Adrian Chan

Financial news of the world this week may now be sinking in amongst the hereto protected economy of the startup world. Many of us will now hold more tightly onto the purse strings in the hopes of stretching out what might be a finite runway to success. I went through this, like many, eight years ago, and the quiet that followed wasn't much fun.

But there's still time for many to make it work. If I were at a VC firm, or heading up a startup today, I'd look more closely now than ever at product and service differentiation. If you have now built the application, done the engineering, and established a user base, now is time to focus on social interaction design. Don't stop at technology design. And while you might be compelled to integrate the features that are quickly becoming standard among social web applications, don't stop there either. Think further and harder about your designing your social interactions. Your equity is in your users and how they use your product - that's the utility, personal and social, that you should leverage to distinguish yourself and capitalize on success.

Here are just a few thoughts and tips that I've gleaned from working with startups and from analyzing the sites I've used:

Users have Personalities
All users are not alike. And this is more important among social media users than in any other kind of designed product. Those users that get the most out of your site or application are the ones that will attract further growth.

In social media, for example, users have different ways of talking and communicating. They have different relationships to other users, and to audiences in general. Different ways of using and consuming information. And different perceptions of social trends. (I'm oversimplifying to keep this short.)

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Feeling overfed lately? Sidle up to the trough, there's company here. Yes, subscribing to feed-based applications can be like drinking from a firehose, especially during times like these. When the daily news is itself the topic of presidential campaigns, late-night talk show hosts, politicians (relevant or not, incoming or outgoing), and the news media in general, being on a site like Friendfeed is a bit like Hussein Bolt gesturing for the Jumbotron at the Beijing Olympics.

The echo chamber is also a hall of mirrors.

All social media play some part in mirroring us, reflecting us, whether to ourselves or in front of others. And this doesn't make every social media user a narcissist. It simply admits to the shiny and reflective surface of the social media screen and to the facts that we like to see ourselves reflected in this screen, and like to be seen by others. It's a particular kind of vanity, of self-image and self-promotion.

I've written about self-image and profile-based social networking, but haven't really applied it to lifestreaming. Of course lifestreaming apps like Twitter also mirror us back to ourselves -- indeed, it would be strange if we didn't see our own tweets alongside others. The production of a self-image online is essential to how lifestreaming works, and why. But oddly enough, original activity feeds weren't posted by users at all.

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Jeremiah Owyang has posted his thoughts on what may come in the long-term for the social web, beginning with the increasing relevance of activities like friending: Why 'Friending' Will Be Obsolete. He writes that as the system learns about our behaviors, preferences, and relationships that it will be able to automate and supply information we normally have to declare explicitly today. I couldn't agree more.

Jeremiah summarizes his model like this:

"The System: The system is the combination of all websites combined, it's a massive data base of content, clicks, search terms, time on site, shared posts, wall posts, links, and tweets.

Teaching the System: Humans are constantly speaking in machine language, from use of hashtags in twitter, or boolean searches in Google, or even from the act of friending folks in your social network. All of these behaviors are humans teaching the system how to understand us, so it can better serve us.

The Intelligent Web: Software that is able to collect and make sense of all the data in the system and is able to deliver meaningful content back to people in context -- often without us saying or gesturing that we need it."

The web was built on links between documents -- objects -- and since it's inception has grown to accommodate not only many different object or media types, but their relevance, popularity, and other measures of use also. In fact links on the social web need not always point to the same thing. Social navigation in the form of a top-ten, for example, points to not only a changing set of top ten items, but updates itself as it is used, thus reflecting social use.

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We have moved beyond "generation gap" differences in technology use and moved into the "experiential gap" in terms of use and understanding. Your experience with an application such as Twitter provides an understanding that cannot be communicated by reading about it or even being told about it.

Tom Foremski recently penned on twitter in which he notes the growing experiential gap that separates those who use new social media tools from those who don't. Those who use, get it, and those who don't, don't. Well, not surprisingly, this digitally dividing line is also the void that old media needs to bridge, if it, like its users, are to join the ranks of the initiated. The adoption curve sweeps like the arc of a #suspension bridge (!) plotting the line of escape from the old and tired traditional media landscape to the bright and shiny shores of the new.

