Web Social Architecture

Crafting a Great Community / Social Media Policy

I've said before that there are three crucial elements of online community policy: Legality, appropriateness, and relevance. I'm now thinking that there's actually a "hierarchy of needs" among those three, and that taken together and put into practice, they are much more than a set of rules for what's ok to do in the community. They’re more like a social contract, a creator of quality and value.

 

Legality isn’t exactly black and white, as you’d sort of want it to be. But it is quite straightforward in that you basically need to do what your lawyers tell you. In many cases there’s some education and negotiation, but there’s also a reason lawyers get paid a lot. In the end, you do what they say.

Likewise, appropriateness is pretty easy. You generally rule out profanity and abuse. From there you can dial the politeness requirements up or down to suit your needs. In fantasy football, for example, smack talk is part of the fun; in a forum for survivors of childhood sexual abuse, behavioral standards are much higher.

But deciding what's relevant and what isn't is a very different story. I consulted, for example, with REI on their online community strategy and governance, and there are a few great examples from that exercise of how challenging relevance is to define:

 

• It’s tempting for an outdoor retailer with a merchandising focus to align community discussions with its product taxonomy. But REI doesn’t sell photography stuff, and photography is a huge part of many people’s outdoor experience. They want to talk about it. So, this one isn’t too tough, right? How about:

 

• Would it be ok to talk about snowmobiling? To post photos and videos of snowmobiling? What about heli-skiing? REI’s focus on stewardship and sustainable enjoyment of the outdoors makes this tough, because most cross-country skiers despise snowmobiles, and heli-skiing is accessible only to the well-off. And then there’s the whole snowmobiles in Yellowstone thing. Yikes. But wait:

 

• In regions like Texas, among the outdoor activities most enjoyed by REI customers are hunting and fishing. Would it be ok on an REI web site to post a photo of yourself posing with the elk you just shot? The poor barefoot hikers in Portland would pass out! But the folks in Plano, or Missoula, would get it. So maybe the elk feels like an extreme example. What about a photo of your six-year-old proudly displaying the day’s catch of bluegill?

 

The thing is, these are brand questions. And when you involve customers in content creation, you expose yourself to all the variety of your customers’ senses of what your brand is all about, from regional variation to variation in taste and preference.

It’s messy. And yes, you have to exercise control. But a degree of openness is also critical, and not only because people won’t participate in a system they perceive as restricting their self-expression. Online community and social media represent a tremendous opportunity to give customers an emotional stake in the brand, a sense of ownership that will increase value at the far end of the funnel—increasing loyalty and generating word of mouth advocacy.

Craft your policies—both outward-facing in community settings and inward-facing for managing your own company’s social media activity—not with the mindset that you need to restrict activity or restrain creative self-expression, but with the mindset that you need to enable creativity and empower participants. I think of it as analogous to sports: The rules are there to make the game safe, fair, and fun—not to keep people from playing.

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."

How Twitter Promotes Quantity to the Detriment of Quality, And Why Twitter Matters Nonetheless

My Twitter experiment was a “successful failure.”

I started an experiment a few weeks ago, basically using Twitter differently than I had previously. Until then, I'd only followed people I know personally--friends, family, colleagues, and professional acquaintances. But a couple weeks ago, I decided to try following everyone who follows me.

This is not a large number of people by Twitter standards (a couple hundred), but I was immediately annoyed with Twitter, and I stopped looking at it for a while. The people I was using Twitter to keep tabs on were simply drowned out by the deluge of incoming tweets, which I found almost entirely uninteresting and not at all useful.

I didn't give up. I created a group in TweetDeck for people I know personally, so I could follow them separately from my full collection of tweeters. That kind of worked on my computer, but it didn’t work on my phone--I never used poor, neglected Twidroid any more. I had to turn off the updates.

I started sort of hating Twitter. What I thought was interesting, though, was people sending me messages thanking me for following them. "You're... uh... welcome...?"

That was what raised the question:

Why do people on Twitter care how many people are following them?

The answer is, because Twitter wants it that way. The affordance for social capital on Twitter is all about quantity: How many following, how many followers, and how many updates posted. The measure of a person, in Twitter, is all about the total amounts accumulated:

The display of these measures represents just a fraction of the text on a Twitter page, just a few pixels of space—but they’re critical, because they are the attributes attached to the representation of my identity. Effectively, they are me, and I am valued on the basis of their accumulation. Other people, at a glance, get a sense of who I am that’s based on the amount of stuff I have, and not what kind of stuff, and not on the value of that stuff.

