Author: Lee Aase

Facebook has reached its tipping point as a social epidemic, even as it is helping other products, services and ideas reach their tipping points.

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell identifies elements necessary to create a social epidemic:

• Mavens
• Connectors
• Salesmen, and
• The Stickiness Factor.

Chip and Dan Heath do a fine job of explaining, in Made to Stick, how to increase the “stickiness” of your ideas.

Mavens are the “thought leaders” who help set the agenda for fashion, technology or other cultural trends. People value their judgments, but without connectors, the maven’s opinions wouldn’t travel nearly as quickly.

When a maven with a sticky idea meets a Connector, it’s magic. Connectors are those people who just seem to know everybody, and when they get a sticky idea from a maven, they pass it on to almost everyone they meet. And Salesmen help encourage the reluctant to give it a try.
Which leads me to my point: with Facebook, by its design, everyone becomes a connector, and many become salesmen.

If the idea isn’t sticky, no amount of connection will cause it to spread. But because of the following elements in Facebook, a somewhat sticky concept can travel quickly.

• News Feed – This feature, which you access by hitting the big FACEBOOK icon at the top left of the page, share highlights of your friends’ activities – and shares yours with them. This is how I found out that Jeremiah Owyang had added the Cities I’ve Visited application, for instance, which caused me to install it myself. That put it both in my Mini-Feed (see below) and in the News Feed of all of my friends. When they added it, the cycle continued. Cities I’ve Visited now has 789,000 users.
• The Mini-Feed – this is on your profile page, and essentially lists the last several things you have done in Facebook. While the News Feed only has selected highlights of your friends’ activities, the mini-feed is more complete.

• The Groups link – When you click this in the left navigation, you see a two-panel display. On the left are groups your friends have recently joined. On the right are the groups to which you belong that have been recently updated. If my friends have recently joined a group, I’m likely to check it out. If I join, the cascade continues.

• Applications – When I wanted to upload a video, I had to install the Facebook Video application. When my friends see the thumbnail and decide to click to watch, if they haven’t installed the application they are prompted to do so. That’s why Facebook Video has 5.9 million users.

Other Facebook applications explicitly start by prompting you to invite your friends to try it. In the long run I don’t think this is going to be acceptable, especially those that preselect all your friends to receive invitations. This borders on Plaxoesque spamming.
Gladwell’s book talks about the optimum group size, and how people can’t maintain relationships in a group of more than about 150. I agree (I know Malcolm will be so relieved to hear that!), but I think Facebook dramatically ramps up the number of effective connections a person can have.

Just as patient sharing sites like CarePages or CaringBridge have been used to help families of hospitalized patients stay in touch with a broader community to give condition updates, Facebook lets you easily poke or send messages to friends and post status updates that they can check when they think of it. It puts their updates in your path, and yours in theirs. It takes the friction out of staying connected.

Which is why Facebook itself has reached The Tipping Point. With about 90 percent of college students on board, it has serious critical mass in a demographic that’s important for many businesses and organizations. For instance, David’s Bridal has found that people spend more money in the five years after their marriage than they do in any other five year period of their lives, and that it almost always starts with the purchase of a wedding dress. This has opened up huge opportunities for cross-selling honeymoon trips, banking and mortgage services and other products and services one wouldn’t immediately think of as being wedding-related. They call it life-stage marketing.

With its supermajority of the college-educated crowd, Facebook is even a step ahead of David’s Bridal in life-stage marketing, because most marriages happen during or after college.

And with the momentum Facebook now reportedly has, with well over 30 million members and adding 1.2 million a week, most of whom are in the 25-49 age group, this is an epidemic that has tipped and for which there doesn’t appear to be a vaccine.

