Category Archives: Networking

Traveling at the Speed of Buzz

First published September 25, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

What makes up buzz? And what determines how fast it travels? Last week, I talked about how important the opinions of others are in shaping our brand beliefs. Today, I want to look at one category of word of mouth, the juicy tidbit, recently christened “buzz,” and see what makes it leap from person to person.

Buzz is Nothing New

For some reason, we think buzz is a new thing that lives online. In fact, it’s as old as human behavior and has its roots in our very social fabric. We need to pass on information. We’re driven to do so. We gossip because it’s inherently satisfying, both to ourselves and to the recipient. But the spread of gossip through a social network is neither uniform nor consistent.  In the ’70s, Mark Granovetter discovered that, like many things, social networks are patchy, made up of tightly linked clusters of people who spend a lot of time together (families, friends, co-workers) which are loosely connected to each other through “weak ties,” more distant social relationships. The survival potential of a viral piece of information (Richard Dawkins first coined the term “meme” as a cultural equivalent of a gene in his book, “The Selfish Gene”) lies in its ability to jump Granovetter’s weak ties.   If the meme doesn’t jump out of a cluster, it ceases to propagate itself and can die an isolated death.

It’s Not Just the Network

In 1993 Jonathon Frenzen and Kent Nakamoto launched an interesting study showing that the ability of a “meme” to spread through a social network depended not only on the structure of the network (the main point of Granovetter’s work) but also on the impact of the meme’s message on the carrier (akin to the idea of a phenotype in genetics) and the value of the meme itself.

Frenzen and Nakamoto worked with three different variables: First of all, they altered the value of the message. In the first variation, it was news of a 20%-off sale, in the other variation; it was the more valuable news of 50% to 70% off. Secondly, they varied the amount of product available at the sale price. In one case, there was unlimited inventory. In another, the supply was very limited. Finally, they varied the structure of the network itself, in one case having a network of strong ties, and in another, strong tie clusters linked by Granovetter’s weak ties.

What they found was that the value of the message (20% off vs. 50% to 70% off) has a significant impact on the rate in which the word spread, as did the availability of items at the sale price. The second factor introduced a moral hazard aspect. It made spreading the news a zero-sum game: if I tell you, I might lose out.

Frenzen and Nakamoto also found that in strong tie clusters, word seemed to spread relatively quickly regardless of the nature of the news. There were variations, but in all cases, the majority of the strongly linked network came to know of the news fairly quickly.

Social Speed Traps

If the discount was fairly low, the news tended to get stuck within clusters and had difficulty jumping the weak ties. If the news was valuable (50% to 70% off) and supply was virtually unlimited, the news was much quicker to jump the weak ties, spreading through the network very quickly. But, if the discount was large and the supplies were limited, suddenly the news tended to get trapped within the strongly tied clusters. People were reluctant to spread the news because the more people that knew, the more it was likely that they and their close family and friends (the people within their strong tie clusters) would lose out on a great deal.

Weak Ties on the Web

In both the online and offline worlds, the speed with which buzz will spread depends on the value of the message (is the gossip juicy? Is the price unbelievable?) and how much we stand to gain or lose (does sharing reduce the chances of me and my close circle getting ahead?). Gossip’s primary purpose is to create social bonds, and the sharing of intensely interesting information is something we’re programmed to do. Similarly, we’re programmed to share opportunity with those closest to us, either through kin selection (we want those with whom we share the most genes to get ahead first – W.D. Hamilton did the foundational work on this) or reciprocal altruism (doing a favor for a friend knowing that at some point, we’ll benefit from the payback — Robert Trivers is the name to search for if you’re interested). In most cases of online buzz, there is no moral hazard. In fact, unless a meme has what it takes to jump the weak ties in a real-world social network, it will never make it onto an online forum. Posting on the Internet is, by its very nature, a weak tie, a reaching out from ourselves to everyone.  We don’t publically post memes if it costs our strong ties the opportunity to capitalize on them. Similarly, we’re less likely to post unremarkable news, although I’m still trying to reconcile Twitter and Facebook status updates with this theory.

