One of the recurrent themes whenever I get drawn into discussions around community, specifically the ‘on-line’ sort, is that of audience versus community. It is all too often that I hear marketing folks talk about their audience as if it was a community, and occasionally their community as if it was an audience. To my mind the two are very different things: an audience is gathered to listen; a community gathers to contribute. One is there to consume. One is there to produce. I don’t see one as any more worthy than the other – sometimes I want to be in an audience, sometimes I want to be in a community. You probably wouldn’t fancy trying to co-create with Take That or the Foo Fighters – you’re there to jump up and down and go deaf, or something like that. Conversely, if I go to a vendor’s user group event, I wouldn’t expect to get shouted at or drowned out.

What emerged from the evening’s discussions was that there are many different types of community. That might seem blindingly obvious, but you wouldn’t think so from much of the writing in the social media world. There are motivated communities – self motivated, or externally motivated (i.e. lead) – and there are unmotivated communities. Unmotivated communities rarely last, and are rarely ‘rewarding’ to be part of. Communities fundamentally exist to do something, or at least to support or preserve something.

My personal favourite minimal definition of community is ‘a group of people gathered around a purpose.’ I like it because of its simplicity, and because it is so actionable. The purpose might be to change the world (thank you to Misae Richwoods for raising the bar on that one), or it might be to exchange tips and stories about a new gadget. Another flash of the blindingly obvious was the realisation that communities are for a period in time. People join, their circumstances change, and they move on. They may stay for a long time, or they may move through swiftly. Similarly, a campaign-based community may have a relatively short life or a lifestyle-driven community a very long one.

The process of joining and leaving a community is not usually a binary one. It is a journey, and those who run communities need to be conscious of that. The moments of leaving or closing are points of difference, and potential friction (or explosion) if they aren’t handled well. That thought touches on many things, which the discussion came back too…

If you have an office without walls or desks, how would you know that you are in it? It’s the same with communities. While most on-line communities don’t have obvious rites of passage, they are there – even if they aren’t explicit. The users worked out how to get on-line, they found the site, they signed up, they managed to post a message. We’ll talk more about rites of passage and tokens of membership in a bit.

The higher the walls, the stronger the community. As the walls erode, the community weakens. Look at Usenet groups in the 90′s, and now Twitter. As the barriers come down, the community fragments, weakens, and finally is engulfed in relational noise. Of course, at the other end of the scale are communities that are [too] exclusive. Barriers to entry, i.e. exclusivity, can drive people’s desire to be in a community, as much as they keep them out. If it is hard to get in, people will stay. If it is too hard to get in, people won’t bother, and may even form their own ‘anti-communities’

Technology has radically transformed community life. The Internet has bulldozed geographic boundaries, eliminated cost and enabled even the most niche of interests to sustain sizeable communities. If you don’t believe me, go for a trawl through meetup.com (an online market place for arranging and managing community meet ups). There is something there for everyone – and I really mean everyone. Newer on-line services like Lanyrd and Plancast have made it easier to discover events and join the communities around them. See where your Twitter friends go to meet, search events in your area, or on your topic of interest. If you want a community, online or offline, you can probably find it, and if you can’t find it, you can create it for marginal cost and effort.

Social platforms like Facebook have made relationships objectively visible, and transformed ‘liking’ into more than just making a connection. They have become a means of association, and a form of visible badge. I ‘like’ Brand X says as more about my identity than just the fact that I have purchased their products. Communities have an ‘identity’ and people need to know what that identity is, so that they know what they are in, and more importantly, people need to know if they are ‘in’ the community or not. They also want to know if other people are inside or outside of the community too. It is all part of forming a group identity, and having a good sense of group identity is a key part of any thriving community. That identity might be supported by the shared stories that people tell, or by the provision of props (e.g. badges, uniforms, and so on). Having an iPad, an iPhone 4 and a MacBook identifies you as likely part of a certain community, just as having a suit and a Blackberry might identify you as part of a different one!

Some badges are ambiguous, some are not, some are conscious, some are not. All are earnt. The Flickr badge on my bag has started conversations, the WordPress badge has got me business. Those badges were obtained through relationships and through being at certain events. They have a story and meaning to them. They are explicit tokens, artefacts of being a part of something. They have a value far beyond their physical worth, they connect to memories and demonstrate participation. Most communities have some form of badges. They aren’t always as obvious as a piece of metal and paper, but they are there all the same.

Community defies our instant reward, popup culture. Communities take a LONG time to develop. Although sense of community can happen within 6 months, or even less, building a viable community, of any type, is a long hard journey. One of the things that definitely helps along the way is recognising the contributions of key community members. A big part of the evening’s discussion circled around the idea of making ‘heroes’ within the community. It works because it strengthens the identity of both the group and the individual, and also because it models the behaviours that are desired within the community. It is in our nature to copy leaders and those that we view as successful. That can be a constructive dynamic in a community, but it can also be a destructive one. An over reliance on the leader or key individuals can leave others feeling unwanted or even excluded.

There was and is much debate as to how much of community building is inductively learnt and subconsciously applied, and how much is conscious, constructed application. Many community leaders are ‘naturals’ rather than consciously constructed. It’s rare to find someone who learnt their community management skills in a classroom, and so that means passing on their skills is something best done through mentoring and working alongside, rather that in a taught course in a classroom. But you knew that already, didn’t you?

At one point there was a heated debate about WordPress versus Drupal. It was notable not for the technical content, but for how much of the debate was driven from the communities that were around each of them. There are certainly big technical differences between the platforms (I’ve built community sites using WordPress, BuddyPress, Drupal and Elgg), but the biggest difference is in the communities of users, developers, content producers and consumers around each. Products, inherently, have communities.

Looking at the ‘insides’ of a community, it becomes obvious that not all community members are equal. There are various different taxonomies that can be used to group members. I lean towards looking at levels of engagement: audience (the edglings), participants, contributors, through to co-leaders. Similarly, communication happens on a continuum from ‘top-down’ communication from leaders, to peer-to-peer discussion between members. Bernie talked about the impact of sending out weekly emails to one of his communities. The community became more active and engaged. People got more involved. Broadcast communication can be helpful, as well as harmful, in maintaining community cohesion and the energy levels within the community. It is all about striking a balance. Too little, and the community fragments and disperses, too much and it diminishes to an audience.

The spectrum for audience to community is a highly graduated one. We discussed many examples of the broadcast/performance vs community/contribution dynamic. For example, the Coke Facebook page that was started by two actors. Community or audience? Participation or entertainment? They aren’t dichotomies or dilemmas, they are  characteristics of moments in the story that becomes the community. How important is the brand of the community leader? Can they be invisible, leading from the shadows, or must they be known by name? Is there a continuum from audience to community? Real world examples don’t reveal simple yes’s and no’s. In the words of Ben Goldacre, “I think you’ll find that it’s a bit more complicated than that.”

So what triggers action in a community? Conversation needs to be peer to peer, not just top down. It’s one of the defining differences between an audience and a community. People want to have meaning, and to make a difference. Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs came up quite a few times. People have a need for significance and people want to feel wanted/needed. Many community drivers are around human emotional needs.

The evening’s discussion touched on issues of mono-culture and sustainability. Consistency is important – it creates and supports identity – but difference is also one of the key drivers of community too.  Communities can be long lived. Like some strange insect that can go without food for years, even if left sleeping communities can sometimes be revived. One of the stories I have heard a number of times about the Obama campaign is how it managed to bootstrap itself from the communities formed during the previous campaigns. Once a community is made, the individual relationships and connections created by it persist, long after the community has gone away.

So what is the role of a community leader? Are they leaders or are they facilitators? The answer seems to be yes and yes. The more challenging question was about the ability of community leaders to establish new leads, and the way that can lead to communities fragmenting or taking on a different path – even splitting apart. Good community ‘managers’ are passionate about the growth of the individuals within the community. The pattern is not about the growth of the community, the community only grows by the growth of the members. Good leaders establish sustainable behaviours: ‘this is how we do things around here’ – and recognise and reward those in the community who are active in supporting it. Recognition goes a long way: It supports the contributors, and it indicates desirable models of behaviour to others in the group.

