Today I went to the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) awards meeting today and blogged several sessions. However, they did not have wi-fi until later so I am posting this later. I will do a separate post for each session I attended for a total of five. First, I attended the session by SNCR Senior Fellow Joseph Carrabis on: The Blogging Power Continuum: How Bloggers & Their Audiences Share & Assign Power in a Knowledge-Based Medium. Here are my notes.
Joseph’s firm, NextStage, creates math models on how people communicate. It is staffed by social scientists not tech people. A recent question studied: how to predetermine if someone will be an influential blogger, what topics will they influence, where influence. They measure levels of interest and engagement. – not how much time, or how often visited. – but social science cognitive measures. He did not go into details on his measures. Findings:

1. There are 2 types of bloggers, holmes and watson (from Sherlock Holmes) holmes – depth of knowledge and Watson – ability to explain holmes’ knowledge - they need each other. Each holmes will have many watsons - rarely will they be the same person

2. Bloggers and their audience may have different writing styles but what matters is that they think alike (his research looks at how they think using some proprietary algorithms) but there are also some subtle differences that spark useful interaction.

3. They thought holmes and watsons have different audiences – with holmes much smaller - but actually found they had the same audience – watsons are power brokers, the holmes are only recognized if watsons decide to discuss them, and only what part of holmes they decide to write about – the watsons steer and guide the conversation and decide on topics that get discussed

4. They looked at what was happening in the current political race to test these concepts. All the candidates have blogs now, Joseph looked at four examples - John McCain is dominating the conversation on his blog even though others participate, John Edwards also dominates his conversation but not as much. Romney and Clinton tend to let the conversation on their blogs steer them. (We can see that this does not translate into ranking in the polls. It seems to show who is more into control and who is more the hands off manager on both sides)

5. Take aways (not sure of the connection between his research and the take ways as he did not cover that. However, the take aways are good common sense and common best practices so I will accept that there is a connection.)

1. How to gain power in blogs and social media
• give credit where it is due
• admit mistakes
• manage the discussion
• be honest
• lead the discussion
• explain everything

2. How to share power
• recognize other’s authority
• accept chastisement graciously
• never argue (discussion is okay)
• be willing to learn
• encourage the discussion
• never cover

3. what is power in the blogosphere? - Gaining respect- being honest

4. Social media key - We long to touch what has been held in human hands.

So are you a holmes or a watson.