Back from a great day at the NMK Forum 07 where the big news was the launch of Calacanis' Greenhouse project as part of his recently unveiled human-powered search-engine, Mahalo.
The Guardian's Bobbie Johnson referred to Calacanis as "marmite-like" and there wasn't shortage of debate about his idea of using staff as information gate-keepers. I'm won't go into great detail about the annoucement as there's plenty of content from Bobbie and his colleagues Jemima and Kevin and non-Guardian write-ups here (Google news) and from the lovely people at Shiny Media here.
What I will go into detail about is the really useful presentation from Jaiku's Jyri Engestrom about successfully using social networks and why micro-blogging is disrupting traditional blogging.
A sociologist by training, Jyri's presentation began with his theory of 'object centred sociality'. In Jyri's words, "the sites that fail are just 'social networks'" while those that succeed are "built around 'social objects'- the reason why people continue to link to the site.
Current examples include:
- Fickr - photos
- Del.icio.us - bookmarks
- Amazon - books
If you're with Jyri so far, then next he outlined five key 'principles' to make your site a success:
- Define your social object - if you can't do it quickly, then you might need to reconsider your proposition
- Define the verb for your site - social sites are centred around an action: Ebay = buy/sell; Flickr = upload your photos; Dogster = add a dog
- Make objects shareable - use permalinks; widgets; thumbnails; P2P file-sharing
- Turn invitations into gifts - make sharing an act of giving that will make friends want to join your networks
- Charge the publishers, not the spectators - this is the key business bit of Jyri's social network model. Some call the model 'freemium' but essentially it's about turning conventional business models on their head. For instance, magazine publishers charge people to read their publications, while blogging platforms charge people to publish content.
If you like the sound of all of that then Jyri's full presentation is up on Slideshare.
Looking forward to NMK Forum 2008.
Technorati tags: NMK+Forum; Jason+Calacanis; Mahalo; Mahalo+Greenhouse; Jyri+Engestrom; Jaiku; social+objects; social+networks
Comments