Gladwell's Weak Ties Don't Bode Well for E-Books

A lot of people involved with social media got their noses out of joint when Malcolm Gladwell published this brief essay in The New Yorker question the value of social media for political activism aimed at promoting social justice.

Gladwell's point was that social movements like the Civil Rights Movement in the American South fifty years ago were built upon strong social ties. After debunking the roles of Twitter and Facebook in recent uprisings and protests in Eastern Eurpoe and Iran, Gladwell draws an important distinction between the weak ties that social media promotes and the strong ties necessary for activism.

I've got nothing useful to add to that debate. But it strikes me that there's an interesting middle ground between overturning governments, which requires strong ties, and helping a stranger find a stolen phone or a bone-marrow donor, which Gladwell shows can happen through weak ties. That middle ground is media.

There's an old saw in the media about magazines: the most successful were clubs that wouldn't have you as a member but still gave you access. So you could explain the success of Playboy in the 50s as giving the reader access to a world where everyone else was having sex but you; Rolling Stone in the 60s and 70s let you into where everyone was getting high but you; Vanity Fair in the 80s showed you that everyone else was partying with the rich and famous but you; and Wired in the 1990s told you that everyone else was using the internet but you.

You get the point: through media individuals build strong levels of identity. They also build trust which creates a two-way street. The question is whether that level of trust is a strong or weak tie.

Facebook, Google and Twitter have proved that they can attract enormous audiences but they've yet to show whether they can deliver the same value to advertisers. If online ad rates are any measure --and you can make the case that they're not a good measure -- ads on social media have a fraction of the value (and, by extension, effect) as ads on TV or in print.

Another way to answer that question would be move away from advertising and talk about editorial. Anyone with something to promote can tell you that the most valuable mention is an editorial mention. It has the authenticity that builds trust and makes sales. Get your product discussed in a newspaper story and you'll see that it's worth geometrically more than an ad.

For writers, the big question is whether social media's weak ties can replace the strong ties of media. It's no secret that book reviews have stopped selling books. With fewer magazines and newspapers, the opportunities to get the kind of off-the-book-page feature exposure for an author are dwindling.

So if you want to get more people to read your great magazine article or book, can you use the weak ties of Facebook and Twitter to amplify the impact? Before you answer consider Gladwell's analysis of social action here.

Traditionally, ideas travel along strong ties. People put more stock into recommendations from real friends or from authorities they trust. You're likely to buy a book because someone in your monthly reading group says her sister-in-law read it in her book group and loved it or because Oprah recommended it.

In the book business, where you can measure the impact of these recommendations through sales, we've seen several different media outlets gain leverage. For a time, getting an author on NPR was the royal road to bestsellerdom; then it was the Today Show; and, then, the Daily Show. Each outlet had its day -- and still can make an impact with a well-timed appearance by a compelling personality -- but none have been able to keep the streak going more than a few years at a time.

As the mass media fades, one has to wonder whether social media can pick up the slack. To date, there's only been a handful of examples of social media-driven hits. Shit My Dad Says -- the Twitter stream that became a bestselling book and sitcom -- is one. But that's not really what we're looking for.

Even with many Twitter accounts having acquired millions of followers, there's no anecdotal story that I've heard where a tweet sparked off a mad rush toward a book or even a song. (Though I'd love to hear about one.)

Looking at the Top 200 twitter accounts, I find Steven Johnson, the science writer who has a new book out this week called Where Good Ideas Come From, ranked number 141 with 1.4 million followers (just above Ana Marie Cox.)

Those 1.4 million followers are obviously worth something -- Johnson's book is in the top 100 at Amazon -- but they're not worth as much as one might think. Where Good Ideas Come From has been slipping down to the nether reaches of the Top 100 all week. As I write, it is #80, a figure that represents good sale but not a barn-burner.

Even if Johnson sells books to only 1% of his Twitter followers this week, that would be 14,000 copies, enough to get most authors a high spot on the New York Times bestseller list. Johnson might not be far off but it doesn't look like the book has momentum less than a week into publication.

That's not a comment on Johnson's book. Rather it suggests Gladwell is right about weak ties. Part of the problem may be the evanescent nature of tweets. If you don't find the right time to tweet your book, you'll miss the impact. Tweet over and over and you'll annoy your followers.

More to the point for the future of media, as books migrate from print to electronic distribution, there's a real danger that this pattern tells us books might lose their impact. Johnson's book is even lower on the Kindle bestseller list at position #173.

If books and ideas really do travel along weak ties, we might have to brace ourselves for a different way to make an impact.