Developing a Social Network
The nature of social media has revealed a new importance to the study of networks. Social media has given us the opportunity to understand the vast and complex networks that control our lives. Over the summer, I worked on creating a social media website. The website was directed toward a specific audience – the art community. The website’s purpose is to give any artist a forum to post their work and collaborate on projects with other artists. In addition, the website gives the art community the ability to comment, critique, view and discuss new works. The hope is that by increasing communication, the social media website will give the art community a new fever. During the course of developing the website, there were many factors to consider besides the basic programming and website design. The most important aspect of creating a successful website beyond the “production” is the method of introducing the website to the rest of the world.
Even companies such as Facebook and Twitter had humble beginnings. Obviously both companies provide an amazing networking tool and are designed to the highest standards. However, neither Facebook nor Twitter started with the large user base, which the each now control. In fact, much of the success of these social media sites can be attributed to the analysis of their original networks. For example, Facebook started by targeting a much smaller audience – Harvard University. Facebook, as many know, was started by Mark Zuckerburg. Mark created Facebook as a way for a student to communicate with any other Harvard student about anything from parties to study groups. The combination of Facebook’s usefulness and the “proximity” of the Harvard student network caused the website to achieve a critical mass very quickly. As we learned in class the fraction of users within the network exceeded the reserve fraction for each student to join, causing the entire network to join Facebook within a matter of days.
Although Twitter was released to the general public, there was also a critical moment in Twitter’s development that can be labeled the company’s “watershed” moment. This occurred in 2007 at the SXSW (South by Southwest) festival. SXSW is a music festival that also focuses on film and emerging technology. Twitter posted several “insta-blog” LCD screens, showing the tweets of any user that posted with the #SXSW. Individuals at the festival reacted to these live tweets positively and suddenly there was a huge spike in activity. Soon the majority of festival goers where sending tweets about the best bands and the best place to grab a bite to eat. The people at the festival are usually more receptive to new technology, which caused the threshold fraction to decrease compared to the general population.
So, you might be asking yourself: Why were these companies successful in introducing their websites? Well to start, both companies provide an amazing and original service, but beyond that they were both introduced into smaller “target audiences”. This target audience was not just a random grouping of people, but a small very inter-connected network, which contained individuals, who were open to new technology. This type of network helped to foster each company by lowering the critical mass of people needed to convert the entire network. In addition, it helped the companies to set up further expansion by introducing many links to other network clusters. It is amazing how much can be learned by looking at the origins of these companies. In understanding the beginnings of these major companies, I was able to see the importance of choosing a specific and highly-interconnected network for my own target audience. At the moment, my website is still undergoing beta testing, yet I know that I will release the website at some point. When I do, I will be more likely to succeed in my endeavour with this knowledge.
Below are the article on Twitter, as well as the websites, which helped me realized the importance of a target audience.
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/03/10/twitter-communication-tools-of-sxsw/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomtaulli/2012/02/22/four-keys-to-building-a-successful-social-network/
SirDobert