What would it be like if your business had a sales, marketing and support force that was 1.3 million strong that you did not have to pay for? What if you could source this leverage with a tiny central force? Sounds impossible? Do you have any idea of how this could work?

Now that everyone is using Social Media – what I am seeing mainly are people who using the new tool in the old way – trying to shout above the noise – “Look at ME!” “Aren’t I cool!” “Aren’t we good!”. I am seeing a Dilbert approach – “Let’s have a Facebook site” “Let’s get on Twitter”.

Most do what most do when a new technology arrives – they apply it in the old way and so get nothing in response.

So what then is the power and leverage that you can harness by using social media well?

Boingo are on their way to finding out how to do this. Oh yes and I am one of the people that are part of this and oh yes I am not being paid and nor do I in any way work for them. I am living the theory.

So how might this work and so how might you do this too?

Boingo have a class of people that are deeply committed to the enterprise that Baochi calls her “Super fans”. They and why they are connected to Boingo and each other is the core of the leverage potential. We will meet 4 of them in this post who agreed enthusiastically to be interviewed by me. As you will see, these Super Fans are attracted first of all to Boingo by the obvious:

• The service – easy one stop access to Wifi in Airports and Hotels – is now no longer a nice to have for travellers but an essential
• The support for the service is outstanding – got a problem – you get instant personal help

But a great product is not enough. Nor is good service. What is the differentiator for Boingo is the human nature of the relationship that Boingo has with its customers. Most organizations do not allow their people to be human. Service people are often ciphers working from a script. Boingo have set up an environment where their key point of contact is a real person who is allowed to be herself.

She has a name and a face and we are all in awe and a bit in love with her. We all feel her presence watching over us. It is way more than getting her help when we can’t sign on. She watches out for us. Have a problem – A quick tweet. In minutes she is there. She is like the guy who runs the old corner store who holds your keys when you go away, keeps an eye on your kids in the street, helps you find a new roommate.

As Nuno Montegro, a customer in Portugal says – It is not what she says but how she says things that is the difference.

Nuno is like me, a customer who actively refers others to the service.

Most of Social media is all about Weak Ties – They are very useful but Weak Ties don’t get people to do much – or risk much – or commit much – that is why they are Weak – they are easy.

If you want to do something – Civil Rights in the US – you need Strong Ties. (Nice new piece by Malcolm Gladwell that explores Weak and Strong Ties in depth)

The key to attracting Strong Ties is being human. It is NOT PIMPING your product. It is instead to show that you really do care about ME. It is instead to show that you can indeed be trusted.

How do you show this? Nuno makes the point that every service and product fails at times. The key is to offer the best possible response to the inevitability of a problem. The best possible response is to know from experience that if there is a problem, you can reach a real person quickly and that they will go the distance to help you get it fixed. “I felt as if I was the only customer in the entire world when she was helping me” Nuno told me. I had the same experience.

Attracting Strong Ties is all about “Giving”.

Aaron Strout is the CMO at social media agency, Powered Inc. and is also Super Fan. “Boingo is proactive and they don’t expect a direct return – they are not selling all day – so if they want an inch, I go the mile back. It’s Karmic! I know if I have a problem that they will look after me. If people are good and do good, then good comes back. Not necessarily directly but good gets attracted back. We talk about a wide range of things that affect me not just the product – which is great too – have to have that – they listen.”

What Aaron is talking about here is a very old model for an economy that was the centre of all tribal economies – the Gift Economy. In the Gift Economy, the Big Guy is not the man who has the most stuff but the person who gives the most.

This is the power in networks – this is how Open Source Works too.

Cliff Bremmer is a programmer who works for a company called Carley Corporation that bids on government contracts to develop instructional CD base/computer based training for the US military.  ”In my spare time I help companies understand and navigate the social media spectrum in a professional yet interactive way.  The company I’m currently helping is the one my father works for called the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel“.

The Gift?

