Online Social Capital and Influence
Posted on June 9, 2008
Filed Under Musings, Offline social, Social Captial, Social Web, Strategy, social media marketing | Leave a Comment
What is online social capital? It’s a new term that contains an older term. The wikipedia definition of social capital refers to gaining influence (access to power) “through the direct and indirect employment of social connections”. Offline capital has been around for thousands of years, and extends beyond personal into business, political, and religious. But online, the effect is different, and it creates a different dynamic.
The modern version is quasi-physical, in most cases, as there are real people with real names that are linked together via relationships. Whether poking each other on social networking sites, or chatting via instant messaging, there is a basis in real relationships with real people in the majority of one’s online social wealth.
A bit more on defining the term, via what it allows… on Scales for Social Capital in the Online Era there is the indication that it creates benefits derived from relationships created by interactions of social actors. These individuals form “a network of individuals—a ’social network’—resulting in positive affective bonds. These in turn yield positive outcomes such as emotional support or the ability to mobilize others.”
This type of capital is not limited to one network, as it can bridge social networks. Bridging’s basic definition applies to when individuals from different backgrounds connect, and this is also extended to cover those that occur between social networks.
Utilizing tools such as facebook may have taken off in part because building social capital takes time, and it is easier to leverage the base of a large social network. Other newer tools allow quick building of the same. Even within networks, there is contrast between “introduction-model” sites such as meetup.com, and microblogging sites such as twitter.com, The first is designed for real-world useful social interaction and one for, well, short bursts of content (useful or otherwise).
The relationship networks that are built through different types of sites are not the same. It is useful to recognize how they are different as you consider the effort expended in building personal or organizational capital.While smart people such as Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam are focused on real-world social capital, there is the hyper-rapid growth of online social capital, as reported in this article.
Online Social Capital and Reputation Managment
Once you have online influence, it becomes as asset to manage, in the sphere of online reputation management. Newbies - people have a handful of online friends and a small network - have less to worry about than people with 5,000 or 10,000 people who are tuned into their online activities & ideas.
Can celebrities really do social media & networking? No, not in the current “traditional” method of social networking, or at least not for the long-term. It’s not really feasible, because as a personal-interaction-based form of communications, it requires hundreds of responses per day. It is possible to engage, but not via having others post for the person, as that quickly becomes apparent for it’s “fake” quality.
Banking
There is no “Central SocialCapital Bank”, and one’s network is quickly spread across the hundreds or thousands of sites. As opposed to the bank model, you can’t build up this type of wealth and have it sit. It exists by being used, but necessarily by being spent.
[More on this to come - this post will be continued and expanded with content that was not ready at the time of publishing ]
Social Juxtapositional Marketing and Promotion
Posted on May 7, 2008
Filed Under Musings, Strategy, social clutter, social media marketing, social viral | Leave a Comment
Proposed: people or organizations who recognize the behavioral-affecting potential of online social juxtapositions can create attention that is highly effective.
What catches our attention easily? Something familiar.
What also catches our attention? Something different.
Recently I’ve seen - randomly - cases where two familiar “things” were together, but they were different things. This caught my attention in a halting sort of way, positively changing my train of thought and action. It wasn’t only online that this happened, but it can apply very well to people trying to create buzz on the web.
A definition of juxtaposition from reference.com refers to placing things close together or side by side, epecially for contrast or comparision.
What I’ve run into lately is juxtapositional contrast… things that are different that contrast each other. Some of these things are social things.
Social Juxtaposition - placing contrasting stuff (i.e. media) together in a social situation.
In promoting - a cause, a product, a service, an idea - it is challenging to stand out from all of the other promotion, especially in a crowded market. For example, trying to showcase one’s awesome website design skill is shouting into a concert of voices saying similar things about their own design skills. How to differentiate? Add some juxtapositional zest.
We’re talking fairly uncontroversial stuff here… but what is new now for marketing online via social web promotion will be how to allow for contrast that gathers attention in positive and perhaps conversational new ways. This technique would also fall into the social viral engineering category.
