Comments (0)

By Tai, September 6, 2010 7:16 pm

I stumbled upon an interesting note from the Economist: Influential people, or those at high social pecking order, tend to make long calls, whereas calls they receive are generally short, stemmed from knowledge of telecommunication companies.

I asked the question why, and attempt to contemplate an answer myself:

• What managers (and influencers) do a lot as part of their job is communicate (Baxter 2010), and they prefer to do so verbally (Mintzberg 1990), explains why they tend to have prolonged conversations through the phone
• Delegation by managers to subordinates involves goal settings (Blanchard & Johnson 1982), information dissemination (Mintzberg 1990), and relationship building (Fisher & Ury 1991). All of these require investment in communication time.
• Influencers tend to have broad networks (Gladwell 2000) and managers need to communicate inter-departmentally (Kanter 1989), this kind of conversation need to be exchanged by elaborated discussions
• Modern autonomous workforce usually call their boss to report status or present quick information or propose solution they have already had in mind, so they tend to quickly wrap up their conversations in short forms

All in all, this is an interesting point in social interactions.

Reference

Baxter, J., 2010, ‘Managing agile organisations’, School of Accounting, Australian School of Business, University of New South Wales, 2010

Comments (2)

By Tai, November 10, 2009 7:47 am

Social media begins to look less social and it need to be so because:

Major online communities usually start with a small group of smart, motivated, everybody-knows-everbody contributors. After crossing critical mass, such communities start to attract more users which is a good thing. The bad thing is that trolls also jump in. What’s more, noise and irrelevant information start to emerge from clueless or, worse, malicious posters.

Two types of community are somewhat immune to such annoyance:

1. Social networks, led by Facebook , with which you determine your social graph of those you care about
2. Services which you determine the content you want, led by Twitter. Others may include Tumblr, twine, squidoo. Addendum: Twitter got better with lists.

I’m sorry, Digg.

What’s the solution? Channel, possibly?

Comments (4)

By Tai, April 10, 2009 7:34 pm

I’d suspected that Facebook is moving fast toward monetization.

But Sheryl Sandberg’s confirmation that Facebook has been profitable for 5 consecutive quarters still comes as a nice surprise.

Nevertheless, considering this model, where all the money has been generated is not much a question.

Where else has Facebook been making money on? Will Social Search come next? Will Facebook do Data Mining behind the scene?

Comments (0)

By Tai, March 7, 2009 9:54 am

My first fortnight in Sydney passed and the only social media entity I’m surrounded by is neither Google, Yahoo nor Twitter, but Facebook.

My experience with the University of New South Wales confirms my hypothesis on the Viralization of Facebook:

In UNSW we have over 100 clubs and societies. Student activities and career orientation programs here are organized make use of Facebook as a platform for announcements, discussions, networking and to some extent, information storage.

Newly arrived students are inevitably invited to create a Facebook account, connect to others and join many of the student groups.

Influencers are ubiquitous. And they’re not necessarily the tech-savvy; mainly, they have something to share.

Around 2,600,000 Australian are in Australian network, around 12% of the whole population of Australia.

A quick check on Alexa shows that Facebook is ranking 3rd in Australia, only after the two Google’s properties. Considering their popularity and potential to dominate the web further, I’m not surprised if Facebook wants to shift from relationship-centric to content-centric.