Social Balkanization

Lost in the endless reviews of Google+ is what another Social environment means for web publishers. For approximately 10 years, web publishers have focused on generating visits and traffic from social networks, using SEO, SEM and other Google friendly techniques. They also really only had to focus on one traffic hose: Google, which controlled 65+% of web search traffic. For the last few years, web publishers could safely focus on Facebook to generate traffic. Before that, Myspace was the 800 pound gorilla in social and though it did not generate a huge amount of traffic, web publishers (or widget makers at the time) could focus their attention on Myspace to generate traffic.

As Fred Wilson points out in yesterday's blog post entitled "Why I am Rooting for Google+" , all that is changing:

"Not everyone wants a Facebook experience; default private, mutual follow, best for close friends and family. Not everyone wants a Twitter experience; default public, asymmetric follow, best for broadcasting short burts of information to large networks. Not everyone wants a Tumblr experience; totally public, asymmetric follow, best for posting microchunked media."

I agree with Fred and think it goes beyond the modality of experience: People have multiple identities. They seek their financial analysis and interactions at Seeking Alpha differently than their entertainment on ESPN or MLB.com (see this friends exchange). And, they do it with different groups of friends or colleagues. I post on LinkedIn using professional language and on Facebook more colloquially. Likewise my comments on Seeking Alpha differ markedly from a comment I would post on the New York Post if I read it. This is actually not terribly different from real life where I interact with different people at a Bar Mitzvah than I would at a Wall Street Journal conference and I discuss different things with them.

Online, I maintain different social identities and I want to port those identities and groups to their appropriate experience. Here is where it is beginning to get tricky for web publishers. Web publishers need to ready themselves for customers and the way the customer wants to interact. With different people using different identities differently (that is a mouthful), a web publisher like the New York Post, Seeking Alpha, Hulu or ESPN and even my blog need to enable multiple identities so they can capture sharing and traffic from all of those identities and platforms. The New York Post wants the Twitter and Facebook traffic hose and communities to interact on the The NYpost.com and it is impossible to predict which of them will generate the most interaction. The same goes for brands like Nike or Pampers who are web publishers like any other today.

When we invested in Gigya, the leading provider of social login and social sharing solutions for web publishers, our biggest fear was that one network would own social sharing and identity. Then, in 2007, we feared Myspace. 12-18 months ago we feared that Facebook Connect would own web login and sharing. Today, as Fred points out, we have multiple networks for multiple needs, varied communities for a variety of interactions and different sharing patterns for different content.

If you are a web publisher, managing this balkanization and optimizing it is becoming complicated, to say the least. However, it is critical that you master it. When you get down to managing it, try to prioritize the top 2-4 networks that will lead to the most traffic. For example, Techcrunch has figured out that LinkedIn is more valuable today as a traffic source than Twitter. For Seeking Alpha, Twitter and LinkedIn are more important than Facebook. Still, however for most of the web, Facebook is the most important traffic source. It is still to early to tell where Google+ fits in to this picture.

Additionally, one of the lessons from Google's hegemony on web search is that the algorithm giveth and the algorithm taketh away. Just ask Demand Media (DMD) or Answers.com. The same will be true on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as they grow and need to optimize their feeds for relevancy. Therefore, the best strategy is always to build organic traffic and have community interactions on your page. You do not need to create your own registration for that. You can leverage registrations of bigger social nets but then keep the feeds and interactions on your web sites. Spend time to analyze cross network scenarios and understand the commonality of those who visit your website who clearly have content and community affinity one for the other.

Managing this social balkanization is complex but it is a better web for all of us. The fragmented social web has fewer "single points of failure" or critical dependencies. And, that is good news for web publishers.

Full Disclosure: Gigya, Seeking Alpha and Twitter are Benchmark portfolio companies