Category: Social Media

Building Relationships part 1

This is part of a series of post about building relationships online and the relationships we build online.

The initial idea was triggered by reading in one of the books for TECH 621 about marketable relationships. Marketable relationships were defined as relationships we build for the sake of the relationship, without expecting an immediate reward. However, the rewards, often in the form of employment, speaking engagements, etc., come as a result of having these connections. Nothing new here. This is how connections work.

I don’t particularly like the term “marketable relationships,” but luckily, the concept does go by another name: social capital.

Social capital was defined by Bourdieu as one of three types of capital:

  1. economic (financial resources)
  2. cultural (knowledge resources)
  3. social (connections, acquaintances, people we know who could do us favors)

Putnam (the one who wrote Bowling Alone) further broke down the concept of social capital into 2 sub-types: bonding and bridging capital.

  1. bonding capital = close relationships  among homogeneous groups (birds of a feather, your close group of friends, family, etc).
  2. bridging capital = loose connections with diverse people. It is out of these types of connections that most benefits and innovations emerge.

So, here are some hypotheses:

  • Many people use Facebook to maintain bonding capital
  • Many people use Twitter to build and maintain bridging capital

Are these the predominant uses of Facebook vs. Twitter? To how many people do these hypotheses apply? Do they apply to you? Are the trends changing towards Facebook becoming more open to loose connections and to building bridging capital? i.e. do you “friend” people you don’t know very well?

[update 10/25: Facebook’s new News Feed vs Live feed feature makes Facebook technology more conducive to maintaining bonding capital, because the algorithm selects the updates to show you in the News Feed based on the previous level of interaction -connection depth?- with that person.]

Next posts in this series:

How social media change organizing

I gave this presentation in TECH 621 today – I’m pretty proud of the way I synthesized and organized (what I thought were) the most important ideas from Clay Shirky‘s book “Here Comes Everybody.”

Organizing – How are social media changing the way we organize?

View more presentations from prprof_mv.

http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=organizing-091014173829-phpapp02&rel=0&stripped_title=organizing-how-are-social-media-changing-the-way-we-organize

I’m not sure how well it went over in class – students seemed tired, and we didn’t have time to discuss as much as we might have liked to. So I’m posting here and inviting students and readers to continue the conversation in the post’s comments. If you have read the book, I believe you’ll appreciate this synthesis. If you haven’t, I’m not sure how much sense it makes…

So…

Questions? Comments? Cabbage jokes?

Brizzly: making Twitter more like Facebook

I’ve been playing around with Brizzly this morning, and here are some initial thoughts. My default Twitter app is Tweetdeck, so I’m comparing to that.

  • for most part, it works as advertised in the demo, except it’s a bit slow sometimes, and when I tried to save a search, it experienced an error (but it’s a private beta, I can live with that)
  • I like that I can see photos and videos on screen, and don’t have to click links to view them.
  • I like the option to store groups on the side column, because I hate lateral scrolling in Tweetdeck. With Brizzly, I can see myself creating more groups.
  • How about mobile? I haven’t found a corresponding iPhone app, so if only for this feature alone, I’ll stick with Tweetdeck.
  • Auto-refresh is spotty, at best. I still haven’t figured out if or how it works. Sometimes I see a message to refresh the page, or a bubble next to a Group, sometimes I don’t – but I refresh the page and see there are new updates anyway.

But here’s the major change that Brizzly introduces, and for me, a concern:

  • The user experience is a bit more like Facebook, but that can be very misleading. See the screenshot below:

Brizzly_screenshot

My reply with a comment about the cat shows up (for me, in Brizzly) – right under the photo. So the context of my comment is very clear to me. However, for the recipient, if she uses another Twitter app, my reply will show as a usual @ tweet in her stream.

The problem is that for me, the context is very clear, but for her, it may be confusing. If I reply “awww…. !” she has to put 2+2 together to figure what my tweet is about. I usually try to include context in my tweets – I’d usually reply “awww… cute cat!” – so she knows that the tweet is about. I try to avoid using “this” and “that” in tweets and instead specify what I’m referring to.

I posted a photo, and people’s comments didn’t show under the photo, like in Twitpic, but just as replies in my twitter stream – so no context there for me on the receiving side.

It’s confusing to have context for some people, in some instances, but not for others. If some people use Brizzly and others don’t, I can see a lot of misscommunication happening on Twitter.

Although Brizzly might enhance MY Twitter experience, the confusion about context might reduce the overall community experience.

Watch the Brizzly demo:

Research Study: @sockington is more influential than @chrisbrogan

This Webecology research report has been making the rounds on Twitter. I haven’t had time to read it until now, here are my reading notes:

The Webecology team uses large scale data mining to identify patterns indicative of online culture and community. Wish I’d do this, too – and will, as soon as I find a research partner to help with the data mining part.

