But while word-of-mouth is a strong force in the general marketplace, it is THE force with the college demographic. From the time kids are old enough to understand wrong from right, we start telling them over and over: “Don’t give in to peer pressure!” Generally, we tell them this to keep them away from drugs and alcohol as youngsters, but it seems they never think to resist peer pressure when it involves anything else! How many study sessions or term papers have been procrastinated because a student’s friends decided to go downtown for the night? People frequently observe that as individuals, people are generally pretty smart; it is in groups that the ‘madness of the mob‘ takes over.

This is all to reinforce the picture that people value thier friends’ input over all else. Social networking has enabled an entirely new paradigm for garnering input from your friends. In fact, your ‘friends’ don’t even have to be people you have ever met! Read Robert Scoble’s beliefs about facebook friends for a look at why you can build your online friends network as a diverse rolodex, rather than a tight-knit circle of childhood friends. Facebook has an application called My Questions that allows you to post a question about anything that all your friends can see and answer, thus enabling nearly instantaneous feedback for any decision you might want to make. MySpace has Bulletins that allow for users to pull in opinions from all their friends, as well as having 3rd party services with embeddable polls if you want to get scientific in your opinion-getting. These are just primary services in the two largest social networks…beyond this there are networks, messageboards, review sites, wikis, and product review blogs/podcasts, etc.

But most of these allow you to get input if you know that you want an opinion; none of them reach out and try and tell you why you should/shouldn’t buy a product. For online advertising to be successful in the collegiate market, the advertising needs to turn everyday users into ‘e-vangelists’. If you have a product that will make people sit back and think, “Wow, this is really cool…and it actually benefits me somehow…hmm, maybe my friends will like it too!” you will have it made. This is how my circle of friends began using del.icio.us for sharing links and articles, it is how everyone started using facebook, and it is the same way that iPods became the most ubiquitous product you will see on any college campus in the country. It sort of seems that you need to have an awesome product before you can really leverage the benefits on social marketing…that is exactly the point. If your product is bad, don’t try and force the fit…you will be thrown out of the online community and spurned forever.

If your product isn’t getting the online buzz you think it deserves, jsut back up and figure out how to make it better: how can I make it so people get more functionality from this? How can I make it easier for people to share this product with thier friends? How can I leverage the existing community to provide relevant feedback about my product? Ask these questions, then try again. And again. And again. Stay out of the community…do not ever anonymously plug your own product in a messageboard or on a blog. If you need to comment on something (which I would suggest against), do it with full disclosure.

People care about what they read online and they will respond if they think a product is actually a good fit for them…or they’ll just do it because their friends told them to. Either way, it is good for you. Create a way for people to easily share your product/service with friends..the rest is viral.

As you read blogs, papers, comments, etc about the rise of online social networking it becomes pretty evident that there are two camps of thought:
1) The people who think that social networking is destroying inter-personal relationships by replacing face-to-face interaction with facebook messages and MySpace bulletins.
2) Those people who think that as more people interact online, it brings them closer together in real life. You can encounter someone online through a mutual friend or an online group, interact with them via blogging, facebook, twitter, etc, meet them in real life and feel like you’ve already known them for years. Or you can simply learn more about the people you already know (without the awkward conversations some details might require)

While I am not about to claim to be an expert or have hard data to back me up, given my own experiences, I’d say that those in the first camp are off the reservation…but maybe I’m just a social media addict. Anyhow, if you look just at the collegiate world, it is easy to see the massive effects that social media has had; specifically facebook and YouTube.

While other social networking tools are used by some college students, if you asked any random student on a campus if they prefer MySpace or facebook, I would stake a fair sum of my life savings that they will tell you that MySpace is creepy and facebook is where they live online.

Many students (at least undergraduates) can’t even remember the days before facebook…and most have forgotten what life was like when facebook was still in its infancy: only available at a few dozen schools, you couldn’t upload photo albums, the ‘Wall’ was freely editable text box open for anyone to trifle with, and there was no News Feed. I sort of feel like my grandfather telling war stories anytime I start talking about the days of yore when us upperclassmen had to pioneer the trails of facebook’s Wild West.

Since that time, facebook has grown to be an integral part of nearly every student’s life; it may be open for the general public, but students still feel segmented from the rest of the ‘herd’ because their networks remain independent of each other. It is integral for a number of reasons: it has changed the way we interact with each other on a daily basis, it has made it easier to stay up-to-date with friends that you might otherwise have lost contact with, and it has made it easier to share content that previously would have required an exchange of physical media.