Not only is he a fan but in interacting with Boingo he has learned a lot about how to use SM media well. “If there is anything I’m proud of lately it’s that I helped the Pegasus Hotel promote their brand with the help and support of @Boingo and other companies to become one of the most popular brands in Jamaica.” Boingo is  not only helping him with his travel and Wifi but is talking with him and helping him help his dad in his business with advice and Tweet Up prizes such as free access and bag tags. The Gift in action!

He can see the flaws of how most use SM – “They are stuck in self promotion versus communication. I can see through it all – it’s all about them.”

In the Gift Economy that drives Trust and so Strong Ties, the starting point is YOU. In the non network economy the starting point is ME. No small difference!

Shelby Rogers is a flight attendant, a serving soldier (in the active reserve) and the wife of a serving soldier. Travel is her life. When she is not working, she travels. Access to Wifi has made her travel better – “I now know more than the Gate Agent does about my flights!” and it has taken away much of the loneliness that travel brings with it. Who has not been alone eating room service and watching TV in our room? “I can stay in touch with my husband on Skype and every city seems to have a friend in it.”

For Shelby, Boingo is a service that truly meets her needs. But it is how Boingo is connected to her that has transformed a pleased customer into a Super fan.

How often has your service provider taken you out to dinner? “We have even had dinner recently. I am now a walking billboard for Boingo with winking bag tags!”

So what does this mean? What are the lesson for both Boingo and for you?

• Baochi is no accident – the Boingo senior leadership have created the role and given it the space to enable someone who is naturally humane to be herself inside it. This new way of using Strong Ties to be the centre of a network is all about culture. In most cases senior leadership is too scared to let go. But if you do let go and create this safe place then the power of the network effect can be yours
• A really powerful network has to have an inner core bound by Strong Ties. This is where the leverage is. One staff person like Baochi can without too much trouble have close ties with 34 people. That gives her an outer network of 1.3 million. If she can handle the Dunbar limit of 144 that creates an opportunity of 400 million! You can see that with the right person, you can have a vast reach – provided you realize that your goal is not to have thousands of relationships but a few Strong Ones
• The secret is the math of social leverage. Many of you know about the “Dunbar Number”. Some of you know about “Magic numbers – the hierarchy of trust in human groups. If you don’t here is a quick primer.

So what now?

I think that the next stage would be this:

• At the moment all the Super Fans have a strong relationship with Baochi – I think that the best next step might be to find a way to connect them to each other
• At the  moment most of the dialogue is still about the obvious and excellent service that Boingo provides – I think that some of the work that the Super Fans could do might be to deepen the conversation – Shelby touched on this in her interview with me – What is it that being easily connected while travelling does? In her case it helped her deal with isolation and loneliness – it helped her do her job better – it kept her in touch with her husband – these are deep issues that I think connect all of us who travel a lot

As I think about networks, I think about the laws of physics. All systems have order and attractors. Some force is needed to keep systems coherent.

Think of the Sun in our own local system. It has mass that provides a gravity that holds all the planets and asteroids and stuff in a pattern. It has energy that creates life in the system. I think that any healthy human social system has to have gravity and light.

At the very centre is the “Right Space” a Trusted Space created by the leadership. In this Space, the Right Person – Right being a person who as part of her natural persona truly cares about others. Connected to her is the fuel and the mass that makes up the Sun – the Super Fans. The closer they are to the centre and the closer they are to each other – the more mass and the more energy. The more mass and energy, the larger and more healthy the network of Weak Ties that form up around the Sun.

What gets in the way is our fear about losing control.

At Disney the surface of the Brand Icon never changes but inside the mask is a person who changes all the time and so is never allowed to speak.

But in the new world we have to take off the costume and let the person inside have conversations with the public – HARD to do.

I think it is a given that Culture is the main barrier for most large organizations as they look at how to use Social media. As my colleague Joe reminds us there is real hesitancy in the mainstream. No large bureaucracy can be so bound by the fear of losing control than government. So it is interesting  - to me anyway – to discover a Canadian Federal Government Agency, the Department of Veterans Affairs, that has got more than a toe in the water. They are well engaged in an area where it is relatively “safe” to find out how to do this. I think that their experience here will give them the right and the know how to expand this into their operational area and to give others in Government the experience-based confidence to follow.

