Social Networking—How to Achieve Engagement Nirvana

So you’ve spent all kinds of money to get your horse to the water, but now you need him to drink… and drink, and drink… and drink. Although people are still joining social networks in droves, it’s a fact that engagement numbers are down.  According to the article “It’s Official: U.S. Social Networking Sites See Slow Down“:

“Since December 2006, when MySpace engagement peaked at about 234 minutes spent per visitor, time spent on the site has dropped consistently throughout the year. In December, time spent per visitor saw its biggest month-to-month drop, of about 8.5%, to 179 minutes per visitor per month, down from 196 minutes in November. That equates to a 24% year-over-year drop.

But the pain is not just a MySpace problem. It seems to be an industry-wide issue. The total audience of U.S. social networks seems to be stuck at a low-to-mid-single digit growth rate, while the engagement metrics are falling for just about everyone. Time spent on Bebo.com has been sliced in half over the last four months, while Friendster’s time spent has plummeted nearly 75% in the same time period. Overall, minutes spent per site fell 5% in December 2007 compared to the year-ago period.”

So what’s the problem with these destinations? And how do you make your social network engagement numbers in these destinations absolutely hop? There’s no simple answer, but there are some guidelines you can follow if you want to achieve engagement nirvana.

1. Serve Individuals — think ‘Email’

Today’s social networks, MySpace, Friendster, Orkut, Facebook, etc. share one common problem—they’re novel. Once the novelty wears off, people lose interest. If you want a supercharged social network your goal should be to make it ‘vital’– as indispensable as email. We certainly can’t live without our email. If your social network is truly serving the target audience, they won’t be able to live without it either. When designing (redesigning) your social net, make sure your goals are to make your site as indispensable as email. How can this site be made integral to the success of the target audience on a daily basis? What will make this site a must-have rather than a nice-to-have (a ‘take it or leave it’ site)? What compelling reason will keep the audience coming back for more, again and again, continuously?

2. Be Relevant– think ‘Personal Assistant’

If you had a personal assistant, a large part of their job would be to make sure that only the most important people and information are getting to you—to promote while protecting you. Why should a social network be any different? I mean it has ample information about you. It should know what is and what is not important to you, right? I like to think of this in the context of a personal long-tail. Everyone in a social network has a personal long-tail. The most relevant people and information are the ‘hits’, while everything else fits nicely into the tail of crap-tracks– less-relevant to irrelevant information (spam). Ample information already exists within the context of the social network to determine what is, and what is not relevant to each individual. Relevant information not only has higher value, but higher CPM (relevant ads), and it can, and at times should, be educational.

Four primary types of relevance should be explored: Situational, Profile, Temporal, and Historical.

Situational Relevance refers to the overall site. How is this site relevant to the target audience? Situational Relevance, depending on the situation, can create in itself high membership penetration as well as reasonable engagement numbers. I should note that engagement will still depend to some degree on the interaction architecture and how well it serves the needs of the participants.

Profile Relevance refers to the individual member’s explicit references and is used to match them to people and content. References typically include profile data, extended profiles, and explicit keywords and tags.

Temporal Relevance refers to the individual member and short-term patterns based on immediate interests. Temporal relevance is typically derived by tracking repeat visits to the same or similar subject matter, writing repeatedly about the same or similar subject matter, and interacting with the same people again and again. Temporal relevance is based on a need for instant gratification and for serving hot-topics or fads.

Historical Relevance refers to the individual member and long-term patterns based on long-term interests. Historical relevance is derived in the same manner as temporal relevance, but extrapolated over time. Historical relevance typically reflects more of a person’s core or guttural values.

3. Exploit Vanity – think ‘Hot-or-Not’

Curiosity and vanity are the basis of social networking. Don’t forget to exploit vanity on the site. Regardless of all of the relevance techniques, it’s human to want to be popular–to be seen as attractive, in high demand, or as an expert in their field—especially in a community of peers. Make sure your site has a rating and vanity system that gives the spotlight to the heavy hitters. The vanity component should be designed to encourage participation and healthy competition.

4. Build in a ‘Grab’– Think ‘Dashboard’

Every social network should have two primary components—the dashboard (nerve center) and the browse. The dashboard should always be the very first thing the member sees and serves as the ‘grab’. The dashboard should serve the immediate needs of the individual viewer’s curiosity. A great dashboard should be dynamic and serve information based on the current state of the community and the underlying activity within the community. Some sites employ dashboard components that continuously surround the member as they use the site. To create a great dashboard you should think ‘newspaper headlines’ for your community. The dashboard should at a minimum have the following components: what’s popular, what’s most valued, who’s popular, what’s new, who’s new, and what’s most relevant to this particular user. If you want to supercharge your social network, no two dashboards should be the same. What I mean is, the information you’re providing each member in their dashboard should individually serve that particular member based on what you know about them.

