Social Media Analysis

by Richard Kastelein

The name for the convergence of user-generated commentary (UGC) with content, video, photos, and music sharing, presented in a simple, user-friendly format that allows participation on a mass scale. For instance, social networking is one example of social media.

Social media has a number of characteristics that make it fundamentally different from traditional media (such as newspapers, television, books, and radio). Primarily, social media depends on interactions between people as the discussion and integration of words builds shared-meaning, using technology as a conduit. Among overall online users, reading others' comments on a Web site and reading blogs are the most popular social media activities.

Social media can take many different forms, including social networks, blogs, vlogs, social bookmarks, user reviews, video sharing, podcasts, rating systems, collaborative ranking, wikis, comments, message boards, and online forums. Technologies include: picture-sharing, wall-postings, e-mail, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing, and VoIP, to name a few. Examples of social media applications are Google Groups (reference, social networking), Wikipedia (reference), MySpace (social networking), Facebook (social networking), Last.fm (personal music), YouTube (social networking and video sharing), Second Life (virtual reality), Flickr (photo sharing), Twitter (social networking and microblogging). Many of these social media services can be integrated via social network aggregation platforms like Mybloglog and Plaxo.

More specifically, Facebook is one of the most popular social media platforms. Facebook pushed the door wide open to user-generated content when it launched its application in May 2007. Facebook’s platform is an API that developers can use to create widgets that can easily be distributed on Facebook. To encourage "take-up," Facebook’s platform strategy allows developers to keep the revenue they generate through traffic to their applications. Within a year, Facebook had nearly 20,000 applications created mostly by thousands of 3rd party developers.

The most frequently visited social networking sites are viewed by approximately one out of every four Internet users at least once a month (according to an iProspect/Jupiter Research study)

Social Media sites continue to grow as top destinations on the web. Three out of the top five most visited sites on the Internet are social networking sites: MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook, according to Alexa. Interest in these sites is typically driven by a desire to stay connected with existing contacts and expand social networks.

Just as social networking sites continue to grow in popularity, demand for access to those sites on mobile devices will continue to grow as users manage more of their lives online. That in mind, mobile social networking apps may taking the shape of enhancements for portals to existing sites like Facebook, will be the most popular.

So what compels users to choose one media site over another, and where do additional opportunities for social networking apps exist?

Well-organized contact lists that allow users to quickly separate work contacts from social contacts, and search functionality to find any given snippet of contact information instantly.

Entertainment - Does the site allow for playful or serious interactions between users in a fun and effective way?

Voting - Bulletproof voting of news, opinions, comments and other members' karma ensures the best rises to the top and the refuse sinks to the bottom. This also means that users not only communicate with one another they can communicate with the service itself… or find strangers that are similar to themselves.

Monetization - In addition to the basic services using a freemium model, additional information or data from from specific members can be accessed by using micropayments. Part of these micropayments will be shared with the authors. Social Media of the future will offer SMS payment secure transactions at nominal cost and no exchange rate fees.

Personal Branding - By interacting and reacting social media community members will be able to establish a reputation – determined by how other members value their contributions to the community vis-à-vis voting on their opinions, analysis, and advice. This reputation or personal branding can be used to help monetize the opinions, analyses and advice of the contributing members. The delivery system of the monetized content can or may include direct access to the particular members’ opinion and analysis, newsletters, email, selected shout boxes, on-demand print media, digital media, premium member groups, SMS, video streams, vlogs, audio (podcasts) and VOIP conferencing.

Expanding networks is a key activity for these users, and finding others with similar interests or goals is usually the first step.

Ease of Use - In order to achieve a maximum ease-of-use and shrink the learning curve – clear and concise, step-by-step instructions on how to use the site - preferably - both in the form of text and screencasts.