When the public think of Veterans Affairs, many of us think of Battlefields and Memorials. I was one of many thousands who returned to Vimy Ridge for the 90th anniversary in 2007.

Like many who visited, I blogged about my experience and posted a lot of information. Of course in these days I was not alone. Today thousands of us post material. Many people are exceptionally knowledgeable. There is enormous wisdom and energy embedded in those who visit.

One of the first ahas of Keith Hillier and his team Teresa MacLean and Joey Mokler – was that they could enhance the experience by bringing the Battlefield to the public rather than focus only on bringing the public to the Battlefield.

This recognition that there could be a “safe” way to bring the public in had very early roots in VAC. Today “silverorange” is a global leader in designing social media platforms. They have sites designed for leading entertainers such as Feist and Sloan, have added design to Firefox and Ning, have leading edge sales sites and so on. But few know that silverorange got its start with Veterans Affairs. A long time ago when many who are now old men at silverorange were in their early teens, VAC put out a tender for kids to create a Virtual Memorial for all those that had died in Canada’s conflicts.

This is the entry for my wife’s uncle Bill.

These are the entries that I made on his behalf. So even before “Social Media” was a buzz word, VAC had created a site, using kids, where the public could find out about their loved ones online and where the public could not only look but participate.

The key issue here in terms of culture and barriers, is that this is quite real – the public are really contributing and the service is authentic and valuable – but that the risks are low. Above all that VAC is learning by doing how to get a start.

They are much further along now. When I first started work with VAC about 10 years ago, they had this wonderful archive of film that they had made of interviews with Vets from WWI, WWI and Korea. The question back then was what were they going to do with this.

The answer of course has been YouTube!

Over time this invaluable archive is being made available for all of us. Not just in a static way but in a way that we can all use and share.

So what about today? Canadian Forces have been in action for many years in Afghanistan. What about their story? What about their families?

The answer is of course Facebook! There are over 200,000 members right now. Much of this is very personal and touching.

Here we see a film made by young Canadians about what Vimy meant to people in New Brunswick followed by a piece on the Highway of Heroes – the route taken by our fallen as they return from Afghanistan.

So what is really going on behind the scenes at VAC and how can what they are doing help you? Here are a few “Tips” that I can see now after nearly a decade in this work.

1. Leadership - First of all the work is being lead by a very senior and trusted executive – Keith Hillier ADM. My experience is that skunk works don’t work. At VAC as at KETC and before at NPR – having the most senior executives as the real champions is essential. For there are organizational risks and there is big push back and fear. Having a very senior person lead the charge enables you to extend your reach.

2. Use Projects – Don’t try and change the world in one go. Have a real project that you can use to find our by discovery and trial and error that will not get people fired if things don’t go well. At VAC this began with the Virtual Memorial and then has been extended into putting the film archive online on YouTube and now with asking the public to participate on Facebook. Teresa told me of their fears of trolls on Facebook. Conventional wisdom is that if the community is sound enough, they will control the trolls. But of course you don’t know that for sure. The war in Afghanistan is a tricky topic right now and sure enough some came to the site to talk about this. But the community – who are there to support the troops and their families asked them to go away and they did!

3. New actions lead to new thinking not the other way around - You can plan for ever, you can imagine for ever but it is only when you do that you learn and by learning your mind gets changed. By choosing small projects that could be made “safe” VAC is doing the doing and so all at VAC, not just the members of the team, can experience the new for themselves.

4. Start small - The team behind Keith includesTeresa MacLean and Joey Mokler. The money behind this is tiny. But the support is big. I think this is the safer way ahead. Jesus was born in a manger. Moses was found in the Bullrushes. You keep the organizational risk and the naysayers quiet by not announcing the second coming up front.

5. Partner – The early partnership was with a group of local teen nerds – what a gift to them and what a gift to PEI. You will not have the skills inside when you start. Now VAC wish to extend this to their service delivery for Vets. They do not have the resources for this. So the plan is to Partner – Partner with other agencies that can help them build a robust service delivery platform.

