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"Can you back that up with empirical data?" asked one of the delegates.

I was running a Social Media Strategy workshop in Sydney for the PRIA and had been pontificating that early adopters of technology (such as Second Life residents) were also likely to be ‘influencers’ within their communities and social spheres.

So I was ‘called to task’ on my claim, asked to substantiate it with something more scientifically sound and rigorous than just my own hearsay-based opinion.

I was able to point to Sherry Turkle’s work on the behavioural characteristics of computer users, showing that many were counter-intuitively also likely to be active in large social networks and to have some power of influence and persuasion. Indeed, another delegate (who has similarly looked at this question) was the first to answer the question and point to Turkle’s work.

And Turkle is not alone in looking at this.

The late Ev Rogers spent an academic lifetime looking at how innovations spread through communities and what role ‘communication’ plays in the process; along the way he influenced and guided a large number of doctoral students to do likewise.

Albert Bandura, noted social psychologist most famous for his work on Social Cognition, once commented that "The worth of a theory is ultimately judged by the power of the change it produces." Arvind Singhal and James Dearing at the School of Communication Studies at Ohio University pointed out that (as at 2006) Rogers’ book Diffusion of Innovations was the second most cited book in the social sciences. Singhal subsequently writes, in a foreword to a chapter written by Bandura, that using Bandura’s own measure of a theory’s importance, Bandura’s own Social Cognition work and Rogers’ work on diffusion would rank close to the top.

As part of a substantial body of academics who, since the late 1950s, have looked at the communication of innovation and its subsequent adoption, Thomas W. Valente PhD provided a fabulous review of the field in Singhal & Dearing’s 2006 collection of invited essays reflecting on the legacy of Rogers’ work and life.

According to Valente’s cursory review of communication network models, there have been four major types of model developed to explain how innovations diffuse through a community:

1. Interpersonal influence: starting with the earliest research, interpersonal models of influence were supported by evidence that ‘leadership’ can strongly influence the adoption of innovations and that greater density and ‘connectedness’ within communities can help the innovation diffuse faster. Thus, those who were rated by their peers as ‘thought leaders’ and who their peers turned to for advice were early adopters of innovations if and when these thought leaders considered that the innovations were compatible with the culture of their community.
2. Structural models: researchers found that key ‘bridges’ (individuals or organisations, depending on the population size) and the structural characteristics of a network can affect diffusion. Thus, thought leaders who adopted a behaviour were quickly mimicked by others in the community. However, this was mitigated or influenced by an individual’s ‘Adoption Threshold Level’ — the number of prior adopters needed for a person to themselves adopt. Additionally, a person of influence can be a ‘bridge’ between two communities not otherwise connected. Even though that person may be considered a ‘weak’ link between these two otherwise disparate communities, because of their influential position they are able to bridge them both and allow innovations from one cross over to the other.

   Stanley Milgram is most well known for his work on how people respond to and with authority — for example in ordering others to give life-threatening electric shocks — but less well known but equally respected academically for his ‘Small World’ experimental work where, as a social psychologist at Harvard University, he found that, around the world, informal social networks are structured in such a way that only six steps separate everyone from everyone else — the infamous "six degrees of separation." or six pixels of separation if you are my colleague Mitch Joel

3. Critical points: researchers further refined their data to conclude that there are key ‘moments’ and ‘thresholds of adoption’ that influence when and how innovations and behaviours are taken up by the wider community. Moreover, once that ‘tipping point’ is reached, either for the individual or the system, diffusion is likely to be self-sustaining.
4. Dynamic interplay: there is argued to be a dynamic interplay between where an individual or an ‘influencer’ sits within a hierarchically-arranged network and whether and when an innovation or new behaviour is adopted. Thus the higher the social influence position an individual holds, the more likely others are to mimic their innovation-driven behaviour; at the same time, the higher an individual’s social influence the more likely they are to adopt an innovative behaviour.
5. Valente also offers a fifth, nascent, model: that often the ‘message’ itself is of less importance than the messenger. By targeting those individuals who are influential within their community of interest, and supporting and encouraging them in supporting and encouraging others to change their behaviours, the more likely the changes are to diffuse and ’stick’, and the faster that diffusion takes place.

   Of course, this is the classic Change Management model as taught at every Change Management programme that I have ever willingly attended or else unwillingly been subjected to. Find an enthusiastic evangelist who is also (a key point) influential in the community of interest, give them the tools and training to modify their own behaviours and belief systems, then give them tremendous levels of support and encouragement as they actively work to change the behaviours and belief systems of their peers. Done well it can be very successful in bringing innovative change to a community, as we all know. Done badly, as it usually is in my experience, and the adoption of innovation is a difficult labour with a highly-exposed risk to sabotage and failure.

