The enormous growth of social media services, with Facebook now over 175 million users and Twitter having a yearly growth rate of 1382%, validates the need for companies to start using these social platforms to engage with customers. And with more people joining these platforms, the amount of content created and shared also increases, with users becoming more sensitive on the way they build their personal network.
At first, users are driven to sign up by curiosity or bombarded by constant friend requests, joining their close circle of contacts. The trouble is that it doesn’t stops here. You then become a fan of your favorite author, start following you favorite basketball player on Twitter or discover that old colleague from trainee years.
The social network, once reserved to our closest friends, is now growing beyond any reasonable Dunbar number and providing much more value that keeping us connected and building group stability.
Friending is a social verb
We can’t deny it: we love groups. We need to belong to a social circle. Bigger online social circles usually imply an increasing complexity of filters and preferences necessary to make it manageable, with revised criteria for friending people. As personal networks grow in size and influence, we also get to the see how artificial barriers to entry are built, with cultural groups creating psychological boundaries (from celebrities to intellectual prejudice).
From Coleman’s concept of network closure as social capital to today’s social media rise, we’ve kept the need to include in our social graphs both weak ties and strong ties. What changed was the way both geographical and social circles were affected by the Internet. Twitter, for instance, favors an asymmetric behavior regarding groups, by not requiring two-way acceptance to get updates. Facebook, on the other hand is focused on a reciprocal relationship that implies social approval.
The nature of these social network relationships also changes according to the stage of a person’s life, with younger demographics having fewer and closer friend evolving to adult life with connections more essential to structural sustainability and innovation. Linkedin, a professional social network, is based on more private conversations and encourages these weak ties, quite valued on today’s economic uncertainty.
In most of these online social networks, users put a great deal of effort to perfect their profile, showing that it goes beyond fine tuning preferences, it’s also a public expression of the self. At social music service Last.fm, your playlist is a pretty good psychographic profile of who you are. Or at least, how you want to be seen by others.
But all these profiles, filters and preferences, where users spend hours so they can have a better experience, are mostly useless. Useless in the sense you can’t easily get this data out of centric platforms.
Portable me
These platforms have been evolving slowly, from pre-api times were each user had to login on services and invite all his relevant social circle to today’s APIs with password anti-patterns and OAuth Support.
If Facebook started providing closed filtering and grouping mechanisms, Google has pushed even further by releasing Portable Contacts. The open standard makes it easier to access your social circle information in a safe way, using existing standards and libraries (OpenSocial, OAuth, vCard).
Users can port in their existing network of friends and see who they know is already using a site. It goes beyond the Facebook feature of optional grouping when adding a friend, by enabling 4 system groups for each user, accessible by service providers. Any user can manually add contacts to the Coworkers, Family, and Friends groups; the My Contacts group contains contacts added to contact groups by the user.
Your mom
What’s your mom have to do with this? Well, let’s put it bluntly: most of us don’t want to share some of our social network updates with our mom, the same way most of us as teenagers didn’t want her to know who we started dating. Or as Clay Shirky mentioned last year at Web2.0 Expo: “What filter just broke ?” As experience architects, we should be thinking on providing context to social circles and encourage the integration of third-party applications that respect this behavior.
Your mom probably doesn’t have a clue what Microformats or Data Portability is, but she still would love to have a future where she could setup a TV with her media preferences, thanks to a simple Facebook Connect on a Boxee device. That way, you don’t need to worry that she messes your remote when staying for the weekend.
With each consumer defining proper contexts, with new tools and better ways to manage their portable profiles, brands and services that encourage this open portability will get to build better behavioral approaches to this ubiquitous vision. The structural holes that will be detected once the data starts flowing will provide immense growth opportunities and gains in productivity, as each person starts connecting their networks with the appropriate context.
So yesterday i went to the theater and today i find this modern interpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet:
Social networks don’t get more mainstream than this.
Speaking of which, this blog now has a Facebook page, where i’ll post other inspirations that don’t quite fit in here. I’d be delighted if you’d drop by and become a fan. Promise i will not send any Mafia Wars messages.
There’s a recurring theme on some mainstream media that the Internet and social media are some kind of dark force, that only does bad things to your kids and those who spent too much time online don’t have anything useful to do with their lives.
As i’m never short of passion of explaining to regular “offline” folks the outstanding opportunities that the web has brought to us, let me share one of my central arguments that you can also use to bring more people in to the conversation.
