Social Networks

Fascinating article in New Scientist, looking at the dynamics of how email network behaviour changes in different conditions:

Ben Collingsworth and Ronaldo Menezes at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne identified key events in Enron's demise, such as the August 2001 resignation of CEO Jeffrey Skilling. They then examined the number of emails sent, and the groups that exchanged the messages, in the period around these events. They did not look at the emails' content.

Menezes says he expected communication networks to change during moments of crisis. Yet the researchers found that the biggest changes actually happened around a month before. For example, the number of active email cliques, defined as groups in which every member has had direct email contact with every other member, jumped from 100 to almost 800 around a month before the December 2001 collapse. Messages were also increasingly exchanged within these groups and not shared with other employees.

Menezes thinks he and Collingsworth may have identified a characteristic change that occurs as stress builds within a company: employees start talking directly to people they feel comfortable with, and stop sharing information more widely.

One of the issues for researchers is getting access to enough emails to study as privacy regulations prevent this, even for academic study. Another study by Yahoo shows:

Duncan Watts of Yahoo Research in New York managed to obtain anonymised university email records - though he is not able to share them with others - and used them to show that instead of varying continuously, [different] individuals' emailing behaviour falls into distinct clusters:

We find that the resulting best-estimate parameter distributions for both data sets are surprisingly similar, indicating that at least some features of communication dynamics generalize beyond specific contexts. We also find that variability of individual behavior over time is significantly less than variability across the population, suggesting that individuals can be classified into persistent "types". We conclude that communication patterns may prove useful as an additional class of attribute data, complementing demographic and network data, for user classification and outlier detection---a point that we illustrate with an interpretable clustering of users based on their inferred model parameters.

We've seen work that shows that a customer's benaviour online can give away the "shadow of future intention to defect" and Telcos have been able to infer a lot from their own users' behaviour. In other words, there is much further to go here.

Oh dear - it seems but a few short weeks ago that the media could not pour enough scorn on Twitter, and as for government, well it had a few fans.... but all has changed this week, and the Twitter Bandwagon has a horde of new joiners.

Firstly, the mainstream media has gone totally overboard about Twitter's role in the Iran election (the US Government even asked them to delay system downtime), but as Ethan Zuckerman and others remind us:

Social media is probably more important as a tool to share the protests with the rest of the world than it is as an organizing tool on the ground....

....One of the reasons MSM outlets are so focused on social media is that they’re not able to deploy reporters to cover these protests. In some cases, the majority of reporting from the ground is coming from social media. It’s worth asking what the biases might be in amplifying those social media reports.

But this is mild compared to our Politicos - today, our Prime Minister has over-reacted in the most astonishing fashion:

"You cannot have Rwanda again," he said. "This week's events in Iran are a reminder of the way that people are using new technology to come together in new ways to make their views known."

"You cannot have Rwanda again because information would come out far more quickly about what is actually going on and the public opinion would grow to the point where action would need to be taken."

Well no, because Social Media needs Social Networks - ie it still needs the underlying networks and computers, which Africa has far less of than Iran - hence Zimbabwe, Somalia, Congo etc.

Very interesting article in ComputerWeekly about use of Social Media in Financial Services. A private meeting was held a few days ago where:

A behind closed-doors meeting of bankers, social media experts and technologists at The Financial Services Club last night revealed how the sector which traditionally leads technology innovation views social media technology. The event, held at the Lloyds building in London, delivered a clear message that banks must embrace social media. But work needs to be done by banks to work out how and where to use it.

There are some interesting quotes from it, I've tried to group the comments under the issues we see most commonly:

How Futureproof are the current tools:

- "Websites like Twitter and Facebook are just blips but it's what comes after that matters,"
- "Twitter is interesting but I do not know why. It is interesting because people are using it."
But banks know that what follows the likes of Twitter and Facebook will depend on how businesses develop the technology.

Rationale for Adoption.

- "Social media is the plumbing of collaboration."
- "Most businesses in this country are one-man bands and most of these are online. They would like to be able to run their businesses online including dealing with banks and the tax office for example."
- "Banks will have to get used to the idea that there will be some customers will want to use the web."
- "There will be a bonus for banks that experiment early with social media."
- "Social media is a good way of engaging with employees as well as customers."
- "A lot of it is total bollocks."
- "Once a customer question has been answered by a corporate through a social media site it doesn't have to be re-answered again and again."
- "In 1923 the head of the Post Office said he could not see any uses for a telephone apart form calling servants."

