We unveiled the first edition of the Future of Sharing with you this past February during Social Media Week, including a sample of our initial findings.

Now, for the first time, the complete whitepaper is available for download!

This study was conducted in order to take a deeper link into these four questions:

• Where are consumers sharing and why?
• What types of content are shared most?
• How are consumer’s lifestyles and surrounding environments impacting sharing and their interactions with brands?
• Why are consumers sharing certain content; i.e. what are the current/future trends in what makes content share-worthy?

Find the answers, along with insights from industry leaders, and recommendations for the future in the full document.

To download the PDF, visit this link (right-click “Save As” or “Save Link As”)  or check out the whitepapers section on the right-hand side of Bynd.com

Questions? Comments? Share your thoughts with us below!

By looking at a number of examples in addition to American Express’ Open, we have identified 10 Steps to Building a Successful Editorial Destination for B2B Brands:

1. Editorial Voice: Have a clear editorial policy and voice that is grounded in the content that the audience cares about
2. Brand Independence: Separate the editorial from the brand and don’t let the brand marketing people near the content
3. Recruit Authors: Recruiting authors who have their own readerships will help drive your audience
4. Cross Promote: Set up and establish relationships with publishers to cross promote content
5. Content Strategy: Ensure you have the right mix of simple hints and tips to indpeth articles depending on the needs of the audience
6. Long term: Establishing a successful property needs time, so if you don’t want to give it at least 12 months don’t bother
7. Search equity: A key part of attracting an audience is to plan the content around the search terms that are relevant for the audience you are trying to reach
8. Distribution is Key: Investment in paid media (as well as earned and owned media) is key to building an audience
9. Professional editor: Magazines are successful because they are run by professional editors. A brand property is no different.
10. Emotional Connection: Just because you have a business audience doesn’t mean you can’t have some fun and appeal to the consumer within

If we look at the reasons for the success of Open Forum, we can see how they adopted some of these principles in creating such a successful property:

• By working with Federated Media, very early on they established a coterie of established authors who didn’t just create compelling content but who cross-promoted the destination on their own publishing sites all of which already had an established audience
• American Express relinquished editorial control to a third party and allowed the content to cover any aspect of a running a small and medium business regardless of whether it related to American Express’ business directly
• Because of the editorial integrity of the content, American Express built up a trust with its readership enabling the site to be closely coupled to the American Express brand. This in turn made it easy for readers to move very quickly from awareness or consideration to purchase (i.e. signing up for a credit card)
• The Open brand (as it is now called – not Open Forum) has now become a marketing platform for American Express. For example, it is the umbrella under which American Express now publishes studies in support of small and medium businesses
• The editorial policy and voice is very in sync with its readership. Small and medium business owners don’t consider themselves SMEs nor do they have time to read in depth articles about business. Instead they are defined more by their location and their industry and want practical actionable hints and tips. This is exactly what the editorial policy serves up
• American Express invested heavily in paid media across a huge range of related titles to build its audience which is now paying dividends

Finding other examples of business to business brands that have done a good job of transforming themselves into a publisher isn’t easy. I don’t think it is a coincidence that another company that has gone down this route is Intuit, with its blog. In many ways it is a direct replica of Open but without the “big name” authors to drive its readership and syndicate content. It also hasn’t made any attempt to distance the destination from the Intuit brand by creating a secondary platform.

One of the things that both American Express and Intuit have in common is that they are both targeting buyers within SMEs who behave as much like consumers as they do businesses, which is probably one of the reasons these two brands are early adopters in the B2B space following the early examples found in the B2C world.

But what about brands outside of the SME space that have attempted to establish an editorial destination? A couple of other examples I have come across are Citrix and Adobe. I think both of these examples have important elements from which we can learn.

While Citrix sells its products and services to businesses, this site is not targeting the IT buyer, but the ultimate benefactor of the technology by focusing on the application of the technology in creating a better lifestyle. What’s more, I like the way that Citrix has established this destination as part of a strategy to insert itself (and own) a conversation about a different way of working that is a huge driver in the adoption of its technology.

