Designing the Social Web (for Web2.0 expo)

Designing Social Websites Christina Wodtke

Page about Christina

Audience question: “what do you want?” I don’t want to ask everyone to say what they want, but here I like to ask a few folks to offer “if you don’t’ get X, will you leave mad? You What do you want?

Jargon Check
Social Media
Social Software
Social Network
The Social Web
The Social Graph
Communities
Web 2.0
UGC
Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
MySpace
Flickr

What is social, really?

Credit Tim O’Reilly

The Social Web is a digital space where data about human interactions is as important as other data types for providing value Community is when those humans care about each other.

Social Software can be loosely defined as software which supports, extends, or derives added value from, human social behavior - message-boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking.
Social XXX
Usenet
Forums
Email
Mailing lists
Groupware
Social Networks Services
Social Software
Social Media
Nothing New

Why bother?

Trebor Scholz http://collectivate.net

8 days after a video was posted showing how to pick the lock in 30 seconds using a pen Kryptonite recalled 380,000 locks

Your users have something to tell you. If you don’t give them a way to communicate, they will find one. Trebor Scholz http://collectivate.net

“ I could go on with the benefits of building relationships rather than SEO campaigns, such as:
Longevity and customer retention, not to mention repeat customers
Bug tracking and community policing (ie. Flickr’s ‘Flag this photo as “may offend”?’)
Amplified word of mouth
Built in market research
Buying ads is bloody expensive”
Tara Hunt

Joshua Porter
“ HOLD ON A SEC...are social features economically viable?
Direct contact with people who make you successful
Amplify customer opinion
Data, data, and more data
Reduce support costs
Engender Trust to form lasting relationships”

When do I have to do something about all this?

When? Are you waiting for Web 4.0?

Credits: Tim O’Reilly’s The Facebook Application Platform and compete, a a site for web metrics

How do you design social?

B=f(P+E) - Lewin’s Equation B ehavior is a f unction of a P erson and his E nvironment

The Social Web is built here, from love and esteem

O’Reilly Report on Facebook The Facebook Application Platform

Motivation for hours (and hours and hours) of work

Kollock’s 4 Motivations for Contributing
Reciprocity
Reputation
Increased sense of efficacy
Attachment to and need of a group

Reciprocity

What's the motivation of behind these people actually interacting and participating? … people want to share with the community what they believe to be important …. and they want to see their name in lights. They want to see their little icon on the front page, their username on the front page, so other people can see it. Reputation

Increased sense of efficacy

Attachment to and need of a group

The New Third Place?
“ All great societies provide informal meeting places, like the Forum in ancient Rome or a contemporary English pub. But since World War II, America has ceased doing so. The neighborhood tavern hasn't followed the middle class out to the suburbs...” -- Ray Oldenburg

205 Structure Follows Social Spaces Conflict No building ever feels right to the people in it unless the physical spaces (defined by columns, walls, and ceilings) are congruent with the social spaces (defined by activities and human groups). Resolution A first principle of construction; on no account allow the engineering to dictate the building's form. Place the load bearing elements- the columns and the walls and floors- according to the social spaces of the building; never modify the social spaces to conform to the engineering structure of the building.

36. Degrees of publicness Conflict: People are different, and the way they want to place their houses in a neighborhood is one of the most basic kinds of difference. Resolution: Make a clear distinction between three kinds of homes―those on quiet backwaters, those on busy streets, and those that are more or less in-between. Make sure that those on quiet backwaters are on twisting paths, and that these houses are themselves physically secluded; make sure that the more public houses are on busy streets with many people passing by all day long and that the houses themselves are exposed to the passers-by. The in-between houses may then be located on the paths halfway between the other two. Give every neighborhood about an equal number of these three kinds of homes.

Identity Activity Relationships Social Space Sign-up Invitations Distribution (Viral)

TOWNS The language begins with patterns that define towns and communities. These patterns can never be designed or built in one fell swoop - but patient piecemeal growth, designed in such a way that every individual act is always helping to create or generate these larger global patterns, will, slowly and surely, over the years, make a community that has these global patterns in it. BUILDINGS We now,start that part of the language which gives shape to individual buildings. These are the patterns which can be "designed)' or "built”- the patterns which define the individual buildings and the space between buildings; where we are dealing for the first time with Patterns that are under the control of individuals or small groups of individuals, who are able to build the patterns all at once:

Identity Activity Relationships Social Space profile reputation presence Share Convos Collab Contacts Attention Groups Sign-up Invitations Distribution (Viral)

Strategize Exercise 1: brainstorm a new feature or site area that brings a appropriate community to your website.
Things to think about:
Business goals: how does this community further the needs of the company?
User goals: what makes this community attractive in a time when they have a hundred other places vying for their attention. What is the personal worth of the tools?
What if no one shows up, can it still have value?
Community nature: will this be a true community, or will this be a collective wisdom tool? Think about the spectrum.
Approach to Creation: can you partner. rather than build?

