The 80/20 Rule

Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference presents some interesting theories that are directly relevant to today’s issues in the measurement of authority and impact in social computing. Gladwell hits on a variety of topics but for the sake of time I’m going to only review “The Law of the Few” or as economists describe the 80/20 rule.

Most of us have heard about it and countless amount of people know the meaning, however, how many of you have really spent the time to understand the people who make up the 20% of the population that produce 80% of the “work”. Gladwell dives into this subject with his theory of “The Law of the Few” and segments out these types of “workers” into three categories; Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen.

A connector is a friend or colleague that knows everyone. In some cases it’s the person that introduced you to new friends, found you a job, or even introduced you to a significant other. These people are highly skilled at connecting with others and have a network that seems to grow exponentially. Gladwell defines connectors as the people who “link us up with the world… people with a specialty for bringing the world together” (Gladwell, 2002). To exemplify his point he cites the Milgram’s experiments in the small world problem, midnight ride of Paul Revere and Six Degreees of Kevin Bacon. These references might be a little dated however they exemplify how connectors understand the notion of the weak ties. As of right now all social computing metrics have been measuring this type of person as having the majority of authority and impact in a network. However, this is only one type of user in social computing that has the potential for authority and impact within a network.

Connector’s advantage lay simplistically in their ability to connect to a vast amount of people. They entirely depend on weak ties to get their information and pull resources. However, there has been little study in analyzing the weak ties in social networking. Does it hold the same meaning as people who have a connection base that are kept by phone, the written word or face-to-face interaction? Moreover to create authority and impact two other types of people must be joined into a connectors network.

Mavens are “information specialists”, or “people we rely upon to connect us with new information.” (Gladwell, 2002) They seemingly have a pathological obsession with helping others and accumulating knowledge about a specific market place or industry. Mavens have a unique skill set and due to their knowledge , social skills and ability to communicate with others ““Mavens are really information brokers, sharing and trading what they know” starting “word-of-mouth epidemics” (Gladwell, 2002). These people are truly the gate keepers of information. They do not need tons a friends to survive like the connectors, however they breathe information and control the flow of it, seating themselves in a place of massive authority. Little has been done is social measurement to see if there are possible ways to either measure or monitor mavens within social networks across the web.

Lastly are the Salesmen. Salesmen are persuaders they are extremely charismatic and have the innate ability to make others want to agree with them. These people exist online in social networks and need to be monitored or measured as well to receive an all encompassing metric for authority and impact in social computing.

To wrap this up for the day, all I’m trying to imply is that there is more than meets the eye when it comes to metrics in social media. A person with tons of friends might be a key player in measuring authority and impact however there are other pieces that must be viewed to get an all encompassing evaluation. Social networks by definition rely more on one specific person or group of people. To advance social computing, we need to broaden our frame of thought and realize that there are multiple layers of interaction and many different kinds of people influencing others. Appearance of having many friends isn’t everything when it comes to measuring who truly has authority and impact within a network. Figuring out the complexity of the population that fills the 20% of the 80/20 rule could bring light to the enigma of social computing metrics.

Let me know what your thoughts are…

Gladwell, M. (2002). The tipping point: How little things can make a big difference. New York: Little, Brown and Company.