June 3rd, 2008

A simple illustration of social design

There is a lot of “social” talk these days, whether it’s social media, social marketing, or social design. Frankly, it’s hard to keep track of it all. When I get into a discussion with someone on one of these subjects, I rarely know where it will end up…are we talking about social interaction or something else?

But I’m pretty sure that social design, at least one way of thinking about it, is something relatively new (as in, the last decade or so). To try and illustrate this, it helps to look at how we’ve evolved so far on the web…I think we’ve seen an evolution in three broad steps:

Many Way Web

Social design is the design of these social interactions (red bendy arrow on the bottom). It’s enabling people to talk to each other and thereby improving their experience. They may be commenting, recommending, friending, or some other social activity. In short, social web applications enable conversation between people who use a web service, not just between people and the web app itself. For years web sites would simply save your preferences and transactions, and as a user it didn’t matter if anybody else used the web site or not (think banking applications). It was a personal tool, for personal use, much like desktop software. Going from personal use to broader social interaction is the crucial distinction.

The genesis of web-based social applications were the bulletin board systems of the Internet, which pre-dated the web and were around since the 70s. These BBSs, as they were called, declined rapidly with the surge of the Internet in the late 1990s.

However, while bulletin boards were the precursor, they were not people-centric. They were instead topic-centric, meaning that discussions revolved around topic threads. What made some of the early social web applications different (PlanetAll, Friendster) is that they focused on the person as the primary pivot (see Finding the Primary Pivot), meaning that you model relationships between people (friend them). This was another huge step in social web application design.

Blogging, which started in earnest around 2000, was also a big push forward for the idea that getting people talking to each other maight actually be a valuable endeavor. Amazon and eBay were the pioneers here, as they laid social elements on top of business transactions to make those transactions more valuable.

Additionally, much of the current evolution of social software is in improving the communication between people who provide a service and people who use a service. This is what I think is meant by “social media marketing”. This is somewhat of the fourth wave…when social applications not only improve the conversations between people using the site, but between people who provide the site and those who use it. (Tearing down the firewall isn’t easy) While email has done much of the heavy lifting here for many years, the mere act of putting these conversations public changes further interaction around them, while scaring the wits out of executives who worry that negative conversation will bring down their empire. (What they don’t count on are the fans they have who defend them)

So while all of this stuff is constantly evolving, and the word “social” is bandied about in countless ways, social design is relatively concrete: it’s designing software that support social interaction.

Grab the RSS Feed

Comments ( 9 Responses so far )

Pingback: Social Design’s Fourth Wave | Socialmediaworx

1. Graham Strong on June 3rd, 2008 (Comment) #

I have been pondering social marketing and “interactivity” of the Internet myself lately. Many marketers believe that social marketing can never truly be achieved, not in any consistent fashion anyway. I don’t believe this myself — I’ve seen too many examples of how social media can spread the word quickly.

I am surprised at the stats though. Direct mail still leads the pack in terms of response rate (while the lowly-old banner ad, apparently, has a response rate somewhere around 0.2%…) But I do think this is where the future, including those mini-sites that are popping up all over the place.

Interactivity, in my mind, is what the Internet is all about. I think it is going to happen anyway (that’s the social media part) but the trick for social marketers is to somehow direct the conversation. And as consumers become more savvy (and more jaded) I think the challenge increases, not decreases, as social media progresses.

Thanks for providing a positive viewpoint!

~Graham

Pingback: EverydayUX: Everyday User Experience by alex rainert » Blog Archive » EverydayUX links for June 3rd through June 4th

Pingback: Pleasure and Pain » Links from 5/19/2008 to 6/4/2008

Pingback: nortypig » Blog Archive » Illustration of Social Design

2. randulo on June 5th, 2008 (Comment) #

This was a nice walk-through of the topic. It made me focus immediately on what I like the least about Ning: the feature-poor private messaging, the lack of presence (except through the use of someone else’s chat, like WidgetLaboratories) and the way the forums and blogs work and display. So, now I’m trying to remember why Ning is so successful?
Somehow, the ease of slapping together a social network on Ning has been more important than the actual usefulness of the assembled network!
Ning with a network-linked Twitter-like functionality would be a winner.

3. bTINA on June 11th, 2008 (Comment) #

This is a very simple but clear and convincing statement to a new development of our conversation in the future. ThanX for your fine explanation! I linked your content to my blog (with reference to your copyright). Hope this is okay for you. bTINA

4. Dale Larson on June 19th, 2008 (Comment) #

I’ve always wanted to say about Web 2.0, “What’s new about that?”
Thanks for your useful picture. Now I get it!

At the birth of the web, the idea (or, the idea I had) was that everyone would be posting their own web pages. Communication would be democratized.

No one would be just a reader, they’d all be readers and writers. A different version of your picture could show that: one-way communication in and one-way communication out. (Non-web technologies such as Usenet discussion groups could further complicate the picture since they enabled public Internet conversation.)

Alas, it became clear that there would be distinct publishers and consumers in Web 1.0, with most consumers not also publishing. It was idealistic to think that everyone wanted web pages of their own in this sense, or not to realize that publishers and advertisers would push their agendas into the new media.

Web 2.0 isn’t just an attempt to make it easier for everyone to have a web page of their own.

It allows a much wider range of participation, as illustrated by another powerful picture from Forrester’s Social Technographics report. Hopefully it continues to force change in marketing and advertising.

Sometimes, a couple of pictures really is worth a few thousand words.

–
@Graham Strong, Direct Mail gets high response rates because it is so personalized, well tested and targeted. The expense of producing and sending the pieces is so great, they’d never show a return without that level of optimization, and they’ve had many years to perfect their techniques.

5. Remmert Braat on June 21st, 2008 (Comment) #

I think true social marketing hasn’t come about yet. By this I mean sites that leverage the selling power of the networks of their visitors.

Apart from the large social networks which try to be everything to everybody, niche sites are having a hard time tapping in to the social marketing mix. This is partly due do the lack of data portability but also because of the absence of permission systems. Services like friendconnect and so on are going to tackle the former but the latter is going to be the killer that needs to be solved. If you have no way of telling the social mesh who gets to see what (of your data) than I’m afraid opting out is going to be the only viable alternative.