Adobe’s approach in targeting CMO’s has been to create a heavyweight resource for by aggregating articles and reports from a wide range of established publications, blogs and research institutes as well as commissioning content from its own stable of contributors. Given the senior nature of the target audience, Adobe has done a  great job of leveraging existing content to create a valuable resource. Some of te content is only available to subscribers, thereby driving greater brand awareness and consideration with the reader.

The final example is one which we can learn from in a different way. Salesforce has set up a destination. As you can see it is only very loosely tied to Salesforce (perhaps for good reason). The look and feel of it is off putting from the outset. It looks like the content has been taken straight from a brochure rather  than being any attempt to create an editorial destination with real integrity and authority.

There is no doubt that Tom Foremski’s prediction all those years ago is going to happen. It has just taken a long time to make its way into the B2B world. While the actual execution behind creating these sites is not difficult, the biggest obstacle is the overall attitude of the organization to having a property that is not pumping out uni-directional product marketing messages. Only when an organization can mentally wrap its head around a new type of content marketing can it hope to replicate the success of American Express’ Open.

A funny thing happens as you begin to get attached to a new social platform– you become mighty persnickety about how other people are using it.

Lovers of crafts, recipes, and good photography on Pinterest have all run into the same pet peeves: some Pinner who credits “Google Image Search”, a link that leads to an outdated or general page instead of the individual post, and so on.

More recently, I’ve been seeing Pinners of my own kind, fellow community managers and social media enthusiasts, making different kinds of mistakes repeatedly on my new favorite service when trying to promote their own sites.

We can’t always control how other people Pin our content, but we can always set a good example and encourage others to follow suit.

What’s important to remember is that unlike most other bookmarking sites, where users can expect to read a paragraph of summary text accompanied by a vague stock photo, Pinterest is all about the instant pleasure of seeing something and knowing exactly what it is.

Example: The reason that bacon cinnamon rolls get repinned 20x more than your “10 Ten Ways to Convert Likes into Customers” post is that it just plain looks better! When I look at a delicious picture of a finished dessert, I get the idea that this may be a pretty good recipe. With bland “tech-y” stock photo or even just a screenshot of your Facebook page, I get no ideas at all.

Yum!

Yuck.

Season your blog post Pin with one juicy, visual morsel of information– a preview of strategies to follow or an interesting mnemonic device. Give me a reason to wonder what’s next, not just wonder what it is.

Another problem I see with many self-promoters is a lack of tag and board organization. Pinterest’s search functionality is limited as it is: don’t make it harder on yourself by leaving a description such as “Some cool factoids” when you want people interested about Facebook metrics to Repin you. That said, if I see your Email Marketing post lurking around while I’m searching for cabbage recipes, I’m likely to skip over it as well. The best recipe and beauty Pins are hashtagged and/or titled with all you need to know.

Lastly, and this goes without saying, even if you’ve got a great thumbnail and tantalizing description, if your original post is junk (or worse, just a placeholder that leads to more confusing material) I’m definitely not going to want to Follow you, let alone Pin your material. Craft bloggers and chefs are bound by the fact that they’re trying to teach their readers, and if their readers are unable to reproduce the right results, well, you get something like this blog: http://craftfail.com/

In short:

• Be visual!
• Be specific!
• Be useful!

And you’ll be on your way to successful Pinning!

What are your top pet peeves when it comes to Pinning? Tell us in the comments! Plus, don’t forget to Follow Beyond on Pinterest!

Beyond worked with Facebook to develop this visual story by addressing this project from a few different angles. First, we utilized our analytics capabilities by doing an analysis of the Facebook.com/green Insights data to understand what stories resonate most with Facebook’s green audience. That formed the basis of what made it into the site, and how the story evolved.

Then, we unleashed our design expertise on the project, working in close collaboration with Facebook. Ultimately, borrowing the look and feel of Facebook’s new Timeline format made the most sense.

And, finally, in the development phase we wanted to make the site subtly dynamic, flexible and built using the latest web standards. With a parallax scrolling effect, HTML5 and CSS3 we were able to make the page come alive as the user navigates through Facebook’s story, uncovering hidden gems as they roll over each new content article.

