Academic Information On Social Media

Social Media: The Ants Metaphor

aiosocialmedia — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 12:57:47 +0000

Six years have already passed, since the concept social media floated to the surface when O’Reilly first coined the term Web 2.0. After six years social media is still considered to be an ambiguous concept that is understood in different ways by different people. A small selection of the buzzwords that are often used to describe social media are: user generated content, online sharing, online collaboration, transparency, social software, emergent software. I would like to take a new approach to describe social media, namely by using ant colonies as a metaphor for social media.

Ants aren’t smart, ant colonies are.

Individual ants have meager intelligence. They are just simple agents with limited memory that are only capable of performing simple actions. Although they do not have the capability to grasp the bigger picture they have been able to organize highways and build elaborate nests. So what is that makes them so intelligent? The answer is swarm Intelligence. The basic idea of this concept is to exploit the emergent collective intelligence of groups of less-intelligent individuals that simply act in terms of particular local rules.

#1 Social media take away: Global brain

The strength of social media lies in the sum of the individual online behaviors. Online social interactions may trigger new interpretations and new discoveries that individuals by themselves would not have been able to generate due to the limited amount of information they have; cognitive limitations or the limited amount of time they have to make decisions. In this way, social media are the communication channels that facilitate dense interactions and knowledge transmissions between individuals that give rise to the emergence of higher-level intelligence (global brain).

Self-organization

Ant colonies have no central control structure that dictates ants to do things in a certain way. So what enables them to fulfill task like finding the shortest path to a food source? The secret to this is having countless interactions between individual ants in the form of smelling and touching each other. For example:

Two ants leave the nest at the same time but take different paths to a food source. Both ants mark their trail with pheromone. The ant that took the shorter path will return first and this trail will be marked with twice as much pheromone (from the nest to the food and back). The nest mates will be attracted to the shorter path because of its higher concentration of pheromone. The more ants that take that route, the more pheromone will be laid down, which will further amplify the attractiveness of the shorter trail. In this way they collectively develop a complex network of trails, connecting the nest in the most efficient way to the different food sources.

#2 Social media take away: structure of connected thoughts

Social media enables individuals to leave a seed of an idea, which may attract other users to build upon and modify this initial concept. Whether or not the idea will be further developed, will be based on self-selection: a promising idea tends to attract the attention of individuals, who reinforce it by revising and advancing –laying a trail – and all these activities then persuade others to contribute. In this way an elaborate structure of connected thoughts is build on the individualistic motivations rather than on a central power that dictates what should be and should not be done.

Flexibility

Individual ants specialize in certain tasks, but are still very flexible in the allocation of work. The rule is: the ant will perform the task for which it is specialized unless it perceives an important need to perform another function.

#3: Social media take away: lack of imposed structure

Social media users shift easily between roles from being merely a content consumer, to becoming a creator of content to being a community member. This is possible because social media lack imposed structure, which means that the structure is not predefine but emerges over time. For example: Nupedia, the forerunner of Wikipedia, had a tightly structured content-creation process that only allowed academics. This idea failed and was relaunched again under the name Wikipedia. However, this time the concept was based on a free-for-all encyclopedia, in which users were not merely content consumers, but they could also add, delete and edit the information. There were no predefined categories of articles. These emerged over time and were created by the users.

To summarize, social media are the communciation channels that merge individual knowledge by facilitating interactions and knowledge transmissions between individuals. These interactions may trigger new interpretations and new discoveries which enhance the emergent collective intelligence. The interaction roles are not predefined and may easily shift.

Find the golden box of your tweets!

aiosocialmedia — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 18:22:44 +0000

So many tweets pass my eye everyday andthere are just a few tweets that catch my interest and make me click on the link that is added in the tweet. Sounds familiar? I always wonder what makes a tweet catchy or not. According to the well-known Malcol Gladwell, author of the Tipping point, a message will stick if has the three principles of the stickiness factor :

Practical: What is the value of your information and have you also include the information that shows how your reader can act on it? Thus, translationo of theory into practice.
Personal: How does the information fit the personal needs of your audience?
Memorable: If the information is practical and person it will become memorable.

Background information

Researchers have found these results, when they tried to get a group of college seniors to get a tetanus shot. There strategy to achieve this objective was to give them a ‘high-fear’ booklet that described tetanus in dramatic term and included horrifying photo’s of people who had the tetanus virus.

While the booklet had succeeded to convince the students of the dangers of tetanus, only a few of them had actually gone to the health center to get the tetanus shot. Even worse, the majority of the seniors had forgotting everything they had learned about tetanus and they did not translate the information into action.

So, the researchers added a map of the university’s campus that highlighted the locations of the healt centers and the opening hours. In this way the seniors were given the information that was needed to schedule the visit to the health center in their daily activities. In other words, the message became practical, personal and with that memorable.

