Many people inherently believe and trust that crowds can decide better than individuals: judges’ decisions can be appealed to larger & larger panels of judges, celebrities are ranked by how many people are fans, et cetera.

Yet trying to make crowds decide implies that there is a decision engine that can operate the crowd.  And we don’t know individually how we decide.  But collectively, the decision engine may be one programmed via software, but operated by human contributors.

We typically – or always - use some emotion in our decisions, and the crowd supposedly doesn’t.  Or shouldn’t, perhaps.

We could each make the best decisions for ourselves… if we had more time to focus in depth on all options.  But we don’t have time, and the crowd does seem to have time to focus on all options in parallel.

And there are those who want to create the illusion of a crowd decision, but to also influence that decision at the same time.

The future promises that, via social networks, we can have a more focused crowd… our personal crowd.  This crowd may not be only people we are friends with, but it will be tuned to us as individuals using a collection of inflences.  The promise is that your crowd will help and guide you in ways you can’t or don’t have time to.

Some tools that perform this help are available now, but they’re early-stage compared to what will come later.  Yet perhaps these tools will have to work around some issues…

A recent study confirmed what I’ve long thought – and assumed – about participation: there is a vocal minority that drives conversation.  If one applies the long-assumed 80-20 rule (Pareto Principle) to online social media, the percentages will vary but the result is similar.

Most people (i.e. the 80%) really don’t participate or contribute much, in areas such as rating or voting.  And within the group that does constructively contribute their voice (i.e. to 20%), only a very small percent do the bulk of activity.  This collection of hyper-contributers allows a very small group to skew the message of the so-called crowd.

Whether or not future studies validate the reported skewing of the crowd’s wisdom, there also is an issue of how the crowd’s decision engine might be constructed.  Search for skin care recomendations online and there are sites that are constructed to show apparent crowd opinions, yet these sites are bogus.  They are set up to sell a product, using the appearance of being an unconnected third party.

The authenticitiy of the wisdom of crowds may work at times like statistics… statistics are frequently calculated so that they prove the point that is desired (while obscuring other data that may be contrary to what message is to be communicated).

The writeup continues in the next part which will include a look at the four key attributes of what could be called wise crowds, using what the wisdom of crowds concept specified: Diversity, Independence, Decentralization, and Aggregation.  In the meantime, as an overview towards crowd wisdom, the first video below is from PBS NOVA ScienceNOW, and the video farther down is from 2007 and highlights some of the wisdom of crowds concepts:

(This is part one of a longer post that needed to be broken into smaller pieces, and is continued here)

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.

  “Johnny, what were you saying to Eddie? ”

 ”Nuthin’” 

  “I want you to repeat it loud so the whole class can hear you!”

…this was the type of social experience that we sought to avoid.

Not all teachers were the same.  Some teachers really didn’t seem to care about our interactions.  And the most clueless ones didn’t flinch when we told jokes about them and laughed about them in plain sight.

The cool ones laughed with us, wisely, and we loved them.

Kind of like some brands are today, in the online social web. Some plug in, some are clueless.

There are lots of articles about how brands are using online social web tactics, successfully.  They use data and watch their markets carefully as they muddy the waters. 

Obvious comparisons to the childhood example – the teacher is an authority figure by position, but still has to earn the respect with every interaction with the students.  Yet she runs a risk every time she tries to mingle with the students on their turf.  A risk worth taking, and learning from. 

And, the teacher writes on the blackboard (”the wall”) and everyone can read it, re-write it, or start writing other ideas on other parts of the room.

These instructors are (usually) paid to be there, and the students know they get to move on to other teachers… that the relationship is only temporary.  Unless their teacher is so influential to their lives that they keep the relationship going for a long time.

And in another parallel with online brands, teachers can only effectively connect with students up to a certain class size. After that, they need helpers… teacher’s aides.

But in the modern world, will brands dilute the impact of their social media interactions as they run up against a corporate version of Dunbar’s Number (the theoretical limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships)?  For individuals, the number is claimed to be 150 inter-personal relationships.

Yet some people “maintain” thousands of relationships online.  They swim (as Robert Scoble said to me) since it’s not possible to interact with every bit of social media as your network grows gigantic.  But swim-strokes are okay if at the heart of it you’re a real person.

