Spring Research Conference at BYU

Here are the slides form the presentation that I gave at the Spring Research Conference at BYU last weekend.

Tolerance and Acceptance

Dr. Barbara Culatta gave an excellent devotional today on being tolerant and accepting people around you. She effectively discussed the seven tips below:

1. Look for Commonalities
2. Accept People Where They Are
3. Reflect on Goodness in Other Religions
4. See Differences as Part of Life
5. Value What We Can Learn From Others
6. Serve People from Different Faith and Backgrounds
7. Give a Soft Response When Criticized

Each of these suggestions (with the exception of #1) encourages us to build "bridging" relationships with people different from us. Tip #1 reminds us that in order to effectively build bridging relationships, we need at least some common ground. When it gets right down to it, we have something in common with everyone (e.g., we are all human beings, we all need food and water). Bridging social capital increases as we establish these types of relationships. Bridging capital is usually harder to obtain as it requires more effort to establish, yet, it is often more rewarding since it gives connecting parties access to resources and information that they otherwise would not have.

These useful tips that can help us be more effective at building these bridges, which improve our social networks.

Social Capital in Startup Networks

Social capital in action surrounds us. Below is a list of sites focused on the niche of starting up new businesses. In order for such ventures to be successful, it is often necessary to build a team of individuals that have complementary attributes and abilities. We are currently working on ways that we can quantify some of these behaviors given the rich data that is generated online everyday.

• 500 Hats
• A VC
• Betaworks (NYC)
• Feld Thoughts
• Founder's Co-Op (Seattle)
• LaunchBox Digital (DC)
• On Startups
• OpenCoffee Club
• Paul Graham
• Redeye VC
• Seedcamp (London)
• Silicon Valley Bank
• Startup2Startup
  
• TechStars (Colorado)
• Trinity Ventures
• Venture Hacks
• VentureBlog
• Web Startup Group (Provo, UT)
  
• Y Combinator (Boston, SF)

ForwardTrack

ForwardTrack is an open source tool (now entirely written in php) that allows email campaigns to be tracked and mapped as they are forwarded from person to person. This is definitely useful as it reveals the spread of information and some of the underlying social network.

Duncan Watts Downplays Viral Marketing Hype

A while back I quickly saw Clive Thompson's article entitled Is the Tipping Point Toast?, but didn't have the time to read it all nor investigate it any further --- until today.

Thompson's article pits Malcolm Gladwell's thesis (in The Tipping Point) against the recent research of Duncan Watts (cited below). I thought the article was well-written and adequately presented both sides of the issue. In short, Watt's claims that spending time and money marketing to influential individuals is no better than marketing to the masses.

Through all of this, Watts makes some important points such as (quoted from Thompson's article):

• The problem of popular viral marketing talk is that it is "incredibly vague"; "how an influential actually influences is not explained." "Precision matters when trying to explain highly social epidemics"
  
• "Influentials don't govern person-to-person communication. We all do."
  "Common sense is misleading"
• Thompson writes that Watts found the "rank-and-file citizen [to be] far more likely to start a contagion"

So, today I finally took the time to learn more about Watts' recent research, available at Collective Dynamics Group website (at Columbia University) as a Working paper in the Papers section. Through the years, I had previously read some of Watts' work, so I was excited to see his recent findings. In this paper he presents an approach they call "Big Seed Marketing", which in essence combines a traditional mass marketing model with a viral propagation.

The idea that there is "no free lunch" in viral marketing is useful to point out, as "there are many more unsuccessful attempts that one never hears about." He also, points out that it is "hard, if not impossible" to predict which of attempts will succeed.

The take-home message in the conclusion is that effective marketing campaigns can be produced without identifying "influentials", but simply by adding a mechanism of peer-to-peer sharing to propagate the message. (As an aside, the formalism presented in the paper is useful for discussing the problem and easily evaluating the results.)

Watts makes some good points, however, I would still argue that people with high social capital (you might call "highly influential") can heighten the network effect. This is even evidenced in Duncan's paper --- as one of Tom Mauser's 'friend' was StopTheNRA, who, in turn sent a large email blast (Table 1, footnote 1). So, Tom Mauser, had a significant enough relationship with StopTheNRA that they used their resources (their large email list) to forward his message.

Although, there is an element of hype in the presentation of "Big Seed Marketing", I find it useful as it presents a nice way of making the issue sticky and bringing to light these more subtle points. The desired effect of propagating these ideas seems to be occurring.

Update (4/23): Podcast with Duncan Watts on Buzz Marketing (mp3)

Freemium Business Model

The freemium model is something that I've been telling start-up businesses to do for quite a while. It allows community --- where social capital resides --- to build around your service at a fundamental level. After a captive community has been established, premium features (or services) can be offered, which effectively converts social capital into profit.

