A valued network pointed me to a study by Facebook engineers investigating the diffusion of information through the Facebook social network with an experimental design!  Yes.  Experimental.  The engineers randomly assigned nearly 250 million account holders (about half of the Facebook universe) to either receive a news story with a link from a friend or not.  They then tracked how that information diffused through the network.  Here’s a visual example of this t-test design.  Click to enlarge.

Over a two week period, Facebook engineers would assign a Feed story with link to one person while randomly assigning two other people as a no Feed control.  They did this repeatedly for two weeks over the 250 million selected accounts.  They then tracked how the link got diffused through the friend networks.

Talk about a big data set.  Huge, Jerry.  Huge!  Here’s the key finding.  Click to enlarge.

Look again at those underlined values.  Those randomly assigned to get a news story with URL in their feed showed a diffusion rate of 0.191% while those in control showed a rate of 0.025%.

Make sure you understand those little percentages.  About two tenths of one percent diffused the link in the treatment condition.  Thus, not even 1% of treatment people passed the link along.  Not even one half of 1%.  Barely 2/10 of 1 percent.

You can read the paper which I found at scribd.com.  Given all the kinds of variables you can generate from a database this large, there’s more to the paper with lots of graphs, but they depend upon relative ratios rather than absolute effects.  When you read that Outcome paragraph just above what probably struck you first was that huge relative risk ratio of 7.37.  A Large RR would be 4.50, so this is absolutely Stupendous.  The rest of the paper focuses upon those RRs while blithely skipping past the absolute diffusion rate.  I remind you:

0.191%.

Please think like a maven here and not a muggle looking to move your 401k into the Facebook IPO. What’s the TACT here?  What’s the Change you want from the Other Guy? Clicking on a link with a mouse and forwarding it to your Facebook network.

I’ve derided the social media TACTs before as the smallest units of communication you can create.  Realize that this huge database quivers with the digital signals of the twitch, the click, the WATtap.  That’s all they collected.  A click.

Wouldn’t it be nice to see if this clicking behavior drove other behaviors?  Like going outside of the Facebook network and using email, phone, or, gasp, face to face contact with other people about the information?  Like making a financial contribution?  Like volunteering.  Like calling law enforcement with a tip?  Like any real world, practical TACT?

And, shootfire, even fooling yourself briefly into thinking a click is as fundamental as kiss or a sigh as time goes by, what diffusion rate do you get?

0.191%.

Mavens, recall the fabulous Al Gore Facebook day.  He made a great scarcity play with a one day extravaganza on Climate Change through Facebook and inveigled everyone to donate their network to the cause.  How’d that go?

0.004%.

All folks had to do was click once and Gore’s machine would do the rest to then propagate the Gore message to your friends.  One little click.  And he got 0.004%.

Sure, we are mixing different variables in the comparison between Al Gore’s project and the one reported here.  The Facebook experiment created a forced exposure while you have to go find Mr. Gore on Facebook that day.  But we don’t have good research on social media, so we’re stuck doing these mental comparisons of apples and oranges, bytes and packets.

Social media has proven itself to be a toy, a pastime for killing time, phatic communication par excellence, a quick and easy way to be quick and easy, social without being sociable.  Sure, imagine a big event like the assassination of JFK or the Challenger explosion and doncha know that Facebook and twitter would light up.  But, so what?  Where’s the TACT?  What’s the Change in the Other Guy?

WATtapping clicks.

P.S. For what it’s worth, this paper apparently has not been published in a peer review source.  It’s been submitted to the Cornell University Library at arXiv.org.  I suspect it will get published in a good peer review outlet given the experimental design in a natural, if virtual, setting.  My practical persuasion concerns remain.  Facebook is a failure for Changing the Other Guys.  Focus on the kiss and the sigh, mavens.

Consider this.

To pitch a prospective client for her ad agency, Amanda Zolten knew she a had to take a risk.  But the client’s product—kitty litter—posed a unique challenge.  Lucy Belle, Ms. Zolten’s cat, furnished the answer.  Before she and her team met with six of the company’s executives, Ms. Zolten buried Lucy Belle’s mess in a box of the company’s litter and pushed it under the conference-room table.  No one noticed until Ms. Zolten pointed it out — and the fact that no one had smelled it.

All’s well that ends well and this story ends in a reward for Zolten:  The coveted Heroic Failure award from her agency!  Her bosses are worried that the ad agency is getting too conservative and want to encourage risk taking with this award.  And, they gave this to Zolten without knowing whether she got the account!  Everyone’s taking a chance in this transaction.

So, where’s the persuasion, Steve?

In a crowded and excited conference room with agency and clients all buzzed up about potential business the fact that no one noticed a used kitty litter box hidden from view may not mean what everyone thinks it means.  We tend to think that we are aware, thoughtful, and intentional in our lives while much of the time we are running on habit, cues, and expectations.  Thus, normal human nature would take Zolten’s story and see her clever tactic without realizing that since that odor is so far out of habit, cue, and expectation no one noticed it.  If you had instead asked everyone in the room to give the air a good sniff and tell me what you smell, I think Zolten’s story would have ended differently.