6. Have a clear vision for the future where social media gives you the win – The vision for “Commemoration” (Memorials etc) was to bring the memorial to the Public. The Vision for “Commemoration” – offering meaning for the sacrifice and the lives of our vets was to give this to the public. The new service delivery goal will be to shift the web from being a big pamphlet to being the place where the services of VAC are enacted – where a vet can get what he or she needs. Finally the visions for the social needs of the vets – which in most cases exceed the program needs – is to use the web to help vets get connected to others like them so that they can help each other. So far so good!

I think that VAC have earned the right to go for the service goals now – don’t you?

I think that they offer us a process that any large organization can follow too – don’t you?

A really weird thought has been building in me for months. Have books been a bad thing?

Is this better?

If so – why?

If so – Is this the campfire of all campfires?

So what’s my argument?

Many people are convinced today that the birth of the web is making us stupid. That the web is only superficial. That only dense books can contain and spread real knowledge.

I am coming to the conclusion that the opposite is true. That books make us stupid and that the web, like the campfire and for the same reasons as for the campfire is what makes us clever.

So here goes. All our foundational knowledge was discovered around the campfire. Imagine you a hominid sitting around the fire at night. You are awake. You are looking at each other. I would imagine that at first, before we could speak, we sang or made music together. The fire elicited a social dance of interaction and community.

I think we can surmise that the campfire helped us speak and so it helped us become conscious. Something like this happened about 100,000 – 60,000 years ago. For suddenly our tool development, art and technology took off. All the foundations of our world today were discovered in a 10,000 year period. Tools had been the same for a million years. Within a 1,000 years they were completely different. We invented pottery. We invented metallurgy. The wheel. Everything we depend on was discovered then. Not only discovered but widely disseminated in a short period of time.

How did this occur?

My bet is that it happened because of the social process created by the campfire and by our hunter gatherer culture of equality. Such an environment extracts order from chaos. Design from intuition. It is ideal for the exploration of implicit knowledge. It is ideal for discovering things that we don’t know exist. It is ideal for taking half baked ideas and refining them. Let’s use a thought experiment.

How did pottery get invented? Surely no one said “Let’s have a project to invent Pottery!” How can you invent something that had never existed? No it must have happened like this – The People stopped for the night after a rainfall. The next morning, as they prepared to leave, the fire keeper noticed that beneath the coals that she was harvesting, the ground had baked to a crust. Maybe she could carry the fire in this thing – this bowl. That night as they shared the food around the fire, she told the people what had happened and showed them the “bowl” that she had lifted out of the earth the day before. And the conversation began – how had that been? Did it hold the fire well? What else could it hold? What if we put it back in the fire? Would it hold water? And on and on. Experiments were made. Some earth worked better than others. At the seasonal meeting with the Cousin Peoples, the People shared their story with the others and gave up a “bowl” as a gift their elder. At the next season meeting, the two tribes spent days sharing the stories of the experiments that they had been making…….

There was no peer review. There was no authorized way of doing it. No one was telling anyone. They were sharing and asking and arguing. They were having conversations!

But with the book comes authority. With the advent of the book, much of knowledge development stopped. Only the in group was allowed to play. What mattered was not observation. Not trial and error. Not experiment. Not sharing. But authority. Most of the accepted authority were texts that had no basis in observation or trial and error. Ptolemy, St Augustine and Galen ruled.

Worse because of the “Book” people who did observe or test were killed or persecuted. The Book stood for the ONE WAY. It spoke not you.

For a while, with the advent of the press, knowledge opened up.

But where did the great advances then come from? Did they come from the Universities? No they came from amateurs – from Natural Philosophers. Who met in clubs over dinner to talk about their work. Gradually, the “BOOK” came back. Only papers written and approved inside the authority system counted as being right. People outside the authority system were discounted.

Knowledge was seen as an explicit thing – an object. The Book was its metaphor.

But now with the web, we have a global campfire. Once again, we can play with ideas, with observations and experiments. Once again we can share with equals who will not knock us down. Even better, this time the group around the fire is not 35 people but all of us.

What new things will come from such a process? Surely amazing things. Things that could never have come from the use of books.

As a person who loves books, whose life is reading, I now wonder……

Facebook has over 400 million members and growing. Why?

