Web Social Architecture

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.

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?

Talk Like a Pirate Day: Huh?

Yes, in case you didn't know (hardly seems possible) September 19th is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. You can get all the details on the official site.

Here's the thing: The world needs good, regular doses of fun and silliness. I'm totally into it. Tomorrow I'll wake up in LA and head to the airport for Seattle. Anyone who talks with me and seems even remotely to have a sense of humor will be dosed with some fun. That's right. Stand back. I'm going to talk like a pirate.

And, I have to ask myself. How did I get interested in this, exactly? This whole thing is a really strange idea.

It's the power of the Internet, and more particularly of the social Web. Things like International Talk Like a Pirate Day are out there, things that are fun, and silly, and are not exactly dumb. How do we hear about these things? How, for example, did you hear about International Talk Like a Pirate Day (I just love saying those words)?

The ways we hear about these things, these random online things of which there are untold thousands, but only a few we notice, are through the channels of the social Web. So do tell, how did you hear about the most wonderful thing of September 19th, International Talk Like a Pirate Day? I'd love to know.

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.

Tagging the Semantic Web with ESP

Here's an interesting bit of online sociability: an anonymous, cooperative game that adds tags to millions of online photos, filling in a part of the metadata required to realize the Semantic Web.

The ESP Game pairs you up anonymously with another player, and shows you both an image. You both type words describing the image, and when one of your words matches a word from the other player, you get a new image. You try to match tags on 15 images in two and a half minutes.

I played for a few minutes this morning, and I have to say I found it much harder than I expected and very addictive. Basically I totally sucked at it...

...and felt strongly compelled to try to improve my score.

The social element is interesting, too. Even though the other player is entirely anonymous, and I had no way to communicate with them, I felt an obligation to do my best, so as not to "let down" my playing partner. Cooperation is a powerful motivator.

I written in the past about using positive, intrinsic motivation to encourage desired behaviors in community. This is a different kind of example than the one I cited earlier, which focused on displaying the community's behavior around an individual's content. Here the reward is primarily personal, and secondarily social.

An interesting tactic to fill in the Semantic Web's metadata gap. I'm resoundingly unconvinced, though, that this kind of approach could ever generate the consistent, complete, and ongoing tagging required to provide the human-added data element. The game is kind of fun, but I won't be back. I've got plenty of more important things to do.

In contrast, consider Flickr. People tag in Flickr to organize photos, to publicize them, and to re-find them. On Flickr the value of the tagging activity is vested in the tagged object itself, rather than in the entertainment value of the tagging activity. This strikes me as much more promising.

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.

A Sea of Flowers: Feevy's Map of the Blogosphere Challenges the Long Tail

In a previous post about Feevy, I wondered aloud what they'd do with the metadata accumulated by their product. David de Ugarte pinged me today with the first hint.

Cool! I have to say, I find this view of the blogosphere much more interesting than the ones provided by Twingly, which shows what's now, and Technorati, which shows what's big.

There is a distinctive quality of this map that strongly interests me:

Within the central "nucleus" of connections, there tends to be a relatively even distribution of connections. That is, there is no small handful of blogs that are substantially more linked-to than others. This is a big surprise, because conventional wisdom says links should create a power curve of influence with a long tail of isolated blogs.

But something different seems to be happening here, and I'll float two theories about it:

• Blogs seem to link to other blogs of equivalent connectedness

because:

• Networks of linkages form loosely around discrete and related topics.

This observation suggests a change of emphasis for businesses wanting to engage the blogosphere from seeking exposure on the top blogs to seeking engagement with the most relevant blogs. Whereas the traditional PR model might seek out the biggest, most widely read blogs, and a newer, targeting-based PR approach might look to respond to specific mentions of a brand or exec, there could well be a Middle Way:

Find the people who care the most about your stuff, engage with them, and stay engaged over time. In other words, focus resources on targeted, relatively narrow sections of the blogosphere, rather than trying to curry favor with the so-called A-List or scattering ephemeral attention across the whole Internet. You might have heard of this. It used to be called relationship marketing.

Moo: Portable Media as Artifact

Lee Lefever posted a rave review of Moo the other day, and as a Flickr fan I was immediately interested. I love Flickr. I had noticed Moo in the past, and frankly, I tuned it out, because its promo on Flickr just felt like advertising for yet another printing service. I don't need my vacation photo on a coffee mug, thank you anyway.

Lee's post makes a great point about the actual genius of the Moo idea: Moo cards are a great conversation starter, and they're a great way to tell a story. Yep, photos and business cards actually do extend each others' value, unlike Rocky Mountain National Park and Starbuck's breakfast blend.

Jay Feinberg adds his typically insightful take:

It’s become more common for websites to strive towards a user experience in itself, rather than being merely an advertisement for some other experience offline. And, given the social basis of the success of the web, it’s becoming common that our experience of products, etc., is itself web-ified across many websites created by many individuals.

So, the conversation surrounding brands is distributed, partly because anyone can publish something about the brand. But what about portable content, like Flickr photos? On the one hand, portable media related to a product can be attached to an artifact like a business card, where it makes sense. On the other hand, the artifact itself is productized.

One of our clients recently hired us to develop a web site using Flash videos to showcase new features in an upcoming product release. The client wants to engage influential bloggers, so we recommended making the videos portable, so bloggers could embed them in their posts. That's a value offering in and of itself for bloggers, who often prefer embedding video rather than linking to it, but I now wonder what else we can add. How can we remix the portable media offering, or enable others to remix it, so it can become more interesting? Perhaps something like the Colbert light saber challenge? Oops, it's gone...