For this project, the authors set out to create a more accurate measure of influence on Twitter that goes beyond either:

  1. number of followers; or
  2. followers/friends ratio

The authors defined influence on Twitter as:

influence on Twitter = the potential of an action of a user to initiate a further action by another user

Specifically, influence means the potential of a tweet to generate replies, mentions (conversational behaviors), RTs, and attributions (content-pushing behaviors).

This is an atheoretical, operational definition of influence (the study’s Achille’s heel).

As far as I understand, all 4 actions were weighed equally. So, a RT factors the same as an @reply in determining influence.

They selected 12 Twitter accounts to study. The selection was based on this criterion: the 12 accounts were  “widely perceived to be among the more influential users on Twitter.” It is not clear who did the perceiving, and what definition or measure of influence they used in the process of perception. IMO, the arbitrary selection of the sample is another major weakness – but in this case, I can live with it, because the purpose is not to derive conclusions about Twitter culture as much as it is to demonstrate how the methodology can be used.

Then, the 12 users were grouped into 3 categories. Here is a table with the accounts they analyzed, and their number of tweets over 10 days, as well as the number of followers and friends at the end of the 10 days:

—

Celebrities Username Tweets Followers Followees
Ashton Kutcher aplusk 3,205 3,407,385 209
Shaquille O’Neil THE_REAL_SHAQ 2,072 2,092,541 562
Stanley Kirk Burrell MCHammer 6,016 1,331,797 31,202
Sockington sockington 5,711 1,089,984 380
Justine Ezarik ijustine 7,718 605,441 3,039
News Outlets Username Tweets Followers Followees
CNN Breaking News cnnbrk 1,096 2,712,530 18
BarackObama.com BarackObama 330 2,018,016 761,851
Mashable.com mashable 17,914 1,363,510 1,925
CNN cnn 11,607 193,625 50
Social Media Analysts Username Tweets Followers Followees
Gary Vaynerchuk garyvee 7,532 862,790 9,683
Chris Brogan chrisbrogan 48,341 94,715 88,431
Robert Scoble Scobleizer 23,112 94,295 2,423

The data that they mined was as collected over 10 days, in August 2009. The data included:

  • The 2143 tweets generated by the 12 users
  • The 90,130 actions (responses, RTs) triggered by the original 2143 tweets
  • All the tweets generated in connection with the 12 users (by their followers and friends;a total of 134, 654 tweets, 15,866,629 followers, and 899,773 friends/followees)

The authors produced 2 types of influence reports, based on the type of action that was triggered:

  1. conversational action (people replied, or mentioned the user – e.g. “meeting @stockington for catnip”)
  2. content-pushing action (people retweeted, or gave attribution – e.g. “via@username”)

Please note that a mention may or may not be a response to a tweet. If they were not responses to a tweet, they fall outside the authors’ definition of Twitter influence, and they should have been excluded from the analysis.

Here we go, on to the findings:

Conversational action

This graph shows you the amount of conversational activity (@replies and mentions) each user got in response to one (average) tweet.

Content action

This graph shows you how much content action (retweets and attributions) each user got for each (average) tweet:

So here we see that, per tweet, @sockington did get more retweets than @chrisbrogan.

The authors claim that these graphs of influence/tweet are the most accurate measure of Twitter influence so far. Therefore:

@sockington IS more influential on Twitter than @chrisbrogan,

because the fake cat gets more retweets. (sorry, @sockington, I do love you!!!)

I know exactly what you’re thinking, it starts with B and ends with T.

That’s because here we have a problem of construct validity. The measures do not actually measure influence. I wish the authors had read some research in communication & persuasion about the concept of influence, then worked their way from a conceptual to an operational definition.

Obviously, @sockington gets more retweets because he’s cuter & funnier than @chrisbrogan (sorry, Chris!). We don’t know why people reply or retweet. This study ignores a very important aspect of human relations: meaning. There is meaning in tweets, and meaning in why people retweet. But that is not captured in this study.

That being said, the report shows what can be done with data mining – it’s awesome! With a bit of help from people who know how to study meaning (hint, hint!), this type of research will be extremely valuable.

If anything, let this be an argument for computers & communication people working together, across disciplines.

In a future post, I will review conceptual and operational definitions of influence.

Social Media Reading List

[update Aug. 20]: This is what the list looks like now:

Anderson, C. (2008). Long Tail, The, Revised and Updated Edition: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. New York: Hyperion Books.

Anderson, C. (2009). Free: The Future of a Radical Price. New York: Hyperion Books.

