Author Archive
Social media: the sixth C
Over a year ago I coined the term The 5 C’s of Social Media as a way of describing how, at it’s core, social media afforded us 5 base opportunities:
- the opportunity to contribute – easy sharing of information
- the opportunity to comment – your chance to have your say
- the opportunity to collaborate – work with anyone, anywhere to achieve a common goal
- the opportunity of conversation – getting involved in discussions with others
- the opportunity of community – building relationships online
I expanded on how each of the C’s formed a part of the online social experience at the time and the ideas were well received, this post can now be found here.
Whilst being a good base form which to start describing the ideas behind social media the phrase was primarily a headline, an attention bringer so – in that regard – was a throw away; useful at the time but not retained or revisited.
It, therefore, makes it more interesting to find that the phrase appears to have taken on a life of it’s own. The phrase has been adopted, repeated, altered and adapted but, regardless of how it is wrapped up, as one blog post put it:
“amongst the social media circles it is nearly universally agreed, the elements of a good social media strategy consist of the 5 C’s: conversation, community, collaboration, contribution and commenting.”
The Sixth C
Back in June 2008 social media was still primarily reserved for the geeks and the early adopters; the holy grail for any social media service was to achieve ubiquity, to enter the mainstream. Then, around 6 months ago, things changed. In one month Twitter saw over 1300% growth with celebrities and the mainstream media trying to claim social media as their own. Whether you are listening to local radio or national sports coverage or watching TV everyone is now talking about Twitter. It has truly entered the public consciousness in a way that not even Facebook with it’s millions of users has managed to do.
People are now using short status updates as a matter of course, supplementing and even, in some cases, bypassing other forms of communication. I believe we have reached the point where social media can honestly be described as an extension of our normal behaviour and it is still growing.
The importance of the social network in our society is finally starting to fulfil it’s potential and, with more and more companies interacting with their customers in this setting, it is rapidly becoming just another way to do business.
My original suggestion for The Sixth C can, therefore, finally be adopted: culture.
Rumours and potenial: facebook lite
The interwebs are abuzz with the news that Facebook is testing a new, streamlined version of its service called “Facebook Lite”. From a first glance at the leaked screenshots it appears to be far more Twitter like having just status updates but with Comments and Likes enabled. Some might say that it looks more like Friendfeed from a while back when the service was still quite new.
The emergence of Facebook Lite shortly after the aquisition of Friendfeed seems more than a coincidence but, according to TechCrunch it is designed for use in areas where download speeds are slow so we should not get over excited at present.
Potential
Whether or not Facebook Lite develops beyond a low bandwidth version of the site or becomes the frameowrk for something else remains to be seen. If it is kept free from all the clutter that plagues the normal version, then it could be the perfect vehicle for Friendfeed integration. If you add in additional import functionality then Lite has the potential to essentially become a Friendfeed clone – Facebook as it used to be: just for sharing info.
We don’t need to be told who has achieved what on Farmville, or poked, or invited to play Mafia Wars – this was the joy of the Friendfeed service and what really caught the imagination: a place to share, connect and discuss without the limitations of 140 characters.
Regardless of any change in functionality or version, however, a primary sticking point between the methods of operation of Facebook and Friendfeed is the actual friending behaviour. Facebook requires mutual friending but on Friendfeed (just like Twitter and other services) friending can be unilateral or not even required at all in order to interact with another user.
If Facebook could release a version without the need for mutual friending that includes full, real time search then we could be on to a winner.
Some thoughts on Facebook and Friendfeed
A lot has already been said about Facebook’s acquisition of Friendfeed even though we don’t know the full details of how it will all pan out. The doom mongers are working overtime, almost revelling in the fact that they have an excuse for another pop at Facebook whilst others feel that this could be the best thing that could have happened (imagine what it would be like if Google or MS bought them instead).
The facts are that Facebook and Friendfeed are aimed at two disparate audiences for two disparate purposes with two completely distinct operating models. Facebook may have been “borrowing” some of the best ideas that Friendfeed had to offer and Friendfeed, in turn, may have been redesigned their interface to make it more familiar to users of other services but they (currently) remain at almost opposite ends of the social media spectrum.
Do we read between the lines from the announcement on the Friendfeed blog when it says that “Friendfeed will continue to operate normally for the time being” – does this mean that it will eventually be devoured by the Facebook monster and no longer exist as we know it? Most likely, but at present it is all speculation.
Cross-breeding functionality may well enhance both but the acquisition must be handled extremely carefully or the same cross breed could ruin both services and alienate both sets of users.
