Following on from my previous post 'It's a small world', historically, and even now, service design has been all about understanding the motivations of the individual. Social network analysis on the other hand is based on the view that the attributes of individuals are less important than their relationships and ties with other actors within the network, and it is by exploiting these that you can really begin to focus on who's really important in your user network.
As an enterprise, social or otherwise, our users are most likely to belong to a random/exponential social network, but we want it to be a scale free network with hubs that positively reinforce our service. Now that we’re talking specifically about networks of people, this is where Tipping Point theory comes in. The tipping point is a concept related to collective behaviour and the fact that any behaviour pattern has a threshold at which point there is a sudden, marked and significant change. Tipping points are what makes marketing go viral; turning products into the epidemic type fads that companies dream about, but that’s a concept for another post.
What’s relevant about Gladwell’s book in terms of networks and business intelligence, however, is that he identifies not only the importance of word of mouth and social interaction in the take-up of ideas, products and services, but also three key types of individual that are needed to achieve this - Connectors, Mavens and Salespersons. I’m not going to go into detail here, but Connectors are people with huge numbers of network links, Mavens are people who research everything before they buy, compare and search out all the best deals, and Salespersons are the persuaders i.e. the ones who find a good or deal and have the drive and power to convince others and sell their ideas.
In the real world, Connectors need charm and personality, but I’d argue that online it is different. Connectedness is much easier and more democratic online as people are already well connected through search engines. The really connected ones then are those who not only share their views, but those whose content or opinion is considered valuable by others and visited frequently, added to favourites and followed through RSS. These then, are our hubs. The ideal version are a personality combination of Maven and Salesperson, and if you are an enterprise, your dream hub is someone is also well connected offline too.
The first step is then to set up mechanisms to identify these ideal hubs. Second is to focus on these individuals and try and get them evangelising about our enterprise. In the bricks and mortar arena there is little hope of exploiting member networks because you have no easy way of getting people talking to each other. The online channel however, presents the perfect opportunity.
The basic framework needed in order to leverage the power of our member/user network is to make sure the website provides easy user friendly opportunities for people to comment, review and interact, possibly with profiles that display their activity along with incentives for them to share information. Basic web analytics software will help, but we're really going to need to invest in or develop network analytics software, involve some intelligent analysts who can both model the audience and help shift it from a random to a scale-free network, and of course use a forward thinking marketing approach to engage and increase the number of ‘hubs’ and really drive word of mouth take up.
Monday, 31 December 2007
It's A Small World: Natural Networks Part 1
This is an adaptation of a post I’d written around natural networks for my 'professional' blog (http://blogs.conchango.com/rizwantayabali). I reckon it has some relevance for us here too.
To start with, here are three books you should read
Why now? Because with the improvements in business intelligence and analytics modelling, we can now really begin to understand and map online networks, and identify the ‘hubs’ or key people that we should be engaging with to turn them into advocates in order to drive take-up through word of mouth. With the ubiquity and popularity of blogs, reviews and the web, this area is turning into a marketing tool that should be taken extremely seriously. It might also help us figure out how a volunteer network might function and where we need to focus within it.
Complex networks like those involving people, although seemingly random, surprisingly do actually follow patterns that can be mapped, and essentially fall into two categories – small-world networks and scale free networks. If networks were linear i.e. A knows B, and B knows C, and so on... the link between A and Z would involve 26 steps; and any knowledge, opinion or influence Z might have would be pretty much inaccessible to A.
Small world networks however essentially describe a pattern of interconnectedness that involves a degree of randomness, i.e. maybe B also knows M and X, and maybe X knows Z, which dramatically improves the connectedness between A and Z. The originally studies in this area were carried out by Stanley Milgram who was responsible for identifying the phenomenon we now know as “6 degrees of separation”. Yes, it’s not a myth!
However real world natural networks do not work as simplistically as this. They have another property that’s even more crucial, known as preferential attachment. Preferential attachment is an example of a positive feedback cycle where initially random variations are automatically reinforced, thus greatly magnifying differences. In popular speak this is the 'Matthew effect' i.e. the rich get richer!
