Last Wednesday night at a fireside chat at the Vilna Shul, I had the pleasure of listening to Misiek Piskorski talk about his research of social networking behavior. Misiek is an Associate Professor of Strategy at Harvard Business School where he teaches a second-year elective entitled “Competing with Social Networks”. Misiek has been studying users interact in Facebook to identify their motivations and habits and he had some interesting observations – most notably, that 78% of users are active “stalkers”. That’s right – most of us are just interested in looking at other people’s profiles, pictures, relationship status and conversations rather than producing our own content.

Overall, the main objective for users in social networks is to build relationships. But more broadly speaking, Misiek covered the motivations of users, how businesses can leverage this activity in their strategy development, and what in the way of technology is here and coming to help us in these interactions.

MOTIVATIONS

Misiek’s data sampling included more than 350,000 Facebook users over a couple of years and the results are amazing but not surprising. The most active of the stalkers are men, in relationships and they spend most of their time looking at other women. This supports the theory that if you are building a social network, design it for women and the men will come, too. The sociology behind this behavior is that social networks become a tool that we use to do things that are hard to do in the real world.

For an example, LinkedIn is a tool that allows us to actively look for a job and network without openly pursuing it. For stay-at-home moms who are socially isolated, social networks are a way to meet others and provide a nurturing support system. So it begs the question, are social networks making it harder to form relationships that are meaningful or are they further isolating us so that we are spending more time behind the computer and less time interacting face-to-face? Personally, I find them an essential tool to reach out more easily with people with the ultimate goal of meeting face-to-face. Social networks are an essential enabling force to meet people and a tool that reinforces the relationships both with in-person meetings and online.

STRATEGY & TECHNOLOGY

Misiek contends that any business that thinks it can plaster an ad in a social network and get a response is going to fail miserably. He likened it to a salesperson sitting down at the dinner table with you and your closest friends and family and without an introduction, trying to sell you something. It’s about building relationships first. Start out with some small talk and connect with who you’re talking with (engage) and then offer them something that improves their relationships and their ability to connect with friends more easily.

Businesses should also consider their over arching business objectives when developing a social media strategy. Is it to reduce your servicing and advertising costs, customer acquisition, etc.? The answer to this question should provide insight into choosing the type of interaction and the technology that will drive the interaction. Misiek gave an example of how Expedia uses Facebook Connect to allow a customer who books a trip, notify his or her Facebook friends to see if anyone wants to travel with them and/or may be at the destination and wants to meet up with them. Expedia can also provide status updates and requests for friends and family if plans change.

Leveraging this technology to expand their customer base through services and special offers will allow their customers to enhance their relationships as well as build their own loyal customer following.

Overall, it was an interesting discussion about the fundamental changes that businesses face using social media and a total “about face” when it comes to using social media to market products and services. Ultimately, companies who can begin to change their business models and use technology to improve the customer interaction can easily sell to others in the social graph.

Tags: General

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 7th, 2010 at 10:27 AM by greatmin and is filed under Wendy Troupe's Perspectives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.