Your Social Network and the Generation of Innovative Ideas

Salvatore Parise, Eoin Whelan and Steve Todd have published their latest research in MIT Sloan Management Review this month.  They have studied hundreds of ideas generated by employees of data storage giant EMC and correlated that data with information about the Twitter networks of those same workers.  EMC has a system whereby employees can submit new ideas.  The researchers gathered that information and then linked it to Twitter usage by those same employees.  What did they find?  The Twitter users did not generate more ideas than the non-Twitter users.  However, other employees and experts judged the ideas submitted by Twitter users more positively.   Most interestingly, they found that people with more diverse Twitter networks tended to generate higher quality ideas.  The finding proves important because many people tend to follow others with similar beliefs when they join social networks such as Twitter.  This study confirms the value of building diverse networks.  We have to avoid the confirmation bias, i.e. gathering data (i.e. Twitter users) that simply confirm what we already believe.

Bryant University's College of Business on Twitter

If you are interested in learning more about Bryant University's College of Business, where I serve on the faculty, please follow us on Twitter at @BryantCOB.   Hope you enjoy the conversation. 

True Engagement via Social Media: Honda's Latest Campaign

Honda launched a very creative social media campaign recently designed to truly drive engagement.  The company created a powerful back-and-forth conversation with its customers.  To kick off its summer promotions, Honda asked customers to write tweets using the hashtag #wantnewcar if they were itching to ditch their old car for a new set of wheels.   The company responded with six-second personalized Vine videos in response to some of these creative tweets.  The Vine videos made suggestions for new Honda cars and encouraged these potential customers to take a closer look.  As you might imagine, this campaign created quite a conversation between Honda and potential customers, as well as among consumers.    Check out this creative exchange as one example of the type of back-and-forth that emerged.  You can see that Honda was truly trying to have some fun with this campaign. 

Did the social media campaign have an impact?  It tripled Honda's engagement via Twitter.  According to this article, the hashtag has been used nearly 7,000 times.  The article reports that, "The word 'Honda' received an estimated 247 million impressions between July 14 and Tuesday morning." 

Has this incredible level of social media engagement with the consumer led to increased revenues?  That will be the key question.  We will watching closely to see if Honda reveals any data on the connection between the increased social media engagement and auto sales. 

The Relationship between TV and Twitter: The Sharknado Case

Flocking Behavior on Social Media Can Lead to Narrow Thinking, Flawed Decisions

Ethan Zuckerman has written about an important issue regarding our use of social media.   The Harvard Gazette recently wrote about a talk that Zuckerman gave at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.  Berkman noted, "Human beings flock; we tend to seek out people like us."  He argued that individuals tend to engage in a great deal of "flocking" behavior on social media platforms.   They find and follow people who are very similar to them.  He says, "We have a talent for finding people with the same socioeconomic background or racial background. But this tendency to flock may be keeping us from finding the information we need... My fear is that our tools are not promoting diversity."   In short, we are not experiencing a wide range of perspectives on issues and topics.  We are hearing from voices that are similar to ours.  As a result, we are vulnerable to the confirmation bias, i.e. we are looking for information that confirms what we already believe.   Cognitive diversity can be an important factor when making decisions, yet social media seems to discourage the nurturing of this key attribute.  For more on Zuckerman's work, see this Ted Talk below:

Top 50 Business Professors on Twitter

I'm very honored to have been named one of the top 50 business school professors on Twitter by the MBAPrograms.org website.   Thank you so much!   I hope my blog readers will follow me on Twitter.  The handle is @michaelaroberto

How Twitter Generates Revenue

Business Insider CEO and Editor-in-Chief Henry Blodget conducted this very informative interview the Twitter's Chief Revenue Officer Adam Bain.  Check it out to learn more about how advertising and sponsored tweets work on the Twitter platform.

Using Twitter to Make Money on Wall Street

The USA Today ran a feature story today on investment firms that are trying to mine Twitter for insight as to how the market will move, and thereby improve investment returns.   What's the logic here?  Apparently, some experts have found that rigorous analysis of tweets can yield insight as to people's emotional state.  Experts then believe those emotions drive investment behavior.

These investment firms cite the research conducted at Indiana University last year by Johan Bollen, a professor of informatics.   He found a correlation between the collective mood, as determined by an analysis of millions of tweets, and the movement of the Dow Jones average in subsequent days.  Bollen reports an 87% accuracy rate for his algorithms which use Twitter mood measurements to predict the DJIA over the next 3-4 days. Other research focuses on specific companies.  Arthur O'Connor, a doctoral candidate at Pace University, has performed a research study which found a positive correlation between social media popularity of major brand names and the performance of those firms' stock prices.

While one might doubt the findings of these particular studies, the overall trend bears watching.  More and more investors will try to glean insights from this abundance of data that is available online.  Some algorithms will be better than others, but ignoring the data altogether surely cannot make sense.    Information is power in the investment community, and social media does provide a great deal of data that may be relevant.  The key question is how to mine that dataset most effectively, and then how to build the best predictive algorithms.