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By Malcolm Coles
There's usually a steep learning curve before you ‘get' a social media site. Take Twitter. You can write updates limited to 140 characters (so you would have had to stop just before these brackets).
And that's it, really. Despite this, it was the 50th most visited site in the UK in April, according to Hitwise. And nearly 2 million people in the UK use it.
Sites like Twitter and alternative social sites where users can submit and recommend content, like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Delicious, are increasingly replacing traditional ways of finding information on the Internet. The Telegraph, for instance, has one of the most visited online newspaper sites and, as I reveal below, approximately 8% of its visitors come from social sites, a figure that can only grow.
Last month I explained the drawbacks of directories and search. This month I'm going to look at five social media sites and explain how they work, and how you can use them to find, share and browse information based on what other people are doing.
I'm going to start with Twitter as I'm going to use it to provide references for these two articles and to suggest further reading.
Twitter
On the face of it, Twitter's 140-character limit doesn't sound too promising. But it's the social and tagging aspect of Twitter that make it a useful tool.
Odd though it may sound, there are many respected people in different industries who spend 5 minutes a day sending Twitter updates (tweets) about interesting content they've seen. By ‘following' the right people (i.e. receiving their tweets), you'll discover new content quicker than any other method - and find out people's reactions to it.
Allied to this is the power of the hashtags, any word in Twitter which is immediately preceded by the '#' symbol (a.k.a the hash). By using a hashtag, you're signaling that you want people to be able to find your tweet and associate it with other tweets that contain the same hashtag. I've published several tweets, tagged as #Fumsicoles, which contain references and further reading for these two articles. Go to search.twitter.com to find them. If you've got any comments, why not sign up for Twitter and post your own thoughts including the same hashtag?
Hashtags are often used at conferences or events. When people cover the conference in a news story or blog, they tweet the URL and the hashtag. Other users just need to search Twitter for the hashtag to find what everyone is saying.
Digg and Reddit
These are social news sites where users can submit content and other users can vote it up or down. As well as lists of the most popular content, these services suggest stories - identifying people with like-minded interests (based on your votes) and recommending content based on that.
Unlike Google, the algorithms don't try to determine the quality of the content. Instead, they attempt to determine how similar your interests are to other people's.
Reddit probably puts it best. Stories are 'filtered for quality by your fellow redditors, but filtered for relevance by you'.
StumbleUpon
Similar to Digg and Reddit, Stumbleupon doesn't restrict itself to news. Part of Stumbleupon's success has been due to its toolbar, allowing you to rate pages directly from your browser.
The toolbar includes a ‘stumble' button - once you've marked a few pages as thumbs up or down, pressing this will take you to a page chosen to match your preferences. Again, there's an algorithm that matches your preferences to other similar users and presents content based upon that.
Although smaller than Digg, StumbleUpon claimed more than 7 million users in March 2009.
Delicious
Delicious is a social bookmarking site. You use it to bookmark webpages of interest (via a button on your web browser).
When you bookmark the pages you tag them - and you can then search your bookmarks by tag. There are no set tags - users are free to tag bookmarked pages with any terms they like.
You can also share your bookmarks, which is what makes Delicious powerful as a search tool. You can see which tags other users have used on pages (essentially creating their own taxonomies, often called a folksonomy) - this helps you understand what a page is about before you even visit it. And you can search by tags, allowing you to see which pages other users have bookmarked with the same terms -helping you browse through quality pages of interest.
Pros and cons of social media
There are problems with social media, although many are self-correcting by other members of the relevant communities.
- Bias - Voting and tagging is largely anonymous and can be manipulated - organizations can register multiple accounts and vote for their own pages. However, many services have systems to spot patterns of suspicious voting. And some publishers have been caught out trying to game the system and publicly exposed, which acts as a disincentive.
