2000 Vs. 2010: How the world has changed
I grew up in Southern California and graduated from UCSB with a BA in Film & Media. Went to NYU/Tisch School of the Arts for an MFA in Film. Lived in England for 6 years, where I met some very cool people and married my true love. Fast forward 13 years and we have 3 incredible daughters, a menagerie of pets and a great life even if we are the only conservatives living in the most liberal college town in America - Ann Arbor, MI.
Professionally, I'm a digital marketing executive. For the past 20 years, I've worked with Fortune 100 companies at a senior-level to accelerate their business growth through consumer insights, marketing strategy, social media and technology investment.
I love photography, teaching people how to use social media, scrapbooking, cooking delicious meals for my family and friends, going horseback riding with my kids and visiting new cities. Oh, and I write. A lot. Growing a heirloom kitchen garden from scratch seemed like it would be a fun thing to do, so here I am.
In this article, I'll share with you 7 powerful questions to ask yourself as you close off your year. I recommend you to allocate at least 30 minutes with yourself and use that time to earnestly answer these questions. This will be one of the most important exercises you've ever done. Here they are:
- On a scale of 1-10, how satisfied are you with 2010?
This gives you a quick snapshot of how satisfied you are with this year. 10 is the highest, and 0 is the lowest. Interestingly, this number can give you a lot of insights.Why did you score that way?
For the score you gave yourself in Q1, why did you assign that? I believe it's more important to understand the underlying drivers of the situation, rather than harp on the assessment itself. For example, if you gave yourself a score of 3/10, why did you give a 3? Is it because you feel that you neglected your relationships and health in pursuit of your work? Is it because you didn't go all the way in achieving your goals? Write them down.What are your biggest accomplishments this year?
Accomplishments here refer to any results you are proud of. It can include business achievements, career, relationships, health & fitness, and more.For some people this question can be confronting, especially if they have been living on auto-pilot. Yet it's extremely important because it makes us take a cold, hard look at how we've been spending our time. Did we put it to good use? Have we been working on our Quadrant 2 tasks? It helps us sieve out the unimportant and zoom down to what matters.
When I first asked myself this question years ago, I had trouble coming up with meaningful answers. It made me realize that the bulk of my achievements that year were for my employer, whereas I had done nothing for myself. It gave me a wake up call, and from there I became a person on a mission. I became in tune with my personal dreams in life, and I was singly focused on bringing them to life. I knew in my heart of hearts that I want to help others grow and be their best selves, so I worked in that direction. In less than a year I had shed away my previous job and was pursuing my dream. By the next year, I had already turned it into a real, full time career. This year is my 2nd year and it's my best performing year yet. This happened because this question made me conscious of what I wanted to achieve in my life.
What are the biggest lessons you learned this year?
Out of all the things that happened this year, what are the biggest things you've learned?In life, we have countless experiences, and there are things to be learned in every experience. We can either let these incidences pass us by, or we can stop to understand, internalize them, and draw lessons from these experiences. When we do that, we literally become wiser than we were before. We can then use these important lessons and apply them to new situations we face.
Since 2006, I took to the habit of writing annual reflections. Writing them down helps us to stack our lessons through time, so we can build upon our wisdom, rather than relearn the same things. This way, we can advance our growth much faster.
What are your biggest goals that you want to achieve next year?
Alternatively:* "How can you make next year your best year ever?"
* "If it's now Dec 31 of next year, what do you want to see in your life?" Then, set these as your goals.What does it take to make you feel a 10/10 satisfaction level at the end of next year? What goals do you want to have achieved? What dreams do you want to see fulfilled? Write these goals down and set them as your key goals for the next year.
What new habits do you want to cultivate?
Successful goal achievement come from having the right habits. What new habits do you want to cultivate? The most popular ones for me every new year include meditating, exercising, waking early, sleeping early, drinking plenty of water a day and more. When you practice positive habits, you naturally become a better person.What are your immediate next steps to achieve them? Here's an important tip - get started right away. Get a head start even and do them before the new year comes! You'll feel ahead of everyone. I'm now already planning out my February-March plans for my blog and it feels great knowing what's ahead! Do that for your life and you'll immediately see the positive difference it brings.
