The Age of the Weak Link

A while ago a fascinating article by Clive Thompson ran in the New York Times, on the phenomenon of Twitter:

I'm So Totally, Digitally Close To You

In it, Thompson confronts the problem facing Twitter and many other Internet startups: at first blush, their services seem stupid. Blogging within a 140-character limit? That seems like nothing more than a recipe for trivia, a process of mind-numbing navel-gazing that would certainly be an exercise in tedium.

I remember my reaction when I first heard of Twitter: it seemed completely pointless. It reminded me of a German art film I once saw, mostly by mistake. The main character got on a bus, and during a stopover we in the audience were treated to a long, long scene in which the bus driver peeled his hard-boiled egg. "I bought a ticket so I could watch this?" I asked myself at the time. That's how Twitter seemed to me: a universe of people sending out status updates as they slowly peeled their eggs. Why should I care?

It turns out, though, that pretty much everyone has that reaction, until they've been using the service for a time and something starts to dawn on them: micro-blogging provides a special form of intimacy.

"... as the days went by, something changed. Haley discovered that he was beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends’ lives in a way he never had before. When one friend got sick with a virulent fever, he could tell by her Twitter updates when she was getting worse and the instant she finally turned the corner. He could see when friends were heading into hellish days at work or when they’d scored a big success. Even the daily catalog of sandwiches became oddly mesmerizing, a sort of metronomic click that he grew accustomed to seeing pop up in the middle of each day. This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting."

Turns out there's a term for this sort of thing: it's called "ambient awareness." Look around you, in whatever room you're in right now. If you're in the office, maybe you can hear someone down the hall, talking on the phone. If you're at home, maybe your dog is scratching itself, or you can hear cars out on the street. Those are all part of your environment; you don't pay attention to them, but you'd feel their lack if they weren't there. If you're in the same room as someone, your ambient awareness includes little facts about their current situation: what they're doing, how they're feeling (which you pick up from their body posture or facial expression), and so on. If you're in a relationship, you probably remember times when the two of you were together but not actually interacting:

"Social scientists ... call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye."

In short, the Internet has developed a new means of maintaining social connections. No matter how far away you are from your friends and loved ones, you can -- through social media -- maintain a form of connection that used to require physical proximity. This is not, however, to say that Web 2.0 allows us to maintain an infinite number of close friendships. Rather, these media function best as extensions of the offline world:

"Many maintained that their circle of true intimates, their very close friends and family, had not become bigger. Constant online contact had made those ties immeasurably richer, but it hadn’t actually increased the number of them; deep relationships are still predicated on face time, and there are only so many hours in the day for that."

This backs up something I've suspected for a long time: that online social networks function best, not when they try to create a social world that exists entirely in virtual space, but as an extension and backup of face-to-face connections that existed prior to the creation of the online service. When you find something cool online, who do you forward it to? Your friends, and when they adopt the same service a social connection is expanded, not created. Any company that seeks, for liability reasons, to limit offline connections between online friends is clearly swimming upstream.

There is a place, though, for old-school virtual relationships: they fall under the heading of "weak ties," and they can be very useful:

"But where their sociality had truly exploded was in their 'weak ties' -- loose acquaintances, people they knew less well. It might be someone they met at a conference, or someone from high school who recently “friended” them on Facebook, or somebody from last year’s holiday party. In their pre-Internet lives, these sorts of acquaintances would have quickly faded from their attention. But when one of these far-flung people suddenly posts a personal note to your feed, it is essentially a reminder that they exist. ... Sociologists have long found that “weak ties” greatly expand your ability to solve problems. For example, if you’re looking for a job and ask your friends, they won’t be much help; they’re too similar to you, and thus probably won’t have any leads that you don’t already have yourself. Remote acquaintances will be much more useful, because they’re farther afield, yet still socially intimate enough to want to help you out."

Which is, of course, why services like LinkedIn are successful: they are founded on the very notion of weak ties, and try to make those ties professionally useful.