This is a bad thing. As Twitter’s massive increase in number of users the last few months has started to illustrate, an increase in users also increases the breadth of topics, decreasing the signal to noise ratio. Six months ago, when Twitter was populated mainly by a relatively narrow group of social software and Web aficionados, there was a stronger sense of Twitter being a community. Today there’s much less topical focus, and Twitter’s limitations as a social tool have become much more readily apparent.

The fix: Build quality-based social capital.

What if, instead of showing, underneath my photo and name, the number of people I follow, the number of people following me, and the number of times I’ve posted, Twitter showed data that reflected the value of my activity? For example, what if my Twitter identity were associated with the percentage of my posts replied to, favorited, and re-tweeted by others?

I’m going to go ahead and suggest that this tweak would substantially alter the way people use Twitter—for the better. Because the measure of a person would be their ability to consistently create value, people would be encouraged to be more interesting. But notice that the measures I’m suggesting don’t reflect the number of people finding any particular tweet valuable, only the percentage of tweets found interesting by someone. That’s an important difference, because it says you don’t need to play to the crowd—that one-to-one value counts the same as one-to-many value. So you don’t have to be interesting to lots and lots of people, only interesting to a single person.

And there’s more here yet: Because the social capital of the system would be tied to recognition by others, the system would encourage connections that were active, and based on mutual attention and interest. “Capital” here works in the sense of “currency.” We’d pass it back and forth—if I like your tweet, I reward you with a reply, a retweet, or a favorite. My doing so counts for you. You look for an opportunity to reciprocate.

Quality and value, when rewarded, are fundamentally self-reinforcing. So if Twitter supported quality and value, great ideas would be passed along more, reaching more people. Reputation and credibility would flow from meaningful contribution. Relationships grounded in mutual helpfulness would flourish.

Now, as Twitterers like the prolific Nancy White illustrate, quality and quantity are not mutually exclusive. And it’s certainly better to have more good stuff than it is to have only some good stuff. So a shortcoming of my suggestion is that it doesn’t reward the consistent creation of value over time, or put another way, the creation not only of consistent value but of a LOT of it, consistently.

Batting average only counts beyond a threshold of at-bats. Total home runs matters only relative to years played. If Ichiro goes 4-for-4 in the season opener, he’s batting a thousand, but that doesn’t yet qualify his season for any discussion of the all-time best. So the real answer, if we’re going to get serious about it, is for Twitter to create a quality algorithm and use that as the measure of an individual’s contribution.

Twanalyst is a gesture in the right direction. It’s a service that analyzes Twitter accounts across a number of quality-focused dimensions, resulting in a (sort of cheesy) personality test: I am very pleased to tell you I am a “chatty coherent guru.” Yes!

Kind of fun, but what I actually really like about Twanalyst is that it’s looking primarily at the nature of what you’re doing on Twitter, rather than the amount of it. That, I believe, is the future on an increasingly noisy web.

Speaking of the future, what about Twitter’s future?

At this point, it’s kind of common knowledge that Twitter has passed a… can I say… Twipping point. As Twitter gets huge, and as the purchase offers get bigger, which direction it takes—toward signal or noise—will help determine its fate as a social application.

Will Twitter end up yet another spammy channel, a trivialized feature of a larger social network, under pressure to monetize? Or will it add a valuable layer of ambient awareness to rich, multi-channel online relationships? I’m rooting for the latter, not just because I’m a fan of Twitter (I am), but because I want to live in a digital future where quality, meaning, order, and value trump unwanted noise.

 

But what I’ve said here is also kind of wrong. The story (like stories always are) is more complicated.

Despite all that—despite the shortcomings of a system that rewards meaningless connections, high volumes of worthless posts, and claiming to listen to more people than anyone possibly could—the truth is we can’t ignore Twitter.

And there’s a reason it’s hard to get comfortable with that truth. Twitter, in the midst of its deluge of valueless tweets, also produces a kind of magic: The collective value of all the noise has a tremendous potential to add up to something meaningful—something with a value beyond what any particular contributor can produce. As the Moldova uprising most recently illustrated, and as did the presidential election and Katrina did before it, Twitter, at its best, is a powerful venue for the expression of real-time collective intelligence. And that’s where businesses need to stand up and pay attention.

