There’s an inherent problem with the word social. Not “social media” or “social business.” Just social. The problem is, it doesn’t incorporate any sense of specificity to it. People are left to think that all things social are massive connectivity festivals. Really, being social is about connecting with sensible, specific others, typically, for specific reasons.
It’s great to open things up and give people freedom, but specificity– that is, some focus or structure- is what really unleashes talent. Specificity comes in many forms of social systems. As Tom Malone et al. point out, the “genome” of collective intelligence can be broken down into Who (staffing), What (goal), Why (incentives), and How (process). Each of these “genes” demand specificity.
Take the Netflix Challenge, for one: its success as a crowdsourced effort was attributed to connecting the right people only after some jockeying happened. It was not a result of all participants being connected, helter-skelter. Often throwing too many people into the mix leads to hasty and irrational outcomes due to groupthink or lazy free-loading, as a result of social loafing — not to mention pluralistic ignorance where we incorrectly assume acceptance of a given norm.
A less oft-cited method of making a social system work has less to do with who is connected and more to do with what you ask of those connections. This is a critical focus as researchers migrate from surveys as our mainstay methodology. Good questions are the currency of social systems that flow between the focused connections discussed above.
The other day I noticed Rypple made an important change in this direction with its “Power of One” initiative. Rypple, as you might know, lets you give and receive feedback online (anonymously), to and from select others. All humans lack an inherent sense of psychometrics, so it’s hard to know precisely what to ask, especially when the stakes are high. That is, you’re asking *specific* trusted others for self-related feedback. The inclination is to ask open-ended questions. Logic being similar to the above: connect everyone // ask people to tell you anything and any number of things. Turns out, lack of specificity leads to confusion, and in most cases non-response. Rypple is alleviating this problem by encouraging users to ask “what’s *one thing* I can do to improve.”
It’s usually one question that makes or breaks a given finding. Gallup’s one question, “Do you have a best friend at work” is the biggest predictor of workplace engagement. Other research shows that one question self-assessments of health are better predictors of mortality than an extensive battery of objective health data. Reicheld told us six years ago that your Net Promoter score is “The One Number you Need to Grow.”
My point is not about measurement error and response bias, it’s about specificity. Being direct in order to make social systems effective. Finding the signal amidst the noise.
We can’t go on idly talking about “social” initiatives. We must be focused in order to make social systems effective. This pertains to who is in your ecosystem, how they are connected, why they are connected, and how you measure those connections.
Being social is not necessarily complex. If you apply a lens of specificity, you can systematically simplify the situation.
Interesting Post Kate. Social is often associated with generic/non-specific and you have to apply the filter of specificity to make sense out of things and avoid getting overwhelmed.
BTW I feel you could have cited a better example than Rypple for the same.
Thanks, Mayank. I really like the Rypple example because it touches on two levels of specificity: who you interact with and how you focus that interaction. I’d love to hear more examples, if you have others in mind.
I truly appreciate this sentiment, as it is the first time I have seen anyone draw the correct distinction. Too often “business” has difficulty understanding the social space, and the fact that the term lacks this specificity points to the communication problem. Marketers and Managers don’t want to spend budget on something that feels so vague, yet we cheerleaders are out here trying to get their attention. The fact that it is not social, but a social means to making correct relationships is a great focusing of that energy.
Thank you!
–tcb
Glad we’re in agreement. I don’t think the problem is relegated to business, but indeed looms large there. There are a lot of misconceptions about social; this [typical lack of specificity] instead is more of a “poor practice” than a misunderstanding. Yes, social is a means to specificity (the Netflix example is the perfect illustration of this).
Kate, You have hit a big nail on the head with your discussion of specificity. Certainly some, if not most, social business initiatives need focus. There must be a clear objective, and hence a target demographic or group for the initiative. I like to use the POST framework by Groundswell authors Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff (see http://bit.ly/vrTzy) precisely because it starts with People…who are the people targeted by your social strategy…this is useful for social strategies both inside and outside the organization.
But I think there is also a place for the less specific (dare I say “more open”) applications too. For example, listening to the conversations that take place about a company brand are likely to need a less specified target demographic (how do you know who’s talking about you if you focus on the people first). Likewise, some crowdsourcing applications designed to gather the wisdom of crowds may also need a more open population. True, it’s more difficult to see the signal within a lot of noise, but patterns do emerge, and without the bias that accompanies a more specified population.
Right, Keri – specificity offers parameters, each of which can vary to create the perfect “genome,” as Tom Malone might say. I think it’s always important to understand who is involved, who is NOT involved; what’s said, what is NOT said. But this is like being inductive before being deductive; each has its place in a rigorous analysis.
I would be the last to limit a listening initiative to a specific demographic; I’ve seen (and analyzed) several cases where a completely unexpected population is discussing a given brand. This is the beauty of induction as a first step in Listening; however, initiatives that sprout from those foundations must be strategic and specific. I might go so far as to say the detection of distinct sub-ecosystems (or populations) require different “hows” “whys” and “whats” — I’m not advocating dismissal of openness, just focus in order to make connections effective.
