The anticipation of the existence of another person – or becoming oriented toward an “other” – is a distinctly social act, as Max Weber explains:

Social action, which includes both failure to act and passive acquiescence, may be oriented to the past, present or expected future behavior of others… The others may be individual persons, and may be known to the actor as such, or may constitute an indefinite plurality and be entirely unknown as individuals. (1978: 22)

As we become oriented toward others, whether these others are formally “known” to us or not, we actually engage in a type of social action.

“Watching is doing,” Erving Goffman asserts, and the same is true of thinking: when we project ourselves mentally into a situation, we really experience it (1974:381).

Technological mediators are as “bridges” between separated people, facilitation joint mental orientation. Two physically separated individuals and a technological mediator (or “mediating element,” in Simmel’s terms) as a mediator “brings: information from one person to another (see Simmel 1950 [1908]: 118-77). Though the triad has three components of “sides” (two people and the mediator), we tend to forget or take for granted the side representing the mediator, because technological mediation occurs constantly in our society. (This would not be the case in a culture in which, for example television had jus been introduced.) The connection, then, comes to feel much more like dyad. With the assistance of the technological mediator, two spatially separated individuals thus have a chance to learn enough about one another so that they can become oriented toward and get to know on another.

Questions of the day –

• Who’s building bridges for you?
• How are you fostering the triad of interaction
• Is the content you’re creating causing a dyad even though you have a technological mediator?

People use symbols to help make mental connections more tangible, and the memories of them more easily accessed and brought into the conscious mind. Durkheim (1965 [1912]: 251 – 52) writes of how members of groups tend to become fixed on totems as tangible representations of groups, keeping the images of the totem in their minds and attaching real sentiments to them, because the social reality of a group (even a dyad) is too complex to be mentally retained in its entirety. When a group is dispersed – or the people involved in a social connection are not in direct contact – totems continue to bring those with whom one is involved to mind and even in a sense to “resemble” the group mentally.

There are literally limitless potential totems – people, things, ideas, images – around which people coalesce, which they similarly see and fix upon, and through which they develop the impressions of one another so entral to social connections. Photographs are one of peoples favorite such symbols, often taken or displayed to specifically to remind people of absent others.

I don’t know if I’ve ever even stepped back and asked myself, “why do I want that photo of me and my groomsman on the wall,” but I would gather that who you have up on your wall… are the people that you don’t see everday. You may not need pictures if people are right here, living next door… If you looked at my wall, at the pictures, most of them would be of people that I am close to, but are not around. For example, I have a great friend nearby named Rick. I don’t have any photos of Rick on the wall. (Bruce)

Symbols lead us, as Suzanne Langer tells us, “to conceive their objects” (1957: 6) – the objects, in this case, being the people with whom we form connections. As photographs generate memories, they bring “the other” back into one’s mind and help the connector sense, visualize, and thus renew the connections.

When I hear salsa music, it reminds me of my aunt. (Rosa)

A way of “enhancing and coordinating group feelings” (Gates 1992: 58)., music helps evoke social connections and communities of the mind particularly well. Disc jockey Paul Cavalconte tapped into this idea as he said during his radio show one morning, “Hearing an old song is like meeting and old friend” (WNEW-AM broadcast, February 6, 1991).

But symbols can, in fact, be virtually anything:

-       Being in school reminds me of my mother. (Jose)

-       When I see something geen. Like clothes. Because my sister really loves gree Or when it’s hot out because she’s got asthma. (Joanne)

-       Whenever I’m trying to solve a problem…my friend comes to the top of my head. She’s the problem lady. (Elise)

-       Hearing something about Cuba reminds me of my family. (Rosa)

Symbols constantly touch off mental images and impressions and bring them into the conscious mind, helping us retrieve temporarily dormant memories and connections. Simply put, symbols are the offline connection for online communities.

Questions of the day –

• What symbols are you using in your communities?
• Are your symbols the same as what your community members consider as symbols for your community?
• How many different forms of symbols are you using?

