SpectatorBytes

Social networks have established a new “social paradigm” on how users can consume information on the Web. Content consumption in social networks has been mainly organized around friends or people you know. The primary tools provided by “social” experiences have proven to be highly addictive and engaging:

-  People  or entity-specific data feeds provide an easy way to personalize the data a user wants to receive (e.g., colleagues from my prior company, high school friends, celebrities, music bands)

-  The “news feed” or “stream” is an efficient user interface which allows users to quickly snack on aggregated information

-  The recommendation engine which enables user to add people to their network (e.g., people you may know, celebrities your friends like, etc.)

-  In-stream interaction tools (comments, likes, pulse, check-ins) foster increased user engagement due to their low-friction

“Social” experiences tend to be much more personalized and allow users to consume information much more efficiently. Given its efficiency and precision, the “social paradigm” is likely to emerge as a dominant framework to create next-generation Web experiences. (These new Web experiences will apply the “social paradigm” to new data sets which today are organized using the traditional Website paradigm.)

It is important to make the following clarification: “social” is not limited to “people I am friends with or people I know.” While “social” products are commonly associated with social networks built around people’s relationships, the “social paradigm” can apply to services built around experts, interests, services, shopping, etc.

We are beginning to see examples of these new experiences. Quora, the recently launched Q&A service, applies the “social paradigm” to enhance the Q&A experience. Linked In has done the same for career and work related services. Microsoft and Facebook recently announced a series of products which seek to rethink the search experience using the “social paradigm”. Content experiences are poised to be the next area ripe for social innovation.

Applying the “social paradigm” to content experiences require adopting a different set of design principles from what is traditionally used by content websites. The following are some of the key design elements:

1) Profile managed by people or entities providing the data become the main environments where “deep engagement” and “consumption” takes place. This is where the user can access all the aggregated content related to a specific person of entity, and becomes the “showcase” destination.

2) Connecting or following people/entities becomes for content personalization

3) Content is organized around taxonomies that are built around people or entities (e.g., teams, brands, players, companies, etc.). Users can then group these entities into “personalized” playlists. Thus, each user gets to see only the relevant information they have selected to follow. This is in contrast with pre-established categories defined by an editor (sports, gossip, movies, celebrities, etc).

4) Each user is presented with a unique, personalized  “feed or stream” of aggregated content rather than a “common” home page for everyone.

5) Recommendations are based on degrees of relationship or interest similarities between people and or entities rather than using semantics or collaborative filtering to determine relatedness.

6) Interaction tools are optimized to foster additional distribution of the content across the network (e.g., check-in, like, pulse) as well as increased user engagement in the site

When these “social” design concepts are applied to content experiences, the results can be transformative. More personalized offerings, better discovery solution, increased community activity and greater engagement.

Achieving mass personalization of content has been elusive to media companies for many years. Applying the “social paradigm” to content experiences offers the best chance to make it a reality in the near future.