Now it is clear that people are finding that online is THE PLACE to find a mate. Average time on site 22 minutes! Average age is 48. Customer spend on average  $239 a year. The industry is worth over a $1.0 billion a year. Why?

What this says to me is that:

• People are alone and cut off – they want to find safe ways of connecting
• What we want is social contact more than content
• If you have content, then you have to wrap contact around it - a Jane Austen Book Club will do it – As Hugh says make it into a Social Object
• Your content becomes a Trust builder- Is this why so many personal ads say “I am an NPR listener”? It could just as well say “I am a Tea Bagger” – still tells others who you are

Contact – real human contact is what people want. The proof is in the sex statistic – 1/3 of women have sex on the first date – why? I think because the online dating algorithms work – both feel that they are indeed a match and the barriers go down

And your online social strategy is based on what ideas?

(Via Online Schools)

Here is a great example of how to use Social Media to advance your brand – Bob Taylor of Taylor’s Guitars – cost nothing to make – captured a moment when millions will look – very personal – lots of good advice – offering a real service.

Why can’t you do this?

If we are to use the power of the network effect to gain more leverage – I think it will be essential to understand the underlying math. For like all things in the natural world – such as say Gravity – there is a mathematical framework that underlies their operations. When Newton could describe how Gravity worked, the modern world took off. When we can do the same for social networks, we will be on our way to solving the great dystopia of our time – that we have succumbed to a machine model.

The power of the social world is like gravity or light. It seems mysterious. It is easy to wax mystical about it. But I think that what is emerging via observation – just like all good science – is the math. What is ironic is that this math is well known and has been part of human knowledge for millenia. It just has never been applied to the social world before.

It is of course the Fibonacci sequence – the sequence that nature uses to order all relationships if they are to reach their full potential. You may know of the key number that seems to be the limit of Trust for humans of about 150 – called the Dunbar Number after Robin Dunbar.

Many in the Blogosphere have been working on this. Many have seen the sequence emerge naturally in say Guilds in Gaming. Some like Stowe and Valdis are seeing this in the power use of Twitter.

Here is a summary post I made on my own blog 2 years ago that pulled together the field of knowledge that existed then. It is my hope, I am a Historian, that people with a sharper brain than I can add much more to this in the future. I am more convinced than ever that the true potential of the power of social media to get important things done will be revealed once our understanding of how all of this works improves.

Not just marketing and media – but the ideal groupings for work, for learning for health, for credit, for families and for all of our lives. A world reset to our natural design versus a machine world.

————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

Dave Snowden posted this recently – I could not get Cognitive Edge to accept my comment so I post them here after his post and then add some comments and list of useful links that add to the topic.

Log(N) = 0.093 + 3.389 log(CR) (1) (r2=0.764, t34=10.35, p<0.001)

Recognise it? Well of course, it’s the best-fit reduced major axis regression equation between neocortex ratio and mean group size for the sample of 36 primate genera taken from Dunbar’s 1992 paper which was popularised, and not unduly trivialised by Malcolm Gladwell into a natural limit on human group size of 150 (or 147.8 to be exact). The idea is a simple one. The human brain has co-evolved with social conditions and as a result there is a natural limit on the number of social relationships we can maintain. Dunbar linked the number to village, nomadic and military size over time. The number is exercising several people on the ever idea-stimulating value networks list serve. The argument there relates to if this is or is not a natural limit on a network or a virtual community.150 is not the only natural number.  There are two others, so I could have titled this post The rule of 5,15 & 150. All of those numbers, plus a need to think more about identity than about individuals, should influence either evolutionary or engineering approaches to community/network design.

What I plan to do is elaborate the numbers and their origins. I then want to look at the way in which the debate around Dunbar’s law is limited by atomistic ontology. This all too common assumption, found in the anglo-saxon world assumes self sufficiency and moral autonomy of the person, and sees communities as assemblies, voluntary or otherwise of individuals. Moving away from social atomism allows to take a different view on communities, their limitations and possibilities, but that will be tomorrow’s blog.