Large mental worlds or communities of the mind can coalesce around any number of phenomena (which may or may not be a “work of art”).  A wide range of individuals can form an “entire cooperating network” that “radiates out” from the core commonality. This network, though, is invisible (no matter what monitoring devices your using) and is primarily characterized by mental pathways and webs of connection.

With this approach we can even conceptualize communities of the mind that have a commercial or political (or other organizational) purpose as jointly created by those who have deliberately set out to “draw” individuals together and by those who have become connected to the community and to one another within it. For along the mental pathways that connect them may grow all kinds of ideas and emotions that can provide commonalities and a sense of connectedness for these individuals. People with power, money, aims, and agendas can create (or attempt to create) communities of the mind and mental worlds, but the interest, knowledge, sophistication and agency of individuals in these worlds can still create and influence outcomes.

When one is chosen for a demographic reason to be part of a political focus group, for example, one can play a part in the changing of a candidate’s political platform (which can surely have a ripple effect on a large number of people if elected.) The feedback of fans and followers can cause the producers of cultural products to make changes to those products that are then available to a large number of people. The Internet is providing followers of carious phenomena with an unprecedented opportunity to provide others in their mental worlds with direct feedback. In explicit fashion, they are using the mental networks that have been created. And audience members and consumers play a critical role in even highly commercialized communities of the mind.

For many political and corporate organizations this influence from the community has been a link of fear for joining the social revolution on the web. However if nurtured properly the interest, knowledge, sophistication and agency of the community members can change a product or political agenda to adapt directly to their needs and wants consequently giving tact to political or corporate agendas.

Questions of the day –

• Do you know what the interest, knowledge, sophistication and agency of your community members?
• In what ways are you collecting their feedback and are your tactics for collecting this feedback organic and free flowing allowing community members to provide their true thoughts?
• What individuals are set out to draw individuals into your community and who are the people connecting them once they arrive?

As technologically derived rituals provide order for an individual, they also provide a sense of comfort and stability. We can come to believe that such connections and communities of the mind will last for a reasonably long time. We come to depend on them to be there and, in a more latent sense, to provide order and structure to our lives. Offering reassurance in their familiarity, rituals are evoked and replicated and we feel safer and more comfortable (Brundson 1984: 86). When we form Internet connections that we anticipate will be long lasting, we allow ourselves to become quite friendly and to feel a pronounced affinity with those to whom we are connection (Walther, Slovacek, and Tidewell 2001). When a series of experiences is predictable generated, people can begin to feel comfortable investing emotional energy in them. The serialized form “alas real anxieties, satisfies real needs and desires, even while it might distort them” (Modleski 1982: 108, emphasis in original; see also Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi 1990: 174)

Routinized social bonding helps individuals maintain “ontological security” – the deeply rooted, unconscious confidence that human beings desire regarding the constancy of their social environment (Giddens 1990: 92, 1979: 219). We cannot emotionally bear the possibility that the world may change overnight; we need to know that the world is as it should be in order to feel safe. As social action is routinized and coordinated among individuals, our world remains ordered and secure. When sociamental bonds provide this for us, it is little wonder that we are so inclined to keep them “alive,” often for very long periods of time, and to keep those to whom we are connected mentally “with” us.

Questions of the day -

• What rituals are you creating in your online communities to provide comfort and stability?

• What tools are you providing to allow your community members to invest emotional energy?

• How are you giving your community a sense of longevity that the platform you’re providing for the mental connections will be around for years to come?

My dad picked me up a Nook yesterday and I’m loving it, so far I’ve picked up a new book called Hot, Flat, and Crowded my Thomas L. Friedman and have been chewing through it the past day. This book isn’t completely new to me since Kyle G. Crider wrote a review on it for one of the communities I manage for Microsoft Hohm. Kyle brought in some great insight mainly around a quote from David Douglas, vice-president of eco-responsibility for Sun Microsystems. This quote is in reference to world population growth, currently at 6.7 billion but projected to top 9 billion people by 2050. Just facing our next billion folks, what if each person was given a single sixty-watt incandescent light bulb?

