Facebook

Below is a link to my most recent blog post for Internet Evolution, titled “HR’s Web 2.0 Paradox”.
The paradox is this: while HR policy in many companies and organizations bans social networking sites like Facebook, it’s an open secret that many HR managers actively mine the same sites to gather information on job candidates and current employees.
Some of the comments to my blog post are clearly negative about HR professionals. For clarity, I don’t believe HR managers are necessarily hypocrites; rather, it’s the institutionalized practice of actively using Web 2.0 networks that are banned in their own organizations that creates the appearance of hypocrisy.
I suggest some reasons that might be behind this inconsistency, and urge HR professionals to reflect seriously on their policies and practices in this area. While these policies continue to be elaborated and enforced on a company-specific basis, perhaps it’s time for HR professionals to convence and adopt professional codes that they can bring back into their organizations.
I hope my blog post can help trigger debate and discussion on this issue.
Here is the link:
httphttp://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=796&doc_id=183079&

The presidential election of 2008 shall go down in history for an obvious symbolic reason that will inspire future generations. Yet while pundits were focused on the question of Barack Obama’s race, another largely overlooked factor was his powerful techno-demographic appeal.

We know that Obama’s landmark victory was due, in part, to a groundswell of support among young Americans. Early in his campaign, political pollsters were observing that Obama was “rocking the youth vote”. This was proved true. Exit polls on Tuesday revealed that Obama had won nearly 70% of the vote among young Americans under 25 — the highest percentage since U.S. exit polling began in 1976.

Obama, in a word, enjoyed a groundswell of support among the Facebook generation. He indeed will be the first occupant of the White House to have won a presidential election on the Web.

This election was the first time that all candidates – presidential and congressional — attempted to connect directly with American voters via online social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. It has even been called the “Facebook election”. It is no coincidence that one of Obama’s key strategists was 24-year-old Chris Hughes, a Facebook co-founder. It was Hughes who masterminded the Obama campaign’s highly effective Web blitzkrieg – everything from social networking sites to podcasting and mobile messaging.

Facebook was not unaware of its suddenly powerful role in American electoral politics. During the presidential campaign, the site launched its own forum to encourage online debates about voter issues. Facebook also teamed up with ABC for election coverage and political forums. And CNN teamed up with YouTube to hold presidential debates.

Obama’s masterful leveraging of Web 2.0 platforms marks a major e-ruption in electoral politics – in America and elsewhere - as campaigning shifts from old-style political machines, focussed on charming those at the top of organisations, towards the horizontal dynamics of online social networks. The Web, a perfect medium for genuine grassroots political movements, is transforming the power dynamics of politics. There are no barriers to entry on sites like Facebook and YouTube. Power is diffused towards the edges because everybody can participate. The Web is being used not only for vote-getting but also – as the Obama campaign demonstrated — for grassroots fundraising. Obama’s campaign drummed up more than $160 million from supporters who gave comparatively tiny amounts — $200 or less.

What was remarkable about the Obama team’s online efforts was how comparatively inexpensive they were. Obama’s spending on online advertising was comparatively tiny – less than $8 million. That pales into insignificance against his TV spending, including $4m on a half-hour TV special in the final week alone. About $3.5 million of the online spend was on adwords by Google searches. The spending figures for Facebook were also small — $467,000 in total, almost all ($370,000) in September.

In political campaigns, the Web is low-cost but high-reach. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center, nearly half — or 46% — of Americans used the Web, email or text messaging for news about the presidential campaign, to contribute to the debate, or to mobilize others. Some 35% of Americans said they’d watched online political videos — three times more than during the 2004 presidential election (before YouTube was created). And roughly 10% said they’d logged on to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace to engage in the election.

Obama, who was often seen thumbing messages on his Blackberry during the campaign, is a new-generation politician who shrewdly understands the electoral power of the Web. Pulling out all the Web 2.0 stops, the Obama campaign used not only Facebook and YouTube, but also MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, Digg, BlackPlanet, LinkedIn, AsianAve, MiGente, Glee and others.

Obama was by a long stretch the most effective online politician during the presidential campaign – not only against John McCain, but also against his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. For the past two years, Facebook has overwhelmingly been pro-Obama virtual territory. Some have attributed Obama’s victory to a “Facebook effect”.

At 47, he may be older than the average user there, but Obama is a natural Facebook politician. On his personal profile there - which featured his “Our Moment is Now” motto - Obama named his favourite musicians as Miles Davis, Stevie Wonder, and Bob Dylan, and listed his pastimes as basketball, writing, and “loafing w/kids” (note the hip shorthand).

