Social media today can take some wisdom from past research into social networks. Mark Granovetter’s famous sociological study of how people hear about job opportunities found that “weak ties” to friends and acquaintances are actually more beneficial than “strong ties” to family and close friends. Social media marketers need to consider who has weak ties and strong ties before designing a social media strategy.

The Individual and The Network: Courtesy of Wikipedia

Weak ties are a product of social and psychological factors. Whether you’re designing an interaction, an experience, a marketing campaign or even an organizational itself, you should know what makes a “weak tie.” Weak ties are the source of precious information, like who’s hiring someone with your exact qualifications, where you can get the best deal on tires, or how good that new movie really is. Weak ties are the source of influence marketing, organizational innovation, and economic growth. In short, weak ties are the ties that matter.

What kind of person develops many weak ties? In his famous study, Granovetter did not measure certain psychological or sociological variables to determine if there was a systematic difference between those with weak ties and those with strong ties. But there are reasons to believe that there is such a systematic difference.

I come from a small town full of people with thick, strong ties have held that community together for generations. Originally a prosperous West Coast Salish Community, Sechelt continues to be archetypical of strong ties. There is economic development there, yet there is little innovation, dynamism or rapid change that occurs in cities.

I came to Toronto, where I knew exactly two people, both of whom were “weak ties” or friends I had known from school. Granovetter’s analysis would show that these were exactly the right kinds of people to help me find economic opportunities. And indeed, he was right; one friend graciously opened her home to me as I started my new job in this new city. 13 years later, I still live in this city (minus a two-year sojourn back home for my Master’s degree and to rack up even more weak ties), and here I am.

I now run this research company by developing and honing my weak ties. Weak ties have brought Copernicus new colleagues, new business, and new ideas. I have many weak ties throughout the city and the continent. What kind of person am I? What are the missing variables from Granovetter’s study?

• I am well educated, with four degrees and armloads of weak ties from each university experience. Did this help me develop a wide social network?
• I have cultural capital, having been trained which fork to use and when by my etiquette conscious mother. Did this help me develop a *quality* social network?
• I am an extrovert, who is comfortable meeting strangers and talking to acquaintances. Did this pre-ordain me to have many weak ties?
• I am a woman, who has been trained to consider social events part of my “gender job.” Does this encourage me to develop weak ties?
• I am white, and have been given white privileges like walking into office buildings, record shops, and convenience stores with nary a blink from a security guard. Has this helped me make new weak ties?

Sociologically speaking, weak ties are likely the result of a combination of social structures like race, gender, and social class. Psychologically speaking, weak ties are likely the result of constitutional personality traits, such as neuroticism or introversion/extroversion. Using both lenses, one can see that social capital is not built without a context; people are born into a personality, a body, and a social location which may — or may not — encourage the development of weak ties.

When you are designing a social media strategy, consider these social and psychological factors. Interaction designers would do well to gather insight around these variables specifically when doing design research, and incorporating them into their personas. Organization designers and HR consultants should consider that innovation does not happen simply because of “social media,” but because of specific social and psychological factors. And marketers should never believe that “if you build it, they will come.” Marketers should instead believe “if you build it, some of these specific types of people will come” to social media applications and campaigns.

Gladwell sparked quite the social media flare when he claimed recently that social media pundits greatly overestimate social media’s ability to effect social change. He compared the famous civil-rights era lunch-counter sit-ins to the revolutionary activity in contemporary Iran and found good, old-fashioned face-to-face relationships were a more effective mobilization tool than the new-fangled Twitter and Facebook.

Malcom Gladwell for The New Yorker

But Gladwell is wrong.

He makes the classic mistake of arguing that a particular technology may (or may not) lead to a particular result. In the real, messy, social world, X technology is not guaranteed to lead to Y results. Nor is X technology guaranteed NOT to lead to Y results. Gladwell commits the same sin as those of social media pundits he so blithely condemns. Namely, Gladwell is a technological determinist with a poor grasp of actual social interaction.

Sociologists, by contrast, recognize the social world is complex and full of exceptions. Their contribution to the phenomena of social change is far more nuanced than Gladwell suggets.

He correctly asserts that the lunch-counter sit-ins were both more effective and required more commitment from its participants. He cites Golnaz Esfandiari who shrewdly noted that Iranian tweets were written almost exclusively in English, not Farsi. The “Twitter revolution” was actually Westerners in Western places, scrolling through the tweets tagged “#iranelection.”

But he goes on to argue that activism in the Facebook Age ain’t what it used to be,

Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is.

Social media help us organize life but they don’t make change, he argues:

The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo.

Sociologists of technology have long ago found that technology has indeterminant results, which can only be understood by examining the social context in which the technology is introduced. Technology researchers Pinch and Bjiker called this “interpretive flexibility” which suggests that technologies are used differently in different social contexts.

