Mapping people’s real life social networks.
I published a research paper in 2007 that detailed an early version of this process. I’ve since iterated on it a few times. The paper also contains some findings towards the end.

The magic number 150.
See this New York Post article where Robin Dunbar describes how different groups are made up of 150 people. Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler have also studied this in modern groups. For a great overview (with data) of Dunbar’s number and online games, see this blog post by Christopher Allen.

Strong and Weak ties
Wikipedia provides a good overview of the research literature on strong and weak ties. The seminal paper is Mark Granovetter’s “The Strength of Weak Ties.”

We have a small number of strong ties
In their book Connected, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler describe one study they conducted with 3,000 Americans. See also research conducted at the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California.

Average number of friends on Facebook
Various research shows that the average number of Facebook friends ranges from 120 to 180. For two examples, see “Rhythms of Social Interaction: Messaging Within an Online Social Network” by researchers at HP Labs, and “Social Network Activity and Social Well-Being” by researchers at Carnegie-Mellon and Facebook. Various research shows that almost all friends on Facebook are people that users first met offline. For an overview, see “The Problem of Conflicting Social Spheres” by researchers at Manchester Business School. For interacting with small numbers of our friends on Facebook, see “User Interactions in Social Networks and Their Implications” by researchers at UC Santa Barbara.

Phone usage and strong ties
Most of this data is from ethnographer Stefana Broadbent. See her presentation at the TED conference. Broadbent has done much research into how people communicate with each other. You can follow her work at usagewatch.org. In particular, see the article “The small size of our communication network”.

Usage of communication tools
The Pew Research Center have much research into this topic. For examples, see “Teens, Cell Phones and Texting”, “Social Isolation and New Technology”, “Social Media and Mobile Internet Use Among Teens and Young Adults”, and “Twitter and Status Updating”.

Different types of friendships
For a detailed look at empirical research on friendships, see the book Rethinking Friendships by Liz Spencer and Ray Pahl.

Influence
For an introduction to cognitive biases, see this Wikipedia article. For further detail check out this full list of social cognitive biases. The fact that we make decisions based on our limited information is part of a theory called bounded rationality. The Tipping Point is nicely summarized on Wikipedia, including key ideas and challenges to those ideas. In their book Connected, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler describe how mutual best friends are most influential, how three degrees of influence works, and the concept of hyperdyadic spread. Other research papers that I reference frequently are “Identifying Influential Spreaders in Complex Networks” by multiple researchers at Universities in the USA, Israel and Sweden, and “Effects of Word-of-Mouth Versus Traditional Marketing: Findings from an Internet Social Networking Site” by Michael Trusov, Randolph Bucklin and Koen Pauwels.

How hubs work
In his book Six Degrees, Duncan Watts explores high and low thresholds for idea adoption, how hipsters influence within a network, the analogy of seeds in nature, and his studies on lists of music. Two research papers that influenced me on hubs and adoption are “The Role of Hubs in the Adoption Process” by Jacob Goldenberg, Sangman Han, Donald Lehmann, and Jae Weon Hong, and “Opinion Leadership and Social Contagion in New Product Diffusion” by professors at Wharton and the University of Southern California.

Multiple facets of identity
danah boyd has done some amazing research over the years, a lot of which relates to identity. For example, see “Profiles as Conversation: Networked Identity Performance on Friendster” by boyd and Heer. Ben Gross has also conducted some great research, see “Addressing Constraints: Multiple Usernames, Task Spillage and Notions of Identity” by Ben Gross and Elizabeth Churchill, and “Names of Our Lives”. Another good paper to check out is “Trust and Nuanced Profile Similarity in Online Social Networks” by Jennifer Golbeck.

Anonymous ratings
See the research paper “I rate you. You rate me. Should we do so publicly?” by researchers at the University of Michigan.

Awareness of Privacy
The following three research papers are a great place to start: “Information Revelation and Internet Privacy Concerns on Social Network Sites: A Case Study of Facebook” by Young and Quan-Haase, “Reputation Management and Social Media” by the Pew Research Center, and “How Different are Young Adults from Older Adults When it Comes to Information Privacy Attitudes and Policies?” by researchers at UC Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania.

