Aide-Memoire

It was fascinating to be at the inaugural Digital Citizens event in Sydney last week – the topic was: Private Parts: Personality and Disclosure – Finding a Balance in the Digital Space.

There was a great line up on the panel with visiting US lawyer and social media specialist Adrian Dayton (Social Media for Lawyers), Sam North (Ogilvy PR), Damian Damjanovski (BMF), and Renai LeMay (Delimiter), all wrangled expertly by the moderator Bronwen Clune (Strategeist).

It was a very thought provoking session with the panel and audience discussion. And the big takeway for me is that social media and its practitioners need to accept that we live within a particular social and legal context.

No matter how much we ’social media’ types decry how poorly the law is setup to deal with what we do everyday, that is the situation we must deal with. The law moves much more slowly than changes in technology, and, upon consideration, maybe that’s not such a bad thing?

For example, Damian Damjanovski argued: “A lot of people out there use it as a personal communications method. There are lots of people with no more than 70 followers . When did we get to the point that this is suddenly publishing and should be treated as such?”

The fact is ordinary people are doing something that was once privileged – publishing. We are publishing content in many places now in the same ways that publishers (who have lawyers vetting much of their content) have for years.

Now that everywoman and everyman is a publisher we need to understand the rights and obligations that come with publication. We are no longer having a chat about something over dinner or at the pub with a bunch of mates. We are posting content (pretty much) for perpetuity and complaining when there are legal ramifications associated with that act.

It all made me think that perhaps a good topic for another Digital Citizens session would be about the legal issues associated with the act of publication on the web? Since, while Adrian Dayton was great, it would have been handy to have Australian lawyer on the panel.

A brief write-up of the event is also available on mUmBRELLA

It’s not really meaningless babble anyway! And this is not necessarily a bad thing.

Most conversation is not important for the words we speak. Instead it is the act of being present to the other person and giving attention that gives most conversations their true value. Some experts term this social grooming.

It also enables the growth of social bonds by means of the time spent in relatively trivial communications.  These seemingly unimportant communications are what makes dealing with bigger issues between individuals and groups easier.

How much easier is it to ask for help from someone you’ve known socially for a while than a stranger? How much easier is it to know the best way to phrase a suggestion or request to someone if you’ve chatted with them before?

The important thing that social networking tools like Twitter or Facebook  (or newer tools like Google’s Buzz) enable is non-localised proximity. No longer do you need to run into a person in the office kitchen each day to build up informal social ties.  Now we can do it from half a world away in real-time.

It’s also worth checking out Dunbar on this kind of thing.

Here are the slides from my presentation at the National Growth Summit in Sydney today.

Crowdsourcing is very trendy these days and is touted as the answer to many of the ills of poor design and the need to reduce costs. In these cash strapped days any way to make innovation better-cheaper-faster is extremely desirable.

But crowdsourcing is just one of the many tools we have at our disposal, and each tool is suited to particular kinds of applications. To simply adopt an idea like this without considering its suitability to the problem domain or to the desired results can be risky.

To assist with critical thinking about crowdsourcing I have collected a few alternative viewpoints & list five reasons why it might not always be the best approach to adopt. Please note I do not agree with everything in the articles linked below – they are meant as a thought starter & to provide different perspectives on crowdsourcing (i.e. if you’ve got any issues with the articles please contact the author directly).

• Innovation: The sinister powers of crowdsourcing
• G20 summit: How the bandwagon wrecked the wisdom of market crowds
• The trouble with Twitter
• The Myth of Crowdsourcing
• Forrester’s Social Technographics report

Since no single tool is the answer in all cases, here are a few times when crowdsourcing might not be the right solution:

1. When the crowd does not have sufficient understanding or knowledge

For crowdsourcing to work you need to find the right crowd.  If the technical or scientific knowledge required is rare then crowdsourcing might not be helpful unless you can find a crowd of people with the requisite foundational knowledge.

2. Where the problem is diffuse and complex

Crowdsourcing lends itself to solving clearly focused problems where there is little ambiguity or nuance – a great recent example of this was the DARPA balloon challenge.

For diffuse and complex problems it might be necessary to chunk up the challenge (if that is possible). And for problems that require painstaking layering of knowledge and information with long term focus it might not be commercially viable.

A good example of this is the discovery of longitude via crowdsourcing in the 18th century. It worked in the long run, but it took a really long time and was funded by the government. However, it might be argued that this kind of discovery would be much quicker today with computer power.

3. When you want to keep your plans secret

Clearly secrecy requires that only a few people know the secret. Thus crowdsourcing something that is meant to be a secret is probably a bad idea (unless you are executing a cunning hide in plain sight sort of plan).

