A Brief Look at Some Businesses Based on Shared Social Experience
Rawn Shah
Music Web site last.fm offers the equivalent of radio stations on the Web, with a particular social aspect that provides innovative customer value: Whenever a listener chooses or plays a song, last.fm detects the choice of artist and song and uses this as input to future recommendations. To re-create the continuous streaming experience of traditional radio stations, the site automatically chooses the next song to play to the listener by using the collective preferences and choices of its members to suggest similar artists and bands, to deliver a better customer experience. This moves well beyond traditional music stations, with songs and artists chosen by a staff of DJs based on a combination of their personal, expertly guided choices; what music promoters actively set before them; and perhaps selections provided by their parent company network. C. K. Prahalad and M. S. Krishnan describe in The New Age of Innovation how supporting this capability for users to customize their experience creates opportunities for the customer and the organization to share in innovation.
If last.fm used only the listener’s own choices to make recommendations, it would lose the social involvement and instead be just a personal experience. The transformation to a social experience occurs when last.fm examines the patterns of similar choices across many users: The recommendation for a listener’s next song is then based on what other users may have picked after the previous choice. The site adds value to the customer by applying social information to guide an individual’s choices, making it easier for the customer to find similar music. This puts the site two steps ahead of traditional broadcast radio, with both customized choices for each individual and socially guided recommendations.
In the last.fm model, users make selections from a large set of products; those selections then influence their own or others’ future decisions. Other online retail sites, such as Amazon.com, the Netflix movie-rental service, and retailer Target.com, use this same model. These sites often take a structured approach to getting input from a social group, resulting in a mass collaboration experience aggregating many individual views into common streams of information.
As more customers make choices, those decisions contribute to the existing information about what selections people make, providing better information to each customer. In this way, such services can actually increase in usefulness and value as the number of participants increases. The value to the business rises as customers make more choices and, hopefully, more purchases.
The input that a person gets from other users of a Web site is the hallmark of a social environment. This input—or, rather, the output that goes to someone else—does not have to be direct; it can go through filters, transformations, or aggregations with other information before it reaches another person. In the case of tracking “similar choices,” the social value depends on aggregating the information from many people, indirectly collaborating en masse. In contrast, it is also possible to be social without aggregating any information, but by independently sharing information with others.
Slideshare provides a distinct online service that lets users share their slide presentations with others, a common need both inside businesses and when presenting at public events and conferences. A user can post a presentation and indicate whether others can download the document or only view it online. Other users can read, rate, and comment on the material, or share it with others. An added convenience is the capability to show a presentation on other Web sites, further increasing its visibility.
Unlike the last.fm example, each content item (slide) on Slideshare can stand on its own; slides do not need to be aggregated to provide value to users. Users post as many presentations as they like, focusing on their own interests even while sharing with others. Users do not even need to form relationships with other Slideshare users to get value from sharing. Therefore, while sharing with others, users are directing their friends or peers to an experience focused on social experience but centered on a user’s individual identity. This same model is common in millions of single-author blogs on the Internet. Every blogger builds an individual experience focused on the author’s persona or interests.
Some social environments extend the individual’s experience to emphasize a person’s network of relationships. In these environments, each person provides content to share with others, but the value comes from the relationship network provided as a service of the context of the Web site. For instance, LinkedIn enables people to maintain and manage their network of business contacts online. Unlike a traditional list of contacts, which you might store in desktop e-mail software such as Microsoft Outlook, in an online e-mail service such as Google gmail, or on your cellphone, the LinkedIn system brings together every member’s network, enabling people to find and create new contacts through others.
Users either indicate whether they are willing to share their contacts with others or evaluate individual requests to establish a contact. In particular, this approach takes advantage of pathways between people; it enables a requestor to reach a target contact by asking each person along the path to bring him closer to the target. This is useful to just about any job role but is of particular interest to marketers, business development managers, and salespeople, who meet and need to meet many people in a single year. No more paper business cards or even online contact information files to pass around—it’s all stored on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn has millions of users, but each person knows only his particular network of contacts, not everyone’s. In other words, each person’s social experience is primarily with his own social network. Users can communicate with individuals in their network or with the entire network. Because users can add information about their expertise, as well as a résumé, they can learn more about each other. Public social sites such as Plaxo or Facebook support similar ideas, but they also enable users to designate others as a family member, a friend, a work contact, or another relationship to qualify how users prefer to talk to them.
The value of LinkedIn comes from meshing many relationship networks, enabling users to discover and form new relationships they might not have otherwise made. This social network experience differs from the individual experience, in that communications are socially output only to members of your network instead of being open to anyone. This is useful when you want to have a conversation only with people in your relationship network.