Communities aren’t owned, and unlike an audience, they can’t be bought. Did technology enable niche communities, or did it actually cause the fragmentation that lead to them? On-line communities, freed from geographic restrictions, can fragment and merge more easily. As humans, we’ve been doing community since we started writing on cave walls, but technology is making (and enabling) us to look at the processes of community differently. Community is part of a cultural megatrend. In the off-line world, many places have forgotten how to do community – The motor car, the television and the privet hedge have enabled use to live socially in the most isolated of ways. In the later part of the last century we learnt to become individual actors, rather than group players. As we escape from broadcast media, and discover the Internet, we are starting to rediscover togetherness. There is a growing desire to create communities, and reintegrate society.

Of course it is all ripples against ripples… We have always been in communities, it is the new lens of social media and the rise of Twitter and Facebook that have turned the cameras, quite literally, back on to ourselves.

In a cruel form of irony, it way well be the mass data from these platforms that starting to create mass customisation/personalisation that breaks up community again. What you read in your Twitter stream or in your Facebook updates is personalised for you. No one else reads the same things in the same context. In social networks, everyone is part of a community of one. It is a scale free network that puts you at the centre of your world. Traditional communities don’t work that way. They are about shared experiences and shared stories – they are more universal than personal. It’s all about creating the shared experience, the stories that people tell about the community and that they have in common. Shared challenges, external threats and common victories bind communities together. They create emotional connections between people.

The nature of what ‘global’ means is changing. Geographic barriers are breaking down…. However ‘Global’ has come to mean a trans-country set of niches… Physical communities are still challenged by geography, but global ones are challenged by a sea of niche interests and a dwindling commonality in what people are interested in.  As opposed to the universal markets that broadcast media and a global film industry created, social media creates micro-worlds with micro-celebrities and loosely bound connections.

Is community growth formulaic? There are certainly patterns. We discussed the early church, Toastmasters, the Mormons and dozens of examples of communities that have grown and persisted. Sometimes communities are for a reason, a season, occasionally for a life time. Communities and members aren’t forever. There is a time, a place and a purpose.

What does community mean to you?

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“Britons are more willing to cut back on holidays and meals out than on spending on communication technology during the recession… … spending on mobiles, the internet and TV is regarded as a higher priority than almost anything except food.”

Time to revisit Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Needs

Curious indeed. I shared the link via Twitter and the ever provocative Camille Mendler of the Yankee Group (and I mean that in a good way) tweeted back. It struck a chord with a series of recent discussions, so I’ll share them here.

Let’s leave Maslow, just for a minute, we’ll come back to him. The way we are using the Internet is subtly changing. The study highlights a dramatic rise in the use of social networking websites. 19 milliom people in the UK, that is around 50% of the internet-using population, spend an average of six hours a month on Facebook. That is a 50% increase from four hours a month back in the previous May.

It’s not just a phenomenon among young people. Quite the opposite.The proportion of 25 to 34-year-olds claiming to have a social networking site profile grew to 46%, while the figure among 35 to 54-year-olds rose to 35%. The only group shrinking was the 15- to 24-year0old group, down by 5% to 50% – perhaps they are trying to avoid their parents on Facebook?

This shift in Internet use is relevant to Maslow’s Hierachy of needs. Just in case you missed, Maslow’s article ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’ appeared in Psychological Review back in 1943, and was the foundation of his book “Toward a Psychology of Being” (on Amazon US and UK). In it Maslow proposed a five tier model to describe human motivation. It is a theoretical approach, rather than an experimental finding, and Maslow himself revised the model in his later works. That said, it has become the foundation for a sea of thought, from sales theory to engaging employees. The five tiers are:

• Self-Actualization
• Esteem
• Love/Belonging
• Safety
• Physiological

Essential, each level of needs has to be fulfilled in order to reach the next. If needs at a lower level are left unmet, we focus back down at that lower level, so the theory goes. Taking the levels in more detail, one by one:

Physiological Needs

We all need to eat, to drink, to breathe and to sleep. Without these, we rapidly fail to function and everything else becomes meaningless.

Safety Needs

We require shelter and protection from physical harm. Exposure to the elements or attack will obviously impact on your physiological needs. Beyond that we seek longer term security, for example paid employment or knowing that we will be provided for. We don’t want just to survive, we want to know that we will survive.

These first two tiers are reasonably well served in western society, although not as universally as one might home. Moving on from the lower levels it starts to get interesting, and somewhat surprisingly, we come back to broadband:

Social Needs

We need a sense of belonging. That might come through friendships, or membership of a group of some description. Something we are part of that is a place for giving and receiving love, in its various forms, is required to meet these social needs. Think: Belonging.

Esteem Needs

We all need to feel wanted and valued, consciously or not. Simple acts, like being recognised and receiving attention from others, protect our self-esteem. A healthy self-respect, a sense of having achieved things, keeps us going. Without these, we are unlikely to feel fulfilled. There are a raft of psychological theories that exist at this level. Simply remember: Attention.

Self-actualisation

This was the subject of much of Maslow’s later work, but that is something for another time. For now, suffice it to say that at this highest level, people become motivated by more social causes and issues such as justice, truth, wisdom and meaning. Operation at this level is often evidenced by the acceptance of facts and the celebration of capabilities like creativity and problem solving.

As a side note, this model seems to hold true at a corporate level as well as a human one. I believe there are companies that achieve “self-actualisation”. They are rare, but I have had the privilege of experiencing them. I recognise themes from the periods of peak growth at both Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks. There was a sense of meaning that was common across the who;e business, and values like justice and wisdom were held in high regard.

So, back to those British broadband users… Social Networking sites like Facebook, enable us to keep in touch with friends. Remember that requirement to belong? To be needed? Simple acts like commenting on a friends status update, or knowing that others might be waiting for our next status update, tick boxes in the hierarchy of needs. For better or worse, broadband is becoming the pipe that provides social fuel on that journey towards self-actualisation.

I’m not making an argument to justify broadband as some sort of basic right, or even an essential service – that is probably a step too far. I am pointing out that broadband pipes don’t just feed us with information, they provide us with much needed social contact too. The Internet of information has become the Internet of people. In doing that, broadband has moved itself from “nice to have” to “nicer to have.”

While people said that they would cut back on going out for dinner (47%), DIY (that most serious of British addictions – 41%) or holidays (41%), only a tiny minority (10%) would be prepared to cut back on their broadband.  It would be intersting to know about more about the survey, as the identification of the surveyors may have skewed the answers.

Maslow’s hierarchy hasn’t changed, but the role of technology within it has. Businesses need to take note here. People have embraced ‘digital intimacy’ as part of their lives. Companies that don’t provide tools to support social cohesion will eventually suffer. Yes, I guess I would say that, but I’m happy to hear counter arguments.

Throwing your staff out on the road, or sending them off to work at home, without providing on-line social tools, will impact on the effectiveness of your business. Staff turnover will increase, communication will dry up, and the creativity that is so vital to innovation will disappear. Alarmist? I don’t think so. Look at how people are using technology at home. Those expectations are coming into the work place. Look at the importance people place on it. This isn’t a fad, it is a change in what the Internet is all about.

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The idea that a community can get together and self-organise an event is still a refreshing one, but when Farhan first suggested the idea of Tweetcamp I knew it was going to be something a bit different, pushing at the boundaries between the on-line and off-line world. What was it about? I’ll let Farhan explain:

TweetCamp is about bringing communities together, in real life.  It’s about accelerating the conversations that happen on Twitter, in real life.  It’s about creating richer, more personal connections… …It’s all about bringing the people together who you know from and through Twitter, into a physical space, and then having some of those great conversations and interactions you would have online, but in real life.

You can get a feel for the day by watching the video I put together:

The process of on-line to off-line bridging is something I pursue in the corporate space. On-line platforms work best with people who have met off-line and interacted face-to-face. Similarly, on-line tools let people sustain relationships when time and distance – from remote working or hectic schedules – would otherwise curtail them. Tweetcamp was an opportunity to experiment with different ways of stimulating discussion and self-organising a very large group (about 150 people or so).

