Social Design Strategy
From the translator: This article was published by Eric Fisher , a Facebook evangelist, in May 2011, and formed the basis of the Faceboo k Social Design Guide .
A product or service becomes outstanding if it offers its users the opportunity to realize some outstanding practice. And this is by no means a question of what users do in the service or how they do it, but rather the question of why they do what they do with the help of the service. Why do they regularly return to the service and why they tell about it to their friends. Social engineering just answers this question “why” and explains how to create opportunities for the implementation of such outstanding practices.
Let me tell you a short story. Strand Book Store is a fairly famous bookstore in New York. But I first learned about its existence (although I live in New York) only when, at the beginning of this year, I had the opportunity to walk not far from him with my girlfriend, and she showed me to him. She said she regularly visits this store, and that I should like it too. And I really liked him. I even bought a book of one of my favorite authors.
')
With the help of modern technology, we can get answers to any questions very quickly. On my phone, I could easily get all the bookstores in New York, determine the route to each of them, and also find out which books my favorite author’s books are for sale in. But the value of the social lies precisely in the fact that I can find even something that I did not even think of looking for at all.
When we are confronted with such questions as: “Where would you find a good Italian restaurant?” Or “What kind of cinema should I watch?”, Or “Is there any outstanding museum nearby?” - in such situations we always ask for help to our surroundings. After all, who else besides the people around us will be able to understand such subjective questions?
The circle of our friends acts as a kind of buffer between us and the rest of the world. In the wild, human communities emerged in the process of evolution as a mechanism that protects us from all sorts of dangers: after all, a group is more powerful than the individual, and the individual can always turn to the group for social clues about what he should do in a given situation. To feel part of a community is to feel your emotional connection with these people. We feel such a connection primarily with loved ones who surround us: with our friends and with our family members. We know these people, we like them, and they, in turn, also know us, and they also like us. We share our thoughts, feelings, experiences with them, and we always turn to them for love and support, because we trust them.
Despite all the diversity of relationships that we enter into in our lives - with colleagues or neighbors, with brands or organizations, whether long-term or short-lived, formal or intimate - all of these relationships are built on trust. Social engineering is impossible without taking into account this fundamental principle.
When my close New York friend advises me a place worth visiting, I trust her opinion, because I am sure that she knows me well. And when we receive recommendations that meet our expectations, we enjoy and learn something new. In this situation, we not only feel gratitude for the experience, but also feel the need to talk about it and share it with our friends. We do this because when we talk about things that we like, we express ourselves in this way, and we want our environment to hear us.
Trust is built through everyday communication. Hundreds of millions of people interact in this way using Facebook or other social platforms: they share thoughts, feelings, places they have visited, articles that they have read, films that have been watched, etc. etc. The goal of social design is to be able to manage this communication, improve it, and be able to give everyone the opportunity to have even more useful and valuable practice.
Social engineering operates with three key elements: personality, communication, and the human environment. In other words, it works with such concepts as: me, other people and communication between me and other people.
I like to depict it in the form of three concentric circles: the person is placed in the center, communication lies in the middle, and the social environment is located at the edges. That’s because communication acts as a glue between a person and his environment. Through communication, we build our identity in our social environment and receive feedback from it.
When developing a social product, you should always keep this picture in your head, start from the center and then move to the edges. To begin with, let people build their identity, then give them the opportunity to talk about it and build a social environment in parallel. This is a very valid approach: this is how Facebook and many other social networks started.
At its very beginning, in 2004, Facebook was a simple site where college students could only create and edit their profiles. This editing was contagious: people hung out on the site to see what changed in their friends' profiles, and to change something in their own. Over time, this became a special form of communication, people gradually built strong identities and formed networks of friends and family members.
And now - when this practice has become the daily routine of hundreds of millions of people - for social design it is more expedient to apply the opposite approach: go from the edges to the center. We must use the already formed communities, create new forms of communication and give people the opportunity to develop their identities further.
The iconographic depiction of the three components of social planning: personality, communication, and the human environment. Communication is the glue that binds the person and her surroundings together.
Facebook profiles are their identities. People spend an infinite number of hours building their profiles: adding friends, posting photos, commenting on friends' posts. In fact, it is their self-representation, and they don’t want to recreate the same thing from scratch in every new product or service.
Therefore, instead of creating a practice that would allow us to build our identity, we should use, if possible, what is already on Facebook, and build a new practice on top of it. Connect users with their friends as soon as they register with the new service. Social applications will not be social without contacts with other people, moreover, creating connections with friends already existing at the user brings previously formed trust to the community. Use information from existing profiles of people to recommend them new content - people already know what they like, otherwise it would not be in their profiles. All that remains to be done next is to establish communication: to understand what people will talk about and how they will do it.
