6 posts tagged “behavior”

I recently saw another Terrence Howard movie called Pride and the swimming team he coached was PDR - The Philadelphia Department of Recreation.

He goes on to coach a bunch of kids playing basketball on the street to win a major league but only after he makes them believe in PDR:

"Pride, Determination and Resilience"

Imagine: Startups without the above

LinkedIn always had a tradition of celebrating its milestones when a significant number of users had signed up.

They just celebrated 20M users and a HUGE CONGRATULATIONS to the much newer and larger team. See all the fun pictures on their blog post here. I started using LinkedIn:

• As a user in 2003 when they had 40k users and with it my initiation to all things social/Web2.0
  
• As an employee in 2004 when it had about 1.5M users
• Left in 2006 when it had about 6.5M users

2 years later and they have grown by about 3 times!

Two of them where I was in on the journey are below. I can spot myself in the second one but had no luck with the first

It took me a day in 2003 to see that LinkedIn worked and it would always work. Why?

"People Always do Business with People

Imagine: It is that simple

I have talked about  caterpillars Stripe and Yellow, then the fish Swimmy so I thought a horse would be a nice addition.Here is a great Sufi legend about a Horse I picked up from Paulo Coelho's (If you have not read The Alchemist - drop everything and read that first) blog:

"Many years ago in a poor Chinese village, there lived a peasant with his son. His only material possession, apart from some land and a small straw hut, was a horse he had inherited from his father.

One day, the horse ran off, leaving the man with no animal with which to till the land. His neighbors - who respected him greatly for his honesty and diligence - came to his house to say how much they regretted what had happened. He thanked them for their visit, but asked:

- How can you know that what has happened has been a misfortune in my life?

Someone mumbled to a friend: “he can’t accept reality, let him think what he wants, as long as he isn’t saddened by what happened.”

And the neighbors went off, pretending to agree with what they had heard.

A week later, the horse returned to the stable, but it was not alone; it brought with it a fine mare for company. Upon hearing this, the villagers - who were flustered since they now understood the answer the man had given them - returned to the peasant’s house, in order to congratulate him on his good fortune.

- Before you had only one horse, and now you have two. Congratulations! - they said.

- Many thanks for your visit and for all your concern - answered the peasant. - But how can you know that what has happened has been a blessing in my life?

Disconcerted, and thinking he must be going mad, the neighbors went off, and on the way commented: “does he really not understand that God has sent him a gift?”

A month later, the peasant’s son decided to tame the mare. But the animal unexpectedly reared up and the boy fell and broke his leg.

The neighbors returned to the peasant’s house - bringing gifts for the wounded boy. The mayor of the village offered his condolences to the father, saying that all were very sad at what had happened.

The man thanked them for their visit and their concern, but asked:

- How can you know that what has happened has been a misfortune in my life?

They were all astonished to hear this, since no one could be in any doubt that the accident of a son was a real tragedy. As they left the peasant’s house, some said to others: “he really has gone mad; his only son might limp forever, and he is still in doubt about whether what happened is a misfortune.”

Some months passed, and Japan declared war on China. The Emperor’s envoys traveled throughout the land in search for healthy young men to be sent to the battle front. Upon arrival in the village, they recruited all the young men except the peasant’s son, whose leg was broken.

None of the young men returned alive. The son recovered, the two animals bred and their offspring were sold at a good price. The peasant began visiting his neighbors to console and help them, - since they had at all times been so caring. Whenever one of them complained, the peasant said: “how do you know it is a misfortune?” If anyone become overjoyed, he asked: “how do you know it is a blessing?” And the men in that village understood that beyond appearances, life has other meanings."

Imagine: Conventional Wisdom

Viral_social marketing

The latest special print issue of MIT's Technology Review has an article on visualizing "Better Friends" by Erica Naone. Apart from the visuals of the blogosphere, Twitter and others, the one that caught my eye was the visual on viral marketing - something very relevant and dear to me.

Furthermore, being deep into social media, networks and user-generated content -  the last line of the paragraph below hit home for me. I used to listen and learn from many top social networkers/producers until I noticed that I started shutting myself out with many - they have lost their influence with me. They are all the time selling products and services with the sole cause of their own popularity. They do not evangelize - they sell. Popularity is their focus - not their collateral success. One erodes the social equity built over time and involvement. Many have have many friends today online but then there is a social connection/equity even with your audience/readers/followers - the mind is fickle with all the noise and the "new new things" and "new new people" coming out everyday.

The web is becoming social - from a network of servers and pages, its becoming a network of people. We are the carriers - we consume from each other (not just reporters), we produce and we distribute.

The full article is here and the piece on viral marketing from the article below:

Viral_social marketing1

"Several years ago, a large retailer tried to encourage word-of-mouth marketing for products sold on its site byoffering incentives to site visitors who made product recommendations. Many companies are trying to use people's social connections for such "viral marketing" programs, hoping that information about products (and the urge to buy them) can spread through a network of people the way a virus might. But after studying more than 15 million recommendations generated by the retailer's incentive program, a team made up of Jure Leskovec, Lada Adamic, and Bernardo Huberman, director of the information dynamics lab at Hewlett-Packard, was skeptical. Huberman and his colleagues looked at the networks that grew up around each product--who bought and recommended it, and who responded to the recommendation--and saw that they took on different characteristics depending on the type of product. A network around a medical book (top image below), where red dots and lines indicate people who purchased the book while blue dots and lines represent people who received a recommendation, shows a scattered network where recommendations, on average, don't travel very far. The network surrounding a Japanese graphic novel (bottom image below), on the other hand, shows a thick flow of information among densely connected people. The researchers found that viral marketing was most effective for expensive products recommended within a small, tightly connected group. They also found that overusing consumers' social connections for marketing can make them less influential."

I had a post on The Dog, The Cat and Web 2.0 a while ago and a few on friendship, its disconnect online and offline so I think it would be appropriate to celebrate Wall Street's anniversary and the change in how we can 'get' a friend after 20 years, with Gordon Gekko's quote in the movie:

I mused over social networks - online and offline - here and then today The Wall Street Journal has an excellent coverage on the content bloggers are sharing with all of us called "The Minutes of Our Lives" here. To summarize it in a line, the article talks about the extremely private moments people are sharing with everyone - from the birth of their child, thanksgiving evenings with family to their mundane moments at home to the growing role of narcissism.

I can not help but notice a phenomenal paradox of our (now that I am American!) society that ties in with some observations (only) I had when I arrived in the US. These were the most prominent for me:

• People were extremely guarded and private about their lives
• My neighbors did not seem to know each other 
• Families were not tightly integrated
• People were (and are) sensitive to personal questions that were very commonly asked in India
• I came across more people that were lonely
  
• I came across more people that were alone
• You never showed up without prior notice at someone's place
• Grocery store clerks or often people at public places would share very private things with a stranger like me

Now, through blogs, people seem to be doing things that are contradictory to the above (disclosing personal and private moments) and at the same time doing exactly the same (sharing a lot of private moments with strangers). All over logical if you look at it closely.

Imagine: Empowering Relationships