Gravity7: Social Interaction Design by Adrian Chan

Social search and advertising: Google's endgame?

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:42:00 +0000

A few weeks back, Jeremiah Owyang wrote a piece "Revealing Google's Stealth Social Network Play." In it he detailed the tactical benefits of a combined of Google Reader, Wave, and Sidewiki in a back-door strategy aimed at social networking. And more to the point, to realizing the advertising opportunities around social networking.

Google has been neither a leader nor a even a decent case study in social networking. It's home-grown social network, Orkut, is popular elsewhere but not here. Open Social is still very real, but is largely invisible to the public. And when it comes to making use of the social graph, Google profiles are a distant cousin to Facebook and even Linkedin profiles. Google's products seem to betray a distinct affinity for information over the more popular and user-friendly experiences that have resulted in the conversational turn in social networking: Facebook status and activity feeds, and twitter.

But with Google Wave, Jeremiah's observation looks spot on. Wave not only facilitates a potentially game-changing departure from old-school email, but also supports the export and re-embedding of "wavelets" outside the Wave experience. These wavelets function as apps, and some of the early extensions featured have already begun to spark interest among developers who see Wave as an application platform turbo-charged by access to Google search, contacts/address book, and distributability. If successful, Google Wave is poised to serve as a platform for distributed social networking.

Brynn Evans writes today about Google social search, in Why There's Nothing to Fear in Social Search. Social search may seem innocuous enough, and the video posted on the company's blog contains a not-so-subtle pitch for Google profiles (the more you related sites and services you add, the better Google can serve you!), but the flip side of an improved search experience is of course advertising. Namely, social advertising.

Now, this is a nut that many have failed to crack, try as they have. But Facebook's failed Beacon was a sign of things to come. There's money in the feed. Feed-based advertising, which I liken to product placement in mainstream media, promises (for now) to leverage the rich social context and realtime conversational power of activity feeds and twitter. Now that twitter has offloaded its advertising problem to Microsoft's Bing and Google, it can worry about making twitter a richer experience, while delegating advertising to the search engines. But reconstructing the conversation, as Adina Levin notes in her post Search the conversation, and as many of the semantic, sentiment, and influence relevance companies I've spoken with will attest, is all the more difficult the shorter the message and the thinner the relationship.

Which is possibly where Wave might create more than a ripple for Google's alogorithmagicians and data miners. Google has lacked access to the information that can be extracted from mined social actions. Wavelets, embedded on end-user and brand blogs, sites, and elsewhere (eg phones, participating social networks), could be used to create an index of social activity. For wave interactions are captured by Google (which hosts the original wavelet and sees all interactions that occur on it).

A social action index built on the back end of Wave could be combined with search indexes of conversational messages from twitter (and possibly other activity feeds: Myspace, Facebook?). Add to those, indexing of blog comments and sidewiki, Google reader subscriptions and its comments, likes, and shares, plus the rich social graph information provided by Google contacts, and you have what looks to me like a distributed, decentralized, gold-mine of search queries, documents, conversations, relationships, and activities. All built on an advertising platform.

If Google could auction off ads in realtime, for printing to the page around conversations, filtered and qualified by social interaction data and constrained perhaps by relationships, it could conceivably personalize targeted advertising and also push a new class of social sales and offers to the user's social graph. That is, reaching friends through those most trusted and respected for their influence in their areas of expertise.

The grail of advertising is not one to one relationships with customers, but access through the right person to a whole network of friends. In or around their own words and at the time most likely to get attention. Realtime is solving the attention problem by capturing it when it's being paid. But it takes a company with a lot of social data to connect the dots and provide social relevance. Google is looking a lot smarter of late.

Realtime streams: now and then

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:40:00 +0000

All social media involve a dislocation that de couples the act of communication or interaction from its artifact, which is a text or recording. This is a shame, in some respects, but one that creates possibilities that wouldn't exist if it weren't for the medium. The medium allows us to be always here and now but visible elsewhere anytime. It has a built in "anyplace, anytime."

This anyplace, anytime is brought into focus by each of us when we use social media. For us it's always now. When I use twitter, I use it now. If I read your tweet, it's now. Your now, which is now "then," is again "now" for me. In reading your tweets I experience them in my own time, even though they were written by you in your time. On your time.

These different times become irrelevant to the medium, for each user's activity makes them present. But the differences do have consequences for some of the medium's particular capabilities. One of these being its way of focusing and harnessing our attention.

Media theory makes the observation that media, or mediated experiences, amplify along some axes of experience while bracketing out others. The phone: voice, and talk. Tv: the eye, and watching. Twitter: the now?

If each of us is in the now but in our own now, then the dislocation and de coupling of a tool like twitter is exacted on the time dimension. We don't experience it that way, because we're always "in time." But we do experience the temporal artefacts, if you will, of the dislocation.

For we in being on twitter, now, we're paying attention to other people, seeking attention from other people, who are not there now, or not in our "now," even though the tool makes it seem so. There's a temporal illusion, if one may mix metaphors ontologically. And I think this may have something to do with the residual practices that develop around attention and which contribute to the attention economy.

I am on twitter now, and for all intents and purposes you seem to be too, or rather, I'm experiencing you now (even though it's now "past" and "then" for you). If I pay attention, by tweeting, tweeting to you, retweeting you, or even simply by reading/observing (which is paying but not giving attention), then I'm being social. I'm engaging in a social act. That social act connects us virtually, because I'm paying attention to you. And if I tweet, some part of that attention wants to close the loop with you. It wants a response.

All social action, mediated especially, intrinsically seeks a return look, a response, if not from you then some other person. It's a tacit social principle and basic social binding mechanism, meaning that it goes without saying.

"Goes without saying." Communication, because it has other people in mind, does a lot that goes without saying. The return is what we want from twitter — and the reason that so many new users drop it. The simplest return is the follow — and the reason so many use following strategies. But talk intrinsically begs the question, makes the appeal, and suggests the response. Talk is structured so that every linguistic statement suggests appropriate, valid, responses. That's how language and meaning work.

The dislocation of all these attention flows, for we are all in the flow of attention, from the streams that result from them, creates a fundamental social "desire" for relocation, or connection. All these mediated forms of talk are looking for ways to make communication more probable, more successful, and more valuable.

The dimension of time is a hidden dimension but one that we know is there, and which operates at a deep level, because twitter is a tool of now. We may see the streams of others, but we experience them in the flow of our own.

This post in continuation of a thread:
Synchronic and diachronic readings of activity streams
The Flow Past Web: even better than the RealTime thing
Activity Streams: Realtime and Streamtime
Activity Streams: Content and Flow

Brands, and putting twitter word of mouth in context

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 19:39:00 +0000

An interesting study of twitter's viability for eWom, or electronic Word of Mouth marketing, has been making the rounds (Twitter Power:Tweets as Electronic Word of Mouth
). The research involved analysis of 150,000 tweets, treated as natural language expressions, or "talk". The aim of the research was to study tweets in which brands are mentioned for a number of attributes relevant to brands, including sentiment, purpose, frequency, and so on.

I found this interesting for several reasons. First was that I've been arguing of late that the conversational turn in social media (twitter, status updates, et al) makes everyday speech into a commodity. That the medium's translation of talk into a form that can be captured, saved, studied, mined, and so on only points to the further use of consumers for marketing purposes. (While I don't personally like this, it has a whiff of inevitability about it. The frontier having shifted from what we consume to what we say.)

This research is a rich study of the tweet in its commodity form: removed from the context of twitter user relationships and from any kind of transactional or conversational context. (Tweets used were extracted for their mention of a brand names studied.)

Secondly, the research finds that "most tweets that mention a brand do so as a secondary focus." I described this in much less precise terms last week, arguing that brands might focus less on how they are reflected in consumer sentiment and more on how the consumer seems to identify with and through brands in online social contexts. The research seems to have found, in other words, that brands are not the sole object of tweets that mention them. Brands are mentioned in passing, in conversation, yes, but not with the intent of soliciting interaction with the brand.

Interestingly, the research cites an assumption examined elsewhere that "consumers engaged in relationships with brands in a manner similar to the personal relationship they formed with people," adding that in online branding "These brand relationships may be the result of participation in brand communities."

I think there are nuances here worth some investigation. A brand's significance to a consumer may in fact have little in common with human relationships. Of course this changes if the brand community manager and consumer interact online. But the "brand" seems to me more likely to involve values, interests, and personal as well as social meanings associated with a brand but not directly caused by it.

Perceptions, reputation, trust, admiration, coveting... these are aspects of human relationships but are not in themselves relationships (to me, at least). And I think they are shaped socially, not in direct reflection on the brand's messaging and image-making.

Also of interest to brands in this study would be the preponderance of positive sentiments expressed in tweets that mention brands: "more than 80% of the tweets that mentioned one of these brands expressed no sentiment. This indicates that people are using Twitter for general information, asking questions, other information-seeking and -sharing activities about brands or products, in addition to expressing opinions about brands or products. Of the 268,662 tweets expressing sentiment, more than 52% of the individual tweets were expressions of positive sentiment, while ≈33% of tweets were negative expressions of opinion."

If I were a brand manager I would want to see these tweets in context. A research or monitoring tool able to show me context of conversation and something of the relationships that leap to life in the course of that conversation.

And I think it's important here to note that "relationships" can be fleeting, transient, and as they often are in conversational media, a sign of the medium's "coincidensity" and speed.

Referring to the brand model of Esch, Langner, Schmitt, & Geus, the authors write of online consumers, that "current purchases were affected by brand image directly and by brand awareness indirectly."

This will be obvious to a brand manager, but current twitter and social media analytics tools can derail the most disciplined analyst. Mentions are the most easily captured signs of social media relevance to branding. But "indirect awareness," which I read as "socially-mediated branding," is harder to track and quantify. Lest the ROI debate threaten to rear its head here, I still think that a softer, more subjective, "sociability" review belong to the social brand's marketing efforts.

Of the four types of brand-relevant tweeting listed here, for example, it would be interesting to know who sentiments were shared with; who was information solicited from; who was it provided to; and in what was the brand comment a reference to?

Furthermore, and I know that these questions aren't yet supported by tools, and so don't scale well: can the brand learn from how it is identified with, whether its social standing is increasing or slipping, or what kind of person the band information is sought from? Are users with social status, fame, success, knowledge, credibility as experts or reputations as critics, solicited or offered brand-relevant tweets?

I suspect that the types of expression listed here would need to be read closely for how they are addressed, and for how they might reflect on their authors. For tweets that mention brands are often a reflection of social relevance. A tweet asking for ticket information on a band is also a sign of an excited concert-goer: a sign of support and interest as much as the need for information.

"Sentiment: the expression of opinion concerning a brand, including company, product, or service. The sentiment could be either positive or negative.
Information Seeking: the expression of a desire to address some gap in data, information, or knowledge concerning some brand, including company, product, or service.
Information Providing: providing data, information, or knowledge concerning some brand, including company, product, or service.
Comment: the use of a brand, including company, product, or service, in a tweet where the brand was not the primary focus."

It's good to see research on this, and especially good to see research that regards tweets as utterances. If we are ascending the ladder of meaning and complexity from the word through the search phrase, on to the utterance, then perhaps it's not so far out to hope we will reach the rung of conversation in the not-so-distant future.

More from Twitter Power:Tweets as Electronic Word of Mouth:

They report that: "Of the 14,200 random tweets, 386 tweets (2.7%) contained mention of one of the brands or products from our list (Table 1). There were 2,700 tweets (19.0%) that mentioned some brand or product, inclusive of the brands that we used in this study."

And of greater interest to brands, would be the preponderance of positive sentiments expressed: "more than 80% of the tweets that mentioned one of these brands expressed no sentiment. This indicates that people are using Twitter for general information, asking questions, other information-seeking and -sharing activities about brands or products, in addition to expressing opinions about brands or products. Of the 268,662 tweets expressing sentiment, more than 52% of the individual tweets were expressions of positive sentiment, while ?33% of tweets were negative expressions of opinion. This is in line with prior work such as that of Anderson (1998), who showed that there was a U-shape relationship between customer satisfaction and the inclination to engage in WOM transfers. This suggests that extremely positive and satisfied and extremely negative customers are more likely to provide information relative to consumers with more moderate experiences."

"As can be seen from Table 7, most tweets that mention a brand do so as a secondary focus. These tweets account for just under half of the branding tweets in this sample. Users expressed brand sentiment in 22% of the tweets. Interestingly, 29%of the tweets were providing or seeking information concerning some brand. This shows that there is considerable use of microblogging as an information source. This would indicate several avenues for companies, including monitoring microblogging sites for brand management (i.e., sentiment), to address customer questions directly (i.e., information seeking), and monitoring information dissemination concerning company products (i.e., information providing)."

Social media, converging streams?

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:35:00 +0000

One of my favorite books about community is a work by Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti called Crowds and Power. It's a beautiful and thoroughly insightful study on people assembled in different ways and for a kaleidoscopic set of reasons. I turn to the book often when thinking about how social media both separate and connect us, using it as an imaginary frontier of sorts for what mediated crowds might or could do.

A piece by Tim Leberecht reminded me of Canetti this morning. Got me thinking about converging streams and how conversational media sometimes produce that effect of being together at the same time.

Which is really a matter of paying attention at the same time, more than of being together, for the medium only connects across our individual spaces and times. The Germans have a nice word for the sense of being with others: "Mitsein." "Being with" is contrasted with contiguity, or being "next to" or adjacent to one another. We're not in one another's stream of consciousness when we are just next to one another; we are when we are "with" one another.

There is no "Mitsein" online, but there is a sense of something that approximates it. But it comes not through being together. It comes through talk. Talk that indicates we are here and now, paying attention. The response is its signal flare.

In a medium so perfectly suited for a kind of self-talk, or talking aloud in front of others, it might be strange that there are occasions when we get a sense of Mitsein. Approximated, of course, in the medium's own peculiar kind of proximity, or proximate intimacy. An "approximity" perhaps. A blend of the real and the imagined, of memory and expectation.

Verbal communication, not the language of bodies sharing space as in Crowds and Power, produces this approximation online. The kind of talk that appeals for a response. The kind of talk that runs out a line with hooks.

Hooks are important for conversation. I much prefer dialog to monolog. Hooks, in the form of "and you?" strung out along the thread of a good conversation are what call me into the world of people. I listen, I pay more attention, when conversation is drawn by the two of us. I like interruptions and clipped sentences, finishing one another's thoughts, and mutual effort of threading out a good line together.

I wonder if the brief moments of simultaneity that pass now and then across our webbed social spaces will result in stream convergence. If the community of talk media might lie not in distributing messages but in the sense of sharing time. And if the point of doing more to make streams — of messages and update and activities — more interesting is also to create more hooks by which to connect them. If streams, like people, not only want the greater flow of the river but also the shared flow of time.