4. Your problem needs to be compelling enough for contributors to care

Experience of Wikipedia indicates that people will contribute to things that are interesting to them. Thus if nobody cares about solving your problem then crowdsourcing might not be the answer.

To get an idea of how crowdsourcing works on an everyday basis there is a good discussion of how Wikipedia contributions happen by Henry Blodget in: Who The Hell Writes Wikipedia, Anyway?.

There is also a well known report by Forrester about Social Technographics that segments the participation of people within social networks. It shows that only a small proportion of people create or share content, a few active creators or editors, with the bulk of people lurking or not participating at all.

5. Crowdsourcing for complex problems requires dedicated resources

To undertake the kind of knowledge work required to solve complex problems contributors need uninterrupted time in the zone.

This is exemplified in some of the large open source software projects where companies pay people to work full time on open source projects for commercial advantage:

Many of the leaders of key projects (like Guido van Rossum, the inventor of Python, who works at Google (nasdaq: GOOG – news – people )) are paid by their employers to continue to lead their projects. Is there an open source community? Of course there is. But on the most prominent projects, the members of the community have jobs and are paid to work on open source because the software is so beneficial to their employers, even though it is not owned by them. True, there are hybrid models, and the smaller the project, the more likely it is unfunded. But when it becomes a big deal, open source becomes commercial.

A while back I got an invitation to join a new social network 434U & was amazed at the barriers to entry & the onerous rules for participation. It’s a new invitation only social network – I do wish them luck. But for me it makes me go “meh”.

Let’s just have a quick squiz at some of the rules:

• Must have a headshot, but it can only be a headshot of you – if you have other people in your picture they message you to crop them out: e.g. “social says: you need to change your photo asap A SOLO HEAD SHOT NO SUNGLASSES PLEASE” or “social says: hey mate it needs to be a solo photo sorry mate you can crop that one with child in it thanks”
• “In order to have an active account on 434u you must have at least 4 active members in your crew. Active members are members who have 4 active crew members under them. Once your 4 crew members have recruited 4 active members your account will automatically become active.” – I can barely manage my own online activity let alone consider moderate my buddies too!
• “Members can invite 6 friends only to join. A member is then responsible for the moderation of those members who form their crew.”
• You have to log in every 14 days
• “By empowering members to moderate, market and promote the site, 434U can then afford to share revenue from the site among its members 70/30.”

It seems to me that some people just don’t understand the concept of barriers to entry. With complex rules like that a social network would need to offer me some compelling value. Not sure what value this one offers?

Also they seem to misunderstand how many people use their avatars and how an avatar can also become almost a part of our personality. I feel quite odd when changing avatars. So making it just a photo of me is not an attractive proposition at all.

Suspect it will need to clarify the cost-benefit equation a lot more before they catch my interest.

UPDATE 1 Jan 2010: Just to prove that everyone is different here’s an alternative perspective on this new social network 434U

For me 2009 goes down as the year other people discovered Twitter. It went from a small and fairly intimate place to hangout to a busy bustling intersection of information, commerce and conversations.

It felt almost like moving from a small town to a big and somewhat impersonal city.

Some of the events of 2009 in which Twitter played a big part for me included:

#media140
#futuresummit
#cccsyd
#poltech
#toto
#usnowsydney
and the various BarCamps in Sydney & Canberra.

The growth of community in real life that was enabled by Twitter continues to amaze me – STUB, Silicon Beach, the various Sydney Coffee Mornings (e.g. NSCM), & SHTBOX in Sydney and countless informal meetups.  A big thank-you to all the kind and lovely people that I met on Twitter and at the various meetups – wishing you all a wonderful 2010.

Twitter also played a different part in reporting the news.  No longer did I rely upon news agencies for breaking news. Instead people on Twitter broke the news and it was left to the traditional news agencies to verify and follow up on the stories.

It was also interesting to look back on my Twitter year by means of a Wordle:

This year has been one of great personal challenges for me and my family. To have made it to the end of the year with all of us still on deck is a good feeling.

2009 brought home to me how truly important continued good health is, and how lucky we are in Australia with our health system.

The year saw many plans in train at the start of the year, with most of them deferred due to the aforementioned personal challenges. So it feels like I did not really achieve much that I’d hoped.

But putting all of that aside, it was a year that revealed the kindness of friends and power of online networks to create and build real relationships. Real life friends who supported me this year have made all the difference.

Another great example of that was the diverse group of people who’ve banded together for Northside Coffee Mornings – where online relationships have merged into offline ones and a supportive network has started to evolve.

