Keynote speech on influence networks at Evolve

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Kimberly Palmer of Networx has put together what looks like a fantastic conference on 14 June in Melbourne, titled Evolve. Its highly diverse content is refreshing after the usual run-of-the-mill marketing events. I’ll be doing a keynote titled: We, Evolved: networks of influence:

The power of the social network – word of mouth, buzz, curation – has never been stronger. This fascinating session examines the structure of influence in a world driven increasingly by social, rather than status-based, opinion.How does the structure of these influence networks evolve? Can we, the marketer, influence these networks overtly or only covertly? How can you identify, drive and reward influences, gaining advantage rather than taking advantage?

In my keynote I will start by going through some of the underlying network science, which surprisingly few marketers and online people are familiar with, considering how useful this is. I will then drill down into the critical distinction between the crude “identify the influencers and influence them” approach to word of mouth marketing, and the value of uncovering the structure of influence networks, the better to craft effective influence strategies. I’ll discuss both consumer marketing and B2B marketing, drawing for example on my research into technology purchase influence networks. I’ll then cover the specific dynamics of online influence, including blogs and recommendation systems such as Digg and Techmeme, before looking at some case studies and concluding action steps for the audience. I will post on this blog again soon on some of the detail of what I’ll cover, including my commentary on the latest research coming out on influence networks.

The state of social networking software for the enterprise

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Social networking software is at the center of technology hype, with MySpace, Bebo, Cyworld, Facebook, Piczo and many others attracting extraordinary valuations. Yet social networking is not just about friends and personal networks. Applying social networks in the enterprise is a sweet spot that has massive potential value. At the heart of the issue is how you tap the true potential of an organization, by bringing its most relevant expertise and resources to where they can be of most value. It’s worth reviewing the background to the space, given recent developments, and also because it remains a very high potential space, which will evolve substantially further over the next years.

In 2003 there were three major vendors of social networking platforms for the enterprise: Spoke, VisiblePath, and Contact Networks, while Interface Software integrated similar functionality into its CRM application InterAction (since bought by Lexis-Nexis). All three vendors showed great promise, which in all cases has yet to come to full fruition. The original intention of each was to suggest the best path through your contacts to the person you wanted to meet. VisiblePath and Contact Networks focused on applications entirely inside the enterprise, with the value proposition centered on being able to identify who within your organization could best introduce you to key contacts at prospective clients. At the time Boston Consulting Group also introduced an internal application that provided similar functionality, listing who inside the firm would be most likely to be able to introduce you to the people in the marketplace you wanted to meet. Spoke had a unique model at the time, providing both social networking applications inside the enterprise, as well as a public version of their application. If you signed up, Spoke indexed your Outlook, and established your “relationship strength” with all your contacts, based on a complex algorithm including how often you emailed each other, how quickly you responded to emails relative to those of others, use of attachments, and much more. As such, instead of providing just a “degrees of separation” between you and others, as with LinkedIn, it recommended the strongest path of relationships between you and the person you wanted to meet.

By providing both a public platform as well as an enterprise version, Spoke provided a far richer scope of connections for both groups to tap. Spoke was the gold sponsor for the Living Networks Forum I ran with Business Development Institute in New York in December 2003. To illustrate the ideas of the living networks, we set up Spoke on screens around the venue and got people to register on Spoke before the event. This meant that attendees could explore their network connections live at the event. For example two people who met at a coffee break could go to a screen and find out who they knew in common, and discover the overlap and potential of their personal networks. [Disclosure: while Spoke sponsored my 2003 event, I have had no contact with them for over two years.]

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The characteristics of high-performance personal networks

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Research has consistently shown that high-performers – in terms of both career success and contribution to their organizations – have personal networks that are different from others. Observing people’s personal networks is one of the best ways to predict success. Building on ideas and references from an earlier post I made, here are some useful ways to understand high-performance personal networks.

CHARACTERISTICS OF HIGH-PERFORMANCE NETWORKS

People who are high-performers in their organizations and build successful careers have been shown to have different personal networks to their peers. Their personal networks have the following characteristics:

• Diversity. Their networks are highly diverse, across organizations, personal background, gender, hierarchy, area of expertise, and personality.

• Awareness. They are aware of who in their organization and beyond has particular talent, experience, and expertise.

• Visibility. Their own capabilities and expertise are visible in their organization and beyond. Others are aware of what they can do.

• Dynamic. They recognize that their personal networks need to and will change over time, and they make the time to create new relationships rather than simply maintaining their existing pattern of relationships.

