12 posts tagged “social media”

I live and breath consumer Internet namely social networks and media but I keep this personal blog independent of that so that I can reflect on some larger intangible characteristics that make us who we are offline and often compare it with our behavior online. Its not about tools and technology, its about people.

So when I got invited to write a guest post on Techcrunch about a basic question on Twitter, MySpace and what really makes us social, I took up the opportunity to muse there

You can read it here - Is Twitter Turning Into MySpace? or here through Techmeme.

And you can follow me on Twitter here.

Imagine Again: Make Friends, Not Add Them

Since I love observing social behavior offline and then online to make some personal notes here, one big one that keeps standing out for me is how different and similar we are socially - online and offline. 

Whether it is through our need to belong ("yearn for contact") by adding friends, instead of making them or our ability to have 100s of friends online but the inability to love our neighbors (no pun intended for the neighborhood here on Vox) or that 25% of Americans have no confidant and the average number of confidants for an American has dropped to 2. 
 
Here are a couple of studies that appeared recently that talk to the differences and similarity:

The Economist: Primates on Facebook
"What also struck Dr Marlow, however, was that the number of people on an individual’s friend list with whom he (or she) frequently interacts is remarkably small and stable. The more “active” or intimate the interaction, the smaller and more stable the group."

The Wall Street Journal Blog: Exploring Twitter Ties
"Consistent with behavior on social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, Twitter users interact with a small number of friends compared with the total number of friends and followers declared."

The Mercury News: "Finding our own little worlds has never been easier" by Mike Cassidy
"I wanted to find myself in the continuum of experiences," Wood, 41, tells me, "where speaking with people was neither good nor bad, but it was superfluous."

It turns out that that superfluous place is almost anywhere in America, depending on how you choose to experience it. With the help of Silicon Valley, we have grown into a society where it's possible to quite literally live in your own little world. So much of what we do, we do alone, even while surrounded by people."

Think of those superfluous conversations that we have with grocery clerks offline parallel to those friends we add (not make) online and the few with whom we interact (the 7 to 20 in the studies above) as those whom we actually meet offline, help, show commitment or drink a beer or two independent of their title or net worth.

We ignore people online all the time - whether its email, a friend request or an @reply on Twitter. As Mike continues to write
"One of Wood's most creative tricks was to rely on what social scientists call "anticipatory disengagement," — in his case putting his cell phone to his ear to avoid conversation.".. or maybe avoid eye contact?

Imagine: The Few, The Real  

I love observing people, social behavior and very importantly applying those observations to my professional life in online social networks and media.So when the Zurb guys invited me over, I took to the opportunity to share some of those observations and exchange best practices.

If you care, here is a pretty detailed documentation of that session. I LOVED the visuals they created (below) which speaks to Zurb's excellence in presentation and making words and a few whiteboard scribbles come to life. More of their visuals are here on their Flickr stream.

 

Once upon a time there was a boy who used to sit at Starbucks and read his newspaper - in rain or shine.

Whenever he read the newspaper, there was usually always another guest at the coffee shop who came with his 2 dogs, annoying if I may say so) who would never stop barking - so rain or shine.... or bark.... the boy kept ooooonnn reading.

The boy had 2 cats in his house.

Then one day, he met another boy, who had his own firm called Zurb that allowed living and non-living things to have a desired effect on one another - nope they are NOT a web design company, NOT a graphic design agency. The boy and his team have accumulated a blue-chip roster of clients like Miss Spears herself and Photobucket amongst others. 

Over time, their low-caffeinieted drowsy good mornings led to more excited and passionate discussions. One thing led to another and they decided to talk a little more about The Cat, The Dog and Web2.0 so if you want to get in and share your experience and meet the awesome team at Zurb, here are the details. No experts - only students please.

Imagine: Make Friends, Not Add 'Em

[Update]: Some cool media coverage of this funding today by Becky Buckman in The Wall Street Journal and Brad Stone at The New York Times 

I could not be more excited for the team at LinkedIn. If there is any social network that delivers a no-brainer value, its LinkedIn. I have benefited from meeting some of the coolest people from the day I started using it in 2003.

Some personal milestones with LinkedIn:

• An early user since 2003 when they had 40k users. Today they have over 22M
• I met Vice Presidents then (I was "Vocationally Challenged") through LinkedIn at Siebel, eBay and more who are now VERY good friends
• Became an early employee in 2004 when they had 1.5M users and about 25 employees
• Left in 2006 when LinkedIn had about 7M users and ~60 employees. Today, I believe, they have more than 250!
• Now, 5 years since I started using LinkedIn, I have over 1000 connections on LinkedIn and I have met and really know almost all of them

Watch the perspective of the returning and (one) new LinkedIn investors on this new milestone. Dan's post is here

Imagine: Its ALL about Relationships

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

2 years later and they have grown by about 3 times!

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

Matt Richtel has a very neat article in the New York Times here called "In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop"

Some quotes from his article:

"Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

It is unclear how many people blog for pay, but there are surely several thousand and maybe even tens of thousands.

I am definitely not paid to blog but if you want to read what they have to say, there are some posts here and here

Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch had a post independent of this article that says a lot about the world of professional bloggers here called "Six Months In, And 600 Posts Later...The Worlds Of Blogging and Journalism Collide (In My Brain)". Some related quotes from this post are:

"It is mostly breaking news, reporting facts and providing analysis. At TechCrunch, I am completely focused on blogging, 24/7"

That is because the blogging never stops. Just ask my wife and kids, who now mock me by repeating back my new mantra: “I’m almost done, just one more post.”

But we live or die by how fast we can post after a story breaks, if we can’t break it ourselves.

I won't be surprised if Matt Richtel's story was inspired by Erick's post.
 
It tied in really well with my earlier post "Who Is Your Chauffeur" here. It was in response to a post on entrepreneurs but applicable to everyone and then of course, there was this post way back, which probably fits the best. The pictures of Stripe climbing (from the book Hope for the Flowers by Trina Paulus) away says it all.

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."

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)

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.

It is one of those lectures, given by Randy Pausch - a Carnegie Mellon professor, who is dying from pancreatic cancer, that he gave at the university on Sept. 18, 2007, that you do not want to miss.

Braveheart, the movie's tagline was "All men die. Not all men really live". Out of all those who die, a few know how to do it with grace and remind others - life is short and anything can happen. Once you are done with this, it should help you to identify your rocks and put them in first.

Imagine: like a child again