January 2009 Archives

For some time, most marketers have agreed that if you want to grow a social media website, or sell stuff through one, a good strategy is to target your offering to "Influentials." If you define Influentials as highly connected people who try stuff out and like to advise others about it all (Keller & Berry, 2003), the thinking has been that these folks are better able to spread an idea than less-connected people.

But targeting Influentials costs money, so it had better work.

Last year, network mathematician and sociologist Duncan Watts together with Peter Dodds (2007) published the results of their computer models of complex networks that questioned this view. Essentially, under a variety of assumptions they found that highly connected people were no more likely than average-connected people to start "cascades," that is, the widespread viral propagation of an idea that ends up being seen by most everyone (like the Facebook explosion, or hush-puppy shoes). Using a forest-fire analogy, Watt & Dodds wrote "no one would claim that the size of a forest fire can be in any way attributed to the exceptional properties of the spark that ignited it." So too, the size of a fad, they found, bears little relation to the popularity of the person who started it.

Watts & Dodds (2007) didn't argue that Influentials don't exist; they concede that they're highly connected and that they try to influence others. But they believe that what's more important is that the ideas get to "easily influenced individuals influencing other easy-to-influence people." Using their forest-fire analogy, they argue "wind, temperature, low humidity, and combustible fuel" are more important to a raging fire/fad than the spark.

Put another way, the subtitle for Keller & Berry's (2003) book is "One American in Ten Tells the Other Nine How to Vote, Where to Eat, and What to Buy." Watts is just saying that doesn't mean they listen. Or pass it on. And that's what matters. It's not about Influentials, it's about the Influenceable.

The debate has only begun, and it will likely take years of semantics, modeling, and empiricism to come to a new refined consensus. BUT in the mean time, you can take advantage of this issue to make sure you're not ignoring any strategy you could be taking with your network.

You should be paying attention to all of the below properties of your network to grow or sell stuff, not just a few of them.

1. increase number of people we all pay a lot of attention to this...

2. increase appeal of the idea ...and this

3. increase number of connections between people. We have Keller & Berry to thank for bringing this to our attention. But it's not all...

4. strengthen the connections between people Watts reminds us of this, which is the intimacy or authority of a connection between people determining how often a recommendation from one to the other is heeded

5. lower the threshold for people to forward and Watts reminds us of this, which is the likelihood that a person will consume and, more importantly, recommend an idea on.

6. increase the number of unique people who forward something to you this is how many different people need to recommend something to you before you adopt. I'll visit a website based on one recommendation. But it takes two to get me to try a restaurant, and four to get me to go to a movie.

The slide deck below shows some ways that designers improve each of the above properties of social networks. Here's a quick verbal summary of two of them:

4. strengthen the connections between people ...oddly enough, you do this by encouraging people to reject friend requests from total strangers. If the digital friendships have no real-world counterpart, they're as meaningless as drawing a line between two random names in the phonebook, and those connections sure as heck aren't going to influence each other to act.

5. lower the threshold for people to forward ...obviously, by making it easier for forward for starters....the goal used to be "1-click forwarding" but then Facebook set a new standard "0-click forwarding"...meaning that they unified the click needed for people to consume content and the click needed for them to forward it into the same click...when I add the YouJustGetMe app the link is automatically forwarded to all my friends on the feed.

And the real lesson here is: All of the above network properties are important. Do some surveys or usability testing (maybe with us!) to learn how to turn up the dial on all of them.

I was recently asked to comment on the news story about the online suicide of Abraham Biggs. Although it is clear that Mr. Biggs was a long suffering victim of bipolar depression, and that a taste of the macabre has clearly driven our interest in this story, I think it does Mr. Biggs no dishonor to ask ourselves - what does this incident reveal about social behavior online and about human nature?

Below are the comments that I sent to the reporter in entirety.

A basic assumption of Psychster Inc., our research and consulting firm dedicated to the psychology of social media, is that people are people both online and offline. So we should expect the full array of human tendencies – constructive, destructive, pro-social, anti-social, conservative, and risky - to be expressed in social media as they are in any other arena of social life. That said, some aspects of online environments enable anti-social tendencies more so than historic, face-to-face environments. These relate to your questions.

First, social media allows us to view and even interact with others under the buffer of a computer interface. This produces “de-individuation” (Festinger, 1952; Milgram, 1962; Zimbardo, 1969) which is a sense of psychological distance from others and a loss of personal accountability that can produce radical behaviors. I suspect that the woman who twittered about hurting her child did not feel as much of a sense of personal accountability as she would if she expressed the same thoughts to others face-to-face. Interestingly, de-individuation can happen even if people are not anonymous (like on Facebook where people use their real names) and regardless of the number of onlookers (which explains our shock, for example, that Abraham Biggs would post his tragic video online despite the potential for millions of people to see it.)

Second, social media allows for “many-to-many communication” through features like boards, comments, and blogs. This form of communication is an essential element for “group polarization” to occur (Moscovici & Zavalloni, 1969), which is when people in groups express more radical views than their individual members would in isolation. Those who urged Abraham Biggs on by posting comments that everyone could see were likely responding to group polarization.

Third, social media allows us to spread our name and ideas far more globally than was previously possible. Thus people often use social media to strive for “memetic fitness” (Dawkins, 1989) which is the propagation of one’s ideas in a population almost synonymous with fame. In some circumstances, people will strive to be remembered even at the cost of longevity or children. Unfortunately, radical actions often spread through the internet as far as rare talents or accomplishments, which creates a powerful motivator for people to post them online.

Summary. Others’ radical actions are no less alarming or disturbing when we encounter them online versus anywhere else. And human nature will always perplex and shock us whether it plays out online or offline. But we should realize that some features of social media make a fertile environment for the expression of radial views and behaviors. Social media makes people feel a sense of psychological distance from others. It allows for many-to-many communication which has long been known to make people express radical views. And the internet can can bring people who post radical actions global attention, which creates a strong motivator for them to do so.

The new media for social behavior is like a new volcanic island in the ocean that is being populated by plants and animals – although there will be a slight evolution in how things look and act, the basic form will reflect its origins.

So rather than asking how social media might be changing us, I think a better question is what does social media reveal about us? And the answer, I suspect, will be the same one that the social sciences and humanities have known all along, that we are a mix of both magnanimity and the macabre.