May 2009 Archive

Social Media has filled a huge connectivity gap on the world wide web over the last few years. But it is only in retrospect that we can now fully appreciate the constraints that interlinked hypertext puts on the creation of true social-emotional context. For a decade or more we have been limited to comments, ratings, and bulletin boards to bring a sense of community to the vast ocean of data exists on the Internet.

Before that, emotional context was best expressed with arcane techniques such as using ALL CAPS!!! or Emoticons : ). In the absence of face-to-face contact however, these techniques are woefully inadequate as tools of true human expression.

The advent of MySpace, Facebook, Linked-In and the like opened the flood gates of virtual expression to the masses. While blogs gave users a platform to express themselves, it was (and still is) at its core a one-way medium. The true power of a social network is it’s ability to rapidly exponentiate ideas by linking friends with friends with friends, dynamically in real-time.

This sea of interlinked relationship data is a fascinating achievement in and of itself but it has had the unintended consequence of diluting the meaning of a relationship. “Friends” are now defined blandly by one’s willingness to accept someone into his or her network. In fact, a “Friend” need not be a person at all. It can be a brand or an idea. And while this is a boon, and arguably the missing power tool, to the web marketers arsenal, it still lacks the humanity and emotional resonance that defines what a true connection is in the real world.

I have seen things in recent months that tell me that tools for providing this type of emotional context are coming. This tool called Moody allows users to rate their iTunes library in a color-grid whereby colors correspond to emotion. As more and more songs get tagged in this way, users have the ability to dynamically create on-the-fly play lists by mood.

This is incredibly cool but also incredibly personal.

The real untapped power in social networks is the ability to leverage this type of emotional context by qualifying the bonds we create in social media spaces. Until now, quantity has been the measurement of social success on sites like facebook where the winner is the one with the most friends. People collect friends as if they were assets not people. The lack of an ability to qualify relationships is a serious shortcoming. And this is especially true in sites like Linked In who’s core purpose is to facilitate professional relationships.

Just as it’s useful to qualify music by how it makes me feel. It’s also useful to qualify the dynamics of my relationships with others.

The idea of “qualifying” a relationship should not be a strange one to anyone who has ever done anything in sales. Leads have been qualified by Hot and Cold since forever. A colleague of mine in the mid-90′s developed a more personal rating system for his contact database that went beyond traditional Hot-Cold sales ratings though. Instead, he would place his contacts on  a 10-point scale from: “This is some one I never met in-person” (cold)  to: “This is somebody who would come to visit me in the hospital even if I didn’t ask” (Hot … as close as family). In the middle were descriptors such as: “I could call this person and go to a movie whenever” and “This person would take a lunch with me” on the med-high end and, “I know this person but haven’t spoken to them in a year or more” on the med-low end.

Imagine the power of exposing the context of relationships before asking for an introduction. Imagine overlaying these qualities with “friends in common.” You could very quickly paint a snapshot of somebody’s TRUE circle of friends. You would see if I were the kind of personality who is a rolodex collector with dozens of business cards I never use, or whether I am somebody who forms deep bonds within a smaller group.

And here is where we get into sticky territory.

The very idea of publicly qualifying relationships is, I suspect inherently frightening to many. On the one hand, openness and knowledge sharing behind is at the very core of the spirit of the web. On the other hand, do people really want to know how others define their relationships with them? I might be unpleasantly surprised to learn that I rated a long-time friend on the very high-end of my sliding scale, only to find that he had a very different opinion of me. It could be a real Pandora’s box with the potential to create tension that is the stuff great reality TV is made of. But it might also end up being an incredibly powerful tool and in the end a, more accurate representation of what friendships mean on the web.