For one example of differentiation, that perhaps is more in the techie appeal area… as blogging became popular and then crowded, some bloggers turned into or started as video bloggers to get attention, and some now are doing live video shows. Beyond simply live with a web cam, the cutting edge now for some is live video from mobile phones in interesting locations… allowing several contrasting juxtpositional intersections:
- Some of the audience will be in different time zones and countries, allowing for a “it’s morning here” vs. “it’s midnight here” feeling of contrast
- Some live feeds (Ustream, Mogulus, others) allow for real-time chat in the same web browser window, sometimes in contrast with the video stream. Sideways chat traffic can also enhance the video, but a lot of time it goes off in other directions, which via social interaction actually seems to keep interest when the video has normal lulls in activity.
- Using tweets to alert the people following you on Twitter.com that you’ve just started an interesting live video stream… this is in contrast to the alternative of stuff like work, or cleaning the dishes, or whatever one was doing before being interrupted.
- Finding locations that match - or contrast with - the subject of the video stream. Try interviewing someone on a seesaw (aka teeter-totter) about some otherwise dry subject like project management and deriving earned value. Or, now that in the northern hemisphere the pools are starting to open up, interview someone who’s in the water.
So interrupting this post now is a short clip taken earlier today of some recreational water activity.
As you are probably reading this sentence while watching the some of the clip, you’re going to try and link the context of the video with this writeup. And, your mind will automagically create some thought to link the video with what you are reading… maybe the water… the idea of video blogging…. or perhaps wondering if this writeup is leading to a marketing pitch. Or, maybe the link your mind creates is that this subject is confusing you a little too much.
Regardless, without creating a time-consuming animation, or slickly producing a video, a clip (taken by chance when stopping to avoid some road traffic) can be used to enhance via juxtaposition someone’s memory of this page. Just use a more exciting or compelling clip.
Furthering this issue one last bit… explaining that I’ve done canoeing and kayaking in that same water will lock in more interest - in a long-tail way - by those people who enjoy those activities. It was this type of contrasting linkages over the last few days that caused me to think how online social web activities are a mesh of random juxtaposed media, to which services (such as friendfeed, mefeed, socialthing, and other lifestreaming services) try to help organize our social clutter.
Yet as always I’ll be looking for and reacting to the interesting social juxtaposition buzz instead of the harmonized feed!
Forecast: Scattered Clouds, With Increasing Atmospheric Integration
Posted on May 3, 2008
Filed Under Clouds, Future, Musings | Leave a Comment
Get your head into the clouds. Now.
There is increasing buzz this month about online clouds - the services that host our applications, contain our data, and can scale on demand. Those who recall grid computing or mesh computing or distributed computing will understand the concept behind clouds: computing services as a utility, like electricity or water.
What is the forecast for clouds? Growth. With recent articles on large technology companies getting together on cloud computing, it will no doubt ride the hype curve very rapidly (even amid some tech voices of sanity).
As in a previous post here which included highlights of the advance from yesterday’s best computers to today’s desktop computers, the lower prices now, combined with the scale of global computing data center resources & virtualization, means that computing actually can be a utility.
In concept, it follows the pattern of the internet - shared resources along with proprietary/private resources, with costs driven lower by higher adoption rates. Shared costs of email relay and internet traffic routed across servers allowed free email to mostly replace paid email. But this time, shared computing via a cloud really will change the, um, landscape.
Why? Developers.
Many tech-savvy people, based on blog comment posts this week, don’t get the cloud. They will, one day soon, but it will take an understanding of how development in the cloud can be done more cheaply, with more scalability, distributed globally. A year from now there will dozens of startups that succeeded in 2008 and early 2009 by leveraging the cloud, combined in many cases with social networks, mashup-ready data, and a keen sense of how to solve problems that are still forming in online user expectations.
As in a previous post here highlighting the big changes of old computers to today’s computers, the lower prices now combined with the scale of global computing data center resources means that computing actually can be a utility.
