27 posts tagged “social networks”

The core theme of this blog is social behavior offline, online. I have written a few posts in the past comparing the online and offline social behavior with The Cat, The Dog and Web2.0, The Online and Offline Social Disconnect, Gordon Gekko's Social Graph.

So when I saw an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times by Peter Lovenheim titled "Will you Be My Neighbor" in the New York Times here,  I was glad that it was not just me who saw what I saw. It underlines some of my observations as an immigrant coming from a culture where all the neighbors (apart from family) knew each other and shared a lot of their lives - offline, synchronous and involved.

You can read the details but here are a few lines from his article that are captivating and at the same time, concerning for our society:

"According to social scientists, from 1974 to 1998, the frequency with which Americans spent a social evening with neighbors fell by about one-third. Robert Putnam, the author of “Bowling Alone,” a groundbreaking study of the disintegration of the American social fabric, suggests that the decline actually began 20 years earlier, so that neighborhood ties today are less than half as strong as they were in the 1950s.

Why is it that in an age of cheap long-distance rates, discount airlines and the Internet, when we can create community anywhere, we often don’t know the people who live next door?"

My response to his Why based on observations and great conversations from my 8 years in America:

• America emphasizes the individual
• America emphasizes independence
• America teaches that destiny is in one's control
• American emphasizes Doing versus Being
• America, generally, measures success financially
• We, globally, still discriminate - color, religion, politics, sex, sexuality, race, country, attire, appearance, net worth, profession
  

I know a few of my neighbors but I know can do better.

Your responses, thoughts?

Imagine: [At least] love thy neighbor

[Update]: Some cool media coverage of this funding today by Becky Buckman in The Wall Street Journal and Brad Stone at The New York Times 

I could not be more excited for the team at LinkedIn. If there is any social network that delivers a no-brainer value, its LinkedIn. I have benefited from meeting some of the coolest people from the day I started using it in 2003.

Some personal milestones with LinkedIn:

• An early user since 2003 when they had 40k users. Today they have over 22M
• I met Vice Presidents then (I was "Vocationally Challenged") through LinkedIn at Siebel, eBay and more who are now VERY good friends
• Became an early employee in 2004 when they had 1.5M users and about 25 employees
• Left in 2006 when LinkedIn had about 7M users and ~60 employees. Today, I believe, they have more than 250!
• Now, 5 years since I started using LinkedIn, I have over 1000 connections on LinkedIn and I have met and really know almost all of them

Watch the perspective of the returning and (one) new LinkedIn investors on this new milestone. Dan's post is here

Imagine: Its ALL about Relationships

I have had a few posts on charactertics around facing adversity, challenges and playing David like 300, I Like It Rough and then my last post recently on (Pride), Determination and Resilience.

You can imagine how excited I was to read an article by Melinda Beck, from The Wall Street Journal, here on how some very successful household names had to face failure before they became what they are today. The article to me was a "Celebration of Failure"!

• J.K. Rowling's first book about a boy wizard named Harry Potter was rejected by 12 publishers before Bloomsbury, a small London publishing house, picked it up.
• Twenty-seven publishers rejected Theodor Seuss (Dr. Seuss) Geisel's first book, "To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street."
• Michael Jordan was cut from his high school varsity basketball team sophomore year.
• Decca Records turned down a contract with the Beatles, saying "Groups of guitars are on their way out."
• Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor who said "he lacked imagination and had no good ideas."

Here are some snippets that I want to make a note to self:

What makes some people rebound from defeats and go on to greatness while others throw in the towel? Psychologists call it "self-efficacy," the unshakable belief some people have that they have what it takes to succeed.

I only think that a few people rebound and most throw in the towel.

Where does such determination come from? In some cases it's inborn optimism -- akin to the kind of resilience that enables some children to emerge unscathed from extreme poverty, tragedy or abuse. Self-efficacy can also be acquired by mastering a task; by modeling the behavior of others who have succeeded; and from what Prof. Bandura calls "verbal persuasion" -- getting effective encouragement that is tied to achievement, rather than empty praise.

Some quotes:

"I've failed over and over and over again in my life. That's why I succeed," - Michael Jordan
"I didn't fail 1,000 times," he told a reporter. "The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps." - Thomas Edison
"Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never -- in nothing, great or small, large or petty -- never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense." - Winston Churchill

Two big failures I have faced personally are:

1. My application for a student visa to study for my MS during my first attempt (1995) to follow my dream to the US, was rejected twice in 2 days. I could not apply for another two years as it was mandatory after 2 consecutive rejections. [I finally applied again in 1999 and made it]
   
2. My 3 years of being "vocationally challenged" during the downturn after the dot-com days. That enabled me to discover social networking online (starting with LinkedIn where I eventually went to work) since I was living it off-line. My LinkedIn profile only details those days since I value my achievements then as one of the best
   

Finally, as Henry Ford said: "Whether you think that you can or you can't, you're right."

Imagine: The Pursuit IS Happyness

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

Matt Richtel has a very neat article in the New York Times here called "In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop"

Some quotes from his article:

"Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

It is unclear how many people blog for pay, but there are surely several thousand and maybe even tens of thousands.

I am definitely not paid to blog but if you want to read what they have to say, there are some posts here and here

Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch had a post independent of this article that says a lot about the world of professional bloggers here called "Six Months In, And 600 Posts Later...The Worlds Of Blogging and Journalism Collide (In My Brain)". Some related quotes from this post are:

"It is mostly breaking news, reporting facts and providing analysis. At TechCrunch, I am completely focused on blogging, 24/7"

That is because the blogging never stops. Just ask my wife and kids, who now mock me by repeating back my new mantra: “I’m almost done, just one more post.”

