23 posts tagged “online and offline”

The core theme of this blog is social behavior offline, online. I have written a few posts in the past comparing the online and offline social behavior with The Cat, The Dog and Web2.0, The Online and Offline Social Disconnect, Gordon Gekko's Social Graph.

So when I saw an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times by Peter Lovenheim titled "Will you Be My Neighbor" in the New York Times here,  I was glad that it was not just me who saw what I saw. It underlines some of my observations as an immigrant coming from a culture where all the neighbors (apart from family) knew each other and shared a lot of their lives - offline, synchronous and involved.

You can read the details but here are a few lines from his article that are captivating and at the same time, concerning for our society:

"According to social scientists, from 1974 to 1998, the frequency with which Americans spent a social evening with neighbors fell by about one-third. Robert Putnam, the author of “Bowling Alone,” a groundbreaking study of the disintegration of the American social fabric, suggests that the decline actually began 20 years earlier, so that neighborhood ties today are less than half as strong as they were in the 1950s.

Why is it that in an age of cheap long-distance rates, discount airlines and the Internet, when we can create community anywhere, we often don’t know the people who live next door?"

My response to his Why based on observations and great conversations from my 8 years in America:

• America emphasizes the individual
• America emphasizes independence
• America teaches that destiny is in one's control
• American emphasizes Doing versus Being
• America, generally, measures success financially
• We, globally, still discriminate - color, religion, politics, sex, sexuality, race, country, attire, appearance, net worth, profession
  

I know a few of my neighbors but I know can do better.

Your responses, thoughts?

Imagine: [At least] love thy neighbor

I have had a few posts on charactertics around facing adversity, challenges and playing David like 300, I Like It Rough and then my last post recently on (Pride), Determination and Resilience.

You can imagine how excited I was to read an article by Melinda Beck, from The Wall Street Journal, here on how some very successful household names had to face failure before they became what they are today. The article to me was a "Celebration of Failure"!

• J.K. Rowling's first book about a boy wizard named Harry Potter was rejected by 12 publishers before Bloomsbury, a small London publishing house, picked it up.
• Twenty-seven publishers rejected Theodor Seuss (Dr. Seuss) Geisel's first book, "To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street."
• Michael Jordan was cut from his high school varsity basketball team sophomore year.
• Decca Records turned down a contract with the Beatles, saying "Groups of guitars are on their way out."
• Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor who said "he lacked imagination and had no good ideas."

Here are some snippets that I want to make a note to self:

What makes some people rebound from defeats and go on to greatness while others throw in the towel? Psychologists call it "self-efficacy," the unshakable belief some people have that they have what it takes to succeed.

I only think that a few people rebound and most throw in the towel.

Where does such determination come from? In some cases it's inborn optimism -- akin to the kind of resilience that enables some children to emerge unscathed from extreme poverty, tragedy or abuse. Self-efficacy can also be acquired by mastering a task; by modeling the behavior of others who have succeeded; and from what Prof. Bandura calls "verbal persuasion" -- getting effective encouragement that is tied to achievement, rather than empty praise.

Some quotes:

"I've failed over and over and over again in my life. That's why I succeed," - Michael Jordan
"I didn't fail 1,000 times," he told a reporter. "The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps." - Thomas Edison
"Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never -- in nothing, great or small, large or petty -- never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense." - Winston Churchill

Two big failures I have faced personally are:

1. My application for a student visa to study for my MS during my first attempt (1995) to follow my dream to the US, was rejected twice in 2 days. I could not apply for another two years as it was mandatory after 2 consecutive rejections. [I finally applied again in 1999 and made it]
   
2. My 3 years of being "vocationally challenged" during the downturn after the dot-com days. That enabled me to discover social networking online (starting with LinkedIn where I eventually went to work) since I was living it off-line. My LinkedIn profile only details those days since I value my achievements then as one of the best
   

Finally, as Henry Ford said: "Whether you think that you can or you can't, you're right."

