

Pollard: Seven Principles of Social Networking

Dave Pollard and some friends have developed Seven Principles of Social Networking

... What emerged from the discussion were a set of principles which might provide some clues on how to develop Social Networking Applications that really do work, and how to establish processes that could enable and encourage effective networking in organizations. Here are the principles we came up with:

  1. Social Relationships Must Meet Four Preconditions: mutual trust, respect, context, and self-disclosure between the parties
  2. Relationships Require a Conversational Ice-Breaking
  3. First Impressions Matter
  4. Information Conveyed by Observation Counts More Than That Conveyed by Language
  5. Collaboration is the Miracle Glue of Relationships
  6. Every Interaction Carries the Burden of Our Entire Networks
  7. Social Networks are Complex Systems

Throughout the article, he suggests that because of these principles, social networking applications have been going about the problem from the wrong angle.  He closes with a set of questions that people should be addressing, closing the piece with

These are not questions for programmers, analysts, sociologists or psychologists, but rather questions for cultural anthropologists, complex adaptive systems experts, and those knowledgeable about heuristics, neural networks and the Wisdom of Crowds. We need to develop much more skill in these emerging disciplines, because the old disciplines and the 'merely complicated' mechanisms for addressing these critical human challenges simply aren't up to the job. As Einstein said, our current problems are not going to be solved using the same thinking that has given rise to them.

KM is hogwash, obviously

Info overload or over-wrong?