“What value do users derive from social networking applications?” by Rebekah Russell-Bennett & Larry Neale

This article by Rebekah Russell-Bennett and Larry Neale examines the qualities that online applications, such as “Scrabble,” “Which Sex and the City Character are You?” and “Green Patch,” must possess for users of a social networking site (SNS) to recommend them to their friends. This study is relevant because advertisers are turning to SNS to reach Generation Y consumers, and since advertising on these sites is expensive, they are creating applications, which are cheap to develop and free to distribute. The success of these applications depends on users recommending them to their friends, and for this to happen, an application must offer the user value (2).

According to the authors, “value is relevant to social networking where the exchange between customer and organization is not currency, but time and information (3).” The four categories of value that Facebook applications provide are emotional, functional, social, and altruistic. Emotional value refers to the enjoyment one gets by using an application; functional value applies to the performance; social value is created when people connect to one another; and altruistic value is gained when an application can help society (3).

To answer the key questions, “What value do users get from applications?” and “What qualities of an application encourage or discourage somebody from passing them on to friends?” this study asked these questions in an anonymous online survey:

• What makes an application cool?
• What would encourage or discourage you from passing an application on to a friend?

Some of the answers to the first question are the application’s allowance for self-categorization and interactivity, as well as, novelty and rarity. The next question isn’t as easy to answer because it varies from user to user. For instance, some people recommend an application because it wastes time. For those who have time to waste, they might recommend, but for those who find wasting time pointless, they would not. Another example to prove this point is competition. Some people (more men than women) like applications that rank them among their peers, whereas others find this to be judgmental (4-7).

While men tend to like applications that promote competition, women prefer features that allow them to express themselves. I don’t regularly do applications on Facebook because I don’t have a lot of time, but I have done “Which Sex and the City Character are You?” and a few others that would fall into the social category. In every case, the applications that I have recommended to a friend have been applications that didn’t take up too much time and didn’t feature competition.

I think it’s interesting that the applications that a user spends time on are another piece that shapes their digital footprint. For example, if you know nothing about a person, but you see on their profile that they are most like the character Samantha from Sex and the City, that tells you something about them. Or, if somebody takes a quiz and it turns out that they are funnier than their friends, an aspect of their personality is revealed. Before reading this article and the Pew Internet Report, Digital Footprints, I hadn’t considered this.

Works Cited

Neale, Larry & Rebekah Russell-Bennett. "What value do users derive from social networking applications?" First Monday, Volume 14. 17 Oct. 2009 http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2506/2278>