As We Now Think

In my last post, I argued that the effects of social media will not simply empower all consumers, nor reflect common public opinion, but will give disproportionate influence to a narrow group. Because there will always be disparity in levels of skill and participation, understanding these effects requires understanding human social behavior. In this post, I will briefly discuss how we can contextualize these media.

In a January 2008 White Paper (‘Distributed Influence: Quantifying the Impact of Social Media’), Jonny Bentwood of Edelman proposed a formula to analyze the influence of any particular individual online. Namely, he suggested that influence can be computed as: (Volume and Quality of Attention x Time)/Size and Quality of Audience.

That it is possible to create a formula (albeit incomplete) to quantify influence on an individual level says more about the potential of social media than I ever could. While such a formula is useful in certain industries (communications and marketing), I am mentioning Bentwood’s paper to highlight a different aspect: the ‘Forrester Social Technographics Ladder’ on page 12. According to this, more than half of the users on the internet (52%) are not in any involved in social media. Only 13% qualify as actual content creators.

What are we to make of these findings? As already suggested, Bentwood argues that communicators and marketing professionals ought to quantify the influence of particular individuals in order to effectively find the most influential. However, I am not as interested in micro-level communications here. Rather, my focus is on the larger, societal effects of social media. Thus, such calculations are secondary to my approach.

I want to find out what differentiates those 13% of creators from everyone else. Only be isolating the factors that predict one’s status on the ladder can we make sense of how these media will shape our commerce, politics, and society.

In my previous post, I suggested that they are most likely younger, well-educated, and of relatively high socioeconomic status. They will tend to cluster in creative industries (wherein the major function is the creation of ideas rather than things). They are most likely white males.

In short, this subset of the population looks a lot like the stereotype of the ‘hipster’.

It stands to reason that the urban hip subculture is starting to have very definite impacts on our society at large. But there is a potential complication here that hasn’t been well-studied yet is extremely important: the possibility that this is all just an echo chamber.

According to the Forrester ladder, 35% of net users fall into categories in between ‘creators’ and ‘inactives’.  These ‘critics’, ‘collecters’, ‘joiners’ and ’spectators’ are the most interesting segment of the population, because they are the most likely to be influenced by the creators. They are the audience.

So when a spectator looks to content created by peers, are they actually looking at content created by ‘peers’? For example, when a 35 year-old, middle-class black woman looks at a blog, is she more or less likely to look at a blog written by someone who fits that description? I know that such a woman would be less likely to create a blog herself, but I don’t know what she looks at.

Understanding what these users are like is the next step in understanding how social media will effect our society. It will help provide necessary context to predict and shape the future for politicians, businesses, campaigns and anyone else interested in shaping minds. It is my next goal.