Marketing Eric

When trying to dream up the next great social website the other day, I was trying to decide on what are some of the most important features to include in a social networking site. I came up with a list of 10 features that I believe would build a great social network and I encourage anyone who is considering to start their own site to at least consider these ten features and rethink the way your site lets users interact with each other. The list isn’t all-inclusive, but its a starting point and I encourage you to submit your thoughts about what you think needs to be added by submitting a comment.

User registration are a real turn off for most readers. Everyone is sick and tired of registering for sites and possibly one day a solution like OpenID will solve this problem. Until this issue of data portability is solved the best way to gain new users is to offer them an incentive to sign up and give them useful tools as a member. An example site that offers beneficial features is Digg which allows you to track friend activity and voting history. The user profile on Digg also allows you to customize your site settings for displaying only certain topics that you are interested in which is covered in the next feature “Content Subscriptions”.

One of the most useful features in sites that I rarely see is the ability to subscribe to the content that you are interested in. I think that the reason that so few sites provide a way to filter out news I’m not interested in is because sites have either a lack of content or a very specific niche that they don’t think that users will benefit from disregarding certain categories. Let me give you an example of how this feature could be used on a “green” news website like TreeHugger.com.

Currently TreeHugger doesn’t offer any way for a user to sign up for their global site, instead they have a separate forum, a Digg-like site (Hugg was previously built on Pligg) and comment system that don’t to carry over any data from one area to another. If users were able to create a site-wide identity that carried over between the segments it would encourage more participation from the audience and make them more interested in navigating around the site to make use of all the features available to them. Now that they have a profile, allow them to select which categories they wish to follow so they don’t have to spend time scanning through the homepage or individual category pages. Someone might be all about green politics, technology and cars, but they don’t care about fashion or travel. As long as you have enough fresh content being served to the website daily it makes sense to let people choose which categories to follow rather than making them scan through it. While I’m talking about TreeHugger I have to mention how much I love their jump menu on the right side of their site that lets you quickly skip articles.

The new website Newspond handles comments in a brilliant manner, allowing users to start new threads not attached to news articles and also comment on articles like other sites. Unfortunately the site doesn’t have enough financial backing or marketing to really make it big. The most useful and interesting feature that the site provides is their comment system and I really wish they had a steadier stream of news articles.

To develop a great comment system you should at a minimum have permalinks for all comments, have a way to reply to existing comments, a way to flag for removal bad comments and a way to promote good comments. There’s a variety of other features that will make your comments more interesting, but the basic formula that I just spelled out has proven itself to be the standard for a reason. The last two features I mentioned for promoting and demoting comments is used mainly as a way to sort through comments by quality, much how Digg and Pligg currently offer.

Having a way to contact other members of a site is a great way to encourage users to keep on your site rather than using email or instant messaging services. Most of the great social networks have a built in private messaging service, MySpace even offers it’s own instant messaging client that launched two years ago. You should take a look at existing models so that you aren’t working from a clean slate if you are planning to develop your own private messaging system. I suggest looking at forum software such as vBuletin or PHPBB along with the big social networks like MySpace and Facebook.

Don’t force private messages on your users. Some people (myself included) don’t want to be bothered by every message that appears in their inbox. Don’t require that they receive an email on every new private message. You should even consider having a way for users to create a contact list of users that they want to receive notifications from.

As I mentioned at the end of the Private Messages section, contact lists for your friends are pretty important to sites. On sites like MySpace everyone has a thousand friends, but not all friends should be considered equal online. There should be a way to discern real world friends from online friends. I think we can all agree that nobody really has over fifty real friends, but for some reason fifty seems like a small number of friends online.

Image by Krahulik and Jerry Holkins of Penny Arcade

Groups are an extension of the friends feature. Groups function as a way to make new friends by meeting people with similar interests. An extreme example of a site that uses group is Facebook. If you are a fan of a music artist, non profit group, political party or whatever your interest you can join or start a group on Facebook. I call Facebook an extreme example because everyone on the site belongs to 30 or more groups, but I feel that the ideal number of groups someone should belong to on most sites should be 5 or less depending on the activity level of the groups.

Social bookmarking tools have become a standard across blogs and even many forum content management systems recently. The simplicity of adding a button is such a great marketing gimmick that its difficult to argue against. There are limits though for what you should provide on your site. You don’t need to support 50 different social bookmarking sites, try to limit it to 5-8 of your favorite sites. Its another good idea to try to make those sites relevant to your site. For example, if you have a marketing blog you should include a link to a social network like Sphinn which specializes in online marketing news.

A site doesn’t become very social unless users are able to submit content to your site to share with others. Forums and newsgroups were one of the first social spots on the web and the model of threads and posts worked so well that they still exist today. Forums are probably the most common example of a social content submission site because users are able to post new threads and others can then post replies creating a conversation. By giving users this ability to submit their own articles to control the direction of the sites content you are giving them what they interpret as a responsibility to participate on a regular base which makes them feel desired.

RSS feeds aren’t just for keeping up with the latest articles on your site. They should also be used for keeping users up to date with their friend’s activities. This feature goes along with feature number ten, portable data, because RSS feeds can be displayed on other sites using other easily available web scripts. Digg has this feature built in to their user profile pages so you can follow anyones history using RSS.

A lot of blogs out there don’t provide much original material out there, they instead just regurgitate other blog content and offer a link to the source article. The semi-social networks Digg provides a similar idea where users share links with each other and provide a short description of the link’s content. This habit of recycling of information through summation can provide fresh content to your site when your users lean toward being more passive readers rather than original content authors.

This item is another tool that your marketing department should be pushing hard to get developed once your social network is up and running smoothly and has gained an audience. The ability for users to take their data off of your site and use on their own blogs or other social networks that they belong to is a fantastic marketing tool. By providing useful widgets with a small watermarked link in the corner pointing back to your site you are encouraging users to advertise your site for you at no cost.

Nothing annoys me more than sites that refuse to let me take my data and use it elsewhere. This rule not only applies to social networks, but many sites that provide a service to a user. I’ve been using the service price!pinx recently to keep an eye on items on wedding registry items that are going on sale, but I can only view the items after logging in and navigating to a page on their site. I would love it if I could take the data from that page and use it on an external url to share the deals with others.

Have a feature that I forgot to mention? Leave a comment below and let me know what I’m missing.