By all accounts, there’s a big data revolution on its way, and soon. New, distributed, and increasingly real time database and data warehousing solutions have made big data storage and querying more viable. Data collection, of course, continues apace. And the number of data sources available, too, continues to grow.

The big data problem and solution, as it stands today, is very simply a matter of: what to do with it. Data reveals insights only as good as the organization mining for them. Even patterns need to be coded into queries — and that has to be done by somebody interested in searching for the pattern in the first place.

So while big data holds an immense amount of potential insight — it’s not obvious what this insight is. Nor whether, once identified, it can be made useful. (To wit, the many data analysts currently confounded by financial breakdowns.)

Given that big data is the type of data to make its truths at scale, that is, by means of high altitude “observations” of very small things, two orders of the big data query emerge: the big and the small. The big, in which the “meaning” of the data is determined. And the small, or the relevant data itself.

There’s no finding value in the small bits of data without first determining the big picture views one hopes to obtain. The need for both big data strategy as well as big data tactics is fascinating. It should not only open new vistas on worlds and patterns not seen before; it should lead to new kinds of business, decision-making, forecasting, marketing, and much more.

Where then does social data fit in? Social data is data about users: their activities, identities, habits, relationships, interests etc on social networks and social media. Social data should be about what users do. Its the exhaust, if you will, of their actions and communication. And ideally well suited to the aims of commerce.

Sometimes it seems that big data contains social data. Other times not. But if big data includes social data within its purview, then an interesting question arises. For social data, presumably, is a different kind of data.

The issue concerns what the data means. And since social data is often activity data, it’s more than data. A tweet may be tweeted to somebody. A share, because it expresses a user’s interests. Events attended because there are friends there. Or because the user is a fan.

In other words, social data isn’t data about something, it’s data created by the action of somebody. Data about events, things, objects is that: objective. Data produced by people interacting and communicating is subjective: it needs to be interpreted, because it is intentional.

It would seem that these two kinds of data won’t mix very well. Data about a population, for example, vs data created by its members. The former view of big data would suggest making use of patterns for efficiencies. The social data view would suggest micro-targeting individuals based on their behaviors. The former wants to better grasp correlations, high level views, and find meaning by mining. The latter wants to describe individuals more accurately, richly, and target behaviors based on expectations.

Big data and social data are not one and the same. But nor are they mutually exclusive. Both tell stories worth paying attention to. It will be interesting to see what comes for each — and of course, who is involved.

Lean UX is meant to be the user experience design approach best suited to the lean startup. Lean startups are meant to be the best business approach suited to the startup industry. And agile development, it goes without saying, the best development model.

It’s hard to contest these on the basis of budgets, market conditions, and even to some extent the needs of social tools early in development. Developers need users, not just to test out product stability and functionality, but to provide feedback also. By starting small, startups get to test out their designs for MVP.

But I can’t help wonder whether this method is the best we can come up with. For in some respects it is less a method and more a justification of trial and error by means of factors unrelated to design. Developers, and designers, surely have expectations of what will happen when their social tool is first used. Entrepreneurs surely have expectations of the same. Perhaps developers and designers base their insights on personal or industry observations. While entrepreneurs might be more informed by the business impact or problem-solution assumptions that they have made.

While there is nothing egregiously misguided about either of these approaches. They’re eminently practical. But given that so many social startups either fail outright, or soon pivot (and sometimes more than once), you can’t help but wonder if there’s a something missing.

From personal professional experience, as well as excessive use of social tools, it strikes me that the lean startup approach lacks a certain amount of spherical mass when it comes to social design. Not that users and social are an afterthought. But that they are an assumption. It is assumed, on the basis of success elsewhere (logical, yes), that users can be expected to adopt and embrace this in the same manner they use that (fallacious).

If we have learned anything, it is that social is not just technology and technique, but also culture, adoption, beach-heading, community management, and so much more. The assumption that what works in one context will work equally well in a different one is perhaps logical. But the conclusion drawn from it — plow ahead and do more or less what they did, but marginally better — is false. Users don’t make a move for the marginally better.

The lack of courage comes into play then when it comes to thinking both differently and better. One might blame this on the industry’s disposition towards financial risk-taking; which is accompanied by an aversion to risk in the user experience department.

That entrepreneurs might be more keen to spend large sums of money on things that more or less exist elsewhere in the marketplace, but shy from the risk of new or different user experiences, makes no sense. And certainly isn’t a design methodology. It suggests to me only that the industry has more confidence in the proven use of existing social tools than it does in its understanding of users, what they want, do, and why.

Every successful new social tool took a risk on user behaviors and social outcomes. Users are entirely capable of new experiences. They can be understood, and their responses to new social products can be anticipated. So, too, can social outcomes — or what happens when user adoption scales.

Perhaps it’s just me, and my own bias. Perhaps it is that neither design nor engineering pass through much social theory, anthropology, or psychology. Perhaps it is just how the industry works — risk on financially, risk off on design. From where I stand, however, the less lean startup methodology could use some fleshing out.

This is for anyone who enjoys thinking about what makes social media what it is, how it works, and why. In particular, it’s for user experience and interaction designers. But there are some morsels in here that should be helpful for those of you professionally committed to the social media industry, in whatever form or manner.

In old school philosophical style, I will begin with my proximate enemy. My proximate enemy is the concept of “feedback loops.” Patina’d with a touch of the de riguer, “feedback loops” are often referenced as an accounting of social media’s virality. These loops describe the mechanism of social media participation. Feedback loops exist, in other domains, it is true. And feedback loops are a common feature of systems. But social media, and social tools in particular, are social systems, not mechanical, biological, climactic, or other operational systems. Social systems are reproduced not by system processes, but by meaningful exchanges among participants: in short, people.

Feedback is an amplifying recycling of a source, say, a Fender Stratocaster in the hands of one Mr. Hendrix. It owes to the distance between two elements: a pickup, and a speaker. Close the distance between the two, and the signal tone amplifies itself, resulting in distorted feedback. Love it, but not an explanation of social media use, because it is acoustic.

Feedback loops fail as an explanation of social media engagement because they are a reproduction or amplification of the same: a single source. Social systems are reproduced on the basis of communication. And communication is dialogical. That is, it involves two or more participants in meaningful exchange. The common “feedback” features of social — likes, retweets, follows, comments, and so on — depend on the actions of individual users. The secret sauce, then, is in facilitating and amplifying not a single signal, but the coupling of signal. For one signal, a response. The response of an other (user).

Social engagement is built on social action. Social action is action of users aware that there are others. Not all social action solicits direct responses and replies, but all social action has in it the appeal to a response. In face to face situations, a look of acknowledgement suffices much of the time. But in mediated social contexts, there is no unilateral means of securing acknowledgment. Social media are built on separation, absence, and deferral. So the intrinsic appeal of social action — a feature, if you will, so fundamental to human social interaction that it must be accepted as a given — always remains. It is residue, ambiguous and unresolved, and it is the first key ingredient of our special sauce.

Social action is dead unless taken up by somebody. All of culture, all of language, and all of speech is “designed,” if you will, to make the improbable more probable. That is, to make communication more probable. Familiarity of meanings, use of a structured form of expression, norms and etiquette and innumerable practices all conspire to make it more likely that we are able to communicate with each other. So then, the challenge for any social tool is to make communication more probable.

Given that in mediated social systems, users sit at small backlit boxes reaching through the wire to share their thoughts and activities, the “design” of the application through which they engage necessarily structures and organizes their experience. But all of our socio technical systems harken back to original forms. Social tools are still part telephone. Part telegraph. Part radio. Part television.

You wait for a reply. The phone rings. It calls you — you are being called to answer. You place a phone call. The phone rings — a voice calls out: “It’s for you.” This is the system coupling of social action: action – response. And it is what becomes more challenging in social tool design, for unlike the phone, social tools are designed for asynchronous use.

Asynchronicity is distance. Distance not in space, but in time. Nearness, closeness, and immediacy are the human experience equivalents of space. This distance is inserted into social action and comes to separate action from response. The appeal — our first ingredient — is now at work. For it takes the form of waiting: urgent, distracted, compulsive, patient, or forgetful waiting.

Communication is a type of action system that by its nature is open-ended and ongoing. As it is how we maintain our relationships, it serves the purpose of allowing us to always resume interaction. And provides means by which to handle the gaps in between. Social tools, then, are built on action systems that are open-ended. They have no ending or conclusion, and are literally never finished. (Which is why it’s not really stories, but narration, which best describes social sharing activity.)

Given that communication wants to be probable, and given that mediation makes communication improbable, social tools use features and action designs that increase probabilities of communication. The Like, the retweet, the vote, and even the follow are system elements that serve as proxy communication. They are indirect symbolic expressions and actions. Same for all, but meaning something unique to each user each and every time they are used. These symbolic social actions in other words enable communication by other means: technical means, symbolic means, and within a social system that has ways of presenting these social actions to others.

Because these social systems are networked, any action taken that is captured and represented by technical form (like button click > “username liked this”) is displayed to others (a user’s friends), according to context (feed, page, etc). This leaves us with something very unique. A form or medium of communication quite different from the directly coupled ancestor of the phone, or the broadcast ancestor of radio and television. This unique property is distribution: propagation of a social action throughout the medium, if you will, according to “sharing,” display, privacy, and other design rules baked into the social system’s logic (just think Facebook timeline).

We saw earlier that the residual feature of social action is the appeal; the unspoken, if you will, of all that is said. Now this is complexified. For mediated symbolic action has a functional dualism: it appeals, and it propagates (distribution). Here we have the fundamental amplification of social media: a social action taken is visible (heard) in many “places.” It is a kind of action dislocated from space and place, and instead reproduced by system logic and rules in “contexts” “elsewhere.”

Now given that all social action seeks acknowledgement (directly or indirectly), mediated social action is split in two. The appeal is split from the action itself. For each additional context in which a social action is represented (say, a Like that appears in many friends’ feeds, on pages, in notifications, on phones, etc), its author’s intent is lost. For it’s a given that the author has not intended to “like” in front of each of his or her friends, to be seen in their feeds, or notified on their phones. A new form of communication is thus born — and all users must develop skills and competencies with which to interpret and handle what their friends mean, as well as what’s going on.

The dual function of the symbolic social action, an appeal split from propagation of the action’s represented form, complicates communication further. For there is but one possibility for communication as a kind of social action, and it is the response. But responses no longer mean what they did, when communication is unmediated and direct (as between people talking face to face). Furthermore, any response is itself a new social action, itself now with an appeal, and itself now propagated to contexts elsewhere.

And so we have the second ingredient of our secret sauce: distribution. We are far from the feedback loop. For we have neither the closure nor the recycling that make up feedback. Rather, we have a much less efficient system of communication. What might be considered noise. And not just the noise “generated” by the propagation of social actions, but the meta noise, if you will, of all the lost intentional signals.

Which is where design comes in. Design of social must answer to the needs and interests of social action, not just the needs and interests of individual users. But social architecture has a growing portfolio of plans and blueprints at its disposal. And accompanied with an understanding of the dynamics of social activities, a sense for how to lay out social designs for increasing complexity over time.

Closure, still, is the first order of business in social interaction design. Closure makes communication more probable. In so doing, it decreases noise (noise being a form of redundancy). And so the social interaction designer asks not “what feedback loops do we build into this?” but “how do we facilitate social closure through other users?”

