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‘…people can and will carve out the time for social media IF they see a reason to.’

There is a prevailing thought among pundits that ‘real people’ don’t have time for social media, which, if true, has major implications for anyone behind a social web startup wanting to build a monetizable audience

To understand ‘real people’ and their usage of social web properties, you have to remember that the assumption that everyone using social media wants to use it for some business-related purposes is simply not true (this can be anything from exposure, branding, connectivity, relationship building, customer service, reputation monitoring and management, and so on). It may appear that way to us because we’re a part of that hyper-connected, early-adopting, digerati that acts that way. If you have to ask questions like “how much does it cost?” (in terms of time investment in this case, but otherwise also monetary investment), then you are also one of those people. People who use social media for business-related purposes may not only use different services (or experiment with them) but are likely to use them with different frequency, and because they have different intentions (goals) they will participate differently too.

The average person - the ‘real person’ - however, is not bound by any mandatory minimum requirements, platforms, sites/services, methodologies of participation, and so on. As is often said, there are no conditions to participation (for these people) apart from basic rules etiquette. when ‘real people’ participate in social media, they do so because they want to, not because they feel obliged to or have to because of their job. They pick a handful of sites they enjoy and use the sites as often or as infrequently as suits their lifestyle. These users aren’t bound by requirements punditsare (actively monitoring, participating, and writing about the latest releases as well as the changes to popular platforms), or businesses are (again, certain minimum time and monetary commitment, various different platforms to understand and leverage, participation, and so on).

In fact just by creating a ‘real person’ scale we perpetuate the artificial requirements and classifications for users. Organic and holistic social media participation has no such requirements or categories.

To get an idea of what ‘real people’ think of social media, I did a non-scientific poll of 12 of my closest friends. Half of them are college students (in their third or fourth year of study) and the other half are people I graduated with and have full-time (9-5) jobs. They are nowhere near as active or proficient when it comes to participating on the social web, and are largely uninterested in the blogs I read, the communities I participate in, and the trends I monitor. Needless to say, they are ‘real people’. When asked why they don’t use more social media sites/services and use them more often (most of them participate on just one service, Facebook) the answer, was unanimously that they don’t feel the need to (i.e. participating wouldn’t give them much of value). When asked if it had anything to do with time commitments, they unanimously said that if they saw value in something, they would re-prioritize, but they don’t so they do other things instead.

In fact, almost all of them subscribe to and read my Twitter feed (but either don’t have accounts or have inactive accounts), and read stories from the Digg front page (but don’t submit, vote, or comment). In fact, one of my friends loves StumbleUpon and uses it regularly to find interesting content, but he only uses the ‘I like it’ and ‘no more like this’ buttons, and is completely uninterested in the community aspect of the toolbar or the ‘send to’ sharing feature. I’m sure a more general survey will find the results conforming to the Pareto Principle.

The more interesting conversation as you can see is not whether ‘real’ people do or don’t have time for social media, rather, what value social media provides for ‘real’ people and how can we increase that value to get them to participate more? The value these services can create for them will determine if they will adopt a service, what services they will adopt, and how frequently they will participate, and it’s at the point of value creation [pdf] that the conversation becomes interesting.

Additional point of interest:

there are two types of social media use: business use and leisure use. business use competes with traditional marketing (branding, pr, reputation management, e-commerce, content delivery, etc) and leisure use competes with traditional entertainment activities like watching tv, reading a book, going out for dinner, hanging out with friends, and so on. To go back to the time issue people don’t reject social media because they don’t have time, they reject it because it doesn’t create enough value for them to rank high on their list of priorities to warrant a lot of their time.

note: I use ‘real people’ only to maintain consistency in language. I think thought leaders, businesses, or any one else for that matter, (regardless of the frequency of their participation) is a real person. Unless of course they are actually a bot.

Technorati Tags: social media, participation, value creation, facebook, digg, twitter

i will be at blogworldexpo 2008, speaking on a panel along with dan gray, michelle naranjo, and scott monty (confirmed so far). We will be covering topics related to establishing blogger credibility and how to be taken seriously on the web.

in order to properly review a product, you have to experience it first hand. how do you get past the gatekeepers and unlock the doors that grant access to people and products? what can you do to stand out from the crowd and achieve true credibility? from software to sports cars, this session shares the lessons learned in over a decade of working the angles, along with perspective from the communications and marketing side of the fence.

if you will be at the panel or at the conference in general and would like to meet up, please leave a comment below or contact me via email with the subject ‘blogworld meet up’.

i’ve written a guest post at mashable debating whether ping.fm and similar sites are helping fix our fragmented networks or worsening the fragmentation.

ping.fm finally announced its open beta today and not everyone is rejoicing. when i first started monitoring these services that allow you to send messages across multiple platforms i was happy. i thought, like many people still do, that these services would unite us with friends and colleagues that are using different social networks, without everyone having to move their profiles to the same service. after watching people use these services for a few months now, I’ve changed my mind.

check it out.

Technorati Tags: social media, ping.fm, hellotxt, mashable

i’ve written a guest post at read/writeweb making the case for the next version of itunes to go truly social.

itunes social networking and collaborative filtering (recommendations) system, coupled with the iphone’s versatile wireless communication and media sharing capabilities, topped off with media and information management (and sharing) in the cloud, the combo is no doubt ready to be our digital life (and relationship) manager.

read more.

