October 5th, 2007
Weak Ties and Diversity in Social Networks
by Joshua Porter | 
12 Comments | shortlink: http://bokardo.com/p/692
Anne Truitt Zelenka has a nice post: Weak Ties for Social Problem Solving in Enterprise 2.0, touching on a subject being discussed more and more these days: weak ties. She suggests that one of the next challenges for social software is distributed problem solving: how to leverage your social network when you have a tough problem to solve.
One of pieces Anne references is Andrew McAfee’s The Ties that Find, a nice overview of the idea of weak ties, which originated with the fascinating work of Mark Granovetter, who wrote the original work The Strength of Weak Ties(PDF) in 1973. Weak ties are relationships we have with people outside our own social networks. We don’t utilize them often, but we utilize them in certain situations to help us with things our social networks can’t. Most importantly, weak ties gives us a perspective outside of the normal groups of which we are a part, whose perspectives tend to become homogenized over time as we learn and become familiar with the people we spend the most time with.
What struck me about Anne and Andrew’s pieces was the implicit idea of the value of diversity. Neither mentioned this explicitly, but for those familiar with James Surowiecki’s work The Wisdom of Crowds, diversity is crucial to wisdom, and thus problem solving. Weak ties helps explain how we continually introduce diversity within our social groups, by periodically leveraging those relationships with people outside our close-knit social networks.
To help understand what was going on, I made a sketch of strong and weak ties:
Click for full-size version
McAfee then makes an interesting point: weak ties are valuable for enterprises who suffer from groupthink. So, while there is lots of pushback on the time wasted by employees using social networking software (many companies prohibit MySpace and/or Facebook behind the firewall), McAfee suggests that under the right conditions social networking software can increase innovation:
“The implication for SNS is obvious: Facebook and its peers should be highly valuable for businesses because they’re tools for increasing the density of weak ties within a company, as well as outside it. My Facebook friends are a large group of people from diverse backgrounds who have very little in common with each other.Furthermore, their profiles give me a decent way to evaluate their expertise. These online friends, in other words, are a large group of bridges to other networks. Facebook already provides me a few good ways to activate these bridges for my own purposes. I anticipate that enterprise SNS (whatever that turns out to be) will have many more.”
The design challenge, then, is to build software that leverages weak ties. The “network” feature of Facebook is an obvious example of a way to organize groups, but does it improve communication between the members within?
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1. Britt Raybould 1:10pm, Fri 5th, 2007
Many of my best ideas for my last corporate job came from bouncing things around with my weak ties. These people had nothing to do with the industry, or in some cases, my actual job function, but their insight proved invaluable.
However, because these were weak ties, they didn’t necessarily relate to each other, except through me, the common point. It always felt like I was working harder than necessary to make connections between the insights. More seemed possible, but no obvious way (at least to me) was readily available. I’ve always thought I could do more if I could figure out a way to make the connections easier to grasp.
2. Ryan Cairns 8:28pm, Fri 5th, 2007
Wow, you always seem to right the most interesting articles. Keep up the good research and unique insights.
3. James Yu 1:39am, Sun 7th, 2007
This is exactly why I like LinkedIn Answers. You get to ask tough questions that not only your strong ties see, but also your weak ties. For people that have enough connections on LinkedIn, the Answers feature is a direct application of the principles put forth in Anne’s posts.
It’s also very valuable to browse through the Answers within your network, since you get to see what problems your weak ties are currently dealing with.
4. Herb 12:09am, Mon 8th, 2007
Joshua,
I have bee reading Herd and have been thinking something like this…but your post articulated it perfectly.
I’ve been thinking about how we move around in weak ties and how much weak ties effects drive our decisions and thoughts. While we will always want our main group to value us, is the main groups opinion on the information we bring in more or less impressionable on us than what effects we receive across the weak links?
Then again, its late and I might be rambling. Good post, look forward to reading your blog.
5. gever 7:19pm, Wed 10th, 2007
I’m not sure I buy the idea that strong ties, which are “utilized frequently” actually need “more management” than the weak ties. In looking at my own social networks, it seems that the stronger the tie, the more self-sustaining and self-repairing it is.
Links to external groups, while not requiring much individual support (look at a business relationship between two people at different businesses), superficially seem to require very little support, but if you include the effort exerted by the businesses themselves then the calculated costs of the relationship becomes much larger.