Rotten Tomatoes , for example, shows the user films that his friends liked - besides the personal recommendations given to him based on those films that he liked before.
Communication generates trust. In fact, any interaction that occurs in real time and is associated with emotions creates strong connections. The interaction can be very different: both by talking on a bench - and by dancing, either by participating in a protest rally - or by a joint parachute jump. Communication is simply a more general term that I use to explain the interaction between the individual and the social environment. And the stronger the emotions experienced by a person when interacting with someone, the stronger the connection between them. Communication is reciprocating in nature and consists of two practices that influence one another: we can generally call them listening and speaking .
An example of the practice of listening is when you come to a restaurant in which you have never been, and order something to eat based on the recommendations of others. You listen to what they say in your environment and what they do in it, so that later on the basis of what they have heard they make their own choice.
We see this in a variety of online services. On Yelp, for example, you can find comments to restaurants, like "Try here hot chocolate." On YouTube, we see the rating of each video, and it helps us to choose what is worth watching, because we most likely will not want to look bad. A good rating as if tells us: “Look at this, because others liked it.” In online stores like Amazon, we also see similar things: reviews of people about products that help us make our choice.
But here a big problem arises: after all, we do not know all these people at all, and they do not know us . How do they understand what we like? How can we trust the rating they have formed? We cannot trust them because there is not enough trust between us.
Facebook solves this problem through your circle of friends. Social plug-ins , for example, give people the opportunity to "like" a variety of things on the Internet and demonstrate this activity to their friends. And we are likely to be interested in what we like to our environment, whom we trust.
I repeat once again, the value of the social is manifested at that moment when we do not know in advance what we want and are not specifically looking for anything, but we still find topics for communication and things that are interesting to us. This happens when our environment regularly shares its experience with us. We learn by watching others. The principle of social mimicry and motivation for action works: when we see that the one whom we trust does something, we will most likely do the same.
Spotify , for example, shows the flow of all songs that users add to their playlists or share with each other. This allows users to see the latest and most popular compositions.
When you log in with Facebook on the Huffington Post , you see a stream of articles that your friends have read recently.
Another part of the communication — and perhaps the most important part of it — is speaking. People are active when they have the right motivation to do this. At the same time, we know that when people share their experiences with those they trust, they tend to do it more often and be more open and honest.
On Facebook, there are many ways to engage users in activity: they have been provided with several possible types of publications (statuses, links, photos, etc.), as well as various feedback methods (likes, comments, answers to questions, publications on the wall, etc.). P.). And all this activity is continuously demonstrated to the user's friends through different channels.
The more people manifest themselves in the system, the more activities occur, which can be listened to and which can be involved. And likewise, the more activities you can get involved in, the more people manifest themselves. This process creates a continuous, exponentially growing, feedback loop. This is really great: communication is fueling even more communication.
Summarizing, we can say that outstanding social practice depends on the communication that occurs between our environment and us. To create such a practice, you need to be able to implement three basic things:
The attractiveness of social projection is that it deals with the most powerful form of motivation: the human “me,” its identity. We share our experiences and interact with others because we learn more about ourselves in this way and because we feel better when we know that we have been heard.
Social engineering, in fact, deals with the central part of Maslow's pyramid of needs , in my opinion. After our physiological needs for food and water, as well as our needs for security, are satisfied, we have two interesting related needs: the need for love and belonging, and the need for recognition. But gaining recognition is directly related to how our environment sees us, for whom it recognizes us. In other words, the community controls our identity. And we feel love and belonging precisely when we can receive recognition and reveal our full potential.
The practice of meeting these needs, of course, already exists in the real world, and we are not trying to discover something “new” here. But the Internet is becoming part of the real world and is increasingly reflecting it, and the means by which we communicate with each other are becoming more and more effective. People immersed in the network, more and more practices, then occurring in the real world, are initially implemented online. When designing social platforms, we have to keep this in mind all the time. We should take into account existing social laws, taking care of identities and their environments that we influence and for which we create our means of communication.
In the end, the value of the social is much greater than anything material. With the help of the social, we can satisfy our social needs - just as we have satisfied our physical needs. We no longer need to worry about food and hunt all our lives, as other animals do. We learned to trust each other and work together, thus creating a safer living space. But each of us individually still suffers from the uncertainty of the future, seeks love, wants to be heard and to know ourselves. Social engineering can help with this.