Amy Sample Ward has challenged the team to build on this start at bridging on-line and off-line communities in her thoughtful post. The conversations and activities were very varied. I met someone I knew by swapping a toilet seat for a wonderful water spray – you had to be there. You’ll also hear Ray mentioned in the video. He is a poet and ran a poetry workshop. Inevitably he was ‘dragged’ on to Twitter, where you can now find him as @TheEducatedfool. He was there as part of the BBC poetry initiative, which came up with an innovative live idea for the event, linking Tweetcamp to Glastonbury via Twitter. People tweeted short poems from the event, which were displayed live over there. I told you it wasn’t your usual barcamp!

As well as a wonderful lunch, and Muesli, from sponsors Mymuesli, Addlestones provided a wonderful end to the day with their cider. A big thank you to all of the sponsors. The day wasn’t about the food though, it was about the conversations, which covered topics as diverse as children’s use of the Internet to internal business communications, and a range of  other topics between.

There are lots of photos from the day up on Flickr, including these by Adam Tinworth and some from Chris Heuer (who recently ebayed himself) as well as a few I took:

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You are a very fortunate individual if you have escaped the torrent of (somewhat spammy) messages from the spy catcher application. It is doing a rather good, and therefore bad, job of turning Twitter into Facebook – or rather the bad old Facebook of a while ago, with the legendary sheep throwing, pirates, vampires and sea of noise generated by that genre of social applications.

Got You! Via Twitter

The success of Spycatcher is a proof point of another unsettling trend: Notice how easily people hand over their username and passwords to a relatively unknown (and potentially untrusted) third party.

There has been a long term problem with twitter third party applications. The first generation of applications required users to enter their username and password on the third party site, where they were stored, so that the 3rd party could get access to the user’s Twitter stream, to do whatever wonderful things it did. It sounds relatively innocuous, but actually it sets a rather bad precedent. It is referred to as an anti-pattern, a commonly bad solution to a problem. It is bad because it teaches people how to be phished.

From Catching Fish to Helping Phishers

Phishers spend their time trying to get users to hand over password details, so that they can gain access to accounts. Twitter has a bad anti-pattern problem, and it knows it, since the Twitter ecosystem trains users to hand over their security details to third parties. To tackle the issue Twitter has added OAuth to the service. It provides a way for third parties to validate users, without storing the username and password. However, this doesn’t solve the whole problem. People are still handing over passwords. So, back to catching those spies…

Increasingly third party Twitter applications are not only logging in to pull down information, but they are actively sending tweets from users accounts (including @ messages and Direct Messages) on behalf of, and in the name of, the user. And why wouldn’t they? If a developer can get away with using a bit of a user’s social capital to promote their application, they probably will. Spycatcher is a particular case in point.

From Bad to Worse

The annoying messages it tweets are one thing, “captured this”, “assassinated that”, they can be blocked. However, over the weekend things took a turn for the worse when I started getting private direct messages from the people I follow asking me to join. Now, either my friends have suddenly all switched to the same writing style, or these were automated DMs. I’ll let you take your pick.

Twitter direct messages are my most trusted communications channel, since only people I have chosen to follow can send me messages (oh that my mobile phone was the same), and the messages generate alerts in near-real-time. So, when people start spamming me via that channel I sit up and take notice. There is another reason too. Because URLs that arrive via that channel are usually from a trusted human, I tend to trust the links. I shouldn’t of course, and neither should you. Combined with anti-patter behaviours, it is all too easy to receive a DM with a link and a “Benjamin, use your Twitter ID to check your security here” – you can see where that heads. If I was being dozy, 5 minutes later all of the people who follow me would be getting the same message. Injecting malware, or carrying out phishing attacks it all too easy. People need to realise that the twitter stream is part of their on-line identity, and to guard security credentials well. It was a little while back that Britney Spears and Barack Obama had their login details compromised.

What to learn?

• Don’t hand over your user name and password unless you are 100% sure where they are going, and what will be done with them.
• Use different passwords for different services. That way any damage should be limited to one service. If your Twitter password is the same as your on-line banking one, fix that quickly!
• Change your passwords every so often. Yes, I’m sounding like the moaning IT guy, but this does make a difference to your security.

I expect to see more and more applications using the social capital of their users to promote them – that has been the model on Facebook, and now it’s coming to Twitter. As for Spymaster, I’m not sure if it should be called spam master rather than spymaster (if you want to play please turn off the notifications I hate having to unfollow people). I’m surprised their hasn’t been a bigger backlash against it.

Perhaps it is a sign of the shifting user. We have reached the “sheep throwing” phase of the social networking platfrom life cycle. It’ll take it as a sign of Twitter entering adolesence already.

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As early users posted updates, they sometimes wanted to indicate that a message was directed at a specific user, or a reply to one of another user’s updates. The idea of @username was quickly adopted as the way of doing that. The @ notation has spread to other social media too – I’ve seen @name in blog comments, forums and even emails. Eventually the concept was incorporated into the Twitter system as a feature, and almost every Twitter client has an “@replies” column or a “reply” button.

Recently Twitter changed ‘replies’ to ‘mentions’ – something you can see reflected on the Twitter web interface. For me that was a retrograde step. Replies and mentions are very different, take these two tweets:

@BenjaminEllis I really don’t think that is the best answer.

Just saw @BenjaminEllis and others on BBC News today.

You can find either of them with a Twitter search, but they are semantically quite different, to my mind at least. I’m interested in the second, but probably need to respond to the first.

Yesterday Twitter went a stage further and removed a key piece of the reply functionality, which has caused an outrage on Twitter (see #fixreplies).

You would generally reply to other people, and it is tempting to think of @replies as just one type of message. They aren’t, and not just because of the mentions versus replies issue. If you take the perspective of someone who is following you, or that you follow, there are two big categories of @ reply:

• Replies to them.
• Replies to others.

Obviously you are going to be interested in replies to you – you’re on Twitter for the conversation, right? However the case of replies to others is a little more complicated, and understanding why reveals one of the most powerful aspects of Twitter.

If you think of your social graph on twitter (the ‘star’ of people that you follow, and the ‘star’ of people that follow you), together with each of those people’s graphs, you’ll see something startling in the way that conversations happen on Twitter. No-one (unless they follow and are followed by exactly the same people) sees the same conversation. Pardon the crude diagram, but hopefully it helps. Think about the two users at the middle of the stars, and also the two solid dots and circles on the edge for a minute:

Everyone on Twitter sees different things, and conversations swing from people to people. It is a very unique dynamic, and one not really replicated elsewhere. Now, back to @replies. Twitter has traditionally subdivided @replies to others into two types: replies to people that you follow, and @ replies to people that you aren’t following. The reason why becomes apparent when you think about the partially-overlapping social graph each person has (that diagram above).

While it is reasonably obvious that you would want to see @replies to yourself (although you might want to see those in your timeline, or see them seperately), what to do with the others isn’t so obvious.

One argument is that you would want to see all the @ replies of the people you are following. They are part of that person’s conversation after all. This option provides a way to discover other people that you might be interested in following, or finding mutual friends that you didn’t know were on twitter. I’ve had the benefit of both of those experiences, and for me it is part of what makes Twitter a great tool: serendipity is built in.

A second argument is that seeing all of the @replies of the people you follow is going to be far too ‘noisy’ and that the only ones that are meaningful are the @ replies to people that you also follow. This is a nice halfway house, in that you can still follow conversations between your friends (or rather between the different people that you follow), but there are far fewer tweets for you to read, as you don’t get the @replies to others. The downside? Sometimes you only see half of the conversation.

In actuality, you often only see half the conversation anyway. If someone you aren’t following @replies someone that you are following, you wouldn’t normally see that tweet. According to the post on the Twitter Blog the issue of one-sided conversation fragments was their reason for removing a very useful option in Twitter: The @ replies options: Until today, Twitter allowed you to choose which argument you accepted. Via an options setting you could:

1. See all @replies (ie @replies to you and all @replies sent by people you follow).
2. See @replies to people that you are following (the second argument above).
3. See only @replies to yourself.