Usability

• Privacy and security concerns. Privacy and security policies are vital in providing users with the assurance that common concerns about engaging in online activities are being capably met. These are principally critical when asking users to provide personal information which will be maintained by the web site.
• Readability. It may seem intuitive but easily readable content and field labels are a must have. All content should easy to read, characterized by charitably sized text and large buttons. Diminutive text, especially during the registration process should not be tolerated as users should be given every reason to read terms/conditions/policies. Wording should be clear and instinctively understood by the average person.
• Screen flows. An efficient sign-up process is key to establishing the basis of a user’s interaction with the site. If it is too complex, users will have reason to quit before getting starting. The registration process should only require basic information fields and should avoid prying for additional personal information like address(es) and phone number(s). If too many steps/screens are involved it will be deemed prohibitive and will deter follow through of the process. Additionally, it should be exceedingly undemanding to perform basic actions such as adding contacts to a new profile.
• Error recovery/event feedback. Clearly discernible error messages should be provided to users to aid them in correct form submission mistakes. These should, ideally, be integrated directly on the current page where users enter the information. Pop-up windows containing error messages are to be avoided and multiple errors should be displayed in close proximity to the related fields to prevent users from being forced through multiple submissions.

Images, video and text are the primary ways users communicate online, so an application that simplified any of those functions would provide efficiency gains on a daily basis.

Popular local events and destinations help users meet in person, and drawing that information into a social network helps bridge the gap between virtual and real life. After users arrive at a local event, connecting them via Bluetooth would be icing on the cake. For people who don't even know each other yet, bluedating — matching up users with similar interests when they're within about 10 meters of each other — is another niche market that could grow. The challenge bluedating faces is a tendency for social networking users to use distance as a convenient and polite reason to reject undesirable new suitors.

Viral Invites - When you join a site such as Facebook the system encourages you to email invites to your entire address book automatically, this is what caused the huge growth amongst college students during late 2006 and early 2007. Any network that can sustain solid growth through viral marketing is a potential winner.

Stickiness

• Increasingly robust personal profiles. As social networking gains more mainstream momentum, it will be necessary to enable users to expand the concept of their personal profile. This area is set to separate the wheat from the chaff. The concept of the simple text/image based profile will be phased out by more personalized forms of profile construction. As Web 2.0 technologies progress, the leading sites will step ahead of the pack and provide highly customizable display options and motifs.
• Mobile integration. This is an area which is extremely ripe for innovation especially as the capabilities and range of mobile devices continue to grow. Consideration of how to profitably form a cohesive mobile experience should be driven by the strengths and weaknesses of an existing social networking offering. The initial focus should be on finding a reasonable intersection of mobile device owners and current social networking users as opposed to attracting those who haven’t yet made a commitment to social networking.
• Geographical context. There is a need to address the fact that users exist in one or more geographical locations. Better association between geographically relevant entities, not just Google ads for local services but a purer form of localization will provide added impetus to use social networking to facilitate offline connections.

More than a service - any new social networking service needs to offer more than just a service. It needs to offer the promise of something better. For example with the emphasis on the environment at the moment the social networking could be “green” or support a cause. This would differentiate it.

Circumspect advertising will present relevant ads to interested users, bring in more income, and prevent frustration by users looking to access their content more quickly — especially on a mobile device where screen real estate is at a premium. Mobile social networking apps that drive appropriate placement of ads will drive user satisfaction and profit.

Search and Link - Providing power and agility to search and link up: Look to some of the bigger dating sites for amazing examples of easy browsing, searching, finding, and filtering. Some even monitor user behaviour to influence search and "recommendations".

Organic organization - Allow users to organize themselves "organically". Most social media sites group users into lists: friends, threads, groups. These are really flat lists that don't reflect well how people view their real-world relationships... Think of a family or work group. These could be better represented by multiple-hierarchies and contextual clustering. You might also look for allowing multiple views of the same user: co-worker in a different department, same co-worker part of my softball team.

Real Time - Take advantage of real-time context. The value (and short-lived novelty) of services like Twitter, or the annoying Facebook Wall updates is that you get a lot of real world status information. Unfortunately all that data isn't useful because it's not presented in the context of your current task. It's not meaningful. When that real-time data is integrated into other systems, it becomes more valuable.

Open Platforms - Open platforms will prosper. In order to find success as a social networking offering, it is becoming important to embrace the concept of an open platform. Even leaders such as Facebook have come to grips with this reality. Fellow leviathan, MySpace has yet to follow suite, and it may cost it some mindshare going forward. The catalyst, ironically, is the demonstrated success by two of the more successfully companies from the dot-com bubble era: Amazon and EBay. Both have evolved from online web sites to e-commerce hubs to full fledged platforms by embracing open Application Programmer Interfaces (API). The availability of interfaces to underlying functionality which characterizes a service has given way to the opportunity to achieve explosive relevance, where an original economy of scale is capable of spawning the existence of succeeding ones. The goal is to create as many points of intersection with other that of the users and developers of applications, services and ecosystems. As API’s garner more popularity and increase in quality, the social networking sites which have already integrated them into their offerings will benefit accordingly.

