Small numbers can make a difference
Most of us will have heard some version of Margaret mead's words, "Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world." But Robert Scoble goes further at Chasing the magical experience.
His point is that the key number is 4.A great dinner out? I’ve found that if there’s four people at the table that you love it always is magical. Five or more? Introduces noise and reduces the magic.
This is something I’ve discovered thanks to Laurent Haug, founder of the LIFT Conference in Geneva, Switzerland. He invited me to spend time after the conference at his friend’s Swiss Chalet.
It is still the most magical experience I’ve had with someone I’ve met online.
[...] It even turned into one of those product launches that really sticks with me, when Laurent showed us something he was working on called CoComment. ...
The point is, that magical experiences in life are — for me at least — those that are small and done with four or so other people.
So, why don’t our social networks try to get us to split up into smaller groups? Facebook and friendfeed do, in their various ways. Yesterday I signed into Facebook for the first time in a while. I tried importing my Tweets and instantly got complaints. Why? Because the usage model there is all about talking with small groups of friends.
[...] I look at my friendfeed experiences, too. I’m starting to put people into separate lists. Four at a time. I imagine having dinner with them and having a conversation about something.
[...] This is something that many PR people and big company employees never get. Read Tara Hunt’s experience of trying to find book reviewers. She’s chasing the magical experience. Her PR company is chasing “bloggers with reach.”
Hint: Tara is right. The magic is with people who care. The magic is in small numbers. ... she knows that if she has a small number of people who are fanatical about what she’s doing that that’s how it’ll get done.
As our online connections multiply in all directions via Facebook or LinkedIn or Plaxo or any number of oddly-named services, we are finding ways to bring that explosion under more control and within our otherwise unchanged human ability to manage relationships.
Frederic Lardinois at ReadWrite Web raises the same issue with How Many Friends Can You Really Have on Facebook?
According to Cameron Marlow, Facebook's "in-house sociologist," that number is four if you are male and six if you are female. As the Economist reports this morning, Marlow's research indicates that the average Facebook user has a network of about 120 friends, but only has two-way conversations with a very small subset of these 'friends.'
[...] When it comes to more casual one-way interactions like leaving comments on photos, status updates, or writing on somebody's wall, those numbers increase slightly and the average male would then have seven friends on Facebook and the average female about ten.
Based on this data, Marlow argues that once your network grows beyond the Dunbar number of 150 (the theoretical cognitive limit of how many people one can maintain a stable social relationship with), you are, at best, increasing the number of 'casual contacts' that you track passively.
The Internet can be a firehose of connectivity and we just can't drink it all, even all the stuff we would love to know. Maybe someone will come up with a tool that enables us to create those online dinner parties where magic happens and effective communication occurs, or maybe we just need to eat out with friends a bit more. In any case, from an organisational perspective, the key is to make sure that the connections are the kind that can make things happen as well as provide light relief in the daily grind.
How do you choose your Facebook friends? What about those you follow on Twitter? comments are open.
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