I’m thinking about this because my Twitter anniversary came and went without me noticing – until it was pointed out by an alert follower. So I thought I’d check into it.

Just like birthdays, it might be yet another reminder of how quickly time goes by, the older you get. But with any luck, you can look back at your Twitter year and think, “Wow, I learned a lot.” Or, better yet, “Well, that was fun!”
So…how long have been tweeting? Has it been fun? Leave a comment and let us know. And keep on keepin’ on.

Social Networks are revolutionizing how we view our world. People are connecting, businesses are being created or transformed, and the world seems like a smaller place. As with any transformation on a grand scale, a plethora of consultants, gurus, blogs, and how-to books have risen to meet the demand for information about the social revolution.

However, it is very rare to hear anything about the underlying forces that actually drive the social network phenomenon.

It’s a shame because the story is a great one that has implications, not only for social media, but for fields as diverse as counter-terrorism, ecology, economics, organizational theory and cancer research. Network Theory has fundamentally changed our understanding about how the world works since its inception a decade ago. Most of all, by understanding how networks form and grow, we can build better ones.

Fireflies and the President of the United States

Our story begins in 1996 at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where an adventurous rock climber and former Australian Navy Officer named, Duncan Watts, was thinking about how crickets, frogs, fireflies, and pacemaker cells all seem to be able to synchronize their behavior within large groups.

His mind must have began to wander because he suddenly remembered that his father once told him that everybody is just six relationships away from the President of the United States. The concept had existed in literature early in the 20th century and was documented in Stanley Milgram’s famous “Small World Experiment”.

In a flash of inspiration he went to his PhD thesis advisor, Steven Strogatz, and told him that he wanted to, yet again, change his thesis topic. Watts had a hunch that both phenomena might be related. Strogatz, somewhat used to giving his brilliant student leeway, consented.

The Strength of Weak Ties

As he began his research, Watts came across a highly cited paper written by Mark Granovetter called “The Strength of Weak Ties” about how people find jobs. He found that most people don’t locate employment through their friends, but through friends of friends.

Granovetter dubbed these relationships “weak ties” (after the attraction between water molecules that give the liquid many of its properties). Granovetter surmised that it is through weak ties that information is largely distributed. While we can maintain relationships with relatively few people, the people they know greatly increase our access to facts, knowledge and wisdom.

We have friends from work, school, our neighborhood, etc. While our ties may be strong ties to us, they are weak ties to our friends from separate clusters. For instance, the felon in our neighborhood can be connected to the law professor at our university in only two steps!

Spacemen vs. Cavemen

Watts also began thinking about his youthful love of science fiction and two Isaac Asimov novels in particular; one about spacemen and another about cavemen. The spacemen communicated remotely so that the people they knew didn’t know each other, while the cavemen lived in isolated groups and knew everybody their friends knew. He decided to build a mathematical model that would describe both situations and every possibility in between.

In addition to the “degrees of separation” metric (the average number of links it takes to get from one network member to another), Watts also created a “cluster coefficient,” in effect how tightly clustered communities are within the network.

A good analogy is a school lunchroom. How many people who have close relationships would be calculated by the cluster coefficient while how many introductions one would need, on average, to get to any particular person, would be the degrees of separation (or more technically, path length). This type of calculation has been second nature for poor note-takers and class-cutters alike for ages.

Armed with mathematical representations for both his “spacemen and his “cavemen” he could experiment with different types of networks.

Small World Networks

What he found was startling. In his model, as communities connect to each other, the social distance between people increases – up to a point – and then immediately comes crashing down. It turns out that it takes just a little bit of mixing for the social distance to decrease by an enormous amount, but a lot of mixing to kill communities. Although surprising, the pattern was familiar. Similar “instantaneous phase transitions” have been long known in Physics.

Moreover, he found that in almost all cases, the same result appeared, it was only a matter of time for a network under fairly normal conditions to reach the optimal state. Globally connected networks with strong local cohesion are not only possible, they are the equilibrium case – you just needed a relatively small number of Granovetter’s “weak ties” mixed in to make the whole thing work.

He called the result a “Small World Network” after Milgram’s famous experiment.

Hey! Networks Grow, Don’t They?

