Why Ants Know More About Digg Than You Do - Social Voting Models | Squareoak Social Media Blog

Leaf Cutter Ants

In 2005 A film producer named Wolfgang Thaler released a documentary called Ants, Nature’s Secret Power. I was lucky enough to watch this documentary on a very late Christmas night and found something extremely interesting that parallels the daily lives of Search Marketers and Social Media users. This thought has remained in my head for almost a month and will now live on this blog…

Bert Hölldobler is the featured professor in this documentary that has dedicated his life to understanding the world of ants.

“There is an immense diversity in this insect group but there is one common feature to all ant species. They all live in societies they all are socially in sync. There’s not a single ant species known that lives solitarily. The evolutionary transition from a solitary life to a social life occurred only in about three to five percent of all animal species, including our own species the homosapians. But this minority places an overwhelmingly dominant role in almost all land habitats.”

We are surrounded by other species that are equally as social as we are. What makes these ants so interesting is that they are an example of this social construct on the most basic level. They don’t have emotions, they don’t have bills to pay, they have a preprogrammed disposition on how to exist. They exist individually because they are many. Since their individual survival depends on the success of this ant state, they have to maintain their efficiency through organization and coordination via communication. So how do they talk to each other? How do they spread the word? How do they make their content go viral?

Rattan ants live inside the stem of climbing palms found in tropical climates. In the documentary they show the accidental destruction of a rattan ant colony. The colony scatters, some ants guard and protect the larvae while scout ants spread out in all directions in search of a new home. Here comes the interesting part. While the scout ants are looking for a new home base…

“they touch the ground with their bodies laying down a broken line of scent. Scouts that find a nest site lay down more scent and other ants follow their trails. They in turn lay down more scent. So one site is selected from many by a chemical democracy. There is no leader giving orders. The site is chosen by the community through the strength of the chemical trails from the scouts.”

Right, what does this remind you of? Digg? StumbleUpon? Reddit? It’s the ant version of social voting! Where we use numbers (symbolic/visual representations of quantity) ants make a collective decision based on the intensity of a chemical scent. It makes you think about different social voting models. Digg, Reddit, Propeller, and Mixx are the same in that they all display vote count. Whereas StumbleUpon is the odd duck in that they simply show you a site that is usually liked by other StumbleUpon users. The more a site is liked, the more it is shown.

Imagine what a social voting site would be like based on our other senses? Maybe the more popular a story is the more vibration it generates or the higher the pitch. Maybe consumers could visit an online perfume store and vote for their favorite scents. What if you had an social alert system setup where the intensity of your iphone’s vibration was based on the importance of the alert? Could this benefit the blind?

There are probably thousands of possibilities for different social voting models and their applications. When we look deeply into the world around us, inspiration can come from the most inconspicuous of things. In many ways I feel we’ve only reached basecamp when it comes to social media. It will be interesting to watch how social voting models evolve and how clever we can be at harnessing technology to bring us the most important information democratically.

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