R2Integrated

Sep 17

Written by: Matt Goddard
9/17/2008 9:00 AM

The Darker Ages

The root of all social networking behavior is to reduce risk when making decisions that affect our lives.   We reduce this risk by reaching out to like-minded peers for advice, insight, or a record of their past experience.   Everyone has their own personal and professional network.  At times, we try to extend this network to others by first going to our original network and then asking if they can point us in the direction of someone that can help.  This advice-seeking behavior has been around for quite some time, before the telegraph, telephone, or internet for that matter.  Humans do not like to make decisions in isolation; we always want to know if someone that came before us had a successful approach that we can use.  After all, why “reinvent the wheel”, right?

Prior to the Web much of the communication in these social networks was done in one-on-one environments.  For example, I would call my friend on the phone to ask for advice or possibly discuss a new idea at a lunch meeting and see if anyone else had tried it before me.  In most cases, I was only talking to one other person or perhaps two or three at the same time.  Because these networks were typically small and close knit, you were stuck with what you could extract from them.  In many cases there might have been a better answer, but we were unable to access that knowledge base.  When we think about all the people in the world and all of the great advice they must have,  this system doesn’t seem too  efficient.  

In addition to the lack of efficiency, these isolated, one-on-one communication networks had yet another flaw.  Once advice was passed from one person to another person, that advice was often unavailable to others that might need it.  If I was at lunch sharing ideas, it was unlikely I had a tape recorder.  Even if I did tape the conversation, who would I send it to? How? Why?  Great ideas and great experiences didn’t travel very far or last very long.  We just weren’t storing them.

Social Media Changes Everything

The evolution of the internet and the explosion of social media have changed the way we share information in advice networks.  Now, instead of accessing a small group of close knit peers,  community websites  encompass  thousands of people,  many of which share similar characteristics.  They may even be in my same profession and even share my exact same job title.  I can examine many different ideas and pose questions to the community.  This system has tremendous reach and efficiency.  We can literally access the Wisdom of the Crowd.  Of equal interest is how the information is exchanged; content is being typed into a computer  and uploaded or downloaded.  These activities are actually stored by technology on websites and could possibly be accessed later.  No longer would advice simply be given at a “moment in time” but if a website was developed with storage in mind, much of the advice could be aggregated, saved, and redistributed.  In fact, if I asked a question to the community and no one answered it might not even matter.  After all, I could simply search for advice that had been given the month, week or day before and get the answer I was looking for.  I could even subscribe to a newsletter or weekly top 10 and have the information sent right to my inbox or Face Book page.  Effective community sites can not only encourage sharing but they can store the value of this sharing for later consumption.  

Stored information has another important characteristic:  it can move from one place to another.  If I found a piece of advice or an interesting idea on a community site, I could send that information to a friend or publish it to another website.  I could link it to my blog or use it again in some different capacity

In summary, communities have always shared advice and experiences but in inefficient ways that were not easily stored or accessible by many people.  Social media and community websites have changed the way we share information.  They connect us to a much wider audience of peers, also allowing us to store information for later consumption or to aggregate it in different ways.

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