Social Media Ingredients

Here are some of the building blocks to think about if you're looking to build and maintain a relevant media service on the web these days:


1. Be the hub. Make your customers feel vested in keeping their content with you. That's the real value exchange. Make sure you can accept all the different types of media they want to share.

2. Be open. Widgets, openid and the social graph factor in here.

3. Make the product accessible. Even with the success of youtube, flickr and Apple, online multimedia still intimidates. It needs to be wickedly accessible to nonsophisticated users all over the world. Take down the old barriers.

4. Think about Consumers and Producers. While it's critical to get people to upload content (the producers), it's equally important to focus on how people find cool stuff (the consumers). Discovery in social media is so much more than search: it's slideshows, maps, friend summaries and all sorts of other interfaces as-yet-undefined.

5. Be really mobile. How are people using social media (photos, videos, short text updates like twitter) when they're out an about with their increasingly powerful mobile phones.

6. Be distributed. Content being generated by your customers needs to be able to be distributed wherever they are. Be incredibly progressive about this.

last, but not least....

7. Be entertaining. I see a lot of folks that miss this one.