“Each bulb doesn’t weigh much—roughly 0.7 ounces with the packaging—but a billion of them together weigh around 20,000 metric tons, or about the same as 15,000 Priuses. Now let’s turn them on. If they’re all on at the same time, it’d be 60,000 megawatts. Luckily, [they] will only use their bulbs four hours per day, so we’re down to 10,000 megawatts at any moment. Yikes! Looks like we’ll still need twenty or so new 500-megawatt coal-burning power plants” – just so the next billion people can turn a light on!

This is a great quote that inspires some deep thought however when I was going through this book another quote stuck out to me that pertains more to social marketing.

“The upside of what I like to call the “flattening” of the world is that so many more people are connected today by networks and high-speed travel that they can meaningfully collaborate. The downside, though, is that so many more people can be connected situationally rather than sustainably. Whoever thought that British savers, with the click of a mouse, could deposit funds in online banks in Iceland? But in the flat world they could. And precisely because they were connected with technology, but without sustainable calques reading risk management and proper finance, those British savers were exposed to so much more financial peril than they ever realized.” (pg. 66 Hot, Flat and Crowded)

The social web is growing at an exponential rate where even Google and other massive web giants are having problems sifting through the mass amount of content created by us socialites. The social revolution has given the ability for everyone to create unique content at their own disposal and spread it through the world. At the same time we’ve set no guidelines or ethical standards other than the unspoken rules that exist spawning from the blogger generation. As we move forward and business continue to jump into the social web it will be very interesting to see if group think and social conscious stays true to sustainable interactions or will we be influenced in such a manner that situational interactions become predominate and eventually collapse the web as we know of it. Or could regulation become the undermine of our currently organic nature of the social web.

Anyways this post is just some food for thought. If you have any suggestions for other books I should pick up leave me a comment and I’ll read them and put my thoughts out on it.

Elliott Lemenager

2. Prevention Is Better Than Cure
If you feel that your community’s behavior is beginning to get out of control, “nip it in the butt” by distracting your audience attention onto a positive activity or game.

3. Understand Your Community’s Behavior
Define simply and clearly any difficult behavior. Keep a diary of what led up to the behavior and what immediately followed it. From this, see if there is a pattern. What are the triggers and consequences which might be keeping the behavior going? What are the “pay-offs” to your community – are you giving the behavior a lot of attention and “giving in for a quiet life”? DON’T blame yourself but work at changing your responses.

4. Take Five
When tensions and anger rise in you or your community take five. Take five minutes to cool down and to ask yourself, “Why am I getting so angry?” Try to identify the real problem, then find the solution.

5. Never Strike In Anger
Try to avoid taking written, verbal, or physical action with your community in anger. Moreover, take a step back before engaging in anger, sometimes the issues are not solely within the community. Acting out in anger can have irreversible affects on a community, damaging your reputation and influence over a group.

6. Get Away
When you feel frustrated, angry or overwhelmed, let your feelings out safely away from your community. Call a friend over or leave your community with someone trustworthy. Get out. Exercise. Do not stay alone with your community when you are overwhelmed. Get help and support.

I’ve read post before on the topic which usually ends up defending the employees, stating everyone should have access to social networking sites at work. I’m not saying that I disagree with this however, the more I talk with different individuals in the industry the more widespread the opinions get. This has varied from social media strategist limiting employee access while their implementing a strategy, companies afraid of productivity failure, risk of disgruntled employees and interestingly enough limiting employee access to train and educate them how to properly use social media outlets so they do not poorly represent the organization.

I’m in flux with the topic and I can truthfully see the pros and cons to both. I would like to hear your thoughts and maybe how your company is handling the situation. There could be multiple solutions for this question or maybe an overall solution.

Kelley, T. (2001). The art of innovation:  Lessons in creativity from IDEO, America’s leading design firm. New York: Doubleday.