Practical, personal and memorable is the golden box of your tweet that will help you get your tweets stand out and being read by your audience!

Understanding the Social Media Influence better!

aiosocialmedia — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 08:41:26 +0000

I’ve recently found an excellent website (listorious.com) where you can find experts on a specific topic. There I found a colleague PhD student Michael Wu that has done research on the factors of social media influence. Ifound the information very concrete and straightforward that could enrich the current information of practitioners. In this blog I will give a short overview of what he has found.

Influence: a 2-way street

Influence can only occur if there is an influencer that has the power to influence its target group AND if there is a target group that wants to be influenced.

You can gain the power of becoming an influencer when you have (1) the expertise and (2) the ability to transmit your expert knowledge through Social Media. Your information will only have influence if there is a targetgroup for that knowledge. The likelihood that you will influence your audience depends on four factors:

Relevancy: the information spread should fulfil the information need of your audience. If your information is perceived as spam and irrelevant, the audience will ignore your information.
Timing: make sure that you spread your knowledge when your audience needs it. This is probably one of the hardest things. Luckly there are several apps such as Icerocket and Google Trends that could help you with that.
Channel: make sure that you’re using a social media channel that is also being used by your audience.
Trust: Your audience should trust you. Otherwise your info will be downgraded by the target.

If any of the above four factors are not in place, the chain of influence will be broken and your expert knowledge will not reach your audience.

Practical Implications

Micheal Wu has showed that becoming an influencer with the help of social media is hard work and the following lessons can be learned :

1)   It’s not about using as many of social media applications as possible and hoping that by spreading all the information you get, someone will might find your information valuable.
2)   It’s all about strategically using the unique features of the different social media applications to share your knowledge with a group of people that have an interest in it. The web 2.0 categorization of Anderson and the web 2.0 as marketingtool-framework of Constantinides are very useful frameworks for doing this.
3)   People will find you if your knowledge of expertise is clear. For example, if your blog, tweets and FB page discuss a broad band of topics from social media to shoe trends to pencils and the topics are not related to each other, you will scare of your audience, because it does not matches the profile of topics they were looking for.
4)   To be an influencers it’s not enough to be knowledgeable. You will also need to have the ability and the knowledge on how to best spread your knowledge through social media. If you’re only active on one channel, you will only reach that specific part of your audience that is active on that specific channel. Therefore, you need to exactly know on which channel(s) your audience is active. If you don’t know how to use that channel, ask someone who does. The most important thing is that you communicate through social media channels that are being used by your audience.

Quality of Online vs. Offline Friendships

aiosocialmedia — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 08:26:10 +0000

In many blogs social media is often referred to as a relationship building tool and a customer loyalty tool. However, there are also some critics out there who state that online interaction can not beat face-to-face interactions’. Since I do see truth in both statements I was curious what scientific research had to say about the differences in the quality of online and offline friendships. And of course I would not dare to keep the results to myself. So here is a post about the difference in quality of online vs. offline friendships and possibly a new way of measuring the ROI of Social Media

Friendship

Friendships develop along a five stage continuum: (1) Initiating (2) Experimenting (3) Intensifying (4) Integrating and (5) Bonding. The quality of friendship consists and can be measured through the following seven dimensions:

Interdependence: Feeling of mutual dependence and the degree to which the two parties influence one another.
Breadth: Variety of conversational topics.
Depth: Communicative aspect of intimacy.
Code Change: Change in linguistic forms and cultural codes used in a relationship.
Understanding: Agreement about which behaviors are acceptable and the understanding of how each person’s actions can contribute to the relationship.
Commitment: Expectation that a relationship will continue and the feeling that a relationship ought to continue.
Network Convergence: Overlapping of social networks of the two parties.

Quality online vs. offline friendships

It seems that both the blog posts and the critics have been right. Online friendships could be just as qualitative as offline relationships, but this only applies to friendships that have lasted for more than a year. Online friendships seem to be more constrained by factors such as lower frequency of exposure. This could indicate that online relationships in the beginning of the friendships continuum stages (1-6 months) are more vulnerable than offline friendships. After six months the friendship starts to grow quickly and the quality of it increases. This indicates that while computer-mediated-communication in comparison to face-to-face communication offers less information per exchange, the problem could be alleviated by allowing longer and more frequent interactions over time.

