March 18^th 2009, a seemingly regular night on Hong Kong television channel TVB, the popular drama E.U was on. Twenty-one episodes have gone by and ratings have held steady at an average of 29 points a week. However this night’s episode, number twenty-two, would eventually spark a best supporting actor award, a successful spinoff, a city wide frenzy about a character with magazine covers and also one of Hong Kong’s most successful Facebook application.

Eric Chow is a fan of the TV series E.U, closely following the entire series as the drama unfolds. But on the twenty-second episode, he was shocked like the other fans of the drama. The producers and writers decided it would be the end of the popular character “Laughing Gor”. Played by Michael Tse, who later won an award for this character, “Laughing Gor” was the one character most defined by the series and loved by the audience.

Later that night, an idea struck Eric. He personally felt the loss of “Laughing Gor” and thought it would be a good idea to create a digital funeral for this most loved character. This idea would manifest itself into a Facebook application that can be shared among the netizens.

Facebook applications are applications built on Facebook’s platform. Software developers can create applications interacting with Facebook’s API. This gives developers the ability to create applications utilizing Facebooks data and user connections. An example would be the popular game Farmville. Players in Farmville can interact with their Facebook friends for a social experience.

Eric Chow decided to make an impact with his idea, it would have to be done fast. Late into the night over a course of five hours, Eric created the “Laughing Gor Funeral” application. The application allows users to present offerings to “Laughing Gor”. After presenting an offering,  As more users presented offerings, the “Laughing Gor Funeral” would level up an open up more potential offerings. A way for all the fans to act on a collective will.

Eric initially shared the application to four people. Not sure where this would take him, his family and friends also installed the application on Facebook and published their activities on their Facebook wall. To his surprise, the application caught on like a firestorm. Within the first week over one hundred thousand people installed the application.

Then over the next few months, over three hundred thousand people installed the “Laughing Gor Funeral” application. The users in the application presented over seven hundred thousand offerings. Each one of the offerings presented by users created a posting to their own Facebook wall that was seen by their friends. If we took the newspaper industry’s standard of calculating impressions, which is to multiply the number of readers or subscribers by three, the “Laughing Gor Funeral” application created potentially over two million impressions just by spreading through the user’s Facebook wall.

Though highly successful, the Facebook app was never noticed by TVB. TVB instead created an online petition on their own website to revive the “Laughing Gor” character. The petition was signed by over a hundred a fifty thousand people, far short of the number of users created by Eric Chow and his Facebook app. However if we look closely, the hundred and fifty thousand people who signed the petition never shared or spread their own activities among their own network of people. That means those were a static hundred and fifty thousand interactions. If we compare that to the number of potential impressions created by the “Laughing Gor Funeral” app, the TVB petition falls short by almost two million impressions, demonstrating mainstream media’s lack of understanding towards social media. This creates a large potential opportunity for people who understand viral ability and social media to fill a need in the market place.

Update:

Sent this to Brandon Cheung of wwwins and he said the average Facebook user has 150 friends. He thinks the multiplication of three can be higher. I used newspaper as an analog just to demonstrate but I think he’s right. I usually get a few comments on my stupid posts and those are only the people who comment. I wonder what the conversion rate of views to comments is?

McDonald's Ad Buy on Digg.com

Probably not what McDonald was thinking when they bought this ad. But the digg.com stories that are populating this section is a very very funny juxtaposition.

An experience doesn’t have to be tangible. Movies are acquired through a ticket booth but the experience is visual. Music is downloaded or acquired at a music store but the experience is acoustic. Video games are bought in store or through downloads but the experience is designed for multi-sensory experience. With the explosion of social network sites, experiences many times exist in the synthetic world, the online space.

However the synthetic social experience is defined by a variety of factors. The synthetic social experience involves social interaction on top of the visual experiences that come with the other mediums. But how does this differ and what makes this unique? Certainly the social interaction has its benefits and repercussions. What other effects do the means of communication embedded in a synthetic social experience have on users? Social behavior has certainly changed since the popularization of social networking sites.

