Web Social Architecture

Too Much Marketing

I really like David Armano’s Conversation Starter post from earlier this week with predicted trends in social media for next year. In particular, his first point hits on exactly what I think is going to be the key to success for marketers in social media:

1. Social media begins to look less social
With groups, lists and niche networks becoming more popular, networks could begin to feel more "exclusive." Not everyone can fit on someone's newly created Twitter list and as networks begin to fill with noise, it's likely that user behavior such as "hiding" the hyperactive updaters that appear in your Facebook news feed may become more common. Perhaps it's not actually less social, but it might seem that way as we all come to terms with getting value out of our networks — while filtering out the clutter.

OK, I actually think the header on Armano’s paragraph is, as he hints, actually the opposite of the truth—the way I’d say it is that “social media begins to look less anti-social!”

But the real point Armano is making is spot on. Social channels are too noisy, and as more and more marketers start to proactively reach out to consumers online next year, and as listening technologies are more widely adopted, we’ll see a dramatic increase in, well, spam.

I made a joke on Twitter recently about going to back to grad school. I was, I think, really obviously joking. But in minutes, I had four @replies from universities plugging their Master’s programs. Yikes!

We are fast approaching a time when public online social venues are saturated with listening marketers, responding to every mention of everything related to their brands, products, and services. It’s easy to anticipate Twitter’s @ channel, for example, becoming essentially useless.

Armano is right to predict an increase in user behaviors that enable them to filter the noise. But I also think we’ll see a rise in demand for and sophistication of privacy controls (and even products—like the “social router” I once pitched to Nancy White after her talk here at ZAAZ), as well as an increase in the importance of private networks and communities.

What’s a marketer to do?

Create value, that’s what. Next year will be a year for opt-in marketing—the focus will be on creating content and services people want to use. Heads up, folks, people don’t want you to “engage them” in “conversation.”

Social Media Teams: Different on the Agency Side than Internal

One of the things I've been saying a lot lately is that over the next couple years, we can expect to see corporations adding dedicated internal social media teams. Does this sound like a statement of the obvious? Then maybe the corollary is more interesting: I think agencies should do the opposite.

I've seen a similar pattern in a dozen or more corporations in the past year: Responsibility for social media falls to the person or people who get interested and raise their hands. They come from PR, customer service, marketing--and sometimes just out of the woodwork. Good!

In other words, responsibility for social media tends to happen in an ad hoc way--and I actually suspect ad hoc is a perfect way to staff an emerging discipline. And staff it you must.

Social media requires a new combination of skill sets, traversing all the disciplines I just mentioned, but also including strong writing skills, a thick skin, and the social savvy to interact with customers through online media in ways that are on-brand, authentic, human, and bounded by corporate guidelines, policy, and politics. It's hard, but for the right people it's super fun.

For the corporate social media team, representing the brand is a full-time job, with its own discrete challenges and rewards. They need to focus on developing the skills and experience to do it well.

But on the agency side, the whole thing is different. Agencies need to bring to bear their full range of capabilities to support clients' social media efforts, and that includes all the "traditional" digital disciplines--at the agency where I work, we have a 10-person social media team that includes people from development, analytics, search, optimization, user experience, creative, and client services. It's a witchy brew. Our goal is to implode the whole idea of "social media" in the next 2 years.

So my message to agencies is: Adapt, or specialize yourself into an oblivion-vortex!

To be sure, social media specialty agencies (I have friends at several of them) provide a tremendously valuable service with their depth of expertise in social media. But my prediction is, as web marketing evolves further, the breadth of expertise brought to bear by "traditional digital" agencies will pose a grave threat to the specialists. They simply won't match digital agencies' capabilities in development, analytics, creative, usability, planning, and optimization.

Seven years ago, we were explaining the idea of online community. Three years ago, we were selling the importance of Web 2.0. Today, we're answering ubiquitous demand from clients that "social media" be included as a component in all our web work. Give it another 2 years and clients will see "web" and "social" as synonymous--data, content, service, identity, content objects, and relationships as integral to a holistic web strategy.

So on the agency side, there should ultimately be no such thing as a "Social Media Team," only a company made of web-savvy, passion-driven professionals who can support all aspects of corporate social media efforts--from concept through implementation.

The nuts and bolts, and rubber meeting the road, and the delivery of the service belong on the client side; and the vision, concept, and creative / conceptual infrastructure are where agencies can help. All in all, I have to admit, it ends up looking a lot like Mad Men, which my 90 year old Grandmother, true story, described as "the most realistic show yet about the '50's."

"It shows," she says, "exactly how we lived."