1. Five is linked to the natural limits on the short term memory. This was first put forward by Miller’s 1956 paper and relates to time more than items (it is a common urban myth to see it as items). This means that it will vary a bit by language, different languages can compress more or less data into a defined time limit. If you have ever spoken through simultaneous translation then you will know that it takes 30% longer to say something in Spanish that it does in English. Given that the Welsh generally speak english 30% faster than the norm, this can present problems! Translation aside, the number is useful and it relates to common sense experience (always helpful). Think about how many directions you can remember, or how we organise telephone numbers. Another way to validate this is to think about models, or lists and see how many elements they have. More than five and you need a crib sheet. One of the reasons I restrict models in my own work to five elements is because of this. Less then five and they pass the paper napkin test which means they are sense making models as they can be drawn from memory, which means they can be used operationally without reference back to authority.
2. Fifteen comes from anthropology and relates to natural levels of deep trust. I define deep trust here as the ability to tolerate a degree of betrayal. The number varies a bit based on the average size of the extended family in a society and is probably an habituated pattern of behaviour learnt during key periods of plasticity for the human brain. Now readers might be able to help be here. I got this number from two sources several years ago. The number was actually an upper limit of thirty but I reduced it to fifteen for alliterative purposes as well as accepting the realities of modern civilisation compared with the tribal systems from which the number originated. Unfortunately I have lost the reference and I am trying to re-discover it to reference in the book. All help appreciated! Again this manages a common sense test. Think about the social groups to which you belong and which pass the relaxation test. This test is a simple one, its who do you feel able to relax with, without worrying too much how your are seen. I realise that this does not always apply to families! However other than in pre or post divorce situations the ideas is that it should. The size there is definitely under fifteen, and more typically is a small number of groups of around eight or nine on average.
3. One hundred and fifty is Dunbar’s law and in effect is the number if identities that you can maintain in your head with some degree of acquaints that an individual can maintain. It does not necessarily imply that you trust them, but it does mean that you can know something about them and their basic capabilities. In other words you can manage your expectations of their performance and abilities in different contexts and environments. For the moment lets consider this in terms of individuals (the switch to identity is for tomorrow’s blog). Consider your work groups and the size of your organisation. How many people do you know by name? How many people would you invite to a party? Again you can see the common sense experience coming though in the number. Now the assumption in Dunbar’s working and subsequent writing is that this level of knowledge requires physical proximity. However we now live in virtual as well as physical worlds so the nature of interactions change. The natural limit is probably in place, but its form, and the nature of its creation will have new variants for a new environment

Now these three numbers, 5, 15 & 150 have an alliterative quality which helps us remember and use them. They also have some fairly immediate and practical implications for communities and networks. That is what I want to look at in tomorrow’s blog which will come from Hong Kong. I am shortly leaving for the KMAP2006 conference at which I am keynoting for the second year, and I will also run workshop on uses of narrative in knowledge management. Hopefully I will meet up with some old friends and make some new ones, the conference has an interesting mix and looks less academic that last year when it was held in Wellington, New Zealand.

Great to find more discussion about these numbers. My bet is that by thinking only mechanistically we have “forgotten” their power and organize without any socially valid reason. This may surely be why so many organizations are so dysfunctional such as schools with say 1500 kids and no sub units. Why hospitals that merely have shifts of individuals are so unhappy. Why there is so much “stress” in most workplaces when the work itself is mundane.

The military however still keeps to these numbers. They have to – the task before them demands the full expression of what an organized group of people can do – they tend to use 8 as the base (8 men in a tent in the Roman army = a section) Sections “shrink” to 5 very quickly in action. Below 4, they are not very capable.

My bet is that 5-8 seems to work as the core unit of intimacy. Most sports teams fit this range. It enables you to pass the ball to a space knowing that the person will be there. It enables uspoken flow. It must have been the ideal hunting size.

Dave talks also about the limits to memory. You can remember a 7 number phone number but longer numbers, unless broken into sections of 3 and 4, are very hard to recall.