Being specific will emerge as a theme in general as we move from the what (what is it? / what is the case for change?) around this whole category of social, to the How (how do I instrument it in my business?). The Harvard Business case on Wikipedia that delved into how they tweaked the system over and over to create the right boundary conditions to stimulate various types of participation (author, editor etc.) while optimizing for accurate results is another great example of how to engineer a successful social dynamic through specific means.
Thanks for the great post.
Josh
Thanks to you, Josh – that would have been a good example; in fact, better than the now almost trite Netflix Challenge!
Hi Kate,
I’m not sure I’m following yet. Let me share some thoughts that came to mind.
The lack of specificity actually troubles me little. We socialize in a myriad of ways through a range of mediums with a variety of purposes. Some social actions are clearly purposeful. Others appear far less so. This rich spectrum of behaviors is not encompassed by specificity in my opinion.
Lack of specificity I would argue is exactly what led to the success of the Netflix Prize. From the perspective of Netflix, the goal was to alleviate themselves of the expense and burden of having to purposefully build a team to pursue their goal, which may or may not have achieved their objective. Instead, with the appropriate incentive, they were able to let the crowd innovate and discover, through countless simultaneous social experiments, the right combination of talent to make advances toward the goal. Netflix gets the benefit of failure for free and only has to expend resources when success is achieved. A beautiful outcome.
Social system design may have a place in certain entities where the strategic goals are well defined and the means to achieve them are relatively clear. Yet in other cases where innovation and idea creation are central, purposeful design seems far from what is needed. Often for organizations that are meant to innovate, the goal is to remove as many constraints as possible, keeping (sub)organizations small, flat and nimble to allow great things to happen. The goal is to leverage serendipity, not specificity, to identify the previously unimagined.
I’m wondering if you have a class of social systems in mind when you think of imposing specificity through the social design process. Maybe I am wanting to hear more about that class.
Thought provoking as usual Kate. I look forward to hearing more.
Hi Chris. Well, first, you probably have more data than I to answer this empirically. I don’t think I can classify the “class of social systems” for which each type of specificity is necessary, but I do think that there is some induction-deduction analogy (as stated in my comment above) that’s applicable.
Indeed, the serendipity-maximizing efforts of open systems is what we’re all trying to harness, but I think it’s unreasonable to think that can happen without boundaries. Your examples of entities such as well defined strategy and clearly designed process would satisfy my criteria.
Your comment reminds me of Sandy Pentland’s research on bees demonstrating the efficacy of online forums for brainstorming and face-to-face conversations for integration and decision-making. Again, openness precedes focus, but the focus is necessary for the fruits… I would argue this is precisely what happened in the NetFlix Challenge. The final, winning connections were made only as a function of transparency of the Leaderboard which indicated who was ahead and which skills they offered.
Thanks for stopping by and leaving such a thoughtful comment.
My first thought on reading this was the poetry assignments I had in high school; I was much more creative when trying to fit into pentameter than imitating the free-wheeling style of more modern poets.
I think some specificity is necessary and useful (and there are surely times when the lack of specificity makes one want to tear one’s hair out), but it has to be applied judiciously. I think there is a tradeoff: too broad, and there is no channel to guide creative impulses; too tight, and you squeeze creativity away.
Now that I think about it, it’s kind of like model fitting.
Which reminds me of the saying ‘Poverty inspires creativity.’
A lot like model-fitting; thanks, Winter!
We think we understand your point and our response is, of course/probably not. We’d suggest there is a category mistake here which goes with your idea of being specific.
Your points make sense in a task/outcome domain/category = work. Although there is growing research that even here being explicit/clear and task focussed is largely a post hoc frame (illusion?) imposed by the way our brains process certain inputs.
Our advice to our clients is simple:
- Social media means it’s a social realm with all the feelings of uncertainty, awkwardness and feeling-round of any social interaction. Brain research suggest that what feels this way is actually much more goal directed and information processed but is largely unconscious.
- The essence is discovery. Others of the usually non-business parts of you, and you of them.
- Like all tech tools, the web/email/etc. the tools are very new and imprecise, most will go away – NOT Twitter we believe so don’t sweat it and it’s not complicated.
There are age/life stage differences. Whether in one’s personal or business life if one is looking for a mate/job/house/car/contacts then social media is VERY gaol-directed (sic).
Ideas?
Us again!…Couple of items:
We are BIG believers in brain processing differences by gender and individual (ethic/geo groups as well probably) so what one “wants” from socmed will depend on how each brains processes, largely unconsciously again, the experiences. Duh!
We are addicted to the MIT World videos – TED is way to salesy/pop/rich-folk oriented for us. Ugh! Here’s a great one we just listed to today on engaging crowdsourcing. We se alot of anecdotes on this but not much research: http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/690
The other great vid source is authors@google
Ideas? We love opposite views.
George Parker: New York, New York, It’s a Hell of a Town
“Yet, in my humble opinion, in spite of the incessant drum beating in its favor, the opportunities for smart marketers in social media don’t lie in creating Twitter profiles or Facebook pages, then seeing how many friends and followers you can amass. And it’s not about iPhone or Facebook apps, pumping out viral videos, or paying bloggers to hype your shit (which could cost you big-time in the future!) No, it’s simply about two way conversations…
yup…shall we?……..all