US Senators are now using Twitter, former vice-presidential candidate is now using Facebook. With over three hundred million users world-wide and a growing number of games, Facebook has become a platform for the synthetic social experience. There are areas of this synthetic social experience to explore and I will attempt to find how reputation, culture and social behavior is changing

Reputation

In a social environment, one interacts with other people. The actions conducted by someone will undoubtedly create a certain influence, esteem, stature or notoriety. In the digital realm “the latent connection can be digitally reconstituted at any time, should the need or desire arise”. (Social Network Sites and Society: Current Trends and Future Possibilities, 2009 ACM, Ellison/Lampe/Steinfield) Connections can be reconstructed and reputations can be recalled.

As people begin to congregate in synthetic spaces, users being to find common interests or develop relationships. As strands of relationships growing and begin to interconnect with each other, people’s reputations are taken into account because the social behavior of the community will depend on it. Looking at MMORPG( Massively Multi-Online Role Play Game) users in the game have to maintain a reputation. If a user carries a reputation of notoriety and disdain among other users, the social aspect of the game will take a step back when goals and tasks require players to work in a social environment.

Many similar aspects found in MMORPGs can also be found in social networking sites. People have been able to create reputations through social networking sites, one of the best examples is Tila Tequila, who is now a reality tv star but first became renown through Myspace. This reputation has been documented in Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail” and now people are learning to profit through reputation gained through online communication tools.

However people are still learning to the side effects of a public reputation that is retained digitally. As evidenced by sites such as www.lamebook.com a site where users post embarrassing moments on the site Facebook. people are still learning the effects of publicity. Now there are also a growing number of cases of cyber-bullying. It has become a strong enough movement that people have organized help groups such as www.stopcyberbullying.org. In the coming years we will begin to learn more about the evolution of online reputation and how society will learn to cope with its effects.

Emerging Culture

Participatory media and the reduce cost of communicating has created viral movements and memes. Within this movement, culture begins to form. An examples is lolcats, pictures of cats with arbitrary captions using a sans-serif. As Clay Shirky says about lolcats, as long as you have a sans-serif font and a picture of a cat you can be part of the conversation.

But even among the emerging culture, there are rules the community and society decides on. A community may set rules for how the network engages each other. Sometimes these rules are set by someone, in the case of “Linux”, Linus Torvald owns the ultimate authority on what will be included. He also owns the trademark to “Linux”. However the software is created by the community who supports this project.

In viral memes that spread across the web, the rules can be simple. Such as one of the recent memes that have been going across the web, “Angers Hitler”. The rules are simple, find something deserving of a rant and create subtitles matching the movie “Downfall”, a biopic about the final days of Hitler. Some of these will include rants about the US Health Care system, the delayed release of Starcraft II or Lamar Odom, Los Angeles Lakers player. They all follow the same method and rule. In an age when participation and communication is easy and affordable, rules can arise from the community participation.

However, from a legal standpoint, online participation is beginning to lose its immunity and special legal privilege. In many states across the US, cyber bullying laws are already being implemented. And in the UK, there are laws and initiatives to prevent cyberbullying. As social find to see certain social behavior as a commodity, they begin to lose it’s special legal privileges, a point argued by Jack Balkin of Director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.

In the end, the synthetic social experience affects our lives inside the world and outside of it. But as far as the user, what equations will satisfy a  user? If a user spends time experiencing this synthetic social experience what compensation will they be looking for? Is the user looking for reputation growth? Are they looking for a network growth/maintenance? Or are they looking for both? If we were to formulate this, maybe this is the formula for the synthetic social experience, user compensation = reputation growth + “network growth/maintenance”.

To contrast my conversation with Jay Oatway, I sent similar questions to Brandon Cheung of wwwins Consulting. Brandon is the Strategic Planning Director in the wwwins Hong Kong office. wwwins Consulting is “one of Asia’s leading full-service digital marketing agencies”. Brandon will provide a perspective of added value for his clients compared to Jay Oatway who is a heavy participant.