Clouds arrive in Hong Kong.
[ Buzzword prediction: clouds will be superceded in buzz-worthiness by what they float in: the atmosphere ]
Social Clutter - Too Much Information
Posted on May 2, 2008
Filed Under CSO, Musings, Strategy, social clutter | Leave a Comment
The music of The Police, including the artist Sting, has among the songs some concepts that were perhaps ahead of their time. One example is “Too Much Information” (listen), which was written over 25 years ago, and refers to having to deal with information overload:
Too much information running through my brain
Too much information driving me insane
… and this was penned before there was cable TV with 500 channels, mobile phones (with or without text messaging & voicemail), and before there was any of the billions of spam emails (worldwide) per hour! My hunch is that today we have 10 times more information to deal with on a daily basis now, and there is more information arriving with (couldn’t resist) every breath you take.
As the information glut continues, organizations - and people - who succeed and excel will be the ones who recognize the importance of managing information efficiently.
And for those many people who have a portion of their social life online, with many friends, updates, events, and activities, the too-much-information aspect extends into a new term: social clutter.
Socially, many of us now suffer from information overload. For some people, quality time has been replaced by quantity, as we now keep up with more people and have more interruptions in our time with friends and family. Anyone with a mobile phone been asked to silence their ring or set it on vibrate for an event?
It’s kind of like asking people to filter out each of their own social clutter to keep the event from being overwhelmed.
Too much information? Since when?
Our information now is typically electronic data, at one time or another. This is new. Only 20 years ago it was still a very analog world. But now, magazines and newspapers are composed using computers. Digital cameras & photos now exceed film cameras. CD’s that were overtaking vinyl are now being replaced by digital files. And email and online text are essential information sources for most of the people reading these words in this post.
And every year, many of us produce a lot of digital material (emails, videos, photos, slide decks, documents) that we don’t need, yet we have to save it, file it, organize it. We don’t know what we won’t need, so we may try and save it all.
As the volume of online social interactions grow, and with these interactions all saved in the online cloud of data, the social clutter will continue to grow. What to do? Use tools, such as filters and folders (online or offline), to be more efficient. And don’t be afraid to unfriend or unfollow people who are cluttering your life. More on the social clutter handling in future posts.
An Old Idea Becomes New? Akashic Records & Tech
Posted on May 1, 2008
Filed Under CSO, Future, Musings | 3 Comments
Someone mentioned to me at lunch last month a term I hadn’t heard - akashic. The wikipedia akashic definition has in it the following: “A theosophical term referring to a universal filing system which records every occurring thought, word, and action. The records are impressed on a subtle substance called akasha (or soniferous ether).”
Stripping away the more mystical aspects, one could assume that the current path of technology is to create an actual akashic record of all events of our world - everything that can be recorded. Road traffic, transactions, conversations, and with microblogging all the rage… apparently every thought (as in, tweets on Twitter.com and updates on sites such as facebook.com and myspace.com).
What about recording thoughts from within the brain? Possible, as EEG (electroencephalography) and MEG have shown. And this development will continue to develop, as who would not want to control a computer - and thus other mechanical devices - with their brains, as shown in the video below about the Neurosky controller:
Assuming technology will evolve and refine thought-reading further, then it also will allow thought-recording. Initially it would be a stream of simple commands such as “move mouse up”.
But how about the future? Less than 40 years ago the large computers that filled an entire room contained less information than fits on a CD or on a memory card for a camera or mobile phone. Today’s personal computers are 100 times smaller, and 1000 times cheaper, and run laps around their ancestors in terms of speed & performance.
So by one stretch - and it is a stretch - the crude EEG game controllers of today will evolve in 20 or 30 years to devices that will read and extract our ideas and concepts. And there will be storage media to record this brain activity, and likely also record a 3-D representation of real events, continuously. These events would include human activity, and nature, weather, etc. While we may not be able to capture past events or the thoughts of someone like Shakespeare as he was writing, we have already started capturing this arguably permanent record of human consciousness.