Death of Email: Not a Minute Too Soon

Email is dead!

OK, maybe not yet, but the latest news certainly suggests the end is inevitable: Social networking has now passed email in global use. Here are the highlights (from Nielsen via Mashable):

New stats from Nielsen Online show that by the end of 2008, social networking had overtaken email in terms of worldwide reach. According to the study, 66.8% of Internet users across the globe accessed “member communities” last year, compared to 65.1% for email.

Some other key findings from the report:

- Globally, Facebook reaches 29.9% of global Internet users, versus 22.4% for MySpace.

- MySpace remains the most profitable social network, generating an estimated $1 billion in revenue versus $300 million for Facebook in 2008.

- Facebook is the top social network in all countries except Germany, Brazil, and Japan (Nielsen still has MySpace as tops in US in the report, but as of January ’09, that had changed).

- On Twitter, CNN, The New York Times, and BBC have the greatest reach among mainstream media companies as of late February.

Details are here: http://mashable.com/2009/03/09/social-networking-more-popular-than-email/

It’s worth mentioning that “member communities” is a pretty broad definition of social networking. It encompasses more, obviously, than formal Facebook-style social networks—it essentially includes every kind of online space where people can interact with each other!

What this points to for me is less that social networks are better than email and more that email is an obsolete tool. Simply put, there isn’t a single thing you can do with email that you can’t do better with a different tool. (And feel free to challenge that point if you like!)

The reason email, like the occasional tape deck, is still around is that it’s been a dominant norm for business communications for long enough that people depend on it. It's a standard.

But rest assured, in the same way email for personal social use is fading, it will also fade in business. It’s just a matter of time, and obviously it won’t happen overnight. And no, email won't disappear off the face of the earth. It'll go the way of snail-mail instead: Relegation to use by Luddites, a few innovative specialized uses (a la Netflix with snail-mail), and saturation with junk.

The transition to a new set of web-based communication and collaboration tools is already well underway, and it’s happening partly invisibly: The new web-based tools, for now, integrate really well with email. You can post to a Typepad blog through email, edit a SocialText wiki through email, update a Basecamp discussion thread through email, and so on. Email users the world over are, at this very moment, authoring blogs and editing wikis, some without knowing it!

The first step in supplanting a standard is to build in compatibility with it, and that's what the newer tools are doing. Email lovers beware! Your demise is at hand!

Ok ok, clearly I have a personal vendetta against email. My point is, so should everyone.

What do you think?

Innies vs. Outies

A colleague sent this awesome email the other day, from the outer reaches of darkest Portland:

I had carrot sticks with <famous Internet guy> and Portland's IxDA group last night.  He was *going off* on how ineffective the agency model is for creating and sustaining great, long-term interfaces/software/websites.  He called us shortcuts and a guaranteed method for design failures and that the only way to get the quality of, let's say, Netflix is to go in house and never use an agency. And while I agreed with him on several fronts, I was most impressed by this entertaining and horrifying quote he spat out:

"Agencies are the liposuction of the design world."
-<famous Internet guy>, Feb. 17, 2009

You heard it here first. Are we just a pack of sexy, short-term solutions that leave our clients temporarily svelte if they have enough money to afford our, um, procedure? Do they go back to their bad bloated selves as soon as we leave? Are we preventing them from regular exercise and a healthy diet?

 

And another colleague sent this awesome response:

 

Well, I think <famous Internet guy> is right on at least one point – we are sexy.  

However, apart from that - although I can see where he’s coming from, I respectfully disagree.  The problem he’s describing is not unique to design/ux/creative/whatever.  Innie v Outie is a classic conflict.  Are we sustained organizational change?  Hell no.  Can we make something better, faster, and stronger than institutional Innies can make?  Hell to the yeah we can.  Will the elegant solutions we deliver be bastardized and Frankenstein-ed after we leave?  It all depends on the client. We are not a guaranteed method for failure, but nor are we for long-term success.  We are less like lipo and more like Jenny Craig, we can give you the tools to succeed, but whether you keep using them after the program is over is up to you.  

 

Personally, I'm in both camps, and I don't mean that as a cop-out. I see a symbiotic relationship between clients and agencies where the agency can provide leading-edge, broadly-informed, and swiftly-executed online strategy, and where clients can provide depth of expertise and long-term accountability.

But I think there's a huge gap today, which has to do with the way budgets are structured in the marketing world: Innies tend to have funding for a project, which they hire Outies to execute, and once the budget is gone the concept languishes.