Barriers to Adoption

- "If you want to adopt social media you need to listen to what people are saying about it by monitoring online discussions."
- "Businesses can facilitate customer services through social media but it is not the answer to everything."
- "If the way to make money out of social media was obvious Facebook would be doing it."
- "Banks can't experimented because of heavy regulations."
- "I am not certain [banks] are in a position to use social media credible."

Concerns

"We do not deny that this technology will be used by us but to do this will require things we do not know."
- "In financial services we are still in the educational phase."
- "The designed for purpose of technology in banks is never the purpose it is put to."
- "We might make a product designed for loans and it could end up being used for payments."

Options for Small Acorns (starter projects)

- "Banks could start working with third parties for technology because it is hard to change legacy systems."
- "Corporates are already monitoring data feeds to see what people are talking about through mechanical scanning of social media feeds."
- "How does social media transfer to the corporate context is what banks are trying to understand. There has to be a new way found for doing this."
- "Two banks ask me to build a community for them every week."

We have put in a major social media strategy for one Financial Services company already, and would reflect that many of these concerns are very valid - it is not a simple transfer from the low security, non transactional consumer world to a financial service environment with its much more stringent requirements. (Twitterers are the first to call #FAIL on banks that are perceived to have made a mistake, that should convince you of that).

Also, quite bluntly a fair bit of the consumer technology is just not up to the thrashing / hard conditions it will get in a business environment (or struggles to integrate etc). You need serious Open Source gear like Drupal, and sometimes need to build your own on top of the LAMP stack unless its fr fairly low risk usage.

And, of course as any person with systems implementation experience in the last 30 years will tell you, the technology is a minority sport compared to data integrity, workflow rationalisation, people change management and training, and management support. Social media doesn't escape any of these social problems.

Also, many of the metrics that you can get digitally do not easily transfer to business value - quite a lot of work required (Its not just us that found this, MeasurementCamp in London was set up for this exact reason)

The benefits are quite wide reaching though, from higher customer acquisition and lower churn, improvement in SEO, better ability to acquire advertising and get better rates (lots of work, though). But its non trivial to get this and needs time, its not a plug and play thing.

The original Anschluss was the Nazi German takeover of Austria:

a well-planned coup d'état by the Austrian Nazi Party of Austria's state institutions in Vienna took place on 11 March, prior to the referendum which was cancelled. With power quickly transferred over to Germany, Wehrmacht troops entered Austria to enforce the Anschluss. The Nazis held a plebiscite – asking the people to ratify what had already been done – within the following month, where they claim to have received 99.73% of the vote. No fighting ever took place and the strongest voices against the annexation, particularly Fascist Italy, France and the United Kingdom (the "Stresa Front"), were powerless or, in the case of Italy, appeased.

(from wikipedia, but it is roughly correct....)

Over the last few days we have watched as the Iranian election initially returned statistically "interesting" results - as commentators on the FT note. The main ones that have me scratching my head are:

- The percentage of the voting was [nearly] the same in all places. It means all the votes cast in various provinces, average tribal, rural and urban votes were almost the same. Such thing is impossible not only in Iran but also in the world. It is amazing that percentage of the vote cast for all four candidates was the same in all over Iran.

- Reformists had total votes of more than 20m in the past three elections. How come they had only 12m in this election, when many of those who had never participated in elections before voted this time for the reformists?

- The filtering/crunching down on all forms of media as elections started.

At any rate, the fascinating thing to watch over the last few days is how the social media that are not purely centralised are still sending a lot of details out of Iran. The lesson is that it is now very hard for good old Anschluss tactics to work, as a plethora of digital media systems capture media and push it out (see the BBC list here or search #Iranelection on Twitter).

But a big difference compared to the previous big breaking stories like Mumbai etc - the Mainstream media were on the story pretty fast, a sign that they are monitoring user generated and real time media services far more closely than a few months ago. (Except for CNN of course, which is now (in)famous for fiddling with a stories discussing Twitter's relevance while Tehran was burning (well, there were a few fires...) - makes bloggers look good in comparison

And this does not mean that Social Media will usher in a new democratic world in and of itself as one overoptimistic article very nearly argued - but, as that article noted in one of its more down-to-earth paragraphs:

My perspective is that the technology we deal with today is a chisel which allows us to chip away at the walls placed between ordinary citizens and those that enjoy positions of power. The previously unassailable press institutions can no longer hide behind veneers of objectivity and accuracy when fact-checking is just a Google away.

