Imagine if we could take clusters of keywords instead of people, what descriptors would we use to group them?

As chance has it, we do take clusters of keywords. In AdWords advertising we call these clusters ad groups. So bear with me while we take this into the important bit of this post.

Exactly like taking a cluster of people, we want to break a cluster of keywords down to the smallest group so that each descriptor we use for the group is homogenic (describes the entire group). The best and most complete keyword cluster would be 1 term, phrase or word, but, exactly like a cluster of 1 person, a cluster of 1 keyword is unmanageable because of the volume of ad groups we'd have to make. Because of this we have to group these best clusters into something more manageable.

How do we do this? I'll use cars as an example (I'm a closet petrolhead, I admit it).

A cluster of car keywords might include "fast car, sports car, best fast car, sporty car" etc. if these keywords were people they would have have similar age, gender, preferences and other descriptors and so it would be safe to put them together as a cluster. 

However if we tried to put "family car" into that cluster it wouldn't fit. It would be like putting someone the same age and gender but with different music tastes into the cluster of people, they kinda look the same and someone not paying much attention wouldn't notice and it would work... kinda.

The problem we face is that Google pays attention, lots and lots and lots of it, we couldn't hide that the person is just a little bit different to the others and the same way we couldn't hide that "family car" is just a little bit different to "fast car, sports car, best fast car, sporty car" etc. So Google has to broaden the descriptors it uses to explain our cluster, the ad group. It can use age and gender, but not preferences. This broadening of descriptors lowers the niche-ness of our targeting and our quality score - that's a very bad thing!

What I'm trying to say (a short essay later) is to check your clusters. If they can be broken into smaller, more descriptive bits - DO IT! You'll spend 15 minutes writing new ad copy, but you'll thank the time when your CPC goes down.

Some differences are the app-ecosystem on Facebook and the amount of feeds you can feed to FriendFeed (though I think some apps take care of that). And maybe FriendFeed will eventually integrate apps as well, who knows?

The thing is that I don't mind. FriendFeed is my way of staying in touch with the countless people that have something to say online. It's unrestricted. Facebook is about the people that I want to have strong ties with, and I purposely don't add people that I don't know. So both can definitely co-exist as far as I'm concerned.

But that doesn't take away that we essentially have a clone on our hands, and it's a good thing that patents on the internet are apparently not worth squat anymore.

Vincent

The one thing I came away with was that networking is in… "Hah!" you say, and I wouldn't blame you. With the rise of social networks and its media attention, of course it's "IN." No, but what I mean is that about 70% of the thesis-topics I heard being presented yesterday, were in some form or fashion centred on networking. And I can't remember it being so dominating a topic before.

As was mine, incidentally, being in part about incubation and innovation systems, and how to improve the connection between tech-startups and investors, but there was one thing I didn't look at, which was: Weak ties, strong ties, and their implications. I won't explain it in great detail now, if interested, you should definitely read this pdf, I just uncovered, by Mark Granovetter, the originator of that theory and how to measure (!) it.

The idea is that we are surrounded by possible ties, some of them non-existant and potential, some of them strong, meaning that we meet frequently and that psychic distance is low, some of them weak, meaning that we see them rarely and that they are perhaps based on less emotional factors. If you're in a university environment, it's of course easy to imagine that you have a lot of strong ties. As everyone enters their careers, your ties to to each other become weaker and weaker. The same, to some extent is happening on this blog: some I have stronger ties with than others, simply because of the frequency of interaction. Of course, I'm hopefully a not-to-weak tie to all of you on this blog ;)

Regarding the power of weak ties, Granovetter also writes:

The macroscopic side of this communications argument is that social systems lacking in weak ties will be fragmented and incoherent. New ideas will spread slowly, scientific endeavors will be handicapped, and subgroups separated by race, ethnicity, geography, or other characteristics will have difficulty reaching a modus vivendi.

In other words, strong ties aren't everything either—they, rather, lock you into a clique and prevent ideas from spreading and changing the world!

The strength of ties & funding
Some things I learned yesterday, was that networking and its strength has certain implications in areas pertaining to funding and sales. One student did his thesis on the Greek semi-conductor industry and how it was funded. He found that (my phrasing):

strong ties are important for finding early-stage funding, like friends & family. But that weak ties are actually the predominant factor in finding funding from VCs and similar. His opinion is that those investors make their decisions not on emotions, but on business-reasons. A connection certainly helps, but is not the primary decision-maker.

The strength of ties and sales
If you ever worked in sales, you know that it's often not really a job focussed on relationship-building. Rather it is about maximising turnover, which can best be achieved by selling to as many people as possible in a short period of time.

Another student did his thesis on how the social environment of startups affects their sales strategies. He interviewed three independent ICT startups and three, which were located in incubators, and found that the first group was much more focussed on developing their sales-force, while the latter group depended much more on the ties it had with their respective incubator, often finding their first customers within, one even supplying the incubator with software. Kind of scary, I think, this co-dependency in the latter case.

Strong ties were an important factor in business development, which were more intense relationships between businesses, trying to get a larger project off the ground. Sales, in general however, relied mostly on NO ties, aka cold approaches to customers. So if you want a job in sales, that's kind of what to expect.

Thoughts and questions
While I dig theses a lot for their practical research alone—it sometimes reads like a section of a business-plan, and I have used it before to research an industry—we are obviously dealing with theories that are generalised across whole populations. But it seems like strong ties are actually not a very important factor in either getting funded or making a sale.

So some questions to you…

• How do you feel about networking after hearing this?
• Can you provide counter-argument, where a strong tie to a person actually improved your career? Ok, wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, and husbands should definitely be left out of this :)
• Are there other areas, apart from funding and sales, where either strong or weak ties are better?
• How often do you use contacts-of-contacts on LinkedIN or otherwise for professional reasons?
• Can you provide some Best Practices in regards to "Weak-tie management"?

I look forward to your answers!
Vincent

P.S. I asked a friend to send me the names of these students. I'll try to fill them in later.