A Dozen Things I learned from Social Media Class

I just finished an experimental class teaching social media analysis to some very enthusiastic and bright grad students at Carnegie Mellon.  I’m happy to say that they would like to continue the class and even expand it out for next year.  I had some time to reflect back on the class and think about what I learned as the professor… 1 – Just about anything can be socialized in name.  You can place social in front of something like social search, social commerce or you can put 2.0 on the back of anything like Finance 2.0, Health 2.0 but to really be a social platform or movement their needs to be some key underpinnings:  transparency, flat structure, community aggregation, safeguards on data security, clear value vs. privacy trade off, etc…

2 – Privacy will never be a non-issue especially as long as mainstream media captures the public attention with the danger of providing online data to social communities.  However, to have true privacy, you need to get off the grid.  There are a number of companies and organizations tracking much more data on consumers than social communities i.e. financial services firms, utilities, wireless carriers, etc.  It just happens that communities are all the rage and garnering the majority of the public’s attention so that where media focuses.

3 – The conversation needs to shift away from privacy and more to proper safeguarding off public data.  Educating the consumer and procedure that hold this data securely are critical to preventing breaches.  Improper use of data collected from social communities will not be tolerated and regulatory bodies increase their vigilance around this issue.

4 – Legacy collaboration platforms will continue to lose ground to the next generation of tools built on top of a social DNA or fabric.  We will see more of them claim social capabilities but fail against platforms like Jive, Socialtext and Teligent, whose scalable architecture delivers around the creation of agile organization using communities (Internal, External and Hybrid) for innovation.

5 – We will continue to see a progression away from uber communities toward specialized and expert communities when it comes to mining community generated data for intelligence.  We have seen an upturn in activity as we form niche communities based on interest or practice.  Expert communities where lots of attention is paid to vetting community members based on credentials not only provide richer demographics but a truer signal.  Noise is taken out of the equation providing greater opportunities to monetize aggregated and anonymous information.  Just check out the folks at Sermo.com

6 – I see a growing divide between the open social and data portability folks and the large community vendors.  Monetization of these networks requires users to generate content and spend as much time as possible within these communities.  User would like to effortlessly cross boundaries from one community to another but what does that mean for a community that would like you to stay “on the reservation”

7 – The taboo questions between jog interviewer and job interviewee will need to be re-adjusted in the era of online user information.  We all know that users are checking prospects profiles prior to an interview.  If the user is comfortable placing that information online for all to see why is it unavailable for discussion or assessment of the perspective employee

8 – In the US, we are fixated on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, but there is a huge international social landscape and global companies need to pay attention to these outlets especially if they want to tap into local communities.  Friendster, which has not popped up in Southeast Asia and Odnoklassniki, which is popular in Russia have much different characteristics, activity, user terms and content that their US counterparts and needs to be viewed accordingly.

9 – Gen. Z or the digital natives those born in 92 or later are displaying unique consumer patters unlike their predecessors.  They came of age in the web 2.0 space and use their community and online capabilities to do everything from shop, find places to hang out, conduct research etc.  Bear in mind this is your next generation of worker, so make sure you engage them with the right tools and work processes.

10 – The social media hype cycle might be diminishing but it has breed mini hype cycles.  One is the race for understanding meaning behind UGC, semantic processing tools that everyone is claiming they have but no one has perfected.  One of the reasons is the unstructured information of content.  2 people can be given the same content and tag or categorize it completely different.  Lots of smart folks are working in this area but it still involves a heavy investment of time from individuals responsible for mining social media

11 – Companies need to think holistically about an overarching social media strategy and approach like any other strategic initiative.  Blindly setting up presences in social outlets with no thought on how to cultivate communities, contribute content, optimize for interaction just develops “ghost towns” of dead corporate occurrences that harm a brand more than add value and create a “bad taste in everyone’s mouth that social media is not relevant or important.

12 – Social media can be taught in an experiential setting.  It works best when the class works similarly to communities they are trying to build and by using tools and platforms to share information they are investigating on behalf of their clients….