Every social network needs a devil's advocate or a bad news bot
We should be actively engineering our social groups (thinking enterprise 2.0 here - social networks at work say) - to permit bearers of bad news by giving them a status that reinforces that their message is for the good of the group. At least, that's my proposal. Here's why:
Here are a few tenets of groups and being liked:
- Overwhelmingly, we like to be liked. We like to be part of a group too.
- You will be looked on more favourably by a group if you do something positive for that group. The opposite is true as well.
- There is research to suggest that "the reluctance to transmit information is directly dependant on the inferred desirability of the message for the potential recipient." See the MUM effect for more on this quote and the effect.
- Association with a positive or negative message/event is enough - you don't actually have to be/do the positive message/event - you simply need to be associated with it. This is why many folk pay good money for those Super Bowl adverts. The watchers are having a great, memorable, positive experience. Simply watching an ad in the midst of that positive experience is good enough for you to feel more positive about that brand (in general). In its negative form, "Don't shoot the messenger" and all that.
One further tenet here is that I'm working on the premise that a group would be stronger if they absorbed some piece of bad news and treated it as positive - as another element of the puzzle to solve, not as a hurdle.
Here's an example: You're in a group of wine tasters on a business network. They're your peers - you go around tasting and rating wines - and work for the same business - a highly competitive one that isn't doing too well. You've just discovered some research that indicates that most of your fellow wine tasters are pretty bad - they don't have the genes for tasting bitter (they've got, (like me - 80% chance), the CC genotype of the TAS2R38 gene). Do you share this on the network, or do you rather tell your good friend, one of the other tasters?
Proposition:
- Many social networks among peer groups, colleagues, businesses will automatically create a culture in which bad news is suppressed.
In other words, people will tip-toe around the bad news, phrase it in a weak positive light, or rather share it with their close friends than the group itself.
But creating that kind of social feeling (this is bad news but hey, it's for the greater good) is pretty hard. By default we aren't wired that way - by default we want the group to feel good about us. After all, my colleagues are in the group, my boss, and so on (or my family, my friends, and so on - depending on context). So by default, the reluctance to share this information is going to lead to a suppression.
What I'm suggesting is that we solve this by providing some kind of official title, a positive status symbol, to bearers of bad news - make it expected that they yield bad news. This might counteract some of the ill will I will harbour for that bearer.
Or perhaps have an anonymising "bad news bot" that posts the bad news on behalf of someone.
Thoughts?
