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WHAT IS A SOCIAL OBJECT?
channels. Dell and Comcast are great examples of this. So are KinkFM (@kinkfm) and
SomaFM (@somafm), my favorite radio stations: They use Twitter in part to push their
playlists along with news and events to listeners.
As a business or cause-based organization, however, your business objectives are
more likely rooted in connecting people and the passions that they have with the prop-
erties of your products and services that enable them to excel, to fulfi ll their objectives.
This generally means that you’ll be building or working around larger social objects—
passions, lifestyles, and causes—and using them in ways that will facilitate engagement
(collaboration) with your brand, product, or service. Compared with the example of
Twitter as an outbound channel, it is much more likely that your community would be
built around a passion like running than around the individual posts or photos that
runners might actually share within that community.
Taken together, social objects are essential elements in the design of a social
media marketing program built around a sense of community: Social objects are the
anchor points for these efforts and as such are the “magnets” that attract participants
and then hold a community together. While it may seem like so much semantics, when
compared to the way in which people are connected or to whom they are connected,
the social object provides the underlying rationale or motive for being connected at all.
In short, without the social object, there is no “social.”
Jyri Engeström
Sociologist, Jaiku cofounder, and now Google Product Manager, Jyri Engeström coined the term
“social object” as a label for the things that people socialize around. Jyri provides a nice discus-
sion of social objects in this video, on Vimeo:
http://vimeo.com/4071624You can follow Jyri on Twitter (@jyri) and read his blog here:
http://www.zengestrom.com/Take a look at the operational defi nition of “social object” at the start of this
section again. What it really says is this: People will congregate around the things they
are most interested in, and will talk about them with others who share that interest.
This is what lies at the heart of the Social Web and applies directly to the use of larger
social objects—a lifestyle, for example—as the starting point for a community pro-
gram versus the granular objects like posts or photos. These small, shareable chunks
of content need to be present; otherwise, what would actually be shared? For purposes
here, though, the focus is on the larger objects: the objects that give rise to the interest
in the community and the act of sharing itself.
Jyri Engeström
Sociologist, Jaiku cofounder, and now Google Product Manager, Jyri Engeström coined the term
“social object” as a label for the things that people socialize around. Jyri provides a nice discus-
sion of social objects in this video, on Vimeo:
http://vimeo.com/4071624You can follow Jyri on Twitter (@jyri) and read his blog here:
http://www.zengestrom.com/