SIP Recap - Wednesday

I'm here in Palo Alto, California attending the AAAI Spring Symposium at Stanford. So far, the Social Information Processing Symposium has been very interesting and exciting. So far, I've met some people doing some neat research. Today's presentations were the following (I've added links to those I could find online):

1. Bernardo Huberman (HP Labs), Social Dynamics in the Age of the Web
2. Ed Chi (PARC), Augmented Social Cognition
3. Tad Hogg (HP Labs), Solving the organizational free riding problem with social networks
4. Riley Crane (ETH), Viral, Quality, and Junk Videos on YouTube: Separating Content From Noise in an Information-Rich Environment
5. Yi-Ching Huang (NTU), You Are What You Tag
6. Julia Stoyanovich (Columbia), Leveraging Tagging to Model User Interests in del.icio.us
7. Steve Whittaker (Sheffield), Temporal Tagging: Implicit Behaviour Identifies Points of Interest in Complex Event
8. Georg Groh, Implicit Social Network Construction and Expert User Determination in Web Portals
   
9. Elizeu Santos-Neto, Content Reuse and Interest Sharing in Tagging Communities
   
10. Matt Smith (BYU), Social Capital in the Blogosphere: A Case Study (this was our presentation, of course)
    

I enjoyed all of the presentations, in particular I liked Bernardo's address which covered a variety of interesting topics, Ed's comments, Riley's trend analysis, Julia's talk analyzing del.icio.us hotlist generation and tag, Steve's flamboyant presentation, Georg's work (as it had some thoughts related to our work on Implicit Affinity Networks).

(Oh, and I lost my cell phone today.)

I'm looking forward to another great day tomorrow!

Building Community around a Blog

At the spring research conference I presented the following:


















Building Community around a Blog (PDF)

Social Science Data

Amidst my search for social science data (to perform social capital experiments), I have discovered the following data:

• Social Science Data on the Internet - seems to have lots of links to data, however the search is limited and results pages are clunky.
• Social capital datasets - presents some information on data sources that are specifically related to investigating social capital.
• INSNA - has the data used in Wasserman and Faust book on Social Network Analysis.
• ICIPSR - Inter-university consortium for political and social research
• SDA - web-based software available for accessing much of the social science data. Additionally, I noticed some archived data available.

There appears to be plenty of data.  Now on to the task of filtering it down to the most relevant...

Notes on Social Capital Views

In Social Capital, by Nan Lin, presents some differing perspectives on social capital. I have made some notes of his assessment below, and have added some additional comments.

Bordieu - Social capital consists of social obligations or connections. It can be reduced to economic capital as it is viewed as collective asset that endows members with credits. The collective asset can be obtained through group membership.
Burt - Social capital is based on the number of people that an individual is connected to, the strength of these relationships, and the location the individual reside within this structure (see Flap's perspective). Individuals that bridge non-redundant groups of people have more social capital. Social capital accrues through bridging structural holes.
Coleman - Social capital is an aspect of social structure, and it facilitates certain actions of individuals within the structure. Social capital accrues through bonding.
Flap - Social capital consists of (1) the number of persons within one's social network who "are prepared or obliged to help you when called upon to do so," (2) the strength of the relationship indicating readiness to help, and (3) the resources of these persons.
Lin - Resources are divided into two types: personal and social. Personal resources include material objects (e.g, an airplane) and symbolic objects (e.g., a diplomas and degrees). Social resources, on the other hand, are resources accessed through an individual's social connections. Social resources, in both quantity and quality, far outweigh personal resources.
Putnam - Group level theory which tends to measure social capital collectively.

These notes are in no way conclusive or complete. However, they serve as a quick reminder to the various views.

Social Capital Simulation Updated

The social capital simulation has been improved! The usability has been improved, preset examples have been added, and additional information in now reported.

Social Connections in Decline

Robert Putnam, an influential social capital researcher, visited BYU nearly two years ago to discuss how social connections are on the decline. Here is good summary of Putnam's talk on BYU NewsNet. His research during the past decade has shown a negative trend in that people are socially connecting less these days. The speech gave fuel to the research on social networks that I had been involved in and has been a strong motivation to our current work on social capital.

Figure 1. "The TV Connection" shows that group membership tends to decline as television viewing increases among those having twelve or more years of education. (see The Strange Disappearance of Civic America)

Empirical studies on group membership, like the study shown in the plot above contribute to the evidence which Putnam uses to support this claim.

Social Capital Simulation (Online)

The past couple days I have been working on an online social capital simulation that was created primarily with Javascript. Currently, it calculates social capital in the same manner as the excel version, however, it is more powerful as it allows you to set how many nodes you would like in the network, it dynamically creates a visual graph of the network, and it is accessible online.
I used Walter Zorn's High Performance JavaScript Vector Graphics Library to draw the network (i.e., nodes, lines, and text). This is an impressive library, which makes drawing with Javascript more pleasant than I originally expected. Also, to facilitate this project, I extended Zorn's library by adding getColor, getOpacity, and setOpacity methods. Furthermore, Michael Deardeuff and other Data Mining Lab members used their keen pattern finding skills to develop the mathematical equation for node placement in the graph.

Let me know how it works for you. I want to make this available so that it is easy to for people to get a feel for how we calculate social capital, which will allow us to refine our method.