The sheer number of kindhearted people who cared for & supported me, who helped me when I was down, fed me, nurtured me, worried with me, and rejoiced when the news was good is truly humbling.

Another thing that amazed me was how many people want to make make the world a better place. And how many of those people are willing to take action in that cause.

I was lucky enough to be involved in various conferences, unconferences and seminars, meeting a large number of fascinating people.

A big thank-you to all those people who were kind and inclusive, sharing ideas and working together. Special thanks to everyone who helped out with Cupcake Camp Sydney – it was great fun and we helped out the RSPCA.

Each year, instead of making new year resolutions, I pick a theme for the year. That way when I get sidetracked (as often happens) I can simply return to the theme. Also with a theme there are often many different things I can do to support it.

For 2009 my theme was simplicity and frugal living. The results here were pretty good on the whole. A big reduction in my carbon footprint; using public transport wherever possible; and living local as much as possible.

I’m still thinking about my theme for 2010, more on that later.

There are three areas that are relevant to both our society in general and to us as educators in particular. They are: (1) the overall landscape in which we are operating; (2) the social implications of the changes being driven by technology and how we are using it; and (3) the changing models that are beginning to impact on educational practice.

Landscape

Before we leap into a look at the landscape it is important to clarify some things about web 2.0 and some key trends that are impacting on the landscape. Key points about web 2.0 are that:

1. It is not new technology – the technology stack is decades old in many cases
2. It is new ways of using older technology – we are putting the technology together differently enabled by reasonable broadband access
3. It is not using the old mindset where technology was the province of gurus – now any script kiddie can make things happen with technology
4. It is democratizing technology – this is breaking down the old cabals of experts
5. It is applying new business models – we are seeing this with companies like Google and Facebook

In terms of the broader landscape I have identified five macro trends that are shaping both computing and our world at present:

• Next Generation Internet – semantics, contextual, geo-aware
• New interfaces – gesture, haptic, auditory, human-computer, voice user interfaces
• Hardware – Virtualization , cloud computing enabled by solid state drives, blade technology
• Social computing – It’s here and it will continue to grow
• Ubiquitous computing – Wearable, networks, convergence

Of these I will concentrate on social computing and the next generation internet as they are driving a lot of change that is impacting on the education sector.

But probably the biggest change over the past thirty years is the rate of change. Once it was completely acceptable to wait a week for a letter to arrive, to ponder one’s response for a few days and then write and dispatch a letter by post. Then the fax machine changed all of that. Now we receive emails immediately followed by a phone call asking why we have not yet responded.

The pace of change is increasing and has increased substantially over the past 30 years. Look at the mobile phone as an example of this. From the time the telephone was invented until the mid-1980s it remained recognisably the same device. Now, to a person who last saw a telephone in 1980, the iPhone or SmartPhone would not even seem to be in the same family of devices. And, indeed they are not. The modern mobile phone is really converged computing, telecommunications and entertainment device. They even have more memory than my first server.

The next thing to consider is the revolution of the internet. Originally conceived as a bulwark against nuclear war and as a way for academic researchers to communicate it has reshaped the world. Now many people use the internet every day as an integral part of their lives – for sending email, chatting online, shopping, entertainment and business.

Along with this growth in the pragmatic use of the internet, social networks are also becoming mainstream; with Pew Research from 2009 showing 46% of US adults have used a social network at least once, and 27% used one yesterday.

This area of social computing has been the real area of growth and the data clearly shows how social computing is changing how ordinary people share, communicate and interact.

Some examples of these changes include:

• In the past email and search engine internet traffic exceeded that of social networks. However, in December 2009 search traffic and social network traffic approached parity in Australia for the first time.
• Also previously in late 2007, social network traffic surpassed that from email in the UK for the first time.
• And adult website traffic was also overtaken by social networking traffic for the first time in late 2008.

The important thing to note here is that the behaviours of searching, sending emails or checking out p~rn did not change. What changed is the location in which it happens. Thus if you are in Facebook and so are all of your friends it simply does not make sense to leave the application to use another email client.

There has also been development of niche networks for different interest groups. For business there are LinkedIn and Plaxo (amongst many others) and Facebook is winning the war as the de facto social network for everyone else.

Another interesting characteristic of this landscape is that ordinary people are creating and participating online in ways that were once unthinkable. Without specialised technical assistance people are creating videos to share on YouTube or Viddler; they are creating blogs on Wordpress, Blogger or Typepad; they are sharing photos on Facebook or Flickr. Remixing music or visual materials is rife –questions of provenance and copyright remain unanswered. Video downloads, online shopping, banking and travel arrangements are becoming the norm.

