Posts Tagged: cognition

Thoughts — 7 Comments
8
Jun 07

The Subscription Curve

Yesterday, I found myself frustrated as I looked at the number of unlistened podcasts in my iTunes queue. With no long plane flights on my immediate radar, where was I ever going to find the time to listen to 16 podcasts! This led me to pondering how my patterns of media consumption, supposedly cutting-edge in their subscriptive nature, had led me awry.

First, a thought experiment. What are your subscriptions? How many newspaper or magazines arrive at your doorstep? How many blogs or podcasts do you subscribe to? What alerts do you get? How many mailing lists are you on? How many shows are on your DVR? How many people do you follow with Facebook feeds or Twitter? As I went through this process, I found that more and more of my consumption was through subscription – and I wondered how happy this “freedom” of subscription was making me.

Let’s remember the old days for a second, when you used to have to type in a web address or click on a bookmark to visit a website. Or a time where you had to be in front of the TV at a certain time (or set the VCR, egad) to catch a show. What about a time when you didn’t know immediately when your friends were breaking up, or you occasionally missed NPR’s Fresh Air because you were doing other things. I’m the last one who is going to make an argument that the past was “better”, that’s not the point; however, it might be useful to consider whether in solving the old problems we simply created a slew of new ones.

Let’s think about information consumption in the old model. Without subscriptions, media flew by you – you had to make time for media, essentially. Maybe you caught two television programs, three radio programs, and visited an average of ten websites regularly. Granted, there were some inefficiencies there, but consider how vastly things have changed. Look at your podcast queue. Look at your DVR queue. Look at how many blogs you have in your feedreader – through the power of subscription, we’ve turned information underload into information overload. As we collectively adopt, how will we deal with the sheer volume of information subscription-based models afford?

This led me to wonder if media becomes primarily subscription based, does that increase the insularity of the consumer? For example, if someone has 300 feeds in their newsreader, the web may seem vast, but 300 feeds in the scope of the entire web is actually quite minuscule. Of course, the counter-argument is that before subscriptions, a human could only pay attention to X people – I realize that. But going forward, as everything becomes a subscription, will it become more and more challenging to look out of our bubble? I think this is a genuine question.

Subscriptions mark a paradigm shift in our information-consumption patterns. Because we can offload the storing and filtering tasks, we can now subscribe to potentially endless information streams. At the end of the day, however, there’s still only so much we can consume. And to that extent, it seems like all of us will have to make peace with our subscriptions and consumption. Looking at those 16 unlistened podcasts in frustration, I simply clicked the “mark as not new” button and freed myself from the obligation. Just because we now can listen to, or read, or watch anything, doesn’t mean we have to. At least for now.

Thoughts — 3 Comments
22
May 07

Activating Latent Ties

There are a number of models that enable the integration of social technology into our everyday lives. In the context of online social networks, we’ve often talked about situational relevance. Here’s the basic principle of situational relevance: When a person is entering a new social network, they have information needs. They need to know about the people around them in order to navigate the social network. An online social network that addresses these needs is situationally relevant.

While I certainly agree that people use social technologies for entertainment/time wasting, a huge part of the calculation is also utility. Why did Facebook have such extensive success with college populations? Because it answered relevant social needs. Why do we choose Google over other search engines? Because it is best at answering our information needs. Ultimately, our relationship with information tools is structured around “what does it do for me.” The tools that best and most frequently answer our questions are often the most popular.

Today I’d like to discuss another model, one that certainly isn’t new but is well worth discussing. In a post yesterday, I talked about the power of latent social ties. Latent social ties are pre-existing social ties that we’ve deactivated or left behind. As we move through the various social networks of our lives, we develop friendships and ties that we ultimately have to backshelf as we move forward. These are our school friends, ex-coworkers, friends from previous neighborhoods, that sort of thing. No rocket science here.

Many of us would like to have a low-involvement context to get back in touch with these individuals. And there’s a plethora of reasons – potential business contacts and networking, catching up, reuniting, etc. Right now, we do this through email, though email is a particularly bad medium for these connections. Yes, it might be fun to write a long-lost bud a huge email filling him in on the details of your life to date, but you’re not going to do this every day. Rather, you’re going to want to keep them in an address book of sorts…one where you can pop in and check out what is new with your old friend’s life.

