Creating Time

There’s been a lot of talk lately on the addictive nature of social networking sites. And these talks are certainly happening in my personal life.

Hung out with a good friend of mine last night who shared that she recently joined Facebook and is now addicted ;) When I asked her “why,” she replied that she finally gave in and joined because her entire office is on it and doing ‘crazy things’ (like B*&#! slapped, roundhouse kicked, headbutted, etc) to each other. For her, the main factors for joining are staying in the know and reconnecting with old friends. She also mentioned that it soaks up all her time because she’ll click on one friend’s profile which leads to another friend, and so on so forth.

People are curious beings and social networks are definitely maximizing upon the curiosity embedded in human nature to increase the ’stickiness’ of the sites. But what else might be contributing to the success of such networks? Perhaps some networks more successful than others because they are actively creating time for their members to spend with them. Facebook creates time by allowing users to make applications and share with other users. It also creates time by adding features like ‘newsfeed’ to encourage friends to read about one another and update their profile more frequently.

Whereas ’stickiness’ refers to the phenomenon of people staying on a site (usually for longer than intended), the concept of creating time addresses the underlying communications strategy. Creating time takes communication to another level by going beyond ‘engaging’ the consumer with messages and dialogue. It’s about creating a space for consumers to play in and providing them with incentives to do so. This concept underlies other marketing tactics as well (ie–pop-up experiential stores, websites/microsites, in-store promos, etc.) Essentially, brands are becoming an actual medium for their consumers to spend time with them. PTRM also commented on brands as media and called it ‘co-suming.’ I’m certain that PTRM and I are not the only people thinking and writing about this, so I’m hoping to see more of this strategy become manifested in communications campaigns.