The 72-year-old John McCain, by contrast, never managed to connect on Facebook. He gave one of his pastimes as “fishing” - which may be popular in some places, but ain’t hip - and listed Letters from Iwo Jima among his favourite movies. His profile even got “punked” by a prankster who hacked it and posted a phony policy announcement on his online profile: “Dear supporters, today I announce that I have reversed my position and come out in full support of gay marriage…particularly marriage between two passionate females.”

The statistics are telling. Obama had more than 2 million American supporters on Facebook; McCain, just over 600,000. On the microblogging platform Twitter, Obama could count on more than 112,000 supporters “tweeting” to get him elected. McCain, for his part, had only 4,600 followers on Twitter. (A map of declared support by American Twitter users found every state overwhelmingly Democrat, apart from South Dakota - which was only “mildly” Democrat.)

On YouTube, Obama’s supporters uploaded more than 1,800 videos onto the BarackObama.com channel, which counted about 115,000 subscribers. The channel attracted more than 97 million video views by some 18 million channel visits. Compare that to McCain’s YouTube presence: only 330 videos were uploaded to the JohnMcCain.com channel, which attracted just over 28,000 subscribers. The McCain channel attracted barely more than 2 million visits and some 25 million video views. Obama beat McCain 4 to 1.

The YouTube coup de grace was the blockbuster “Yes We Can” videoclip. The viral circulation of that video, watched by millions of Americans only days after it was first posted, gave Obama solid electoral credibility in Middle America. Suddenly he was like a pop star on MTV. The video wasn’t even made by the Obama campaign team: it was produced spontaneously by the hip hop star Will.i.am, from the group Black Eyed Peas.

Obama also effectively used podcasts and electoral messaging to mobile devices (he had already been doing so as a U.S. Senator). As one observer put it: “While Obama was making great use of podcasts, John McCain was missing in action.” The McCain campaign finally came up with the idea of posting a videogame called “Pork Invaders” on his Facebook page to underscore the war hero candidate’s determination to take on Washington “pork barrelling” (in which politicians manoeuvre lucrative schemes for their areas into legislation, to ensure re-election or repay favours bought to get them elected). The Obama team, meanwhile, was harnessing the power of network effects through an “Obama app” for iPhones, which allowed supporters to spread the pro-Obama message to everyone on their contact list.

Obama had already honed his Web 2.0 campaigning skills against Hillary Clinton. While political pundits were following the Obama-Clinton head-butting on the hustings, Obama was outmanoeuvring his Democratic rival below the radar on Facebook. In early 2007, more than a year before he won his party’s nomination, Obama had attracted a massive following on Facebook while Hillary Clinton was struggling with the negative fallout of a Facebook movement called “Stop Hillary Clinton”. While Obama’s Facebook page had attracted more than 250,000 members, Clinton’s page counted a paltry 3,200.

The Internet, to be sure, had already been deployed in political campaigns, but was used mainly to raise money. But as voters massively shift towards the Internet for social interaction, consumer purchasing, and political participation, office-seekers are rushing to establish an online presence and connect with voters on the ground. During the U.S. elections, more than 500 American politicians had their own Facebook page. Many more will in future elections – not only in the United States, but also in Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Australia and other democracies. From now on, success in electoral politics depends on having friends in low places.

U.S. election update…Here is an article by my colleague Soumitra Dutta and I published today on the London newspaper The Guardian’s website. It’s on the powerful role of Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter and other Web 2.0 platforms in Barack Obama’s electoral victory. I will publish another version of this article shortly as a blog post with links, but it’s available now on the Guardian website.

Is it possible that the global financial meltdown may actually be good news for Web 2.0 social networking?

By most accounts, the economic crisis won’t spare Silicon Valley or the high-tech sector. eBay has announced layoffs, and there are rumours that Yahoo is about to push a large number of employees out the door. IT software spending at many corporations is bound to decline. Some are even comparing the current climate to the high-tech bubble bursting eight years ago. 

But let’s look at the potential upside.

First, perhaps the financial crisis will force corporations to give serious consideration to putting into practice, instead of merely talking a good game, Web 2.0 strategies aimed at harnessing the productivity advantages of horizontal collaboration and open innovation. With pressures to rationalize operations, maybe now is the time for making a solid “ROI” (return on investment) case for Web 2.0. Perhaps Enterprise 2.0 is finally about to shift from evangelist vision to executed strategy

Second, an intelligent working hypothesis would be that social networking sites like LinkedIn, Plaxo, Ning — and even Facebook — will see their membership ranks soar in coming weeks and months as widespread insecurity drives people to connect with others to boost their social capital. A cynical way of putting it would be: “misery likes company”. Still, there can be no doubt that, as people worry about their financial security and career situation, many will feel motivated to plug into social networks. Anxious about their institutional status inside vertical hierarchies, people will turn to the social dynamics of horizontal networks.