We mentioned earlier that distance in human experience is closeness. Closure is closeness. Jimi’s guitar feedback was closeness — proximity to the amp. But as speed of feedback. And in mediated systems, because they are technologies, closeness is a factor of speed (or time, as duration). The notification increases speed. The realtime feed increases speed. Speed reduces waiting time, and accelerates the process of communication.

And so we have our third ingredient: temporality. All human affairs take time. Time not measured in minutes or hours, but felt and experienced: as tedious, dragging, plodding, or urgent, impatient, distracted time. Time has stretches, and spans; it has rhythms, cycles, and repetitions. It becomes habit, and pastime. And is lost in distraction, ephemera, and its own passage. Time, as we know it, has past and future. As past, it is recollection; as future, it is anticipation and expectation. No time, in human terms, is entirely unorganized, and all time, as we experience it, has meaning.

So the real real time revolution is not the revolution of speed alone. It is the revolution of im-mediacy. Approximation, by proxy of proximity, of immediacy in mediation. Design of socio-technical systems making increasingly running claims upon our awareness and attention. In short, getting ever closer to the presence in absence of that open state of talk which is the normal condition of everyday life.

Now many social systems designers have gone at the abstraction of social into design forms and rules. Gamification is one example of something interesting gone badly wrong at the hands of abstraction. Game mechanics, too, are oft but a shell of something compelling dislocated from the eventfulness of games and reified into codified sets of rules and recommendations. Design like this gets nowhere close to the grist because it takes its abstractions as real. Soon the map precedes the territory.

Designing for social makes use of much simpler factors. All social action appeals to others. All social action communicates. All communication is coupling. People understand the appeal of social action as acknowledgment. People understand the action of communication as response. People engage in communication through reciprocity and reciprocal action. All occurs over time, in order, and the more synchronous the experience the more present it feels.

To design social tools you need only to understand the distance at which you operate from the realities of human experience.

Social interaction design is not just and strictly “design.” There’s no designing social, insofar as designed social interactions and experiences would be nothing shy of the nefarious and misguided efforts of past European social engineers. To say nothing more of the matter. (Don’t mention the war. I did, but I think I got away with it.) Social outcomes aren’t for the designing: social outcomes happen. They’re events: live, and as easily affected as the proverbial typhoon by the far-away butterfly.

But designed they must be. For all online experiences are designed. Any social site or tool has been designed for social interaction, whether consciously or not. Site architects and designers, engineers and marketers, have had social in mind while building out features and functionalities. Or have witnessed social occurring, after the fact. Design is; either by design or not. What the user experiences, and how interactions among users are shaped by technology — is by means of design.

And yet the design  of social interactions and of experiences dependent on social participation remains a black art to many. A factor in product development, but as much an afterthought and realization as a force of intelligent foresight. Lean UX, thepreferred design orientation for those building lean companies, privileges live and agile social testing. Products are launched to small audiences, and scaled up as technology and user participation grows. I don’t know if this is truly intended, or a concession to market unknowns and, moreso, submission to the black magic of user engagement.

The butterfly is no reason to ignore the storm. No reason to forego storm science, storm tracking, or storm preparation. Whether you ascribe engagement around your social product as a result of your design choices, or as a matter of whim and fancy, that engagement itself does have structure and order. People are not haphazard, nor are social practices.

Key points:

• social interaction is social action
• social action is action taken with the knowledge and awareness, if not even interest, in the audience at hand
• social action is known, if not intended, to mean something to an other person in particular, or to other people in general
• social action is taken by a person who knows that it reflects on them
• the point of an action can be in these social dimensions — not in the “apparent” objective or object
• when action is social, it communicates
• when communication is a way of doing things, it is action
• many social tools depend on ways of organizing and structuring communication; communication is itself a system of action
• communication, as an action system, is only “understood” by people, for “what is said” and “what to do” are different things
• social data starts with communication, and for this reason always carries signals that are meta data
• gestures are a means of communicating without use of language
• gestures, like communication, make sense according to their action system: a context or frame of who, what, why, and what to do
• social action systems provide meaning necessary for using and interpreting gestures and communication, actions and behaviors
• all social action unfolds over time
• interaction is serial in nature: it comprises of actions for which there are sometimes responses
• all social interaction design involves architecting temporal social engagement for the purpose of facilitating on-going, independent, social systems.
• user experience design for social products includes both the individual user experience, and the forms of social clustering and of social interactions
• in most cases, the user experience of non-members and non-participants is also of critical interest

Social interaction design matters as long as you care about what happens around your product. But it does require a shift in framing the design problem. Onscreen design, features and functionalities, and conventional user experience still of course matter. But they are only part of the equation. Social outcomes — what happens when users are actively involved with a product — are not explained by what is onscreen. There is no “objective” design focus. Users are as engaged with who they are, how they appear, who they know or are connected to, what they do, and so on, as they are with the product’s features. Yes, these are design outcomes. It’s just that they are mediated by the actions and behaviors of users with each other — and not strictly by your product design.

There are a couple simple metaphors possibly worth using here. The first involves the screen. Design is design for and of what’s on the screen. But in social, the screen has three modes. It is mirror, and reflects the user; it is window, and shows other users; and it is surface, on which is content. We are a culture of screens, and have a sophisticated relationship to the screen. These three modes are the modes of the social interface: mirror, window, surface.

A second metaphor worth mentioning helps to simplify social relations. It is that all social is built out of ones, twos, and threes. A self, a couple, and a triangle. Social units of anything larger break down: four into two twos or a three and one, for example. And in fact in social preferences, or those competencies of social interaction and communication, there are again these three primary axes: self (one), other (two), and group (three). So, you can think about users in terms of self-oriented, other-oriented, and group-oriented. This is not to say that people all divide into one of these categories. But insofar as the medium amplifies social factors, and insofar as simple models are of design help (who would use this feature?), this model fits social action and communication nicely.

And remember, it is not just that there are different “types” of users. Or that people have different kinds of social skills and competencies. For it would be one thing to understand the user experience of different kinds of people, and to design products and services to best suit them. No, there is more: social interactions have dynamics. Pundits need fans. Socialites need wallflowers. Inviters need guests. The myriad of things that we do, socially, are not only recognizable for the activities that they are, but for who is involved in them. Your product may need the buy in, and engagement, of some core user types — whose actions and communication provide the critical “aha” to others trying out the product.

Social interaction design, then, is worth considering any time your product or service depends upon successful adoption by users. It helps when you want not only user growth, but sustained engagement. It helps when your design and development decisions have impact at scale — and when conventional user experience or interaction design guidelines fail to provide insight into the social dynamics and outcomes that matter to you.

So Google is going to offer deals for check ins. No doubt this extends Google’s grip on merchant online advertising, providing for a new kind of offering as well as for a new means of connecting with customers. (Neither is strictly new for Google.) In short, the business model, from Google’s perspective, is a no-brainer. And Google’s decision to support checkins is, from Google’s perspective, completely rational.

As a social interaction designer, I’m somewhat underwhelmed by Google’s decision. Google’s track record in social has left a great deal of social to be desired. Google+ seems to be humming along, but due largely to its close resemblance to Facebook (IMHO), to a ready supply of expatriates transitioning from Facebook or twitter, as tourists if not long-term re-settlers. Google+ circles is sort of interesting (it’s not finished) and seems to work for some people. (But no, Google, it’s not just like real life, as claims your TV ad.) Google+ has a like button, this one branded by the minimalist but essential functional logic of the LIke, as understood by Google: plus one.

So, I think it’s Google’s strategic absorption of social features that’s unsettling to me. If Google is right, and gets its social successfully this time, then the social of social either never was or has ceased to be that very social. Circles, plus ones, and check ins would, according to Google’s social logic, serve simply to capture very passing interests. This, because Google’s approach to social is even more global than that of Facebook: it operates at a scale that requires it provide generic social. Basic, simple, and stripped-down social features make sense in this context. But it’s a functional, minimalist, and culturally generic one.

We know from social media and tool design that it’s not the feature in-and-of-itself that captures social actions and activities. It’s in the context of use; use in this case that’s characterized by social practices. I fear that for Google, social logic is reduced to a functionalist, instrumentalist, and information-oriented view of the world. In Foursquare, for example, the check in at least belonged to a somewhat trivial but novel set of activities. Google’s check in will serve simply to connect a user’s intent to declare his/her location: in short, a submit button.

Clearly the meaning of social features is not in the button — its function or its label. We will have to see whether or not the Google view of the social world is the correct one. Whether more people will check in, encircle people, and +1 sans engaging social context. Or whether the lack of an engaging social context will leave users nonplussed (!) and checked out.

I suspect that it is and always will be in context that social communicates — not in functional operations, features, and experiences. I may be wildly off, but my sense is that when Google encroaches upon what the merchant considers to be its customer and brand relationships — as is the case with deals required for checkins, then the merchant will resent featurization of social. This reduces relationships to visits, and to transactions. But I may be wrong. Google has scale. Perhaps Foursquare always was too nerdy for mainstream adoption. Maybe the checkin died its own death last year and carries on now only as a shell of its former self: a universal feature but not a social activity. I don’t know. It’s but a short distance from the check in to the check out. And Google knows the check out.

In the midst of a running conversation with a couple colleagues about a stress-tracking device, and tracking, I thought I would open up the topic a little. Trackers and tracking are a commonplace among social tools. Badges and achievements, leaderboards, social games — all, and more, make some use of user progress and activity tracking.

The device in question, and which sparked this time-out, is a tracker for stress levels. Physical stress levels. My concern was that any kind of device that tracks stress levels could in fact cause and reinforce stress, if the user were to become obsessive about his/her stress level measurements. The numbers, in other words, become an object of focus. I can see that an instrument that measures stress in real time, and which displays stress in real time, might be a stress-inducing accessory.

I would want to dim the display, at least.

Step back for a moment then. What are these things we track? States, right? Quantifiable measurements of personal, or individual, state. Measured in numerical terms; counted; compared against past metrics in order to obtain a progress metric; compared perhaps to others to make the number relative. Absolute numbers, relative numbers.

Absolute numbers are meaningless. It is relative numbers that matter. Absolute numbers are just numbers. Relative numbers are numbers that count. Absolute numbers are an identity; relative numbers are a difference.

What interests us is the difference, not the number.

I am not much of a tracker, personally. I know some who are. My sense of the tracking instinct ( ) is that it takes some pleasure and comfort, some pride and joy, in counting and in making progress. The numbers allow the tracker to follow his/her own progress. Numbers then, are really not the point: the point is evidence, proof. Evidence of an outcome — having run faster, longer, having lost weight, etc — of activity over which the individual has control.

Tracking is control. By proxy. The number is the proxy. Proxy for control.

I would like to know if this resonates with people. If it’s the case that the numbers enjoyed by tracker types are in fact stand in for something else, be it control, success, pride, incentive, motive, etc, then there’s more to do with the tracking interface and experience than is self evident.

I’ve been following a lot of financial news of late. Not just because it’s interesting, in a “the end of the world is nigh” kind of way. Because it’s immensely complex. And I like complex things.

If the world economy is now perhaps the most complex socio-technical phenomena out there, reading and listening to its experts is fascinating. There simply is no possibility of consensus and agreement among the myriad of voices and opinions wagered in the world of high finance and global economics. All of it is interpretation.

Global financial news now travels and develops so quickly that when not simply reacting to news, experts are forced to make hurried interpretations of what financial news means. By the time these individuals have a moment to pen an article or appear on the media, they are as likely to repeat trending analyses as they are to proffer a fresh interpretation of their own.

