Over the past few years, a great deal of effort has been invested by traditional news organizations in making their websites look and feel more “social.”
I suspect that many within the industry have moments of doubt about the whole process, especially when they compare their industry’s own efforts with those of companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter. These companies appear to have more resources and fewer constraints, and add features in a rapid and casual manner that sometimes looks effortless to the outside observer. (It isn’t.)
However, if we compare CNN’s website today to that of CNN five years ago — or do the same thing with many other newspaper websites — we can see that there’s been significant progress.
In 2004, most newspaper websites were vehicles for one-way communication; there was no way for a reader to leave a comment. Many sites were even frustrating to link to, as stories had permalinks that weren’t so permanent.
Today, allowing reader comments on stories isn’t universal, but it is commonplace. Articles with permalinks and rows of icons inviting you to send an article to your favorite bookmarking service or to submit it to Digg are increasingly common. More and more news organizations tout their participation (well, headline distribution) on Twitter. And a surprising number of news organizations have started to open up to more than reader commentary, bookmarking, or rating: they’ve opened channels that let readers submit content, not just comments.
But how can news organizations keep up, when Facebook launches a new feature at a rate of what seems like every fifteen minutes?
Should we let users fling sheep at columnists? Auction off fellow commenters?
What’s going to work?
In the following series of four short articles, I’m going to propose four “social cues for news” — crowds, trending, proximity, and trajectory. I’ll explain what I mean by each of them, and make the argument that adding features that take advantage of these four common social cues are the ones that news organizations should focus their limited resources on.
When we’re in a public place, we tend to notice crowds, and the gaze direction of crowds. For instance, if there’s a loud noise, and we did not hear it (perhaps we’ve got our iPod turned up a bit too high), we still tend to look in the direction that others are looking in. Crowds give us social cues about what’s interesting in a novel environment. We also notice trending — we notice when there’s a queue forming, or if people are running toward or away from something. We use proximity as a way to orient ourselves — we tend to give more attention to people who are close to us than people who are further away. Lastly, there’s trajectory: we pay more attention to people or things whose trajectory indicates that we’ll either meet up or are going to the same place.
What all these social cues have in common is that they are the social cues we use in public places, where we can’t assume that we’ll be in the company of people we’ve met before.
News websites also have this property: most people visiting NYTimes.com don’t assume that they know the other people who happen to be visiting at the same time. This makes news websites strikingly different from social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace, where users assume that they will find people they have interacted with in real life, and where users are encouraged to replicate their offline social networks by “friending” other users of a social networking site.
While social networks have been employed for public uses — to recruit political support for a candidate for office, to raise money for charities, etc — my guess is that the bulk of what happens on most social networking sites relates to the private lives of the people who use them.
News websites, by the nature of the information that they distribute, tend to gather groups of people that are more like those that assemble in a public park. We’re unlikely to fling a sheep at a passing pedestrian, or friend a random park-bench sitter whom we’ve never met before, and it certainly feels inappropriate to auction off the rollerbladers who terrify other bike/pedestrian path users with their speed (though it may be tempting). Instead, we use our own assessment of the environment, looking at factors like crowds, trending, proximity, and trajectory to negotiate that environment.
The good news for news organizations is that focusing on building features that mimic the things people do in real-life public settings will help them focus on a relatively small set of social features that people will actually use. If we recognize the fact that users relate to news websites the way they relate to public spaces, we won’t waste time and energy trying to port features from Facebook that won’t fly because they don’t “feel right” to users.