There are many lessons to be learned here. I would suggest that anyone who builds websites for a living should copy the article locally and re-read it from time to time. Just a few thoughts that occur to me now:

First, this scenario poses a tremendous barrier to entry for new social networking sites. If the value of a service like Twitter is not apparent until after you've been using it for a while, it's going to be very difficult to convince new users to come by and give it a shot. Sounds like Twitter benefited greatly from word-of-mouth marketing from a few influential early-adopters, but it also sounds like the service could easily have disappeared without a trace. There was no inevitability to Twitter's success, and it will be extremely difficult for anyone to follow in their footsteps.

Second, I love the paradox of Twitter's creation: if you don't know how good it is until after you've been using it for a while, then logically no one who was in on the initial development of the service new what they were building. They might have believed firmly that they knew what they were doing, but they didn't know anything until after it was up and running and they were able to experience it along with everyone else. In short, Twitter's founders got very, very lucky. No doubt we're all in for a series of articles profiling these "visionaries," and there's also a good chance that one or more of them will, with great fanfare, move on to a new startup that will be like Twitter, only better. And I can predict it now: those startups will vanish from the face of the earth, because Twitter's founders didn't know what they were doing when they built Twitter, and they won't know what they're doing the next time out. Lightning doesn't strike twice in the same spot.

I don't mean to pick on Twitter. I think this is true of any community-oriented site or service: you don't know what you have until people start to use it. Inevitably they will use it in ways you didn't expect or intend. In a nutshell, the v1 of any community site is likely to miss the mark. So the only thing you can do is plan from Day One for v2: build into your schedule and budget the expectation that you'll need to tear everything down and start over, three to six months after launch.

This is, of course, a huge challenge. It's hard enough to get one site off the ground, let alone build with the assumption that you'll get it wrong and will need to correct it later. But, naturally, "get it wrong" is not the right phrase to use if you truly embrace the idea that the community will define how your site is to be used. Better to think of it in terms of a provisional launch: first you launch the platform, then you figure out what the service should look like through iterative testing and measurement. Which is, of course, how products like the iPod were designed: first Apple launches them, then they release updates that refine the specs and feature set in response to customer demand. If it's good enough for Steve Jobs, shouldn't it be good enough for you?

Five Tips for Effective Social Design

I came across this a while ago. It's short -- just the summary of a conference presentation -- but it's a goldmine of insight into web community building:

http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9902834-2.html

Let's look at those five tips, one by one.

1. Personal value precludes network value: To make a strong social site, you've got to start by making a good personal site. If the features you offer don't serve a solo user, it's unlikely your users will stick around long enough to become social.

This is an easy trap to fall into when you're designing community features: you build out something that will be great among a group of friends, without ever addressing the question of why that group will be coming to your site in the first place. "If you build it, they will come" -- all well and good, but you need to reward visitors on their very first visit, or there won't be a second visit, and the odds are excellent that initially they're coming as individuals, not as members of a group. So as much time and money as you've put into that excellent event-planning tool, with all the social networking gizmos you've plugged into the back-end, your home page had better attract clicks to content and tools of value to individuals, or those individuals won't be around long enough to become members of your community.

The key here: think about customer lifecycle. People will come to your site in every moment within that lifecycle. Some will be vaguely interested in your site/product and looking to learn more, others will be engaged and looking for specifics, some will be committed members looking to get full value from what your site offers, and then there will be the post-users who are bored/burned out on the experience and need some reason to come back into the fold. Look at your home page design: is there something on that page for every one of these people? If not, you probably need to revise your design, or figure out some way to engineer different entry points for the various points in the customer lifecycle.

2. Tie behavior to identity: What you do on the site should describe you more than what you say about yourself in your profile.

Historically, one of the primary obstacles to online communities is the way people tend to behave when they're online. If you've spent more than 10 minutes on Usenet or some other online forum, you know what I'm talking about: people online tend to be jerks. Flamewars break out because otherwise reasonable people, when cloaked in online anonymity, check their social conventions at the door and act like jerks. Racism, homophobia, sexism, obscenity, professions of extremist political beliefs, immature behavior: it's all to be found online, and sometimes it's so prevalent that it's hard to locate the wheat amid all that chaff.