As Marshall McLuhan (pictured above) insightfully observed:

"The "content" of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph."

Now that bit about the telegraph may be a bit out of dot dot dash date, so simply substitute in "social media" for telegraph and you're back in the present tense. Social media are a recontextualization of old print forms and contents within a new distribution and communication framework (social web). It's not surprising that so many of our social practices (tools and uses) echo, if not amplify, their old media (broadcast) forebears: celebrity, self-promotion, news, anchoring, commentary, top tens, ratings, rankings, and polls (diggs, votes).

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To extend my thoughts on people vs. content further, let's consider the opportunities for those in marketing, PR, and advertising who hope yet to realize value by engaging social media. In spite of their differences, one thing these industries have in common is a taste for volume. Their taste for success is a taste for more, and their appetites sated best by high calorie helpings of servings that perform.

That said, we all know that high volume advertising across social media are just *this* far off the bottom of the feed trough. Just ask Scott Rafer of Lookery (here's Allen Stern's interview with him, dated but relevant). CPMs are notoriously low on social media because users are disinclined to pay attention to ads whilst they're busy with friends. But sites like MySpace and Facebook serve up a huge number of pages, and are the equivalent of the outdoor advertising marketplace online.

Richer, more embedded, better targeted (by means of micro-targeting to the user, social graph targeting to the group, or social context targeting to audiences of followers) marketing is a better indicator of the future of online marketing. But as anyone in this space knows, ROI is not yet measurable, as is performance. In order for one-to-one or relationship marketing to make their comeback in the guise of social media marketing, industry and application standards will need to show success. And those successes will need to be evangelized by the social media community as case studies and best practices. The phase of application and service innovation is maturing, and is ready for adoption by those who can see a path to engagement.

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I don't know if this bespeaks a major trend, but I've noticed that of the slew of news and friend aggregators, services seem built on a choice between aggregation of content around people (as sources) or aggregation of people around content (as sources).

The distinction between contributors and contributions is at the core of social media in general. Design limitations, including allocation of screen real estate, navigation schemes, actions and features/functions, and the resulting social content and practices these limitations produce, would seem to suggest that any aggregation tool will stake a preference on either the person or his/her content.

I don't know if this suggests that there's a corresponding division among user preferences and interests: to prefer people over content, or content over people. As users, do we fall into two camps? Are there two types of social media users -- those drawn to the social face and those drawn to the media face? Those who relate to people first, and those who relate to content first? Those who pay attention to the person, and whose trust and interest aligns with personality, relationship, authority, etc? Versus those whose interests connect with content, statements, news, and talk -- over and above the people posting and doing the talking?

But between friendfeed, digg, stumbleupon, socialmedian, twitter, facebook, and scores of others now in the business of assembling audiences around social content, it does seem that some are more conversational (twitter and feed aggregators like FF) and some more topical (digg, socialmedian, the new strands).

Perhaps, indeed, some of us are more attentive (in general) to who's talking, and some to what's being said.

These screenshots are taken from Radian6, social media monitoring application that I've been using for the past couple of days.

This screen shows topical clouds taken from twitter accounts of several social media influencers. Shown here are Tara Hunt (missrogue), Chris Brogan, Adrian Chan (gravity7 -- the parser apparently doesn't like alphanumerical names), Dave Winer, Stowe Boyd, Michael Arrington, Chris Heuer, Jeremiah Owyang, and Brian Solis.

(note I worked myself in there? crafty eh? I'm not really an influencer, of course, so I put myself in there as a proxy control group.)

You'll need to hit each of these and pop them to full size to be able to read them. If you do, you'll probably wonder as I did what, if anything, this tells us. These are cloud views, and could be provided by tweetclouds, but I found it handy to be able to lay them side by side, and to be able to flip each window over and change parameters (eg. date range). And they're updated in real time, so they refresh every few minutes or so. MORE »

I've been having a fascinating time reading through papers on NextStage Evolution, a company in the business of metrics and online media analysis. And I'm compelled to write briefly on some core methodological principles, primarily because the methodology behind social analytics warrants careful consideration. All of us in this space want to know what the user wants, does, and might likely do. That would be valuable information, and having it would allow us to anticipate and deliver, and engage, with users. Unfortunately, user's don't declare their motives or intentions, and so it is up to analysis to model user interests from user behavior.