It's not just about writing, but about doing. Now that you have written your intentions for the new year, what are the immediate next steps you've to take to achieve them? What do you have to do to get the ball rolling? Write down specific dates to the actions.Share Your Reflections!
How are your year end reflections? How do you feel about this year? Why? What have you learned? What are your biggest goals for the next year? Share with everyone here in the comments.
Facebook’s users are updating their status millions of times per day. We know what those users were chatting about the most, but what do teenagers talk about most? What about users with more Facebook friends? How does time of day affect status updates?
To find out, Facebook’s computers analyzed approximately one million status updates from U.S. English speakers. It then broke down those updates based on context, demographics and content to figure out just what its users are buzzing about.
The social network first analyzed the correlation between the use of specific words and age. Unsurprisingly, they found that there’s a positive correlation between age and religious words, family, and positive emotions, while there was a negative correlation between sex, sleeping, first person pronouns, school, swear words and negative emotions. In other words, the younger you are, the angrier you are.
Facebook () also analyzed the correlation between word choice and friend count. While the correlation is not as strong as age’s correlation to word choice, Facebook’s data team did find that there’s a positive correlation between friend count and second person pronouns, total word count, communication, religion, swear words and sex. On the other end of the spectrum, there’s a negative correlation between friend count and past and present tense verbs, family and emotions.
Another interesting finding is the impact of the time of day on word choice. Not only do Facebook’s users tend to talk about sleeping the most at around 4 AM ET, but they tend to talk about their work right before they head into the office. Positive and negative emotions are also affected by the time of day: negative emotions tend to peak at around 1 AM ET, while positive emotions tend to peak at about 7 AM ET. More importantly, negative emotions tend to increase as the day progresses at the expense of positive emotions.
What type of status updates tend to get the most attention? Facebook dug into this data as well and found that positive status updates tend to get more likes while negative status updates tend to get more comments. Check out this image for the breakdown:
Illustration by Keith Negley
Companies, both big and small, risk their reputation each day. No matter how good things seem to be — earnings are on the rise or a new product is a smash hit — serious threats can instantly damage a company’s reputation, sending even the most respected businesses into a tailspin from which they might not fully recover for years. Environmental accidents, manufacturing mishaps, executive misconduct, financial irregularities, product recalls, and online attacks by special interest groups, for starters, are now commonplace. Many businesspeople seem to think, watching the recent public excoriation of BP, Toyota, Goldman Sachs, and other companies, that the most appropriate way to manage reputational risk is to significantly increase spending on crisis management: Invest in lobbying, “apology advertising,” and a crackerjack public relations agency that can swoop in to make such problems go away.
However, this approach will no longer fly, because the public is growing increasingly cynical about corporate behavior. Some companies’ hapless responses to accidents and other incidents have made business seem generally out of touch and untrustworthy. At the same time, the strategic value of a good corporate reputation seems to be growing stronger. The 2010 “Trust Barometer” survey by the PR firm Edelman found that people believe that trust, transparency, and honest business practices influence corporate reputation more than the quality of products and services or financial performance. Given this intriguing sentiment, what can companies do to safeguard their reputation and their brands — and beyond that, to enhance and even realize strategic value from them?
The answer starts with taking a long, hard look at your company’s current reputation management strategy and determining whether it is still tenable. In the past, companies adopted one of four possible strategies; all four were effective to some degree. However, today only two, numbers 3 and 4 in the list below, are viable.
1. Reckless negligence. This strategy involves continuing with business as usual: doing little or nothing to improve your capabilities in health, safety, and environmental management, assuming that you can cut corners and shave costs without reprisal. You believe that whatever chances you are taking will be justified as long as you keep your prices low, your customers satisfied, and your quarterly shareholder expectations met. Perhaps 25 to 30 percent of the companies in the industrialized world and in emerging markets have chosen this strategy. These companies are one misfortune away from irreversible damage to their reputation. Some food companies that ignore the growing concerns about obesity and health are in this category.
