Social Networks vs. Online Communities vs. Panels

Email Article |  Facebook |  Twitter |  LinkedIn 

The terms "online community" and "social network" are sometimes used interchangeably, but an important distinction between them is how members interact.

For instance, in a traditional research panel, the researcher communicates with a panelist (typically sending a survey request) and the panelist can only communicate with the researcher.  It's a one-to-one relationship.

In an online community, that panelist is now a community member, and he or she can talk with any other community member, much to the chagrin of sponsoring organizations!  Sponsors are often afraid of what members will say to one another and are concerned that bad news will spread.  Yet it is this member-to-member interaction that unlocks much of the value of online communities, as members riff off one another's comments and ideas to provide new insights.  It's always worth the risk.
   
Whenever I talk about proprietary online communities, people can't seem to help but ask me to compare them to Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and other social networks.  Where social networks differ from communities is that not all members can see one another.  If you register for a new online community today, once you log-in you can typically see all the forums and all the recent comments from all participating community members.  When you log in to a social network for the first time, you can't see any activity.  You need to find and add "friends" (nodes in the social network).  Once you've done that, you can see their activity and profiles, but you can't see everything.   If an online community is a party, a social network is a multistory club with multiple stages, but you can't leave the room you're in (let's hope the band is good!).

For researchers, the nature of a social networks means they need to "friend" those they wish to research, and they can only research that subset of the social network-which makes social networks very different from proprietary online communities.

Over course, reality is never quite as neat as a diagram:  some online communities enable members to have lists of friends, whose comments they can then conveniently read;  some social networks enable members to post public comments for anyone to read.  Over time, most communities will properly blend the two into public and private spaces, but for now I find this diagram to be a useful introduction for people new to social media.