But, the real credit here goes to Facebook itself, who has been making great strides to help the environment and empower billions of people around the world to do the same. As the site explains, the power of the Facebook Platform, the company’s Sustainable Technology and approach to living “Everyday Green” is making a significant impact globally. To stay up to date on these initiatives, head over to www.facebook.com/green.

We hope you enjoy.

(and, again, thanks for scrolling).

Amid a quickly-changing social media landscape and a lack of guidance from the FDA, it can be tricky for pharmaceutical and healthcare companies to develop a social media marketing and engagement strategy that is both engaging and in line with marketing regulations.  However, although pharmaceutical brands need to invest additional time and effort into building an effective and compliant social media program, the rewards to be gained from social media engagement far outweigh the costs.

Here at Beyond, our team of pharma-focused analysts have been aiding clients in social media management, measurement, and campaign design.  Through our work, we’ve developed a few insights and suggestions we’d like to share.  Additionally, in the course of our research, we’ve come across a fair amount of incorrect or outdated information on this topic, so we thought it worthwhile to provide a quick recap of recent events related to social media and pharmaceutical companies.

Background:

In August of last year, Facebook stopped providing most pharmaceutical page owners with the option to block all visitor posts and comments on their page.  Though all page owners still have the option to block visitors from creating entirely new posts on the wall, pharma page owners can no longer restrict whether page visitors can reply to the company’s own posts on the wall.  This change does not affect branded drug pages, where companies can still restrict all forms of commenting and engagement.  However, this change caused some initial panic among page-owners who had grown used to the system as it was.

As Facebook stated, the change was designed to open the lines of communication between pharma companies and the general public.  However, after the announcement, some companies deleted their Facebook pages in response to this change, which helped quell regulatory departments’ fears of unsolicited posts that could theoretically be construed by the FDA as non-compliant.  However, closing down pages (or disabling all comments on them) is clearly not a long-term solution for pharma brands who must operate in a media and marketing world that’s becoming increasingly social.

As pharma brands and marketing professionals are aware, the FDA has been painfully quiet about its stance on social media.  It recently published Draft Guidance on how companies should respond to social media posts that contain unsolicited, public requests for off-label usage information.  However, these guidelines were met with mixed emotions by brands and marketers, some of whom expressed that they were wishing for more concrete guidance on how drug manufacturers should use social media more broadly.

Though the FDA has its own blog and page on every major form of social media (including Twitter and Facebook), a recent piece in the San Francisco Business Times quoted FDA Commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg as saying “‘Social media’ is a scary term for me.”  Understandably, it is difficult for the FDA to draft extremely precise guidelines for manufacturers in the rapidly-changing world of social media, where networks and platforms are constantly evolving.  However, brands that spend time waiting for more concrete guidelines to emerge can find themselves missing out on valuable opportunities to engage with patients and improve their brand image, especially as competitors rise to the challenge.

How and Why to Engage 

Despite these hurdles that make social media engagement slightly trickier for pharmaceutical companies as opposed to other brands, we still believe it is essential for all pharmaceutical and healthcare-related brands to engage with patients and customers via social media.

Last summer, Beyond developed a Facebook wall moderation app for pharma companies that allows page moderators to review visitor-generated content before it goes live.  This allows page owners the option to block inappropriate content and respond to requests privately, much as they would if the poster contacted the company directly via a more traditional channel (e.g. writing or calling).  Page owners can, of course, also allow comments to go live, and follow up with a publicly-visible response if they think the response would be of use to other page visitors.

The recently-published FDA guidelines also help to clarify what companies should do if a poster raises the issue of off-label usage of a product in a public posting: the company must simply provide the poster with contact information so that the company can engage the individual in a private, one-on-one conversation about off-label usage (again, just as if the poster had contacted the company’s customer response team directly).

A well-executed social media strategy can soon bring a strong return on the time and effort invested in setting up and maintaining your company’s social media presence.  Here are three simple reasons why it’s essential for pharmaceutical companies to engage in and monitor social media:

1. Patients are increasingly turning to the internet and social media for information when they need to make healthcare decisions for themselves and/or loved ones.  This research includes everything from “self-diagnosing” conditions to learning more about a newly-diagnosed condition, researching drugs, and sharing experiences with patients who have similar symptoms or conditions.  By owning appropriate and relevant content, such as managing a discussion about your product on Facebook or hosting a non-branded patient forum, you can help ensure that accurate information is getting to your target audience.