So, in the world of social networks, some people have more influence than others, right? Some are mavens, or super connected hubs, or natural salespeople (borrowing from Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point”). Not so fast, says Columbia University’s Duncan Watts.  But more on that next week.

What Makes a Rumor so Easy to Spread?

urban-legend-rumorWe all want to be part of the next viral world of mouth success story. We want our product to be at the epicenter of a “buzz” storm that spreads like wildfire across the internet. But the conditions that lead to true word of mouth viral outbreaks dictate that these outbreaks are few and far between.

Jumping the Weak Ties

First of all, let’s look at what’s required for word of mouth to spread. The trick to a true viral outbreak is finding something that will jump the “weak ties”. Mark Granovetter identified weak ties in a social network back in the 70’s. Basically, social networks are not uniform and even. They are “clumpy”. They have dense clusters, comprised of people who tend to spend a lot of time together. These are family members, co workers, close friends, members of the same church or organization. Word spreads quickly throughout these clusters, because of the frequency of communication and the nature of the relationships between the members of the cluster. There’s an inherent trust there and people talk to each other a lot. This makes the social ties within the cluster strong ties. Given this, once one person in the cluster knows something, there’s a pretty good bet that everyone in the cluster will know it in a relatively short period of time.

But the challenge comes in getting a message to make the jump from cluster to cluster. How does word of mouth spread from one group of co workers to a church group in another town? To do this, we’re relying on social ties that are much weaker than strong ties. We’re counting on an acquaintance to pass word along. And for that to happen, some conditions have to be met first.

Lowering the Drawbridge

In 1993, Jonathon Frenzen and Kent Nakamoto followed up on Granovetter’s earlier work (Frenzen, Nakamoto: “Structure, Cooperation and the Flow of Market Information,” The Journal of Consumer Research, December 1993) to see the conditions that had to be met before a message would jump across a weak tie. In their words,

“Instead of an array of islands interconnected by a network of fixed bridges, the islands are interconnected by a web of “drawbridges” that are metaphorically raised and lowered by transmitters depending on the moral hazards imposed by the information transmitted by word of mouth.

In their study, they looked at a number of factors, including the nature of the message itself, and the concept of moral hazard, or how it would impact the messenger. For the test, they used news about a sale. In one social network, they saw how fast word would spread about a 20% off sale. In the other social network, they used a sale where the discounts were a more remarkable 50 to 70% off. To introduce a moral hazard variable, they also altered the availability of sales items. In one case, quantities were very limited, and in the other, quantities were practically unlimited.

What they found was that amongst strong ties, word of the sales spread fairly quickly in most instances. But when the message wasn’t that remarkable (the 20% off example), word of mouth had difficulty jumping across weak ties. Also, when moral hazard was high (quantities were limited) again, the message tended to get stuck within a cluster and not be transmitted across the weak ties.

Mexican Vacation Sale

Let’s use an example to make this a little clearer. Let’s imagine an airline is having a seat sale to Mexico. In the first example, it’s $50 off per seat, but it applies to every seat on the plane, on every flight. There is no limit on the inventory available. In the second instance, instead of $50 off per seat, the entire cost of a return flight to Mexico is just $50. That’s much more remarkable. And in the third instance, the sale is again $50 per person, but it’s limited to 10 seats on 2 flights, for one day only. Only 20 tickets are available at this price.

In the first instance, you would probably only pass along the information if someone happened to mention to you that they were thinking of going to Mexico. The information is not that note worthy. The value of information is not that great. There’s little chance that this would ever move beyond your “strong tie” cluster. It’s not something you’d go out of your way to mention to an acquaintance.

In the second instance, a $50 flight to Mexico is big news. And we’re socially predisposed to share remarkable stories. We believe it elevates our social status within our cluster. Every one likes to be the first to tell someone about something remarkable. It’s part of human nature. So we’ll go out of our way to share this information. We don’t even wait for someone to raise the topic. This is noteworthy enough that it merits bringing up in any context. It’s worth interrupting normal conversations for. Word will spread far and wide, across strong ties and weak ties alike.

