How a social media expert feels when he tries to engage with features on the web that should be on a social network!

As I outlined in this post about the Sky News election map I often find myself wanting more social features from the day to day web.

With the advent of social networks and great features like easy sharing, friend awareness and friend to friend communication, it’s not entirely clear when web site owners can extend their channel onto the new platforms to take advantage of these features.

There are three approaches:

1. Do nothing - “our traffic is still strong, the users will keep coming to us anyway, it’s the only place to get this feature or find this content”
2. Outreach and capture - “lets reach out to the users on the social network and get them to come to our web site”
3. Exist in the new world - “lets make our channel features and content available to users in their preferred social networking environment”

To each web site owner there will be a different answer to this question. For companies house there is almost no advantage in using social networks - businesses have to visit their web site to file returns by law, similarly a bank has little to gain with providing its features (transactions, account balances) on the social network.

On the flip side, for a web site that is strongly social  (film web sites for example) it must get its content (film trailers, movie show times) and features (watch trailer, discover nearest cinema) onto social networks as a matter of urgency. Hence we see Facebook trialling Video Social Ads and Adknowledge’s videotheater app. 

Films compete with each other for viewers budgets. Imagine if a trailer for Film X is shared, discussed and engaged with on a social network and a trailer for Film Y is simply viewed on a website - there are no prizes for guessing which will one the viewers will be more comfortable picking at their next outing to the multi-screen cinema.

So the message for today - create a matrix and break down your features and content one by one and decide “where would it most make sense for my customers to engage with this?” - you may be surprised by the results.

A successful micro payment solution, a way someone could give 30 pence to read a web page, has been a dream of web content publishers like the Economist, FT and so on since the dawn of the web.

Usually it has failed as a concept due to two factors:

1. high relative transaction costs (PayPal) who wants to pay a bank 20 pence to handover 30 pence?
2. people spend too much time thinking about the purchase - most people apply the same due diligence to all purchases they make, only varying slightly depending on the purchase price (if you are the type of person that buys the first suitable chocolate bar you see in a shop, you’re probably going to buy the first suitable house you see).

   i.e. there is high relative thinking time cost to a micro-payment - 5 mins to buy a CD wirth £15 is okay but spending 2 mins to buy a blog article for 30p is a waste of time

But, in social media, like the rest of the web, there is still a demand by content producers (now singleton bloggers) to monetise their content. Charging a monthly subscription (the solution favoured by the traditional media brands) isn’t going to work as they simply don’t have enough content to warrant it. A newspaper provides thousands of content items a day, a blogger struggles to produce one a day.

However, like the traditional “busker” a blogger can attract funds through tipping. Enter tipit.to a nice tipping service that I discovered on the home page of new Nudge developer, Cristiano Betta.

TipIt screenshot

The tool lets you create a tip fund (like £2) and then quickly give 50p here and there to bloggers when you appreciate their posts. If you haven’t got a fund together you can just pledge a tip until you have paid in enough to your fund. According to Reinier Zwitserloot, from Tip it, about 75% of pledges are already paid up and the average tip is 50p or $1.

So who is using it? Well, take up is about 50% bloggers and 50% donation drives and service requests (like competitor service chipin).  They are moving into providing the service for music artist pages, remember last year’s Radiohead tip jar approach to releasing an album.

So, tipping is being used on the social web. However is it the finished product?

For me to leave a tip, I really need the social pressure as when leaving a restaurant with friends (a cynic might say the real customers to whom I want to demonstrate my generosity ;o).

Tipping on the web might work  if my friends can see I’ve been to a site (mybloglog, facebook connect) but forgot to leave a tip… so for tipping to work on the social web we need to mash-up tipit with facebook connect.

Toby just read your blog and left a tip of 50p…. that might encourage others to do the same.