The challenge for those of us who would like to build online communities, then, is to find some way to protect our users from mistreatment at the hands of other community members. Moderation is one option, but that can get expensive, and it can introduce a time-lag in the experience that substantially degrades the member's experience. (Not to mention the outcry that will certainly result as soon as a member is banned or a forum post is rejected for a reason that the community finds to be unjust or otherwise insufficient.)

Or you can take another route: lessen the anonymity. Allow your users to select any username they like -- and by all means don't make it mandatory for them to disclose real-world information about themselves -- but build your site in such a way that their actions persist and follow them around the site. Wikipedia vandals are outed by the fact that their edits can be uncovered -- a fact which has proven embarrassing for a number of companies and politicians caught falsifying their own entries. YouTube uploads are associated with the user who uploaded them. Ebay sellers or buyers who tend to piss people off will find their ratings a serious drag on their commercial success. When your actions follow you around, you'll be more careful about the way you present yourself.

In a nutshell: community depends on trust. Give your members a means by which they can tell whether or not they can trust the next guy, and they'll be more open to joining your community.

3. Give recognition. When your users contribute to the site, applaud them for it. Make those contributions publically visible. But make it temporary: once a user is recognized as a top contributor, let them fall off the map if they don't stay active.

This blends into something that's become my mantra of late: you can't build community, you can only enable it. You can design a terrific site full of wonderful features, but if no one uses them, you have a ghost town. Community doesn't exist until you have a multitude of people acting on their own and choosing to interact with others. You don't build community, in other words -- your members do, using the tools you've given them. Their contribution is critical, absolutely indispensable, so how could you not recognize and celebrate that?

Digg is the poster child here; its members compete with one another to fill the site with the most engaging content, because they crave the recognition they receive in doing so. But the same principle works on a much smaller scale. Think of a forum. Let's say that, when you look at a post, you can also see how often the person who posted it has contributed to the site. Towards the bottom of the post you can rate it on a scale of zero to five stars; now the poster has a cumulative rating, based on how well his or her posts have been rated. Those two features are all it takes to celebrate the most active and well-regarded members of your forum community. They do something nice for you, and you do something nice for them in return. (Or, if they choose to vandalize your site, the same system works to stigmatize them.) It's all good.

4. Show causation: If you're going to ask people to participate, make it clear what participating does for them.

This might be the #1 failing of the corporate site: it puts its own interests ahead of the user. Companies build community sites because they expect, in the long term, those sites to produce higher sales or greater customer satisfaction or some other measurable outcome. And, of course, there's nothing wrong with that; most companies are not in the business of doing stuff for free. But in my experience that situation lends itself to a company-first mindset: we build our sites and our features to address company needs, not user needs. And that is why so many corporate sites fail.

It only takes a moment to understand why: most customers couldn't care less about your company. They want to know what your site does for them. If your site doesn't cater to their needs, they'll find another site that does. Simple as that. So if, when you think about community, all you see is dollar signs, you're in trouble. Ask, instead, what your online community provides to its members. If you're not giving them reason enough to come back time and time again, you're already dead.

The moral: start first with the question, "Why will users come to my site rather than all the others out there?" Give them a reason to come, and then give them many reasons to come back. Then, once visiting their site has become a part of their lives, you can think about marketing to them.

5. Leverage reciprocity: People contribute to social sites because they want to see what other people say about their contributions. Make it easy for people to leave feedback, compliments, and awards.

We all want to be appreciated. When we contribute something, we want to be thanked for it. When we create something, we want people to like it. No matter how thick your skin might be, there's a part of you that wants to be loved and appreciated and embraced. In fact, that's a pretty good picture of community right there: it's the group of people whose opinions matter to you and who value your opinion in return.

The good news is this is dead easy. At the bottom of every forum post, there should be a mechanism for rating its contents. You should always be able to rate user-generated content (and flag it if the content is objectionable), and allow people to add comments as well. Create online friends lists that allow your users to signal personal connections. When you give people a means of adding approval or disapproval to the actions and contributions of your community's members, you create a very strong incentive for your members to make frequent positive contributions. And that, in a nutshell, is the picture of a thriving community.

So there you have it: five tips that might not make your community site the best thing since sliced bread, but I can guarantee that they will improve your site significantly.