Social Media Fatigue, Open Social/Data Portability, Facebook, Clan marketing
The question on many people’s minds is whether the users are getting tired – supporting their activity on multiple social web portals. And worse still – if they tire – will they turn away?
This chart from Compete , a web analytics/measurement company with a panel of 2Million US web users, highlights member overlap within 11 social networks. For example, looking down the MySpace user column we see that 64% of them also have a profile on Facebook, 32% on Linked In, etc. By adding the column percentages (and remembering to add 1 for the home site) we see that within this study the average My Space user avails themselves of 5.1* different social media, Facebook users are less proliferate – availing themselves of only 4 of the social media.
*(1.0+.64+.65+.49+..+.34+.27)
That’s still 4-5 sites that the average user will spend time creating, commenting or just reading. And if we go by the Forrester data (see link) that represents anywhere from 5-37% of users creating some level of input and 19-59% who are reading/watching social content. So it is not a big surprise that sooner or later we would see user fatigue – perhaps even now as these unofficial US market comScore numbers for Oct-Dec'07 would suggest.
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The industry has been mindful of the possibility of this development and have begun working out new shared open source standards that will make it easier for users and developers to continue to evolve and monetize the social web.
It all came to a higher profile boil when Google introduced Open Social (November’07). Throughout the year, Google watched Facebook go from 19 Million unique visitors per month to 33 Million – when Facebook opened its network to non-students, professionals and third party developers. These developers created new apps ‘enriching’ the experience for Facebook users and with it sought to generate some revenue for themselves. And the strategy worked - focusing the attention of the marketing/advertising world onto the Facebook platform which sought to lay the groundwork for an eventual/hopeful $15 Billion IPO perhaps as early as 2008.
Google strove to take the wind out of Facebook’s sails by becoming even more open. They wanted to outflank Facebook by making it even easier, quicker and less costly for developers to create open source app’s - which could be readily adopted across multiple participating social web sites. Their gambit paid off as one site after another came onto the chessboard – with the new growing collective now significantly outnumbering Facebook’s user base.
And so going forward application developers will ask themselves a simple question: where do I put my effort? Do I build something that has potential monetary value in a big multi-site pool and then rollout to Facebook if it’s a success? Or do I expend my resources initially on a smaller single pool?
Users/advertisers will ask themselves: if Facebook tends to get the second crack at new applications – what does that do to the innovation experience at Facebook? Will that erode the fickle youth that is the foundation of the site?
In one masterful move, Facebook saw its sails begin to luff.
An umbrella group was formed (DataPortability.org) to help seize on the Google and other open source initiatives already in motion (Open Id, Higgins Project, OSIS etc…) One of its more vocal evangelists:
“At Plaxo, we believe strongly that users should have ownership, control, and portability of their profiles and friends list. No service you use should claim your data as their own and keep it trapped in their "walled garden"… ....An important aspect of the open social graph is being able to declare the different sites you use and tie them together. That way, your friends can keep in touch with you across multiple services, and you won't have to tell each new site what other tools you're already using.”
Leaving the intrigue aside, lets get back to the poor tired user. A number of important developments are underway and some already implemented:
Going forward sites will begin to enable users to better define their “friends” list (Social Graph) into at least 3 categories: Family vs Friends Vs Business associates. Increasingly sites will also allow users to stitch together feeds from several sources and control how much of that information is pushed and pulled. For example – I will be able to turn off one friend’s Twitter feed while allowing another’s to continue – or turn on (off) selective or even all feeds at any time. I am in control of what comes through my filters - and my ‘friends’ can do the same to the feeds I choose to push out to them.
Plaxo Pulse is perhaps the most advanced enabler at this moment but others will be catching up soon.
What does any of this mean for marketers?
Part of the data portability initiative is giving users the ability to better manage their online identities. The enhanced “circle of friends” segmentation will likely lead to more widespread use of Word of Mouth as it becomes easier to send one’s inner circle ‘heads up’ notices on key brand experience events. And while this was happening before via email, phone conversations or over a few beers – the difference now is that everyone in the inner circle will be able to receive messages. (I am not including the outer circles in this because these notices will carry less weight without the deeper shared history between sender and receiver. Chances are user filter feeds will likely choke off these kinds of blasts.)
So welcome to the social media world - your brand experience has just been leveraged (again)– the good and the bad. As marketers – it places a greater premium on brand consistency but it also opens the door to clan marketing. I’m not talking about Beacon type programs – where the consumer’s selected brand activity is ‘shared with friends’- “Hey I just bought a Brand “X”, thought you would be interested” – but something more open and organic. This is about brand reinforcing programs designed from a clan-centric perspective such that if a traceable brand purchase is transacted – the clan gains access to additional benefits.
FI’s for example could increase stickiness with family/clan benefits not unlike the family 'points' pooling capability from the old GM Visa program. MMOG is a natural clan environment – Pepsi, Coke and other leading beverage brands can readily fold in their point schemes to create cumulative clan benefits in the game space. Retailers can benefit as well. Ditto for travel, entertainment, life insurance...
Once the clan has self identified itself via registration – you have the beginnings of your own ROI based group marketing platform that builds on the important inner circle of relationships to help the brand develop deeper shared roots.
