TheWayoftheWeb

Content and Digital Marketing Specialists

social networking

My presentation on building online communities

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I was invited to speak about ‘Building online communities to support successful media brands’ on Tuesday by the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, as part of an event covering what Scholarly Publishing can learn from other industries.

As the opening act, and with a subject so huge, I opted to go for a fairly general overview to hopefully inspire more people to give it a go without worrying about the ‘correct’ way to do things – because I’ve found that beyond some simple principles, the most important thing is tailoring what you do to your specific community.

In retrospect I probably could have included some more specific case studies – for instance Absolute Radio on Twitter and Facebook! But that’s why I subtitled it ‘a work in progess’ because anything on online communities is going to need constant revision and updating, and I intend to create v2.0, v3.0 etc and hopefully involve some more people to create a more comprehensive guide.

When concerns over social networks go way too far…

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Businesses and organisations can either embrace the opportunities and challenges of increasingly easy social interaction, or they can react against it. And two recent examples show how worrying that reaction can be.

Most digitally-aware people realise that anything you put on a public (or even supposedly private) social networking site can be seen by people including your employers.

But how about Bozeman City, in Montana, which requires job applicants to hand over their log-in information and passwords to any internet chat rooms, social networks or forums?

Why should potential employees have any right to privacy at all?

And then a media company, which by rights should know better, gets shown up. The Associated Press has issued social media guidelines, which not only match the restrictions put out by other media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal,  but actually asks employees to monitor and edit what appears on their social network profiles, even when it’s written by their friends.

From the guidelines (via Mashable)

“Q. Anything specific to Facebook?

It’s a good idea to monitor your profile page to make sure material posted by others doesn’t violate AP standards; any such material should be deleted. Also, managers should not issue friend requests to subordinates, since that could be awkward for employees. It’s fine if employees want to initiate the friend process with their bosses.

The News Media Guild, which represents 1500+ AP employees is rightly speaking out about the matter, which could, in theory, see AP employees punished for something written by someone else on their profile wall etc. Or, as is equally likely, a spambot.

The democratisation of old school networks

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A chance conversation with @farhan about social networking and social media reminded me of something I’d been considering for a while, but hadn’t got round to posting.

Which is the fact that ‘social networking’ has always existed in a very formal sense – in the networking that took place on the golf course, or amongst graduates of certain university colleges or public schools (In the UK, a ‘public’ school is, in fact a private school). You’d network with people wearing the right tie and blazer, and you’d either be born into, or pay your way into that network. A rare few tended to work their way into it by some good fortune.

And I’m not for a moment going to suggest that the ‘old school tie’ networks have been replaced by Facebook or Twitter. Or that there aren’t cliques already formed by social media ‘experts’, marketing people or tech geeks.

But the barrier to entry has become a lot lower. By investing time and effort into researching the right topics, adding value, or tieing together individuals, it’s entirely possible to become the lynchpin or a significant member of an online community – and whilst it’s not always a measure of skill or knowledge, the barrier is your natural skill in interacting via your keyboard or mobile, rather than anything else – unless you’ve reached a certain stage of internet celebrity, your looks, elocution, or ease in the presence of others won’t be tested, and your online social footprint will go some way to preparing, mitigating or even celebrating your possible shortcomings.

Which can only be a good thing – although the question is whether the new networking will evolve to better recognise the people truly providing value, and those who talk (blog) a good game. And how well those truly working at what they do are able to invest the additional time in marketing themselves in the age of the *ahem* personal brand.

Why Mark Zuckerberg is right to dismiss Facebook users

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As a specialist in online communities and social media, it may seem a little strange that I would suggest Mark Zuckerberg is right to ignore the complaints of Facebook users over the recent changes to the social network, but stick with me on this one.

