Users in social network will typically assume one or many of social roles and relations under the communicative paradigm:
1) family member in family relationship
2) dating relationship and love relationship
3) close buddies with strong trust relationship
4) common friends bonded by physical connections (e.g. classmates)
5) playmates sharing common interests, can be virtual relations (e.g. "friends" at online forum or chatroom)
6) co-workers in job related relationship
7) consumers related to business entities (e.g. online stores, dentist, lawyer, consumer brands, publishers, music labels, movie producers, pop stars, etc.)
The first 3 are quite strong relations in daily social life and help to maintain a healthy personal psychological conditions. Ironically, since the bonding is so strong and natural in family and close buddies, we tend to invest least effort in social networks. The perceived social distance in online world can never compete with the close natural relations. In contrast, the top investment regarding networking efforts is the dating relation. Seeking such relation is the primary objective for most single people.
Depending on the user's role and personality, typically there's a "hub", or "anchor", or "lead" person in a small and closed personal network. The anchor person could be wife in family, mother for children in natural relations. As just stated, family relations are not most active in social networks. Among friends circles, people having hypersocial type of personality will assume the role of organizer for conversation flow, virtual events, and the glue to connect other friends, including introducing new friends. Interestingly, hypersocial personality may not necessarily consistent between physical world and virtual world. A shy person could be hypersocial and becomes a hub in social networks.
Second to dating relation, common friends relation (category 4) is quite rewarding for relation investment and there is less risk involved. A social skillful person could easily leverage regular friends base for both personal life and career. Good social apps or social utilities will enhance relations and help to overcome social skill shortage. Common friends relation is the twilight zone between 2, 3, 5 and 6 because "friend" here has very broad range of definition.
Working relation (category 6) is the key for career success and also could be high risk relation. People carefully invest and mitigate the risk by following social codes or social norms more strictly. Given the risk factor, enterprise or corporate social networks is less popular than social networks for other relations.
Relation 5 and 7 are important in leisure life. Since there's no risk involved in the relations, usually users are also least responsible in the virtual world, specially with disguised identities.
Relation 7 is the key to generate advertising revenue when the social network can be used as a powerful marketing tool. Social network operators' core business is to bridge all other relations with consumers. The difficulty remains in intent vs. interest. Consumers searching Google for product info is taking consumer role and the relation has shortest distance to business entities. Dating and friend roles distance from consumer role by orthogonal relations. Social ads attempt to fill the gap. However, the only possible success is the transmedia approach, i.e. ads become a part of social message and remix with normal social messages in order to enhance non-consumer type of relations.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Saturday, March 8, 2008
Fans, entourage, and hypersociability
Fans are the core public social relations in Myspace since day one. At least, the original vanilla version of Myspace as public community was made up of music artists surrounded by their fans. In Myspace, fan relation is just a special kind of friend. It's relatively easy to get friended as most artists really pay attention and take care of precious fan relations. More interestingly, aggressive artists often send add friend request to "steal" fans.
in early days, fans didn't exist in Facebook. The vanilla Facebook never cared much about virtual relations in virtual community. Facebook differentiated from Myspace by focusing on physical world relations happened in campus. Last year, in the game of Myspace catching up, fans feature was finally added.
Fans in facebook is a dedicated feature and it is an explicit social relation, while in Myspace, fans are implicit "friends" to the artist. Mixing regular friends with fans, the cons is that two different relations belong to two distinct social circles. However, fans having entourage attitude may leverage such hypersociability. The pros is that fans could feel closer to the artist and could easily make entourage relations once the fans can be mixed with the artist's personal friend circle and perceptively involved. In Myspace, the entourage relations is perceived though top friends and message board. It can appear hypersocial but the relation indeed helps the artist to build fan base.
Hypersociability could further allow fans involve into artists creative activities. From different perspectives, today artists may explore transmedia approach. Some artists in Myspace provides music sample loops and ask fans to do the remix. The remix later got posted on the message board for share.
in early days, fans didn't exist in Facebook. The vanilla Facebook never cared much about virtual relations in virtual community. Facebook differentiated from Myspace by focusing on physical world relations happened in campus. Last year, in the game of Myspace catching up, fans feature was finally added.
