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How do we make social communication better for the projected 2 billion plus online users? If we agree that social communication is both dominant and potentially valuable, but we also admit our frustrations – we have tremendous incentive to make a better world with new social network architectures. Let’s get started.
What if?
Let’s start with a blank white board and envision what our ideal online social life might look like. Maybe the future looks something like this:
- Our personal networks will be dynamic and “self-organizing” – not static, or rigidly architected by any one social network. We will have control over our personalized experience.
- Our networks will work together. The total experience will simultaneously allow us to call upon all of our “social network” relationships organized by interest in one unified experience. – not necessarily by individual network (this will lessen fragmentation). Our personal interests will be defined by a desire to know what our family and friends are up to (our support groups), some by discovery and others, by opportunity. Each of us will customize the architecture for how we consume all of our social communication – working together.
- Our experience will be optimized for mobile communication so that we can “be” in the moment. This is a key component of building personal network value.
- We will be able to turn the “noise” off. (This will minimize distraction. Note that this doesn’t necessarily mean that we would turn off all “advertising”. But that advertising will be designed for engagement and will always be consensual).
- Our social communication will be persistent – it will last, and not be fleetingly captive to any given moment.
- There will be a way to engage with specific brands why and when we want to.
- We will “opt in” to sharing our user information – not “opt out”. In other words commercial surveillance will be limited. Our experience will be privacy centric. And it will be simple and understandable. It will be designed not for obfuscation but for simplicity and effectiveness.
- Algorithms will be personal to the user not centric to the network.
- We will be able to selectively and simultaneously share unique content across all of our networks.
- Participation will be driven by connection and discovery (dopamine) versus a fear of missing out (cortisol).
Is this the future that you see?
The Future of Social Network Companies
Social network companies obviously have a “stake in the game”. Virtually all successful networks and social network companies started with a sense of community and shared purpose. At inception social networks made connections and sharing valuable. And virtually all of those networks were self-organizing.
But things changed – mostly because financial engineering took hold. And in the brief history of social networks, financial engineering has meant social engineering and a dilution of valuable network experience. As examples:
What doesn’t work?
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For the most part – pushing content and maximizing distractions as a way to “make money”. Both dilute the user experience, and disincentivize network participation. Familiar illustrations:
- Yahoo – which started with a strong community ethos was transformed by Wall Street pressures into what is today a media and publishing model with a dominant online advertising business model. It is driven by content – not community sharing. It has almost entirely lost its network effects, and thus its market value.
- Facebook, which emerged as a starfish network of friends and family clusters and diluted it with online “native” advertising and now, content publishing in a way that makes the friends and family experience more difficult at the least, and a waste of time at worst. It is like having characters on TV shouting at you from the center of your dining room table while your family is trying to have a conversation.
- Twitter, which has become a hodge-podge of unrelated posts and advertising that asks users to embrace “rapid toggling” and “context switching” – effectively a “scream machine”.
And the list goes on…
What does work?
- Messaging services that are unfiltered – snap chat, what’s app. Using these networks it is easy to connect to and keep up with friends. The same might be said for Instagram – friends dialogue around pictures –a real conversation.
- Pininterest – Pininterest enables social communication to be organized by personal interest. Is also allows sharing by interest. Pinterest has demonstrated that there is an emerging market for direct commercial engagement through consent of network users.
- Amazon. Similarly, and also by user consent, Amazon combines coordinate effects (social signals that are quantified) and cooperative effects (sharing – think reviews) to generate recommendations and influence purchase behaviors. Using Amazon, in deciding whether to buy a book (or almost anything), the user can receive both a quantitative score (1-5 stars), and a qualitative opinion based on a qualitative assessment. This combination is one of the most powerful value creation engines today based on a network model. [1]
There will be better days ahead….
The goal should be to make our lives better.
Before too long the mythology of big number metrics – “a billion users” “page views” “impressions”, like most mythologies, will fail as proxies for value creation (and value propositions).
New paradigms will take their place – paradigms that will create better user experiences and even more commercial value. [2]
By allowing (and encouraging) users to define their experiences social networks will ultimately build even greater network value than those of today. But the financial opportunities won’t be in advertising – native, video or other in the way that it is delivered today. In the future commercial value will be built on a foundation of meaningful engagement. It will be refreshing not having brands shout at us in our Facebook and Twitter network streams – but participating with us – when asked – in one universal social networking experience.
Until then….
Over the next few posts, we will explore how existing social networks might better build and leverage greater network value. There is incredible untapped potential in Twitter, Yahoo and Facebook – so let’s start there… Stay tuned.
[1] See The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler.
[2] See Paid Attention, Innovating Advertising for a Digital World, Faris Yakob
