Breathing New Life into an Old Social Network

Originally published 7/28/2011

One big question that is eventually faced by all mature social networking sites is, “how do you breathe new life into an existing social network?”  How do you take a site whose popularity and relevance has dropped off over time and revitalize it?  How do you attract new members? How do you win back old members who used to be active but have moved on?

Perhaps social networking can take a cue from a completely different medium for some of the answers: television. In many respects, a social media site is a lot like a television series.  TV shows are created and debuted with much enthusiasm.  A few people try them out for a while before deciding if they like them.  Some shows are wildly successful, but most are not.  Television networks routinely retool flagging shows in an attempt to attract new viewers or bring back viewers they’ve lost over time…which is exactly the same goal of an aging social network.  So let’s examine a few of the tricks that television shows use when ratings begin to decline and see if we can find some best practices that translate to social media.

1)      Change the cast of characters.  Bring in new characters or promote minor characters to major roles.  This allows the writers to think of new and (hopefully) interesting character dynamics and plot lines.  Or perhaps bring in a famous guest star for a few episodes. For the social media analog, this might mean recruiting new bloggers or administrators to bring fresh viewpoints to the site and change some of the existing dynamics of the network’s interactions.  It might also mean bringing in guest bloggers from other sites, or sponsoring AMA (Ask Me Anything) question and answer sessions from luminaries in a field or other subject matter experts. Part of the excitement of a social networking site is finding new and fresh (and valuable) ideas: new blood is always a good way to bring in fresh viewpoints.

2)      Change the location.  Take the old characters and upset the apple cart by moving them to a different country or city.  Again, this is a commonly used plot device that allows the writers of a show to explore new venues in new ways.  For the social media analog, this might mean adding features to the site that it never had before.  Or making a feature that wasn’t used much into one that is far more useful.  Add a chat or instant messaging feature perhaps, if there wasn’t one before.  Allow people to interact in real-time vs. an extended conversation on a forum. Perhaps add a contest or a way for members to play games with each other (hey, it seems to have worked for Facebook).  Changing the way the community members can interact with each other can be a catalyst for increased popularity.

3)      Change the focus.  Perhaps kill off a main character and let the writers focus on a different one. Or fire a character and change the focus from a work situation to a home situation.  Give the audience and the writers a chance to learn something new about a favorite character that they didn’t know before, or see a different aspect of his or her persona.  For a social network, this might mean a shift in the focus of the website.  Instead of being about government change, for instance, perhaps a shift to being about societal change in general might broaden the potential member base.  Or if the current focus is broadly based, perhaps a change to a more narrow focus that would interest a smaller, but potentially far more passionate, community.

4)      Change the show runner.  Let the person (or people) that have been running the show move on and bring in a fresh voice.  Bring in someone who has revitalized shows in the past, or who has a history of creating content that people like.  For social media, this is all about community management. Community management isn’t just about administration and moderation.  It’s about marketing. It’s about finding ways to build excitement among existing members and to attract new ones.  It’s about finding interesting people with challenging viewpoints and recruiting them to be involved in the network.  It’s about promoting the value of the social experience to existing and potential members.

You’ll notice one thing all these ideas have in common: the element of change. Change the characters, change the location, change the focus, and change the people in charge.  And of these things I would argue that the most critical one is the last one.  People with fresh eyes and fresh viewpoints are often the driving force behind the other types of change I’ve mentioned.  And when those people are successful, they are usually given the majority of credit when a show pulls out of a ratings slump.  

As with television shows, not all change in social media is for the positive (i.e., Digg…also known as the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” rule).  We’ve all seen shows that introduced change in such a way that they alienated their original base without attracting enough new viewers to matter. 

One other lesson to take away from all this is that television series, even the most beloved and enduring ones, are all eventually cancelled.  While we are still relatively early into the age of social media, I suspect that lesson will also prove true in the long run (i.e., AOL, Napster, Friendster, MySpace).

Gov 2.0 - Is Anyone Listening?

Originally posted 11/24/2010

There has been a lot written in the last few months about Gov 2.0 and using social media to connect constituents to government.  What happens if governments aren’t listening?

If you’ve been following any of the popular social media outlets in the last few days (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Digg, ArsTechnica, etc.) you’ve seen the online kerfuffle that’s erupted over the new TSA security procedures. Although they’ve been in use for months at some airports with relatively little fanfare, the new backscatter x-ray devices are suddenly the heated subject of social media conversation.  Why now?