Fans in facebook is a dedicated feature and it is an explicit social relation, while in Myspace, fans are implicit "friends" to the artist. Mixing regular friends with fans, the cons is that two different relations belong to two distinct social circles. However, fans having entourage attitude may leverage such hypersociability. The pros is that fans could feel closer to the artist and could easily make entourage relations once the fans can be mixed with the artist's personal friend circle and perceptively involved. In Myspace, the entourage relations is perceived though top friends and message board. It can appear hypersocial but the relation indeed helps the artist to build fan base.
Hypersociability could further allow fans involve into artists creative activities. From different perspectives, today artists may explore transmedia approach. Some artists in Myspace provides music sample loops and ask fans to do the remix. The remix later got posted on the message board for share.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
How mobile social networks differ from Internet social networks
Internet social networks have become mainstream online activities. However, mobile counterpart has not yet taken off. As we carefully evaluate the difference, we can foresee the huge potential.
Technology, usage, and user experience
Obviously, Internet browser has the advantage of browsing and capable to deliver rich user experience. Given the larger screen, faster connection and processing power, rich media is pervasive on Internet. In this sense, the usage of Internet is more media oriented. On the other hand, mobile device is historically more communication oriented. Today, mobile computing is becoming more powerful as we experienced with iPhone, once the cost barrier is overcome by volume, eventually rich media will penetrate into mobile world. However, mobile device is not ideal for browsing behavior, there must be innovative ways for users to acquire content more efficiently and effectively. So far, social networks along with widgets and social media are most promising solutions for mobile user experience.
Social graph
Internet users need to add friends one by one in order to build up their social graph. Friends discovery is only possible on large networks. In mobile case, the social graph is pre-existed in the form of contact list or phone book. There is virtually no extra effort to bootstrap the individual network.
Physical relations vs. virtual relations
Mobile phone book represents the real life relationships in physical world. It is not convenient to establish virtual relationships, and the users are not used to engage people they don't know. In contrast, Internet users tend to enjoy the relationship without physical contact at various virtual communities (e.g. fans of music bands at myspace).
Public and semi-public profile
One primary attraction of Internet social networks is the profile presentation. It could be completely public or only available to friends. Self expression could be a main objective. Users spend significant amount of time in profile page construction and decoration. The expressive profile is not easy to build and to show on mobile devices. The device constraint and usage habit prevent mobile social networks from profile centric social messaging.
Activity and behavioral social messaging
Since mobile devices allow users stay connected on the go, conceptually, mobile social networks are perfect candidates for activity centric or behavior centric social messaging and interactions. IM type of messaging, Twitter type of micro blogging, FireEagle type of location based mobile social apps, and facebook type of social widgets prefer mobility by nature. The usage pattern differs from Internet in that the access could be more frequently and time span would be shorter. The overall user engagement might be higher than Internet counterpart, specially when rich media is embraced.
Social equity
Aside from self entertainment (media oriented activities), the objective of mobile communication is social interaction and it is the process of accumulating social equity. Since mobile social networks favor real life relations, the social equity is easier to "cash out" in physical world. In other words, users should have more incentives in mobile social interactions. In contrast, building social equity in virtual communities requires more investment in time and effort, the reward and the equity value are more difficult to realize.
Technology, usage, and user experience
Obviously, Internet browser has the advantage of browsing and capable to deliver rich user experience. Given the larger screen, faster connection and processing power, rich media is pervasive on Internet. In this sense, the usage of Internet is more media oriented. On the other hand, mobile device is historically more communication oriented. Today, mobile computing is becoming more powerful as we experienced with iPhone, once the cost barrier is overcome by volume, eventually rich media will penetrate into mobile world. However, mobile device is not ideal for browsing behavior, there must be innovative ways for users to acquire content more efficiently and effectively. So far, social networks along with widgets and social media are most promising solutions for mobile user experience.
Social graph
Internet users need to add friends one by one in order to build up their social graph. Friends discovery is only possible on large networks. In mobile case, the social graph is pre-existed in the form of contact list or phone book. There is virtually no extra effort to bootstrap the individual network.
