I’ve been updating my blogroll after having a bit of a switch around on my blog. One of the blogs that’s on the must-read social media list is Jeff Bullas’. Check it out. Here’s the best nuggets from his latest post: “10 Principles At Work In Creating Buzz In Social Networking“.
1. Social Networks are Invisible...even in the age of social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace
No matter how hard you try you cannot find the “strength of the tie” and this comes down to
- the privacy of the networks
- people don’t reveal their true network ties
- there is a lot of noise in the data that comes from these sites
2. People Link With Other Who Are Similiar To Them
An example of this is that each sport has it’s own social network, Golfers hang out with golfers and compare notes on things like golf clubs. This “Homophily Principle” has 2 basic implications
- They tend to form clusters
- The more similiar your employees are to your customersthe easier the communications will be
3. People Who Are Similiar To Each Other Form Clusters
This can be simply shown with examples of why do Hells Angels travel in packs or girls in second grade play together. Clusters can informally adopt products together such as “Apple” fanatics.
Note: If you product becomes becomes the standard within a cluster , it makes it dificult for competitors to uproot you from this postion.
4. Buzz Spreads Through Common Nodes
This means that even though we as human beings might have only “6 degrees of seperation” that transferring buzz between different structures or nodes has a high degree of friction.
5. Information Gets Trapped In Clusters
You can have different clusters in the same building or company such as Marketing and PR. Spreading buzz from one group to another is rare. It normally means that a story can be trapped within the marketers or PR.
To read the next five, check out Jeff’s blog.