Language, and how we speak about the events that concern us, is so fundamentally critical to what we do and why, that it bears note. For those of us in social media, be it at the product and business end, or at the implement and execute end, our language and talk binds us. It is the framework with which we understand what happens in our industry.

Social media, because it is a medium given to talking about its medium in its medium, produces an extra degree of talk. And where much of it is anchored in facts, events, and realities, it is amplified by perspectives, opinions, and interpretations. Many of these, of course, are developed in order to preserve and grow yet another small business or reputation.

Like the language of economic and financial analysis, the language of modern-day marketing is challenged. It is challenged to describe new phenomena, but in terms and concepts inherited from the old. It is challenged to offer new insights and guidance, but with understanding rooted in the old. And while it frequently insists on change and innovation, it does so in terms and with ideas as traditional as they come.

On the economy: “when it recovers.” (Who’s to say it will?) On marketing: “customer relationship.” (What, honestly, does that even mean?) On the economy: “it’s cyclical.” (Until it’s not!) On marketing: “brand value.” (is possibly just a concept made up by brands!) On the economy: “when jobs come back.” (Unless they have been transferred to the next empire of wealth) On marketing: “customer loyalty.” (What person thinks of him/herself as a “customer?!”)

The problem is that marketing is just language. It’s just an interpretive schema through which a group of people observe, understand, and describe the world. Nothing, but nothing, suggests that it be true, accurate, or real. In fact, for all of its wisdom, and of late, it’s commitment to transparency, it is still as good at lies and falsehoods as anything resembling sincerity.

Like economic analysis, marketing speak is collective interpretation. A type of discourse designed to further coordinated activities by means of providing discursive guidance. We do as we speak. What we do, we do. What we speak, makes sense of and communicates it.

Marketing is, in short, a world unto its own. What means does it have of realizing new ideas? What power does it have of engendering real innovation and change? What understanding can it truly offer? None or little, if it is not self-aware, self-reflective, and self-critical.

Marketing facts obtain from quantitative observations and data, accompanied by qualitative analyses and explanations. These explanations are not true to the quantitive world, for there is no such thing. They interpret the quantitative world. Stats and data are stats and data, numbers that can be made to say anything you want. Marketing explanations are true to themselves — that is, to the language in which they are spoken.

The function of marketing language is to be believable: to combine both observation, description, explanation, and guidance. It is this last bit, the normative effect of marketing speak, that it needs to be most self-critical of. For this is where marketing speak wants as much to reinforce its own self as it does provide insight. It’s a language in which many people fashion careers and make enormous financial decisions. So it is required to have a built-in normative aspect: that part that suggests, that recommends, and that seeks agreement.

What if the consumer has no interest in a brand relationship? What if s/he simply buys what is needed, at a price or in packaging or from a name or based on a review, but ad hoc and mostly disconnected from the “realities” in which marketers have come to believe. What if, in contrast to the reasons marketers provide for consumer behavior (and this is profoundly important when it comes to social media marketing), “consumers” (aka individuals) have reasons of their own?

What if marketers actually need to rethink and invert their entire mental model of what consumers (individuals) are doing, and what they are doing with what consumers are doing? And what if there’s no genuinely insightful insight possible into the workings of modern-day late-stage socialized consumerism unless and until marketers cease to defend and perpetuate the old conventions of influence-shaping marketing activities upon which their own linguistic community depends?

Would you invest in the old?

I don’t have a new language to offer, and were it that I did, I wouldn’t be able to communicate sensibly here. I mean simply to raise the question: are we adequately self-critical? Do we know why we draw our conclusions? Are we really in synch with socialized “consumer” behaviors? And until we are self-aware, and until we have broken down our legacy concepts — relationships, branding, awareness, value — can we be trusted to see and to know insightfully what has changed and is changing?

I don’t want to be led by the language of marketing. I want to be led by deep insight into how social media work. What people do with them and why. How culture and our sense of self, of others, of our communities are affected and informed by these new technologies. By the unique properties of reflection, echo, shine, and share that characterize this medium. And by the profound manner in which all social commerce is now driven by an engine of communication and social action, gesture and attention — and how this presents a terminal encounter with broadcast messaging and marketing. Word.

I’m pleased that the Bain company conducted research into social media users. Honestly and with earnest affirmation. However, the types they found among us users beg a few questions. And I should state up front that I have my own set of social media personality types — so what follows is admittedly biased if not critical.

First of all, these are a weird amalgam of market segment categories and user types. Blow up the image and you will see that Fact finders “skew male and older.” I guess this is the guy who sits on his blackberry at the airport dialing in facts and bookmarking them for later pre-purchase reference. He is almost by definition not a social butterfly, even though he might in fact be a trusted source of “facts found and saved” among friends.

Bain writes in its research report:

Our research has identified 10 segments of social consumers. Members of these segments frequent different social media platforms and prefer different types of content and engagement models. For example, companies such as Disney, Wal-Mart and Mattel, who target “moms,” will find they are disproportionately “Social Butterflies” and “Social Gamers.” A key demographic on Facebook, “moms” as a group spend significant amounts of time playing social games. Companies such as Nestlé have found ways to embed their brands into the games that moms play online. For example, the company allows users to grow ingredients of its Stouffer’s brand prepared meals within the FarmVille game. It engages with key customers in the right platform, and with the content those customers find compelling. Alternatively, companies looking to capture the online attention of the “Young and Mobile” will reach them through micro-blogs and location-based games, making the most of the platforms that are popular with this segment. As the social media ecosystem continues to evolve, it will likely further fragment, making consumer segmentation—and tailored social media approaches—even more important for success.

Never mind the categories for a minute. Clearly they leave a lot to be desired (connectors? inviters? pundits? thought leaders? critics? wikipedians? moderators? hashtaggers?) Who are these people? Both this description and the chart would suggest that these are real people — people found online and accounted for. That’s a bit strange. Our use of “user types” has, at least in the fields of design, UX, IxD, etc, at best served as a heuristic: a means of communicating with and to clients who belongs to a target market or is a target user.

Look at the categories, and the residual types we’ve used for the past decade are in there: the soccer mom, the butterfly, the gamer… You might think that these are life stages. That they are stages of technology use in life life stages. And you wouldn’t be far from the mark, for indeed, these are types combining conventional market segmentation and technology adoption stages.

How accurate can they then possibly be? And if they were somehow plausible facsimiles of actual users, how likely is it that they’re the same as they have been for, oh, as long as online marketing has been around?

These aren’t real people. They’re not even real categories. They are categories used to describe either a market and its segments, or technology adoption, in language familiar and reasonably commonsensical.

But in fact moms use instagram. Gamers get their facts down. Butterflies enjoy games. Blog readers tweet. And so on. You can’t describe a person generically and also capture their individual qualities. To describe people in the abstract by what appear to be qualities, then, is misleading. The name is neither a good description of who the person is, nor adequate to describing their behaviors and motives.

Seeing as in social media use, the grail for marketing is to close the distance between the brand/business and consumer, these kinds of reductive categorizations ought to be done away with as soon as they have served the purpose of framing the marketing opportunities and challenges. Move past the generalizations instead to a consumer’s interests, activities, and behaviors. Interests are motivated. Activities are habitual. Behaviors are observable.

And in the age of communication, when so much of the world of information has been socialized, by means of socializing tools, why bother with abstractions? Especially if they aren’t even good ones.

I suspect that we’re moving, slowly, to a world of mediated commerce. A world in which market segmentation and to some degree traditional marketing itself will be replaced by the real time and dynamic pricing and sales made possible by social data. Data specific to individuals and their relationships. This is a big data problem, and will take innovation to solve, and partnerships to leverage.

I question the categories used in this research and wonder whether or not research truly found these types of people, or simply confirmed what it already believed to be the case. I don’t think people actually vary in their behavior on social tools in this way. I think people’s communication styles and competencies vary, and that these more strongly govern or inform their use of social tools. Some develop an extended presence and ego; care-take a reputation; craft expertise; edit and contribute to what they believe is true and right; find distraction; hunt and mine; share and reciprocate; comment and plus one socially; and so on. It’s a newish medium and no old set of segments or categories captures how people use today’s social tools, and in particular how they relate to the content they create.

At risk with these kinds of broad consumer categories is that they substitute for what consumers are actually doing. That they offer up proxy explanations for why consumers like, identify, choose, and do. That they inform strategy that perpetuates a sense of ownership and control (over the consumer and his/her consumption), because they name the un-nameable, define the ineffable, and capture the ephemeral.

I would advise marketers to learn something from those of us at the user experience end of the equation. We too, have to anticipate what people do. But we know we have to frame it in terms of interaction and experience: how and why and what users do with each other. We learned a while back that it’s not up to us to control or define their experiences.

Marketers are using the phrase “zero moment of truth” to describe the challenge they face in online marketing and sales. The challenge being that, unlike the “first moment of truth” customers experience when first ogling a product on the store shelves, in online commerce there’s neither product nor experience to grasp. Customers have a zero moment, or a moment of zero truth, with the product (and brand).

The term zero moment of truth is admittedly awkward. Why reference a moment that doesn’t occur, when obviously something does occur, else there would be no moment at all. And if the point is to reference the absence of a moment of truth, why not just say that? The “missing moment of truth.” Or better, since this is online we’re talking about: “The proxy moment of truth” Or, since what we really mean to talk about are the myriad of pre-purchase brand encounters in social, review, search, etc sites: “the vicarious tease,” “the anticipatory moment of truth,” “the social quest for truthful moments” …

Allow me one further digressive bit of commentary. There’s a lot baked into that “moment of truth.” First, that truth has anything to do with a customer’s experience of brand and product. I’m not sure that it has. The concept suggests that a) there is a brand truth and b) this can be communicated, equally, to all customers. Well that’s well over-stating it. Not to mention, customers aren’t fools; they know brands and products are advertised by means of lies big and small. But more significantly, the customer owns any experience and measure of “truth.” We call this, rightly or wrongly, value. It’s an expression of what is valuable to the customer, which of course varies, and includes: desire, aspiration, performance, discount, identity, popularity, and so much more. A complex of rational and irrational choices that include price, name, history, impression, messaging, aesthetics, hearsay, status, and so on.

My issue with “zero moment of truth” isn’t so much that it may not exist. Although that is a concern. Truth is falsehood, actually, on the brand end, since brands have foresworn “real” relationships over profitable sales transactions. Moments are, well, not really moments because we’re dealing here with a customer looking at a product — something we do so much of it can hardly be called a moment. Zero, well that refers to a lack, so what’s the point in creating something out of a nothing, particularly when that nothing is circumspect to begin with.

The real problem is that even the zero moment wants to preserve the illusion of brand control. Brands don’t control customer experiences. They control their own branding. Brands are a part of customer experiences, yes, but customers have their own experiences, period.

What the zero moment intends is to refer to the many ways in which customers encounter a brand in reference prior to making any purchase. The channels in which this occur, and so which seem to be available to bands, include review sites, twitter, facebook and pages, g+, and so on. In other words customer talk and shared stories, questions and answers, recommendations, reviews, etc.

These are not “zero moments” at all, but are potentially rich and influential moments. That they are “zero moments” to the brand tells us something about the brand and how brand sees these customer experiences.

