Tag Archives: Facebook

Are Twitter, Facebook et al just another media?

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My recent conversations with marketing people brought this home to me. They tend to refer to Facebook, Twitter, Myspace et al as social media.

The people who build these things call them social platforms or utilities. The people who work at Ning, Meetup, Facebook etc see them as new social infrastructure where the Internet can remove the friction that impeded social interaction and community-building in the analog world.

You might think I’m parsing this too fine, but I believe that what they’re called is indicative of how they’re used.

For many marketers, these tools are simply media. They’re another way to reach a target audience. Not only that, they use them akin to the old broadcast media. Twitter and Facebook Fan pages are there to blast ‘messaging’ to their audience. (Not all marketers…the smartest brands use them as part of sophisticated community-building or customer service strategies).

The builders of Meetup, Ning, Facebook, Twitter etc see them as platforms on which people self-organize to form relationships and communities, often in ways they never envisaged.

They’re not ‘channels.’ They’re the new town halls, or social mixers, or forums or village squares.

Or are they? I could also argue that Fan pages are like the old media. They have an audience that receives updates and can respond in a limited fashion. But the degree of interaction between others on the Fan page is rudimentary at best. It’s not a real community.

Likewise with Twitter. Each person or organization or brand is broadcasting a point of view or an interesting link. Again, there’s limited functionality for interaction. And that’s just fine. It’s there as a personal radio station if you like with limited ‘call-in’ ability.

What do you think? Do you call them media or platforms, and why?

Facebook, Meetup, Twitter or Ning?

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Following on from the previous post that attempts to distinguish between fan, follower and community member, here’s a brief and imperfect review of the major platforms that we generally consider as suitable for community building.

Bear in mind that each of these do some of the other (and increasingly so as they develop more functionality). But this is a broad-stroke review designed to help someone who’s considering how to create an online platform for community (if they’re not custom-designing their own).

Facebook isn’t designed to create distinct communities. Its main function is to distribute information amongst people who already know each other (or are separated through a few degrees of separation if they’re friends of friends).

Its brilliance is that it removes the resistance to communication within a network of strong and weak ties that geography, time, telephone, mail or even email represent. It’s as its makers describe it: a utility, one that enables things to be shared by people who already know each other, and as such it likely makes those ties a little stronger.

But you can’t say the majority of relationships on Facebook are defined by buying into a common goal, doing things together, having complex interactions, being distinct from other communities because of their values or goals. It’s about fast and seamless information-sharing, whether video, photos, messages or status updates.

Fanpages are slightly different. They can be used to create a community of sorts around an idea, person or thing. At least, it’s a group of people distinguished from the larger Facebook population by putting up their hand up to say I’m a fan of x.

But it’s not really designed to create real community. Co-creation is very limited. There are discussion boards, if enabled, and even some offline functionality. You can receive updates from the fan-object. You can post your own updates (if the administrator enables that).

At the end of the day it’s designed for an audience, not a membership. It’s no accident it’s called a fan page. Fandom normally means a two-way relationship between the fan and the fan-object. Actually, on Facebook it’s often only one-way and used as simply another broadcast medium for distributing information from the fan-object to the fan. It’s not designed for relationship building between members, co-creation or any of the other markers of true community.

Meetup is completely different. It’s almost the reverse of Facebook. Where Facebook is about information-distribution amongst people who already know each other, wherever they are in the world, Meetup’s single-minded focus is creating local, sustainable community around interests, passions, needs and causes amongst people who were initially strangers. It creates a framework for strangers to become friends through successive Meetups, co-create and do stuff together.

Its software is designed for people to find each other and share common interests, easily organize events, appoint responsibilities, create economies within the groups (via fees and sponsorships) and recruit. It’s a reinvention of local community predicated on shared interests (not just proximity), using the Internet to get off the Internet.

Ning is like Meetup, in that it is also designed to create community around shared passions and interests amongst people who were initially strangers. But the focus is not on local, face-to-face community. Its Networks (its name for its communities) can be huge and are normally global. If you’re into zombies you can collaborate with other zombie-lovers globally and make a movie together.