Tweeting about the Weather Isn't Lame

I can't remember where I read this, but someone (with some time on their hands?) figured out that some higher-than-you'd-expect percentage of posts to Twitter are about the weather. Seriously, the weather!

I myself have done this. And the past month in Seattle, with the crazy snow and now rain we've had, my PNW-centric personal Twittersphere has been all abuzz about sledding, traffic, holiday travel hassles, snow, snow, snow, and now the road-salting controversy in the City Council. (Salting! What is this, Wisconsin? It snows like twice a year here.)

I have to say, the volume of weather-related tweets this holiday season has been marked. And this has made me wonder what's going on. Why would anyone go to the trouble to broadcast a stray water cooler comment out to the world?

On the one hand, this sudden flood (ahem) of banal weather tweets might seem to confirm once and for all the uselessness of Twitter. I see it a little differently, though. What I think is actually happening is that people are creating a layer of light conversation around a synchronous shared experience. It's the equivalent of a water-cooler chat, yes--but I've started to think there's something important about the shared aspect of that experience. If there's one thing we have in common, after all, it's the weather.

Though other smart folks (including, most vehemently, my psychotherapist / wife) disagree, I'm starting to think experiences don't have to be meaningful to be important, as long as they're shared, and especially when the sharing is synchronous with the experience.

So no, tweeting about the weather isn't lame at all. I'd rather think of it as a social gesture acknowledging commonality, strengthening bonds, and maintaining connectedness.

But do all our random followers on Twitter, or even our followers who (are lucky enough to) live in other climates care about this kind of stuff? In many cases, clearly not. For me, this points to Twitter's shortcoming as a social network. Twitter, I'd even say, is not an appropriate tool for relationship-building. It's not, in other words, a social network in its own right.

I see Twitter, instead, as a powerful feature of social networks. Standing alone, it's a feature of existing distributed social networks--and a great reminder that social networks are made of people, not web pages. Fed into Facebook, Twitter becomes a more-powerful status communicator, a feature of Facebook. And with Twitter's open API, endless possibilities exist for layering meaningful triviality into social network-driven web experiences.

Twitter: Trivial. Beautifully So.

I wrote a post a year and a half ago on Twitter in which I identified two types of use for it. This was at the height of the initial buzz about Twitter, and while some folks were really excited to finally see an HTML / SMS / IM social application, others worried aloud that Twitter, for the same reasons it offers such a low threshold of entry, would also tend to erode the quality of social relationships online. The thoughtful anti-Twitter point of view was that it encourages triviality, and the gist of my post was that while that may be true, there are times when trivialities are useful.

Since I wrote that post, I've become an avid Twitterer, and I have to say my perspective on Twitter, and indeed on triviality, has changed. I now see triviality as maybe the critical element of truly meaningful relationships, online and off, and Twitter has accordingly become one of the cornerstone services of my personal and professional social lives.

That sounds crazy, I know, and while it may be true that I am prone to crazy-sounding declaratives, I'm actually not kidding about this. I now use Twitter at work very frequently, mostly within my team, and it has improved our functioning and, dare I say it, made us closer, more personally connected.

Let me float an assertion: The deeper the relationship, the greater the proportion of it dedicated to triviality; and beyond, say, 90% triviality, the relationship isn't a relationship at all. And likewise with meaningful interactions--if everything is meaningful, it's not a relationship, it's therapy.

So here is my Bullseye Diagram of Love, illustrating the way I'm starting to envision online social systems supporting healthy relationships:

So I'm arguing for Twitter, or an analogous triviality service (ha!) as a supplement to existing relationships, not as a full-fledged social channel in and of itself. As a social network, I actually do think it's useless, or worse. And you can take that as a caveat.

But I am saying I think triviality in general and as supported by Twitter, in both personal and professional settings, is indispensable--that we can and should deliberately design it into social systems.

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.

 

Justin Marshall on Social Media Marketing

Here is the video of Justin Marshall's talk last week, titled Money, Media, and Your Mom's Peach Cobbler: Social Media Marketing Done Right. Justin is a colleague of mine at ZAAZ and a major contributor to our efforts in social media.