Physical relations vs. virtual relations
Mobile phone book represents the real life relationships in physical world. It is not convenient to establish virtual relationships, and the users are not used to engage people they don't know. In contrast, Internet users tend to enjoy the relationship without physical contact at various virtual communities (e.g. fans of music bands at myspace).
Public and semi-public profile
One primary attraction of Internet social networks is the profile presentation. It could be completely public or only available to friends. Self expression could be a main objective. Users spend significant amount of time in profile page construction and decoration. The expressive profile is not easy to build and to show on mobile devices. The device constraint and usage habit prevent mobile social networks from profile centric social messaging.
Activity and behavioral social messaging
Since mobile devices allow users stay connected on the go, conceptually, mobile social networks are perfect candidates for activity centric or behavior centric social messaging and interactions. IM type of messaging, Twitter type of micro blogging, FireEagle type of location based mobile social apps, and facebook type of social widgets prefer mobility by nature. The usage pattern differs from Internet in that the access could be more frequently and time span would be shorter. The overall user engagement might be higher than Internet counterpart, specially when rich media is embraced.
Social equity
Aside from self entertainment (media oriented activities), the objective of mobile communication is social interaction and it is the process of accumulating social equity. Since mobile social networks favor real life relations, the social equity is easier to "cash out" in physical world. In other words, users should have more incentives in mobile social interactions. In contrast, building social equity in virtual communities requires more investment in time and effort, the reward and the equity value are more difficult to realize.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
3 generations of social networks
So far, the evolution of social networks has been through three generations:
1G - Profile centric
The early social networks like friendster and myspace in 2005 emphasized user profile construction and sharing. The social graph is also part of the profile. Today, LinkedIn is still profile centric. A profile presents a user's static identity only. The persona presented is not yet a living creature, but quite useful when user wants to check out a new friend or contact.
2G - Activity centric
Users proactive interactions make persona live. In myspace, only the user comment area (message board) is the primary social interaction place, while the whole purpose of Facebook is to enable all sorts of social activities. After Facebook opened up its social platform, thousands of 3rd party social widgets flood in, making Facebook more activity centric. Activities keep users busy but may overload the users as well.
3G - Behavior centric
User's social behavior observed by others, mainly through passive or unintentional social message, is the trend of next generation of social networks. This is because behavior centric is more close to real life social interactions. One example is the body language in physical world. The behavior observation mechanism can be traced back to Facebook's innovative mini-feed and later beacon feature. The biological human can process the surrounding social messages efficiently. However, beacon as of today is extremely inefficient. Intelligent agents must be applied to partially automate the behavior observation. The recommendation or taste engines at Flixter, Amazon, Netflix, etc. are automated, though narrow banded to taste comparison only.
1G - Profile centric
The early social networks like friendster and myspace in 2005 emphasized user profile construction and sharing. The social graph is also part of the profile. Today, LinkedIn is still profile centric. A profile presents a user's static identity only. The persona presented is not yet a living creature, but quite useful when user wants to check out a new friend or contact.
2G - Activity centric
Users proactive interactions make persona live. In myspace, only the user comment area (message board) is the primary social interaction place, while the whole purpose of Facebook is to enable all sorts of social activities. After Facebook opened up its social platform, thousands of 3rd party social widgets flood in, making Facebook more activity centric. Activities keep users busy but may overload the users as well.
3G - Behavior centric
User's social behavior observed by others, mainly through passive or unintentional social message, is the trend of next generation of social networks. This is because behavior centric is more close to real life social interactions. One example is the body language in physical world. The behavior observation mechanism can be traced back to Facebook's innovative mini-feed and later beacon feature. The biological human can process the surrounding social messages efficiently. However, beacon as of today is extremely inefficient. Intelligent agents must be applied to partially automate the behavior observation. The recommendation or taste engines at Flixter, Amazon, Netflix, etc. are automated, though narrow banded to taste comparison only.
Monday, February 25, 2008
Who will pay the bill for social media?
Stage6, the video sharing site from DivX, today has announced that it will be shutting down. Last month, Revver, another video site was on sale for $1M. We would expect to see more death tolls among social media startups, mainly from video companies with the high operating cost.
Users love UGC, however, who will pay the bill? The list of possible payers is quite short:
1) Users. No way! Internet is free, that's Internet culture. Subscription model won't work in general.