This allowed a great deal of flexibility, and meant that if you were following a small number of people, you could choose to see all @replies and so gradually find new people to follow. If it all got too noisy, then you could limit what you saw down to the people that you followed, and just join in those conversations. If even that was too much, you could stick to just replies to yourself. A piece of design brilliance – leave the decision in the hands of the user. I’ll come back to that in a minute.

There is a school of thought that @replies are really just a matter between the two users involved, and that allowing people to butt into conversations is somehow wrong. From my perspective I really don’t agree with that.  I quite enjoy people butting in from time to time. If the message is that private, then use a Direct Message (“D ” – although with care, one slip of the keyboard by you or the other person and that message is in the public timeline).

The issue of user choice is a tricky one for any product manager or a service designer. If you require users to make too many choices, your offering rapidly becomes hard to use, even confusing. If the choices require expertise that isn’t available to the new user, it is easy for them to get the wrong end of the stick and end up with a poor user experience.

I don’t think the @replies option has been well understood, neither have @replies in general, but I also don’t believe that is a reason to remove it. A simpler tactic (that probably wouldn’t have caused the same level of outrage in the Twitter community) would have been to change the default setting for the @replies option. It’s a neat compromise, since the ‘power users’ can still get to the setting, but those less interested in the technicalities can simply ignore it.

@EV (Twitter CEO) tweeted to say they will reconsider. Hopefully here ends the lesson, for us all. It is interesting to see a user community in action, but may also be an example of where ‘democracy’ and crowd sourcing does and doesn’t fit in with product design. I’ll come back to that one.

He’s a Qik video from a little while ago which explains more, and also shows the options that have been removed:

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Today’s Internet is a curious mix of problems seeking answers and answers seeking problems. Later in the week, the EPSRC Research Cluster on Innovative Media for the Digital Economy held it’s Springboard Event. Both were thought provoking, and I will come back to them, especially the session with Charlie Leadbeater in another post. First though, some thoughts on the recurring challenge that came up in both events: The issue of trust in the on-line world.

What Does Trust Mean On-line?

Trust is a troublesome topic to study, partly because it occurs in so many different contexts, but also because it is so hard to nail down a definition. Rousseau and her colleagues offered up the following definition:

“Trust is a psychological state comprising the intention to accept vulnerability based upon positive expectations of the intentions or behavior of another.” Rousseau, D. M., Sitkin, S. B., Burt, R. S., and Camerer, C. (1998). “Not so Different After All: A Cross-Discipline View of Trust,” in Academy of Management Review, 23, 393-404.

Quite a mouthful. Let me simplify a little: Trust is being ready to do something (risky), in the hope that it will work out. It is something we do everyday, especially when we carry out a interactions on-line. However it is something we probably understand less well than we would like to think.

Personality theorists have argued that some people are more likely to trust than others, based on how their trust has been rewarded in the past. That doesn’t tell us much about the mechanisms of trust, at least not in a way that we can action personally, or use in running a business.

Most academic papers divide trust into two types. At the early stages of a relationship, trust is “calculus-based“. We carefully calculate how the other party is likely to behave, looking at the rewards and punishments for being trustworthy or untrustworthy. In other words, trust is driven by some form of accountability. We are more likely to trust if we know that when the other party does something ‘bad’, then something ‘bad’ will happen to them in response. In these days of blogs, on-line review sites and social networks you can see how that can work on-line – even if imperfectly.

As a relationship develops, shared values and goals start to emerge. This allows trust to move to a different level, towards what is sometimes called “identification-based trust“. At this point, both sides have grasped and digested the other’s desires and intentions. They understand what the other side cares about to the point where they can act in each others interest. This kind of trust forms an emotional bond between the parties, one that drives valuable things like loyalty and the desire for mutual satisfaction.

In one direction, trust, in the on-line world at least, points towards accountability, and from there to transparency, openness and confidence. Trust is traditionally based on social relations, but in the on-line world that anchor is often substituted for another one: Confidence – the belief that things will unfold as expected. There are distinctions between trust and confidence. Confidence is based on familiarity, and it is something that can be designed for. An important point when building websites.

In the other direction, trust points towards compliance. This is perhaps not as obvious, but think about it for a moment. If you carry out a transaction on-line, you have effectively complied with the desires of the other party. Be it purchasing something via a web site, registering for a whitepaper or just signing up to join the latest social networking site, you essentially did what that other party wanted you to do. That might sound a little oppressive, but it is never-the-less a fact, and a very useful one if you want to understand how that happened.

From Trust to Persuasion

The more friendly face of compliance is persuasion, and recently I reread an old Robert B. Cialdini book “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion“, although I’ve lost my copy somewhere between London and Austin. I hope I can replace it, as it’s a good read. Cialdini introduces six principles of ethical persuasion:

• Reciprocity
• Commitment/consistency
• Scarcity
• Liking
• Authority
• Social proof

These concepts have become so popular that you are probably familiar with the terms. They are techniques used by sales and marketing professionals day in and day out around the world.

Reciprocity is an extremely powerful influence. That’s hardly surprising, since it is one of the underlying behaviours that enables us to have a society where we can have specialist roles and engage in trade. People generally feel obligated to return a favour. This tendency is often played on by offering a small gift to potential customers. Studies show that even if the gift is unwanted, it will influence the recipient to want to reciprocate, usually by buying something. A variation on this theme is to ask for a particularly big favour. When this request is turned down, a smaller favour is then asked. Having refused the first request, it becomes that much harder to refuse the second.

Ever been given a “free” taster and then ended up buying something you wouldn’t have otherwise? Or recommended or helped out as a result of a service that gave you a “free” account. You were probably motivated by reciprocity.

Commitment and consistency are important factors in trust, and also compliance. Our desire to appear consistent in our words, beliefs, attitudes and actions is very strong. Society values personal consistency exactly because it enables trust – if we are consistent, our future actions are predictable, and that leads to confidence and so to trust.

Being consistent in our decision making also provides a useful shortcut: By sticking with decisions that we have already made, we don’t have to go through the stress and effort involved in continually reprocessing all the information that enabled us to make the decision in the first place. Consistency gets us through the complexity of our modern existence. One merely needs to recall the earlier decision and respond in keeping with it. Given the choice between deciding we are wrong, and simply changing our opinion by rearranging the facts to support our existing opinion, we will generally re-arrange the facts. As an additional shortcut, we are completely unaware that we re-arranged the facts. Google ‘cognitive dissonance’ if you want to scare yourself.

Scarcity is a fairly self-evident motivator: Offer closes today. Last 5 places remaining. That exclusive event that has tickets that always sell out before you get a chance to buy them. We hate missing out, and that influences our decisions.

The last few factors (liking, authority and social proof) can also be interpreted in terms of social influence or social trust. People trust, and comply with, people they like and that they perceive are like them (i.e. have similar values). That is why broadcast media advertisers pay large sums of money to have celebrities feature in them. Similarly, sales people look for shared interests between themselves and you.

This is simply another way of reducing the complexity we are faced with daily, using the decisions other people have already made, to reduce the ones that we have to make. People affect other people and are affected by other people. Social media and social networking sites almost codify this practice. We conform and comply based on the perceived views of others. Social Impact Theory (Latane, 1980) suggests that the amount of influence depends on:

1. The number of people who agree (although as the number of people increases, the number is less significant).
2. Strength (the status, expertise and power of the influencers).
3. Immediacy (the proximity of the influence).

Conformity from social proof is immensely powerful. If you are in any doubt, look into the origin of the phrase “Don’t drink the Kool – Aid” often kicked around in tech circles. It comes from the Jonestown tragedy, a mass suicide in 1978.

The most common form of social proof used in marketing is case studies – people like you purchased this product. Social proof is most influential at moments of uncertainty. If a situation is ambiguous, people are more likely to look to other’s behaviour and follow it. Further, people are more inclined to follow the lead of ‘similar’ people, see liking, above.

We also respond to perceived authority and expertise. The exact nature of our compliance varies by the situation, but generally we are most influenced by job titles, clothes, and even the cars that people drive. Again, these are techniques commonly used in advertising. Thumb through the adverts in any glossy mainstream magazine and count the examples.

