your thinking represents you, not in how much ephemeral attention or “popularity” your posts generate.

 

Always be blogging.

I’ll typically have a few dozen posts in draft mode at any given time. Every time I hear something interesting or have an idea I want to remember, I start a new post. (I use Windows Live Writer, which I think is still the best authoring tool out there.) Maybe a quarter of my draft posts ever get finished. So I essentially keep a long running list of things I’m thinking about, and whenever the ideas develop a bit I spend 5 or 10 minutes adding to the post.

Who cares if I waste time on posts I don’t end up publishing? The point, for me, is to keep thinking about stuff, not to finish anything. And because I’m not writing for a nonexistent audience that isn’t waiting with bated breath for my next post or who will stop loving me if my next post isn’t for another month, there’s really no pressure to finish posts. Writing for myself sure is less stressful!

 

Don’t try to “keep up.”

Forget about linking to other bloggers, cruising the web looking for relevant places to comment, etc—all the conventional wisdom from 5 years ago about how to build a following for your blog is less than unhelpful—it’s counterproductive to the development of original ideas.

And creating commentary on the hamster wheel of industry news is a waste of time. I actually think there’s a new kind of domain knowledge these days, and it’s less about collecting the full set of information, the traditional way of looking at mastery, and more about knowing what amidst all the noise you need to pay attention to because it matters. Filtering, not accumulation.

Don’t try to keep up. Instead, think hard about the stuff that sticks.

When I interview people, I always ask what they think the brave new world will look like. This is my way of understanding how well candidates can filter out the noise and tell a clear story about what really matters. And blogging is the way I get there, personally—which means not trying to be an industry commentator, but trying to be bigger than the industry, being about culture not news.

 

Anyway, if you’re reading this, I look forward to your feedback. And in return I promise to start actually blogging again! 

 

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.

Setting Up a Corporate Blog: Easy as 1,2,3

Readers familiar with my sense of humor will recognize the title of this post as being, of course, tongue-in-cheek. Like anything worth doing, setting up a corporate blog is difficult. There are numerous issues to work through, from technological to legal—not to mention selling blogging through the gauntlet of marketing, PR, and executive circles in the first place, no small feat in many corporate contexts.

Without a doubt, the biggest challenge in creating a corporate blog is to secure active participation and engagement from authors who can contribute great content.

Still, there are some steps you can take to increase the likelihood of a your blogging program succeeding. Here it is, the three-step breakdown! (Is there anything that can't be turned into an "easy as 1,2,3" blog post?)

 

Step 1: Cultivate Content Authors

Identify a core group of blog contributors, and get them engaged. To the extent possible, formalize their blogging efforts as part of their jobs. Give them public recognition.

Remember, the best people to blog aren't the people with the words "Director of" in their job titles. This is a common mistake--but directors, managers, VPs and the like are busy, and they often aren't as engaged with the work practice as they are with leading and managing. They're probably the people least likely to blog consistently. However, they're probably the people who are best qualified to help you identify the real contributors.

What you're looking for are people with two key qualities: Passion for the work, and comfort expressing themselves in writing.

Stay in constant touch with your core group. Send them links. Ask them for their opinions. Give them ownership.

But don't let the core group become an exclusive group. Extend the invitation to contribute as broadly as you can. Actively solicit contributions from new authors--you never know who might catch fire and become a consistent contributor.

 

Step 2: Create an Editorial Calendar

What we're talking about here is not a proscriptive list of posts you'd like to have written, but an "inspiration list" of topic ideas to help contributors think of stuff to write about.

Get your core group together, and brainstorm a list. This early conversation will help get everybody on the same page about what kinds of things will be included in the blog. You should emphasize the opportunity to address a breadth of topics and stress the freedom of individual authors to take their writing in any direction they feel is appropriate.

Show your core group a couple sample posts from blogs you like, including both short and long posts. Emphasize that a wide range of posts is desirable--folks should be think about their effort as more akin to writing an email than writing a white paper, but a few white-paper level posts won't hurt a thing.

 

Step 3: Develop Guidelines, Policies, and Processes

Editorial guidelines are about communicating your requirements as clearly as possible to authors. It's about helping them understand the legal and ethical requirements, and it's the place to communicate the line between appropriate and inappropriate content.

Your policy, on the other hand, is a legal document. Have a lawyer help you with it. Publish it on your blog. There are some specific requirements about copyright, privacy, and so forth that you need to address.

In terms of process, you need to figure out what level of editorial support you'll provide authors. At a minimum, it's a good idea to approve posts before publishing them, so at least two sets of eyes confirm every post's compliance with your policies. At the other end of the spectrum, highly-engaged editorial support can make it easier for authors to crank out content while ensuring high quality--and don't worry, a good editor won't dampen the individuality of your authors' voices.

