Page 327 - Social Media Marketing

Malleable Social Networks 305

Blogger and technology evangelist Robert Scoble raised the idea of “malleable” social ■ ╇ U se the S ocial G raph in B usiness
networks as a sort of “What’s Next” or “What Should Be.” Simply, a malleable social
network is one that reconfigures itself dynamically, based on what a particular member
is doing right now. In general, as currently implemented a member’s social graph in
Facebook, for example, is constant regardless of what that person is doing: Posting to
your wall, or reading your news feed, for example, is not tied to the similar members
sharing your current physical context—out of town, or at a party or conference, etc.—
but rather to the larger set of members to whom you are (always) connected. Twitter and
most other social networks are the same in this regard. When I am in New Delhi, my
tweets go to everyone in the world who follows me, with no visibly evident context that
would make these posts more relevant to the people who happen to be physically near
me in New Delhi: It’s up to them to make that connection, something that is not always
easy. The same thing occurs when attendees gather at DrupalCon or Ad:Tech or Web
2.0 Expo. Twitter offers no mechanism—beyond the basic use of hashtags—to restrict
or selectively push tweets to my followers who are also at the same event or are directly
interested in it. On the one hand, this in some ways follows from the underlying value of
sending conference information, as an example, out to people who aren’t present: This
practice shares the conference energy and teachings with a wider audience. On the other
hand, it means that for two or three days all of my Twitter followers are going to get
hit with posts that lack—at least in part—a proper context. A tweet like “Wow! I can’t
believe Chris Anderson really just said that! #adtechsf2010” is likely to elicit a wave of
retweets among the conference attendees...and as many blank stares (along with a few
unfollows) from my followers who are elsewhere or otherwise not interested.

The relatively fixed nature of the social graph as one moves around locally—the
social graph of course still grows and shrinks over a longer time frame as friends are
added or dropped—means that businesses wanting to tap into what people are doing
right now miss out on the ability to provide the more finely nuanced offers that they
could otherwise bring forth. Lacking the ability of a social graph to quickly reconfig-
ure itself—having only the relatively crude vantage point of “one’s entire graph” to act
on—is akin to serving the mass rather than serving the individual. Checking in using
a location-based service like Foursquare or Gowalla, for example, should immediately
reconfigure my social graph on those services (and all others that have been enabled to
receive this same check-in information) to focus on or otherwise highlight the activi-
ties, recommendations, and preferences of others who are nearby. At the same time,
they might convey directly to one’s larger following the current physical context of the
individual, and so add value to the experiences of people not present (if only by alerting
them that they can safely ignore the ensuing activity stream).