horsepigcow

After a lovely dinner with some friends and a half a bottle of wine, I was snuggled up with my dog and my laptop, thinking about some upcoming presentations and the assumptions I had in my approach. These assumptions are:

• For those who share their personal lives online, the majority aren’t too concerned with privacy as we understood it previously (concerns about security, etc.) and will freely trade privacy for the benefits of openness
• The benefits of openness are mostly to do with connecting with other people – both friends and friendly strangers – but also growing one’s social capital (increasing network, access to resources, goodwill, trust, etc)
• The idea is that the more open we are, the more we personally and professionally benefit, but sharing – in itself – is seen as positive
• Things seen as ‘inane babble’ to those who don’t share (what we are eating, where we are going, random thoughts) are highly important to those who do share and are part of the fabric that connects us
• Above all, those who share want to be heard – this is not seen as narcissistic nor egotistical, but rather as a contribution to the greater good that is connecting, building trust and creating community

Poking around the web, this type of information was philosophically waxed upon, but not really quantified. Most surveys were centered in buyer behavior and tool usage. There weren’t any questions being asked about human to human connection. At the same time, I received a survey from Cindy Kelly who I thought asked some great in-depth questions, so I clicked a link at the end of her survey to make my own.

The results? In just 24 hours, the survey spread through Twitter, Facebook and email and over 1,200 people took the time to answer the hacked together survey (questions formed unscientifically and from my heart).

Now I get to look at the data, which on first glance is WOW. People truly expressed themselves in amazing ways. I’m already publishing the results openly and raw for anyone to see (and here is the pdf of the summary results). The survey, itself, was completely anonymous, but I’ve glanced through to make sure nobody said anything too revealing to identify themselves. I’m releasing the data under a CC-attribution license so anyone can use it in their own work. This much value cannot be kept under wraps!

I’m going to take my next steps unconventionally as well. It’s not going to be one of those reports where I have some graphs and type out paragraphs reiterating the graphs. During the survey, I had several people pass along amazing resources that align with my questions:

• A fantastic New York Times column by John Tierney on what nytimes.com articles people shared via email over a one year period – great stuff forwarded by Matthieu Guyonnet-Duluc
• A great survey of a similar nature to mine (but asking slightly different questions) by Samir Balwani – forwarded by Tamar Weinberg
• danah boyd’s talk from SXSW Interactive this year that brings up some interesting points about the new privacy being control. – discussed on the Project VRM List
• A 2003 Paper by Jonathan Haidt and Dacher Kelter on awe that was referenced in the Tierney NYTimes column as the thing most likely to incite sharing articles.

I’ll be using some of this material (and some of my other research/experience) to analyze and interpret the data. If you have any additional resources, I’d be very open to including them in the report/analysis.

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A few people have expressed their concerns to me that this is research being done outside of an academic institution or not following a recognized research methodology. FWIW, I did an undergrad honors thesis, was on the Dean’s List, loved writing papers (always got A’s) and ended up doing a stint as a research assistant to masters and ph.d. students – many of whom followed the letter of the law when it came to research but ended up with really boring outcomes. I may not be doing this ‘right’ (meaning scientifically or under any rules), but I am doing this with the right level of curiosity and openness. Perhaps recognized research methodology is another one of those old skool dinosaurs that needs to get a little more creative. Either way, the raw data is open so feel free to interpret it in the way you’d like!

In the book as well as in previous definitions of Whuffie, I’ve included the idea that reciprocity is a core part of the definition. But what I probably should have outlined is that the type of reciprocity I’m talking about is indirect and non-obligatory. Here is the rough definition taken from previous posts and from the book:

The sum of the reputation, influence, bridging capital and bonding capital, access to ideas and talent, access to resources, potential access to further resources, saved up favors, accomplishments (resumes, awards, articles, etc.) and the Whuffie of those who you have relationships with.

I first realized the power of reciprocity when I read Matt Ridley’s The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation. His main thesis (though I highly recommend reading as it’s full of great anthropological evidence) is that human beings are wired to cooperate because that is how we survive. We help people out because there may be a time in our future that we will need help, too. But reciprocity in Ridley’s thesis isn’t direct – i.e. I do you this favor, then you do me that favor. In fact, the most powerful acts of generosity are without direct return. The more we help others, the stronger our own status becomes. If we help people out without request of the favor being returned, we increase our bank of goodwill. If the favors are performed as a tit for tat, the goodwill bank stays empty.

This theme continues through books like The Generous Man: How Helping Others is the Sexiest Thing You Can Do by Tor Norretranders and Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships by Daniel Goleman. Both books supply more evidence that helping others increases our status in society because of the idea of reciprocity. The power lies in the idea of reciprocity, not the direct exchange of favors.

Along the way I’ve encountered multiple misinterpretations of reciprocity where I’ve been challenged by contacts in my social network with the question, “I did this for you, now I want you to do this for me.” There are two types of reciprocity at work. One, which is described by Ridley, Norretranders and Goleman is indirect reciprocity. You do me a favor and in the future when you need something that I can help out with, I will voluntarily help you. The ideal situation is that the favor is about equivalent to the favor you performed for me. For example, you introduce me to a contact that can help me out in a situation and, down the road, I see that you could use a similar introduction to help you out. There is time and a lack of obligation between the favors. The second situation is direct reciprocity, which is more transactional and can be with or without obligation. You make an introduction then ask me if I can also make an introduction to someone in your network. When obligation comes into play, you say, “I will make this introduction for you, but only if you make this introduction for me.”

