I caught the tail-end of the New Media Knowledge Forum in London last week just in time to see what I was told was one of the highlights -- a presentation from Jyri Engestrom, founder of Jaiku -- the micro-blogging service from Finland.
If you've not come across micro-blogging yet then you're likely to soon. It does for blogging what the iPod did for the MP3 player -- makes it bonehead easy. So much so that it is currently the fastest growing area of social media and growing faster than blogging did at a similar stage. The best guide I have found on this subject is on Mark Glaser's MediaShift blog.
I recently switched to Jaiku from the American service Twitter and I use it to update my Facebook profile so that my 'friends' can see what I'm up to. The beauty is that I can do this via my mobile -- this is blogging by text and it takes a fraction of the time of conventional blogging partly because the limit on length stops me worrying about structure and style.
My interest in Jyri was piqued when he opened his presentation by saying he was an academic sociologist. As a long-time journalist now earning his living in the confusing world of social media I've been feeling for a while that a) I'm too old, and b) too technically illiterate to really get it. So I'm extremely sensitive to signs of any other inadequacies I might have. Might lack of knowledge of what motivates groups be another?
No need to worry. The curious thing about social media circles is the willingness of the industry leaders to pass on their insights and experience with all-comers. And Jyri was exemplary. Transparency and sharing are not just features of the new social media services but also of many of the business leaders behind them. It's a big change from the 'information is power' model that, if we're honest, still pervades much of modern business organisation.
Enough background. These are Jyri's five tips for organisations wanting to build a successful social network.
1. Define your object.
Jyri's thesis is that all social networking sites are built around a 'social object' something which increases in value once shared. You need to make it very clear to the visitor what your object is.
2. Define your verbs.
Answer the question: what will this site do for me? You need to make very clear by the site's structure or content what its function is. For e-Bay it's buy (and sell), for MySpace, built round music-sharing, it's symbolised by the prominent 'play' button.
3. Make the objects 'shareable'
By using permalinks, or thumbnails, or RSS feeds, or widgets of some description
4. Turn invitations to the network into a gift.
Jyri's favourite example is from e-Bay, which, hard to believe this now, struggled initially to attract users. So e-Bay came up with the notion of a ten dollar gift for referrals from existing subscribers. The twist was that the gift went to the new user. So the referrer got the kudos of giving a gift and the recipient got to use it on the site they were checking out.
5. Charge the publishers not the spectators.
Don't charge for your site. Create a mass audience and charge those who want to reach them. Jyri's example was the virtual world of Habbo Hotel, to which entry is free but users pay to 'publish' in the form of buying wallpaper and furnishings for their virtual rooms.
Try applying these five rules to your favourite social networking sites and see if they work. And, you'll have guessed this was coming, Jyri has shared his presentation with the rest of the world via the SlideShare social networking service
