I am big fan of looking to outside fields for ideas and expertise. Case-in-point: I recently came across a reference to a great study about contract law – when people rely on the contract for enforcement during the course of business, and when they don’t. Hint: they usually don’t; they rely on the relationship.
Translating the findings to social network analysis, we come up with six great pieces of advice for all aspiring master networkers:
Established relationships provide more value than new ones.
Your reputation is critical to creating new relationships.
The more your peer gets out of a relationship, the more you will get out of it: deliver excellence.
If you are stuck together for the foreseeable future, you will both get more out of the relationship. This could be from getting forced to trust each other or pushing harder to get more out of the relationship.
New relationships are easier through introductions as the introducer can punish the introducee, through reputation or otherwise, if he does not deliver.
Your network is your asset and yours alone, no one is invested the way you are to maintain your relationships.
Oct. 15 (Bloomberg) — Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said the central bank will consider discarding its long- standing aversion to interfering with asset-price bubbles and warned that the banking business may be concentrated in too few companies.
Individual power increases network risk. When the power goes, so does the network.
But, this risk can also mobilize everyone else to buoy up the network by supporting the powerful (AIG rescue) or group cooperation (bailout lobbying). When a power fails, there will be painful redistribution of wealth (Lehman Brothers) and the market as new relationships are established. The market redistribution remains to be seen, but JPMorgan’s buying up relationships (the network) left and right.
Recommendations to the survivors. It’s easier to buy existing relationships through M&A than to create them from scratch, so think specific geographies and buy local; that’s where you’ll find the majority of relationships. For all those new customers you acquire reach out to them early and often. Build the relationships that kept them with your acquiring company.
Network risk is inherent to trading, and traders will never willingly open their books. The bulk of a trader’s value is in his judgment, not the actual trading. If you knew what they were buying and selling, you could duplicate their portfolio without paying their fees. But, there’s an opportunity for a new Moody’s: grade trading funds on network risk.
First is an important matter of language. There is a large difference between authority and an authority. Authority is power formally granted by a position or role. An authority is some who has power or influence; it’s a matter of trust by others for a given context. E.g. I trust my doctor to diagnose an illness, but have no reason to trust him on gardening.
There are many reasons we (dis-) trust others, including: shared opinions; length, frequency, and consistency of interactions; and how our peers feel about the individual the given context. These are all correlated, but frequency and peer opinion have the biggest impact on transferability of trust.
Frequency can be no surprise, it’s the underpinning of blanket marketing. Familiarity bred through repetition. Ever wonder why you stop on a TV show you dislike while flipping through the channels? Of course, that could be me making excuses for lousy taste.
Peer consideration is the tricky bit. There is a lot of research going into this, but there are some great seminal works that are written for non-academics covering the spread of innovation and adoption of scientific principles.
When our peers already have some experience or opinion on a topic or an authority, then our own opinions are strongly colored by these existing opinions. In fact, as odd as it may sound, given a pattern of relationships where the opinion of all but one individual is known, we can predictably estimate both what the opinion is, and how strong the opinion is, of the unknown person.
But how about when we something brand new to us and our peers? Frequency plays a big role here too. If lots of people, even people we know nothing about, say XYZ is a good idea, we’re likely to give it the benefit of the doubt, trusting the wisdom of the crowd.
So, strictly speaking, is (dis-) trust transferable? Depends. If trust already exists in our network of peers, yes, and predictably so. If the context is brand new to you and your peers, there is no trust to transfer, but we use frequency as a proxy in our decisions.
So what does this all mean? Let’s look at an example: you’re trying to decide whether you agree (trust) what I have written.
I am new to writing about this, and I’m not particularly active in social media, so chances are we don’t have peers in common. You can google for what others have said about me, but you’re not going to find much relevant to trusting me in this context. Ultimately, because I don’t have a track record (frequency & consistency) for participation (peers) in this context, I am at the mercy of how similar our outlooks are, and any opinions that may develop in comments.
I was recently asked to put together some thoughts about the potential impact Social Networks could have on education by a really savvy M.D. over at Cerner, and I thought this audience might be interested too. I have not seen too much about this topic, and would really like to hear your thoughts.
Peer Learning & Diabetes
Social Networking sites simplify conversations by lowering the cost to communicate to large groups, both for the speaker and the recipient. Accomplished by enforcing small messages, recipients can easily consume or ignore the content with trivial effort. This in itself has some pretty interesting impact on one’s social network. But, the messages are also semi-permanent, consumed at leisure, and are often open to any interested peers, not just the intended recipient.
Open recorded dialog offers a unique value in communication: the conversation doesn’t end just because it has stopped. This persistence and openness in the dialog has some interesting conceivable implications for education:
Participants can join into the conversation, well after it’s stopped. This is a biggie. This open availability allows individuals to pick up the conversation where it left off, taking it in new directions their own context brings with them. It is this factor that not only contributes to many new ideas, but also helps drive quality by squeezing the most out of existing ones..
Discuss once, available to all. The SN creates a naturally accumulating body of knowledge, available to all with thanks to your favorite search engine.