There is an awful lot to learn and use in the world of commercial discourse, meaning, where people share interests and exchange views, sometimes about values and sometimes about brands and products. This is a space from which brands are not excluded unless they choose to exclude themselves. It belongs to the spectrum of learnings and choices in which customers engage and share with friends, and is thus very intentional, if not also action based. These “zero moments” in which brands are referenced but by customers, not by brands, are possibly the most important moments: they culminate in a choice to buy or not to buy. Little zero about that!

I understand where the “zero moment of truth” comes from. But I have a bone to pick with language. For it gives rise to false concepts and misleads us into thinking that we understand something, and how it works, when in fact we understand only a metaphor. And this phrase “zero moment” in particular gets under my skin, for customers are people, and customers own and enjoy their experiences, and thread together the narratives that make sense to them about who to listen to and what to want, which to buy, from whom, when, and whom to tell about it. And all of this if very rich, and there might be little zero about it, other than zero advertising, in which case the term, viewed from the customer’s perspective, might as well be “zero moment of false.”

See: Google’s Jim Lecinski on What the ‘Zero Moment of Truth’ Means for Marketers

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2825#.Tswn3XWVW0o.twitter

I’ve been taking care of other things, as they say, and off the blogmobile for a while awaiting inspiration and a muse. Neither has made any great arrival, so I opt now for Plan B — which is to simply start writing.

Instagram is easily the app I use most frequently now, and with the greatest amount of pleasure. I think, for the obvious reason that it’s pictorial. There’s simply no end to the surprising things you see on instagram. Flickr I am sure offers a similar experience — but I wasn’t ever a very social flickr user.

Instagram may be a photo sharing service, and immensely popular with iphone users. But it’s not all just about pictures. Pictures are objects of a sort that we look at and occasionally react to. They’re objects that have content: their image. Most are recognizable for what they are, or for what they depict.

What makes a service like Instagram interesting, however, is not just that they excel at socializing a basic
experience (and this instagram does, in its design simplicity and ease of sharing). What makes instagram interesting is how creatively cultures and subcultures develop around the object of sharing, and the shared object, to bring it to life and to transcend the product’s generic functionalities. In other words, instagram has produced user cultures whose practices add a very specific kind of value: communication.

Users on instagram do more with their pictures than just take them. They do more with their pictures than just share them. They tag them. They tag their pictures. They picture their tags. They like each other’s pictures, sometimes just to like each other. They comment and name call, both what they are doing and who they follow/like/know etc. And all of this with a remarkably compressed system for communicating.

Enable a social object with sharing, and forms of communication will transform and recontextualize the object by means of sharing cultures and practices. Users interested in yellow or green. Black and whites posted on Wednesday. Cars. Mealtimes. Happy hour drinks. Apps like hipstamatic and even names of lenses and editing apps.

In this way instagram can almost be like a visual twitter. Images are like tweets, distinguished by their likes, tags, comments, and emoji iconography. Instead of tweeting, users share pictures — content then is images not words. Looking replaces the act of reading. And liking, like retweeting, may be an endorsement of the expression’s content or may be a social gesture (directed at the user,

The paradox in this is that it is not the quality of the image or content of the object that gives rise to sharing, although this is sometimes the case. Popularity and activity of users seems a more likely cause of a picture’s popularity. This is the principle at work elsewhere in media, wherein attention accrues to the communication of those with the most subscribers, regardless of their “interestingness.”

Images as communication. Instagram really is a lot like twitter. But hey if a picture’s worth a thousand words, how many characters is that?

It’s becoming increasingly clear to me (perhaps I’m slow) that live video chat will be among the next new things to reshape the social web experience. Friend and colleague Bernard Moon brought this to my attention with a post in readwriteweb yesterday. But it’s been on the margins for years. Some innovations just take a while.

Live video chat is not for everyone. It’s time-consuming. It’s interruptive. It’s somewhat exposing (depends what you’re doing at the time). It’s more place and location sensitive than IM or text chat (will be vidchatting in cafes soon? I rather hope not). And of course it has a greater number of technical issues: latency, bandwidth, audio, notifications, and so on.

But video has some clear advantages over text and IM chat. It is far richer and passes through both the face and the look. It’s a communication form of higher commitment — unless deception is part of your job, lying is just simply harder to do in live video than text chat. Live video chat handles etiquette better than text, being both infinitely faster at supplying the little ceremonial exchanges of interaction and more effectively too. People are impacted more by these kinds of live experiences than they are a written format.

There are some very powerful use cases for live video chat. Any situation that involves obtaining expert consultation, visual illustration (you don’t need to share screens — just hold up a sketch on a sheet of paper!), evidence (insurance, healthcare), how tos, you name it. There is no shortage of use cases that involve instruction/learning and even task coordination that would benefit from live video (a hat cam bossman on the factory floor?).

If extremely effective, then, at the communication end of things, what else might change with live video? Well, live video rather cuts right to the heart of any meta communicative functions of social. This is why so few conventional dating sites yet use video. It’s just too rich, too close, and too soon. Some interactions benefit from the use of symbolic gestures and interactions that warm a couple or group of people into more committed interactions. Live video feels like it creates more of a commitment to the other person because it does. For the period of time one is live on video, leaving the interaction is not an option. (Chatroulette disproves this but then chatroulette was a novelty. Meaning it demonstrated that we’re a) not there yet but b) certainly will get there.)

So video won’t be an enhancement to many current online social practices until or unless it is dropped into new contexts of interaction. Just as we still text, when we could phone. Or just as we “like,” when we could comment. The low commitment of many online social interactions in fact serves a purpose — to reduce the risk of rejection, ignoring, disinterest, and so on. Real life face to face situations are provisioned with many tacit rituals by which people acknowledge each other without committing to interact. (Known as “civil inattention.”)

Online social is practically an architectural system of exactly these kinds of aids — protecting people from the uncertainties of personal and social interactions. Yes, this changes as people are in general more comfortable with the medium. But no society or culture lives in or wants full transparency. Too many social practices are designed to make use of nuances and subtleties of interaction for the simple reason that playing them competently is in itself rewarding.

One could say much more on this but enough for now. This will be an interesting area to dig into more deeply, as realtime and live continue to shape social tools and experiences.

A mini epiphany strikes a writer interested in enterprise social: Enterprise social networking sucks the social out of ‘social’. On an epiphanic scale, it’s more mega than mini, methinks.

Social in the enterprise is nothing like social in the “real world.” People write about the silos, separation, closed-fistedness and a general ambiance lacking in the intimacy promised by real time media. Relations articulated by an org chart have nothing to do with people relations. They’re functional relations! Roles, responsibilities, jobs, as selected by organizational design. They’re meant to produce work!

Social, on the other hand, is woven by the fabric of people relations — real relations. Built and sustained by communication, social emerges because people like and get along with each other. That’s what the water cooler is for, and why the water cooler is no sooner going away than is the oasis that punctuates the barren passage.

Deployed in the enterprise, social tools encounter resistance.That’s a normal and should-be expected outcome. The demos we have all seen of enterprise level products smartly capturing leads and assembling on-the-fly sales and marketing teams are a bit smoke and mirrors. They show what looks to be an “all-in” adoption of social tools. Fact is, adoption never works like that. Some buy in quickly and seize opportunities (to the mirth, in cases, of classmates keen to spot the brown-noser); but many withhold. Their resistance is the social — not their adoption. Their adoption is work.

The trick, in enterprise social, is not to transpose end user social tool practices into the enterprise ecosystem, but to innovate new practices that either leverage resistance or mitigate risks of adoption. People (not “workers”), if they’re to use social tools for “social” collaboration and communication, need to understand their exposure to others personally. One cannot expect an employee to “act normal” while also protecting his/her professional career.

Social solutions to this need to be designed — they can be fashioned out of roles, groups, teams, and more. These would all be social solutions, not technical ones. This isn’t rocket science, but it takes some out of the box thinking. Precisely because the problem is out of the box.

Some companies are doing just fine with enterprise social. They’re yammering, chattering, and Jiving their way forward. But the tales of doubt and hesitation that still print to enterprise media are a reminder that the vast majority of workplaces are not ready for enterprise social tools as is. And the gap between successful deployment and failure is bridged by an understanding of people, not technology.

Here’s a great and concise passage from Eric Berne on real social games:

“The solitary individual can structure time in two ways: activity and fantasy. When one is a member of a social aggregation of two or more people, there are several options for structuring time. In order of complexity, these are: (1) Rituals (2) Pastimes (3) Games (4) Intimacy and (5) Activity, which may form a matrix for any of the others. The goal of each member of the aggregation is to obtain as many satisfactions as possible from his transactions with other members. The more accessible he is, the more ‘satisfactions’ he can obtain.” — Games People Play

According to Berne, game are but a structuring of time and experience, to wit time spent in social experiences. Given that social tools and social media are the means by which many of us “spend” social time “with” others, Berne’s perspectives are interesting and provocative. According to Berne, and others in the school of Transactional Analysis, structured social interactions serve an ulterior purpose: to provide emotional “strokes” of recognition to individuals.

Indeed, these psychologists believed that social interactions are there for that purpose primarily — the staving off of an existential exclusion, by means of an emotionally inclusive recognition. Conveniently for sociologists, emotional strokes are provided tacitly and secondarily. They are not an explicit content of interactions but are handled by the very structure or organization of the transaction itself. Transactional failure, or violation of the expectations of participants engaged in some kind of familiar social pastime, would thus damage the transaction of emotional strokes.

Correspondingly, then, the tacit provision of emotional recognition must be diminished by the technical framing of social interaction by means of social tools and media. One either supposes that some emotional strokes are obtained by proxy, possibly also vicariously (through observation and projection of others’ activities), and by fantasy. When social action or communication is completed, modified emotional strokes are created. The act — say an act as simple as a retweet — delivers emotional recognition (as well as acknowledgment of the content of the tweet, in some fashion) but without affect.

I don’t know what this implies for social integration and development in real life, and in the real world. I admit that many people simply use social tools as a supplement to their everyday interactions and surely obtain a “good” and uncomplicated amount of emotional recognition and connection from their social media use. But there is no denying that media provide an affectless, faceless, and static mode of social engagement. The nuanced and lively experience of shared facetime simply isn’t there. Surely people satisfy much of their sense of “OK” by themselves — bolstered or anchored on mediated interactions.

What this means, I don’t know. Whether it is fragile, illusory, or a perfectly fine combination of imagination and social reality — say, best understood as some kind of modern social skill of interpretation — I can’t say. Obviously, social tools are only a very small part of a person’s social interactions. But they may be a lesser or greater factor in a persons’s sense of Self, from self-worth and importance to reputation and social relevance. And insofar as those are emotionally-grounded and mediated Self Images (affective images) they are more tightly and closely coupled to the new forms of proximity, connectedness, “presence” and so on provided by social media. And this is, I believe, something new. Absence, not presence, still governs the emotional and affective dimension of social media.

I dipped back into Eric Berne yesterday for a while. Berne was a Transactional Analyst, and has insights into the structure of human interaction that would seem obvious to us now. That, for example, interactions provide us with “strokes” of recognition; that we hunger for social contact and stimulus; that our interactions are often wonderfully organized little games whose rules we know without ever having seen them.

I was looking for material on social games, which I am sure involve more than the “gamification” techniques responsible for badges, points, leaderboards, and suchlike. Those are elements but at best substitutes for the kinds of “rewards” we truly seek. And so, as substitutes, may be limited in their appeal. What makes them curious and interesting at first, becomes habit as novelty wears off, and is ultimately an unsustainable “mechanism” of incentivizing participation.