2. Echoing Facebook’s sentiment around opening up Facebook walls for commenting, we also believe that creating open lines of communication between your company and its customer base is essential.  As many “mainstream” corporations have found, engaging with frustrated customers can help to turn detractors into advocates and clear up misconceptions about your products.  This can be especially important in the healthcare/pharmaceutical space, where some customers may be suspicious of large drug companies.  It’s wise to monitor social media conversations around your brand and competitors so that you may craft your PR strategies accordingly.

3. Social media sites provide a nice way to highlight your corporate news and achievements and strategically position your brand online.  Showcasing things like your charitable initiatives can go a long way towards fostering a positive image for your brand, especially when such information is presented in a setting where visitors can engage with the content.

In closing, social media platforms provide rewarding opportunities for pharma brands to improve their corporate image and capture the attention of patients and potential customers.  As social media expands rapidly and the rising costs of healthcare incent an increasing number of patients to seek information online, healthcare and pharma companies can engage with this growing, captive audience in entirely new ways.

I won’t touch on every single one of the updates. Countless other blogs and news articles will do that. A couple of good resources come from GigaOm and TechCrunch. You can also walk through the learning course of the new aesthetic features.

What I think is most important is that at the center of this shift is the brand Page. The brand Page as we’ve known it for the last few years has been completely uprooted. No more welcome page. No more tabs. The new Timeline format is here and Facebook’s ad platform – built around the brand Page – is now supercharged.

Put simply, Facebook is taking a much more cohesive approach to the earned, owned, paid spectrum of content on the brand Page. They are now completely intertwined. So, what does that mean?

• Earned content matters more than ever. Prominently displayed on every brand Page is your friend’s activity. Getting people to talk about your brand is critical to make that personalized experience to each individual user valuable.
• Paid content matters more than ever. There is no more separate ad copy & creative. Page posts are ads, or as Facebook puts it, they are stories. And, with new ad packages, page posts can be immediately placed among the Facebook universe for a fee, driving the percentage brand fans you typically reach from 16% (industry average provided by ComScore) up to an average of 75%. This is referred to as the Reach Generator.
• Owned content matters more than ever. You need your owned content to work in order to make earned & paid strategy work. They are no longer separate. Good page posts will get fans to engage, which their friends will see, and will also generate high CTR in page post ads.

Timeline for brand pages is likely to steal the lions share of headlines coming out of the first fMC, but Timeline is merely the visual representation of something much more fundamental and powerful going on. Eight years since it’s inception, Facebook seems to have finally put a stake in the ground about what’s strategy is all about. Ads. Or, as Facebook is calling them – stories (that have the ability to be paid for and placed like, well, ads). It’s all about creating a social economy where every post from every brand has a cost and a value. And, supported by some additional news around Insights, there is a very simple and moderately robust way of measuring that cost and value

This shouldn’t be all too surprising. Just yesterday, TechCrunch posted an article with a bold headline “Why Google+ Doesn’t Care if You Never Come Back” (poor grammar, but let’s ignore that) with the reason being that just by signing up for Google+ you are handing over incredibly valuable information to fuel their ad service. I’m sure Google would like you to come back, but it’s true, they don’t need you to.

Similarly, Facebook is betting on ads. By putting the brand Page at the center of every brand’s world, you make Facebook not just a distribution vehicle to garner eyeballs, but the backbone of an entire marketing strategy (“mission control” is what Facebook is calling it). And, for Facebook’s part, they get mountains and mountains of data that they can recycle to further fuel their ad service.

Years ago, when everyone was debating the validity of social media, asking how any of it was going to make money, we heard arguments & business models that ranged from far fetched to primitive. It seems that the solution was right under our noses the whole time, and has been around for decades. Ads.

Sorry, I mean stories.

The panel of Facebook, Microsoft, Nokia and Reuters were great and Brand Republic’s/The Wall’s Editor Gordon MacMillan did a brilliant job moderating the discussion while encouraging some great panel rivalry.