Against this backdrop various researchers have mapped the generations:

• GI Generation aged 73+
• Silent Generation aged 64-72
• Older Boomers aged 55-63
• Younger Boomer aged 45-54
• Gen X aged 33-44
• Gen Y aged 18-32

And, while the notion of dividing up the population on the basis of age cohorts is useful for analytical purposes, it ignores some simple facts about people. In each age cohort is a bell curve for change adoption – with some members as early adopters, the mass as early & late majority, followed by the laggards. I fundamentally disagree with the idea that mere membership of an age cohort determines a person’s relationship to technology or propensity to adopt change. Rather the determining factor will become one’s willingness to be connected.

This willingness and desire to be hyperconnected via technology will become the new generation gap. A great example of this is the loose confederation of people who meetup on Thursday mornings on the northside of Sydney for coffee. Most of them met originally on Twitter, decided that they liked each other and thought it would be good to catch up informally for coffee.

What has happened is that this has created a vibrant group of people who know each other in real life now. Business ideas are exchanged, family and social tips are shared and other connections are made and broadened. More can be seen at their Posterous site at www.nscm.posterous.com .There are now many similar groups all around Australia – I have attended them in Perth and Brisbane.

What is interesting here is that online and offline activities are blurring and the boundaries between public and private are no longer clear. The conflicts between the connected and the unconnected are already being seen in schools, colleges and workplaces around the world. Just try asking members of your class to turn off their mobile phones to test this hypothesis.

Social implications

The social implications for all of this are astounding. They reverberate across all areas of life from business to education to socialising.

This technology and the way it is being used now is creating massive interconnections between people and enabling the creation of groups and communities. This kind of community building and collaboration is similar to that we experienced when living in smaller villages rather than in large cities.

But think on this – the children of today will stay in loose contact with every group of people the meet throughout their lives from kindergarten onwards. It is going to be a challenge to manage over a lifetime. The only way to manage these masses of loose connections is by chunking them up into niches. This is where richer technologies that enable this to happen seamlessly based on use rather than manually based on effort.

Another feature of this interconnected world we live in is that we no longer need to wait. Delayed gratification is becoming a thing of the past in many respects. For example in the area of entertainment we used to wait for a movie to come out or wait until our favourite television show was broadcast. But now with the advent of decent broadband and streaming video there is no more waiting. Anyone can watch what they want when they want. And they do exactly that, as anyone with teenagers in the house with a broadband connection knows all too well.

However, against the backdrop of this explosion in connections, information and entertainment at our fingertips we remain unreconstructed human beings. This remains similar to our cave dwelling days.

We still retain our tribal brains that work best in small groups the size of a basketball team. Our brains are wired to deal with small chunks of information – like the magic number seven, which is the number of items we can retain in our short-term memory.

Also we are constrained in our ability to handle a great many close relationships. Many cite Dunbar’s number which is the supposed cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable social relationships: the kind of relationships that go with knowing who each person is and how each person relates socially to every other person.

Imagine how many contacts you would have if everyone you had ever met since kindergarten was a friend on Facebook. This is precisely what is happening to our young people today.

This means that we need to chunk up all of those massive networks we collect so as to manage them over time. It also means that we are maintaining increasingly loose ties with larger numbers of people.

Ultimately we are social creatures and want to create social networks either on or offline. I often use the example of Facebook, where ordinary people of all ages are routinely creating affiliation groups. These online groups are even creating real life relationships – for example the Twitter community in Sydney often meets up physically with most of us having met online originally.

Another element to the mix is the amount of information we are required to process everyday – email, news, social networks, entertainment, etc. We can no longer store all of this information in our heads.

This is not merely a gratuitous picture of Brad Pitt. It harks back to a time in the past when our societies used epic poetry to store and transmit important information, but now it is all in nearline or online storage. For example, many of us no longer recall the phone numbers of our nearest and dearest since they are stored so handily in our mobile phones.

Also the question of how we are going to retrieve a lot of that information in the future is open to question. I’ve got a floppy disk at home with some interesting photos of a data centre I built a few years ago, but no longer have any technology to access that information.

Changing models

So where does all of this put us as educators? There are some who talk of a nirvana where all students are self directed learners and we are coaches and facilitators. But I suspect that those people have not met some of my students.

Let’s look back to the web 2.0 meme map from O’Reilly’s Foo Camp a few years ago. It clearly talks about all of the things that have become part of social computing (and this includes social media and social networking).

The social web has developed a set of values based on that original web 2.0 meme map and this Wordle map shows some of those enacted in social computing at present.

But teaching has its own longstanding set of values. And today we are seeing a conflict between those two sets of values in classrooms and lecture halls around the world.

