Putting aside for the moment the question of whether brands should even utilise social networking sites (SNS) as a communications channel, a more insightful question is: do enterprise-based social networking practices recognise altruism as an MO, making as much effort to ‘friend down’ as they do when they rush to score points with the most popular?
MySpace Music
An elegant piece of research from the University of California, by Judd Antin and Matthew Earp (2010), focused on MySpace Music and the ‘friendship’ practices of musicians. The study concludes that the more successful an artist, and the longer they have been an active member, the more likely they are to use a scarce resource like Top Friends to link to emerging music artists (friend down) as opposed to friending-up to other block-busters. There’s even a strong dose of value-based decision making going on when artists select their Top Friends.
The analysis concluded that up to 90% of the top 10% of successful artists (as evaluated in the context of MySpace Music using a combination of surface and network measures) would friend-down, with very few linking to either peers or artists more successful than themselves. Why? Part of the reason is that the risks of linking to an emerging artist are relatively low. Music substitution is unlikely, but the option to score a collaborative gig or recording session with a hot original artist working on the periphery keeps the ‘old guy’ on his toes and refreshes the brand.
What’s meshing here is a combination of pure altruism, the perception of credibility, reputation management and the very powerful dynamic called ‘competitive altruism’. This is a classic play on the conflict which dominates many discussions about contemporary art – authenticity and commercialism – but which has immense implications for any enterprise espousing the virtues of audience engagement.
Too often and too quickly an enterprise (and its agents) will single out ‘dialogue’ as the DNA of engagement, and if relatively sophisticated, will throw in some fragment of customer intelligence to round off the targeting argument. Yet in the case of this measured MySpace Music phenomena, the engagement process begins with a deliberate framework to support the development of ‘brand’ credibility and authenticity, not a superficial entanglement of links and friends to satisfy a project’s KPI.
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