Bicycle Mower

Pinch and Bijker  introduced this idea decades ago, yet Gladwell has no grasp on these decades of socio-technical analysis.

Instead, he uses a single social theory, specifically, Granovetter’s social network theory of “weak ties” versus “strong ties.” Gladwell argues that social change requires a great deal of “strong ties,” which existed in the south at the time of the civil rights movements.

Yet he does no comparison to other examples of social change, such as the ‘60s counter-culture in general, which cannot be demonstrably be traced to a disproportionate amount of strong ties. Instead, social scientists have attributed the mass youth uprisings of the ‘60s in North America and especially France to a high number of young people with “post bourgeois” values.

Gladwell also simplistically characterizes effective organization as necessarily “hierarchical.” But sociologists know that social institutions can either enable or constrain weak or strong ties. Sociologist Mario Luis Small, for example, has shown that how organizations connect people matters, and conceivably matters more than the technology they use. Small found that daycare centres in New York City encouraged the formation of new ties between parents when they had frequent, non-competitive and regular interactions, such as meeting to plan field trips or daycare holiday parties.

Researchers have also found recently that mobile technology use actually strengthens strong ties, depending on the context in which they are used.

The lunch-counter sit-ins succeeded because they had the requisite organizational structure already in place, not because these organizations were “hierarchical” as Gladwell argues. Hierarchies are not required to create social change, as much as Lenin’s “vanguard elite” might want us to believe it.

And these lunch-counter protesters did have technology that they used to incite more activism, notably, the telephone and the newsletters and newspapers. Gladwell skates over this fact in his zeal to condemn social media.

Maybe we should cut Gladwell some slack. He is, after all, a great synthesizer and a storyteller. He succeeds in popularizing ideas that have gained little attention outside academic circles. And granted, his New Yorker post was a brief post, not a treatise.

But fans of Gladwell take note: his ideas are usually not his. Worse, he often fails to apply them in the same thoughtful, nuanced ways their originators had intended.

UPDATE: Gladwell has incited a fair number of awesome ripostes including @leighh ’s very similar post and this awesome one from Anil Dash.

I was recently invited to speak at Ottawa’s Social Media Breakfast. The organizers, Simon Chen, Rob Lane and Ryan Anderson, asked me specifically to bring a sociologist’s understanding to social media. Below is my presentation. For the full version, with the notes, visit the full slideshare version.

My essential argument for the presentation was that we don’t have enough deep understanding of “the social” in social media. Social media gurus abound these days, but too few of them actually understand social theory. Sociologists have been thinking about and researching social interactions for over a century. Just because we are now using the Web doesn’t mean those essential insights are no longer valid. Quite, the contrary, I argue. Social theory is even more relevant today because it coheres and synthesizes design and marketing research. We need social theory to provide some weight, some shape to what we learn about social media use.

As an aside, I notice “social business” is an emerging buzz word. All business is social. Those who argue “social business” is new are missing the point; we have only just begun to realize social interaction is fundamental to business, in part because we have begun to engage in empathetic research projects such as ethnography. When you do quantitative surveys, for example, it’s incredibly easy to dismiss the real impact of your business policies on your customers or employees. But when you hang out with your employees and hear candid feedback about how you’ve organized your business processes, it’s impossible to ignore the social impact (Undercover Boss is a great example of this phenomenon). “Social business,” then, is the effect of “taking on the role of the other” in your employee or customer research. It is not new.

But back to social media. I offer two social theories: social capital (Bourdieu) and dramaturgical theory (Goffman) to explain how we interact both on and off-line. Social networks are a source of wealth, says Bourdieu. Social interaction is a well-crafted play, says Goffman. I apply these theories to well executed, and not-so-well executed social media experiences.

Bourdieu understood our social networks to be a source of wealth. It’s what helps the rich get richer, he argued. Rich people know other people who can help them make more money or to keep the money they have. Sociologist Mark Granovetter found that in fact, it is the “weak ties” we have with our acquaintances that gets us jobs, for example. “Strong ties” with friends and family may enrich us spiritually but provide us fewer job opportunities.

Goffman had another framework for understanding social interaction: the theatre. Goffman believed social actors play roles when they interact. We have scripts, a wardrobe, a set, make-up, and a cast (or “team” as he called it). Embarrassment happens when the script slips. Imagine you must be both a manager, a father, a school buddy, and a cousin all at the same time. Embarrassing! This is what online social networks do to us everyday: they force us to play multiple roles at the same time. Good social media allows “audience segregation,” which lets us select which role to play when.