But we live or die by how fast we can post after a story breaks, if we can’t break it ourselves.

I won't be surprised if Matt Richtel's story was inspired by Erick's post.
 
It tied in really well with my earlier post "Who Is Your Chauffeur" here. It was in response to a post on entrepreneurs but applicable to everyone and then of course, there was this post way back, which probably fits the best. The pictures of Stripe climbing (from the book Hope for the Flowers by Trina Paulus) away says it all.

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."

There is a really neat article in the new issue of The Economist here about social networks, the walls around them and how they are utilities hard to monetize - like webmails. Since a picture is worth a 1000 words, I thought the one below was very contextual and would say it all.

It is of course possible, that it is a recommendation engine of products - ones that I might need in the future since they have a lot of profile information about my life with startups.

Imagine: Startups can be a hairy ride

I had a fantastic opportunity yesterday to attend a Churchill Club (They organize some of the best events in the Valley, btw) event called "Who Do You Trust? Trends in Trust and Influence for the Next Generation of Business Leaders". A post on that definitely coming up later.(I tweeted this event)

The one reason why I attended was to get a chance to see and listen to Robert Cialdini, Author of one of my all time favorite that I had referred to in this blog some time ago - “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”

One big take away I had from the event was an observation from his studies about "credible communicators" with reference to reporters, bloggers, social media folks, msm, friends etc - anyone can be a source of information that you might trust. These communicators had two characteristics:

• They are percieved as experts/ authorities in their domain
• Very importantly and critical, they were perceived as being objective and unbiased

For the latter, those who were perceived as trustworthy were straightshooters having built that reputation over some years. If you do not have the 'many years' luxury, here is what many people do:

State a weakness first and then right after that they follow it up with their argument or statement.

The example Dr. Cialdini gave was for Avis: We Are #2 But We Try Harder

Being personally always fascinated and studying social behavior (online and offline) - this blog being only one form of expression with the subtitle "Everything social offline, Online", I was very keen on making an attempt to sign up for his social experiments/thesis. After a quick introduction and chat, I signed up to be a part of this expertiments and thesis. He gracefull accepted my offer and now the hard part - waiting for the next steps assuming the right people in his team actually need more volunteers.

Imagine: I am not as good as David Pogue but I believe that CrossLoop is the best free software to help someone. To establish further trustworthiness, here is a Disclaimer: I am one of the Co-Founders of CrossLoop.

Here is a quick back of the envelope comparison of the two recent valuations Ballmer and his team have made - Yahoo (the most recent) and Facebook.

• Microsoft's "overture" to Yahoo - $45B (approximated)
• Microsoft's investment in Facebook - $240M for 1.6% leading to a total valuation of Facebook at $15B
  

So Ballmer values Yahoo at approximately 3x times Facebook.

So lets look at some comparable metrics for Yahoo and Facebook:

1) UNIQUE VISITORS:
Yahoo - 134M (Source: Comscore)
Facebook - 35M (Source: Comscore)

Yahoo has a multiple here of almost 4x

2) PAGE VIEWS
Yahoo - 32B (Source: Compete Blog)
Facebook - 65B (Source: Facebook Press)

Facebook has a 2x multiple advantage (Note: Web analytics software used by comScore and other services treat "page views" as complete refreshes of an entire page. But web sites like Yahoo use more modern approaches to layout have recently adopted Asynchronous JavaScript to enable browsers to refresh select portions of the page when necessary, reducing bandwidth and improving layout.)

3) REVENUE
Yahoo - $7B (Source: WSJ. None of it comes as a guaranteed revenue from MSFT)
Facebook - $250M (the numbers thrown around are $150M for last year so giving FB some benefit of doubt - half of which, of course, comes from MSFT)

The biggie - Yahoo has a 28x multiple advantage over Facebook

Imagine: It is still less than half of a projected value of Facebook! Ooh - ya!

I usually don't like to blog about technology since I live and breath it. Furthermore, I prefer the more complex creature that uses it - people. Once in a while, I am tempted so here goes:

There are tons of different views on how Facebook should monetize their traffic - something that obviously needs a lot of improvement. Facebook Ads launched recently and if there is one thing in common to all of the various options - it was NewsFeeds. Sponsored Pages, Beacon, Social Ads - all of them tie into the NewsFeed.

Competing against Google with search was recently thrown out there by VentureBeat as a revenue stream but it does not make sense to me and here is why:

1. Search is not in the page views business and is "open" - it sends user to other sites. Social networks are in the page views business and hence they are closed
2. Facebook lives that - even messages (except for mobile) need to read by coming to the site
3. Search is a different beast all together
   

The DNA, imho, of both businesses are very different.

Search bring intent inherently in the act whereas most social networks today bring curiosity (unless it is a business network like LinkedIn). It can potentially bring intent to the party by tapping into the offline social behavior of seeking referrals or recommendations.

If 99.8% of stories that all Facebook users publish are not seen, I would think  Facebook could turbo charge curiosity and enhance their referrals (to Quote Mark Zuckerberg: "“People influence people. Nothing influences people more than are recommendation from a trusted friend. A trusted referral influences people more than the best broadcast message. A trusted referral is the Holy Grail of advertising.") by bringing search to its NewsFeeds. Currently they have a limited 'push' element to it but nothing to 'pull'. They definitely have the content. If that is done, there is far more context for their ads on the system.

When you want to achieve/ acquire or research something where do you start - maybe by asking/ searching for people (who you know) who have experienced that in the past?

Focusing on one's core competency, users and their behavior always helps.

Imagine: Seeing relevant ads from Amazon or Orbitz while searching for someone who has read a book (or bought one that Beacon can tell me about) or has traveled to Paris (information available through apps)