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Thanks for the slideshow. I like the idea that we have different roles online. I think sometimes my roles vary depending on what network I'm using, and in what capacity (work/play/experience level).

My narcissism kicked in and I have to admit I read through the personality types wondering which I was (an officiator by the way).

Woud love to see a whitepaper in the future.

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Adrian, I enjoyed your slideshow and appreciate reading your thoughts on the relevance of personality to social media. I have one basic response to your post.

The "personality types" you distinguish seem more personas than personalities. By persona I'm not referring to the concept currently in use for experience design by marketers and user experience teams. Rather, I mean it in the sense of social psychology. "Variability in the way a person presents himself to others is sometimes represented by distinguishing his 'personas' from his personality, where 'persona' is used for the way he appears to others on particular kinds of occasions, and 'personality' is reserved for the inner complex of cognitive resources a person needs to be able to be a skilled presenter of himself to others," J. Morgan, C. O'Neill, and Rom Harre, Nicknames: Their Origins and Social Consequences (1979, p. 4).

A lurker in one social media venue may present herself as a critic in another venue. These are personas at work, not personality, in my opinion. Of course, if the other does not know that the individual's persona they engage in one venue is different in other venues, then the persona is treated as a personality in that venue, when in fact it is simply one presentation of self among others.

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Interesting post, I wonder how will this information be viewed in the future? Will blogs be viewed a public diary of people thoughts for a given time. Will the media thats being used now be around to extract and connect the conversations?
I wonder how future society will be able to make sense of today history with the amount of content that has been generated?

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I really do enjoy your take on social media, especially the way you adapt the concept of the self as social. Your take on social media as involving the design of social interaction makes me wonder if you are channeling Charles Horton Cooley.

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Agreed. I tend to think branding is too complex to assume that use of social tools will always yield results. The way they are used and the process is what most ventures could choose to invest in.

Success would seem to favor those who update traditional branding and integrate with new media.

To do little or nothing is folly.

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Fantastic dialogue. The race is on between traditional marketing and entertainment/media to deliver value to the consumer and PR is the perfect hybrid between the two; positioned to deliver the best balance of brand engagement and value for the consumer.

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www.ethos3.com like minded revolutionaries

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har -- a long strange trip would've been fine with me! i call it more of a bad dream. But if by strange you also include bats, thievery, and a committed nutter leading the last great gas guzzler on the long road out of Barstow towards a shimmering mirage in late capitalist desert heat, yes.

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I think a lot of us finally feel welcomed back home....what a long strange trip from there to here.

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Raygsmn, absolutely true! I may be biased, but it wasn't just UPS and Graco that took the "I" and "Me" out of social media. It was every company that presented -- UPS, Graco, Walmart (yes, Walmart!), The Home Depot, Intel, Kaiser Permanente, and Cisco.

--
Michael E. Rubin
michael@blogcouncil.org / twitter: merubin
I am a Blog Council employee and this is my personal opinion.

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Angela,
Wait a second, don't I know you? ;-) (how's it going?!)

This may be a matter of semantics, or of my not being clear. Personas are, as far as I get it, heuristics -- so they are incredibly useful in the design process for communicating *about* the personified "user." I've got nothing against that.

What i'm after tho is the inner user experience, which is a matter not of "observing" the user, or "describing" the user -- those serve the purpose of communicating *about* the user and are helpful, as personas are, in reports about social media users. Forrester, etc do this very well -- there are probably 4 or 5 models of user types, social media market segmentation, and so on that help communicate about social media.

The inner experience requires not a descriptive but an explanatory theory, if not predictive theory. And as we both know, that's a hermeneutical challenge. I'm using psychology, against better instincts, because it is a familiar language. I want to know what psychological hooks work online. What people think they are doing (which can be very different from what others think they are seeing them do.) I want a language for phenomena like "I see myself being seen" -- stuff that I think motivates users *even if it is subconscious.* I need a framework for how to understand how some social media really engage and compel users because they offer such great presentations of the user and the social. And the list goes on and on.

I'm using modernism a la Giddens, and Goffman for interaction, Berne et al for transactional analysis, Habermas in part, and so on...

Writ large, I think users have a private encounter with the social (online). That encounter is where the gold is (literally and figuratively). Personalities are thus, for me, better than personas.

cheers!
a

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Hi Adrian,

I've been following your "user needs" vs. "user interests" distinction in various posts and I agree that it is an excellent, clarifying distinction about social media users. Social media designers will benefit from the social and psychological perspective you so clearly lay out here and elsewhere.

I disagree, however, with your assertion that personas cannot capture users' social media interests. My experience is that personas and scenarios can help communicate interests. Why do you not see them as appropriate tools? What other tools would you recommend to convey users' social and psychological interests to designers and programmers?

Great post-- Cheers!
Angela

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It's companies like UPS and Graco that take the "I" and the "Me" out of Social Media. Both presenters at Blogwell emphasized that building realtionships begins with the "listening". Your whiteboard ideas support that as well. Well done.

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Lauren,

Absolutely -- thanks for the distribution, and I'm available for more if there's the opportunity!

Ian,
glad you enjoyed the post. Edelman can show leadership in the space with success stories in creative conversational branding

Christel,
It was a thrill joining your class on social media and we should do an in-house working session.

To Grunig's four characteristics of relationships, I agree that number four is most interesting. It seems he's describing strategic relationships, perhaps not organic relationships.

Trust is a measure of risk and confidence, reached by means of experience over time, and having a value related to the vulnerability/risk either partner exposes him/herself to.