Brands have it both easier and harder… like a teacher, they have implied authority and a mutually-respected “I’m not really your friend” attitude in their core, yet they also have to reach people on a personal level.  Odds are, like teachers and their pupils, some brands will get it wrong, and some will work with each day to find something to evolve the relationship to have rewards for both sides.

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.

Over the last three days there have been two major startup demonstration events – DEMO and TechCrunch50.

The presenters are among the top of the crop for this year’s startups (notwithstanding the ones we will showcase on Startup Rockstars!).  If you step back and realize the sheer volume of new tech ideas that are launching or recently launched, you might (and should) be overwhelmed.  Mostly the theme seemed to be (1) social and (2) mobile (as in iPhone apps).

I was able to watch many presentation from both of these events online, and at times there was almost 3,000 people watching the live TechCrunch50 stream (on Ustream.tv).  This viewer number is large for an online show of any kind today, but also notable because it’s an unknown event to most people.  It was (probably) never advertised on mainstream TV.  And so this post is relevant to the current panel on TechCrunch50, which *wins* the ratings race by default as it was the only event streamed live. Both events were well-attended over the last three days, with the long-running DEMO event stating it was their largest-attended event so far.

As I type this post, the TechCrunch50 is wrapping up with a Hollywood discussion panel.  While they are discussing whether YouTube “is a disruptive force in Hollywood?” (question by Michael Arrington), most of the conversation is about how the old model of watching TV is evolving to even newer sites and services than YouTube. 

Some of this change is described as generational, as large numbers of teens (at least in the USA) now are watching shows on the web, totally ignoring mainstream over-the-air (or -cable) network programming.  So the challenge is to leverage what I termed the “assimilation of TV” into the social web.

Examples of how this assimilation happens is when a TV show has a major online presence, including clips or entire shows, blogs, and online social interactions with viewers and fans.  While most stars aren’t on Facebook or Twitter, some are slowly embracing technology such as Seesmic, which allows video comments and feedback to be posted immediately on the web.

A separate post will discuss the higher-level issues brought out by the trend of startups.  For now, the merger forecast years ago between TV and the internet has happened, and will continue to happen.  With films released on the internet included, the total merging of media is at hand.  How will this affect your business, your lifestyle, and our civilization?

And now back to the show, already in progress. (and next up after that, the re-runs of what was missed!)

For a social network, community, or website you may be trying to grow, sometimes it helps to determine your goals for growth, and the reasons behind these goals.  This analysis may help in better planning for social media marketing campaigns & engagements. 

The objectives may include one or more of the following:

1. Participation – If your site has social features, having more visitors and/or members generates the multiplier effect: more people, ideas, and conversations pollinating for increased social participation.
2. Sales – in addition to promoting a product or service, a site that sells what it is bringing awareness & engagement to has a built-in goal.
3. Competitive advantage – sometime competition is fighting on other levels, and by claiming the online social audience, or mindshare, you get leverage that may be hard to unseat.  Just as the top social network platform in a particular country has an advantage due to its many members, your online social community can provide a balance of social power if you’re either first, or best, in growing the community in your niche.
4. Customer Interaction – beyond customer service, you want to interact with your customers and alongside them as they interact together.  A natural for this goal is to also provide standard reference information via social media so the interactions can link to the common questions and issues.
5. Attention / Traffic / Visitors - Do you want more people to visit your site?  Common reasons for more usage includes to promote a product, service, idea, or brand.  The side-effects can include:

• Online reputation impact – more attention and knowledge about your image, brand, or reputation (linkbait tactics included).

• Organic search traffic increase – from content alone, or adding in the benefit of many links to your content

• Viral information spread – your message is spread by others for you.  (and sometimes a different or negative-seeming message is spread… and that is another story).

There are many ways to present goals such as shown above, including tying social media marketing to long-term growth.  But there is still confusion among those who would be using social campaigns.  Chalk some of that up to ambiguous “buzz-speak” for a new technology.

