The prom queen

This individual (and it’s just as likely to be a “prom king” as the queen) is a true social butterfly. Online media—Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter, MySpace—is just another one of many tools she uses to keep her social circle intact. While she may not have been her high school’s actual prom queen, she almost certainly still keeps in touch with her.

She’s a planner—she organizes gatherings, soccer games, poker games for her spouse, and feels involved whenever she has direct control over an activity. Whether it’s running the annual candy sale for her children’s junior high school orchestra, or putting together the annual reunion for her college graduating class, she’s an integral part.

She drives a minivan.

She is frustrated by limits imposed on her: why, for example, does Facebook limit her to 5,000 friends? She went to high school with 3,000 people, and to college with 12,000 more, and she knows at least half of them by name.

She has a blog and writes regularly on women’s issues.

She dropped out of the work force when she had her first child, but has since returned, now that her kids are in elementary school. Her job title will be “Event Planner” or  maybe”Marketing Manager.”

She ran her first marathon the year after her youngest child turned 7.

If you’re building a social media experience for her, then get out of her way. She needs tools and she knows how to use them. Your job as a developer is to make sure that those tools always work, even in ways that you didn’t foresee. Give her ways to bring people together (“groups,” “events,” or “interests”) and ways to communicate with large numbers of people, and she’ll be happy. Whatever you do, don’t force her to work in a way that fits your expectations: that’s a sure way to drive her away. Expect creativity—if she finds a way to embed a Google Map into her comment, then embrace that and leverage it, don’t quash it. She is quite possibly the best way to see your social media site expand because of all the new members she keeps bringing in.

The marketer

He is only interested in social media as a way to expand his market. He talks about “reach” and “distribution” as if people were meat channels for the delivery of advertising. He dreams of viral videos about his product. Often, he’s a consultant and uses words like “leverage” and “synergy.”

On Facebook, he has 4,992 “friends” that he met at conferences. He considers them his “vital business connections.” He values his Porsche more highly than either his wife or his girlfriend. Both his wife and his girlfriend, in fact, are less “relationships” and more “strategic alliances” that he will discard once they’ve outlived their usefulness.

His Twitter page uses a full-screen image of himself, wearing sunglasses and standing next to his car, and a trite slogan like “improve your throughput.”

He sometimes thinks about his upbringing in the Roman Catholic church and thinks that they have a really well-connected graph.

He is great to go out with, since he will always pick up the tab, trying to impress you. On the other hand, you then have to listen to him.

Given a free reign on your socially-enabled website, he will kill whatever community that you have painstakingly built over the years, often with a few well-directed comments.

He sells Amway to his relatives on the weekends.

To be continued…

In keeping with my homage to William James, I suppose that this blog post should be subtitled, “A Study in Human Nature.” However, my goals are not quite so lofty as James’s; I am merely an observer, and not a philosopher, of online social activities. Perhaps a better title would be, “A Field Guide to the Social Media Participants of the Online Realm,” but even that is a bit pretentious, don’t you think?

Those of us who live in the rarefied air of Silicon Valley tend to assume, almost always incorrectly, that the “rest of the world” experiences social media the way we do. It therefore comes as quite a shock, at times, to discover that there are enormous hordes of online users who do not experience the Internet the way we do. Here are some facts about the “other half” of the online world:

• Many of them do not know what a URL is, nor what a search engine is. There’s a reason that the most common search query at Yahoo! is “Google,” and the most common search query at Google is “Yahoo.”
• The term hyperlink has no meaning and is probably confused with something in science fiction.
• They have never heard of Techmeme, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, TechCrunch, or any of the other dozens of sites that we tend to rely on for our daily news.
• They believe that the Internet is a scary and dangerous place, and will rarely, if ever, divulge any personal information, much less their credit card numbers, online.
• They have no sense at all of the relatively safety or security of one website versus another. “https://” vs. “http://” is meaningless.
• They tend to perceive Internet sites as TV channels: different content, to be sure, but fundamentally the same technology.
• If they notice the URL, they get concerned if the site does not use “www.” before the domain name, thinking that it somehow controls the behavior of the web.

It’s not surprising, then, that these people tend to have different experiences of social media. This is an attempt to catalog, based solely on my personal experience, the various types of social media behaviors that occur.

The grandma

She has an account on Facebook after frequently seeing her grandchildren using it. She has had a computer since the 1990′s, and it’s mostly used by her grandkids when they come over to visit. She’s good at a few tasks using the computer: she can print out maps and directions, she can retrieve her email, and she can upload pictures from the tiny little Canon point-and-shoot camera that she carries everywhere.

Unfortunately, she has no fear and little understanding that there are Very Bad People on the Internet who would like to take over her computer and use it to send thousands of spam messages per hour for the next few years.

Her social graph consists of a) her immediate family members, b) some people she knows from church or the local community, and c) scammers who would like to inherit her modest fortune.

She loves seeing the pictures of her children and grand children, and she’s a big fan of casual games online. She has a farm on Farmville.

She reads every word of text on a web page before taking any action at all; because of this, she does not distinguish between actual content, navigation, and advertising.

Because of her innocence, she needs to be protected. Default privacy settings that reveal her name and location to the world could put her in very real physical danger. She will never be a mobile device user, and strategies that encourage her to become one will only confuse and frustrate her. She gets far more value out of “real life” social interaction than she does online, and she will drop the online interaction in a heartbeat if she has an opportunity to do something that involves real people.

The student

He is in high school or college, and has never known a world without the Internet. He does not wear a watch and probably never will. The concept of a “landline” is a novelty, since he’s never known a phone that would not go everywhere. He will not use email personally because it’s too slow, instead relying on SMS (text messaging) for most of his interaction with his peers.

His attention span is under two seconds: if he looks at a web page and cannot figure out how to use it in that time (or if it takes longer than that to load in the browser), he will drop it and move on to something more interesting. He is incredibly frustrated with his college’s website, and will scream out loud at how difficult it is to use.

He is completely and totally paranoid. He was raised hearing horror stories about online dangers and will go to great lengths to avoid giving any personal information online. He has no way of determining the difference between real and imagined risks. He will grudgingly order things from Amazon, but he will not allow them to save his credit card information for later, preferring to enter it each time.

He uses Facebook almost exclusively on his smartphone. He updates his status several times today, often with totally introverted comments about his state of mind.

Because of his paranoia (some of it justified), the student needs to be enticed to expand his social media horizons. For people his age, the best way to do this is with sex. The ability to share with people of the opposite gender is a strong attractor, overcoming many fears. Seriously, however, the student needs to be introduced to things gradually; he needs to be assured that he has control over who can see his personal information, and what it will be used for.

To be continued…