3 hour workshop on how to select, design and optimize social web functionality. Covers everything from what goes on a profile, to optimizing invitation flows to viral distribution.

1. Designing Social Websites Christina Wodtke

2. Page about Christina

3. Audience question: “what do you want?” I don’t want to ask everyone to say what they want, but here I like to ask a few folks to offer “if you don’t’ get X, will you leave mad? You What do you want?

4. Twitter Facebook LinkedIn MySpace Flickr Social Media Social Software Social Network The Social Web The Social Graph Communities Web 2.0 UGC Jargon Check

5. What is social, really?

6. Social Software can be loosely defined as software which supports, extends, or derives added value from, human social behavior - message-boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking. Social XXX Usenet Forums Email Mailing lists Groupware Social Networks Services Social Software Social Media Nothing New

7. The Social Web is a digital space where data about human interactions is as important as other data types for providing value Community is when those humans care about each other.

8. What kind of social do you need? Social Marketing Social Support Social Sites When you want to leverage your customers to promote your product Customers help each other to reduce support costs Your site is social at the core: blogs, networks, photosharing.

9. How do you design social?

10. B=f(P+E) Behavior is a function of a Person and his Environment - Lewin’s Equation

11. Understand the Person

12. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Morality, Creativity. Spontaneity, Problem solving, Lack of prejudice 5. Self-Actualization 4. Esteem 3. Love/Belonging 2. Safety 1. Physiological Self-esteem, Confidence, Achievement, Respect by others Friendship, Family, Sexual intimacy Security of body, or employment, of resources, Of morality, or the family, of health , of property Breathing, Food, Water, Sex, Sleep, Homeostasis, Excretion

13. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Self-Actualization Esteem Love/Belonging Safety Physiological The Social Web is built here, from love and esteem

14. O’Reilly Report on Facebook The Facebook Application Platform

15. Motivation for hours (and hours and hours) of work

16. Kollock’s 4 Motivationsfor Contributing Reciprocity Reputation Increased sense of efficacy Attachment to and need of a group - Peter Kollock, UCLA

17. Reciprocity

18. Reputation What's the motivation of behind these people actually interacting and participating? … people want to share with the community what they believe to be important …. and they want to see their name in lights.They want to see their little icon on the front page, their username on the front page, so other people can see it.

19. Increased sense of efficacy

20. Attachment to and need of a group

21. The New Third Place? “All great societies provide informal meeting places, like the Forum in ancient Rome or a contemporary English pub. But since World War II, America has ceased doing so. The neighborhood tavern hasn't followed the middle class out to the suburbs...” -- Ray Oldenburg

22. Design the Environment

23. 205 Structure Follows Social Spaces Conflict No building ever feels right to the people in it unless the physical spaces (defined by columns, walls, and ceilings) are congruent with the social spaces (defined by activities and human groups). Resolution A first principle of construction; on no account allow the engineering to dictate the building's form. Place the load bearing elements- the columns and the walls and floors- according to the social spaces of the building; never modify the social spaces to conform to the engineering structure of the building.

24. 36. Degrees of publicness Conflict: People are different, and the way they want to place their houses in a neighborhood is one of the most basic kinds of difference. Resolution: Make a clear distinction between three kinds of homes―those on quiet backwaters, those on busy streets, and those that are more or less in-between. Make sure that those on quiet backwaters are on twisting paths, and that these houses are themselves physically secluded; make sure that the more public houses are on busy streets with many people passing by all day long and that the houses themselves are exposed to the passers-by. The in-between houses may then be located on the paths halfway between the other two. Give every neighborhood about an equal number of these three kinds of homes.

25. Create space by building around it

26. Identity Sign-up Invitations Social Space Activity Relationships Distribution (Viral) Distribution (Viral)

28. Share Contacts Profile Identity Sign-up Sign-up Invitations Invitations presence Collab Comm Groups Attention Presence Reputation Social Space Relationships Activity Distribution (Viral) Distribution (Viral)

30. User goals: what makes this community attractive in a time when they have a hundred other places vying for their attention. What is the personal worth of the tools?

31. What if no one shows up, can it still have value?

32. Community nature: will this be a true community, or will this be a collective wisdom tool? Think about the spectrum.

34. If you were going to build a piece of social software to support large and long-lived groups, what would you design for? The first thing you would design for is handles the user can invest in. Profile Clay Shirky, A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

35. Profile Avatar Biography Collections History

36. Identity is Context Based Facebook- Personal LinkedIN - Professional

37. Avatar

38. Collections

39. Presence

40. Presence Signs of life Status History Company

41. Second, you have to design a way for there to be members in good standing. Have to design some way in which good works get recognized. The minimal way is, posts appear with identity. You can do more sophisticated things like having formal karma or "member since." Reputation

42. Reputation is… Information used to make avalue judgment about an object or person…

43. Reputations Named levels Badging Rating Points

45. Strategize Exercise 2: what elements do you need for identity? Profile Presence Reputation

46. Site Optimization: Sign-up Tiny changes that yield big wins Identity Sign-up Invitations Social Space Activity Relationships Distribution (Viral) Distribution (Viral)

49. Placement

50. Flow – Quiz  2 3 1

51. Flow 3 2 4 1

52. Organization Entrees

53. Finishing Touches A. $12.99 B. 12 C. twelve Increases the bill by and average of $5.55

54. Avoid Embarassment Market Price

56. Increase social outreach

57. Make it dead simple

58. Hold their hand

59. Reward themIntroduce social learning throughout these flows to teach the user how to user the site

60. Registration Registered users is a key metric for success Once a user is registered: You have a way to reach out to them You have some key demographics to advertise against

61. First Impressions

62. Subject Line Checklist

63. Email Content

64. Email Content

65. Email Content

66. Email Content

67. Registration

68. Registration

70. People you know are already here

71. Contacts Groups Attention Relationships

72. you have to find a way to spare the group from scale. Scale alone kills conversations, because conversations require dense two-way conversations. [Dunbar] found that the MAXIMUM number of people that a person could keep up with socially at any given time, gossip maintenance, was 150. This doesn't mean that people don't have 150 people in their social network, but that they only keep tabs on 150 people max at any given point.

