What are you doing? Where are you doing it? Who are you doing it with? What do you like? These used to be things we kept to ourselves or shared with our friends and family. Now we’re willing to broadcast them to whomever is willing to listen.
- David Armano, from Why Social Sharing is Bigger than Facebook and Twitter – Harvard Business Review
More than ever before, the information people now freely share through their social graphs enables us to efficiently and quickly develop more effective, useful and desirable experiences for online social audiences. Many times, it’s merely mashing up the right content for the right person at the right time in the right place.
So, how can these questions help us design better real-time, tailored, participatory user experiences? What are the best applications for them?
What are you doing (right now)?
Initially popularized by Twitter, this real-time phenomenon of digitally-distributed sharing is a gold mine of insight into user behavior as it happens. How do sharing patterns bring relevant content and people together in real time? Some examples:
- Contextually-relevant content based on real-time keyword frequency. For example, I’m a guitar fan. I also follow and am followed by other guitar fans. Let’s say we’re all chatting about guitars. A service that offers relevant tailored, evolving guitar content in or near the stream of our conversation would be invaluable.
- Real-time proactive personal assistance, much in the way brands and companies leverage Twitter for their customer service response mechanisms. How many companies do you know that are not yet leveraging this?
- Connecting similar commentary in real time, like a news feed that forms itself based on the individual’s comments as they happen (similar to the way a suggestive search field prefills keywords you might be searching on).
What will you be doing in the future?
Patterns identified in the ‘now’ can theoretically predict people’s future activities. What do our social connections say about what we might do in the future? Some applications:
- Suggestive future purchases and services based on my (and others) current journal of personal activities (from places like Daytum and Me-trics). Here, a plethora of diet, exercise and health related applications abound.
- Same concept, applied in a financial context, only with a thicker layer of social or peer context in the mix.
Where are you doing it?
Let’s extend the real-time idea of status to geography: I know what you’re doing, and where you are. And over time, I can predict where you’re headed next; furthermore, I can anticipate how I can help you there:
- Location-based services leveraging content based on geographic location. This is not a new concept, but not widely leveraged yet by many brick-and-mortar venues.
- These same services can push relevant information to you ahead of your visits to particular places based on the frequency and duration of your prior visits.
Who are you doing it with?
Some research now suggests your behaviors have significant influence on people within your social networks. In addition, we’ve come to understand the amplification effect of communicating through extremely efficient channels like You Tube: Small numbers can still take a brand down in a matter of moments. Likewise, large communities around like-minded interests can quickly form to provide momentum for specific causes. Strength is established in both small and large numbers.
What do you like?
Express preferences and sentiment in real time are arguably the best indicators of people’s real (time) intent, much like the guitar fan example above. Even though people generally say things that are inconsistent with what they actually do, express, active preference in real time is probably a better indicator of behavior than any contained, contrived, laboratory-like focus group. What about offering up related products and services content based on real-time purchase activity?
Mash ups in these sharing contexts are the fuel to driving innovation for enhanced user experiences that are either (1) participatory by nature, or (2) could benefit by injecting more tailored, participatory content. With the advent of an exponentially expanding universe of shared information, where can these or other (better) social user experience ideas lead us?