I’m live blogging @ NYU using my 3G IPhone, forgive my spelling, grammer errors and lack of hyperlinks. I wrote about this lecture in my last post, and yes, I did decide to attend.
We’re talking about Etsy.com. Founder of Foundation for Peer to Peer Networking.
In 2003 if you asked “who do you trust”? You’d get the usual answers while in 2007, we trust ourselves more (people like myself).
P2P is undertaking relational, permissionless decision making. Now P2P can scale globally.
Strong Hierarchy without command and control, small groups to cooperate at a global level.
We’re reaching a point of self organization around common objectives.
New set of choices - 3 ways (Centralized, Decentralized, Distributed); example of civil society enable and empower creativity in a town in France.
Division of Labor, everyone can produce and there’s a peer to peer review process.
Individual self selects tasks and level of contribution. Transparent Process (WikiPidia). But you need open access to raw materials and the permission to use them. When costs of participation are low enough - new way of producing value (Wikipidia vs ), new way is hyper productive vs. The alternatives.
Innovation can only be competitive in the old way, in Peer 2 Peer, the default option is pasionfull participation (absolute quality).
Corporations can’t compete with Peer 2 Peer, when compared.
Social Change - when societies change it’s when the organizing (ruling) and production (working) changing together.
Sharing model - share your expressions, but the links are weak, and your platform is 3rd party.
Or, Wikipedia, where everyone is working toward a shared goal on the same platform.
Peer 2 Peer needs to be govern different. Peer goverence is not based on Market Scarcity.
But while this may work for Wikipidia, but will it work in building a car? Yes, as long as you design it first.
Open Source Car Projects. Peer Production as a model if what is coming next.
Ancient Roman Empire, moving from large scale production with slaves to a more localized product. But markets require scarcity.
In our society now we have a crisis of value; we can produce almost infinately but.. Much of it is not yet monitiable, and is becoming, therefore, unsustainable.
Rapid protyping shows means of production is becoming decentralizated. Relocalization of global production.
We can’t succeed without large scale particapation in Peer to Peer - Peer to Peer Society.
When Roman Empire fell, society had 500 years of local solutions via Midevil.
I was thinking about a paper I read today on Innovating Through Recession by Andrew Razeghi, Kellogg School of Management, which I heard about via @ecevents on Twitter, I attempted to Embed the paper here. By the way, I often think as I write - and the attempt to “marshall” the information (no pun intended on my first name) often leads to my flashes of insight - as I write. I can tell you right now this is going to be a long post - and furthermore - it’s worth reading it - all the way though, maybe a couple of times.
Gary thought me that if you have a Brand, and I do, it’s me, my Web Analytics and my Art,you need to work that Brand, and reply to every comment, and even as many tweets as your can - you need to show your open to conversation and having one. Gary Vaynerchuk even said that if you have a blog with 2500 visitors a month or more, you can turn that blog into an income of 4K or 5K a month, if your willing to build up the Brand - but it’s a lot, a lot of work. But it was always work. I wasn’t thinking about the money - but then again, I would not mind it. But at least, I know what I need to focus on - and it’s what I want to do, anyway.
… I was thinking about how parts of this paper would play into Social Media outreach and how we’d track it using Web Analytics and Buzz Media Tracking. I realize Web Analytics and Buzz Media Tracking are not the same thing - but I see them merging, eventually, done by the same team.
The first two points, “Listening to the Market” and “Investing in Your Custom is perfect for Social Media Buzz Tracking - think about it - if your not listening via Twitter, via comments on Blogs in the subject area your company or Brand it part of - ie: using platforms like Radian6 to identify influentialsls - you have few clues on where the conversation is taking place, what it is, and how you can reply.
Setting up a Profile in Radian6, SM2, Trackur, is not a bad idea, and having someone in the Analytics team, who works with Marketing and PR, is probably not a bad idea, either. The biggest problem will be knowing about issues, and problems that crop up in enough time to respond to them - if it’s no one’s job - it won’t happen - and right now, it’s usually no one’s job,and there are no tools being purchased - but the role might be sourced out to a Marketing PR agency - which is a bad idea - they are not your Brand, you are - and it needs to be a pretty senior type person who is part of the Brand outreach and response.