Community
Unfortunately, social media is a living paradox. It strives for openness and flexibility with accessibility from as many platforms as possible but, despite this surface flexibility, we are tied to the same back end. The constant battle between technological freedom and system dependence. We may be able to connect from anywhere but we are always connecting to the same thing.
But that is what social media is about. We have a choice of networks but a service is only as good as the people who use it, your friends and your community. I may use Twitter, you may use Plurk but without interaction they are meaningless. The choice exists but unless we get all of our friends, our community, to choose the same way we are talking to ourselves.
For all of the flexibility we crave we are governed, out of necessity, by the herd mentality and this is what has a lot of people running scared about the Friendfeed acquisition. If Friendfeed does get absorbed and cease to function as a separate entity what will the resulting offspring be like? Which features will come from either parent? Will we get a genetically perfect super child or end up with a Frankenstein’s monster and, ultimately, will we be able to persuade our community to migrate with us.
Fear of change
As a rule we fear change – at least BIG change – but change can be an extremely effective catalyst prompting new ideas and ways of achieving our goals. Whilst this fear may sometimes be justified it is, at the base level, often unfounded as the likes of Friendfeed are subject to constant change as the service evolves and grows over time. Perhaps the acquisition by Facebook is required for the next evolutionary jump to occur or, just as equally, it may cause an evolutionary dead end – the social media Neanderthal.
All we know is that the winds of change are blowing, their direction remains to be seen so we should all reserve judgement until the storm hits.
Sometimes we need to leave our comfort zones.
The Social Media Economy
Social media and the global economy – the parallels are striking and significant.
Now that the global economy appears to be on the upward curve of a major economic “downturn” it is obvious why things have failed. Hindsight is a marvellous thing but too often we don’t learn from what hindsight has shown us.
Perhaps, more importantly, we also don’t learn from those with the foresight to realise when things are about to go south. There were those who had been forecasting a major financial crash and there are those that have been forecasting problems ahead with the social media “industry”.
Social media has seen the expansion of the biggest online bubble since the whole dotcom boom and it was not hard to see that this level of growth was unsustainable.
Just like our economies, social media services have their own “interest rates”. The more compelling a service (just like a savings account) the more we invest our time in it and, consequently, the more “interest” is paid. If a service becomes less interesting we invest less and, as it can no longer support the same levels of excitement, the “interest rate” falls.
The relative rates between services and the cross over of features/interoperability can be seen as the social media equivalent of the exchange rate between currencies. The exchange rates between services will be in a constant state of flux depending on what facilities they offer and the perception the users have based on comparisons with similar offerings.
As far as ‘mainstream’ usage is concerned, Facebook is the equivalent of the US dollar against which all other services are judged. While those in other markets may not feel that the Facebook dollar is the most relevant currency, the market needs a point of reference and that falls to the service with which ‘Joe Public’ is most familiar.
Just as “real world” companies had been surviving on debt the social media sphere has existed on “borrowing” ideas from somewhere else, mimicking the functionality of other services. As there are only a finite number of ways you can communicate with someone else over the internet we obviously can’t go on with this borrowing. The credit (ideas) either runs out or no-one wants to lend to you. This is when we get the creation of walled gardens – businesses doing their own thing in isolation: a retreat from the global sense of openness that social media tried to instil in all of us.
Aggregators and other services quickly became a repository for rehashes of information held in other places – trading (and potentially profiting) on the returns made elsewhere – money for (essentially) nothing and, perhaps, can be seen as the social media equivalent of the fat cat bankers although, at present, there doesn’t appear to be the financial reward.
In the past 6 months it has been interesting to see that – like a number of banks – various social media services have ‘folded’; social media became too disjointed. The mistakes have been recognised in hindsight and measures taken before the whole industry collapsed like the proverbial house of cards.
Whose stuff is it anyway?
I started thinking about how we use certain social media services a couple of months ago and Alexander reinforced the path my thoughts were taking.
More recently, Allen Stern stated on FriendFeed “i think sharing on google reader is finished – the value for so many sharers has continued to drop from my perspective” which garnered a number of contrary responses.
The real issue as I see it is that the value offered by various services has not been lessened rather it has been altered since the emergence of mashups with data from multiple services all feeding in to each other.
Isolation
Prior to aggregation services such as FriendFeed we looked at other services in isolation and everything had a set perceived value; you knew exactly what you were getting from your RSS reader or your social networking service.
Now we have aggregation and lifestreaming and it is becoming less clear where the boundaries of any function begin and end.
Distinctions
Lifestreaming is an over used term and is often employed when we really mean aggregation. Lifestreaming is traditionally more a Truman Show type experience (literally your life streamed) rather than aggregation which is the collection of your actions on different services in to one location, but what exactly is our stuff? Is our stream a record of our actions or a share of the content of others?
