Page 315 - Social Media Marketing

Reputation management plays a role in the development of values-based com- 293
munities too: Status differentiation can and does occur as some contributors within a
shared value-driven community will produce more and/or more useful content than ■ SOCIAL GRAPHS SPREAD INFORMATION
other members. That’s a natural condition, and members expect recognition for their
efforts. What’s important, though, is that the community as a whole does not lose sight
of the overall values connection as some members are elevated as a result of varying
contribution and participation.

Birds of a Feather Flock Together

Homophily—literally meaning “love of the same”—is a characteristic that has been generally
observed in social networks. For more on this and the ways it expresses itself in a social context,
see the following Wikipedia entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophily

Social Graphs Spread Information

Beyond linking people within a social network, the relationships that are present
within a social graph play an important role in the spread of information throughout
that social graph, and hence play a direct role in the sharing of content across a social
network. Looked at another way, without sharing, a social network is a largely theo-
retical construct: What difference do a thousand connections make if nothing of value
is flowing between them? Consider, for example, the value to you, personally, of a
network that you may have joined without understanding why—except perhaps that
everyone else was joining it—and as a result rarely find yourself using it: You have con-
nections within this network, but of what use are they?

As an example, when I first joined Twitter I did not “get it.” Half of my motiva-
tion for joining was “everyone else” I knew had already joined. I started using Twitter
in 2007 at SXSW; I am member number 12,556,112. Given a bit of time, however, I
started to develop actual relationships with people and began linking with people that
I knew, or knew of, and with people interested in working on some of the same things
I was interested in. That’s when Twitter made sense—when I was able to utilize my
social graph as it existed within Twitter in ways that benefited me and benefited the
growing Twitter community around me. Again, the takeaway is that only with a mean-
ingful social graph—only with connections between people with shared interests, com-
mon values, or aligned purposes, as examples—do the social networks that people may
belong to become relevant.

The applications built around the direct use of the social graph are important: I
spoke with Rapleaf’s Michael Hsu—Michael is part of Rapleaf’s marketing team—about