Blossom, J. (2009). Content Nation: Surviving and Thriving as Social Media Changes Our Work, Our Lives, and Our Future Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Clapperton, G. (2009). This is Social Media: Tweet, blog, link and post your way to business success. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Davenport, T. H., & Beck, J. C. (2001). The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business. Boston: Harvard Business Press.

Fogg, B. (2007). Mobile persuasion. Stanford: Stanford Captology Media.

Israel, S. (2009). Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods.

Jackson, M., & McKibben, B. (2008). Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.

Jue, A. L., Marr, J. A., & Kassotakis, M. E. (2009). Social Media at Work: How Networking Tools Propel Organizational Performance: Jossey-Bass. (N/A until November 2009)

Locke, C., Searls, D., Weinberger, D., & Levine, J. (1999). The Cluetrain Manifesto.

O’Reilly, T., & Milstein, S. (2009). The Twitter Book. Sebastopol, Ca: O’Reilly Media.

Palfrey, J., & Gasser, U. (2008). Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives Philadelphia: Basic Books.

Postman, N. (1992). Technopoly. New York: Vintage Books.

Qualman, E. (2009). Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do business. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Safko, L., & Brake, D. (2009). The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Scoble, R., & Israel, S. (2006). Naked conversations. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Shirky, C. (2008). Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. New York: Penguin Press.

Solis, B. (2010). The Social Media Manifesto: The Revolutionary Guide to Build, Manage, and Measure Online Networks in Business Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Surowiecki. (2005). The Wisdom of Crowds: Anchor Books.

Tapscott, D., & Williams, A. D. (2008). Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. New York: Portfolio.

Zittrain, J. (2009). The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It: Yale University Press.

Social media & Marketing

Bhargava, R. (2008). Personality Not Included: Why Companies Lose Their Authenticity And How Great Brands Get it Back. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Brogan, C., & Smith, J. (2009). Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Gillin, P. (2007). The new influencers: A marketer’s guide to the new social media. Sanger, CA: Quill Driver Books.

Gillin, P. (2008). Secrets of social media marketing. Fresno, CA: Quill Driver Books.

Halligan, B., Shah, D., & Scott, D. M. (2009). Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Holtz, S., Havens, J. C., & Johnson, L. D. (2008). Tactical Transparency: How Leaders Can Leverage Social Media to Maximize Value and Build their Brand: Josey-Bass.

Li, C., & Bernoff, J. (2008). Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Livingston, G., & Solis, B. (2007). Now is gone: A primer on new media for executives and entrpreneurs. Laurel, MD: Bartleby Press.

McConnell, B., & Huba, J. (2007). Citizen Marketers: When People Are the Message. Chicago: Kaplan Publishing.

Scott, D. M. (2008). The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Scott, D. M. (2008). The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Thomas, M., & Brain, D. (2009). Crowd Surfing: Surviving and Thriving in the Age of Consumer Empowerment. London: A&C Black.

Weber, L. (2009). Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

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[original post:]

I’m putting together a reading list for my graduate seminar (TECH 621 – Research Focus: The Social Internet). I’m trying to get to books that discuss social media principles, and research – not only how-to guides and marketing advice.

Here is the list as it stands right now:

Blossom, J. (2009). Content Nation: Surviving and Thriving as Social Media Changes Our Work, Our Lives, and Our Future Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Clapperton, G. (2009). This is Social Media: Tweet, blog, link and post your way to business success. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Gillin, P. (2007). The new influencers: A marketer’s guide to the new social media. Sanger, CA: Quill Driver Books.

Halligan, B., Shah, D., & Scott, D. M. (2009). Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Holtz, S., Havens, J. C., & Johnson, L. D. (2008). Tactical Transparency: How Leaders Can Leverage Social Media to Maximize Value and Build their Brand: Josey-Bass.

Israel, S. (2009). Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods.

Jue, A. L., Marr, J. A., & Kassotakis, M. E. (2009). Social Media at Work: How Networking Tools Propel Organizational Performance: Jossey-Bass.

Li, C., & Bernoff, J. (2008). Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Locke, C., Searls, D., Weinberger, D., & Levine, J. (1999). The Cluetrain Manifesto. http://www.cluetrain.com/

O’Reilly, T., & Milstein, S. (2009). The Twitter Book. Sebastopol, Ca: O’Reilly Media.

Qualman, E. (2009). Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do business. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Safko, L., & Brake, D. (2009). The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Scoble, R., & Israel, S. (2006). Naked conversations. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Scott, D. M. (2009). World Wide Rave: Creating Triggers that Get Millions of People to Spread Your Ideas and Share Your Stories. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Solis, B. (2010). The Social Media Manifesto: The Revolutionary Guide to Build, Manage, and Measure Online Networks in Business Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Do you have a book I should add to this list? Please let me know!