Are there now distinctions between sharing, aggregation, social bookmarking and the like or have they all merged in to one process? When are you just bookmarking as opposed to sharing? As Alexander said: it’s about your intention but, with the way services like FriendFeed operate, is intention enough?
The social contract
I discussed before about the implied social contract of blogging which has caused a number of arguments over exactly what bloggers owe their audiences and perhaps we should be asking if an implied social contract should extend to the way we utilise sharing and aggregation services.
One aspect of FriendFeed, as an example, causes a big divide in opinion and that is the way in which it handles multiple instances of the same item.
Consider the following scenario:
- User A has their Google Reader and Delicious streams fed in to FriendFeed
- User B has their StumbleUpon and Social Median streams fed in to FriendFeed
- User A shares a specific item in Google Reader and also bookmarks that item in Delicious
- User B stumbles the same item and also clips it on Social Median
Two users have between them now created four instances of the same item within FriendFeed and other users will create further duplication upon sharing the same item.
Is this enabling a wider audience to discuss the same item leading to wider ranges of opinion or is it leading to a fragmentation of the conversation and cluttering peoples streams with useless duplicates?
Intention
With isolated services out intention was clear – we would bookmark something for our own reference or share an item to our link blog but now just about any action we perform becomes a ’share’ if we have our online activities aggregated. This leads to a number of new questions:
- do we share things differently based on where we know the share will be seen?
- does our potential audience affect the actions we take on our subscribed services?
- should we be tailoring our behaviour to our online environment and the community that we are a part of?
Prevously, a single action would have one consequence but with aggregation thrown in to the mix we set off a chain of events. A bookmark or a Digg is no longer just that, it also becomes a share which contributes to the duplication on our aggregation services so should we be asking ourselves whether we need to perform the initial act based on our environment or whether we actually need to have these streams aggregated in the first place?
If a number of our ‘friends’ have shared an item and it already has multiple conversation threads do we hold back so as not to muddy the waters or do we go ahead with the share to boost the item up the rankings of a particular service (ReadBurner for Google Reader shares for example) but at the risk of clogging up our streams with further duplicates?
Is this a conflict of interests? Should we help an item gain more exposure or should we accede to the implied social contract and not clutter the streams of those subscribed to our updates?
Social dilemma or over-analysing?
What do you think?
Related Posts
Image by Andy Woo.
Are we too demanding?
It never ceases to amaze me how demanding we can be as IT users and early adopters; to put a twist to the Queen lyric we want it all and we want it now!
We have gone beyond just having an opinion and have all become armchair experts in just about everything – it’s no longer just reserved for sports fans thinking they can manage their team better than the “incompetent muppet” standing on the sidelines.
We feel that we can design things and suggest features better than those getting paid to do the job. In some cases users do have valid points and companies have used customer suggestions to improve their products but we should never lose sight of the fact that we are just one person and the designers and developers are catering for the needs of millions. What might be right for you may not be right for some (hmm, wasn’t that in the Different Strokes theme song?)
So, when a new product gets released in beta when does helpful, constructive criticism go too far and border of the realms of being over demanding?
Take Google Chrome for example.
Now I’m not going to remark on the feature set or the pros and cons of the fledgling browser as many others have already done that and better than I could (although I must admit that I like where Google are coming from) but I would like to comment on the reactions and expectations that are being thrown around the web.
Yes, this is Google and we should expect big things – in some respects I think we already have them, but we must never lose sight of the fact that Chrome is just a first beta; it’s an artists sketch before committing to getting the brushes dirty.
The first beta of Chrome has laid the foundations and put down some very good groundwork which will be fleshed out and perfected over the course of development so statements like “Chrome Not Ready For Enterprise” are pointless.
Of course it’s not and no-one should be suggesting otherwise.
Chrome will not be ready for enterprise for quite a while and will not be considered for enterprise use for even longer – at least in any enterprise with any integrity and a decent IT infrastructure. There are many more factors at play that just the features built in to the browser.
An enterprise environment will have procedures in place to test and approve any new software prior to deployment – beta software will never be considered. Not only do you have potential security or data corruption issues but you must also consider the reputation of your company. How would it look if you were connecting to third party services to access and manipulate sensitive data using an incomplete product? Not only would you tarnish your reputation but you would most likely be kicked off the service.
All we are saying…
Give Chrome a chance. Give any new product or service that comes out as beta a chance and stop making ridiculous demands of something which is, by definition, just a work in progress. This is what beta is all about regardless of who is behind it.
First look reviews and constructive criticism should be encouraged but outlandish statements and ridiculous demands get us nowhere.
