danah set a blistering pace in her talk yesterday morning in Cambridge. Packed with great information and enthusiasm, if you have a chance to hear danah speak, you must. Unlike many experts, she speaks plainly and on-target to her audience. Please check back for other segments of her talk you may find interesting.
These are notes and are not indicative of final copy. Comments, questions, discussions are welcome!
Social Media Summit: What Is the ROI of Social Media?
Mass Technology Leadership Council
4/30/09
http://www.masstlc.org/clu/socialmedia/
Speaker: danah boyd (all lowercase, stet) Microsoft, Harvard Fellow
http://www.danah.org/
Various Social Media interest groups and where they’re at:
Technology: Shifts from development and deployment of technology, integrated processes, to nothing ever finished, real-time, open source, user-generated content
Business: Trying to re-inflate the dot-come bubble
People: Connecting with people you know, meeting people you don’t
Create a public realm and engage with others
Meet those you already know, meet people like at a dinner party, friends of friends
How did SM dev in US?
2003 Friendster: online dating site, taken over by digerati, developed “fakesters”
then indie rock bands took over to connect with fans → got to MySpace
MySpace welcomed the indie rocker crowd: bands and fans, which intrigued teens
Facebook: Started with Ivy League, then “lesser” colleges
Facebook vs MySpace perceptions: boring vs elegant, intelligent vs cheesy
Division of class, or as in HS cliques: Facebook good, MySpace bad
Adults joined Facebook, reconnected w their friends from high school, very different than teen use
Features in both sites are similar, early adopters matter, the tone they set, the flavor. These are the places people go to with the people they know.
Clusters, how people connect and who they connect to, driven by barriers between different platforms
Network affect: network density, the new form of stickiness, uniques, frequency of logins, clusters
If someone is using it and their friends aren’t, they’re a one-hit wonder
Community managers/monitors measure health. Health of neighborhood driven by relationships
If all your friends are there, are you really going to leave?