Social media = weak ties

Posted on | September 7, 2009 | No Comments

Weak ties, most famously exhibited by Mark Granovetter, comprise those ties that a person has to other people that are not personal and strong, but rather random, occasional and superficial. However, weak ties usually play a key role in life–changing experiences, be it in work or in personal life. Think about it: you’re spouse is unlikely to belong to your closest network when you meet her/him; you didn’t hear from that amazing job you just landed from your best friend, but instead his cousin who happened to hear you’re looking for work; you took up a new hobby not because you’re brother is into it, but because an acquaintance at a cocktail party was so enthusiastic about the intricasies and details of the sport. Nassim Nicholas Taleb implies the utilization of weak ties when whe writes in The Black Swan that you should live in a big city and go to lots of off-work events in order to expose yourself to as many opportunities of good luck as possible.

What’s important to note is that in the age of social media, it doesn’t necessarily require a big city to exploit weak ties effectively. People well-embedded in social media are inherently well positioned to expose themselves to these opportunities. Using social networks for the purposes of work, personal communications as well as hobbies and interests, I constantly encourage and experience first–hand brushes benefits derived from activating weak ties.

For example, when in Rome, after having posted my whereabouts to Jaiku, a co-Finn Teemu Arina contacted me and told me that I should get in touch with a local media expert Robin Good there, which I did. What’s funny is that Teemu and I had never met by that time, but had simply read and liked each others’ blogs. Another, more recent example had me thinking about options to learn salsa in Helsinki. Not knowing where to start, I simply posted my question to Facebook and at the end of the day had 36 comments to the ensuing discussion. All were made by people who I’m not in constant contant with, even some who I had met only once for 15 seconds or so. Nevertheless, in the end I had a comprehensive list of different salsa schools and their characteristics and could use that to pick the one that suited me best. Google wasn’t involved in any way with this information search.

What does this mean to organizations then? A lot. Companies, traditionally set in the command and control mode, are not implicitly well–vetted to harvest the benefits of weak ties. Their communications and responsibility structure encourages formal and frequent ties over informal and occasional ones, and so the companies are poised to overlook opportunities that lie on the fringes. Cisco, as an example of a well–networked company, uses digital tools to work around the problem. Instead of being either business area or function–oriented, they form councils and boards around promising business opportunities (business adjacencies in Cisco-speak). These boards and councils comprise heads of functions who get rewarded not only by the performance of their unit but significantly also by their performance and co-operation in the team they are part of. To accomplish required tasks of varying sizes, the councils and boards gather up work groups that are always tailored to the task at hand and which are not mapped in the organization chart because they come and go so quickly. More on the Cisco approach in the recent Economist article here.

Although being criticized for spreading the organization too thinly and endangering burning out participants, Cisco’s approach at the moment seems to be working. They are successfully pushing to many new areas, from cloud computing to electrical power grids to consumer products, and are now far from what they became knwon for: supplying the switches and routers that are the plumbing of the internet. And they are doing this by not only facilitating weak ties, but making exploiting them a fundamental way of conducting everyday business. The question is, are you doing this? Have you even considered it?

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