One of the most interesting things I’ve been studying over the last year has been the power social design and network effects. Even though many of us have used Social Media for quite sometime, it has typically been what I would call a disconnected and fragmented system of communication. Now, of course, I have to make a statement like that to catch your attention, but, really, is it that far off?

Lets think about this for a second, how many of the conversations we have daily are disconnected and fragmented? How many times have you known a friend or person that could be engaged in a conversation, but, the only way to get them involved was to send them a URL or share the link? Still doesn’t seem like the most optimal experience.

A couple examples of this are with early versions of the wall on Facebook, and, even up until today, the way twitter handles the conversations around an individual tweet. Can you truly share the individual tweet? Or, have a conversation around the tweet?

Twitter @mention pop out:

You’ll notice that it tries to find tweets around things with “a question” in it, while in reality, I’d probably want tweets related to Chicago Bears. And, yes, these experiences have been what we know as social communication on the web today. But, that still means that whether it is a Social Network or Information Network, the way we communicate, engage in conversations, discover content and have discussions is still broken in my opinion. Or, are new sites like Quora and Namesake helping us think about Social Media in ways that we haven’t up until now and connecting the dots on those conversations that were broken.

Namesake has done a great job in really building in network effects and real time components into the interface and because of that, it makes the site super viral and sticky in my opinion. Now, I’ll go into this in a bit, but, here is a screenshot for example on their conversations in a stream:

Notice the “faces” that you see within the post of all your friends and others that are interacting on a stream item. There is also a little “route” button that can allow you to route a conversation to a friend. But, you can also invite people to join conversations and interact in real-time. This is how conversations should be happening:

Network Effects

Ever since seeing Sean Parker’s video on the power of network effects, I have made it a priority to extensively research social design and network effects, and try to understand them as thoroughly as possible. While I’d love to say that I have come to a full understanding of this, I feel we have only begun to tip here and there is much more that we will be discovering. To be quite honest, it seems as though as new products and services become available and technologies are advanced, the more innovation we will see in online social communication.

To take a step back for a moment though, in order for us to understand the power of network effects and the social design principles that go along with it, we need to define them? So, what are network effects? To quote Sean Parker referencing Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian:

“When the value of a product to one user depends on how many others there are. “

Parker points out that while it feels like network effects applies to almost every site, it truly applies to communication networks like Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn; Marketplace like eBay; Games brought to us by Zynga; and platforms such Facebook and the Apple iPhone. On the other hand, companies like Yahoo!, Google, and MSN are less effected by Network effects, as they are considered to be information services and does not generally depend on the number of users participating in the service to derive value proportionally to the number of users on their service.

In the case of Social Networks, the more people register and become users, the more useful the website is to its users. This is why it makes it more and more important to leverage the power of networks, and design even more socially than current model. Giving the users, friends, guests, etc. of our websites the ability to communicate, connect with others, share/discover content, and discuss content is going to be more and more significant in the latest iterations of the web.

As product and marketing people, designing more socially plays a larger role in the products that we create and how we market them. Being conscious of the way that users can discuss the content on our networks is just as important as how they share that content off network. Along those same lines, content has become much more distributed, in my opinion, and leveraging external audiences to increase traffic and participation is essential. I would almost go as far as to call it a shift in the way we promote content and distribute that content, pushing links is not as important as increasing the discussions and conversations around content, which is why it’s not online a form of product design, but, also a factor of marketing optimization…which is where I came up with Social Design & Optimization…I’ll touch more on this in a few.

Social Design:

When it comes to social design, there are a few key principles that are applied that can really increase the virality of a site. Mainly it revolves around getting people to share content, engaging others, and participate more in conversations, or even games. Zynga has made a killing off getting others addicted to gaming and Facebook has done this through photos and tagging. By definition, these actions are what making people more social is all about.

Notifications

Notifications are a big part of social design because they alert a user there is something waiting for them to take action on. All of the major social sites involve a notification implementation of some sort and this usually encourages users to act upon them.

Twitter Notifications: Net Tweets:

Quora Notification Example

Most people see a notification and act on it. But, it’s not just important to say “we’re going to have notifications!” Because, there is is obviously a lot more to it than just implementing them. You’ve got to think through the notifications. Understanding the actions within your system that should invoke a notification is even more important. You want to make sure that you are getting the right balance of being in a users face or overly spammy, that balance could make or break someone actually checking their notifications or not.