1. What were the primary elements that first drove you to become interested in social media?

At first, social media just hit me over the head as a better utility to keep in touch with a growing network of friends. As my real network of friends got larger, and as I moved to a different locations, social media helped me keep in touch with good friends, acquaintances, and eventually professional contacts. I wish it was this mature while I was still in college so I could have kept better contact with the people I knew then. Friendster just wasn’t cutting it back then. Fast forward to today, social media is my life. It’s at the core of digital communications and every marketer in the world wants to know how to harness its power.

2. Which parts of social software do you see providing the greatest benefit and added value? Who benefits the greatest from this added value? Users? Marketers?

Social software definitely benefits the users the most right now. We’ve seen some decent innovation in terms of aggregation tools and analytics tools, mostly being offered for free. Marketers trying to “get in the game” can use a combination of these tools to get started, but sooner or later a pricing model will have to come into play. The lack of paid services is limiting tools development from taking the next step as a more serious utility for marketers. The money will eventually come from marketers when the right set of tools can make their SM efforts accountable. In the meantime, you’ll see the tools space remain a mile wide and an inch deep.

3. As an advertiser utilizing social media and social software, how has his benefited you personally? Has it enhanced your reputation? What are drawbacks?

Social media has definitely helped me in the advertising world. I personally don’t try to acquire a mass following. I focus more on using social media as a learning space from others, as well as a connection point for other people that I find to be influential. There are superstars out there focused on making a name for themselves and their mass followings will prove to be beneficial to them one day. Advertisers will want them to push their products like PR people want journalists to push their stories.

4. Twitter isn’t popular in HK compared to the US and other regions. How have you used services like Twitter/Fanfou to your benefit? Does this provide you with a larger global audience?

Twitter is the biggest and best for now. I’m not saying it will stay like this forever, but the reason they remain ahead is their API. They’re allowing a lot of outside developers to take the essence of micro-blogging and mash it up with other great services (e.g. customer service, buzz monitoring, social network enhancement, CRM programs). Yes, it enables connectivity to a global audience but at the moment the country lines are all a bit grey. I personally can’t wait for the location-based-services to kick into play.

5. What are some of the trends you see in the near future for social network sites and social media?

I see 3 big trends that will drive the social media space forward:

Open APIs are at the heart of being social. They enable mash-ups of the best tools. You’ll see more leading companies open up their code to the world to reap the benefits. Zuckerberg and Stone know what they’re doing.

Increased social connectivity enables the power of crowd-sourcing. We talk about the power of cloud computing, but we rarely give credit to the power of cloud-thinking. We consume information so much faster than we used to and we solve problems more collectively than we used to. Look at companies like Threadless and how they’ve empowered a design community to create new business models around social media. That’s just the beginning. Don’t be surprised to see cloud-thinking used on a larger stage to solve bigger problems.

Real-time search. Twitter started it. Google will probably finish it. Once the world has access to search through real-time information you’ll see services online act like they’re on steroids. The moment a comment of relevance is made to a person/brand/service, the opportunity to reach or respond will be instantaneous. The efficiency is going to be fascinating.

Globally in the last ten decade, social networking sites have created great social change in terms of culture and the way we communicate. Not limited to Europe or North America, SNS’s are springing in countries such as China with QQ.com or Renren.com, Cyworld in South Korea, the Google owned Orkut in India and many other.  Ever since SNS’s have hit the main stream a few years ago, it has become a great topic of discussion. During the United States Presidential Election of 2008, people witnessed one of the greatest effects of how communication and social network sites have managed to alter the landscape of possibilities and trends.