If you’re into reinventing government both federally and locally, join the 24k plus members who belong to Govloop. You can create more specialized communities within the Meta-Network (say, of Federal Recruiters), and they can meet locally (although that’s not a frequent thing). Ning has a selection of tools that enable interaction and co-creation: blogs, discussion boards, groups, status updates etc.

Both Ning and Meetup are in the community business. They have software platforms that recognize the need for a strong community to define its purpose, recruit people who buy into that purpose, enable rich interactions between members and encourage co-creation and participation.

Now Twitter. Is Twitter a community-building platform? I would say not. Yes, people can have tweet-ups and spontaneously show up for an event. You can have lists that are predicated on common interests. But in essence it’s a broadcast medium to followers that you normally don’t know, and never will. They’re an audience, or sometimes a fanbase.

Twitter is really the status-update feature of Facebook without the network of pre-existing relationships. It’s being used by some people as a sort of proto-community of similar values and interests that enables peer-reviewed and distributed information. I’ll read x article because y person who I respect and follow recommends it. It’s sort of a select crowd-curated information source if used this way (versus broadcasting your teeth-flossing schedule). But basically it’s a stripped-down broadcast medium, with some direct messaging functionality.

Summary

So, if you’re not building your own custom-designed site for community creation, Meetup and Ning are really the only platforms out there that have robust functionality to enable communities of shared interest. Then you have to decide if you’re creating a local or global community.

If you’re custom-designing and want access to the crowd, you can go where the crowd is, or fish where the fish are and create an outpost on Facebook. But it really should be recognized for its limited community functionality. It’s often used as a feeder into the main community site. Twitter is a great communication device to broadcast to your community and beyond, and a great intelligence-gleaning device if you’re monitoring what people think of your fan-object or community-leading skills, or you want recommendations on what to read, see and attend from people you respect.

Conversation with Gina Bianchini (Part 1)

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This is the first of two parts of a conversation I had with Gina Bianchini. Gina is CEO and Co-Founder (with Mark Andreessen) of Ning.

Ning is a social platform that enables people to form communities of interests and passions. Well, you’ll see what it is and why Gina thinks it’s different from other platforms in this conversation…

This part covers why Ning was founded, what makes it different from other social platforms and what defines a successful Network.

The next (to be posted in a few days) will cover the evolution of Ning, it’s next significant development, what social platforms will be around in five years time and what Network Creators need to do to ensure success.

Douglas: Gina, why did you start Ning?

Gina: We started Ning with a simple premise: what if we gave everyone the opportunity to create their own unique social experiences online?

We saw early on that the native behavior on the web – or what people wanted to do on the web differently from any other medium before it – was connect people with other people. Looking at eBay, Craigslist, chat and discussion boards, it was clear to us that people wanted to connect and engage online in a fundamentally social way that the Internet and no other media type enabled.

With this as our foundation, we sought to create a social platform for people to create rich, immersive social experiences for the things they cared about the most.

Ning vs. other Social Platforms

Douglas: So what distinguishes Ning from other social networking sites?

Gina: We are focused on enabling unique social experiences for people’s interests and passions.

The fascinating thing about how social technology platforms are evolving today is that each social platform focuses in on a specific area of the human experience. It’s a bit like the five families actually. You have Facebook for connecting you to people you already know; Twitter for news and real-time events; Linked In for your professional identity and Ning is designed for meeting new people around your interests and passions.

For example, the IAVA (The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America) has created a private social network on Ning for returning veterans to be able to find and talk to other returning veterans in a safe place and share their experiences.

Or TuDiabetes (http://tudiabetes.com), which has over 10,000 members touched by diabetes who are there to dive deep and build strong relationships online with others affected via videos, blogs and discussions around topics critical to living with diabetes.

From the politically important to the emotionally critical, Ning is the broadest platform for unique social experiences on the Internet today.

Douglas: So do you think online relationships based around a passion or a need are inherently stronger than, say, those that are on Facebook?

Gina: I don’t know if they’re stronger, they are just different. There will always be a place for you to have a relationship with the people with whom you grew up or went to college. That is one of the things that makes Facebook special.