In the Q&A afterward, I mentioned a few pieces of social research that would help people understand social theory. The first is

McMillan, S. and M. Morrison (2006). “Coming of Age With The Internet: A Qualitative Exploration of How The Internet Has Become An Integral Part of Young People’s Lives.” New Media and Society 8(1): 73-95.

The second that is a wealth of information about social networking and online life:

Wellman, B. and C. Haythornwait, Eds. (2002). The Internet in Everyday Life. New York, Blackwell.

And finally, the original sources:

Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. Handbook of Theory And Research for The Sociology of Education. J. G. Richardson. New York, Greenwood: 248.

Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behaviour. New York, Pantheon Books.

Social media “gurus” abound these days. Which ones are worth listening to and which ones are bullshitters?

Philosopher Harry Frankfurt exposed bullshitters in his famous essay “On Bullshit.” The liar knows what the truth is and cares very much about concealing it. The bullshitter, on the other hand, doesn’t care what the truth is and has no compunction in stretching it.

The same goes for social media “gurus.” Those that care what about rigourous examination of the social may be wrong, but at least they take great pains to analyze the phenomenon. Those that don’t care about systematic, theoretically informed social inquiry are interested only in stretching or shaping their own agendas.

How can you tell the difference?

Here are a few signs you’re dealing with a social media bullshitter.

1. They skate over the tension between structure and agency: The tension between structure and agency is an age-old sociological debate. Social media bullshitters somehow miss this very important point. They often argue that implementing social media or social business design will somehow evaporate decades or even centuries of organizational structures. If your social media guru tells you that adding social media and stirring will create equality, harmony, and profits, begin to question them. If, on the other hand, they tell you that your organization does not live in a vacuum, and that your social media will be integrated in people’s existing lives with their existing economic, technological, and ethnically grounded experience, then they may be onto something.
2. They use the same social research methods every time: A classically trained sociologist is trained in both qualitative and quantitative methods. They are designers in the sense that they have expertise, which they draw upon selectively, according to the research question. Social media bullshitters, on the other hand, likely have a common stock of tools that they use repeatedly, regardless of the nuance of the research question. If their answer is always, “do a focus group,” or always, “do a survey,” then question them.
3. They see no paradoxes. Ever: Sociologists are constantly grappling with paradoxes. Weber’s famous paradoxical finding was that bureaucracies are both efficient and inefficient. They work wonders building and managing railroads, for example, but they result in horrible catastrophes like the Challenger disaster. Weber explained this paradox by arguing that rationality, or the rule of rules, is an “iron cage,” that keeps us safe but enslaved. If your social media guru claims there will be no paradox, nuance, or ambiguity, question them.
4. They don’t know what social capital really is: Social capital is not something one can measure in terms of bank balances. It was the creation of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (come to think of it, the bullshitters wouldn’t know that either). Social capital is something one develops by being in a particular social location. I may go to an exclusive boarding school. My social capital is my network of well-off friends. Social capital is a particularly important concept when thinking about social media. Bourdieu noted that those in lower economic classes explicitly reject items they consider “above their station.” This means that luxury or “top of the line” is not always your best approach.

The bottom line is this: social media bullshitters have no knowledge of social theory or methodology. Trust a person who provides no easy answer, who carefully selects their research method, and who understands complex concepts.

Do you have more signs of being a social media bullshitter? Please share them here!

Data-driven social experience is an entirely new manner of social interaction, one that obscures our emotional connections to people. Data makes social relationships visible, knowable, and countable in unprecedented ways. But it does not — and cannot — convey the emotional experience of social interaction. I’ve already discussed how digital technologies transform text and time. Now I want to explore how “data” transforms social experience.

Take the notion of the “social network.” Most people (especially those that read blogs!) think these synonymous with Web sites like Facebook. Truth be told, social network analysis has existed for almost a century. We’ve all heard the term “six degrees of separation,” but most of us don’t know that was coined by none other that Stanley Milgram, of the “shock experiments” fame, when he tracked letters mailed around the world.

Social networks are exceedingly difficult to know from a quantitative perspective. We all live inside social networks but we have a very hard time knowing how these networks are constructed. We may know, for example, that our friend Jeff is friends with another one, Sarah, but we don’t know if Sarah knows Jeff’s partner Sam. Social network analysis is a set of methods designed to learn exactly that.

Now imagine your social network, as it is represented on Facebook (what, you’re not on Facebook?). Below is an image from Visual Complexity that renders a social network visibly but also very easily, simply by mining the data inherent in Facebook’s structure:

from Visual Complexity

Note how we instantly and easily know how institutions are connected, and through which people. Previously, researchers would have to conduct extensive and expensive surveys to get these data. Now these data are easily calculated and visualized by anyone with access to a social network online.

