I've been struggling with social networks and social network platforms: I have a lot of thoughts about them, all clamoring for attention in my head, and I'm to create neat square boxes for my thoughts, the way consultants do when they create those neat clearly-articulated lists that are supposed to show off their expertise.
There's a whole world of web marketing consultants that do this – Rohit Bhargava, for instance, and his "five rules of social media optimization." Others, presumably also marketing consultants, added more, and eventually there were seventeen rules (of diminishing relevance, in my opinion). But what I'm describing here is an attempt to make the wildly complex and chaotic web bite-size understandable for the bazillion people who want – or need – to do business there.
Social media and social network platforms are related but different. Social media is what we sometimes also call "user generated content;" it's been part of the Internet since the web came along and Internet service providers gave their customers "public.html" directories where anybody with an account could have a web page... which meant that anybody could be a publisher, extending a trend that had begun with desktop publishing and 'zines. The big surprise was that content created by amateurs could be good, sometimes great.
Later blogs came along, then sites like Flickr (photos) and YouTube (videos) for user-generated rich media.
Cream tended to rise. And so, in the world of social media, people who never would've made a dent in the professional publishing world built huge audiences for their blogs, photos and videos. The social aspect was that blogs and media sites facilitated not just publishing, but conversation. People were talking with and through their contribuitions to the social mediasphere.
In the midst of all this, social network platforms have appeared – sites like Ryze and Friendster and Orkut and Myspace, and lately the phenomenally successful Facebook. Other sites, like Flickr, incorporate social network features to support the core activity of the site, which in the case of Flickr is photo publishing and sharing. Social network sites encourage their users to create rich profiles that can be used to facilitate connection, to identify connections with people on the network that they already know, and to invite their friends to join and connect.
I've had a lot of conversations lately about the value of social network platforms or the value of connections made within those platforms. That word "value" is a sticking point because it's about qualities that are quite subjective, variable, and hard to assess in any standardized way.
The conversation about social network value starts with a couple of assertions, or "laws," that have influenced the evolution of both technical and social networks:
- Metcalfe's Law: The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of endpoints.
- Reed's Law: The utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network.
The first law, authored by Ethernet creator Bob Metcalfe, describes how the value of a communications network grows with the square of the number of people or devices it connects. Forgetting the math behind this assertion, what he's really saying is that the value grows faster than the number of access points.
Metcalfe coined another term, network effect, to describe the increase in value of a good or service as it's adopted by more and more people. This makes sense: If only one guy has a telephone, it's not valuable at all, but as more and more people acquire phones, value increases because the potential for connection increases. When I first got an email account in the 1980's, its value was practically zero because there were so few email users and nobody I knew had it. From a personal perspective, as more people used email, and especially as more people I knew got accounts, the more valuable it became. From a global perspective, email has significant value now because so many people have accounts. Even the homeless guy sleeping in the park is liable to have a free email account that he can access at the library.
(Increased value can also have a down side. Because the network is so valuable, it creates a negative, in that it creates value for the spammers who make my life, and probably yours, miserable.)
Metcalfe was influential early on, but David Reed went a step further, and a lot of us who've been co-creating the "Web 2.0" world had an "aha moment" when we read his piece about the "sneaky exponential" and the real power of community building.
Reed says that a network's value can grow even more dramatically than Metcalfe had imagined. Metcalfe's Law hadn't considered how the number of potential subgroups of a social network grows as more people join the network.
In fact, the value of a network increases exponentially as it scales up.
These two laws explain a lot about the Internet's growth and impact. But the way they describe value doesn't help me understand how to think about my own relationship to social networks – not the specific platforms necessarily, but the people I'm connected to, and the meaning and relevance of those connections.
Forget the technology for a minute: what nonvirtual social networks am I part of, and how do I participate? My involvement varies, as does the strength of connections to the people I know. But what does it mean to "know" someone?
I don't have a clear, standardized way to evaluate those connections, so I don't can't say how valuable I think they are without being quite subjective. As a first step in assessing value, I should consider how I define whether I'm connected to somebody, and the degrees of possible connection.
So what's the minimum that has to be there for a connection to exist? I think there's no connection without reciprocity, i.e. if I know who Brad Pitt is, that doesn't mean we're connected. The least connection would be that I recognize his name and he recognizes mine, though that's not quite it. It could be that I've seen him in films and (however unlikely) that he's read something I've written, in which case we might recognize each other's names. I think, to have a connection, we also have to have met, if only through email.
At that point we're networked, but how much value does that kind of link have? It's pretty insignificant. Compare it to a really strong link – for instance, my connection to one of my business partners. Not only are we connected, but we're working together on something, and we hope that our project will have real value. That kind of link is inherently more valuable. How many strong links like this can I sustain? Probably not many, because that kind of link requires a commitment to a certain social overhead of time and attention, and both are available only in limited quantities.
I've heard people say that they know many people but have very few friends; that's a bandwidth issue. Last night I ran into a friend that I haven't seen much lately. We share membership in some online social networks, but the shared virtual space isn't doing much for our connection. Another way to say it is that those networks, while they may appear valuable, aren't effective in supporting the specific connection between two members. Ours had thinned; some projects we were working on had fallen off. Let's find something in your world or my world where we have some overlap, we said to each other, and create an opportunity to hang out. Neither of us considered hanging out just for the hell of it; we're both busy, so hanging out would be conditional on the value that might be created if we collaborated on something.
I have a lot of connections on Facebook – 415, to be exact. When I go there, I see quite a few friends doing interesting things, and I always have invitations to connect, join groups, join causes, etc. Facebook is a very effective social network platform, perhaps because people like me like the idea of having a place where we can connect with people we know. But the more people we connect with, the more demands there are on our limited attention, and the less truly engaged we can be with anyone.
On the other hand, the more people I connect to on Facebook, the more who will see my stuff. So if I ever do have a cause I want supported, or a message I want to circulate, having a large network would be helpful. The downside is that it feels less social and more like the broadcast model of publishing: one to many.
I do want more Facebook friends, but there are some significant issues to think about if I want to use the network effectively and avoid wasting my -- and everyone's -- time. And there's a distinction to be made between "social" and "mass." As you get more and more connections you have more social overhead; as you scale up you run into an inherent limit on social media's ability to remain social. If I value a broad attention base or large audience over effective manageable relationships, I should work from a different set of assumptions.
I still don't have neat boxes for these thoughts and concepts; I have more that I'll get into within the next few weeks. Meanwhile I'd like to hear your thoughts...
Image: Jon L.'s "Friend Wheel" from Facebook.