But in the third instance, even though the news is remarkable, we personally have something to lose by spreading the story. There are only 20 seats available, so if we tell too many people, we might not get a chance to take advantage of the sale ourselves. Chances are, we won’t tell anyone until our seats are booked. And even then, we’ll probably only tell those we’re closest to. After we look after ourselves, our next inclination is to make sure those that are closest to us won’t miss out on the opportunity. Again, because of this “moral hazard” there’s little likelihood that word will spread beyond our strong ties.

Rumor has it

So, now that we know the limitations of message transmission within a network, depending both on the structure of the network and the cooperativeness of it, let’s look at one type of information that always seems to spread like wildfire through any social network, regardless of the circumstance: the juicy rumor.

Rumors have no moral hazard, at least, not for us. There are no limitations of quantity. We don’t stand to lose out (at least, not in a material sense. We’ll leave the ethical questions aside for now) by spreading a rumor. So that restriction is gone.
Secondly, the likelihood to spread a rumor depends on the nature of the rumor itself. First of all, does it involve people we know? Personal rumors about people we know are almost irresistible to spread. They beg to be passed on, again, because they put us in the position of “being in the know” and having access to information not available to everyone. Second to the personal rumor is the celebrity rumor. These are a little less “spreadable” because we’re not in the same privileged informant position. Also, although we know the people involved, in the public sense, we don’t really know them in the personal sense. When it comes to rumors, the closer to home they hit, the better.

Finally, we have the “juiciness” of the rumor. How sensational is the story? How remarkable is it? A rumor about your neighbor’s washing machine breaking down isn’t going to go too far. But an affair leading to a marriage break up, being fired from a job or a significant health issue, unfortunately, are stories made to spread. Because we’re human and inherently competitive, we love to spread bad news about others.

Fine Tuning the Rumor

And this brings us to an almost universal behavior seen whenever rumors tend to spread. We like to fine tune the story to make it a little more interesting. Rumors are subjected to “flattening”, “sharpening” and “assimilation”, just to make the story a little more sticky. Flattening is where we get rid of the details that get in the way of what we feel is the noteworthy aspects of the story. In some cases, the discarded details are contradictory and in some cases they’re just extraneous. Regardless, if they’re not pertinent to the main story we want to get across, or if they dilute the story, we toss them out.

Sharpening takes the remaining facts and enhances them a little (or a lot) to bring the story and it’s value as news into sharper focus.

Finally, assimilation is where we take the story and make sure it fits within our shared mental framework. We alter the story so it fits with ours (and our recipients) shared beliefs and views of the world. That’s one reason why rumors are so “spreadable”. We alter the story to ensure it’s interesting, and the further the story goes, the more irresistible it becomes.

The ultimate example of this are urban legends, where once there may have been a kernel of truth, but the stories have become so flattened, sharpened and assimilated through countless retellings that now, as intriguing as they are, they are basically manufactured fictions.

Negative Word of Mouth

We’ve always known that negative word of mouth spreads faster than positive. When we take what we now know about social networking and apply it, we begin to see why. For instance, negative word of mouth and rumors share a lot in common. There’s generally no moral hazard in play. In fact, the reverse is true. You’re actually helping people out by sharing this information, and you get a little retribution and revenge yourself. It’s a twisted win-win!

And for some reason, humans are much more likely to pass along negative information than positive. Again, it comes to our concept of social hierarchy and building ourselves up through the misfortunes of others. Admirable it’s not, but predictable? You bet!

And finally, the better known a company or brand is, the more likely negative word of mouth will spread. If there’s bad buzz circling about Nike, McDonald’s or Starbucks, we’ll all take part because all those brands are part of our shared frame of reference. We’ve already assimilated them.

By the way, remember that negative word of mouth will also be subjected to flattening and sharpening, as well as assimilation. So the negative buzz will get worse with each retelling.

