This is a draft excerpt from my upcoming book ‘Social Circles’. I’d love to get feedback on it. This excerpt is from the middle of chapter 2: “The Real Life Social Network”. The plan is for each section in the book to broken up like this - multiple sub-sections, followed by a section with ideas for designers and marketers, and topics for brainstorming with starter ideas.
How interesting is it? How useful is it? How could I improve the content and/or the structure?
GROUPS
People belong to multiple independent groups
When we think about our social network, we don’t simply have friends, we have groups of friends. Research studies show that these groups form around different life stages, and shared experiences [1]. For example, people may have a group of friends from school, and a group of friends from college. They may have a group of friends from different places that they have lived - their friends from Chicago, their friends from New York. Other factors that distinguish groups of friends include shared interests, hobbies, work, and changes in family situation e.g. someone getting married receives new groups of friends from their partner’s life. This may sound obvious to us, but it’s not how most online social networks are structured. Most online social networks have everyone in one big bucket.
A typical example of someone’s real life social network. They have a small number of independent groups, formed around life stages and shared experiences.
The people in each of our groups tend to know each other very well, but our groups of friends tend to remain independent. It is not common for friends in one group to know friends in another. My “college friends” all know each other, but they don’t know my “New York friends”. Our ties do not extend outward, reaching many people, but rather they double back on themselves inside our tightly clustered groups.
Our independent groups of friends mean that we often have conversations that are only relevant to one of the groups. Much content shared within groups will be meaningful for that group alone, and defined by the context of their relationships [2]. This is currently a problem online, as we share status updates to all our network, extended across groups. Our update may have been meaningful for people in one of the groups, but not at all interesting for people in another. As a result, we’re often subjected to updates that we perceive as uninteresting, but which weren’t intended for us in the first place.
As groups are independent, knowing the people who bridge groups is very powerful. They are the people who can pass information from one social circle into another. They are not necessarily the people with the most connections. In fact, they may have a small number of connections, but they may happen to have lived in a few different places, or happen to have a diverse set of interests.
People don’t have one group of “friends”
Most social networks ask us to create our “friends” group. Increasingly, this means importing big friend groups from existing online social networks. The problem is, in real life, no such group exists. As we have seen, we don’t have one big friends group, we have different, independent groups of friends.
The word “friend” also means different things to different people depending on their culture and background. If you asked ten people to describe what a friend was, you would get ten different answers. They might say that a friend was someone they would trust to mind their children. Or they might say a friend was anyone they knew on a first name basis.
Not everyone in a group is equal
Although our groups of friends are small, usually containing less than 10 people [3], not all members of the group are equal. We are closer to some than others. We trust some people in a group on one set of topics, and others on a different set. Think of one of your groups of friends. Even though everyone knows each other well, there is probably one person you would trust to recommend a good restaurant, but another to point you to new cutting-edge music.
The fact that people in a group are not equal often leads to side conversations within groups. For example, when a group of friends are trying to organize a night out, side conversations often break out to resolve differences of opinion.
Ideas around groups
Designers:
- When developing social features, consider whether designing for groups would be better than creating one big bucket of people. Groups better represent people’s offline social network, and depending on your product’s goals, it may be a better way to structure what you are offering.
- Avoid the use of the word “friend” when describing relationships. There is almost always a better word that more accurately describes the behavior you’re trying to encourage.
- If you’re designing for groups, give people easy ways to create groups, build group management into the flow of other tasks, allow custom names for each group, and allow people to rename the group if they change over time.
- Support side conversations. Allow people to fork conversation threads with a smaller number of people.
Marketers + Advertisers:
- Think about how you might build campaigns where you target specific groups rather than mass targeting individuals. How people describe groups can give insight into their interests. Knowing the things around which groups have formed can lead to much better targeting. A more relevant audience for you, and more relevant advertising for the audience.
