Social media: beyond fashion

Written by Fernando Maciá

Sergio Llano at the I Iberoamerican Congress of Community Managers

Annotations of Sergio Llano’s(@sergiollanoa) talk on Social Media at the I Congreso Iberoamericano de Community Managers that started today in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia.

The advantage of being first is that I have all the attention, but the disadvantage is that I have all the stress. I want to bring a different perspective from what you are going to hear in the rest of the presentations.

Eighteen years ago, I was finishing my degree in Communication right at the beginning of the Internet, and I foresaw that this was the future, so I joined the phenomenon.

With social networks I didn’t have that intuition, I admit that at the beginning I was a bit skeptical. Few people saw what was coming and I was not among them. I began to ask myself questions about how social networks could be integrated into the company and what role they should play.

My perspective is a bit theoretical, it is true, but I will try to draw practical applications from it.

These are my ideas, which are obviously open to debate.

Questions about social networks

First idea: my reflection is based on the following questions that can be asked about social networks:

• What?
• Who?
• How?
• When?
• Why?
• What for?

It is not clear what social networks are and when they appeared.
Who, why and what for have had answers so far, but clearly insufficient.
How people are trying to learn at social media conferences.

That is, we have answers to only some of these questions.

A scientific approach to social networks

So this is the script I’m going to try to follow:

1. Five questions about digital social networks
2. The science behind social networks
3. Some suggestions for practical application.

First distinction: society itself is a network, and we must specify that we are referring to digital social networks.

There is nothing more practical than a good theory: I am a fan of this concept. Google is the result of a doctoral thesis.

Are social networks a fad?

Gustave Le Bon, (psychology of crowds) says that the crowd possesses a collective soul that makes individuals think, feel and act differently from how they would think, feel and act if they acted individually.

Le Bon saw that the coming society was a society of masses who would follow the intellectual elites.

Jack Treynor does an experiment in which he presents a group of individuals with a picture of a jar of chewing gum, and asks, “How much gum is in the jar?”

Ask many participants and find that the average collective value is much closer to reality than the best approximation of a single individual.

A more current example: in the Who Wants to be a Millionaire contest, the “help from the public” gets 91% of correct answers, while the call to a friend gets a much lower percentage.

James Surowiecki (intelligence of the masses), says that “the collective can act intelligently and make better decisions than an individual if several conditions are met: independence, diversity of opinions, decentralization and the possibility of combination“. He wrote the book
The wisdom of crowds
.

This seems to indicate that society functions more organically and intelligently than sociologists originally thought.

Pierre Levy (collective intelligence) says that“collective intelligence is a group or shared intelligence that arises from collaboration or competition among many individuals“. It appears in a variety of decision making forms such as humans, animals, computers, etc.

What application does all this have in Social Media? Well, for example, collective intelligence: it emerges as knowledge in examples such as Wikipedia. Open source knowledge. It is an example of collective collaborative intelligence.

The journal Nature compared the quality of Wikipedia results with the Encyclopedia Britannica and found that the former had better information quality. Nature also found that 17% of scientists consult Wikipedia weekly.

Jeff Howe (crowdsourcing): open solicitation of an undetermined group helps gather the best people to execute tasks, respond to complex problems, and contribute the freshest and most relevant ideas. Article published in Wired, the author of the book Crowdsourcing.

Sergio Llano suggests applying these concepts in practice

1. Take advantage of the collective coefficient.
2. Involve the collective in your processes.
3. Generate collective participation initiatives.

The social network has to accompany the real world and not replace it.

Have digital social networks finally allowed us to connect?

There is a lot of talk about it and talk about “we are connected”. But are we really? And we got it through social networks?

Graph theory (network topology) is attributed to Euler (the seven bridges of Kaliningrad, Russia). It was a mathematical puzzle that gave rise to the two elements of networks: nodes and graphs or links. In social networks, a node is a person, and a link is the relationship that person has with another person.

This is where the famous “6 degrees of separation” theory comes from, which is related to LinkedIn.

Milgran made in 1967 the “experiments for a small world” in which he tried to show that we are all connected. He sent letters through contacts by hand and they had to reach other places. Of the 160 letters, he was receiving the route of arrival to their destination for 62 of them. And he found that, on average, the letters had gone through 6 different people.

The theory became famous when Watts published the 2003 book 6 degrees of separation. In the Web, the average degrees of separation are 19, in molecules, 3 (chemical reactions), in neurons, 14 (synapses), in food, two (species). We are, therefore, a world of networks. Everything in the Universe has some kind of relationship.

But what does this mean in practical terms?

Baran (1964) spoke of three types of networks: centralized, decentralized, distributed. The structure of the Internet takes the form of a distributed network, which allows all nodes to be interconnected. This is from an IT point of view.

But the same happens in society: a hierarchical, centralized society. Trade unions and other centers of power emerged and decentralization took place. And the Internet emerged and the network was distributed.

When we interact with social networks, we are recognizing the power of distributed networks. David de Ugarte (2007),
The power of networks
free book on the Internet.

Yes, we are connected, but certainly not only through social networks. We are connected beings: social networks have helped us to enhance interconnectivity and give it visibility.

Let’s not forget that we have a natural social connectivity with which we can shift power in society.

Put into practice:

1. Analyze natural social connectivity
2. Make a contribution to the change in the social structure
3. Contribute to power sharing

Is behavior in social networks random and unpredictable?