2. Deceptive virtue. You put your best face forward through public relations or rebranding campaigns, corporate philanthropy, sustainability programs, and espousal of high-quality business practices, building yourself a reputation for being farsighted and responsible — even if you aren’t. As long as the company is well managed, competent, and reasonably lucky, this strategy works. But if your actual core values and business practices don’t match the image you present to the world, you’re taking a huge gamble. Comparatively few companies have adopted this narcissistic strategy; those that have include tobacco companies in the 1960s, pharmaceutical companies defending killer drugs in the 1990s, and the highest-profile corporate falling stars of the 2000s, including Enron and, more recently, some of the biggest banks.
The seismic events of the past few years have shown that these two strategies are untenable. They leave companies too exposed — to populist outrage, competitors, litigation, and the loss of a license to operate. Moreover, as they falter, new rivals with better reputations (and better reputation management strategies) can always step in and fill the gap.
3. Benign competence. You set out to be an efficient and effective company with just enough emphasis on responsible management of your reputation. You comply with regulations and make adequate investments in building your capabilities for health, safety, and environmental management as well as investing in corporate communications. However, the fact is that these capabilities are “table stakes.” Like the finance and legal support functions in most companies, these capabilities have to be sufficiently developed to substantially reduce reputational risk, but they do not have to be world-class. Under this strategy, your reputation is not the center of your business, nor should it be, although you may invest in systems that monitor this risk. You are focused on delivering quality products and services and fulfilling your obligations to customers and shareholders. Perhaps 50 percent of the companies in the world fall into this category.
4. Trustworthiness as a competitive advantage. This strategy — adopted either by choice or because circumstances have left you no alternative — involves making reputation management a critical capability of your organization. This capability distinguishes you from the competition, attracts both employees and customers, and can earn you an enviable reputation among customers, investors, regulators, suppliers, and policymakers.
Being a reputation-driven company is a painstaking endeavor, in which you pay as much attention to maintaining transparency and living up to your public promises as to developing the next great product. For example, Walmart is making significant progress toward trustworthiness around environmental sustainability in particular, by walking the talk in its logistics, operations, and sales practices. The retailer is both changing consumers’ buying habits — by offering a wider array of green products — and transforming its core business operations with responsible sourcing and packaging, supply chain transparency, increased fuel efficiency in its vehicles, greater energy efficiency in its stores, and waste minimization due to increased recycling. As a result, Walmart is well on the way to achieving three sustainability objectives previously considered impossible: being supplied solely by renewable energy, creating zero waste, and selling environmentally sustainable products. At least 55 percent of the seafood in Walmart stores is certified as having been caught with sustainable fishing practices, all its large electronics equipment and personal computers are manufactured without hazardous materials, and it has sold more than 350 million energy-efficient compact fluorescent lightbulbs in the United States.
The pursuit of trustworthiness is not a purely altruistic practice. It is a choice that some companies make to establish themselves in an age when corporate reputation matters. This doesn’t mean that to be trustworthy a company must be flawless. But the company must at the very least admit mistakes and accept responsibility for them, gain the commitment of all employees to fix broken business practices that cause harm or that no longer reinforce the business strategy, and offer a realistic plan to deliver on its promises in the future.
A strategy of benign competence is an easier and more suitable path for many companies — and frequently, it’s not a bad choice. Trustworthiness is almost always harder to implement; companies choosing that course will probably need to change deeply embedded habits and instill new capabilities. However, if they make it work, they have the chance to create a sustainable strategy for growth that could beat the competition no matter how industry conditions change.