Obviously, if you’re counting on word of mouth as your marketing channel, you have to take the reasons why word of mouth spreads into account. It can be made to work for you, if the conditions are right, but remember, this is not a process you have much control over. You can plant the seeds, but then human nature will take it’s course.

The Strength of Weak Ties and Search

First published August 2, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Mark Granovetter wrote a ground-breaking study in 1973 called the “The Strength of Weak Ties.” It later became one of the foundations for Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point.” I ran across Granovetter’s work and a later follow up study by Jonathan Frenzen and Kent Nakamoto (Frenzen, Nakamoto: “Structure, Cooperation and the Flow of Market Information,” The Journal of Consumer Research, December 1993) that further explored the fascinating world of word-of-mouth and how it spreads through networks. When we move this into an online paradigm, it has some thought-provoking implications.

No Network is an Island

First, let’s cover Granovetter’s work. In an oversimplified version, it states that social networks are not uniformly dense in their makeup. There are very densely linked nodes. These are families, circles of best friends, immediate co-workers and other very close relationships. These clusters, or islands, are then loosely linked by more fragile ties that span the clusters. They include formal acquaintances, lapsed or dormant friendships, more distant relationships and other “arm’s length” connections. These are Granovetter’s “weak ties.” For a viral spreading of information, we can assume that word will spread quickly within the tightly linked clusters, the “strong ties” — but for it to spread widely, it has to be passed through the “weak ties.” Otherwise, it will never spread outside a cluster. Thus the importance of these “weak ties” in the structure of the social network.

But there is another factor, and that is the cooperativeness of those “weak ties.” Are they motivated to pass on the information? In the words of Frenzen and Nakamoto: “Instead of an array of islands interconnected by a network of fixed bridges, the islands are interconnected by a web of “drawbridges” that are metaphorically raised and lowered by transmitters depending on the moral hazards imposed by the information transmitted by word of mouth.”

The Principles of “Passing it On”

Frenzen and Nakamoto’s study introduced two variables: value of information and moral hazard. In this case, they used the framework of an exclusive sale. The value of information varied with the size of the price discount. And the moral hazard was the scarcity of inventory available at this discounted price. So in the low value/low moral hazard version, it was a smaller discount (20%) and there was plenty of inventory available. There was no danger that close friends and family would “lose out” by sharing this information with a wider circle. In the high value/high moral hazard version, the discount was high (50-70%) and the number of items available at this price was very limited. A scarcity mentality was imposed.

Frenzen and Nakamoto also varied the structure of the network by assigning different “tie strengths” to the linkages within the group. The results were striking. In the low moral hazard scenario, where there was maximal cooperation to pass along information, everyone in a 100 member social network, composed of five loosely linked clusters, received the information in a maximum of seven time periods (the actual period used was not stated), even with a varying link strength of the network. In fact, in the strongest structure, everyone knew by the third time period. But in the high moral hazard situation, transfer of information was much slower and less effective. In the strongest structure, it took eight time periods for 100% spreading of the information. And in the weakest structure, even after 15 time periods, still only 66% of the group had received the information.

WOM Moved Online

So, what does this have to do with search? Simply this. The weak ties are now moving online. If we have great news or a great product story to share, we can now share this information on line. We can blog about it, post a comment or leave a review. But we’re most likely to do this when there’s low moral hazard. We pass information where there’s no “scarcity mentality.” So we’ll happily post about a great travel destination, a restaurant or a piece of software because by doing so, we’re not running the risk of losing out ourselves. We’re much less likely to blog about that exceptional deal on men’s suits at 70% off, when there’s only six suits left. That information is reserved for our closest friends. It only gets passed along through our strong ties.

