Mark Bonchek

When people talk, they talk about something.  Social objects are the things we talk about.  The weather is perhaps the most common  social object, as in “Nice day we are having.”  Other common social objects are news stories (“Did you hear about  ..”), sports teams (“Did you see the game last night?), children (“How are the kids?), and gadgets (“Oh, I see you have the latest …”).

Jyri Engeström pioneered the concept of social objects starting with a 2005 blog post.  He observed that people don’t just connect to each other, they connect through a shared object.  As a result, according to the cartoonist Hugh Macleod, “social networks form around social objects, not the other way around.”

Jyri shows how the most successful social networks have been built around social objects:  Flickr with photos, Delicious with bookmarks, Amazon with books, YouTube with videos, and MySpace with music.  Facebook can also been seen through the lens of social objects. The original objects on Facebook were posts, profiles, and pages.  The genius of the “Like” button is that it turns other web pages into social objects on Facebook.

According to Jyri, the five rules for creating an effective social network are:

1. Define the social object your service is built around.
2. Define your verbs that your users perform on the objects.
3. How can people share the objects?
4. Turn invitations into gifts.
5. Charge the publishers, not the spectators.

In Jyri’s definition, social objects do not change.   Things are done to them.  You can upload, download, comment, rate, post, link, rank, or share, but the objects remain unchanged.

But what about social objects that are created collaboratively by the network?

Consider Wikipedia.  The pages are phenomenally successful social objects.  People share them, link to them, and debate them all the time.  But they also collaborate to create them.  This collaboration makes them much different than a YouTube video or Flick photo.

In the case of a Wikipedia page, the process of creating the collaborative object is quite complex.  But it need not be.  For example, an Amazon book rating is created collaboratively by Amazon members.  So is the count of people following you on Twitter.

In some ways, collaborative objects are like super-social objects.  They reinforce the power of the network.  Think often people talk about how many followers someone has on Twitter.  This reinforces the strength of Twitter as a social network.  Or consider how much people vie for a good Amazon rating, which again reinforces the Amazon social network.

Collaborative objects are so powerful because they require community support, participation,  and validation.  They cannot be made by any individual and are therefore more difficult to earn.  So are more than currency in the social network’s gift economy, as with traditional social objects.  They also represent social status.

Some questions to consider:

• Do all social networks product collaborative objects?
• Are networks with collaborative objects more successful than those without?
• What are the five rules for successful use of collaborative objects?

I got a call today from a conference organizer putting together a conference on social media.  There have been a lot of conferences on social media, so he asked me an interesting question:  What hasn’t been said yet about social media?

I told him that there is a lot of talk these days about the tools of social media.  How to build a Facebook page, build a Twitter followership.  etc.   And companies are finally getting on the cluetrain, figuring out how to “listen to the groundswell,” and “join the conversation.”

But there is a transformation underway in social media that most people don’t seem aware of.  Social Media is evolving from conversation to collaboration.  You can hear it in the growing backlash to Facebook and Twitter.  You can see it in the growth of crowdsourcing and mobile applications that provide some type of service or utility.  People want to do more than talk.  They want to get something done.

This transformation is an evolution to the third generation of social media.

• The first generation of social media is Content.  The conversation forms around the content.  Think publishers or bloggers and their community of readers.

• The second generation of social media is Conversation.  The conversation is the content.   Think Facebook or Twitter.

• The third generation of social media is Collaboration.  The community forms around a common purpose, and the content and conversation is instrumental to that purpose.  Think Pepsi Refresh or other crowdsourcing initiatives.

Facebook was revolutionary because it shifted us squarely into the world of Social  Media as Conversation.  MySpace, by contrast, stayed in the world of Content.  And we know what happened to them.

Now we are moving from Conversation to Collaboration.  Companies should start thinking about not just social media, but collaborative media.  After all, you can only talk for so long before you want to get something done.