Community Mobilization

The Anantomy of Virality or How StopKony Spread

This post on Social Flow's website does a great job of creating a visual representation of the network that drove the Stop Kony message into a viral tizzie over the course of the last week. Moreover the article does a great job of pinpointing the underlying mechanisims and prerequisites that enabled the video to take off and go viral so quickly.

First Invisible Children had a pre exiting network to seed and spread the video.

Secont they had a preexiwting network of Celebrities associated with their cause.

Third they activated their network all at once, and drive them to not only share their own message but also pressure the celebrity base.

The net effect is a verry fast and furrious publicity spike that creates ripples and aftershock spikes over the course of a week. Like a pebble landin in a pond or an earthquake there is an initial surge of traffic and then subsequent smaller rushes of eneregy. The real question posed is if this is a sustainable model for garnering attention or not.

Social Collaboraton in Enterprise

I was lucky enough to be interviewed for this project a number of moths ago and am very excited to read the pre-release of the book. David Coleman did an exceptional job surveying and engaging collaborators within enterprise to see how social tools can drive collaboration.

I was very excited to hear David mention Basecamp and PB Wiki (tools I love to use) as cornerstones of his new book writing process. David's new book 42 Rules for Successful collaboration is an amalgam of input form those who use these systems and tools on a daily basis.

FinNode Studies Successful Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration Strategies from Mark Addison on Vimeo.

The interview is interesting and give a lot of insight into the inital findings but also highlights some of the key challenges with enterprise level collaboration systems. Many years ago I helped ferret out an internal portal and found that AirProducts and Chemicals Co. in Allentown, PA had an exceptional tool. Collaboration tools and systems are not just about effeciency and communication, but also about getting th emost out of hiden tallents in your employees. I look forward to reading the file and think about internal social networks and relationship structures as an overlay on systems.

Do Social Networks Make Good Friends

I got a ping when I looked at my Facebook Account the other day reminding me it was a friend's birthday. He is a good friend, someone I have know for over a decade, and so I sent him a message and gave a call congratulating him on another year. This is also the same friend who has been in and out of the hospital battling pneumonia, but you would never have know it from his profile.

To what extent do social networks provide the rudimentary bits of data to help people identify as a 'friend', and blur the meaning of a friendship? In addition have social networks spaces changed our definition of Friend to whomever finds us in the digital spaces and asks to befriend us? And most curious to me is do we have different standards for what constitutes a real world friend and an online friend?

I do not ask these questions rhetorically, I am honestly interested in the evolving definition of Friend. And once we understand the barrier to entry, I think we have to look at what the expectations and benefits are to both. Is it more permissible for a live friend to miss a birthday vs the digital on line friend who has the system as a crib sheet to important data?If you are in distress who get put on the telephone tree - either or both?  Most importantly who holds the most sway in helping you with decision making?

I think the last one is the million dollar question. There are associations and conference all based on word of mouth marketing, but have we measured the value or power of word of text? Does the digital friend have the same impact on your decision making as the real world friend? I would be hesitant to throw blanket statements over this, and end the post with my hope that there may be some genuine longitudinal market research showcasing the value propositions that exist in digital friends.

Social Media Marketing vs. Word of Mouth? Are You Crazy?

I was having a conversation with a fellow marketing professional the other day and we lamented about recent conversations we had both overheard about the strategic independence of word of mouth marketing and social network marketing.

Certain organizations we both interface with are retooling their marketing approach to segment word of mouth and social media, but they are missing the point that this is all one in the same. The ability to deliver a compelling message and have it spread from one person to the next is equally as critical in traditional media as it is in new social media. When consider that 'net speed' is 7X faster than real life, we have to really consider who is king here - channel, content, or connection.

Quitting Smoking happens in Social Networks

A study from Harvard Medical School and the University of California, San Diego appearing in the May 22 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine finds smoking cessation occurs in network clusters. The idea of getting help to achieve a goal is nothing new but here is empirical data that supports the support group. The primary finding of this study is that smoking cessation tends to be contagious, i.e. people tend to make the decision to quit smoking based on the influence of their social networks.

The study is important because it points to the fact that legislating out smoking via taxation and smoking bans push smokers to the fringe of their social networks, and it is clearly important to have a 'quitting network'.

NNDB Mapping Tool

NNDB has created a mapping tool that allows you to create a visual map of the connections amongst the people in the database. The visualizations are enlightening and provide a unique perspective to viewers.
Visualizations are fantastic ways to examine complex data sets. Rob Cross from UVA has been using data visualization tools such as UCI net to track information and energy networks.

NNDB is an intelligence aggregator that tracks the activities of people we have determined to be noteworthy, both living and dead. Superficially, it seems much like a "Who's Who" where a noted person's curriculum vitae is available (the usual information such as date of birth, a biography, and other essential facts.

Will Web 2.0 Transform Market Research

Our friends at Forester Research have a new article out discussing the value of using online social media and social networks in market research. The immediate reaction is that social networks are a complete collection of lowest common denominator banter and hollow ramblings and musings. My response to that is  ... well yea.