Lastly, create an explicit policy for moderation. You need clearly-communicated rules about what comments can be published, and you need to enforce the rules consistently and transparently. I encourage you to think very liberally about publishing critical comments.

 

That's it. A very boiled-down step-by-step to get started. For more, I recommend you pick up The Corporate Blogging Book. I've just started reading it, but it's good and very thorough.

The Big Leap: New Mactopia Site Integrates Community

Yesterday we launched a major client site that has a couple important community features. Hopefully the level of complexity involved isn't apparent on the site itself, but I'm proud of the work, because we did some complicated stuff.

Meet the new Mactopia, the web home of MacBU, the Microsoft group that creates software for the Mac:

This site is a great example of a business moving from a broadcast to a participatory model on the web. The old site had little more than a web email form supporting customer interaction: Click Submit to send your message into oblivion. Today the new site includes numerous access points for customer interaction, all serving core user requirements, dynamically layered throughout the site, algorithmically filtered, and aligned with the brand.

Two new areas of the site support direct interaction among customers and between customers and the company:

• The existing NNTP technical support groups are now mirrored on the site itself, in a web-based forums interface that adds features to make them easier to use. They synch in both directions, and discussion threads are now searchable along with other support content.
• The popular Mac Mojo blog, formerly hosted on MSDN, is fully integrated with the new site, and the best content from the blog is dynamically integrated with product pages, providing a way for people considering a purchase to look under the hood, ask questions, and get to know the people and thinking behind the products.

To integrate these areas of the site in a meaningful way, we had a number of challenges to solve:

• The existing NNTP groups were working. We had to keep from breaking them.
• The MVP community, crucial contributors of technical support and general help for Mac Office users, strongly prefers to interact with the NNTP groups through a newsreader interface--which is an inappropriate interface for the users they're there to help.
• Support Forums created by the community and Help content published by the company serve the same user need: Get a solution to a problem. The two kinds of content needed to be differentiated, so authorship is clear. But there's no way to know whether a given question has the best answer in one place or the other.
• While the Support Forums and Help content are both searchable, there's no way to rank search results by relevance across the two areas, and the databases being searched return differently-structured data.
• Integrating the blog with the main site means many people who aren't familiar with blog conventions will encounter it. We needed to present the most broadly interesting content, along with the standard newest content, front and center.

This list is really just the tip of the iceberg, and I think it's interesting because these are challenges typical to any large project that involves integration of community content. We had to make compromises every step of the way. Only time will tell, but I think the site architecture will support great quality over the long term--thanks in large part to the passion and smarts of the fine folks at the MacBU.

MacBU took a huge step here by opening the site to user participation. They'll face huge challenges over the next year as they adjust to a brave new world of customer relationships online. A lot will depend on their ability to stay responsive in the face of a huge volume of questions and requests (the old site's monthly traffic was already in seven digits). They'll face tough questions about how to moderate borderline posts. Their commitment to transparency will be tested. They'll be unfairly treated.

All this adds up to a big opportunity. So pay attention. This is a ride almost everybody's in line for.

What Is a Blog?

It's a perplexing question, when you think about it, and it gets more perplexing all the time. From a technical perspective, a blog is just a web site. Blogs tend to have certain features, but those features aren't unique to blogs, and not all blogs have them. Blogs are usually, but not always, published by individuals, but not all web sites published by individuals are blogs. Blogs are frequently-updated, but not all frequently-updated web sites are blogs. These days, blogs are not always even web sites per se--they are integrated with instant messaging, social media API's, mobile devices, and so on. Is your IM-driven Twitter stream, transmitted through your blog via RSS actually a blog when I view it on my cell phone?

The seemingly easy question of what exactly is a blog turns out to actually be pretty interesting.

And Lee and Sachi at Commoncraft have busted out a nice, basic answer. What I really like here is the focus away from technology and toward authorship, utility, and relationships. This is great stuff for a person who's unfamiliar with blogs and needs to grasp the basics:

 

 

What a great introduction to blogs! Give those two a hand.

Of course, for those familiar with blogs, it's not hard to see that there's much more to the story than Lee and Sachi included in this video. (They understand the complexities as well as anyone.)

You can see blogs as a set of conventions or features:

• Posts appear in reverse-chronological order (newest at the top of the page). Except when there's a persistent initial post or welcome page.
• People can comment on posts. Except when comments are disabled.
• Incoming links are displayed along with comments. Except when they aren't.
• There's a persistent link to an "About" page that introduces the blog and / or author(s). Except when there isn't.
• Posts are archived either by category or date. Except when they are organized by tags, or not archived at all.
• You can subscribe by RSS and / or email. Except when not.
• Blogs link to each other. Most of the time, but not always.
• A list of links to other blogs (the blogroll) is included in the margin. Usually, that is.
• Blogs are standalone sites. Unless they're integrated into a bigger site, excerpted, or aggregated.

These conventions have too many exceptions to meaningfully differentiate blogs from other kinds of web sites and services. So here's another way to look at it:

From a social architecture perspective, blogs are structured around a singular voice, even when that "voice" is multivocal and multifaceted. The voice is the container. Within that container, the individual post is the primary content object, and the secondary (comment) objects that attach to posts are important mainly as attributes of post objects.

Likewise the author or authors of a blog are secondary objects, experientially subordinate to individual posts and important mainly as attributes of posts. In other words, in the context of a blog, what you say is more important than who you are.

You can contrast that structure with the structure of social networks (Lee and Sachi have a video about this topic too), where the individual profile (or "about page") is the primary content object, and blog posts by the author are secondary content objects that are important mainly as attributes of their author. Here identity is primary, and blog posts, along with other types of secondary objects, are important mainly as attributes of identity. In other words, who you are is the thing--what you say is how you construct and transmit who you are.

For me, most of all, blogs are social. They include commenting, subscription, and trackback. You can contact the author. They are human, authentic, a little rough around the edges. If none of the above, then it ain't a blog. Architectural considerations aside, you know it when you see it. A blog is, ultimately, an aesthetic.

What do you think?

Going Viral is not a Marketing Strategy

Producing content that spreads across the Internet like wildfire, garnering massive attention at low cost, tends to be seen as an end in and of itself. While on the one hand I think that's true, in that awareness is better than lack of awareness, I also want to suggest that going viral is not enough. You need to connect your viral content to a kind of conversion.

What makes content go viral? It's about people telling other people they like your content. One person likes it, they tell ten more, those ten more tell ten more each, and so on. Back in the day, this meant email forwarding. It's a little more automated these days, but the basic idea is the same. Your content gets voted up on Digg or Reddit. You become a popular bookmark on Del.icio.us. Your photo cracks the Explore page on Flickr. Your YouTube video gets featured.

Suddenly, everyone's looking at you. It's like you should hold up a sign or something.

Alan Rimm-Kaufman illustrates the issue nicely in his post about Digg-baiting via 120' water balloon. His effort to "go viral," executed to perfection, produced the so-called "Digg Effect," that is, a huge short-term increase in traffic:

The question is: What do you do with a huge short-term increase in traffic? And the answer, 9 times out of 10, is, unfortunately, you freeze in the spotlight, and next week try to come up with something else that will be just as viral.

 

Do Not Turn to the Dark Side

Viral content garners many links, and links are good for SEO.

Stephen Spencer, writing about Alan's stunt, breaks down the real reason I say, tongue partially in cheek, that viral is not marketing. He cleverly calls it the "Digg bait and switch:"

So then what's the benefit of getting dugg and getting all those links, you may ask. There really isn't much of one, since you aren't passing that hard-earned link juice on to your home page, product pages, etc. Unless... you add all your links, ads and commercial content to your dugg page as soon as the Digg traffic has died down.

Um, yeah. Brilliant. Cool. Not going to annoy anyone with that approach, and definitely going to sleep well knowing we've offered value to our customers. Clearly, this is the dark side of SEO. You can do better.

 

Converting Viral Traffic

The real key is to do viral to accomplish a goal. Develop a plan for what to do with all the attention, and present an effective call to action alongside or within your viral content. Unless you're offering branded viral content with the aim of raising brand awareness, you usually want to move visitors from one place to another or prompt them to take an action.

The trick with viral, as with all forms of social marketing, is to align the content with your brand. This doesn't always mean branding it per se, but it does mean that a promise of "more like this" alongside viral content offers visitors a value that also serves your business.

 

Building a Strong Subscriber Base

In many contexts, subscription is a powerful benefit, enabling you to sustain relationships over time and repeatedly reach people who want to hear what you have to say. In my estimation, subscription is one of the most powerful indicators of engagement--more powerful than return visits, time on site, and certainly visits. Simply offering a subscription option with your viral content can create opportunities to form lasting relationships.

Lee Lefever has nailed the viral thing a couple times now with his video series, The CommonCraft Show. He posted some stats about the viral effects of his RSS in Plain English video: 80,000 views, 400 new subscribers. A 0.5% conversion rate.

I had my own, MUCH more humble, viral hit a while back, and I found that about one in every hundred visitors subscribed, a 1% conversion. Those subscribers seem to have stuck around now for several months.

Neither Lee nor I included any particularly strong call to action in our viral content (mine wasn't even intentionally viral), so it seems we could probably convert more visitors to subscribers if we were to try.