Going back to the definition of akashic, it contains: “…adherents describe the existence of various akashic records (e.g., human, animal, plant, mineral, etc.) that in their summation encompass all possible knowledge.” There is a counter-balance in that “the akashic records have been rejected by the scientific community, due to a lack of any independently verifiable evidence.”
Evidence lacking, that is, until the scientific community creates it. Or, actually, as we all create it.
Footprints: Social Application Data Architecture
Posted on April 19, 2008
Filed Under Musings, Strategy, social media marketing | Leave a Comment
Another focus for this blog is the engineering side of the social web, as it relates to functionality and business uses. And the biggest engineering craze to hit software development in decades, in terms of general trends not related to a specific technology, is online social applications.
There are an increasing number of social technology conferences, like this one, and anyone who has been reading about web technology in the last 12 months has been reading about the thousands of applications launched in the last year on social networking sites, such as facebook and, more recently, MySpace.
From a high-level perspective, it’s all about information. Information that flows as data, from the social applications to the servers run by the people who own the application. Information being data - data about people, data about actions taken by people, and in many cases data relating to monetization.
One way to look at the data interactions is shown in the social application data architecture diagram below.
Non-technical readers can look at this diagram as food for thought: do I know where my data is going? Will my data be safe?
Technical readers and entrepreneurs can go beyond those questions and ask: what will create a leap of usefulness - and business or social opportunity - in recognizing how this “data footprint” can be leveraged to profoundly change our interactions?
With social applications being about a year old, the chart above will be very dated in another year. (Additions expected: LinkedIn is projected to have social applications later this year. White label social platform kickapps supports OpenSocial, and ning does as well.)
And, over the course of the next year and beyond, the promise of implementing new and unique social data flows will present challenges and opportunities. While this may or may not be a series, there will be more on this to come in future posts.
You Can’t Touch a Tweet!
Posted on April 18, 2008
Filed Under CSO, Musings, Offline social, Strategy | Leave a Comment
Online social interaction requires the real world, but can (or do) social media marketers blend the offline and online together in a useful way? Rarely.
My own online social interaction has always had a strong connection to the physical (real) world. My instant messaging was always with people I had met physically, until it wasn’t. My email messages were always exchanged with people I had met physically, until (quickly) they weren’t.
And now, years later, there is a growing churning sea of connection with people I will never meet. And organizations whose offices or stores I won’t get to visit. Online social has exploded, and offline social can expect to continue to reap the benefits of connections that start online. Tomorrow I’m attending an event that I learned of through online social networking, because people I had met in the real world were also going. But, curiously, I met those people because of an event organized via a different online social networking site.
That type of synergy is perfect, in a way, to illustrate what will hopefully be more than just this short snippet today. For me, online social works only because it has positively affected my real world. The same way that I enjoyed going to sites that focused on my interests, such as filmmaking, I now belong to groups with people local to me who want to get together to share those interests.
But, that’s for a person. Organizations are different. They seem to like to aloof, online available via toll-free numbers, email, and occasionally online chat (but only via their chat).
Should online social campaigns just be virtual? Having benefited from the friendships that come from online social groups that meet in the real world, and vice versa, I can say “no, bring them into the real world.” Brands and organizations looking to to use social media may be slow to understand that while everyone won’t be able to connect in the physical world, it can be invaluable to try. Mostly they should abandon the thought that a social campaign can be all done at arms-keyboard length.
Recently I spoke with a new media executive from a major league sports team, and this person was specifically interested in making online social work in close connection with offline acitivities & events. Right on. It takes more effort and surely can’t be 100 percent automated, but it also will build lasting involvement. A sports team understand fans, but other businesses are coming around to an understanding of fans, conversations, and participation.
This is likely part one of a multi-part series, as I have yet to organize the rest of what I’d prepared - a list of positive ideas and bad ideas for getting the offline and online worlds to mix. I’d write more now but there is an offline event starting shortly… one where I’m looking to meet some people who are at this point only virtual people I’ve found via activities such as Twitter tweets and online message exchanges.
