aha-moments » Network Bridges

The Social LMS

Bill Sherman — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 23:30:09 +0000

In the March 2010 issue of Chief Learning Officer, I explore the future of the social learning management system.

As a result, I’ve been having a number of excellent conversations with people who have been thinking about the future of learning and development.

The traditional design methodologies of ADDIE and ISD need re-envisioning in the post-Facebook age.
The tempo needed for learning and development departments has accelerated.
The mindsets and skills needed within training departments need to be reconstituted.

In short, organizations need to rethink the relationship and network structures within their organization.

The article itself provides a nice framing platform for some of these conversations, and I’ll be diving more deeply into these topics over the next few weeks.

Expanding Your Ability to Find Answers through LinkedIn

Bill Sherman — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 01:37:42 +0000

Tony Karrer makes a very interesting post about finding expert answers within the extended social network of LinkedIn. If you use LinkedIn, it’s a worthwhile read, and it may change how you use LinkedIn.

As my father (a reference librarian) used to say, “You don’t need to know the answer yourself. You just need to know how to find the answer you need.”

Tony essentially models LinkedIn as a cocktail mixer of people he’s met, reserving his recommendations to people he trusts. This model allows him allows him to expand his reach to locate resources within his network who can answer his question. However, number of “connections” does not confer expertise on any single person.

From a social capital perspective, he’s expanded his potential access to information–without immediately creating deeper social capital. He still must find reasons for casual acquaintances and 2nd level contacts to help him locate the answer he needs.

His approach aligns closely what I’ve described many times here. LinkedIn itself is just a network.

If you use any social network passively, you’ll see few benefits, but if you actively invest time into it, you will see a significant return.

Tweeting the American Revolution

Bill Sherman — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 07:05:55 +0000

Yesterday, I wrote about the impact of social network technology on the Iranian protests.

It’s interesting to compare this past week’s events with other protests:

Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (2004-05)
China’s Tianamen Square Protests (1989)
Czechosolovakia’s Velvet Revolution (1989)
Poland’s Solidarity Movement (1980)

Would Poland’s change have occured quicker if the union members and organizers had access to today’s social media? How would Tianamen Square’s protests have changed (if any)?

Yet, the thought-experiment becomes even more striking when we move further back into history and look at popular uprisings–The French Revolution of 1789; the Revolutions of 1848; and the American Revolution of 1776. Here are a couple early-American examples:
Paul Revere
Paul Revere would could have saved himself a long midnight ride with just a few keyclicks.

@PaulRevere. “The Redcoats are coming out. Please RT.” (RT = re-tweet/pass-it-on)

After a quick Tweet, he could have gone back to sleep. Generations of students would be spared the task of memorizing Longfellow’s poem. But, on a more significant level, more information would have passed than just that one single tweet. Bostonian Twitterers would have erupted with distributed information passed peer-to-peer rather than through a single network node. The structure (and communications) within the early days of the American Revolution would have looked very different.

Malcolm Gladwell explores the story of Paul Revere and a less-successful rival in The Tipping Point and comes to the conclusion that Revere succeeded because he was a connector with pre-established connections (essentially someone with a large social network and a high degree of social capital within that network).

Declaration of Indepndence

In the 18th century, word of the Declaration of Independence spread slowly. It took weeks to spread through te Thirteen Colonies and the announcement didn’t appear in the British Newspapers until mid-August (almost five weeks later). The Continental Congress relied on printers to distribute broadside sheets with the Declaration. They didn’t have Twitter, tinyurl, and the Internet:

@Continental Congress Independence declared http://tinyurl.com/3k9vnc
@John.hancock /signed. @king_george_iii do u see this?

Imagine YouTube used by both sides to show their sides of the story directly. King George appearing in a video to Loyalists, while Washington appeals for shoes for his nascent Continental Army.

What if Thomas Paine’s Common Sense appeared via a blog or The Federalist Papers were posted under pseudonym nicks on a political blogsite (such as today’s FreeRepublic or DailyKos) during the debate to ratify the U.S. Constitution?

The flow of information and social capital has changed on the macro-level in the digital age. We take digital technologies for granted these days, so it’s worth comparing today’s events vs. the pre-digitial social networks. We still need the connectors–such as Paul Revere to share information, but it operates on a very different level now.

It’s possible to build an ad-hoc social network for information on-the-fly, which is what we’re seeing now in the Twitterverse on #iranelections. New social bonds can be created quickly. However, even there, pre-established twitterers have had an advantage of established social connections through previous blogging and twittering. The network of followers has grown, surely. However, the network already had “pre-existing” structure and authority hubs–for both Farsi and English.

So, while few people were following @Change_for_Iran, @PersianKiwi, or @Tehranbureau before today, the social network has flexed and reconfigured itself to allow people to find and share information. The network reconfigured itself.

Again, I’m not equating # of followers with authenticity or reliability. Someone can become quickly popular without being authentic or reliable. And certainly some people will take advantage of a situation for their own benefit.

Yet, even despite these caveats, there’s a resonant similarity that cannot (and should not) be ignored.

Compare Revere’s “The Redcoats are coming out” with a Tweet from @PersianKiwi earlier today: “streets very dangerous now. groups of militia on motorbikes searching for protesters.”

They’re essentially the same message, two-hundred and thirty four years apart. One was delivered house-to-house by a silversmith, and the other broadcast via Twitter.

Sure, there’s a difference between secrecy and broadcast that’s worth exploring. The delivery method carries a significant change to our understanding of macro-level social networks and social capital. It’ll be the subject of my next post.

Swapping IMs in Milgram’s Ever-Shrinking Small World

Bill Sherman — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 20:07:18 +0000

Here’s an interesting question. Let’s say you use an instant messanger at least once-a-month. How far are you removed from any other person who sent an IM across the network that month?