On this second point – which is my main concern here – empirical data already appears to validate this hypothesis. In the spring when petrol prices were spiking, Neilson released findings that suggested people were networking online to “cope” with hard economic times. LinkedIn meanwhile has been boasting soaring membership numbers, reaching 28 million worldwide. Nobody will be surprised to learn that many of LinkedIn’s new sign-ups are coming from the financial sector, whose membership has doubled. It may be hard to feel sorry for bonus-bloated investment bankers on Wall Street and in London’s City, but many are frantically dusting off their CVs and rushing to online social networks in the hope of repositioning their careers.

A new LinkedIn survey has revealed that 42% of the network’s members feel their job security has been impacted by the economic crisis, while 13% say it’s too soon to tell. In other words, more than half of LinkedIn’s worldwide membership is scared.

But is joining LinkedIn really the answer?  Or as BBC tech blogger Rory Cellan-Jones put it: “It sounds pretty desperate to me — and I still fail to see the attraction of a network where everyone is only interested in what you can offer them, rather than what you have to say.”

Cellan-Jones’ comment underlines two fundamental tensions that we analyze in some detail in Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom. The first is the tension between rational and non-rational motivations to belong to social groups. The second is the tension between “close” and “weak” social ties.

Motivations for joining social networking sites are varied and complex. At risk of oversimplifying, we can classify motivations into two broad categories: rational and non-rational. Professionals who join sites like LinkedIn are primarily motivated by rational calculations related to their career interests. Most teenagers who collect “friends” on MySpace, on the other hand, are not looking to improve their career prospects. Their social interaction is motivated primarily by a non-rational instinct to forge social bonds.

The classic conceptual dichotomy for these two impulses comes to us from 19th century German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies: gemeinschaft versus gesellschaft.  Loosely translated, gemeinschaft describes “community” identification based on common values and close bonds. Gesellschaft, by contrast, describes rational forms of association based on self-interest. MySpace is largely a gemeinschaft social networking site; LinkedIn is essentially a forum for gesellschaft interactions.

This dichotomy is complicated by an intriguing paradox. Most of us like to feel connected to others through close-knit ties or shared interests and passions. Yet in truth, we frequently depend on people with whom we maintain only “weak” ties – especially when we are looking for a job. The strength-of-weak-ties theory was famously elaborated by American sociologist Mark Granovetter. He defined “weak ties” as social relationships characterized by infrequent contact, an absence of emotional closeness, and no history of reciprocal favours. In professional parlance, you might say people in your “extended network”.

Granovetter found that we rely on “weak tie” connections much more often than we think. Most intelligent job-seekers don’t turn to close friends or family for jobs, unless they are expecting to benefit from the advantages of cronyism or nepotism. Most turn to their extended network. And most business networks are based on relatively “weak tie” associations.

Which brings us back to the economic downturn. When out-of-work investment bankers scramble to sign up to LinkedIn, they are making a rational calculation. They’re not looking for friends; they are seeking to leverage the strength of weak ties.

What happens, however, when people start invading Facebook – where “friend” values are embedded in the site’s social etiquette – to network for career reasons? It’s easy to see how a tension between gemeinschaft instincts and gesellschaft calculations could create some social conflict on Facebook. And yet Facebook is cluttered with self-promoters, career artists, and marketing entrepreneurs. Can these people really be considered “friends”, even when defined as “weak” ties? Just how many Facebook “friends” can we reasonably have anyway?

Anthropologists tell us that it’s impossible to maintain stable social relationships with more than 150 people. This is widely known as “Dunbar’s Number“, named after British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who argued that the necessary ritual of “social grooming” breaks down in groups whose membership exceeds roughly 150. Interestingly, the social networking site, Friendster, originally capped the number of any one member’s “friends” at — you guessed it — 150.

If we apply Dunbar’s figure to all social networking sites, any “friend” list that exceeds 150 is not credible — and pushes social networking into the zone rational calculation. Maintaining a professional network of more than 150 connections on LinkedIn might be plausible, but it would appear to be humanly impossible to maintain social relations with more than 150 different people. And yet many Facebook profiles — including mine — feature “friend” lists that not only surpass that figure, but double, triple, and quadruple it. Some Facebook “friend” lists count in the thousands. Which leads to the question: is the virtual world exempt from basic laws of socio-anthropology?

While we ponder that question, it’s a safe bet that the economic downturn will accelerate the trend towards a blurring between non-rational instincts to connect socially with like-minded people and rational calculations to build a social network for self-interested reasons.