There’s another factor at play here that was beyond the scope of Frenzen and Nakamoto’s study. We are motivated to pass on information online when it’s remarkable. Product or brand experiences have to earn the right to be passed on. As online mavens, we’re motivated by being “first to know” and by passing on value. Therefore, we carefully consider the trustworthiness of the information and its authenticity before we decide to share it. After all, we’re staking our reputation on it. Although these online posts become Granovetter’s “weak ties” online (because we usually don’t have strong personal relations with all the readers of our various online “footprints”) they only happen when the nature of the information bears passing along.

If we’re depending on the spread of word of mouth for our marketing, we have to start with some basic understanding of how the dynamics of the network works. All too often, we assume that everyone is like our best friend, eager to spread the word about our product or service. In the wired world, this would include leaving footprints online, through blog posts, comments and reviews. There, future customers can connect with them through search. But a successful viral campaign is largely dependent on those weak ties being motivated to pass along the information. It needs to be remarkable in some compelling way (i.e. Godin’s Purple Cow), it has to eliminate a scarcity mentality, it has to feel authentic and, to appeal to the mavens, it has to have the feel of news.

Brain Numbing Ideas on a Friday Afternoon

I can’t help but get the feeling that when we look at online marketing, we tend to get blinded by the technology and lose sight of what’s really important: how it affects people.

Right now there’s a flurry of attention surrounding YouTube because of copyright issues and other factors.  And YouTube isn’t alone in this.  The majority of things I did in my in box focus on technology.  What will be the next killer platform?  I see mobile search, I see online video, I see social networking. It’s hard to keep your finger on the pulse of what’s really important.  I find it useful to step back a little bit and see how these things affect real people: people not like you and I, who are caught up in the promise of technology, but people like my daughter’s principal, people like my mom, people like my next-door neighbor.  People who are wary about technology and who will only embrace it if it makes their life better in some way.  This is not to discount the importance of technology, because it truly has turned our lives inside out in the last decade.  But there’s a distillation, a time when we have to get comfortable with change.  The dotcom boom and bust was not because of the lack of technology or its inadequacy.  To technology all things are possible.  But to people, it’s all about what’s in it for me.  And that, ultimately, is the success factor that has to be considered in all this.

So, is YouTube hot?  Is online video hot?  Is social networking hot?  All these things are, but not because of the technology that lies beneath, but rather because of the social change that they empower.  Consider online video for example.  A couple of items in my in box talked about how, at this point, we won’t watch television online.  Even the person at Google who was responsible for online video admitted that at this point, even with Google’s tremendous resources, online video at the quality that we’ve come to expect is not a scalable proposition. 

We interact with video in a far different way online.  For example, YouTube is all about the viral spiral.  It’s all about that cute little two to three minutes of video: something that is either funny or outrageous or awful.  There’s no tremendous requirement for engagement for this.  YouTube is the repository for a million different “in” jokes.  It’s the basket where we collect what titillates the fancy of our collective consciousness at any given time.  It gives us an easy reference point so we can take what interests us and forward it to others if we think they are interested as well.  We’re not ready to watch a one or two hour documentary on the web, simply because we’re not used to interacting with our computer screen in that way.  Our computers are things we do things on, not things we watch passively.  A commitment of two to three minutes to watch a little video screen is fine, but we don’t look to the Web for passive entertainment.  That’s not to say we won’t, some day, as connectivity and convergence moves our channels beyond the current paradigm and as we evolve and learn to interact with them in new ways. 

And it’s there that we start to pick apart at what truly makes technology, at least as far as it’s manifested on the web, really interesting.  It stitches together the fabric of our society.  It’s a synapse that allows our collective brain to fire more effectively than it did before. Communications can zing back and forth between us at a far faster rate.  What we find interesting, what we find intriguing, what we find funny, what we find painful to watch is now available for anyone to see.  It’s cataloged and categorized for our convenience.  It occupies a finite space in the virtual world that we can point to and say, “Look at this, it impacted me and I think it will impact you to.”

