Truth, Rumours, Real Science and the Social Graph
Sir Tim Berners-Lee said the internet needs a way to help people separate rumour from real science according to a BBC article published today, “Warning sounded on Web’s future“. The BBC said Sir Berners-Lee, the creator of the web, told them he is worried about the way the web has been used to spread disinformation. He wants to see a new system where websites would carry a label for trustworthiness after they had been proved reliable sources.
I think this certainly opens an interesting conversation. I wonder if he thinks this is a new problem unique to social media or the same old phenomenon that already existed in word of mouth or even mainstream media?
Berners-Lee wants to create a mechanism to separate rumours from real science, but this quickly gets to the question, “what is truth” and “who gets to decide”? In today’s pluralistic, post modern society, which is increasingly reflective of much of the world’s thinking, even science isn’t considered to be objective anymore.
In the modern era, science reined as king and humankind had all eyes on center stage which was featuring the greatest show on earth and it was called “progress”. People believed that science could and would discover the objective truths of our world; we would eventually “figure it all out”. We were confident about reality and believed that the universe was knowable and manageable. Using our rational minds, proven methods of observation (scientific method) and better technology & instruments we could attain the truths needed to improve life and solve the world’s problems. As American philosopher John Dewey put it, “the patient and experimental study of nature, bearing fruit in inventions which control nature and subdue her forces to social use, is the method by which progress is made”.
Well, like it or not, the show is struggling in its final season and the modern mind is no longer so confident. The beliefs of modernity are in radical decline. Although there are still those who think that the dream has just run into a few temporary snags, fewer are willing to believe it.
The post-modern mind, however, believes that reality is mediated by your perspective. Some take it even further concluding that reality is purely a human construct or more particularly a social construct. And so throughout history, the post-modernist would say that it was always some social group’s construct of reality that has been the generally accepted one. The post-modern construct is gaining that position in present times asking, “whose reality” and “why should your version of reality rule the roost?”. The result is that every voice, every perspective is given equal standing and presented to society as a menu of realities. Since the choices are all believed to be constructs, the post-modernist is free to take different truths for a test drive, pick his favorite colour, and change it as often as he likes.
Ok, back to Sir Tim Berners-Lee and his concerns about the social web and his idea about a system of labels of trustworthiness.
If truth today is perceived to be perceptual and not objective (yes, that statement has circular logic), then you can never get to a universal agreement on what constitutes trustworthy or truthful. It will just be perceived as one person or group’s version of trustworthy which has no right to be the dominant view and so it won’t be trusted. Someone might object and say, let’s use the wisdom of the crowd to determine trustworthiness and go with the majority (i.e. crowd-sourced trustworthiness), but then you end up back where you started, because the problem Berners-Lee is trying to solve is stopping bad ideas from spreading rapidly (where many people end up believing something which isn’t “true”) . If you use the crowd, however, to determine what is trustworthy or true, then the rapidly propagating idea, once it spreads, would no longer be considered a bad idea since so many now believe it.
I guess my point is that I think Sir Tim Berners-Lee is in for a really tough challenge in developing & implementing his new system, to put it mildly.
There is another characteristic of social media that I think plays into this conversation: the social graph and trust. People trust certain people; ideas propagate more easily through a network of trusted relationships. Ideas themselves are not just intellectual facts, but have emotional, relational and other considerations which come into play. Particularly in a post-modern culture, people might easily accept an idea because it feels good and they may not care if it is true (after all they believe truth is a construct).
Sir Berners-Lee might successfully build a system with labels of trust, but it won’t work if his goal is to stop “bad” ideas from propagating. Now if he could integrate his idea into the social graph somehow, he might be onto something. However, I think the social graph IS the new system.
Person Tim Berners-Lee
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September 16th, 2008 - Posted in Trust, Influence, Social Media | | 3 Comments
Un-Marketing
Brian Solis wrote a great post today that every marketer should read. He articulates a very important change that is taking place, “Now, we’re entering an entirely new paradigm for cultivating relationships with customers as well as the people who may one day become customers.” I completely agree.
Please check out the full article, “Will The Real Social Media Expert Please Stand Up?”
In it, Brian describes a change that is taking place from traditional marketing where we speak through relatively impersonal top down messages to one where we have real conversations with people.
He says:
“We’re starting to figure out that we need to humanize our story. We’re realizing that we would never speak to our friends and family through messages, so why should we speak “at” the very people we want to reach and befriend. We’re opening our ears and our minds to acknowledge that we can no longer push our thoughts at people in order to earn resonance; we have to listen, talk, listen, assess, and contribute value.”
And,
“Instead of top down communications and focusing on the influence and control of messages and perception, we’re learning that those influential groups of people are now our peers and therefore require respect, honesty, and support in order for us to earn their trust – and hopefully their business and enthusiasm along the way.”
So how does a marketer go about this? Brian also provides very practical advice including:
“Observe the online communities where your company and brands (or those of your competitors) are actively discussed and figure out how to participate in those conversations as if you were approaching someone in real life whom you greatly respect. Perhaps the most valuable piece of advice I can share is to pay attention to the culture of each community and how people communicate and interact with each other. This will reveal how best to embrace the opportunity and reach out to people though a through a new form of “un” marketing.