The use of thin incentives and superficially applied game mechanics may capture small numbers of the population, but only that. And I think social products that use game mechanics recognize this. The social they facilitate and build around “gamified” interactions are both artificial and fictional. They provide a tiny amount of entertainment. For they don’t hook into narratives, real games, real outcomes, or real social relationships. We will look back on them and laugh at ourselves for having designed experiences around actions so materially and psychically pointless.

Berne was onto games people play for life. Psychological games, having real psychological costs and benefits, structured into recognizable social pastimes. Games by the name of “woe is me” and “if it weren’t for you” and “look ma, no hands.” I don’t see these as games on which to model social interactions. But I’m interested in the maneuvers that comprise these games, the narratives that identify them, and the outcomes they make probable. For those are aspects (if not the games themselves) of social interaction that do indeed come into play online.

Games are an explanation of what’s going on, of what’s happening and how to do it, that have bearing on mediated interactions. For when we don’t know what’s going on, or how to use a social tool, real life games provide a reference. A reference, mind you, that helps us understand what people are doing — not what the application is.

This gets interesting because clearly we have only scratched the surface when it comes to the social games our social tools might engage. Most of the games Berne canvasses are played across many different types of situations and using many transactional “subroutines.” A foursquare, by contrast, simply takes the cultural tokens and representations of structured games as a means of architecting interactions. There is far more power and stickiness in real life social games than there is in the minimal application of “game mechanics.”

But there are, of course, profound challenges to weaving these larger narratives into social interaction online. The fragmentation and disembedding of interaction from actual situations, for one, brackets out many of the nuances and cues used in games played in real life. Presence is thin, and social feedback is extremely slow, in most mediated environments. (Ironically, enterprise social may thicken relations and task-oriented activities to a degree that some workplace games may be more tangible to employees on social tools.)

The opportunity is there, however, for us to make use of a richer palette of interactions — one that involves deeper and more meaningful strategies and tactics, and more “valuable” outcomes. I’m working on this, but it means identifying ways in which to express real world pastimes in uses of social tools that are not readily visible on the screen or in features and functions. It’s challenging, but fascinating.

“A game is an ongoing series of complementary ulterior transactions progressing to a well-defined, predictable outcome. Descriptively it is a recurring set of transactions, often repetitious, superficially plausible, with a concealed motivation; or, more colloquially, a series of moves with a snare, or “gimmick.” Games are clearly differentiated from procedures, rituals, and pastimes by two chief characteristics: (1) their ulterior quality and (2) the payoff. Procedures may be successful, rituals effective, and pastimes profitable, but all of them are by definition candid; they may involve contest, but not conflict, and the ending may be sensational, but it is not dramatic. Every game, on the other hand, is basically dishonest, and the outcome has a dramatic, as distance from merely exciting, quality.” Eric Berne, Games People Play

“To say that the bulk of social activity consists of playing games does not necessarily mean that it is mostly ‘fun’ or that the parties are not seriously engaged in the relationship…. The essential characteristic of human play is not that the emotions are spurious, but that they are regulated.” Eric Berne, Games People Play

“Social systems only exist in and through the continuity of social practices, fading away in time.” Anthony Giddens

In matters of designing social media and social tools, I don’t think we can ever fully appreciate the importance of time. Time is largely invisible to design/ers. It has no visibility. It has no structure. No architecture. And yet time is the essential ribbon on which the life lived unfolds. It is the flow that connects, as it is the thread that is interrupted. Discontinuous when mediated, but ever unspooling for the user.

Social tools are. They “exist.” By means of predication, we are able to name them. And so attach to them attributes they do not in fact possess. Users bring social tools to life. Tools without users are not only useless, they are no longer tools. They are just dead paragraphs of code resting on silicon substrates inanimate.

Social interaction is event. Users are eventual. Activity is eventful. Time — rhythmic, habitual, repetitive, routine — is the hidden architecture of social interaction. And a primary dimension of use of social tools.

’Action’ is not a combination of ‘acts’: ‘acts’ are constituted only by a discursive moment of attention to the duree of lived-through experience. Nor can ‘action’ be discussed in separation from the body, its mediations with the surrounding world and the coherence of an acting self. — Anthony Giddens

I draw from this the importance of understanding social activities online within a context of routines and habits created and maintained by users. It’s impossible to grasp the real motives and interests of users if we look only at the actions enabled on an application’s interface. Those are actions that enable user activities, yes. But they are meaningful only if we embed these individual actions in a flow of user activities sustained over time.

For this reason, it’s important to view actions within the context of activity. Activity, again, not only on the content and media of social tools. But activity within which a user engages through his or her own interests in self image, relationships, perception, reputation, and so much more.

Giddens (among many others) would argue that we approach these “activities of the Self” in part by recourse to the discourses that govern or describe social pastimes. Presence and participation in online media are one such pastime. So how we talk about social media, and how we talk through social media, belong to this discourse.

If we can grasp the importance social media engagement has for a user, and how it is reinforced by their own activities on social tools, as well as those of their peers, then we can design better for the needs and interests of users and for the social outcomes those design decisions may have.

“Language is not content to go from a first party to a second party, from one who has seen to one who has not, but necessarily goes from a second party to a third party, neither of whom has seen. It is in this sense that language is the transmission of the word as order-word, not the communication of a sign as information. Language is a map, not a tracing.” Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus

“According to Garfinkel, social facts, that is, socially constructed, or achieved, social phenomena, and in particular an understanding of the way they are achieved as social constructions, provide the key to answering the essential sociological questions regarding the character and origin of social order and human knowledge.” editor’s intro to Ethnomethodology’s Program by Harold Garfinkel

A couple quotes from very different sources and schools of thought. Post modernism, or post structuralism, and sociology. But they share something in common: recognition that much of human experience is constructed. That its organization is a manifestation of social forces; and that these forces become meaningful to subjects by means of systems of expression that include the claims of language and speech.

We talk about social objects in user experience and interaction design disciplines. These are supposed to be contexts around which conversation occurs. Objects such as pictures and videos, about which people leave comments.

But the evolution of social tools has progressed far beyond the world of objects, and if anything, now privileges communication first, objects second. Objects become referents in the circulation of messages and posts — forms of speech preserved as textual artifacts so familiar that we forget the unique properties of digital text. Communication becomes the context in which objects appear, become personal and social, are shared and distributed.

I chose the quotes above because I believe that in social systems (online social media being social systems of a sort), one of the central questions must be the production of social facts. Social facts come into existence, if you will, as messages and communication posted, shared, and distributed on services like Facebook, twitter, blogs, and so on. We have a term for those that trend: memes.

These are little more than units of meaning with reference either to communication in the system (retweets or blog links), to real world events, to opinions (if they are quotes), and so on. There is order of a sort (it’s weak order), and organization in the circulation of these social facts.

Order and organization, because these facts are produced by users whose presence in social media is itself structured: users have followers, friends, and identities (accounts, blogs). They have habits, routines, and practices (they maintain their profiles and reputations; they revisit the same blogs, list their followers, pay attention to some users more than others, and so on. Their activity, in short, is social and not arbitrary, habitual and not random.

The medium itself is a medium of production in time. It is always reproducing itself as a system on the millions of individual actions of its members. Feeds and streams become the flow, or temporality, of this medium’s reproduction. And out of this network come social facts: communication whose relevance has risen above the noise of everyday observations and commentary.

Social facts, and not social objects, are likely the better way to approach matters of context in tools of communication. We can borrow some of the object-oriented language of social objects to describe the manner in which statements become “objective” — as tweets become “objects” when they are retweeted (they are no longer the direct expression of an author, but a reference).

Subjective expression becomes objective when it’s captured and circulated through the medium (means of production and distribution). But they are not objects — they are expressions, using language, and having an author whose intent was to make a claim by linguistic means.

The question of order remains. Networks confound conventional analyses of order. So, too, do these talk systems. The claims are not subjected to validation or legitimation by any higher authorities. There is just circulation. Volume and speed (popularity) are its most notable feature — sometimes this is bestowed upon users as a proxy for authority (experts, etc).

But the system is no more ordered than is the stock market. It’s active and reactive. Processual not architectural. Event not place. Duration not permanence.

At the risk of speaking too soon on Facebook’s announced design changes, I want to venture some reflections on what it seems Facebook is doing. I’ve long argued for capturing user interests over needs and objectives; of using social interaction design to galvanize and connect activities and communication; of allowing talk to emerge around shared interests; of extending the ego into the mediated social — friendships and groups; and of using preserving value in the stream as a means of slowing the flow of realtime feeds.

Well it seems that Facebook has got it right. The site’s new stories and timeline changes look to be a happy combination of good user and business practices. Where the Like button had become an over-used and under-whelming gesture of interest, stories will now collect emerging social attention to topics, events, activities, and news in a manner that permits topical talk to coalesce dynamically and real time within the user timeline. Relevant stories will presumably endure, as attention and activity persists, as they should.

A separate realtime ticker will serve to bubble up activity that may capture attention and springboard talk — that’s about right for the use of brief user comments as well as for the system messages about user activity that Facebook pioneered and which it has developed into a successful interaction model (I don’t have to tell anybody that I’ve uploaded pictures — Facebook does that for me). The ticker and timeline give us two distinct speeds of flow — an improvement over the very time-consuming river of recent news that used to serve as our primary lens onto friend activity. (We must wonder whether or not twitter might consider doing the same — tweets slowed down and preserved in a timeline that combines tweets with their @replies and RTs; a separate feed for realtime twitter?)

New Facebook stories, because they are slower and more durable, better aggregate social interest in shared social news and activity. This should serve us users better, by making news more interesting, and by preserving our sharing efforts. It also does Facebook a great service, for it creates traveling social real estate and social data around which to intervene with future business and promotional links, related stories, ads, and so on (all TBD and according to user permissions and receptiveness.)

Facebook stories motivate us to create. There being two main views of identity — create your identity or discover your identity — Facebook seems to empower both. Story creation becomes social, and as it becomes social, creates discovery (I believe Zuckerberg even called it serendipity). Again, this aligns with the 21st century Self — identity created by taking up interests and socialized by interests shared and reflected by others. All the while leaving behind valuable social data.

Facebook then has managed a new way of engaging latent social graph interaction by means of interest graphs. That is, social graph activity founded not simply on a relationship, but connected by relationship and actualized around topical sharing talk and talk. It would seem that our prior complaints about Facebook having mistakenly designed itself around a single homogeneous social graph, at the expense of the interest graph, are now moot.

Clearly, they’ve done a lot of good work and smart thinking at Facebook. Google+ needs to get on top of topical circles. And find a way to bubble up conversations in the stream so that they, too, become story-like. (At present, talk on G+ still aggregates around people doing the most talking, with the greatest number of followers. Soapbox interaction instead of the more nuanced interaction possibilities on Facebook.)

I’m looking forward to seeing how this plays out. But like them or not, Facebook’s redesign will push other feed and stream-based companies to focus on stories over narration; of tales told together over isolated appeals for attention and response. I’ve long thought that social media are talk media — facilitating a new kind of talk on the basis of its intrinsic interest in shared, social engagement, for stretches or episodes of time, preserved or punctuating a daily life increasingly attentive of mediated relationships and interactions. Talk by means of brief statements and media-rich expressions (posting a video to friends is talk), soliciting the interest of those who may happen to notice and find interest in it. What sociologists have called an “open state of talk”: neither formal nor task-oriented, not a telling, and never finished. In the book of online social, Facebook has turned a new chapter. Let’s see how it writes.

