Inside Scoop

The top 5 mistakes to avoid in social networks
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If you want your social network to be DOA, try making the same mistakes as the creators of ‘A Pampered Life’:

1. Insult your audience: A Pampered Life sounds like something that was invented in a focus group. Do you think anybody responded negatively to the question ‘Do you like to be pampered?’ But does it follow that this makes it a good name?

For a site that’s supposed to be by, for and about women, A Pampered Life seems profoundly unfeminist, even misogynistic. It suggests that women are too delicate and precious to do any real work, and should be sequestered away at home on the shelf with the trophy wives. And kept there. Moreover, instead of focusing on the practical issues and daily travails that many women face, it reinforces stereotypes of vanity and self-indulgence that simply aren’t part of most women’s lives (who has time?).

2. Be top-down. If your intention is to build a community, you have to involve the people who are purportedly going to be in it. Collaborate. Consult. Then create. The first we heard of A Pampered Life was an email stating that we could go there and write for free. We’d not been consulted. We didn’t know it existed. It had been prepared and created by fiat. That’s not a community, that’s a corporate shill.

3. Email first, ask questions later. By the time you broadcast an email to your target audience, it’s far too late to retract any mistakes or recalibrate your strategy. You’re supposed to micro-test first. Ring around and talk to people. Find out their impressions before you go off half-cocked. We get at least 100 “important” emails a day. If you’re expecting us to come along and help you, you need to put in an effort that’s at least commensurate with what you’re expecting us to do. So some pre-publicity would help. A phone call is better. Let us inside the tent early. After all it was supposed to be a community, right?

4. Kill spontaneity. Social networks work because people can interact authentically and spontaneously. A six-month advance editorial schedule doesn’t permit that. Especially a schedule that wasn’t developed within the “community” itself.

5. Blame the network. Worst of all, when the project crashes and the dust settles, don’t you dare tell your managers or the media that “we tried social networking and it didn’t work” or “Web 2.0 is a waste of time”. It wasn’t social networking that failed. For in the words of the Lolcat community - a real social network - UR DOIN IT RONG.