Social Interaction Design: Ratings

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 18:35:00 +0000

I had other things in mind for this morning until a client sent me an article in today's Wall Street Journal about online ratings. She, like many others running review and ratings-based sites, is "suffering" from excessively generous end user ratings. The article, which surveys a number of online properties, cites the tendency to 4.3: On the Internet, Everyone's a Critic But They're Not Very Critical.

Offering up a number of anecdotes as reasons for the broken state of online ratings, the article's authors pretty much capture what many of us get intuitively about why online ratings really don't work.

I thought I'd break this down from a social interaction design perspective to get at some of the causes of this.

First and foremost is the fact that most online systems built to capture user tastes, preferences, and interests engender bias. And online media amplify bias, for a number of reasons.

This bias originates with the user's intention, which goes unknown and is not captured in the rating system itself. The reasons a user may have for rating something can be many: a mood, attitude, a personal interest, a habit of use, interest in getting attention, building a profile, promoting a product, and so on.

Social media, because they provide indirect visibility in front of a mediated public, amplify any distortion baked into the selection itself (a selection being the act of rating something). This amplification is explained in part by the de-coupling of selective acts (rating) from consequences and outcomes.

Selections are de-coupled from personal consequences, which excuses a certain lack of accountability and responsibility. Selections are de-coupled from their context of use, which range from personal utility to social promotion. And selections are de-coupled from social implications, which removes the user from his or her contribution to a social outcome (eg, highly-rated items look popular).

Consider the reasons a user may have for making a selection (rating something). They include:

personal recollection (like favoriting)
to inform a recommendation engine (so that it can make better personal recommendations)
because the item is a favorite (sharing favorites)
because the social system has no accountability
because it always creates the possibility of recognition for the user
because it promotes the item
because it's nice (socially; possibly karmic)
because it's a gesture about how the user felt

Social selections are thus encumbered by ambiguity: of intent, of meaning, of relevance, and of use.

Can these be addressed and resolved by better system design? Or can they only be resolved by social means?

It might be possible to couple ratings with outcomes. This would involve new sets of selections and activities made available to other users and used to create consequences. Users would then consider these consequences when making a rating selection.

Contexts of use could be distinguished, so that users rate with greater purpose. This would involve creating new views of rated content, such as "rate your favorite item this wk," "rate your favorite genre," "rate your personal favorite," "rate which you think is the best," and so on. Each of these distinctions, if followed by users (!) would specify the selection by means of a different social purpose.

It might be possible to reduce ambiguity by means of some cross-referencing achieved by algorithms and relationships set up in the data structure. Without detailing these, they would probably include means by which to distinguish:

the bias of the user him or herself, measured in terms of personal tastes
the domain expertise of the user, as demonstrated by ratings provided by the user on other items and in which categories/genres/domains
the social communication and signaling style of the user, which would reveal some of his/her relation to the social space
use by other users and the public, as a measure of relevance

Cross references could then be applied when aggregating ratings, used to filter and sort the ratings sourced for averaged results. Theoretically, the system would be able to identify experts, promoters, favoriters, and others by their practices.

Social solutions might be created to supply distinctions among the different kinds of social capital involved in ratings. Such as:

the user's expertise (domain knowledge)
trust capital, or the user's standing within his/her social graph
credibility capital, or the user's believability, as measured in loyalty perhaps
reputation capital, or the tendency of the user's ratings to be referred to and cited beyond his/her immediate social graph

Finally, ratings systems can diversify possibilities for making selections, and separate communication from ratings selections so that ratings are used less for visibility and attention-seeking reasons (eg users who rate a lot).

There are too many kinds of socially-themed activities and practices in which ratings play a part for me to delve into this here. But each theme could be examined for the social benefits of ratings, for how they attribute value to the user, add value to content, and distinguish social content items to result in shared social and cultural resources. Those distinctions could be used to isolate different rating and qualification systems so that they are tighter and less biased.

Recent related posts:

Twitter, Google Wave, and Online Talk

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 18:08:00 +0000

This post is a reflection on some questions raised by Adina Levin in a post on Google Wave dated July. I haven't myself used the product, so this is not a product review but is instead a continuation of some of the thoughts Adina raised around Wave's social models. I'll speak here more to the ongoing innovation in conversation tools rather than attempt even educated guesses as to Wave itself. I should also say that this post is un-premeditated and off the cuff.

Wave is a communication tool. In that, it will be compared to twitter. But there seem to be substantial differences between the two, as many (some) will no doubt have experienced from using Wave. Regardless of Google's strategic interest in launching Wave (as a response to twitter or not), they seem to bear resemblance only in their contributions to the conversational trend in social tools and social media.

Twitter creates a mediated public, and this means that twitter users are not only using it for communication but for social reasons also. As I tried to show in a recent post (Social media: the attention economy explained), the user's awareness of this public results in incidental social effects, byproducts, and outcomes.

Communication in twitter is not just a matter of talking to people but of being seen talking by the public — or at least being aware that one's communication may be seen. The tweet itself thus takes on two forms. One, the statement itself, which may be described as communication (what a person says). And secondly, the commodity form of the tweet, which is an artifact of digitally mediated communication and which results in statements being re-distributable.

As I've written elsewhere, this makes many conversational tools a means of production: of the self, of relationships, of visibility, presence, status, and so on. In the communication age, these tools are an intrinsic part of the attention economy and of the manufacture, if you will, of a mediated self: one that is extended across time and space, represented and captured online.

Note that the "Self" is always extended across time and space through relationships; but media offer the possibility of representing this extension. This means that distribution becomes as important a factor in a social tool's use as communication (talking with the purpose of reaching understanding with somebody about something).

The tweet as commodity form plays into and allows many social and cultural practices involving social visibility, status, reputation, and other aspects of individual identity and social position. Redistribution of the commodity form of the tweet, as seen in retweeting "influencers," sharing news, linking to blog posts and sites, announcing one's activities, engaging in social rituals such as #followfriday, social and event pics, declarations of gratitude — all these social activities are achieved using direct and indirect acts of communication.

They use both forms. Loosely coupled or un-coupled linguistic statements; and the commodity form of the tweet, whereby the tweet is essentially a social object, and the act of distributing it supplements its meaning.

The meaning of an act of communication, the stated meaning of the tweet in other words, is the communicative act. The commodity form is the meaning the tweet has that's not in the statement but obtains from its use. A retweet is a statement retweeted and thus the act of retweeting is a social act which has its own social meanings above and beyond what the retweeted tweet actually says.

Twitter thrives on the supplementary meanings that are produced in the wake of its unique discontinuities: de-coupled conversational turns, out of synch and time, each experienced in a view particular to the user's own selection of followers. In contrast to Wave, twitter is a disaggregated social space. Each of us has his or her own window onto a social world taken in through stretches of thin but durable attention streamtime.

These social acts, which are virtually unlimited in possibility given twitter's open structure and lack of social design (no groups, virtually no functional syntax, no navigation besides chronological, etc) result in a highly inefficient social space rich in ambiguities that are as compelling and engaging as they are frustrating.

My position on this is that ambiguities of social action and intent, as well as of linguistic meanings, are the fuel of conversational media. For the greater the ambiguity of intent and meaning, the more social relationships and interpersonal handling (interaction) has to do. The more it has to do, the richer the social possibilities.

Social conventions and practices supply understanding to compensate for design inadequacies. In short, loss of context is addressed by social action and emerging practices. Practices provide a different type of context, one not of design but of interaction.

Google Wave seems intended to capture conversation in its context. It is not a public social tool, and not likely to engender the types of social visibility, identity, status, and so on that have made twitter what it is. As such, it seems interested in providing a functional improvement to conversation, by means of design, by means of containing the audience, by means of capturing and offering playback of past conversation.

Adina writes: "Wave is a toolset with even more flexibility than a wiki, with even more interactive content. This poses even greater challenges to help people understand how to use it and be productive."

I would object somewhat to the suggestion that conversational tools ought to be designed with productivity in mind. And to the idea that the tool has a way of being used. Conversation itself has structure and organization, both internally (linguistic statements have grammar, syntax, and semantic stabilities) and pragmatically (conversations involve moves, turns, and many selections that expose how participants interpret what's going on).

Adina addresses Wave's threading: "When there are comments interspersed between paragraphs in email/forum threads, it can be difficult for newcomers to get the gist of what has occurred. But there is a time-honored way to bring people up to speed — summarize the conversation to date. The summary has a social purpose, too, it steers the discussion toward a state of current understanding." I beg to differ, again, on the last point. I don't believe there is such a thing as "current understanding."

Conversation is itself an action system. Communication, say a statement, that is not answered is only an observed act of communication. Communication that is picked up is social action. The act of responding to, or picking up, a statement is an act. It has linguistic meaning (what's said in the response) and it has social meaning (to those participating). So from the perspective of mediated social interaction, conversation is more than reaching consensus ("current understanding") about what's been said so far.

Many participants, in fact, will have relational interest in the conversation to date. Not just what has been said but who said it, to whom, how, and so on. This is the drama and performance of talk, and has a great deal of social relevance to participants as well as to those who use the playback feature.

Adina raises good questions about Wave's social models, and directly poses the matter of groups: "The differences between these models make a vast difference between how the tools are used and what they are good for." Again, I wonder whether groups are even the right design approach in conversational tools. It could be that we need to think in terms of social action, interaction, and conversation rather than groups.

Groups aggregate an audience (participants included in the group), capture attention, provide social inclusion (and exclusion), and create a place or context for communication. Wave might make some of this irrelevant (I would need to use it to better understand design implications and models).

I have a preference for thinking in terms of frames of experience and interaction, over abstracted social models, and particularly those that imply containers. For in conversational tools, the interactions can have order and organization (for example, they have temporal order: a matter clearly addressed in Wave) without need for audience containers (groups, pages, place). Context can be created ad hoc as messages are threaded, arranged, re-aggregated, and so on.

That's about all I wanted to say. Conversational tools are in part such a rich turn in social media's evolution because the act of talking in front of others, in a form that can be redistributed and stored, will always engage social interests. All statements have a double meaning. That of the statement and that of the act of making the statement. It belongs to communication itself that we can tell the difference between the statement and its production (utterance and the uttering of the utterance). So for this reason, open public social spaces always enjoy the social play of ambiguity: of intended meaning and of the social act of making, circulating, referencing statements (and their authors!).

Wave seems to want to streamline the conversational experience. I cant see how it would possibly relate then to the unique sociality of twitter. That it might offer up possibilities not only for use of conversation, but for meta functionalities derived from the observation, visualization, navigation and analytics of conversation seems, however very clear. But that would be a different post entirely!

Foursquare vs Yelp: Recommendations and Reviews

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:02:00 +0000

Foursquare and Yelp are each sites that capitalize on user-contributed reviews and recommendations. Users contribute their favorite places and things to do, spotlighting best-kept secrets and customer favorites. Users get visibility and even some amount of notoriety for their contributions. Their enthusiasm for, or against, a merchant can have substantial repercussions for businesses. In the age of social media, might sometimes makes right, whether the customer is "right" or not.

Social interaction models: Yelp and Foursquare
Yelp and Foursquare offer an interesting comparison in the use of social interaction models. For each of them has had to create a compelling and engaging social experience, and has done so with some degree of success.

Yelp has done it with a slight twist on reviews. Yelp's reviews may be associated with a business, but are in fact as much about their authors as they are the business reviewed. On Yelp, users can profile their tastes, interests, habits, and opinions through the places they frequent. In this way, Yelp makes it easy for users to talk about themselves without having to fill in the "about me" box so common to un-themed profiles.

Foursquare does it with a combination of recommendations and offline activity check-ins. Users leave short posts recommending things to try or do at a location, and then separately check in to locations they visit. In a sense, Foursquare extends the practice of reviews by going mobile: Foursquare can be used to find friends on the go. But it substitutes the recommendation for the review, and in its focus on messaging over review writing, seems more closely aligned to social interactions and relationships than to reviewer taste profiling and publishing.

Yelp's interaction models: extracting the value add
From a social interaction design perspective, the differences between Yelp and Foursquare are interesting. Each site is designed to capture users interested in real places.

Yelp captures interests in particular places and makes connections to other similar places: it turns the individual user's subjective interest into an objective "type" of interest, and constructs relationships that are then surfaced as a directory of sorts.

For example, interest in one Chinese restaurant can be used to create links to other Chinese restaurants. Yelp can get as specific with this as it's able to subdivide interests. Theoretically, it could get down to specific dishes, to service, price, ambience, and so on. It could do this (and does in some attributes, like price) by means of structuring form input at the review, or by extracting meta data by mining text (less reliable).

This is the essential practice of end-user review sites, and rests on the assumption that subjective review content can be translated into common social values. I call this "taste making," for it by-and-large corresponds to the role played by media in our culture, relying in this case on local and "authentic" experts over accredited or branded (mass media) experts.

Bias in the model
The transformation of subjective interests (values held by the individual user) into some form of socially valid tastes and opinions is undermined, however, by the introduction of bias in the social practice of reviews. Bias enters the system because reviews not only serve to describe a business, but to express individual user personality also.

In any social system, the user's interest in making an impression, and being seen (popularity, respect, credibility, or other form of social rank), introduces a second incentive to the core activity. If the core activity is the "review," then motives corresponding to the system's social architecture distort behavior. And indeed, popularity, leaderboard rank, visibility, follower count, and any number of similar social effects can be motivating to users for whom online interactions serve personal and psychological interests (which is not only commonplace, but deeply sticky).

Whether the user is interested and motivated by trust, reputation, celebrity, credibility, intellect, experience, or something else, will factor into his or her habits and online social participation styles. Engaging with these motives is essential to participation, but also contributes to the social bias and distortion of social content. No amount of filtering, sorting, or ordering user contributions can eliminate bias if it has been introduced by the motivating attributes of a social system.

Separating social interaction from content production
What Yelp has done, and which was smart (if unintended, I don't know), was to offer symbolic and gestural tokens and icons to users for use in communicating with each other. This not only had the effect of building social relationships (compliments are great ice breakers) — it also offloads social interaction and communication into a separate social system. Users need not speak to each other in their reviews, but can do this by means of tokens. Reciprocity, as a social norm, then comes into play and encourages positive social behaviors. And exchange and gift economies come into play as a social mechanism governing the use of these tokens.

(Note that in many social systems, these tokens are an unlimited social resource; if there were limited numbers of tokens available to users, competition for possession of tokens for social rank would govern the dynamic.)

Foursquare's interaction model: social activity
Now let's look at Foursquare. In contrast to Yelp, Foursquare users profile themselves by where they have been, and to some degree by what they have done (insofar as they post a statement about it.) A look at Foursquare posts shows that consensus seems to emerge quickly around points of interest. Users may be more inclined to agree with one another on what makes a place good. But that's not likely the reason for the uniformity of their posts. More likely is that the form here is the recommendation, not the review.