And,
“- Start by participating as a person, not as a marketer.
- Talk like a person, not as a sales person or message factory.
- Be helpful and bring value to the conversation.
During this entire process, you’re contributing to the personality and the perception of the brand you represent.”
This advice is right on the bull’s-eye and exactly the type of marketing that I believe in. At what point did we forget that it has always been about people and relationships, about adding value? I’m glad this movement is under way.
April 9th, 2008 - Posted in Online Listening, Influence, Conversation, Social Media | | 1 Comments
The Social Medium is the Message
Marshall McLuhan was a true media philosopher. Born in 1911 in Edmonton, Alberta (Canada), he became a highly regarded communications theorist, scholar/educator and philosopher. The concept of persuasion and influence was of great interest to McLuhan. His most famous publication, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man was written in 1964. From this research and analysis he coined the now famous saying, “the medium is the message”. What did he mean by this?
The slogan summarizes his theory about the influence of communications media on society. His thesis was that a communications medium influences society by the inherent characteristics of the medium rather than the contents of its message. Hence, the medium itself is the message; the medium itself is the greater influencer of society - more than the messages it is carrying.
Now, honestly, when I first decoded his famous slogan, I thought, “that can’t be right”. Surely it is the ideas themselves that change society and not the communications pipe through which they are sent? I mean, did McLuhan really believe that the impact of television on society would have been the same regardless of the type of programming? Yes, he apparently did.
At first, this seems counter-intuitive, but let’s consider an example: e-mail. Did the introduction of e-mail as a communication medium, by its own characteristics, change society (ex: how we work) or was it the specific messages we received? When you really think about it, this particular medium has completely transformed how we work. Try working without a computer (or any email device) for a day and you will be reminded just how much the medium itself has impacted society.
In his Prologue to The Gutenberg Galaxy – McLuhan stated that media are “extensions” of our human senses, bodies and minds. And he believed that each medium produced a different effect on how we view the world.
For instance, he argued that “the technique of suspended judgment” (or suspended disbelief) was brought on by the story telling characteristics of radio, movies and television and that this was a key point of change in the 20th century in terms of how we now look at the world.
Whether you agree with his theories or not, it is certainly interesting to think about the impact of social media, or rather the Social Medium, and all of its new characteristics. In particular, I wonder how the unique conversational characteristics of the Social Medium might be changing our values or views. In what ways do you think the current adoption of the Social Medium is changing our perceptions of the world?
The social medium is the message.
February 27th, 2008 - Posted in Influence, Conversation, Social Media | | 4 Comments
Influencer Share of Meme
I have been thinking about the distributed influence discussion that Jonny Bentwood and the roundtable initiated. It is now a meme where several others have added to the conversation. The focus of the discussion is on the calculation of an individual’s online influence. An idea occurred to me this week about memes and the measurement of influence.
As background, Jeremiah Owyang defined a meme as, “an idea or discussion that grows and spreads from individual to individual into a lengthy commentary”.
The whitepaper connects influencers to memes. It begins by recording the opinion of Jeff Jarvis who believes that an influencer is either a meme starter or a meme spreader. The roundtable then adds other types of influencers to the list such as the meme adapter, meme commentator, meme reader, but reaffirms that the first two have the greatest impact (starters and spreaders). The group also references Charlene Li’s technographics that categorizes online consumers into creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, and inactives.
So I thought I would test drive the idea for the “distributed influence” meme. I setup a topic profile to analyse the meme in our social media monitoring & analysis system. I then compared each of the roundtable participants and also added a few other influencers who contributed to the meme.
You can see from the above chart that Jonny Bentwood is not only the meme starter, but he is also a prominent part of the meme itself. His Influencer Share of Meme is 43.6% (48 mentions out of 110 on-topic posts in a 30 day window). This means that when someone talks about distributed influence, they also talk about Jonny Bentwood 43.6% of the time. The remaining Influencer Share of Meme leaders for meme are Peter Kim with 12.7%, Jeff Jarvis and Steve Rubel at 11.8%, David Brain at 10.9%, Max Kalehoff at 7.2%, Keith O’Brien and Henry Copeland at 6.4%, Dr. Walter Carl, Sarah Petersen and Charlene Li at 5.5%, Jim Tobin and Rick Murray 4.5%, Kami Huyse at 3.6%
Another interesting point is that this influencer share of meme is a dynamic value that can also be measured over time.
For example, the illustration above shows a time series chart comparing the Influencer Share of Meme for David Brain and Jim Tobin over the past 30 days. From January 16 to January 23, David Brain had a 19.3% SoM where Jim Tobin had 0%. But then you can see that Jim Tobin jumps in and grabs a 41.6% SoM from January 31 to Feb. 2 where he and his ideas suddenly became a bigger part of the meme… although the meme momentum itself (the red line) is gradually slowing at the moment.
February 8th, 2008 - Posted in Influence, Social Media | | 5 Comments
Social Media Influence
If you are interested in the topic of social media and influence, there is a really interesting conversation taking place currently. I posted a few links about it today on the Radian6 corporate blog, PowerShift, in case you want to check it out.
February 2nd, 2008 - Posted in Influence, Online Media, Social Media | | 0 Comments