The gap, in other words, is operational. Agencies can provide vision, but we can't, even on retainer, provide true follow-through. Nobody can get in between businesses and their relationships with their customers. (And that's just as it should be.)

Your thoughts?

Leadership in Three Easy Steps

I was on the road a lot in the early and late parts of 2008, which is fortunately not something I have to do a lot most of the time. I am not a fan of business travel. But there's a single note I took during all those road days that sticks with me still. I'd almost say it made it worthwhile. (But, let's get real. I missed my kids.) I'll share:

Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP, the parent company of the company I work for, said something that was well worth the 18 hours of travel to get to a conference in Athens. Yes, Athens Greece, not Athens Georgia. Long flight(s).

Leadership, he said, is three things:

"Vision, alignment, and execution. That's it."

I take it as a given that we all lead, as well as follow. So this isn't about rank, seniority, or the org chart. It's about effective leadership, period. And it's clear that the best "anointed leaders" in effective organizations know how to "follow" their most junior colleagues at the right times.

Vision. Alignment. Execution.

I could expound for a while on each of those, and end up with a nice, meaty blog post, but I give you more credit. What a great, simple way to encapsulate such a difficult practice! Sorrell said it well.

A Simple Recipe for Great Mobile Application Design

As you can probably tell, I'm being a little tongue-in-cheek with the title of this post, just for the sake of provocation. But I actually do have a theory about how to design great mobile apps. I've been floating the idea with colleagues lately, and it's been producing great results: Strongly opinionated responses, for and against!

Here it is: There are two things about mobile that are fundamentally different from web designed for the desktop / laptop, two things that are really cool about mobile. They are location awareness and constant access to your relationships. Where those two factors intersect is the sweet spot of great mobile design.

Your mobile device knows where you are. As our creative director said to me in one of his wild rants (yes you, Tim), good mobile is all about "information about your surroundings." I agree, but I'd add that your mobile device also knows who you know. It knows how to contact the people you know, it knows what they're saying, and it gives them a way to contact you. It's a portal into all your relationship channels--good mobile is also all about portable access to your people.

Good mobile design, says me, taps into one of those two unique attributes of mobile. And great mobile design taps into them both.

I also say no manifesto worth its salt lacks a Venn diagram. Therefore:

 

                     

 

Some smart people have voiced objections to this idea, including that there are some really cool games out there for mobile that have nothing to do with location awareness or sociability. I've even been called on my recent defense of triviality in light of this argument. Fair enough. But I'm sticking to my guns.

I'm not saying everything for mobile has to fall into this framework to be worthwhile. I'm just saying great mobile design--game-changing, market-defining, indispensable design--takes full advantage of the unique benefits of mobile. Ms. Pac-Man might be pretty fun controlled by the iPhone's accelerometer, but just because it's kind of cool doesn't mean it's great design.

Here's an example that I think illustrates what I'm talking about.

Helio's "buddy beacon" feature takes advantage of both location awareness and access to the contacts list. (Disclosure: Helio is a client.) Buddy beacons represent people in your contact list, and it displays their locations on a map. You can see where your people are, and you can also see their status: Are they busy, available, on the phone, etc.

Helio has taken the instant messaging metaphors of presence and status, and extended them into a location context.

Pretty nice. There are some limitations, though: Only other Helio customers show up, and there's no seamless way to contact buddies directly through the map. In the era of open standards and touchscreen interfaces, this doesn't quite cut the mustard.

There are plenty of other easy examples. Finding nearby restaurants is cool, and seeing customers' ratings and reviews of those restaurants is even cooler. But cooler yet would be to show restaurants visited by people you know--a shared restaurant landscape of opinions, experiences, and preferences. It's not hard to imagine all kinds of extensions of relatively simple ideas: Just ask, how do we add geographic and social context to create value?

Poof! Mobile design made easy. What do you think?

Real-World Marketing for the Social Web

The great web of human identity and relationship has begun to express itself on the Internet. I mean "express" in the same sense as a gene expresses itself as a quality in an organism. Just as my genetic code expresses itself as my blonde hair and stubbornness (it's genetic because I SAY it is!), the collective creativity, action, and beingness of humanity expresses itself online as what we call the Web.

The Web of HTML pages and hyperlinks, of databases, protocols, and services, is less like the framing of a house than it is like the canvas of an Expressionist painting. Or so I like to think if it: Human expression is the generative force online, technology the raw material.

And the Web is in no way a simulacrum of a more "real" analog world. It's as real, in every meaningful sense, as the offline world. And the relationships, interactions, and experiences we have online are as real as their offline equivalents. Sure, they're lower-resolution. But they're not illegitimate as channels and containers of meaning and value. I can't give my grandmother a hug online, of course, but she sure appreciates it when I drop her an email with photos of the kids.

