The New York Times chronicles another example of an online ad campaign gone bad. This time the California Milk Processor Board ran a campaign at everythingidoiswrong.org (since replaced with gotdiscussion.org) touting the abilities of milk to help reduce PMS symptoms that clearly made light of women from a stereotyped males perspective. As we well know by now, in the age of social media, a misstep like this can quickly turn into a disaster.
Today's New York Times has an article on an educational software start-up that "has a social-networking twist." The company, Piazza, provides a course page where students can ask and answer questions with moderation from the instructor. I'm not sure what the "social networking" component of this site is. From the Times article, it sounds simply like a message board with a few bells and whistles. A quick search for the company's website left me empty handed, so we can only speculate that there is actually something more here.
In passing, the article raised another interesting point though: "As in the case of Facebook, the wildly popular social network that sprang from a Harvard dorm room, the close-knit nature of college campuses has helped accelerate the adoption of Piazza." The idea that close-knit communities lead to increased technology adoption is something that I prove in my recent paper, "Friendship-based Games." The idea of closely knit communities is captured by the clustering coefficient of a network. This metric measures the probability that two individuals that share a mutual friend are friends with one another. In the paper, I show using a game theoretic model that new (beneficial) technologies have an easier time breaking into a market in networks with high clustering. The basic idea is that small communities of users can adopt the new technology and interact mainly with one another, protecting themselves from the incumbent. This may be one of the reason that college campuses, which probably exhibit higher clustering than many other social networks, prove to be such fertile ground for the adoption of new innovations.
A recent New York Times newsletter contained an article, "Social Media in Tornado Alley," in which they describe how resident posted YouTube videos and reporter Twitter feeds contributed to their coverage of the tornado devastation in Joplin, Missouri. They created a video by piecing together YouTube clips and their reporter Brian Stelter, "immediately began filing a stream of Twitter updates that provide a unique and up to the second account of what he was seeing on the ground there."
It's interesting to see how the Times and other "traditional" news organizations are folding social media into their portfolio. On the one hand, social media is seen as a challenge to traditional news sources, since so much information is available via the Web. But, I think we're seeing how organizations like the Times can serve as curators of this information by collecting the most interesting/important/reliable pieces and adding expert commentary and analysis.
There is a great story on the Atlantic’s website about a fake quotation that exploded on Facebook and Twitter after Osama Bin Laden’s death. The quote, wrongly attributed to Martin Luther King Jr. is:
“I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.”
The author of the article, Megan McArdle, traces the origins of the wrongly attributed quote to a facebook post from a 24 year old Penn State graduate student (check out the article for the fascinating story). This brings up some interesting issues about rumors and social media. An open question regarding information and the web, is whether technologies like social media and the Internet in general increase or decrease the prevalence of false information. On the one hand, the “wisdom of the crowd” might be able to pick out the truth from falsehoods. True statements will be repeated and spread, while false statements will be recognized by a great enough number of people to squelch them. On the other hand, we know that systems like this with strong positive feedbacks can converge to suboptimal solutions. If you think of retweeting some piece of information as like casting a vote that it is true, we might expect information cascades of the sort described theoretically by Bikhchandani et al.. In this case, two things seem to have happened. Initially, there was a sort of information cascade that led to the spread of the quote. Then it wasn’t the wisdom of the crowds that led to the squelching of the rumor, but the efforts of knowledgable individuals tracing the quotation back to the initial post. What the Internet provided was a way to uncover the roots of the false information for those willing to take the time to look.
The burst of Twitter reports of Bin Laden’s death prior to any official announcements is continuing to generate interest. NPR has an informative interview with Andy Carvin, NPR’s senior strategist for social media (thanks to Georgia Kernell for sending it to me). The event raises several interesting questions about social dynamics and the spread of information. It would be interesting to know how many false reports of Osama Bin Laden’s death there have been on Twitter prior to this that didn’t “go viral.” It would seem that a key feature of this particular cascade of tweets was the apparent authority of the “earlier adopters.” The initial tweet that got things going seems to have come from a former aide to Donald Rumsfeld. This tweet was probably picked up by other “Beltway insiders.” I would guess a key feature to the rumor’s success in spreading was the fact that these initial tweeters were people that other people trusted to know this sort of thing. That’s a difficult aspect to capture in basic compartmental models of rumor spreading, or even standard network models of information transmission. You not only need to have highly credible individuals, but you have to have a large cluster of credible individuals that are all tightly connected to one another.
By now many people have heard of how Twitter predicts the stock market. The Media Decoder blog at the New York Times has an entry today on how Twitter contributed to the leak of Osama Bin Laden’s death. A follow-up article was posted later.
Highlights:
“Unconfirmed reports — that turned out to be true — of Osama bin Laden’s demise circulated widely on social media for about 20 minutes before the anchors of the major broadcast and cable networks reported news of the raid at 10:45 p.m., about an hour before Mr. Obama’s address from the White House.”
“Twitter saw the highest sustained rate of posts ever, with an average of 3,440 per second from 10:45 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. Eastern time. There were more than five million mentions of Bin Laden on Facebook in the United States alone.”
Facebook hopes to leverage its more than 600 million members and “ability to tap directly into the communications and activities of networks of friends” to cut into the business of successful coupon websites like Groupon and Living Social.
Read more here.