73. Contacts Groups Attention Types of relationships

74. Groups • 1.8% of all users write more than 70% of all Wikipedia articles • .003% of digg’s users are responsible for 56% of the stories on the site’s home page • .o64% creator to consumer ration on YouTube Source: http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?448

75. Attention Twitter Users • 10% of users account for 90% of production • 50% have not updated status in past 7 days • 55% are not following anyone • 52% have no followers Source: Inside Twitter study, Sysomos June 2009 State of the Twittersphere, Hubspot, June 2009

76. Connections • 10% of users account for 30% of production • 12% of Facebook users update their status daily • 40% of Facebook users have updated status in past 7 days • 1.89% of page views are contribution (photos, content, videos, events) Source: Facebook statistics: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics Facebook app data for friend updates (300+ users)

77. Invite Optimization Jennifer Ruffner Identity Sign-up Invitations Social Space Activity Relationships Distribution (Viral) Distribution (Viral)

78. Invitations Viral distribution increases the number of unique users on the site People that are connected are more active When they enter that flow you can present them with more interactions that they are more wiling to take

79. Sending Invitations

80. Sending Invitations

81. Sending Invitations

82. Receiving Invitations

83. Receiving Invitations

84. Strategize Exercise 3: what kinds of relationships will you support? Contacts Groups Attention

85. Share Collaborate Communicate Activity

86. The AOF Method Defining your Activity Identifying your Social Objects Choosing your Features Courtesy of Joshua Porter. Check out bokardo.com!

88. Classic Question Who are your users? Better Question What are your users doing? What do people have to do to make you successful? What are you making people better at? What are your users passionate about?

90. 2. Identifying yourSocial Objects

91. The term “social networking” makes little sense if we leave out the objects that mediate the ties between people. Think about the object as the reason why people affiliate with each specific other and not just anyone. JyriEngeström

94. What are Social Objects? Social objects can be ideas, people, or physical objects. Social objects influence social interaction...they change the way people interact with each other. By interacting through/with social objects, people meet others they might not otherwise know. Social objects can be the reason why people have an interaction or form a relationship. Joshua Porter (bokardo.com)

95. 3. Choosing your Features

97. Verb! That’s what’s happening…

98. Conversations Comment Initiate Rate and Report Reply

99. Talking about talking

100. Sharing

101. Collaborate

102. Strategize i.e. What are your nouns and verbs? Exercise 4: what are the social objects and what do people do? Share Activity Collab Comm

103. Share Contacts Profile Identity Sign-up Sign-up Invitations Invitations presence Collab Comm Groups Attention Presence Reputation Social Space Relationships Activity Distribution (Viral)

104. Viral Distribution

105. Gladwell Duncan watts

106. “There was the president of the Hush Puppies company, of Rockford, Michigan, population thirty-eight hundred, sharing a stage with Calvin Klein and Donna Karan and Isaac Mizrahi-and all because some kids in the East Village began combing through thrift shops for old Dukes. Fashion was at the mercy of those kids, whoever they were, and it was a wonderful thing if the kids picked you, but a scary thing, too, because it meant that cool was something you could not control. You needed someone to find cool and tell you what it was.” - Malcom Gladwell

107. Nobody knows anything. – William Goldman

109. B=f(P,E) Behavior is a function of a Person and his Environment

110. Some Patterns

111. Frictionless I think, I blink

114. At Hand See it, use it

115. Table setting?

117. Impactful Maximize reach

118. Email this

119. Newsfeed, Network Updates

120. Groups, Asymmetric Follow

122. Relationship antipatterns High-level antipatterns Explicit “Will you be my friend” requests Teach a man to be phished (adactio) Don’t break email (do-not-reply) Auto-faux-pas (notification of rejection / unsub / delinking / re-follow) Having to spam my friends…

123. Targeted Features for the most useful users

126. Outreach Social seo

127. <meta name="description" content="Find cheap airline tickets, hotels, great cruise and vacation packages, honeymoon travel guides, flight information and more, with Yahoo! Travel." /> <meta name="verify-v1" content="hfk2kPTdsyPJIULFv58St5zM/BKR4WjvWpVSbgr23vA=" /><meta name="y_key" content="17f2f671d47e7697" /><title>Yahoo! Travel - Airline tickets, cheap hotels, cruises, vacations & honeymoon travel</title>

129. Whateevershare Adaptive Path, using “Share this” widget

130. Pick your channels New York Times Slideshare

133. Impactful

134. Targeted

136. Questions? Christina Wodtke http://www.blueprintsfortheweb.com http://www.eleganthack.com http://www.boxesandarrows.com @cwodtke Jennifer Ruffner JenniferRuffner@gmail.com @jeng24 http://www.linkedin.com/in/jengranito