Recently, I was asked to weigh in on this conversation monster hoping to ‘reinvent’ industry and I noticed several comments - people are asking to engage - they want to hear - but does anyone think about how to go and answer every question that anyone has? But that’s what you’d have to do now - go out and engage with each one of them, on every blog, message board and social network they live.
That’s how you defend Brand today, in my opinion. To be honest with you, I’m not sure weather the product is really better or not, as much as it’s perceived people’s opinion is being listened to, considered, and acknowledged. But if the “product” really is better, people will more likely listen if the reviews are coming from all over the internet, and not just from the Brand, itself.
I could almost see crowd sourcing the response to employees, getting everyone involved - just give them a “press kit” of guidelines - appoint and editor - and let the employees go out there an answer - in mass - that would be the way to do it now, and Search Engines would love it.
That’s what I’d do, if I were running Social Media for a Brand (did I throw down the gauntlet?) Yeah, I did.
End of point 1 and 2 - in Innovating Through Recession by Andrew Razeghi, Kellogg School of Management listening was done, during the Depression and last few recessions, by having different ideas and trying them - against conventional wisdom, but today, with the rise of the Internet and Social Media, it could be done differently, still innovating, but getting feedback from the “Cloud”.
Guess I’m on a roll today - figure I might as well write these ideas down as they come to me, before I forget them, so as to fix them in physical reality, put my stamp on them, before someone else thinks of them (and I’m guessing, a few probably all ready have).
But putting tracking code in place and have it “ping” a Social Measurement Platform - tracking a specific set of pattern strings we’ve set up for a campaign - we still have to figure out what that’s all worth and measure it .
Take “Friending” someone - what’s that worth - I compared the value of a “friend” to the value of “Gold”; but how is Gold Valued - how is it’s price fixed? According to Wikipedia the price of Gold is determined by …:
“…. The price of gold is determined on the open market, but a procedure known as the Gold Fixing in London, originating in September 1919, provides a daily benchmark figure to the industry. The afternoon fixing appeared in 1968 to fix a price when US markets are open.”
What I’m suggesting is the value of a “friendship”, virtual OR real, as long as it pertains to the online world - varies from day to day, hour to hour, person to person. In fact, like a molecule, a friendship can’t be evaluated entirely by only one node of it - in other words, a “friendship” needs at least one other person - you can’t friend “nothingness” - and in that sense, a virtual friend, can’t, by my thinking, be 100% analogous to a particle of Gold, or a “dollar bill”, as those units of value don’t suddenly change, depending on who holds them (some people will probably argue this point with me) while two nodes of a “network” could be of a different value than another two nodes, if you get my drift.
I thought of water and a glass as an analogy - but I don’t think it applies that well - but anyway, I’m just thinking this through now.
For one thing, you can’t have friendship with out some degree of attention, and that, alone, is difficult to measure. Also, not everyone’s attention is worth the same amount - so getting, say Kevin Rose of Digg’s attention may be worth more than getting my attention, especially according to “Blogger King” Allen Stern.
I think it’s fair to say that people who have been online “longer” and invested more time in building relationships online, and leveraging the web, might have a higher “value” placed on the value of their friendship - for example, early adopters to Facebook (after the College Dorm days) like Robert Scoble have well over 5,000 friends - I’m at 623 friends now - and I’ve been using Facebook actively for well over a year - but someone who just joined and isn’t really into Facebook, or maybe is more into LinkedIn and hardly uses Facebook, all things equal, is probably worth “less” as an Internet friend (again, given a system of determining value) than someone who has put in more time, and therefore, is more likely to have generated more value, online.
But, then again, there’s also a component of offline popularity that is totally applicable to online friendship - someone who is known to the general public, or even to a small community, but never been online, if they suddenly joined Facebook or Myspace, say Henry Kissinger (not that he would, but suppose he did) the value of having him friend you online, or vice versa, would be higher than, say, me friending you (all things being equal); that’s just a hypothetical example, by the way.
Plus, not all friends are equal, we all know that - just like in the “real world” your close with a few friends, and probably know many more.
And then, if we think about the number of friends, getting back to Robert Scoble or Loic Le Meur, or Jason Calacanis, for example - each has close to or more than the limit of Facebook friends and Scoble has well over 10,000 Twitter followers - maybe double that - he doesn’t probably have that much time to interact with anyone but a few of his contacts … right?
