There was no doubt at the recent Defrag conferencethe research puzzle | This is the second in a series of postings on the conference.  The first, linked here, was “defrag this.” that social networking is the hottest thing going.  The majority of the exhibitors were selling it in some way or other, and the bulk of the presentations dealt with it in whole or in part.  Like other products, services, and ideas with moonshot growth curves that we have witnessed in the past (especially those with a billionaire poster boy or two), a flood of imitators and adapters is part of the maturation process.

Many firms are trying to apply the social networking structure to the world of the enterprise.  For people who wear investment hats, there have been and will be opportunities to invest in these firms, so sorting the winners from the losers in the gold rush will be important.  There also will be claims from businesses of all types that these tools have led them to greater efficiencies and new discoveries (once surviving the credit crunch allows for such things to be on the agenda for analyst days).  And investment firms themselves need to think about how such tools could be used to make better decisions.

As an outsider (with a good theoretical grasp of the issues, but only a cursory working knowledge of the tools themselvesthe research puzzle | A couple of months ago, I had some initial thoughts about “links with links.”), I found myself thinking that the “all social, all the time” mantra was simplisticly being applied to every problem.  The greatest shortcoming was that there was almost no talk at the conference about the quality of information produced, the assumption being that good ideas will win out in the end, and that people will use the tools wisely and well.  I don’t find the evidence for either belief to be persuasive.

In considering the issues, I found myself thinking about the three roles that Malcolm Gladwell described in The Tipping Point as necessary for an idea or a trend to take hold.  Social networking focuses mostly on just one of those roles, that of “connector.”  These days, everyone is urged to be a connector and, within some firms, even incented to be a connector, whether that is a person’s natural strength or the best use of her time.  While Gladwell was not describing the broad issues of information sharing, his thesis did recognize the importance of different types of actors (“mavens” and “salesmen”) working in combination with those with connection skills.

It is that type of analysis that I found lacking in most of the presentations I saw.  One exception was the talk by Paul Pedrazzi of Oracle.SlideShare | This is Pedrazzi’s slide deck.  The diagrams start on page nine and the “treatments” on page fifteen. His descriptions of players in the networks included those he termed “hubs,” “gatekeepers,” “monitors,” “loners,” and “bridges,” and he gave ideas about how to approach, involve, and leverage each one for the benefit of the network.  His talk recognized what others did not, that one prerequisite for social networks to be successful in the enterprise is for them to encompass and incorporate the abilities of a wide variety of people, not just those for whom the inclination to use the networks is natural.  Otherwise, they are at great risk of become nothing more than echo chambers.

Real breakthroughs often come via the loners and bridges to other worlds, for whom the network itself is not the be all and end all.  Incorporating those unique folks that can produce “big content” — as opposed to blips and tweets — and those who look outside the network for ideas is critical to improving the quality of the discourse.  Throw in a few heretics and some astute leaders, and you have the possibility that “the wisdom of crowds” that social networking promises doesn’t end up as “the madness of crowds,” where the social reinforcement of bad ideas is the thing the network does best.