Eric Schlissel

SXSW Panel - An Anthropological Perspective of Online Communities and Social Media

Please vote for my SXSW panel:

Cultural anthropology will become increasingly important to social media marketers, community managers and brand advocates as Internet users develop communal ties through technology. Social media and social networks have significantly increased social interactions online, creating cultural pools throughout the Internet. As outsiders or participant-observers we must study a culture before interacting with it in order to achieve our goals, whether messaging, management or motivation.

We’ll start by exploring the identification of norms, values, mores and symbols of online communities, while establishing more efficient practices of building targeted campaigns and community outreach based on this information. We’ll conclude with some examples and case studies and specific methodologies of creating ethnographies of communities.

Update: Please see these instructions!

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Future (and past) of Social Media Powerpoint from APGA

Today I’m giving a presentation on the history and future of social networks and social media at the American Public Gardens Association conference in Pasadena. I’ve attached the powerpoint and will be updating this post with the latest version as the afternoon progresses. This is released under Creative Commons, so please feel free to use this preso!

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Musings on Profile Portability

This year there will continue to be a big discussion about portable identities on Social Networks. The ability for people to bring their identity and friends from one network to another is going to be one of the next stages of the evolution of SN’s. This year there will continue to be a big discussion about portable identities on Social Networks. The ability for people to bring their identity and friends from one network to another is going to be one of the next stages of the evolution of SN’s. As Jeff Weiner from Yahoo (they’re having a bad day) said at EconSM last week, people are getting sick of signing up for network after network (paraphrasing). I agree that most people, like me, are not interested in spamming their friends with invites every time they join a Dodgeball or Twitter, but I disagree that the users of niche social networks are reluctant to invite their friends.

Getting back to the point, I join a lot of networks just to try them out. The thought of bringing my friends from one to another is intriguing, however I would need the ability to assign context to each of my friends. For instance, I wouldn’t want to bring most of my LinkedIn contacts over to Yelp, because all of those friends have different context. Currently many networks let members import contacts, but the import mechanism often insists that everyone you know that’s active on the site should be invited to connect, or it makes you browse through hundreds (if not thousands!) of contacts to pick and choose people to connect with. Even if this were perfect, and I assigned context prior to importing, I’d still end up spamming the same people over and over again with invites every time I want to try out the latest and greatest. Let’s call the solution “Context driven portable network identities.” I’ll work on an acronym-friendly version later.

My experience is a much different experience than most members joining anetwork, but down the road we’ll see this issue moving more mainstream. Being on the forefront of the evolution of the social internet helps our company anticipate changes in the marketplace. We strive to be at the sweet spot of the market - providing clients with the tools they need to create meaningful experiences for their members, while making sure our clients stay ahead of the technology curve.

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