I have a sense of foreboding though. Wailing on Social Media is one thing, but the Anschluss was carried out because no one could do anything to stop it in real life. Information is power, but its a slow burn type.

Now I originally wrote about this dynamic effect here - but here it is again, following my realisation from the Great Social Media Expert debate that some of the hard economics underpinning (and even contradicting!) the Social Media evangelical fluffiness may be worth exposing, even for other - ahem - Experts (Part 1 is over here).

Firstly, its a fairly well know phenomenon that the average user puts a huge amount of effort into setting up their social network in the early days, but that - for the majority - the usage decays over time. (Twitter stats suggest that about 10% are superusers, the rest are extremely occasional. Anyway, the first graph below shows an estimated mean tailoff curve with c 10% being very active. (Yes, its a power law.....)



Now transpose this onto a standard growth S curve (see blue line below). What happens is that as growth of users rises and their activity is at its highest. the red curve - tota transcation son the network - goes through the roof. This has 2 impacts:

- The cost of operations rises geometrically faster than the user base increases (especially if its a high transaction system like say Twitter, so there is huge early pressure on ite infrastructure) - see he beginning of the Red curve
- The temptation is to think that the opportunity to monetise by putting Ads on all those transactions is exaggerated, as once growth starts to level out and the existing users start to drop off their initial peaks, transactions decline rapidly

In parallel with the levelling off of user visits comes the realisation that pure social net Ad revenue CPMs are in the pennies, as so many other SocNets create more inventory than the existing budgets could possibly fill. Initially there is a rush to the Big Beasts - say Facebook, but that creates all sorts of problems - see Beacon, travails of.....

I have an new hypothesis therefore - that walled garden pure play SocNets will prove to be uneconomic, and will shift to open "pure play" - think web, email - to get low value commodity scale benefits, and also to niche higher value plays.

By the way, the time to sell one of these f*ckers is just before the red line peaks - ie when new user growth is starting to tail off but traffic is still going strong so the buyer is bamboozled into continual massive growth projections. At the time I wrote the original article I was commenting on the Bebo sale, and I noted that:

There's a deja vu here. Time Warner bought AOL at the peak of the Web 1.0 bubble , AOL has bought Bebo at the top of this one. Soon after the Time Warner purchase the dotcom game collapsed, I suspect that buying Bebo has marked the top of the silly SocNet valuation season.

Was true re Facebook, but with all the hype re Twitter, I now wonder........

As we reported yesterday, Facebook is to introduce "Vanity" URLS.. Not to be outdone, Twitter has replied with "Verified" accounts. What is going on?

Well, the official story is its so that YOU (a Time Magazine put it) can increase your "whuffieness" (social media capital) - trust, authenticity etc - on the social network of your choice. Another touted story is that this will stop the activities of spamsters and rogues.

Its all bollocks, of course...the 2 main games in town are:

(i) To lock YOU in to the network, as we explained earlier, and

(ii) To entice/lock web celebrities into these social media services too, so they can carry on their relentless PR drive*.

Yes, gentle reader, it would appear that in this non-hierarchical world of social media we are all equal, its just that some are more equal than others, and certain web-sleb people already have their own accounts ready and polished for them, even if - in the case of Michael Arrington of TechCrunch - they didn't actually verify themselves anyway. Its just ensuring that the "right" people do the spamming.......

*The University of Salford has launched a Social Media MA for "graduates looking for careers in PR, marketing or community work. 'nuff said......

I just had to have this - link from NotCot

A study of Twitter usage by HBR has some interesting snippets:

We found that an average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman. Similarly, an average woman is 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman. Finally, an average man is 40% more likely to be followed by another man than by a woman. These results cannot be explained by different tweeting activity - both men and women tweet at the same rate.

This is a rather interesting difference, I wonder how much of this is early adopter based and it will revert to more standard patterns over time. As HBR points out, this is different to other social nets which are more profile than chat based:

On a typical online social network, most of the activity is focused around women - men follow content produced by women they do and do not know, and women follow content produced by women they know. Generally, men receive comparatively little attention from other men or from women.

Sounds like the standard date site (Which in fact it is - most social networks boil down into date sites, human social motives and actions being fairly predictable)

We wonder to what extent this pattern of results arises because men and women find the content produced by other men on Twitter more compelling than on a typical social network, and men find the content produced by women less compelling (because of a lack of photo sharing, detailed biographies, etc.).

We suspect that this is because Twitter is more chat based. It may still resolve to a date site in the end, but it is clearly carrying out other information tasks as well.

