Research Mixology: How to use social media connections for passion and profit

TEDxSanDiego—Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED)—teaches us lessons about the power of intersections: ideas + invention+ innovation + impact; people + possibilities; and, most importantly, connections + commitment + community.

If you haven’t yet joined the hundreds of millions of participants in the TED wave, the TED conference started years ago as a live gathering of people interested in technology, entertainment, and design, and has evolved into a global movement of online TED talks, translated  into dozens of languages and designed to spread like wildfire, and TEDx events, a very recent addition of volunteer-run, independently-organized conferences conceived and produced on the local level.

After being part of the TED community for years, I committed to founding the first TEDx event in San Diego and have been awestruck by the spirit and innovation that has seeped in from every corner of the city. People have rallied together to create this new, locally-themed colloquium, entitled The Next Wave, a tip of the hat to our ocean views.

But this isn’t a story about TED, but one inspired by TED: about how the multiplier effect of relationships and the intersections of ideas can take on a life of its own. How our connections grow and how that growth leads to unexpected, and many times fantastic, outcomes.

Enter the research mixologist.

James Fowler is one of TEDxSanDiego’s featured speakers. He’s known for his disarming and hilarious interplays with Stephen Colbert; his book, Connected, about how our social networks shape our lives; his large-scale research project with Facebook (400 million+ participants); and now…his real-time experiment that will track the conversations and interests of the TEDxSanDiego audience and speakers.

How it works: James and his 2 “research mixologists,” a term we coined for the TEDx event, will sit at the bar. All day. With laptops.

As people mingle at the breaks in the conference and stop by the bar, they’ll weigh in on whom they’ve had “interesting conversations” with throughout the event. And, thanks to the power of mapping software, Fowler and his team will track who’s talked with whom. And, thanks to Twitter and some pre-screening questions, they’ll be able to read the tea leaves about what it all means. Will men talk to more men? Will one person emerge as the single person that connects with the most people throughout the day (and that others find “interesting”), will measuring the interactions force artificiality—people who are trying to game the system and engage in especially “interesting” conversations?

We don’t know.

But what fascinates me about overlaying this Social Mapping Experiment onto a live event is that we all expect the relationships we form and the conversations we make will have a special impact on our lives, our work, our passions.

Social media isn’t just for OMG and BFF anymore
As business leaders, we’re all trying to make sense of how to enter the social media game. We need metrics and analysis to chart the potential payback to our companies in our investments in Twitter, Facebook, and the hundreds of other ways we make our presence known through new channels of chat. Now that the genie of crowd talk is out of the bottle, companies have to face the facts and craft new tools for turning up the volume on corporate messages and conversations. What could “research mixologists” do to help our businesses grow in the future?

Let’s see what Fowler and his team discover about the patterns of our interactions and the potential for business leaders to tap into the results of this first experiment.

Stay tuned to hear how it all shakes out.

MUSICAL CODA
Talkin’ About It by Lil’ Wayne

Came in the game as a youngin’ sign with cash money, pocket full of money

…always talkin’ about something

See ya…in public it’s a whole ‘nother subject

Man, they just talkin’ about it.

See where I come from, you gotta be about it.

And if you want it, want it, we come and see about it.