Harvard B-School’s Social Media Wizard

“Then, we jump into the course. Now you have a framework to view all the companies against. You can ask the important questions, such as ‘what kind of problem in the real world does it (a new feature on Facebook or a new social website) solve? It gives us a very common denominator to fall back on. If you can’t see how a technology or new social platform helps anyone with their relationships, it probably won’t get used very much.”

The takeaway? “Everything goes back to the offline world. If it doesn’t address some social failure in the offline world, you are in trouble. Failure manifests itself in lack of action rather than action. When you ask single people how to improve their social interactions, they will likely say, ‘Well, I would like to find someone to love.’ And when you ask a professional what he or she may need, he might say, ‘I want to find someone who can introduce me to a better job—a headhunter or a recruiting director.’ Speak with someone who wants to improve their social relationships, and he might say, ‘I’d like to be closer to my parents and brothers and sisters.’

“The second takeaway is that just because you identify something as a social failure doesn’t mean it is very easy to solve. The way for people to meet new people isn’t to put them in a really big room of people who are interested in meeting other people. The best way to make new relationships is to pretend not to want to make a new relationships. If we were told that we have to be friends by the end of the day, it would put a great onus on us. Human beings are afraid of the embarrassment of failed relationships. So more often than not, it’s easier to get people involved in a common activity where it becomes an excuse for us to get to know each other. So you remove the pressure of having to become friends.”

His wry and witty observations about online behavior make him something of a quote machine. He notes, for example, that 10% of the people on Twitter are responsible for 90% of the tweets. His conclusion: Twitter is less a social network than it is a one-way broadcasting device. Piskorski also discovered that two-thirds of all the pageviews on social networking sites are of women. When he once presented this statistic to a biology department, a professor raised his hand and said, “’In biology, we knew this 200 years ago. If you look at any species of animals, the males are usually bigger and more colorful and the females are small and gray. They don’t need to be bigger to get noticed.’”