Over 60 years ago, this effect was first verified in an experiment by psychologist Bertram Forer with some students. He constructed a personality assessment from various horoscopes, and gave the same assessment individually to every student who took a personality test.

The assessment included sentences such as:

At times you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved.

Almost anyone can find some truth about themselves in sentences like that.  And, in repeated experiments that tendency held true.  And with social media and other online (or offline) interactions, there is perhaps the same tendency to follow the Forer effect.

If a social media tool analyzes our online traits and provides us with a judgement, we probably will think it must have truth in it.  After all, it’s about us, based on our own input.

Even knowing that an interaction is non-human, such as interacting with a “bot” of some sort (or a voice response system), we still feel that the interaction is ours alone.  But perhaps like a credit score run amok with other people’s information, we should not accept the assessment without making sure it’s not co-mingling our information with others.

To some extent, what you believe becomes your reality, and certainly our belief can get us past otherwise-overwhelming challenges.

If a new tool tells you that you are #1,230 of all tweeters worldwide (on Twitter), you are inclined to want to believe it. But what if it were partly a randomly-generated number?

hmmm….

And in a perhaps orthogonal way, an online persona is our own Forer effect upon the world, and this can be bolstered using social networks.  It’s the same old technique put online: if enough people refer about someone as a visionary, then it is easier to believe to be true about that person.  And we can get others to say those nice things about us! (article continues below)

Sites such as Facebook & LinkedIn, along newer sites such as Philtro, are also trying to enhance their picture of who you are via your social network, in order to provide you with more relevant information (and, of course, advertisements).

While this social network assessment technology is still new, over time we are likely to expect our online services to deliver us what we like, without us having to do much to filter those information & media feeds.  Just say (one day) to your phone/PDA – “I want to watch a minute of the most interesting clips of my friend’s party last night, and after that chill out for about 30 minutes to some new music like what I heard there.  Go!” and you just might get what you instructed.

And you may believe it’s been done just for you.

The reasons behind being what could be called “semi-social” are varied, and include:

• Desire to be different
• Fear of (using) technology
• Not enough desire to socialize online
• Not enough time to socialize online – information overload
• Most friends or relatives not using online social websites
• Desire to cut back on online social activities

So, your choices on how to handle these miscreants – um, miscellaneous users – include:

• Acknowledge them – Show that you know that not everyone “gets” it and tone down the geeky/chic-y plug-ins and social media campaigns
• Help them – Provide work-arounds so that semi-socials can partake of your website’s offerings
• Ignore them – Don’t slow down the speed at which you use every possible social media tool to expand your reach, while risking alienating people who are semi-social.
• Invite them to socialize – Take a chance that you may find their moment to start socializing via one of your preferred methods. (This invitation can happen along with the first bullet point above – after acknowledging them.)

We’re all semi-social and even non-social during the course of a given day. So, it is easy to understand the mindset of someone who is routinely less social online. That is, if you can stop posting for a moment and ponder about them.

Times Square, New York City (2009), slightly altered. © 2009 ChiefSocialOfficer.com

Whether it is written, or not, if you are using social media then you have a strategy.  The key to excellence starts with how much time you devote to something, and this area is no exception.

There has been advice out there on social media strategy for a year or more. Following up the strategy, there are lots of lists to help you plan. A strategy is important, since you can do anything with social media.

And it’s all free!

Not really. As the excellent slide deck below points out (see slide 38), it takes time. Time is not free, even if you are not getting paid. There is the opportunity cost of making a choice, as time spent on one activity prevents or delays another one.

Or, will we elect to stay in mostly same-thinking groups?  As we join up in communities online, the homophily aspect could kick in.  Homophily is defined as the tendency to be friends with others who are similar, and is described futher in this New York Times article.

Birds of a feather flock together… True?  Looks like it.  As stated in this 2001 paper “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks” the tendency shown is to connect with people who are like you: “Similarity breeds connection”.  If you’ve stumbled upon a MySpace.com profile that is for an artist in Los Angeles, you will likely see this tendancy at work as you see their friends and the interactions. The University of Wolverhampton in England determined in a study that homophily exists on MySpace (Homophily in Myspace – MS Word format).