People who fret about a decline in the quality of our relationships in the low-resolution online environment are missing the point. The Web isn't an alternative to the offline world, it's a complementary dimension, and online relationships and interactions aren't a replacement for our offline relationships and interactions--digital and analog, rather, are parts of a whole. And that whole, online and off, is being created every moment by the sum of human activity.

So when we as marketers and publishers say we aren't in control online any more, it's not some kind of generous gesture acknowledging that the customer now has a voice--it means we really, really are NOT in control.

Which is fine. As a matter of fact, we never were. We just thought we were, because broadcast media are echo-chambers. Until recently, we could fool ourselves: La-la-la, I can't hear you. Everyone else was participating as they always had. They would have liked to engage us, but broadcast channels only go one way.

And as you know, the Web isn't a broadcast channel. One difference online today, compared to three years ago, is that word of mouth has gained exponential scale, and network effects happen faster than ever. The voice of the customer is amplified, and the tools are now in place for customers to talk back where we can listen.

Mining the Business Value of the Social Web: Behavioral Metadata

As an information architect, I work with metadata a lot. I help define interfaces based on information about the content. For example, an object on a home page might be the "newest" object in a system, or it might be a rotating series of "newest" objects by each "author" with "home page" authority. See my other posts on quality and self-organization in the presentation layer if you want more on that.

I work at a company with a strong focus on performance-driven design, and so I work constantly with web analysts, who specialize in understanding behavior on web sites and using that behavioral data to drive business decisions, and I work constantly with designers, researchers, and information architects whose focus is creating innovative, valuable stuff people want to use.

I'm working where I work partly because I think there's tremendous potential in the intersection of information architecture and web analytics, in particular on the social web.

While some companies have been implementing sophisticated web analytics programs for years, many are just starting to measure behavior on their sites. Very frequently, there's lots of data collected but no real plan for taking action based on it.

At the same time, many companies are just beginning to experiment with social media marketing. They're getting out there and participating, and their customers are creating content, but that content is hard to present meaningfully, and partly because of that most social media marketing efforts fail to realize their full promise.

And naturally, the new focus on measurement and data raises the question of how the success of those social media marketing efforts should be measured. I've posted in the past about measuring communities, and there are a lot of people out there contributing to that discussion. What I think is frequently overlooked, though, is behavioral data helping to create value in social systems. Not data about value, but data creating value.

I made this handy chart to help explain what I mean. Click the image for a more-legible view:

 

When users interact with web sites, information about their behavior accumulates--information attached both to the user as object and content as object. That information about people and the things they do--what's called behavioral or tacit metadata--tells a lot about people and content. And in complex, emergent and self-organizing systems, behavioral metadata is especially powerful, because in those kinds of systems it's a challenge on the one hand to present content in meaningful ways and on the other hand to generate business intelligence to drive smart decisions.

As content and people increasingly cross freely between domains in the emerging standards-based social universe, I think we'll see a shift in business models from today's focus on owning content to a new focus on owning the metadata about the content and the people interacting with the content. I'll risk a prediction: In a short time, behavioral metadata, the information about what people do with content, will be more valuable than the content itself.

What do you think?

A Conceptual Map: The Mobile Web as a Social Space

Following last month's release of the iPhone 3G, along with the launch of the App Store, and what Brian Fling called the "first true Mobile 2.0," everyone around here is talking about the emergence of the mobile device as a critical facet of web strategy. My colleague Anders Rosenquist, who is seriously deep on mobile, presented a first take on the company point of view on mobile strategy at a recent meeting; another colleague, Justin Marshall, is knee-deep in an iPhone app; and in general things are just all abuzz about mobile.

And Brian has pretty much convinced me that mobile is, in fact, a huge deal. But I don't think it's a huge deal in quite the obvious way. The initial reaction to everyone's sudden attention to mobile seems to be along the lines of, "We need to make our web site accessible on mobile!"

Not so fast.

I got  a lot of help on this diagram from Anders and Justin. It's meant to be a framework for thinking about the mobile experience, in particular about how the mobile web experience is different from the web experience in general. There's quite a bit to debate in that question, and we could talk about it for hours. And of course, this kind of diagram certainly oversimplifies a very complex system in a complex space. It doesn't show all the elements, and it doesn't show all the relationships between the elements. What I hope it does do is provide a framework for thinking about the mobile space that makes it easier to uncover opportunities to create real value for real people.