What this means is that the more connected something is, the more likely it is to gain new connections. In a social network this means that any new unconnected member is more likely to become acquainted with more visible members than with relative unknowns. These ‘visible’ elements are effectively hubs with lots of connections and therefore influence, and these networks show a pattern called the ‘Power law’, which basically means that doubling the number of hubs reduces the degrees of separation between elements in the network by a constant; in this case, our users.
In other words all our potential users are connected to one other, and although we all know this, so far I’ve not heard of anyone that’s really modelling this connectivity for the specific goal of building and improving online networks. Personally I'm fascinated by this area and reckon it’s part of the future of the web, which is why I'm keen to see if there's any way we can build some of this thinking into the way we set this project up.
If any of this interests you, check out what the specialists have to say on the network weaving blog online. It's pretty fascinating stuff even if it is a little geeky ;-)
To start with, here are three books you should read
- Small World - Mark Buchanan
- Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life - Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
- Tipping Point – Malcolm Gladwell
Why now? Because with the improvements in business intelligence and analytics modelling, we can now really begin to understand and map online networks, and identify the ‘hubs’ or key people that we should be engaging with to turn them into advocates in order to drive take-up through word of mouth. With the ubiquity and popularity of blogs, reviews and the web, this area is turning into a marketing tool that should be taken extremely seriously. It might also help us figure out how a volunteer network might function and where we need to focus within it.
Complex networks like those involving people, although seemingly random, surprisingly do actually follow patterns that can be mapped, and essentially fall into two categories – small-world networks and scale free networks. If networks were linear i.e. A knows B, and B knows C, and so on... the link between A and Z would involve 26 steps; and any knowledge, opinion or influence Z might have would be pretty much inaccessible to A.
Small world networks however essentially describe a pattern of interconnectedness that involves a degree of randomness, i.e. maybe B also knows M and X, and maybe X knows Z, which dramatically improves the connectedness between A and Z. The originally studies in this area were carried out by Stanley Milgram who was responsible for identifying the phenomenon we now know as “6 degrees of separation”. Yes, it’s not a myth!
However real world natural networks do not work as simplistically as this. They have another property that’s even more crucial, known as preferential attachment. Preferential attachment is an example of a positive feedback cycle where initially random variations are automatically reinforced, thus greatly magnifying differences. In popular speak this is the 'Matthew effect' i.e. the rich get richer!
What this means is that the more connected something is, the more likely it is to gain new connections. In a social network this means that any new unconnected member is more likely to become acquainted with more visible members than with relative unknowns. These ‘visible’ elements are effectively hubs with lots of connections and therefore influence, and these networks show a pattern called the ‘Power law’, which basically means that doubling the number of hubs reduces the degrees of separation between elements in the network by a constant; in this case, our users.
In other words all our potential users are connected to one other, and although we all know this, so far I’ve not heard of anyone that’s really modelling this connectivity for the specific goal of building and improving online networks. Personally I'm fascinated by this area and reckon it’s part of the future of the web, which is why I'm keen to see if there's any way we can build some of this thinking into the way we set this project up.
If any of this interests you, check out what the specialists have to say on the network weaving blog online. It's pretty fascinating stuff even if it is a little geeky ;-)
Sunday, 30 December 2007
Dunbar's Number
In my various readings on random topics, I often come across ideas and snippets of information that can be interestingly applied to the different things I'm involved with, and so sooner or later I was always bound to hit on something that's at least tangentially related to this project... in this case Dunbar's number.
Dunbar's number is 150. According to Peter Pirolli from PARC, 150 is "the theoretical limit of the number of people that you can “know socially” in the sense that you know them as individuals and know something about their relations to one another (and you)".
I wonder if this beings to explain why most people on Facebook have somewhere between 150 and 250 friends - something I noticed after the initial feeling of competitiveness everyone has when they first join! If I discounted the number of people I've politely accepted as a 'friend' but can't honestly say I keep up with in any way, I'd be pretty close to Dunbar's number myself.