As one might imagine, online social networks are particularly well suited for this task. The low-involvement, low-effort model of friend maintenance is pretty much what the environment is built for. It’s also a useful way to keep people engaged when they arent exploring new, situationally relevant new networks. If you’ve been at your job or college for a few years, the value of situational relevance declines somewhat, so what can a social network do to keep you engaged? They can certainly get you activating latent ties.

Of course, activating latent ties is somewhat tricky. My undergrad classmates largely aren’t on FB, and that reality is even moreso for those who graduated in the 90′s, 80′s and so on. So how can you create an environment to activate these latent ties? As a list:

  • The environment must be “accessible” (or comfortable, or usable, or whatever you want to call it). Facebook is particularly well suited for this role, with their emphasis on clean design and usability. Further, it must be easy for users to get on the systems and find their old ties.
  • Contexts must be respected. One of the main reasons that we feel uncomfortable about the mixing of social networks is the fact we’re different things to different people. While Facebook doesn’t really foster faceted identity, we can keep our social networks separate, which is a very important facet. It is up to us to provide a palatable identity, but if we can keep our social networks separate, that’s almost as valuable.
  • The activation of ties must be fostered. It isn’t an accident that people go to Classmates.com to connect with ex-classmates. The site is set up with the premise of rediscovering old ties. While I think Classmates.com is hopelessly broken, the point is valuable – the activation of latent ties doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because people enter the social network with the intention of doing so, and they have the tools for doing so. Therefore, social networks must put effort into this approach – they have to foster the activation of latent ties.

While the answering of situationally relevant social information needs provide motivation for using online social networks, if that is all the user does, they will run into the “what’s next” problem. The activation of latent ties may stem this problem; and when you think about all of the potential latent ties we’ve left behind, you see the potential scope of the market.

Just like situational relevance, the activation of latent ties is something that must be done correctly. It is a unique information transaction and must be treated as such. The online social network that best understands the complications involved in this transaction, and designs appropriately towards these complexities will reap huge rewards from the latent ties market. Of course, I write this with Facebook in mind, as they are the network best situated to benefit from this opportunity. If my Facebook can become the low maintenance, low involvement directory of our lives, it is going to stand alone as a useful information tool. And usefulness, folks, is what its all about.

Software / Thoughts — 2 Comments
10
May 07

Structural holes in del.icio.us, or, the value of editorship

Last year, Joshua Schachter raised some eyebrows when he announced that del.icio.us would be adding enhanced social features. This announcement generated some pushback, and I haven’t noticed much work towards integrating meaningful social tools in the meantime. Ultimately, this is dissapointing, because the integration of better social tools in delicious is a good idea, and without these tools, del.icio.us is comprimising its value significantly.

When we first started bookmarking links in del.icio.us, the notion of transportable, social, rss-able bookmarks was a great concept. It remains a great concept, and del.icio.us’ growth is evidence of the strategy’s value. Del.icio.us’ UI also appealed to many – it was fast, stripped down and eminently usable. Schachter had elected to design with an eye towards utility, not Web 2.0 fluff. This design reduced complexity and barriers to entry; combined with its core value, del.icio.us had all the right stuff to really take off.

And take off it did. The acquisition of del.icio.us by Yahoo (along with the acquisition of Flickr) proved to be one of the best marketing moves Yahoo has made in the past few years. In the wake of the acquisition, more people joined, the networks grew stronger, and the value of the bookmarks stored in del.icio.us grew exponentially.

Social bookmarking is a cool idea. If you follow del.icio.us/popular, you can see bookmarks that lots of people like. In doing so, you can spend lots of time reading top ten lists ad nauseam. This is the crowdsourcing model, the Digg model, whatever you want to call it. It flies in the face of editorship and control, and is one of the key concepts of Web 2.0. Unfortunately, del.icio.us has overinvested in the crowdsourcing concept. In fact, I’d argue that the key value of del.icio.us is editorship, a value that seems to fly in the face of Web 2.0.

What is del.icio.us other than an editorial tool? Each person that uses del.icio.us is slicing up the web it their own special way. And as millions of people have flocked to del.icio.us, its userbase has grown to include academics, experts, notables and laymen alike. And the slices of the web created by these people are all potentially valuable to someone else.