   Valente argues that there are diagnostic tools that can identify who these change agents are, whether in a community adoption occurs best by one of the aforementioned four models, whether certain individuals display more or less susceptibility to innovations, and who displays more or less ‘infectiousness’ or the ability to influence others. As he says,

"These diagnostics will help promoting organizations tailor their promotions more effectively and focus their activities more on who gets the message and who delivers it rather than what the message says."

This is because the ’song’ will never remain the same: at each interaction and at each step in a network the message will change — sometimes blatantly, sometimes subtly.

The bottom line

To answer the question posed at the beginning of this post, and during my workshop, there IS a whole body of research on the power of early adopters to influence their wider communities.

So next time you look at innovations like Second Life (as we did) and say to yourself, "That will never take off", take a look at who is actually playing with the innovation — if they are influential and if they consider that the innovation will be of benefit to and likely to ‘fit’ within the culture of their community the chances are very strong that that adoption of that innovation will spread and spread and spread, until it reaches Gladwell’s ‘tipping point’ and becomes an almost unstoppable force.

——————-

Further information

For those keen to dig deeper into this, Valente showed the lineage of these diffusion network models in a table, replicated below.

And if you get out Singhal, A. and Dearing, J.W. (2006). Communication of Innovation. Sage, London you can find Valente’s article (pages 61-82) and investigate his bibliography.

I also commend other articles/chapters within the book, such as Bandura’s On Integrating Social Cognitive and Social Diffusion Theories (pp. 111-135), marketing guru Philip Kotler’s Social Marketing and the Broadening of Marketing Movement (pp. 136-145), and Adhikarya’s Implementing Strategic Extension Campaigns: Applying Best Practices and Lessons Learned from Ev Rogers, (pp.172-198).

In fact, read the whole thing and be amazed at how on just about every page you learn something new!

Filed under: Second Life & 3D virtual worlds, academic research, nonverbal communication, tools
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The rather clever Jasmin Tragas reminded me yesterday that even though it’s a new communication landscape, we bring to it our old, ingrained habits.

To wit: I often add pictures to my blog posts; usually these pictures are mashups of retro images and text, but every now and then I use pictures of attractive young women. Not without reason and to support a point I am making in that post, but they are young, attractive and female.

Jasmin pointed out that she very occasionally (i.e. hardly ever but at least once in a blue moon) forwards my emails on to higher/other management. Some of those images might not be wholly suitable for such distribution.

Because Jasmin works at IBM in a senior role that means other key people in the tech-comms world.

But I confess right here, right now, that the thought that someone would forward a post of mine to others simply never occurred to me. Honestly. Not even on my radar.

By letting me know that she occasionally does forward a post, Jasmin reminded me that even though this is a new communication landscape we still behave in ways that we are comfortable with.

So posts will still get forwarded, just like emails have been forwarded around the world since emails began.

And just as forwarded emails have the potential to attract all sorts of unwanted consequences, so too with forwarded posts.

Notes to self:

1. treat my readers with more respect

2. treat myself with more gravitas — sometimes being a ‘work from home office’ (step-)parent of teenagers, without the daily conversations with peers that an office-based role brings, means that your own self-esteem takes a hammering and you forget that other people might actually be interested in what you have to say

3. thank Jasmin publicly for taking the time and risk to contact me privately about it via Twitter

4. wish Jasmin a very happy 1st birthday for her WonderWebby blog

5. work harder at deserving to be on to her ‘wonderpeeps’ blogroll

Filed under: PR, blogging, customer service, ethics, marketing, nonverbal communication
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by Philip Yaffe

Some people have experiences early in life that seem to have nothing to do with their intended careers but later turn out to be crucial. I am one of those lucky people.

I graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1965 with a degree in mathematics and no intention of becoming a professional expository (non-fiction) writer. Immediately following graduating, I spent two years as a math and physics teacher in Tanzania, East Africa. After being stationed several months in a mud-hut village, I was posted to a rather more developed location with electricity, running water and other modern conveniences.

A colleague of mine still in the bush had an excellent idea. Since most people in rural villages hardly ever left their villages, he thought it a good idea to take his brightest students on a tour of the country to get a feeling of what this new, developing nation was all about. The first stop was my place.