There are two takeaways here. Firstly, as a company looking to build trust in an increasingly on-line world, there are a number of mechanisms open to you:

• Be open and transparent.
• Be predictable and consistent.
• Be visibly accountable.

Summarising Trust for Businesses On-line

In short, be part of your customers’ community. Yes, in the short term, you could get away with just the ‘appearance’ of these activities, but if you want to get to the highest levels of trust with customers, you will actually need to carry them out fully.

As individuals, we need to pay careful attention to how social media influences us, and where we place our trust. Social media plays curious games with otherwise highly effective psychological mechanisms. Just because a number of people write a positive review about a product on-line doesn’t actually make it good, although it may feel that way. At the very least, you are looking at a self-selecting group: people who chose to buy the product, rather than ones who chose not to because they perceived it to be poor.

People writing reviews are prone to exactly the same mechanisms that you are: Consistency and commitment means that they are unlikely to write a bad review for a restaurant they have patronised, since they have already paid for a meal there. Sometimes trust is broken so much that other forces come in to play, hence the occasional ranting negative review.

In face to face communication, as an effective barrier against many of these compliance techniques is to congratulate the persuader on their skill in using them. That isn’t so easy when you are dealing with a website. Give yourself time and space when making decisions. A simple self-enforced cooling-off period can work quite well.

Our life experience has probably made us suitably cynical about advertising in broadcast media. The on-line world is evolving so rapidly that we haven’t yet settled on well-adapted behaviours to deal with it.

I’m not intending to be negative here, just keen that we build real trust and real communities via the on-line world. With that in mind, I am off to the Centre for Applied Positive Psychology’s Creating Flourishing Communities Conference this week (details here), more on that later.

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I don’t mean the meetup.com service. I mean meet up for a coffee. Meet up for a lunch. Meet up for a drink. “Benjamin!” you say, “that’s a bit frivolous. Shouldn’t we be working harder, rather than out socialising?” But think about it. Business demand is down in many sectors. That means getting smarter about finding new customers and keeping existing ones. It means ensuring you have a good network in place, should things take a turn for the worse.  It is about scarcity, not capacity. The long-term winners will be those with that extra insight that enables them to make smart decisions and avoid mistakes. It won’t be the ones running 10% faster in the wrong direction. 

Keep on Meeting

Discussions are great for a business, especially in tough times. Identity your most important customers and meet up with them. Not email. Not a phone call. Arrange to meet for that coffee or drink. At a personal level, think about your most valued friends. Book in some time with them, just to meet up and chat. Find out how they are doing. It’s about protecting valuable relationships, as well as sharing issues and insights.

I’m a massive advocate of social media and technology-mediated communication. I blog, tweet and video my way through the day. Often I’m teaching others to do the same, or I’m building blogs and community sites, networks and communication systems. I love the stuff. However, I value face to face communication more. There are somethings that only face to face communication will provide, and they are things that we need right now.

Something is Missing

When you talk to someone, rather that type to them, you hear a sea of additional information. Technically, it’s called prosody. The inflection, rhythm and tone of their voice change, from “yes, things are ok” to “yes, things are ok”. Did you spot the difference? Of course not. There wasn’t any. But if you heard me say them, you’d be able to tell if business was turning good, or if business was turning bad. Not because I was trying to mislead you by what I was saying, but because words may tell you where things are, but emotions tell you where things are heading. You don’t need to consciously think about interpreting the information coded in the prosody of someone’s speech. You’ve been learning to do it every day since you started listening. It happens unconsciously, but only when you talk.

When you see someone, you  see their body language. Their posture and movements tell you even more about what they are thinking and feeling. Are they looking at you, or gazing away? Are they fidgety or still? If you can’t see the person, you loose that information. I’m not talking about advanced body language reading skills, just understanding “how is my relationship?” or “am I spending enough time with them?”

And That’s Not All

I haven’t got to the most important reason for meeting up face to face. Non-verbal communication is great, but there is something else that only happens when you physically go somewhere to meet up. Chance conversations. When I was working in Asian cultures, it took me a while to realise the important conversations were the ones that happened when the formal ones were over. Actually it’s no different anywhere in the world.

While email and phone might be informal compared to the written letters of old, they still aren’t as informal as we like to think they are. We are trained to be efficient on the phone, and conversations are stilted, even in video conferences with the very latest high definition equipment. Our brain knows that valuable bits of communication are missing, and it longs to have the gaps filled in. A conversation, in a relaxed atmosphere, is something unique. We crave it, but too often we deny ourselves the opportunity for it. In difficult times, it is the only way to figure out what is going on. It is the only way to build strong relationships that will protect you and your business. It is the only thing that provides the confidence to get on and get things done. It also surfaces the extra nuggets of information that enable the entrepreneur to succeed.  Trust your instincts on this one.

Balancing Online and Offline

There was a peace in the Mail Online today - How using Facebook could raise your risk of cancer. Ordinarily it isn’t something I would rise to citing, but it has been interesting to see the reaction on-line. Dr Aric Sigman, quoted in the article, probably hasn’t made any friends in the on-line world, but I doubt he is bothered about that. Don’t worry, he has written about how TV is killing us too. In case the comments people have added to the piece don’t provide enough entertainment for, you, check out the spoof “Daily Mail says Postal System Causes Cancer“ by the incorrigible Tom Morris. Needless to say, neither represents a systematic research piece!

I’m definitely not reducing the importance or the power of digital communication. The mass media makes much of ‘the battle’ between online (social media and social networking) and offline. While they might appear to be warring for our time – or budget in the case of business – in a healthy set up, they are complementary to each other.

As a business, for almost everything except on-line retail, you want to end up face to face with potential customers. You want potential customers and your sales channel to meet and transact business. For personal relationships, eventually you want to push past the technology and meet the people “in real life”. Social media scales your ability to reach out to new contacts, and preserve existing ones.

One Thing Leads to Another

Vibrant on-line communities lead to face-to-face meet ups. It is almost inevitable, and has been since the earliest digital communications. In the same way, online tools act as a sustaining mechansim for existing relationships, when distance or time limit contact. The best way to build an on-line community? Get people meeting face to face. Want to preserve a time-scarce or geographically dispersed community? Use on-line tools. One of the reasons that social media is such an effective tool for growing business, or your personal social network, is that it acts as an efficient funnel between “the big wide world” of contacts and our intimate circle of relationships. Which takes me back to where I started…

Meet Up

Now is the time to invest time into important relationships. Check in with your most important customers. Look up your friends. How are they doing? Is there anything that you can be doing to support them? “Chill out” away from the day to day hype and get a proper read on what is happening.

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These days we are all a bit social on-line. We have always been social creatures, but now we have technology to help us manage those connections, from well-known sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Digg, to photo sharing sites like Flickr , even virtual world applications such as Second Life.

Computer technology means we can start to map out the relationships an individual has. Certainly we could have done this in the past with paper and pen, but applications like Twitter, Linked-In and Facebook mean that a vast swathe of the population are now submitting details of their relationships into databases, where they can be graphed and modelled by computer. This idea of a social graph – a map of relationships that individuals have with each other – has applications in both business and consumer marketing.

In the early days of the Internet it was joked that “on The Internet nobody knows you are a dog”. However, on today’s Internet we do know who you are, what you do, and the relationships that you have. Depending on your privacy settings, this information is available to a narrower or broader set of people – but it is, nonetheless, available.

One of the most interesting things about making a graph of the relationships is looking at the connections of our connections. Taking an obvious example: I know a few people, those people know other people. With a social graph (or with social media applications) I can see that two of my friends don’t know each other, but they do know a third mutual acquaintance. That creates new ways of introducing people to each other, and strengthening relationships with mutual contacts (see the Dunbar’s Number – Groups, Language and Social Media post with reference to tribes and clans in this context).

In some ways there’s nothing new there. Social people have been doing this sort of thing for millenia, but what is new is that people can use computer technology to identify friends or contacts that might be relevant with information that might previously have been missed or unnoticed. I have two friends who live at the opposite ends of the country, who I’ve never seen at the same time, and I assumed never knew each other. It wasn’t until Facebook came on the scene that I realised they went to the same school as children. A detail that might not (and in fact did not) come up in years of conversation.

