Entries tagged as ‘social networks’
November 26, 2009 · 1 Comment
Today’s Wall Street Journal includes an interesting article about the Wednesday 10 group–a network of (at the time) up and coming businessmen in New York that was formed in 1957. The group was the brainchild of former columnist William Safire, and the article coincides with the group’s first meeting since his passing. The rationale for the group sounds quite similar to claims about the importance of social networks, organizing for innovation, and the power of weak ties:
When Robert Menschel, a senior director at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., was considering deals involving large consumer companies such as Procter & Gamble, he would pick the brain of fellow club member Ed Meyer, the former chief executive of Grey Advertising.
“We were all young kids starting out, and it is easy when you are so involved in building your career to lose touch with other people who are outside your field,” says Mr. Menschel, who has been at Goldman Sachs for 55 years. “It helped me to understand why other people do what they do—which is important in life and in business. You don’t learn anything from talking to sameness.”
The Wednesday 10 comprised, at various points, more than 20 men; the goal was a number small enough to maintain intimacy yet large enough to ensure that at least 10 members would show up for each of the monthly Wednesday-night meetings. No more than two representatives of any one industry were permitted. The idea was to combat insularity, to keep the men connected to people and events outside their own professions.
The engineering of the group is particularly interesting: keep the group small enough so members could develop some sense of intimacy, but large enough to ensure decent and consistent attendance; and ensure that no single industry was overrepresented. By ensuring diverse membership the group could benefit from an exposure to ideas and viewpoints from outside their day-to-day professional circles. Additionally, the members would invite guest speakers for each session, further benefiting from a diverse membership that could tap into various experts from all sorts of fields.
There are, of course, questions to what extent the group succeeded in maximizing diversity and guarding against sameness. However, the fact that these individuals in late 1950 were cognizant of these issues and tried to guard against them by organizing the group in a specific way is quite impressive and instructional for folks living in the age of social media.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Innovation, LinkedIn, social networks
McKinsey’s Mary Kunz interviewed Mark Helprin and discussed various issues connected to his view that the “‘all free, all the time ethos’ of the Internet threatens to erode the creation of new knowledge and new art”. Helprin is a staunch skeptic of the creative and innovative potential of the Internet. In fact, he stakes out the position that, at best, it will lead to sub-par innovation and, at worse, threatens to degrade our entire modern culture.
Now Helprin does make some valid points; however, I think on balance the conclusions he reaches about new technologies and techniques is overblown and based on his own biases and misunderstandings. I’d like to speak to a few of them below:
Mark Helprin (MH): Before there was copyright, there was very little incentive for people to actually write things and assemble information. With the development of copyright, all that has increased.
I agree with Helprin here and there is quite a lot of excellent research (particularly by economic historians like Douglass North) to back up the notion that the institution of copyright and associated legal protections such as property rights, patents, etc, led to an explosion in creativity and economic development in the Western world. So, point for Helprin.
Mary Kuntz (MK): [...] There’s a lot of activity online right now that’s all about collaboration and crowd sourcing. And some of what gets produced that way people call art. I gather that you would take issue with that?
MH: I would. Crowd sourcing—to me, the words are a nightmare. The great achievement of Western civilization, anyway, has been to end the collective approach to things that marked the early history of man.
In other words, you were defined as part of a group. You were a serf. You were a peasant. You were a slave or whatever. And then in medieval times, you were a member of a guild. And the rights of the individual didn’t really count. What happened with the Greeks and then with Roman law and then over a long, long period culminating in modern times is that we have refined the rights of the individual. Now, obviously collaboration can be very powerful, and it’s important, and we do things in concert with one another. And we advance science that way and many things. But there’s really nothing that can substitute for one mind and one voice.
In a single thought, Helprin does two things: 1) illustrates that he does not truly understand crowdsourcing, but sees it as a threat anyway (and he is surely not alone here); and 2) his entire premise (“nothing can substitute for one mind and one voice) is based on a myth (that of the lone or heroic innovator/creator), one that is contradicted by the two sentences immediately preceding it. Continue reading
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: crowdsourcing, Innovation, social media, social networks
October 28, 2009 · 1 Comment
Andy Oram over at O’Reilly Radar writes a really interesting piece on the work of Erving Goffman and how it relates to identity and the web:
Goffman's classic text
[Goffman's] fundamental contribution is how he slants his premise that we present a front in all our behavior before others. You have to understand that this posturing is real and pervasive, but rarely a consequence of out-and-out deception, or because we have succeeded in deceiving outselves. Usually we simply associate certain behaviors as appropriate in certain circumstances; some stylization is inherent in our interactions.
For instance, just as a certain attention to style–or a stubborn flouting of its demands–enters into the clothes we choose to wear in public, there is inherent artificiality in our choice of screen name on a social network (unless an account related to our real name happens to be available). And whatever we choose certainly expresses something we want to reveal about our nature. This doesn’t mean we are deceiving ourselves or others–we are being ourselves, but in a stylized manner.
Goffman’s approach certainly applies online, because our postings–even our instant messages–are more deliberate acts than our informal behaviors in real life. Although some participants play at being flippant and spontaneous on Facebook walls and microblogs, they must have greater consciousness of their effects on the viewer than most dinner table guests or concert attendees. Our online personas, therefore, conform even more closely to Goffman’s idea of everyday life than our everyday life does.
