Pew Report notes, part three: He shoots, he scores... telling the story that makes a winner

The Pew Internet & American Life Project's report, A Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users, has raised a lot of questions in the mediasphere in the past couple days. Despite the concerns that social media, or "Web 2.0," are not catching on with rapidly or broadly enough, the report merely confirms what we all know, that early adopters are involved with these tools and services today. That's no reason to breathe a sigh of relief, since many early-adopter technologies never go anywhere in society at large.

In this piece, I'll reveal something that everyone thinking about designing social media should be focused When we start making people the center of their stories, everyone will be better off.on. But more on that later.

I believe the report clearly shows that the problem is a failure of engagement due to the increasing narrative fragmentation of users' lives. Here's what I've covered so far:

• Part 1: Introduced the 10 types of users identified by the Pew report and explored the top-three groups, who seem to be most involved in social media.
• Part 2: By focusing on network and device use, the Pew report creates some paradoxical types, ranking deeply engaged wireless users lower than people who have more devices but use them less for communication. Nevertheless, the reasons for engagement with networks and devices revolve around how they impact the user's perspective on and experience of their lives. In short, they have a story that justifies the time spent with these tools.

Social media is still merely a collection of disparate features. They need to be woven together into something that everyone understands as a way of explaining themselves, connecting and recording their relationships, and, most critically, delivers some transformative value to people who invest the time to use them. This does happen for some folks today, but they are in the tiny minority that are actively using social media, perhaps 90 million people—about 1/72nd of the world's population.

You can sell 1/72nd of the people all of the time. Social media requires a lot of personal investment, hence the comments of the majority of users interviewed by the Pew team, who don't have a lot of time or patience for technology that makes more demands on them. For example:

[T]he Connected but Hassled do not much appreciate the information and communications assets they have acquired. Many of them say they suffer from information overload, and very few find the extra availability ICTs offer to be a good thing.... Although some 18% of the Connected but Hassled will go online just for fun on the typical day (against the 28% average), very few download music, pay for online content,or use the wireless internet. And just 24% have done anything pertaining to user generated content. Only 19% have ever sent or received a text message and 9% has watched TV on a device other than their home television.

[T]he Light but Satisfied, has a below-average rate of internet and cell phone access. They are not frequent users of the internet and are least likely group to rely on their cell phones for most of their calls. Although ICTs do not loom large in the lives of Light but Satisfied group members, they seem reasonably satisfied with how it lets them keep in touch with family and friends. The “Light but Satisfied” group is marked by a wide internet-cell phone adoption gap. Nearly 9 in 10 (86%) have a cell phone, but 60% are internet users, with few (15%) with high-speed connections at home.

"Light but Satisfied" isn't really satisfied as engaged with the Net, just talking on the phone. Nothing has grabbed them, it is simply what they do with the modern version of the tools their grandparents used.

As I said in the second installment, the missing ingredient is narrative. We currently collect little bits of user's lives and keep them in the cul-de-sac where we first caught them, hoping to keep them there as long as possible (visit length being the key metric) and have them come back often (measured by frequency of visits). There's no story in separate fragments, nothing that tells people why they are better off for the effort.

What is that secret approach to the problem of designing social media? It's what already drives most communities in "Web 2.0" today, the story members tell themselves about their participation. As I pointed out in the last posting, the problem is that most communities are built on stories about the central functionality of the technology, not the people. Why else would we describe successful members of these communities as "top Diggers" or "top Twitterer"? A search for "top Twitterer" yields 11,500 hits on Google.

We should be building tools that turn the interior narrative, the stories people tell themselves about themselves, become richer and more rewarding rather than about being prolific at functions, like "posting," "tagging" and uploading (none of the video sites are about the creative process, they are about uploading and access to finished video).

Let's think about comic strips for a moment. Everyone likes comic strips and they represent an increasingly popular form for novels and have inspired movies to new limits. Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes, every character in Doonesbury at one time or another, and Charlie Brown, to name just a few of the characters that have captured huge audiences with their interior narratives, should sit firmly in the social media maker's mind, delivering their coverage of every little action, complete with commentary: "He shoots, he scores, the crowd goes wild!" That, more than the football being pulled away by Lucy, is what makes Charlie Brown's efforts at placekicking so vitally human.

In the first pre-syndication strip published by Garry Trudeau in the Yale Daily (see above), Doonesbury character B.D. comments on his own desperately disorganized play-calling, putting the best spin on it. That early humanity made the strip live and grow for almost 40 years. It's not a widespread standard for judging software, but that same capacity for making people bigger and more themselves is what has assured the success of all the great application and services software, albeit we've tended to concentrate on making people better accountants rather than better people.

When we start making people the center of their stories, everyone will be better off. Forget about your mission if it doesn't revolve enlarging the member of the community you are building. The editorial value of building online communities will become crystal clear. Marketers will no longer wonder how to use social media, because they'll see that letting the customer be themselves is the keystone for engagement based on the customers use of the product or service, not the corporation's expectations about how people should use it.

As social media matures all the bits and pieces of information collected across the many social functions that make up "Web 2.0" will become interoperable. But it won't mean diddly if those parts don't come together to create, at minimum, short stories about the people shoveling fragments of their lives into different social media sites. Should those short stories fail to coalesce into chapters that make up whole novels, historical documents  and memoir, the hype will all be for naught. 

Remember Charlie Brown. Social media is a palette under construction.