Watts published a paper on his findings with Strogatz and it became an immediate success, widely read and cited throughout the scientific community. At Notre Dame University, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi and his student, Réka Albert, noticed an oversight – networks grow over time and large communities within networks drive the growth. They quickly published their own paper.

What they found was that networks follow a very specific mathematical rule called a “power law” that described well known phenomena such as the “80/20 rule” and Chris Andersen’s now famous long tail. Their findings suggested that even very large networks were driven by relatively few “hubs” around which everything else was organized.

The two teams continued to trade papers back and forth and in a very short time Network Theory had arrived!

Implications of Network Theory for Social Media

Through understanding the forces that drive social networks, we can take some practical steps to improve Social Media performance.

Communities are primary: A network is only as strong as the communities that it contains. A big mistake that many Social Media efforts make is to pursue broad coverage early on. Building enthusiastic, devoted communities requires a local approach (either geographically or in social space). Those local communities have “weak ties” to other communities in other places, even faraway places. So you really can think globally by acting locally.

People want to connect: Connections between communities naturally grow over time for the same reasons that information wants to be free and dictatorships are expensive to maintain. Any opportunity to implement open architecture (while maintaining security protocols for the site core) should be seized upon. Walling off a social network is choosing the path to obscurity (although hardly the one less traveled).

Large clusters drive the network: A small number of extremely active members drive network growth. Mostly, they are driven by reputation and attention so it is crucial to give users every opportunity to be recognized by their peers.

Social Media isn’t successful… until it is: A network doesn’t grow in a linear fashion and it doesn’t grow in just one direction, but two: outward and inward. Watts described a network maturing as an “instantaneous phase transition” similar to a crystal forming. The process moves relatively slowly and then, suddenly, a new global state is achieved. Once a “Small World Network” has formed, the growth becomes exponential.

Social Networks on the web can be extremely powerful. Once you understand the forces that drive them, you can make their horsepower work with you and not against you.

Greg’s Note: For those of you who are interested in learning more, Watts and Barabasi have both published highly readable and informative accounts of their Network Theory adventure and the friendly rivalry. It’s a lot of fun to read both sides and learn both about their triumphs and their frustration when the other one uncovered something which seemed fairly obvious in retrospect. Besides being brilliant both write well and in friendly and engaging styles. In fact, the books are much more accessible than journalist accounts of the same events.

The titles are “Six Degrees” (Watts) and “Linked” (Barabasi). Steven Strogatz has also published a great book called “Sync” that covers pre-cursor work to Network Theory. All are refreshing counterpoints to “guru books” and offer true insight and wisdom.

This whole social media thing is kinda crazy. I did it before I knew what it was. Years ago, I was at an open mic event in downtown Fort Myers in a hookah bar with cushions all over the floor. The emcee, now a good friend of mine, made an announcement asking for participants’ email addresses and MySpace usernames. It was the first time I heard about MySpace. I went home and tried it out. I spent far too much time. It was silly. But the most important thing is I was turned on to this easy and dynamic way to get in touch with people.

Driven to distraction

Later, I became amazed at how many people came out of the woodwork through social media platforms. Friends I had written off “friended” me on Facebook, and kind of brought me home to a place I had run away from. Suddenly, people I thought had moved in and out of my life showed they were there all along.

So at this point, I’m starting to see the power in all this stuff. I used it with some good success to build name recognition for my husband’s business. We showed up for TweetUps, where we built a great new community of friends and business contacts around us. We got involved with Social Media Club Southwest Florida and an awesome fundraiser called Twestival, which raised a couple thousand for Pace Center for Girls. I dabbled in affiliate marketing. I got an important job offer…

I got results. However, “getting out there” has also been a bit of a distraction – I suffered a traumatic life event about five years ago that turned into a sustained process that still hasn’t been resolved. A psychologist even told me, “You’re like a soldier who’s returned from war.” My online life has been a chance to show a brave face. But now I’ve found another way that “getting out there” can bring me back to myself.

A breadcrumb trail

The first friend I made in Fort Myers more than eight years ago (at one of those open mic events) is a brilliant poet and a beautiful person. Today I found out about this thing he’s doing at EditRed. He calls himself the Suicide Kid and he uses a mug shot for his profile photo, but it’s a front (sorry, Ryun, but you know it’s true).