- The madness of crowds. Social systems allow incorrect information to be promoted with no formal checks (although the scandal of UK newspapers' sensational reporting of the discredited link between MMR vaccines and autism show that newspapers do this as well). They can also lead to a herd mentality. Once a story has made the front page of Digg, for instance, it's more likely to be seen and voted for, reinforcing the original effect. Although true, this problem is often fixed by the users themselves - voting down wrong information or exposing attempts to manipulate the services.
- Accuracy of classifications - Folksonomies may lead to problems in seeing the full picture when people use different tags for the same subject (such as ‘football' and ‘soccer'). And devoid of context, is a tag of 'row' referring to an argument or a way to move a boat? Again, there are ways of dealing with these - such as suggesting other ways people have already tagged a bit of content, (this practice itself is controversial, as users are likely to copy the initial tags used, reducing the benefit of multiple users tagging content), allowing people to combine tags and so on. You can also argue it's no worse than trying to work out where to classify something in a top-down taxonomy.
- World View. As with top-down taxonomies, the choice of language may reflect a certain way of thinking, that might not be understood by an individual user. ‘Technical' users in a particular subject might use different terms to lay people. However, social sites often attempt to match similar patterns of recommendation in order to overcome this. And in some ways this is an advantage. Rather than relying on one person's view of labeling, you just need to find people who share a similar attitude or understanding to you, and then you'll understand their tags.
Here to stay
These services already send significant amounts of traffic to other websites - and have many millions of users.
Julian Sambles is head of audience development at telegraph.co.uk, and says that approximately 8% of visitors find the Telegraph's content through social sites.
The Telegraph publishes about 500 articles per day on everything from breaking news to hotel reviews: ‘All our articles can be found by coming to our site, but relying on this alone will limit the size of our audience. By working on how this content can be distributed and found in the digital world we can (and have) greatly increased the audience that reads our rich content.'
The Telegraph still relies on search engines - they drive a third of its traffic. But, to get traffic from sites like Digg, it has made it easy for users to submit stories there. 'We have enabled all our stories to be submitted to these social sites by adding a "share this" button on every article. In each case users can then add their own headline and comments onto the article so enabling their point of view to get across.'
The Telegraph has also developed tools to reflect social media usage back onto its site.
Its football ‘match centre', for instance, includes a Twitter box showing recent, relevant tweets on the featured matches: http://footballstats.telegraph.co.uk/MatchCenter.aspx. And its ‘how about that' news section shows which Telegraph stories are popular on Digg: http://digbig.com/4yrqb
Social media functionality and tools are now a consideration in the design of the Telegraph site. As Julian says, 'In the changing role of newspapers in the digital world it is important that we have the ability to adapt and engage with new services and social media to ensure that our great content reaches the many people who are interested in reading it.'
Summary
There are two main ways these sites can affect you. If you publish information, they can send you traffic - for instance, why not add their ‘share' buttons to your site to encourage people to promote or bookmark your content?
And you can use them personally - and if you work in a small field, persuading your colleagues to all you use the same service is likely to massively increase the benefit. You could all follow each other and use Twitter to share new information you've come across. You could do the same by tagging the content on Delicious, perhaps using a series of unique tags you agree between you. Or you could all Digg, Reddit or Stumble pages and find out what each other are reading.
Whatever you do, don't forget your Twitter search for #Fumsicoles.
View Part 1 of this article »
By Malcolm Coles
Malcolm Coles is an internet consultant specialising in web content. He used to be
editor of which.co.uk,
the UK's most successful paid-content website. Before that, he
was editor of Which? magazine. These days, he is mostly interested in
projects that involve high-quality content - particularly those that
involve ensuring design, functionality, information architecture and
content work together to maximize the user experience. He likes big
subheadings, web tools that are easy to use and labels that make
sense. He can be contacted at:
Personal blog (www.malcolmcoles.co.uk)
Company website (www.digitalsparkle.co.uk)
Twitter page (www.twitter.com/malcolmcoles)
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