If you follow these golden guidelines and do them well, your engagement numbers should soar. There’s never a guarantee, mostly because people are involved, and every site has a different flavor of people who react differently to different things, but if you follow these guidelines you’re almost assured of some level of increased engagement. And, if you iterate, if you learn continuously about your audience and fine tune your site along the way– maybe, just maybe you will reach engagement nirvana.

A Grand Social Experiment Called Sun Microsystems

I recently picked this up off of a Yahoo message board… “Sun has now fallen into the mid-cap category… Next week we could be looking at a small cap stock. Then the lights will be turned out and the yellow tape will wrap the Sun campus. Sun does not control their destiny any longer. The street has decided for them. The nightmare is near an end.” What this person is referring to is the fact that Sun Microsystems just last week, once again handed pink slips to over 2,000 employees.

Why should we care? It’s important that we keep our eye on this, what I refer to as “The Grand Social Experiment”, because Sun is a Fortune 500 company who is embracing social technology (blogs, wikis, forums, podcasts, vodcasts, Facebook, Second Life, and possibly their own attempt at customer social networks) as a strategy– as a means not only to increase customer accessibility, visibility, and interaction, but to reinvent itself and hopefully restore their once market prominence. Can social engineering save Sun Microsystems?

Sun Microsystems was founded in 1982 by Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Scott McNealy. In 1987 Sun formed an alliance with AT&T to develop a UNIX system for business computing. By 1988 Sun became the leader in the workstation market, with revenues reaching $1 billion. By the time the dot-com boom hit in the 1990’s, Sun Microsystems was positioned perfectly to take a leadership position. It was during this period that Sun experienced a meteoric growth in revenue, profits, and share price that even its executives struggled to defend. It was during this period that Sun adopted the slogan “We put the dot in dot-com.” But, as the story goes, that which goes up must come down. The synthetic expansion of demand during the dot-com boom eventually came to an end. When the bubble burst, the one-time king of the Internet suffered an enormous blow, leaving its market share and headcount in a compromising position.

In an effort to return to the profitability it had in the first Internet bubble, Sun has embraced open-source software, adopted servers based on competing processor technology, and switched CEOs. In 2006 Scott McNealy handed the reins to his successor, Jonathan Schwartz. Jonathan Schwartz is a maverick– willing to try new things– willing to embrace change in an attempt to reinstate Sun’s position as a marketplace leader. But most importantly, Jonathan is a thought leader who has embraced social media and community as a means to reinvent Sun—or at least the perception of Sun. Countless articles tout Jonathan as the #1 blogger of the Fortune 500— one of the few according to Fortune 500 Bloggers. In countless blogs and speeches Jonathan repeats the word ‘community’, again and again. The one thing Jonathan seems to understand is the importance of engaging the customer in the business. I truly believe that Jonathan ‘gets it.’ After all, today the customer, more than ever before, ‘is’ the brand. It is the masses—the customers– who will decide the fate of Sun and whether it’s worthy of surviving and thriving—or not.

Not unlike any other enterprise, the biggest detractor to Sun’s success with social engineering is itself. There is a great divide in Sun—those who believe, and those who don’t. It reminds me of the movie “The 300”, where 300 Spartans against insurmountable odds fight a Persian army of more than one million soldiers. There is a great silent majority inside Sun who believe that Jonathan is taking Sun away from what’s important. This same camp (what I refer to as the ‘Old Guard’) believes that all of this blogging, social adoption, and the creation of community is nothing more than a distraction– an enormous waste of time. And every time new blood enters Sun to embrace Jonathan’s vision for reaching out to the masses, the Old Guard selectively weeds them out with the next RIF (Reduction in Force—more commonly referred to as a layoff). Had Jonathan had more time, had the company not been on fire when he took the reins, possibly he could have focused a bit more on internal alignment before engaging the customers and the market– like with Dell’s EmployeeStorm initiative.

