Bookmarking inspirations
Oprah, with a simple reference, can propel a book onto the NY Times bestseller list. Paris Hilton, with no traditional talent to speak of, can install into the common dialect of generation the phrase “that’s hot”. There is no doubt that these and others who are plugged into traditional media outlets strongly influence what’s hot and what’s not.
There are, however, many hot trends that strongly and stealthfully establish themselves without the aid of traditional media sources. Malcolm Gladwell begins his book, The Tipping Point, with a recount of the resurgence of Hush Puppies, a popular shoe brand of the late ‘50s. In the mid ‘90s, a small group of no-name, club-going kids in Soho began sporting Hush Puppies and somehow started a “social epidemic” with the classic $30 shoe quickly making frequent appearances in hip Manhattan bars and fashion runways. Within a year, the once forgotten shoe was sold in department stores nationwide, becoming a staple in wardrobes across the country once again. Throughout his book, Gladwell explores a number of contagious trends that seem to stem from small, unusually informed, and faceless groups of people who are influential through interpersonal means. Gladwell contends that finding and gaining insights from these “influentials” can quickly drive and maintain a brand’s “cool factor”. Airwalk, for example, was extremely successful at tapping influentials in the skateboard community to transform what was counterculturally “rad” to what was mainstreamly cool.
The ability for underground ideas or trends to take hold may not be the product of influentials themselves, as Gladwell asserts, but, rather, the interconnectivity of those looking to be influenced. Recently Duncan Watts, a professor of sociology at Columbia University, conducted experiments in social contagion by performing thousands of computer simulations of fictitious populations. In the simulations he and his colleague, Peter Dodds, manipulated variables related to one’s ability to influence others and one’s tendency to be influenced. The simulations showed that influential characteristics had far less impact than had been believed and, in fact, didn’t seem to be required at all. The widespread transmission of influence through networks was not reliant on a few influential people but, rather, a critical mass of influenced people. In contrast to the belief that there is a small, uniquely influential group of people responsible for creating pandemic trends, Watts and Dodds’s research suggests that influence is not driven by the influentials, but by the influenced–turning the focus away from recruiting those with influential traits to helping ordinary people reach and influence others just like them.
This outreach is happening right now on social bookmarking sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, and Newsvine. These in addition to others allow anyone to troll the online universe for ideas, news, and commentary and attach tags and catchy descriptions to their online finds. As bookmarked pages receive votes of approval by fellow community members, their influence rises to the front page of the social networks. It is these front pages that propagate a global cascade as viral word of mouth spreads beyond the bookmarking sites to mainstream outlets. The next time you are made aware of a “buzzy” website, an unusual take on the news, or a funny video clip, chances are you owe your awareness to communities of diversely ordinary people interested in influencing and, more importantly, being influenced.
A recent Wall Street Journal article revealed just how powerfully influential these communities have become. The WSJ found that the substantial number of bookmarking submissions originate from a low percent of users. For example, of Digg’s 900,000 registered users, 30 were responsible for nearly one-third of the posts that made it to the front page of the site. This small group of users has become influentially popular by consistently finding interesting and relevant content. Consequently, their bookmarks are monitored by a large number of community members and are more likely to receive the numerous votes of approval needed to catapult their finds to the front page. As Gladwell proposes in his book, the influentials are faceless and small in number, but as Watts and Dodds suggest, the network effects of those influenced drives the influence, rather than the personal characteristics of those influencing. In fact, this small group of influentials is surprisingly ordinary. Some of the most influential people cited in the WSJ article include:
• Pamela Drew – a mother of three in New York
• Henry Wang – a high-school senior and varsity tennis player outside Chicago
• Cliff Worthington – a 45-year-old English Teacher in Osaka Japan
• Jeff Hoard – a 25-year-old worker in a shipping warehouse in British Columbia
• Adam Fuhrer – a 12-year-old hockey fan in Toronto
• Elise Bauer – A marketing consultant in California
Companies have long struggled to harness the knowledge found within their walls. Their pursuit is to ultimately gain a competitive advantage by bringing awareness to expertise and influential ideas. Excluding technical knowledge banks, like Xerox’s Eureka system, which has had great success, efforts in this area have lead to clumsy, often unpopulated repositories with disappointing returns.With each passing day, our world becomes flatter as the universe of knowledge and ideas becomes evermore entwined.
If the struggle is to stay on the wave of innovation through knowledge management, why do we so often limit our efforts to harvesting an internal landscape? The vast majority of our workforce is being defined as knowledge workers as the information age continues to mature. Productive time is increasingly used to troll for new ideas, and surely workers are looking beyond internally limiting and disappointing knowledge management systems for inspiration.
It’s time to open the shutters and leverage each worker’s knowledge collection effort by utilizing social bookmark technologies–allowing employees to bookmark both internet and intranet inspirations. We should limit our tireless efforts of formally wrestling knowledge from the minds of employees and, rather, provide them tools to tag and catalogue the world of found anecdotes and ideas, allowing their influences to percolate to the top of an organization’s strategic list–separating what’s hot from what’s not.