• Investment. They continually take the time and effort to invest in their networks, both in maintaining existing relationships from their past and immediate work environment, and in building new relationships.

ENERGY IN NETWORKS

Energy is created in networks by collaborating to achieve worthwhile outcomes. When people interact with an energizer, they feel energized about possibilities and opportunities. When they interact with a de-energizer, they are more likely to feel deflated and unenthusiastic. Energizers are the real leaders in an organization, by creating positive momentum and activity.

There are six key behaviors that create energizing relationships:

• Have and communicate a compelling vision. Energizers can effectively communicate that there is something worthwhile that people can achieve together, and that it is achievable.

• Seek and acknowledge quality contributions. Energizers don’t think or say that they have the answer – they always actively seek out the best possibly contributions, and acknowledge those contributions to the group’s efforts.

• Interact constructively. Energizers focus on issues not personalities, and always look to build positively on people’s contributions.

• Make and fulfil commitments. Energizers do what they say. They recognize that if people see that others are doing their part, they will feel compelled to do theirs. However if people see that others are being slack, they will find no energy to do their allocated tasks.

• Give genuine attention to people. Energizers pay attention when people are speaking, listen to comprehend, and engage with others. They are interested in people and what makes them tick. They give time to people and their feelings, and do not treat them solely as a means to an end.

• Connect others. Energizers are alert to opportunities to introduce other people. More than trying to connect themselves, they see where people should be connected, and they make those valuable connections.

One of the great things about helping people enhance their personal networks is that it benefits both the individual and the organization. I am now consistently seeing leading organizations focus on helping their staff develop their personal networks. One of the best ways to use the characteristics of high-performance networks above is as the basis of a workshop, something which can also be done on a large scale at an offsite meeting. Done well, this builds people’s awareness of their current behaviors, and helps identify specific activities that will enhance their networks within their organization and beyond. Far better is to perform a social network analysis on the organizational group, so people have the data and comparisons to see how their networks are currently structured relative to their peers, and what they can do to enhance their own success.

A significant body of research has been done into energy in networks over the last few years. If you’re interested in delving deeper, the best starting point is What Creates Energy in Organizations, a paper by Rob Cross, Wayne Baker, and Andrew Parker that appeared in MIT Sloan Management Review, Summer 2003.

Interview on connecting spaces and our interstitial world

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Maria O’Donovan is a very interesting commentator who is currently doing a Masters in ICT and learning at Aarlborg University in Denmark. She recently interviewed me for her Enabling Spaces blog, and has transcribed our wide-ranging conversation. Things that I discuss in the interview include:

• Media as an interstitial phenomenon

• Lead consumers and the diffusion of innovations

• The diversity and passion of online conversations

• The different implications of blogs and social media tools

• The long tail, scale free networks, and how those that have get more

• Success through creating value for the entire community

• Identity and the aggregation of reputation

Enterprise 2.0 – are the differences philosophical?

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A vigorous discussion continues on whether Enterprise 2.0 happens by itself or by design. Andrew McAfee says that he and Euan Semple agree “vociferously”. He also makes the very relevant point that “doing nothing” will only work well if companies don’t block access to online collaboration tools.

Dion Hinchcliffe points to organizations where the use of wikis and blogs has proliferated simply through user demand. He also notes that data is at the heart of corporate applications. As such, having many collaborative tools without a way to aggregate the information results in balkanization of corporate information. This is part of my point that higher level planning helps to unleash the power of participatory applications. He concludes his comments by saying:

“What’s a likely sweet spot for applying Enterprise 2.0 inside the firewall? Keeping adoption of your preferred tools simple within the complex landscape of your organization so users won’t prefer theirs; flatten your network as much as you can, open your systems using simple, open standards, and push the tools out fast (the network effect is pronounced with these tools so speed does matter). Make Enterprise 2.0 as simple as humanely possible for your organization in this framework, but no simpler.”

Dave Snowden distils the discussion to a “Weltanschauung for social computing”.He says:

“If you aim to influence, but not design evolution you have more control than if you attempt to design an ideal system.”

I absolutely agree. Corporations cannot design in detail emergent systems – this is an oxymoron. Yet they can influence these systems, by creating an environment that supports these high-value yet unpredictable outcomes.

Playing with new event formats: Mobile Meshwalk

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Shannon Clark, networker extraordinaire and organizer of MeshForum, among other claims to fame, is organizing a neat event with a very innovative format. The Mobile Meshwalk will be held on March 20 from 9am to 9pm. The morning is a “Design Crawl”, where participants visit a number of design companies in San Francisco’s South Park area. In the afternoon a “Walking Camp” small groups will drift, take photos, and brainstorm about mobile advertising based on what they’re seeing on their stroll. Drinks at the end of the day will accompany sharing findings, general discussion, and much jollity. The whole thing is free, enabled by sponsorship by Orange.