The hot topic was frictionless sharing; and as Allister Frost at Microsoft neatly summarised - ”Frictionless sharing has to have utility, or it’s simply noise. There has to be a value exchange”

Here’s the article from Gordon MacMillan - Blog on the Wall (Brand Republic) as well as the Mashable Coverage 

If you missed the event then then here are some of the discussion questions answered by the panel:

1. Is frictionless sharing here to stay: why or why not?
2. Is grouping your friends and selectively sharing content the way of the future or is that too difficult to maintain?
3. How much will sharing via mobile devices change in the next 5 years?
4. What will consumers be sharing in five years time that they are not sharing today? How will businesses build their products/services to be “social by design”?
5. Will the ubiquity of sharing ultimately help or hurt businesses more when it all nets out?
6. What is the most bizarre thing you’ve ever shared online OR have you ever shared something online that you regretted?

Check out the presentation slides HERE

If you have any question on the Future of Sharing contact me on: josh@bynd.com

Watch more interviews from Mark Jones (Reuters) and Ash Choudhury (Nokia) on our Beyond youtube channel.

In conjunction with Social Media Week, we are excited to release the findings of our follow-up study: The Future of Sharing.

And we’ll be discussing these findings at Social Media Week SF, NY and London with brands that include: Buddy Media, Buzzfeed, Facebook, Haymarket Media, Microsoft, Nokia, OPOWER, Reuters and Spotify.

This study essentially aimed to take a deep dive into four broad categories:

• Where are consumers sharing and why
• What types of content are shared most
• How are consumer’s lifestyles and surrounding environments impacting sharing and their interactions with brands
• Why are consumers sharing certain content; ie. what are the current/future trends in what makes content share-worthy

Quite frankly, this discussion couldn’t be timelier. With the introduction of Facebook OpenGraph, brands like Spotify, Ticketmaster, AirBnB – and soon to be plenty more – are ushering in a new era of sharing, dubbed “frictionless.”

And, this shift has proven to be quite polarizing already. Molly Wood of CNET wrote simply about how Facebook is ruining sharing, while Mike Isaac of Wired shares a different view (no pun intended), offering that “It’s a telling sign of the age we’re in. With the early aughts, search and discovery meant algorithms, Page rank, Google. But Facebook — and sites like it — have ushered in a new era of discovery: The social era. Instead of a search bar, there are friends’ ticker feeds. Instead of Page ranks, there is the priority of an action in Timeline.”

These competing views formed the basis of our study. Are we approaching a huge sharing backlash? Or, are we at the tip of the iceberg in how brands can leverage new forms of sharing to integrate their products or services into the thread of consumers’ daily lives? A middle ground also exists – that the trends in sharing are both positive and dangerous, with the greater importance on making sharing more intelligent.

The criteria for the study was as follows:

• 2059 consumers worldwide were surveyed (1059 US, 1000 UK)
• All had to be active Facebook, Twitter or Google+ users
• Ages 16-40, with 68% of respondents between 19-34
• 98% were active Facebook users, with 60% logging in several times a day

(We also gathered insights from a variety of industry thought leaders, which you can read here)

The results that emerged shed interesting light on what the future holds for consumer behavior online. And, not surprisingly, they present both challenges and opportunities for brands:

• A “sharing burnout effect” does exist with sharing behavior peaking for users between 3-12 months, while social network usage (amount of times logged in per week), grows continually on a per-user basis from 3 months – 2+ years.

• As part of sharing burnout, 61% of people report feeling “annoyed” by applications that automatically post content, and the longer people have Facebook accounts the more likely that they are to be annoyed by applications that post automatically to their profiles.

• Despite consumer frustration, 67% of people have done at least one of the following things:
  • allowed an application to post automatically to their profile
  • listened to a song that was automatically shared (spotify, etc)
  • read an automatically shared article (online reader)

• Overall, only 40% of people have created subgroups to selectively share posts, but 62% said that that the idea appeals to them.