A public beta is just the external face of a project and there will be a lot more going on behind the scenes both in terms of advancements of the technology involved and where the project is heading. As I have mentioned in the past, just because a company hasn’t said they will be doing X, Y or Z doesn’t mean it isn’t already on the table; you don’t want to give away all your secrets too early. You may not be able to deliver on all your promises (remember the Longhorn saga) so under promise and over deliver but, more importantly, you don’t want to give too much of a heads up to the competition.
Lessons learnt or common sense?
So, I took most of August out and distanced myself from social media and blogging – it seemed a good time to do it as I had some other stuff going on (a mini cruise to Amsterdam and a weeks holiday).
I had an occasional glance at FriendFeed but only very rarely and Google Reader went begging – there are thousands of unread items I need to wade through/mark as read and a number of feeds that I will most likely unsubscribe from.
Before I start anything here I’d first like to say thanks to Mark and Hutch for thinking of me while I was away, it’s always nice to know that out of site isn’t always out of mind.
Have I learnt any lessons from my time away or is it all really common sense? Let’s have a look.
Who needs social media?
What did we do before we had what we currently think of as social media? We found other things to occupy ourselves, and that’s exactly what I did during last month.
As a family we have started playing World of Warcraft so that’s good to eat up a few hours and it also helped that the UK domestic football (soccer) season has started again so that provides something else to keep me occupied.
Do I need social media? No, and to be honest I haven’t really been missing it as I have been spending more time with my family in the ‘real’ world.
Social media, just like anything else, is habit forming – we can create our own addictions by getting, and wanting to stay, involved. Conversely, distancing ourselves from something for long enough reduces the craving until you can quit. Will power is needed and having a distraction is very beneficial.
Common sense. The above can apply to just about anything and not just social media.
Who needs blogging?
I have had no inclination to blog during my time away and have had to force myself to write this; do I feel I owe it to myself to summarise what happened, or owe it to you the reader? Why should we owe anyone anything?
Blogging is a tough mistress and we often put undue pressure on ourselves. Whether it is because we feel that our readers have invested their trust in us by subscribing to the feeds so we feel compelled to explain ourselves I don’t know but we are always our own worst critics when. let’s face it, most others couldn’t care less. For every social media blogger who disappears there are dozens more to take up the mantle – this is not an area that will dry up anytime soon.
Hutch remarked that if you are having problems blogging then you should return to what interests you but it can be worse than that: what do you do when the blogging process itself doesn’t interest you? You just have to step back like I did and wait for the enthusiam to return. I think I’ll be waiting for a little while longer yet.
Addiction
I’m the kind of person who becomes addicted to things very easily but I also have a very low boredom threshold. If I’m not kept interested then even the strongest addiction doesn’t stand a chance (alcohol and gambling in my past can attest to this) so I need to keep myself challenged in order to thrive.
We’ll have to see what happens over the coming weeks.
Getting too social?
Social media is both a blessing and a curse.
We have the ability to communicate with many interesting people from all over the world in the easiest ways we have ever had available to us. The flow of information and responses is incredibly engaging and is making the world ever smaller – even if governments still have their differences, the citizens of the world are rapidly becoming citizens of the one global village.
On the other hand, however, social media can be a huge time-sink if not managed correctly and the danger exists that we become too engrossed so that other areas of our lives start to suffer. As I have said before: it is about finding a balance that works for us.
Different strokes
We all use social media differently, we have different goals and objectives, different reasons for using one service over another. Bloggers will use services to expand their audience and make items available to a wider cross section of the web thus enhancing their exposure. Nowhere, however, is is written that we must engage on all fronts and, as such, should not be criticised for not doing so.
We all have our favourite services and social networks; we may have accounts on dozens but we invariably use a core set of tools to get us through our daily lives be they Twitter, Plurk, FriendFeed etc. We have our followers across the web and can choose where we interact with them – our choices do not have to match and the variety in social media is what makes it interesting.
Echo?
We complain about the echo chamber and call for users of social media to broaden their horizons and use social media in different ways but, it seems, when certain individuals do this they are criticised for not being accessible or interactive.
A while back, Phil over at Scribkin called out Steve Gillmor among others for signing up to FriendFeed, importing their streams and not returning deeming those individuals Posers. Now, Tad questions how many of those “well known outside of FF” actively engage on the service (fftogo link)
Forgive me if I’m wrong here, but FriendFeed is an aggregation service that just happens to let you discuss items in situ. There is no obligation that the conversation must take place in any given location or even that a conversation should take place at all. Why is it then, that someone using a service for one purpose (aggregation) should de facto be using it in the same way as others? Doesn’t this go against our call for variety?