Imagine: The Pursuit IS Happyness

LinkedIn always had a tradition of celebrating its milestones when a significant number of users had signed up.

They just celebrated 20M users and a HUGE CONGRATULATIONS to the much newer and larger team. See all the fun pictures on their blog post here. I started using LinkedIn:

• As a user in 2003 when they had 40k users and with it my initiation to all things social/Web2.0
  
• As an employee in 2004 when it had about 1.5M users
• Left in 2006 when it had about 6.5M users

Two of them where I was in on the journey are below. I can spot myself in the second one but had no luck with the first

It took me a day in 2003 to see that LinkedIn worked and it would always work. Why?

"People Always do Business with People

Imagine: It is that simple

Viral_social marketing

The latest special print issue of MIT's Technology Review has an article on visualizing "Better Friends" by Erica Naone. Apart from the visuals of the blogosphere, Twitter and others, the one that caught my eye was the visual on viral marketing - something very relevant and dear to me.

Furthermore, being deep into social media, networks and user-generated content -  the last line of the paragraph below hit home for me. I used to listen and learn from many top social networkers/producers until I noticed that I started shutting myself out with many - they have lost their influence with me. They are all the time selling products and services with the sole cause of their own popularity. They do not evangelize - they sell. Popularity is their focus - not their collateral success. One erodes the social equity built over time and involvement. Many have have many friends today online but then there is a social connection/equity even with your audience/readers/followers - the mind is fickle with all the noise and the "new new things" and "new new people" coming out everyday.

The web is becoming social - from a network of servers and pages, its becoming a network of people. We are the carriers - we consume from each other (not just reporters), we produce and we distribute.

The full article is here and the piece on viral marketing from the article below:

Viral_social marketing1

"Several years ago, a large retailer tried to encourage word-of-mouth marketing for products sold on its site byoffering incentives to site visitors who made product recommendations. Many companies are trying to use people's social connections for such "viral marketing" programs, hoping that information about products (and the urge to buy them) can spread through a network of people the way a virus might. But after studying more than 15 million recommendations generated by the retailer's incentive program, a team made up of Jure Leskovec, Lada Adamic, and Bernardo Huberman, director of the information dynamics lab at Hewlett-Packard, was skeptical. Huberman and his colleagues looked at the networks that grew up around each product--who bought and recommended it, and who responded to the recommendation--and saw that they took on different characteristics depending on the type of product. A network around a medical book (top image below), where red dots and lines indicate people who purchased the book while blue dots and lines represent people who received a recommendation, shows a scattered network where recommendations, on average, don't travel very far. The network surrounding a Japanese graphic novel (bottom image below), on the other hand, shows a thick flow of information among densely connected people. The researchers found that viral marketing was most effective for expensive products recommended within a small, tightly connected group. They also found that overusing consumers' social connections for marketing can make them less influential."

Since I am always driven by learning and unlearning from others and whenever I see, read or hear something that I feel really inspired about, I make it a point to share it here. Here is one that got my mindshare on the treadmill today - the tag line of Marines.com

"We don't accept applications. Only Commitments!

The only currency for startups is commitment:

• Its a small army of 300 wishing to disrupt the might Persian army
• It can not, should not accept mediocrity
  
• Its a passion to make a difference in people's lives
• Its against conventional wisdom
• Its not comfortable - ones works everywhere, wherever and is on duty all the time
  

Imagine: The Few, The Proud!

I had a fantastic opportunity yesterday to attend a Churchill Club (They organize some of the best events in the Valley, btw) event called "Who Do You Trust? Trends in Trust and Influence for the Next Generation of Business Leaders". A post on that definitely coming up later.(I tweeted this event)

Cialdini-Robert

The one reason why I attended was to get a chance to see and listen to Robert Cialdini, Author of one of my all time favorite that I had referred to in this blog some time ago - “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”

One big take away I had from the event was an observation from his studies about "credible communicators" with reference to reporters, bloggers, social media folks, msm, friends etc - anyone can be a source of information that you might trust. These communicators had two characteristics:

• They are percieved as experts/ authorities in their domain
• Very importantly and critical, they were perceived as being objective and unbiased

For the latter, those who were perceived as trustworthy were straightshooters having built that reputation over some years. If you do not have the 'many years' luxury, here is what many people do:

State a weakness first and then right after that they follow it up with their argument or statement.

