Communicative social software is where a single user controls a thing (like their profile) and then interacts with other users via some mechanism (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn).

Collaborative social software is where multiple users at different lifecycle stages need to collaboratively interact (e.g. Wikipedia, SourceForge).

Our company builds online project management software. I don’t think that project management software is often thought of as “social” but since (ideally) it’s designed to facilitate interactions between people, I think it should be social. That’s why I read this blog; we want health social interactions built into our product. Our product is a good example of “collaborative social software”.

The thing that vexes me is having different users at different stages in their lifecycle. This seems to be easier to cope with in the communicative model than in the collaborative one.

How the heck do you design for these different stages simultaneously? It feels like trying to build a single chair that is perfect for infants, teens, adults, and seniors all at once.

Love your thoughts and writing – always full of gems.

Reading this article I was struck by similarities with a behaviour change model put out by Alan R Andreasen in his 1995 book “Marketing Social Change” (search on Amazon). Andreasen’s model describes four basic stages people go through when adopting a new behaviour: pre-contemplation; contemplation; action and maintenance.

I think you’ve nicely captured the ideas underlying Andreasen’s model and applied them to the social web context. Maybe you can do a similar adaptation to take his ideas about how to move people from one stage to the next in a social marketing context into the social web space.

Cheers
Jessica