How Connectors Feed the Magic of Sharing
(pre-copyedit version)
There is another important, yet very specialized, role some people play in passing on stories through social networks. These people have larger spheres of influence based on their connections to many different groups. Author Malcolm Gladwell spends a great deal of time talking about these folks in his book The Tipping Point. These are his "Connectors:"
Sprinkled among every walk of life… are a handful of people with a truly extraordinary knack of making friends and acquaintances. [...]
They are people whom all of us can reach in only a few steps because, for one reason or another, they occupy many different worlds and subcultures and niches.
Connectors create two main types of relationships that play a huge role in social media. First, there are the obvious "strong ties" — close friendships, business relationships, romances, family. They are the people with whom we come into contact regularly, and we have a deep, core understanding of one another.
Then there are what sociologists refer to as "weak ties." Weak ties can be people with whom we have random, light, infrequent interactions. Maybe you sat next to someone at a conference and exchanged contact info, and you only run into each another at those kinds of events.
Weak ties can also represent the idea that we might know or be interested in each other simply based on the number of people we have in common. If I have 20 friends on Facebook, and I see that 10 of them are friends with you, then there is a chance that we share some commonality.
Making and maintaining weak ties used to require a special sort of person — someone whom Gladwell describes as having "some combination of curiosity, self-confidence, sociability and energy." Maintaining weak ties, prior to the explosion of social technologies, took a lot of work.
Because social technologies now make it easier to stay both loosely and tightly connected to one another, it’s more convenient than ever for all of us to maintain weak ties (we'll discuss how later). But in many ways, Connectors play an even larger role than ever because of the multiple worlds they move within. It's no longer as important to be at the top of some social pecking order to have a major impact on how far we spread information.
In the case of "Testing Is Not Teaching," let's say that there are people are blogging and commenting on social networks about the academic program, coming at it from different angles. There's the educational value angle of the story, there are class and race implications of standardized testing, there are local politics angles that are being discussed. If there are enough people talking about it, a Connector is going to notice the chatter across different spheres, and she will likely post it to Twitter or Facebook, thus spreading the story out even further.
When these Connector folks get involved, mainstream media, politicians and others at the top of the old hierarchy start to take notice. That hierarchy (unfortunately) isn't completely going away anytime soon, so it can still be important to get people with influence on board. But the distribution of information doesn’t have to start with those "in charge."