• There is a significant relationship between number of friends and preference for using the filtering feature (filtering how you share content by groups of friends). People with higher number of Facebook friends are more likely to use, or want to use, the filtering feature than people with lower number of Facebook friends. 70% of people who have at least 250 friends use, or want to use, the filtering feature compared to 57% of people who have less than 250 friends. This implies that as people build out their social networks, the networks essentially need to be more complex (with more disparate groups), instead of just amassing a high volume of people that you share of your content with.

• 23% of people say that they are overwhelmed with the amount of posts shared with them in social networks. Those who are overwhelmed tend to be older and have fewer friends in their social networks. Power users, despite being subject to more content, are less likely to be overwhelmed. 34% of people who log-into Facebook a few times per week or less are overwhelmed by the amount of sharing content compared to 21% of people who log into Facebook at least once per day.

• 60% of people say that they’d willing to post about products/services on Facebook if they were offered a deal or discount.

• “Informing friends” was the most-cited reason for sharing content, as 64% of people report that it’s important to them to inform friends when sharing content.

• Personal milestones will be the biggest category of content people share with 43 percent of people saying they will share a personal milestone, while 30 percent will share planning a trip, 28 percent will share purchasing a ticket to an event, 27 percent will share a donation to a charity or getting a deal from a deal site and 23 percent would share a purchase from an online retailer such as Amazon.

Looking at these results, a few insights can be extracted that offer a view of what the “future of sharing” looks like:

• The rate of shared content online will eventually plateau. A sharing burnout currently exists, with the individual rate of sharing peaking between 3-12 months of setting up a new social account, despite usage (rate an individual logs in) steadily increasing over time. In short, users become more passive the longer they are on a social network, which means brands will need to find a way to keep their fan base active and engaged over time.

• Frictionless sharing is here to stay, but it will need to get much, much better. The majority of people are currently experimenting with these apps, but there is a growing backlash. If done right, ultimately just about everything we do in a day will have the capacity to be shared online, but with accuracy and without needing to actively think about it.

• Segmenting your social networks into disparate friend groups to selectively share content (ie. the Google+ model) is likely to catch on – but needs to be simple to manage for users

• Tried and true marketing tactics will continue to fuel the sharing evolution – discounts & free giveaways will spur users to share brand content, particularly as it relates to location based services.

• Sharing will expand to include transactions as well as life events and personal achievements to define a new action-oriented sharing culture. The most common type of content that people currently share are status updates about life achievements (89% of people posted this type of content at least a few times per month).  But, looking ahead, respondents indicated that reaching a personal milestone was the most likely sharing activity they would do in the future if the sharing was made easier (ie. via frictionless sharing).

• The personal motivations for sharing content will remain the same. The top 3 motivations for sharing content are to inform your friends, express a point of view and humor. You could argue these have always been the three biggest sharing drivers.

But, it is not to say that these are etched in stone, nor does it mean that other meaningful changes don’t lie ahead for sharing online. Let us know your thoughts on the Future of Sharing by attending the Social Media Week event in your city and allowing your voice to be heard:

New York

Wednesday, February 15
4:00 – 5:00 pm
Location: Big Fuel Headquarters, 40 W. 23 Street

Craig Hepburn, Global Director of Social Media, Nokia
Mike Lazerow, CEO, Buddy Media
Dave Altarescu, Head of US Consumer Marketing, Spotify
Jon Steinberg, President, Buzzfeed
Ben Smith, Editor-in-Chief, Buzzfeed (Moderator)
Matt Basford, Director, Beyond

London

Thursday, February 16
9:00 – 11:00 am
Location: Design Council, 34 Bow Street

Trevor Johnson, Strategy & Planning, Facebook
Mark Jones, Financial Communities Editor, Reuters
Michael McClary, Business Development, Microsot
Ash Choudhury, Head of Digital Marketing UK, Nokia
Gordon MacMillan, Social Media Editor, Brand Republic Group, Haymarket Media (Moderator)
Nick Rappolt, Managing Director, Beyond

San Francisco

Thursday, February 16
1:00 – 1:50 pm
Location: San Francisco State University, 835 Market Street, 5^th Floor

