Monthly Archives: July 2008

What we can learn from the real evangelists?

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This is a description of Billy Graham crusades from an academic study I’ve been reading. I’m interested in how real evangelists work (after all, I use the term often enough when talking to colleagues and clients):

Counselors begin their work after the singing, testimonials, collection and Billy Graham’s sermon, which culminates in the altar call. At the moment of Graham’s invitation to “come forward to Christ.” counselors and choir members begin moving forward to an area usually in front of the speaker’s platform or rostrum. To a naive member of the audience or a television viewer, this movement creates an illusion of a spontaneous and mass response to the invitation. Having been assigned seating in strategic areas of the auditorium or arena and given instructions on the staggered time-sequencing for coming forward, the counselors move forward in such a fashion so as to create the illusion of individuals “flowing” into the center of the arena from all quarters, in a steady outpouring of individual decision. Unless an outsider or observer of these events has been instructed to look for the name tags and ribbons worn by those moving forward it is all too easy to infer from these appearances the “charismatic” impact of Graham and his invitation. These strategies promote the respectability of making a public commitment and represent methods calculated to manipulate the consent of the passive, the uncertain, the wary, and the indecisive.

(from: David L. Altheide and John M. Johnson, Counting Souls: A Study of Counseling at Evangelical Crusades, The Pacific Sociological Review, Vol. 20, No. 3, (Jul., 1977), pp. 323-348)

Momentum

A recent (and criticised) study by Tubemogul on the short shelf life of online video reminded me of some research into views on YouTube videos I did back in 2006. I only looked at about 130 random YouTube videos for the first 20 days of their life cycle, while TubeMogul’s methodology was somewhat more sound (they tracked more than 10K videos for around three months, among other things.)

Here’s the chart from my analysis: Continue reading →

Mapping the social graph of weight loss groups

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These are the graphs from some research on weight-loss groups on Facebook. I’ve processed the data so that:

  1. the size of dot is related to "total number of friends" – this only works where a user’s friends are publicly visible – quite often they aren’t, and I haven’t checked to see what the incidence of this privacy setting is generally and specifically
  2. all isolates (i.e. those users with no relationship to any other within the group) have been removed.

    3. personal weight loss support group

    This is the network graph of relationships on a personal weight loss support group. A college student set this up to support her own goals. She told me: " For my group, I just started it out by inviting all of my friends and then some people joined the group who found it in a search, I think. I am amazed by the amount of support I receive from random people who encourage me to keep on going. There are some spammers on the group who are just there trying to sell stuff and that gets annoying, but I know I can’t avoid them."

    unofficial weightwatchers support group

    This is the network graph of relationships on an unofficial weightwatchers group on Facebook. You can see that there are hardly any member-get-member relationships here. My friend Valery Yakubovich (who has a professorship in this sort of thing at Wharton) says:
    "It’s very common that organizations and interest groups become foci for personal networks. In fact, I believe that joint activities are the prevalent mechanism of tie formation."

    But it doesn’t look like it here. Looks to me that – while people may form relationships around special interests – they don’t mirror these on Facebook. Say I suffer from Meniere’s Disease (apparently true) and I participate in a Meniere’s support forum (not true at present), I don’t necessarily make those people my Facebook friends…

    blog-related support group

    Another example of the "not many personal relationships" graph for a weight loss support group on Facebook, this time, it’s the Facebook adjunct of a popular weight loss blog.

    How do people get information on weight loss? After a few interviews, I think the answer is like this:

    1. Influencers are "pull", rather than "push" resources (I’m thinking of going on a particular product, so I mention it casually to several friends to gauge consensus/temperature. One or more of them tell me "oh yes, I’ve heard of that", and one tells me "yes, My friend tried that, and lost 20lbs") This is not an active market. Most people won’t be evangelising, and evangelising behaviour may even appear suspicious.
    2. That said, people trust strangers to an extraordinary degree. Friend-of-friend endorsement is readily accepted, as is the anonymous commentary on boards & groups. Bloggers are slightly less trustworthy, it seems – because most of them have an axe to grind.