Recommendations are intrinsically more social: they are directed at an audience. And on Foursquare, the audience is those who are going to a venues, not those who are comparing venues (by review shopping). Not only are recommendations addressed to people (reviews being written for a public), they are most likely to cite the best thing to do.

And indeed, Foursquare seems more interested in cultivating social activity than in building a community of experts. Social activity benefits Foursquare by motivating users to check in to a venue when they are there, which in turn provides presence and location information useful to the mobile user.

Foursquare was built in the era of twitter, and takes inspiration more from tweeting than from writing. It serves communication and social connectedness; this, again, is clear from the site's emphasis on friends and followers.

To help serve this purpose, the game-like aspect of Foursquare has been implemented well. A variety of badges provide two social functions: differentiating individual users from the user population overall (users differentiated by having a badge), and identifying user interests (by what the badge means). As with Yelp, the ambiguity involved in what a badge means can be compelling in itself (in Foursquare: is she a "player," or does she just travel with male friends? Did she mean to look like a player or is that Foursquare's doing?)

The interest here is a social interest. Foursquare attracts users who enjoy playing: for mayor, for stats, for badges, and to a lesser extent, for friends. Because social gaming and games suspend the normal conventions of social interaction while at the same time putting real relationships into play, there are endless variations Foursquare can roll out in the future.

For example, the site could embrace interests of users to whom pure social games are less appealing, and instead address their inclination to be taste makers, demonstrate expertise, display their depth of local experience or knowledge, and more. Foursquare could provide modalities to end users to bring attention to these other user personality types. Photographers might twitpic scenes and situations grabbed on location. Contests could be staged for "best of" category, including discoveries, best-kept secrets, and the more obvious local favorites. City walks could be extracted from local mayors for tips on a great first date, things to do on a family visit, or bartenders and service staff who are fun to talk to.

Frames of social activity
The advantage earned by Foursquare obtains from channelling social activity into social games. These games generate participation, offer a compelling engagement model, are fast and relatively quick and easy, and can be used as an interaction system for many different kinds of content.

From a social interaction design perspective, games are frames: interaction and user experience are framed by the game. All social situations involve a frame of some kind, whether mediated online or not. This frame supplies participants with an idea of What's going on and How to proceed, both critical aspects to social interaction.

Use of a frame other than that intrinsic to the content itself provides other, and new, things to do. Therein lies the innovation of socially-mediated experiences: experience frames that leverage and extend relationships, forms of talk (questions, recommendations, etc), interactions with tokens (eg social gifts), gestures (eg compliments), and so on. Social interaction designers can use frames to organize social interaction around content, and thereby offload some of the social motives from content left behind, improving its value to non-participating users. Or the opposite: to concentrate social motives into communication in order to thicken a system's social sticky. Every frame brings with it new ways to capture user interests and motivations.

Conclusion and implications
Interaction models that directly relate to users and what they find interesting, and not concepts like "community" or the "social graph," are in my opinion the more precise approach to designing and leveraging social media. Since all social media involve some variation on talk and talking, interactions can be structured and organized by design and their outcomes ordered and presented to lay emphasis and focus on the aspects and social dynamics that propel a social system forward. We do this best, I think, not by abstracting models but by aligning them closer to user experiences. The richer our understanding of what users are like and what they do, the better our interaction models will be.

Socially-mediated branding: Revangelism?

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 19:18:00 +0000

I have been talking about socially-mediated branding without having really offered a description of what I mean by it. In follow up to yesterday's post on consumers and their identification with brands, I want to just unpack this idea a bit further.

I consider socially-mediated branding the smart business response to the disruptive effects of social media. It is a call to businesses not to reclaim control over their brand identity across social media as powerful new channels, but rather a suggestion that marketing, PR, advertising and other brand-related efforts shift their frame of perspective when considering the social media space. Namely, that brands see themselves from the consumer's perspective. And try to find there what interests the consumer about the brand.

I suggested yesterday that brands might think not in terms of brand or consumer identity, but in terms of how we identify with each other (brands and consumers). Brands ought to start from what the brand means to the consumer, and let that inform what the consumer means to the brand. Not the other way around.

I made it sound simple. Consumers identify with some aspect of a brand, and that's the basis from which they might express their tastes and interests online. Faceted branding and conversational strategies with multiple story lines would then factor into brand strategies as a smart and pro-active integration of social media into brand messaging. Different strokes for different folks.

And in examining the brand's sociability, a business might also be pro-active by listening and learning from how its audience picks up the brand in talk amongst friends and peers. This approach is qualitative, subjective, and contingent on the brand's own sensitivities and perceptiveness, not to simple mentions and responses but of what interests consumers. Social media give away an incredible amount of information. But the real meaning of what all that information offers a brand can only be read by humans and made actionable by flexible organizations.

The fact that people talk to each other using social media, and that they offer up what matters to them in the process, represents a massive improvement in what any organization can know about itself. Not just in how much of its own brand image is seen, but in how its brand message has conversational value. Brand sociability, in short.

But not all consumers identify directly with a brand. Take, for example, Disney versus, say, a tire company. Well clearly Disney's got it pretty good insofar as sociability is concerned. It's an experience brand. It's entertaining, and it's fun — and it's for the whole family. The tire company, on the other hand, is woefully disadvantaged by comparison. I don't identify with the tires on my car any more than I suspect you do — unless you have a penchant for the weekend tractor pull competition or an expensive fantasy involving F1 track racing and the flutter of the checkered flag.

If one of us were at a tire company in social media branding, and spotted this post, it would be ridiculous if we ran upstairs and proclaimed: "let's sponsor this blog!" Blogger relations would be driving blind if they took this post and drew the conclusion that I was a tire blogger. That I have mentioned tires doesn't mean I have a tire relationship, nor even a passing interest in tires.

But I did recently have an experience with a tire company. Traveling to hog island for an all day feast of freshly-farmed oysters, our crew sustained a high-speed flat. After what seemed like eons of tense this-is-not-my-family roadside pleas and ultimatums delivered to a hapless rental agency customer service agent, I proffered the alternative to immediate rental car replacement. Which was to drive on the donut to a tire shop and just have the tire replaced instead of the car.

Which went over so swimmingly that we were hardly late to our destination, relaxed, and dare I say, soon happy as clams. I still don't have a relationship with a tire company but I have had a memorable experience with a flat tire. Now as it turned out, the imminent violence manifest in our sudden appearance at Big O tires warranted a canny move on the part of the manager in charge that morning. To wit, we were bumped to the front of the line, hoisted and affixed while no less than one loyal local was left longer to wait.

And we found the place using an iPhone. There was no app for that, but google maps, but if it hadn't been for that we might have spent even more time placing desperate customer service calls, and coming ever and more speedily closer to the brink of family outing meltdown.

So if you or I were at Big O tire company in the social media marketing department of one, reading this post might suggest a different take-away. Flat tire is the experience — not tire, tire treads, or tire technology. We might run upstairs and a across the floor to the marketing department and proclaim: "Flat tires! That's the consumer experience related to online! To hell with blogger relations (wait, that's me), let's ask to use this guy's story and see if we can find more. People tell stories about flats, not tires!"

We might then bank around the corner and ask for a moment with the IT group. "Big O tire locations: Do we have an app for that?" Hey, ho, no we don't! And perhaps zip up to the C suite and declare: "Here's this guy who had a flat tire, the rental car agency reps dropped the ball, and we solved their problem. I'm thinking, why doesn't the rental car agency realize how much it could save if it offered to cover tire replacements with us. Instead of shipping out a tow truck, why not we and the rental car agency roll out a new tire program: share the cost and market together. Rental car customer service reps will have locations and numbers of Big O tire shops, and offer to help get the customer first in line in case of emergency flats?"

That would be organizational learning, of the kind that we often mean when talking about social business design. Learning from the consumer's experience and stories, rethinking the experience and finding inspiration. And we could take this further, for there are many other consumer tales out there, including the ones about the tractor pull and the checkered flag.

And I haven't even unpacked some of the other ways in which consumers relate and identify, not with the brand directly perhaps but with what its product means. The crushing power of the monster tire, or high performance precision of the Formula 1 racing treads. The teamwork of the pit stop, the rumble of a lowrider, the car modifications of a Pimp My Car, the green branding of recycling retired tires. All of which are much more social than the personal tale told here.

So socially-mediated branding capitalizes on the re-tale-ability of retail stories originating in the marketplace, amongst consumers whose experiences and interests are authentic and authentically told. I'm tempted to call this "revangelism." Or brand evangelism retold.

Socially-mediated branding: identify yourself

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 20:13:00 +0000

If one did a semantic analysis of the language I use in my blog posts of late, I'd not be surprised if two of the words I use most are "many" and "different." I much prefer many and different to "one" and "the same." Which is where I think there are some ideas worth noting about identity online. Identity says to me "one" and "the same."

We think of identity as the identity of a person. But people are far from one thing only, just as identity is far from always the same. In fact we could debate, and many do, whether or not there even is such a thing as identity.

It's been said, I don't recall by whom, that we experience ourselves as complex and differentiated, but that we see others as whole. I don't know if this tendency also permeates how we think of users and consumers. But in the interest of pushing a little on the assumptions we in social media make about the user and his or her interests, I'd like to unpack this a bit.

Philosophically, I'm more interested in becoming than being. Much more interesting, to me, is not the identity of who we are, but the question of how we become. For we become not by staying the same, but by relating to something different. If identity is a valid concept, then to me it is still a process. If identity ever "is," then it becomes so by identifying.

The aims of socially-mediated branding are to capitalize on the many and different ways in which companies can leverage relationships. Relationships through which consumers identify themselves, with or through a brand, friends and peers, values, and other kinds of interests.

The relationship is formed on the basis of identifying with something. This might be the brand itself, or its products, but also its principles, reputation, or values. In the case of a popular brand, and a lifestyle brand in particular, this relation usually involves relating to social perceptions of the brand.

Brand identity is not how the brand sees itself but how consumers relate to it: how they identify with it, and which facet or brand attribute it is that interests them (again: product, brand, values, reputation, etc).

Let's take the example of a user interested in a football team. We say the fan identifies with the team. If this fan is a particularly fanatic one, then this identification may even be called an identity. It's not who the person is, but how he or she sees themselves.

Identity might also be how the person represents him or herself to others, may be clear in how they talk, and will most certainly be involved in who they relate to and how. Other fans will be said to have the same identity. Fans relate to each other as fans of the same team, sharing a common identity.

Identity then is social. How we see ourselves is social. We see our own identities reflected in the social scenes we relate to and with which we identify. It's never enough to ask "what's the consumer's passion" and stop there. Passion is social. It is expressed in how the person relates to others and to the social world of things that he or she identifies with.

We have left the information age and are now in the age of communication. That's where our technologies and "industries" currently show much of the most interesting innovation. And in this age of rapidly socializing media, communication itself becomes a commodity.

Online talk, once it's been captured, can be circulated and distributed, and can attract the value and attention that drives non-money social economies. As social currency spent, and as social capital accumulated, communication on social media represents a very disruptive shift to the uses of media for marketing, branding, and sales.

Whether we like it or not, the commodification of communication by means of social media will be used. It will be used to the consumer's advantage, in some cases and by some brands. And exploited in others. This is how media work, when bound to the math of the bottom line.

As users identify themselves by means of media, as their relationships expose both individual tastes and preferences, as well as social affinities and common social identities, we should be advised that identity is not a fixed property. It is a work in progress and always in play. A dynamic of social identifications by which many and different relationships take shape through interactions and communication.

Brand identities, too, are socially determined. And brands interested in socially-mediated branding would be well advised to spend less on their identity. The brand's view of its identity is not the same as the consumer's. Brands, instead of communicating their identity, and identifying themselves, would do well to embrace the dynamic of identity through identification. Which is, in short, to identify with their consumers.

The sociability spec: documenting social interaction requirements

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 13:24:00 +0000

The social interaction requirements doc
We're all familiar with the MRD and PRD, documents used to set market and product requirements for a new software application or service. For social media products, I think there's another piece of documentation worth writing. I have call it the social interaction requirements document (SxRD?). This document details the sociability of a product, service, or even campaign, and serves to capture social dimensions.

There are a couple reasons I think this document might stand apart from the other two. First, it is used to align business needs with user social practices that will support those needs. And secondly, it forces a user-centric appreciation of a product's social utilities. Who will use it, why, for what, and what will be the social outcomes of their participation? Not features and functionality, but support of relationships, interactions, and communication.

These aspects of a social media product's use are so critical that a separate brief written from user perspectives can be essential to getting the social mix right. In contrast to use cases seen from the product or business perspective, sociability starts with user interests and personalities.

For reasons similar to those that apply for social media products and services, brand campaigns and marketing efforts can be served by addressing social requirements also. For these focus on the conversation space and the many kinds of interactions and communication users adopt through tools that the campaign will depend upon. Again, the point of the document is to frame the business perspective in social terms: from within the social diversity of an audience's many members.

Set goals
The document should begin, as do the others, with your organizational goals. These should include what you want to achieve with your social media product, service, or campaign. Identify outcomes you wish to achieve, for your own benefit as well as that of users. Set metrics for success, and select means by which to measure them. These may be simple and freely available analytics (such Google alerts and analytics), or third party applications. If you wish to measure the impact of traffic produced across social media, as well as influential blogs and users it's coming from, there are many tools by which to measure that, too.

Having set goals and objectives for social outcomes, now recognize that reaching them depends upon user participation. Not just of individual users, but in social practices and participation that builds on its own. This is where objective metrics and analytics should be complemented by a more subjective interpretation and review of social outcomes: in short, a sociability assessment.

Sociablity
The sociability assessment will be used to help align you with user interests. Because users will engage with your site for reasons not just beyond your control and direct influence, but out of interests they themselves bring to the experience, insight into this aspect of social media participation is key. It takes many different kinds of users, with different habits around using, interacting, and communicating with friends and others through social media. The dynamics of their interactions will determine whether your efforts are successful.

Sociability applies not just to social media apps and sites, but to brands and their campaigns, also. In the case of applications, it's a description of social usability. In the case of brands, and use of social media for campaign purposes, it's a description of the audience and marketplace focused on how members relate, interact, and communicate. Not from a market segmentation perspective, but according to how users actually use social media, and for what.

Real users, not user categories
This approach goes a level deeper than the categories often used to group social media users. Take the category of "creators," for example. While many users may belong to the "creators" category, the term describes a group and doesn't explain motives, behaviors, and social participation.

There are, of course, many reasons a user's activity in social media might result in content created. But they're different, and if understood in terms of the user's interests and personality, can align you with how core personalities help to galvanize and sustain your audience's engagement. After all, users interact not just with content and features, but with each other.

Interest users take in each other, in making contact, developing relationships, giving and getting attention — these and many more of the features of social interaction are the reason that "creators" get up in the morning. (This includes the mere perception of being visible, relevant, and socially involved, too.) To create, for somebody; or for an idea, belief, value, principle; for reputation or standing, or out of a sense of reciprocity, group membership, or expectation. Not "I'm a creator, thus I must arise and create as it is who I am!"

