A Matter Of Degree

20080801 - LinkedIn for Superheroes

20080801 - LinkedIn for Superheroes, originally uploaded by sadalit.

When are we mere mortals going to have access to a graphical display of commonly-used social networks like LinkedIn, FaceBook, etc.?

xobni - five minutes and I was hooked

I learned about xobni from a colleague last week, and downloaded it today.  Xobni ('inbox" backwards) bills itself as "the Outlook plug-in that saves you time finding email conversations, contacts and attachments" and / or "a more socially aware email environment."  I would prefer to describe it as "the free Outlook tool with addictive metrics."  Once it started analyzing, showing me, for example, who among my contacts is quickest to respond to me, I was fascinated.  Then when it gave me the option to send said contacts their stats, I was hooked. 

The design is bright and appealing (maybe a little too appealing - compared to the bland light-blue-and-white Outlook color scheme its orange, black and purple tones make it difficult to look away or ignore the pane) and I found it user-friendly and intuitive.  After eight hours I'm thinking of my correspondents in terms of their xobni rank ("Yeah, he's my number three") and trying to figure out imbalances ("Why am I sending her two emails for every one she sends me?").  It interfaces with LinkedIn.  It bubbles-up attachments.  It threads conversations.  It hasn't broken anything on my pc, although the comments on this post about xobni's business model indicate that it may cause problems with FireFox.  For my setup, there is no downside and a tremendous upside.

I would rave more, but I've got to go reply to an email from my #1.

Social Networks and Smoking Cessation - what it might mean for your organization

I heard a great article on NPR this morning about a study which shows that when an individual quits smoking, this has a ripple effect on family members and friends, with the result that those in the social network are more likely to quit as well. 

"There's no doubt that people are influenced by the behaviors of individuals that are not just one degree of separation from them, but two and three degrees of separation. There's a kind of cascading influence," says Nicholas Christakis, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a co-author of the study, which appears in Thursday's edition of The New England Journal of Medicine.

This story was an inspiration, as I see so many companies struggling with behavioral and cultural issues that affect productivity and delivery.  If the clustering / hive intelligence effect that the article describes can work the same way within the social network of an organization, then there's hope for cultural change if a few key individuals will adopt the desired behavior, and spread this to their colleagues.

What issues is your company struggling with, that technology alone can't solve?  Here are a few that I see all the time:

• adopting a new tool, application, or platform
• using a naming or filing convention
• allotting time to non-billable activities that are critical to improving the practice or organization

In most cases there are at least a few people in any company who are doing the "right thing" already.  What will encourage them to spread their behavior to their network, and beyond?  How can the social network be strengthened so that desired behaviors might spread more rapidly?  And how can you start tracking this spread, to be able to show that positive change is happening?

Update - my colleague Marcel pointed me to a similar NPR article about social networks and weight gain / weight loss.