2) VC's. No kidding! VC's only pay for bait - baiting for high return exit. If there's no sight of exit, bait can never be meal.
3) M&A bidders. No hot seat on deal table. There are so many potential acquisition targets, but first, large media and enterprises need time to figure out new social media strategies. There's no enough fear factor to miss the deal.
4) Advertisers. Not falling love yet. Everyone dream to be the next Google until the advertisers buy in the idea. Advertising on social media is still a test tube business.
It's not the fault that social media startups could not figure out a viable business model. Simply because the business model doesn't exist. Google's longtail story is about timing - once the ad industry is ready, new business model can be sold and somebody will pay the bill.
Before the stone can be turned into gold, the social media game is abort surviving. I see three surviving strategies:
1) Lure larger bait and make pocket deep. Youtube won't fall even there's no clear business model. However, there's no many Googles for other whatever tubes.
2) Get a night job. VMIX just dumped its community and focused on its technology offering to NBC type of marquee accounts.
3) Tighten the belt. Lower burn rate in rich media is tough but doable. Joost and Vuze utilizing P2P technology are able to cut the bandwidth bill. Hulu gets its R&D in Beijing to cut the relatively low paychecks.
Stop talking about business model, it's time to focus on surviving before the web2.0 bubble bursts.
Users love UGC, however, who will pay the bill? The list of possible payers is quite short:
1) Users. No way! Internet is free, that's Internet culture. Subscription model won't work in general.
2) VC's. No kidding! VC's only pay for bait - baiting for high return exit. If there's no sight of exit, bait can never be meal.
3) M&A bidders. No hot seat on deal table. There are so many potential acquisition targets, but first, large media and enterprises need time to figure out new social media strategies. There's no enough fear factor to miss the deal.
4) Advertisers. Not falling love yet. Everyone dream to be the next Google until the advertisers buy in the idea. Advertising on social media is still a test tube business.
It's not the fault that social media startups could not figure out a viable business model. Simply because the business model doesn't exist. Google's longtail story is about timing - once the ad industry is ready, new business model can be sold and somebody will pay the bill.
Before the stone can be turned into gold, the social media game is abort surviving. I see three surviving strategies:
1) Lure larger bait and make pocket deep. Youtube won't fall even there's no clear business model. However, there's no many Googles for other whatever tubes.
2) Get a night job. VMIX just dumped its community and focused on its technology offering to NBC type of marquee accounts.
3) Tighten the belt. Lower burn rate in rich media is tough but doable. Joost and Vuze utilizing P2P technology are able to cut the bandwidth bill. Hulu gets its R&D in Beijing to cut the relatively low paychecks.
Stop talking about business model, it's time to focus on surviving before the web2.0 bubble bursts.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
3R ingredients in social recipes
Upon designing a social application, we need to focus on three main social ingredients that make up the recipes for social interactions:
1) Role: the person's acting role within the community.
2) Relation: the inter-person relationship.
3) Re/action: the action/reaction behavoir under certain relationship.
At flickr, it's easy to see two different roles: content producers and content consumers. However, there are social roles that sometimes may not be quite obvious, such as newbies, fans of certain photographers, subject specialists, gear lovers, critique, moderators, etc. Definitely the same person may assume multiple roles, and roles of the same person can be shifted from time to time.
Relationships are formed and shaped by connecting roles among people. A subject specialist on seascape photography, or a gear lover collecting Canon lens is likely surrounded by newbies. Fans would enjoy reading quality critiques. Reputable moderators would settle the flame generated by the hostile commenters. A community cannot be well forms if certain important relations are missing.
Re/action makes the social dialog and keeps the relation live. Re/action behavior is conducted under social norms. Social features in the sense of tools can help the formation of social norms. Spam filter can fend off intruders in bad relations. Thumb-up, dig, or kudo as reaction can accumulate social equity and promote healthy relations. Beyond the tools functionality, like any society, the action/reaction behavior at the end collectively forms the culture. Users make the culture through the app. App itself won't make the culture.
Successful social apps should allow users to find out easily:
1) This is the right place for me as my role can fit into the community.
2) Based on my preferred acting roles, I can bring in and extend my existing relations from physical world if needed, and establish new relations at the virtual world.
