Networks are integral to all our lives. They’re the people who help you through the tough times, the job opportunity you wouldn’t have otherwise known about or something as trivial as the gig you might have missed.
Academics and institutions have formalised this and given it a name – social capital – the strength and make-up of networks, and the value they have for the individuals within them.
Without going into detail, the theory is that as well as providing support and creating shared values, networks facilitate the flow of information, opportunities and financial capital, and that stronger networks enrich peoples’ lives and strengthen society as a whole.
[An important note here: this is just scratching the surface. It's a complex subject and definitions vary – if you want to find out more, check out good ol' wikipedia, what the World Bank has to say and the work of the ONS.]
The value of strong and weak ties
One of the core principles is the type of connections we form, those with people that we share a lot of similarities, networks which provide support and create social norms (known as bonding social capital) and those who we are only weakly connected to, but can bring us new information and opportunities (bridging social capital or “the strength of weak ties”).
In coarse terms, an example of networks that create bonding capital would be your best mates or work colleagues, while bridging social capital might be generated by some of connections you form through Linked In or twitter – people with shared interests, but who live 1,000 miles away and that you don’t communicate with very often.
As you can imagine social networking offers a massive opportunity for developing social capital and for the past year, we’ve been working with Enterprise UK and Virgin Media on a project that has this at its core – the Virgin Media Pioneers programme.
Developing entrepreneurial social capital
The Pioneers project is all about equipping young people with the skills, confidence and opportunities to turn their entrepreneurial ideas into reality, all by connecting them with the right people. We think of this as generating ‘entrepreneurial social capital’.
The project centres around a social networking platform we’ve built, that encourages people to use video blogging to share their experiences, advice and start conversations, with people like them, and more experienced professionals.
Pioneers, as they’ve become known, are creating both strong, supporting relationships and discovering new connections that can bring them the new information and opportunities that they never would have known about otherwise.
Measuring and visualising the strength of networks
There’s a robust and complex measurement programme in place to demonstrate social capital, using in-depth qualitative and attitudinal surveys as well as web metrics. These are necessary to get a detailed and statistical picture – but we wondered how we might tell this as a story, and make it more human.
We realised that the eco-system behind the website was difficult to see from the outside, but that we could make it visible. If we could demonstrate how social capital was developing, in an immediately engaging way, this would have benefits not only for those managing and investing in the programme, but for the people who are a part of these networks.
We’ve developed an application, with technology created by some of our expert technical associates, Ollie Glass and George Bashi, that uses snapshots of the website database, over time, to plot users and their networks over geographic locations, as the eco-system evolved.
To demonstrate social capital, albeit initially in a simple way, we used data on the amount of information that flowed across individual connections to reflect the strength of the different parts of the network, all in a way that could be explored by the user.
The result is not just something that looks pretty, it’s a way of demonstrating what the website is achieving for the people we set out to support.
It also serves as a neat way of reporting success to stakeholders who won’t read a 30-page report, as well as allowing us, and the people within the network to spot areas of strength and weakness.
And, we think it’s pretty special.
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[...] underlying principle and the measure of success was that of building social capital. The idea that social media had the potential to help the right people connect, share knowledge and [...]