social networks – Andrew Careaga

What drives social networking?

What causes people to participate in social networks? Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s new book Groundswell (must purchase soon) may have the answer. Here’s are eight drivers of participation in social media, capsulized from that book. This is only a partial list, but a pretty good start.

Keeping up friendships. Facebook is about connecting with people you know, to find out what’s going on with them.

Making new friends. We’ve all heard stories of people hooking up on social networks. According to Forrester’s consumer surveys, one in five online singles has viewed or participated in online dating in the past year.

Succumbing to social pressure from existing friends. People in the groundswell want their friends there, too. Your friends, your daughter, or your golf buddies are emailing you right now, asking you to join them.

Paying it forward. Having seen that a site is useful, you may be moved to contribute.

The altruistic impulse. This is Flickr cofounder Caterina Fake’s “culture of generosity.” It’s what made Wikipedia possible. People just want to help.

The prurient impulse. People are sexy, entertaining, and stupid. All that is on display in an endless parade of exhibitionism.

The creative impulse. If you’re a photographer, a writer, or a videographer, the Web is the perfect place to show your work.

The validation impulse. People who post information on Yahoo! Answers, for example, would like to be seen as knowledgeable experts.

The affinity impulse. If your bowling league, your PTA, or your fellow Red Sox fans have connected online, you can join and connect with people who share your interests.

Bernoff adds this note of caution (marketers, take heed): “Respect this diversity. Keep it in mind as you set up your social applications. Assuming everyone wants the same thing as you do — or as each other — is a big mistake.”

Via @bobcarlton.

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Social networking trends: new players for 2008

Update, March 20, 2008: Joining Dots took the data presented below and put it in graph form, along with further analysis. See the entry Social Networks Long Tail.

Recent research from the web analytics firm Compete turns up some interesting information about the popularity of various social networking sites. Compete’s comparison of social networking traffic from February 2008 and February 2007 shows dramatic growth in up-and-comers like Ning (4803% change) and Twitter (4368%). LinkedIn also experienced a hefty spike in usage (729%). (Click image for the chart showing comparisons by social network.)

Meanwhile, MySpace is still the top social network, but usage actually decreased by 1 percent. Facebook, the No. 2 social network, grew by 77 percent between February 2007 and February 2008, an indication that Facebook’s popularity may be leveling off (as previously suggested on this very blog).

(Hat tip to Jonathan’s blog.)

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Whites are from Facebook, Latinos are from MySpace

Race and class may have something to do with how people select social networking sites, and may mirror real-world race and class issues, a recent study suggests. As reported on the Chronicle’s Wired Campus blog, the study, published in the October issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, “argues that a student’s race, ethnicity, and upbringing play important parts in predicting which online social networks he or she will join.”

The report, “Whose Space? Differences Among Users and Non-Users of Social Network Sites,” by Eszter Hargittai, an assistant professor of communication studies at Northwestern University, summarizes the results of Hargittai’s surveys of more than 1,000 students at the University of Illinois at Chicago about their social network preferences. Among the findings: White students favor Facebook, hispanics prefer MySpace, and “Asian and Asian-American students prefer Facebook, but they also use other social-networking sites, like Xanga and Friendster, that are less popular with other ethnic groups.”

Class also plays a role in social network selection. “Students whose parents have lower levels of schooling are likely to use MySpace, while students whose parents have more formal education lean toward Facebook. And students who live at home are much less likely to frequent social networks than are their classmates who live on the campus.”

What should campus officials take away from the study? Ms. Hargittai says the results show that online social networks evoke real-world communities and demographics. “Online actions and interactions cannot be seen as tabula rasa activities, independent of existing offline identities,” she writes. “Rather, constraints on one’s everyday life are reflected in online behavior, thereby limiting—for some more than others—the extent to which students from different backgrounds may interact with students not like themselves.”

It’s interesting, but my high school classmates who are into social networking tend to reflect this class breakdown. (There aren’t many of us into social networking; we graduated in 1978, after all.) Most of us were from lower-middle class backgrounds, and we’ve gravitated to MySpace. A few of us are on Facebook, too. Some of us are on LinkedIn, too (more my college classmates than high school). So maybe the class divisions play out in social networking even beyond the college years.

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Journalism 2.0: a social network experiment

Despite the challenges “old media” face from the new world of social networking, these appear to be exciting times for journalists who are willing to embrace the new reality — or to at least experiment with it.

A new weblog, Beat Blogging, is one such experiment. The idea behind Beat Blogging is to connect reporters via a social network — a blog, in this case — to help them improve their beat reporting.

The group of 13 journalists — one each from various news organizations — includes a couple of journalist-bloggers whom I try to read occasionally:

Eric Berger, who blogs as SciGuy for the Houston Chronicle. Berger says he joined the network because he hopes “to raise the level of debate on my existing blog by adding considerably more commentary from practicing scientists, and giving scientists a non-threatening place to interact with the general public.”
Eliot Van Buskirk of Wired’s Listening Post blog. His editor, Evan Hansen, says, “One of the lessons we’ve learned is that blogging offers a fundamentally different relationship with readers than traditional newsgathering, and with this project we hope to tap even deeper into that phenomenon.”

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s news blog. The Chronicle is one of the 13 news organizations to take part in the experiment and has assigned Brad Wolverton, who covers the business of college sports, to Beat Blogging.

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