3. How Relationships and Social Capital Are Changing
“People who are members of online social networks are not so
much networking as they are broadcasting their lives to an
outer tier of acquaintances… ”.
—Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and
American Life Project
The World Wide Web of information is about content. The World Wide Web of people—the social Web—is about people and relationships. By necessity, this book is equally about culture and sociology as it is about business and technology. Facebook and Twitter have played substantial roles in affecting the outcome of social movements, such as mobilizing volunteers for the earthquake in Haiti and helping facilitate the uprising in Iran. The social Web itself is a social movement, mobilizing Internet users every day in scar-ily efficient and far-reaching ways to engage with the people, organizations, and events they hold most dear.
Behind the scenes, social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have lowered the cost of staying in touch, so we are all staying in touch with more people. It’s similar to when we went from in-person meetings to phone calls, and from phone calls to email. Each time, the cost of staying in touch went down, so our capacity to maintain relationships went up. We can call or telemarket to more people than we can see face-to-face on a regular basis. We can email or email-market to far more people than we can call on a regular basis. Today we can become Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections, and Twitter followers with far more people than we could visit, call, or email. Over time, thanks to new technologies, the average number of relationships each of us have is increasing. This is true for both businesses and individuals.
Having bigger pools of people to draw from and ask favors of means we can all become more personally and professionally empowered to accomplish our goals and tasks. Equally important, understanding the concepts in this chapter can empower us to better help others.
This chapter talks about relationships in the social Web through the lens of social capital. It discusses how new modes of communication on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are expanding our weak-tie networks, supplementing offline networking, flattening organizational hierarchies, and creating a win–win situation from network effects for all network participants—that is, you, your customers, partners, and colleagues.
What Is Social Capital?
Individuals and organizations have two sources of competitive advantage: human capital and social capital. Human capital, which includes talent, intellect, charisma, and formal authority, is necessary for success but is often beyond an individual’s direct control and is insufficient in most organizations. In contrast, social capital comes from our relationships. Robert Putnam, the Harvard political science professor who coined the term, defines social capital as the collective value of all social networks and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other. According to Putnam, we can measure social capital by the level of trust and reciprocity in a community or between individuals, and it is an essential component to building and maintaining organizations, communities, and even democracy.
More recent work on social capital has focused on the individual. Studies such as those by Deb Gruenfeld at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Mikolaj Piskorski at Harvard Business School have shown that social capital is a powerful source of knowledge, ideas, opportunities, support, reputation, and visibility that is as influential as human capital (if not more so). Individuals with greater social capital close more deals, are better respected, and get higher-ranking jobs. In the Facebook Era, everyone’s social capital increases. Online social networks offer greater access to social capital, empowering those who are well connected with private information, diverse skill sets, and others’ energy and attention, and enabling everyone else to become better connected.
Early research already shows that bringing networks online makes people more capable and efficient at accumulating, managing, and exercising social capital. Consciously or unconsciously, people are using sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn as tools to maximize relationship social capital.
Sources of Social Capital on Social Networking Sites
Private Information and Conversation
• Explanation—Frequent and informal communications that occur on social networking sites, such as Twitter direct messages or Facebook messages, are an easy way to exchange or obtain private information. Emotional rapport built between individuals on social networking sites also carries into offline relationships, further increasing the likelihood of information exchange.
• Example—For those who need to work from home or are less able to join work events after hours (such as those needing to care for their children or the elderly), casual communications on social networking sites can help fill the gap in lost communication opportunities with the online equivalent of water-cooler conversations or chats over a beer.
Diverse Skill Sets
• Explanation—Hiring managers, recruiters, and others can easily search on LinkedIn or Facebook for member profiles that match desired skills and then either reach out directly or via mutual friends. Because online social connections are lower commitment and more abundant, chances are higher that someone in a friend-of-friends network fits the bill or at least knows someone who does.
• Example—With a quick search on social networking sites, someone seeking to hire a Java developer can reach a broader audience while being more targeted about which profiles of individuals to consider. The result is a bigger pipeline of more qualified candidates.
Others’ Energy and Attention
• Explanation—The passive broadcast nature of information on social network profiles and status messages has made it socially acceptable for people to share more about themselves on a more frequent basis, enabling them to stay top of mind for friends and colleagues.