Rubinstein, M., & Firstenberg, I. (1999). The minding organization: Bring the future to the present and turn creative ideas into business solutions. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

N. Rosenberg  (1994), Exploring the Black Box: Technology, Economics, and History, New York: Cambridge University Press, p. 139.

J. Schoen (2005), The Innovation Cycle: A New Model and Case Study for the Invention to Innovation Process, Engineering Management Journal; Sep2005, Vol 17 Issue 3, p3-10, 8p.

Through studies the first three typologies (ethnocentric, polycentric & geocentric) are used more as a generic terms to describe MNCs. Ethnocentric organizations manage overseas operations directly primarily to protect the company’s competitiveness in the home market. “Communication and information is top down and all strategic decisions are steered from corporate headquarters. Subsidiaries sell products design and manufactured by parent companies with little or no local control.” (Odell, 2006) Ethnocentrism allows such organizations to streamline manufacturing processes while protecting their intellectual capital. This method is also used with organization sin how they release information throughout social computing platforms. Intellectual capital can constrain organizations ability to reach out and touch people through social computing. In contrast to an ethnocentric company polycentric organizations take more responsibility to adapting designs while customizing products to meet local needs. Unlike the ethnocentric management model a polycentric organization manages their subsidiaries as independent units with minimal influence from headquarters. According to Odell geocentric organizations define global markets and technology is transferred rapidly to sell more or less the same product worldwide maximizing economies of scale both in production and R&D. Organizations that are thriving right now in social media are using this tactic allowing community managers, social marketing strategist and their employees to operate more independently allowing greater transparency and relevancy of information to be transmitted through social channels. 

 Through many efforts to define types of MNCs four terms have been used across a variety of researchers to better define the typology of MNCs. These include multidomestic, global, international and transnational. Within these four typologies they have been broken into three subsets to weigh the pros and cons of each. These subsets are organizational design, local responsiveness and interdependence.

Organizational design varies from all typologies. According to Harzing a decentralized network was most commonly seen in transnational strategies however the major difference of decentralized and centralized networks only seemed significant between transnational and global companies. Meaning that multidomestic, international and transnational use intersubsidiary organizational designs to pipeline their products or service while Global companies are quite the opposite. However common multidomestic, international and transnational companies set up their subsidiaries transnational organizations are vastly different from the other typologies because they have no specific allegiance to one country. 

To further distinguish these typologies local responsiveness is taken under consideration. Looking at all four typologies the major differences where between multidomestic, transnational and global MNCs. “Conforming to our expectations, however, adaptation of marketing was higher for subsidiaries of Transnational and Multidomestic companies than for subsidiaries of Global companies” (Harzing, 2000) This seems to be pretty straight forward since global companies interject their products and ideas with little concern with the local communities. They simply believe in the idea that the consumers will either like the product or not. Even though this might seem like a harsh business practice it allows global companies leverage economies of scale within their operations.

Interdependence is the final subgroup that Harzing uses to differentiate the multiple typologies for MNCs. “Further, as predicted, the level of dependence, that is dependence on headquarters for purchases and sales, is highest for subsidiaries of Global companies and lowest for subsidiaries of Multidomestic companies, while subsidiaries of Transnational companies fall between these two extremes” (Harzing, 2000) Dissecting the interdependence of the subsidiaries with their headquarters give crucial insight to the typologies of MNCs. Understanding the type of relationship that international subsidiaries have with their headquarters allows opens up a MNC to how their operations are really conducted. These typologies and help an organization make conscious decisions on how they interact with people throughout social computing. Social computing has opened up the world for consumers and companies to interact. It is no longer massive conglomerates that can touch the other side of the world. Small, mid to large companies are now playing on a world wide level and assessing your organizational structure and strategy to interact with an eclectic market needs to take place to leverage social computing.

Cox Jr., T. (2001). Creating the multicultural organization. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Daft, R.L (2008). The leadership experience. 4th Ed. Mason, OH: Southwestern