People underestimating their audience
See the research paper “Characterizing Privacy in Online Social Networks” by Krishnamurthy and Wills.

People misunderstanding privacy settings
Multiple research studies show how people misunderstand the privacy implications of their activities. For examples, see “Strategies and Struggles with Privacy in an Online Social Networking Community” by Strater and Lipford, “Expandable grids for visualizing and authoring computer security policies” by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, University of North Carolina, and Gonzaga University, and “How Different are Young Adults from Older Adults When it Comes to Information Privacy Attitudes and Policies?” by researchers at UC Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania,

So, that’s a lot of links and a lot of research, happy digging!

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Next week I’m excited to speak at the VTM web design conference. Here is an outline of my talk. What parts interest you the most? What would you like to hear me write more about on this blog?

The web of people
The web is undergoing a fundamental change from a web of documents to a web of people. This change is not being driven by new technologies, but by human behavior that is thousands of years old.

How people are connected
People’s social networks have complex structures. Many interconnected people and groups means millions of people are linked through a small number of connections. But it’s important not to confuse possibility with reality. Most people communicate regularly with less than 15 people.

How people relate to each other
People have different types of relationships and rely on some people for very different things than other people. We have three types of ties: Strong ties are the people we care about most. Weak ties are people we don’t know very well. Temporary ties are people we interact with temporarily.

How people interact with each other
People choose different communication channels depending on whether they need to communicate with one person, a few people, or many people. Despite the rise of online social networks, voice calls and text messages dominate people’s communication habits. Email also remains very important. The majority of communication instances happen with a small number of strong ties.

How people influence each other
Our access to information is increasing but our capacity for memory remains the same. So when considering whether something is useful and valuable for us, we rely on others. We place much higher trust in strong ties and in people who share our lifestyle than in celebrities, bloggers, or hipsters. The common ways companies use to target influential people are oversimplified. To measure influence, it’s just as important to measure how influenceable someone is as how influential someone is.

How people display themselves to others
Our identities are not only crafted by us, but also shaped by our connections and environments. We use everyday conversation, including status updates on social networks, to continually shape and refine our identity. Our identities help us recognize common ground for interacting with others, and to judge whether we should trust someone we don’t know. People need to display different facets of their identity to the different groups in their life.

How people manage who sees their personal information
Privacy is about controlling what other people know about us. When we give away personal information, we expect it to stay within a certain boundary and not be publicized. People, young and old, care deeply about their privacy. However, they often misunderstand privacy settings, and underestimate the size of their audience, leading to a perception that they care less about their privacy than they used to.

How interactions on the web are changing
The next stage of the web won’t have destinations, it will be a distributed network of content and people that will get reassembled depending on context and relationships. The increase in people interactions on the web will mean that building and managing communities will be important for responding to customer suggestions, queries, and complaints. Communities will need to be embedded in consumer experiences and not built at a new destination.

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Yesterday a friend emailed me a link to watch the new Nike World Cup 2010 ad. It was recommended from a friend, so I was pretty motivated to watch it - even when they forced me to “Like” it before I had watched it.

No doubt it’s a fantastic ad. It’s exciting, and football fans the world over are waiting with bated breath for the World Cup to start.

No doubt it cost them an immense sum of money, and they need to work hard to justify the cost. Today, this shows up in my newsfeed:

This campaign is completely dishonest. It should be clear to people what they are signing up to when they hit the “Like” button on the video. In fact, people shouldn’t be forced to hit “Like” just to watch it, and when they do, it should be clear that they are allowing Nike to send them messages in their newsfeed.

Welcome to our newest form of spam.

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We have a final cover design:

We’re working on what the interior design looks like (the red star is a comment):

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The question marketers need to ask is what they are going to do with all these new fans and followers. How will having someone as a fan or follower fundamentally improve the relationships between the brand and the customer? Adverts often say “Follow us on Twitter!” “Become a fan on Facebook!”. But they never say why.