User interests and personalities
Not all users are alike, and their reasons for using social media vary by site or tool as well as by interest and more. Some professional experts, for example, may be more inclined to use twitter for the purpose of soap-boxing (nothing wrong with that!), building an audience and reputation. Others may use Wikipedia to collaborate around getting the story right, say on topics of deep personal interest. Where the expert may pursue and defend his or her opinion, the Wikipedian may care more about accuracy and objectivity. Each is personally invested, but with attention being driven differently, and resulting in different kinds of content created.

Likewise, the expert or pundit can draw an audience of fans, where the Wikipedian does not. This is not to say that experts just get more attention and personal branding; Wikipedians presumably take pride in getting the story right — a quality that may reflect their values and belief in collaboration for the greater good. What is important is that some types of users go well together. Experts attract fans, fans supply the audience and reputation by which the expert is motivated. Combinations can lead to dynamics that fuel rapid adoption, or which corrupt and endanger it.

Causes and effects
Many other social media applications, from review and recommendation sites to conversational tools and social games, attract and serve different kinds of users for reasons related to their different ways of producing sociability. Social dynamics not only provide the attention, followings, conversation, and other kinds of interactions that in turn generate more content and participation. They are the dynamo and engine of any social media success.

Brands should recognize this, and supplement their use of analytics tools and metrics with sociability descriptions. Tools don't (yet) provide analysis of these distinctions, let alone suggest ways to leverage the nuances beneath the "soft stuff" of social media. And while numbers may be a measure of results, but reveal little of their inner workings. Effects can be quantified, but causes will always take a human evaluation. The rising importance of community managers is a step in the right direction, although community managers can get close to their communities and may do well to step up occasionally for an "objective" review of site, service, or campaign engagement.

Conclusion
The art of the social interaction design requirements spec, and of sociability assessments performed after product launch and over the course of a campaign, complements the science of quantitative analysis. Nowhere else does a medium offer so much information about what's going on than in social media. But it's not for this reason alone that you might take a big picture look at the sociability of your business, and build the soft skills by which to understand how user engagement, thick or thin, passing or lasting, can be sustaining and sustained.

For more on sociability for brands, see: Sociability review

Social Interaction Design: Leaderboard

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 18:11:00 +0000

11.
On the heels of a bit of to-and-fro with Josh Porter (@bokardo) and Adina Levin (@alevin) on leaderboards as used in social media, I have to confess that Josh may be right. Designers do influence users. That is, insofar as my writing this can be construed as a reflection of a designer's influence on me. This is in the spirti of collegial discussion. ;-)

The leaderboard debate is not a new one. I don't mean to bring it all back up here. I want, instead, to show that the leaderboard in social media may be different than the leaderboard in non-social media. Or, outside of game contexts, leaderboards in social media may work in ways extrinsic to their implementation for game use.

10.
I'm going to focus on leaderboards used to rank people. Say, Top Users, one through ten. One is the important number here. One is made possible by two through ten. Two through ten make One the Top of the List. One, alone, is just One of something. But in a ranked list One through Ten are an Order. Two through ten want to be One. One is the best, and there is no better than One. One arranges two through ten in descending order, all being less than One and all aspiring to become One.

9.
The representational system used by a leaderboard is "Numbers." The ranking is the Ordering of Numbers. But is there more than a numerical order at work here? More than the Order of One through Ten?

Numbers have a numerical order from One to Ten., but not a signifying system of One is better than Ten. In other words, the value of the number is not the meaning of the number. So then the Order of the List must be more than numberical, even though it orders numbers.

8.
The Order of numbers, then, is not contained in the numbers themselves. Numbers must be put in order. But what is that order if it's not just the numerical order of One through Ten? Do the numbers mean something other than their number? Or does the Order supply meaning more that that of ordered numbers?

As we have said, One matters most. So let's look at Two. What is Two? Is it half as good as One? How about Seven? Is Seven six places from the Best or three places from the Bottom? Is the difference between One and Two the same as that between Nine and Ten? If the answers are ambiguous, then certainly we're not going to find the Order of the Leaderboard in the numbers, for numbers themselves have an unambiguous numerical relation known by the quantities expressed by the number.

Notice that the numbers at the extremes matter the most. For example, Two and Nine matter more than, say, Four or Six. Two is Nearly the Best, and Nine is Nearly the Bottom. We say Next to First Place or Next to Last; or we say Second Place and Second to Last. These expressions suggest that the numerical value is not as important as its relative position. Again, number is not the meaning. Perhaps, then, it is Position.

7.
Position is not a Quantity, but a relation. It takes two or more Numbers to get a relation. Nor is Position numerical, even if it is represented by a Number. Perhaps the Order of the numbers creates Positions among the numbers.

6.
So let's shfit from the Number to the Position, from One through Ten to First through Last. Let's assume that the user wants to get away from nearly falling off the list (Last) and move up to First Place.

Not only is Position relative, as ordered by the List. It is dynamic: any Numbe below One wants to be different, wants to be higher. Better. Last Place seeks First Place.

To peg the meaning of a number even on Relative Position, then, would be missing out on the List's dynamic. Changing Position counts. There is only one First Position, whereas there are nine Other Positions. The Order contains a shortage: there can only be one Best. And competition: there are nine other Positions aspiring to First.

5.
If Position is relative, and the Order is dynamic, what's moves the dynamic? Is it a dynamic of ordered numbers only?

Let's say that I want to improve my position and get into First Place. Do I care about Second? Fifth? What if I am Last? Would I rather not be on the List at all?

I know that even if I would rather not be on the List, than be on it in Last Place, I want to increase my Position.

Is this what moves the dynamic? Something that's not in the Numbers themselves, the Numerical list, or the Order of Relative Positions?

Why do I want to improve my Position, and best of all, get First Place? Is it because that's what the List means? Or possibly because it's what everyone else wants too? Social Ranking, not Numerical Ranking?

4.
So, if my motive is to make the list, my incentives and inclinations are to do things that improve my Position. Motivated by Social Ranking and by making the List, my actions can now be explained by an incentive to keep my position, and if possible, improve it. Is Five an incentive? Seven? No, Relative Position is what motives me.

So, then the numbers don't explain my actions. The ordering system does. Well, in part. In part, only, because we have said that it's neither the Numbers nor the Ordering of Relative Positions, but the social Ranking represented.

If what is on screen represents the ranking of a Social group, then perhaps it's not really the Numbers in the List but my identification with the Social Group. Perhaps the Meaning of the Order, and of its dynamic, isn't in fact in the List or its Numbers but in What it Means to Me.

If the Ordering system involves reaching First Place, then to some extent it must matter that in First Place I am Ahead of the Others. Ahead of Everyone Else, I'm Number One. This is a Position I have and Nobody Else does.

Surely this is social, then. The Order relates numbers in relative Position to one another, and relates me to the Social Group it ranks. The Relative Position represented by Numbers is also a list of Social Positions that are relevant to me.

3.
The incentive on which I choose to pursue Number One is now likely a reflection of my orientation towards the social group ranked. So, if I don't care about the social group, I don't mind not being in the ranking.

So it's not just the Ranking itself, but the social group referred to in the ranking. It matters what the Social means to me. What it's about is Who is in it and Who sees it. Presumably, those who see it can be in it. But perhaps not all who can see it can be in it. So there is social distinction involved in Making the List.

My incentive, now, is presumably a reflection of Where I See Myself vis-a-vis others Who can be on the List. It is a reflection of my Self Perception within a Social context — as represented by the ordering of People on a List. So my incentive must involve My Position within the Social group.

2.
Then surely it matters Who else is on the List. If this is the case, the List is about my Relative position among People I have some Feeling about. And this, even if I don't know them.

And if I don't care about the People on the List, or about Who sees the List, then I may not want to pursue my own Rank. And if I dislike the People who are on the List, if I think the List or the Site that it's on is unimportant, then I probably don't care about being on the List.

1.
Nowhere, then, is there an Incentive that clearly belongs to the List, to its Numbers, to the People on it, or Who can see it. There is just its relevance to me: my incentives are internal.

Incentives are what one may describe as causes of User Action. The Leaderboard itself "has" or possesses no Incentives in an objective and universal sense. What produces the Incentive is the user's Recognition of what it means, socially; and how much it matters, personally.

Leaderboards work, and they do work, not for reasons intrinsic to the design or functionality of the Leaderboard, but for reasons internal to the people to whom they matter. Incentives belong to people and are represented using functional design methods that depend on individual interests and social relevance for their success.

Social media: the attention economy explained

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:30:00 +0000

I started wondering last evening what twitter would be like if in addition to followers we could also see who was actually being paid attention to. The groups many of us use in clients like Tweetdeck or Seesmic, for example. So in the midst all of our positive talk of transparency and authenticity, I found myself chuckling at the opacity we in fact rely on to make it through the day.

There's nothing wrong with this, and while some may see a cynical twist or twitter's dirty little secret (nobody's listening!), I see instead perfectly reasonable social media coping mechanisms. ;-)

Social media's two audiences
Social behaviors are shaped and informed by design, but not explained by design. The obvious reason that none of us can see each other's twitter usage (groups, or subsets of followers actually viewed and paid attention to) is that if designed into twitter, activity would change instantly and radically. This is not just a matter of privacy, but a deeply social matter.

Reflecting on this last night led me to thinking about the social and public space constructed across all social media. There are, in mediated social contexts, always two audiences.

There is an audience we'll call social, and which we describe in terms of proximity: it's a internalized social world of friends, peers, colleagues: known individuals.
And there is a second, anonymous public, which is not internalized but is imagined.

Any person known belongs in the social and is potentially present. Any anonymous individual, because we don't yet know them (as soon as we do, they move to the internalized social world), is possibly present.

Potential and possible relations
Potential social relations become active relations, or interactions, when we communicate. Possible relations become actual relations, based on the action of following, when we are seen and found.

I think the doubling of audience could go far in explaining the power of social media.

We know, for example, that the probability of actually having a conversation is less in social media than it is face to face. There's simply a lot more at our command in face to face situations by means of which to have conversation. However, face to face situations limit us, of course, to those in our presence. Social media may reduce the probability of having real conversation but increase the opportunities for creating conversation.

This seems, to me, the main reason we use social media. Not mass, but mini media. Or, "me"-dia, in the context of social, not mass audiences. The distinction between social and mass media being that relations are possible in the former, not so in the latter. (This is changing as mass incorporates social.)

The medium's three modes: mirror, surface, window
Back then to attention, and the veil of nondisclosure from behind which we engage in social media. I like to say that the social interface has three modes: mirror, surface, and window.

We see ourselves reflected in social media: this is it's mirror mode.
We consume content of all kinds off the screen — sites, apps, communication — all using the screen as a presentation layer: this is its surface mode.
And we talk to each other through social media: this is its window mode

Modes of attention
Social presence, proximity, and attention are then each implicated in a mediated social context that has ways of seeing and ways of being seen.

Consider this, for example. We enjoy accumulating followers, seeing ourselves referred to, commented to, and otherwise being made visible. Doesn't matter whether this involves acknowledgment, recognition, or validation; the point is that the medium does create a kind of social visibility. Call it, for simplicity's sake, "being paid attention to."

Well, attention doesn't correlate with actually engaging in conversation. Many of us sometimes ignore a request for communication, for whatever reason. It's part of daily life; in real life it's called "civil inattention," and is handled by acknowledging others in ways that also indicate to them "I see you, recognize you, but I'm not available to interact." Simply put, politeness.

Now, consider the social media space. Attention paid to others may not be visible to them. But if it's given, such as by taking any action recorded and captured by the medium and surfaced by design, then this action can have two social outcomes, not one. This is the power of the medium, and the net effect of the doubled audience mentioned above.

Social actions, social relations
One translates as the potential for further social action. The other translates into the possibility for social relation. For the social world already has relations but has activity only on the basis of user actions. And the public world has activity but lacks the connection until a relation is established.

A social action has been made which can be picked up by any user who sees it: potential for further action
A social action increases the user's visibility: the possibility of being seen

The possibility of being seen is motive enough, for some. While communication is no more probable, the possibility is there. As they say of the lottery: your odds of winning increase dramatically if you buy a ticket.

The power of this second audience, the public, which creates infinite possibilities and which is motivation for much of what we do, explains a lot of how the attention economy works.

Perceived and transactional influence
Attention, interestingly, is described in economic terms: paid, spent, given, taken. Note that the first two are zero sum and involve the temporality of attention. Paying attention takes our time. The second two are non-zero sum and transactional.

Giving and getting attention is the simplest social action. Nothing yet has to be said or communicated verbally: attention can be given a person, and that in itself, is socially meaningful.

Now consider how we attend to the attention economy in social media. Brands, as well as users, watch and attend to it. Brands, as well as users, transact in it.

Social capital, the perceived value of a brand or individual, collects attention paid and spent on that brand or person. Call this perceived influence.
Social currency, the transacted value of a brand or individual, is attention given and taken by the brand or person by means of social actions. Call this transactional influence.

Unfortunately, perceived influence, which is just social observation, is grossly under-rated. It's much more difficult to measure because there's no action taken. Brands can't see the value in it for it's not in the numbers provided by metrics and analytics tools. For it lies behind the veil of personal social media use, in the activity of paying attention to twitter, or more specifically, to the users we actually follow.

I say this is unfortunate because i think much social action is preceded by long periods of social observation. Consider the difference it would make, to brands and to users, if all social media were split screen interfaces: what I see and what you see. Real life social situations are like this: I see you looking at me, and can see reflected in your face something of how you see me (what you think of me).

Motives explained by the social and the public
The dual public also helps to explain many of our motives in using social media. Again, our actions can lead to potential further action, and if not, are at least possibly seen. Tweets, like comments, reflect these motives.

For example:

Tweets or comments intended to get attention from the author
Tweets or comments soliciting or appealing for direct response
Tweets or comments that are a direct response
Tweets or comments that continue a conversational run or thread
Tweets or comments intended to garner attention to their author

We could break each of these down and show that for each, the user's motive may be to appeal to the author's attention, to get visibility in front of the public, to solicit a response, or to respond. Tweets and comments, in other words are not just that: (Nothing is explained if we describe social action by its form of content.)

Summary
To conclude, then, I think that the fact that any use of social media can have outcomes in two distinct audiences may explain its uniqueness as a medium, and its use by brands and individuals alike. That the attention economy involves both looking and being seen, posting and responding, would explain why motives for participating in social media reflect to the "presence" of two audiences. These are properties particular to the sociality of the medium, and to the sociability of its uses.

Activity Streams: Realtime and Streamtime

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:43:00 +0000

The realtime web is living on borrowed time. Not in the sense that time's running out on realtime. But in the sense that the realtime web actually involves two kinds of time. One is the time in which information is delivered. We call that realtime. The other is the user's time, which I'm going to call streamtime.