Tagging

Speaking of things that should invoke a notification, tagging is a big one. Tagging is also great in that it gives a site a great discovery element that previously might not have been there. When I tag a friend in a photo on Facebook that was at an event with me, but others might not have known, the possibilities of new friends and increased friending is going to increase because of my tag. But, also, on sites like Quora and Namesake, tagging or assigning someone an expertise will increase the number of times that person interacts with the content and/or other users in that topic. Also, on sites that are professionally or content driven, this will likely increase friending, which in turn will increase engagement, as well.

Sharing Buttons

While notifications and tagging are more related to features that you’d want to implement on your site to increase the virality and discoverability, external sharing is just as important. Because of it’s importance, the implementation of the buttons you use on your site are going to help the promotion of content on external networks. There are sites like Share This that provide an all in one and customizable solution for sharing across all social networks. In my opinion though, it is much better to figure out what sites actually make sense for your particular niche and demographic. The two that seem to make the most sense now at days are Twitter and Facebook, and everyone should implement the Tweet Button and Facebook Like Button. But, it isn’t just a matter of implementing them, it’s implementing them correctly. Many publishers don’t turn on faces and don’t realize the importance of concepts like Social Proof. So, they implement the Like button, but never get the most value out of it because of a lack of engagement around it and/or the lack of likes that turn into shares with thumbnails, which also improves the interactions it gets on Facebook.

Facebook Like with faces aka ‘Facepile’ turned on:

Facebook Like with ‘facepile’ and sharing:

While it is the standard implementation for the Facebook Like Button, many publishers, high profile and smaller blogs, don’t realize that their implementation is broken and the “share” aspect that gets you in the actual news feed is missing.

Further than Facebook and Twitter there is the thought process of whether you are promoting content on sites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon. If you are, including those buttons, where it makes sense, is going to be a move that will help the spread of content. You might want to think through niche social media sites that might have buttons and could be very beneficial to your implementation.

It’s really important to think through all of this carefully and make the right decisions on implementation. Leveraging off-network audiences are a huge way of driving traffic and visibility to your content. This will not only help the traffic, but, the visibility could eventually lead to more links, which will lead to more eyeballs and probably even larger traffic through organic sources like SEO and Direct.

Social Proof

The final thing to harness is the power of Social Proof within design. Social Proof is the psychological theory that once we see that others are using or engaging with an object that we should as well. Basically, lowering the barrier of a “like”, comment, or any sort of engagement on an item. This is why including the facepile is so important in the Facebook Like Button implementation, because, when people see their friends faces, and they feel like their friends are typically pretty smart people, they will act on the item to conform to the group. The use of faces are so important that Dave McClure wrote an entire post titled: The Faces, the *FACES*… it’s *ALL* about the Motherf**king FACES!
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Harnessing the power of network effects and social design have been crucial up until now, but, are going to be even more so as we becoming a more connected and real time web. From the way we design our websites, content and networks to the way share content into streams off our websites network. The audiences that we building around the web will be just as crucial to the ones we build on our own sites. Knowing how to leverage concepts like social proof and injecting content into the stream will just make us that much more effective at driving traffic and/or building products that will eventually be constant funnel of virality.

When I started on the path of using Twitter, it was fairly easy getting used to keep in touch with people, albeit, a bit like a stalkers dream! (not that i am a stalker! I swear!). I was led into it by a former collegue at PayPal, Mark Trammell. I kept hearing him talk about it, and me being the early adopter I am, I figured I’d give it a whirl! (no pun intended). Signed up, added about 20-30 people and I was tweeting! (Probably more than some people would have liked!)

I loved it though, I was figured out all the cool stuff going on in SF, getting blog posts pushed to me, etc. I also realized that I could connect and converse with people through twitter that I probably wouldn’t have been as in touch with before. I wanted more though, sitting there with those slim stats, I wasn’t able to be the social butterfly I think people know me to be. That said, I went on the hunt, became a total twitter advocate, promoted it at a geek dinner I threw to get people to sign up so we could stay in touch!

