I've been harboring a theory for a while now that human beings don't change very much when they go online. We watch some of our communication behaviors change as we become addicted to various technologies (Twitter seems to the be the most annoying recent addition to this habit, though I'll admit I haven't tried it... see more on why below). But fundamentally, we use online tools to do the same things we do offline - kill time, learn, play, work. When it comes to social media, just like in the real world, we move between networks depending on which other friends are there, what they're doing and why we want to interact with them. If we're loyal to groups offline, we're probably loyal to them online. If we're fickle, well - we hop networks online too.
[Under the link I muse on about MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google's OpenSocial, Twitter, LiveJournal and Ning with more opinions about the psychology of the human species.]
Over coffee with a tech-loving friend like myself recently, I postulated that in its infancy, the social media market seemed to be "growing up" much like the population that uses it most. It is interesting to watch MySpace rocket in popularity (catering largely to teens), followed by FaceBook (catering to college students) and meanwhile LinkedIn has been perking along and now seems to be heating up as a popular professional networking tool (based on the increasing number of new invites I and my friends seem to be getting within the last year). Notice a pattern here? People grow up. As they grow up, their activities, interests and circles of friends change and so do their communication behaviors, i.e., so do their favorite social media platforms. Why should we think there will ever be a single giant network when people and their circle of friends are constantly moving around as they change?
Google certainly doesn't think there will be a huge uber-network (or, I suppose maybe it wants to be that network by virtue of being the "glue platform" between them all) with it's recent announcement of OpenSocial. By diving underneath the application development business and creating an open API to build applications on and which will interact with multiple sites (not Facebook or MySpace yet) Google is positioning itself in the infrastructure layer at the same time it's recognizing that there will never be one single site that is as useful/interesting to the soccer mom set as to the teenyboppers - both of whom are very desirable demographics. For a great analysis of OpenSocial's impact on the market, check out Charlene Li's blog entry at Forrester Research's Groundswell.
I was interested to see that I'm not the only one observing the fact that people join multiple groups for multiple reasons, move between them and increasing/decreasing their participation as their lives change. Rod Boothby of Innovation Creators reported in October on a panel at the Next Generation of Social Networking conference in Silicon Valley noted the following comments from people who know better than I do (these are not direct quotes, Rod says to blame him if they're wrong, but I think their spirit is probably right on):
The truth is that users don't care to move their friends between networks - because people use different networks in different ways. - Jonathan Abrams, Founder & CEO, Socializr - He also helped found friendster
Don't look at "theories" - look at what the kids are doing. The generations seem to be 1995, 2000, 2005. All my friends used friendster.... and then they got married. [Jonathan said "When they get divorced, that's when they come back".] The interesting thing will be to create a network that can transition. For example, can the network transition from dating to businesses. Jia Shen, CTO, Rock You (huge Facebook Application)
Personally, I'll be surprised if there's a network that really transitions from "dating to business" as Shen theorizes. And if it does I'm guessing there will be something other than either dating or business that draws people to it. Maybe - here's a radical thought - it will be the same things that keep people connected between these life patterns in the real world, like movies, sports, spirituality, food, children... you get the idea. This is why blog communities like LiveJournal interest me as well as the huge sites that seem focused on demographics alone. LiveJournal, Ning and others are really designed to facilitate communities as much as be individual's soapboxes (though they definitely allow that as well). They provide community managers robust tools to help individual bloggers interact with each other in both public and private ways. So naturally, people who are interested in cooking or comic books seem to hang out there. Based on some anecdotal evidence I've seen, some of these folks stay connected - both to the social media platform and to each other - through various life transitions because their connections are more integrated into who they are as people as opposed to just the time/place in life they happen to occupy. Does this make these platforms more useful? More likely to be financially successful? Not necessarily. They might get higher ad rates but at lower volumes and so in the end financial success will still come down to whether or not they run a really good business or not. But it does prove that - just like in life where you hang out at the school or the office with one set of people and then go somewhere else to hang out with your friends or volunteer colleagues or teammates, there's room enough in the social mediasphere for all kinds of mega and niche players.
Twitter. For those who don't know, it's a service where you can Twit off a message about where you are and what you're doing at any point in time for your friends to see. Why would anyone want to do this? Well, I kinda get it. I certainly have people in my networks (on and offline) that I enjoy touching base with throughout the day to find out what they're up to. Family, very close friends, clients... But my whole network? My first impulse is to say "nah," you'll never find me on Twitter. But then I KNOW that if my kids got into it, or some of my really good virtual friends, and we used it as a low-bandwidth way to stay in touch, I'd probably become just as addicted to Twitter as I am to email. But.... I will not be the one to lead the way. I simply have no more time in my day because I spend so much time online and on email in between the rest of my real life duties. I think this is reflective of many people's experience with social media. We go where we have reason to go and to go there requires changes of habits and time allocations that are sometimes difficult, but sometimes made easy by the fact that we want to be with the people enough to overcome the challenges. When your friends and/or colleagues get involved in a new service and use it in such a way that provides value (fun or productivity both count for value here), we all find ourselves migrating a bit onto new platforms because it's the people that draw us there (or, for geeks, just cuz it's cool).
So are us old fogies getting into social media more slowly because we're old? Fogies? Sure. Some of us. But mostly, our habits for staying in touch are currently more offline, ingrained and fewer of us are willing to "lead the way." We'll get there eventually, when we have good reason. And when we do it will be for the same reason we share phone calls and email strings today, because we enjoy each other more by doing it. I really don't think that will ever change, and I hope it doesn't!
What's the "so what" for organizations incorporating social media into their communications and technology strategies? I'll pontificate more on that in future posts, but the bottom line is - don't forget everything you know about human nature as you implement new technology initiatives.
Do you think I'm full of it? Think the human species is evolving more fundamentally than I do because of these newfangled technologies? Let me know.
Link to original post