• Example—If you are waiting to hear back from a prospect or someone from whom you asked a favor, it’s better for them to be passively reminded that they owe you an answer from seeing your update on a social networking site than for you to call or email to remind them.
Social capital is the currency of business interactions and relationships. This chapter provides an important conceptual framework about social capital that we repeatedly reference in subsequent chapters on social sales, marketing, product innovation, and recruiting. New modes of communication that social networking sites establish are encouraging weak-tie relationships, complementing offline networking efforts, and creating new social value for people who use these sites.
New Modes of Communication on the Social Web
Online social networking sites have invented new modes of communication such as Facebook pokes, Wall posts, and tweets that are easier and more casual than forms of communication in the past. The “transaction cost” of staying in touch has gone down, so it’s now possible for each of us to maintain a greater number of more casual relationships. Although personalized, private messages still play an important role, new semi-public modes of communication such as photos, status messages, and pokes are creating efficient yet emotional ways for us to keep in touch.
In the past, we simply had to forego many relationships because we didn’t have enough hours in the day to visit, call, or email someone on a semiperiodic basis. In the Facebook Era, our capacity for weak-tie relationships is almost unbounded. Ordinary people can keep in touch with everyone they have ever known or become Twitter “celebrities” with millions of followers.
Changing Expectations for How We Communicate
Over time, the expectations for how we communicate have changed as new technologies have emerged. It used to be common for friends or door-to-door salesmen to drop by unexpectedly. As people began to relocate and many living communities became less homogenous, phone calls gradually replaced surprise in-person visits as the norm for individuals and businesses to get in touch.
Then BlackBerrys and email came along and extended our workday to 24 hours, significantly cutting into our free time. One coping mechanism was to stop answering phone calls that interrupted us in real time and to move more toward email, which is asynchronous. For businesses, email marketing seemed like a godsend that enabled them to reach many individuals at a very low cost.
But the low cost of sending email has resulted in too much of it. Today, by default, many people treat emails from others they don’t know as spam. Other people create separate accounts for the email lists they are on. They worry (and rightly so) that opting in to an email marketing list might mean being flooded with communications from the sender.
The World Wide Web of information is content overload—it is too much. The World Wide Web of people—the Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter online social graph—enables us to use transitive trust with friends and people we follow to filter out reliable, interesting, and relevant content, products, and individuals. As we discuss further in Chapter 6, “Marketing in the Facebook Era,” Facebook Pages and Twitter accounts are a purely opt-in form of communications. People choose to “like” or follow a business, and they can just as easily choose to stop “liking” or following.
Privacy norms about communication are quite nuanced. People are less private than they were in the past, sharing a great amount of personal information openly on their Facebook profiles and tweets, and interacting with acquaintances. Conversely, people are much more guarded about who shows up at their home or calls on the telephone.
To be successful in communicating to their audience base, businesses need to adapt their communications to match what people want and expect.
Facebook: CRM for Individuals?
Social networking sites not only provide mechanisms for communicating, but they are also a useful contact management system. Facebook is similar to CRM (customer relationship management) for individuals—it is increasingly how many of us manage relationships across our personal and professional lives.
In the past, “keeping in touch” was hard work. After two people met—say, at a conference—staying in touch required one or both parties to actively communicate on a somewhat regular basis. Communication required time and planning.
In contrast, social networking sites are designed for passive communication. Facebook status messages, notifications, and upcoming birthdays remind us to keep in touch. It is fun and intuitive, visual, active, searchable, and self-updating:
• Fun and intuitive—Far from fitting the stereotype of traditional CRM databases as being boring and complicated, social networking sites bring games, multimedia, and intuitive design to managing contacts. A simple design and the help wizard that appears when you first register for sites such as Facebook enable people to start using these sites right away, reducing the barriers to joining the online social graph.
• Visual—The visual aspect of social networking sites is especially important. Most people in the world aren’t very good at remembering names, especially when we have just met a large number of people during a short amount of time. After a party, conference, wedding, or the first day on a new job, profile pictures act as flash cards to help us put the face to the name and better remember people we meet. Seeing people’s photos and videos from different aspects of their lives that they choose to share, such as pictures of their dog, also helps us get to know and understand them better.