The example Dr. Cialdini gave was for Avis: We Are #2 But We Try Harder

Being personally always fascinated and studying social behavior (online and offline) - this blog being only one form of expression with the subtitle "Everything social offline, Online", I was very keen on making an attempt to sign up for his social experiments/thesis. After a quick introduction and chat, I signed up to be a part of this expertiments and thesis. He gracefull accepted my offer and now the hard part - waiting for the next steps assuming the right people in his team actually need more volunteers.

Imagine: I am not as good as David Pogue but I believe that CrossLoop is the best free software to help someone. To establish further trustworthiness, here is a Disclaimer: I am one of the Co-Founders of CrossLoop.

If you can't visualize the destination or have the wrong one in sight, don't panic - You Can't Always Get What You Want.

Well - I couldn't think of a better way to test how relevant TechMeme "is" or should I say the relevance of Techmeme.
This post has nothing to do with technology so here is some important trivia on it:

• Is is the third-person singular verb form of the copula in the English language [Source:Wikipedia]
• A search on Google for 'is' gives 4,450,000,000 results
• Is is country code top level domain name for Iceland

Imagine: iSocial instead Social Ads [John/Steve - you cool?]

I usually don't like to blog about technology since I live and breath it. Furthermore, I prefer the more complex creature that uses it - people. Once in a while, I am tempted so here goes:

There are tons of different views on how Facebook should monetize their traffic - something that obviously needs a lot of improvement. Facebook Ads launched recently and if there is one thing in common to all of the various options - it was NewsFeeds. Sponsored Pages, Beacon, Social Ads - all of them tie into the NewsFeed.

Competing against Google with search was recently thrown out there by VentureBeat as a revenue stream but it does not make sense to me and here is why:

1. Search is not in the page views business and is "open" - it sends user to other sites. Social networks are in the page views business and hence they are closed
2. Facebook lives that - even messages (except for mobile) need to read by coming to the site
3. Search is a different beast all together
   

The DNA, imho, of both businesses are very different.

Search bring intent inherently in the act whereas most social networks today bring curiosity (unless it is a business network like LinkedIn). It can potentially bring intent to the party by tapping into the offline social behavior of seeking referrals or recommendations.

If 99.8% of stories that all Facebook users publish are not seen, I would think  Facebook could turbo charge curiosity and enhance their referrals (to Quote Mark Zuckerberg: "“People influence people. Nothing influences people more than are recommendation from a trusted friend. A trusted referral influences people more than the best broadcast message. A trusted referral is the Holy Grail of advertising.") by bringing search to its NewsFeeds. Currently they have a limited 'push' element to it but nothing to 'pull'. They definitely have the content. If that is done, there is far more context for their ads on the system.

When you want to achieve/ acquire or research something where do you start - maybe by asking/ searching for people (who you know) who have experienced that in the past?

Focusing on one's core competency, users and their behavior always helps.

Imagine: Seeing relevant ads from Amazon or Orbitz while searching for someone who has read a book (or bought one that Beacon can tell me about) or has traveled to Paris (information available through apps)

Update - it is ironic that now you can [Ad]Friends

With Facebook just launching their new ad program of Beacon, Insight and Social Ads - you have more choices now.
If Gordon Gekko's Social Graph is not a good strategy for you, how about adding them as friends and getting more Insight? Aw - Aren't they cute.

Beacon seems like 'Share' available today on any New York Times article or other sites etc and Insight seems to be like MySpace brand pages (here is one for Cherry Coke) with metrics but I am sure there is something that I don't know ......