Social Behavior: Following, Friending, and the Establishment of Credible and Trusted Sources

How following and tracking social behavior allow for more trusted sources to emerge...

I was playing around with social network icons the other day, pairing ones that I liked to form word phrases. The one I liked best was the Hype Machine´s heart (for when you heart a song) and Tumblrr´s follow (the plus sign followed by the word "follow"). Combined they become "follow your heart."



When I first started social bookmarking on Delicious I realized that if you subscribed to someone´s feed you could in some ways follow their train of thought - viewing their fluctuating interest levels through what they were viewing and reading over time.

Users can build a loyal set of followers by establishing themselves as a credible and trusted source of information. These "alpha users" have strong, well-established profiles on various social networking platforms, micro-blogging, and bookmarking sites, with loyal followers that subscribe to their feeds across these outlets.  

These followings create networks that are not based on inviting, but more so a reciprocal relationship between the user and the follower, based on the user being a trusted source and innovator either online or off and establishing themselves as someone others are interested in.

Online one's innovator status can be exhibited through their social network behaviors; what they are bookmarking, how it is being tagged, how early they identify new information, sites, and trends. With tags, one's skills are further refined, and in the case of Delicious, the more thorough a user is at parsing the single most relevant line in a story, the more quickly that user can evolve into a trusted source and establish themselves as someone other users look to for the latest news and innovations.

This following process has enabled a natural selection-like structure of networked intelligence to emerge that is vastly different from the friending process of social networks and the associated social relevancy and importance of users with high friend counts.  It is amazing how much one can see and learn by following the social networks and the related web-tools utilized by their peers.

A good way for users to gain credibility and increase awareness of their existence would be for these social networks to free up more meta-data around the behavior of users.  This would allow for qualification and rankings around which users might be deemed worthy of following.  For example, if I want to follow the top ten users who were the first to identify and properly tag a certain trend or topic, I should be able to easily access that information through one aggregate feed or application.

Unfortunately, at the present moment each bookmarking, micro-blogging, and social networking site has its own ranking and tagging system, making it nearly impossible for someone to easily migrate their tags or networks (of followers or alpha users - the users they are following) from one site to another. 

This is a difficult process as each social network has completely different tools and associated metrics.  For example:

-    On Flickr, my contacts are those that I follow and their image-specific skills (how good of a photographer they are) is what determines my following, and I have ascribed a level of trust to their image feeds on Tumblr as well.

-    On Twitter, much like Delicious there is a natural selection of signal to noise that determines the follow. The more signal, the better the follow.  The more noise, the less likely I am to follow

-    Each of these follows have their own hierarchy of adoption. In my experience the hardest follow is Delicious, followed by Twitter, then Flickr, than Tumblr, I could go on.

-    Delicious is the hardest because it has taken me over two years and 11,000 +
bookmarks to amass 200 people in my network/follows to my daily bookmarking.  Over the same period at Flickr, where I have published 2,620 photos and received 173,115 views, I have 417 people that call me a contact or follow my photos.


As we have been building out social features around Trendrr, I am pleased that we will be generating cool exportable data and tags around social behavior and impressions that have not been generated before; essentially allowing new aggregate values to emerge so actionable intelligence can be properly followed.

I am excited to be following, followed, and creating new tools in this exciting space.  We are just on the tip of understanding the importance of this movement and I look forward to following the progress and development of these new metrics and associated values.