Social Design Strategies

Hey it's Jon here at the Conference Center, above is what I am seeing RIGHT NOW! in room 18ABCD, listening to a panel called Social Design Strategies. The panelists are talking about "leverage reciprocity" in a social networking site....

DEF: Leverage Reciprocity - when making a web page, users will put more into the site when you give them kind of initial positive comment or help. LinkedIn uses a great example of this on their site called Recommendations. When someone gives someone else a professional recommendation, then they will get positive comments made about them. This kind of reminds me of ebay feedback...when someone gives you a positive review, you usually give them the same.

Ok, next topic. Daniel Burka (Digg.com & Pownce.com) is now explaining the balance between privacy and community. He's talking about his Facebook experiences and how it walks the line between Public and Private content. He says the closer you get to that line, you have to be a lot more careful - private messages can easily become public and vice versa. He's saying that Digg has a feature similar to the Facebook wall called the "Shout." This allows people to know for sure that their information is public, while most other messages are private

Daniel is now discussing tracking site activity. Digg.com does it pretty easily because you can follow someone's "digs" - that's a main tenet of the site. When you are creating a site, however, where this isn't a main feature, and it's just one of many, it becomes a bigger issue. People sometimes don't realize they can be tracked easily and you end up walking that public/private line and can be dangerous.



He recommends that if you start a site, it's easier to add features as you see the need instead of utilizing mounds of features. However, don't get in the habit of adding more and more features (like Facebook - he says it's reached this threshold). He also mentioned that it's good to give users control but not to use it as a crutch.


A question from the audience:
Is there a legitimate way to monetize social networks without advertising. MONETIZATION!

ANSWER: It needs to be indirect...allowing the passionate ones to get full recognition like how Facebook is using Beacon (what is that? I'll have to look that one up)


Ok, they're getting kicked off the stage...time to go to the next seminar!! TTYL