But first a few comments on the nature of these new tools. These tools are a great enabler for minority groups. It levels the playing field for them in many ways. However, it is well to note, as Grady Booch once said: “a fool with a tool is still a fool”.

Our learning institutions are sometimes slow to change and adapt to new ways. On the other hand teachers are often the ones in vanguard embracing change and pushing the boundaries. The institutions of learning in this country are pretty conservative and slow to adopt new fangled technology, usually quite sensibly on the basis of cost.  But now with web 2.0 social computing and open source the main arguments against new technology adoption are being destroyed.

Individual teachers are embracing change, but sometimes when I meet these visionary folks they seem more like revolutionary cells of the vanguard than part of the institutional mainstream.  But the learners will eventually force our hands by disengaging if we do not respond to the shifts in their cultural practices.

This leads into another area of contention, that of boundaries. These new tools are creating disputes about the appropriate times and places where it is appropriate to use the technology (for example, have you ever tried to get a Gen Y class to turn off their mobile phones?). Also questions about the content and authority of information created or shared. Think about the endless discussions about plagiarism and the appropriateness of Wikipedia as a research authority.

We are dealing with a radically different set of expectations – from our staff, administrators and students (or consumers). Many of these people were socialised in the old non-digital world; while others are digital natives.

As part of my preparation for this session I’ve been trying to distil my thoughts on the implications of new technology on culture and learning.  And for me it has all come down to sensemaking as the purpose of education.  Dan Russell provides a nice definition of sensemaking: “Sensemaking is in many ways a search for the right organization or the right way to represent what you know about a topic. It’s data collection, analysis, organization and performing the task.”

To a certain extent I think that these changes mean we need to become co-participants in the learning experience.  Become facilitators of the process rather than the experts.  This does not mean that our experience or empirical knowledge is not valuable.  We need to establish mutual respect and open dialogue. And luckily now we have the technological tools to facilitate that dialogue.

It is going to be an interesting balancing act between those different sets of expectations. Defining boundaries in a hyperconnected world is a challenge, but it is worth remembering that interesting discoveries are made at the boundaries of the currently known world. Some of the tools to help with this sense-making process are to embrace the values of web 2.0 as part of classroom practice.

But the challenges to the authority of the teacher and of the institution are not only coming from students and society in general. They are also coming from competitors.

By this I mean the institutions that are subverting traditional ideas of the university or college and putting their intellectual property out online for free.  The institutions doing this include the august (e.g. Stanford, MIT) as well as the ambitious (e.g. USQ) as Lifehacker so kindly lists.

Other challenges are coming because of the radical transparency that the web enables. Here I’m thinking of things like Rate My Teacher and Rate My Professor. No more hiding from bad appraisals by students it’s all out in the open now. But looking on the bright side it’s happening to kittens as well.

All of this brings us tremendous opportunities as both a society and as educators. It seems like we’re not in control any more. But I do question if the control we once had was merely an illusion. And I wonder if this new world might not be a healthier one for all of us?

The biggest shift is that we are dealing with connected individuals who are at the centre of a web of networks enabled and mediated by technology. This will give rise to power shifts that we will need to live through and embrace in order to survive.

Note: all data mentioned above is detailed in my slides here

I really enjoyed the opportunity to present to the TAFE teachers of the Western Sydney Insititute recently about social computing and its implications for education. Slides follow and more detailed notes will be posted shortly.

I spoke at Ross Dawson’s SME Technology Summit last week. Here are my slides & some brief thoughts about social media for business:

This is a very thought provoking TED talk from Philip Zimbardo. He’s famous for the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment.

Think about how you would react in certain situations (e.g. Abu Ghraib) – how easy it is to act in ways you might regret later? Hero or villain it all comes down to choices.

The other interesting thing to consider is how the growth in communications devices and information sharing technologies makes hiding evil acts so much harder nowadays. The revelations from Abu Ghraib are an excellent example.

Here’s a few more interesting people I follow on Twitter, & some more evidence that Twitter helps to build real relationships too

@mpesce – Mark is a good friend in real life these days (we met originally via Twitter) he’s a thinker, inventor, rabble rouser and all round nice guy

@socialalchemy – Matt is a social entrepreneur (we also met originally via Twitter), with an active curiousity, he’s also a former army officer with some interesting stories (recently coordinated Global Entrepreneurship Week Australia)

@piawaugh – Pia is another of my geek heroines, fearless open source advocate, adviser to Senator Kate Lundy, champion of open government, and a good buddy

Really looking forward to speaking at the SME Technology Summit by The Insight Exchange on 1 December 2009.

