The big message coming from Facebook is that companies that manage to put what they call social design at the heart of their business will beat those that don’t.

Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, talked about this at length in her recent speech at the London School of Economics (LSE).  While her talk failed to answer many of the questions Facebook faces (leading many to focus instead on Sandberg’s superb delivery), social design was one concept that was communicated eloquently and, more importantly, carried intellectual weight.

Every business is about people

Sandberg used two examples to show the disruptive impact of putting people at the very heart of a business strategy.  Her first evidence of social design’s positive impact was the Facebook photo sharing application.  This app, declared Sandberg, has such limited functionality ‘that you can’t even rotate a picture’. Yet because it’s social – people can share images easily – that doesn’t matter, because a simple social product will always beat a sophisticated non-social one.  It’s now bigger than the next three photo sharing services on the internet combined (including the once-dominant Flickr) and continues to grow faster than they do.

Her other example was computer gaming, where companies such as Zynga and Playfish are now proving that games built around the central concept of connecting people are outstripping the growth of those that don’t.  IHS Screen Digest says the market for social gaming grew by 116 per cent between 2009 and 2010, with Zynga and Playfish accounting for almost half of the $1.4 billion market.

Connecting people is, Sandberg repeated over and again, the essence of social design, and it’s clearly big business.

Can any industry be social?

It turns out that Mark Zuckerberg was saying exactly the same thing in Paris last week, the day before Sandberg spoke at the LSE.  In an on-stage interview, ‘Zuck’ used media organisations to emphasise his point.  He suggested that, when it comes to picking the winners of social design, media industries – those making movies, music, books, news and games – are ‘going to be big ones’.

It’s not immediately clear how social design could be – to use a beautifully Californian phrase – baked in to more traditional industries, but Sandberg had some suggestions.  Shopping, she said, was already becoming social.  She used the example of American college students sharing photos of their prom dresses with friends to make sure they didn’t turn up to the most important night of their young lives in the same threads.  And even industries such as healthcare and education could benefit from connecting people and sharing content (although she admitted issues such as privacy would need to be dealt with for that to happen).

There’s real sense in social design and the examples Zuckerberg and Sandberg used this week make the point well.

Evidence of social design

Reuters’ Felix Salmon provided an excellent analysis a few months ago of why the same story drives far more engagement on the Huffington Post than on the New York Times (NYT) website, even though the content is largely identical.  In his blog post, Why the NYT will lose to HuffPo, Salmon painstakingly detailed the anatomy of the Huffington Post, showing how it connects people around stories and lowers the barriers to sharing and commenting that exist on websites like the NYT.

Of course, now that it’s behind a paywall, the NYT has put up the biggest barrier of all to driving engagement – and it’s having an impact with traffic reportedly down 24% in the first full month since the paywall went up.  The NYT has seemingly given up on social design altogether.  If Sandberg and Zuckerberg are right, they may come to regret that decision.

On Thursday, ABC Multichannel (formerly called ABCe) published its monthly figures for UK national newspaper visitor numbers.  They show the Daily Mirror has seen a huge jump in traffic since it launched a concerted Facebook story seeding campaign a month ago.  Certainly, the argument for social design is becoming more difficult to ignore.

How to bake in social design

It will be interesting to see how media and other businesses interpret social design.  At Fishburn Hedges, we have been helping many businesses in recent years to redefine how they approach communications – perhaps you could say we’ve been helping them bake social design into their communications strategies.

More recently still, we’ve been helping some organisations overcome the internal siloisation (not a word, I know) that prevents them delivering joined up communications and customer relationship management.

It certainly seems likely that the key to baking in social design for businesses is to think about it not merely from a communications, or even a reputation management perspective, but to consider how social design could impact their entire business.  For some organisations, the path to social design is going to be a long one.  But you have to start sometime.  Why not today?

Sheryl Sandberg’s speech is available as an LSE podcast.