What's interesting is that in terms of building a network for this project it gives us an idea of the size of our existing close links, i.e. the number of people whose knowledge we can directly tap in to through the members of our Facebook group. Right now there's about 100 members in the group. Even if we accounted for a hugely optimistic 10% overlap of friends between all members, that still gives us (100*150)*(0.9) which is 13,500 people, and all it took was a few friends joining a group over a period of a couple of weeks. How amazing is that?
Dunbar's number is 150. According to Peter Pirolli from PARC, 150 is "the theoretical limit of the number of people that you can “know socially” in the sense that you know them as individuals and know something about their relations to one another (and you)".
I wonder if this beings to explain why most people on Facebook have somewhere between 150 and 250 friends - something I noticed after the initial feeling of competitiveness everyone has when they first join! If I discounted the number of people I've politely accepted as a 'friend' but can't honestly say I keep up with in any way, I'd be pretty close to Dunbar's number myself.
What's interesting is that in terms of building a network for this project it gives us an idea of the size of our existing close links, i.e. the number of people whose knowledge we can directly tap in to through the members of our Facebook group. Right now there's about 100 members in the group. Even if we accounted for a hugely optimistic 10% overlap of friends between all members, that still gives us (100*150)*(0.9) which is 13,500 people, and all it took was a few friends joining a group over a period of a couple of weeks. How amazing is that?
Saturday, 29 December 2007
How To Set Up A Blog For Novices
You'd think blogging is easy. Just sign up to some free host, start writing and away you go. If all you want to do is put your thoughts into a vast nothingness where no one will ever read any of it, then it really is just that simple.
However if you want to actually achieve something with your blog, build readership, community and momentum, then blogging is harder than it looks.
1) Figuring out features
Firstly and most painfully, you have to figure out what you want on your blog. Here are some of the things I wanted:
Having accepted that your tech skills are limited or non-existent, you're suddenly faced with a plethora of preset blogging platforms such as
...or on regular web hosting services that you pay monthly subscriptions for. Of course they all offer different features and templates and customisability. The biggest names in the game seem to be Wordpress, TypePad, and Blogger.
Having spent days wading through features and options and complexity, my recommendation is Blogger for the ambitious novice, because it has all of Google behind it, and lots of cool features you can add like polls and slideshows and photos and feeds and video with no effort. In my opinion Wordpress felt more basic when I played with it.
But the default templates in Blogger only have two columns and I'm struggling to customise them, there's no inbuilt statistics, podcasts aren't easy to set up and there doesn't seem to be any easy to create multiple pages for a website feel. Sadly there also isn't a free blog anywhere that allows people to comment on comments and thus use blog posts as discussion starters. Ah well!
But for those that persevere, as always help is at hand over the web. There's a great post on the asymptomatic blog on choosing blog software and a really useful blog comparison chart that covers every blog platform out there in a simple grid.
2) Creating an audience
The next problem you face is how to create an audience and what to say to keep them interested. More on this once I've experimented a little longer. My initial thoughts were to keep content focused on the point of the blog, but maybe I should be looking to expand the scope to sharing knowledge that is tangentially relevant to the core theme in order to give readers a little more variety.
Some initial notes based on experience and recent reading:
Finally I think I should mention Feedburner. Ever heard of it? If you aren't a hardcore blogger you probably haven't. I've been blogging for a while and had no idea what it was or how to work it. To be honest, I still don't fully know what it's about, but it seems to act as a sort of middleman between blogs and blog readers. It's free and you get:
So this blog is now
:)
However if you want to actually achieve something with your blog, build readership, community and momentum, then blogging is harder than it looks.
1) Figuring out features
Firstly and most painfully, you have to figure out what you want on your blog. Here are some of the things I wanted:
- Comment threads (discussion capability)
- Customisability
- Polls
- Multiple author capability
- Multiple non-blog pages - like a website
- Export/Import capability to/from other blogs
- Visitor and hits tracking
- Advertising
- Podcasting & Videocasting
Having accepted that your tech skills are limited or non-existent, you're suddenly faced with a plethora of preset blogging platforms such as
...or on regular web hosting services that you pay monthly subscriptions for. Of course they all offer different features and templates and customisability. The biggest names in the game seem to be Wordpress, TypePad, and Blogger.