It made me realize – I’ve been doing this social media thing, and to a great extent, leaving my passions out of it. So I followed my friend’s lead, and signed up for an account at that writer’s networking site. I did a search for others of that type and came across Read Write Poem And I felt a weight lifting.

I’ve had a few poems published in a few different places. Two can be found online at Nthposition, an online literary magazine out of the UK. But that was between 2005 and 2007 and I haven’t done much with my work since then. Now that I know I can read Ryun’s work whenever I want to, I’m also inspired to post some of my work, get it “out there.”

Inertia can be a real presence in my life. The community and accountability offered by these writer’s sites offer me an opportunity to convert that inertia into the “in motion” kind, instead of the alternative.

Have you found an online network that serves as a channel for your passions? Has “getting out there” provided a way to bring you back to yourself?

By the way, Ryun’s got this book he’d like to publish. If you know anyone in the biz…well, you know how to find me.

I put up a blog post (almost) every day, and sometimes, I put up more than one a day. On top of this, I write for clients, write for other projects, work on books, and other things. Some of you don’t have all these other writing commitments, but still want some ideas on getting more writing out the door. Here are some thoughts into my process that I hope will give you a framework for writing a blog post (almost) every day.

How to Blog Almost Every Day

1. Read something new every day. Need a starting point? Try Alltop. (Hint: read something outside your particular circle to get new thoughts).
2. Talk with people every day. I get many of my topic ideas from questions people pose to me, or through conversations.
3. Write down titles and topic ideas in a notepad file. ( I’ve given you 100 blog topics and another 20 blog topics just to get started.)
4. Maintain a healthy bookmarking and revisiting habit. I use Delicious.com
5. Find 20-40 minutes in every day to sit still and type.
6. Follow an easy framework. Here are 27 blogging secrets to start you on what I mean.
7. Get the post up fast, not perfect. You can edit if you have to, later. Perfectionism kills good habits.
8. Dissect other people’s posts to understand what makes them tick. The more you understand of HOW they write, the more you can take the best parts of it into how you write. (hint, my 27 blogging secrets post gives you my patterns.)
9. Find useful and interesting pictures. I use Flickr photos licensed under Creative commons for most of my photos. This helps me sometimes get a great photo for a post I already have in mind, but it also gives me post material sometimes.
10. Think about what your customers and prospects need. I write from the perspective of the communities I serve. Every post is aimed at something I believe will be helpful to my community in some form or another. This focus takes some weight off my worries about what I should write about or not. I write about what my community needs.
11. Mix things up by sometimes blogging on paper first.
12. Mix things up by writing guest posts for sites that aren’t like yours. This gives your mind new formats to think about. I did this recently as part of a project and I loved it.
13. Mix things up by changing the lengths of your posts: some long, some brief. Learn what makes an impact how.
14. Never worry about throwing up the occasional “best of” post, once you get enough material. Example: here’s My best advice about blogging.

It’s not easy, but once you develop the habits, they stick with you. I’m writing quite regularly now, but it took me several years to get my groove down to a science. Some days, it’s still thrown off. Busy schedules can get the best of us, no matter what. That said, try to keep some content “in the can,” so that you’re rarely at a loss to keep your audience happy.

What do you think? Any other ideas to add?

Evan Slusher, operations for charity:water; Chris Brogan; and your social media concierge at TwestivalSWFL to benefit Pace Center for Girls. Photo courtesy Chris Griffith @Twitterzilla.

You would think at this point that we’d be up to curiosity or even playful experimentation.

That’s only a start. Another course is to engage with consumers where they want to be reached. When the surveyed companies state that their goals of using social media are: to increase engagement, build brand loyalty, and spur word of mouth. If that’s the case, you don’t get there by (a) ignoring where the rest of the world is going; or (b) burying your head in the sand in terms of these sites.

The good news is that half of the suggested activities/sites mentioned in the survey (Facebook page, Twitter, customer reviews, blogs and viral [sic] videos) are already accepted or used by more than half of the respondents. That’s a great start, but there’s more potential.

