Anne Truitt Zelenka

Andrew McAfee suggests that Facebook and similar social tools bring value to business by allowing employees to create and maintain more weak ties with people. Weak ties often bridge across groups and thus offer access to information and other resources that might not otherwise be available. Andrew likens these to options (e.g., financial ones that give you the right but not the obligation to exercise them):

I also think that employees who blog behind the firewall are establishing something like weak ties with all of their colleagues. If decent search exists, any employee can find out if their blogging peers have sought-after knowledge or expertise. The ties in this instance are potential rather than actual, but they’re still still valuable in the way that all options are.

In fact, the concept of an option is a useful one for understanding the overall power of weak ties. An employee’s strong ties give her colleagues. Her weak ones open up options. Technologies that help weak ties proliferate therefore also provide options. Given how cheap they are, and how many options they bring, they seem like one of the best investments out there.

Jack Vinson asks how you know when to access those options, when to activate those weak ties:

So, we have technologies that open up our options. How do we talk about when to access those options? Obviously, the whole point of weak ties is that they are infrequent. But how does one know to move away from the strong ties and implore weak ties for help? Is there a “process,” or do you rely on random colleagues coming across your questions / problems / etc? Or is there some other mechanism.

This may be the next great problem for social networking platforms to solve: how to enable social problem solving. When an employee is faced with a complex, ambiguous, and uncertain problem and she doesn’t have enough information or other resources to solve it on her own, how does she find and marshal what she needs? She may search through her network, either the hierarchy or her informal social network.

Using the hierarchy, she might just ask her manager (moving up) or her colleagues (laterally) or subordinates (down). Then her manager or her subordinates or her colleagues might get involved, navigating their relationships on the hierarchy. This can become time and communications-intensive, because the person or people who can solve the problem might be far away if all you can use is the organizational hierarchy.

An informal social network includes ties that cut across the formal hierarchy and thus offer shortcut information finding and problem solving. If the employee has a way of searching across these ties, she might be more successful in a shorter time.

A couple things that could be important here:

• For complex search problems like this, people don’t “teleport” directly to their destination. They use what some researchers have labeled “orienteering.” With orienteering, you take small steps towards your goal, learning what does exist and what doesn’t, redirecting and refocusing as you move throughout the search space. Gene Smith has provided a good summary of orienteering vs. teleporting; research paper here (PDF).
• Our world is made small — meaning we know how to navigate through it — by our multi-dimensional identities. People like to cluster with other people similar to themselves (homophily), but they are similar to other people in many ways. They use knowledge of who is like whom to determine how to search through social networks.

These two ideas together, orienteering plus multi-dimensional identities, might make it easier to figure out exactly how social tools can support social problem solving. Another idea I think may be important is Richard Ogle’s concept of the idea space that thinks for itself, described in his book Smart World.

What do we need then? Maybe a tool designed for orienteering-style search and problem-solving that incorporates an informal social network into it via something like Twitter search or LinkedIn Answers. And it needs a useful representation of what people are like: what they know, their demographic characteristics, their personal characteristics, and who they know. This allows someone doing a social network search to prune their search space by navigating only to people likely to have the answer to their question.

Next maybe I’ll consider how Facebook or LinkedIn or a combination of tools might support social network problem solving.