• Active — Most databases are passive, in the sense that they wait for you to query them for specific kinds of data. Social networking sites go beyond passive data queries. Every time we log in to Facebook, we see News Feed updates—such as new status messages, profile pictures, friend connections, videos, gifts, and so on—about a different, random subset of our contacts. We are, in effect, reminded to think about people we know who might not otherwise have crossed our mind that day. Status messages, birthday and engagement announcements, and tweets are timely, proactive suggestions about whom we might want to reach out to and what we might want to say. Compared with before, communication with our contacts requires less work, planning, and remembering because we can count on social networking tools to tell us who, when, and what we want to communicate.
• Searchable — Social networking sites make it easy to find contacts within your network. Almost all the sites enable you to search and filter contacts based on various criteria of interest, such as name, employer, school, city, hobbies, gender, relationship status, and other profile information. This search functionality is useful both when you want to establish a new online connection and when you want to search from among your existing connections, such as finding which of your friends have a particular area of expertise.
• Self-updating—The advantage of social networking sites over traditional contact databases is that everyone is responsible for maintaining and updating his own profile. This means that information is more likely to be current and accurate.
The Power of Weak Ties
Although most people use Facebook and, to a lesser extent Twitter, to keep in touch with close friends and family members, these social networking sites make the greatest difference from the perspective of social capital with our weak-tie relationships. Weak ties include people you have just met, people you met only a few times, people you used to know, and friends of friends. Before Facebook, we would lose touch with most of these people. Now we stay in touch.
Interestingly, sociology research since the 1970s has shown that our weak ties carry the greatest amount of social capital. We are most often hiring, getting hired by, and closing deals not with our best friends and family members, but with acquaintances, friends of friends, and people we have just met. Weak ties also act as crucial bridges across clumps of people, providing an information advantage to network members.
For most people, social networks are characterized by few strong connections (such as with parents and best friends) and many weak connections. The exact number and type of connections vary by individual, but we all have a threshold beyond which we choose not to or simply are unable to maintain relationships. Dunbar’s number, a cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, has been approximated at 150. An interesting question being explored in today’s research is whether social networking sites help increase Dunbar’s number. Early data suggests no—that humans have a biological limit on the number of close relationships we can maintain. My theory is that social networks let us better manage who is in the inner circle and more fluidly adapt to new situations and circumstances.
In the following guest expert sidebar, Harvard Business School professor Mikolaj Piskorski shares compelling research about how social sites such as Facebook change interpersonal relationships and how companies can best position themselves to succeed in this environment.
Interpersonal Relationships and Facebook
Mikolaj Jan Piskorski
Popular press, bloggers, and certain academics often sound an alarm to warn us that the Internet, and online social networks in particular, make us lonely and estranged. Online social networks apparently make us focus on weak online relationships, which leads us to abandon our deeper and meaningful offline relationships.
The other view argues that online social networks make us more satisfied with our social lives by improving both strong and weak social relationships. Specifically, social sites such as Facebook and Twitter enable people to efficiently participate in the lives of loved ones, even when they are far away. They also help people sustain valuable acquaintance relationships that would otherwise disintegrate very quickly. Finally, online social networks make it easier to befriend people whom we could not otherwise easily find or approach in the offline world. With time, many of these new online relationships lead to meaningful offline relationships, which makes people happier.
Although both views have merit, and we can always find someone who has become either more isolated or more connected as a result of online media, it is useful to know what the numbers say. Overall, research supports the second point of view. The data shows that use of Facebook improves people’s networks and their psychological well-being. Although social sites are excellent at helping maintain acquaintance relationships, the main source of user satisfaction with Facebook comes from helping people maintain and deepen offline contacts.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project, which involved more than 2,500 randomly chosen adult Americans, reported in 2009 that Internet users—and users of online social networks, in particular—end up having more diverse social networks. They are also more likely to discuss matters of high importance with people of another race or those who belong to another political party. These findings are great news for our society.
