Week 2 - Social Networking: something old, something new, something borrowed...

Social networks are not new. 'People have used the idea of "social network" loosely for over a century to connote complex sets of relationships between members of social systems at all scales, from interpersonal to international.' (Source: Wikipedia) In his book "The Tipping Point", Malcolm Gladwell takes many examples from history, covering a variety of social phenomena, to identify the human interaction characteristics that can cause ideas and behavior and messages and products sometimes to become what he calls "social epidemics". Essentially, these epidemics relied on social networks to spread, and one central factor was the role of a few, influential people in propagating the message or idea. His book was published prior to the social networking sites becoming big in the mainstream (primarily in the 2000's per this JCMC article). So what, then, is new?

I would argue that it's the rate and magnitude of change, facilitated by the speed with which the message/ idea spreads through social networks online. One of the cases in Gladwell's book is of Paul Revere who in 1775 rode throughout the night to warn communities surrounding Boston of a potential attack, thereby enabling the local militia to be prepared and ward off the offence when it came. He would have saved a lot of time and reached an exponentially higher number of people, were tools like Twitter or Facebook available to him. By all accounts, it appears Mr. Revere would have had a fair number of 'followers' and 'friends'.

By using a wide variety of examples, Gladwell tries to uncover the anatomy and lifecycle of a social epidemic, with the objective that if this is a reliable, tested formula and predictable pattern, then positive, rapid social change (or "social epidemic") can be intentionally created. This is an important message for any organization at any time, but especially so now that there are powerful tools available that can accelerate the impact. There are many success stories, where organizations - public or private - have utilized the collective social capital to their advantage, a situation made possible through social media's immense reach in "enabling conversations." From Wikipedia to Kiva, the possibilities are endless.

However, big gains come with big risks. Embracing social change of this nature and scope takes courage. For instance, when GM invited site visitors to create Chevy Tahoe ads and publish on the GM site, many critical ads were created. GM retained those ads, and their company's credibility. And as a result of this decision (taken in consultation with Campbell-Ewald, the company handling Chevy's advertising since 1914), "for three weeks running, Chevyapprentice.com funneled more people to the Chevy site than either Google or Yahoo did. Once there, many requested info or left a cookie trail to dealers' sites." (Source: Wired.com) As one of Campbell-Ewald's top execs, Ed Dilworth, said, "You can either stay in the bunker, or you can jump out there and try to participate, [a]nd to not participate is criminal."

Such risk-taking is not limited to the entrepreneurial world; for instance, the US intelligence community has adopted social media. Its transformation - both technologically and philosophically - is worth studying (see Intellipedia's story or this article in ITWorld).

These are but a few instances. Examples abound on how to leverage social media technologies for organizational communication and effectiveness. The possibilities are only limited by one's creativity and the level of acceptable risk. What is needed, then, is to ask and answer this basic question: which conversation(s) does one want to enable?