Same-sex and cross-sex online friendships

The development of cross-sex friendships are in an offline setting more constrained than same-sex friendships. Reasons for this are normative constraints such as the social disapprovement of such friendships or because of structural constraints such as the lack of opportunities for males and females to meet and interact continuously. Well, for all of you out there who encountered those constraints: the Internet offers a solution to your problem. Research has shown that cross-sex friendships seem to be less difficult to develop offline. It removes the offline constraints that withhold the development of cross-sex friendships and allows physical absence and anomity and with that reduces the perception of risk that exists in cross-sex face-to-face interactions, such as unwanted sexual advances. In other words, it provides an environment that may be perceived as a safe environment for people to initiate and develop cross-sex friendships with a lower degree of reticence and reservation.

Implications

I think that some important implications can be drawn from the above stated information and also explains some thoughts on the ROI of social media.

Firms want to befriend their customers and it seems that this could well be achieved in an online setting with social media applications. However, it will take at least six months before the foundations for a good friendship are in place. Thus, it will take a lot of effort and patience to achieve a qualitative friendship.
Since online friendships are more likely to be constrained by frequency of exposure, it is advisable to increase the intensity of your customer contact moments. Let your customers know that you are around; keep them updated on what your brand/organizations is doing and more importantly ask their opinion and show your customers if possible that you have listened to what they have told you.
Sometimes a post or tweet passes by wherein complaints are shared on the low measurement of the ROI of social media. I think that this post supports the fact that social media applications are great tools for building customer loyalty, but this will not happen overnight! As mentioned earlier it will take at least six months before the first signs of friendships appear and can be measured.
A new Social Media ROI measurement that is not financially oriented but more on the relation aspect could be the measurement of quality of friendship that consists of the seven dimensions interdependence; breadth; depth; code change; understanding; commitment; network convergence.

I’m very curious on what you all think of the last implications the quality of friendship as a new social media ROI measurement. I all encourage you to share your thoughts on the subject It may help us to create a new way of measuring the ROI of Social Media!

Use of Social Media should be banned during political meetings: YES or NO?

aiosocialmedia — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 11:43:29 +0000

Politics is not my field of research, but since the blog is called All Information On Social Media I should do my best to address the issues brought on by my readers. So here it goes…an item on Politics and Social Media!

In an interview of the Volkskrant (Dutch Newspaper: http://bit.ly/bd9MgO) with our former minister of Home Affairs Guusje ter Horst, she stated that it was an thorn in her side that ministers are communicating with the outside world through new media during meetings. She advocates that the new prime minister should prohibit (?!) the use of twitter, text messages, Internet etc. To me this sounded kind of strange, because the Netherlands has a representative democracy. This means that politicians represent the folk, so why shut the door during discussions and debate away from media spotlights? Why not involve the real-time opinions of the folk?

Politics is communication

Communication is a necessary prerequisite for the functioning of any political system. It needs input – demands of citizens and their expressions – and it needs output – political decisions and actions have to be communicated to the public-. The mass media are essential for this function.

Understanding the world

Individuals cannot understand the world fully and they constantly struggle to interpret their life experiences and to make sense of the world around them. In order for individuals to efficiently process new information, they apply interpretive schemas or primary frameworks to classify information and interpret it meaningfully. Media and in particular social media have the ability to present relatively complex issues, such as politics, efficiently and in a way that makes the information comprehensible to the public because they play to existing cognitive schemas.

Mediatization of Politics

The intensity of how people rely on mass media to form and shape their opinions over time have been increased. This is called the mediatization of politics. Four phases can be distinguished that should give insight in what the current position of the media for political communication holds. We have reached the fourth and last stage of mediatization of politics called permenantly campaigning.

In this last phase the intensity of the media experiences is much stronger than in the earlier phases. Political actors not only have to adapt to the media but also internalize these and allow the media to become a built-in part of the governing processes. This is, what I think, that Guusje Terhorst wants to prevent.

Social Media and Government

What could social media offer to the government? Possibly the following five things:

More differentiation: Instead of a one-size fits it all approach the government could target and monitor the specific needs and wants of different groups of citizens.
Less Jargon: Microblogging applications such as twitter force politicians to give clear cut answers and responses, without jargon and formal stump speech/press release formats. Also, the informal character of social media invites politicians to write and talk informally and dispose all the jargon.
Learn from thousands of interactions: Many conversation take place online. People who have never met physically could have very personal and deep conversations and discussions with each other that are open to the public. Politicians could observe and listen to this and learn more about the problems citizens walk against in daily life.
Citizen reviewers: A lot of documents/brochures etc are developed to inform citizens about particular subjects. These document could be posted online so that citizens can tag, comment and rate them.
Behavioral feedback: Data site navigation, downloaded information, time spend on the webs, performed clicks etc, is all valuable information that can be used to shape the design and delivery of services.