Research also shows profound implications for companies seeking to engage customers on the social Web. Many companies have attempted to engage customers on Facebook or Twitter only to find limited results. This is not very surprising:People go on these sites to connect with friends, not necessarily with businesses. But this does not mean that companies cannot get involved. On the contrary, business initiatives can be very successful, as a handful of companies are discovering.
But to become successful, companies need to change their mindset from trying to “friend” their customers to helping their customers build and improve relationships with other people. By facilitating these relationships, companies can then lower their marketing and operation costs, build brands, and increase willingness to pay for their products and services.
Mikolaj Piskorski (@mpiskorski) is an associate professor of strategy and Marvin Bower Fellow at Harvard Business School.
At their core, social networking sites are relationship tools that enable us to be both more aware and better able to engage with our outer networks. By reducing the cost of interaction and the cost of maintaining a relationship, sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn help increase our network capacity to include otherwise-foregone fringe relationships. As a result, we can capture more of the full value of our cumulative lifetime social network (see Figure 3.1).
Figure 3.1
Social networking sites provide both low-touch communications and CRM-like features to help us maintain better relationships with more people, including weak ties.
Bernie Hogan and his colleagues at the Oxford Internet Institute have been collecting data on how offline networks manifest themselves online on social networking sites such as Facebook, which we summarized in the following guest expert sidebar. Their early findings suggest a high degree of overlap between people’s Facebook networks and their offline networks, but the Facebook networks tend to be much bigger (because of the weak ties).
Comparing Facebook Friend Networks to Offline Personal Networks
Bernie Hogan
It is interesting to compare one’s personal (offline) network and one’s Facebook network. For this study, I use a hybrid of Hogan et al.’s (2007) and McCarty and Govindaramanujam’s (2005) methods to determine personal networks. I first ask about groups the respondent belongs to, and then I ask about group members. I also have respondents start with a seed set of ties and work their way out toward other network members.
To give an example of this analysis, I have opted to use my own Facebook network, which I consider a pretty typical network.
As shown in Figure 3.2, the personal network has 27 nodes, whereas the Facebook network has 186, thereby representing a far larger number of nodes. A high amount of overlap exists between the two networks, as expected. The eight individuals who are in the personal network but not the Facebook network are primarily older individuals and several people who know of Facebook but have actively chosen not to participate. The dark squares represent the 19 (out of 27 total) personal network members on Facebook. The white squares represent the 186 Facebook network members—including 167 weak ties.
Figure 3.2
This is a rendering of Bernie Hogan’s Facebook friendship network using NodeXL. The different shaded regions represent different real-world networks, including grad school, professional, and family.
Similar to a few hundred other networks I am currently analyzing, this one has some pretty tell-tale signs:
• Dense pockets of connections with few links in between suggest a change in social context and often a change in geography. When university students examine their networks, the two biggest clusters are high school and university, except those who grew up near the university—then the clusters are not as distinct. People who have lived in several areas for a long time tend to see multiple clear clusters. Family often represents a third, smaller cluster because the natural limit to the size of family is often smaller than the natural limit to who is “friendable” from other places.
• Bridges are meaningful. Two kinds of bridges generally exist between these clusters. The first bridge is just a coincidence:someone who happens to know people from your home-town and people from your current job. These bridges are characterized by few links between clusters. The second kind of bridge refers to people who have multiple relationships to several clusters. These are typically people whom you introduce to others. In this example network, you can see several people who appear to link across groups.
Dr. Bernie Hogan (@blurky) is a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute.
Relationship “Options”
Some of you might be wondering if it really counts as having a relationship with someone if all you do is see pictures of their dog and “poke” them occasionally, and that’s a fair point. Another way of thinking about weak ties on Facebook or Twitter is as relationship “options” that you have the capability but not the obligation to exercise down the road if it makes sense to invest more in that relationship. Instead of foregoing momentary rapport shared with someone you met at a conference or on the plane, you can “file it away” for later.
The rationale is that, during a lifetime, you will build up a large and likely very valuable pool of weak-tie contacts for you to draw from when you are hiring, looking for a job, selling a product, or accomplishing some other goal.
Twitter takes this even further by enabling one-sided relationships: Someone can follow you without you necessarily having to follow them back. It’s not a bad idea to check out who has been following you, in case it’s someone with whom you’d want to establish a mutual relationship or start interacting.