I recently had the opportunity to watch Dr. Gary Flake from Microsoft talk.  He started his presentation with the claim that the information technology revolution that we’re currently in will be more significant, as far as the change factor for our society, than anything that has gone before.  More important than the Industrial Revolution, more important than the invention of the printing press, more important than television.  To me the real power of the Internet is that it’s rewiring our society in ways we could never dream of and in ways we never anticipated.  To focus on the wiring or the technology of the Web is to take the mechanic’s view of the world.  To a mechanic or a car buff, a vehicle is a wonderful thing because of the internal combustion engine, because of the horsepower and how fast it can go from zero to 60.  They focus on what it is.  But when you look at how the automobile has affected our society, it’s not about what it is, it’s about what it does.  The automobile brought the world closer.  It allowed us to travel and see new things.  It allowed us to live in one place and work in another.  The macro change that the automobile engendered had nothing to do with how an internal combustion engine worked, it came from moving people from one place to another quickly, cheaply and efficiently.  It mobilized our society in a way that never existed before.

Likewise, the Web is not powerful because of Web 2.0 technologies, or speed of connection, or the ability to host video.  It’s important because it connects us in new and different ways.  It moves power from where it was stuck before into new hands.  It breaks down existing power structures and distributes that power amongst all of us.  It puts the individual in control and allows one individual to connect with another, freely and without paying a poll to the previous power brokers.

The really interesting thing about the Internet is the underlying social current, the groundswell of change that is redefining us and how we live together.  These fundamental factors are exerting a tremendous force within our day-to-day lives.  They’re precipitating change so fast that we haven’t been able to step back and see what the full impact to us will be.  We can’t see the trickle down effect of the things that are happening to us today.  The Internet is changing the very DNA of our society, and we are unable to take a long-term view of what those current mutations will mean for us.  One only has to look at the generational difference between the 45-year-old parent, myself, and my 13-year-old daughter, the first generation that has been fully immersed in online technology.  She interacts with the world in a completely different way.  She searches for information in a different way and evaluates it differently.  She takes these things for granted because she’s never known any other way.  What happens when this entire generation emerges as the shapers of our society?  What happens when they take control from us, with their innate understanding of what the Web makes possible, and redefine everything?

Here are three things that I believe are the foundations of social change being pushed by the Internet:

Access to Information

The amount of information we currently have access to is mind-boggling.  Never has so much raw information lived so close to us.  You can now think about any given topic in the universe of our consciousness, and that information exists just a mouse click away.  And, as the saying goes, information is power.  It empowers each one of us to take a more active role in our destiny.  This information has completely changed how people buy things.  It’s completely changed the relationship between vendors and buyers.  More and more, we go direct to the source, as educated, knowledgeable buyers who know exactly what we want and what we will pay for it.  The challenge on the Internet is that not all information is created equal.  There’s good information and there’s bad information.  However, we are becoming extremely good at being able to differentiate between the two.  We’re becoming amazingly adept at being able to recognize authenticity and we can sniff out BS.  In picking through the multiple threads of information that are available to us out there, we can recognize the scent of truth and quickly discount hype, spin and sheer lies. 

Again, as we begin to recognize the shifting of power to the consumer, the full impact has not shaken out yet.  When we can buy anything online, quickly, easily and confidently, will what will that mean for the entire bricks and mortar retail world out there?  Will there be shopping malls in 20 years?  Will there be stores at all?  Will we buy directly from the manufacturers, cutting out distributors, wholesalers and retailers?  Or will distribution of products to the world of consumers lie in the hands of a few mega, long tail retailers such as Amazon?  I certainly don’t know, the future is far too murky to be able to peer down this path.  And I don’t think it’s important to be able to predict the future, but I do think it’s vitally important to consider the quantum change that is likely in the future.

Searchability

As the amount of information available to us continues to multiply exponentially, the ability to connect with the right information at the right time becomes more and more important.  I’ve always maintained that search is the fundamental foundation of everything that will transpire online.  It is the essential connector between our intent, and the content we’re looking for.  But more than just the connector, the sheer functionality of search, both as it is today and as it will be in the future, creates another catalyst for change in our society. 