Reportedly, many places block Facebook, including entire countries, and MySpace is blocked by many of these same places… plus hordes of well-meaning parents. There are perhaps just as many proposed workarounds for users to bypass the blocks. But for the world wide social web to work out, including monetization aspects, it will have to work in enough places to be considered ubiquitous. Adsense is pervasive today, and is not generally blocked in the way that social networks are. This situation is probably due to it’s origins, function, and the fact that it is not seen as linked to some of the issues such as malware and productivity loss that cause social networking sites to be blocked.

The evolving integration of the social web puts choices into the hands of website owners trying to see the ROI (return on investment) of adopting and adapting the technologies to their websites. The technology is not yet available to the public, and competes in various ways with OpenSocial, OpenID, MyBlogLog, and other services as the effort to evolve identity management on the web continues. If one’s website audience primarily accesses the site at work locations that might block social networking sites, form a social network integration strategy and implementation plan that accounts for these hurdles.

How will webmasters decide what works for them?

The effort to implement “social connector” technology on a website, plus the possibly-problematic ability of these technologies to to integrate with each other, may have the war of the social web won based on webmaster adoption. What platform will bring them the most reward (users, money, attention, etc.)? The ROI of time and money, plus compatibility, becomes important.

The first major text-ad service, Goto.com (which became Overture and was bought by Yahoo!), has given up it’s first place market position to Adsense. Being huge, successful, and in first place (and then getting bought) does not mean ultimately winning the war. The battles now in the social platform space include fighting to be the preferred (or only) identity-holder for people when they are online across the entire social web. The “first place” position of social networking sites & services is in flux this year. And the ability of each site to monetize it’s social base, and thus survive, may rely on sharing their success with thousands of website operators.

The near-term winners will likely be those that have a compelling ROI for website and social application owners, enough to get them to make the effort to write for a particular social platform. Facebook Connect seems to have this ROI coming out of the gate.

The popularity of social networks varies by country. The adoption of social networks within and by website owners may follow similar patterns. And, like sports popularity varying by area, with baseball, soccer, football, basketball, cricket, and others all competing for similar passion & purchases from fans, it may simply be a multi-player game with multiple fields.

Photo (c) 2008 Chief Social Officer

The modern version is quasi-physical, in most cases, as there are real people with real names that are linked together via relationships. Whether poking each other on social networking sites, or chatting via instant messaging, there is a basis in real relationships with real people in the majority of one’s online social wealth.

A bit more on defining the term, via what it allows… on Scales for Social Capital in the Online Era there is the indication that it creates benefits derived from relationships created by interactions of social actors. These individuals form “a network of individuals—a ’social network’—resulting in positive affective bonds. These in turn yield positive outcomes such as emotional support or the ability to mobilize others.”

This type of capital is not limited to one network, as it can bridge social networks. Bridging’s basic definition applies to when individuals from different backgrounds connect, and this is also extended to cover those that occur between social networks.

Utilizing tools such as facebook may have taken off in part because building social capital takes time, and it is easier to leverage the base of a large social network. Other newer tools allow quick building of the same. Even within networks, there is contrast between “introduction-model” sites such as meetup.com, and microblogging sites such as twitter.com, The first is designed for real-world useful social interaction and one for, well, short bursts of content (useful or otherwise).

The relationship networks that are built through different types of sites are not the same. It is useful to recognize how they are different as you consider the effort expended in building personal or organizational capital.While smart people such as Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam are focused on real-world social capital, there is the hyper-rapid growth of online social capital, as reported in this article.

Online Social Capital and Reputation Managment

Once you have online influence, it becomes as asset to manage, in the sphere of online reputation management. Newbies – people have a handful of online friends and a small network – have less to worry about than people with 5,000 or 10,000 people who are tuned into their online activities & ideas.

Can celebrities really do social media & networking? No, not in the current “traditional” method of social networking, or at least not for the long-term. It’s not really feasible, because as a personal-interaction-based form of communications, it requires hundreds of responses per day. It is possible to engage, but not via having others post for the person, as that quickly becomes apparent for it’s “fake” quality.

Banking

There is no “Central SocialCapital Bank”, and one’s network is quickly spread across the hundreds or thousands of sites. As opposed to the bank model, you can’t build up this type of wealth and have it sit. It exists by being used, but necessarily by being spent.

[More on this to come - this post will be continued and expanded with content that was not ready at the time of publishing ]