Paul Adams - Grouped: How Small Groups of Friends Are the Key to Influence on the Social Web

How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web

Paul Adams

For Jenny. Thank you.

Grouped: How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web
Paul Adams

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New Riders is an imprint of Peachpit, a division of Pearson Education.

Copyright 2012 by Paul Adams

Project Editor: Michael J. Nolan
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ISBN 13: 978-0-321-80411-2
ISBN 10 0-321-80411-2

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Printed and bound in the United States of America

The world around us is changing rapidly. With the invention and rise of the web, were seeing the largest increase in the amount of information accessible to us since the printing press was invented over 550 years ago. This is truly a revolutionary time, and it will test much of what we have accepted as fact for hundreds of years. There are four massive shifts that are shaping this new world.

The first shift is the rise in accessible information. The accessibility of information is increasing exponentially and is not going to stop within our lifetime. A single query into a search engine produces millions of results. People are adding information to Wikipedia faster than we can read it. Every single day, hundreds of millions of people post billions of distinct pieces of content online. All of this information is digital, and can be analyzed for patterns.

The second shift is a major change in the structure of the web. Its moving away from being built around content, and is being rebuilt around people. This is correlated with a major change in how people spend their time on the web. Theyre spending less time interacting with content, and more time communicating with other people.

The third shift is that for the first time, we can accurately map and measure social interaction. Many of our theories can now be quantitatively tested. This is incredibly exciting for researchers, but it will also transform how we think about marketing and advertising. Many things that were previously hard to measure, for example, word of mouth marketing, can now be analyzed and understood. We can now start to measure how people really influence other people, and it will change how we do business.

The fourth shift is the dramatic increase in our understanding of how we make decisions. In the past decade, we have learned more about the workings of the brain than in all the time before that. Many of our theories about rational thought have turned out to be false, and we have greatly underestimated the power of our nonconscious brain.

If we want to be successful in this new age of exponentially increasing information and a web built around people, we will need to understand social behavior. We will need to understand how people are connected, how they interact, and how they are influenced by different people in their lives. We will also need to understand how people make decisions, and how the different parts of their brain and their biases drive their behavior.

Each year, many thousands of research studies are carried out on social behavior. This book is not a comprehensive account of all these studies, which would take up thousands of pages, and would never be read by busy professionals. This book is a synthesis of key studies in related fields, summarized into actionable patterns. The goal of this book is to give people a foundational understanding of social behavior, and how it applies to the future of business.

Many of the examples in the book are from Facebook. Because I work there, I have access to many trustworthy case studies and examples that I can share with readers. Many of the Quick Tips apply just as well to activity on other social networks. The academic reader may at times feel that I have oversimplified, overgeneralized, and talked about causality when we may be dealing with correlation. But this simplification is necessary to make research actionable to business. In this case, I believe that perfect is the enemy of good. People who are busy creating products and building companies dont have time to read full research papers, never mind try to synthesize them to find the larger patterns. But to be successful in reorienting their businesses around people, they need an actionable summary of this dataa foundation around which they can build a strategy. If you are that busy professional, this book is your foundation. Its the beginning, not the end.

This book is your introduction to the patterns behind our social behavior. Humans are social creatures, and an understanding of social behavior on the web will soon be required knowledge for almost all businesses. This book is your guide for the exciting new world that were collectively creating. Ive attempted to write a book that will give you, in a matter of hours, all the basic information you need to rethink your business.

The book is made up of independent sections which are designed to be reused. I hope you find that these sections can be taken in isolation if you choose, and used as input to think of new ways in which your business might support social behavior. When youre creating your next product, your next marketing plan, your next advertising strategy, revisit the relevant sections and brainstorm around established patterns of social behavior.

If you want to get into the detail, Ive included references to the main research studies I cite. This is not a comprehensive list, but the references included in these papers will lead you to many more related and fascinating research studies. Now lets get started by looking at how, and why, the web is being rebuilt around people.