Having spent days wading through features and options and complexity, my recommendation is Blogger for the ambitious novice, because it has all of Google behind it, and lots of cool features you can add like polls and slideshows and photos and feeds and video with no effort. In my opinion Wordpress felt more basic when I played with it.
But the default templates in Blogger only have two columns and I'm struggling to customise them, there's no inbuilt statistics, podcasts aren't easy to set up and there doesn't seem to be any easy to create multiple pages for a website feel. Sadly there also isn't a free blog anywhere that allows people to comment on comments and thus use blog posts as discussion starters. Ah well!
But for those that persevere, as always help is at hand over the web. There's a great post on the asymptomatic blog on choosing blog software and a really useful blog comparison chart that covers every blog platform out there in a simple grid.
2) Creating an audience
The next problem you face is how to create an audience and what to say to keep them interested. More on this once I've experimented a little longer. My initial thoughts were to keep content focused on the point of the blog, but maybe I should be looking to expand the scope to sharing knowledge that is tangentially relevant to the core theme in order to give readers a little more variety.
Some initial notes based on experience and recent reading:
- Audience creation for blogs tends to be driven by content originality and relevance.
- Have a clear focal point.
- Blog regularly as people lose interest pretty fast.
- Write something useful, interesting and clearly individual and people start to listen.
- Focus on subjects people are likely to search for and you've got a winner.
- Publish often and Google starts to rank your posts higher and higher in its search results.
- Add your blog to blog aggregators so that new posts show up to the vast audiences that visit them.
- Create groups in your social networks like Facebook :)
- Try and get other (ideally relevant) websites and bloggers to link back to your blog
Finally I think I should mention Feedburner. Ever heard of it? If you aren't a hardcore blogger you probably haven't. I've been blogging for a while and had no idea what it was or how to work it. To be honest, I still don't fully know what it's about, but it seems to act as a sort of middleman between blogs and blog readers. It's free and you get:
- A unique and universal feed address so if you change your blog you don't lose your readers.
- Really nice overviews of how many visitors your blog has had, what countries they've visited from and what type of browsers they've used
- Details of how many subscribers you've got and which pages people are looking at
- Various little gadgets and widgets to help publicise and monetise your posts
- Ability for readers to subscribe to your blog via email, which is great because most people still have no idea what a blog reader is!
- Podcasting capability for blogs that don't yet support it
So this blog is now
:)
Friday, 28 December 2007
An early look at the world of volunteering online
As someone who's been involved with voluntary and non-profit stuff for years, I was pretty surprised this week when I started researching what's already out there in web world for volunteers. Never knew any of it existed, and to be honest there's a good reason why.
None of them are exciting, and their approach is hugely self-service. Big and yes, boring, sites full of information about volunteering opportunities. Completely dependent on proactive volunteers going online, wading through the sites out there and finding the opportunity relevant to them. In our world of instant gratification and information delivered how you want it, when you want it, into whatever space is most convenient, these sites might as well be invisible to the audiences we're talking about with the Urban Survival Project.
It is still early stages, and I'm working on a more detailed analysis of how volunteering currently works online and where exactly the opportunities lie, but I think I can reasonably safely say that the findings will back up why we need to do what we're doing, and our approach to doing it. There is a real need to bring social engagement into the spaces we all use, in ways that remove the effort barriers to getting involved, and make it easy for the busy generation to make the differences they'd like to.
Anyway, having scanned through loads of volunteering sites including many that are specifically for whichever charity is hosting it, here's the list I'm going to look at seriously. Where I can, I'll sign up as a member and see where it takes me. My aim is to really understand what they're all about and why they haven't captured our collective imaginations. When I'm done I expect to be able to show where the Urban Survival Project will both differentiate and fit in. Maybe using a basic 2D grid quadrant - some sort of adaptation of a BCG matrix.