We are becoming used to having the answers just a few mouse clicks away.  We are becoming a society of instant gratification.  In the past, we accepted that we couldn’t know everything.  In divvying up the world’s knowledge, some of us were experts in one area and some of us were experts in another.  Some of us were experts in nothing.  But we held no pretensions that we would become experts in areas where we had no previous experience.  There was no path to follow so there was no reason to start the journey. 

But today, you can become an instant expert in anything, depending on how you define the scope of that expertise.  Within 30 seconds I can tell you every movie that Uma Thurman ever appeared in.  I can look up a medical condition and have access to the same information, likely more information, that a doctor 20 years ago would have access to, based on his own experience, education and reference materials.  But again, what is the impact of this?  Does having access to the information about a medical condition makes me an expert in treating that condition?  I have the information but I have no context in which to apply it.  As we gain access to information, will we use that information wisely without the experience and domain expertise that used to accompany that information?

And how will instant access to information alter education in the future?  I remember hearing an observation that if we had a modern day Rip van Winkle, who had gone to sleep 20 years ago and suddenly woke up today, the one place he would feel most comfortable would be in the elementary classroom.  While the outside world is changed dramatically in the past 20 years, the classroom in which your child spends the majority of their day has changed very little.  When I help my children do their homework, there isn’t much difference between the textbooks and the worksheets I see today and the ones I saw 30 years ago.  I recently had to explain to my daughter’s principal the difference between a Web browser and a search engine.  The classroom is like a backwater eddy in the rushing torrent of technological change that typifies the rest of the world.  And it’s not just elementary school where this is an issue.  We often speak to students who are currently going through marketing programs at the university level and are always aghast at how little they’re learning about this new world of marketing and the reality of consumer empowerment.  They’re learning the rules of a game that changed at least a decade ago.

So to bring the point home once more, what will the organization of the world’s information mean for our society?  As search gets better at connecting us to the content that we are looking for, what are the ripple effects for us?  Will our children’s and grandchildren’s brains be wired in a different way than ours are?  Will they assimilate information differently? Will they research differently? Will they structure their logic in a different way?

Creation of Ideological Communities

The Web has redefined our idea of community.  It used to be the communities were defined along geographic lines.  You need a physical proximity to people in order to create a community because physical proximity was a prerequisite for communication.  Communities could exist if there was two way communication.  That’s the reason why community and communication are extensions of the same root word and concept. 

Perhaps the most powerful change introduced by the Internet has been the enabling of real, two way communication between people where physical proximity was not required.  Consider the chain of events that typifies online interaction.  You become aware of someone who shares an ideological interest, usually through stumbling upon them somewhere online.  You initiate communication.  Depending on the scope of your shared interest, you may create the core of the community by inviting others into it.  The Internet gives us the platform that allows for the creation of ideological communities.  We see this happen all the time on properties such as YouTube or MySpace.  Ideological communities are created on the fly, flourish for awhile, and then fade away as interest in the idea that engendered them also fades away.  The Internet, at any given point in time, is a snapshot of thousands, or perhaps millions, of these ad hoc ideological communities.  They form, they flourish and then they disappear.

But in our real world there was physicality to the concept of community.  The way our world is built, our political boundaries, come from physical considerations.  There are distinct geographic boundaries like mountain ranges, oceans and rivers that, in the past, prevented the flow of people across them.  Because of the restricted ability to move, people spent long enough together to share ideals and create communities.  As time moved on these communities became larger and larger.  Transportation allowed us to share common ideals over a greater expanse and nations became possible.  The more efficient the transportation, the larger the nation became.  But throughout this entire process, the concept of geography defined communities and defined nations.  Our entire existing political structure was built around this geographic foundation.

