BrandSavant

Gaining Insight From Social Media Data

Is The Social Web An “Economy Of Favors?”

by Tom Webster on July 16, 2010

A short thought for “Follow Friday“: spend a little time searching out people who take you well outside your comfort zone. I wrote more about the Twitter “self-selection bias” a while back, but to put it plainly, if you are only following people you agree with, sooner or later Mr. Social Darwin will catch up with you. I was reminded of this while reading the comments to Tamsen McMahon’s thought-provoking and oddly controversial piece, “Clique Clique…BOOM” over on the excellent Brass Tack Thinking blog she cowrites with Amber Naslund.

I won’t recapitulate Tamsen’s piece here, because you will go read it as soon as you finish this, right? What I appreciated about the piece was the level of constructive debate in the comments, from people who took issue with Tamsen’s stance on the “clique.” One notable dissenter, Mark Schaefer, made an interesting point regarding what he termed “the blogger’s pack”: the social web is an economy of favors.

Mark’s meaning is clear: prominence on the social web is driven by a simple mechanic: you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. You promote my e-book, I’ll give your online course a favorable review. And so on. Do you agree with this? I think in many ways it’s empirically true, but only if your horizon is short.

So, here’s what I think (I wrote this there, and I’ll repeat it here). In the short term, he might be right. In the long term, the social web is an economy of ideas. The difference, for the individual, is backing the right horses. You are who you retweet.

So, this “Follow Friday,” promote someone with a lasting idea, regardless of their “clique.” Not only will it be good for your soul, it’ll be good for society. Mr. Social Darwin guarantees it.

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  • http://www.linkedin.com/in/foodsho Mark Moreno

    So now I am wondering if “follow friday” is a good thing, a bad thing, or a neutral thing?

    Probably too early to tell without some sort of statistical analysis!

  • Tom Webster

    Dunno. I’m just crap with numbers.

  • http://www.design-kompany.com DK

    Twitter is fascinating. A whole language and style of connecting with other people sprouts from nowhere in a very short time. Cultural shifts are brought about by FB, too, but I have some weird feelings about FB since it was partly funded by the CIA. But that’s an aside.

    I worry that the further we fragment into self-selected groups online, the less diversity of opinion and awareness of other voices we’ll have. For example, it becomes obvious when we talk about Twitter selection bias (just read your other post) that there’s a much larger division going on: Internet vs. non-Internet people.

    Maybe some communities don’t have high-speed connections, laptops, or even the ability to read. Yet, in places like the rural deserts and villages here and abroad, there flourish an abundance of handed-down stories, generations-old. Philosophies not found in books or magazines or blogs.

    These, like the pools of ideas in untapped islands of Twitter communities, are impossible to tap unless you GO there. It’s scary, makes us vulnerable, but then, we learn.

  • http://www.convinceandconvert.com Jay Baer

    You are who you retweet. I love that. Nicely done.

    It would be more true, however, if we had a backwards-looking scorecard for those behaviors. Like the reports that show your mutual fund manager is actually an idiot – something that shows whether your retweet choices actually generate traffic or gain traction.

    Something like a “Curation Contest”. Hmmmm.

  • Tom Webster

    I think – like trust – that the average “score” for that would be pretty misleading. I retweet a lot of great things, but I also retweet a lot of crap :)

    For those who care about this sort of thing, it will fast become obligatory to maintain two Twitter personas (as Brogan does): one for “media”, and one for the person. I hope I don’t have to bifurcate my personality like that, as I’ve barely got a handle on the one.

  • http://cultivat.us Philip Brown

    Yeah I totally agree with the “you scratch my back, i’ll scratch yours” mentally in social media. It seems to me that people often promote their friends stuff no matter what, but will often neglect great content if it isn’t from a person in their clique.

    It also means that poor quality content gets hits and views whilst really good content can’t break through.

    I think you can really see this on Digg. How many of the front page items are really poor? But they made it too the front page because of power users who have armys of friends who will digg their submissions without even reading the article.

    Its a shame really, and something that I hope does not continue through the evolution of social media.

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