Identity profile reputation presence

1.) If you were going to build a piece of social software to support large and long-lived groups, what would you design for? The first thing you would design for is handles the user can invest in. Clay Shirky, A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

Profile
Profile
Avatar
Bio
Collections

Identity is Context Based Facebook- Personal LinkedIN - Professional

Avatar
Identity
Avatar
Profile
Activity
Collections

Collections

Presence

Presence
Presence
Status
History
Statistics
Signs of Life
Company

Presence
Presence
Status
History
Statistics
Signs of Life
Keeping me Company

2.) Second, you have to design a way for there to be members in good standing . Have to design some way in which good works get recognized. The minimal way is, posts appear with identity. You can do more sophisticated things like having formal karma or "member since."

Reputation is… Information used to make a value judgment about an object or person …

Reputations

Strategize Exercise 2: what elements do you need for identity? Profile? Presence? Reputation?

Relationships Contacts Attention Groups

you have to find a way to spare the group from scale. Scale alone kills conversations, because conversations require dense two-way conversations. [Dunbar] found that the MAXIMUM number of people that a person could keep up with socially at any given time, gossip maintenance, was 150. This doesn't mean that people don't have 150 people in their social network, but that they only keep tabs on 150 people max at any given point.

Contacts Attention Groups

Attention

Groups

Connections

Strategize Exercise 3: what kinds of relationships will you support? Asymmetrical Attention-Based? Groups? Connections?

Activity Share Communicate Collaborate

The AOF Method
1. Defining your Activity
2. Identifying your Social Objects
3. Choosing your Features
Courtesy of Joshua Porter. Check out bokardo.com!

Classic Question
Who are your users?
Better Question
What are your users doing?
What do people have to do to make you successful?
What are you making people better at?
What are your users passionate about?

2. Identifying your Social Objects

The term “social networking” makes little sense if we leave out the objects that mediate the ties between people. Think about the object as the reason why people affiliate with each specific other and not just anyone.
Jyri Engeström

What are Social Objects?
Social objects can be ideas, people, or physical objects.
Social objects influence social interaction...they change the way people interact with each other.
By interacting through/with social objects, people meet others they might not otherwise know.
Social objects can be the reason why people have an interaction or form a relationship.
Joshua Porter (bokardo.com)

3. Choosing your Features

Conversations

Sharing

Strategize Exercise 4: what are the social objects and what do people do? i.e. What are your nouns and verbs?

Identity Activity Relationships Social Space profile reputation presence Share Convos Collab Contacts Attention Groups Sign-up Invitations Distribution (Viral)

Social Space

Norms & Caretakers

Community Management
Who’s going to do what?
Participate in your community
Who will handle complaints?
CRM or GetSatisfaction?
What is the resource commitment?
What is the core functionality
What are the phased releases?
Will you learn from your mistakes?

Vilification
Veneration

Simple (hard) Steps
Have a compelling idea
Seed
Someone must live on the site
Community manager or you
Make the rules clear (and short)
Write a good TOS
Punish swiftly and nicely
Reward contributions
Spread the work out
Adapt to Community Norms
Apologize publicly, swiftly and frequently
Simple good software that grows with group

Does Software Matter? Robin Miller , Cofounder of Slahdot Joel Spolsky , Joel on Software

Probably not

Business Exercise
Design and organizational structure and a launchplan
Present it to the entire group

Why
If you build it… they don’t come

Gladwell
Duncan watts

“ There was the president of the Hush Puppies company, of Rockford, Michigan, population thirty-eight hundred, sharing a stage with Calvin Klein and Donna Karan and Isaac Mizrahi-and all because some kids in the East Village began combing through thrift shops for old Dukes. Fashion was at the mercy of those kids, whoever they were, and it was a wonderful thing if the kids picked you, but a scary thing, too, because it meant that cool was something you could not control . You needed someone to find cool and tell you what it was.”
- Malcom Gladwell

Nobody knows anything. – William Goldman

B=f(P,E) B ehavior is a f unction of a P erson and his E nvironment

Some Patterns

Frictionless

At Hand

Table setting?

Impactful Maximize reach

Email this Consumer Broadcaster

Newsfeed, Network Updates Consumer Consumer Consumer Consumer Consumer Broadcaster

Groups, Asymmetric Follow spark

Relationship antipatterns
High-level antipatterns
Explicit “Will you be my friend” requests
Teach a man to be phished (adactio)
Don’t break email (do-not-reply)
Auto-faux-pas (notification of rejection / unsub / delinking / re-follow)
Having to spam my friends…

Targeted Features for the most useful users

Outreach

Checklist
Frictionless
Impactful
Targeted
Outreach

Think about how you will pull people in…
How do people share?
With whom do they share?
Where and how many of those tools do you place?
Distribution Exercise

Questions? http://www.blueprintsfortheweb.com http://www.eleganthack.com http://www.boxesandarrows.com @cwodtke

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Designing the Social Web (for Web2.0 expo)

by cwodtke on Apr 01, 2009

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Designing the Social Web (for Web2.0 expo) — Presentation Transcript