This is the million-dollar question: how do I identify the behavior and how do I influence it. If I can answer this question, then it means that if I pursue certain objectives, I can set a strategy to achieve them.

Paul Erdos(Erdos number) represents the degree of separation of mathematicians and scientific communication with Paul Erdos. For Erdos, links or links in networks occur randomly, out of interest and identification. On average, members of the mathematical community are 4 degrees apart. Their conclusion is that it is not possible to control the behavior of a network. It is not possible to plan a strategy in order to achieve an objective.

Laszlo Barábasi (
Linked
2003) says that if the theory of random networks inherited from Erdos suggests that it is not possible to know the laws that govern the social networks, then… Is God playing dice with the Universe?

If they were random, says Barábasi, all nodes would have the same number of links, and this is not the case. Therefore, there must be laws governing networks. As the number of links in a network increases, the possibility of a node remaining isolated decreases. Nodes naturally tend to cluster. Before computers, it was difficult to make links and grouping between nodes visible.

Social networks will tend to become more clustered and denser, by evolution. With computers we are trying to visualize the topology of networks.

Facebook, for example, tells us how many friends we have in common with other contacts. That is, it makes the structure of the network visible: every time I look at a person I see all the contacts he/she has. Linkedin also tells us the degrees of separation we have with some people. And, in general, social networks are very good at suggesting friends and new contacts.

N. Cristakis and J. Fowler: they wrote the book
Connected
in which they state that it is indeed possible to map the network structure and anticipate its behavior. By making the links between network nodes visible, it is possible to measure the behavior of a network and measure the degree of influence, propagation, contagion and transformation, which would be the pinnacle of what can be achieved in a social network.

They do the Birmingham study where they map the nodes and links of the inhabitants of this city. Balls get bigger when people get fatter: if I get fatter, those around me are likely to get fatter. Conclusion: influence in social networks exists, and behavior can be predicted.

The same level of influence exists for other feelings such as joy, sadness, changes in habits, etc. The social network is not so random: we influence each other and fate is not so random.

Forces that do not contribute to evolution tend to disappear.

Recommends the interview with Eduard Punset to James Fowler.

To put into practice:

1. Study and analyze the structure of your network.
2. Identify the behavior of your network.
3. Analyze your ability to influence, propagate, spread, infect, transform, etc.

Are social networks synonymous with Facebook and Twitter?

I am a facebooker and a shy twitterer. Networks are not exclusive to the digital world: every social community has its own network. Computers are connected by telecommunications. Molecules by chemical reactions, nerve cells by synapses…

There is life beyond Facebook and Twitter. On a recent stay at Harvard, I discovered that few professors were active on Facebook or Twitter. They said they simply didn’t have time for it. And of course it does not mean that they are not connected.

Google Scholar collects scientific and scholarly articles. Sorts articles by the number of links and citations to an article. In the academic world, a researcher is recognized by the number of citations he or she receives.

Richard Stallman (free software, free society): “My work in free software is motivated by an idealistic goal: to spread freedom and cooperation. I want to encourage the spread of free software, replacing proprietary software that prohibits cooperation, and thereby make our society better.”

Hacker culture: hackers need free access to information. Each node claims its right to connect with others without going through a central node. Intellectual property, i.e., the topology of the information structure, is questioned.

To put into practice:

1. Avoid reticular myopia, all in the eyes of FB and TW
2. Locate particular social networks
3. Analyze your ability to exert influence

Are we living in a second dot-com bubble?

What do Altavista, Nokia, StarMedia… have in common? Things changed. It seems to me that it can happen to Facebook, more so than Twitter. Let’s see what Google is trying with Google Glass. What happens if we combine augmented reality and social networks?

The tool cannot be the end in itself.

They are metaphors from the real world to the virtual world: I like… vote, share…

To put into practice:

1. Relax the dogmatic view towards Facebook and Twitter.
2. Remember that he who does not change with change, change changes him.
3. Do not ignore that what lies behind social networks are new forms of communication, socialization, societal structures, etc.

The tool cannot be the end in itself.

We are not only mediating communication: we are mediating socialization.

About Sergio Llano

Social Communicator and Journalist from Universidad de La Sabana, with a Master’s Degree in Information Technology Management from Universidad Oberta de Cataluña (Spain) and a Master’s Degree in Communication in Organizations from Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain). At the latter university he is currently pursuing doctoral studies in Politics, Communication and Culture under the line of research on the social impact of information technologies. Experience in the application of new media and information technologies to organizational communication.

As a consultant and trainer, he has developed projects and activities for the Colombian companies EPM Bogotá, Fresenius Medical Care, Edime, Empresas Públicas de Medellín, Promigas, Financiera Comultrasan, Tecn&ca Ltda., Fundación Niños de los Andes, Ecomedios, Ofixpres of the Carvajal group, Dpto. Nacional de Planeación, Concejo de Bogotá, RTVC, Terpel, and Telecom. Internationally, he has participated in training activities and projects in the newspapers El Universal (Venezuela) and Nuestro Diario (Guatemala).

His areas of expertise, in which he has experience as a teacher, researcher and consultant are, among others, the alignment of information technologies and new media with organizational communication plans and strategies, Web Marketing, SEO – optimization and positioning of Web sites, incorporation of Web 2.0 and participatory media in organizational communication, multimedia convergence and digital journalism, free software as a tool for organizational communication.