This post is the first in a series where I will share personal observations and theories about the evolution of the social media space. They are worth every cent that you paid for them. For future posts in the series, please see other materials I have tagged with "social theory" by visiting tom.gather.com/social+theory.
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Information Cascades
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Most of us grew-up in the age of the newspaper. No doubt, children born today will find it curious that we used to pulp millions of trees, bake them into thin paper that was put on giant spools, print on that paper with high speed presses, cut and fold that paper into single newspapers, and then rush those newspapers to stores and homes across the country. They will find it equally odd that we used to wait for our news and information, a nation of uninformed until trusted network news broadcast it into livingrooms across the country.
What may go unnoticed, or less noticed, than the shifting forms and frequency of information delivery is our method of discovery. The power of the William Randolph Hearsts of old or the Rupert Murdochs of today to set the agenda for a group of readers is fading. (Murdoch realized this early, and capitalized on that knowledge with the acquisition of MySpace). The editorially created homepages of most newspapers offline and online are seen less and less, by fewer and fewer people. The centralized authority that has focused public opinion for decades is giving way to something else.
That something else is "social discovery." Social discovery is, broadly defined, discovering new things from interactions with other people (rather than, say, a trusted editorial board). Millions of people use Digg to leverage what James Surowiecki calls "the wisdom of crowds" to find new and interesting things. Here, we follow a galloping herd of others toward new things, often unsure of why the herd is shifting or changing direction.
Over the last year, we have seen a number of services, Gather included, offer platforms that enable a different kind of social discovery, a highly personal kind. This kind of personal social discovery maps well to how people learn offline, with information, perspective, or recommendations travelling through trusted social connections.
We often learn new things from our friends. Sometimes we learn through a direct recommendation from a friend (e.g. “You should see Vicky, Christina, Barcelona!”) and sometimes it comes by observing what friends are doing. This happens every day in our offline worlds.
On social platforms today, this kind of personal social discovery happens more quickly and travels more broadly than ever before. When one member shares something on Gather, for example, we notify her friends. You may have noticed that each time you come to Gather, for example, we list everything that your friends have shared or done in one place. These things appear on your "My Gather" page.
These shared items often stimulate conversation between friends, because they are socially relevant and timely. When a member joins a conversation, we notify that member’s friends as well. These comments become guideposts for the commenter’s friends, pointing them to the original experience on Gather.
As the conversation grows, an increasing number of people are notified, and have the opportunity to join the dialog. Through these comments made on Gather’s social platform, information flows through trusted relationships to broader and broader circles. We call this information cascade(tm). Social discovery broadens and accelerates as information cascades through broader and broader sets of friends.
This type of social discovery allows the people we trust to play the role that newspaper editors and television producers used to play: they guide us to new information. Through their own sharing and the conversations they have, our friends lead us to national debates (on politics, rights, and religion), things that entertain us (poems, fiction, recipes), and things that connect us (photos and videos of family and friends).
Personal social discovery has a few advantages over the "herd" methods of discovery (that's not to say that herd discovery doesn't have advantages as well). First, we know the person that is pointing us to something new. This means that we can evaluate their recommendation (and do, unconsciously and immediately) based on their personal brand. Second, when we discover something socially, we are guaranteed to end-up there with people we know. That permits us to have conversations with trusted people, not just the random strangers we might encounter on traditional media properties. These conversations can continue online and in our real world lives, connecting us better than ever before. Third, by connecting with only people we know as friends (or by focusing on only people that we know and trust using settings for our feeds), we can avoid spam/gaming that sometimes hit herd systems. Our friends are pretty unlikely to pass spam our way (and those that do will find themselves lonely pretty quickly).
It has be fascinating to watch how social discovery is working on Gather since the re-launch of our social platform (feeds, etc) in the spring, and the improvement of that platform just last month. I'd love your perspective on what you have experienced with social discovery, if it is changing how you learn and share, what impact you expect it will have on traditional media, and where you think things will go next. I'll share additional observations in the weeks to come.