Sun Microsystems is the story of transformation and struggle, of rise and fall, of old vs. new. The battle for Sun is as much an internal battle as an external one—a battle to rebuild trust more than to build new technology— a grand experiment to reinvent Sun and the perception of Sun in the marketplace using social media, social networking, and Web 2.0. We’re currently in the fourth wave of computing which is all about connecting us to our information and to each other. Today, more than ever before it’s about word-of-mouth and connecting with the customer. And thanks to social engineering the market is voting– continuously. The best CEO’s today are thought leaders who listen intently to their customers, and take action. We’ve seen it with Dell’s IdeaStorm, Starbucks’ MyStarbucksIdea, and Salesforce’s IdeaExchange. Best-in-class companies are embracing social engineering to change and form market perception, and to grow revenues and profitability. If Jonathan Schwartz is successful, it will be one of the biggest turnarounds accredited in part to the adoption of social technology as a major part of their strategy. If I were a Fortune 1000 CEO, I would be monitoring the impact social engineering has on Sun’s transformation very closely, at least for lessons learned.

A Case for Social Discrimination

About a year ago I created my very own store on Amazon. I had a bunch of books I’d never gotten around to reading and just wanted to get rid of them. As each order would come in I would diligently package my books and drop them in the mail. Then I would notify the recipient that their book had been shipped—all on the very day I would receive the order. My customer service was spectacular! The rave reviews started rolling in. A PERFECT 5 STAR RATING! YES! And then it happened. But how could this be? My 5 star rating all of a sudden dropped down to a 4.2? Somebody gave me a 1-star rating and said that they would never order from me again. But why? I mean, I did everything perfectly. I followed up on the orders, made sure they were addressed properly. All deliveries were made in record time. After a thorough investigation, I discovered that the person who gave me a 1-star rating had been maliciously slamming sellers all over Amazon, for no apparent reason. I was just his next victim. I contacted Amazon and requested that the rating be removed due to this person’s pattern of destructive behavior. They told me that there was no way to remove a rating, and that this unfortunately was how the system worked.

In the United States, it’s written right into our Declaration of Independence– “All men are created equal.” I believe in equality for all people, and the American way of life. But beyond the basis of equality, everyone has a particular standing in their respective communities. Everyone has varying degrees of impact or ‘weight’. In your local ‘real-world’ community, if you are a citizen, if you are highly active, if you are popular, if you’re connected, if you are charitable, if you are highly involved and a major contributor, if your contributions are held in high regard– you have impact—you have ‘weight’—your community most likely looks up to you. And if you are an introvert, if aren’t known in your community, if you aren’t actively involved, if you’re not connected, or if your contributions are looked down upon– your voice is virtually unheard and you are most likely not held in high regard. This is how it works in the ‘real world’ right? So why is it in cyberspace we allow inactive citizens, non-citizens (non-members, illegal immigrants?) and even rogues to impact the value of our contributions and reputations? Why is it we give inactive citizens and rogues equal footing with hard-working diligent citizens? To ratings systems we’re all just citizen ‘X’. Regardless of our standing in the community, our impact when rating things is equal. We may be very popular and we may be recognized by our constituents within our respective communities, but with today’s rating systems that unfortunately does not transcend into any kind of power or leverage when rating things. These aren’t popular voting systems; they’re ‘rating’ systems. Shouldn’t these super-citizens be rewarded with some kind of super-delegate status? I mean, after all, didn’t they earn that privilege?

I’ve been a long-time proponent of more intelligent, more relevant online communities. One of my biggest areas of ‘rant’ is in the area of ratings. I want ratings to have more value and I want them to be self-policing. To create value within a system of ratings, a system of inequality must be developed. If a person is highly active in their online community, if they are held in high regard because they contribute often, if they’re connected, and the respective value of their contributions is high, the impact of their voice should be greater—the impact of what they rate should be greater. And the converse– if a person is a schmuck, if they rarely (if ever) contribute, and if the value of their contributions is low, their voice should be little-to-none—and the impact of what they rate should be lower. Anyone new to the system still gets to vote, and they’re voice is heard, they’re just in the middle somewhere. This type of system would reward those who are hard-working and diligent and it would provide incentive for members in a community to be actively involved and to provide more and better contributions—and the ratings and reviews would be far more valuable to the viewing audience. A system like this would also prevent, or at least diminish the impact of those whose only goal is to be destructive. We’ve seen a few folks in the general market playing with reputation scores. Naymz and Rapleaf are two such companies. Admittedly I haven’t explored just how an entire company could be formed around this, and how it might be monetized, but I do see reputation scoring as a feature of any site that has membership and/or community. Besides, we’re all used to this type of a system. If you want to have more credit, be more active and diligent. If you want to have a louder voice and more impact, do good stuff more often. To quote from Orwell’s classic Animal Farm, “ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL, BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.”