Discovering Which Relationships Are Valuable
In addition to increasing our relationship capacity, social networking sites provide important information that can help us better assess up front the potential relevance and value of a relationship. Instead of waiting for time or happenstance to reveal common ground, mutual friends, or overlapping interests, we can glean more of this information sooner from viewing profile information our new contacts have chosen to share. Having access to this information helps accelerate relationships by making us smarter about which relationships to invest in, prioritize, and potentially escalate from the fringe.
For example, it might never have come up during your brief conversation and business card exchange with the guy you met at a medical conference last month that he also plays soccer. If your league team is seeking another member, that new information could be enough for you to decide to become more than just fringe friends. You might have any number of reasons why you would actually want to stay in touch, but you might not have had a chance to discover this the first time you met—and without social networking, you might not have decided to stay in touch.
Online social networking gives serendipity extra chances. First, you are more likely to stay in touch with people you have just met because the bar for establishing an online social networking connection is lower compared with traditional relationships. Second, after you’ve established the connection, you are empowered with information to decide sooner whether this is a relationship worth pursuing. Information helps us qualify early and reduce false positives and false negatives: We waste less time on relationships that likely won’t go anywhere, and we miss out less often on relationships that likely will go far.
Latent Value:When Options Come in Handy
Friend options come in handy when life circumstances change and new unmet needs emerge. If you are laid off, tap your social network to find a job. If you are moving or traveling to a new city, see who in your network is local and perhaps someone can show you the ins and outs. If you are starting a company, hire employees from your network. If you have a sudden need for advice or expertise, find answers and experts from your network.
For this reason, weak ties can carry immense latent value. Maybe that friendly gal who sat next to you on the flight to New York ends up introducing you years later to your new job or business partner. She might not have seemed “valuable” at the time you met, but she could become valuable later. Online social networking extends serendipity across time and circumstance.
Especially for younger generations of people who are starting to use Facebook at earlier ages, it provides interesting implications of having a database containing every person you have ever met. My friend’s younger brother, Tyler, is a good example. Tyler is 13 (the minimum age for joining Facebook) and registered for an account several months ago. The first thing he did was search for all his elementary school classmates and add them as friends. If Tyler wants, he could be Facebook friends with these people forever. In fact, Tyler will be able to keep in touch with everyone he meets from now on, accumulating a lifetime of latent social capital. In 20 years, perhaps Tyler will find that his friend from kindergarten has become an important business partner.
Of course, Tyler might not want to stay in touch in every instance. (Who among us hasn’t wanted to “start over” at some point?) When relationships or life circumstances change, it sometimes makes sense to reflect these changes in our online social networks. We have several options: adjusting privacy settings to limit what information is visible to a contact, “defriending” a contact, blocking a contact, or committing “Facebook suicide” (deactivating your account).
Supplementing Offline Networking with Online Interactions
One common objection to online social networking is that it sacrifices relationship quality for quantity. Although this might have been true of first-generation sites, it is becoming less the case as people become more sophisticated about the connections they accept and establish. As we discussed in Chapter 2, “The New Social Norms,” interactions on social networking sites tend to augment instead of replace offline interactions. One of the reasons Facebook has been so successful compared with its predecessors is the focus on supporting offline networks instead of online-only relationships.
To test this assumption, I surveyed 100 of my own friends to ask whether they initiate or accept friend requests from strangers on social networking sites. A stranger is defined as someone whom you have never met in person. I tried to get representative coverage across different age groups, professions, and geographies, but admittedly many of my friends tend to reflect my own demographic. Also, this is not strictly an apples-to-apples comparison because not everyone I surveyed belongs to all four sites I asked about.
Still, the results are illuminating. Most (73%) had never received a friend request from a stranger on Facebook. Even among those who had, most had not accepted these requests. They either had clicked Ignore Request or simply had not responded (see Table 3.1). The results for LinkedIn follow a similar pattern.
Table 3.1 Survey of Friend Requests from Strangers
The respondents’ experience on Orkut and MySpace was markedly different. Without exception, everyone had been solicited by a stranger. More tended to accept strangers’ requests on MySpace than on Orkut. More people had also initiated friend requests with strangers on MySpace, presumably because it is common practice to befriend bands and celebrities on MySpace.