This idea is codified in the concept of friends of a friend or “FOAF“. It was an early attempt to capture a person’s social graph and publish it on the web. The idea is that I could embed a list people that I know on my web site, so that you can see who you know too – that way you can see if you are a friend of a friend. One hop away on the social graph. By identifying those mutual contacts it provides a way for us to come to know each other. That is the concept that business social networking site LinkedIn is based upon.

So how does FOAF work? It uses something called RDF – Resource Description Framework – to express metadata, that is information about information. In the case of FOAF that is information about people and their interests, relationships and actitivites.

FOAF uses RDF to express metadata about people, and their interests, relationships and activities. Founded by Dan Brickley and Libby Miller, FOAF is an open community-lead initiative which is tackling head-on the wider Semantic Web goal of creating a machine processable web of data.

Semantic web overlays data about data on the Internet so that computers can make sense of it. Because FOAF information is machine readable, computer applications can read it and process it to present information or bring things to our attention. So a very simple and idealistic view might be you come to my website or my page on Facebook and the web brouser automatically picks up that FOAF information and is able to notifiy you that there are some people we know in common. The idea is to build that information into all sorts of web pages so that many applications become, as it were, social or at least socially aware.

So FOAF, in the technical sense, is a very simple text structure, based on an XML format, which is machine and human readable – although not too pretty for a human. It is very easy to write applications to use it. A FOAF entry might include information such as my name, gender, title, what my preferred nickname is, separate out my family name, point to my home page or my blog, and include similar information for my contacts. It is a very simple piece of data, but we can add details about the nature of the relationships. It isn’t as complex as it probably sounds, it is flat text, which might look a bit like this:

<foaf:Person>
   <foaf:name>Benjamin Ellis</foaf:name>
   <foaf:gender>Male</foaf:gender>
   <foaf:title>Mr</foaf:title>
   <foaf:givenname>Benjamin</foaf:givenname>
   <foaf:family_name>Ellis</foaf:family_name>
   <foaf:nick >jamin</foaf:nick>
   <foaf:mbox_sha1sum>...(inverse functional property)...</foaf:mbox_sha1sum>
   <foaf:homepage rdf:resource="http://www.benjaminellis.co.uk"/>
   <foaf:weblog rdf:resource="http://www.redcatco.com/blog/"/>
   <foaf:workplacehomepage rdf:resource="http://redcatco.com/" />
   <foaf:depiction
           rdf:resource="http://benjaminellis/images/bmje.jpg" />
   <foaf:knows>
       <foaf:Person>
         <foaf:name>Joe Blogs</foaf:name>
       </foaf:Person>   
   </foaf:knows>
 </foaf:Person>

What does all this technology do? It give us opportunities to introduce people to other people, or to find people via mutual contacts. It might be computer-based, but the end goal is human to human social interaction. The power of my social graph, the map of my relationships, is not just in the releationsips I have, but also in that friend of a friend information – The relationships my contacts have, and they or I might have as a result of them.

People’s social graphs are exceptionally complicated. The FOAF proposal is a long way from providing even the beginnings of being able to express the relationships we have. I’ve played in a band with someone across the street, who baby sits for us on occasion. Are they my neighbour? A fellow musician? My baby sitter? Computers struggle with such vagaries, some people thrive on them. A social graph is not a simple star with me in the middle and people around the outside. It is actually a complex mixture of more and less connected individuals.

In using social networking platforms for marketing, agencies often seek out the person with the most ‘connections’ or ‘friends’. That is an error. Who is going to be more effective in propagating a message – someone with 350 contacts, or someone with 20? It depends as much on the second and third degrees of their social graph (ie out to the friend of a friend level) as on the direct contacts in the first.

One person might know 100 contacts, another might know 10. For the person who knows 100 contacts each of those people might know 100 or they might know a 1,000. Some of them may be very well connected , some may have a few tightly formed relationships, that are heavily meshed –  where all their contacts and mutual friends are related. Others may be outliers, or bridgers as I like to call them, sitting across different communities. They might only have a few relationships. but they bridge between large communities.

Social software, even in its current form, is effective in the ‘discovery’ phase of relationships. One of the reasons that Twitter is so popular with many is that it makes it easy to find new people, based on their interests or experience, and start exchanges with them. Browsers like Flock aim to integrate the social and data aspects of web surfing. The area certainly has a lot of potential, for example knowing that a web site is written by a friend of a trusted friend might have me interpret the information as more trusted than that of a total stranger (for better or for worse). There are applications that generate FOAF from your Facebook page , Firefox includes a built in FOAF browser.

FOAF also has the potential to act as a format for porting our social graphs from one social networking platform to another (as long as the platforms stop banning people for running export scripts). A number of platforms (at last a dozen at last count) already allow exporting data as FOAF information. The approach might also be useful in the Enterprise 2.0 context, where social graphs might need to be used across applications.

All of this is, of course, still in a nascent stage. Be it FOAF, or a functionally equivalent standard, we will be seeing a lot more activity around the portability and interpretation of social graph data in the coming year. In the mean time, don’t forget that it is all about connecting with people!

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This post is based on the talk I gave at Media Camp London 2 last month, with thanks to alex4d who diligently took notes and live tweeted the session. It was useful to see how someone else interpreted what I said. As an aside, in one of those “small world” incidences, Alex and I  had worked at the same radio station back in the 80′s, although not at the same time.

It is a three layer model. Imagine a slice of a pie, with you on the outside, and digital media in the middle. Taking things one at a time:

The Media In Social Media

By media I mean media as in digital content, rather than “The Media” as in the press – the joys of overloaded words in English and the confusion they cause. Social tools use digital media based on the modalities of our senses. Today’s tools are built around the audio or visual modalities (or in the case of most video services, both). So far we are thankfully spared tools based around touch, taste and smell, but who knows what is around the corner!

I like the ideal of “VITAL”, which I first came across via Kosso, of Phreadz fame. VITAL stands for Video, Image, Text, Audio, and Links. I like it mostly because it is a memorable acronym, and is a good reminder that some tools might simply point to the media (with a hyperlink reference). Media deserves more discussion, but I’ll save that for the next post.

Social Tools

The biggest difference between platforms is not the media that they support, it is actually the tool they apply to the media. The predominant functionality of a social networking platform is in how it causes users to interact – that’s why it is called “social” after all. Social media platforms cause people to interact around digital media objects, by distributing them and allowing users to annotate them in different ways. Again, a fuller explanation is for a future post, but remember that the tools that the platform provides are a key differentiator. Specific tools drive behaviours and attract different types of users.

The Community

One of the most frequently overlooked, but obvious, differences between platforms is their communities. Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube et al all have their unique community. Individuals may belong to multiple communities, but it is almost impossible for two different platforms to have identical communities. Even if they did, the communities would still have distinct feels, based on how the tools cause people to interact. There is a further dimension to the issue of community. In the early days, a platform might only have a single “community”, but as they grow the reality is that the community fragments into multiple communities on the one platform. That is actually a good thing (see Dunbar’s Number and social media for more background), and these different communities aren’t completely separate.

Understanding the interaction between the community and the tool is essential to understanding how platforms evolve. A great tool with a poor community is unlikely to survive, while a mediocre tool with a great community can get off the ground – proof that, given sufficient thrust, pigs can indeed fly, on the Internet at least.

So, next time you are trying to understand the difference between two social networking platforms, try breaking it down into these layers:

• Media – What sort of medium is it based around? Is it direct, or link based. Text or Image?
• Tool – How does it operate on the media, and how does it enable users to interact?
• Community – what is the user base, or are their different subsets of users? Who are they?

In answering these questions, you will be able to build a picture of what differentiates the platform, and what use it might be best suited to.

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 If you look at my copy of CauseWired, you’ll see that I’ve marked more than one or two pages out, and if you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know that I’ve been reading it for quite a while. Reading. Thinking. Reading.