I think relationships built around interests and passions are typically about meeting new people who have a shared love or identity to you. Where you can’t control where you are born or who you went to school with, what you care about – your favorite music, your critical causes, the reason you get out of bed in the morning – is what makes you uniquely you.

Connecting people around the things they care about requires a different approach than Facebook or Twitter, which are really set up for a different purpose. Interests and passions require context for that particular topic and the ability to go deeper with a smaller set of people filtered for the truly engaged.

Douglas: I agree.  I was talking about this to Linda Stone. We discussed what needs were being satisfied by which social networks.  Twitter versus Facebook versus Ning versus Meetup and so on. The only two that lean into the passion/interest/ cause/needs area effectively are Ning and Meetup.  Except there’s a fundamental difference between the two. Ning is enabling people to cluster around these things online…not necessarily anchored by geography. Meetup is at the intersection of passions and local.

Gina: Yeah.  I think they’re very complementary actually.

Douglas: I do too.
So here’s another big question.  What is community exactly?

What is Community?

Gina: A community has historically been defined as a group of people organized around common values and social cohesion within a shared geographical location.

With the Internet, you don’t need the geographical location, so the opportunity for community has increased exponentially with the types of communities expanding in ways that have no analog in the real world. From offbeat brides to steampunk aficionados, entirely new communities can emerge in minutes around interests that may only exist or be possible in an online world.

Ingredients of a successful Network

Douglas: What constitutes a successful Ning Network?  What are the ingredients?

Gina: Our successful Ning Networks share one thing in common and that’s “The Hook.” Regardless of topic, category, or member base, when a Ning Network has a Hook you know immediately what the social network is about, who it targets, why you should be there, and whether you belong in this contextual world.

How is the Hook communicated? The Hook is communicated via the name of the social network, the brand, the visual design, the features, and the layout. From these small sets of levers, we’ve seen tremendous diversity in the rich, immersive social experiences on Ning.

For example, when you show up at the Offbeat Bride Tribe, it’s got a Goth boot – like a Doc Marten boot – under a wedding dress.  In a split second, you know this Ning Network is about brides who want a wedding that doesn’t conform to the traditional.

Or Lost Zombies, which is a Ning Network creating a crowd-sourced documentary of people who are contributing themselves as the majority of the zombie army.  You immediately know when you’re on it that it’s about zombies: the look and feel, the photos, the videos and overall design tells you immediately what it is about.

These different Ning Networks are really clear about why they exist and why you should join them. They make their case immediately when you first land on the homepage and it goes from there.

Difference

Douglas: One of the things I wrote about in the Culting book is the ‘Four D’s of Difference’. It’s about how effective communities must communicate their difference to potential recruits. Everyone is trying to find their tribe.  We have a profound human need to be amongst ‘like-others’.  The successful cult-like communities…the ones that generate enormous stickiness…are the ones that telegraph their difference to those that are the most likely ‘match’. They say: “you’re different and we’re different in the same way… so come on in.”

Gina: Exactly.

Douglas: And they can do this in a number of ways.  But they absolutely must declare their purpose very clearly.  It could be in a Manifesto. By the way the membership behaves, maybe how they dress, the design of the site, the church, the meeting place, how they talk to each other.

And what’s equally important is to communicate not just to those who could belong but also to those who shouldn’t.  It needs to say, “Hey, you’re not like us. That’s cool but you probably don’t belong here so find the place where you do and you’ll be more comfortable”.

In other words you need to be very clear about who you’re appealing to and who you are not. And be very clear about what you get, and what you don’t if you join.

Gina: Absolutely. And I think that that’s going to get more and more obvious as we move forward.

Douglas: Why?

Gina: Because people are becoming more sophisticated in how they use social technologies and, especially, how and where they define what they stand for and who they want to stand with online.

If people want to be one of many in a rigid, uniform social network, they have that option with where social networks have been, not where they are going.

As the number of options for social experiences continues to grow exponentially, social experiences must both be unique and interesting, but they also must telegraph who belongs and who doesn’t. And they need to do it quickly and effectively on the first impression or they may not get another chance.

We see this playing out everyday across hundreds of thousands of active Ning Networks and it’s absolutely critical in separating out the successful from those that merely exist.