More curious though is the HBR conclusions based around the usage patterns:

A Typical Twitter user contributes very rarely. Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days.

At the same time there is a small contingent of users who are very active. Specifically, the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production. To put Twitter in perspective, consider an unlikely analogue - Wikipedia. There, the top 15% of the most prolific editors account for 90% of Wikipedia's edits

So Twitter has a higher power curve than most social nets (see graph above). I must admit I'm surprised, if I were to hazard a guess its that the transaction costs of a twt is lower, so heavier users thus use it more. The conclusion HBR comes to.....

In other words, the pattern of contributions on Twitter is more concentrated among the few top users than is the case on Wikipedia, even though Wikipedia is clearly not a communications tool. This implies that Twitter's resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.

....just does not tally with my experience. My experience is that there is a cadre of users - quite a large one - that use Twitter as a sort of IM-cum-chat system, rather than being passive recipients of sleb broadcasters. I think HBR should look at the actual dynamics of conversation, I suspect there is far more to and froing than they are assuming.

Update - good point in comments from Ben Ellis, ie HBR probably haven't stripped out all the "listening post" sites that say nothing but follow thousands.

Another day, another Facebook "Boob with boobs" story - this time about Breast Cancer:

After having a mastectomy, Sharon Adams decided to raise awareness of breast cancer by posting photographs of her scar on Facebook.

They were accompanied by a description of the mother of four's fight against the disease and encouragement from her for other women to go for regular check-ups.

But within a day, the social networking site removed the photos after describing them as 'sexual and abusive'.

Breast cancer sufferer Sharon Adams was banned from putting her mastectomy photos on Facebook

The action triggered a wave of protest, with nearly 900 people joining an online group calling for the ban to be lifted.

'I put these pictures out on Facebook to put a message out to women - check your breasts regularly and do not ever be ashamed of a mastectomy,' said Miss Adams, 45, yesterday.

'For Facebook to claim they were sexual and abusive was absurd. Facebook has online groups about sexual positions and some groups which are bordering on racist - but they ban this.'

This follows the furore over Facebook banning pictures of mothers feeding babies with bared boobs, as they were considered not safe and secure for all users, including children. But anyone who has been on Facebook will know that bare breasts are not hard to find.... as the article notes, there are a lot of breasts in more compromising positions.

So in Facebookland it seems that the only allowed boobs are on women who are fit and f*cking. Still, what do you expect of a service started up by college students?

But as well as the tittering, there is a bigger point here, in that the users in both cases have decided what they believe is the correct treatment, and have forced the network to change policy this time by protest. And kudos to Facebook for reacting this time. Now, how about doing the right things by the lactating mothers?

The background - on Britain's Got Talent tonight (thats the show that the very viral Susan Boyle is in, final is tomorrow night) a little girl (Hollie Steele) sings, breaks down onstage and is then given another go (not a thing given to any other performers, I add). At the end of the show, the format is that the highest public voted act goes straight through to the Final, but the next two most popular get to have the 3 judges decide which one of them goes through. She comes joint second with a guy who can sing both voices in "Barcelona".

The 3 judges put the little girl through, and they admit its largely as a sympathy vote, over the other act.

The little girls's bravery makes the nightly news in a sympathetic light.

So far so good.

However, the Twitterstream, which has been following Britains Got Talent (#bgt) in big numbers, goes apoplectic at this point - the general feeling (running at about 50:1 as best I can gauge* ) is that this is a fix (thats a polite term), so this result is definitely not a reflection of the public's - or at least the Twittering public's - view.

(Just look at the #bgt stream from about 22.20 for the next 20 minutes - Update: nay, 4 hours - or so)

In the past you would never have seen this feedback, now its very visible in both numbers and points of view, in real time.

This is very interesting, I await to see what happens next - this is a precursor of what I think will be a very disruptive trend, when the realtime response is massively different to the (stage managed?) "user generated choice" shows' results - and then other shows.

* I had another look the next morning, there has been a rise in the defenders but the vast majority - and we are talking thousands of twts here now - felt that either (i) no second chance as its unfair and/or (ii) sing, but don't go through. What is interesting is that - so far - none of this has been picked up in the "official" media despite protests on any comment site going - Facebook groups, BBC and Newspaper online readers pages, the YouTube clips etc. I wonder if this is another reason why Mainstream Media is failing - it genuinely is not reflecting what people actually think, but runs to an agenda from someplace else?