Commitment is a measure of future expectations, called sometimes the "shadow of the future," and having to do with the future and ongoing commitment to the interaction and relationship, varying in value by the length of that future. (short if i'm just buying basics, long if i'm buying brand identity).

Satisfaction is a bit weird to organic relationships, but in brand-consumer relationships would correspond to the exchange and transactional value of whatever is promised and then purchased. Value being a matter then of consumer expectation measured against brand deliverable.

Mutual recognition is key: it's weakest link in the chain and as such the most important, for it's achieved only through reciprocal participation and acknowledgment. It is directly affected by handling of relationship, quality of communication, authenticity of presence, integrity of character, sincerity of approach. All are factors available to the smart social media marketer.

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Whoops. I mean *people*.

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Hi Adrian,
I'm a colleague of Christel's and would like to link to your piece in an internal publication I'm putting together for PR people. I copied the sound bite I'd like to excerpt below. I like this because it provides effective vocabulary for client counsel. We *sense* this is true, but I haven't seen it put this way before. I think it will help us give good guidance to our clients. Then I'd offer the link to the whole piece. Sound OK? I also like your ending where you say that **peope* are the content of social media. How true!
"Social media serve highly local, personal, and episodic purposes. Conversations are fast, disjointed, and discontinuous. In other words, they have little in common with mass media and broadcasting. Talk starts with the user more than with published content. It unfolds in front of an audience on the medium, not outside of it. Commercial participation needs to come off the screen and embed itself."
Lauren E

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Hi Adrian - Great piece. I think this phrase in your post sums it up for me: "a shift in marketing from impression to expression and from image to relationship".

In some ways, I would argue that what branding is to product advertising is what social networking is to PR - the latter two are both aimed at building relationships.

Branding and social networking often don't have an immediate effect on sales (with a few exceptions) but its effects build over time. A brand gives a company or product an identity, something for people to relate to.

Social networking is a new way to build or strengthen relationships - it seems to work better with real people that represent the brand rather than the brand itself.

Companies that do this well build their relationships and make their friends before they need them - Pandora and JetBlue are great examples.

I guess it’s possible to use a brand as an element in social media marketing, as long as you can find ways for people to engage with it. Often, success comes from things going viral, which means that people adapted a campaign element, so it’s down to people again (just not company reps, but customers or fans.)

I once heard of a way to measure the quality of a relationship, developed by Dr. James Grunig of the University of Maryland's (and I believe Edelman, my employer, had a hand in it too.) He uses four characteristics: trust, commitment, satisfaction, and mutuality of control.

The last one, I find especially intriguing and relevant, because social media tools give end-users, consumers, people a lot more control and almost demand that companies give up some of it.

So much for my 2 cents...

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adrian,

i had a such a pleasure reading this post. it's such a good perspective on the fundamental change that is happening in marketing with the rising popularity of social media.

as you so well described, marketers need to think differently when it comes to this space, primarily based on the fact that consumers now for the first time have a real voice and an important role in the marketing process.

ian
http://radar.net

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Sorry for the delay in response. I have an information overload problem and I like to sleep at night.
I think you pose very good questions, and the answer is probably that it will be different for each company and their agency. The CMO of one company may be a perfect blogger on certain visionary topics, whereas in another company perhaps that is better served by a CTO. At the end of the day, the client should "own" the campaign, and the agency supports it, guides it, helps to shape it.
People and companies make mistakes, they always have and they always will, so one just needs to be prepared in the event... It is a team effort clearly, and some companies new to blogging may rely more heavily on agency counsel. That is ok, as long as everyone is being true and authentic.
Sabrina

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daniel,

I'd say that branding will still be important, if not as much to the consumer, then still to the brand. Old habits die hard.

That said, i think new marketers will see what more can be done to brand, and done with the brand, than over mainstream media. brands that engage, participate, and respond will accrue intangible brand equity: trust, respect, mindshare, reputation, credibility, etc.

The thing about branding i think is that the brand manager needs to see his/her brand out there: on pages, on billboards, on tv, etc etc. Makes perfect sense. But there's a critical difference between getting traction in social media and getting exposure (buys) in mainstream media. The former cannot be as well controlled or managed. Therein lies both the rub and the opportunity.

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In traditional marketing, campaigns are used to establish a brand around a product.

In new marketing, we can theoretically make the marketing consumer-centric (Contextual ads are a first step), so do you think branding will be as important?

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Paddy,

It's not quite that simple, but yes. Users do do those things, and social media do accommodate them. What I'm getting at is "what interests the user?" Because if the user's not interested, they won't use it. And I think that's a more psychological proposition than it seems at face value.

What I've noticed is that there are users who start from the Self, the "I", and they see themselves reflected in social media. There are users who start with another person(s), and are interested in the acknowledgment, recognition, validation etc that come from interacting. (The Self oriented user may not actually browse other people's profiles, for example, but spend most time on their own.) Then the social user gets interested by social interactions (games, apps, etc).

We know these differences in personality from people all around us. There are hosts, and those who show up. There are mediators and activity-based people (who may not be very intimate, or close). People good at asking how you're doing; and people who seem to be on their own trip most of the time.

I'm simplifying, of course, but I think these differences are engaged in social media use, and that we can enrich our view of design and user experience if we see that what interests users can be very different.

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Thanks

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So what you're saying is that social media websites must be designed for and respond to user interactions and that there are three kinds of user interactions: talking about yourself for others,
responding to others,
and conversing directly and live.

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Interesting comments here

http://www.ixda.org/discuss.php?post=34457

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