Anyone with a good background in marketing knows that people wildly overestimate the power of their senses which is why Coke and Pepsi, for example, can make billions of dollars on their two brands that most consumers most of the time cannot distinguish.  A prior post on my experience with milk demonstrate the effect.  This is not to say that senses like taste or smell or touch have no effect, but rather people’s awareness of taste or smell or touch is incredibly variable and subject to all manner of situational influences that have little to do with the stimulus intensity and more to do with the limitations of human nature and cognition.

Now, if this doesn’t occur to the potential client, then Zolten may have run a subtle persuasion play based on the difference between human conceit (gee, I’m thoughtful!) and human nature (gee, this is a sharp conference room!).  Kudos Zolten.

And, if this doesn’t occur to her bosses, then kudos again, Zolten.

But, if it doesn’t occur to anyone, there’s no persuasion here.  Just confusion.  And the potential for future disaster.

There’s a Difference between Persuasion, and Smoke and Mirrors; With Persuasion the Illusion Lingers.

Peace and prosperity bring many consequences. Time, for example.

With no consensus among the delegates, officials at the International Telecommunication Union, part of the United Nations, kicked the issue into the future and sent it back to a panel of experts for further study. A revised proposal will be introduced no earlier than 2015. Mr. Beaird characterized the delay as “a significant step forward” and said that the burst of interestgreater prominence in surrounding leap seconds “should allow for a decision that will have the widest possible backing.”

One second. Every four years. People meeting. Plane reservations. Hotel stays. Itineraries. Parlimentary procedure. Votes to delay. For three years.

This year for sure!

Facebook will go public, and with more inSincere interviews like this, will be the largest Internet IPO to date. Bigger than Amazon. Google. Here’s how.

WSJ: What’s the company’s first focus, business or product?
Mr. Zuckerberg: The thing to take away isn’t that we don’t care [about business]. People for years were asking me why aren’t we trying to make more money. I would say I’m trying to build a business for the long term and it was clearly the right strategy. I think the same is true now. Maybe there will come a time down the road when most of the industries we think should be social are already social and the primary thing we can do is optimize the amount of money we can make.

Hey, I want a $50 billion IPO for my business and I’m worth it because I DON’T CARE ABOUT BUSINESS.

More sand! More sand! More sand!

All PR is shameless, but still.

JEFF HAMMERBACHER is a man of varied interests. The son of an auto assembly-line worker from Kalamazoo, Mich., the 29-year-old has tried his hand at poetry, philosophy, psychology, venture capital, baseball and, yes, automaking. He began his academic career as an English major, but ended up graduating from Harvard with a degree in mathematics. As a teen he’d been a star pitcher and looked set for a career in the major leagues; he ended up working as an analyst at Bear Stearns. You could call him hopelessly scattered, or you could say he’s a genius. Frankly, it’s a tough call. In 2006, with his stint at Bear Stearns but a memory, Hammerbacher was hired by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (fittingly, in a friend-of-a-friend scenario), and developed a wondrously efficient system to handle the massive amounts of data coursing through the website. Not only was Hammerbacher fast becoming an important player in the rarefied world of Silicon Valley, but he was also on his way to becoming very well-off. Then, in 2008, he chucked it all.

Sounds like an interesting and talented guy. But, even more than you know!

While Hammerbacher is loath to portray himself as some sort of modern-day Marie Curie — he refuses to even comment on this aspect of his business — his talents are currently being applied to one of the greatest puzzles of human existence. The basic idea being this: If you can tell a half-billion social networkers which celebrity they most or least resemble, maybe you can do similar things with cancerous cells.

Wow. Whodda guessed that cancer is a social network? Whodda guessed there’s an app for that? Whodda guessed you can WATtap death?

This kind of PR is standard (see this earlier James Cameron puff piece as another exemplar), but we’ve become so tech-blind that we believe a software engineer working with bits and bytes of social flotsam from Facebook can transfer that engineering to DNA and End Cancer As We Know It. Good grief, why can’t Facebook engineers solve Global Warming, own the Stock Market, and rig all free Elections while they are Curing Cancer? Jeepers it’s the same data problem, isn’t it?

Hammerbacher is presented as a kind of Queen of Tomorrow who knows the Laws. It’s a constant conceit of human nature to believe that we can control life – remember only Frankenstein – and Web 2.0 is just the current exemplar. If you live long enough, you will see it in the next New New Thing beyond the wildest imaginings of today’s persuasion mavens.

P.S.  I found this story in the United Airlines flight magazine, Hemispheres, as I carried Melanie’s purse to the New Orleans NCA Conference.  Any research on the persuasion impact of these kind of information sources?  Millions of people, trapped in aluminum tubes read these stories every day.  I wonder what the WATTage is?