With the Internet, geography ceases to have meaning.  It’s now a virtual world, and I can feel closer to someone in China with whom I share one particularly strong mutually held belief then I might with my next-door neighbor.  More fundamentally, I can belong to several different communities at the same time.  Again, the restraint of the physical world usually restricted the number of interests we had that we could share with those immediately around us.  Our sphere of interest as an individual was somewhat dictated by the critical mass each of those interest areas had within the community in which we lived.  If we thought particularly strongly about one interest we could physically move to a community where there were more people who shared that interest.  So we tended to move to communities that felt “right” ideologically as well as physically.  But with the Internet, does that need for ideological “sameness” where we live eventually disappear?  Does our physical need for community decrease as our ideological need for community is fulfilled through the Internet?

And, if this physical definition of community begins to erode, what does that do for the concept of nationhood and all the things that come along with it? Increasingly, communication and commerce travel along lines not defined by geography.  The idea of a nation, as we currently understand it, is inextricably bound to the realities of geography.  Politics, trade, laws and defense are all concepts that are rooted in thinking developed over the past several centuries.  In the past 30 years we’ve seen the erosion of the concept of nationhood through the creation of common markets and free trade areas.  The very breakdown of the Soviet Union comes from the inability to isolate the population from the concepts which flourished in the free world.  And that was before the Internet ever became a factor.  What happens when we take this movement, already afoot, and add the tremendous catalyst that is the Internet?

It’s in these macro trends that the true power of the Internet can be seen.  It’s not about an individual technology or even the cumulative power of all the technology.  It’s about how the sum of all that affects us as individuals, how we interact with the world around us and how we connect with other individuals.  The seeds have been planted, we can’t turn back, and we can’t foresee what will be.  The world is evolving and truly becoming a global community.  We are entering a time when change will accelerate faster than our society may be able to keep up.  There will be costs, certainly, but my hope and belief is that the rewards will far outweigh the costs.

Social Networking Research Update from KnowledgeStorm

A few posts ago I talked about KnowledgeStorm’s new study on the use of social networking by B2B technology buyers. Apparently, the two facts that were getting reported were a little misleading in the way they were presented. Matt Lohman from KnowledgeStorm clears them up:

“I wanted to thank you for referencing the recent research study from KnowledgeStorm. I thought I would clarify some of the confusion with the respondent percentages: The write up of results that you reference is a bit misleading. I’ll try to explain without getting too off the deep end…

We asked about familiarity with social networks first, for which 35% replied “not familiar at all” while another 42% replied “somewhat familiar” adding up to the 77% figure. As part of further validation, the next question asked “How often do you visit social networking sites?” from which we received 31% stating “Never”. This is very close to the 35% who were “not at all familiar” in the previous question. Good confirmation there. From that point forward in the questioning, we excluded anyone who claimed they “never” visit social networking sites (the 31%). Therefore, when we got to the question that asked “What are your primary reasons for using social networking sites?” the only respondents were those individuals who visit social networking sites at least once a month (69%). Of the individuals using these sites, 70% are doing so for business development networking or development reasons.

I still think your conclusions are valid but also wanted to make sure our research wasn’t getting misconstrued. “

Thanks Matt

This is Not Your Kid’s Social Network: Leveraging LinkedIn

The worlds of social networking and search are beginning to blur more and more. And the number of influencers that are networking is higher than you might think. It’s not all about MySpace, but in many cases, contact networks like LinkedIn. New research from KnowledgeStorm and Universal McCann shows these seemingly contradictory findings:

“Seventy seven percent of B2B technology buyers have little to no familiarity with social networking online. Of the 24% who are very accustomed to social networks, a large majority of the respondents visit these sites at least once a month.

70% of B2B technology buyers use social networking sites for business networking and/or development, though 59% admit to also using these sites for personal reasons.”

So if 77% don’t know what social networking is, but 70% use them, what’s going on? I think it comes from many people not knowing that having a LinkedIn or Plaxo network actually counts as social networking. They’re participating, but they don’t know it. When they think social networking, they’re thinking about teenagers spending hours on MySpace or Second Life.

And at 70% usage, it’s a channel worth paying some attention to. Luckily, Guy Kawasaki recently engaged Kay Luo and Mike Lin at LinkedIn to brush up his profile. Check out the results of Guy’s Profile “Extreme Makeover”.