Goffman is by far one of my favorite social scientists and a major influence on my graduate research and my worldview in general. I recommend the entire piece.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Erving Goffman, Online Communities, reputation, signals, social networks, social science
October 27, 2009 · 1 Comment
Ana Anjdelic responded to my latest post with some very interesting points. She commented that some of my suggestions would significantly increase transaction costs, specifically information search costs incurred by firm. Ana notes that increasing transaction costs in this way contradicts (or runs logically counter to) Coase’s view of the firm. She writes:
It’s true – knowledge “reshuffling” is key to innovation (or, as you said “when it comes to thinking, we need more disruption, not less.”) This reshuffling, however, creates a lot of “noise” (how do you know what you are looking for before you find it?), and ultimately accounts for less-than-efficient organization, because it creates crazy transaction costs.
And reduction of transaction costs is what made firms show up in the first place (in opposition to markets), as Ronald Coase would have said.
So, the very condition that’s critical for generation of new knowledge and/or recombining old and new knowledge is actually detrimental for efficiency. The question then is, how to combine organizational efficiency with innovation?
I think Ana is right to invoke Coase’s theory and to be concerned about drastically increasing transaction costs and it got me thinking.
My view: while historically firms were able to lessen the search costs associated with valuable information, this no longer applies. Firms are no longer the most efficient and effective means for collecting and sourcing innovative ideas and insights. Therefore, as Coase’s theory would predict, firms may need to go beyond their four walls an turn to the market, effectively outsourcing (or co-sourcing) a large portion of idea generation. Additionally, firms can further reduce information and search costs by leveraging technologies that tag, catalog, and organize knowledge–both within and outside firms. Continue reading
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Business, crowdsourcing, Innovation, Organizations, social media, social networks, transaction costs
Ana Andjelic and I have just started a discussion around how to best organize for innovation. (BTW, if you aren’t already a reader you should really check out Ana’s blog, i [love] marketing.) Rather than continue the conversation in the comments thread I thought it might be good to bring it over to the blog.
Ana recently wrote an interesting piece about the impact of organizational structure and systems on performance. In it, she cited a post I wrote on the role of polymaths in innovation. The gist of my post was that there is evidence that individuals with a broad, diverse knowledge base contribute more to innovation than highly specialized “experts”. Ana claimed that what is likely more important than polymaths is the connections between them. On this point I would also agree.
Weak vs. Strong Ties in a Social Network
The discussion has now turned to how you structure an organization to maximize the likelihood of individuals bumping into others with different sets of knowledge. And away we go… Continue reading
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: crowdsourcing, Innovation, Organization, social media, social networks
Christopher Penn discusses an interesting notion–the idea that people don’t actually know what their ideal world looks like.
When we try to solve a problem, or consult with others to help them solve their problems, often time we are told to start by answering this question: In a perfect world, what would this process look like? This product? Etc.
It’s a great starting point–in order to get away from the (assumed) inefficient state of today we need to know what a better state looks like. Even if we can’t get there the answer helps frame the analysis and set goals to work towards. But there is a problem with this approach; it assumes people already know what their ‘perfect world’ looks like.
Chris explains why this is dangerous: Continue reading
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Innovation, social media, social networks
Nathan at FlowingData points to an application on Facebook that aims to measures happiness. The application seeks to calculate the “Gross National Happiness” (GNH) of the United States by analyzing the ratio of positive to negative words found in users’ status updates on a daily basis.
It is an interesting project and certainly relates to the broader issue of using the data produced by social media technologies to measure and visualize emotions and feelings broadly. However, in its current form, the application falls well short of providing a true measure of gross happiness. Continue reading
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: data, data visualization, facebook, sentiment analysis, social media, social networks, User-generated content
September 11, 2009 · 1 Comment
In a recent report, Garnter proposes that as corporations try to benefit from the growth of social media they will come to rely more and more on employees with formal, advanced training in the social sciences.
Stanley Milgram
Gartner Vice President Kathy Harris discusses in some detail four areas of jobs needed in the near future. Though she never really uses the words “social networks” the implication is that most companies aren’t really geared toward taking advantage of the impact of these online communities, and that the numbers will be too large to ignore, regardless of the business you are in.
“Many of the needed technical capabilities originate in the social sciences and are aimed at usability and adoption of technology-related business services,” Harris said in a release. “These capabilities embody the notion of ‘action at the interface’ between the enterprise and its markets or between business management and technology management. Therefore, organizations are likely to shift the responsibility for leveraging technology outside centralized IT organizations and into the business units responsible for growth and innovation of revenue, products and services.”
Erving Goffman
To me, if you combine the plethora of data being generated by Web 2.0 technologies with the inherent social and behavioral aspects of these technologies, it screams for individuals that have training in sophisticated research methodologies (both quantitative and qualitative) as well as substantive subject’s that relate to sociology, psychology, and behavioral economics. It may be creating a perfect storm where individuals with this particular skill set finally find themselves in high demand outside of the Ivory Tower. As a trained social scientist myself, I also hope it puts to bed, once and for all, the short-sighted notion that the social sciences don’t really belong in the category of ’science’ compared to their physical cousins.
(Via Jason Spector)
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Big Data, social media, social networks, social science
I’ve been getting more interested in data visualization lately (as you might have picked up by some of my recent posts). I do not have the technical skills required for really insightful, visually impressive work at this point. Thankfully, Nate at FlowingData pointed me in the direction of IBM’s Many Eyes project, which allows you to upload your own data set and create custom views of the data using their pre-fab visualizations.
To get my feet wet I decided to create a visualization of my network using data from LinkedIn. I currently have ~350 connections and decided to visualize the frequency with which particular companies and organizations were observed among those connections. So here is what the first cut looks like:
Clicking on the visualization will allow you to interact with it, selecting companies to see what percentage of the data they account for.
Looking at the data a few patterns quickly emerge: Continue reading
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: data visualization, LinkedIn, Many Eyes, networks, social networks
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