Triumph of the “default” in sports social networks

Back in 2006 when were white-boarding the concept of mycolts.net, we made a conscious decision to design the system around the individual fan. We went heavy on personal value (i.e. content controls) and set defaults to maximize privacy thinking fans would prefer it that way. We assumed that social value would just happen automatically. I now realize that the “default settings” we built into the system actually ran counter to the business reasons for launching the site in the first place. We were envisioning a “community site” that connected fans to each other, but by setting defaults to maximize personal value, we fell short of our social vision.

The triumph of the default (Following are excerpts from the Technium blog)

…defaults are “sticky.” Many psychological studies have shown that the tiny bit of extra effort needed to alter a default is enough to dissuade most people from bothering, so they stick to the default, despite their untapped freedom.

The hard truth, as any engineer will tell you, is that most defaults are never altered. Pick up any device, and 98 out of 100 options will be the ones preset at the factory. Read more from the Technium

IMPORTANT LESSON: don’t let anti-social people set the defaults on your social network.

This realization crystalized for me as I ready Clay Shirky’s book, “Cognitive Surplus, Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.”.

Engineers and coders tend to be highly logical. Social systems, social currency and generosity are not rational things. If you want people to be social, you need to give them social opportunities. And the best way to do that is to set your system defaults as open as possible. This seems to be what Mark Zuckerberg did with Facebook when he opened it to the world beyond colleges. Set everything to public, and most people will just go with it.

Obviously, open and public defaults make brands, sports properties and traditional publishers cringe. Traditional media usually defaults to “private” or at least controlled in order to protect I.P. When controls are built in, smaller more intimate systems are the results. But, as Shirky says, “intimacy doesn’t scale.”

In his book he uses the example of CNN.com’s “Sound Off” feature and notes, “…the site has millions of readers, but most of the articles generate only a few dozen comments…better than 99-percent of the audience members don’t participate, they just consume…” Shirky compares this model to others like Yahoo! mailing lists, which are smaller, and more socially dense than CNN.com. “But people are either on a mailing list, or not…few of those list users think of themselves as part of a larger Yahoo! community, even though Yahoo! is their host.

“Facebook,” Shirky writes, “is in the middle of this audience-and-cluster spectrum. Facebook doesn’t have a single center, as CNN.com does, nor a set of sharply drawn edges, as mailing lists do. Instead, it has a overlapping social horizons…Facebook has 500 million users…but users cluster into much smaller groups, with dozens of friends. Those clusters are considerably more involved with each other than any random sampling of the CNN audience (or CNN commentators), but they are considerably less involved than members of a small mailing list….

…Every service that wants to harness the power of the cognitive surplus at large scale faces these trade-offs: you can have a large group of users. You can have an active group of users. You can have a group of users all paying attention to the same thing. Pick two, because you can’t have all three at the same time.”

Shirky goes on to say what I’ve already learned, “…there is no recipe for success with social systems.” The only way to figure out what will work is to try a lot of different stuff. Amen to that! We are currently on the third generation of MyColts.net, and we’re still seeking the magical balance, only now we are working in a totally different atmosphere from when we first began. Back in ’06, MySpace was the leading example of (massive) social media in the marketplace. Today, Facebook is king.

The Colts get 8 million visitors to Colts.com annually, the team Facebook page has over 400,000 fans, but MyColts has just 30,000 members. Given this landscape, we’ve decided with this latest iteration of MyColts site to try and strike an optimal balance between Facebook.com/colts, Colts.com and MyColts, hoping we can find a way to reach the most fans, and draw them into tighter community (and ultimately into the team’s database).

I realize that I have highlighted Shirky’s book, but I never explained what his “cognitive surplus” is all about. I hope to do that in a future post (or posts) after I get some sleep. I underlined pretty much every page in the book, so it’s going to take me a while to boil it all down. I definitely recommend it for anyone involved in designing, building or managing online communities.