None of them are exciting, and their approach is hugely self-service. Big and yes, boring, sites full of information about volunteering opportunities. Completely dependent on proactive volunteers going online, wading through the sites out there and finding the opportunity relevant to them. In our world of instant gratification and information delivered how you want it, when you want it, into whatever space is most convenient, these sites might as well be invisible to the audiences we're talking about with the Urban Survival Project.
It is still early stages, and I'm working on a more detailed analysis of how volunteering currently works online and where exactly the opportunities lie, but I think I can reasonably safely say that the findings will back up why we need to do what we're doing, and our approach to doing it. There is a real need to bring social engagement into the spaces we all use, in ways that remove the effort barriers to getting involved, and make it easy for the busy generation to make the differences they'd like to.
Anyway, having scanned through loads of volunteering sites including many that are specifically for whichever charity is hosting it, here's the list I'm going to look at seriously. Where I can, I'll sign up as a member and see where it takes me. My aim is to really understand what they're all about and why they haven't captured our collective imaginations. When I'm done I expect to be able to show where the Urban Survival Project will both differentiate and fit in. Maybe using a basic 2D grid quadrant - some sort of adaptation of a BCG matrix.
- 4laborsoflove
- Communityservice.com
- Do Something
- Geek Corps
- Global Volunteer Network (GVN)
- Global Volunteers
- IC Volunteers
- Idealist.org
- Just Volunteers.org
- Online Volunteering Service
- UN Volunteers
- United Nations Information Technology Service
- V Inspired
- Volunteer Match
- Volunteer Projects Overseas
- VSO
- World Volunteer Web
Thursday, 13 December 2007
Networking technologies of the future?
Considering that this project is planned to essentially end up as one or more volunteer based websites that link into the social networking sites we all currently use, I guess the question of what technology to build it with can't really be avoided. Given the young professional demographic I think we should focus on, Facebook is the obvious place to start.
Facebook then, provides a set of APIs that third parties can use to build applications that link in to its website. An API is an 'Application Programming Interface', which basically means that it allows applications and websites to communicate with each other without having to write lots of complicated code. I'd point to the wikipedia definition but frankly its pretty impossible to understand! Anyway, key point is that this interface is specific to Facebook only. If we wanted to link into other sites we'd have to repeat the whole process again.
But timing couldn't be better because the geniuses at Google have just released OpenSocial, which does the same thing as the Facebook API but for a whole range for social networking sites simultaneously. It allows developers to access the following core functions and information at social networks:
Finally, there's also FOAF. Did we really need another acronym?? But it is worth a mention because it could well be the future beyond Facebook and MySpace. FOAF or the "Friend of a Friend" project is a "simple technology that makes it easier to share and use information about people and their activities (eg. photos, calendars, weblogs), to transfer information between Web sites, and to automatically extend, merge and re-use it online." Unlike the others this is about standards based freely available tools. This could just be the next disruptive technology and another one to keep an eye on.
If you or anyone you know knows how to develop on any of these platforms, or is a budding genius looking to explore these for fun or to boost their CV... drop us a note :)
Facebook then, provides a set of APIs that third parties can use to build applications that link in to its website. An API is an 'Application Programming Interface', which basically means that it allows applications and websites to communicate with each other without having to write lots of complicated code. I'd point to the wikipedia definition but frankly its pretty impossible to understand! Anyway, key point is that this interface is specific to Facebook only. If we wanted to link into other sites we'd have to repeat the whole process again.
But timing couldn't be better because the geniuses at Google have just released OpenSocial, which does the same thing as the Facebook API but for a whole range for social networking sites simultaneously. It allows developers to access the following core functions and information at social networks:
- Profile Information (user data)
- Friends Information (social graph)
- Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)
Finally, there's also FOAF. Did we really need another acronym?? But it is worth a mention because it could well be the future beyond Facebook and MySpace. FOAF or the "Friend of a Friend" project is a "simple technology that makes it easier to share and use information about people and their activities (eg. photos, calendars, weblogs), to transfer information between Web sites, and to automatically extend, merge and re-use it online." Unlike the others this is about standards based freely available tools. This could just be the next disruptive technology and another one to keep an eye on.