What’s worse, some marketers are trying all sorts of tricks to get people to fan or follow them. There is an arms race for the most fans or followers. But the question is whether quantity or quality of fans is a better goal. I’d argue for the latter, yet many are going for the former. Bing is a case in point.
[Disclaimer: I work for Google. I'd prefer to use a different example but this is the best one I've got]

Bing ran an ad inside Farmville, offering Farmville users “Farm cash” (real money that can be used to buy stuff in the game) in exchange for becoming a fan of Bing on Facebook.

Farmville users were motivated to act, and Bing had 400,000 new fans in 24 hours. This gave them more fans on Facebook than Google. But so what? What does that mean? The quality of those fans is questionable. Are those people really fans of Bing? Or are they fans of Farmville? Many people filled Bing’s Facebook wall with questions about Farmville, and whether Bing were handing out any more free cash. Was this what Bing had hoped for? I don’t know Bing’s goals with this marketing activity, so I can’t comment on whether it was a success. I can only look at their wall, and conclude that the content and quality of conversation there, is unlikely to be what Bing had hoped for.

Before you try and collect as many fans and followers as possible, think long and hard about who you want as a fan/follower, and what value you’re going to give them when they follow you.

You don’t want the most fans. You want the best fans.

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Associates were people who only shared a common activity, like a hobby or a sport.
Useful contacts were people who shared information and advice, typically related to work or advancing ones career.
Favor friends were people who helped each other out in a functional manner, but not in an emotional manner.
Fun friends were people who socialized together, but only for fun. They didn’t provide each other with a deep level of emotional support.
Helpmates were a combination of favor friends and fun friends. They socialized together and helped each other out in a functional manner.
Comforters were like helpmates, but they also provided emotional support.
Confidants disclosed personal information to each other, enjoyed each other’s company, but weren’t always in a position to offer practical help, for example if they lived far away.
Soulmates displayed all of the elements.

Which types of friendships are you targeting?

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Here’s the core diagram I spoke around.

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The ad is from the Swedish government, and it’s to get people to pay for their broadcasting fee for TV. It’s a movie, and this is the final frame:

On the left you can pay your broadcasting fee. On the right you can send it to a friend. What is interesting here is the little strapline that runs at the bottom right of the movie:

And a click through explains that the video had a very high number of views:

I’m going to assume that the client’s metric for success was not to create the most viral video out there. After all, the audience is people living in Sweden. I’m assuming the success metric was the number of people who went on to pay their broadcasting fee. So why is that not the metric being promoted? Surely a better promotion is:

“Find out how we motivated 21% of people in Sweden to pay their broadcasting fee (and created the most successful global viral interactive ever).”

Virality is not a success metric. How many times something gets shared or forwarded is only ever a means to an end. Your message might be out there, but people might be sharing something because they are mocking your brand, not because they are celebrating it.

We need to get better at measuring and promoting the metrics that matter.

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This is a draft excerpt from my upcoming book ‘Social Circles’. I’d love to get feedback on it. This excerpt is from the middle of chapter 2: “The Real Life Social Network”. The plan is for each section in the book to broken up like this - multiple sub-sections, followed by a section with ideas for designers and marketers, and topics for brainstorming with starter ideas.

How interesting is it? How useful is it? How could I improve the content and/or the structure?

GROUPS

People belong to multiple independent groups

When we think about our social network, we don’t simply have friends, we have groups of friends. Research studies show that these groups form around different life stages, and shared experiences [1]. For example, people may have a group of friends from school, and a group of friends from college. They may have a group of friends from different places that they have lived - their friends from Chicago, their friends from New York. Other factors that distinguish groups of friends include shared interests, hobbies, work, and changes in family situation e.g. someone getting married receives new groups of friends from their partner’s life. This may sound obvious to us, but it’s not how most online social networks are structured. Most online social networks have everyone in one big bucket.

A typical example of someone’s real life social network. They have a small number of independent groups, formed around life stages and shared experiences.

