A recent post by Forrester’s Josh Bernhoff finally got me going on this.
Why do people participate in social applications?
I have been working on why people participate in online communities – and after reading Josh’s post – one clear difficulty is definitional.
Social Applications include:
- YouTube
- Flickr
- MySpace/Facebook/Linkedin, etc.
- Blogs
- Forums & newsgroups
and all of their competitors. My thought is that we want to look at why people participate by type of application. Motivations for YouTube and Flickr (creative/storage) are quite different from Blogs (editorial) are different from MySpace (connections) are different from Forums (conversations/information) are different from Twitter (conversations and communication).
So, I am going to put together a series of posts examining participation motivations by social application type.
Only with this level of understanding can we do anything useful.
TO’B
