Social Media Fast Tips From Google Social Network Expert
25 Aug
Golden Nuggets from The Real Life Social Network v2 – Document Transcript – Google Social Media Expert Paul Padday
Resource: http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2#text-version
THE SOCIAL WEB IS NOT GOING AWAY The social web is not a fad, and it’s not going away. It’s not an add-on to the web as we know it today. It’s a fundamental change, a re-architecture, and in hindsight its evolution is obvious.
The web is undergoing a fundamental change Make no mistake about this. Everyone in this room will need to learn how to design social features on websites. Whether you like it or not.
The web was originally built to link static documents together (left), but evolved to incorporate social media (center), and we’re now seeing a web built around people, where their profiles and content are moving with them as they visit different websites (right).
When we use search engines today, it’s a pretty solitary experience. We get millions of web pages in our results, yet we don’t see any other people. But notice how often we send other people links to what we found, search in the company of others, and talk about our search results when we meet.
Buy this? No. People are increasingly using the web to get the information they need from each other, rather than from businesses.
People are increasingly likely to find out about products and brands from their friends rather than from your business. It means that it is much harder to control how people first come to experience your messages. We’re also seeing a much bigger shift in how people spend their time online. People are spending much more time interacting with other people, and much less time consuming content from websites. This shift is not about any one particular social network. It’s about people connecting to each other online.
So this shift is much greater than any one social network, and much more complicated than deciding where the ‘share this’ buttons go. Almost all the sites and apps we design from now on will have embedded social features.
Controlled Open The social web, and all social media that operate within it, is a way of thinking as opposed to a new channel. It’s not about sales, or ads, or click-through rates. It’s about pursuing relationships and fostering communities of consumers. Itʼs about rethinking how you make plans when your customers are in the center and in control.
Understand behavior, not technology.
New technology doesn’t change how our brains work. Social networks are not new. For thousands of years, people have formed into groups, built strong and weak relationships with others, formed allegiances, and spread rumor and gossip. The emergence of the social web is simply our online world catching up with our offline world. As technology changes the tools we use to communicate, we still use the same behavior patterns that we evolved over those thousands of years.
No explicit goals Focus on motivation There are two problems with focusing on technology.
174,340 fans Now what? The first is that people often don’t know what they are going to do with the things they build. There are so many Facebook fan pages with hundreds of thousands of followers yet nothing is happening. So 100,000 people became a fan of yours on Facebook. Now what? This is the fan page for the magazine seventeen. There are 174,000 fans but no conversation. You need to look at things like Facebook fan pages and think: “How is this going to fundamentally improve my relationship with my customers?”
What are you doing? I’m social networking! The second problem is more subtle, and it’s complicated and messy so people tend to ignore it. When have you ever heard this? People donʼt say things like this when they are on social networks.
Social networking is a means to an end. You need to understand what the end is. Focus on what motivates people to use new technology. Technologies will come and go, but the fundamental social behavior patterns of people will remain the same. A better long term strategy for business is to understand people’s motivations for using new technologies, and not the technologies themselves.
Understanding sociability is complex. Understanding the end is not simple. In fact, it’s very complex. I’m going to try and map out some key behaviors that matter. If you come away from this talk thinking that designing for the social web is complicated, that’s a good thing. It is! We don’t have to understand it all today, we just need to start with a solid foundation from which to build.
