I'm 1,500 times Stronger - The Strength of Weak Ties and Social Networks

I marvel at what social networks and the power of people I only know through digital connections have done for my professional and personal life.

So many potential partners, clients and personal contacts, I would have never met without the tools of the social net. There may be many ills about the internet - loss of privacy, pornography and other vices, the rise of the gossip mill, the drop in sports participation - but connecting with like-minded others is one of it's big saving graces.

Back in 1992 when I was a "wet behind the ears" brand assistant at P&G during the digital infancy era (remember LED terminals), my world really did consist of the immediate world around me. Being a social guy, I likely at the time could keep about 150 "social friends" in the air before I hit the Dunbar number. 

It would roughly breakdown 20 family-related, 40 work-related, 40 school-related, 20 neighbor/community-related, 30 hobby/interest related people, people who I wouldn't feel weird about inviting over for dinner (given my small bachelor pad of course, not at the same time).

And if I was enthusiastic enough about something, these people, given a sense of personal affiliation to me, could likely extend out that idea comfortably to about 12 other people - people they had enough familiarity and local contact with to feel comfortable phoning or discussing my "new thing".

That makes 8,600 possible connections, not bad. We could start a mini-insurrection or some type of grassroots movement but it would be tough to grow beyond a certain point without the help of traditional media.

Now in 2009, the equation is much different. The social web has made it so easy to send messages and connect to a web of weak ties that my potential social footprint is about 1,500 times larger.

How did I get to that number? 

Just using the top 5 networks I participate in - I looked at how many people are in my first generation of contacts (and yes, mathematicians there will be overlap). I have tapped out on Facebook at 5,000 friends, across 5 principal Twitter profiles - I have about 8,000 followers, I am what they charitably refer to as a LinkedIn lion, I have about 2,000 people that traipse through my blog every so often and I have two networks of very interesting people on Ning that are 1,700 deep.

Now if I look at their second level of connections, here is the key social multiplier factor -
Facebook - an average person has 120 friends on Facebook(mine have more but let's be conservative)
Twitter - an average person has 70 followers (same deal as facebook, but let's take the mean no.)
LinkedIn - my average contacts have 170 connections (the average LinkedIn contact is more likely 30)
Ning - these same people are professionals with Linkedin attributes - I have assumed the 170 number
Blog - I have taken the average blogger I'm connected to as having 1/4 the traffic that Buzz Canuck gets

All told, that suggests that 2.8 million people can be reached almost directly if I came up with the Next Big Thing (was thinking shoes that had bottle cap openers the other day), a great new cause (remember Twestival is coming up everybody) or some incredibly genuine personal outreach (cancer and Crohn's diseases seem to have beset my family this year).

That doesn't even count the scenarios where things go viral and dip out to the extended third and fourth circle of friends among the 1.6 billion internet users in the world and their extended 6 billion non Internet-linked friends.

Before people jump on this note and say "Sean, typical flesh-peddling buzz marketer - just sees his friends and followers as chattel". Wait. The caveats: Social currency is built up here through sweat equity and investment of time, content, dialogue and effort. Unlike digital display media, you just can't run in and broker eyeballs. Even great content or motives get missed on the web through clutter or wrong context. And if you abuse these relationships by over-messaging, over-promoting or over-broadcasting above the dialogue, you risk social media "blowback".

I just find the potential of the social web so interesting and it has changed the tables on old equations of hierarchy, power, monopoly, nationalism, media and a host of other sacred cows we have believed to be true, many since the start of the industrial age. If only all my professional colleagues adopted the same faith in the social web around their brands, maybe my 2.8 million "friends" can become ambassadors for my message.