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

Also, at Comcast, we’ve noticed every experience has two distinct cycles.

1. The acquisition cycle (roughly parallels your cycle above) is about how users come into contact with and begin interacting with the experience.

2. The consumption lifecycle is about how users interact with the service space your experience impacts. (Not very clear, but bear with me.)

Our example is fancast.com. We have a very clear acquisition cycle designed to make users aware of the site and then move them gently from first-time to comes every day users.

The consumption cycle, though is about for Fancast talks about how people consume entertainment. There’s a dovetail at the end of the two cycles: people will come all the time, if we help them consume appropriately.

I’ve found thinking about the two cycles individually helps focus specific interactions on the site.

There’s a corollary thought here as well. Design is always about affecting user behavior. With Fancast, we have an image of an ideal user being someone who watches lots of entertainment and talks about and shares lots of entertainment with their friends.

Part of our design focus is based on moving users from one behavior group into our desired behavior group. (Of course the assumption is the desired behavior group would make us lots f money).

So maybe that’s three cycles to consider when designing an experience?

1. How users become aware and then develop a relationship with your service.
2. How users consume the service your experience provides.
3. How you affect user behavior to benefit both you and them.