Realtime is immediate, streamtime is borrowed. The realtime web operates immediately. The streamtime experience is immediacy.

A lot has been said about realtime and our immediate access to information, but little has been said about streamtime, or the immediacy with which we experience realtime. And since streamtime relates to our consumption of realtime content, the concept might be worth unpacking.

The web collapses the distance between production and consumption. In realtime web terms, the stream delivers information instantaneously. The user, in streamtime, has access to it as if it were there. So where realtime information delivery has to do with simple clock time, streamtime involves the immediacy with which we relate to realtime information. This immediacy is actually a kind of proximity — of the kind sometimes called "ambient intimacy."

Streamtime is about proximity. And proximity combines two concepts: closeness and now. Immediacy as here, and immediately as now. And since there is no "space" on the internet, when we say proximity, we mean it in different terms: not spatial distance but presence.

But when we say presence, we usually mean individual presence: the presence of other people sensed through realtime social tools. So the streamtime experience actually contains two separate kinds of proximity: that of the information itself (delivered in realtime) and that of its sender.

Of course, we don't think of the information source as a sender — we think of the person. It's this trick of imagination that allows us to "feel" connected through the wire. (What I've called "approximity" in the past.)

For example, streamtime, not realtime, is the dimension in which attention is paid. Attention is awareness (directed mental attention, or focus), and time. Attention is paid by when we mentally select something to pay attention to, and is paid for as long as we hold that in our awareness. So streamtime then involves a commitment of attention to a steady stream of incoming information, much of which is messages (updates, tweets, etc).

Some of these messages are personal messages, some are system messages. Personal messages are communication of a sort. System messages are as if sent by a person, insofar as they report on a user's activity. They are sent automatically, but we read them as if they were personal messages and can sense who they are about. Activity updates may not be in the words of the user, but they're nonetheless a proxy for communication.

Streamtime, then, not only takes attention paid to the information and content itself, but also takes the attention we pay to each other, and which we spend by communicating. Where information is just that, information, communication is actionable. We can respond to it, reflect on what a person meant, reply, or forward (RT) it. Or rather, we can respond to the person, not to "it."

Streamtime raises the constant possibility that we might take up communication with a person — at a minimum it requires the increased attention we pay to people (over information straight up). This is the demand on the attention economy staged by realtime and experienced in realtime: that we think not only about what's been said but about the person who said it.

Social tools to help with the demands of interacting and communicating may be an area still ripe for innovation. These demands are real, and they affect not only users and how they maintain friendships, but also brands and how they connect to customers. If the cost of realtime is paid in streamtime, then communication, not just information, is the problem we're facing.

Sociability: Usability for Social Media

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 19:47:00 +0000

People who know me personally are familiar with my baroque inclinations for turning simple things into brid"s nests of complexity. I'm drawn to what lies behind, below, before, and because of anything that has to do with people. For reasons I have spent much of my life working through, I am naturally and insatiably interested in what people mean — much more than what I mean to people.

This makes me a pretty good accidental observer and, incidentally, analyst too. So when I work with social media clients — often application providers who "need" their users to get involved in their product or service — I always start from the perspective of their users. Product descriptions, such as "our platform is for ____" just tell me what the client wants. I might use his or her business interests to figure out what will count as a success (note to consultants: it's not about you!). I will usually quickly assess what a client's view of his or her users is, in fact, and even better, why he or she thinks users would want to use the product.

User experience, a term that bounces around within the hollows of my cranium, and the user, whose reflection I catch as if I am negotiating a hall of mirrors, are first and foremost the key to social media success. It's strikes me as paradoxical that the user experience profession really doesn't offer a description of the many experiences users have of social media. For uses we have a great deal of description; but for experience, relatively little. (The term "user" gives away our bias: use.)

My first deliverable to clients is usually an accounting of different user personalities and interests, specific to the ways in which their experiences of a company's "social" may be engaging, disengaging, effective, ineffective, and so on. In all honesty, I don't even use those terms. I simply describe the experiences.

My personality types are then means to think through the product or service from different angles. Not personas, for they are a fiction and a target audience, but personalities. Because each of us is limited by our own experience and, naturally, inclined to think others are more or less like us.

I'm going to start offering and pitching (softly) a Sociability review to clients. I'd like to do this not only for social applications but for businesses using social media, also. Sociability, because I think the usability issues of social media are social. And because I continually encounter the question "How do we get our users to do ___? "

One doesn't get users to do anything, of course. One provides something the users know how to do and are interested in doing already. The Sociability review will probably take the form of a description. No high-falutin social interaction design theory, just a close reading of user contributions, of their interactions and communication, for insights into their motives and interests.

I don't know who will pay for this, but it won't cost much, as I have lived and breathed social and web for longer than I care to admit. And deeply — always and tirelessly reflecting on what it's like for the other person. So this won't be difficult. Even better, is that it will be interesting. I don't think there are many folks out there who use deeply social analyses, or who wonder by nature at what lies beneath the social habits and practices that make up our daily lives. And who do social media analysis.

These media are to me all about the social that envelopes and embraces them, when they succeed, or the social that struggles and stumbles, when they fail. And insofar as social works only by the tacit and implicit engagement of users who "get it," I think a Sociability assessment could be a valued addition to the usual marketing requirements and product specs we have relied upon for so long to define and steer design and development.

I'm putting my interests and passion for social theory to use. Theory development is an intellectual pursuit. The practice of it is where it comes to life. So the door is open. I'll hang out the shingle later. I like this idea. Now to see if clients do, too.

Social Interaction Design: Structure

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 19:37:00 +0000

This post is inspired by today's excellent reflection On the thoughtful use of points in social systems by Adin Levin of Socialtext. Adina summarizes a twitter conversation that unfolded yesterday among "Kevin Marks, Tom Coates, Jane McGonigal, Tara Hunt, Josh Porter and a few others on the thoughtful use of points and competition in social systems."

I'm going to spin this off in a different direction for reasons of my own, but I highly recommend visiting Adina's post.

I want to address just a few somewhat philosophical points salient to the social media design field in general, and important to my own practice of social interaction design more specifically.

There's an intrinsic tension between three key positions, each of which we should have an understanding about. They are:

the user
the system
the social media professional

Why the third? Because we observe user actions and build or implement social media systems, and therefore have notions about the other two, how they inter-relate, and need to reflect on our notions to better understand how they shape what we can do.

The user has interests and motives that we will never have complete access to — in fact by most accounts the user himself isn't aware of the reasons or causes of all his actions and choices. But the user matters to us because we do claim to take a user-centric approach to social media design. And not for no reason: capturing user interests and producing compelling and engaging social experiences is what it's all about.

And we recognize that there's this vast and complex social field there in which all manner of reasons, motives, incentives, interests, goals, and what have you that might account for what users do, why, and whether they will do it again. We won't know all of that, but for that we should not consider the user a black box, or explain user behavior on the basis of causes external to him or her. The user supplies his own motives and experience.

Now there's a natural tension between user-centricity and design. For the explanations of user action are subjective — anchored in the user's own stream of activity, and embedded in the user's experience of friendships and social structures that span time and space.

Design, however, needs objectivity. Things, elements, operations, ordered in support of functions having functionality. In short, uses.

Now, in the old days, that is, pre-social software, we could conflate the user and the use case. All was neat and tidy. The user was what her use of the software was, the use case described that use, and the system's success was a clear binary situation. We could describe users by their needs (I need to do this "because of" motive) or goals (I want to do this "in order to" motive). These supplied the utility served by means of transactions with the software. Easy pass/fail system problem: was the software successful, efficient, and effective.

Design requirements could then be articulated on the basis of user flow, activity, or action sequencing (wizards step the interaction for simplicity and effectiveness). And more. The point, in other words, being that we could structure user action with elements, codify button functions, articulate requirements for screen content, layout, and navigation, and even structure time. Then, according to the system's primary functions, we could filter data, sort results, and order them on the screen — using many tried and tested best practices.

Now, as professionals interested in designing and building social media, we need to consider a) the user experience b) the system design and c) our own perspectives and understanding of how a) and b) inter-relate.

We can take a roughly causal view of it: the user responds to design constraints.
Or a normative view: the user is constrained by the norms and values of a community of users
Or a functional view: the user has needs and goals, and uses social media to accomplish these with and through other users
Or a psychological view: social media present an external psychosocial world onto which users project their expectations, and from which they internalize the meanings of interaction outcomes
Or a communication view: users maintain relationships and engage in communication through social media as they would in daily life, with varying notions of what social media are, do, and of the people who use them

And there are other views, some of which pertain strongly to brands (users have passions), to marketers (users consume brand messaging), to mass media (user eyeballs have moved to social media), to customer service (users have the power), and so on.

My point being that each of us, as social media industry practitioner, likely has a take on this that leans in some direction or another.

I often find that design, engineering, and product folks tend to have more objective explanations of What Social Media do and how they work. Marketers, PR, Sales, etc have a more people (user) centric view. And so on.

We need both, but we also need to know the limits of our own perspectives — else we run the risk of confusing what it means to us with what it means to the user. And of confusing how the design works with what the user is doing. They are not the same.

Social interaction is a particular kind of action. Social action is oriented to another person. It has the relationship of "I : Thou" or of "We." Now the fact that social media are media — that action is mediated by means of design elements that have their own "meanings" and by language as writing, sight as image or recording, and interaction through navigation — this all matters, for any social action is not directly social but mediately social.

Terms like proximity, connection, relationship, conversation — we need to recognize that these are terms applied to a world that is phenomenologically constructed and ontologically absent. Or better, imagined. I am, now, typing into a little box talking to you, attached to a little box. Terms we use to describe the social evoke precisely the social attributes that world is missing. It is missing proximity, connection, relationship, and conversation. Just a point worth making.

Clearly this point serves little purpose aside from dusting off our idiom a bit, but clarity in perspective requires a good wipe now and then.

So, to where I wanted to go with this. Social interaction needs to accommodate users, as individuals. Needs to accommodate users with other users (social action, communication, and social practices). Needs to accommodate design (structure of elements and resources, rules, functionalities, and systemness: structure in and over time).

Anthony Giddens has a nice take on this. His view, called "structuration theory," claims that social structure is a duality: it is real, but doesn't exist unless reproduced by people constrained and enabled by it. The user has agency, structure constrains and enables action. This is perfect (IMHO) for social systems.

He makes three helpful distinctions around structure:

structural principles: Principles of organization of societal totalities
structures: Rule-resource sets, involved in the institutional articulation of social systems
structural properties: Institutionalized features of social systems, stretching across time and space

I find these very useful. For the challenge is in trying not to confuse design and structure with causality (that a user responds to constraints). And it permits seeing the ways in which social "stuff" happens when users begin, haphazardly and around a particular tool, app, site (etc) to form practices (the sticky). For social practice is structuring: relations, behavior, expression, meanings.

There is "structure," then, on the social side and on the design side. And in between, the interactions and communication are how the whole thing is reproduced, constantly, daily, all the time. (And why flow and streams are such an important shift.)

There is more to say here on interaction and communication (language has structure, interaction has structure), and how users use each to relate to each other, while also supplying the juice that turns the social media engine. But this was meant to be a quickie and I don't want to violate your sense of good and proper form.

(I will say, though, that I think it's in articulating social practices that supply social organization, use of symbolic elements that stabilize meanings used in social media (little design features, nav, icons etc), and then how the system transforms communication into infomation and social content, about which it offers system messages, views, aggregate data as a reflection of the system on its own use by users.)

So I think that as we move forward in our approach to designing the social, we might reflect on our positions and approaches. By doing so, we might shape the field, and I think it's an emerging one, so that we can see how practitioners with different areas of focus and experience fit together.

Activity Streams: Content and Flow

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 15:13:00 +0000

The realtime trend continues unabated, with presentations at TechCrunch50, Facebook's recent updates, and next-generation newspaper designs all extending the impact and value of the stream in social media. Disaggregation begets reaggregation, as demonstrated by the newcomer threadsy this week. As client applications and new services add organization and structure to activity, news, status, and twitter streams, we see hints of what is likely to come in the months ahead.

I think there are two distinct trends at work here. One, the popularity and adoption of the stream as a form of social conversation. And the other, the conversion of realtime information into value that can be consumed outside the stream. Or to put it another way, the value of being in the flow, and of watching it from the river's edge.

These trends lead to some interesting implications for social media professionals, from designers and developers to brands and businesses. We'll take them separately, and for simplicity's sake distinguish them by interaction "in the flow" and interaction "around the flow." Interaction in the flow is conversation and talk itself — in the form of tweets and updates distributed among friends and across various social spaces. Interaction around the flow involves the value-added actions and activities that use social content, such as rating, diggs, tags, and so on.

In the flow
Many of us are in the stream to communicate. We use the tools available in ways not entirely dissimilar from the ways we have used message boards, IM, chat, and email in the past. We experience it as a kind of online talk. Here, the interaction systems emerging around stream applications focus on ways of improving communication. Twitter's @reply and retweet are examples of these. So, too, is Facebook's recent adoption of activity tagging. Feed readers for streams both reaggregate these distributed conversations and provide for interaction within.

As in all forms of talk, the critical design and experience elements and features include addressing (individual, social, and public audiences intended by the user), subject or object, topic (hashtags, tags), time stamp, and other references (could be @names or could be links). Other distinctions not yet supported would include other linguistic types (request, invitation, answer, greeting, etc), urgency, commercial/individual, and more.

A lot of interesting things happen around conversation and designers are only beginning to wrap their heads around the possibilities for surfacing value, extracting meta data, structuring and organizing talk itself, and so on. Because the primary value of the user experience lies in communication itself, the possibilities are virtually endless.

We can easily imagine a wide range of activities that are currently page or site-based being handled instead by the stream. Invitations, meeting requests, buying and selling, questions/answers — these and much more could be transacted by means of messages "off the page" and extracted or sorted out of streams by smart clients or aggregators. Analytics companies will have a gold mine of relationship data to scrape and visualize, for example, for use by those who want to see how influencers reach their audiences, around what topics, how quickly, with what redistribution, and so on.

The conversation space holds many more opportunities than we can currently take advantage of, in part because many applications are still trying to simplify the experience of being in the flow. At present this requires aggregation of messages posted across numerous contexts. Over time, however, it seems inevitable that conversational tools will be able to offer not only the direct messaging experience but also a variety of benefits from use of metadata, analysis, search, and structure/organization.

Around the flow
For those who spend less of their social media time in the flow, there are the interactions with content instead of person. Many of the long tail services create value through interactions with content that are designed to surface and rank by popularity, trend, similarity, rating, and so on. This is the world of taste-making, and it uses indirect social interaction (meaning not person to person communication) to qualify social content items. Recommendations services depend on the contributions of users to qualify and differentiate content: the more ways there are of differentiating content items, the more ways there are of relating it and providing navigation through it.