The closest thing to this I’m aware of is the “learning journeys” organized by Global Business Network, where participants visit organizations, events, and sites to learn through direct experience of innovation. The concept has been copied and adapted by a range of organizations to help senior executives grapple with emerging ideas and business models. This is a nice variation on the theme – I won’t be able to make it but look forward to hearing back from participants.

The intersection of value networks and social networks

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I’m at Auckland airport, on my way home from co-presenting a Value Networks Masterclass with Verna Allee. It was a fabulous event, with around 30 attendees. This included a group from the event organizers AgResearch, which is already well under way in applying value networks methodologies, including having a number of people certified in Verna Allee’s ValueNet Works™ methodologies. When I initially described the Value Networks approaches on this blog, I also wrote about Verna’s and my shared interests and background. In the few years since we’ve done anything substantive together, Verna and her network of colleagues, including Oliver Schwabe and John Maloney, have developed the state-of-the-art to make this a business methodology with deep and broad foundations. Part of the intent of the workshop was for Verna to use her value networks work, and for me to contribute my social networks orientation. However we both see not just that they are highly complementary approaches, but also that they represent different facets of a larger whole of network thinking and tools. Given the great success of our collaboration on the workshop, Verna and I will now seek new opportunities to run workshops or development programs on network approaches to business. In particular I’m keen to explore and develop the value network approaches, as I can see many, many applications. Having recently spent some more time on the open Value Networks site, I strongly recommend anyone interested to delve into the resources here. One major organization that the workshop organizers approached said that they had already successfully run a major project using the resources on the website, so they didn’t feel they needed to come to the workshop. I think they would have benefited substantially from the depth on methodologies we went into during the Masterclass, however their comments are a testimony to the quality of the resources on the site. Verna in particular has been more generous than any other consultant I can think of in sharing her resources with the public.

Many insights and thoughts and emerged for me in the process of running the workshop and in conversations with Verna. One simple phrase that she used: “We are in the middle of a huge barter economy,” struck me. It’s absolutely true that financial transactions represent a minority of value created in the economy. Money is central, but value is exchanged in created on many other dimensions. The value networks approaches help us to uncover those hidden value exchanges. Recognizing the multiple facest of value and perceived value are not only critical to effective organizational functioning, but also to designing solid business models. Most of the economy based around Web 2.0, for example, is non-financial, and to extract financial value, you need to recognize where non-financial value is created, and the configurations in which it flows. There will always be institutional power, yet at the same time distributed power is rising. How institutional power and distributed power interact will be central to the structure of the economy and society over the next decades. I will expand on some of these thoughts in more detail later…

A second Second Life – new competition in virtual worlds

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Hey, how come I read about this on Scobleizer first? Randal Leeb-du-Toit and I are due to catch up for lunch when he’s back from Silicon Valley, so he can tell me about Outback Online, a new 3D virtual world his company Yoick is creating. Robert Scoble has just had lunch with Randal and executive producer John Wolpert (who when he was with IBM was mentioned to me with great reverence by his colleagues). Robert has now told the world about the new product, and he seems to think it’s possible that the new service could indeed offer real competition for Second Life, based on graphics quality, scalability, and age-based segmentation. I very much look forward to seeing the alpha. Certainly for the meantime there’s been some very good buzz generated, suggesting that people are open to an alternative to Second Life.

There are definitely some rather hefty network effects at play in this kind of virtual world, not least because the worlds are created from scratch, and thus require substantial personal investment from many people before they start to become interesting. However there have been many complaints about Second Life, not least on performance, as well as on some of it policies. Second Life has established itself as the de facto leader in user-created free-form virtual worlds. Yet it is more than possible that in 5-10 years from now others will have taken the lead. TD Goodcliffe believes that the space is open for the taking. Duncan Riley has doubts about the name (“the outback sucks”). Justin Thorp wonders whether virtual worlds are ready for mainstream acceptance. I certainly believe that virtual worlds will play a major role in our future, both socially and in business, though that may take quite a while to pass. I’m not prepared to punt on whether Second Life will be transcended by others, as this partly depends on how good a job Second Life does at defending what is absolutely a very solid incumbency. It’s definitely going to take significant capital to take it on. However I’m all in favor of competition, so I certainly hope that Outback Online has what it takes to put the field into play.