[Note: comments will be moderated to keep the conversation focused on the theory side of social media. I encourage anyone who would like to share feature requests, suggestions, comments, or complaints about the Gather experience specifically to visit our group on Building a Better Gather. Thanks!]
by
Tom Gerace
Member since:
August 31, 2005 Social Discovery (Media, Audience, Organic Editorial, and the New, New World)
September 03, 2008 11:16 AM EDT
(Updated: March 11, 2009 01:44 PM EDT)
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Comments: 22
I feel that "social discovery" is an important part of any home space like Gather. We draw our friends into the places we feel comfortable. We connect most time with people whose content has interested us. You are right in that Gather is a large Social Discovery network. Just remeber tho that feeds and what our connections do is not as important to most of us as is seeing what they have written, photographed, or videoed. For this I am greatful for the change MyGather page. The "Social Discovery" only works when the majority is comfortable with the network.
I haven't seen Digg blocked before. It is a site trusted and used by millions of people every month. I wonder what objection your anti-spyware/antivirus program had.
Thanks too for the kind words about the experience. We will always have work to do, but I am glad you like the general direction.
It is so true that the expansion your drawings show depict how large our lives can become, and for the better through this venue. It is a joy to be a member of such a form of communication, imagine writing letters, or actually going to a place to meet the people we do, and form bonds with. Who could do it? So thanks for the food for thought Tom, great article, and though we many be fussy during upgrades, it is only missing our friends, that we owe to Gather that are now really in our lives. Not counting the contests, the rewards, and many perks that are also thrown in there. Keep up the great work for one of the best sites around. EllenB
I want to personally thank you for having started Gather. I am enjoying the many aspects of it; and I think it is becoming a remarkable tool that can help we Gather members become better at developing our communication and writing skills, regardless of the genres of our preference. Although some of the changes have been posed a challenge to adaptation, I have seen where they have proven to be in our best interest. I commend you and your staff for persevering.
I can see, too, where this, “Social Discovery (Media, Audience, Organic Editorial, and the New, New World)” can encourage the more reticent to branch out, experiment with people and/or groups with which they are comfortable, then springboard into the unfamiliar with a tad more confidence.
I appreciate all of the hard work you and your staff do for us here at Gather. You are providing a wonderful arena of discovery and insightful networking avenues from which we can all benefit.
Thank You Very Much!
You raise a great question, and one I have been thinking a lot about. Where do talented reporters go, as audience shifts from traditional media toward platforms that enable social discovery? And where to readers go for quality opinion and thought?
In this socially connected world, personal brands (whether people know you and, if they do, how they view you) seem to climb in importance as traditional media brands struggle. There was a time when people trusted the institution. Now, often, they come to read the columnist. Would you trust Maureen Dowd or Thomas Friedman less if they were not under the New York Times banner? Perhaps the success of the Huffington Post demonstrates this best, where known personalities brought audiences to HuffPo, before the site had established its brand.
When we began Gather, we wanted to create something of a content marketplace, where authors and ideas could compete for eyeballs. One of the key reasons we launched the Gather points system was to create a platform for contributors to earn supplemental income, and perhaps someday a living, as audience shifted from traditional media sources toward social media platforms like Gather. I still believe this will develop; we are currently paying-out enough in rewards to the community to fund a small reporting staff. That will grow as Gather does.
What is clear, though, is that contributors must build or bring their own audience to sites like Gather to succeed in this way. Book authors or recognized journalists have a good start, particularly if they built email lists that they can use to invite people into their space.
Writers must be prepared to build that audience (and see your success grow with it) over a reasonable time horizon. Gather may provide early critical mass, but those people that come with a group of people that already know and like them, contribute regularly, and grow their audience by reaching-out on Gather and off-Gather (and similar sites) will earn the greatest return. In effect, if you are the "product" that you are selling, you need to market yourself to the marketplace.
For our part, Gather's job (and the job of similar sites) will be to create a system where:
- people who know and like you are informed when you share something new
- we allow people to find the best quality work on a topic easily (and thus discover new contributors)
- we can monetize your traffic for you and share revenues with you
We do the first and third of these today, with reasonable success. We now need to focus on the second item and find scalable methods of calling out the best content on the site. Our current Explore page is a first shot at that, but we know we have work to do in this area.
I do believe, though, that we are moving to new ways to discover information. In a world where new information sources come online each year, social discovery plays a key role in sorting-out the good and great from the mundane, worthless, wrong, or repetitive. I expect this shift will accelerate over time.
Thanks for this article. I'm fascinated by the mechanics of social networking.
I also want to personally thank you for starting Gather, as it has made possible some things I've been wanting to do but had no platform from which to do them.
I've read Surowieki's book, and while I enjoy "social discovery" for the arts, I'm reluctant to rely on it for news and other hard information.