If you look at my network, you’ll see a list of people who I follow, as well as a list of people who follow me. I follow a small collection of friends, academics and industry experts. You’ll notice that I only follow about 15 people (on average) – the reason I do so is because that’s about all the people I can meaningfully follow in the current state of del.icio.us networks. In my opinion, there’s a lot of work del.icio.us could endeavor to make the editorial aspects of the service (the true long-tail value) more usable. Here’s a start:

  • Make people findable. Currently, del.icio.us offers you a single field that you can use to tell others who you are. You can basically offer a link to your blog or website, that’s it. This is terribly inefficient. Give people fields to describe their interests, occupation, areas of expertise. Make it searchable! If I want to find people who bookmark in the social networking field, let me search for people who describe themselves thusly. I’ll look over their bookmarks and decide if I want to follow them. Don’t make me use Google to find danah boyd’s bookmarks!
  • Enable people browsing. I want to know who is bookmarking or tagging stuff in a way similar to my own. If delicious would compute some rudimentary similarity metrics, I’d be able to find other people that share my interests. I want to know who these people are! I want to follow their bookmarks because doing so makes my life easier. Give me the tools so I can better find people who are like me, or who are popular for a certain topic area, or who are widely followed. People follow danah or Howard Rheingold or Fred Wilson for a reason – so make it easier for people to find these luminaries.
  • Improve the social UI. As I previously mentioned, I can only follow the bookmarks of around 15 people. Any more than that and I can’t keep track of what’s what. I wrote in to Yahoo some months back suggeesting that they set a cookie that would tell me what links are new when I refresh the network page – that’s a start. The social interface needs work – I should be able to follow groups of people, specific tags individuals use, and so on. The UI is a key limitation to the entire social strategy.

As it stands, the fact that del.icio.us overlooks the value of the individual is a key structural hole in the service. Del.icio.us is populated by many brilliant minds, but they are simply too hard to find! Its almost as if everyone on del.icio.us is blogging anonymously. It might have made sense a few years ago, but it doesn’t anymore. Del.icio.us can improve the social aspects of the service without becoming another social network; the idea that adding social to del.icio.us is somehow a negative is completely bunk. Social can be added well, and it will make del.icio.us even more popular. It’s time for del.icio.us to realize the value of editorship.

Research / Thoughts — 5 Comments
23
Apr 07

How they’ll learn

This weekend, I participated in the first HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) conference, which proved to be an illuminating experience. The conference had a visionary focus, which led to some great discussions and panels. A theme that came up again and again was the future of learning (as the MacArthur Foundation was a key sponsor, and Connie Yowell was in attendance, certainly not surprising).

In a panel entitled “Funding the Digital Future”, Yowell talked about MacArthur’s view on digital learning, and how digital learning will ultimately be a long-tail endeavor. Granted, the long tail gets paid a lot of lip service, but as I processed the applicability to youth education, it was really striking. If you think a little bit differently about education, you can see some very interesting opportunities.

There are lots of different methodological approaches to education, and I won’t even act like I know a lot about them them. In most models, the instructor is the “center” of the model. As instructors have a limited quantity of time and patience, this is inherently an inefficient model. Indeed, questions go unanswered, children get “left behind” – but there aren’t a ton of other ways to go about it, and this model enforces the pseudo-egalitarian principles of our society.

This is a classic short-tail (anti-long-tail?) model. The problem with turning education into a long tail model, however, is confounding. In the long-model of education, the learners must also be teachers. As you’ve probably noticed, as you progressed through school, you were more likely to engage in group projects. As we get older, the educational system develops some faith in our teaching ability. Groups represent this long-tail teaching/learning model, but these are still constructed, controlled experiments.

With technology, however, we can always work in groups. In fact, it is natural to work socially, in groups. Think about the role of instant messenger as children work together on math homework. Kids have adopted and internalized uses of these technologies to make the learning process more efficient – ad hoc networks of peer-teachers emerge. The only problem here is that we’d generally call this cheating, so lets think reevaluate this assumption for a second.

The assignments coming from teachers are built on short-tail models. That is, everyone gets the same questions, they work on them alone, and they turn them in. Teacher has limited time for grading and answering questions, so we’ve got to use this model. So lets think outside of the box for a second. What if each student in the class got individual assignments, and they were encouraged to work on the homework collaboratively via instant messenger. This solves the cheating problem, and it encourages peer-to-peer learning and teaching. Of course, we’d need a system to assist the teacher in grading and evaluation (as grading is not simply the right/wrong evaluation, but also recognizing patterns to understand what the children learned or didn’t learn), but we’re thinking about the “future” of learning here.

The future of our knowledge economy is built on collaboration. If we are always in touch, then we are always able to work together. Why then do our schools not work to optimize collaboration skills? In this collaboration economy, the most successful participants will be the ones who combine knowledge and critical thinking skills with an ability to extend their knowledge via the network. Under our current scheme, the student who can sit alone in the library studying for hours may get the best grades, but they may be missing a critical skill for operationalizing their ability.

