Takeaways from DLD #4: Social Etiquette

Social Etiquette

Many of the DLD participants have moved on to Davos and concerns about the volatile financial markets. I am back home, but still thinking about social networks – social networks like, say, Davos and DLD, as well as Facebook and LinkedIn.

In the Creating Universes session, creative spirit Oliviero Toscani, well-known for his work with Benetton, delivered a manifesto about creativity as his images flashed before us on dual screens.

“Brands do not nourish society,” he said emphatically at one point. “Brands are nourished by society.”

And whether or not you agree with that, social networks are most definitely nourished by people.

According to the Getting Social panelists (which included, among others, Matt Cohler from Facebook, Reid Hoffman from LinkedIn and Joanna Shields from Bebo) we are increasingly moving from virtual communities to representational communities.

More and more, social networks reflect real life, not fake identities.

Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster and Plaxo and a founding President of Facebook is now a baby-faced venture guy. “It’s not a technology, so it’s hard to think about as a sector,” he said. Instead, he spoke about a social graph that plots real relationships as they are “represented” on the internet.

He referenced the ultimate social network – the human network.

In the meantime, though, the operating officers of the big social networks, spurred by their investors, are concentrating on scale, monetizing their efforts and winning. They are all about enormous user bases – something that doesn’t feel particularly human.

And some of the features they describe sound distinctly non-social, like describing LinkedIn as a “branded professional utility”. Oh, I know what that means, and I actually like that LinkedIn isn’t in my face constantly like an attention-starved puppy, that it is more focused and specific and reflective of only one aspect of my life. But I’ve never actually said that phrase to anyone outside of work.

I scribbled in my notebook: is there a social ineptness to current social networks?

The current environment doesn’t feel particularly representational to me. It seems more like a petition – collect signatures and move on. In fact, it feels programmed.

I’m on Facebook, but it’s more of a stage of life in my eyes than anything else. Facebook represents the stage of life when you want, feel compelled even, to broadcast to and interact regularly with a broad swath of the world (50% of Facebook users come back every day). I, however, am in a stage of life where my pronouncements are circumscribed and divvied up according to need and interest and I don’t have time to monitor my representational life for long stretches. (And when my daughter gets married and has a family, she won’t have that time either, Millennial or no.)

To me, the big-box approach doesn’t feel particularly representational. To really reflect the social graph (vs. monetize the masses), you have to consider the other social networks in our lives. The smaller, more human scale networks. What about temporary, or “pop-up” social networks, the kind that come together around a specific purpose and time (canvas for a candidate, DLD) or just periodically over long expanses of time (high school friends)? What about alumni networks - which today function primarily as fundraising vehicles - but which could be richer environments not unlike campuses themselves? What about workplace networks and sports talk radio and shared life stages?

These are social interactions and networks as defined by people, not programmers. And they are rich in possibility. To be truly representational about real life social interactions, to build a mirror social world similar to the mirror physical world Google is focused on, we’re going to need flexibility and options of scale.

Our lives are built on relevance, the ties that bind and conversation. I don’t want to join one network – I am my own series of networks.

Joanna Shields of Bebo tried to make that point by arguing that social networking was not a “zero sum game” and that it could be additive.

If a brand wants to be nourished by society, and truly build conversational relationships and connections with its consumers, one big opportunity is to identify real networks that already exist and empower them to connect.

**to read more articles by Teri and see all of her DLD (Digital, Life, Design) conference coverage, click on the name under the headline**