The primary goals of interaction models used around the flow involve separating content from the conversational stream, extracting meta data where possible, assigning categories and embedding within content structures and navigational systems. Then the social challenge becomes making it accessible (search, browse, and categorization) and making it socially interesting (lists, rankings, votes, etc).

The disadvantage this older page-based method of social experience has with respect to the recent conversational trend is of course that it's at a remove from the user. The factors that compel us to talk are not available here. Attention is not paid to people directly, but indirectly through means of content. The advantage, however, is of course in the many ways already developed for organizing content and making it available for re-use within other contexts.

[Note: All interactions with social content first involve a selection of something. These indirect kinds of social interaction assign value to the content item (a vote up or down, a rating, a favorite, a tag, etc). Selections in the stream, by contrast, create value by distributing (sharing, replying) communication. There is a critical distinction between the direct communication interaction model and the indirect social action model. Communication uses language; social action uses symbolic tokens and signifying systems like emoticons, icons, ratings, votes, etc.]

...

In each of these two trends, value is in the relationships, either between people or among content elements. Communication itself creates value, but of a kind known best by those involved and extracted only with difficulty. Social content can more easily represent value assigned to items, but must then find ways to restore what made it interesting in the first place.

One could see a new breed of social networking experiences built around messaging, if conversational features can be codified and structured for ease of participation and consumption. It will be interesting to see whether or not this happens. In either case, the emergence of interaction models appropriate for communication and social participation, to streamline communication and to make social content a more interesting experience, holds a lot of promise.

Social Interaction Design simplified

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 21:36:00 +0000

I have been asked recently to explain Social Interaction Design (SxD) in simple terms. What it is to design and designers, and to user experience design fields in particular (interaction design and information architecture). But also what it is to social media in general, including application development, social media business design, strategies, and their execution.

Folks who know what I'm trying to do with Social Interaction Design know that I'm after a description of individual and social practices around social applications that starts from the user experience. This is important to me and to the theory and framework of SxD for a simple reason. If the framework is to be accurate and valuable it needs to account for social dimensions intrinsically (not by metaphor, analogy, or anecdote). That is, grounded in the individual experience. For there is no "there" there in online interactions — all communication and interaction is lifted out of the context of place, and dislocated from the continuity of time and presence that frames our face to face encounters. (Social interaction online is not "like" interaction face to face, but is different for reasons worth exploring.)

Starting from the user experience also forces the designer, architect, marketer, strategist, or other social media professional to think from the user's perspective. Thinking from the perspective of product, problem, solution, utility, or branding is fine, but excludes the experience: what people do, why, and how many people "together" produce social outcomes.

The user centric approach here is deeper than it is in conventional design for the simple reason that social interaction involves users interacting with users. Not with the screen, with functions, features, elements, content, navigation, or what have you. And not with the brand, product, or service. Users don't talk about brands, they talk to each other. How they talk to each other in ways that also bring attention to a brand is what is interesting to me — and requires a more holistic approach to social media than use of media as media.

....

While I resist anecdotal descriptions for the reason that I'm after the dynamics of social from a view of participation, I'll use one here to see if I can better convey what I'm talking about.

Take a lunch. Lunch is a meal. One might explain it as a means of satisfying the universal human need to eat food. This would explain lunch from the perspective of satisfying "needs." This is true, but it's an inadequate description of what goes on when we're having lunch

[Google meets our "need" to find information.]

For example, there's is the matter of what's for lunch. Lunch has content. The food itself is not just food to be eaten for the satisfaction of metabolic conversion into energy. It comes in all different forms: recipes, menus, dishes and all the rest of it.

[Twitter has created a new form of talk.]

But the lunch itself is also not the sum of it. Our fellow diners have different tastes, and what's tasty to one may be just so-so to another. If food tastes good, "good" is not an objective property of the food. It's the experience of those of us who think the food is good.

[Foursquare combines the social of popular places to go with the personal recommendations of things we think are good.]

But the meal served, good or not, is again not the sum of it. Where are we going for lunch? And what's "where?" In choosing where to have lunch together we may run through many different kinds of restaurants, and compare them on the basis of quality, price, reputation, style, ambience, and so on. (Is it hip?) Regardless of which attribute we agree on, and by which we choose our lunch place, the value choice we have made is not objective either. Value is in how we value. What's a valid reason for choosing our lunch place, say "it's new and it's getting popular" may not be valid for another (it's overpriced; it's not the real thing).

[Yelp is about taste and opinion. Reviews illustrate the many ways in which users disclose their tastes, identify with merchants, and express their values.]

And what about who's going? Are we friends? Co-workers? Are we having a work lunch or lunch to catch up with each other? Surely these are important social aspects of going out for lunch.

[Linkedin social practices, even when their design is similar to Facebook, are social in different ways.]

But in these respects, then, what matters more: the type of relationships we have (eg work); the status of our relationships (one of us is tagging along); or how we feel (bummer, because now we're going to have to listen to him complain about the boss)? If we talk about how relationships affect the experience, we have to acknowledge that there are different ways of characterizing what a relationship is.

[Facebook is popular in part because there are so many ways to engage and relate to friends near and far, new and old, from greetings to games]

And there's our communication and interactions with each other. Are we boisterous and comfortable with each other? Do we bring work to the table? Do we have lunch to talk casually about work, or because we genuinely like each other? Both, of course, could serve friendship, or serve our workplace.

[Social practices vary significantly from dating to jobs sites.]

If in fact this is a working lunch, then the social context is actually "work." Our lunch is an extension of work insofar as we continue relationships with each other as employees in a non-work environment. But this makes us better co-workers, improves the basis of our appreciation for each other, and helps out our communication. As a work lunch, this lunch works (is work of a different sort).

[Social media in the enterprise don't work the same way as public social media.]

And so on we could go. We could talk about plates and silverware. We could talk about the space and its design. Its location. Or we could talk about the service and presentation. None of these would describe whether we enjoyed lunch, or account for the "experience" in toto. None would explain why we had lunch, or be able to predict whether we will do it again (and how soon).

...

I have dramatically over-simplified this example to show that there are different ways of observing social practices, describing them, and accounting for their elements, their organization, value, social routines, and social significations.

We see similar differences taken every day in how we describe social media. You and I will at times use industry trends, business transformations, technical innovation, social habits, information needs, communication practices, designs, features, types, and more to describe What goes on with social media and How people do it.

We might attribute the medium's popularity to changes in how we connect with people. To how we talk and stay in touch. To disruption in the marketplace. To the demographics of various audiences and their use of social tools. To the fortunes of big players and the ecosystem of application developers. To the periodic success of a product or service and its trickle down effect in copying and extending hits like the iPhone or twitter. To the cultural trends like personal branding, status updates, blogging, social networking, and many more.

My aim with social interaction design is to contextualize these various and valid descriptions and observations, but to seek a deeper accounting of the user's practices and how they add up to the social practices we see, and will see emerging, in social media. My hope is to help to shape the field in ways that will result in clear assessments and insightful and useful explanations — connected, ultimately, to human experience.

Social Interaction Design Client Forensic Brief

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 22:50:00 +0000

We're now four years into social media, depending on how you measure it. We have a goodly number of best practices to share, from the activity update that is fast becoming ubiquitous among social networking sites to twitter campaign tips of all shapes and sizes. Social media consultants are nigh on a dime a dozen, and their ranks have swelled of late with an influx of SEO and e-marketing consultants.

And yet, in many ways we are still at a loss to explain exactly how social media work. Why some social sites fail and others succeed. And why features that work in one context seem to work very differently in another.

As self-appointed experts in the field, ask any one of us what distinguishes social media and you will get a different answer. For some it's the new relationship, for others the new branding. For some, the new public, for others the new medium. Most of us will have some view of social media as a force for greater trust, closer relationships, better communication, and faster, cheaper, and better distribution. But when it comes to an accounting for why these are the case, we tend, as a group, to fall back on analogies and metaphors.

Analogies and metaphors communicate well, but come up shy of an explanation of how social media work. While I lay no claim to a complete or exhaustive logic of social media and their uses, I am a somewhat tireless thinker of the mechanics and dynamics of social interactions. These are real phenomena, and can be described better by means of sociology and media theory than by analogy and metaphor. In this I am finding kindred spirits and fellow thinkers, and collectively I hope that our efforts will be able to offer deeper analysis of social media from design, function, and social practice perspectives: built on the kinds of insights that can help you, the client, better benefit from your social media efforts, whatever they may be.

I offer a unique and holistic analysis of social media. Your site, application, community, or campaign. I bring seven years in web development and three years specializing in social media to my analyses. My social interaction design approach combines a grasp of design features and functionality as traditionally practiced by user experience professionals with a deep and broad grasp of social practices anchored in a wide reading of social theory. I have brought this to other clients, from those offering online communities to apps, analytics, and campaigns.

I approach client social media product and service issues with questions addressed to the user experiences key to your success:

What are your user's interests?
How do they use social media and where do you fit in?
Do your interaction models lead to the kind of content you want left behind?
Can you make them better — by providing users with features, content, or functionality that also results in new practices?
What kinds of users use your product and what kinds of users are you losing?
If you have adopted social media best practices, are they working well, and have you considered alternatives?
How will you grow and develop on a forward basis, and what's your strategy for getting there?

The goals of my forensic analysis are to provide you with a review of how well you are doing socially. And of course how to become better. I take the user perspective in order to walk through the experiences of different kinds of users, not only in goals and uses but in personality also. I look at communication among users, and find signs of breakdown and fade out as well as effectiveness and engagement.

In terms of design and feature implementation, I offer recommendations on how to map features and social functionality to growth of your user base. Social architecture and social features can be used to steer social practices and make adjustments to the kinds of interactions that your product encourages. Here, ratings, lists, tags, favoriting, sharing, member profiles, messaging, boards and commenting, navigation, and other social activities can be finessed to emphasize different facets of social media use.

In your selection of social objects, tokens, and social elements used in communication, social exchanges, themed activities, and content structure and interaction, I look for ways to focus activity by means of structure and support for interaction. I look at the kinds of information and content contributed, and help to delineate between interactions based on contributions and those based around their contributors.

In social interactions and activities, I examine the ways in which your product organizes the user's time. This involves an understanding of fast and slow systems, open and closed social transactions, sequenced, serial, and chained interactions, and the opportunities and expectations these create for users participating in real time as well as those who consume content later.

Different kinds of social groups and publics can shape user participation, and their inclination to be seen, by whom, and how. I look at your product or service for the ways in which system design provides this soft organization of social formations, as well as the interactions common to them. Here the differences among user populations on fan sites, mobile networks, friend-based networks, expert review and recommendation systems all involve trust, reciprocity, and other aspects of social relationships and dynamics. Subtle and nuanced descriptions can help you understand what's going on from user perspectives.

I examine the conversations taking place in your product or around your campaign, and look at the kinds of users who participate in them. I examine social incentive models and the types of conversations that your core (current and potential) users engage in naturally, using my own personas 2.0 for social media. I look at transaction types and the cultures and economies in which they provide the highest levels of participation. With those in mind, I look for areas of breakdown or failure, and generate potential improvements.

Looking at the kinds of presence and public your product enables for users, I identify design practices that might create distortion and bias. If your product is designed for subjective experiences and individual engagement, I propose ways to use bias constructively. If your product is designed to produce more objective content, I examine ways in which you can reduce bias.

With enterprise and organizational adoption of social media, I look at points of resistance to use and adoption, and propose ways through or around them. In marketing and customer service use of social media for campaigns, or for community product innovation, I can help you make best use of community management and audience engagement techniques, from twitter on up to closed communities.

In conversational media, I bring conversation models to bear on the kinds of conversation occurring around your product. These include the kinds of use habits common to users based on personality and on a variety of user interests. I look for ways to best support users whose interests are mutually engaging and compelling, and which tend to produce high levels of communication.

In summary, a forensic analysis of your social media efforts can help you to develop further according to user experiences and perspectives. And help you to see how social dynamics contribute to your success. I bring my unique framework for social media social practices to every client engagement. And hope to do so for you.

Engagements can be one-off or ongoing, and vary in depth and scope as best suits your needs and budgets.

Download pdf

Structured Tweeting?

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:52:00 +0000

Adina Levin of Socialtext posted recently about Tags for ActivityStrea.ms. I've been enjoying online conversations with Adina quite a lot of late; there's a constructive Venn overlap between our approaches to design for social media and social interactions.

Given the amount of time we all spend skimming through Facebook status updates, twitter, and blog posts and comments, the idea of tagged activity streams has a strong appeal for me. But without going into detail into the proposed architecture for activity tagging (which I would like to do separately), I want to just conjecture for a moment on the question this idea begs. To wit, structured conversation.

A while back, Stowe Boyd and Chris Messina launched a related effort around microsyntax. I don't know where it currently stands, but the idea — to codify and back inline (in the tweet) syntax that would permit tweet parsing for some common types of tweets made a lot of sense to me. Besides location, consistent syntax could be used to identify any number of things, from reviews and recommendations to requests, offers, invitations, and so on.

Where microsyntax uses structure embedded in the tweet, activity tagging would place rely on structure outside the message (as I understand it). External structure has some advantages, not the least of which is a certain robustness (microsyntax depends on the user's written compliance with syntax).

However, and this is what I wanted to conjecture about, both are signs of a need for structure. Or if not need, then at least a nascent interest in structure. Years back, the structured blogging effort made a go at wrapping classification around the blog post format. It was abandoned for several reasons. Its taxonomies were probably excessively detailed. Its success would have required participation by search engines and blog indexing services. But most of all, it required a lot of extra work on the part of the user. The structured blog post was not a replacement for the standard post (subject, body, datestamp, tags) but a set of supplemental formats that could capture review, music, product, and other types of posts. (Fields were added for product name, manufacturer, rating, etc).

One can easily imagine the potential benefits of structured activity updates, as well as tweets, and other status updates. In fact one can imagine structure scaffolded around individual posts rich and connected enough to provide a back door into social networking and profile-based groups and communities. Theoretically, there's a slippery slope from structured conversation to the navigation and page-based organization we enjoy on the web today. In other words, messages could form the basis of browsing and finding just as pages do today. In theory.

But in theory, the idea is quite compelling. If "information overload" stands today as the single-most unwanted byproduct of the conversational turn in social media, then structure could help to solve some of its problems. One might imagine a set of codified values and attributes that authors and readers might use on messages. Messages could be classified by linguistic expression (or linguistic action), such as request, question, answer, comment, invitation, offer, forward, and so on. Twitter's codification of replies is one such example. Structured updates might then also be sucked into sites that organize them by their attributes, thus enabling group and community-like activity. Updates and tweets might ultimately form the basis of a kind of "message board" system (sound familiar?) built around dynamic aggregation of individual messages. Pages would not be content containers, but would be "written' by aggregation of distributed content.

None of this seems likely, however, for several reasons. Search engines and readers would have to participate around shared standards. And users would have to make the effort to classify their updates. Neither seem very realistic. But it's a compelling idea!