A product or service becomes outstanding if it offers its users the opportunity to realize some outstanding practice. And this is by no means a question of what users do in the service or how they do it, but rather the question of why they do what they do with the help of the service. Why do they regularly return to the service and why they tell about it to their friends. Social engineering just answers this question “why” and explains how to create opportunities for the implementation of such outstanding practices.
Let me tell you a short story. Strand Book Store is a fairly famous bookstore in New York. But I first learned about its existence (although I live in New York) only when, at the beginning of this year, I had the opportunity to walk not far from him with my girlfriend, and she showed me to him. She said she regularly visits this store, and that I should like it too. And I really liked him. I even bought a book of one of my favorite authors.
')
With the help of modern technology, we can get answers to any questions very quickly. On my phone, I could easily get all the bookstores in New York, determine the route to each of them, and also find out which books my favorite author’s books are for sale in. But the value of the social lies precisely in the fact that I can find even something that I did not even think of looking for at all.
When we are confronted with such questions as: “Where would you find a good Italian restaurant?” Or “What kind of cinema should I watch?”, Or “Is there any outstanding museum nearby?” - in such situations we always ask for help to our surroundings. After all, who else besides the people around us will be able to understand such subjective questions?
The circle of our friends acts as a kind of buffer between us and the rest of the world. In the wild, human communities emerged in the process of evolution as a mechanism that protects us from all sorts of dangers: after all, a group is more powerful than the individual, and the individual can always turn to the group for social clues about what he should do in a given situation. To feel part of a community is to feel your emotional connection with these people. We feel such a connection primarily with loved ones who surround us: with our friends and with our family members. We know these people, we like them, and they, in turn, also know us, and they also like us. We share our thoughts, feelings, experiences with them, and we always turn to them for love and support, because we trust them.
Despite all the diversity of relationships that we enter into in our lives - with colleagues or neighbors, with brands or organizations, whether long-term or short-lived, formal or intimate - all of these relationships are built on trust. Social engineering is impossible without taking into account this fundamental principle.
When my close New York friend advises me a place worth visiting, I trust her opinion, because I am sure that she knows me well. And when we receive recommendations that meet our expectations, we enjoy and learn something new. In this situation, we not only feel gratitude for the experience, but also feel the need to talk about it and share it with our friends. We do this because when we talk about things that we like, we express ourselves in this way, and we want our environment to hear us.
Trust is built through everyday communication. Hundreds of millions of people interact in this way using Facebook or other social platforms: they share thoughts, feelings, places they have visited, articles that they have read, films that have been watched, etc. etc. The goal of social design is to be able to manage this communication, improve it, and be able to give everyone the opportunity to have even more useful and valuable practice.
Three elements of social design
Social engineering operates with three key elements: personality, communication, and the human environment. In other words, it works with such concepts as: me, other people and communication between me and other people.
I like to depict it in the form of three concentric circles: the person is placed in the center, communication lies in the middle, and the social environment is located at the edges. That’s because communication acts as a glue between a person and his environment. Through communication, we build our identity in our social environment and receive feedback from it.
When developing a social product, you should always keep this picture in your head, start from the center and then move to the edges. To begin with, let people build their identity, then give them the opportunity to talk about it and build a social environment in parallel. This is a very valid approach: this is how Facebook and many other social networks started.
At its very beginning, in 2004, Facebook was a simple site where college students could only create and edit their profiles. This editing was contagious: people hung out on the site to see what changed in their friends' profiles, and to change something in their own. Over time, this became a special form of communication, people gradually built strong identities and formed networks of friends and family members.
And now - when this practice has become the daily routine of hundreds of millions of people - for social design it is more expedient to apply the opposite approach: go from the edges to the center. We must use the already formed communities, create new forms of communication and give people the opportunity to develop their identities further.
The iconographic depiction of the three components of social planning: personality, communication, and the human environment. Communication is the glue that binds the person and her surroundings together.Community use
Facebook profiles are their identities. People spend an infinite number of hours building their profiles: adding friends, posting photos, commenting on friends' posts. In fact, it is their self-representation, and they don’t want to recreate the same thing from scratch in every new product or service.
Therefore, instead of creating a practice that would allow us to build our identity, we should use, if possible, what is already on Facebook, and build a new practice on top of it. Connect users with their friends as soon as they register with the new service. Social applications will not be social without contacts with other people, moreover, creating connections with friends already existing at the user brings previously formed trust to the community. Use information from existing profiles of people to recommend them new content - people already know what they like, otherwise it would not be in their profiles. All that remains to be done next is to establish communication: to understand what people will talk about and how they will do it.