The Third Place
The Third Place refers to social surroundings separate from the two usual social environments of home and the workplace, or as i call it the private and professional spheres. The concept was created by Ray Oldenburg , arguing that these places were central on their community building role on a society.
The web pushed this whole concept further, as citizens increasingly rely on digital tools to stay connected, with social media becoming their main third place. With shopping malls and other consumption temples getting emptier in a year of crisis, this trend will deepen and it’s up to us, early adopters, to show the Yellow Brick Road to newcomers.
Show your friends the best community tools available so we all can build a better society. From Kiva.org to Twitter.com, these are not only tools for digital democracy but effective agents of change.
So when those folks tell you to get a life, just reply: “Get a Third Place”.
This week i commented at work the fact that some blogs rival in terms of online audience with same major newspapers, with marketers needing to review their traditional media planning. On a happy coincidence, today the Wall Street Journal writes why many marketers are lagging behind consumers in terms of social media.
Don’t just talk at consumers — work with them throughout the marketing process.
The conversations consumers have with each other, result in “some of the most interesting insights,” including gift ideas for specific occasions, such as a college graduation, and the prices consumers are willing to pay for different gifts.
Give consumers a reason to participate.
Other companies provide more-direct incentives: cash rewards or products, some of which are available only to members of the online community. Still others offer consumers peer recognition by awarding points each time they post comments, answer questions or contribute to a wiki entry
Listen to — and join — the conversation outside your site.
monitor relevant online conversations among consumers and, when appropriate, look for opportunities to inject themselves into a conversation or initiate a potential collaboration.
Resist the temptation to sell, sell, sell.
When consumers are invited to participate in online communities, they expect marketers to listen and to consider their ideas. They don’t want to feel like they’re simply a captive audience for advertising, and if they do they’re likely to abandon the community.
Don’t control, let it go.
“You have to let the members drive. When community members feel controlled, told how to respond and how to act, the community shuts down.”
Like it or not, the old way of doing (push) marketing is on its final days. Or has i heard yesterday on the Campus Party panel about Advertising and social media, your homepage is now Google.
We have to realize that most of the jobs that will be here in ten years haven’t been invented. So it’s hard to set up a curriculum for these new kind of creatives.
Great work on the podcast, Jay.
RSS readers have to visit the site to listen the audio
Brand Hijacking happens when consumers appropriate the brand for themselves and add meaning to it. Most of the times, we get to know only the benign form, when customers act as evangelists. This behavior is something to be encouraged by companies, or as David Armano puts it, brands should act as facilitators, opening communication channels and providing tools and materials (if you’re really hip, wrap it around a Creative Commons license) to consumers.
The brand positioning envisioned by the company isn’t always how the consumers perceives it: remember the blockbuster Snakes on a Plane or a more classical brand like Dr. Martens, initially a gardening shoe for senior womens, until teenagers hijacked the brand with ideological purposes.
Things can get even dirtier, with the next-generation cybersquattingpractices, fueled by search engine marketing or plain digital identity squatting on a new malign form of brand hijacking, with Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and all the social media universe making things even more complicated.
No matter how well intentioned Alex Wipperfurth was with his book Brand Hijack: Marketing Without Marketing, there will always be people using the (social media) FORCE for the wrong purposes.
On top of these misuses, one big issue remains: most companies are completely out of touch with brand hijacking in social media, with no Online Reputation Management strategies whatsoever.
Mad Men on Twitter
One of the recent episodes of brand hijacking involved AMC Series “Mad Men”, a TV Show that revolves around the advertising world in the 60′s, and Twitter users that were impersonating some of the series characters on the microblogging service.
It turns out AMC wasn’t involved at all and when they find about it, a take-down was issued to Twitter with most of the accounts suspended. It can’t really get more clueless than this about social media, when a legion of fans (Don Draper has almost 2000 followers) is evangelizing the show for free and a company silents their voices like this.
With all the Twitter uprising and badpress afterwards, AMC came to their senses and reinstated the accounts (although there was no disclosure of future intentions). At wearesterlingcooper.com, the Twitter Fans Blog, it was summed up pretty well:
Fan fiction. Brand hijacking. Copyright misuse. Sheer devotion. Call it what you will, but we call it the blurred line between content creators and content consumers, and it’s not going away. We’re your biggest fans, your die-hard proponents, and when your show gets canceled we’ll be among the first to pass around the petition. Talk to us. Befriend us. Engage us. But please, don’t treat us like criminals.