Social Interaction Design: Beyond Use

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 18:33:00 +0000

Interaction design works, in part, because it is able to anticipate user behaviors. Design theory models interactions: with products or services and their features, functions, interface, and so on. And if we're reasonably competent and a little lucky, we get the outcomes we expect.

But it's one thing to model interactions with software or hardware, and another to model the social interactions so critical to social media.

The conventional (non-social) approach to interaction involves a single user experience. User-centric approaches provide ways of thinking through that user's goals, needs, and objectives. The idea being that by modeling interactions based on theoretical notions of user-centric objectives, software can be designed to successfully and satisfactorily engage with the user.

In short, the interaction is between the user and the product (software). The design methodology defines user needs and thus suggests successful design solutions.

But the methodology is based on a functionalist view of interaction and an instrumentalist view of user goals. Functionalism, grossly stated, reduces human interests to causal sequences. It is based on the idea that we know what we want to achieve, and how to go about achieving it.

This is called instrumentalism because it suggests that humans do things for a reason, and human activity is understood as a combination of acts, actions, and activities in which ends are met by appropriate means. We all know where this leads us: to a view of human interaction that can be optimized, operationalized, quantified, and assessed in overly simplistic terms of success or failure, efficiency or inefficiency, and effectiveness of ineffectiveness.

The reason this approach fails to account for interactions around social media is two-fold. First, it fails to grasp the rich social dimensions of social interaction and communication, which as we experience daily are not governed by rational and instrumental goals alone. Secondly, it propagates a misleading claim that design structures and organizes interactions in social media (because design satisfies user needs and goals) — which of course it doesn't.

Social interaction involves two users (or more). Their interactions with each other, mediated and facilitated by social media (the software), are what qualify whether a system "works" or not. But to incorporate the experiences of two users into a social interaction design methodology we need to do more than simply double up user-centricity (say, as a two-user framework). It's not just a case of two users instead of one. It's a case of two subjects communicating and interacting with each other. And that means relational dynamics.

The critical insight into a social interaction design model then must absolutely begin with human interaction. And the most fundamental idea in human interaction is that it rests on double contingency. Double contingency is the basis of inter-subjectivity: each subject intends and interprets meaning freely. The meaning experienced by one user, even if it explains some of what the user intends to communicate and do with the other user, is not the same as the meaning experienced and interpreted by the other. The contingency comes into play simply because meaning cannot be attached to the interaction, but "exists" only in the experiences of the users involved.

This generates some perplexing problems. As much as we would like to stabilize and define the interaction's meaning, there is no such thing as objective meaning in social interaction. There is only the meaning experience by each participating user. Meaning is inter-subjective, not objective. An outsider cannot know it, define it, or even observe it. Designers are the outsiders, and in social media all interactions are meaning-based, not information based. (Information can be said to be "meaningful" objectively, but interactions are meaningful only to a person who experiences subjectively.)

The fact that as social interaction designers, we have no access to the subjective world of meaning and experience of the user does not mean we lose our ability to observe and describe what's going on entirely. It means what it has meant to any professional in the human and social practices: we need to know how we know what we observe and describe, and be aware of the limitations of our knowledge acquired and explained. The meaning of an interaction, or of communication, is not what the observer thinks it is (that would be ridiculous). It belongs to experience itself, and in many ways is not even conscious to the person experiencing it.

From some perspectives this is not an intractable problem. Social interactions become consistent, recognizable, and familiar as personal and individual habits are taken up as routines, pastimes, games, and many other forms of "conventional" interaction. As long as we, as practitioners, grant that we cannot offer a complete account of the inner experience of each and every user, and that we seek instead to observe social media to find common social practices and forms of interaction, we can still model interactions and describe frames of experience in generalized terms.

(Note: The goal of social theory is to go from particular descriptions to general descriptions. User-centric design is of two-minds on this and is in some ways stricken with an internal paradox: emphasis on user experience lays claim to the particular (an individual); design for all intents and purposes can only model the general.)

Related design disciplines encounter a similar problem. One that may serve as an analogy is urban planning. Urban planning anticipates social interactions facilitated by architectural choices. It recognizes the importance of general social phenomena: traffic and traffic flow, congestion, activity, commerce, the congregation of people, and so on. Urban planners are social architects, and they can model and design for these social phenomena. They cannot guarantee that fans have a good game, but they design stadiums to the observed social practices of what people do when attending live events.

Or to take another example, multi-player games. Designers of multi-player games use social interactions as an intrinsic aspect of game play. The standard ingredients of game design — roles, positions, rules, scoring, powers, levels of difficulty, etc — are only the game's elements, rules, and design. They are not the same as game play itself. Game designers anticipate the experience of game play by their users separately from the elements which comprise the game. They work game play and experience into the design by anticipating play: taking turns, slowing down, speeding up, providing back-channels for player communication, structuring collaboration, competition, and other social dependencies, etc.

Event planners represent another example. Event planners work with their understanding of large (or small) groups of people, often bringing their sense of time, timing, and duration to bear on activity scheduling (from the rituals of events like opening and closing ceremonies, to satisfying the seemingly banal needs of audiences, such as wi-fi, name tags, coffee breaks, and swag).

There are of course other examples of disciplines and professions that are social in nature.

Designing for the social interactions of people using social and communication applications, however, is complicated by the fact that the interaction is mediated. Social interactions online are not the same as they are offline. There is less "there," there online: people aren't together, so it is impossible to describe "what's happening." Often times, people aren't interacting at the same time, so it is difficult to observe a temporality or duration. And in the absence of a sense of shared space or location and shared period of time, we lose our ability to refer to a "situation." It becomes difficult to observe, let alone describe, what's going on.

We may then be tempted to describe interactions using what can be seen on the screen: posts, messages, ratings, votes, and so on. But that would be to miss out completely on the relationships, the intentions, motives, communication, symbolic interactions, and other aspects of social interaction which transcend empirical evidence. Not to mention time, which is such a critical dimension to social interactions. For all social interactions involve references to past activity and create opportunities for future activity. Relationships are nothing if not the orientation we take to others over time, moreso perhaps when we are absent from each other than when we are present.

Designers like to talk about context. Context situates activity, and activity's acts and actions. Context situates participants, and frames their interactions for a stretch of time (an episode or period of time). Context, in design speak, is like situation in social interaction speak.

Most social encounters involve a situation. Situations supply almost unlimited possibilities for creating and experiencing meaning, using all aspects of social action and communication together. Meaningfully intended acts, taken up by participants oriented to a meaningful situation and meaningful interaction, may objectify their meaning intentions through language, use of symbols, engagement in ritualized social transactions, and so on. And because members of a shared cultural background can recognize these externalized intentions, and the languages and objects used for expression and communication, common practices can emerge and become familiar. (Familiarity breeds repetition, repetition becomes routine.)

The designer of social media must work without access to "a situation" and all the context that situations provide (which we can also describe as the framing of experience). Instead, designers have only their inherited orientation towards the user experience, and a framework of social practices continuously evolving around the media that sustain them.

(Second Note: We should note that users and experiences are different. Use cases conflate the two by combining a need, goal, or objective with the user experiencing that need, goal, or objective. It's a phenomenological reduction of the experience used to define a generalizable "case." In our (use) case: the user has the need that defines the utility of the use. This kind of definition of user experience conveniently leaves out the user interests unmet or inconsequential to an application's functionality.)

Users are not just their needs and goals; and are not just the experience they are having now. In social media, user personality differences are profound and important. It is in fact likely that certain combinations of user personality types not only work well, but contribute to the growth and success of some social media systems. Users are different and their experiences are different.

So where do we stand, given that context defined as experience and practice involves factors that transcend what can be empirically observed? And given that a reduction of user centricity to needs and goals results in misleading use cases founded on a functionalist notion of utility?

We simply don't have the language required to observe, describe, and explain existing online interactions yet. Nor to anticipate the possible field of online social interactions, let alone the probable future of social interaction design innovations.

To produce this framework, we would need to both describe the user's interactions with a social media system and explain, if not predict, the social outcomes and practices that make the application a viable social system.

There may be an aporia in the theory and methodology. To wit, a complete and systematic description and framework of online social interaction may be impossible, not because such a framework simply could not account for all that goes on descriptively, not to mention proscriptively. Rather, because much of online social interaction is rife with "failure": missed and failed communication, and failed or fading interactions.

With the breakdown sometimes comes a breakthrough. Failure, in this case, is not total. Failure may instead suggest that a design methodology oriented to success is simply the wrong approach to social phenomena.

Design normally regards its successes and failures in terms of functional efficiency and efficacy. But in social media, function is not the best metric. In fact, systems that are poor examples of design may indeed result in high volumes of use and activity: the less well something works, the more social interaction and communication may be involved in using it. We might say that people like mess and messy, or that they like to go where the action is (to quote sociologist Erving Goffman).

Can mess and failure be designed, such that social activity results? Possibly, though it might make more sense to think of mess as "ambiguity."

Goffman observed that in social situations, rituals provided a means for corrective behavior and action when the communication itself had broken down. He observed that ritual picks up where grammar leaves off: that when grammatical rules are broken, other ways of making sense are required. And this is true in social media. So true, in fact, that the entire genre may be described as a failing, error-prone, discombobulated and wholly-uncoordinated mess of a social experiment. And that it is only through the persistence, tolerance, and fascination of its users that much of social media survives with users intact.

But if this is the case, and I believe that some degree it is, then the failures, mistakes, misunderstandings, and missed connections serve to create new forms of interaction. These interactions answer the need created by failure, and take shape as gestures, communication, acts, and the myriad tacit codes of conduct that distinguish people, groups, identities, and more.

Ambiguity, unresolved and unclarified, may drive users on to repeat and reiterate their attempts at expressing themselves and obtaining a response or reply. Ambiguity may motivate those who wish to know more or understand better. Ambiguity may fuel rich and complex social dynamics in which the myriad of acts intended to figure out what's going on and how to do it in effect create what's going and how it works.

These phenomena exceed the capabilities of design to regulate or control — but not the abilities of designers to anticipate and accommodate. A social interaction design discipline oriented to regulating social dynamics, responding with agility to emerging social practices, steering social outcomes by dynamically controlling, gating, preempting, and amplifying communication by means of navigation, content layout, emphasis, symbolic objects, and channeling might promise a new kind of design. One that oriented to outcomes but which emphasizes system processes and social dynamics over structure and stability.

I do not know if this means a different kind of design or a different kind of designer. Social interaction design, to me, is not a matter of designing the screen but of designing systems for interaction. It's my impression that the boxes by which many of us design and with which we try to contain the experience need to be opened up to systems and their processes, and interactions and their social dynamics. It strikes me that user experience professionals could enjoy a rich and fascinating engagement with social media if we can further develop approaches to social interaction that accurately anticipate outcomes by means of a grasp of these dynamics.

This is by no means a finiished thought, and I welcome your thoughts and comments.

SXSW: Please vote! Social Interaction Design Concepts

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 17:01:00 +0000

I'm excited but still somewhat churlish about posting this, the obligatory Vote for Me at SXSW! post. But I think there could be some great insights to come out of this event. It seems that time for the industry. Time for a bit of critical thinking and deeper investigation.

As many of you know from talking to me, my take on social interaction design is as much sociological as it is design. I'll be presenting (given the chance) an overview of core concepts and insights, key questions and issues, and examples.

I'm hoping that by the time the panel comes around a number of us will have had a chance to blog and talk on this topic. My sense is that a number of us recognize that designs, features, architecture, and other tools in the designer's toolbox cannot explain or structure the social alone. That the interaction is not between user and screen but user and user. The timing feels right for a deeper look at what drives social media participation.

Core concepts:

A critique of cognitively-based ideas of the user and the user's behavior in favor of social action and communication
User centric and psychologically-oriented emphasis on accommodating and understanding multiple user types
A view of social dynamics and how some user types might work well together
A look at paired and triangulated interactions
The reflective and imaginary properties of the screen: how it is we see ourselves being seen by others, and project ourselves into those we see only an image of
Definitions of user acts and actions, social actions, interactions, and communication
A look at transactional and conversational forms, including gestural, symbolic, reciprocated, and other kinds of social and economic exchanges
The impact of conversational media and the use of talk itself as a medium of distribution and circulation

There will be more. I'm hoping to provide examples, and offer good stuff to practitioners along with the concepts.

And here are some other panels I'm hoping to see at SXSW. I know these folks but that's not why I've listed them ;-).

Thanks for the vote, and don't hesitate to retweet!

Social Design for Enterprise 2.0 Adina Levin

The Right Way to Wireframe Russ Unger, with Will Evans, Fred Beecher, Todd Zaki Warfel

How Screenwriting and Film Theory Creates Enchanting Websites Michael Leis

The Community is Dead, Long Live the Community Carla Borsoi

Practical Digital Anthropology: Getting to Know Your Users Marc Vermut

SocialMania: Designing Social Interfaces - The Game Erin Malone

Social Search: A Little Help from my Friends Brynn Evans

Digital Ethnography: Gathering Insights in the Digital Landscape Guthrie Dolin

Newspaper culture, authority, social media, and relevance

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 20:04:00 +0000

Stowe Boyd has an excellent post today on social news. While at first I was going to just leave a comment, my thoughts ascended from commentary to a post in their own right. Not wanting to blogjack Stowe's points, I'd like to continue the conversation by means of referencing the debate around newsprint's decline and the economic threat to journalism here instead.

As I see it the problem facing traditional news media is not just a problem of old media, new media. Indeed, as McLuhan argued, any new medium initially uses an old medium as its content. Old media methods and practices aren't about to disappear simply because attention is shifting increasingly to social media — a consequence of changing reading habits, advertising budgets, expenses and costs of maintaining and print publication in challenging credit markets, a shift from time spent by consumers in print and television to internet-based experiences, and so on.

All those forces are real and are exacting a punishing toll on traditional media, of course. But there's another paradigm shift in the works, and it has less to do with economic forces and more to do with the very social and cultural function of news.

News is not simply reported; it is produced. News media create the news. Their reporting not only documents facts, but through processes of editorial, publishing, and distribution, it also creates the news. The legitimacy of traditional media rested on the authority news media brought to this process. This authority in turn comprised of several "social functions," if you will. For there were different ways in which news media established their positions, defined their roles, and maintained their market leadership and service:

Authority can be had by means of reputation. This is a perception issue, and is maintained by consistent adherence by news organizations to internal (brand) principles, commitments, interests, style, judgment, taste, truth, personality, accuracy, speed, and so on. In this way news organizations might each command a different reputation, a brand identified with authority of a kind, or in a field, or within a genre. In other words authority can be had by a news media leader regardless of its actual credibility and service as a news gathering and reporting organization.

Left of center, right of center, news "lite," — the audience of readers either buys it, and thus legitimizes the organization's authority, or not. This point is important because we should separate authority from the "truth" of reporting events, and the "fact" of news itself. News is created: the process is owned by for profit institutions, and seeks market share and financial performance. News is never just an objective recording of events, but is always a selection and narration of events.