How many? I have no idea, and I do think you could blow it with a call to action that came across as manipulatively commercial. "You liked our video of the anaconda swallowing a robot vacuum cleaner? Maybe you'd like to purchase a new cell phone!"

Anil Batra noted a while back that his number of subscribers increased when he had a longer gap between blog posts. Goodness gracious! What could that mean? Apparently Anil has a theory.Yo Anil, care to share?

Social Network Marketing: Think Differently about "Placement"

"Social networking" is a term I hear used interchangeably with "online community," "Web 2.0," and, most discouragingly, "viral marketing." In the latest intallment of The Commoncraft Show, Lee has done a nice job clarifying the term for those unfamiliar with it: 

What I like here is that Lee describes social networking in a platform-independent way. Obviously, there are lots of different kinds of web site that could serve as a social network, including blogs, which aren't typically considered social networks. 

Online social networking is a human activity, not a technology type. While there are some very familiar sites like MySpace, LinkedIn, and Match.com that are typically lumped into a category as "social networking sites," I'm much more inclined to think about social networks in architectural terms. 

From a social architecture perspective, online social networking sites are clusters of linked identity-centric web spaces. While on the one hand, there's no real hard-and-fast line between "social networking" sites like MySpace, which are structured around the individual identities of users, and "social media" sites like YouTube, which are structured primarily around individual pieces of content and secondarily around "channels" (groups of content objects with a common author), on the other hand this difference of emphasis has a huge influence on how these sites are used. 

Most significantly, social networks increasingly cross boundaries between web sites. Behind the power of web services, APIs, widgets, and portable content (like Lee's video above), relationships and content move effortlessly across domains. 

Even more interestingly, social networks are beginning to cross boundaries between our physical and digital lives. Add-on services like Moo's 3rd-party-based business cards herald a new generation of real-world artifacts of our online experience. 

Marketers wanting to tap into "the all-powerful magic of" online social networks need to shift from thinking about (and budgeting for) site based-initiatives and campaigns ("Let's do something on MySpace this fiscal year") and begin viewing social networks as a relational architecture, independent from and superimposed against what I'd call the superficial architecture of mere web sites.

Another Great "Plain English" Video from Lee at Commoncraft

I saw a post from Lee the other day saying he was working on another video to follow up his roaring success on "RSS in Plain English," which basically went gold. Says Lee:

The video was posted on April 23rd, 2007. Today is May 28th and in just over a month the video has been...

• Viewed over 80,000 times across three hosts (Blip.tv, YouTube and DotSub)
• Translated into 9 languages (subtitles)
• Commented on 160 times (across sites)
• Dugg 975 times
• Added to Del.icio.us 795 times
• Linked-to over 680 times (says Technorati)

Not bad. It did a ton for his blog as well, adding over 400 subscribers, etc. My thinking was, he really hit the nail on the head in terms of finding the right topic--well-known but not well understood technology, explained in a fun, understandable way. A home run.

I wondered to myself whether he'd be able to duplicate that success with an equally compelling topic. And--does it matter, or does one huge success, sustained with more-modest follow-up, get the job done?

And here's the next installment, "Wikis in Plain English."

Lee's really having fun with this, obviously. It'll be fun to see the response.

Lee's "RSS in Plain English" Video

Lee Lefever has a great knack for explaining complicated stuff in simple terms, and as part of his new fascination Lee's taking that knack to the silver screen. Watch out Brad Pitt:

 

 

   

Click To Play

And while we're all watching TV, just in case you missed it, check out this fun video about Web 2.0 (which got replayed at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, much to my delight, since I had seen it much earlier and am usually the last to see these things).

UPDATE: Lee's post made the front page of Digg, holy grail of viral marketing. His "In plain English" concept strikes a chord. Rock on, Lee! The lesson here is: offer value around your audience's needs, rather than trying to spread your own gospel.

Link Affordance via Snap Shots: What Do You Think?

I added Snap Shots to my blog this past week. It's a free tool that produces a preview of linked web pages, like so:

When you hover over an external link, you get a popup like the one above that shows a picture of the web page the link points to. Click and you go to the linked page.

I like the idea that Snap Shots strengthens the affordance of links, giving you a visual sense of whats there before you have to commit to loading a new page. Conceptually, I think it's brilliant, and especially useful in the link-driven blog experience.

In a way, it reduces the importance of the "best practice" of using descriptive links.

But I can also imagine being annoyed by little pop-ups flickering around everywhere as you move your mouse.

What do you think?

UPDATE: I'm convinced. I killed SnapShots--see the comment thread for my explanation. Any SnapShots apologists want to re-open the discussion, or do the Nays have it?