October 29 - Significance, Influence

October 29 - Significance, Influence

Chapter 7 of Design to Thrive explains the dynamics of building significance among the members of an online community.  One of the difficult aspects of creating a sense of significance is a sort of paradox between letting people into a group on an arbitrary basis in order to build a member base and the resulting lack of value they might feel in having become members so easily.  Essentially, letting people easily become members of a group makes them value their membership less, and so social media authors must learn how to juggle exclusivity and inclusion when building social media.  This factor of building membership based on exclusivity is also known as social capital.  It basically builds the significance of a group because when building a community, quality should be valued over quantity.  This is how Facebook started out, and when they went public a lot of its members were actually upset over the loosened criteria for joining.  I've personally felt the same way in my martial arts career as I've seen more and more karate schools offer advancement based on less and less stringent guidelines over the years.  My black belt was a very difficult achievement and took a long time to reach, so nowadays when I see small children who have only been in martial arts for a few years walking around with black belts of their own , I tend to get frustrated.  Not only do I feel that they deserve theirs less, but the value of my black belt goes down.  To say the least, in regards to significance in both martial arts and social media authoring, it all boils down to quality over quantity.

Mashable's business section contains an informative infographic on the criteria of Influence, which begins with a history of Influence that began in 1704 with the first recorded advertisement.  Obviously, social media is much different today than it was 300 years ago, but some of the fundamental dynamics remain the same.  The graphic explains the split between two main schools of thought on Influence. The first is called "the law of the few," and was first posited by a guy named Malcolm  Gladwell.  This law states that influence is driven by small groups of people with massive followings.  The other side of the argument was first presented by Duncan Watts, and is known as "the pass-around power of everyday people."  Watts's argument seems to hold more weight, and the facts support it.  It's simple, really - consumers trust their peers more than any other form of advertising, and that's something social media authors must keep in mind when building Influence in any online community.

October 8 - Made to Stick - Ch. 3 & 4

Chapter 1 of Made to Stick discusses the necessity of simplicity in getting ideas to stick.  A story itself doesn't need to be simple in order to stick; rather, Heath & Heath explain that simplicity is part of what makes up an effective schema, which in turn helps us to grasp concepts faster and more easily.  A great example we've dealt with in our class recently has been in writing executive summaries for our formal recommendation reports.  Rather than bogging the reader down with a complex slew of information that would otherwise detract from his or her comprehension, the executive summary quickly details the main points of the entire report; it's basically the brass tax or the gist of whoever the report was made for needs to know.  Heath & Heath call these facts the core ideas.  For a concept to be easily understood it must be simple, and it must access the core ideas of whatever is being expressed.  Going along the same military analogy the writers use in the beginning of the chapter, military commanders everywhere discuss battle plans on two levels, strategy and tactics, and Heath & Heath explain that an idea which sticks should be expressed on a strategic level rather than a tactical one.  In hostile situations as well as those outside of battlefield, a given strategy is the large-scale plan for what a commander wants to happen.  For instance, a commander's strategy could be to capture a given bunker - that's all there is to it.  Where tactics come in, however, is the nitty-gritty details of how that strategy must be carried out.  A sticky idea is one that is strategic, and does not waste time with tactical information.

Chapter 2 discusses two important questions that must be asked in getting ideas to stick: How do I get people's attention, and how do I keep it?  One answer that Heath & Heath offer for addressing both of those questions is making those ideas unexpected.  As they rightly point out, "The first problem with communication is getting people's attention" (64).  So what's one of the best ways to do that?  Well, catching them off guard is one great way.  One of my favorite high school teachers got our attention on the first day of class.  None of us had ever seen or heard of her before, and when she walked into the classroom, she immediately seemed like she was in a horrible mood.  The first thing she did was give us a pop quiz, and got more and more noticeably upset as the class went on.  She made such a show of her supposedly evil demeanor that it was all we talked about for the rest of the day.  The next day, we showed up to class and she was an entirely different person.  She was all smiles, friendly as could be, and had even tossed out our pop quizzes from the previous day.  It was all a rouse to just to catch us off guard, and to be sure, she has always stuck in my mind, even to this day.

October 1 - Design to Thrive - Chapter 6

Chapter 6 of Design to Thrive explains the process of creating a sense of belonging among members of communities, and I love that Howard chose to use the much-loved ritual of fraternity hazing as an example of initiating individuals into a community.  Initiation rituals, Howard explains, basically serve as ways to help novices become part of a community, and "level up" the ranks as they become more experienced and knowledgeable.  This idea of leveling applies directly to social media in the sense that users who become involved in a community will want to build their own sense of belonging through a sort of quantifiable experience level - think leveling up in online games like Warcraft; however, Howard points out that there are drawbacks to creating belonging in this way.  For instance, once a Warcraft player reaches the highest rank possible, his or her interest will likely fade.  And perhaps a more relevant example of this drawback would be social media sites like Facebook or Myspace.  For better or worse, a great deal of people seem to build their sense of status among online communities through their number of friends or connections, and I feel that this actually detracts from their sense of belonging as they become fixated on simply raising those numbers rather than interacting with the people they represent.

Stories or myths can be effective ways to create belonging among communities.  The first example that comes to my mind is the legend of the alligators in the sewers of New York City.  Although it's highly unlikely, the story has survived for so long mostly because of the unique sense of community every New Yorker seems to feel, and the togetherness they get from speculating together over the truth of the myth.  Symbols or visual identities are two more great ways to build belonging, and while Howard provides the example of Clemson's logo and the ubiquitous C-L-E-M-S-O-N chant, perhaps an even more basic one would be the instantly-identifiable Clemson orange, and how the color has become invariably associated with the Clemson community.  And how has the color orange become so tied to Clemson and the members of its community?  Howard has set out eight rules that explain this process, and they apply to any sort of social atmosphere.  First, create and distribute a story of origin.  Then, create an initiation ritual (think frat brothers hazing frat brothers).  Next, create a mythology and circulate it.  Create leveling up ceremonies, then establish routines and protocols, and then establish symbols, colors, and visual identities.  And finally, for online social media, create a membership application as an initiation ritual.  Through this process, any group of people- not just online social media - can create belonging among its members, and that is one of the first steps in creating a lasting and thriving community.