Justin's take on social media revolves around 3 critical points: Find your customer's shared passion, build value through community, and focus on strategic objectives. His talk includes some great stories and examples, including a sample concept for a social media campaign done right. (Are you listening, Whole Foods?)

Here's the 15-minute video:

 And here are the slides, so you can follow along:

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I'll be posting the other presentations from the event as I get them ready. Video processing, especially at my novice level, takes forever.

Web Professionals: Social Media is about to Change Your Job. Are You Ready?

Let me set the stage for what I mean to discuss here by sharing Ryan's Two-Minute History of Web Marketing:

The web has been defined by three revolutions over the past 20 years.

Prior to the involvement of business, the web was a connected ring of online communities. People interacted with each other and shared information. But the threshold of entry was relatively high, and there was no business model in place to drive innovation. The web kind of stayed the same for a long time.

In the early 90's, businesses started to get involved with the web, and driven by advertising dollars, they applied the same approach to the web as to broadcast media: This was the Broadcast Web. Web as TV commercial, billboard, brochure.

In the late 90's, e-commerce emerged. Amazon started kicking peoples' butts. The web was now a storefront (minus most of the customer support, but that's another story), complete with data-driven pages and integration with business and financial channels. Give me your credit card number, and I ship you a book: This was the Transactive Web. Remember? The one with the bubble.

We're now at the flashpoint of another revolution, driven by the convergence of three forces: Widespread availability of broadband, the lowering of thresholds of entry to publishing (especially for photos and video), and popular awareness of social media (especially MySpace and YouTube). We're only beginning to see the impacts of this change. We're at the bottom of the curve of the Participatory Web. In some ways we've come full circle, returning to a web of connected people sharing information. But in other ways, the emerging web is a new beast entirely: Bigger, faster, with exponentially more people and institutions involved, and with more at stake.

My point with all that is to suggest that most of the way we do our work today in the web-site-making profession reflects the demands of the Broadcast and Transactive web ages. Our planning, processes, tools, and tasks are undergoing a shift—and we’ll be well-served to get out in front of the demands of the Participatory Web.

So what's changing? Most obviously, a greater proportion of the total work of the web site happens after launch. And in a world of limited budgets, budgets built on the idea that the site is mostly done at launch, we're challenged to be faster before launch and smarter after.

Here are some ideas about the disciplines of the people I work closely with day-to-day at ZAAZ. I'm not an expert in all of this, but I sent an early version of this post internally as a memo and got some great feedback. And I'd really love to hear what you think. What have I got wrong, or missed entirely?

Client Services will shift toward helping clients plan for ongoing engagement with customers through the web channel. We’ll be supporting policy development, leadership, and moderation, and we’ll be helping clients transition over set timeframes to self-sustaining community management. We’ll be scoping and planning iterative work responsive to user communities.

User Research professionals will shift toward working to understand issues like value, trust, identity, reputation, motivation, and social ecosystems--online and off. 

Information Architects will shift toward organizing user-generated content; participatory interaction; and emergent and self-organizing content.

Designers will shift toward faster prototyping, with an emphasis on developing brand-aligned affordances for social and participatory spaces.

Developers will shift toward increased reuse and customization of third-party tools, vendor assessment, portability standards, and integration with third-party sites. We’ll be supporting prototyping and iterating live sites. Standards will become more important for client work.

Search professionals will be supporting on-site metadata definition for user-generated content and driving awareness beyond the site. Findability is a key differentiator in the crowded social media marketplace.

Web Site Analytics will shift toward measuring engagement, affinity, and cross-domain activity. Analytics reports will become thermometers for measuring the health of communities and guiding site iterations. The convergence of ad network power and data portability will have huge impacts. It's not about what happens on only your own site anymore.

Web Site Optimization folks will work in closer partnership with analytics, design, and UX to improve engagement, raise trust, and build motivation to participate--conversions that address customer lifetime value. It’s no longer going to be all about pushing more purchasers through the funnel.

Every web discipline is affected by the revolution at hand. To be successful, we need to define how to talk about our capabilities in that light, to frame up those capabilities as offerings, and integrate them into an overall story about our ability to execute social media--because clients are asking, and very soon they're going to want proof.

 

I've got plenty of ideas about this stuff, but I'd really love to hear from you and write a follow-up post summarizing your perspectives. Do share your thoughts about your discipline and how you see it changing in the next few years!

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.