The sheer difficulty of "vetting" my work on Gather has caused me to go off-site for editing. Gather isn't set up to encourage input from others before publication. I realize that part of this is due to the hybrid nature of social networking, which is somewhere between talking and reading print.
I just hope that not too many people rely on social networking for important facts that need verification. Social networks have very few professional-quality editors, and I don't expect that they will ever have anything resembling the "fact-checking" department of a newspaper.
Social discovery provides a new way to find content (and perhaps to encourage discussion with people that share your interests), but it does not fulfill the others. We have considered authoring tools that, for example, accomplish "story assignment" by showing topics that drive frequent searches or browsing.
On fact/source checking, of course, there is a much bigger challenge. I watch the wiki companies with great interest to see what they are doing. For our part, today, we rely on organizations like Harvard Medical School that have this function internally when we need reliable sources (see harvardhealth.gather.com).
Thanks again, Ann.
I have noticed that Gather employs some professional writers to cover important and/or technical issues, and that's highly appreciated.
Your idea of assigning stories based on leads from Gather's search engines sounds intriguing. "What Does the Crowd Want to Know?" is an interesting reverse use of Surowiecki's "Wisdom of the Crowd."
Ann beat me to my biggest concern. Often, I see opinion pieces presented at factual information. I enjoy and write opinion pieces, so I am not complaining that they exist. I worry that when they are not labeled as such, or written so that it is obvious, they are not serving the greater good as well as they should. To compare to the newspaper, my letters to the editor are not published on the front pages as news; they are placed under a heading that lets the reader know this is my opinion.
My other concern is that in this forum - and others like it - people often tend to follow friends instead of principles. The discussion under an article that contains inaccurate information often contains nothing but "great job" comments and if someone comes in clear up that information, that person is called a troll and/or an attacker. This can be a great disservice to people who are turning to a site like this for news or information.
I never thought of it before in the online function. It makes sense though, when I hold it up to the interactions I have here and other places online.
I'm an old horse in a new barn. But I have been figuring out the new opportunities we have because of the Internet and our personal usage.
We can do amazing things depending on how we use the Internet.
I have good friends that have developed an entire social network environment that is translated into community growth. The things they have developed are astounding and I feel privileged to have become a small part of that.
this is something that, as a writer and photographer and someone who makes her living that way, I've been thinking about quite often as well. the way I frame the subject of my work is most often in the area of inspiration, really --connecting people with music and musicians which might intrigue and inspire them, from whom they might learn more about the world and themselves. sometimes that's giving fresh perspective on the work of a well known artists, sometimes it's talking with someone who is less widely known, sometimes it's making connections between what's said in music and other parts of life, sometimes it's making connections among the work of different artists. crowd sourcing is a real challenge with that sort of work, still learning.
I am a member of MySpace, Facebook and hi5. None of those sites can compare with the social networking aspects that are available to the community on Gather. For that, I thank you. Thank you for founding this site, and thank you for continuing to tweak it to make it a better place and to help keep up with trends in the marketplace. I know that as a business person, you have to constantly watch the trends and then tweak your business plan, or your business runs the risk of running stale and then eventually failing. However, you must be doing something right, Because you continue to attract new members, you keep rolling out new promotions and it appears that your loyal members are staying in droves. Congratulations!
As far as social discovery goes, I really don't pay too much attention to the feeds. I find them too confusing. Rather, I have set it up so that I will be emailed to an outside email address whenever a connection posts an article, a pic or a video. But, I do like the friend of a friend that you set up on the home page.
I see another trend on our horizon. Along with the decline in the newspapers, with most of the going online and losing subscriptions, and social networking sites taking over with news, and things like Twitter all abuzz, I am a huge fan of texting. Not texting like the kids are texting - texting each other. I get text alerts from two television stations - from two different towns, one from a radio station in one town, and I was getting text alerts from NBC during the Olympics. What this means is that I am getting news from the television stations before they even post the news on their websites and before they break the news on television. I think this is a great service and a wave of the future, and another type of social networking.
Thanks for listening!
Andrea LaGrow
It is difficult for to explain to someone who hasn't been involved in an online discussion how it works. Discussing this with co-workers, we realized we are a group who for the most part have been part of virtual communities since the old BBS days. It is second nature to us to converse online by discussion board or IM. We figure that explaining a discussion board to someone is almost the same as trying to explain how to eat a sandwich. We wonder why it isn't intuitive to them, especially when they're in our age bracket or younger.
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