For decades, companies have defined the channels their customers must use to contact them. But phrases like, “We are available by phone weekdays from 9am until 4pm Eastern Standard Time,” and “We will attempt to answer the emails we receive within 48 hours, but times vary based on incoming volume” are quickly becoming a thing of the past. The long-held notion that companies control the conversation is being challenged by social media.

In a world where any customer can, in seconds, tweet or post to Facebook a pithy product review or share an experience they had with a brand, companies are forced to entirely rethink how they interact with their customers. Step one, probably the hardest step, is realizing they are no longer in control. The power of social media has empowered the consumer to reach literally hundreds or thousands of people in seconds. And because we know a consumer’s closest friends are three to five times more likely to share the same preferences for products and brands, this newfound power is not to be underestimated.

Sure, companies have Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. Yes, a few thousand companies are already searching Twitter for mentions and engaging customers. This is only a start. The real transformation happens when the companies let go of the conversation and instead work to nurture it. The brands who offer tools to their customers to increase the amount of conversation and encourage their customers to discuss the pros and cons of their products will be the winners who emerge from this disruptive time.

Companies like Get Satisfaction and UserVoice offer tools that change the balance of power between a company and its customers. Get Satisfaction has a fantastic manifesto, or “Company-Customer Pact,” which defines a new relationship between a brand and its customers, encouraging public dialog, warts and all, but expecting productive discussion in return for the company’s helpful engagement.

While product forums from companies like Jive Software have been around for many years, I believe public conversations about brands will now be distributed in nature, spread across the web into thousands of tiny corners. The challenge for companies is figuring out how to manage this. A conversation could start with a tweet, be directed to a help forum, be responded to in email, updated in a blog post, and then broadcast on Facebook. How will this be tracked, measured and monitored? This market is ripe with opportunity for both brands and software platforms built to nurture the distributed web-wide conversation. And brands who support a public dialog will engender more respect from their customers than those who turn a blind eye to it–or worse, try to shut it down. Ultimately, companies become more customer-centric from this disruption. I am sure United Airlines wishes they had just paid for the passenger’s guitar they broke now that the music video he recorded chronicling the ordeal spread virally and has been viewed more than five million times!

The company/customer relationship is but one relationship forever changed by social media. Similar transformations are happening between companies and their employees and companies and their vendors. New companies and tools will emerge to address these situations. At Venrock, we are looking for the entrepreneurs that are pioneering this space and embracing this opportunity.

“To listen well is as powerful a means of influence as to talk well, and is as essential to all true conversation.”
-Chinese Proverb

I attended a meeting of social media aficionados last week—the Dallas Social Media Club. It was a vibrant group of new-media-savvy folks with cutting-edge interests and razor-sharp wits. I loved the energy in the room and the combination of slightly smug awareness and wide-eyed curiosity about what might replace Twitter as the next techno-networking phenomenon. Officially, “the Social Media Club Dallas focuses on social media practitioners in corporate, agency, and PR roles—primarily interested in how the medium to large enterprises are leveraging social media to reach, engage, and most important, drive revenue.”

Interestingly, but not surprisingly, Thursday evening’s confab consisted primarily of “vendor” types—as the speaker, Chris Vary, VP of Weber Shandwick’s Digital Division, noted when he conducted a quick poll of the room. I think this strongly indicates that the social media charge is still led by the practitioner-evangelists, and that most businesses, small to large to small (including nonprofits), have still not seen the proverbial light. On a practical level, they have not figured out how to integrate it into everyday operations.

As I have posited in past posts, I believe this is because it is more than a change of media. It is a change of mentality. That’s a tougher paradigm to shift. Clay Shirky is one our most articulate voices around the gestalt of this communication transformation, yet it’s still a bit slippery.

As I interact with nonprofits and small businesses, I struggle to identify ways to provide high-value impact. So many complain that they have set up their various social platform accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Linked In, but they sit dormant—like throwing a party and no one attends. Still, nonprofits and for-profits are tentative about investing—staff time, budgets, mindshare to the care and feeding of these communities without tangible proof of ROI. I was amazed when the PR big wheels at Weber Shandwick had to cajole their Fortune 10 client— General Motors, to commit to social media. It took three years. They had to construct some sort of elaborate expense metaphor quantifying projected Google pay-per-click costs.

