When I discuss social design, I am talking about social design structure of a brand’s efforts in the space of Social Media marketing.   Not the aesthetic design of a blog or Twitter page or a social network.  I love graphic design, I deeply appreciate it and it is of great importance in, and around social media or any other interactive outlet.  But, to me the bigger picture is the creation of a social design to engage with a brand’s audience and turning them into passionate brand advocates.  Plus, I have art skills equal to that of my 9 month old.

All brands should be very concerned with the structure of their social media design.  They may have a Facebook fan page, a Twitter account(or multiple Twitter accounts), a flickr account, a community forum etc.  What I have found in my experience is that all these efforts are wonderful, but they tend to be very disconnected.  There never seems to be a strategy for each network and more importantly the brand does not have an overall social strategy of how each platform works to achieve  a similar goal.  Perhaps brands should adopt a social design  how the brand engages with the audience in these platforms and how they can flow, how they work together.

Each social network has it’s own ecosystem and culture; it goes without saying that a brand ought to engage with their audience in a manner equivalent to the culture of that particular social space.  The efforts of brands on these platforms should have a social design structure that:

1. Listens to the audience.
2. Empathizes with them.
3. Gives the audience content valuable to them, not the brand
4. Breaths authenticity.
5. Build a process to learn from experience and better understand the analytics of social design.