Social Networking sites are a new communication tools found since the boom of the internet but it only replicates the way we have always been communicating with each other. For example, people have been sharing photos since the inception of the camera. However with SNS’s, we can now share this information broadly with minimal transaction costs. At the same time, people can now leave comments on the photographs, tag who is in the picture and provide more meaning to a photograph. This allows us to “digitally represent our connections with other users-meaning that we can use these ites tto model our network of social relationships”. (Social Network Sites and Society: Current Trends and Future Possibilities, 2009 ACM, Ellison/Lampe/Steinfield)

Social Network sites also provide space to retain relationships digitally. In scenarios described by Social Network Sites and Society: Current Trends and Future Possibilities, weak acquaintances or meetings can encounter many pitfalls from reconnecting, such as a meeting in the park can lose it’s adhesiveness. However, using the low entry barrier of social network sites, this relationship can be retained as a “weak tie”. The benefits of “weak ties” are not immediately apparent. “Our weak ties are valuable conduits to diverse perspectives and new information; research has show that we are more likely to receive information about an employment opportunity from someone we see rarely”(Social Network Sites and Society: Current Trends and Future Possibilities, 2009 ACM, Ellison/Lampe/Steinfield).

Though SNS’s have been a part of the mainstream since 2003, users are still struggling with privacy and online identities. As evidenced by www.lamebook.com discovering embarrassing moments on social networks have become an activity in itself. However this is not isolated to people revealing their own personal feelings, what is considered acceptable online interaction is still in it’s infancy and evolution. Many of the posts on www.lamebook.com also include the responses people post when responding to someone’s personal online revelation.

A disturbing trend in SNSs is the increasing possibility of people narrowing where their information flow comes from. Previously the public was informed through packages and bundles of information printed out on paper. As you already know, I am describing newspapers. During the process of unfolding a newspaper bundle, the reader will grab what is considered important news. This is what is printed as headlines and on the front page. The news might not be what the reader would like to read, but if a story is on the front page it gives the story a significant status, meaning you may not want to read it, but you should probably know about it. However in the new web world this has changed, and social networking sites haven’t necessarily eliminate this information polarization.

Now that information is fragmented into many pieces across the web, people can choose to read what they would like how to read. However “a concern raised by Cass Sunstein is that Internet use will allow people to increasingly exclude viewpoints that conflict with their own, creating a bubble of information in which individuals are exposed only to data that reinforce their current opinion”.(Social Network Sites and Society: Current Trends and Future Possibilities, 2009 ACM, Ellison/Lampe/Steinfield) This is demonstrated by the number of political blogs that lean only towards the left or the right of the political spectrum, such as The Huffington Post or Think Progress.

One reason for this is that a site has a certain value and the users know this. “Value ares built into social software and spread through the networks of people who join. This is why most of these sites are so tech-centric. Because social software is all about the collective, the early values often get reinforced on the entrance page.”(The Significance of Social Software, Danah Boyd, 2006) Using the social news sharing website www.Digg.com as an example, the news stories that populate the front can range from a new tutorial for CSS development to a basketball star’s retirement. If one were to only visit Digg for news, the information absorbed for the day may exclude headline international news that are on the front page of news websites. This can lead to group polarization as users on Digg may find the tops stories on Digg’s website as the most important news, potentially ignoring other international news and other dissenting opinion because users do not find that piece relevant and worthy of the front page.

In the end, a user’s choice of which social networking site is based on cultural and social values. The reason more people in China use renren.com instead of Facebook might not just be because the fact that Facebook is blocked in China. Many young people already know how to “hop” across the “Great Firewall of China”. Like Facebook, many Chinese students began using renren.com because it was previously known as xiaonei.com, which targeted the social values of University students. Orkut became popular in Brazil, though initially a United States site, “folks in Brazil started realizing that they could be US in the listings…..At some juncture, there was a tipping point after which it was seen as a Brazilian site and Brazilians joined with such nationalist encouragement.” (The Significance of Social Software, Danah Boyd, 2006) As we look further, we may see more group polarization and value sovereignty in social network sites, however this could all scale in different ways as more data becomes portable across the web.