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02.12.07
Social Media, Blog Rage & the Relational Web
 By
Alister Cameron
One of the things I spend quite a bit of my time doing is helping clients and prospects understand the difference between a "regular" website and a social network. I spend a lot of my time arguing in favour of "social media", in the belief that a social media approach is at the heart of what we call "Web 2.0? and is closer to how humans naturally function in "real life".
I wrote a version of what follows for a prospective client today, and I have reshaped it a little for my blog. Whether or not you're considering building the next MySpace, YouTube or Flickr, I encourage you to "immerse" yourself for a few moments in what I describe below, so you can perhaps come to a deeper understanding of how the web's move towards a more deeply immersive "social" experience is a reflection of our innate relationality, and therefore in keeping with how we naturally function, and therefore a good thing.
What is a Social Network?
A social network sees user-contributed content as its major asset, along with the committed user-base itself. It assumes a fundamental premise: that people want to express themselves to others, want to see/experience the reaction of others, and want feedback.
A social network trades in the currency of human relationships and sees its product offering as a means of allowing humans to relate richly, online.
So, flickr.com enables the user-contribution of photographic images, and facilitates the cultivation of human relationships (both agnostic and antagonistic) around this contributed content.
Similarly, Amazon.com enables the user-contribution of (mainly) book reviews, wishlists, recommendations and the like and facilitates the cultivation of human relationships around this contributed content.
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Now, it would not be hard to create a site that sells books, or lets people upload and catalogue photos. The difference here is that the site owners do not look at the asset as, say, the books (or book sales), but rather as the size of the committed user-base, and the size, breadth, consistency and frequency of their contributions/interactions.
MySpace sold for hundreds of millions, and did so (to the best of my knowledge) without any other direct revenue stream except banner ad sales. But News Ltd wisely saw the "asset" for what it was: committed, active, engaged users making regular, substantial and measurable contibutions of content (of one kind or another). And much of this content is, by its nature, relational: a comment under a blog post, a "flame" in a forum thread, a rating beside a picture, the addition of another user as a "friend", etcetera.
So then, we do not look at a social network through the "lens" of a spreadsheet of product sales, nor as a series of webpages held together by hyperlinks, but as a living and active, growing/shrinking social organism made up of "content contributors" who are going about the business of building relationships with each other while gaining much satisfaction from talking a lot about themselves and their lives(!) and "putting something of themselves out there" - whatever that is.
Continue reading this article.
About the Author:
Alister Cameron is an accomplished web designer and internet marketing
consultant who turns established subject-matter experts into expert
bloggers. Alister's clients are using blogging and social media to leverage
their offline expertise in the online world, and engage Alister to build
their blogging platform or social network; to train them in writing and
online marketing strategy; and to help them stay up with the latest
developments in blogging and online marketing. Alister's blog is a rich
tapestry of advice, anecdotes and reflections from the frontline of
professional blogging, social media and search engine marketing, and never
without generous dollops of humor and wit.
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