There is an insightful presentation by Paul Adams who works in the UX team at Google. He the user research lead for social, and work on things like Buzz and YouTube. In this presentation he has spoke about 6 things: –

  1. How the web is fundamentally changing.
  2. The real life social network. How people are connected to each other offline, and what that means for their behaviour online.
  3. Relationships. We all have very different relationships with the people in our life and designing for them is very different.
  4. Influence. How people influence each other, and how that is driven by the structure of our social network.
  5. Identity. Why identity is a cornerstone of the social web. And last not absolutely not least –
  6. Privacy. Why it’s critical to give people control over their data.

 

Bridging the gap between our online and offline social network
View more presentations from Paul Adams.

Real influence, Paul asserts, only comes from “strong tie” relationships which are the people closest to you. Those strong ties don’t increase through social media, but “weak ties” and “temporary ties” do increase, adding to a lot of the noise and hype about social media. This has huge implications for how we think about understanding consumer behavior online, and understanding how use of social media influences behavior.

Happy Reading

M