Record the process, not just the answer. Following along with a conversation, you can actually learn with the participants, not just gain from their answers. Further, many times the conversation is not going to answer your specific question, but you can gain insight from the ideas already discussed, and get pointers to more places to look.
Don’t have to know conversation partners in advance. In conjunction with (1), you can put a question out to your peers, and see who responds. Find experts, even when you don’t know where to look.
Much of the above is available to any generic SN, from MySpace to any online forum. But, what SNs offer over and above online forums, is trust. The who you are carrying on conversations with, you know. You know whether the respondent is knowledgeable or guessing, and can more likely read into the subtlety of their responses. Couple this trust with focused goals, as SERMO has for the medical community, and you open the pool even wider for advice.
You’ve noticed that the language I am using is around conversation, dialog, and advice. Because of the short-form messaging, SNs are much more suited to peer-based education than seminars. I have yet to see anyone artfully present more than maybe 1,000 words on the Internet; it’s no substitute for medical journals. It is, however, an excellent place to discuss the journal contents, grind out all the last subtleties, and come up with ideas for your next article.
It is the pressure of our peers, after all, that gives us the support to try things we otherwise wouldn’t have. — BILL TREASURER, Right Risk
In addition to these benefits, there are the possible benefits of all of this being a social venture: cultural norms. If you, the educator, control a network, there’s a lot you can do to build group behaviors to reinforce whatever you are trying to teach them: group rewards if 90% of the class does their homework, peer pressure to go outside and exercise for asthmatics, peer support in the middle of the night not to give in to that nicotine craving, or even just introducing icebreakers prior to a convention.
Each of these has been around long well before the prevalence of SNs. But today, SNs now provide an easy platform that automates much of the hard work, and create a reason for pools of trusted colleagues to come together spanning many timezones. From your colleagues, and from their colleagues, ideas and new perspectives arise. It requires motivation on your part, but this is prime time for peer education.
So, how have you used SNs for education? Constructively used peer pressure in an educational setting? What’s your example of peer pressure helping you?
As a follow up to this previous post with an image of the relationship between people mentioned in the news, I’ve been asked to provide more detail.
First, why bother at all? Exploring the implied relationships may tell us about the individuals in question, but certainly provide more context to each of the other topics at hand. This context not only provides additional understanding the of topic, but can also be a valuable research tool in quickly determining which other topics may impact the one at hand.
What are the relationships shown? Shown are names occurring in the same news articles, which implies a relationship. This relationship may a formal relationship, e.g. the working relationship of Bush (8) and Condoleezza Rice (10). Or, the individuals may be related to a common topic such as Michael Phelps (4) and Babe Ruth.
Following are the top 20 names, by centrality, and the number of different implied relationships for each.
People in the News (detail)
Barack Obama 1128
John McCain 902
Sarah Palin 405
Michael Phelps 237
Pervez Musharraf 95
Kwame Kilpatrick 103
Hillary Clinton 270
Bush 158
Joe Biden 218
Condoleezza Rice 107
Steve Jobs 160
John Edwards 101
Clark Rockefeller 69
Britney Spears 122
Brett Favre 65
Bernie Mac 60
Miley Cyrus 70
Bill Clinton 148
Anwar Ibrahim 34
Stephenie Meyer 27
What’s the data set? A random sampling of news sites including NYTimes, Google, Yahoo!, CNN, Drudge, and the like.
Is this an accurate reflection of news? I am polling a number of the big news sites, so hopefully it’s not far off.
Merlin Mann has a large set of public delicioustags, and I thought I’d take a stab at their interrelation. By my measure of centrality, his top 20 are:
Merlin Mann's Delicious Tags
43folders
domains
tumble
music
sanfrancisco
macosx
flickr
mbwideas
gtd
movies
design
tv
selflink
mac
heh
email
productivity
lifehacks
the_man
cigars
Why Merlin Mann you might ask? Well, I like his work, and he has a walloping collection of tags.
Want your tags drawn and quartiled? Leave a comment or drop me a line at erich@howweknowus.com…
This is not my usual topic, but I’ve done a lot of work looking at innovation, and the conditions under which it thrives.
Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey, founders of Twitter, have talked often of the “constraints” that are built into the Twitter app. You can only post 140 characters in a single message, for example. And because Twitter didn’t have desktop client when it launched, a number of them were created and they are probably better than anything Twitter would have created. Same with the iPhone apps like Twinkle and Twitterific. A VC, Aug 2008
My interest started with looking at innovation levels and the social networks of the individuals involved; and Fred Wilson hit on something really important here: innovation thrives under constraint.
Ask any artist, there’s nothing more more terrifying than a naked canvas, blank sheet of paper, or unformed block of clay. It is the constraints that give us to innovate something from. They are the core of the idea that pushes us through writers/painters/coders block.
Robert Pirsig tells us about an experiment in writing. Students were consistently having difficulty when asked to write about anything they wanted. So he had them all write for an hour solely about the back of their thumb. Lots of odd looks surely, but no one had any trouble finding something to say.
Constraints provide focus. Focus allows execution. If the goal is creating an external service (e.g. web service), focus also communicates what the service will and will not do — providing clear constraints to the next ring of innovators.