Phil Schwarzmann, Head of Owned and Social Media, Nokia, North America
Carla Bourque, SVP, Buddy Media
Andy Weidlin, Chief Revenue Officer, Buzzfeed
Stephanie Berner, Engagement Director, Opower
David Hargreaves, CEO, Beyond (Moderator)

]]> http://bynd.com/2012/02/15/future-of-sharing/feed/ 0 http://bynd.com/2012/02/15/experience-mapping-future-sharing/ http://bynd.com/2012/02/15/experience-mapping-future-sharing/#comments Wed, 15 Feb 2012 17:54:09 +0000 Samantha Gottlieb http://bynd.com/?p=5658 Continue reading]]> In addition to collecting survey data on consumers’ behaviors on social media sites, Beyond also conducted an experience mapping project. We invited local Bay Area participants to our offices in early February 2012 to tell us how they use social media to stay connected, distribute various content with their social groups, and how they imagine the social media landscape might change in the next ten years. We were eager to hear how individual users might narrate their interactions online and how they expected their social media behaviors to change.

We gathered two groups of people, who did not know each other previously, on two separate nights, to get them to tell us about an average day of using social media platforms and the kinds of information they chose to share or chose not to share. We plied them with pizza and set them to work with markers and big sheets of paper. Using process map techniques, participants drew for us different layers of their daily sharing behaviors and shared how they engaged with the media throughout their day.

While our sample group was small, with a total of thirteen participants, a common theme emerged from our participants’ maps, both from their mapping of current behaviors online and their projections of how their behaviors might change in the future.

• Most of the participants recognized that they engaged in some form of self-curation, managing their audience either by social platform choice or within the social network itself. It is unclear whether this idea of audience-management reflects the Google+ introduction of Circles, and Facebook’s subsequent allowing users to create lists, but the participants all had thoughts about with whom they were sharing information and what sorts of information they were willing to share with their targeted audiences.
• Curation of groups was also something our participants expected to remain constant in the future. The people with whom they might choose to share and the content might change, but our respondents foresaw segregating their audiences. They did hope that this might get easier to do in the future.

The experience mapping groups, unlike those surveyed, were much more wary of frictionless sharing than the broad consumer group that was surveyed (67% said they had used some form of frictionless sharing), perhaps partly due to their own active management of their content. One participant had two separate Twitter accounts for her public persona and her personal life and interests. Another participant segregated her Facebook friends by the sort of content she was going to share with them, keenly aware that her hometown friends or parents might not be comfortable with some of her activities or shared information.

Most of the participants had a hard time imagining their future behavior, but many expected the existing platforms would still be around, though hopefully improved upon.

Areas that our respondents wanted to see changed included a more centralized method of sharing, although this did not seem to mean “frictionless” sharing, but rather reducing the number of sites and ways in which they shared or accessed content. One of the challenges users faced was deciding which site was appropriate for what sort of content they wanted to share. This was somewhat mitigated by their own curation of groups or social media site usage, but they found this to be a significantly limiting element of social media sites. A couple of people responded to this decision-fatigue by reducing their usage, instead of trying to sort groups or content they would share.

Respondents were interested in using social media platforms for self-tracking. Though they did not refer to it as a form of “quantified self,” they saw the sites as opportunities to keep journal-like data about their own activities. This was less about sharing the content than just having a way to aggregate information about themselves for themselves, but many of our respondents didn’t really mind if this information was widely disseminated. There was a gender difference, however, with the male participants finding this less troubling than women, who noted they might not feel safe having their whereabouts accessible publicly.

The responses and user-generated narratives raised a lot of questions about what users want in their sharing experiences.

• Do people actually want to review the data that ends up being collected over time? Do they look at it again or is it enough to just know it’s there?
• How important is others’ feedback on shared content? Is having other people’s engagement with shared content an important motivator to continue sharing?

As social media platforms refine their forms of engagement with their users, there is a clear need to better recognize what keeps people coming back and the consequences of willy-nilly changing sharing parameters with no real user input. More than half a decade after the launch of Facebook, users are more savvy and more wary. Everyone we talked to shared some content at least once a day, including status updates, but everyone also had plenty of workarounds and critiques of the current systems. This is an exciting challenge, but it also requires that those who produce easily-shared content minimize spamming users.