Following blindly
Social media ‘friending’ has always been pretty incestuous – once we follow someone in one location we tend to seek them out on the new services that we join so that our following/follower lists become ever more similar across the board. While it is always nice to have a few familiar faces on a new service there is no guarantee that we will use it to interact with each other in the same way and this should be recognised, understood and accepted.
It is our choice who we follow on any given network but if they don’t use it in the same way we do then so what? As Robert Scoble commented “God forbid somebody actually try to do something other than hang out in FriendFeed all day”.
Guest post: Is There A Way Back From Free?
Yesterday, I was privileged to do a guest post for Louis Gray and chose to do something a little bit different and wrote about the issue of whether APIs can be used to generate revenue for services such as Twitter, It was something I had been thinking about for a while but the news that they had throttled the unauthenticated API calls which are the life blood of many third party applications brought it in to context:
“It has seemed obvious to me for a while that an ideal aspect of a business plan for a social networking service such as Twitter would be to charge partners for premium access to the API, but once you have started down the free path, is it possible, or wise, to backtrack and start charging?”
You can read the full post over at Louis’ blog here.
I was a bit worried about this post as it could have been a potential banana skin; instead it garnered some good responses both in the comments and on FriendFeed so I wanted to follow up on a few issues raised as a result.
“The route to success is recognising that Twitter’s power is as a service”
Jeff Sonstein raised the above point that a successful way forward would be for other services to aggregate the data from Twitter for their own users – much as FriendFeed is doing. Jesse Stay argues that developers may not be willing to pay and go elsewhere such as identi.ca and that, instead, Twitter should consider premium features that they can offer their users for a fee.
As I mentioned in my post, services like FriendFeed are just as guilty as having no clearly defined business plan; the social web is running on venture capital but how close are we to running on empty? It is unlikely that many services will be willing or able to pay for API access and, although, both users and developers may move to a free alternative how then will thatservice support itself – we will enter into a vicious cycle.
Sudha Jamthe suggested that Twitter could “go to traditional media companies to build new services upon their API, similar to what Sphere did with NY Times” but I don’t see the potential for the same kind of relationship here. Admittedly, Twitter has a large body of data but a lot of that is quite frankly useless and banal – even some relatively interesting content is worthless when taken out of it’s original context.
Trend analysis
Perhaps the main use for the bulk of Twitter data is in trend analysis which could, in turn, be used to plan advertising campaigns or for targeted marketing. Is this why Twitter bought the best search tool and has limited the API requests for all the rest? Could they make money by selling their analysis results or by charging for full access to enable companies to perform their own?
The folks at Twitter have never completely ruled out advertising so full trend analysis of your conversations and your friends could provide the only way to effectively target you as an individual and provide ads that you are actually likely to act upon.
Whatever the future brings I feel it will be quite different from the way we are operating now. Users may still get free access and developers might only be charged a small amount (perhaps an initial one off fee to get a licence to use the API) but advertising or data analysis is probably the way way to get most bang for the Twitter buck.
Dispensing with the trappings of technology.
I wanted to post something a little different today and look at how my use of technology has altered which, in turn, gives an idea as to how my perception of social media has changed.
This blog took over from the old Randomelements site which I had self-hosted on one flavour of SharePoint or another since 2003. I was also running my own Exchange Server and handling all my own emails. Initially, these endeavours were useful in that they forced me to learn: managing and maintaining a Windows 2003 based network and the related server applications but, once things were established and I was able to troubleshoot any issues that arose the learning stopped.
While other people were content to have their sites and mails hosted remotely I was dealing with everything locally just for the sake of it; being able to say I could.
I changed ISP and in doing so lost the static IP address I had been using. While dynamic solutions exist – such as DynDNS – managing things became a chore, especially when it became apparent that the IP addresses I was being assigned by the new ISP were on the PBL. Any change of IP address meant that I had to request it be removed from the PBL before emails sent from my server would be accepted by an servers checking the originating IP address. At the same time, SharePoint no longer cut it as an effective blogging platform.
Consequently, the move to Wordpress and remotely hosted email have been made and life has been simplified from a technical perspective. Outlook and my phone are both accessing email via IMAP this keeping in sync and I have been able to shut down the server at home - it is no longer being used so why waste the power.
I was using technology at home just for the sake of it under the misguided impression that it made a difference but I still have full control over my blog and emails so what is the difference? I treat them now as a means to achieve something rather than as a focus in themselves, and this is how I see social media. Social media should not focus on the tool in use but on what that tool allows you to do so we must not get caught up in the trappings of the technology as they will distract us from our goals.