Daily Interaction:

If there is a quick comment to make to a friend that doesn’t warrant a phone call and isn’t quite email length, what do you do? Well, before facebook, you likely forgot it…but now, you can just make a quick wall post and get a good chuckle from your random thought. Facebook events have allowed for people to spread the word about just about anything they might want to coordinate between groups of people, messages have steadily eaten away at the number f emails students send on a daily basis, and pokes…well, most people still aren’t sure what those are for.

Everyone has a few things they do every time they get online: I check my Google Reader, facebook, Gmail, Wordpress Stats, and Google News. Most people don’t have that many automatic actions, but everyone has a few. For nearly all college students, the first two things they do online are check facebook, then check email…usually in that order.

Keeping up with the News:

Thanks to the News Feed, people can keep track of what is happening in their social graph without having to check each friend’s profile on a daily basis. Despite its rocky roll-out, this feature has become an integral part of keeping one’s finger on the pulse of your network of friends; it is eerie how fast word travels when someone’s relationship status changes or when someone adds a section to their About Me section that raises eyebrows.

Frequently when you run into an old friend, they will start giving you tidbits about their life, and your response will be ‘Oh yeah, I saw that in facebook.’…thus is the changing face of our social interaction. The only major pitfall that remains in the News Feed is users’ lack of control. You can edit your privacy settings for whole sections of events (ex: ‘Don’t publish stories when I update my Quotes, add a friend, or write on a wall.’) but there is no case-by case management available. It should be that when a user deletes an event from their profile-based Mini Feed, that it is automatically removed from the news Feed as well…but this is not the case today.

Sharing:

Other sites such as del.icio.us, flickr, YouTube and ma.gnolia let you share online content, but facebook allows you to all types of content on one site. Through posting items, uploading photos, writing notes, and posting videos, facebook allows you to centralize all your shared items on a single site and eliminate the need for students to exchange any sort of physical media. No one says “Hey, can you burn me a disc of those pictures?”…it has become “Hey, get those up on facebook, so I can get them too!”

I personally use del.icio.us and flickr because I they are more open and can be imported to other sites via widgets or plugins (something facebook is going to have to adopt, but that is a whole other post), but because of the facebook platform, I can still share my content on my profile page. With other widgets from Zoho and Box.net, you can even share files with your friends without ever opening your email.

These are just a few of the big ways that facebook has effected social interaction in the collegiate world, though I would venture to say that similar results are occurring in most other demographics as well. All of these have strengthened students’ interpersonal relationships, which places me squarely in the 2nd camp…

Other reading on the sociological aspects of social networking: check out this post from Brian Solis

I have come to find the ‘ripple’ metaphor to be a good tool in describing the overall effect that the online ’social revolution’ has had. When you drop even the smallest pebble into a body of water, it will cause an initial splash that greatly affects the water immediately around it, but then the actions of those close-proximity water molecules cause the molecules next to them to respond…do that a few thousand times and you get a ripple. As the ripple expands out into the body of water, it affects all the water it passes through, as well as anything that might be on the water’s surface. Eventually, the ripple hits the edge of the pond and bounces back…unless the body of water is so big that the ripple just fades out and disperses. Drop a few pebbles into a pond and you get overlapping ripples that cause all sorts of commotion and waves.

The metaphor paints the picture of various aspects of the external world affecting change throughout the college market. While you might be able to say that it could apply to new products and services dropped into the general market, I’m focusing on the collegiate side of things. The ripples in the collegiate market tend to be a lot stronger than in the general market because students are the most brand loyal, idealistic, impressionable, and forthcoming demographic in the marketing world. Ripples through a student population begin to overlap and get lost in one another, blurring the lines between students’ academic, personal, and business lives; for a student, everything is figuratively portable from one aspect of life to the next, because most do not work 9-5 and leave everything behind on a desk at work. A student takes their work home: a coffee table might be a multimedia work center or a textbook might be used more often as a coaster than as a learning device. In general, students are also willing to try out new things that might still have some bugs or other issues, thus making college students a prime launching pad for startup companies.

When this willingness for experimentation is combined with a general ‘follow-the-crowd’ mentality, you begin to see a place from where just about anything can emerge with minimal encouragement. If you have a product that can’t be successful in a college market, you probably are not ready for prime time yet. (Unless, of course, you have a product that is micro-targeted to a demographic outside the college age bracket).

The point of this extended metaphor is to set the stage for the rest of this series by illustrating how the student life is continually in flux, has no definite boundaries between its segments, and allows for testing or launching products in the most penetrable market on earth. This translates into a unique opportunity for a relatively small development to cause major shifts in a variety of areas such as marketing, social constructs, academic coordination, and external communication: all of which are subjects to be discussed in the coming weeks.