Leskovec and Horvitz, two researchers at Microsoft, conducted a planetary-wide study of MSN Messenger traffic for a single month (over 180 million users). They created a social graph of everyone who sent at least one message during the month. They found that the average IM “chatter” was 6.6 connections away from the furthest person in their network.

This study isn’t quite a replication study of Stanley Milgram‘s famous “small world” study, but presents a modern-age twist. When Milgram sent letters to Omaha, he gave the recipients a target person in Boston and asked people to “forward it to someone in your network who you can get this closer to the target person”. Milgram allowed people to use their full network.

I learned about this research through Thomas Sander, Executive Director at Harvard’s Saguaro Seminar (part of the Kennedy School of Government). He blogs on locally-based social capital–the Social Capital blog. If you have an interest in social capital, then i encourage you to add his blog to your “must read” list. He’s a lively, thoughtful, and engaging writer.

When Layoffs Happen, Businesses Lose Social Capital

Bill Sherman — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:13:21 +0000

A business can be viewed as a community. As we’ve seen in the past few posts, every community contains social capital within it. What happens when the economy hits a downturn and a company lays-off good people?

The company must balance three types of capital:

Financial capital–cashflow to pay employees, vendors, etc.;
Human capital–experience and expertise; and
Social capital–networks and connections.

When layoffs happen, the company preserves financial capital and sacrifices its access to both human capital and social capital. The loss of human capital is obvious. You have fewer hands to get work done. However, the loss of social capital can be even more critical.

The people let-go during layoffs may possess crucial cross-departmental connections and knowledge (people who serve as internal bridges). More importantly, the company also loses the social capital embedded within these connections with clients, vendors, suppliers, channel partners, etc.

Marketing Tool: Help a Reporter Out

Bill Sherman — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:46:26 +0000

One of my friends, Dana vanDen Heuvel, recently sent me a link to a very interesting project: Help a Reporter. This project is the brainchild of Peter Shankman.

The premise is simple, and it relies on the “Strength of Weak Ties” with a digital twist.

Reporters/writers go on to “Help a Reporter” and describe the type of interview they would like to conduct.
The site aggregates these requests and sends out an e-mail blast 3x/day.
If you have a relevant story or quote to share, you can send it to the reporter (who may choose a follow-up interview).

Can this process be abused? Certainly, PR spammers could swarm every request with non-relevant responses that promote themselves or their company. However, if used judiciously, it can increase the quality of reporting (diverse interviewees and insights).

The tool allows reporters to expand their virtual networks (spanning structural holes) and still meet aggressive writing deadlines. In three months, it’s gone from a simple list to over 12,000 subscribers.

The tool creates an opportunity to create a relevant relationship. However, that’s all it is . . . an opportunity. It’s a social networking tool, but it’s not a social capital too. If you reply to a reporter with junk, you’ll hurt yourself more than you’ll help. You still need to invest time to create a meaningful relationship.

However, if you’ve got a great story that fits a reporter’s current need, you can be a hero. Think of it as “speed-dating” for the journalist/PR world.

Social Networks vs. Social Capital

Bill Sherman — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:00:56 +0000

Social networking tools have become commonplace (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.). While these tools allow people to create a surface-level connnection, they are (at best) tools that create very weak ties.

Imagine a network 5,000 people wide. All of those relationships must be shallow. In fact, if you have 5,000 people in your LinkedIn network, you can’t spend much time with all of your contacts.

Social capital provides a completely different approach. When you have social capital, you have influence. People will take (and return) your calls. When you make an introduction or recommendation, people will eagerly welcome it. When you ask for help (or an introduction), your contacts will gladly help you.

Many people think that by expanding the number of contacts within their social network that they will increase their social capital. They’re making a huge mistake.

Your social network represents the total potential size of your network.
Your social capital represents your ability to leverage the resources and opportunities within that network.

New technology has made it easy for us to focus on expanding our social network, but it also tempts us to be lazy. We can easily forget the value of building social capital.

The Slow Migration of Ideas

Bill Sherman — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 00:58:27 +0000

Ideas that are commonplace in one field often take a long while to migrate to other fields–even when they are directly transferrable.

In the 1850′s the sugar refining industry figured out how to evaporate the water out of sugar through multiple-chamber distillation. Each successive chamber would be at a slightly lower pressure, and the water vapor would boil out. According to the Economist, this process reduced the energy needed for sugar refining by 80%.

If you’re distilling water out of sugar, you can use the same approach to remove salt out of seawater (and create a desalinization method). However, almost fifty years passed before this innovation crossed over from its initial industry of sugar refining and into desalinization.*

People can create value by taking the “commonplace” ideas within one field and applying them to a radically new use.

What do you know today that others could use . . . if only they knew about it? How can you create value by accelerating this transfer?

*Source: “Tapping the Oceans.” The Economist June 7-13, 2008.

Social Capital and Networks

Bill Sherman — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 03:16:12 +0000

“When you have an opportunity to learn how someone in another group does what you do differently–go.”

Burt, Ronald. Brokerage and Closure: An Introduction to Social Capital. New York: Oxford UP 2005.

Sometimes you read a gem of a book that gives you an entirely new set of tools to analyze patterns that you’ve instinctively known–but never been able to talk about.

If you’re interested in how social networks work (and want to increase your effectiveness as a network entrepreneur), then this book will be a great investment of your time. Burt explores many concepts

the economic value of bridging across closed networks;
the impact of closed networks on an individual’s reputation (the hypotheses of bandwidth and echo; and
the effect of decay on relationships (both within relationship bridges as well as within closed networks.

I’ve spent the past two weeks carefully reading through this book, taking notes and acting like I was in grad school once again. It’s not a how-to manual, but it will take you to a deeper understanding of social networks and social capital.