[for now I’m here on twitter]
Do You Like Being Watched? The Uncertainty Principle and Social Media Marketing
Posted on April 5, 2008
Filed Under Musings, Social Web, social media marketing | Leave a Comment
How’s your online new media marketing going? If you want to guess, fine. If you want to observe and measure, that’s another story.
Intended or otherwise, your own use of the pages & web properties does affect the measurement. That usage would be minimal in most cases. But want about the use by people who are not plain users… by users who know their actions are not transparent?
First, a well-established and well-known quantum physics idea - the Heisenberg uncertainty principle - says that measuring something happening can alter what it is that you are measuring. A simpler way to envision it in a related way, is that by pouring ketchup into thimble to measure it, and then pouring it out, you would reduce the amount of ketchup that you end up with… because some would stay stuck in the thimble.
This change means your measurement is off and your cooking might suffer. Fine for ketchup because you can see it, of course, and work around this to some extent. But getting down to the level of tiny particles such as electrons means you can’t see that your measurement-taking changed what the electron was doing.
Whew - totally boring science club stuff, yes?
Not if you think of people as electrons, as then maybe things start to come into focus. Under the social microscope, some of these electrons know that they are being watched. They know and believe that their actions - their visits, their votes, their comments, tweets, social bookmarks, clicks - are observable, and also in many cases permanent records of their actions.
Everyone online *knows* they are being observed. Well, most people do, anyway. Especially the people who are involved in online marketing.
So, let’s bring in another aspect named the observer effect, which separate from Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle has a related aspect: the impact that even observing something can change it. The actions of animals at night can’t be observed very well without light, and shining a light on them will change their actions. Taking your temperature with a thermometer actually lowers your temperature because a small amount of your heat is transferred into the thermometer.
Now we’re cooking…
… because we all know that behavior of most people can be affected by observation. That is, if they know they are being observed, many people will change behavior as a result. One humorous example relating to this is that people are more likely to wash their hands in a restroom if someone else is there to notice the act. This wonderful truth was measured via experiments over the years (with another truth being that people often say they washed when they didn’t… maybe 25% were liars). It could be true that “Self-awareness… may be enhanced by being watched by others.”
So, now what does this theory stuff have to do with anything social online?
Hmm… in the old days, people consumed media such as newspapers and radio and tv, and it was one-way. Online new media now has people creating and consuming media, with a touch of competition thrown in. With sites such as YouTube, by putting all this media in one place, people go to see what’s popular… knowing in many cases that by watching a video they are also voting it up in popularity. So they tell their friends and others to watch their stuff so it might go viral by rising in the charts.
And of course, with deep-packet inspection going on, even more observation is happening that what was revealed with the release of private user data in recent times by some major online web properties. What happens as more users realize that they may not be anonymous, and thus have to think of their next click: ”What will someone else think about my activity?”
Wrapping up, there may be some value to exploring and understanding the play between people’s activities on an individual basis, in consideration that they may be acting differently just because they know they may be watched.
CSO: Chief Social Officer Job Description
Posted on March 31, 2008
Filed Under CSO, Musings, Strategy | 2 Comments
So what does a CSO do, anyway? After searching a few top search engines, I couldn’t find any job descriptions for the title of “Chief Social Officer”, although I did find a partial writeup. After creating a quickly-cobbled together first-ever CSO job description, I’ve decided to refine it and share it out, as a true CSO should.
The duties fall into what I’ve done, or will be doing, or should be doing, for the various organizations and individuals that I advise. It uses “organization” and “enterprise” to allow it to work for both corporate positions and non-profit/political positions. Feel free to use it, with attribution to this site:
Chief Social Officer Job Description
Primary Duties:
- Leads enterprise-wise social direction, via creation & execution of vision and mission statements, for areas such as: Social (general), Social Technology & Communities, Social Media
- Enables and may also enact social media strategies, campaigns, and ensures the optimal use of in-house technical and community platforms
- Maintains awareness of social technology & related trends, and communication of this aspect throughout the enterprise
- Networks with bloggers, especially those writing about social tech & communities
- Sets & advises on the organization’s policy on social activities & processes, including privacy & data-related aspects
The above list of duties is just for starters, and any future updates will be linked into this post.
