Over the past couple of weeks I have been bookmarking (del.icio.us/ealbrycht/socialnetwork)
and reading a variety of articles and posts about social networks, with
an emphasis on corporate or white label ones.  There is a wealth of
material out there; Jeremiah Owyang tracks this area closely for Forrester,
for one. What I thought I’d do is synthesize here what, in my opinion,
is some of the more interesting advice and thoughts out there.  This
isn’t a “10 steps to successful social networking” article, but rather
an introduction to some ideas about how to approach corporate social
networks.

Today, I think that public social networks are pretty primitive
things.  I don’t like the walled gardens, and the awkwardness of
profile and friending processes are laughable.  In the end, for the
most part, these different social networks have become cages for pieces
of my identity, which then stagnate as I forget about them.  Because
once you’ve built your little home, there is nothing much else to do
other than add old high school classmates that find you or join groups
that I, invariably, never really do anything with.  I simply cannot
imagine that translating this type of environment into a corporate
garden would be successful.  And yet, I don’t deny that the basic
concept of social networking represents a potentially powerful tool for
organizations.

From conversations I have had with people, reading I have done, and
my own personal experiences, I don’t think people will join and
participate in brand communities sponsored by organizations, just
because they are asked. Nor do I think that they will do it for earning
promotional bonuses (free products etc.). For particularly high profile
brands there might be some initial buzz value, but I don’t think it
will last.  Nor do I think that entertainment alone will keep people
around.  You can give them games to play and contests to win, but in
the end, that will fall flat.  So why do people join social networks? 
What is a commonality among successful ones (public or private)?  I
think it is that the networks are about something concrete.

There is a wonderful post from a couple of years ago
on the concept of object-centered sociality that states “The fallacy is
to think that social networks are just made up of people.  They’re not;
social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared
object.”  These shared objects can be jobs, dates, photos etc.  Flickr is a social network based on photos.  Del.icio.us is based on URLs.  Upcoming.org is based on events. LinkedIn on jobs. [Examples all from post].  I look at a successful corporate social network, that of Nestle Purina: petcentric.  At its core, it is about people’s pets, not the brand.  Brilliant.

This post suggests that, “When it becomes easy to create digital
instances of the object, online services for networking on, through,
and around that object will emerge too.”  Organizations need to ask
themselves:  what is their object?

Francois Gossieaux has written recently about “interrupt marketing”
and how it doesn’t work in social networking.  He states, “It doesn’t
matter how a person feels about your product; it matters how they feel
about themselves in the context of your product.”  I would broaden
that, saying, “It matters how they feel about themselves and their
relationships (perhaps “emotional connection” is a better phrase) with
their objects in the context of your product.”

Once you know your object, and you have determined that there isn’t
already a strong social network in place around it (if there is, it is
probably better to join and participate in some way vs. trying to
create a new one), what kind of social network do you construct?  What
kind of activities do you offer?  What do you want people to DO on your
network?  If an important aspect of your social network is to market to
its users, that marketing has to use some kind of contextual technology
that inserts itself into the action stream, into what the people are
doing.  Search ads work because people are looking for something, as Alexander van Elsas reminds us, then admonishes us: “There is no room for advertisement when people interact.” 

So, what could you do on a corporate social network?  Obviously
providing forms of interaction (chat, forums, photo sharing, etc.) are
good bets. There are plenty of tips and tool articles out there that
can help with that (see my del.icio.us feed).  I have stated before that companies should ask for contributions (ideas, etc.) and demonstrate they have listened. This quote comes from a profile of Communispace in the Boston Globe
a couple of years ago:  “Consumers also participate in the online
communities because it gives them a feeling of power.  They seem to
love the idea of being consulted, and love even more the notion that
they are being listened to.”  And later in the same article, “The
experience of being heard is so rare.”

Remember, the activities you provide have to be appropriate to the context, to the object, and to the action stream.  Petcentric,
with its “pet” object relies heavily on photo sharing and videos.  Of
course!  Pets are cute, people are proud of them, they want to
share/brag.  What is your organization’s “pet”?  (Perhaps you can think
about it another way.  What is unique about your product?  Is there
anything that has an almost cult-like status or following?  It could
even be an “alternative” use.) 

Another hurdle you will have to leap comes once you have a network and participants in place: participation inequality,
which states that 90% of users are lurkers, 9% contribute a little and
1% contribute most. (Whether or not these are the exact figures, I
think the basic idea is sound.) This means that for the organization,
“Implementation efforts need to consciously manage participation and
activity to compensate for a smaller population.”  This same conclusion
can be read from a different context described by Kevin Kelly in The Bottom is Not Enough. 
He writes, arguing for some form of editorial control or leadership:
“The reason every bottom-up crowd-source hive-mind needs some top-down
control is because of time. The bottom runs on a different time scale
than our instant culture.”  He continues,

“The systems we keep will be hybrid creations. They will
have a strong rootstock of peer-to-peer generation, grafted below
highly refined strains of controlling functions.  Sturdy, robust
foundations of user-made content and crowd-sourced innovation will feed
very small slivers of leadership agility. Pure plays of 100% smart mobs
or 100% smart elites will be rare.

The real art of business and organizations in the network economy
will not be in harnessing the crowd of “everybody” (simple!) but in
finding the appropriate hybrid mix of bottom and top for each niche, at
the right time. The mix of control/no-control will shift as a system
grows and matures. “

Perhaps the very core of the issue is a choice between existence and meaning. (I was inspired by this quote about social networks,
“The existence of relationships is replacing the meaning of
relationships.”)  The first is relatively easy to create, but the
second, quite difficult.  The question is: How can we create a social
network that becomes a frequent/habitual part of someone’s practices of
meaning creation (for his/her life)?  Clearly, SuperSliderFunWalls
aren’t the answer here.  Then, the community manager comes into play,
seeking to nurture meaning for all participants, which will require
very special skills. (Here’s a hint.)

I will be watching this space in the coming months, sharing further
thoughts with you as they take shape.  As always, I welcome your
comments and ideas.

This article originally appeared on Corporate PR, reprinted with permission.