And it goes with out saying, though I’ll say it outright, that the more friends some one has, the less the value of the friendship is for each person - this can be conceptualized in a similar way to the GooglePageRank Algorithm - where more “links” on a page (which equate to more nodes a “hub” in social network fan out to, the less each connection, on average, is worth - in what ever unit of value you want to affix to a connection between nodes in a Social Network.
Along with all that I’ve said so far is the concept of “scarcity” and how it might translate into Virtual Friendship - after all, when all is said and done, you only have so many hours in a day - you only have so much that you can spend with anything or anyone - there is a limit. Therefore, Robert Scoble has a limit, Loic has a limit - they can not, even if they wanted to, respond to every Tweet, or every request that comes to them virtually - no more than they could do it in the real (3D) world.
Another assumption would be that each individual, as they enter into Virtual Relationships, as they get involved with the Internet, has a certain pre set value. This would be similar to the concept of “reach” in Audience Measurement tools like ComScore and NielsenNetRatings - for example, for any customer segment you want to examine during a given time period, Comscore will give you the number of Unique Visitors that make up the segment compared to the total number of Internet Users who could, at that time, be online, and might go, or be part of the segment - the “reach” is the number of unique visitors in your segment, or site (if your looking at site numbers) divided by the total number of uniques online at that moment in time (and all Comscore numbers are “estimated” based on Panel data and calculations, just in case your unaware) of it).
So I think, given all that I have discussed, so far, we could begin to map out the idea for a workable formula for the value of friendship, the value of a contribution.
Here’s the basic parts that would make up the formula for the value of a unit of virtual friendship:
First, a “commodities market” that “bets” on the average value of “attention” for a particular segment - a fair trading system would need to be set up - and now would be the perfect time.
why? The Sub-Prime Meltdown has taken down Wall Street - consumer and customer credit has almost vanished for the foreseeable future, ever since Lehman’s fall last month, and now Real Estate value is dropping rapidly, even in New York - and yet there’s a lot of “Global” Money floating around - though, there’s not much left in America to invest in - the Republicans have ensured that by de-regulating securities and all other kinds of “risk” starting in 2002 - that ended up fueling the housing boom that has now “bust”. In order to revive the economy, at some point - we need a new place to invest - and perhaps, another bubble - maybe not as messed up as the last, though.
For an Avatar who we’re trying to Virtually “Friend”:
[Formula] for the value of “unit” of virtual friendship - which has a sub dependency on the value of “attention” as determine on the “open market” - similar to the “Gold Market”, see the previous paragraph, above.
[Variable] the number of friends a “virtual” friend has (both in the Social Network your friending them in, and all other social networks they belong to, along with the friends they have there.
[Variable] the closeness of a friend vs. all the other friends you have online. I don’t know about you, but the individuals I interact with more (ie: more two way conversations) and the longer they are, the more “probability” that individual is a closer friend, relative to someone else - but of course, that doesn’t cover cardinality - you might have a burst of activity where you interact much more with a virtual friend than normal - maybe a joint project, for example. I’m suggesting, two or more recent instances of a two way conversation that’s longer than a few minutes counts as the person being in a closer “rung” of friendship.
the first three points I’ve shared, above, would seem to be part of any standard network topology - things you’d expect to see in a social network diagram - such as nodes, interconnects, with some being closer and others, not - and there’s a weight we can assign the interconnects and the nodes (and they don’t have to agree).
The next set of measurements have to do with the individual -who is “friending” - though some of this may be redundant - in other words - this is just a working idea - it’s not the final version - maybe I’m repeating the same info twice, maybe not -
[variable] value of the individual’s time who is friending - this too, is determined in the attention commodity market.
[variable] the number of online friends this person has in this network and in all networks.
[variable] the online and offline influence the “friender” has.
[variable] number of “inter-related” nodes - how many connections do you have to friends that are also connected to each other?
The next set of variables might be related to visitor segments a virtual friend is located in, for example:
[variable] segment value time, segment value reach as a percentage of all visitors in that segment.
[variable] duration of time between interactions been nodes - individual vs. average
In my mind, the “attention” commodities market would determine the value of units within a segment - maybe that’s what would be swapped, or go up or down.
The rest is “fuzzy” - I can see the outline -but it’s really for wizzards now working on Wall Street or someone similar to put this “Trading System” together and make it work, at least, as a computer model.