Gowalla re-launched its service today in a blog post titled: A New Gowalla. The move confirms what most of us already know — gamification has but a limited appeal. Seems both Foursquare and Gowalla reached this conclusion at about the same time. (Will SCVNGR be next?)

Gamification was meant to provide a more interesting user experience. It was supposed to hook users and sustain their engagement with incremental rewards and incentives. And it does — some of the time, and for some users. But gamification, if and when there’s no actual game involved (and there wasn’t, on Gowalla or Foursquare) is at best a cynical use of user time, effort, and attention.

By cynical, I don’t mean that it’s not in some ways rewarding or even entertaining and fun. By cynical, I mean that it asks users to engage in an activity even if they don’t believe in it. Cynicism is the act of maintaining a practice while not taking it seriously. One can be cynical about ideas, routines, products, brands, whatever — but never be cynical about people. It comes through in the end.

So I’m all for the pivot away from gamification to storytelling (Gowalla) and Lists (Foursquare). Our aim in local social ought to be preserving value in the stream. Not just the stream as in the feed. Stream as in the flow of daily life. Where we go, what we like, what we recommend, why, to whom… There is still such a great amount of value in both customers and retailers to be taken advantage of. Games undervalued both the value in the relationship of loyal patrons to merchants; and of value communicated, shared, and distributed to friends and peers.

Stories, lists, local guides — these are better “narratives” for the challenges and opportunities specific to local social. They lay the ground work for social deal distribution. For live and real time deal or sale sharing. For the convergence of commercial habits, perhaps even some kinds of social shopping, around affinity interests. What people like about their neighborhood spots. The similarities among patrons of a new bar; an old video shop; a friendly barrista. These are the local and social elements of the kinds of stories and narratives we might tell to our friends. The characters, locations, props, and settings of the stories we might write with friends.

Gowalla and Foursquare took their gaming to the ego. They fed self image on the stage of “me.” Points, mayors — these are fine and good if all you want to do is make some social distinctions. But they are wholly and completely orthogonal to the value distinctions that define and by which we should measure local social. There, both the narratives of my everyday, the stories of my loyalties, routines, and pastimes; and the value of my local relationships are far more important than the mayorship of me.

So I’m pleased to see that local social is heading in what I consider a more fitting direction. I hope users come along. I’d like to see the industry continue to eat away at the blind advertising and the dull marketing that so many small businesses must resort to in order to get the word out. I’d like to see non profits benefit from the outreach efforts of committed volunteers. And for the local retailer to enjoy the sustenance of neighborhood patrons — small but meaningful help in an Amazonian ecosystem.

“Talk is an intrinsic feature of nearly all encounters and also displays similarities of systemic form. Talk ordinarily manifests itself as conversation. ‘Conversation’ admits of a plural, which indicates that conversations are episodes having beginnings and endings in time-space. Norms of talk pertain not only to what is said, the syntactical and semantic form of utterances, but also to the routinized occasions of talk. Conversations, or units of talk, involve standardized opening and closing devices, as well as devices for ensuring and displaying the credentials of speakers as having the right to contribute to dialogue. The very term ‘ bracketing’ represents a stylized insertion of boundaries in writing.” Anthony Giddens

I have long been fascinated by the intrinsic structure and order of conversation. A form of interaction that supplies both cues for how to proceed, expressions and communication of a non-linguistic form (feelings, emotions, pathos, enthusiasm!), internal rules about what is being talked about, tacit cues for passing along the conversation, handling of expectations regarding replies, responses, queries and the like, and of course, a shared experience and sense of time.

Good conversation is such an under-appreciated form of daily art and craft. And it’s not simple. Nor is it straightforward. Good conversation can bring about change. It can produce results. We move each other to new positions — if we’re good at conversation. Conversation can walk a pair of friends to a promise, a shared commitment, a decision or consensus. Good conversation can handle epic failures and still finish with a flair and a laugh.

We might be losing this art. And the pleasures enjoyed with it. Good conversation takes skill in handling both the involvement of people and the topics at hand. In ways, we seem to be losing both the ability to manage and negotiate the prism of feelings a good conversation may unhinge. As we may also be losing our ability both to mine a topic at depth, or traverse an escape to something completely different.

Most of all, we may be losing the wonder and spark of connection that a good conversation provides. That would be a shame. It’s not something that comes through the medium — for it’s in the eyes, the flesh, and again, in time.

While I am fascinated by this medium for its ability to create new kinds of conversation, I think we should protect and sustain conversation old-school style. Lose that, and we won’t have much to talk about.

The key to designing social media well lies in designing it for a user’s social interests. Conventional software addresses the user’s task-oriented needs and objectives. But social media succeed when they engage the user’s social interests.

Social interests involve two psychological insights: that users are interested in others generally (social activities, or what’s going on); and users are interested in others particularly (another user).

Each of these is doubled up by the self-reflexivity of social action: users are interested in how they themselves appear to others in general (one’s self image, impressions made, the stuff of “self-presentation” common in social media); and another particular user’s relationship to him or her (e.g. their interest in us).

From this we can quickly see that social media are not a matter of straightforward goal-oriented interaction design. As users, we are aware (if not consciously) of what and how social activities proceed. We  become interested in ourselves, in how we are perceived, and in the relation others take up to us.

Thus the interest captivated by social media is twofold: it’s a self-interest and an Other-interest. And the habits that engage users with social media engage users are not just the interaction between a user and the site, but between the user and other users. In the course of using social tools, reciprocity by others, and our mutual recognition of each other, deepens our interests and interactions.

Because social tools use a medium that works by representing our identities and activities, representations themselves become interesting. Klout is an example of meta data used to create social reputation that becomes motivating in and of itself. Many other representations that have become meaningful (for better or worse) include follower numbers on twitter, being listed, circled, commented on; or being retweeted, cited, tagged, and badged.

Activities that would normally pass by unnoticed in the daily course of work and life accrue different meanings when they are captured and represented online. We become extended. These extensions of ourselves (our social media presences) reflect on us. In turn, we become interested in an externalized and represented “version” of ourselves.

This is possible, as a motivation of action and habit, only because we’re able to form and sustain the ideas involved in extended presence. The idea of friendship, the idea of relationships, the idea of popularity, of importance and attention are all motivating and interesting. Social media can seem to make friends count for more than friendship. In some cases this is positive. In others, it is undermining.

To the social interaction designer, this doesn’t matter. All mediated activities that users may take an interest in become motives and those motives become habit — the ingredient, if you will, of successful social tool design and adoption.

The task of social interaction design is to capture and sustain user interest, even if it’s an interest in the abstraction and idea of accumulating friendships, getting noticed, becoming popular, and so on. Doing that requires successfully generating and feeding interests.

To the extent that these might produce meaningful and valuable information in the form of commerce, viral communication, social marketing or meta data, human interests are critical factors of social interaction design. A site or system that fails to captivate these basic social interests will wither on the vine.

The user may become interested in any of the following. Note that in each case we are talking about the perceived status of an interest and relation. Social realities are all subjective, interpreted, and can only be validated to the extent that communication provides truthful and sincere verification. Social media require neither to be successful.

Social and interpersonal interests grow from Self to include an Other in person; Others as friends, peers, groups; Others in general (an audience); and online social activities and pastimes.

The user’s interests develop around:

• his or her own self image as represented
• his or her image and presentation as a reflection of acknowledgment by others
• a particular person the interest that person has in oneself
• a scene or social activitysocial position, or who’s who
• an audience or community
• news and social facts, as circulated by known people

These personal and social interests become habits of use. Habits form not around needs and goals, but again, around the deeper motives that structure individual personality and sense of self. Habits are supported and extended by the tools themselves, and are ever evolving with change in the industry and technologies. Social technologies are simply the functional application of individual and social techniques, applied to identity, relating, interacting, and communicating.

User’s activities can include:

• collecting socially relevant items (including friends)
• accumulating socially relevant distinction
• sself promotion, brand promotion, site promotion, profile promotion (social capital)
• appealing to others through requests, posts (bog, video, audio), and comments, etc
• participating in collaboration (wiki, lists, tagging)
• extending daily activities such as shopping, bookmarking, keeping in touch
• avoiding risks, embarrassment, social faux pas and failures (real or imagined)
• work and work-related successes (admittedly more or less interesting)
• social games, including socialized games, and gamified social
• small habits, from instagramming to music sharing
• influence monitoring, projection of persona and reputation

To conclude, then, social tools can never be grasped from a technical or functional perspective alone. Granted, they are designed, architected, built and extended by means of current industry technologies and standards. But their use, and use is the central orientation of any user experience or interaction designer, is explained not on the basis of what tools do, but why and how they are used. The uses of social tools are not utilitarian — comprising of tasks, needs, or goals. Rather, they are intrinsically psychological and social. And as such, comprise of the relational interests people take in their own self and relations to others as represented and communicated online.

“Structure thus refers, in social analysis, to the structuring properties allowing the ‘binding’ of time-space in social systems, the properties which make it possible for discernibly similar social practices to exist across varying spans of time and space and which lend them ‘systemic’ form. To say that structure is a ‘virtual order’ of transformative relations means that social systems, as reproduced social practices, do not have ‘structures’ but rather exhibit ‘structural properties’ and that structure exists, as time-space presence, only its instantiations in such practices and as memory traces orienting the conduct of knowledgeable human agents.” Anthony Giddens

I like Anthony Giddens and a lot of my social interaction design thinking draws on his handling of systems and structural properties reproduced by acting agents, or people. It allows us to describe the systemic features of social tools and online social interactions without losing sight of users.

User-centricity is key to approaching any social interaction design challenges. And yet in mediated social interactions, emergent phenomena are both likely and necessary. People interact with people; any social service that fails to engage people with each other fails, period.

The challenge for any social theoretical view of “organized” human relations is how to both recognize structure and system without selling short acting subjects and the interests that motivate their actions. Giddens provides a compelling “both and” view of this analytical choice, calling the reproduction of system features “structuration.” (Structuralists have been known for dismissing the relevance of human agency, claiming that structures determine individual actions.)

This might all seem like high falutin gobbledy-gook, but designers design by generalized principles — by necessity. Designers need to work with models of social interaction, as well as software/application interaction (e.g. human computer interaction). Those models are accurate only insofar as they generalize individual behaviors and activities into social systemic features and structural properties.

User-centric design therefore needs a model of system and structural factors that accommodates user choices and actions without subsuming them to “design (or system) influence.”

Regardless of our personal views on design influence and user behavior, our design principles require general descriptions. Opinions and observations don’t make models. Structuration, I think, offers a theoretical advantage by placing structural and systemic properties in the service of the aggregate individual actions of actors (members, users). Design influences behavior, but in turn responds to behaviors in the aggregate (as emergent social events).

With structuration, designers can point to both design (system and structure) features as well as user interests without falling into a theoretical hole. Both design features and user actions can be rationally explained and inter-woven into a holistic analysis of design requirements and likely social outcomes.

Brian Solis has a post out today that struck me for its leadin picture. Accurate or not, I’m not sure, but the picture shows what looks to be a gatorade social media monitoring station. Command and control like.

Now I’m a fan of Brian’s and respect and follow his industry contributions and thought leadership. So this has nothing to do with his post — nor much to do with the claim that brands need to both listen and learn from and through their engagements on social media. (Strikes me as good, if not obvious advice.)