Technorati Tags: social media, social networking, apple, iphone, itunes

i’ve written a guest post at read/writeweb looking at the state of yahoo! buzz in the wake of the most recent changes.

since they opened the submission process to everyone, the buzz surrounding the site has really been at a high. desperate publishers and marketers who were previously locked out of the supposed ‘traffic mecca’ have joined the service in droves and have already started the practice of vote-begging in the hopes that enough votes will get them promoted to yahoo’s main page. here’s what you need to know about the current state of buzz.

check it out.

Technorati Tags: read/writeweb, yahoo, buzz, social media, social news

i’ve written a post on search engine land covering some basics of social media content marketing, roi metrics, and analysis.

when you take the advice above, keep in mind that businesses cannot succeed in social media without obeying the principles of authenticity, integrity, transparency, and participation. self-serving networking and a singular and goal of promoting your content or service isn’t the best way to ensure success.

read the entire article.

Technorati Tags: social media, marketing, roi, metrics, analysis, search engine land

i’ve written a guest post at mashable exploring the state of social bookmarking, social news, and personal bookmarking. would love to read your feedback on the topic.

while ma.gnolia’s efforts are commendable they don’t predict a very bright future for the site and the ongoing decline in use and impending obsolescence of social ‘bookmarking’ is partly to blame.

read the entire post.

Technorati Tags: mashable, social bookmarking, social news, personal bookmarking, social media, digg, ma.gnolia, yahoo buzz, stumbleupon, delicious

among the speculation on what facebook is application making $1 million a month, one application that was named as possible candidate was ‘friends for sale‘. not to be a kill joy but if you look at what the application is actually about, you will probably have just as hard a time as myself, believing that the application has 4.5 million active monthly users.

photo: am i being a killjoy or is virtual slavery bad?

in short, the application let’s you:

1. buy and sell people as pets.
2. make your pets poke and show off for you.
3. trade your friends (now pets) as commodities.

you should feel honored when someone buys you! when people buy you, your value goes up and when you buy people and then sell them you make money, too.

oh okay then. i feel honored now.

Technorati Tags: facebook, applications, f8, friends for sale

when some of the most dedicated community members on the social news and networking site, digg, staged temporary boycott in january, they hardly knew the impact their actions would have. in the short-term they had to bear with an exceptional amount of irrational bad press, unnecessary and misdirected community backlash, and even active burying of their content. in hindsight, not only did they exemplify the importance of any social site to have regular and open dialogue with its community, but they may have (inadvertently) led to the democratization of dialogue in general.

today digg announced digg dialogg, a platform that allows the digg community (one of the biggest social news communities) to pose questions ‘… some of the individuals and leaders of the moment (sans editors), who are taking action to change the world in cool ways.’ the concept, as the site explains, is rather simple, but also flawed on the basics. digg identifies a featured guest, the community submits text or video questions, then much like regular Digging activity (and exactly how they take questions for digg townhalls), people vote on the best and digg poses the top questions to the guest in a live interview.

sounds good? the only problem is that the process is limited in that the community doesn’t get to pick the featured guests. if you want to completely democratize dialogue, allow the people to submit requests and vote on the guests as well, and ask the questions themselves until the question is actually answered (rather than skillfully evaded, which is most often the case with townhall questions).

featured guests will represent thought leaders and tastemakers across diverse topics including technology luminaries, environmentalists, entrepreneurs, musicians and filmmakers.

the first of these guests comes from the party conventions where digg has partnered with cnn’s ireport and will be hosting an interview with nancy pelosi, live on wednesday 8/27. the partnership with cnn, a presence at the party conventions, and access to nancy pelosi, all go on to show the dramatic transformation of digg from a technology-focused site to a ‘world news and american politics’ site as well as digg’s intentional move away from giving a voice to independent publishers and towards mainstream media.

photo: no wonder they picked nancy first

this also prove that digg is no longer just an ‘internet famous’ geek haven, but has achieved mass market presence (their always increasing partnerships with mainstream news outlets and their partnerships with political candidates have previously help build that reputation). it is important to note that what digg is doing is by no means new. facebook, youtube, myspace, and others have similarly capitalized on election season before. digg’s approach is important because this kind of action is fundamentally what digg is supposed to be about, and because of how the community has been trained to interact with the site, the digg community is likely to take advantage of this opportunity more readily than other communities.

participate in the first of these dialoggs by voting on and submitting questions. also check out coverage from read/writeweb, mashable, and techcrunch.

Technorati Tags: digg, social media, social news, public dialogie, nancy pelosi, politics

here’s a recap of the most active conversations from+the social media room.

1. etiquette in the age of social media
2. twitter hurting entire industry?
3. twitter adds threaded replies
4. the web’s dirty little secret
5. what happened to pownce?
6. 9 ways to enlarge the social media audience
7. corporate social media in action
8. can you be a social media introvert?

as always, everyone is welcome to join the room and start or join conversations as long as they are relevant to social media.

Technorati Tags: social media, etiquette, twitter, pownce, audience, introvert