Social Networking, UGC: Applications Inside Information

Social networking is fundamentally about forming communities. The internet has opened powerful avenues for people to expand their community networks. People visit these sites to meet and mingle, to learn and relearn, to share and absorb.

Social Networking sites allow members to contribute to site content in the form of journal entries, photos, videos, and blogs; they become producers, artists, storytellers, and authors. The vast proliferation of users has reset the preset notions about social networking sites and skeptics are revisiting the business opportunities which seem to abound.

Along with its high potential upside, for companies entering this space, social networking presents a number of unique business challenges and associated technical issues.

Retention, Revenue, and ROI

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Building and retaining an audience is critical to monetising a site or seeing return on investment. But today’s Web-savvy consumers are fickle and have lots of choices of how to spend their online time. Site performance has a direct effect on visitor retention, brand favorability, and ad revenue. For instance, improved performance increases the number of unique visitors and the number of page views per visit, which leads to more ad revenue. For sites that don’t derive revenue from advertising, such as branded destination sites, site performance is equally important as it directly reflects that brand experience.

Pressure For Fast Innovation

Each user community is somewhat unique, and the site layouts, features, and policies that drive one community to success may be different for the next. The massively interconnected nature of social networking sites is built upon Web 2.0 technologies that enhance interactivity and the responsiveness of user interfaces.

These technologies enable the user-driven content model in important ways. RSS allows simple syndication of content summaries from one site to another, available to end users without server-side coding.

AJAX, a technique used to update specific content within a Web page without reloading the entire page, creates Web sites that can be as instantly responsive to user activity as desktop applications, even as they draw content from other sites across the Web. These technologies and others make it possible to present dynamically updated site information, augmented by embedded photos from one site, next to headlines from another and video from a third.

These richer Web experiences and dynamic content put even more strain on site infrastructure and performance. Site owners find themselves dealing with infrastructure and capacity planning issues instead of focusing on innovation. Companies that achieve success at social networking will be the ones that can quickly bring new ideas to market without incurring huge risk. In short, ideas that fail shouldn’t cost a company a fortune, and ones that are successful need instant scalability to support the uptick in site traffic.

Scaling the Business while Controlling Costs Social-networking sites can experience sudden, non-linear growth, making traditional capacity planning essentially impossible, not to mention costly.

The combination of users’ content and their relationships online can bring exponential traffic growth literally overnight. A photo of a national news event, a video that achieves instant pop-culture status, a blog entry that earns a link from a major weblog, or a top-rated link from a social book marking site all can lead to the “flash crowd” phenomenon—sudden load that can take sites’ performance to unacceptable lows or even entirely offline. One popular social networking site pushes 700Mbps of sustained internet traffic, growing at 100-200 Mbps per quarter. One of the largest sites routinely exceeds 20Gbps bandwidth.

Since companies don’t know when and how quickly their sites will take off, they need to have an easy way to support fast, unplanned growth. Dealing with success can be the biggest challenge. The rapid growth of traffic and the quantity of user-generated content will make it challenging to maintain high site performance. Just when high usage makes the potential for increased revenue a reality, a quick, responsive site will be harder to achieve.

Sites with growing traffic and burgeoning user communities can incur ongoing capital expenditures for additional infrastructure that can limit their potential for innovation and scale. Infrastructure can quickly become the limiting factor to a site’s growth, leading to significant capital expense—for startups and established companies alike.

Exercising The Right Amount Of Editorial Control

Social networking represents a significant transfer of control from site publishers to consumers, creating a number of challenges. Should companies review and approve user content? How will they store and manage the content that users upload? How can companies capture the value from user-generated content without giving up control over their online presence? There’s no single right answer to questions of governance and editorial control over a company’s social networking presence.

There are three basic models for managing user-generated content on a site, each with its own place in the social networking landscape:

Pre-approval is required before an item appears on the site: When Wikipedia first launched as Nupedia in March 2000, each site submission involved a seven-step review process to ensure accuracy and completeness. The result was a nearly empty site that never achieved traction. For a contest site, user expectations are different, and the same rules can work well. “The Coke Show”, a user-submitted video competition, states clearly in its Terms of Use that it will review and either approve or refuse to post all user-submitted materials.

Posting is immediate, but is later reviewed: User contributions to YouTube are posted immediately to the site, but each video includes a link that allows viewers to flag it as inappropriate. Content that violates the site’s terms of use are then removed by YouTube staff. Similarly, Craigslist staff will remove any content that violates its policies, once it’s brought to their attention.

Moderation is handled by the community: Craigslist also employs peer moderation, which it says allows removal of inappropriate content more quickly than could be done by company staff. Users may “flag” content as inappropriate; enough negative flags results in automatic removal from the system. On Wikipedia, content edits and additions can be made by any user at any time. With its enormous user community, peer moderation seems to work. In a recent study, Nature magazine found Wikipedia on-par with formal encyclopedias: …among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three.

Social networking and user-generated content are becoming essential components of a successful Web communications strategy, and are behind the fastest-growing category of Web site. The trend indicates that companies in every industry are using social-networking techniques to build brand affinity, reach customers and potential customers with highly targeted advertising, develop dialog with their user communities, and build awareness around media content.

The author is Country Manager, Akamai Technologies (I)