The Power of Node Communities: Instant Information Sharing

Within a week, the Big Bird Node Community had exponentially grown. The power was in the node community as evidenced by major newspapers picking up the story and following with lead stories, articles, and opinion editorials about the response. Weekly magazines carried articles from many writers, and internet news sites like the Huffington Post weighed in on discussions. Gov. Romney’s Big Bird comment became one of the campaign’s pivotal points. Incredibly, the scale of a largely spontaneous reaction to a comment about a fictitious character was met with rapid return fire and incredulous astonishment! Mr. Romney and his campaign were forced to temper the outcry by attempting to explain his intent and redirect his comment over firing Big Bird.

The power of nodes and node communities is also evident in the influence of social media on customer service. In the past, individual cases were handled in a customer service complaint department. Supervisors handled tougher situations, but complaints rarely reached the attention of anyone above government middle management. News of mistreatment by a particular company hardly ever moved beyond an individual’s immediate social circle.

Today, the landscape is dramatically different. Gone are the days when disgruntled customers had minimal impact on sales, stock prices, or the overall perception of an institution. A post to Facebook or a 140-character complaint on Twitter can have a profound effect on a company’s bottom line performance, an organization’s funding, or an academic institution’s enrollment. For instance, a musician and United Airlines passenger named Dave Carroll once found that baggage handlers had destroyed his guitar during a flight. After the airline refused to replace the badly damaged instrument, Carroll penned a now infamous song—“United Breaks Guitars”—created a video, and posted it to peer-to-peer video sharing site YouTube. The video and song that skewered United’s customer service has since garnered over 12 million views; some claim it even had an impact on United’s stock prices.

Dave Carroll employed computer technology to disrupt and raise awareness of United Airlines’ customer service practice; regardless of whether or not it had a substantial effect on United’s bottom line, the impact of social technology to transfer information rapidly and influence formal structures and processes certainly reaches beyond the one encounter with a customer service representative. Computer technology is no longer just a tool; it is a social phenomenon that makes information readily accessible and more transparent. It makes reliable communication in real time possible. Anyone can take the lead.