Social Media Enabled Website Success Factors

The ability to share information directly with others on the Internet is now expected. And users want to be able to share that information with friends and collegues easily. Every site of note either has ways to establish a connection to others or they are planning to do so. It is now an expected feature. What I intend to lay out here are the basic socialization features that site or service should have just to be in the game.

Identity

The first necessary feature is a basic identity. This might be the person’s real name or it might just be a non-identifying id or nickname of some sort. I would expect that this is password protected. There is a problem with each site requiring a user to create an account on that site. This eventually becomes a burden for the users. Even the most heavy power user will eventually have so many accounts all over that they will resist using a site that requires them to have yet another user name and password. Consider offering OpenID as an alternative so that users can use their login from an OpenID identity provider.

Profile

The site should offer a profile. This should let the user put in whatever information they would like. There are many things to offer in this area. It really depends on what the site is all about. Whatever information the profile allows there are some guidelines to follow.

Do not require a birthday. This has security implications.

All information should be optional.

If the profile has a place for specific information, be sure to offer a section for the user to share whatever information they want to share. For example, I have seen profiles that let users share their favorite movies, music, books etc. However, it did not have a place for me to share a link to my blog. Let users customize the profile.

The last item to mention is that a profile should let users control who has access to each profile component.

Connecting to Others

The site should allow users to connect to others for whatever reason makes sense for the site. This might be a connection to friends, collegues, or others with similar interests. The one thing that I am strongly against is asking users to enter their passwords for other sites. I still get alarmed when I see sites asking me for my Yahoo or Google username and passwords so they can import my contacts. This should NEVER be done. If the third party site supports OAuth, then use that.

Let users categorize or tag their connections. Make it easy for them to find all their connections that have certain characteristics.

Sharing Outside The Site

We can no longer live in an isolated world. A site should expect to share and interact with other sites. No one will want to input all their connections in every site they belong to. In a perfect world, I would like to make my list of favorite music once. And then share that information with other sites if I choose to do that. I should not have to input the same information separately into Facebook, Yahoo, Orkut, Last FM and so on.

Sharing means offering a web service so that third party sites can get to the user’s information. This means that a user may want to participate in a certain community provided by a site but may not want to actually go to that site on a regular basis. This one probably scares some site owners. The traditional approach has been to draw users to a site and try to keep them captive. The ability to do that is fading. Internet mind leaders have realized that this has to change. Oauth is the most glaring example of this realization and effort to switch to a new paradigm. The rest of the world has to catch up or perish. For example, users are realizing that it is not unreasonable to prefer to use Facebook as their primary interface and still use some other site for music. Or better yet, they are willing to participate in multiple social networking sites but only want to use one of them as their primary means of managing their social data. We all know that the customer is always right.

Interacting With Other Devices

The world is no longer made up of PCs sitting on desks. Phones, if they can still be called that, represent a huge means by which users interact. Relatively few of them use their phone to browse the web. I don’t see that changing. But, the use of text messaging and phone hosted applications is become more and more popular. Users of iPhone are familiar with this concept. The challenge is to come up with ways to seamlessly integrate these various technologies to make users’ lives easier.

In the end, any site owner should be concerned about one thing. Am I bringing value to my users. Make their lives easier. Let them connect and communicate with others. Don’t box them in. Let them be flexible. If they do these things, then the site will be a success.