Then SMX West was here and it was like a tipping point. This is where I realized that I could not only connect with people, I could engage in conversation and promote content when necessary! Overall it was a great personal branding tool. Being fully transparent, I would have to say that I have benefitted from this tremendously, not only career wise, but also in keeping up to date with industry news, events, etc.

Why Twitter is useful, from my eyes

There have been soooo many posts already about Twitter being useful and why. But, I wanted to provide my perspective on why I think twitter has been useful to me. Granted, I may not have “the most followers” or anything like that, but that was never my goal. My goal was to connect with like minded people, engage in the community (being general web stuff or specific to SEO, Social Media, and Marketing), and/or grow as a professional in the industry.

I never thought I would be able to connect with people like Chris Winfield, Todd Malicoat, Brent Csutoras, Todd Friesen, and Steve Ganz as much as I did. These are people I had met at some point, but never got the ability to have daily or even weekly conversations with because of timezones, schedules, locations, etc. Thanks to Twitter I have been able to keep in touch with them and now would say I consider them good friends and peers. This was made possible by simply participating, engaging, and starting conversations, via Twitter.

Twitter tools and staying productive

But, what about work, what about productivity losses, etc. Isn’t that going to be a problem!? To start, there are some great tools that help with twitter marketing. But, lets focus on productivity, right away I setup Gtalk to take in my twitter feed, so that it wouldn’t interfere with the day-to-day and I could passively check updates, etc. (that worked great, until twitter started running into server issues, but I digress) Lately, I have been using Twhirl for it all and it has been great to be able to be able to get involved in conversations, etc. and to be honest, at this point, prefer using it over IM.

Help Twitter, Help you!

Twitter can be a helpful tool to help you with your daily routine, tasks that you need to perform, making purchases, etc. For example, twitter gave me a quick opportunity to find relevant links within a short period of time through @ and Direct Messages sent based on a tweet I sent out:

Or, how about the time that I was looking for a free FTP client for the Mac and the winner from the poll. It was great that so many people replied, including people that were going to take the recommendation:

Just today, I threw out a poll about how people approach titles and h1′s in article pages and blog posts to help with some ideas that I was playing around with and get an outside view of peoples approachses. I get the following replies and helped with the thought process:

I have leveraged the great community for my own research, pricing questions, organizing events, pushing content, and questions/polls/engagement/etc. Which will lead me too the most important part of twitter, the community.

The community, engagement, and participation are most important

Social media is all about engaging and participating in the community, and twitter does not fall short here one bit. In fact, I have to say that is the reason that I have fallen in love with using twitter, because it allows me to participate in conversations. It allowed me, as I mentioned, to keep in touch, find and meet new people, and tighten existing relationships. I could go to a conference, meet some new people, we start following each other and exchange conversations easily.

Twitter is about all of that. It is about participation. It is about being involved in the community. It is about engaging people. I love that I can get into work and throughout the day participate in some mind share, help someone with a question or issue they have, or even just casually engage in conversations.

That is great and all and sounds like a time waste, but it truly isn’t. There are tons of ways that Twitter becomes useful once you are engaged. Think of all the time you could save having industry news and updates pushed to you once its published. This is a huge benefit for me, since sometimes I get too caught up in what I am doing that I don’t take a second to read the industry news, updates, thoughts, etc. On that same token, pushing your own content out to the people following you and expanding your readership or the reach of your audience. I also save time by solving problems, making decisions, and/or asking a poll/question to a large group and getting answers quicker then over email or IM conversations.

To Summize my Twitter thoughts

I have really enjoyed using twitter as a connectivity and personal branding tool. The connections I have made and the relationships I have built I am so grateful for, because it has allowed me to attain goals, otherwise unattainable. I love that I am able to push my content out, be the social butterfly that I am in setting up and organizing events, and just being involved in the community overall.

Don’t forget to follow me @tonyadam on Twitter and if you are new, subscribe to my blog!

I have been inundated with communities over the last couple years and recently it has been almost the only thing I am working on lately. I have learned so much about managing volunteer groups, creating an offline community of web geeks called “San Francisco Geek Dinners,” and in consulting roles.