There are five strategic pillars for becoming a trustworthy, reputation-driven company:
1. Facilitate dynamic strategy development and execution. Trustworthy companies must become market-driven, by developing deep insight into the needs and perceptions of their stakeholders, and into the issues confronting customers, communities, employees, and shareholders, among others. Nimble systems should be developed to enable frontline employees to participate in dialogues with management about what is working and to fix problems before they escalate. In addition, strategic communications must be derived from the overall corporate strategy and become a central part of every senior executive’s responsibility. One example of a company succeeding at this is Avon Products, which has created a so-called 360-degree communications program. It is the public face of an ambitious grassroots turnaround strategy that has placed the cosmetics company closer to its customers in global communities, enabling it to better cater to the needs of women across specific age groups and social strata.
2. Foster the key behaviors for a one-company culture. Implementing a market-driven strategy in a complex world requires companies to build a globally integrated culture that enables employees at all levels to consistently practice trustworthy behaviors in all facets of the business. This should be accomplished with transparency inside and outside the company, and it increasingly demands the help of a fully integrated corporate communications function that supports senior leadership. The transformation of Philips over the last decade from a high-volume electronics firm into a much more diverse healthcare, lighting, and consumer lifestyle company is a noteworthy example. Having established a coherent business portfolio and simplified the company’s global operating model, Philips CEO Gerard Kleisterlee launched two major communication campaigns: “One Philips” revitalized the company’s identity internally, and “Sense and Simplicity” repositioned its brand around the world. These efforts have helped provide a clear road map for all employees to follow in acting as one company.
3. Nurture reputational capital. Internal business practices must institutionalize the alignment of the company’s reputation with its actual behavior. This typically involves closing any gaps that may exist between corporate identity and image. To recognize these gaps, trustworthy companies maintain agile reputation “radar” systems, in which decision makers are continually informed of how outsiders see the company, and of strategic opportunities for or risks to reputational capital. Nurturing reputational capital also typically requires rethinking corporate social responsibility programs as vehicles for competitive advantage, distinguishing the company’s practices and overall capabilities from those of competitors.
4. Harness social media to strengthen relationships. Companies must empower employee communities with new collaboration skills and tools. They should facilitate dialogues with key constituents to better understand what matters to them and to address emerging problems early. During the 2008–09 recession, Ford Motor Company took advantage of its website and social media platforms to launch live conversations among suppliers, dealers, and customers. These were designed to bring Ford’s bright performance — bright compared with the looming bankruptcies and bailouts involving rivals GM and Chrysler — to everyone’s attention.
5. Integrate rigorous crisis management policies and procedures to quickly address behavioral lapses. Rapid response capabilities at local, regional, and corporate levels are critical to applying the five rules of protecting the organization’s reputation during a potentially damaging incident: frame the problem; tell the story you want to tell; execute a practical plan that mitigates the problem, minimizes the damage, and offers concrete steps to rebuild confidence among directly affected constituents; tell the truth; and transform the crisis into strategic opportunities to build reputational capital.
Once you have decided to become a trustworthy company, there is no turning back. Organizations that fail to develop trustworthiness completely or simply lose their way are vulnerable to significant criticism and backlash — which can result in a complete loss of credibility. The choice between neglect and building trustworthiness as a core capability may well become vital for competitive advantage in a world looking for institutions it can count on for the long term.Source: Strategy + Business http://www.strategy-business.com/article/10401?gko=4adb7&cid=20101221enews
Many companies struggle with trying to resolve disputes between management and employees, and between employees. I managed large union and non-union workforces for more than three decades, and I never had a formal grievance or arbitration. Here are a few of the important lessons I learned along the way to keep everyone working together effectively:
At the end of the day, it’s all about how companies promote communications. Employees will smell a lie, they’ll sense confusion and they’ll reject anything that’s insincere. Remember that you need each other to be successful. Value and honor that thinking and see if you can reduce the number and intensity of your company’s disputes.
And for fellow leaders everywhere, I offer these seven fast, easy tips — inspired by Kahler Slater’s seven core values and practiced throughout our firm — for “besting” your own workplace.
