What’s In It For Me?
I intentionally differentiate between my personal and professional interests. My current profession demands that I stay up to date and involved in the inner-workings of social communities. But at a personal level I have never fully invested the time to create a robust and active profile on any of the major communities. Oh sure, I have accounts on Flickr, Plaxo, Facebook, del.icio.us, Twitter, LinkedIn and the like but I use the vast majority simply for research – del.icio.us and Linkedin are probably the two exceptions, but I would argue that those are social utilities, not communities.
So what would motivate me to create that connection to a larger group of people and want to invest my time and information to interact with them? How about some actual usable, tangible and real world information that I can use to make my life easier and more efficient.
This post from Matt McAlister gives some great examples – “…you can imagine that you will walk into H&M and discover that one of your first-degree contacts recently bought the same shirt you were about to purchase. You buy a different one instead.”
This post from Jeff Jarvis describes the concept of a community of travelers on a plane. He says that “at the simplest level, we could connect while in the air to set up shared cab rides once we land, saving passengers a fortune.”
These, what I call “practical communities,” offer me actionable and useable information to improve my everyday offline experiences. In the majority of situations I’m not interested in how many friends are attached to your particular profile, what bands you like, your random rants on twitter or photos from your last outing to wherever. What I am interested in is information you have that I consider valuable. This perceived value is what will motivate me to get involved, participate and share my own information. From conversations with peers and co-workers I know I am not alone in my lack of motivation for social community participation, but as Matt McAlister puts it, “I think we’re finally about to see the useful combination of the 4 W’s - Who, What, Where, and When.”
Andy Sackmann, Client Services
January 11th, 2008 at 10:40 am
A good way to look at this, from an experience design perspective, is to include a persona, let’s call it the “Andy” persona, in your exploration of what matters in your social community.
Clearly, the rise of Facebook, etc. show that purely social networks do resonate for many.
But to connect with a whole second wave of users who are still waiting in the wings, because the pure social thing doesn’t really resonate, use your “Andy” persona to explore connection primarily through utility.