Page 314 - Social Media Marketing

chapter 11: THE SOCIAL GRAPH ■immediate tasks required to protect itself. This plays out online in a social context
when women across diverse walks of life come together to talk about common issues
and challenges in places like the BlogHer Community. This sort of democratized social
interaction is actually at the root of a lot of what happens on the Social Web.

The tendency for people to come together and organize around common issues
given diversity is particularly important when designing a community application.
When people are gathering around large social objects—lifestyles, passions, and
causes—it is very likely that it is the shared values and purposes associated with these
larger objects that are bringing together a variety of different people, in addition to the
primary common interest itself (the specific passion, lifestyle, or cause that is shared).
This in turn means that the shared outcomes, activities, and intellectual content pro-
duced within the community need to flow back in some form to everyone, regardless of
who the actual contributor is: Otherwise, the individual interests will take over and the
community will fragment.

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Visualizing Partisanship

The tendency for like people to act together is nowhere more evident than in partisan politics. In
this Ignite presentation, Andrew Odewahn visually presents the impact of coalitions in govern-
ment by looking at the social graph that defines the United States Congress. You’ll find the video
presentation here:

http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/06/visualizing-the-senate-social.html

Starbucks’ various online projects that focus effort on local physical communi-
ties—beginning with its association around the V2V (volunteer-to-volunteer) program
in 2008, along with others like the Pepsi Refresh program that is active now—are
examples of values-driven online social efforts, built around a collective interest in
making a difference in one’s local community.

The status community, by comparison, is very likely to be driven by the reputa-
tion management system within a community, forum, or other social application. The
reputation management system provides many of the cues that alert members to their
own status or that of others within that community. CTOs joining a C-level tech com-
munity know already that the title of “CTO” or its equivalent is a shared credential:
What engages them in that community after that are the solutions, tips, referrals, and
best practices that they can pick up and apply in their work. The reputation manage-
ment system—which provides a visible indication of which members are most likely
to have offered viable solutions, for example—will quickly sort out the relative status
ranking—beyond title—within this type of community.