State of the Information Economy: “We’re Drowning”

In January 2008 the ISC Internet Domain Survey reported the number of hosts on the Internet at 541,677,360. As of March 2008 Internet World Stats counted over 1.4 billion Internet users globally. As of May 2007 it was estimated that the web consisted of over 19.2 billion documents, 1.6 billion images, and over 50 million audio and video files. In the 2007 article “The Fight Against Infoglut” Mary Hayes Weier states “ The numbers are barely comprehensible. The amount of digital information created, captured, and replicated last year was equal to 161 billion Gbytes, according to a recent IDC report, roughly equivalent to the contents of 12 stacks of books extending from the Earth to the sun. In 2010, IDC estimates, the info flow will reach 988 billion Gbytes… this year, for the first time, the amount of digital information generated will surpass the storage capacity available.”

The Web is so enormous that we can only find things by using powerful search tools like Google. But with each passing year it’s becoming obvious that even Google is losing the keyword-relevance search battle. Based on the enormous number of results returned, we barely get past the first two pages of results. What value lies in the remaining pages of Google search results that we don’t have the time or patience to weed through?

In the enterprise, and now in our private lives we routinely see hundreds of daily email messages. Mesmo, an email consultancy, determined that three out of every four employees spend at least half of their day sifting through email messages and a quarter spend more than four hours per day. Consider these stats and projections from the Radicati Group cited in a Wall Street Journal article of 11/27/07:

• Over the next four years the number of e-mail users worldwide will approach two billion people
• The average number of corporate emails sent and received per person, per day in 2008 is estimated to be 156. By the year 2011 that number will be 228
• By the year 2009 it is estimated that over 41% of the average workday will be spent managing email

To compound this problem it is estimated that the average percentage of spam in mail traffic amounted to 86.4% in January 2008. On New Year’s Day 2008 it was estimated that spam levels reached 97.4% for that day. It’s been estimated that spam in 2007 reached an astounding cost of over $197 billion in lost productivity. Despite our futile attempts to eliminate or even reduce spam, it keeps rolling forward, hammering our systems with spyware, viruses, and scams.

Web 2.0 only contributed to yet another massive explosion of information consisting of social media—video, wikis, forums, reviews, postings, micro-blogs, livecasting, podcasts, blogs, vlogs, social network postings, etc. etc. etc. In March 2007 Technorati was tracking over 74 million blogs and social network postings. Scarier yet, estimates show that the blogosphere has been doubling every six months.

As for Social Networks last estimates put global social networking subscriber growth rates at 47% year-over-year, expected to reach saturation somewhere around the year 2012. MySpace today has over 55 million subscribers, over 100 Billion rows of data with 14 Billion comments, 20 Billion mails, 50 Million mails per day, 10 Billion friend relationships, 1.5 Billion images (8 Million images uploaded each day), and 60,000 new videos uploaded daily– mostly contributed by a mere 1% of the subscribers. According to the 90-9-1 rule only about 1% of users in any given community actually contribute to any significant degree. Imagine what would happen if that number doubled to a whopping 2%.

The overload of cheap information threatens our ability to function in cyberspace. We’re generating information far faster than our individual capacity to process it. The term infoglut doesn’t give it justice… it’s more like an information tsunami. We spend an inordinate amount of time searching, sorting, and filtering just to find those valuable nuggets of information. At times it feels like searching for a needle in a haystack. When overwhelmed, we simply start ignoring information and search results. It’s the best we can do with our current technology. While the youth are still enamored by the faddish fun-and-game world of social networking, the ever-growing technically savvy professional herd is continuously gravitating toward anything that saves time… anything that provides real, bottom-line value. Time is an individual’s most valuable asset. We have very little time and once it’s gone, it’s gone forever. No one on their deathbed ever said, ‘I wish I spent more time at work.’

Directional Syndication is a concept I conceived and began working on in 2002– and continue to work on to this very day. Directional Syndication describes a collective networked intelligence concept that continuously delivers, high-value, relevant information in a timely fashion, to its intended individual recipient(s). A Personal Relevance Agent (PR Agent), owned and controlled by the recipient learns about the recipient through their profile as well as their behavior. It picks up on things they read, sites they visit, things they belong to, people they are connected to and people they interact with, messages they write and messages they receive, as well as ratings and their personal contributions. Directional Syndication is based on the premise “that which is not relevant, is a waste of time.” Too many people, too much information, not enough time, and things change, continuously. With Directional Syndication what you end up with is in essence a massive distributed intelligent content router. With Directional Syndication, you don’t find information, information finds you.

Whether it’s Directional Syndication or some other new-fangled technology, the time has come for a leap in technology—a technology that knows the receiver—a technology that knows what is relevant and valuable to the receiver—and delivers.