In contrast to the person-centric approach of a social network, people frequently work on common goals in groups. Such a workgroup might have a leader, but it typically does not center on a single individual. The traditional view of a team within a specific hierarchy of an organization under one manager fits here, but so does the concept of workgroups with members from multiple teams with different managers.
IBM Lotus Quickr is a social software tool designed to allow workgroups to share documents, coordinate calendars, and assign and track tasks. The software supports this classic model of team or workgroup collaboration, acting as a common container for all the products of members’ joint or combined efforts. These products are stored in a common context instead of being stored individually on each member’s computer, making it easier for group members to understand and keep track of the shared activities. In closed workgroups, a member must be invited to the social environment, and what that member shares is generally kept private to the group.
However, some workgroups might need to share their work with others, while still preserving their core group members as the “team” behind the information. They can do this by assigning some team members the core workgroup rights to perform functions such as creating, editing, and deleting, while allowing others only to read or provide comments. This distinction creates two classes of people with identities of “the workgroup members” and “everyone else,” which has its own benefits and consequences.
A visible workgroup of music experts at Pandora.com, another online radio station, performs the job of categorizing music (as in last.fm). Although both Pandora and last.fm are online radio stations with similar goals of providing guided choices personalized to each user’s tastes, they go about it in different ways. Pandora is an outgrowth of the Music Genome Project, an organized approach meant to categorize any type of recorded music according to distinguishing qualities. For example, a song might have a particular lyrical style, harmony, use of instruments, and genre. In all, several hundred factors describe a “genome” for any piece of music. Pandora examines each user’s direct selections of artists or songs and tracks the commonalities in these genomic factors of their preferences. Users are also offered other selections and asked to rate them to further determine their taste preferences.
The primary social aspect of Pandora comes from the collective work of the group of musical experts who work together to describe the qualities of each piece of music. The results from this core group’s efforts factor into the decision-support system of Pandora music, provided to all its customers.
Whether restricted to use by only its own members or openly visible to others, after a certain point, a core group can become too large for everyone to know or work closely with each other. The tightly knit experience of a small circle breaks down, but a different form of value can emerge from this larger entity of a community experience.
Software technology vendor SAP’s Developer Network provides a community in which members can reach out to each other to get advice on issues they face or to gather information on new features or products. The nature of complex enterprise applications, such as the one from SAP, means that it might be impossible for a vendor to describe all the possible problems a customer could run into. There are simply too many permutations of the vendor’s own software, along with other systems and databases in the organization to integrate with. However, large vendors have many customers who come across similar situations, so these customers can help each other. As an example, SAP’s Developer Network, open to anyone who wants to direct a question to other members, can potentially reduce support calls, as well as uncover new methods or practices directly from customers.
Some might consider the changing list of members and not knowing all other members in a community experience as a disadvantage. Although some subset of the members could stay the same over the long term, this open-ended possibility makes the community experience continually evolving, both an advantage and a challenge at the same time. Thus, participating in a community is different from interacting in a workgroup because it introduces greater unknowns about others—including their expertise, skills, experience, and opinions or positions on different matters—and usually relies on weaker relationships between members. However, a larger membership offers greater diversity of ideas and perspectives. Additionally, in many circumstances, a community approach is needed instead of a workgroup approach simply because of the number of people involved.
In contrast to the indirectness of mass collaborations, such as in the last.fm example, communities are necessary when the identity and background of people matter in decision making. Whom you get advice from in the SAP Developer Network can make a big difference when you need to rely on another member’s recommendation. Therefore, understanding others’ experiences and seeing some demonstration or getting references from others can strengthen a recommendation. Here, people need to interact more directly with each other than in a mass collaboration because identity and role make a difference. A person’s identity and reputation, as well as his history of direct contact with the requestor, enhances the output of the social environment. Also, unlike workgroups and social networks, how someone communicates to a public community might be different from what that person would say to his direct contacts. Relationships can be weaker in general, so greater emphasis falls on finding commonality and shared interests. Hence, the topic or purpose of the community becomes the center of the experience, often with members pursuing many possible goals within the overall theme.
Social collaboration occurs within various contexts in a shared social experience. Each type of experience provides its own value to the owner of a social environment, its members, or its sponsors; you can apply each experience in a different manner. A handful of archetypes exist as common models of these social experiences: social network, individual usage, closed workgroup, visible workgroup, community, or mass collaboration. In addition, the nonsocial personal experience model, a precursor to these others, is common to many Web sites.