The story so far:

Facebook releases a redesign which shows more of a Friendfeed/Twitter influence. Users react badly and an app is introduced to vote on the new design. The app has over 1 million votes so far, with 94% against the new layout and 600,000 comments – Facebook has over 175 million users for context. (A suitable time to remind everyone of ‘the supermarket effect‘ when it comes to redesigns?)

Then on Friday, Gawker posted details of a memo by Mark Zuckerberg to Facebook employees, supplied by an anonymous tipster.  ‘He said something like ‘the most disruptive companies don’t listen to their customers’

Sadly, the memo hasn’t been published anywhere, so like everyone else, I’m going on the third-hand hearsay. Cnet has a reasonable summary of the split between people attacking Facebook/Zuckerberg for his apparent lack of concern about users, and those who are supporting Facebook. So far, though, only Robert Scoble appears to have addressed why Zuckerberg is right to dismiss user concerns in this instance.

So why is Mark Zuckerberg right?

There’s a difference between collaboration and co-creation (which I evangelise), and, as Scoble puts it, ‘letting the customers run our business mode’. Think of every product that has been dulled by focus groups until it fails to ignite any interest from anyone.

Zuckerberg wants to keep Facebook disruptive – which is completely correct if it will avoid the loss of interest associated with the previous big social networks – look at the current state of Friendster and  Myspace. Both are still sizeable, but when did either of them ignite any sense of passion or controversy?

Too often, a great idea gets lost in repeated meetings, discussions and trying to meet the expectations of everyone involved – now try applying the views of 175 million people to a business plan.

And it takes strong leadership to lead any project, no matter how democratic in nature – from Wikipedia to Twitter, users contribute, collaborate, create, build-on and influence – but eventually someone has to pick a strategy and run with it.

And the redesign is leading to reports of the benefits for brands and for Facebook advertising.

Meanwhile Scoble points to user data and recommendations leading to businesses. And the fact that people may claim they’re rushing to leave since the redesign, but what people say is often different to what they do, and with such a critical mass, there are a lot of strong ties to break, with no like-for-like alternative really getting any attention.

They just don’t get it:

Part of my reason for posting is an article by Frank Reed over at Marketing Pilgrim, and others like it. We shouldn’t confuse customer service with customers dictating business strategy simply by an immediate backlash – all customer input should be acknowledged, and then a decision has to be made to act on it. It’s the same confusion that portrays Open Source as impossible to make money from, or social media as the only place to bother marketing in.

(And for the record, I don’t like the new design, I’m not going to leave over it, and I probably use Facebook 1-2 times a day for pleasure and 3-4 times a day for work, preferring Twitter and Friendfeed).

Responses to ‘social network health threat’ include the NHS

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Following the mass media coverage of Aric Sigman’s paper on the ‘biological implications of social networking’, to which I added my own response yesterday, the Institute of Biology has made the paper publicly available.

And there are two good responses to reading the paper available already, and well worth reading.

The first is by Charles Arthur on the Guardian technology blog, which is a pretty fair and balanced look at the paper.

And the second is a great examination of the findings by the National Health Service Choices site. (Cheers to @peeebeee for the tip)

Both point out that the description of the paper and the subsequent reporting appears to have made a jump from the actual research into the implications of isolation, to claiming that social networking is causing isolation without any evidence.

‘A Facebook poke cannot replace a good old hug, it seems.’  – from the Insititue of Biology’s own description.

I don’t think anyone would claim replacing physical contact with humans with digital contact exclusively would be a desirable aim – which is probably why so many online social networks are devoted to enabling people to connect and then meet in the real world – Facebook events, online dating, barcamps, unconferences, travel networks etc.

For instance, I love the latest blog post from travel network Dopplr – highlighting that there were 250,000+ times travellers were coincidentally in the same place and could have shared dinner etc.

I don’t think the debate about the potential health risks (physical and mental) of changing work and leisure should be dismissed or hidden. I just fear that, as often happens, the sensible debate gets buried under soundbites to the point that any realistic recommendations are ignored because people have become tired of the subject.

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