So, more and more, I’m thinking it is really all about listening. I’m not too keen on the concept of “active listening,” because I think that is redundant and a little cheesy, as my teenage sons say. “Passive listening” is simply not paying attention in my book. (That reminds me of some relationships I’ve had.) That said, I think businesses should first approach social media as a listening tool, as opposed to a communications tool—an ear as opposed to a mouth. I think that helps marketers diminish some of the execution-related tension. All of the social media gurus—from Beth Kanter to Seth Godin, recommend starting with listening. However, I’m now thinking this should be the fundamental objective—allowing other opportunities to blossom.

Really, social media is a gift to market research professionals—a way to gather real-time and real customer feedback inexpensively. Then, the way we respond can dramatically enhance, strength, and embellish our brands in this new context of conversation. Crafting the response becomes the artistry. We can provide customer service, build relationships, or even soothe the ruffled feathers of cranky influencers/bloggers. This must be authentic, customer-validating, spin-free conversation.

Chris Vary talked about the new PR being the “virtual newsroom.” He is definitely on to something. We as public relations and communications professionals must me become more like monitors than marketers. Great places to start include: (Begin with the free ones.)

• Technorati
• Google Alerts
• Social Mention
• Delicious
• Twitter
• Radian 6

RSS feed rules:

Your feed dashboard becomes your roadmap. Set up Google Reader, iGoogle, or Bloglines to track—organization names, names of key leaders/board members, other players in your space, industry terms, your URLs, possible controversial subjects, etc. Get creative with keywords. And as Beth Kanter advises, involve the entire operation in the process.

Move social media out of the silo of the communications department. Empower all of your employees as listeners. Then, your social media strategy looks more like a training initiative for your various constituents and stakeholders. Brainstorm keywords, learn how to respond effectively, and handle red-flag issues. This is where social media gets organic, integrated, and exponential in impact.

Are you listening?

Joe Iadanza, Musician

Musicians amaze me. A lot like a good chef, they are consumed with creating wonderful things. On the flip side, they need to expand and massage their fans, satisfy them and bring in revenue. The similarities are unique; a restaurant also needs to expand and massage its customers, satisfy them and bring in revenue.

With only 10% of affordable fine-dining restaurants using social media, I thought an introduction to how musicians have completely embraced this new communication world would be of benefit.

Let’s look at how a New England based musician is growing his fan base and supporting his family, predominantly by using social media.

Joe Iadanza, based in Long IslandNY, has been described as Dylan-esque. You can listen to him here: Joe Iadanza With a critically released CD and an upcoming tour in the Netherlands, how is Joe increasing his fan base through social media?

Facebook. Twitter. MySpace. Feedburner. ilike.com. YouTube. Flickr. thesixtyone.com. and, a dynamic website.

I follow Joe; have been for a little while now. He’s a friend of another musician friend of mine who’s just jumping into social media. Everyday, Joe says one, two or three short messages to his fans over a few of his social networks.

Yesterday, it was about being stuck in traffic at 1 mph, heading to a show on Cape Cod – oh, and by the way, don’t go over the bridge he was on and that he really had to pee. Earlier in the week he had announced that show. Late that night, on his way back, he let everyone know how much fun he had playing to that particular crowd. He’s engaged. He’s producing compelling content with pictures from shows. He’s telling a story about what he does. That keeps his fan base interested – and they share his music with their friends.

I wonder often how many customers a restaurant could bring in this way. In the morning the chef gets a message out with a picture – of him checking that fine fresh new fish in – and in the message perhaps saying you never want to buy a fish who’s eyes aren’t right and that doesn’t smell of the sea. Later in the afternoon, the sommelier might take a 30 second video and send it out – of him pouring a glass of that great white wine that would match perfectly with the fish the chef just bought. And then, just before dinner’s staff pre-meal, they take another picture – or maybe a quick video of pre-meal – talking about and showing that great fish entrée, with the wait staff tasting it and the wine prior to service.

That would bring me in. Heck – I’d hit that share button on Facebook and Twitter and send it to my friends.

The social web is waiting for your creativity. Your future guests want to know more about you. Your existing fans want a little love and attention. Its game time, folks.

Chalkboarder.com offers consulting and strategic social media planning and execution.