Geese of a feather on the snowy Potomac River in Washington DC

In looking how a phenomenon, concept, or media can “go viral”, the virality aspect has to allow it travel along different groups, each with may have their own different patterns of interaction.

And political alignments can seemingly prove this “fact” – that birds of a feather flock together.  As has been seen increasingly online, getting the message out directly to small homogenous social groups has value, especially as it usually comes from a member of the group.

But this same social group limits your options. As you meet and interact with new people, via your social networks, they will pretty much be the same as your old friends.  Exceptions to this trend possibly include on-the-job interactions, networking for a new job, and ad hoc activities such as searching for a lost pet or person.

For support towards goals, this similarity within a group can be a positive aspect.  For a marketing campaign, it is both a hindrance and a help.  People resist ideas or concepts that come from outside their group, but if it is shared within a group it is helped by the peer-to-peer approvals.

As pointed out in this O’Reilly blog post & comments, social networking sites encourage you after you sign up to invite all of your friends to join (or at least load them up as contacts).  Is homophilus behavior a feature or a bug?  How about in one’s own life?

This depends on whether a person wants change, and to some extent if they are open to conflict.  Engaging with people who think and act differently from you often means conflict.

On sites such as Twitter, we can search and see different and opposing views to our own, but odds are that we are not following or friending these people, on average.  On a philosophical note, then, each can blame themselves for limiting their choices of friends.

In the trend of people to find their news via online social activities, the news we get there is filtered by our preference in friends.  The videos we get pointed to, the memes we share… they are going to vary among friend-lines.  This inbreeding of content perhaps goes contrary to the common belief that we are expanding our horizons by interacting with hundreds or thousands of friends online.  This trend may be also relevant to how mainstream news covers mostly the same events.

The people who become online web celebrities cross the boundaries of smaller social groups… or may define larger groups as they show commonalities.  They connect to us on levels that transcend simple small-group connections, and sometimes even transcend language barriers, and satisfy people’s yearning to be part of something bigger.  Even as we also apparently yearn to part of something similar.

“Everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes“

is now a quaint anachronism from the 20th century.  Thanks to the social internet, everyone is now capable of being continuously famous.

Perhaps not world-famous, but famous among enough people around the globe.  Some personas will break out into mass stardom, assisted by traditional media.  Some will be famous only in online communities, and they will be quite happy & successful there.

There is plenty of room for stardom. In sports there are often farm leagues – the minor leagues that feed up talent to the major leagues.  In the online stardom arena, it’s a free-for-all, but the concept of farm leagues might apply, especially among the thousands of niche areas.  The rumors of enough social media experts in the niche are far from true, as experts continue to share advice on how to make your own star rise.

There will not be a practical cap on the universe of online stars anytime soon.  As the rise-and-fall cycle is, well, happening in “internet time”, it is viciously fast.  This aspect allows for more stars. And, in a sense, “once a star online, always a star online”, as the social proof via metrics such as video view counts and written feedback & conversations may never go away.

Now let’s forget about the old days where everyone knew the 1st and 2nd-tier media stars, as the growth of India’s Bollywood, China’s film industry , and other production locales such as Dubai create their own stardom centers of gravity.  Being world-famous can happen in niches, as has been proven on sites such as YouTube and MySpace.

Every day the worldwide online social network grows by tens of thousands, and should do so forever.  One simple metric:  every day there are hundreds of thousands of new teenagers in the world and many of them are already online (of course there are almost as many new ex-teenagers every day).  Whatever the online coming-of-age threshold, user-generated-content (UGC) will always have thousands of new creators annually who can draw fans from tens of millions who were not online the year before.

Are you cut out for stardom? Even the introverted can find more fame than the mere quarter hour Mr. Warhol envisioned, and they can do it on their own terms online.  So are true introverts headed for extinction?

The internet introverts of tomorrow may seek stardom in spite of their base personality.  They will be updating their status continuously, always quick to tell-a-friend about what’s important in their lives, and these social introverts will blend seamlessly into an extraverts-only society online (as they perhaps conquer fears about the dark side of online notoriety).

Who won’t be a star in their community? The non-star list includes those people who are not networking online.  Some non-networking behavior will be situational, such as people who cannot use a computer for physical, mental, religious, or emotional reasons.  And there are generational aspects that stop older people from adopting online social networking techniques, along with digital divide factors that limit who can build or accidentally obtain their online social stardom.