It is worth remembering where I am coming from here. I got into the Internet because I was captivated by the power it had to connect people, and the things that happened when it did. I saw technology as a tool for creating positive change.

The companies I have worked for have lead me into commercial business. I’ve worked to create markets, fund companies, sell companies and buy companies, but in parallel to that I’ve also served on the board of trustees for a charity and run with the occasional social cause. I’m no expert on philanthropy or social action, but I do see it as an essential balance to the activities of the commercial world. It is something that the commercially-minded should be actively engaged in. It is no coincidence that some of the richest people on the planet are the greatest philanthropists.

CauseWired, or rather “CauseWired – Plugging in, Getting Involved, Changing the World,” to give the book its full title, makes a big claim. It is about changing the circumstances of others, through your own actions, something that Tom Watson knows about. This particular Tom Watson isn’t the UK MP (here), he’s this one, the US journalist and media critic (fuller bio on the Changing Our World site). There is a link between them, I’ll come back to. The book charts how social networks, like Facebook and a range of more specialist sites, are changing the world of charities/nonprofits and social causes.

Let me take this post as an example of the new dynamic social media (and social networking) is creating. I found out about the book via twitter, got details via a blog post and contacted the publishers via email. I started following Tom, via twitter, as I was interested in his work. Through Twitter I realised that Tom (US) knew Tom (UK), who I’ve followed on twitter since the New York Digital Mission.

 I usually post pictures of my travels to photo-sharing site Flickr, and recently posted one of my good self reading CauseWired. Tom commented on the photo, tweeted about it and linked to it in a post on his blog [I hope you are still managing to follow the thread!] The Amazon site picked up that blog post, and so, currently, there I am reading in a picture on the Amazon page for the book (here). I’ve just put that link as my Facebook status update, and… To be continued.

Now, none of that has changed the world, although I’m hoping that someone who reads the book as a result will. However, there are now a few hundred people who know we have a shared interest and skills that can be brought to bear on a cause. Connections and conversations on this kind of global scale would have been unlikely before the web, or more specifically before social media came to the web. Activists can amplify their efforts, create awareness and join forces with like minded individuals. That, in essence, is what CauseWired is about: How new communications technology is revolutionizing the flow of money and talent in the third sector.

The book weaves a course across the short history and global geography of the CauseWired phenomenon. The introduction felt a little long, but I have been buried in much of the subject matter for a long time so that may just be me. Once I was through that, I started busily scribbling notes and pondering deep thoughts.

Reading the book was like seeing from the other side of a two way mirror. I know the technologies and many of the causes that Tom uses as examples, but in telling the inside story, he brings them to life with a new freshness. The smaller examples in the book are even more interesting than the larger ones. Traditional broadcast media often leads the rally for the big causes. Social media has created the bandwidth for the smaller ones to emerge, the ones that don’t get big media air-time, in their early days at least. That is a qualitative change in the way that things work.

The big take aways and aha’s for me:

• There is a big difference between being aware or interested and engaged and active.
• We’ve been doing this stuff ‘forever’ – I remember charitable activity on the Bulletin boards in the 80′s – it is the tools and scale that has changed.
• This is yet another inter-generational fault-line.
• The shift from anonymity to authenticity is high-impact. “On the Internet no-one knows you are a dog” was 90′s. “I am…” is the 00′s.
• The powerful stuff happens when the on-line meet off-line and the off-line comes on-line.
• Tom Watson mentions Tom Watson in the book, in the context of UK open government, a slightly surreal moment.
• There’s more… Which I’ll come back to in future posts.
• Reading this book will be expensive – I’ve added lots of the books mentioned on to my Amazon wish list, and found some interesting causes.

If you’re in business, and you plan to hire or work with millennials, you better have a cause and/or be involved in one. CauseWired is a good place to start to understand that world. This book doesn’t aim to dig into the depths of social media. It isn’t going to lose the uninitiated, and experts shouldn’t expect any great revelations in that domain. It does illuminate wired causes, and provide a wealth of illustrations. If you work for a charity or not-for-profit, read this book. Digest it. Then read it again. It is the new shape of your world.

For our own mental well being, all of us need to be involved in something that transcends the ‘me’ and engages with the ‘us’, something that reaches beyond the ‘now’ to the tomorrow and beyond. If you haven’t done that yet, then Tom’s book will give you insight into what can be achieved, together with a list of places to get engaged in a rewarding way.

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At the time, networks were new and exciting things – they were the web 2.0 of their time. Ethernet, Bob Metcalfe’s technology, had some unusual properties, which are still true nearly 30 years on, now that it connects almost every computer in the average office:

• Everything ON an Ethernet network is connected TO everything on the network (hold that thought).
• All connections are equal, in as much as it didn’t matter where you connected, you got the same.
• Everything on the network receives everything sent to the network (this one has changed slightly).

Compared to point to point or ring based networks most of us fought with at the time, this was revolutionary stuff. Metcalfe asserted that the value of such a network was the square of the number of nodes on it: n^2 (or n x n for the benefit of Windows calculator in basic mode). A picture explains better:

Matcalfe’s law

Matcalfe’s law has been held up along side the likes of Moore’s Law as the foundation of Internet growth, but there are at least a couple of problems with that:

• A. It was never really an empirically proven law.
• B. If it was, we have well and truly broken it.

Alan points to some of the reasons for that, but I’d like to dissect it another way, in thinking about social networks and social media. There are some implicit assumptions in Metcale’s law:

1. All nodes start equal (a node here could be a computer, person, etc…).
2. Every node is equally connected.
3. The interaction of the nodes does not change their value (all nodes stay equal).

If these three things aren’t true for today’s Internet or for social networks, then Metcalfe’s Law probably does not apply. Are they true? Do they reflect a network with people as nodes? One by one:

1. In today’s Internet, as with many things, it turns out that not all nodes are equal. In fact it is often an inverse power law, or a 1/n rule. You see this with blogs, where a small proportion account for the majority of traffic. On most computer networks you have desktop machines (clients) and servers. In people you have introverts and extroverts. Definitely not all equal.
2. The bandwidth or connectivity between nodes is not just about how much is available, it is also about how much is used. We may be able to phone each other, but do we? Also, today’s networks, social or otherwise, have nodes that are connected to more than others – be it Scoble or a Google server. This is the most asymmetric part of social networks and the Internet today.
3. Transactional models have made a huge difference in Psychology. They apply equally well to social computing. The way that nodes (or people!) interact with each other changes their value, and how they interact with other nodes. I start commenting on a blog, I change its value to others. This interaction is one of the very dynamic things in the blogosphere. A complex dynamic, but a key to the value.

A Different Law of Social Media Networks?

By the way, I’m not throwing stones at the law, that would be far too fashionable, as a quick search would show! Two related laws, which Alan picked up on are Sarnoff’s Law (for broadcast networks – their value is proportional to the number of viewers, nice straight line stuff) and Reed’s Law (which is highly exponential, essential saying that Metcalfe’s law understates the value of a network). Somewhere inbetween Sarnoff’s Law and Reed’s Law is the value of a network. Remember, all of these Law’s say that the value is proportional, we aren’t talking absolutes – we can’t say your network is worth “12″ – whatever the units for such a measurement might be.

It was the thinking around uncapped exponential models which caused much of the dot com madness – the myth of infinite scale and near infinite value from huge scale. The reality is that networks actually reach a point of diminishing returns. Some have argued for an inverse of Metcalfe’s law for social sites. It is interesting to think about why this is, at least from looking at computer networks:

• Broadcast noise – this is the reason really big (Ethernet) networks don’t work well. Broadcast packets which go out to everyone, if you get too many devices on the network, sending too many, you end up spending your whole time trying to take it all in. Nodes have no processing power left to get processing done or to send data. This is probably familiar to Twitter addicts! For broadcast media to be two way requires ‘turn taking’ and that gets harder as there are more involved.
• Finite (global) bandwidth. Bandwidth is finite, based on technology and physical infrastructure (if you want to argue this one, go and look at how many under sea cables there are/aren’t). As you add more devices, they share than bandwidth pool, however it is constrained. That means less and less information can be sent. Think of it this way, what happens if you open 100 web pages at once, or if you had 4,000 friends and a single phone was your only means of communication.
• Networks in networks. The Internet provides universal connectivity – pretty much everything is connected to pretty much everything, give or take the occasional blip and governmental intervention. However, the network we experience is not the servers and routers that make it up, it is the applications on them. Web servers running blog software and other applications. These are not universally connected. At the high layers, we revert to point-to-point communication, which puts everything back to a linear model. When the conversation moves from the blog to IM or the phone, others loose out, but at scale that is how it has to be.

