Jamie Beckland is a digital and social media strategist at Janrain where he helps Fortune 1000 companies integrate social media technologies into their websites to improve user acquisition and engagement. He has built online communities since 2004. He tweets as @Beckland.

People are naturally social creatures. That’s what makes social media such a powerful concept. Social media channels allow human beings to sort themselves into groups and factions seamlessly, and maintain intimate relationships at greater distances than ever before.

But as anthropologist Herbert Spencer describes in his theory of the social organism, society is a system of interrelated parts that operate interdependently. Social media users understand that concept intuitively, and segment their relationships accordingly.

For instance, you are not the same person at work as you are among friends on a Friday night. The things you talk about, the vocabulary you use and the friendships you maintain in different contexts are the products of years of learning how to interpret relationships cues. From flirting to non-verbal communication, the way we present ourselves to others is constantly shifting based on whom we are talking to, and why.

The current social media environment has evolved to reflect this reality. It is made up of a number of independent social channels (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, etc.) that allow users to create and maintain separate and distinct parts of their identity with different social circles. For example, your friends are on Facebook, but you find business colleagues on LinkedIn.

This disconnect creates complications for anyone attempting to use social data to connect with customers or prospects. Where do you find the most appropriate audience? Do marketers need to maintain an ever-increasing number of individual social channels? How can we create a system that is scalable?

How Google+ Makes Social Networking More Confusing

The Google+ approach aims to simplify managing relationships, but ultimately fails because it works against people’s natural behavioral patterns. This is why Google+ faces an uphill challenge to adoption. Google+ allows users to define their own “circles” of contacts, like “High School Classmates,” “Family” or “Classic Car Fans.” The platform seeks to merge distinct interaction groups together into a unified experience. Users spend time creating the circles they want to share with, a tactic that helps push information into your contacts’ streams.

But the system breaks down once you try to consume content from a variety of different sources in your own stream. Suddenly, college roommates are mixed in with professional contacts, or people you’ve never actually met. This requires additional cognitive effort of the user to filter content by relationship, rendering the experience frustrating and confusing.

Social Networks Come With Baggage

Initial response to circles was positive, but was driven more by the temporal desire to refresh and bucket one’s relationships. Since Facebook’s popularity surge in 2008, people haven’t really been asked to categorize their friends in a social network. And naturally, in the course of three years, a user’s interpersonal relationships have likely evolved. Maybe you moved, and no longer see your old neighbor anymore, or your relationship has changed.

People grow, reinvent themselves, move to new cities and find new interests. Hanging on to your baggage from five years ago is actually a huge hindrance, and the psychic energy to maintain those old selves is more than we can cognitively manage. Therefore, we gravitate toward manageable and flexible social networks that change along with us.

Multiple, Smaller Social Networks Are Inevitable

In fact, since people are already comfortable managing multiple versions of their personas, it’s more likely that we will create increasingly narrow identities across multiple services, rather than defining ourselves on one platform. Fred Wilson writes about the nine identities he maintains on a regular basis, with full knowledge that this is just a smattering of the total personas he has created online. There’s much value in having distinct identities for different purposes — entire businesses like About.me are built on maintaining them.

Marketers must learn to identify and adapt to these different identities. They inform the potential social media interactions between a customer and a brand. For instance, messaging and status updates for one product should be tackled very differently, depending on the social channel. For example, the Droid Users group on LinkedIn may be interested in a device’s productivity benefits, while the Droid Facebook Fans may be more inclined toward gaming apps.

Additional narrowly cast identities, in fact, become the key to understanding the psychographics of users. An individual who explores a sailing forum, and is also an expert in the TiVo community, seeks a unique perspective that no large umbrella social network can fully provide. For social marketing to succeed, it needs to study the myriad of contexts and networks in which people identify themselves.

How To Create Marketing Value in a Multi-Node Social Landscape

Unfortunately, the large social networks are too busy competing with each other to tackle the challenge of various user identities, of an evolving view of consumers aggregated across multiple identity platforms. Instead, social networks run toward their defined identities: Facebook for friends, LinkedIn for business, etc. They do not represent interests or values in any significant way.

The challenge for marketers, then, is to create this structure themselves. Businesses must dissect the various selves that people choose to represent them in any given interaction (or transaction). By tying together multiple identities, marketers now have the power to create a more nuanced, unified understanding of their customers than ever before.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, mammamaart

More About: business, MARKETING, Social Media

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