On October 30th, 2010 the TSA instituted new “pat down” procedures for those opting out of the new scanners.  Prior to then, the TSA would perform a relatively benign wanding and partial pat down of travelers opting out of the x-ray scans. While annoying, the older pat downs weren’t particularly personal, nor did they take much time.  That all changed a few days ago.  The new pat downs are indeed quite personal (I’ve experienced them first hand…traveling with an artificial knee is so much fun!) and apparently a very vocal part of the public feels we have reached a tipping point with airport security.

I’m not going to get into whether the new security procedures are worthwhile here (although I have talked about it on my personal blog).  What I did want to talk about was the role of social media in influencing government behavior.

Are social media outlets an appropriate place for protesting government actions?  Historically, citizens upset with governments have taken to the streets to protest. Sit-in’s, marches, and mass gatherings in public places (like the Mall in Washington DC) were seen as a peaceful yet visible way to express one’s displeasure with government policies. On occasion, these protests even work (it might be argued that the civil rights movement would not have occurred otherwise).

Does social media have the same political impact? Faced with what many see as a choice between two very personal, intrusive security scans, travelers have taken to the social airways en mass to express their displeasure.  The question is: does government listen?  They’ve certainly heard—the head of TSA and the Director of Homeland Security have both taken to the airways to publicly state that they’ve heard the complaints—but hearing and listening are two different things. Time will tell, but it’s my perception that online actions seem to carry little weight with politicians and bureaucrats.  Phone calls, letters, in-person visits are all apparently much more effective with elected officials than email, tweets or postings on a Facebook wall.  I’m waiting to be proven wrong, but it seems to me that today, social media is more of an avenue for the public to vent amongst themselves rather than serve as a serious conduit to public officials.

Unless governments (State, Local as well as Federal) learn to adopt social media as a valid channel of constituent communication, they will miss a golden opportunity to transform society. And we, the people of an increasingly social nation, will be missing the opportunity to use social networking as a channel for crowdsourcing effective governmental change.  Those of us in the social media industry must keep pushing for this transformation to occur.

The Social Learning Curve

Originally posted 10/21/2010

In my last blog entry I talked about a couple of things to consider when starting up a new social media community. It addressed the fact that vibrant social communities don’t come that way out of the box, but that they grow and evolve over time.  In this entry, I’d like to continue that discussion and talk about how to keep that momentum alive once it’s been kickstarted.

Years ago when I used to teach software development methods, one issue we always addressed at the conclusion of the training was the difference between expected productivity gains and actual productivity gains.  The “learning curve,” while somewhat counterintuitive, should also be considered if you are trying to kickstart a social community.

To begin with: why does anyone ever try to learn a new technology? The answer: to be more productive than they can with the technology they already know.  So people often have the perception that the minute they learn a new technology, their productivity will jump up from the level at which they’ve been producing to a new, higher level of productivity.  But guess what. It usually doesn’t. Most of the time (especially if that new technology is revolutionary rather than evolutionary) a person’s productivity goes down for a while after learning something new before rising to a new higher level.  Why?  Lots of reasons, but the main one is that people are better at doing things they know how to do than they are at things they don’t know how to do (yet). As they practice with the new tools, they get better with them and more accustomed to them and eventually can do more with them than they used to with the old tools.

What does this have to do with kickstarting social media communities? A lot, it turns out. When you are getting a community going you have to be committed to trying lots of different marketing efforts: lots of different “kicks,” if you will. Some of these will work and some of them won’t. But regardless, each time you introduce something new to your community (especially if it’s radically new) you have to realize that you might be impacting the learning curve of the community. No matter what you do, the productive output of the community might go down before it tracks up again to a new level.  The problem is, it’s often hard to know if a decrease in participation is simply due to the learning curve or the fact that you’ve introduced a barrier to participation.  Case in point: the new Digg interface that debuted back in August.  Traffic to Digg dropped off noticeably after the rollout of their new interface (26% in the US; 34% in the UK).  Is that just the learning curve in action before traffic returns and eventually exceeds the previous levels? Or is it Digg’s “New Coke” moment and a future case study for social media marketing? As of this writing, the jury is still out. 

If you own or operate a social media site, you have to be prepared to give it a kick now and then. You also have to realize that the learning curve might mean that your kick might not work right away. You also have to be aware of the fact that not all kicks send the snowball down the hill: some can smash it to bits.