I sincerely believe that social media analysis needs to account not only for the user's proximate activities, those being his or her online behavior and actions as trackable by analytical tools (be they within a walled garden social network, on and around blogs, in conversation tools like twitter, or even through social applications and widgets), but also deeper and less available interests. These are the interests that underlie interpersonal interactions, communication, and relationships. And no matter how near or far interactions, communication, or relationships may appear through social media applications, they form the basis of user agency.

Agency is a sociological concept, and it underlies user actions and activities. Agency, to me, involves intentionality and motive, as well as content (information), and is interested (identifies or attaches to an object or subject). User experience is about agency. Interaction design is about agency. And inaction can be about agency, too. Fundamental to the concept of agency is that of self-reflexivity -- that we know what we are doing. MORE »

I happened on a local bookstore going out of business yesterday and raided the psychology section, picking up a number of cardinal texts at $2.98 a pop. One of them was Please Understand Me, by David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates, of the Keirsey personality test. Actually, they call it temperament, not personalities. Reading the complete descriptions of what makes up INTFs and ENTPs et al was a real eye-opener, not to mention an entertaining and insightful read.

Character types, modified to account for the effects of social media and related technologies on interaction and communication, and taking into account users' communication styles, relationship preferences, and sense of self and self image, could be a powerful addition to current efforts to architect social analytics and conversation analytics programs.

The state of the art in measuring and making use of social media users and social graphs still centers on relatively straight-forward views of influence, attention, intention, and social capital. While these are more easily measured on closed social networks, a model for analysis of distributed social media tools, including feed-based apps, is clearly on a lot of people's minds. PR, marketing, advertising, branding, and customer service industries all want in on social media, and whether they stand by the sidelines watching, tracking, and monitoring, or jump into the river of conversation and engage, analytical tools and engagement applications will be essential. Nobody, but nobody, could possibly manage to be in the flow everywhere and at all times.

Traditional mass media approaches to audience metrics may have given us the right questions, and brought us to an appropriate starting point. But social media approaches will be needed now if we're to make proper sense of audience behavior. And here's where character psychologists like Keirsey might be of help.

I have an approach to social interaction design that takes conventional view of user experience and interaction design and extends it to social media users. With an eye to interpersonal dynamics, communication, and social practices, I like to call user behaviors "competencies." Each of us, as users interacts with social media and with others using it according to personal preferences, tastes, and most importantly, perceptions and interpretations. Our social skills online are social competencies. But each of us is different in our uses and, as psychologists would say, our behavior is informed by our psychology.

While this might be looking down the road a couple years, wouldn't an effective social analytics tool, and engagement platform (say, for advertisers and marketers) use not only social metric data but also psychological and personality models? Take the concept of the influencer, for example. As it stands today, an influencer is a well connected, credible, trusted, and active. He or she may also be on topic. That's not currently in the model, but should and probably will be, shortly, as we fold in not only who the person is but what s/he talks about (with credibility). So we might add expert to influencer.

But there are other kinds of user types, too, whose role in conversation can benefit specific marketing, branding, or advertising interests. There's the expert. The inviter. The emcee. The connector. The artist. The follower. And more. Keirsey has 16 types, I've got a similar number, tho based around communication and presencing styles. The inviter, for example, would serve the needs of event promoters. The follower, the needs of PR and news dissemination. The expert validates new products. The emcee gathers together like-minded friends, and would benefit branding or entertainment rollouts.

This is a new medium, and it begs for appropriate analysis. The metrics used in mass media measurement serve the purposes of a medium in which two-way and friend or peer-network constrained interactions don't exist. The future is engagement. Granted, masses of data will have to be mine and modeled. But isn't that what we're good at?

There's consistency in psychology, and applied appropriately and insightfully, durability in behavior and relationships. The noise will subside if we can wise up and if we put users first. If we fail, the doors blow open and a river of spam will inundate the flow. Either way, the mass marketplace is going to enter the stream.