Rotten Tomatoes , for example, shows the user films that his friends liked - besides the personal recommendations given to him based on those films that he liked before.Alignment of communication
Communication generates trust. In fact, any interaction that occurs in real time and is associated with emotions creates strong connections. The interaction can be very different: both by talking on a bench - and by dancing, either by participating in a protest rally - or by a joint parachute jump. Communication is simply a more general term that I use to explain the interaction between the individual and the social environment. And the stronger the emotions experienced by a person when interacting with someone, the stronger the connection between them. Communication is reciprocating in nature and consists of two practices that influence one another: we can generally call them listening and speaking .
Hearing
An example of the practice of listening is when you come to a restaurant in which you have never been, and order something to eat based on the recommendations of others. You listen to what they say in your environment and what they do in it, so that later on the basis of what they have heard they make their own choice.
We see this in a variety of online services. On Yelp, for example, you can find comments to restaurants, like "Try here hot chocolate." On YouTube, we see the rating of each video, and it helps us to choose what is worth watching, because we most likely will not want to look bad. A good rating as if tells us: “Look at this, because others liked it.” In online stores like Amazon, we also see similar things: reviews of people about products that help us make our choice.
But here a big problem arises: after all, we do not know all these people at all, and they do not know us . How do they understand what we like? How can we trust the rating they have formed? We cannot trust them because there is not enough trust between us.
Facebook solves this problem through your circle of friends. Social plug-ins , for example, give people the opportunity to "like" a variety of things on the Internet and demonstrate this activity to their friends. And we are likely to be interested in what we like to our environment, whom we trust.
I repeat once again, the value of the social is manifested at that moment when we do not know in advance what we want and are not specifically looking for anything, but we still find topics for communication and things that are interesting to us. This happens when our environment regularly shares its experience with us. We learn by watching others. The principle of social mimicry and motivation for action works: when we see that the one whom we trust does something, we will most likely do the same.
Spotify , for example, shows the flow of all songs that users add to their playlists or share with each other. This allows users to see the latest and most popular compositions. When you log in with Facebook on the Huffington Post , you see a stream of articles that your friends have read recently.Speaking
Another part of the communication — and perhaps the most important part of it — is speaking. People are active when they have the right motivation to do this. At the same time, we know that when people share their experiences with those they trust, they tend to do it more often and be more open and honest.
On Facebook, there are many ways to engage users in activity: they have been provided with several possible types of publications (statuses, links, photos, etc.), as well as various feedback methods (likes, comments, answers to questions, publications on the wall, etc.). P.). And all this activity is continuously demonstrated to the user's friends through different channels.
The more people manifest themselves in the system, the more activities occur, which can be listened to and which can be involved. And likewise, the more activities you can get involved in, the more people manifest themselves. This process creates a continuous, exponentially growing, feedback loop. This is really great: communication is fueling even more communication.
Summarizing, we can say that outstanding social practice depends on the communication that occurs between our environment and us. To create such a practice, you need to be able to implement three basic things:
- Use personal information from the profile and user-generated communications to create personal space for it
- To maximize communication between people, demonstrate the social context of this communication and show any activity
- Making it really easy is the opportunity to talk, share your experience, give feedback and get involved.
Alignment of identity
The attractiveness of social projection is that it deals with the most powerful form of motivation: the human “me,” its identity. We share our experiences and interact with others because we learn more about ourselves in this way and because we feel better when we know that we have been heard.
Social engineering, in fact, deals with the central part of Maslow's pyramid of needs , in my opinion. After our physiological needs for food and water, as well as our needs for security, are satisfied, we have two interesting related needs: the need for love and belonging, and the need for recognition. But gaining recognition is directly related to how our environment sees us, for whom it recognizes us. In other words, the community controls our identity. And we feel love and belonging precisely when we can receive recognition and reveal our full potential.
The practice of meeting these needs, of course, already exists in the real world, and we are not trying to discover something “new” here. But the Internet is becoming part of the real world and is increasingly reflecting it, and the means by which we communicate with each other are becoming more and more effective. People immersed in the network, more and more practices, then occurring in the real world, are initially implemented online. When designing social platforms, we have to keep this in mind all the time. We should take into account existing social laws, taking care of identities and their environments that we influence and for which we create our means of communication.
In the end, the value of the social is much greater than anything material. With the help of the social, we can satisfy our social needs - just as we have satisfied our physical needs. We no longer need to worry about food and hunt all our lives, as other animals do. We learned to trust each other and work together, thus creating a safer living space. But each of us individually still suffers from the uncertainty of the future, seeks love, wants to be heard and to know ourselves. Social engineering can help with this.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/127819/
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