Some people are talking about this visualization as a piece of intellectual property. Alex Iskold on Mashable, for example, asks “Who owns the social map?” I go further and ask, “What does it mean that our social world is mappable?”

Our social world is now infiltrated by masses of data. These data inform us about the structure of our interactions with others in ways that we could not recall correctly if asked. Suddenly we can now see our social world reflected back to us, punctuated by institutions, and social structures. When we see our social network through the eyes of data, we see the names of organizations, or the institutional affiliation of the people. We do not “see” the emotional experience that created our connections in the first place.

Suddenly, we may think we really are not that close with Jeff, because his partner Sam is really not friends with anyone I know. I can also see that Sarah and I have very few friends in common, which may lead me to think I don’t have much of a future friendship with her.

Those data crowd out the qualitative, embodied experience of the laughs I shared with Jeff and Sam at their cottage last summer. Those data obscure the fact that Sarah and I shared 3 long months as call centre employees together, a time that bonded us forever. A data-filled social world is one that masks the visceral, emotional experiences of face-to-face interaction.

Digital social life is revealed to us in fragmented, mashed up ways. Such ways were impossible before the freely available data on social networks, data that is now so ubiquitous, we don’t even see it.

The digital availability of social information has lead many to think it’s a crisis of privacy. It is not; it is a crisis of identity management. Designers of online profiles should think about privacy as the management of identity, which can be an easily damaged piece of social information. Users who can control access to any “stigmatizing” social information have absolute privacy.

Social theorist Erving Goffman’s work on identity can help us design better and more private online profiles. What is “stigmatizing” social information? This is the tough part: it changes depending on who is involved. For example, a teardrop tattoo may provide status inside a prison, but on the face of a defendant in a court room, it is a stigma. Goffman points out that social actors conceal “stigma symbols” in some contexts, but these become “status symbols” in other contexts.

Designers of online profiles should recognize then that what is “embarrassing” changes depending on the context. There is simply no way to predict all the possible social contexts that any given person will find themselves in, so there is no way that a designer can accurately predict a “privacy breach” of digitally available information. Hence the confusion and hand-wringing over Beacon, Facebook’s privacy-busting advertising system. Instead, designers should create a framework for users to manage their identities.

How is identity management achieved? Designers should offer users the following:

1. Concealment tools: users should be able to disguise or conceal any single piece of social information. This means that “my interests” should be singular items that can be turned on and off.
2. Low-burden social network filtering: some social information only becomes embarrassing in particular social contexts. Designers must allow users to sort or filter their social contacts depending on how they know them. Make this interaction easier and low burden, and users will happily sort their friends from their family, their co-workers from their acquaintances.
3. Reduce the ability to collate social information: Goffman points out that one of the main problems for stigmatized identities is what he calls “know-about-ness.” How much access do people have to the sum total of an individual’s social information? How readily accessible is all of that information? How easily collated is it? For example, if your golf buddies can find out that you like to cook, you take Japanese rock gardening classes AND you take tap dancing on Friday nights, the sum total of that information could be stigmatizing (but only while playing golf). Good designers would make that collation difficult.
4. Allow quick, effortless and PERMANENT erasure: We are only now learning how embarrasing a decade’s worth of personal information can be. All too often, designers make it too difficult for users to easily delete their personal information. Make password retrieval easy. Do not require people to remember ancient email addresses. Provide 1-800 number access for “identity emergencies.” And finally, put users’ social information firmly in their own hands, not on your servers.

I’m currently forming research questions for an ethnography of Toronto-based technology and design workers. I am working through this question: is Twitter a “place”?

In her 2000 book Virtual Ethnography, Christine Hine argues that there are two analytic strategies to see “cyberspace.” First, one can view it as a “place,” where social norms emerge. Or second, one can view it as a cultural artifact. The second view allows us to see the designers behind the technology. Think of it as a hermeneutics of a technology, which allows us to see what assumptions its designers about their users (this is an approach that will make sense to interaction designers).

I believe Twitter to be a place, but one that is heavily influenced by its architects and its users. In other words, its design sets the stage for certain kinds of interactions, just as prisons, malls, and casinos do. The architecture of Twitter, which includes its dozens API-driven applications as well as its simple, Web-based interface, is constantly evolving by its network of users, API application designers, and the company of Twitter itself.

This approach suggests that Twitter has “interpretive flexibility,” which is how technology theorists argue that design is determinant; users decide how a technology will actually be used, within the confines of the material form of that technology.

Do you believe Twitter is a “place”? What kind of place? Or is Twitter a technology or technological artifact?

For those of you interested in my presentation from Toronto’s MESH 08 conference, here is the presentation via slideshare. Part of this presentation was inspired by my thoughts on the brand as a self.

A great summary of the talk by Mark Blevis, and another by Connie Crosby.