5 Social Media Revelations from Web 2.0 Expo in New York

Web 2.0 Expo is under way in New York this week for the first time in the conference history. There were lots of interesting ideas discussed during sessions yesterday with some of the sessions containing facts about social media that seem to be neglected or overlooked way too often. So I have decided to summarize a few of the most interesting surprises and revelations as I see them here.

Social media users are excessively friendly

Have you noticed how often people reciprocate on social networking sites when you befriend them even if they don’t have any idea who you are? I think I have experienced that myself way too often when as a newbie on most social networking sites in the early days of this blog I befriended everyone I was interested in – and received a friend back more often than not.

Now I have a personal habit of adding a small personal message when sending a friend request on Facebook, for example, to introduce myself to the person I am befriending, even if I believe that this person must recognize my name or my photo. But the majority of users tend not to add any introductions at all – yet getting reciprocations everywhere. What’s more, many services will send a notification to a user you subscribed to letting this user know you are interested but never giving you any opportunity to describe why. And while I often feel that this functionality is a necessity, we don’t see people only befriend those that they already know – instead people often use various social media sites (like FriendFeed, for example) as a way to discover new content via new people they follow. And I am sure that we have all had examples of real friendships developing out of these subscriptions to content.

But the most amazing fact is that it is true not only for friendship and entertainment, it is equally true for business networking as well. Joshua Porter during his Designing for Community session mentioned one more evidence of this: almost every time that a user receives a recommendation on LinkedIn, he or she will write one back. I think it is because we feel the need to somehow thank the person for this act of recognition and the easiest way to do it is by using the same tool to demonstrate the same recognition.

I am quite sure that this has never been the intention of LinkedIn creators – after all, the recommendations are intended to help people get more visibility for their services, not to show that they are capable of writing recommendations for others and get some back as well.

Yet there’s no doubt we constantly reciprocate everywhere – digging articles, commenting on blog posts, joining various groups and networks, etc. I am not sure if this idea of reciprocal activities is a good or bad one but it is obviously a reality we have to deal with anyway in social media.

Technology is not what makes or breaks communities

Building a community is a real challenge for website owners and community managers but if you succeed in cultivating a good community, it will survive anywhere. If a community can not survive in a terrible environment like Yahoo Groups or Facebook groups, it will not survive anywhere, no matter how nice the communications tools will be.

This basically means that if you build the best-looking social network in the world, it does not mean that you will have the perfect community there – the community either exists or not and it does not depend on the technology and tools you provide.

To see how true this idea is, we are offered to take a look at a knitting community Ravelry that has a user base of 182K users which is definitely an immense size for a very niche community website in an invite-only beta where people are offered to wait up to 3 days to be let in. But the reason for such an impressive growth is simple: the community needs this site and people see a real value in it for themselves so it proves that the purpose is more important than the tool for a community.

I believe this partly explains popularity of Twitter as well – the community is already there and Twitter simply serves as the tool – and the tool does not need to be perfect to be used. So no matter how many shiny and new Twitter clones are launched, people still stay where the community is because they are not looking for yet another cool interface (and much better functionality), they are looking for the conversations they can have within the existing community.

Money is not a guarantee that you will build a successful social media website

There has been a topic discussed during the session named Online Customer Communities that Connect and Thrive about the motivations for people to join communities and participate in their activities. Basically people participate in communities out of social reasons (when they want to help or find something to be truly useful) or for market reasons (when they are offered some material incentives).

We have seen lots of examples where emerging startups try to promote their products by luring people in with money/prizes or other incentives for participation, for bringing other users, and for creating content. But unfortunately, I have not witnessed any examples when such a contest/competition/promotion succeeded and really helped a startup to take off – the sites brought users in and made them participate for a while to the extent needed to be rewarded. But once the promotional campaign was over, people left quickly because it is impossible to change their motivation.

Once people start participating in a community out of their free will because they see some value in it for themselves, they will probably continue using the site (provided that it continues to be useful) without any additional motivation. But if you try to build a user base by offering some incentives, you will hardly succeed because people that come motivated with money or prizes will never switch to participating in the community for pleasure. Basically if you bring people in by paying them, you will never make them stay for free.

It is a very interesting theory, I think, and I believe we will start seeing it applied by various internet marketers in their attempts to build healthy online communities instead of luring people with money or free iPhones.

Search is still the king

It looks like the web 2.0 crowd has grown too fascinated by all the latest social networking/voting/bookmarking sites and forgot about the most natural way of driving people to our websites. It has seemed to me for a while that all the latest and greatest toys can be efficient for conversation and community building but there’s nothing compared to organic search traffic when it comes to traffic building. This issue has been addressed during the Free Traffic: SEO/SMO 101 session.

Basically the lesson is that no matter how much we may be disappointed, search engine optimization still should be one of the most important focuses for anyone trying to make a website visible – so before you start investing your time in posting dozens of tweets and hundreds of FriendFeed comments in hopes of promoting your content, think about SEO first and make sure it is perfect.

True, social media locations like FriendFeed or Twitter may be a good place to drive visitors if you are mostly interested in the early adopters. But if you are looking for more mainstream market, there’s an unpleasant surprise for you: 80% (!) of all internet sessions start for users from a search engine. I think it proves that the majority of people still rely on search for their online activities, not on recommendations on Twitter or FriendFeed. For example, 55% of all internet purchases are made on sites people arrive to from search engines. At the same time natural search engine optimization is 6 times more effective for a website than placing a banner ad on some other site(s).

So if you are not creating your website for a small crowd that already knows what social media is, focus on making your site visible to search engines.

Google is even more the king of search engines than expected

During the same search engine optimization session it was also mentioned that if you do SEO right for Google, it is almost certainly enough for other search engines to be happy with your content. This concept can be summarized as “being Google-friendly means being friendly to every other search engine”. The explanation is quite simple: Google requires the highest level of optimization for a site to be ranked well – thus if you do accomplish this, you will most certainly please other search engines as well.

While we are already accustomed to the fact that Google is already the king everywhere – be it web search, online advertising or web applications – there is one more area where a large group of internet professionals rely on Google heavily as well, and this area is search engine optimization. This additional field of Google domination makes me a little uncomfortable when I think about how many SEO experts are obsessed about having their pages ranked well on Google without even bothering about the rest of the search engines because they will do good there anyway if everything is perfect for Google. But in my opinion this is yet another proof of the high quality of Google’s ranking system and another hint to anyone still trying to launch the next Google killer: a whole industry is already focused on Google and you will hardly make it change the focus.

So here are some of the most interesting things discussed at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York as I see them. Feel free to share what you think is most important issue discussed at the Web 2.0 Expo this week in the comments.