If we’re going to enable the long-tail of education by turning students into peer-teachers, then we’ll need to do two things. First, we must update our system of goals and expectations. It is not enough to simply say “let’s let them use technology”, as technology alone is never the single answer. Second, we’ve got to create structures or “architectures for participation”, in which the natural tendencies for collaboration are rewarded and evaluated. Is this games-based learning? Is it virtual collaboration? Is it telepresence or remote instruction? As we move towards the future or learning, we’ll see all of that and more.

The most important thing, however, is that we must update our expectations and evaluation criteria. They kids are already using these collaborative technologies – they’ve been doing it for years, and they’ll do it on the job and throughout their lives. Let’s reward them for this natural tendency.

Please feel free to contribute your thoughts to this thread…I’d particularly like to hear creative ideas for how we can use technology in long-tail learning situations.

Thoughts — No Comments
2
Apr 07

Mobile telcos rush to social networks – but are they missing the point?

After reading the BusinessWeek article Mobile Telcos Rush to Social Networking, I’m sort of left shaking my head, wondering exactly what telcos are thinking when they lay out their social networking strategy. In the article, writer Kate Norton describes partnerships between Orange Mobile and Bebo.com, and Vodafone and NewsCorp, parent of Myspace. The gist of these partnerships is that the provider will guarantee (exclusive?) access to the respective social networking service, which I guess is supposed to make people want to buy data plans or some such thing.

My problem with a strategy like this is that the telcos seem to fail to understand that social networking on the mobile is a distinctly different experience than social networking in the browser. As I’ve previously written, social networking is different experience between these mediums; in the browser, social networking has the luxury of being a browsing experience. That is, we can spend inordinate amounts of time traversing profiles on our desktops – which is a luxury not afforded by most handhelds, due to data plan speed and cost, as well as a number of other factors (extremely media-rich social networking profiles do not translate well to the mobile, for one).

What surprises me about these partnerships is that the major telcos seem happy to delude themselves that the experience customers want on the mobile mimics the browser experience. Furthermore, by pushing their customer base onto one social networking platform, the carriers strategic plans break the back of network-effects based adoption that could come from embracing social networking.

If Twitter’s amazing adoption has told us anything, it is that people want information solutions from their mobile device – these being primarily social informational solutions. Twitter operates in the TXT-based context – it isn’t media-rich, it isn’t GPRS dependent, it isn’t locked in to one carrier – but it is better mobile social networking than I’ve seen in years. And you know what? It doesn’t look all that much like our browser-based social networking experience.

Until we live in a world of media-rich mobile devices attached to fat pipes, we’re going to make do with the tools we have. That is, we’re not expecting the mobile to be the browser – and we quite like (or rather, grudgingly accept) the mobile as its own space. The social networking that we do in the mobile is different from that in the browser, and as long as it answers our information needs, we’re quite pleased with the results.

Along with Twitter, Loopt is another fantastic example of mobile social networking. The folks from Loopt (I believe the company has something like a 21-year-old CEO) built an entire product around the answering of a very simple, but very relevant social information need – “Where you at?” The Loopt platform took advantage of the E911 infrastructure and is now providing its location-based services to subscribers of Boost Mobile. Of course, Loopt is not cross-service, heavily limiting its usefulness – but imagine if it was.

Both of these services prove a very important point – the ways we think of social networking in the mobile are different. While the various Telco/Social Network deals make for good ad copy and probably sound sexy to some senior VP of something or another when pitched, the actual value in these relationships will come through implementation. If Orange and Vodafone can look beyond the mindset of simply connecting the mobile to the site as if it were a browser, perhaps they can leverage the real value of these partnerships.

As the article’s expert, Falk Müller-Veerse states, “it’s likely to take three to four years before social networking via mobile phones becomes mainstream,” that is probably the best argument I could muster for rethinking mobile social networking. The handsets aren’t here, the data plans aren’t here, the data speed isn’t here – but if we think of mobile social networking in new and innovative ways – ala Twitter or Loopt – there are tremendous opportunities. And the rub is, these opportunities exist for answering very simple questions.

Until the providers wake up to this reality – and perhaps they never will because their paradigm is so carrier-centric (Imagine a mobile company developing something that would work cross-carrier like Twitter – never!), the market for mobile social networking is squarely in the hands of those who design elegantly simple technologies that solve real information needs. I’m looking at you, readers.