Think about the value of a focus group, and how it comes from collecting an assortment of average people to talk about or review a concept or a product. In non profits we may use them for website usability testing, or new patient service programs. If we are looking at the average John and Jane then why would we not got into social networking spaces for feedback?

The article hints at the cost structure involved in using the spaces to collect data and how it could reduce the response costs and increase response rates. Already there are survey applications appearing on Facebooks and Myspace. The next great leap forward is going to be targeted surveys based on profile information and purchase information. That is the 4th monetization strategy of Social Networks.

Influence of Internal and External Networks on the Outcomes of Strategic Change in Organizations

Alexander Alexiev is presenting on the internal and external networks have direct impact on strategic decision making from top level leadership. The complexity of decision making is complex so the research looked at the difference in exploitation and exploration. He is looking at the network differentiation in ration vs. consensus decision making. Only Ration is featured in the report. Two major factors were the homogeneity and consistency of senior management and the change pace of the market the industry was in.

In exploration having a Heterogeneous  board for  exploration overrules outside social network influences. The same thing is true in the dynamic fast paced environment - a heterogeneous core is very critical. One of the key future factors will be the tracking of centrality of executive officers and the bounds of external networks and their reach. Access of those networks is also a key consideration. The dependent variable was sales and product development and the question was if the new innovations were tied to new technologies or revivals of existing items.

INSNA Conference morning sessions

Neighborhood norms of Reciprocity, Netwrok Social Capital and Depressive symptoms.

 

Valerie Haines presented this unique study that examined health care, and how neighborhoods helped themselves stay connected to mental health care in particular surrounding depressive symptoms. The study looked at 32 neighborhoods in a mid sized southern city. They study employed phone and personal interviews. The study was looking at Network social capital – the ability and capacity to get members of the network the capital and access they need. The questions looked at perception of how willing neighbors were to be of help. The research questioned a set of resources including education, health care, and employment resources. The studies overall state that perceived support is more important than received support.

 

The study found that the access to social capital impacts depressive systems. Moreover the study team did conduct a study in

New Orleans

pre-Katrina and they plan to return to follow up, now that a good amount of the network social capital has been eroded by the storm and ensuing population change.

 

 

Mass Media Programming and Contraceptive use in

Nepal

Marc Boulay

 

The study evaluated the personal network for injunctive (active) and Descriptive norms (passive) around birth control. So the study looked at if these norms influenced birth control adoption and how. This is a significant research as it addresses basic personal network power to persuade an individual health choice. As a matter of research it shows that if a majority (51%) of your network uses contraceptive then you are 90% more likely to do so. Moreover there was an additive effect (sum is greater than the parts) when there was injunctive and descriptive norms in individual’s personal network. As a matter of research those who listened to the radio serials that discussed birth control, and then participated in a discussion group, were much more likely to have a favorable opinion of contraceptive.

 

Social network activities in Health Promoting Schools in Thiland

 

The WHO identifies

Health

Promoting

School

as an effective methodology to develop effective education system within countries.

Thailand

began the HPS in 1988. The study looks at networks of Gold standard quality (as measured by 10 metrics set by the Thai education department) and Bronze schools. The researcher looked at the difference between the network structure of the school population using survey questions and UCINet for analysis.  One of the questions that was posed in the discussion was if a segregated group that appeared on the network map were the smokers.

 

How Does network Structure impact performance – On Water Collection and Utilization

Water collectives serve about 850 K households with some cooperative being as small as 40 houses and some being as large as 50,000 houses. The cooperative managers were a key subject in the study. The study looked at how do different networks address the low income household need for water. Part of the intrigue is that water cooperatives serve a wide range of socio economic homes from lean-toos to million dollar mansions. Social networks of the water managers as well as the social pressures are key to keeping the water on to all homes. Formal affiliation with a national water management organization or another national league did not have a significant impact on the performance of the water cooperative.

Moving up in The Game: Status and Attention in Hip Hop Music

The Social Network of Hip Hop Dis songs Within hip hop there are directional relationships amongst dis songs and the flow of energy to and from rappers. There is a centrality  component in dis networks. The questions become what happens to the actors involved in the network and why are they dissing each others. In the late 1990s dis songs lost popularity in lieu of murders. The qualitative data included in a dis includes content as well as album sales. Furthermore there is a public perception attribute to dis. Affiliation with a high status person (positive or negative) has a positive impact on popularity or status. Methodology looked at may 1 2001 – January 1 2007. The sample included 203 rappers looking at sales and award data as well. What impact to the relationships have on performance in terms of sales. In degrees are disses in and out degree are disses out. Disses in have a positive sales impact. Status was determined by Gold record sales. Being dissed by a higher status improves your own status. However dissing upwards is more beneficial than dissing down. Reciprocity view over a one year period says that diss reciprocity is positive. Giving a response to a diss has an inconclusive impact on sales. Most importantly the Diss is mediated by the industry status structure.