I’m often asked what makes SM a success. People ask if technology makes the solution: it does, and it doesn’t. If technical skill were responsible for social success, why do geeks often have the worst social-life in school? It’s true they built the web, but the rest of the world made it social.

Successful SM sites engage visitors as active participants in the web experience. Remember, “The best tool is often not the most advanced or cleverest but the tool that’s understood and used daily.” Successful SM sites are like engines: they need a spark to get them started — and continuous content to keep running. But is that all a successful social media site needs: people, content and some cool technology?

NO. The most important factor is much older and simpler, buried deep within the shadowy past of our primitive nature. Social Media’s success is contained within something called a meme, or if you prefer a more dramatic image, a “mind virus.”

Richard Dawkins introduced the concept of the “meme” and “memetics” in his book ‘The Selfish Gene’ referring to the imitative process whereby humans transmit ideas, values, beliefs, and practices to each other. The memes that catch on are conditioned by repetition and continued by subsequent generations.

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by a process similar to how an infection spreads – ergo a mind virus.

The most successful social sites leverage our oldest, most ancient memes as well as our newest, and this allows us to embrace these darker, base natures in a socially acceptable, and even productive fashion. Consider how many social sites pander to aspects of our nature — that as children we were discouraged from participating in: gossiping, time-wasting, forming cliques and more.

I’m not saying all social sites succeed because we want to express our darker nature, but the sites that gained the most traction and momentum have done so by allowing us free rein over our basic human nature…

Something to consider isn’t it?

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1. Social Media’s Dirty Little Secret
2. Social Media, What Makes It Successful?
3. The Secret Behind the Nook and Kindle Success Machines
4. What Is Social Networking and What Makes a Social Media Guru?
5. Social Media in Small Business – Making the Most of It