The thing about direct and obligatory reciprocity that bothers me is that there is no generosity involved. The motivation is clear. You want something from me and you are only willing to do something nice for me if I give that to you. It is no different than me paying directly for a good or service and there is no bond left between us. In fact, the obligatory nature of it may even leave a goodwill deficit behind. I no longer want to accept any favors from you in the future because I know they come with a price. And the price means there have been no favors performed. This is essentially where the idea of reciprocity has earned its negative reputation as it becomes more akin to coersion than cohesion between multiple parties.

It is always best to leave a surplus of goodwill in your account with friends and leave the transactions to a disconnected world. When it comes to increasing one’s Whuffie/social capital, it’s important to proceed on the side of generosity. Great generosity with people will be recognized and, when it is needed, reciprocity will be voluntary and bountiful. Anything less – favors bound by obligation or tit-for-tat – is part of a disconnected transactional context that is best left to bullies, cartels and gangs.

I’ve spoken before about whuffie deposits and withdrawals before. I’d like to think I deposit a lot into my whuffie account. I help people out with their campaigns, vote for them when they ask and generally follow links, photos and blog posts I see and RT, comment and pass along when necessary. I also spend a good amount of time helping friends out with advice, time and encouragement as well as spending a good amount of time on giving stuff out in general for free (posting links from my research, writing blog posts like this one, working for a large percentage of time on movements that help the general community like Coworking, etc.). So, all in all, I deposit quite a bit into my whuffie account.

On the withdrawal side of things, I ask for very little. I have only asked for RT’s and passing things along when it has to do with a charity or a movement that benefits others. I rarely, if ever, pass along links to my blogposts and ask people to read (although I do post them to twitter now since they are infrequent). I love to highlight others work more than mine and have a problem in general asking for withdrawals.

So, when the voting for Cogaoke came up, I decided that I could ‘spend’ some of that saved up social capital/whuffie and get myself enough votes to be near the top of the performing list.

How it works: last year the fine folks at Happy Cog created Cogaoke, a once a year karaoke contest taking place at SXSW Interactive. Contest hopefuls created a profile and got people to vote for them to compete. Only the top 20 voted would get to compete for the coveted title of Cogaoke Champion. I was #21, which meant I missed out on competing and went and cheered on my friends who got to compete in the top 20. This year, Cogaoke is only allowing the top 15 voted up in advance to compete and changed the rules of voting (you can only vote once per day – last year, you could refresh your browser and game the system). Being utterly disappointed that I didn’t get to compete last year, I was prepared this year. I had to treat this seriously if I was going to get in the top 15 and be allowed to compete.

So everyday for the past ten days, I’ve been barraging my followers on Twitter and my friends on Facebook to vote for me, trying everything from enticing them with the fact we will wear lingerie to perform Lady Marmalade to explaining that the vote itself takes less than 20 seconds to complete (no sign up required). I even posted a screenshot on Flickr giving instructions that show how easy it is.

Taking into account that there are four of us in our group doing the same thing daily and cumulatively having the largest following on Twitter and Facebook, the results have been quite shocking and a little disheartening. Calculating the number of votes we get per day, it’s just over 100. Divided between four of us, that is 25 each. And seeing that I’m voting 5x for myself (one on each browser and one on my phone browser) each day, that’s 20 per day! Seeing that I have 31,815 followers on Twitter alone, that’s 0.06% of my followers that are actually voting (and that’s taking into account that people are voting only once!). Not to mention that I also got the infamous Gary Vaynerchuk to ask his 878,000+ followers to vote and my SEO friend, Dean B to sprinkle it through is network…which got us probably a couple dozen votes in total.

I’ve said this before but haven’t had great proof of it: NUMBERS OF FOLLOWERS DO NOT MATTER. I did a quick survey of the top 15 as of 3:00 pm today, comparing their ‘reach’ (twitter followers/facebook friends) and their votes and as you read down the list you will see that there is absolutely no correlation as to how many votes people have compared to their ‘reach’:

Now…I won’t make any leaps into why it is that four attractive women who are real people, give a good amount to their community, have loads of followers, and offered lingerie donning have such a low percentage of votes to Twitter followers. I’m sure there are loads of factors involved, but I will say this:

• your number of followers has little to do with your ability to influence
• the larger the number, it seems, the lower the engagement per follower generally
• numbers do not equal action in the real world – which should be the true measure of influence

Certainly, voting for a karaoke contest is not an action of higher purpose, I get that, but the ‘spend’ of 10-20 seconds should correlate at some level. I’ve seen similar discrepancies when trying to engage at a low time/energy spend high purpose level (asking to retweet and/or vote for a good cause).

I pretty much know for a fact that numbers don’t matter, so some follow up questions to this are:

• have networks grown so big and saturated with content that few people pay attention anymore?
• did RickRolls, spam and phishing get us to the point where we don’t trust clicking on links anymore?
• does everyone just hate karaoke? Or me? Or me singing karaoke?
• since the promise of social networks and influence is obviously bunked, is there truly a path of influence that is decidedly old skool? (for instance, RogerNiner, who is a Karaoke Artist in his real life actually has a great list of people who support and follow him for his gigs via email) Or is it impossible to *really* figure it out because there are so many mediums and everyone has a different depth of engagement?

At the end of the day, I’m glad this happened. I’ve been looking for a good example to show in my presentations that demonstrates how little the numbers of followers/friends on social networks means when it comes to real world action. Unfortunately, the example may cost me the ability to compete for the second year in a row in Cogaoke…

Oh yeah…and of course VOTE here if you haven’t already! Today is the final day! (no sign up required btw)