- Trusting relationships. Positive, trusting relationships are the most potent pathways to creating a winning workplace and realizing your organization’s vision and objectives. Fast tip: Start upfront and choose new hires through consensus decisions — team-driven choices made by the candidates’ potential co-workers, not just by the HR department.
- Respectful collaboration. Two heads are almost always better than one, yet successful collaboration requires respectful communication, from engaging people openly and civilly to looking for value in others’ ideas. Fast tip: As a culture, make an agreement to build on others’ ideas. How? Start by always responding with “Yes, and …” rather than “No, but …”
- Passion. True passion, not superficial whims, is a requisite for real and lasting business success. Fast tip: Make passion a manifesto for the business, and ask everyone the ultimate question, “What is your passion?” Also, be willing to make difficult, passion-driven decisions, including letting people go if their passions aren’t the best fit for the business.
- Creativity. Fun is serious business, and play ignites imaginations and sparks creativity and innovation. Fast tip: Have regular “Creativity Fire Drills”—“Quick! Pin up whatever you’re working on and discuss it with anyone in the office who’s interested.”
- Integrity. Honesty rocks — and rules. Fast tip: Commit to being truthful, even when it means having difficult conversations or dealing with sticky situations (No avoidance allowed, period).
- Openness. The more people know about the business, the better equipped they will be to contribute to its success. Fast tip: Be transparent in every way, from opening up office spaces to opening up the books and sharing financial information. (One exception: when you are planning a fun surprise or practical joke!)
- Community. It’s important to be a part of your local community and the world community, and to share your time, talent and treasure for the betterment of society. Fast tip: Host a Volunteer Day at least once a year. Assign employees to different teams and charitable causes, and bring everyone together at the end of the day to share and celebrate their contributions, successes and experiences.
Leadership 101.
How do we close the gap between theory and results in selecting leaders? In discussing why our achievements in selecting leaders are less than stellar, contributors offered a rich set of ideas. Given their number, I've tried to categorize them into several categories. First were those essentially enumerating the qualities that we should look for in a leader without suggesting how we identify and select for them. Some of the more interesting ones included Kapil Kumar Sopory's suggestion that we look for "... the person with the biggest fire inside of them...." Rowland Freeman would ask, "... how will the selected individual handle power?" Edward Hare suggested that results fall short of expectations "... because we don't understand motives (of the candidate for the leadership position) ... How many aspiring leaders are not genuine or authentic? They're the ones that scare me." These comments raise the question of how much theory tells us about selecting for harder to measure characteristics such as possible behaviors under fire and motives as opposed to skills and past accomplishments.
A second group pointed to the body of knowledge based on research and practice that can guide and improve the selection process and its outcomes. Their message was: "We know how to do it. And here's how." As Al Shealy commented, "The research isn't being used." Dan Erwin suggested that "... cutting-edge interviewing skills can give important insight ...." Stephanie Fuentes said that "It's not hard if you take the time to do the planning and preparation." But the comments of the first group leave us wondering whether theory serves us well when it comes to selecting for such things as "fire," potential use of power, and motives. As Matthew Tuttle suggested, "Many of the traits are ... difficult to see in an interview." One answer to the challenge was suggested by Kirk Richardson: "There is only one true way to select really good leaders in a highly-predictable manner. You home-grow them ...."
A third group concentrated on why theory has had less impact on results than we might expect, essentially identifying reasons for a gap between theory and results achieved in practice. Several pointed out that since needs can't be standardized, standardized approaches may not work. As Stevan Trooboff put it, "... the problem in picking leaders lies as much with definition of what types of leadership is required as in the process of selection itself." Dean Madison asked whether, in selecting leaders, we are skipping over a more important question of "What are we trying to achieve as an organization?" Adrian Grigoriu commented that "... it shouldn't be so hard. But business leader stereotypes corrupt the selection process ...." Several others questioned the capabilities of the selectors themselves. As Ganesh Ram put it, "Unfortunately excellence does (not always) breed excellence… because some of the best leaders may still not be the best selectors." Dick Meza suggested that "The issue here may be the degree to which senior management cares about selection."