Social Networking: That Which Matters Most

According to Spencer Ante (It’s Official: U.S. Social Networking Sites See Slow Down) the social networking market is slowing down. One interesting fact presented by Mr. Ante is that although membership numbers on particular sites like Facebook are up, engagement numbers are down– way down. But isn’t it about time that we see this trend downward? I mean we’ve all witnessed Social Networking 1.0– we’ve beaten that dead horse. And if we aren’t absolutely inundated by peopleglut and infoglut within the social networks, then we simply become bored and return to our real lives. What’s left to keep us engaged? There just isn’t a very compelling reason.

The problem with the majority of today’s social networks is that they are purposeless and irrelevant. They experience social and information entropy as they grow. They become irrelevant and noisy. As it goes, once the novelty of a social site wears off, the community or herd migrates. It started in 1999 with a little startup called Ryze. Ryze didn’t have a lot to offer in the beginning. As soon as Friendster hit the radar the herd migrated. After finding Friendster to be appallingly slow and problematic they migrated to MySpace. Today the herd continues to migrate to Facebook, but they’re looking… looking for new digs where they can move their social equity.

Purpose Driven Social Networking

The following is a list of types or classifications of community that when applied to social networking can create or drive purpose:

• Communities of Action– a community where its members have the possibility of bringing about change
• Communities of Circumstance– a community based on life experience or the situation a member is currently in
• Communities of Interest– a community where its members share a common interest or passion
• Communities of Position– a community built around life stages that provide individuals with the opportunity to build relationships with others during that particular phase of their lives
• Communities of Practice– a community made up of people who have common goals who interact to share experiences, lessons learned, new techniques, and information as they strive towards those goals
• Communities of Purpose– a community made up of people who are going through the same process or are trying to achieve a similar objective. For example a community of people working to make a difference in the world, where mission matters as much as the bottom line.
• Community of Inquiry– a community based on questioning, reasoning, connecting, deliberating, challenging, and developing problem-solving techniques, especially in the context of education

One social network in particular that stands as an example of purpose driven social networking is LinkedIn. A business-oriented social networking site, LinkedIn was launched from Silicon Valley in May 2003 by Reid Hoffman. Used for professional networking, LinkedIn generates a degree of continuous value as it not only keeps the member abreast of changes in their professional network, but in their professional market. Unlike Facebook and MySpace who have seen a dramatic drop in engagement, LinkedIn members stay engaged because it becomes an integral part of career exposure, promotion, and management. There’s value in staying connected to and being exposed in your professional network. But still, LinkedIn falls short in the area of driving continuous value to the individual member. Every time I go to LinkedIn it’s the same-old same-old. And although LinkedIn remains interesting to me, it’s most likely because it started here in Silicon Valley and therefore (still) has relevance.My biggest fear is that it’s going to go the route of so many other social sites and become convoluted as it continues to grow. My fear is that it will lose its relevance to me.

So why doesn’t LinkedIn serve me better? Why doesn’t LinkedIn try to keep itself relevant to me (beyond my network connections). I mean, it knows a LOT about me. It knows my entire career, it knows who I’m connected to, it knows how often I visit, it knows what I look at most often. So why doesn’t it serve me continuously while I’m engaged to keep me coming back? Why doesn’t it extend far beyond network connectivity to find interesting matches for me, in both information and people?

Relevance, Purpose, and that which matters most…

Social networks, in order to be successful and monetizable must drive continuous value to their stakeholders, through relevance and purpose. There simply needs to be a reason to go there and spend your time on a daily basis, and it has to extend beyond fun and games. And we have to move beyond siloing (the creation of purpose or relevance through vertical and/or private label social networks attached to brands and already existing groups and organizations). Siloing does create a particular degree of community-based relevance, but in itself does not serve the individual’s needs. In order toachieve the desired levels of engagement and participation v.Next Social Networks must understand the user and what and who is relevant to that individual user at any moment in time.

The question has been raised… “Is the party over?” The allure of social networking may be waning, but it’s far from over. Social networking is in its infancy. The Web was originally designed to do one thing really well… ‘connect people.’ This point was driven home when my company launched Match.com back in the mid-1990′s (we became very good at connecting people through the web). The time is ripe for the next innovator to steal the social networking market, like Google did back when they stole a supposedly saturated search engine market– and monetized it.

Social Networking v.Next must be focused on intelligence. It must continuously learn about and serve its membership, individually. It must be about things finding you rather than you finding them– about driving individual value, continuously. With so many social networking sites that end up as little more than vanity mouthpieces, it would be refreshing to see the emergence of those that serve real purpose and continuously drive individual value.

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