I recall other material suggesting that most “Tribes” in the hunter gatherer world (our cultural base) were about 35. 8 men and 8 women plus 16 youths and younger children. 35 is the platoon in the military which is the core organizing unit to get any serious work done. The Company would be about 200 as an paper ideal but would shrink in action to the 150 number which is the operational ideal.

VC friends of mine tell me that they get very concerned when they see new companies reach these staffing milestones of 8 -15 – 35 – 150. The hardest one being 15 -35 when you have to introduce some formal communication mechanisms. Complexity obviously does grow exponentially along a log scale.

Other work on gene pools suggests that 500 is the optimal number to keep enough variety. Hence tribal meetings for festivals etc that acted as genetic mixers as well.

What if these hard social numbers were brought back into formal prominence? What would happen to organizations? We see this with blogging now. My blogging social world has settled out along this gradient of 8 close intimates – about 16 close – about 35 reasonably close and a maximum world of 150. My test is my bloglines aggregator. I pay attention along the gradient.

I have also found that I can be assured that those that fit inside the 8 really do fit. I have worked with 2 of them before we ever met face to face.

So is this just an interesting topic or might it lead to an OD revolution? I add some good supporting links in the follow on:-

• Here is Ross Mayfield with his perspective of how these numbers work in the world of social media
• Here is a link to Robin Dunbar’s book – Grooming and Gossip that expands on his paper quoted by Dave
• Here is a link to a piece on the maths of genetics – that we need a population of 500 to ensure enough genetic diversity
• Here is John Robb talking about magic numbers and how terrorist cells are best organized
• A link to a brief survey of mine on the work of John Pfeiffer, author of the Emergence of Man (Out of print) on the numbers of conflict – why groups over 150 have to drive friction
• Ton Zijlstra weighs in here
• Here is I think the most comprehensive summary by Christopher Allen. I find his comments on Guild size compelling

Chris makes the point that while guilds have these total group numbers, it is rare to have more than 40 online at any one time. More on guilds by Chris here

He goes deeper and deeper into the friction that we feel inside organizations today because we do not consider the fall out from not understanding how these numbers work. I find this diagram very helpful -

This confirm my VC friends observation that going from a group of 7-8 to 50 plus is exceptionally difficult. Moving beyond 150 is also a chasm -

I’ve already noted the next chasm when you go beyond 80 people, which I think is the point that Dunbar’s Number actually marks for a non-survival oriented group. Even at this lower point, the noise level created by required socialization becomes an issue, and filtering becomes essential. As you approach 150 this begins to be unmanageable. Once a company grows past 200 you are really starting to need middle-management, but often you can’t afford it yet. Only when you get up past that, maybe at 350-500 people, does middle-management start really working, primarily because you’ve once again segmented your original departments, possibly again reducing them to Dunbar-sized groups.

• Chris also asks in this age of social networking software “Is there an effective limit to the size of your personal network. He adds a comment by a VC friend of his -

Venture Capitalist Jeff Nolan relates similar concerns:

“It strikes me that the social networking theory holds that the more volume you have, the bigger your network will become by introducing degrees of separation roughly along the lines of Metcalfe’s Law. I disagree, human networks do not grow in value by multiplying, but rather by reduction. For me, it’s the quality of relationships that enhances my professional and personal life, not the sheer numbers.”

If you know of other good links please let me know.

The show Bryant Park Project has been off the air for 2 show days and what is happening?

There are nearly 300 members of the BPP Diner that are assembling at a NIng site that is there to catch the fall out from the show.

This is twice the norms of the Dunbar number of 150 that will assure a healthy self-regulated site. My sense if that the site will grow much larger.

