Page 318 - Social Media Marketing

c h a p t e r 11 : ╇ T he S ocial G raph╇ ■that community to raise the overall experience to one that’s more like “Show me some-
thing cool I can do with someone else that I have met through this network.”

When you’re creating a community, there’s an additional reason to ensure a
robust social graph: Purely practical value can be easily be copied into a competing net-
work. Especially for the answers to common questions like auto repairs, minor health
issues like the treatment of swimmer’s ear, and DIY projects around the house, there is
no shortage of sites that offer up information. The stickier sites, however, provide more:
They add to the basic tools the experiences of more meaningful connections between
members. The “stickier” the relationships are within the community, the stickier the
community itself. As noted, relationships are what ultimately form the basis for collabo-
ration, and it is collaboration that powers higher levels of engagement. It is, therefore, in
your interest to implement or otherwise ensure that the tools within a candidate social
platform strongly facilitate relationships. You buy these prebuilt in some platforms and
build them on to many others. Either way, be sure that you understand what is required
to implement the relationship-building activities that you’ll need.
296 Because the development of meaningful relationships is central to the long-term
value (the reason to return, again and again) of a social network, the tools that guide
friendship development, social graph and content exploration, and similar actions that
encourage participants to branch out are fundamentally important. As a best prac-
tice, spend some time in the design process—getting personally involved with your
development team, agency, or design firm—as you plan and build social applications.
Understand the capabilities and costs of the relationship-building tools and the rules
that power them: The smarter and more active these tools, the more the participants will
connect up, build relationships, and help each other move into the highest levels of the
engagement process. This is what builds a strong community, online just as in real life.

In addition to the rules that power potential relationships (friending suggestions,
for example) and engagement in the community, members need ways to find each other,
to find people with whom a relationship might be beneficial. Twellow, the Twitter tool
referenced earlier, is one such tool. At an even more basic level, Facebook’s activity feed
and Twitter’s retweet capability—“RT” in Twitter parlance: the act of forwarding a
tweet that you have received from someone you follow to all of your own followers—
are themselves useful in discovering potential relationships.

The retweet in Twitter works to build one’s social graph like this: Say Chris fol-
lows Pat, and that Pat posts something interesting that Chris sees. Chris retweets Pat’s
post—a lot like forwarding an email—and as a result Chris’s followers (including those
who may not have known of Pat) now see Pat’s post. Chris’s followers discover and fol-
low Pat in this way—potentially increasing the size and reach of Pat’s social graph, all
because Chris thought Pat’s post was interesting and simply passed it along.

In this example, it was Chris’s social graph that acted as the conduit for Pat’s post:
The ability to easily retweet is what enabled Chris to share Pat’s post, building Pat’s