There’s lots of interesting speakers:

• Tim Pethick – Entrepreneur & Founder, Nudie
• Mark Pesce – Inventor, Writer, Educator, Futurist
• WilliePang – Managing Director, Search Marketing, Yahoo! Australia
• Suzi Dafnis – Community Director, Australian Businesswomans Network
• David James – CEO & Director, Brasserie Bread
• Matt Barrie – Chief Executive, Freelancer.com
• Matt Bateman – Managing Director, Viva9
• Sharon Williams – Founder and CEO, Taurus Marketing

And some of the topics covered include:

• Using social media to attract customers and generate sales
• Building an online presence so customers can easily find you
• Generating revenue while you sleep with eCommerce
• Selling effectively with email marketing
• Leveraging your relationships with powerful CRM

For some great value access to ideas to help your business grab a 30% discount off the regular registration rate, that’s only $350+GST for a full day of education, by using code: CARRUTHERS here.

I went for a cheese & wine dinner at Bells at Killcare on Friday night with @frombecca and @JohannaBD.

The food – by Stefano Manfredi (a.k.a. @manfredistefano) – was wonderful as usual. The wines selected by Michael Trembath were lovely, the cheeses selected by Will Studd were a delight, the venue charming, and our hosts Brian & Karina Barry welcoming.

But, while each of these was admirable, the thing that pulled it all together was the amazing professionalism and teamwork by the staff at Bells.

The staff were the people who executed and brought together all the elements into a seamless and wonderful evening.

This is the kind of thing that you see with great companies.  They have similar kinds of raw materials to their competitors but understand how to execute with excellence.  And execution always come down to the staff.

The smooth teamwork and gracious service at Bells is what made the evening.  The same fundamental elements without the service would not have been so great.

It got me thinking about how true this is for business, even for social media – it is the quality of the execution that makes all the difference.

In this day of LinkedIn, Plaxo, Facebook and Twitter it might seem that networking the old fashioned way is dying. But nothing could be further from the truth.

Many real life social interactions arise from these online networks. The old fashioned networking skills actually assist in both the effective use of these online networking platforms as well as during real life meetups.

Lots of people over the years have said how much they hate walking into an event or function where they don’t know anyone. That feeling of fear is a familiar one for most of us.

Often they are offered some well meaning advice like: ‘just treat people the way you would like to be treated’.

The obvious riposte to this is that it’s not about how you want to be treated so much as about how the other person wants to be treated. The trick is that most of us are not psychic & thus have little clue how other people want to be treated.

But the good thing about this is that it gives us a topic of conversation with everyone we meet, finding out how they want to be treated.  Here’s some tips based on my own experience of online and offline networking:

1) Be yourself

It takes a huge amount of energy and a really good memory to be someone or something you’re not – this makes being yourself a sensible option.  Also people will eventually realise what you are really like if they have any kind of repeated exposure to you. Thus it’s just as well to start as you mean to go on.

2) Listen

Being interested in other people is very attractive.  Most people like to feel as if they matter and the easiest way to demonstrate this is to listen to them rather than talking yourself.  Even chatterboxes like me need to give this one a whirl.  Listening includes non-verbal signals too, such as body language for real life meetings.

3) Respond

Responding to the other person is important and this can take various forms.  Sometimes it is about following the other person’s lead on a topic of conversation or mode of communication.  Other times it is about taking the lead yourself and starting a new topic, or even backing off and leaving the person alone.

Responding is very closely bound to listening, since listening provides the feedback to enable creation of an appropriate response.

A good tip

One of the best tips I ever had on networking in real life came from networking guru Robyn Henderson – she advised when you are off to a function “arrive early and act like the host”. Her rationale for this was that most people are terrified of meeting new people and having someone act as the host and break the ice was helpful to them.

I recently had a thought provoking note from a buddy, Sheetal Patel, who’s not really a fan of social networking apart from LinkedIn.

He commented that “perhaps this increasing human need to relate is being perpetuated by Web 2.0 enablement technologies standing on (and encouraging even greater dependencies) the shoulders of the mobile phone and the internet”. And he cited some modern examples of how important being or feeling connected is becoming, for example:

• “Schoolchildren checking mobiles for missed calls & SMS texts every few minutes.”
• Old style “Internet content writers wanting to be the top search result in internet search engines (disconnected follower-ship)”  versus “the new notion of creating passive ‘as it happens’ Twitter follower-ship.”
• “Psychologically for people to want to be constantly visible amongst their peers, and as Maslow’s hierarchy might dictate, ultimately perceived as the metaphoric rock/movie star that everyone must follow in every great detail, any way they can, as soon as they can.”