In only a few days I am seeing a number of patterns:

• Grieving – so important to tell the stories of the deceased many are humorous – just like we do after a person has died. In fact part of the site reminds me so much of being with friends and family grieving a loved one. This is so much more than a show being canceled
• Anger – I have set one rule for the site – Just be nice – this is a hard line but most are there but there is a lot of anger
• Relief – one of the parts of BPP that was not there except on Twitter was the ability of the members to interact with each other – many are so happy to be able to do this
• Global – many come from all over the world – we are all a bit stunned by the geography – Russia, France, Israel – so is Public Media really just American anymore?
• Struggle – to learn how the software really works – Ning is very intuitive but now there are a lot of people using it with varied experience – it could be easier – many cant see the Music link and the forum is constrained
• Getting lost – with so many people doing stuff – I can’t keep up any more and I am wondering how we are going to make sense of it all – I am hoping that Groups of interest will form
• It’s a world – the site is so big, so dynamic and so varied already that you can disappear into it for hours – redefines content for me

But I think one of things that we all miss is more structure – a hard core centre of content. I suspect that if we cannot repalce this – the site will die for nostalgia can only supply so much energy

My bottom lne is that the site is a very important experiment – can a community site with only a handful of volunteer admins create enough energy from content to keep us all coming back and to expand the site?

If we can find the answer, then we will have found the holy grail I think

So my friends – what to do – how do we put a sun into the centre of this system that will act as both the gravity pull and the energy push?

Search has not been at the forefront for many social media sites. They’ve focused on drawing traffic, building a brand, and looking for a business model. But, there is a great opportunity for social media sites to leverage search in new ways. I decided to take a look at a few top social media sites to examine how they’re using search and what’s missing.

The sites I selected were drawn from top site lists on Web2Center and Technorati. (Interestingly, I had difficulty finding the top 100 blog list on Technorati through its site search. I had to resort to a web search.)

What Can We Learn

The common denominator across these sites is to have a standard search box with a results list showing basic information about an item, and in most cases, some teaser text. Beyond that there is variation, with some sites not doing much more than the basics.

1. Old News is Old News

Freshness is an important factor in search. Social media often becomes a sequential feed. Allowing users to sort and view by date gives them a reference point from their last visit.

[Click to Enlarge]	[Click to Enlarge]
Squidoo provides sort by recently updated	Digg lets you narrow by timeline and anchors on how long something has been popular

2. Show Me What’s Popular and What’s Authoritative

Social media volume is growing. Providing insight into popularity and authority helps users make a decision to explore or not.

[Click to Enlarge]	[Click to Enlarge]
lifehacker shows # of views and comments	Digg shows # of diggs and comments and top across all topics
[Click to Enlarge]
Technorati gives an authority ranking based on “the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months”

3. Categorize To Help Me Navigate

The cloud navigation feature started with “most popular” lists. But what about most interesting to me? Enter tag clouds.

Categorization, both predefined and user-defined, is an important way to help users digest content, find related information, and navigate directly to what they like.

[Click to Enlarge]	[Click to Enlarge]
Technorati provides a tag cloud that is dynamic and changes constantly while you’re sitting on a page (while it’s interesting to see this, I don’t know if the value outweighs the distraction it creates)	Engadget provides static categories, but they’re buried below the fold
[Click to Enlarge]
TechCrunch allows you to navigation by company or product

4. Connect Me to the Community

Social media sites expand connections to link users to users. Not only does this allow users to build a community and find experts, it also helps them uncover new content by exploring what others are viewing.

[Click to Enlarge]	[Click to Enlarge]
Digg lets you see a contributor’s favorites, recent activity, history, friends and their activities, and digg stats – great insight into a contributor’s behavior and likes	StumbleUpon shows recent “stumblers” and provides “people who like” front and center at the top of search results
[Click to Enlarge]
Technorati links you to a contributor’s blogs and exposes how popular each blog is

What’s the Opportunity

Through social media, search teams have a new source of input. With this they can build new practices around “social search” taking all the clues provided to uncover user behavior, intent and preferences. Social search is not limited to externally-facing sites. It also can be applied to sites behind the firewall that employ social media techniques.

Some additional ways search teams might use this input include:

• Making use of comments. Core content is searched against and exposed, but comments provide an additional source of content.
• Interpreting and exposing sentiment. Sentiment gives us great insight into opinions and preferences (see A Certain Sentiment in the Air).
• Using behavior as a feedback loop. Social media is a rich source of user interaction with content and it is captured in a real day-to-day situation. This behavior can be used as input to user experience design supplementing what is gathered through simulated tests or surveys.

We are just starting to tap the value of this source and the ways in which we use the input will expand.