Research / Thoughts — No Comments
17
Mar 07

On Twitter and Youth Adoption

Like everyone else on the internet, I’ve been seeing tons of articles fly by about Twitter, the social-presence/microblogging app designed by folks from the Obvious Corporation (former founders of Blogger.com). As an attendee of SXSW, I had the chance to experience Twitter in optimal circumstances, and I was impressed – Twitter is a prime example of a situationally relevant piece of social software.

For the uninitiated, the simplest way to think of Twitter is like a stateful IRC backchannel. In this analogy, your twitter homepage is your chat room, and your friends are the chat participants. Every time you log in you can see the messages that have been sent to your chat room, so you can instantly keep up with the people you’re following. Of course Twitter also has a strong mobile component, in which your friends posts can be delivered to your mobile phone, allowing constant updates by your friends.

So what makes Twitter cool? The one thing that blows me away is the power of its simplicity. Web 2.0 has been characterized by a race to the bottom in terms of interactivity, with the mantra of competition being “add more features.” My version of Myspace is better than your version of Myspace because my version of Myspace has chat! – that sort of stuff. Twitter, on the other hand has decided to deliver extreme simplicity – the notion that a small amount of text can be a useful social object. And you know what – it works. We can create social experiences around simple bits of text just like we can create social experiences around high-interactivity hot media like video clips.

Twitter is also cool because it leverages pre-existing practices. Twitter feels like a chat room – and the action in the service is very much like setting away messages in an instant messenger app. In a sense, a twitter stream is mostly comprised of away-message type messages – little bits of social information about individuals we care about. By leveraging these pre-existing practices, and simply bringing them into a new medium, Twitter has created a product that feels native – you know how to use it pretty much immediately. This is the hallmark of great IA and great product design.

In a way, Twitter represents some of the best values of Web 2.0 – it is a product that addresses a social need in a simple, useful way. It doesn’t overreach, it doesn’t try to do more than it should. They’ve likely cut more features than they added, which is a design philosophy I really believe in. Its refreshing to see applications like these still viably coming to market – because in the past few months I haven’t seen anything on Mashable or Techcrunch that had had a vague chance of being incorporated into my set of tools.

Ok, so that’s the upside for Twitter – now, what are the challenges the product faces? Perhaps the greatest challenge Twitter faces is making inroads into the youth market. Why? Well, young people have been utilizing and hacking apps to create social presence for many years now. The main vector for social presence is the buddy list. With more young people having their own computers, the buddy list becomes the default location for presence. While I couldn’t find a good stat in the literature, my guess would be that the average young person has an average of one- or two-hundred friends on their buddy list. At the same time, instant messenger has successfully jumped to mobile, so the notion of using the buddy list as a presence notifier is nothing new.

Therefore, to bring these younger users over to Twitter will be somewhat challenging – barring some unforeseen Myspace-like growth in popularity, Twitter’s network won’t be as valuable (in the Metcalfe sense) as an instant messenger network, simple due to the fact there’s more information available in the instant messenger network.

Of coruse, one can argue that Twitter isn’t just about setting away messages – it is also about Microblogging. As it happens, young people have been Microblogging in social network services for some time now – the wall or message board is the perfect example of a microblog. Again, Twitter leverages pre-existing behaviors, but the ultimate question revolves around where the individual’s microblogging is most valuable. For a young person, it may be more valuable to share a link or write a wall post (knowing the wall post will get sent to Feed) in Facebook.

The purpose of this post isn’t to come down hard on Twitter, but to point out that the behaviors and practices it is leveraging aren’t exactly new. And for bloggers who don’t have a robust buddy list, and don’t write wall messages, Twitter may seem revolutionary. However, in the youth market, they already have a place for these practices, and the process of pulling these users to a new place may be rather difficult.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with Twitter being the current sweetheart of the blogosphere. 54k meme be damned, its always a good thing to have A-list bloggers loving your product – and they love it for the right reasons. It is actually providing them a useful service, and they love it as a result. However, as I look at my Twitter friend list, a vast majority of users are people I see 2-4 times a year at conferences. Great people, but they’re only situationally relevant during those times.