The CSO job requirements are another matter… and now the post takes a humorous slant. Having read in the past many technical job experience requirements that were not actually possible for someone to have, this part was a pleasurable release to create. Maybe it will help continue the trend of impossible requirements when a click-happy recruiter inadvertently uses this writeup below thinking it’s the real McCoy? And, remember this is early 2008, so maybe in a few years this list can become the norm:
CSO Job Qualification List:
Required:
- Experience creating and executing online social media campaigns, for in-house or out-sourced teams (minimum of 10 years)
- Creation of online social applications for at least 2 different major social networking platforms, via having led 5 to 10 person teams (minimum of 10 years, 15 years preferred)
- Thorough knowledge of the following technology & platforms: blogs, social bookmarking, social networking, social news, microblogs, video sharing & media streaming, photo sharing, social software & applications, integration of messaging & social networking applications, widgets & gadgets, ad integration, viral campaign management, podcasting, and all open source software (minimum of 10 years, 20 years preferred)
Optional:
- Creation of infinitely scalable social applications in the 100 million to 750 million user range, including simultaneous usage of 5 million or more users
- Creation of viral online social campaigns with growth from zero to 100 million views/adds/opt-ins within a 30 day period
- Achievement of simultaneous top placement of a story or webpage on the 5 top social news sites, including: Digg, Fark, Mixx, Newsvine, Propeller, Reddit, Shoutwire, Sphinn, and Technorati.
For now, we can leave out the ability to leap a two-story building in a single click. And yes, I can count to five (see final bullet above if you didn’t catch it).
The social networking hierarchy of needs
Posted on March 25, 2008
Filed Under Musings, Social Web | Leave a Comment
Last night I stumbled across (as opposed to stumbling upon) a year-old blog post that mentioned a web user’s hierarchy of needs, and immediately thought about recasting it as to climbing up today’s online social networking hierarchy of needs. And after creating the items in the graphic below, I searched online today and found someone down under had also posted today around the idea. Laurel Papworth took Maslow’s actual hierarchy and was applying it to social networking sites (SNS).
The approach below was a twist in coming up with a new hierarchy of social needs, and including some humorous ones for effect. See if you like it, and if it gets you thinking about where you might be in the pyramid:
Somewhere between the second and third levels (from the bottom) is when someone starts to “get” social networking. Even if you get it in concept before you join a network, it’s like reading about swimming in the ocean and tasting the salt water in the summer sun. You have to do it or it’s all theory. The post from last month also illustrates that many people are looking for the value in social networking.
Recent posts from spiritual social networking site Spirituality.org also discuss the hierarchy of needs and their upcoming launch of a community which aims in part to use the web & technology to help the attainment of self-actualization.
Arguably (by me at least!) it can be said that people connect to the internet as the first step into the online social heirarchy of needs. The moment someone first exchanges email, or visits a website, or has an IM conversation, they are connecting in some sort of social way. Even a visit to a corporate website is connecting to content written by a real human (most of the time).
And the web has been successful in the last 10+ years precisely because it allows social interaction. What are the killer apps online today? Multi-player games, video-sharing sites, communities. What were some of the killer apps of 10 years ago? Webmail, IM, and primitive (by today’s standards) community sites such as Geocities. All having an aspect of social connectedness.
And 10 years from now? With the “web” already becoming a more distributed platform, including mobile, IM, streaming video and podcasting which don’t require a web browser, the social-connecting aspect will continue to grow. In 10 years offline social will be even more integrated into online social, as demonstrated by emerging technology that today can tell you if your online friends are nearby in the physical world.
The version above is the 2008 First Draft, and a second draft is possible (and will be linked here if it happens).
This posts ends with a question: what is the end-state for social activity online, for you or for the online community at large?
keep looking »
