Trust, Twitter, and "Going Viral": SMSociety13 #1

SMSociety Post #1

So I was at the SMSocial13 conference @ Dalhousie University. It is a conference on Social Media: its use, impact, and possibilities.  The presentations from the first morning went from 'big data' analyses (1 billion tweets) to small networks of Canadian military spouse bloggers.  It is good to see old friends and meet some new ones.  Interestingly conversations among both groups turned to when I'm finishing my PhD.  I suspect collusion but I digress.

Saturday Morning Keynote: Our keynote speaker was Sharad Goel, a senior researcher with Microsoft.  He's the guy who has the system big enough to map out 1 billion tweets.  He asked an interesting question: "what does 'going viral' really mean?"  Oddly enough my blog has never gone viral (insert kitten picture here) so I listened intently.  He examined the way videos, online games, tweets, and pics spread online, and mapped out those relationships.  Guess what he found? 93% of stuff posted never gets reposted/retweeted, 5% gets one reposted by one person, and fewer still by two and three.  What percentage of posts get reposted by someone, and in turns gets reposted by another? 0.3%.  This is not viral yet; you have only graduated from friend repost to social repost.  A few of these continue to spread, and these are the ones Sharad focused on.

How do they spread?  Well a variety of ways, sometimes it starts with a broadcast to a wide audience, and some of those begin to repost.  Other times it starts with one person, and then like the common cold you give it to your friend, and it spreads one person at a time.  It can be various combinations of the two; I think of Gangnam style as one that spread through a variety of means including word of mouth.  He did raise questions about this thing the media calls "going viral"; we know it happens but it seems that the way it happens is still the person to person, one "like" at a time.  So in the end Sharad couldn't tell me how to make my blog go viral.  His exact words to us were, "if I knew that I wouldn't be here, I wouldn't tell you, and I'd start a company."

I had a good discussion with a couple of other attendees about the role of "trust" in online sharing.  We share through our personal networks, but we share differently based on trust relationships.  The broadcast post assumes we trust in the broadcast source.  In an earlier post I noted that Lady Gaga and "the Beib" have many more followers, but religious leaders like the Joyce Meyers, Joel Osteen and Dalai Lama are much more likely to be retweeted.  The trust relationship is different.

In the 1980s before online communication, I read a lot about the role of trust in the context of cross cultural communication and religion. Religious conversion is one of the most dramatic shared experiences, and requires a prior trust bond: I trust you so I am more willing to trust your Jesus.  Religious proselytizing had its own broadcast models through traditional media. Evangelists like Billy Graham reached many people this way.  But rarely was this their first experience with the message. They usually had a prior one-to-one interpersonal trust relationship (the friend who brought them).  Broadcast played a role but by building on the trust of individual relationships.

The theme of trust came through in other social media presentations so we'll continue this conversation later this week.  In the meantime enjoy one of my favourite viral videos again.

Cheesy but fun!