I dug a little deeper. Most people who had accepted requests from strangers said they had done so because the protocol for acceptance or rejection was not clear and they didn’t want to appear rude. Many told me that after awhile, their Orkut networks degraded into largely random connections. Spam started drowning out interactions with real friends; as the site became less relevant, people stopped logging in and interacting, which made it even less relevant for their real friends who were on the site. Pretty soon, entire groups of friends stopped logging in.
Compared with Orkut or MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn established a clear friend request protocol and culture of trust for their networks. Facebook did so through email-based identity confirmation (talked about in Chapter 1, “The Fourth Revolution”) and online networks modeled off real offline networks. For example, when you join Facebook, one of the first things you must do is choose one or more networks to associate with. Your options include schools, employers, and other real offline networks that have real offline meaning and trust. LinkedIn took a different approach to establish protocol. By accepting a LinkedIn connection request, you implicitly agree to share your network and to professionally vouch for this person. Most people aren’t willing to vouch for strangers, so they are more careful about accepting LinkedIn connection requests from strangers.
Even when people meet for the first time on Facebook or LinkedIn, they usually are friends of friends or at least belong to the same network. In the case of LinkedIn, a business objective is generally driving a connection that would result in a real offline relationship.
Far from signaling the end of traditional relationships, Facebook’s success is a testament that nothing is stronger than in-person rapport. Protecting the quality of online networks and focusing them on supporting offline relationships keeps the Facebook experience relevant and valuable.
However, one interesting trend I did notice in the surveys is that teenagers are more willing to initiate and accept requests from strangers. As I investigated further, it became clear that this is because of competition over who has the most Facebook friends. Similarly, heavy gamers on Facebook have incentives for befriending strangers to gain virtual goods and points within various social games.
Fortunately, it is now possible on Facebook to classify and tag your relationships using Friend Lists, and to accordingly limit interaction and how much data is visible to each connection. For example, you could create a Never Met Friend List for strangers and hide all your photos, wall posts, and contact information for all connections on this list. Relationship tagging and tiering using Friend Lists can be extremely helpful in maintaining high-quality online networks. Chapter 10, “How To: Build and Manage Relationships on the Social Web,” describes in detail how Friend Lists work.
With perhaps the exception of teens, we are seeing that online interactions tend to support instead of replace offline rapport, strengthening existing relationships and laying the groundwork for future relationships that you might not otherwise have enough context and capacity to pursue.
The Flattening Effect
It’s interesting to think about how social capital from social networking sites affects organizations. The Internet democratized privileged access to information. Online social networking takes this further, democratizing privileged access to people.
Because fewer barriers exist, people are empowered to build social capital in more informal, entrepreneurial, and ad hoc ways. On most social networking sites, registration is open to anyone, and every member primarily starts on level footing. Sites such as Facebook were designed without hierarchy, so real-world social structures that are hierarchical don’t translate well—they tend to flatten out. Take corporate communication, for example. Something the CEO says is more likely to spread across the company’s informal word-of-mouth networks compared with something an entry-level worker says. But to Facebook, these statements look identical.
Imagine that the CEO posts a link on her profile to a news article annotated with her comments, and the entry-level employee does the same with a different article. Before Facebook, the CEO’s comments would likely have propagated across the company and the employee’s would not have. But on Facebook, both messages might have equal opportunity to propagate the company network. In the truly flat Facebook Era, entry-level workers potentially have the same opportunity as the CEO to have their voice heard.
Using online social networking, employees might also bypass traditional organizational hierarchy and boundaries to network directly with senior managers or colleagues in other departments, units, and geographies. Similar to how blogging democratized who had a voice on the Internet, someone who is active on Facebook and who posts interesting links and commentary might win visibility in the company in ways that would simply not have been possible before.
Creating New Value from Network Effects
Metcalfe’s Law provides a good explanation behind the power and value of the online social graph. Originally used to describe telecommunications networks, it states that the value of a network increases exponentially with the number of members. This is because, for n members, roughly n2 possible connections exist. Among these n2 connections forms a social economy of mutual trust, favor, and contribution. Over time, as new members join, the value of each individual’s network increases, as does the value of the overall social economy.