Authority can be had by means of position. This is a general perspective on authority. It claims simply that an authoritative social position bestows authority on the organization, entity, or individual who occupies the position. From a cultural and historical perspective, new media have long occupied a traditional position of delivering timely, relevant, significant, and objective reporting of events, topics, issues, and perspectives. This tradition is surely changing — not only because news media are no longer the best first source of news itself, but because other media (social) compete for the position of authority.

This argument does not claim that social media are better or more accurate, faster or more honest — these are some claims made by citizen journalists and I agree with many of them — it simply claims that authority is a social and cultural function, and that the function can be fulfilled by different entities. (Functionalism argues that the function remains relatively stable, but who fulfills the function is interchangeable.)

There are other ways of defining authority, but I'll leave those aside as they relate more to contexts in which power and force are in play. Now, there's an interesting change taking place in the migration of consumers from mainstream media to social media. It's not just in the content, the communication and "conversation," the social networking and personalization of media, but does involve all of these. We might characterize it more broadly as a change in modes of consumption and modes of production. And here it is where traditional media are at a distinct and overwhelming disadvantage, for their medium of choice is the wrong medium.

In the traditional medium, value is added to news by the production of news as a news medium for mass consumption. The work of producing news was the work that created value for the news organization, and which is consumed by readers and viewers. The mode of production of news was separate from the consumption of news. Social media, by contrast, involve consumers in the process of value creation. The mode of production is also the mode of consumption. There's no distance separating the two: distance that normally permits the transaction fees that cover distribution, circulation, and broadcast.

Furthermore, the value determined in traditional journalism by means of authority as described above, is now determined instead by means of social communication and interaction. This leads to a shift in the value itself: from the editorial voice and authority of journalism to the personal and social relevance of friends, colleagues, and other social relations. Value is no longer measured in degrees of authority but in degrees of relevance. Note the distinction, for there's no underestimating the significance of this shift. It's a change that, for better or worse, re-calibrates the consumer's interest in and consumption of news.

News is no longer "that which is important" and is now "that which is socially relevant." Social relevance rests not on value as determined by a scale or hierarchy of significance (what's worth telling, objectively assessed) but that which is distributed, shared, retold, cited, referenced, quoted, linked to, favorited, and otherwise socially ranked and delivered. Value of news in social media accrues by means of speed, distribution, reach and leveraged influence of individuals who get attention by means of paying attention. Value is a matter of "who chooses" not "what is worth choosing."

This shift from an editorial and journalistic version of objectivity — closely wed to the perception of an authoritative voice occupying an authoritative role &dash: to a unregulated, communicative production of value that is individually and subjectively chosen and socially proliferated constitutes an enormous rebalancing of media landscape. Not only are old media disadvantaged for their medium is non-social and non-communicative, but they are losing their authority and their traditional role occupying that authority. It is really only up to social media to better filter out noise, personalize news and content consumption, continually improve relational controls (friends, peers, colleagues — the whole personal/social/public thing), innovate interaction models to raise the medium's unique production value, and fine tune advertising business models for sustainability.

It seems to me unlikely that we will return, as a culture, to traditional modes of consuming news. There will always be a need for experts, a respect for their credibility and reputation, and interest in voices that can tell, narrate, and entertain. Those skills are platform agnostic. But the genie's out of the bottle. Regardless of how one feels about the quality of user-generated content, the noise of social media and irrelevance of much of its content, the most profound distinction between old and new media is in the relationship between production and consumption. New media content is sourced and distributed by means of social relations. It seems very unlikely that a culture would wish a return to the hierarchy of authority, when the proximity and immediacy of social media offer much of the same information, selected in a fundamentally different way.

Dave Winer's little tweet reader: some thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 22:15:00 +0000

This morning I followed the suggestions of Marshall Kirkpatrick and tried out Dave Winer's new little twitter backup tool. I pulled the opml file into Google Reader as instructed and it wasn't long before i had one of those "Aha!" moments. The kind that happen when you re-encounter something you have been using for a while — a new perspective, a peripheral insight.

Marshall asks in his post if there are things we could imagine doing with the tool. Absolutely! Now, I'm not a coder so my understanding of api limitations is here restricted. But I'd want to build off the tool and create a conversation viewer. Twitter is an inefficient conversional tool, and third party apps have only limited effectiveness, because it simply delivers too many tweets. To make matters worse, each of us has different tweeting habits.

Personally, I'm constantly losing the people for the tweets. I use Seesmic desktop (love it) and have set up 7 panels each with 15 - 30 folks I follow in journalism, social media, marketing, user experience, philosophy and two groups of friends. Every few weeks I spend an entire morning reading the home stream and add people I've missed. This takes a lot of work!

The reader view of tweets surfaced people I've been missing for months — many now only tweet irregularly and infrequently. Now I spend a lot of time in the stream, so if I'm missing stuff, I can't imagine what it's like for others (well, I can, and it relaxes me to do so).

Being in twitter is being in the flow. And the river is now huge, it flows quickly, it's crowded, everybody's shouting (some are whispering), some are muttering to themselves, others just saying hello... it's a mess. It's no more a conversation than it is a high-school auditorium in a pre-game frenzy and everybody's got a sign to wave about and there's a constant stream of students coming and going and the signs keep changing and it never stops.

So I'd like to go meta, and Winer's tool reminded me why. I'd like a conversation viewer. Not just for the messages I'm missing, and more importantly, the people I'm missing them from, but for the cross-talk, depth, and threads, too. I'd like to see not just a feed for each of the people I'm following but I'd like to see the dots connected. I'd like to see and be able to navigate from person to person, on topic or off topics. During certain periods of time -- for the episodic interactions that often happen in twitter.

I'd like to surface experts, and not just the ones who think they're experts and tweet like they are, but those who are responsive experts: the ones who are quiet till asked. And the friendly experts: the ones who pipe up when they encounter a fellow soccer fan, make an introduction, and follow.

And the recommenders: those who may not be topical experts but who have some pretty good reasons to make a recommendation: they know the person, they know what they like, and whose recommendations are timely and helpful.

And the helpers: those who may not be experts but who recently had the same experience and can offer timely and targeted advice.

And the inviters: those who know what's going on and invite people they think may be interested (or invite everyone) because they themselves are interested. People who may not be hosting their own event but are socially and culturally active.

And the buddies: those who are there but you might not know it until you tweet something personal and it turns out they've been paying attention. The ones whose tweets you remember because they're kind and comforting in a me-too and we-all-have-those-kinds-of-days way. The ones whose tweeting is personal.

And many more. I'd like a meta-view of the space, by topic, person, group, clique, culture, profession, hobby, activity, location, and event. Over time, for periods of time, with flow velocities and rates of change. A navigation system so that I can hop around through conversations and save, favorite, and share. I'd like a viewer for myself and one for clients. I'd like different kinds for clients, depending on whether they do community management, brand management, PR, marketing, customer service, or sales.

And a whole lot more. I think I'm going to dig up some of my old conversation analysis stuff now. Did I mention social analytics? So, thanks Dave! And thanks Marshall!

Transparency: truth in social media

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 12:45:00 +0000

I consider social media to be talk technologies, and I've been suspecting of late that the debate around "transparency" is a debate about communication. I say this only because transparency is sometimes used to describe branding, advertising, PR, marketing, corporate behavior, and of course, use of social media. All of these activities can possibly benefit, or suffer, from transparency.

Think of transparency and you see clarity. You see through the foil, the "grand gestures" (Deb Shultz), and the clever tactics of corporate marketing and PR. Transparency then describes how a brand relates to its cusomtomers.

Transparency certainly involves a company's interactions with its customers. This impacts the customer's experience, and thus idea, of the brand. From the customer's perspective, you get what you see, and what you ask for, you sometimes get also. We sometimes call this authenticity, meaning that a company is sincere in its customer relationships and communication.

Company walls, too, become transparent &emdash; if not on the inside, then on the outside. Company disclosure is an element of transparency: companies that no longer try to conceal their inner workings, or which are "open" to sharing their activities with the outside world, are transparent. This kind of transparency involves the visibility of company actviities.

Then there is customer service. This, too, is a key feature in the new transparency. Here it generally means treating customers with respect, fairly and responsively (in a timely manner). This involves a kind of equality in relations, in the sense that, as the saying goes, the customer is always right. It's transparency because it puts the company in its right place: not above, but in the service of, the customer. This is the rightness, the justice, or fairness of relations.

To return to the beginning, then, I find these different accounts of transparency interesting because they all involve "truth." I deliberately avoid Colbert's infamous claim to "truthiness," because that is just the image of truth.

There are, in pragmatics (a branch of linguistics), three claims to truth made in all our communication:

a claim to truth as fact (something is true about reality)

a claim to truthfulness (somebody is sincere, means what s/he says)

and a claim to authority (somebody is allowed to claim what s/he claims, e.g. has the social position or authority)

These aspects of truth in communication underlie the concept of transparency.

Transparency is:

truth in brand communication and behavior: factual accuracy, full disclosure, no manipulation, denial, misrepresentation of the truth

truthfulness in brand intent: authentic self-representation, genuine, sincere, and honest communication, behavior with integrity, respect, and understanding (including the listening part)

truth as the right to speak and act: respect for laws and norms, codes of conduct, etiquette, shown by associating with the brand's own community, audience, and marketplace as an equal participant committed to a shared and common future, sustainably and compassionately

I suspected that transparency had something to do with communication when it became virtually interchangeable with authenticity. These are terms we use in describing people, and trust, especially. They apply to people because they involve intentions, actions, speech, behavior: human stuff, deeply social stuff.

We might in fact say that transparency is really about humanizing for-profit companies. That as professionals, and as consumers, we ask for transparency in corporate behavior because it is what we expect from state and government behavior: accountability. In other words, transparency is in the zeitgeist.

One final thought. For transparency is not all that it's cracked up to be, for all and at all times equally. As tax payers, it is a citizen's right to expect accountability in government actions.

Companies that sell products, and which use their brand reputation to do so, are paid by consumers for their products. There is no social contract, but an exchange of money. In other words, the brand that embraces transparency does so in its own self interest. I'm not saying that this invalidates corporate transparency, but that it complicates it. Social media may want to be used authentically. But companies and brands are unlikely to embrace full transparency.

Enterprise and Social Media: Ambient Knowledge, Hidden Knowledge

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 20:57:00 +0000

In the process of considering the differences between "regular" consumer social media, and social media in the enterprise, I've been turning over the idea of ambient intimacy vs ambient knowledge. I thought "knowledge" might not only capture the knowledge management trendline that continues to run through many internal enterprise software applications, but that it might also shift emphasis from social to organizational values. The idea of "ambient knowledge" came up around some webinars hosted by Ross Mayfield (@ross), Laura Fitton (@pistachio), and Marcia Conner (@marciamarcia). The term seemed to suit realtime social media in the enterprise well, namely twitter and, in this case, Socialtext and its Signals messaging platform.

But in the weeks since, the concept has been tumbling and turning over in my mind's eye. The "knowledge" part of it works for me still, but the "ambient," like an ill-fitting shirt drawn from the tumble drier too late, does not.

I went back to Leisa Reichelt's (@leisa) first use of the term ambient intimacy.

"Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn�t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible. Flickr lets me see what friends are eating for lunch, how they�ve redecorated their bedroom, their latest haircut. Twitter tells me when they�re hungry, what technology is currently frustrating them, who they�re having drinks with tonight." Leisa Reichelt

Leisa's description is about awareness, access, visibility. These are provided by means of messaging and communication. "Ambient" here means a kind of passive connectedness and awareness; the metaphor is visual, specular, spatial. "Ambiance" refers to one's surroundings and place. Here, ambient intimacy hints at Wim Wenders' "Far Away, So Close," a film that is about intimacy, video, vision.

But where "ambient" suggests connectedness where there would otherwise be none, people within the organization are often connected: if not in fact and by virtue of a shared building, company identity, purpose and so on, then also by means of in-house technologies. The issue, as often noted in the knowledge management literature, is less a connectedness problem and more a problem of silos. Awareness, not of what people are up to but of who may have an answer.

Relationships within the organization are structured. They serve functional organization. Communication, too, tends to serve tasks, jobs, projects: communication coordinates activities.

The "awareness" problem, in terms of knowing and having access to knowledge that others have, seems more one of transparency and disclosure. And in the organization, the relationships that could be helped by use of social technologies are the latent relationships: those that could be functionally productive, if the employees knew of one another.

So I have been going with "hidden knowledge" instead of "ambient knowledge" of late.

Lee Bryant, in his (old) post Ambient Knowledge describes a feed and flow-based view of organizational social media use. The fact that this dates to 2005 seems to me, in fact, prescient.

Lee describes three directions for KM (Knowledge Management) as suggested by David Snowden:

Techno-fetishism: where organisations focus on codification through technology solutions, which is little more than an advanced form of information management

HR solutions: where it becomes a servant of recruitment, retention and succession policy, owned by HR and run by IT

Sense making: where the focus is not on sharing knowledge but on enabling better decision making, creating the conditions for innovation and understanding the way we make sense of our world

Lee then reflects on the social interaction model, if you will, for a socialized KM:

"We need to let people organise their inputs by exposing all relevant information in granular feed form and then provide smart aggregation and tagging tools to create a personal eco-system of content, cues and links.

This is what we have been describing as a social interface to corporate information sources: create a layer of feeds and flows that reference content objects, and allow people to apply flexible personal meta-data within a social context to constantly reorganise the links into that content according to their day-to-day needs.

Second, we should help people develop the skills and confidence to move from linear processing mode, where they feel a need to respond to our acknowledge everything (e.g. memos and the email inbox) to peripheral vision mode, where people make better decisions and connections by assisted by ambient information feeds, and where information grabs our attention only when it needs to (e.g. "reading" in an RSS aggregator, sensing importance of links through number of references or recognised trust relationships)."

I think the passing emphasis on action, and on use of social tools to make what might be "ambient" (hidden) knowledge actionable (or connecting up latent relationships to make them actual) is important. Work is focused activity. Work done in part by talking uses talk to coordinate action and activity. Flow-based social media can supplement this kind of work: by routing, distributing, exposing and sharing communication differently. From email to a more transparent and visible kind of communication.

Transparency creates and opens possibilities: for reciprocity and recognition of shared goals and common purposes. It discloses bias and undermines (somewhat) structural tendencies (the schlerotic organizational body). It can work, using social media communication tools, in part because communication becomes more personal (in contrast to professional or employee role and position). And while this personalization may create risks for employees, it can produce coincidental and serendipitous openings. These are the benefits that accrue to activities not designed for their utility (productivity), but for their ability to weave and bind socially (social fabric).

This is where I'm at now with it. I'm still allowing the coincidence, serendipity, and social of social media to tumble about the cranium. I know that the "social" inside a company is not the social we normally mean by social media. But that'll be a separate post.