This site exists to catalogue the conversation around AMC’s Mad Men and its fan base across the social web. But it’s just the beginning. ‘We are Sterling Cooper’ is a rallying cry to brands and fans alike to come together and create together.
This sad episode (not of Mad Men, which I’m also a fan), highlighted the dangers and opportunities that brands are facing in social media. On the one hand, brands should listen and participate, being igniters of positive hijacking. On the other hand, it is becoming evident that the same amount of attention that was being put on domain squatting, must be taken in regards to social media identities.
It could happen to your brand
The Mad Men example is mostly about companies being clueless and getting punk’ed by social media. Most of the times it’s a case of not being able to understand these communities. At Twitter for instance, there are plenty of brand hijacking examples, with big names like iPhone, Vivendi, Motorola, Nokia, Intel or WindowsXP not being run by the company. Just imagine the amount of harm to a brand an individual with wrong intentions or resentment could do to your brand.
With this, i’m not defending that a company should go out and start issuing take down notices in every social media service there is. Instead, you should check what you could protect today and start providing these hardcore fans a safe harbor to continue evangelizing your brand, They’re your best friends, your customers, don’t turn them into enemies.
If things really go wrong, you could always go the judicial route or contact the service regarding the issue, but that’s something you should be really be sure, or you could turn into another RIAA.
These concerns not only apply to company brands, but also to individuals. Celebrities, politicians, writers, musicians, everyone that has a digital footprint should care about their social media brand. Just imagine if someone registered your name on Facebook and started using your name. Wait. Perhaps it’s already happening. You’d better check it out.
MySpace and Facebook have plenty of digital copycats, fans with the “me-first” mentality, creating unofficial profiles that are so credible that everyone adds as a friend. Again, most of the times, it’s positive brand hijacking, but what if?
So now that i’ve warned you about the problem, what’s a company to do?
Register your brand/product name early. How early? As soon as a social media service is generating consistent buzz about your brand. That means that you should have registered yesterday on MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, while monitoring promising services like Friendfeed or Disqus.
Ask your agency what to do. I’m sure there is someone smart enough to give you the right answers.
Define procedures for brand hijacking as one of your social media best practices. A simple social media policy will do.
Get your voice. Is it a push model, or do you actually engage with the users? Delegated or internal ? Formal or Informal conversational tone? Does your company have a a Digital Curator ?
Provide aggregation mechanisms. It’s hard to keep pace with all the services. If you don’t have internal resources, services like Friendfeed or SocialThing are a great choice.
Track your brand buzz, with free services like Trackur.com, Backtype.com, Google Alerts and Technorati or more professional ones like BrandsEye, BuzzLogic or StartPR.
Have a consistent alias/nickname in different services. This is also a great marketing tool, making it easy for fans to guess your channel on YouTube or even getting a few more SERP hits.
All these measures have a preventive character, shielding your brand from being used in harmful ways by users. It mostly relates to domain squatting, that has brought so many troubles to brands, forcing them to take legal actions.
The implications for online advertising are clear: if you’re to launch a new campaign / product / service, be sure to register the most significant aliases in the main social media services. It’s obvious you can’t register all variations, but at least assure the most obvious ones. Think about it as if you were optimizing for search engines. Better yet, think about it as Social Media Marketing.
Tired of putting your name on web forms? Don’t give up yet as you can do something different for a change and unsubscribe.
Amnesty International UK is inviting people to do just that, on a message to governments that citizens are no longer quiet while human rights are attacked under the false pretext of ‘the war on terror’. And while most petitions ask you to sign up, the British AI is asking citizens to take your name off.
The campaign uses email and social media to encourage others to spread the message, and at the same time building a humanitarian life-stream conscientiousness.
With a subscription process that feels like a regular social network service, you’re invited to write your views on the subject and share it to your friends.
Data visualization is also one of the main features of the “true” social network, with live updates on the progress you and your friends have made to stop the government manipulation of public opinion, with a call to action against such acts as the ones being perpetrated at Guantanamo.
It then extends itself to other networks, such as Orkut, MySpace or Facebook, and links to other online media activists, again building on the concept of networks and how these can make a change. With such a magnitude, I guess we could call it human-rights crowdsourcing.
And of course, with a widget that you can use to share the campaign latest film:
