(Rich Gordon)

As Facebook and MySpace have climbed the list of most popular Web sites in the past couple of years, executives at news companies have looked on with interest - and more than a little envy. In a very short time, these social network sites have achieved levels of engagement and loyalty (as measured by metrics such as page views per visit) that news sites can only dream of.

MySpace attracted 66 million unique visitors in December, and Facebook 32 million, according to Compete.com. That's well ahead of CNN.com (23 million unique visitors), USAToday.com (12.5 million), NYTimes.com (11 million), WashingtonPost.com (6 million), and LATimes.com (3 million).

Perhaps more importantly, the social network sites are much more engaging to their users. Typical visitors to news Web sites view 5 to 10 pages per visit. MySpace users viewed more than 34 pages per visit in December, and Facebook more than 44.

Here at the Media Management Center at Northwestern, we've been looking closely at social network sites and planning new research projects to help us, and the media companies and leaders we serve, understand the keys to their success. While the research ideas are still taking shape, I'd like to offer some tentative observations (feedback is welcome, either via the comment thread below, or via email at richgor-at-northwestern.edu:

1. Online communities of all forms - from dial-up BBS systems in the 1970s to AOL forums in the 1980s to social networks today - are key drivers of engagement.


2. The technology underlying social networks includes important new capabilities - especially, the concepts of profiles, "friends" lists and "news feeds" - that news and information Web sites should offer these days.


3. It's impossible to understand the success of MySpace and Facebook without also understanding their core audiences - teenagers (MySpace) and young adults (Facebook).


4. Technology capabilities don't determine how people use a Web site - much more important are who its core audience is, and what the site is for. (If this last point is unclear, hang on until you get further into this post.)

Let's take these one at a time.

Online communities of all forms are key drivers of engagement

This is the easiest one. Read Howard Rheingold's "The Virtual Community," which describes the vibrant social network on the pioneering dial-up service, the WELL in the 1980s. Or consider how AOL grew in its days as a commercial online service - the AOL discussion forums, chat rooms and other forms of interpersonal connection were what drove usage. (And in those days, when online services charged for access by the minute, AOL got very good at finding ways to make people want to stay online.)

Or bringing us up to the Web era, consider the Readership Institute's "online experiences" research, which found that the "Looks out for people like me" experience was the no. 2 driver of Web site usage. This experience can be defined by Web site users who agree with statements like this:

• The people who run this site really seem to care about their visitors.


• This site has a strong sense of community to it.


• This is a very interactive site.


• This site offers a variety of different perspectives

Psychology research finds that humans have a biological need to belong to groups - or communities. So it shouldn't be surprising that the drive for community affects online usage. It's also interesting to remember that sociologists have documented a strong connection between people's sense of connection to their neighborhoods and towns, and their interest in local news - and readership of newspapers. Also recall that for print newspapers, the "something to talk about" experience is a key driver of readership. So media companies - especially local media, and especially newspapers - must learn to use their Web sites to foster community.

Social network sites have important new capabilities that news and information sites should offer

Looking back at the early history of Web publishing - for instance, the 1995-99 period when I was new media director for The Miami Herald - it's really interesting to see how differently news organizations thought about the Web than other kinds of companies did. Many businesses quickly saw that the Web was most useful for building connections with their customers and potential customers. Others saw it as a means for selling products. Traditional media companies said, in effect, the Web is a new publishing medium - built for distributing content to their online users. In hindsight, it seems clear that the Web is, fundamentally, built on interpersonal communication - not one-way publishing. This goes a long way toward explaining the high engagement levels on Facebook and MySpace, and the comparably low levels of engagement for online news sites.

Here at the Media Management Center, one of the key questions we've been thinking about is what makes MySpace and Facebook different from earlier kinds of online communities. One clear answer is that on an online social network, you build your community outward from your friends. I've been involved in online communities since the 1980s via Compuserve forums, email lists and Web sites. These communities existed to bring people together who weren't already friends but shared a common interest. The software underlying MySpace and Facebook is built explicitly to lubricate social connections. The "friends" list not only determines whose information I can see; it also determines whose activities show up on my "news feed." My profile provides information through which I can meet other people who share my interests, characteristics (for instance, they're associated with Northwestern) or personal relationships. I have no conclusive data on this, but I've read that the majority of MySpace profiles are private, which means these users are using MySpace mostly for communication with people they already know. I'd go so far as to suggest that for many users of online social networks, MySpace and Facebook substitute for, or amplify, direct interpersonal communications (phone calls, instant messages, email) - these sites are not, at least for their core users) forms of media in the one-way orientation we have traditionally defined.

Still, news and information sites can learn a lot from online social networks - and some are trying to do so. USA Today, for instance, rolled out a completely new Web site last March that included key social network features including the ability to comment on stories, create profiles, identify friends and share content. While I don't know enough about Compete.com's methodology to be confident the data is accurate, it certainly is stunning (at right) to see the growth in pages per visit that began right after the redesign. From an average of just two pages per visit, USAToday.com is now up to about eight pages per visit, according to Compete.com.

The Compete.com data also suggests some challenges for USAToday.com leaders - while the site's unique monthly audience has remained stable, users seem to be visiting less frequently. They visit more pages and spend more time on each visit, but USA Today now needs to figure out how to make users come back more often.

This is where Facebook is now outperforming USA Today, according to Compete.com. Facebook's audience is growing and so are its number of visits. And on a typical visit, Facebook users ring up about six times as many page views (44.5 vs. 7.7 as of December) as users of USAToday.com do.

Assuming the Compete.com data is informative, it looks to me that USAToday.com has taken a big step forward, but has much more work to do to drive more frequent usage. Are there other lessons USAToday.com can learn from Facebook? That's where it's important to think about the core audiences of the online social networks.

To understand MySpace and Facebook, you must understand teenagers and young adults

Given the social network sites' popularity among young people, we can probably turn this statement around, too: to understand teenagers and young adults, you need to understand MySpace and Facebook.

Much has been written about today's young people, in popular publications as well as more scholarly ones. The Media Management Center just released an interesting new report on teenagers' news usage, "If It Catches My Eye: An Exploration of Online News Experiences of Teenagers," which is one place to look for insights. Two other sources worth looking at are "You have been poked: Exploring the uses and gratifications of Facebook among emerging adults," a scholarly research article by Brett Bumgarner, and "Friend Game: Behind the online hoax that led to a girl's suicide," in the Jan. 21 New Yorker. And no explanation about the dynamics of online social networks would be complete without consulting the works of danah boyd, a Ph.D. student at the University of California-Berkeley who has spent thousands of hours viewing profiles and talking with young people about their usage of online social networks. While I find all of these sources interesting and relevant, the thoughts below are my own. I should also note that I realize MySpace and Facebook have users who fall outside of the teen and young-adult demographic groups. But it seems clear that the success of these two sites has been driven by young people.

Here's what I've taken away from these sources, as well as my experience raising a (now) 11-year-old child and interacting with college students (undergraduate and graduate) for the past eight years.

There are enormously significant societal and cultural factors that define the lives of today's teens and young adults. For teenagers, a consequence of suburban sprawl, our car-oriented society and parents' fears of unsupervised activities is that teens don't have a place to "hang out" with their peers. For many, MySpace is that place. College students are living a different reality - the "emerging adulthood" life stage when, as Bumgarner puts it, "people are experiencing freedom by living on their own for the first time and not yet having a family of their own or a career." For people in that situation, their network of friends is their identity. You can think of Facebook as a service for managing your identity.

The implications of these observations are pretty obvious. If MySpace and Facebook are successful mostly because they satisfy needs of teenagers and young adults, their lessons apply mostly to sites targeting those demographic groups. Social network features on other sites won't have the same impact on usage as they do on MySpace and Facebook. This is consistent with my experience using LinkedIn, a business-oriented social network. It's very valuable to me as a way of finding and developing relationships with business contacts, but I don't use it the same way teenagers and young adults use their social network sites.

Technology capabilities don't determine how people use a Web site

While MySpace and Facebook have many differences - in their design, in their interface, in their colors and overall sensibility - you can tell immediately when you log in to these sites that their purpose is to network with other people. The cues show up in the features that are most prominently displayed on the first page (Facebook's "news feed" of what your friends are up to), in the branding ("myspace.com: a place for friends"), in the language used (the prominence of the term "member").

While USAToday.com has many of the same features, they are not central to the branding and design of the site. Anyone coming to USAToday.com for the first time would recognize it as a news site. They might recognize the community features, but you can tell what the site is for: news. Considering USAToday.com's core audience (older news consumers) and the way the site's design and technology work, it's unrealistic to expect Facebook-like usage. But there's some evidence that USAToday.com is succeeding in building a community revolving around news - and continuing to do so could drive significant increases in usage and loyalty.

In conclusion

Online news and information sites absolutely should roll out community features like those on MySpace and Facebook. And leaders of news sites need to become familiar with the online social networks because they provide such important insights into the lives of today's young people, a critical audience for the future (and present). New, socially oriented Web sites may be worth trying as a means of engaging young people in your market. (A couple of sites operated by newspaper companies are interesting experiments in this area: The Bakersfield Californian's Bakotopia.com and the Minneapolis Star Tribune's Vita.mn.) Certainly, news and information sites need to do a lot more to drive usage upward.

At the Media Management Center, we are convinced that "cracking the code" for online communities is a key to succeeding in the online environment. We're continuing to explore these topics as part of a "new communities" initiative at the center. Our goal is to help the media industry understand - through research, publication and in-person educational programs - how the definition of "community" is changing in the digital age and how to build community successfully, online and off. We'd welcome your ideas and insights.


By Rich Gordon (richgor-at-northwestern.edu)
Rich Gordon is Associate Professor and Director of Digital Technology in Education at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.