What makes the social web tick? Christina Wodtke, Principal Instigator (great title btw!) at LinkedIn says it’s LOVE and ESTEEM. In her session entitled “Designing Social Websites”, Wodtke referred to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs which essentially tells us that humans need things like food, sleep, love and the respect of other humans. And it makes perfect sense doesn’t it? We share funny videos because we want our friends to laugh and remember that we made them laugh. We post photos of ourselves on Facebook because we crave comments on those photos (“Great outfit!” “I’m so jealous of your vacation!”). There’s nothing wrong with this – it’s what makes us human. Why else would someone spend countless hours making a mashup of Harry Potter videos set to popular showtunes on YouTube if not to gain props from other people?

Thinking about the social web in this context allows to stand back and consider how people behave before creating a site or community. All too often as marketers we look at web tools first or see online strategy as a daunting approach to reaching communities. Why not think of online as just an extension of the physical world? In our professional or personal worlds we all want to feel that we have friends/connections and we want to have a good reputation in our professional and personal lives. If we create online experiences that answer these needs, people will keep coming back for more.

Key takeaways for designing social websites:

• design a way for members to be “superheroes”/in good standing in their community when they share, comment or post content
• make it easy for them to be seen – this could be through offering dynamic avatars, multi-layered profiles or even just usernames
• always have mechanisms on the site for members to spread the word virally to other sites so your community can grow
• remember, humans are humans online and offline – treat them as such