This interests me because of the growing phenomenon of what I refer to as the hive mind experience that many Twitter users have had.

That is where one becomes so used to being loosely connected to a large number of people that disconnection from the group induces feelings of mild anxiety or “feeling weird”.  I often joke about it with friends but their laugh sometimes tells me it’s not really a joke – we do feel a bit strange when disconnected from the collective.

We do not know yet what kind of impact this level of connectedness will have on social interaction.  But there is already evidence that this connectedness enables mob-like activity – such as mobilizing people for a cause (e.g. Cotton On Kids or Motrin Moms ). My friend Mark Pesce contemplates some of these themes on his blog and in particular in his Nexus post.

But Sheetal also raised another issue, that we might be developing a “population of individuals who are extremely connected and incredibly well-followed (predominantly in the Twitter third-person context) but suffer from fundamental inabilities to create and maintain physical relationships and oblivious (or in self-denial?) of the daily need to maintain and develop first/second person interactions as part of everyone’s physical daily existence”.

That is an interesting question.  It is also the complete opposite of my own experience with Twitter. Instead, through meeting people on Twitter and over time getting to know them in real life, I now have a much richer set of personal relationships.

At dinner the other night I was discussing just this issue with a bunch of people who had all met initially via Twitter but were now good friends in real life. We maintain those relationships – both on and offline – using time honoured techniques such as having conversations, sharing ideas and opinions, and getting together to share meals or attend events.

What I suspect is happening is that people without social skills in real life find it just as difficult to build and maintain relationships in other places too, including online.

Further, the network amplification effects of social network relationship matrices serve to amplify the knowledge of any social failures.  Thus, where once a social failure was constrained in time and place, it might now be recorded digitally forever. Also that social failure has the potential to go viral and become known more widely than ever before – such is the power of YouTube and its ilk.

Joel Postman argues that A Blog is a Better Social Media Hub Than Twitter. I tend to agree, especially from a business perspective. His post got me thinking about the critical elements for a business social media toolkit.

1) A Blog or a Website (it’s the same thing really)

A business or personal brand needs to have a home base – it’s the virtual equivalent of an office or post office box.

However, the reason that a website (powered by a blogging tool or by handcrafted HTML or whatever) is a necessary part of your social media arsenal is that you control it and all of the content therein. This assumes that you to host your own site & have access to all the data. If it is hosted or managed by someone else then your data is at risk if the relationship breaks down or their business has a failure.

Many businesses put their websites/blogs into the hands of third parties & often don’t even know the passwords to access their own information. This is a huge risk!

One thing that is rapidly becoming apparent to me is a convergence between blogs and websites. Someone asked me the other day: what is the difference between the two? It really made me think. And the answer was they are the same thing. This is because the platform – blog as content management system – does not matter any longer.

What is important is the content delivered on the site. We can also see this convergence in the number of websites that now use a blogging platform as their content management system.

2) Social media & social network presence

Social networks and social media are the elements that bring website or blog content alive.  These are tools that enable sharing of messages with communities of people who are interested.  They also provide an opportunity to move from a monologue publishing style to a conversational dialogue style of interaction.

Even if your business does not want or need to use social networks it makes sense to own your corporate identity. What happens if someone who hates your business registers “YourBusinessName” on Twitter and starts sending out messages?

Also it is worth setting up a social networking presence as a low cost distribution channel for your website content. Think of the website as a publication platform while social networks are the distribution channel.

A big challenge for websites until now has been letting people know that they exist and have useful or relevant content.  Social media helps to solve this problem for businesses and personal brands.

The other important thing is to store the content of your social networking interactions for later analysis and reference. For example, on Twitter it is possible to create an RSS feed of a particular user’s or hashtag’s Twitter stream. Just go to search.twitter.com, enter your search term & there is an option to create an RSS feed of that search.

Also a number of plugins are available that enable posting of social network activity to a website/blog. And if all this information goes back to your website it can be backed up and remain available even if the original source network is ephemeral.

3) Social media reputation tracking
Once you take a brand out to play in this socially connected world monitoring what is going on becomes important. I’ve written about this before, giving a few examples where social media has both helped and harmed brands.

An implicit social contract is created by brands when they participate in social networks. Your brand becomes more accessible and people will interact (even if you would prefer that they did not).

There are some great paid services that can monitor your online reputation. However, here are a few free tools that are available:

1. Google Alerts
2. TweetBeep
3. Social mention
4. Google search

This kind of monitoring should be setup and reviewed regularly.

Regular participation, care and feeding of social media is necessary as it is now part of the marketing mix. Social media and social networking are part of both the place and the promotion of a brand or product.