Practical Implications

The following implications can be drawn from the above stated information:

People have a need to classify and simplify information to build a better understanding of things. Media and in particular social media have the ability to make complex issues simple and to explain it plain and simple, thus without the jargon, what the issue entails. This makes discussion about the topic possible.
Social media have the properties to enhance the communication between politicians/government and citizens; to engage citizens in the political decision-making which is the basic foundation of democracy and to improve the delivery of services.
Using social media for political objectives is still in an experimental phase. Of course there are risks, but the exact risks of the usage of social media applications will only enlighten when these apps are used. Effective and efficiently make use of these apps is a learning process as with everything I suppose.

These implications are not as clear cut as the previous post, but politics and engagement of citizens is a complex process. As said earlier, politics is not my field of research, but I do hope that this post has given some perspective on how social media could be used for political purposes. But I do know one thing and that is that I disagree with Guusje Terhorst.

I don’t think that cutting the communication with the outside world during meeting is a good solution. prohibiting mobiles with internet possibilities is a good solution. We should actually all make use of the collective intelligence that characterizes social media and brainstorm together on how we can effectively make use of social media applications to support governmental processes and effectively engage citizens into the political decision-making process.

Therefore I would like to end this post by encouriging you all to join he discussion and share your point of thoughts regarding this subject!

Why do consumers voluntarily produce valuable content for marketers?

aiosocialmedia — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 12:56:49 +0000

Misuse of consumers?

User generated internet content has exploded over the years. Individuals post comments on Facebook, upload movies on Youtube, begin their own blog and are co-authors on Wikipedia. In many blog posts marketers are encouraged to use that information for marketing purposes or even advise them to let consumers do their job for them. What I had always wondered after reading such a post is: why would consumers voluntarily let themselves be used for such purposes and generate valuable information for free?

Isn’t it strange that marketing is all about analyzing and researching consumer behavior, their motives, buying patterns etc and that this question has not been raised before (at least not on one of the blogs I follow).

Strategic use of media

To fulfill my curiosity I’ve searched for some scientific articles that could help me better understand these consumer motives. I had found a very old and widely used theory called the “Uses and Gratification Theory”. It states that people use media strategically. They employ different media for different purposes and more importantly they select among media choices based on how well each option helps them meet specific needs or goals. Sounds logic, right?

Motives for UGC

Major motivations user-generated-content online:

Recognition needs: establish personal identity, gain respect, build confidence and publicize their expertise.
Cognitive needs: broaden knowledge base, keep abreast with the latest development and understand why things are happening in the community.
Social needs: reveal their feelings, share views and experiences and to let their family and friends know about their latest information.
Entertainment needs: content generation is fun, entertaining, trendy and used to the pass the time.

From those four motivations, recognition need is found to be the most important predictor of providing user generated content. Thus the more individuals are appraised for providing content the more motivated they will be for continuing providing information.Another interesting fact is that age, education and income also influence how active individuals are with user generated content. The younger and less educated the internet users and the higher monthly income they have the more active they would be in all forms of content generation activities.

Practical implications

So a lot of information, I would say so, but what does this actually mean. I think three important conclusions can be drawn from the above stated information that could be of relevance for practitioners:

Recognize value and ideas: If you want consumers to actively help you with your marketing and let them co-operate with you instead of just analyzing what is being said on forums etc (which is also VERY IMPORTANT) you should actively recognize their efforts in providing valuable content for your firm by for example rewarding them financially; hand out awards or rewarding them with products/services that are related to your product/service.
Be aware of the limited variance in group composition: It is just a select group that actively engages in user-generated-content-activities. Thus, this could mean that the individuals that produce content for you will not always be part of your target group. Therefore, it is advisable to use different data sources, both offline and online, next to each other to validate the information. In science we use the term information triangulation and several methods can be distinguished:
- Data Triangulation: use of different data sources to find comparable material in different places in time and space. Different sources will provide different perspective on the concerning subject.
- Investigator Triangulation: Check identity of provider of content with tools such as LinkedIn or Facebook. Could be used to determine if produced information is in line with the information needs of your target group.
- Method Triangulation: Use different methods to examine a phenomenon. This means not only online methods but also offline methods.
Use the four motives to segment your target group online: as mentioned earlier people use media strategically. Thus, this indirectly implies that each social media application fulfills different needs. Try to figure out the needs of your target group and try to brainstorm or use different social media monitoring tools to find out what applications your target group is using to fulfill that specific need instead of randomly using all kinds of apps and hope for the best.

Googles’ research on social networking

aiosocialmedia — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 20:36:04 +0000

This presentation has been uploaded a few days ago and I have seen it pass by several times on Twitter and on blogs. But…for the people who haven’t seen this presentation, it really is a killer presentation and it does give good insight information on how people behave both online and offline. Also, it discusses some of the defaults of social networking sites => they don’t support the different relationships and networking groups we have offline. Getting curious yet? Just check out the presentation.
Presentation Google: The Real Life Social Network

View more documents from Paul Adams.