I just am a bit offset by this image. If it is corporate communications — a social media monitoring station — then it does look a bit command and control, doesn’t it? And if it’s a command and control center, then how is that any different from, say, other kinds of command and control centers?  Get my drift?

Am I the only one waiting for a voice to appeal through the gray uncourtesy telephone: “Tuttle!” “Tuttle!” — images of corporate duct work and pneumatic deliveries not far behind…

Do you want a relationship with a brand that engages in this manner? A fake relationship that has been initiated and sustained from behind a wall of opacity? Rendered on a screen of analytical schemas that you, consumer, are likely little less than another moving target? A tweeting account with klout to count?

Maybe it’s just me — likely not. Command and control is command and control. It’s wrong metaphorically and in practice. It is distant, removed, and operates on the false idealism of an organization’s desire to regulate relationships with customers and an audience in a world of as if. As if — fake, false, and insincere.

Sincerely, I do hope that social media provides better communication and engagement at both ends of the wire. It will, otherwise, simply become absorbed into the practices of yesteryear.

There have been a lot of signs recently that social media is prime for some critical pause and reflection. Anemic growth in user acquisition, a sense of fatigue, copycat sites and services, and unworkable business models all point to industry challenges ahead. As Mashable reports, daily deals may be at the end of an era.

The daily deal space was bound to contract. Retailers and marketers know that deals do not loyal customers make. And their novelty has worn off for both customers and retailers.

But most interestingly, deals offered by Groupon and even Facebook failed to become social. Groupon hasn’t yet tried to socialize its deals — using sharing models to enhance deals and galvanize distribution, for example. Facebook, in spite of being ideally positioned, still has difficulty un-intrusively blending commerce with its users’ social networking activities.

The promise of socialized deal distribution, benefiting customers (and their friends), as well as retailers, still stands. And deserves closer examination. Mobile commerce, for example, is nigh upon us. Payment systems should soon provide a boost to both mobile and social networking commerce. And social networking services will inevitably get smarter about what their users (and friends) are interested in.

The daily deal has taken advantage of few of the core benefits of social networking and the real-time social web. These include social graphs, interest graphs, and social interaction models — from connecting to sharing. The deal simply offers a price reduction. And little or nothing by way of relevance, individual or social.

Marketers have long sought after not personalized one-to-one marketing, but socialized one-to-friends marketing. Social, not relationship marketing. This kind of marketing seeks to leverage natural and organic connections, communication, and activity. As far as social commerce goes, then, I see the promise of social deals as yet unsolved.

–from Gravity7.com

So Facebook, confronting a conundrum on where to press on user activity — Places or Pages — has nullified the Place checkin. In favor of location tagging, which is now possible from inside of Facebook posts (no need to be mobile), and free of realtime constraints (can be past, present, or future. More here.)

Now, besides the obvious underutilization of Place checkins by users, Facebook may have had further internal reasons for demoting the checkin. These may have been due to bifurcated data storage on businesses listed as Places vs those listed with business Pages. And so funneling location-oriented activity to the more common practices on Facebook would make sense.  But be that as it may, Facebook’s abandonment of the Place checkin raises doubts for others services, Foursquare most significantly.

There is a problem with the implementation of checkins at the level of basic social first principles. Checkins are a non-social and solitary activity, viewed strictly as user actions. Checkins are a “I am here” expression or update but lacking in any clear social context. All social interaction online requires some amount of social context in order for it to generate follow on activity.

The foursquare checkin, having been put in service of badges and achievements (the game-like gamification of social without a game itself to supply good motives and rewards), was a shallow and poor implementation of location-based social interaction. It suffers now from the “Who cares?” and “So what’s next?” problem of situated social context. The checkin is neither a) addressed to anybody in particular (in fact, it’s addressed to nobody in general) and b) solicits no clear follow on activity by having c) no social context.

Social interaction online is always a poor imitation of real life. But as we build and design social services, we draw from what is real to thicken what is virtual. Learning as we go, and as our technologies enable us to accomplish new forms of communication and social action online that we simply are unable to in the physically constrained world of the everyday.

So there are, in social interactions, a few basic principles that we leverage and extend where possible in our online services.

First, direct action and communication. This is social action that has a direct and clear appeal to another person or persons. Gestures, communication, and social actions (e.g. using “games,” rules, codes, rituals, as well as symbolic mediation supplied by objects and signifiers — scores, media, etc) that are directed at an audience or recipient. Direct social action clearly solicits engagement and can be easily picked up by others.

Indirect communication and social action. This is not directed explicitly or clearly to or at a recipient or audience, but is rather mediated by the social service to appeal indirectly to those who may observe the activity. Communication is responded to, and action followed up, when and where others observe and elect to engage. The inefficiency of indirect communication and action (it can be missed, for it does not directly address anyone) is compensated for by its “reaching” (in theory) a greater number of people. To wit, tweets.

Aggregated, or meta social communication and action. This is social interaction made visible and observable by means of systems that capture and represent overall or aggregate activities of incidental audiences and populations. By instilling this kind of activity in symbolic and signifying features — possible because we can count, order, sort, rank, and distinguish both individual and collective activities — aggregate activity becomes meaningful within a system extrinsic to everyday life. Collectivities and audiences then emerge as their members become connected (social networking), as topics and themed activities are made relevant, and as actions accrue meaning (from posts and comments to Likes and +1s to badges to scores).

Checkins 1.0 failed to deliver on all three counts.

In terms of direct communication and action, the checkin suffered from the “Who cares” factor. Who cares where I am, if they are not here with me? There’s never been a clear articulation of why physical location becomes relevant to another individual if — and this is the crux of social — if there is no social context, shared activity, or relevant communication attached to the location declaration. So who cares where I am, if my declaration (checkin) of where I am is unaccompanied by any direct social or communicative appeal. As in, meet me here. I want to share this experience with you. And so on. (Bell’s first words by telephone: “Mr Watson, come here, I want to see you.” Words disguising an ironic but not surprising appeal to thwart the telephone’s essential differences: invisibility and distance.)

Checkins 1.0 failed on the count of indirect social action and communication. Here they encounter the “So what’s next?” factor. In any socially situated context of action, participants implicitly understand what can be done next, or “how to proceed,” based on place, social context, and social interaction cues. None of these are supplied by the checkin itself; nor are any furnished by services such as Facebook or Foursquare. In fact, Foursquare’s counter-social execution may provide many users good reason not to acknowledge another’s checkin, nor to engage with it (checkins being for an individual’s badges and mayorships). There has been no social interaction suggested or developed by the checkin.

On the final count, that of aggregate social action and communication, checkins 1.0 again failed. Disappointingly, because this is where social tools can accomplish feats of social mediation impossible in the everyday. Game-like badge, social ranking, and mayorship (leaderboards and the desired status of being special) “incentives” are simply too thin to become mainstreamed social commonplace (ritual). So the “small form” of social gaming appealed to a fraction of users too small to care about, and by definition unscalable (the population’s core values and practices exist at a small scale; and their activities cannot scale without wider adoption). And checkins 1.0 were not implemented in any large form social game or practices, wherein location checkins would have accrued value to other practices — social practices extrinsic to the “game constraints.” (I contrast small and large form games as those providing socialization of games vs gamification of social)

Core principles of social interaction should be the designer’s touchstone when building for social at scale. The checkin 1.0 simply took too small a view of its own potential and social opportunities. Checkin 2.0 may yet succeed where 1.0 has now tapped the wall.

A checkin 2.0 would have to successfully meet one or more of the conditions of social action and communication described above.

On direct action, it would successfully couple to responses, replies, sharing, and ongoing activity with one or more individuals. Imagine, for example, that tweeted location checkins (twitter location tweets or Foursquare checkins) were printed with response action buttons. (This making use of what I covered in my action streams proposal.) Checkins would have communicative value for being easily communicated. The checkin would in effect be only a reference of a statement/post/update for which there were a structured communication response (“I’m coming” “I have been there too” “I like it” and so on — endless possibilities). And social actions of different kinds could be enabled similarly, for example to create social distribution of checkin references (serving, perhaps, social deal sharing).

On indirect action, it would successfully facilitate possibilities and promote the probability of these possibilities of social action and communication based on rendering checkins visible and observable. Facebook is doing this now by demoting the mobile checkin in favor of a location tag that can be assigned to posts and activities with atemporal specificity (past, present, or future). In other words, it has increased the number of uses and observations (where locations are noticed) of location tags — presumably to learn from use what they might be good for. Location can become incredibly interesting if and only if it is wrapped in relevant and action-enabled online social contexts. It then becomes a reference around which additional action and communication can become meaningful to people.

On aggregate social action, the checkin 2.0 can succeed if it is given new follow on life and significance by means of social practices made possible by new social technologies and techniques of use (socio-technical features — or design features having social uses). There would be countless ways to design interesting and compelling activities and interactions around aggregated views, trends, events and more derived from individual checkins. Color was and is one attempt at developing new experiences from the coincidensity of the locations of individuals.

It is that time to recognize the failure of some social media (1.0?) features and practices and to innovate based on what we can recognize were the reasons for failure. In many cases, I think, we should take responsibility for having drawn too small a circle around the social uses of our designs. For having extrapolated too optimistically from features and uses that appealed primarily to early adopter and core user types. For having been too set on our own business models and startup schemes to admit to our own social blindspots, and misperceptions. And for having neglected to recognize and appreciate, with earnest intent, the motives and interests of other people (designers have a world view). And, in my opinion, for failing to integrate fundamental principles of social interaction, by means of social logics, in the rationale with which we design technologies for social use.

It’s out there, in the air, a murmur if not clear as writing on the wall. Hushed whispers about feed fatigue. Seasonal slowdown. A proliferation of bots. And among the real users: a sense that it’s always more of the same.

Twitter, Facebook, Google, competing for attention where there’s never been enough of it. What’s next? What’s new? And even, what can be new?

Signs that today’s social media have become tedious and redundant are real. And none too surprising. Our industry has designed and built according to practices established by the competition. All social tools are similar — different in ways but to the mainstream, more similar than different.

Copycat design assures some success. Keeps the risk at bay. But is no guarantee that new users will adopt and populate a new platform, tool, or service. So design collapses to the certainties; features continue what’s commonplace. Innovation is sacrificed to familiarity.

It’s not that social media is nearing an end. It’s that its first round and a bit of innovation is nearing an end. Those of us still using it regularly and frequently have very strong habits of use. For most, our levels of engagement just don’t add up. They’re neither rewarding in and of themselves, nor beneficial for other reasons. Given the opportunity cost of being heavily engaged in social media, the time spent for the return just isn’t enough to stick.

What comes next has to be more compelling. In design terms, and in terms of social interaction. Our use of social data and must make “socially informed” online experiences more interesting. Our use of social features must make “socially engaged” online experiences more rewarding.

It is more easy to improve “socially informed” experiences. For there, the challenge is in connecting and surfacing relevance through smart use of social data: data on what users have done, selected, shared, and so on.

The challenge in “socially engaged” experiences is more difficult for the reason that it relies on deeper and sustained user engagement. This is the conversational and interactive end of the media spectrum. Social tools and services that connect up our habits of online talk and action.

This is still a very me-centric medium. Ongoing debates about influence and ROI metrics attest to this. We’re not yet at the point of being able to leverage social units — be they circles, groups, or communities, loosely or formally defined.

Until this becomes possible, large amounts of activity will continue to float down the stream under-utilized. We produce a lot of noise, yes. But this is in part because so many signals go unrecognized.