3) I can act/react in my comfortable zone when interacting with other people in my preferred social graph.
To make 1,2,3 happen, besides building the right social features from the tool angle, human factors are more significant as they shape the culture. Checkpoint: Do you have dedicated community managers? Are you able to promote and encourage loyal users who have been taking moderator roles?
1) Role: the person's acting role within the community.
2) Relation: the inter-person relationship.
3) Re/action: the action/reaction behavoir under certain relationship.
At flickr, it's easy to see two different roles: content producers and content consumers. However, there are social roles that sometimes may not be quite obvious, such as newbies, fans of certain photographers, subject specialists, gear lovers, critique, moderators, etc. Definitely the same person may assume multiple roles, and roles of the same person can be shifted from time to time.
Relationships are formed and shaped by connecting roles among people. A subject specialist on seascape photography, or a gear lover collecting Canon lens is likely surrounded by newbies. Fans would enjoy reading quality critiques. Reputable moderators would settle the flame generated by the hostile commenters. A community cannot be well forms if certain important relations are missing.
Re/action makes the social dialog and keeps the relation live. Re/action behavior is conducted under social norms. Social features in the sense of tools can help the formation of social norms. Spam filter can fend off intruders in bad relations. Thumb-up, dig, or kudo as reaction can accumulate social equity and promote healthy relations. Beyond the tools functionality, like any society, the action/reaction behavior at the end collectively forms the culture. Users make the culture through the app. App itself won't make the culture.
Successful social apps should allow users to find out easily:
1) This is the right place for me as my role can fit into the community.
2) Based on my preferred acting roles, I can bring in and extend my existing relations from physical world if needed, and establish new relations at the virtual world.
3) I can act/react in my comfortable zone when interacting with other people in my preferred social graph.
To make 1,2,3 happen, besides building the right social features from the tool angle, human factors are more significant as they shape the culture. Checkpoint: Do you have dedicated community managers? Are you able to promote and encourage loyal users who have been taking moderator roles?
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
When social ads missing semantics
"Leaving Yahoo?" ad placed at facebook by First Round Capital made a news: facebook social engine mistakenly mashed up a profile photo of a Yahoo employee to the ad. Read the fact.
The advertiser First Round Capital cannot see the actual ad at Yahoo network on facebook. What happened is that the Yahoo employee also belongs to FRC group:
Anyhow, I've now been informed (loudly) that my ad which said "Leaving Yahoo?" was accompanied by a picture of a current Yahoo employee. Most of those employees joined the FRC group before the ad campaign -- and (obviously and justifiably) were not too pleased by any implications that they were leaving their employer. And while I've apologized in person to those that contacted me, here's a very public apology to those who haven't.
This interesting social ad experiment generated totally unexpected results for the advertiser. The missing link is the semantics processed by facebook social engine. Even human can make mistakes during social engagement with misaligned social context, as of the machine, why not?
The simple machine model doesn't work for human. If the ad is going thru viral channel, human social ability would mostly place it in appropriate social context. However, this natural human model seems not working for facebook's eager revenue objective.
Anyway, it's funny to see actual people being placed by ad engine in the way of AdSense which is often non-sense. This story could be a perfect sample of first generation social ads.
The advertiser First Round Capital cannot see the actual ad at Yahoo network on facebook. What happened is that the Yahoo employee also belongs to FRC group:
Anyhow, I've now been informed (loudly) that my ad which said "Leaving Yahoo?" was accompanied by a picture of a current Yahoo employee. Most of those employees joined the FRC group before the ad campaign -- and (obviously and justifiably) were not too pleased by any implications that they were leaving their employer. And while I've apologized in person to those that contacted me, here's a very public apology to those who haven't.
This interesting social ad experiment generated totally unexpected results for the advertiser. The missing link is the semantics processed by facebook social engine. Even human can make mistakes during social engagement with misaligned social context, as of the machine, why not?
The simple machine model doesn't work for human. If the ad is going thru viral channel, human social ability would mostly place it in appropriate social context. However, this natural human model seems not working for facebook's eager revenue objective.
Anyway, it's funny to see actual people being placed by ad engine in the way of AdSense which is often non-sense. This story could be a perfect sample of first generation social ads.
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