I think this illustrates the problem for Twitter – for it to catch on in a mainstream fashion, it must be filled with people you care about/interact with on a day-to-day basis. You must be able to log into Twitter and find out what your friends are doing. And considering that we have countless other ways to do this, Twitter faces somewhat long odds. In the end, the value of Twitter is so closely tied to the value of its network due to its simplicity (in my Network Effect Multiplier equation, Twitter lets a small initial value). Getting to this point will be a challenge for Twitter, but they’re off to a strong start, and it will be interesting to watch them grow.

Research / Software / Thoughts — 10 Comments
24
Feb 07

Understanding Candidate Facebook Groups

At this point, we’ve all heard the story of Farouk Olu Aregbe’s Facebook group “Barack Obama (One Million Strong For Barack).” As of this writing, the group is less than 1000 members away from a total membership count of 300,000. This is somewhat of a stunning achievement, especially when you consider that no other candidate has a group that even compares to this group’s size.

As far as I can tell, Aregbe is not affiliated with the Obama campaign. He is a connected, concerned supporter but nothing more. At the same time, many other concerned supporters of other candidates have started Facebook groups – there are hundreds listed for the campaigns (and potential campaigns) I surveyed – Clinton, Obama, Edwards, McCain, Giuliani and Romney. None of these groups even come close to Aregbe’s group in terms of size. Why?

First, lets survey the state of Facebook groups for the political candidates. With the exception of the Clinton campaign (more on this later), the groups were fairly homogenous. Some groups supported the candidate, some groups opposed the candidate. There were a few global groups, with membership not exceeding 5000, with the average large group membership around 1000-2000. There are also many subgroups based on region (DC for..), interest group (College Students for..) or quip (If X wins the election, I’m moving to..). For each candidate there were many groups, with the majority of groups small (sub-100) and unnoticed.

The outlier in my survey was Clinton’s campaign, where opposition groups account for a large percentage of groups formed. In fact, the most significant group was one entitled “ANTI Hillary Clinton for president ’08“, which has nearly 48,000 members at my last count. This is clearly the largest candidate opposition group on Facebook, and its size is quite noteworthy. The tone among anti-Clinton groups was rather vile, with a number of groups (often created by high school students) advocating violence towards the candidate.

So what made Aregbe’s group special? Just as in the case of Ben Parr’s “Students Against Facebook News Feed”, the success of the group was somewhat arbitrary, but there were factors that contributed to its success. First, Aregbe’s group was properly timed. He created it the day after Obama’s video “A Message from Barack” made its way around the web. Unlike the inevitable campaign announcements of Edwards and Clinton, Obama’s announcement was a pleasant and noteworthy surprise to many. This, combined with the connected nature of Aregbe (his day job is advising college student government) made his timing and placement perfect. The message moved through his network (via Facebook news feeds) like wildfire, quickly arriving on the growth path that has let it to its success today. To boil things down a little more, this was a 1) perfectly-timed message sent to a 2) primed audience by a 3) maven/connector.

Perhaps this is why the other groups have failed. For a group to be as successful as Aregbe’s, it may need all of these factors simultaneously, which is a rare situation. In Parr’s case, he denies being a connector, though his message could have easily been picked up and carried forward by a connector. At the same time, Facebook makes it difficult for groups of large volume to form in this context. Since group searches are returned based on semantic match, and not on size, it may take someone clicking through 15 pages of returns before they come across the group with the largest number of participants.

Does this mean that candidates won’t be able to engineer this process to build large Facebook groups? In fact, if they optimize their offerings, I think they will also be able to create large Facebook groups.

  • First, the group must be strategically named – the candidate’s name must be in the group name and description. At the same time, since group searches are returned alphabetically, a group name like America for Candidate X will return before Candidate X for President.
  • Second, there must be an opportune time. Obama’s announcement got everyone talking – and since at that point Obama occupied more cognitive space than other candidates, people were primed for Obama. Since candidates can’t announce again, what can they do for an encore? Well, a scandal (America supports Candidate X) or especially noteworthy event (America is proud of Candidate X) might create opportune timing.
  • Third, the candidate will likely be the connector. If the candidate appeals to the audience directly to join their Facebook group, their centrality could spark viral growth.

Even if they do all of these things, success is not guaranteed. There are only a few very large groups in Facebook, so there is certainly some magic in the process. But groups are valuable. Group membership is an identity statement, one that influences the cohort. Group membership creates a place for supporters to come together to discuss, learn and share. Perhaps more importantly, groups are huge mailing lists – the group owner can message every groups member directly. I haven’t a clue what the election laws say about this if a group was candidate-managed, but a list of that size and concentration is enviable in any situation.

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