Page 317 - Social Media Marketing

restaurants, and more—everyone will start to integrate friendships and 295
the social graph in creative ways in order to provide more relevance and
to personalize content for the user.” ■ ╇ S ocial G raphs S pread I nformation

It is the social graph—combined with tools that encourage or facilitate con-
tent creation and sharing—that literally powers a social network. Think back to the
engagement process—consumption, curation, creation, and collaboration. The tools
that support the sharing of information through the social graph drive the engage-
ment process. Ultimately, collaboration is driven by relationships, and the relationships
themselves are what form the social graph.

The Tools that Power a Social Graph

The tools that drive the formation of relationships and the engagement process itself
range from essentially passive to highly active. During the design phase of your com-
munities, ideation platforms, support forums, and similar, an important concept to
remember is that the more active the relationship encouragement is, the stronger in
general the resulting social experiences that link participants will be.

In a basic social-software platform—an entry level discussion or community
platform, for example—deployed straight out of the box, participants are generally
able to create basic profiles and engage in topic-oriented discussions. These basic social
platforms may also include built-in support for photo uploading, creating profile pic-
tures, writing individual blog posts, group formation and discussion, and so on. Note
here that these are features that enable members to do things that relate primarily to
consumption, curation, and creation: Members of a woodworking forum might be
creating and publishing pictures of cabinets, tables, and other projects they have com-
pleted or a review of new table saw that has been recently purchased.

The exposure in these platforms is that there is often relatively little in the way
of automated support for suggesting relationships (“Given your interest in these topics,
you may be interested in these members.”) or content suggestions (“You were interested
in this topic, so you may also want to look at this.”). Sorting out precisely who would
be good to connect with is left to the participants.

As a result many discussion forums fail to move past the provision of a basic
utility, providing quick one-off answers, for example, and so fail to become social
sites that are visited frequently. Note that this may be just fine with the participants
at the outset: If someone is looking for a tip on changing a fan belt in the family car
or how to repair a canoe, the pure utility orientation of these basic forums and their
member’s initial interest in them starts with how quickly an answer can be found. But
it doesn’t—or needn’t—end there. Communities grow based on the balanced interac-
tion and contribution of all members: A robust social graph builds on the initial draw
of basic utility—“Show me something cool I can do in this network…”—by connecting
members into increasingly rich and relevant relationships with the other participants in