Online should be monitored similar to the way we used to monitor customer feedback, newspapers and magazines in the past.

Have been chatting online with Evan from Sency.com and decided to experiment with his new gadget using the Media140 Twitter feed:

#media140

An email for a conference arrived the other day, and it enticed me with the tag line:

Learning how to leverage Web 2.0 and Social Media sites to market your brand and control your message

This got me wondering can brands really control their message using social media?

One thing I know from experience with social media is that it is like quicksilver, easily slipping around barriers and constraints. The behaviour of people in social computing situations is mercurial and whimsical.  Sudden memes arise, become active and then die off as quickly as they came.

Social computing environments enable highly reactive and emotionally driven behaviour.  For example, often a rumour will circulate, followed by a wave of anger and reaction.  Then as facts filter through a more reasoned response develops.

However, these platforms also enable groups to mobilise quickly to address concerns and to take action on issues that galvanise them. In short, a bunch of people on a social network can sometimes behave just like a mob in real life.

This can work against brands very easily. Two great examples of this are the ‘Cotton On Kids saga‘ and ‘Motrin Moms mess’.

On the hand social media has enabled some true success stories, like Zappos and Comcast.

People who’ve been used to ‘controlling‘ their brands never had much opportunity for direct contact with their customers (apart from behind the glass at the odd focus group).  This seems to have reinforced the illusion that they were really in control of their brands. However, it is questionable if they really had control at any stage. Perhaps the absence of feedback simply provided an illusion of control?

But how can brands get their message out effectively using social media? Paradoxically, it seems that this can be achieved by letting go of attempts to control the brand in relation to social media.

This paradox of relaxation of control is exemplified by Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh. By letting go and allowing customers interact with staff the brand was built up to such a degree that it was recently sold to Amazon for mega bucks. But this kind of approach requires a strong and confident CEO and a corporate culture that supports and nurtures the dialogue, openness and interaction.

The problem for brands is that navigating this hyperconnected and networked world requires a paradoxical relaxation of control. And not everyone has nerves strong enough to let go and to let people be free to interact.

As a humble member of various social networks including Twitter it never fails to amaze me how lame some businesses are in their approach.

I don’t know what is happening inside the brains of the people behind this behaviour on behalf of companies. But it is like they’ve forgotten what it is like to be a real person.

Here are five sins that I’ve seen businesses commit in social networks:

1) No foreplay

Social networking is precisely that ’social’, that means it works just like real life.  How many times in real life do you just walk up to someone and say: “Hi I’m X, do you want to buy my product?” without saying “hi”, making some eye contact & introducing yourself?

In real life, apart from outbound telemarketers, we typically shoot the breeze for a while before launching into the hard sell.

2) Not being real & not letting staff be real

One of the reasons that @comcastcares and @zappos have worked on Twitter is that there were real people behind those accounts & they backed it up with consistently having real people there. Some companies forget that the social nature of these networks means that they need to be more transparent and open up to the outside world. It’s time to personalise the experience in the social world. This also means letting your staff be real people too.

3) Not being interesting

Are you interesting? What have you got to offer? Besides your products why would anyone bother interacting with you socially? Many companies seem to assume that their products are fascinating – but let me assure you, apart from a few special brands like Apple, most people don’t give a toss about your product especially in a social context. That means you will need to be interesting on a personal level. Being helpful & friendly can go a long way on this front.

4) Not getting the culture

Each social network has its own culture and mores of behaviour. Woe betide a company that messes with these. Important questions to ask about your social network presence: Are you interesting? What have you got to offer? Does your brand make sense within the social network context? There is nothing worse than being in the wrong place in the wrong outfit – it’s like walking into a biker bar in your best preppie outfit.

5) Lack of consistency

Are you consistently friendly, helpful and real? If not it jars with the human beings that you’re interacting with in a social context.

One thing that characterises all the problems listed above is that they reflect a lack of understanding of the social contract inherent in social network participation. Social networks mean that the traditional marketing context & the social contract that goes with it are absent.

For example, in the traditional marketing context there is social contract – you try to sell stuff to me & I consume your media, potentially taking up your offer. But in social networks the social contract is more like you’ve joined me in my living room. The social contract here is about being sociable and making human-like contact with other people.

The essence of the social web is that it enables humans to be human.  Where in the past we had to conform ourselves to the constraints of the technology and participate within a pure business or marketing context now we are free to be human.  The people in businesses need to reimagine how to interact with customers on a human to human level.

In  a similar vein check out Louis Gray’s post: The Era of the Faceless Giant Corporation Is Over