You hear these words every day: Social media, social web, web2.0, wikis, blogs, social networks, social bookmarking, presence applications, chat,… A connecting key word is ‘social’. A website has to be social these days. Well, it depends on the owner’s goals of course… , but a high social factor is - for one - a well-recognized marketing component for websites. How do I measure the ‘S-factor’?

Let me first give you some definitions that I found. Then I will give you four aspects that I decided to use for judging the S-factor. After that, I will judge the S-factor for the new Bemba, that will be released at the end of this month.

Wikipedia: ‘Social’
The adjective “social” implies that the verb or noun to which it is applied is somehow more communicative, cooperative, and moderated by contact with human beings, than if it were omitted. [Wikipedia]

Wikipedia: ‘Social media’
Participatory online media where news, photos, videos, and podcasts are made public via social media websites through submission. Normally accompanied with a voting process to make media items become ‘popular’. Social Media is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into content publishers. It is the shift from a broadcast mechanism to a many-to-many model, rooted in conversations between authors, people, and peers. [Wikipedia]

Buzzlogic: ‘Social media’
Web content such as blogs and wikis, created by individuals or a collaboration of individuals. Often times, social media content is intended as the starting point for larger conversations. [Buzzlogic]

Rootslab: ‘Social web’
Ian Wilker writes that the social web is about:

• Expressing identity. The social web allows individuals to share aspects of their lives with friends, family, or anyone at all, via easy-to-use online tools. It allows people, whatever their motives, to reveal a tangible sense of who they are and what they’re interested in.
• Relationships and trust. The social web makes it easy to find and start talking with others who share your interests, whose ideas you like, who make pictures, videos, writings that you find appealing. People develop authentic bonds with others through the social web.
• User-driven websites. The social web allows users to be active, empowered participants in the production and distribution of media, the word-of-mouth reputation of a business, the grassroots support for a political candidate, and other tides that course through our culture.

My way of judging the S-factor
These are the four aspects I want to use for judging the social factor of a website, based on the definitions given above together with my personal opinion:

• Networking: Most import of all. Its about communication between individuals!
• Participation: The degree of involvement, users are adding ‘life’ to the website
• Expression: The degree in which users can show themselves and their interests
• Feedback: Amount of insight in community behavior, given back to the user

How social is the new Bemba?

• Networking. Communication and cooperation are important aspects of Bemba. Users follow and comment on each other’s shared websites. They don’t just do this at Bemba.com, but this also occurs at the social networks they have connected to Bemba. Sharing will be a starting point of conversations. It’s part of their relationship.
• Participation. The users make the value of Bemba. It will be super easy for them to share websites, and easy to react. Readers become content spotters and graders. Participation is high.
• Expression: Users can express themselves well in two ways. The most important one is by being active. Sharing websites shows others what a person is into, or wants to be into. Commenting is another way to show yourself. The other way is by ‘pimping’ your profile. But that’s not very detailed at Bemba.com. Our website should be lean and mean, and users will use Bemba as a tool to add flavor to their existing social network pages.
• Feedback: At first, Bemba enables people to share websites and experiences within their own network only, mostly on their social network and Bemba.com. Soon after, we will show users the community interests with ‘popular’ and ‘new’ alike lists.

So I give the very next Bemba a three out of four. The last quarter will make it completely social, a little later.

My last paragraph may not interest you much because the new Bemba has not yet been launched. But, if you’re interested to test it as one of the first, then please drop us a quick note!