The Reciprocity Ring
I experienced Metcalfe’s Law firsthand in spring 2008 during a somewhat contrived but nevertheless convincing offline experiment. It was the last day of a weeklong leadership course I was taking at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and in our final session together, we created a reciprocity ring to demonstrate how social networking can create value for everyone who participates.
The first step was coming up with a request to put forth to the group. Each one of us wrote down our request and our name on a Post-it Note and placed it around a large circle that had been drawn on the whiteboard (see Figure 3.3).
Figure 3.3
The first step in the reciprocity ring exercise was to write down your name and a request to put forth to the group, and then place these in a circle.
Next we were handed a pad of blank Post-it Notes and given ten minutes to survey the circle of requests. For each request where we could contribute, we wrote on a Post-it Note our name and how we might be able to help and placed it below the request on the whiteboard (see Figure 3.4).
Figure 3.4
Each participant scanned the set of requests and volunteered to help where he or she could provide value.
The results were impressive. First, every request received help—and most requests received multiple offers of help (see Figure 3.5). Second, each one of us could contribute to at least one request—and most of us volunteered to help with multiple requests. However, it was most interesting that almost no one-to-one exchanges occurred. In the majority of cases, the person providing the favor to you was not the same person to whom you provided a favor.
For example, Elaine needs to find funding for her new start-up. Amy volunteered to help because she knows several of the partners at a venture capital firm. Amy, in turn, is looking for a job at Google. She receives help on this request, but not from Elaine. It is Frances, who receives help from Gina, who receives help from Elaine, who actually can help Amy. The reason this works is that the cost of helping is generally miniscule compared with the benefit of being helped. To Elaine, receiving an introduction to a venture capitalist is worth a lot because it could make or break her new start-up. But to Amy, providing the introduction is no big deal. It takes her just a few minutes to do so over email. In the end, new value is created for each individual and for the group collectively. Everyone wins.
Figure 3.5
Every request received help and every participant helped provided a favor, creating value for everyone in the group.
The Online Social Graph Reciprocity Ring
For the Stanford experiment to work, we all had to be at the same place at the same time for the same purpose. In real life, this is extremely rare. Offline, such explicit networking feels too utilitarian and contrived. And you would never physically assemble a large group of people for the purpose of asking each other favors. But in Facebook, Orkut, and LinkedIn, these large groups of people are already assembled and ready to be mobilized when you need a favor.
Social networking sites take the rapport we have established offline and bridge them into a system that you can call on in times of need. Online social networking extends the notion of the reciprocity ring across time, geography, and networks and is therefore capable of generating a tremendous amount of social capital for participants. Ultimately, efficiency gains from bringing technology to the intrinsically human activity of social networking create new, mutually beneficial value for individuals and to the collective community.
Lower Barriers to Engagement
Social networking sites might even be making it easier to ask for favors while making it harder to say no. Because interactions feel more casual on Facebook or LinkedIn, a lower bar is in place for when it is considered okay to make a request. Picking up the phone or visiting someone in person and asking for a favor puts the person on the spot and, therefore, carries a higher social cost. In contrast, sending someone a Facebook message is no big deal. By reducing the cost, social networking sites can make people feel more comfortable asking for favors.
What about being on the receiving end of a request? Even when they contain legitimate requests you should actually consider, emails and voicemails are easy to ignore or lose in the shuffle. These traditional forms of communication can feel impersonal in comparison.
At the risk of generalizing, similar requests made on Facebook might be harder to ignore because of the social pressure tied to them. Facebook messages do not come in isolation—you see the requestor’s photo, profile, and who you know in common. The request feels personal, so you think twice before saying no. Especially if you have strong mutual ties or belong to the same networks (or the requestor belongs to a different network that has value to you), the social and mental cost of ignoring the request is higher. This ties back to the earlier discussion on how information on social networking sites helps people qualify the potential value of relationships earlier. If you receive a request on Facebook and can quickly identify that the requestor might be a valuable contact, it is much harder to ignore the request. If you received the same request on email, in our age of rampant spam, you might never give it a chance.