I do think there are some issues unique to mobile that go beyond form factor, device compatibility, and the challenges of adapting content. Let's get this one out of the way: It's not enough to just take your web site, add some new CSS, and deliver it to the mobile device. If that doesn't strike you as self-apparent, bear with me.

In the longer term, the mobile device will become the hub of our social worlds, an indispensable tool for navigating our physical, cultural, and relational landscapes. Does that sound like an overstatement? I don't think it is.

Let's take a closer look at the major elements of the diagram above. Taken together they illustrate what I think is interesting about the human-centric view of mobile computing sketched above:

The mobile context is fundamentally different:

• A contact is the combination of 1) a person you know and 2) the ways you communicate with them. Because it goes with you everywhere and it directly enables communication with people, the mobile device is the logical primary home for contacts.
• Task orientation is the focus on a single primary task at any given moment. The mobile device lends itself to neither multitasking nor complex tasks. Unless you're waiting through a flight delay or sitting on a train somewhere, your focus on the mobile web is probably singular, with a specific goal and a discrete activity. And as mobile evolves to support more kinds of tasks, a self-reinforcing cycle will emerge, where the mobile device becomes the device of preference for an increasing number of activities.
• Location awareness is a critical differentiator between the mobile and, um, non-mobile web experience. Whether or not the device itself includes location awareness per se, the context of use is, well, mobile--away from the desk, network-independent, and out in the analog world we'll always call home. And the more things you can accomplish untethered from your desk chair, the more time you'll spend that way.

And the mobile device has a different relationship to content:

• Regardless of the advances in the browsing experienced introduced by the iPhone, the mobile device will not soon become the preferred medium for web surfing. Mobile content will be increasingly targeted, driven by subscription, syndication, filtering. It will adapting dynamically to the context of use: Locations, tasks, and relationships.
• Web sites have a different relationship with content consumed on the mobile device. The New York Times site will still be the New York Times site, of course--web sites per se aren't going anywhere. But the mobile context creates demand for different uses of the site: The site will increasingly function as a container we interact with through services like syndication. My friend Chris uploads baby photos to Flickr, I subscribe to Chris, and his photos are delivered to my device. The site is a holder of content, syndication is the delivery mechanism, and the device is the receiver; and, APIs deliver content to the site from, you guessed it, the mobile device:
• Artifacts are the things we create on our mobile devices, like pictures and videos. Part of the reason I think mobile really lends itself to social applications is that it is both a producer and consumer of content: A two-way channel between you and the world. And not just any world or the world at large, but the world of your choosing, your place and time, your relationships.

So the most important difference between the mobile web experience and the computer-based web experience is that the mobile web has a context of use that features place and activity: What I've labeled on this diagram Task Orientation and Location Awareness. Also, the mobile device, unlike desktop and even laptop computers, is essentially a communication device. Its heritage remains the cell phone, and its core use, despite its profound evolution the past several years, is to enable communication between people. It's the context that's different for mobile.

Developing web sites and services for mobile requires a keen sense of this different context. Users of your mobile site are out and about--and they're less likely to be reading the New York Times or researching a health care topic than they are to be trying to get directions to a restaurant where someone is waiting for them, maybe take a quick look at the menu, and send their friend a quick SMS apology and ETA.

None of this is to minimize the challenges of designing and developing for mobile. There are still a bunch of screen sizes to deal with, hundreds of devices with different functionality, and no fully-effective standard for adapting content to the variety of requirements. And as important as the iPhone is, it's still only a small slice of the overall market. These are all real challenges you still have to address.

Nonetheless, the opportunity is huge, and soon you might not be able to afford to ignore mobile. Look to Asia and northern Europe for a sense of mobile's future importance in the US.

So what does your business have to offer your customers via mobile? And maybe even more importantly, what do your customers have to offer each other?

Nancy White on Slow Community

Nancy White spoke at ZAAZ last week at our social media event. Her talk, titled Slow Community, was wonderfully ironic coming from the most prolific online participant in THE ENTIRE WORLD. And as usual, Nancy has her finger on an important pulse. Her (she credits others as well) notion of slow community is an exploratory gesture toward solving an emeging crisis in our online lives: social overload, or if you like, information overload 2.0. Ha!

Who doesn't have trouble these days, tracking professional, avocational, personal, and informational relationships across sites, services, and devices? Social network fatigue is here today--and tomorrow promises a truly overwhelming inundation of social and relational input across many channels.

Here's Nancy's 15-minute talk:

Here are the slides:

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Nancy wrote a follow-up post here. There are some great comments on her post--check them out.

For more on Slow Community, start here, then go here.