The web celebrated its 20th birthday this month. In March of 1989, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a paper about Information Management thereby coining the term “world wide web.” In The Economist, a discussion about what the web accomplished over these past 20 years caught my attention since it related to advocacy. According to the article, science has benefitted tremendously from Berners-Lee’s vast web of links and networks. Amateurs now can be called upon to help scientists solve knotty problems that would take years and decades to complete. These freelance Advocates joined GalaxyZoo where people are helping to classify galaxies into categories. More than 150,000 have joined in and they are now onto GalaxyZoo2. Another advocate network termed Herbaria@athome reviews and scrutinizes old plant cuttings from British museums to hopefully decipher climate change. Over 35,0000 herbarium specimens have been documented so far. The idea of online advocates banding together to solve scientific problems and social science issues is encouraging.
Tags: advocates, Economist, GalaxyZoo, Herbaria, Tim Berners-Lee, world wide web
How big are people’s networks? This is a question that has always intrigued me. I recall learning about the Dunbar number years ago and often wonder how it applies to Facebook. I keep thinking that everyone has a deeper and wider network than me since they are always talking about their “friends” on the social media site. By the way, the Dunbar number is “a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships” (Wikipedia) or how many people you can reasonably know without it getting out of hand. The Dunbar number is 148.
I was recently delighted to read an article in The Economist on the Dunbar number and how it applies to Facebook. The Economist asked Facebook’s in-house sociologist Cameron Marlow about average size of a person’s Facebook friends (your personal advocates). He said that the average number is 120 which is somewhat close to the Dunbar hypothesis. No surprise that women have larger networks than men. The more interesting question posed by Marlow was how many individuals do people interact with on a frequent basis. I felt much better after hearing what he found:
“Thus an average man—one with 120 friends—generally responds to the postings of only seven of those friends by leaving comments on the posting individual’s photos, status messages or “wall”. An average woman is slightly more sociable, responding to ten. When it comes to two-way communication such as e-mails or chats, the average man interacts with only four people and the average woman with six. Among those Facebook users with 500 friends, these numbers are somewhat higher, but not hugely so. Men leave comments for 17 friends, women for 26. Men communicate with ten, women with 16.”
Essentially, people still keep their inner circles small and personal although they have wider networks of casual friends and distant acquaintances. If that is the case, why does Facebook and Twitter count your friends and followers?
Tags: Dunbar number, Economist, Facebook, personal advocates, social networks
Took a look on Facebook (if you belong) to see what was cooking for AIG in light of the disturbing news about AIG bonuses. There were several sites but one that had many members (400+) has a picture of a pig with an AIG logo on a party hat on top of its head. The group is described as “Take part and put an end to the party AIG has been having at our economic expense. AIG is the epitome of unconscionable greed, corruption, and the sociopathic corporate mind set. Together we can unite and put an end to the vile gluttonous reign of AIG, one canceled policy, one personal choice to boycott at a time.” The language is getting more colorful as the story develops. The knives are out and my sense is that people feel better being able to vent their anger as AIG continues to be the poster boy for greed and a damaged economy. The New York Times has a good article on why we can’t let the government change the rule of law and why we must abide by our contractual agreements.
Tags: Advocacy, AIG, Facebook
Advocates can help companies recover. So says Daniel Roth in the latest Wired. He says that one way to recover from this paralyzing economic downturn is to create an army of citizen-regulators or as we call them Advocates. “By giving everyone access to every piece of data—and making it easy to crunch—we can crowdsource regulation, creating a self-correcting financial systems and unlocking new ways of measuring the market’s health.” Smart idea. Instead of relying on the SEC who has not been able to detect frauds, review annual reports and convoluted investment products, Roth suggests that advocates do the work. He makes the argument that it is time that we take advantage of the massive parallel processing power at our disposal and by give people the tools for tracking and analyzing financial data. These regulator Advocates can then regulate the markets for us more efficiently than the wizards of Wall Street. “The revolution will be powered by data, which should be unshackled from the pages of regulatory filings and made more flexible and useful.” This dependence on advocates who want to spend the time with the data and can punish or invest in companies that are providing accurate and transparent financial data makes commonsense. Again Roth says it better than I can: “When data is kept under lock and key, as mysterious as a temple secret, only the priests can read and interpret it.” Let’s allow regular data-obsessed people to do the investigatory work and advocate for better companies so that can get out of this mess.
Tags: advocates, crowdsource, financial downturn, Wired
Forrester Research really stirred the social media pot this week when they launched their report, Add Sponsored Conversations To Your Toolbox: Why You Should Pay Bloggers To Talk About Your Brand. Their POV is that paying someone to blog about your product, provided full disclosure of the sponsored relationship, is one more communications tool for marketers to leverage. Since the release on March 2 through the morning of March 6, there have been 95 mentions of “sponsored conversation” in social media. In the entire month of February there were only two. The clamor is generally over the appropriateness of this tactic. I am not joining this discussion, rather I raise the issue because the Forrester report underscores what we at Weber Shandwick have been demonstrating through our research for a few years now - there are benefits when companies tap into their advocates who can spread positive word-of-mouth (we call it “Return on Advocacy“).
Our latest research identifies that there are also reputational returns from advocacy. Risky Business: Reputations OnlineTM, conducted with the Economist Intelligence Unit among more than 700 senior executives worldwide, found that positive word-of-mouth about a company is considered almost as important as corporate transparency and is more important than financial performance and employee talent in terms of value to a company’s reputation.
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Factors most valuable to a company’s overall reputation…
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Global Executives
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Quality of products and services
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76%
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Leadership/credibility of executive leaders
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63%
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Transparency of policies and operations
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48%
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Word-of-mouth about the company
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44%
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Financial performance
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39%
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Employee talent
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33%
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CEOs and Chairmen especially believe in the impact of word-of-mouth on company reputation. Not only is positive word-of-mouth more important to those in the corner office, the power of positive word-of-mouth to counteract negative word-of-mouth seems to be recognized more clearly by CEO/Chairs. They consider negative word-of-mouth as critical to damaging reputation as positive word-of-mouth is to building reputation. Other executives may be minimizing the “buffer” effect positive word-of-mouth has on negative word-of-mouth.
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Percent of executives who consider…
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CEOs/Chairs
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Non-CEOs/Chairs
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Positive word-of-mouth valuable to company reputation
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56%
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42%
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Negative word-of-mouth damaging to company reputation
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60%
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52%
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These executives acknowledge what earlier global consumer research conducted by Weber Shandwick with KRC Research found, that advocates have significant influence to spread their point-of-view and mobilize others to act. Regardless of your opinion about paid conversations, it’s impossible to overlook the influence of advocates on a company’s bottom-line, especially during these tough times.