If you or anyone you know knows how to develop on any of these platforms, or is a budding genius looking to explore these for fun or to boost their CV... drop us a note :)
Wednesday, 12 December 2007
Copyright Protection For Your Idea
So it turns out that ideas per se are not subject to copyright. They aren't trademarks, designs, inventions or patents so the long and short of it seems to involve holding them close to your chest and hoping desperately that no will steal them.
Lawyers I've spoken to seem stumped and the fresh faced bank manager at my local branch got all fidgety before he admitted he didn't have a clue. It seems we're an unusual case. Creating an enterprise in full view of the world is not the usual way of doing things.
But since we're doing it anyway, I looked into it a little further. As far as I can tell, ideas themselves are not protectable but documentation is. Documenting ideas in some kind of date-stamped way then is copyrightable and protection enough as it is recognised as defendable collateral in any kind of legal dispute over theft.
For reference this applies to any kind of creativity. According to the Government's Business Link Website" You automatically hold the copyright on any literary, dramatic, musical or artistic works that you create or that your business employs somebody to create. These works can range from information booklets and computer programs to sound recordings and films."
It is difficult however to enforce IP protection so it helps to be able to prove authorship and date. The two recommended approaches are
More info on this in the Protecting your business & ideas section of the Business Link site. Have a look at the bit on Copyright.
Lawyers I've spoken to seem stumped and the fresh faced bank manager at my local branch got all fidgety before he admitted he didn't have a clue. It seems we're an unusual case. Creating an enterprise in full view of the world is not the usual way of doing things.
But since we're doing it anyway, I looked into it a little further. As far as I can tell, ideas themselves are not protectable but documentation is. Documenting ideas in some kind of date-stamped way then is copyrightable and protection enough as it is recognised as defendable collateral in any kind of legal dispute over theft.
For reference this applies to any kind of creativity. According to the Government's Business Link Website" You automatically hold the copyright on any literary, dramatic, musical or artistic works that you create or that your business employs somebody to create. These works can range from information booklets and computer programs to sound recordings and films."
It is difficult however to enforce IP protection so it helps to be able to prove authorship and date. The two recommended approaches are
- Lodge your ideas with a lawyer or bank for safekeeping
- Registered post them to yourself and keep the package unopened
More info on this in the Protecting your business & ideas section of the Business Link site. Have a look at the bit on Copyright.
Tuesday, 11 December 2007
How do you protect an idea?
Some people recently sued the Facebook guys for stealing their idea based on a conversation in a bedroom, which got me thinking. Should I try and protect this one? And if so, how?
The problem is complicated. The whole premise of this project is openness. I'm not looking to make money out of this, and I don't really think I'll get it done alone, so being open with ideas is for me an easy step. If other people get involved and share their knowledge like I'm hoping you all will, this could take off pretty quickly, which leaves me in a slight quandary.
What if we did all the thinking work and some third party lifted the concept and went off, built it and pocketed the returns? Firstly they'd probably get it wrong, secondly all those people who put time and thought into it would never get recognition for their efforts, and most importantly the revenue streams may never feed back into supporting vulnerable young people's dreams and ambitions. So I figured I ought to at least have a go at affording our intellectual property a little protection.
I'll discuss how I've done this in the next post, but maybe you know someone that could advise on how we can do this better? Drop me a note if you do...
The problem is complicated. The whole premise of this project is openness. I'm not looking to make money out of this, and I don't really think I'll get it done alone, so being open with ideas is for me an easy step. If other people get involved and share their knowledge like I'm hoping you all will, this could take off pretty quickly, which leaves me in a slight quandary.
What if we did all the thinking work and some third party lifted the concept and went off, built it and pocketed the returns? Firstly they'd probably get it wrong, secondly all those people who put time and thought into it would never get recognition for their efforts, and most importantly the revenue streams may never feed back into supporting vulnerable young people's dreams and ambitions. So I figured I ought to at least have a go at affording our intellectual property a little protection.
I'll discuss how I've done this in the next post, but maybe you know someone that could advise on how we can do this better? Drop me a note if you do...
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