- 27 November, 2007 04:22 PM EST
- Social Circles, Not One-Size-Fits-All, Are a Recipe for Long-Term Social Networking Success
- Posted By: Anthony Bradley, Managing VP
Two recent and interesting press articles addressed the reality of and need for social subsetting in social networking implementations. I am dubbing these subsets "social circles." Both articles make valid points about public Web social networking. This post addresses the importance of enterprises recognizing social circles when implementing social networking solutions to grow thriving, productive, and long-lived communities.
In the first piece, “Controlling Social Networks,” the author talks about wanting Facebook to help him divide his social network into groups because he will interact differently with friends, business contacts, co-workers and so forth. He laments Facebook's limitations in its one-size-fits-all approach to social networking.
The second article, “Social Networking Sites May Foster Same Old Divisions,” presents the tendency for people to adhere to their demographic comfort zones while networking online.
Both of these pieces reinforce the importance of social circles to social networking. On the public Web, a social site's "cool factor" can be the primary draw for participants. Maintaining this cool factor is directly related to attracting and keeping a social circle. We all have social circles that somewhat define who we are by association. For example, if Facebook moves more toward servicing the 50-something business person, then it risks losing its base of college students — who won't run in that circle. This indicates that one-size-fits-all is not a formula for a social networking platform or for community implementation longevity. The challenge of effectively establishing and managing groups within a social networking site is not new. Facebook and other social networking platform sites recognize the importance of social circles and are moving to offer more robust grouping capabilities. See “Facebook and the Emerging Social Platform Wars” for more information on social platform evolution. Enterprises considering leveraging public Web social sites such as Facebook and Myspace for corporate application must understand their capabilities and limitations including support for social circles.
For enterprise social software implementations the concept of social circles is a critical success factor in building effective communities. Whereas, in the public Web realm, social circles are often primarily defined by loose or undefined relationships among a demographic, in the enterprise it is most often the "cause" that will determine the social circle. In the Gartner research "How to Apply the PLANT SEEDS Framework for Enhanced Enterprise Web 2.0 Adoption" The "cause" is the purpose why the enterprise wishes to build a community. Purpose is the "P" in the acronym PLANT SEEDS. Some purpose examples include collaborating directly with a large number of customers to enhance product or service design, working with suppliers to enhance product quality, and creating tighter ties between sales people and product marketing. The promise and challenge of social software is that it can deliver value to an immense number of causes. Identifying the right purpose as the nucleus of the social circle is critical to implementation success. The purpose will drive all other actions in defining, growing, and nurturing the community. It will be the foundation for understanding the functionality, content, people, and user experience necessary for achieving rapid adoption and sustaining community critical mass. Additional Gartner research on social networking best practices includes “Seven Ways Your Organization Can Benefit from Web 2.0,” “Findings: Social Networks Are Adding a New Dimension to PLM,” and “How to Use Social Software to Support Your Learning Ecosystem.”
Bottom line: Enterprises should not take a one-size-fits-all approach in building communities but must employ social software implementations to target a cause (purpose) and build a community presence that caters to the primary social circle that will adopt that cause.
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I strongly agree that enabling social circles is a key aspect of social networking software -- whether on public sites like Facebook or internal enterprise systems. The challenge is that the concept is difficult to implement well. The need is well-known but the execution is thus far spotty, and future success depends upon continued innovation.
Facebook is an interesting case study, because it already supports multiple ways of aggregating social contacts:
- friends -- which can be either of two levels: "limited friends" or, alternatively, full friends.
- networks -- which group populations of users (some of which are "friends") based on geography or workplace
- groups -- which group populations are based on arbitrary, user-defined interests
Each of these concepts is layered on the other. Facebook provides many ways to fine-tune visibility of information (for example, you can decide to have specific items such as your birthday or your phone number visible only to your friends, or alternatively to users that are members of specific networks).
Yet the current crop of mechanisms is not enough. Having a user-defined way to group friends into circles is the single most requested feature not yet implemented in Facebook. The idea is that users want to group friends into various circles, such as: work colleagues, football buddies, family, school chums, and so on.
Translating this example to an enterprise setting, an equivalent hypothetical scenario might be: I am a salesperson and want to collaborate with my colleagues in the Northeast region, my associates in my department (say, Sales), my fellow mid-level managers, the members of my project team, the special-task force, the Employee-of-the-Month club, and so on. The point is that each person in an organization has a multi-faceted social identity, and those facets overlap and function simultaneously.
Implementing this feature in a way that meets the full range of usage scenarios while preserving a high-quality user experience is still an unsolved problem. Facebook management is well aware of the need for circles-of-friends, and has promised to deliver this feature. However, it has not yet been rolled out (perhaps because it is so important to do it right). In the meantime, there are a half-dozen third-party applications that layer on top of the Facebook platform and provide mechanisms for enabling social circles -- for example, "Circle of Friends", "Top Friends", and "Friends Plus". Facebook needs to get ahead of this parade soon, or else the result will be fragmented and incompatible mechanisms, and frustrated users.
Back to the topic of enterprise social computing, IT managers need to assess social software solutions in light of the Facebook experience, and realize that satisfactory mechanisms are still in the future, and depend on continued innovation from software designers and vendors.
I'll chime in on this.
We did some research a few years ago on communities which included consideration of some of these issues. The purpose idea is on target; however, for an organization that wants to develop a community, there is more to it than simply stating a purpose — there has to be intentional facilitation, moderation, a compelling environment and good support to keep the group on purpose.
Once established, social networks will define their own purpose and take their own direction — that's the nature of a social network. This means that the network of customers that was envisioned to improve products (if not well supported) may evolve to a group focused on bashing current products and the company itself. Therefore, the owning organization needs to set achievable goals and social structures, and be willing to live with the results. For example, if the current products are not solid, then maybe the customer network purpose should be narrowed (at least in the beginning) to improving a specific product, rather than having a more open-ended direction. Also, to drive the right social interaction, you need a compelling, flexible, technical environment; some rules of the road; and honesty from the owning organization (Is this a public or an invited group? Are participants anonymous? Can members have private conversations with each other and off the record or is everything public? Is this a permanent community or does it have a defined life? Is there a requirement for some shared demographic or characteristic among the group? What is acceptable behavior and what is not? Is the company willing to live with the results?).
I think some scenario planning and thinking is critical for companies that have high or well-defined expectations of their social networks — What can happen and how will we respond? The more engineered you want the social group and its purpose to be, the more you need this scenario planning. If the social network is a true experiment, then it can be more organic. In either case, thinking about the possible direction the social network may take is important; so is thinking about whether you can live with the results.
