How do you evaluate social software? I’ve been part of four social software companies, Odeo, Twitter (just the very beginning), Wesabe, and now CrowdVine. For each of those companies, we spent a lot of time working through misconceptions that seem rooted in how other people are used to evaluating non-social software (say Excel or Oracle). I think this problem bites almost everyone who’s trying to use social software or social media (including at least: blogs, twitter, youtube, podcasting, social networks, niche social networks, message boards, and wikis).

Here’s an example of even professionals getting it wrong, a 2007 review comparing two social software services, Twitter and Dodgeball. The review, from the leading news site for web startups, insisted on declaring a winner based on features and potential uses for those features. Within months, the winner of the review, Dodgeball, was out of business due to lack of usage, and the loser, Twitter, had doubled in size. If leading tech journalists can’t get an easy evaluation right, then the general public (i.e. our customers) are really in trouble.

Luckily, evaluating social software is not magic, in fact it’s mostly common sense.

1. If people use it, it’s valuable

Show some respect for other people. If they’re spending time with something then let’s at least start with the assumption that they’re getting some value in return. I see too many people dismiss something like Twitter or Facebook as trivial or worthless, only to find themselves doing a complete reversal a few weeks later.

With social software, the people are everything. If people you care about are active, then the software is going to stick with you. If not, that’s when you can dismiss it (but often only temporarily).

Does your company need a Twitter strategy? The way to find out is to search Twitter for mentions of your company. If nobody is talking about you now, then you don’t have a lot to do. But things change fast. When I started CrowdVine several people told me I shouldn’t call what we provided “social networks” because nobody knew what those were. Within two years, the people who didn’t know what a social network was are now active Facebook users.

2. Solve a problem

“[Twitter is] the messaging service we didn’t know we needed until we had it.” – Twitter co-founder Biz Stone on the Colbert Show.

I think Biz was joking. Social software isn’t a “build it and they will come” world. It solves problems. The real Twitter story comes from Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder and originator of the idea. He had been thinking of use cases for a service like Twitter for years.

Take Jack’s approach and make sure you’re solving real problems. The trick is to frame the problem in social terms that include the people who are going to be using the software or media you put out. A good example of a problem social software can solve would be “my members want a way to network with each other.” Saying “I want to be rich,” on the other hand, is not a well-framed problem.

As an example, CrowdVine regularly gets high adoption rates, regardless of demographics, because we’re clear about what problems we can solve. Social networks as a class of software can be dismissed as trendy, but even the most conservative attendee wants something better than a printed attendee directory to help them meet people. We got our start with tech conferences, but the meat of our business is with mainstream companies like General Mills, or main stream professionals like lawyers and nurses.

3. Budget the right amount of time

When I work with someone to budget time for a social media project, I try to place the project into one of two camps. Either they’re going to tap into some existing behaviors or desires of their members, in which case the members do most of the work. This is an opportunistic project. Or they’re going to create a brand new social experience, in which case they’re going to have to do most of the work, often over a long period of time.

If you want to create a blog, you have to be willing to write blog posts for the life of the blog. That takes work. It’s the same with a podcast. However, if your community is already on Twitter, sometimes all it takes is for you to provide a hashtag that they can all use to find and talk to each other. That takes five minutes.

So why would you ever choose to take the hard work approach? Sometimes you don’t have a choice. Your community isn’t likely to start a blog about your company. That’s your job. You can use hard work to create something new or you can be opportunistic. If your community is on Twitter then you can use Twitter, otherwise, you can’t.

With conferences, we see both sides. If the organizer is intending to just help attendees network then their work load is to configure a social network, invite members, and get out of the way. They can do more, but they don’t have to. However, we also get customers who want to use CrowdVine to help attendees learn more. These conference organizers create additional session materials and sometimes even pre-event homework (they tend to be corporations who have some ability to make the attendees actually follow through). Nobody is going to do that work for them.

So when you start to roll out social media, you need to ask how much time is this going to take? Hopefully, if you’ve got a good grasp of what problems you’re solving, you’ll also know how much time it’s worth spending. In the case of the corporate meeting above, they’re paying all the typical event costs plus salary and travel for the attendees. Taking an extra thirty hours to develop additional content for their social network is easy to justify. Conferences put on by three person superhero teams, however, should be looking for opportunistic uses of social media.

I want to know what problems you’ve solved with social media and how much time you had to put into it. Tell me in the comments.

Tags: general, howto, socialsoftware

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 at 12:48 pm by tony. 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.