Today, we are honored to have Michael Wu, Principal Scientist at Lithium Technologies, participate in our social media Q&A.
1. How did you get your start in the industry?
I was a pure academic track research scientist before I entered the industry. I did research in computational neuroscience and my thesis was on modeling visual processing in the human brain using mathematical approaches, such as statistics and machine learning. Because computer vision is nowhere near the performance of humans in terms of its ability to segment objects, recognize people and understand a scene, my goal was to understand the computations that occur in our brains so we can recreate them in a machine vision system.
I joined the industry right after finishing my PhD. I still use the same mathematical approach in my daily work, but instead of analyzing data from human fMRI scans, I analyze human behavioral data on social media. My goal is to understand social media well enough to build predictive algorithms that allow us to predict user behavior so we can gain actionable insights into the inner workings of the social web. For example, I’ve developed a predictive model of influence on social media. Since much of the value of social media is only realized when users actually interact socially with each other, I also developed an evaluative framework for understanding and designing gamification strategies, a mechanism that drives actions and interaction on social media.
2. What is the biggest challenge facing your industry?
I’m an analytics scientist for an external enterprise social software vendor. That makes every challenge twice as hard.
Unlike most enterprise social software which focuses on internal collaboration, we focus on external collaboration with the customers. External customer collaboration is a much more challenging problem than internal collaboration because employees within an enterprise are obligated to collaborate for the benefit of the enterprise, but customers are under no obligation to work with each other or the brand. So the ability to drive participation that results in measurable actions and interactions is certainly a big challenge.
Secondly, being a software vendor to some of the largest brands, ROI always comes up. There are many mechanisms for social media to generate ROI, but quantifying it is another challenge. One of the key features of social media is its network effect. As such, many ROI calculations and predictive algorithms involve network science and network metrics that businesses are not familiar with and do not understand. Explaining difficult concepts, such as eigenvector centrality in social network analysis and making people understand the mathematics behind graph analysis is even more challenging.
Finally, large enterprises are rather conservative when it comes to adoption of innovation. Part of it is the fear of the unknown (e.g. unknown ROI) and the lack of control (e.g. brands have no control over what customers may say about them). These fears hinder their adoption of social media, and since social media is so new, there aren’t many credible sources for senior executives and decision makers to learn about them. So adoption and education are also challenges.
3. What is the secret to your social media success?
I follow my passion and do original and novel research that tackles the hard questions. Because social media has democratized publishing and self-expression, it becomes increasingly harder to distinguish yourself from the rest of the crowd. Since anyone can publish, quantity becomes less important, and quality counts more. One piece of high quality research may be more influential than 100 or even 1,000 mediocre pieces. What I found is that when you publish superb content that is truly novel, the experts in the space will pick it up. This may not happen immediately, but they will eventually recognize the quality, so you have to be patient…very patient.
At the beginning, I simply did my day to day research at Lithium, analyzing huge data sets and developing algorithms. I was only able to blog when I found something truly novel and interesting, something that I would be surprised by. I had no intention to get recognition or validation of any kind. When people comment or bother to take time to ask a question, I always respond within a day or two. But even if no one cared about what I wrote, that is perfectly fine too. If I am truly passionate about what I do, I will continue doing what I always love to do regardless of whether people engage with me or not. For me, the cake is in finding answers to open questions that have no answers and finding new ways to explain a phenomenon that gives me a novel perspective and understanding– people’s engagement is the icing on top.
Without true passion, I don’t think I could have continued writing for nearly a year before the industry started to recognize my work. Moreover, true passion translates to quality content. I strongly believe that if people are doing what they love to do, they will do a much better job and produce higher quality content. And over time this quality will set them apart from the noise makers.
4. What do you think is the future of social media?
Social media will become an integral part of our lives that we won’t even think about it. It will be pervasive and will serve as the foundation of other new technologies – what radio, television, and email are today We are already seeing some of this beginning to happen. Today, there are already hundreds and probably thousands of tools and services developed on top of Twitter and Facebook. These new tools and services build on top of social media, which serves as the foundational infrastructure over which social communication occurs. More recently, there has been a cross pollination between social and mobile with mobile-social and local-social technologies. Since mobile is also another fundamental shift in the way we communicate, social and mobile can build on top of each other. In the future, more new technologies will develop on top of social media. For a scientist, prediction is a fool’s game. So stretch your imagination. The future is unlimited.
5. What advice would you give to someone who is just starting out?
I would say don’t use social media just for the sake of being social. There are much better and more effective ways to be social. In fact, if you are trying to be more social by only using social media and not actually going out to socialize with people, then the result may be counterproductive. You may end up being less social, because communication over social media is less efficient and less effective than face to face communication. Rather, I recommend using social media to complement something that you love and are passionate about. This gives you a true edge over others, because you can produce higher quality content that is both novel and valuable to others.
6. Where can we find you on the web/on Twitter/Facebook/etc.?
- Twitter: mich8elwu (Michael Wu is just too common of a name)
- Lithosphere: My Blog
- Google+: plus.google.com/105061099394492403376
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/michaelwuphd
