Hurricanes, Snowballs and Social Media

Here at INgage headquarters in southwest Florida, this year’s hurricane season is starting to wind down, and will be officially over in a few weeks (I’m looking for some wood to knock on as I write this). And I just came back from a trip to our offices in Michigan, where cooler weather has descended (finally!) and snow season will be winding up in a few weeks. 

I find that analogies are often useful in discussing technology (especially new technology), and it occurred to me that both hurricanes and snowballs can be useful for describing conditions under which social media sites can thrive.

Consider: Hurricanes only exist in summer months, when prevailing upper level winds and warm ocean temperatures are conducive to their formation.  A “wave” of clouds, thunderstorms and lower atmospheric pressure rolls off the west coast of Africa and heads west every few days during the late summer months.  Some of these waves develop into hurricanes. Many do not. They remain a harmless cluster of thunderstorms and clouds until they dissipate or are absorbed into other storms.  They only form into hurricanes when conditions are just right: the spin in the clouds coupled with low wind shear allows more thunderstorms to build, more moisture to be pulled into the storm; which somehow causes the rotation of the storm to increase, building even more storms and pulling in even more moisture, and so on.  In other words, some of these storms create a kind of positive feedback loop with their environment, altering it in ways that make the storm spin faster and faster until a hurricane is born.

And snowballs?  Well, anyone that has lived in a hilly, snowy climate has at one point or another tried to make a large snowball and push it down a hill to see if they could get it to grow into a big snowball by the time it gets to the bottom.  It doesn’t always work.  Sometimes the snow is the wrong consistency; sometimes the snowball is too small and doesn’t roll; sometimes the snowball is too large and falls apart; sometimes the hill is too shallow for the snowball to roll very far.  But when it works: wow.  It works so well that I can use the phrase “snowball effect” and pretty much everyone will know what I mean.

Social media sites can behave a lot like hurricanes and snowballs.  They can generate enough positive feedback to snowball into huge, vibrant communities.  As they grow they attract new members, which contribute new content, which attract other new members, and so on. But like snowballs and hurricanes they can be awfully hard to kick start when they are new.  They need just the right social networking conditions and the right networking environment, and usually a helpful nudge or two before they can take off.  And without the right conditions—just like hurricanes and snowballs—they can easily fizzle or fall apart.