These observations raise interesting questions. Are there leadership traits that can't be measured? How do we determine what role they may play and what outcomes they may produce in a challenging situation? Which ones are relevant to the challenges that may be faced by a particular organization, at least in the opinion of those doing the selecting at one point in time? Do selectors really know what they are looking for in a leader? How do we close the gap between theory and results in selecting leaders? What do you think?
Original Article
Selection is on my mind again. Perhaps it is prompted by the inauguration of a new U.S. President or the drama of leaders of our largest financial institutions worldwide struggling to justify decisions that have placed their organizations in jeopardy. I was reminded, too, of the CEO of a well-known retail organization who, I believe, would be regarded by Jim Collins (of Good to Great fame) as a Level 5 leader—"Builds enduring greatness through a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will"—except for the fact that he has been plagued with bad decisions regarding his choices for senior management positions and a reluctance to repair them quickly enough. Collins writes about the need to get the wrong people off the bus, but what about the need to avoid putting the wrong people on the bus in the first place? As Capital One's CEO, Richard Fairbank, put it several years ago, "At most companies, people spend 2 percent of their time recruiting and 75 percent managing their recruiting mistakes."
Now Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers) has come forth with the proposition that there may be some jobs for which it is impossible to hire with any confidence. As he puts it, "There are certain jobs where almost nothing you can learn about candidates before they start predicts how they'll do once they're hired." Three that he cites in a recent article in The New Yorker are pro football quarterbacks, high-performing financial advisors, and teachers.
Learning is more strongly influenced by individual teachers, for example, than any other factor, including class size and quality of the facilities. In various studies, the truly great teachers do things like giving good, individualized feedback while remaining sensitive and responding to interactions going on around them that might indicate needs of other students. The reason that these findings are important to the field of management is that all good leaders, among other things, teach as well as learn. It requires careful listening and responding, often to individual needs. I suspect that they apply the same sensitivity to the social, economic, and legal environment in the search for effective competitive strategies.
At our institution, like many others, we've addressed the problem by hiring at least four people for every one that we expect to succeed at the tasks of teaching and research that our faculty members face. That's a solution that most business organizations would consider too costly. Some organizations have inventoried the qualities that successful employees display, then try to select others with the same qualities. But the process is often applied only to those at middle or lower levels.
Are there leadership jobs in business for which it is simply impossible to select people with any degree of confidence? Do behaviors change when one is anointed with the power of a leadership position? Are we condemned to an on-the-job training approach, with the attendant obligation to correct mistakes quickly (which boards understandably are reluctant to do)? Or are there more affordable approaches to the problem? What do you think?
How is great leadership measured? By the productivity of the company or the effect on people's lives?
"I’m Alex Bogusky at FearLessRevolution.com. We like to think of ourselves over here as insurgents in the new consumer revolution. I guess, in the simplest terms I’ve gone from working as a brand advocate to a consumer advocate—but I don’t really think of it as a very radical transition, because all the smartest brands have actually been transforming themselves into consumer advocates. Collaboration is the new competition, so as the control of data shifts away from sellers towards buyers, the new opportunity is to become not just a force of transparency in your business, but in your entire category.
Becoming transparent isn’t a choice. The only choice is: do you do it, or do you have it done to you? The latter has proven to be very unpleasant for brands. And please don’t make the mistake of trying to be a little bit transparent. Take the aspect of your business you feel you would least like to get PR on and make a plan to tell your customers how you hope to address the issue. And don’t forget to ask them for help along the way. Your customers are ready and anxious to join your mission if you let them in."
Fabulous advice from iconic Creative Director, Alex Bogusky: "Becoming transparent isn't a choice. The only choice is: do you do it or do you have it done to you? The latter has proven to be v. unpleasant for brands."
Fans of new media say Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites are changing the world.