Metcalfe’s Law and Dunbar’s Number

This all brings me to Dunbar’s Number, which Alan just had to drag into it! For background see earlier posts on the complete bounds of our social networks: Part I and Part II. Many tout the Dunbar number. I it might be better off throwing around Metcalfe. The law was valid at the time, and in the context, but the way that networks work have changed and evolved means that Metcalfe’s law needs to be evolved accordingly, and many a postgrad is pursuing that one. Likewise with the Dundar number.

Dunbar took research on primates, then scaled the numbers to reflect our larger brains. However, we no longer interact as apes do. Our day to day communication is not just face to face, but increasingly mediated by technology. Ambient communication (like Twitter), blogs, photosharing, Dopplr and Instant Messaging are changing the nature of our communications and relationships.

Welcome to the global beta program, there is no planned release date, little support, no product manager and no uninstall option. We need to take the best that we know, from psychology, systems theory and wherever else we can find, and hold on tight for the ride!

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The village is a social concept that most of us are familiar with, at least theoretically. An early village was social network, with bounds. Without modern communications and affordable transport, villages were isolated communities, with the occasional messengers travelling between them carrying news. The social network in a village was tightly meshed. Not only did you know someone, you knew everyone that they knew – mutual friends and friends of friends. People had a strong shared context too (culture, history and other knowledge).

Cheap transportation, followed by electronic communication, has enabled ‘villages’ to grow into global communities. In communication terms, I am as close to someone on the other side of the planet, as someone on the other side of the office – sometimes closer. For me this has been one of the joys of using enterprise Wikis and digital media in the business context. Productivity is increased, there is a reduced need to travel, and greater access to a global talent pool.

However, we have lost that shared context and deep meshing of the village. The village model enforced symmetry in people’s networks – knowing people outside of the village boundary took great effort. That isn’t the case anymore. In recent years we have come to live with more fragmented networks, as people commute long distances to work, and travel more. For a while, mass media created a shared context for us: We read the same news and watched the same television programs. But today, with hundreds of channels and more and more micro-publishers (e.g. podcasts) even the media is now fragmented.

We can end up becoming more and more ‘niched’ into our areas of interest and expertise, but less and less deeply connected. What little shared context we have is dwindling. Perhaps that is why celebrities are so lauded these days – they are one of the few remaining things that we universally share.

Facebook, twitter et. al have held a mirror up to us. Now we can see our social networks for what they are – fascinatingly complex, frighteningly large and increasingly fragmented. We are pushing the bounds of our social attachments, not so much in the number of people we know, but rather in the depth of context that we share across the network.

We need shared context and history for efficient communication, to preserve relationships – especially in the work place. The right use of social media can create this. Sharing news stories and updates, as well as a good old face to face meet up, even just to have fun, are investments. They strengthen our social network s and improve communication in the long run.

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Paul Graham wrote an essay “You weren’t meant to have a boss” which is really about large versus small companies, and it raises some good questions – if a little controversially.

However, it is Robin Dunbar (now teaching at Oxford) who produced the most famous research, back in 1993. His work was popularised in Malcolm Gladwell’s book ‘The Tipping Point’ – to such extent that many in the social media space talk about “Dunbar’s number“.

Dunbar took research on non-human primate social groups and used some (fairly finger in the air – by his own admission) statistical methods to extrapolate this to humans. Based on our brain’s larger neocortex size, he predicted 150 as the mean size limit for a human’s meaningful social network.

This has been widely used as a sound-bite, even featuring in The Wall Street Journal (article written by Carl Bialik). In a later paper (2003), Dunbar talks about a number range of 100-300 as the number of people in our social world (defined as the people we might turn to in severe stress, or at least approach at the airport if we needed help).

Now that we have social software, we can study people’s social graphs in ways that were very difficult previously. That said, some of the research is a little esoteric, for example Christopher Allen has an interesting post with links to research on the playon blog, looking at data from groups on World of Warcraft (for the non-gamers out there, this is a massively multiplayer on-line role playing game). We have to remember that on-line games and social networking sites like Facebook don’t directly relate to real life relationships – much as the average Facebook addict might find that hard to accept.

Researchers also have the concept of subgraphs – essentially tighter ‘cliques’ that exist within the social graph, as clusters of more tightly meshed relationships, that is individuals who have more mutual friends. In his book ‘Evolutionary Psychology’, Dunbar talks about circles of intimacy – different rings of friendship, with different levels of intimacy. We can map that to our own lives, where we usually have a smaller group of people that we are closer to.

Although Dunbar doesn’t use social networks, his view is that they might help our brains push past this limit. However, on-line networking doesn’t replace the social grooming required to maintain relationships. We still need to meet ‘IRL’ (in real life). He isn’t sold on the idea that social networks make his number outdated. Language may provide a cheaper form of social grooming – it certainly beats picking nits out of your friend’s hair – but it isn’t clear if communication technology provides even greater short cuts. The research, Dunbar says, “made us realize people don’t know what these wretched things called relationships are — and that helps explain why we’re so bad at them”.

Continued in Part II >>

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I’m am convinced that the business technology of the future is the consumer technology of today. In past decades technology flowed from business use to consumer use. Think of things like mobile phones and email, which started off as business tools, then became affordable and accessible at home. That flow is now reversing. The productivity tools of the future are in use by the youth of today, and they will bring them into businesses as they join the workforce. It will be the consumerization of IT.

Back in December, I was at Chinwag Live, Xmas Futures, Crystal Balls, an event that gathers some of the most intelligent figures from the world of digital marketing to have a shot at predicting where the industry will be in 5 years time. Now, if property prices are anything to go by, the newspapers are having trouble agreeing on what happened last month, so predicting technology five years out is a long shot! But this is an arena that is on the cutting edge of change and gets to see just that little bit further ahead.

The event confirmed many of my current thoughts, as well as being a great chance to have some meaningful debate. Here I am with the legendary Sam Michel, CEO of Chinwag, at the end of the session as we mulled over the discussions (there is a podcast here).

Social media is becoming more and more prominent. Jon Bains – Co-Founder of Lateral – raised the issue of Facebook versus LinkedIn. For me, the two are complimentary. I use Facebook for personal friends and LinkedIn for work associates, and some people I connect to on both – you’ll find a link to my LinkedIn profile in the about page. They represent two very different faces, excuse pun, of social networking applications. The teen-laden, wild partying Facebook, and the straight-laced executive LinkedIn. Now I hear of more and more people using even Facebook for business networking.

Today’s business leaders and tomorrow’s will be very different. The fact is that social networking tools, in one form or another, are here to stay. I predict they will be standard tools for many large businesses in years to come, although run on private, secure intranets.

Today most IT managers and business leaders are missing out on the potential productivity benefits of these tools. They provide an amazing ability to create and strengthen social bonds in businesses and enable people to find the resources they need to get their job done. In years gone by, the resources we needed to get the job done were ‘things’. Where is the plough? Where is the hammer?

Today, in a knowledge-led business world, they are the people with knowledge and skills. Where is someone who understands this? Where is the person who can interpret this data? Where is someone who has done this before? In a large company, with many staff telecommuting, you can’t get those answers by shouting across the desk anymore. Something else is needed.

Microsoft sponsored some recent research on skills businesses need, which is covered in an interesting BBC article here. The modern work place demands both people skills and IT skills. These two skill sets are becoming intertwined, as computers become the medium through which we communicate. Social Networking tools are powerful at expanding our social network, both in business and at home. Used badly, they can be a massive drain in terms of time and stress (see “web 2.0 as the new master” by Maz Hardy). Used wisely, they just might be one of the productivity tools of the future.

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