I hold out hope that our industry can tackle this. In large part, because it’s how we socialize. We are social, and we do pay attention to each other. And when things get interesting, we get engaged.

It’s a matter of creating value. Of our learning how better to recognize it when it’s contributed or shared, and of how to distribute it so that it reaches the right audiences.

Perhaps this fatigue is just seasonal. Perhaps it’s in some measure a reflection of greater economic and cultural fatigue. To the extent that we acknowledge it, however, we’re readying ourselves for new growth and innovation. With some good thinking, luck, and funding, we’ll get there. It’s in our DNA.

“A timetable, such as a schedule of the times at which trains run, might seem at first sight to be merely a temporal chart. But actually it is a time-space ordering device, indicating both when and where trains arrive. As such, it permits the complex coordination of trains and their passengers and freight across large tracts of time-space.” — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity

Just came across this passage, and I had to immediately think about its implications for social interaction design. We live in a time when real time media are structured by chronological flow. Communication and talk are transformed by the medium into information, which is then distributed in the order it was published. Media consumption occurs on a first come first served basis.

This forces those who are keen to curate content, and to reshare and distribue what they find interesting, to live in the stream. It’s an enormously time-consuming occupation. And whether curators suffer from real attention deficit disorder or not, time spent in the flow is an unnatural kind of time. An external, discontinuous, interruptive and distracting kind of time — very ungroovy and arbitrary.

Feeds are everywhere and having become a common way of producing activity on social networking sites and services, they dominate our present-day consumption of social media content. But saying that is to say also that talk has been left to flow with very little meta-level organization. Talk flows in the form of messages that, for the most part, lack both a targeted recipient and a topical description. Status updates, tweets, posts don’t even have the basic addressing and subject lines of email. There’s no browsing this kind of talk — you simply have to be “in it.”

Could it be that we want for some meta organization of feeds and streams? If so, then perhaps we need to recognize that information flow is a form of talk. A form of talk that could be better consumed, and which would be more useful and compelling, if it had some of the basic organization of face-to-face talk. And for those not in the talk, more meta data about talk so that it can be more easily browsed and recovered.

The alternative, it seems to me, is that we continue to live with feeds as unstructured and chronological flows of stand-alone messaging. We’ll eventually have filters and search by which to separate relevance from noise. And with which to find lost gems. This model may work for those of us heavily invested in the medium. But for the vast majority, it is bound to seem overwhelming, ineffective, and arbitrary.

I think this is worth chipping away at. There are some very good reasons not to overly structure the communication served by social tools. But I suspect that there is still an iceberg’s worth of utility — personal and social — left to produce in real time social media. It will require us to think about organizing time and designing temporality. Neither of these are in the web design vernacular. The navigation of time has been tackled in other practices. Perhaps our time is yet to come.

It’s that time of year — time to vote up your favorite SXSW panels! I’m excited to finally present core social interaction design concepts. This presentation will canvas essential elements of design and strategy for modeling and executing on social media design.

I will review some of my core concepts, from user-centricity and framing interactions, to core personality types and social dynamics and practices. We will look at how design, marketing, and engineering teams can anticipate the outcomes of social features and functionalities. I will ground these in the fundamental approaches provided by sociology and psychology, from user agency and action to interaction and communication models. We will learn how social systems involve both bias and feedback loops, and examine where these are relevant, from realtime feeds and filters to social games.

I look forward to seeing you there! In the meantime, please pass this around, vote, retweet, comment, and all that good stuff!

Cheers!

Vote here: Social Interaction Design Concepts and Insights

“We are best served here by taking the general model of the game as a point of orientation. This will also explain to us why it is that sports programmes, especially where replays are concerned, count more as entertainment than as news. A game, too, is a kind of doubling of reality, where the reality perceived as the game is separated off from normal reality without having to negate the latter.” Niklas Luhmann

Interesting thoughts here from one of my favorite media theorists, Niklas Luhmann. A minor and somewhat obvious point perhaps: games are a form of entertainment, and both forms involve a doubling of reality.

Now apply this to social media, and social games played using social sites and networks. (Disclosure: I play the more social social games, and few of the gamey social games.)  These social games are thin on entertainment value. They sacrifice immersion within a game experience for connectedness across a player’s real online identities and activities.

For this, social games built around checkins, posts, comments, likes, and so on become compelling because they gamify a player’s personal reality. Not because they immerse the player in the reality of a game. It is the player’s own (and very real) world that is gamified.

These kinds of social games (I call them large form social games) extend the player’s ego and online reputation — regardless of whether they do so accurately or not. Ego extension figures into the player’s motivation: game play sustains the player’s view of self, as it is represented by a score, position, badges, etc; and insofar as it changes.

How is this related to Luhmann’s observation? Well, most online games connect to “actual” or “real” online realities. Game activity can be tweeted, posted to facebook, and so on. The “doubling of reality” Luhmann attributes to media-based entertainment becomes “news” within the actual reality of online social media.

This tells us that the distinction between “fictional” and “real” experiences is already blurred online. It is easy to pass “real” news into online commentary, and game-like activities back into “real” online habits. The medium used is the same, and for this, the distinction between one experience and the other owes to context and practice, not to representation and form.

Social media, which have leveraged gamification with limited success, must then confront the matter of their relevance within “real” daily realities. How well, and using what services, do online activities stick in “real” life? Where time, image, message, and event are bound to laws of physical reality. And more importantly, where the ego does not encounter representations of itself but is constrained by immediacy?

Do social games — with their incentives, badges, and leaderboards, ever extend into daily life? Can they only be played online? Which is the more likely future scenario: gamification of more of daily life; or a whithering interest in playing games online?

Google finally seems to have found a viable path to social. Twitter has taken on substantial investment for growth. Facebook just released its marketing api for advertising and stories. Mobile usage is up, way up, and Apple’s iPad seems to have filled a need, if not created one. Social is not over, it’s very much here to stay.

And yet at the same time, heavy users are experiencing “feed fatigue.” Google+ works a lot like Facebook (with notable differences, and a distinct culture). Twitter remains a very noisy, highly random, and disorganized river of content. And “there’s an app for that” is really no longer funny. If social tools are the media’s newest medium, the ecosystem is a lot like cable tv. There’s just too many to choose from, too much on, and not enough worth watching.

The age of communication has found its medium. It’s a flow-based network of social arteries pulsating with lifeblood but at risk from the many obstacles that challenge any fluid distribution system: dead ends, eddies, backwaters, floodplains, waterfalls, and dams.

And while it’s good and accurate to call this flow (which mass and broadcast were not), our mental picture of flow is from the shoreline. The metaphor should not be of a river rushing past. Rather, it should be from the bobbing tumbling vantage point of a swimmer barely keeping head above water. If you use the tools, you’re in the flow.

All of this raises an interesting and pressing conundrum to those who would like to use social media to commercial benefit. Marketers, advertisers, coupon distributors, brand managers, event organizers — you name it. Commerce in this medium is challenging. And the reasons for these challenges suggest both promise and risk.

We have heard about the art of listening. About influencers. Conversation and engagement. And these are good and often inspirational guidance if not also insight into how best to leverage the medium. We have used analytics, set metrics, and redesigned campaigns to best get satisfying numbers. But as months and years in social media pass, clarity is as hard to achieve now as ever. A lot of folks still cannot put their finger on what, exactly, they are getting.

Flows do not flow equally. Streams, or feeds, are not the same — tools, target markets, content interests, activities, influencers. The currents driving social capital accumulation and expenditure flow quickly and change location and direction often. It is hard to find targets in flows. Influence alone is often an imperfect measure of a person or group’s social capital — for it cannot fully account for responsivity.

This responsivity of influence is attention, and is the proper measure of influence. Because influence is not owned, but is only a relationship between “influencer” and audience. And this relationship changes, as influencers themselves change their sites of use, their habits and activities, topical interests, professions, and so on. And, of course, as audiences, too, drift towards and away from what interests them.

We see this today, in the rapid population growth of Google+ and the hyperactivity of circling. As users jump into a new current, they aggregate where the activity is. River barges and boat parties, not the stream itself, get attention. Plus 1s, comments, circling and circling back — all are indicators of how this new flow system works. And the nuances and subtleties of social capital accumulation and attention mechanics on Google+ give it unique character.

Marketers do not yet even have the tools by which to observe this activity. Let alone the insights to make accurate observations and distinctions. It’s not yet clear how to appropriately set up and engage in Google+. Nor do we have anything but circumstantial tips and advice yet to go by.

Marketing into the stream presents unique challenges. For not only is it uncertain what impact influencers may have for marketers (it’s the most influential who are perhaps least likely to respond to commercial solicitations), the dynamics of any particular channel present real and material differences. One campaign cannot fit all. Either all kinds of users, or all kinds of streams.

Not only is it difficult to identify and target people and their social graphs or circles, there are also the matters of content interests and activity. People’s interests persist and change, along with who they share those interests with. Clearly, this is informed by the channel or site in which the person is active. Interest sharing on Facebook is different from interest sharing on Google+, and twitter. And who takes up those interests and either engages or shares, differs too. (For that individual’s own reasons.)

And activity varies across channels. Due in some part to users’ past or emerging habits, and in some part to the channel’s own dynamics. So how people interact, contribute, engage, and share differs from site to site, platform to platform. But activity is perhaps more important than influence — for in a medium of flow, the rapids are more valuable than still water.

Analytics and tools, in the meantime, are designed to present marketers and advertisers with some version of what they want to see. Which is, themselves. Mirrored, echoed, shared, cited, linked to, recommended, liked, and purchased. But as long as these activities are presented out of context of the who that shares, the why others reshare, and when and how rapidly activity occurs, these commercial interests miss out on valuable insights.

Flow-based activity centered on individuals, distributed by peers and audiences, and acted upon in social contexts should offer real and meaningful information on brand and product potential. No other medium offers the possibility of witnessing the dynamics of attention prior to consumer decision-making. Nor the social contextuality of that decision-making.

Analytics wants to make the marketer happy and employed. But a raft of metrics that primarily count direct activity on commercial mentions omits social context and presents little to use for the purpose of engagement. Companies will try and sometimes succeed, and do more of what works, learning little about what else could have worked. For that kind of information is not easily rendered — either in brand specific data and stats, or in generic trends.

These are unique challenges but rife with opportunity. The tools do work, and are continually redesigned and enhanced to accommodate marketing and advertising needs and interests. Facebook’s marketing api is an example of this, and is indeed very granular. Google certainly has intentions of its own — and has the merchant relationships to capitalize on. Add to these coupons, on-site and mobile payments, and socialized deal distribution and there should be much more to come.

Just this weekend, in London and elsewhere, crowds used mobile devices to target stores. They assembled faster than the authorities could keep up with them. And descended upon targeted retailers to get what they wanted. Unfortunately, and tragically, they had no intention of buying any of it. But they did prove that our new media can be used to move goods speedily from the storefront to the home.

This medium has different properties. It does not broadcast packaged messaging and imagery like the media of old. Its distribution mechanics are entirely different. And it captures attention and captivates audiences according to dynamics and for reasons explained by people, not messaging.

Mastering use of this medium is an evolving art. Those who have had campaign successes should be proud. It’s not easy. But they should push, too, on the countless products and services populating the marketplace to better grasp and deliver on the medium’s unique qualities. There is more here than can be simply measured. And success, as always, is not in a number.