Because it feels more personal and more information exists about who is making the request, online social networking makes it both more casual and acceptable to ask for favors while making it harder to say no. As a result, more requests tend to get made and fulfilled, increasing the amount of social capital in circulation and overall value of the social economy. In a sense, social networking sites extend the notion of the reciprocity ring across time, geography, and networks. Therefore, they might have the potential to generate a tremendous amount of new value for everyone involved.
Of course, the easiest “favor” a company can ask for is any form of engagement, including a “like” or comment. In the following guest expert sidebar, Stanford University persuasion psychologist BJ Fogg explains why he believes Facebook is the most persuasive technology of all time.
Understanding the Power of Persuasion on Facebook
BJ Fogg, Ph. D.
Facebook is a landscape for persuasion, both for Facebook the company and for all of us who are on Facebook.
Facebook the company creates experiences that influence people to upload a profile picture, invite friends to join, comment on posts, and so on. In my lab at Stanford University, we’ve found more than 80 such behavior targets. When you do any of these, Facebook the company becomes more valuable.
But it’s not just Facebook Inc.that sets out to persuade people. We, the users, are agents of influence. We use the features of Facebook to create groups and rally people to a cause. We post content hoping to provoke others to comment and engage with us. And on it goes.
Everything people do on Facebook is an act with intent. For example, imagine posting a photo every day and no one ever comments. You’d eventually stop posting. We want people to comment on our photos, posts, status updates, and so on, and each item of engagement makes Facebook the company more valuable.
Three factors combine to make Facebook the # 1 persuasive technology of all time. First, people we know on Facebook—not brands or strangers—ask us to do things:Join this group or donate to this cause. Some of the requests are subtle, built into the interface:“Like” my photo. But still the messages are perceived to be requests from friends, not from a company.
Next, the flood of triggers that come to us when we use Facebook are actionable. I call these “hot triggers.” And when you get a hot trigger on Facebook—accept my Friend invitation, watch my video, or play FarmVille—you can react immediately. As a result, behavior happens fast on Facebook, and it gives the Facebook experience a sense of energy, as if a party is always going on.
To explain the third factor of persuasive power, consider how different Facebook is from task-focused Web sites. If I go to Quicken.com, I’m on the site to pay bills. If I get a hot trigger to join a political group, I feel annoyed. It’s distracting me from my goal. But on Facebook it’s entirely different. Most of us use Facebook without any specific goal, and that means we’re distractible. We want to be seduced away into something unexpected—that’s what makes Facebook fun.
When you combine these three elements—friends as persuaders, hot triggers, and openness to distraction—you create an experience we’ve never seen before on a large scale. These three things enabled my Stanford students to engage 16 million people on Facebook with apps they created during my 10-week class.
BJ Fogg (@bjfogg and www.bjfogg.com) directs research and design at Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab.
Social capital is the collective value of all social networks and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other. We can measure it by the level of trust and reciprocity in a community or between individuals.
Unlike earlier social networking sites such as Orkut or Friendster, Facebook (and also LinkedIn and Twitter) is modeled off of people’s real-world networks and relationships instead of encouraging people to connect with strangers.
By making it possible to maintain relationships with a greater number of people, the social Web increases the average number of weak ties in our personal networks.
Having a bigger pool of people to draw on for help increases our individual social capital when we are trying to accomplish personal and professional goals.
Facebook is similar to CRM (customer relationship management) for individuals—it is increasingly how many people manage relationships across their personal and professional lives.
> > > TIPS and TODO’s
Stay in touch with people you meet at conferences and events by connecting with them on LinkedIn or Facebook, if appropriate.
When you move to a new city or are traveling on a business trip and have extra time, search on social networking sites to see which of your friends and acquaintances you might want to reconnect with. On Facebook, you can browse friends by city.
Understand the accepted etiquette on social networking sites, such as initiating or accepting friend requests only from people you know, and make sure your actions reflect the etiquette, especially when interacting with customers.
Think about how you can help others based on the frustrations or requests they post on their status messages. Sometimes just liking or commenting on their post is greatly appreciated.
Explore the mechanisms of persuasion on Facebook to increase audience engagement and likelihood of response to your call-to-actions.