I asked the boy (he was 14 years old) what he really wanted to do while he was in my house. "I want to take a hot running shower," he replied. This, of course, was not just a luxury in his home village; it was not even a possibility. A shower there meant filling a jerry can with water, heating it on an open fire, then pouring it over your head.

We had some friends near by we wanted to visit. I took the boy into the bathroom and meticulously showed him how to regulate the butane tank (no central heating in my house), how to adjust the temperature and water flow, how to position the shower head, etc. "Now, when you are finished, I want you turn everything off and go to go to bed," I said. We then set off down the road.

About a half hour later, I thought it a good idea come back and check up on him. I went into the bathroom and I was pleased to see that he had correctly turned off both the water and the butane exactly as I had shown him. The light was still on in his room, so I went over to say goodnight. When I opened the door, I saw this poor kid lying on the bed with his hands over his eyes trying to sleep.

Then it hit me. I had shown everything to him except the most obvious - how to turn off the light!

He of course knew about electric lights, theoretically, but he had never actually seen one. His experience was with kerosene lanterns, which you turn off by blowing out the flame. If you have never actually used an electric light, there is no obvious connection between that button on the wall and that brilliant bulb on the ceiling.

The poor kid simply didn’t have a clue. More importantly, I simply didn’t have a clue either. As meticulous as I thought I had been, it just never occurred to me that I had failed to give him adequate instructions.

I had a number of such experiences in Tanzania, none of which had anything to do with lack of intelligence. Because of fierce competition to get into school in the first place (the country hardly had any schools), these students were not just intelligent, they were the cream of the crop.

Why Simplification Isn’t "Dumbing-down"

Someone once said: "Nothing is so simple that it can’t be misunderstood." I have always tried to live by this maxim, with my experiences in Tanzania as a constant reminder to simplify to the extreme.

But the objection can be raised: "Isn’t aiming at the lowest common denominator patronizing?"

Yes it is, but mainly in the mind of the writer, not the reader. The fact is, no matter how hard you try, you can never know for certain what each individual reader knows and doesn’t know about your topic. What you can know for certain is that if you say something they don’t understand, you will lose some (if not all) of their attention.

It is of course necessary to make some assumptions about your readers’ level of understanding. However, you should make as few as possible. Those readers who are already knowledgeable about what a particular section of text is saying will either skip it or appreciate the reminder. Those who are less knowledgeable will be grateful for your clear explanation.

Throughout my 40-year career as a professional writer, I have produced press releases, sales brochures, speeches, instruction manuals, training programs, etc. I can recall no occasion where someone complained that my text was "too simple". However, I distinctly recall several occasions where someone said, "I thought this subject would be extremely difficult, but I understood everything you wrote. How did you do it?"

Now you know; it was by aiming for the lowest common denominator - and then some.

————————

Philip Yaffe is a former writer with The Wall Street Journal and international marketing communication consultant. He now teaches courses in persuasive communication in Brussels, Belgium. Because his clients use English as a second or third language, his approach to writing and public speaking is somewhat different from other communication coaches. He is the author of In the “I” of the Storm: the Simple Secrets of Writing & Speaking (Almost) like a Professional, available from the publisher (www.storypublishers.be) and Amazon (www.Amazon.com). Contact: .

Filed under: PR, blogging, internal communications, marketing, nonverbal communication, tools
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Watch this and marvel at the human being’s ability to create much out of little, courtesy of our imagination.

So, the business outcome is this:

Never say it can’t be done; there is always some imaginative way to get your message across!

Filed under: PR, nonverbal communication, tools, videoblog
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I am stunned!

Over at MyRagan there is a 20-something who writes that even she feels ‘overwhelmed’ sometimes by social media and struggles to keep up, which is why she attends conferences, seminars and workshops on the subject.

After her post–and yes, I agree with Sue Johnston that the headline of the article was exceedingly cheap and misleading; shame on you Mark et al–there is a plethora of fellow business communicators whining about how they can’t cope.

Give me a break!!!

The whole point is not whether you feel swamped or not, the whole point is that you can no longer afford to be uninvolved.

