I went to NESTA’s seminar on Social Networks on Monday to listen to Ron Burt from the University of Chicago and Meg Pickard from AOL who also writes a brilliant blog called meish.
I filled my notebook with scribbling – here is some of it…
Ron talked about the social origins of good ideas. He argued that:
- you don’t own the value of your ideas – your audience does.
- creativity is an import-export game – finding a good idea where it works well and then finding a new target audience for it.
- people who live at the intersection of social worlds are more likely to spot good ideas working in one context and be able to seed that idea into another context. Malcolm Gladwell calls these people Connectors – “the closer an idea comes to a Connector the more power and opportunity it has”.
I agree completely. We have started up a group called Make Your Mark Connectors – people who run networks in different regions, industries and sectors bringing people and ideas together. These are the people who make things happen. People like Oli Barrett, Raj Dey, Heather Wilkinson, Claudie Plen, Servane Mouazan, Jack Butler. (If you run a network and want to be part of this - get in touch with oli@enterpriseinsight.co.uk)
Ron gave a few interesting links that explore the information market of social networks further – Touchgraph – a visual network mapping tool, a music mapping interface called Music Plasma - type in your favorite bands and it maps out funky relations with others of similar style or musical influence. And a book about T-shaped Managers.
Ron ended with a call to action – “When you have the opportunity to learn how someone in another group does what you do differently – go!”
Then over to Meg Pickard who works at AOL, improving online social experiences. She compared two different types of online social networks:
- Identity driven social networks such as MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn – where a user creates a profile and builds networks of friends – some people on mySpace have 100,000s of friends! But essentially this is about creating lists of contacts and this seems to be the end in itself. I have to admit to uploading profiles on lots of these social networking sites – but once you’ve done that and built up your network of contacts, there isn’t much else to do.
- Topic driven social experiences offer new ways for people to connect online. For example Flikr, del.icio.us and Trip Advisor.These are passion driven clusters where the topic acts as the context for the social interaction. So for example, when you buy a book from Amazon, you get a link to ‘People who bought this book, also bought these items”. As a user, you feel the effect of others that have gone before you – they clear a path through the woods. However, the relationship is between data, information, stuff – which acts as a context to connect people.
Meg argues that in the old days everyone said Content is King – but nowadays Context is King. This is my favourite example - Last.fm - a site that connects users who have similar music tastes – building the world's largest social music collection – try it. Another brilliant example is Squidoo where thousands of people are creating a handbuilt catalogue of the best stuff online. It's driven by passion and its heroes are everyday enthusiasts - I love it.
Some of Meg's recommended links Mashup, Halfbakery, Lazyweb, Innocentive.
