A recent article on MIT Sloan Management Review sparked my
interest. The article listed some
lifecycle stages and suggested that people at each stage have different needs
for social media. It is a short article,
so I had to add some of my own thoughts.
Here are some ideas:
Early adolescents
are strongly affected by peer pressure and have a need to belong to the
in-group. So the design of the social
network should make it easy for someone to join a group and look good in the
group while making it hard for the group to exclude someone or make them look
bad. Since many perceptions at this
stage are as much imagined as real, testing should look into whether designs
make a teen feel excluded or bad even if no overt action was taken.
Late adolescents
have a strong need to find themselves, develop an identity, and perhaps try out
some alternatives that might not be popular.
So the design of the social network should support experimentation. It should be easy to get information about a
group’s story, perhaps through testimonials, group psychographics, and similar
information. It should support anonymity
so people can try out a group without being trackable by their peers.
Young adults have a need
to develop one-to-one relationships, including intimate ones. I am not just referring to on-line dating,
but also communicating with a good friend or finding and interacting with a
mentor. Other channels could include interacting
with a sports partner, a doctor/patient pair, or any number of specialized
relationships. The social network should
support private one-to-one connections, making it easy to find the person and
communicate.
Mid-career adults
have a need to feel productive and valued.
I would suggest the Community of Practice model that I have published on
extensively (Yeah, self-plug. I am a mid-career adult so I need to feel valued J). Use
extensive reputation management to make posts, comments, and other
contributions more valuable. Use
contestification to reward activity.
Lurkers (which is often 90% of the users of a CoP) can be supported
through anonymity and learning badges.
Later-stage adults
(retirees) need a way to reflect backwards. The social network can support a more
organized personal portfolio, groups focused on the past, a way to reconnect
with old groups or individuals, probably in a more casual and limited way (you
may want to know what happened to that old girlfriend, but not THAT much).
Notice that this
whole approach suggests that a single time-line that is the same for everyone
(this means YOU Facebook) is not particularly helpful for anyone. And it can actually be counterproductive in
cases where it is important to make it easy for a member to show content to
limited subgroups of their social graph or to protect anonymity.
If you disagree with
the lifecycle stages or the basic needs of each group, you can blame Gerald
Kane over at Sloan Management Review.
For the design ideas, blame me.
Comments welcome.