Technorati: Facebook, Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell, Social Epidemics, marketing, viral, social networking, social media

Organizations interested in creating social networks for employees, customers or other outside constituents (vendors, business partners, etc.) have three options:
1. Don’t. Create one, that is. Find an existing social networking site that already serves your industry, and participate there. This has several benefits:

• You don’t need IT support or budget
• A crowd of similarly interested people is already gathered so you don’t need to build a group
• If you participate intelligently, you and your organization can be seen as having worthwhile contributions for the community

Among the downsides are that you have no ability to influence the structure and direction of the site. You may be contributing to the conversation, but you are a thought follower rather than a thought leader. That’s fine; the world needs followers, too; without them, so-called “leaders” are just taking a stroll by themselves. And the reality may be that others have taken the lead in forming an online community, so instead of starting another party you should knock on the door and join the one next door. If there isn’t a network like the one you want to build, you could move on to consider options 2 or 3.
2. Create a new standalone social networking site. With numerous so-called “white label” software products available (Jeremiah has a list here) that can carry your organization’s visual identity, creating a networking space is relatively quick and easy. Advantages include:

• Complete control over the site’s look, including what features it offers and whether any outside advertising is included.
• If you are the “first mover” in your area of interest to create such a space, and if your organization is big enough to have the gravitational pull to draw others in, your site could reinforce your organization’s thought leadership.

Downsides:

• It’s not free, and you and your IT department are responsible for it. Anything less than 100 percent uptime reflects poorly on your organization. Some white label vendors also offer hosting services, but you pay for them, and your organization’s reputation is at risk if the site malfunctions.
• Building a social networking space is different from building a social network. As compared to option 3, a standalone site creates barriers to adoption that can hinder your network’s growth. Your members need usernames and passwords for your site. They need to remember to come back to the site, or you need to remind them through email or RSS feeds. Given its modest penetration to date, RSS will likely not be sufficient for these reminders.

3. Create a group within one of the existing social networking sites. Leading candidates for this are MySpace and Facebook. I have a MySpace profile I almost never visit. I focus on Facebook in this post because I am most familiar with it and I think it’s the most powerful, especially given its open platform that encourages outside developers to create applications to build upon its framework. If someone wants to make the argument that a group within MySpace is as good an option as a Facebook group for an organization looking to form a network, please let me know and I will edit this post and link to you.

Advantages of Facebook groups:

• They are free, and easy to create. In fact, I created a new Facebook group called “Social Network Options for Organizations” in exactly 7 minutes after I finished drafting this post, including pasting in this post as the first discussion topic.
• No IT support is needed, and Facebook is responsible for maintaining the servers.
• You can have your organization’s logo (see this one from the AAAS) emblazoned on your group site. In the case of the “Social Network Options for Organizations” site, I just added a photo of me. Assuming you have a logo already created, putting it on your group site adds another 45 seconds or so to your build time.
• They are easy to join compared with white label sites. If your potential members aren’t in Facebook yet, the sign-up time is roughly equivalent to a white label site. But for the 31 million current Facebook members (growing by 1.2 million a week), they can join your group in about 5 seconds. They just go there and click the “Join this Group” link.
• Your organization can form a network of networks. Say you want to have one network of customers or constituents and another of vendors, business partners or allies and still another of employees. In Facebook you can create all of those groups in less than an hour, and people can join whichever groups are appropriate for them.

Disadvantages:

• The site has advertising. This is much less intrusive in Facebook than in MySpace; just one ad per page at the most, in the left-hand navigation or on the bottom of the page. But it’s a free service, someone has to pay. Facebook offers sponsored groups, so if advertising is a big problem for your organization I think you could likely pay to not have ads.
• The feature set is basic. You can upload photos and videos and have a discussion board, as well as the Wall. You can choose not to have any of those features. The white label products likely offer more customization, but the Facebook interface is elegant and pleasing and the feature set is expanding. For example, I believe videos for groups is a new function; previously I think you could only add videos to personal profiles. And with outside companies developing applications for the Facebook platform, undoubtedly some of them will extend functionality for groups. If there is some feature you particularly need, I believe you could get a programmer to develop an application to add it for your group.

These are some of the factors to consider as you are exploring how your organization can become active in online social networking. Even if you do decide to use a white label product, you also should have a Facebook group, if for no other reason than to serve as an outpost with a link to your organization’s white-label site. If you don’t create a Facebook group for your organization, someone else likely will.

Technorati: Social networking, white label, Facebook, MySpace