Does the Guanxi Game Influence your Reputation?
Politicians are perhaps the least trusted people in society. With allegations of ever-changing policies, broken manifesto promises and of course, the expenses scandal, tweetGuv aims to answer the question on the mind of every conscientious voter – can I trust politicians?
Yes, you can!
But you have to select them carefully!
Keep in mind that the winner’s game is a number’s game and that politicians who are unable to follow or connect with everybody, have only very little chances to win, how well known they might be, in the new social mass media structure!
Your reputation really is everything
and you increase your reputation only through the number of contacts, through your page rank, through your guanxi game, independently of what all the quality geek will tell you, only quantity will be your key to success!
Barack Obama, who is following 733,406 people on Twitter and is followed by 3,499,924 twitter user is the most connected man, not only President, but individual on earth and he also is on top of his online reputation against all other top politicians. Barack Obama understands the importance of connections! He has introduced a bottom-up and democratic, open, random and supportive administration that uses social networks like no other administration in no other country has ever used before! He is shifting away from the old Taylorian mass production philosophy to a Demingian philosophy of KAIZEN, of GOOD CHANGE!
Social media websites, like Twitter and Facebook, are now seen as crucial battlegrounds, as well as potential forums for political gaffes. The influence of bloggers too, free as they are to support or attack the various parties, also seems to be growing by the day.
Guanxi describes the basic dynamic in personalized networks of influence, and is a central idea in Chinese society. In Western media, the pinyin romanization of this Chinese word is becoming more widely used instead of the two common translations “connections” and “relationships” as neither of those terms sufficiently reflects the wide cultural implications that guanxi describes.
Closely related concepts include that of ganqing, a measure which reflects the depth of feeling within an interpersonal relationship, renqing, the moral obligation to maintain the relationship, and the idea of “face”, meaning social status, propriety, prestige, or more realistically a combination of all three.
In a BBC article, research shows party leaders’ ‘social media reputation‘, Victoria King introduces Yomego, a UK company that says it can put some numbers on the effect of all this – with what it calls “social media reputation scores” (SMRs) for the parties and their leaders.
But Yomego still is only a tool that calculates in a top-down measure what yomego thinks the online reputation of a politician could be with all the errors and assumptions of such an approach, it lacks the wisdom of crowds, the bottom-up approach that only Yasni offers us.
What do you think?
Does the Number of Contacts, your Guanxi Game, Influences your Reputation?
Lucas Wyrsch