They point to Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, the 2009 demonstrations in Iran and Moldova's "Twitter Revolution" in Eastern Europe in 2009 as evidence that all those tweets and status updates are making a difference.
People want power online, and they can have it, but only in a particular way. Actress Alyssa Milano can help explain why.
Milano loves to tweet, and tweeters love Milano. She has 1 million followers who at any moment can learn how she eats, when she sleeps and what she reads. On September 15, unbeknownst to us, she tweeted about our book, "Connected," and included a direct link to its Amazon.com page.
You might expect our sales to skyrocket. They did not. If anything, our sales rank was lower in the 24-hour period after her tweet than before. We didn't sell a single extra copy.
This is not surprising. Online networks may be good for transmitting information, but they are usually not conduits for behavior change.
Although our research shows that obesity, happiness and even divorce can spread in networks between close friends, there is little evidence that behaviors spread between the tenuous relationships people have online.
On September 30, we mentioned this Twitter experience at a conference held in Washington by the American Legacy Foundation on the use of online networks to foster smoking cessation. It's very tough to quit smoking. But online networks connect motivated smokers to each other, and they seem to work.
Although the audience laughed when we showed them a slide with Milano looking grimly at our sales figures, one of the attendees thought that something was not right.
Susannah Fox of the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project argued that if someone else, someone really influential, someone such as media mogul Tim O'Reilly, had sent the tweet, there might have been a different outcome.
So we contacted O'Reilly, and he graciously agreed to a little experiment.
On October 1, he too sent out a positive tweet about "Connected" that included a link to Amazon.com to his 1.5 million followers. This time, our sales rank did bounce a bit, but we estimate that we sold just one or two extra books. Given the number of followers he has, that's just a little better than the odds of getting struck by lightning. The mogul beat the actress, but not by much.
So who can we turn to for help if we want to use online social networks to influence people's behavior, whether for book sales or smoking cessation?
In our case, it was Fox who came to the rescue. A few days after O'Reilly, she sent her own tweet about "Connected." And although Fox has only 4,345 followers, we estimate that we sold three extra books as a result. A much smaller group of attentive followers, it turns out, may be more influenceable -- individually and collectively -- than the millions who follow the most famous tweeters.
These anecdotes comport with the more formal mathematical study of online interactions that we and others have been conducting over the past few years. And they suggest a number of important considerations regarding online influence.
First, it is not just the number of ties that matters online, it is also the nature and quality of these ties.
Malcolm Gladwell, author and staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, recently argued there was no hope that online social networks could be used for large-scale change. The reason is that the connections between people online are usually weak ties, not strong ties such as those to our family, next-door neighbors and real friends.
But this perspective overlooks something important. People do not just have countless weak ties online. Buried among all those weak ties are some strong ties. And they can make all the difference.
Online smoking cessation efforts work because people come to know and support each other to achieve something of mutual interest. And, under the right circumstances, the same thing can happen with political movements.
In 2008, for example, a 33-year-old Colombian engineer was able to mobilize 4.8 million people to attend rallies around the world to protest the holding of hostages by revolutionary groups in his country. But he started it with a group composed of himself and five close friends. And they in turn influenced other people with whom they had personal connections and with whom they shared a common goal, and so on.
Second, it is not just "influentials" who matter, but also "influenceables." O'Reilly and Milano can both be persuasive, and they are connected to millions of people. But it was the thousands of followers of Fox who ultimately won --granted, not by much -- our little contest. To make change happen, we need sheep as well as shepherds.
Finally, what is most important for efforts to harness the power of the internet to change people's behavior is this: We must learn how to cultivate online interactions that are, or feel, real.
We need interactions where something is actually at stake, such as the health status of the connected individuals, the business they are transacting, the game they are playing, the personal relationship they are maintaining or the political revolution they are fostering. When the circumstances are right, a shout can start an avalanche.
Regardless of influence or number of followers, there is little evidence that tweets change human behavior in any meaningful way (read: sales).
