Weak Ties and Social Networking
Andrew McAfee at HBS has a very good article in his blog on how social networking can strengthen weak ties among knowledge workers in networks. He writes:
Consider the prototypical knowledge worker inside a large, geographically distributed organization (all of what follows also applies for smaller and more centralized organizations, but probably to a lesser extent). She has a relatively small group of close collaborators; these are people with whom she has strong professional ties. Beyond this group, there’s also a set that includes people she with worked on a project with in the past, coworkers who she interacts with periodically, colleagues she knows via an introduction, and the many other varieties of ‘professional acquaintance.’ In Granovetter’s language, she has weak ties to these people.
Beyond this group there’s a still-larger set of fellow employees who could be valuable to our prototypical knowledge worker if only she knew about them. These are people who could keep her from re-inventing the wheel, answer one of her pressing questions, point her to exactly the right resource, tell her about a really good vendor, consultant, or other external partner, let her know that they were working on a similar problem and had made some encouraging progress, or do any of the other scores of good things that come from a well-functioning tie. By the same token, if our focal worker is a person of good will, there are many other people in the company she could help if her existence, work experiences, and abilities were more widely known.
Weak ties are important because they enable people to reach beyond their intimate circles of friends and co-workers to find people and information. Weak ties are differentiated from strong ties which are among people with long-term, sustained interaction.
In his blog article, McAfee goes on to explain how weak ties are strengthened through social networking:
As I wrote earlier, enterprise social networking software lets our prototypical knowledge worker stay in touch with a large network of colleagues, allowing her to keep up to date with that they’re doing, working on, and producing. It also lets her tell this network what she’s up to.
This might sound like an only marginally useful exercise, but it can in fact be quite powerful because it’s a quick and easy way to form connections and make associations that might not ever occur otherwise. I saw this firsthand a couple days ago when one of my Facebook friends told his network via his status message that he was going to accompany a foreign head of state to a high-level meeting on technology issues. Because I was only weakly tied to this person I had no idea that he was that well connected or interested in public policy. But as a result of his Facebook update, which took him about ten seconds to type and me one second to read, I now know who to reach out to should I ever want to dive into European IT issues, or desire an invitation to the Elysee Palace wink. SNS lets its users build bridges to new human networks, and to let non-redundant information emerge.
Facebook currently lets members ask their network a question, then collects their answers on one globally-visible page. I imagine that successful enterprise Facebook equivalents will have much more advanced tools to allow members to actively exploit their networks by asking them for assistance, pumping them for information, etc. I also imagine that they’ll let users post answers to their most frequently-asked questions, then simply point seekers to this resource. The facts that Facebook has opened its platform to outside applications, and that a consortium of social media providers anchored by Google and MySpace has just announced a common specification for developers, will no doubt hasten the arrival of robust enterprise SNS.
I think this is an extremely important insight into the value of social networking for knowledge workers and why everybody should be looking at joining a social network (Facebook now and more specialized networks that emerge out of the Google Open Social Initiative later). My own experience with Facebook and Linked In is that they are opportunistic tools. While I do have good friends on Facebook, I really use it to manage my weak ties — loosely track the interests and activities of a network of people with whom I have some kind of relationship — I met them at a meeting or conference — but with whom I am not going to be in regular phone or email contact. When I need something beyond my network of strong ties (like an introduction to the people who run SXSW), I turn to my social networks. And I have been very successful at exploiting the weak ties in my network.
In his blog article, Andrew talks about how other enterprise 2.0 technologies can be used to support other types of relationships, but I think the weak tie argument is extremely cogent and compelling.
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