- You can search for groups online and use the information about the group to understand if you should target messages at them. Be mindful of information that people consider private. Many people will consider information about their groups of friends as very private. Always give people control, and run all activities as “opt-in”. If people see tangible benefits to communicating with you, they’ll happily involve relevant friends.
- Focus on getting your message shared within a group as much as you focus on getting it to spread between groups. Messages shared within a group are likely to be relevant to more members of the group, as the members usually have similar attitudes and interests. Also, messages are reinforced by multiple members of the group, increasing the influence of the message.
- Don’t force the sharing of messages from group to group. If the message is relevant it will spread, but if it’s not, then look elsewhere. It’s better to not spread a message than risking appearing as irrelevant, or worse, as spam. Often, when people are not interested, they perceive legitimate messages from companies as spam. This does untold damage to brand perceptions.
Brainstorm topics:
How might we create marketing activities that involve groups of friends?
How might we create value for small groups, motivating individuals to involve their friends?
How might we ensure that our messages don’t get pushed to groups that aren’t interested?
References
[1] “Rethinking Friendship” Liz Spencer + Ray Pahl Page 89
[2] “Six Degrees” Duncan Watts Page 71
on Mar 14th, 2010 at 12:52 am
Thanks for posting your except. The structure is approachable. I like the sub-sections of content, and the recommendations for your two defined audiences.
I’m undecided on how I’m feeling about the brainstorming topics yet. I presume that you will give guidance on how to use this book, somewhere at the beginning. The brainstorming topics I think need that kind of explanation - how people can effectively use them in their contexts. Readers will need to understand how these brainstorming topics do in fact give them a step-up from where they already may be. I mention this because there is some risk in leaving the reader feeling like they are left with more questions than answers. Yes, a good thing (means they are starting to think about things more deeply, more critically); but kind of unsatisfying for the reader, as they start to see the enormity of the task in front of them, as they gather more and more open brainstorming questions and topics as they progress through the book. How are you going to reassure them that this is doable?
I really like the ideas section. I think you need to avoid giving advice that says ‘don’t do this’, or ‘avoid this’ with out giving any constructive examples, or describing a path to take. The only one that I felt had this problem with was the one about avoiding the use of the word “friend”. That’s just tough - I’d push yourself to give some suggestions about what to provide instead, because your audiences are looking to you to help them with this (many will already have a hunch that ‘friends’ is inadequate; but not a sense of what to provide otherwise). I think you’ve dealt with some of the others really well - the last one for example, where you explained what to do after the ‘don’t.. ‘, advice given.
Have a few more smaller suggestions on content that I’ll send your way. Enjoyable read!
on Mar 14th, 2010 at 8:07 am
This got me to thinking about how we use the word “spam.”
Like “friends,” “spam” is a term that can be subdivided into several meanings. Some ways a communication becomes labeled as spam that I can think of off-hand:
The frequency of communication creates noise
Repetitive
The offer is not believable
The stance speaks of desperation — impoverished presentation, begging/urging action
Irrrelevant — wide broadcast of msg/broad categories of recipients
Repetitive
Intrusive — covering desired content or pushing it lower; keeping pg from loading or causing reload
Distracting — sound, incessant movement
Repetitive
Really, anything that annoys more than it creates interest or awareness is being labeled as spam. I think I’ve seen “spam” used to signify any content that came into existence in order to make money for someone. OTOH, B1FF ca.1988 might exhibit all of the above characteristics without the money motivation and it would still be spam.
With your examination of how the Friends category can be subdivided, it might be worth showing somewhere that Spam also means different things to different people.
on Jul 24th, 2010 at 2:54 am
The same with language.
People also don’t use only one speech/language for all their “friends”. For example, the way they talk to family differs in the way they talk to colleagues. They use different terms, talk about different topics. Also their roles in each group will affect the speech used.
For example Juan, who is a mexican immigrant in the U.S. He wants to use twitter to tell others about what he’s doing. If he’d use english, he could not reach all his mexican “friends”. The same with spanish. How to solve that with twitter like it is designed ATM?