On and off again for some time now, I’ve had the pleasure of co-sponsoring academic research for EMC thanks to Steve Todd.
Here’s some of the proposal from professors Eoin Whelan (NUI Galway) and Salvatore Parise (Babson):
Our theory is that if the people an employee follows on Twitter already follow each other, then over time a groupthink situation emerges which is not good for generating novel ideas. On the other hand, if the people an employee follows on Twitter all move in different circles, then the employee is constantly getting access to novel information which should be good for ideation.
I love the theory and wanted to help see it come to fruition. Steve writes about some of his initial thoughts here as well.
Early results are in.. and I want to highlight just two of them.
#1 – It’s How You Use It
Some other interesting findings starting to emerge. Initially we examined if twitter users generated better ideas than their non twitter using colleagues, but we found no differences. After more analysis, what we have found is that it is not whether you use twitter that makes a difference, but how you use twitter i.e. those who use twitter to connect to disparate information sources (the highly fragmented networks explained in the last post) generate significantly better ideas than non twitter users.
#2 – More Followers Doesn’t Mean Better
We also found that the size of your twitter network is related to the quality of ideas generated. We looked at this from a network perspective. So if I follow lots of people, and they in turn follow lots of other people, then the data is showing this is negatively correlated with ideation. This metric is call ‘average degree’ in social network analysis speak. So it seems that too much information from your twitter network is harmful for ideation.
These gentlemen are neck deep in analysis that Steve will continue to highlight on his blog.
I’d love to extrapolate on how these findings impact my thoughts on Twitter, but I’d much rather hear your thoughts.
What do you think?