There are many methodologies that I have learned over the past couple years and I am even learning all different forms daily by being thrown into it. What I find extremely intriguing is how there is no two communities or groups that function in the exact same way. This can take form in the shape of an online community that deals with technology or even travel, a group of people to manage within an organization, or a community of individuals in the offline sense, like a meetup.

So, the question remains, how do you deal with this? I truly don’t have the smoking gun nor will this article answer this all for you. Rather, I think this will get you on the path of thinking about how your unique community needs to be managed and/or gain traction. All communities have a set of common practices that are apparent within them.

Define a purpose and show you care about the community

Define the reason that the community exists and show that you really care about the community. Put some effort into this by putting a lot of grass roots effort into the planning and growth of the community. This gives the members and users of the community the sense that you are vested in the welfare of the community, which you truly are. Moving forward, the next steps are to engage community members and start having conversations with them, once again, both online and offline. Make members or volunteers feel like they have an opportunity to be involved in the overall success of an online community or organization. An example of this is as simple as providing a feedback link on your website that allows members/users to provide feedback on features, updates, or bugs that they run into. Other things that you can do is send out polls or surveys on user experience or features.

Things that I have done in the past is create user polls about new interfaces or more recent internal teams for naming conventions. Within the SEO community I have seen a number of people sending out polls/surveys about details for events as well.

Building momentum and keeping it going

Momentum is also a huge factor and keeping that momentum going is very hard to do, but once you have it, do not lose it! If you get some steam behind the community or group members, there is a great chance they will ride that momentum and want to get more involved. This is easier said than done though, as I am sure you can attest to if you have run or built a community.

Creating events and meetups for your online community is a great way to get the members or users together and even invite others to the event, thus creating Customer Evangelists for your community. Something else that you can do to create momentum is to create participation and conversations, which I will get to in a second.

On the offline community side, I have to admit, I had some great momentum with the first two dinners for San Francisco Geek Dinners. But, because I have not been able to stick with it but hope I can re-energize the momentum with the group. Granted, this is not an online community that I am working on, but, it shows that if you miss a beat with a community, you can instantly lose momentum and traction.

Creating Participation and Conversations

Just like I mentioned above throwing events is a great way to build momentum, but also a great way to start getting people involved in becoming an Evangelist for you. Members, will typically bring others along and hopefully get them involved in the community as well.

Also, give people the opportunity to volunteer and get their hands on something that they will make them feel like they are contributing. This can be as small as making recommendations or bring community involvement into the overall decision making process. Create a location for users to get together and discuss issues they are facing, let them talk it out, moderate it a bit, and you have create a think tank of your own for your community.

While building an online community, you want to ensure that the participation is staying put on your domain. Polls, survey’s, events, etc. are a great way of getting the community together. Ensure that your online community has a lot of sticky features that make it easy for people to be a Customer Evangelist of your online community. Do this by giving users all the “social/viral” features that they can use to pass things on to friends, collegues and family. Many community members want to be the first in on the news, to report it, get in touch with people, etc. From an Online Reputation Management standpoint, if you give users the opportunity to talk to you or provide feedback, it will prevent them from creating flame posts or sites about your community or brand.

Bottom line, Encourage the online community to be just that, an online community that allows people to participate and have conversations with each other.

Incentivise the community

Finally, you can create participation channels, but sometimes we all need or want an incentive to make things happen. They also give people the feeling of being rewarded, and we all enjoy knowing that we are appreciated for the hard work that we do.

In an offline community, ask the members if someone wants to run the event/meetup and I can guarantee you that there will be someone that is interested in stepping up. Empowering someone to step up and leave his/her mark on the group can be priceless. Create contests that give users/members a chance to win prizes. An example of this can be creating a twitter account for your community and asking everyone to follow you and that the 100th, 200th, etc. will win a free iPod Touch, or something along those lines.

Where do we go from here?

I think it is very apparent and we all know that we have already moved into an era of the online culture. But, that does not mean that we cannot build or leverage an offline community to help the online community or vice versa. Yes, that sounds a bit confusing, but there are commonalities between the two that can be important in building your online community like creating conversation, participation, etc. Overall, you want the community to be sticky and get members and users to become Customer Evangelists for your community.