The people in each of our groups tend to know each other very well, but our groups of friends tend to remain independent. It is not common for friends in one group to know friends in another. My “college friends” all know each other, but they don’t know my “New York friends”. Our ties do not extend outward, reaching many people, but rather they double back on themselves inside our tightly clustered groups.

Our independent groups of friends mean that we often have conversations that are only relevant to one of the groups. Much content shared within groups will be meaningful for that group alone, and defined by the context of their relationships [2]. This is currently a problem online, as we share status updates to all our network, extended across groups. Our update may have been meaningful for people in one of the groups, but not at all interesting for people in another. As a result, we’re often subjected to updates that we perceive as uninteresting, but which weren’t intended for us in the first place.

As groups are independent, knowing the people who bridge groups is very powerful. They are the people who can pass information from one social circle into another. They are not necessarily the people with the most connections. In fact, they may have a small number of connections, but they may happen to have lived in a few different places, or happen to have a diverse set of interests.

People don’t have one group of “friends”

Most social networks ask us to create our “friends” group. Increasingly, this means importing big friend groups from existing online social networks. The problem is, in real life, no such group exists. As we have seen, we don’t have one big friends group, we have different, independent groups of friends.

The word “friend” also means different things to different people depending on their culture and background. If you asked ten people to describe what a friend was, you would get ten different answers. They might say that a friend was someone they would trust to mind their children. Or they might say a friend was anyone they knew on a first name basis.

Not everyone in a group is equal

Although our groups of friends are small, usually containing less than 10 people [3], not all members of the group are equal. We are closer to some than others. We trust some people in a group on one set of topics, and others on a different set. Think of one of your groups of friends. Even though everyone knows each other well, there is probably one person you would trust to recommend a good restaurant, but another to point you to new cutting-edge music.

The fact that people in a group are not equal often leads to side conversations within groups. For example, when a group of friends are trying to organize a night out, side conversations often break out to resolve differences of opinion.

Ideas around groups

Designers:

- When developing social features, consider whether designing for groups would be better than creating one big bucket of people. Groups better represent people’s offline social network, and depending on your product’s goals, it may be a better way to structure what you are offering.

- Avoid the use of the word “friend” when describing relationships. There is almost always a better word that more accurately describes the behavior you’re trying to encourage.

- If you’re designing for groups, give people easy ways to create groups, build group management into the flow of other tasks, allow custom names for each group, and allow people to rename the group if they change over time.

- Support side conversations. Allow people to fork conversation threads with a smaller number of people.

Marketers + Advertisers:

- Think about how you might build campaigns where you target specific groups rather than mass targeting individuals. How people describe groups can give insight into their interests. Knowing the things around which groups have formed can lead to much better targeting. A more relevant audience for you, and more relevant advertising for the audience.

- You can search for groups online and use the information about the group to understand if you should target messages at them. Be mindful of information that people consider private. Many people will consider information about their groups of friends as very private. Always give people control, and run all activities as “opt-in”. If people see tangible benefits to communicating with you, they’ll happily involve relevant friends.

- Focus on getting your message shared within a group as much as you focus on getting it to spread between groups. Messages shared within a group are likely to be relevant to more members of the group, as the members usually have similar attitudes and interests. Also, messages are reinforced by multiple members of the group, increasing the influence of the message.

- Don’t force the sharing of messages from group to group. If the message is relevant it will spread, but if it’s not, then look elsewhere. It’s better to not spread a message than risking appearing as irrelevant, or worse, as spam. Often, when people are not interested, they perceive legitimate messages from companies as spam. This does untold damage to brand perceptions.

Brainstorm topics:

How might we create marketing activities that involve groups of friends?

How might we create value for small groups, motivating individuals to involve their friends?

How might we ensure that our messages don’t get pushed to groups that aren’t interested?

References

[1] “Rethinking Friendship” Liz Spencer + Ray Pahl Page 89

[2] “Six Degrees” Duncan Watts Page 71

[3] ‘Flocking’ behavior lands on social networking sites

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