Verticals

Existing social engagement in the real world and in old-school community sites - There are verticals where you can find large communities already interacting socially prior to the social-networking era. We can find these communities online and in the real-world. A lot of these communities hang out at discussion forums where they have already formed cliques, have tacit reputations among their members, have rudimentary profiles etc. You might be surprised to know that some of these boards (topics ranging from sports teams to anime to faiths) have millions of registered members using relatively 'primitive' technology to connect with one another. In the real-world, we see mom's club or playgroups, book clubs, and clubs/societies in schools. We can use the growth and size of membership in these existing social networks as indicators of whether certain communities will be successful in the modern social networking era.

Community that collaborates to better solve problems - The need to solve problems that can be better solved collaboratively is a strong motivation to join a social network. This is in contrast to social networks that help to enhance your lifestyle or status. Examples like support group for people with serious illnesses, people who are trying to find a diet solution that work for them, people who are in research etc.

Social networks that help you achieve life's milestones - There are milestones in life that most people in most cultures will encounter: education/college, dating/marriage, career, pregnancy/child-rearing and retirement to name the common ones. For the first three, we have already seen online communities (in US and Asia) form around college prep/selection, career/jobs, dating and pregnancy/child-rearing. Many of these communities still exist in the form of discussion forums and might be nurtured for further growth using current social networking features.

Social networks that help filter the noise for important and useful information - We have seen the use of social networks for filtering news, stock tips, restaurant recommendations/reviews etc. Some of these sites have become reliable sources of information for certain verticals An example is Investopedia that was acquired by Forbes, an old-school magazine that have aggregated over the years a big audience of business and finance professionals.

Horizontal

• There are successful businesses that are extending and enriching the functionality of Amazon and Google for the generic masses. In the social media space, there are a few companies that have achieved critical mass in the areas of image hosting, slide shows, layout skins and glitter text and many others trying to gain critical mass in areas like messaging, gaming, p2p payments/commerce.
• In the horizontal space, the main difference is that the extensions/widgets have to be running on top of a proprietary social network. This is a risk to consider as some of these extensions are also things that Facebook and MySpace may be interested in providing themselves. Features like slide-shows, profile layout designs and messaging are closer to the core platform features of a social network. Facebook and MySpace might want to own these features as a way to differentiate themselves. As we have seen, MySpace have chosen to use their leverage to strong-arm YouTube out of their network and promote their own video feature. On Facebook, they have chosen to compete on a more 'level playing field', claiming that their own apps are developed on top of the same API as 3rd-party developers. Of course, one has to remember that they own the API as well. An example we are seeing is the case of the Superwall app (one of the most successful app on facebook) slowly becoming redundant due to Facebook improving its own Wall application.
• We can learn from the exit of Photobucket to MySpace. They have such deep penetration into MySpace and have such a profitable business model that it becomes an easy decision for MySpace to acquire it as an additional source of revenue driven by its own users. This is in contrast to Slide and Rockyou who also have deep penetration into MySpace and Facebook but haven't found a good business model around its apps. The build-vs-buy decision is just too skewed toward build until they have something significant to contribute to the bottom-lines of the social networking companies they so dependent on.

Futurology

Integration with Virtual Worlds - It's going to take a fair bit of time for the models surrounding virtual worlds to smooth over, but the first potential area of revenue generation lies in links between social media profiles as they exist online and their virtual world representations.

User generated content integration - This area has a huge amount of potential to better connect the wave of UGC to networked groups of people. However, copyright and integration issues will be problematic. The link between individuals connected through social computing platforms and the content (multimedia, blogs, etc.) they produce and consume has implications on a number of areas including search and metadata.

Product marketing 2.0 - Users as marketeers has yet to see its day come but it's inevitable. Amazon has leveraged product reviews into its business model quite well and social networking has the opportunity to take the concept to another level.