Everyone’s data streams for everything visible everywhere

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Emily Chang has written about a project to aggregate all the information that flows through her life.

“As the calendar rolled to 2007, I kept wishing I could look at all my social activity from 2006 in context: time, date, type of activity, location, memory, information interest, and so on. What was I bookmarking, blogging about, listening to, going to, and thinking about? I still had the urge to have an information and online activity mash-up that would allow me to discover my own patterns and to share my activity across the web in one chronological stream of data (to start with anyway).”

She has now created a data stream that aggregates her blogs and websites, and usage of stylehive, del.icio.us, twitter, plazes, flickr, last.fm, and upcoming. There has been substantial interesting commentary on this initiative already, notably from Grant Robertson, Chris Saad, Daniela Barbosa (including what an enterprise data stream may look like), and Stowe Boyd, who says he’s working on a similar initiative. Stowe writes:

“This traffic flow — made more liquid by RSS and instant messaging style real-time messaging — is the primary dynamic that I believe we will see in all future social apps. Yes, we will want to have our traffic cached — for search and analysis purposes — but we will increasingly move toward a flow model: where the various bits that we craft and throw into the ether — blog posts, calendar entries, photos, presence updates, whatever — will be picked up by other apps, either to display them to us, or to make sense of them. We want to consolidate all into one flow — a single time-stamped thread — that all apps can dip into.

A pal of yours is having a party? He will create the event using some social application site, and the event will be cast into his traffic. Your flow-aware calendar app might snag the event from the traffic, and ask you if you’d like to confirm. You agree, and the agreement is thrown into your traffic, for your buddy and others to make sense of, downstream.”

For me, what this suggests is a world in which many people choose to expose all of their activities to the world. Del.icio.us is a great example. People used to favorite websites on their PC. Now many are happy to do it publicly, so other people can look at what they choose to make note of. Very importantly, this exposing of behaviors provides the foundation for Web 2.0, in that it provides input to allow collaborative filtering and the creation of “collective intelligence”. It seems that many people are thinking about and putting the mechanisms in place to expose all that we do, including our activities in socializing, entertainment, work, and more. Clearly not everyone will choose to expose their activities, yet many will – this has been proven over the last few years. From an enterprise perspective, implementing these kinds of exposing mechanisms inside organizations will allow far more effective knowledge work and business processes – but only after substantially new workflow and systems are put in place to synthesize this plethora of valuable information.

Uncovering the structure of influence and social opinion

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An article in the Wall Street Journal titled The Wizards of Buzz zooms in on a group of people much discussed by the tech crowd over the last year, but who have not visible in the mainstream media before now. They are the people who submit stories to the social news sites. The article includes a nice sidebar describing the most prominent social news sites: Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Newsvine, and Netscape. These sites create what I call “social opinion” (as distinct from the traditional approach of status-based opinion). Each of these sites depends on people submitting what they think are the most interesting news items. Then the community at large votes on these suggestions, with the links getting the most votes going to the front page, being seen by thousands or even millions of people, and sometimes creating overnight stars. The main focus up until now has been the ‘You’ named by Time magazine as the person of the year – that is the many who vote on the stories. Yet there is only a fairly small pool of people who submit stories.

The Wall Street Journal did its own analysis of who was submitting stories on the sites, and came up with some interesting insights, including the startling fact that on Digg, 30 people (from 900,000 registered users) are responsible for one third of stories that made the front page of the site. The article names 20 of the most active and influential people who are submitting to social news sites, putting in the limelight people who are working hard for no pay, scouring the web for interesting stories, and being the first to submit them for a potential 15 seconds of fame.

Of course, influential people of all stripes can be wooed with attention, invitations, presents, money, and other nice things. Netscape, in a bid to attract some of these influencers, offered $1,000 a month to some of the top submitters on Digg to get them to switch to Netscape. No doubt PR people are already keenly courting these influencers. This research and article has helped to uncover the structure of influence in a world driven increasingly by social opinion rather than status-based opinion. What interests me in particular is how the structure of these influence networks will evolve – we are absolutely in a transition phase, and the way social opinion is formed will quickly change. Michael Arrington calls it a “crazy ecosystem”. Jason Kaneshiro focuses on the potential for these influencers to be paid – they are creating value, including being central to the very high valuations of some of these sites, so they should be rewarded. The question is, in what form does that reward come? Being written about in the Wall Street Journal is a strong reward in itself, for many. And if they are paid, who pays them, and is it overt or covert? This will be a fascinating space to follow.