Then, there needs to be a broad enough agreement that a trading platform is needed - and then the fun begins. Of course, all of this would need to become “standardized” and written up - no one is going to build Trading System based on something that can’t be codified - just common sense.
Let’s say, in the future, I see betting on the value of an “interaction” and the value of a “friend” say, on FaceBook, being determined and changing by the minute - financial calculations could be modeled - for valuation - this then, could - eventually, become the basis for a Social Media Capital Add, much as Micheal Cayley has in mind - but I’m sure his idea is way different than anything I’ve put forward.
To close this long, long post - what I’ve put forward is what I believe should happen going forward -
Way to Measure Social Media - a data collection tag is needed along with a “listener” on the sites whose Social Media traffic you want to measure - the Social Media Platform needs to collect information and correlate it with the the campaigns being run - it’s akin to the Web Analytics model - which is what I come out of - enterprise monitoring as well - so it’s easier for me conceive of something like Social Media Measurement - in sort of an “intelligent agent” communicating back to the “mothership”. Think that model would work well for this kind of task.
- in a universal form, so it can be “traded”/ “swapped”, bought or sold, in some form. This can’t be done if your just going to value Social Media traffic based on ROI your site produces - because the value of “THAT” is something the site owner decides - but can’t trade that - you have to trade something the MARKET decides, is of value - and that might not agree with what a site or business values the most.
Finally, in this post - I’ve worked out part of what you’d make a formula out of - but I have not figured it all out -and I don’t have the exact formula - I’m figuring someone else can figure out what that might be, at this point. But, if I think of anything more, I’ll share it here.
Social Timehas a lot of meanings (ie:Social TimeIn The Life Of A Man And Society where "..social time-the peculiarities of the Past-Present-Future in social processes, and their unbreakable connection) or Social Time as SOCIAL RHYTHMS, CYCLES, and CLOCKS where "..Members of work groups, for instance, cross the temporal boundary between family and work when they "punch in" at the company time clock".
Definitions of Social Time, before the Internet was really widely adopted and used were discussed in A Very Social Time about social life in social life of literate working people in antebellum New England; but it doesn't really address the use of "Social Time" as I mean it. Also, Simonetta Tabboni discusses The Idea of Social Time in Norbert Elias "….. Elias's definitionof time enables us to understand that dominant time, which varieshistorically according to different kinds of society, expressesthe need for an organization of work and reflects above alleach society's privileged values. Social time always resultsfrom a choice…".
"….Now it’s practically a given that your time online is social time. Between commercial and peer pressure, you’re expected to maintain both a public presence for general interaction and a semi-private sphere for friends and family, both updated in real time with your activities, opinions, latest interests, location, and cultural tastes. The vehicles for this presence were homepages at first, then blogs, and now the widget-laden profiles on the social networking sites, along with an endless flow of pinging, poking and tweeting. It’s sort of funny that a system built by notoriously socially awkward geeks has turned into a mammoth, never-ending cocktail party. But that’s where we are, and right now, billions are being bet on monetizing the world of constant acquaintanceship.
"…. “The social network of the future will be populated by the RSS feeds of the activities of your friends and your friends will be determined by e-mail. The big players won’t put a major push into building a new social network,” he writes. “Your e-mail account isn’t valuable because it’s got the e-mail addresses of other people who could be solicited commercially — it’s valuable because it articulates who in the world is able to command your attention. It contains analyzable, direct communication between you and the people most important to you.” And Larry Dignan at ZDNet wonders what the future looks like for any but the biggest social networking specialty sites: “Increasingly, social networking is looking like a feature more than a business. There will be big ramifications to consider as social networking becomes integrated into your everyday applications.”
I was kinda thinking of Twitter lately - as I've tried to get into it more - I still don't really use it like many are now doing, but I noticed a friend's tweet the other day of being in a traffic jam outside of Philadelphia and a recent visit to New York, and wondered just how much I really wanted to know about people's lives.
Does anyone really want to know what I'm doing right now (I'm actually blogging right now, can't you tell)? I think, personally, that knowing what someone does or is doing, should come more as a form of "permission marketing" rather than a broadcast "tweet".
The Web Analytics Association is currently working on set of Web 2.0 definitions, it is more and more appearing that my own committee, Social Media, will work with the Standards Committee to define Social Media Standards, and I think we should also define "Social Time" and how it would be measured.
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