After notoriety, one base necessity for web stardom is content. Usually this content is self-generated, and self-promoted.  To be social on the internet implies interacting in form of content creation.  Even someone’s RSVP to an event, or joining a group, creates a snippet of content.

But ubiquitous stardom for all may be limited by our own inertia, as revealed in the currently-accepted rule of thumb that 90% of us don’t create real content, and only 1% of us create the bulk of content.  And many people have other life goals, ensuring that they do more with their lives and their influence to help others than simply chasing or embracing stardom.

[The next post here will continue an earlier post about online social capital and influence, and touch on how to utilize aspects of one's social stardom.]

A definition of social: the aspect of life that is lived in communities.

Another definition of social: belonging to organized groups, with a known or assumed boundary that defines the group.

A definition of community: a group of interacting people sharing one or more life aspects in common.

The wikipedia definition of community is longer than these definitions.  It delves into sociology, anthropology, psychology, and other areas.  One could derive from it that online communities fall into the general category of either “communities of culture” or “community organizations”, with the other  category being geography.

Yet online – and virtual – communities have evolved to a different blend that has not existed before.  The sheer number of virtual communities may grow to equal or exceed the population that supports it – i.e. the population of the world.  This growth won’t happen overnight.  But if you assume that 80% or 90% of the population may be candidates for virtual communities (including groups), and people usually join multiple groups, the case can be made for billions of groups existing in 5 to 10 years.

But what is the “blend that has not existed before“?  It is the interwoven way that community boundaries exist and change in the virtual world.

In the real world, communities are usually physical, and also non-overlapping.  The town of, for example, Fundale, consisted of the society that lived within its borders.  Physical borders defined geographical community borders.  And the teachers of Fundale would be the community defined by teachers working in the town’s borders.

In the virtual world, communities now overlap.   There can be a Teachers of Fundale group on Facebook, another one on MySpace, another one at TeachersOfFundale.org, and numerous other ones.  Membership is almost guaranteed to be different in each of these communities, as some of them may not even know about the existence of the others.

Oh, and what about the Instuctors of Fundale?  And the Professors of Fundale?  And don’t forget the Fundale Educators and the Coaches of Fundale.  Each of these communities may differ in name only from the functional boundaries of “people that instruct or teach other within Fundale“.

What’s the point?  Why should you care?

The largest social network is… the human race.  Some people reading this post may assume (or hope) that one day there will be one online social network that becomes #1 worldwide and that everyone will join.  We’re all members of the human race, after all, and we deserve our virtual platform with no walls for everyone on the planet, right?  But that one worldwide social networking platform is not likely to exist anytime soon, as there are hundreds of social networks launching each week (our estimate based on a few scattered stories and statistics).

Instead, envision an online world that mirrors – and expands on – the mix of communities in the real world.  Boundaries are mushy – membership fickle – and the human nature of competition is just as real as in the offline world.  (All your members are belong to us.)

You may believe you are the member of a particular community.  When does that membership cross into areas that are outside of the community?  How do you describe the essence of your membership? For many communities online, it becomes hard to define the boundaries, especially if anyone can join and quit at will.

The activity of the members creates the community.  Usually this description applies to the social activity, and it also includes activity that may not be on-topic for the community.  If an online community member (who is a member of 12 communities simultaneously) uploads a video to YouTube or a photo to Flickr, and links it to 4 or 5 communities, and then is removed from 2 of those communities…

…the boundaries and intersections of “community” may start to become more interesting. As does the strength or level of group participation, the distributed nature of community (including what is going to explode with technology such as Open Social and Facebook Connect), and mobile aspects.  Understanding the dynamics behind community boundaries is worth exploring, as that aspect has a lot to do with how community exists out of its ability to satisfy basic human needs (to belong, to be understood, to have meaning).

The community boundaries become defined by the members of the moment, and their activities and contributions.

Consider this post to be the first attempt to get words around how to manage the chaos of online communities, and that it is to be continued (link will be added when that happens).

Author’s Disclaimer: Fundale.com is a site that I’m involved in, and is not an actual town (that I know of).