Drew Mendelson points to ongoing research by Universal McCann [pdf] that comes up with interesting stats and comments, some of which I repeat here:

• Social media is a global phenomenon happening in all markets regardless of wider economic, social and cultural development.
• If you are online you are using social media
• Asian markets are leading in terms of participation, creating more content than any other region
• All social media platforms have grown significantly 
• Video Clips are the quickest growing platform, up from 31% penetration in Wave 1 to 83% in Wave 3
• 57% have joined a Social Network, making it the number one platform for creating and sharing content
• 55% of users have uploaded photos
• 22% of users have uploaded videos
• Blogs are a mainstream media world-wide and as a collective rival any traditional media
• 73% have read a blog
• The blogosphere is becoming increasingly participatory, now 184m bloggers world-wide
• China has the largest blogging community in the world with 42m bloggers, more than the US and Western Europe combined

As a business communicator you no longer have the luxury of burying your head in the sand and pretending that this will all go away. It won’t. And it will just get bigger and bigger and go faster and faster and if you don’t leap onboard now you will never catch up.

KPI your bottom, Mr BeanCounter

As I explained to a client in Brisbane yesterday, Social Media doesn’t replace any of the more traditional channels of communication, instead it adds significantly to your burden. You need to throw resource at it and you need to forget about any dumb-arsed KPIs and ROIs. It is a set of ‘relationship’ tools, not easily shoe-horned into neatly fitting your CFO’s ‘Cost-Benefit Analysis’ metrics.

Every businessperson worth their salt knows that taking clients out to lunch, or to golf, or the cricket, or whatever, is beneficial in the long term for the relationship betwixt company and client. No one stands with a clipboard and a calculator outside the CEO’s office when they return from a golfing day and grills them about the ROI of their golf.

As Alex Manchester once said to me, “how much is a good relationship with your customer worth to you?” THAT is your bloomin’ ROI, Mr BeanCounter.

Social Media Burnout

Yes, there is such a thing as Social Media burnout. My good friend Iwan Winoto at IBM pointed me to an interesting article from the New York Times. It seems that they are not alone in worrying about ‘blogger burnout’.

Yes, the demands of this never-off Internet are incredible. I feel under pressure to blog something intelligent every day (Mrs BetterComms would argue that I rarely have one intelligent thought a week) less I lose my audience and subscriber numbers. I know that employees of companies equally feel under pressure to perform, to meet ever-tougher KPIs.

Yes, there is a new ‘must see’ Social Media tool released every week (sometimes several a week).

Yes, it can be an incredible drain on your time evaluating them, let alone joining them.

But who says you have to do it all yourself? Doh!

Be uninvolved; be unemployed and unemployable

I’ve had very legitimate concerns expressed to me about the whole Social Media thing; not in terms of whether it will stay, but where does one find the time to get up to speed on it?

The answer is simple: how do you learn ANYTHING within a corporation? Answer: you go to a seminar, attend a workshop, invite a guest speaker in to your meeting, bring in a consultant to help you strategise and roll-out your strategy…

Is it expensive? Yes. Well, at least I am, but then again I’m also one of the very few experts in Australia who understands this stuff and is available to help you grow. Laurel Papworth is another. Trevor Cook is another. So is Gary Hayes. So too is Stephen Collins.

We don’t come cheap. After all, do you expect ‘bargain basement’ pricing from, say, PwC or McKinsey and at the same time expect the top level of intelligence and insight that they are able to bring to your company’s benefit? In business life you very much get what you pay for. But you already know that.

What you probably don’t wish to acknowledge to yourself is that if you don’t keep your own skills current you will be unemployable within five years.

Yes, unemployable. Second-rate. The business communication world is moving at such a pace that if you don’t have a few Social Media campaigns and successes under your belt you will be passed over for promotion/head-hunting/a new job by someone else who does.

Survival of the fittest.

Remember all that HR bumpf about ‘life long learning’? They were telling the truth.

Says Anna:

Just last Sept I attended some teaching workshops for working with students at the university level and social media issues were brought up several times. I was shocked when I was informed that I would most likely find it difficult to relate to new students as a recent graduate myself because the typical generation gap has now shrunk to about 4 years. The availability of cellphones, laptops, wireless internet, ipods, msn, facebook and basically social media in general is a major factor behind just how differently these students interact. Although I’m hardly older then these students, I am somehow now old.

Just don’t be one of the whingers (that’s Aussie-speak for ‘whiners’) over at the MyRagan site who are whimpering about it all. Either be part of the problem or be part of the solution; either skill up or get out of the way. Tough love.

Think that’s a bit harsh? As we say here in Australia,

“build a bridge and get over it.”

Filed under: PR, Second Life & 3D virtual worlds, blogging, customer service, ethics, housekeeping, internal communications, marketing, micro-blogging, miscellaneous, nonverbal communication, podcasting, tools, videoblog
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