These days we (at least those of us reading this) are plugged in. We are heard. Our voices are carried by The Internet to countries and continents we may never have visited, and may never visit. Nevertheless, we are carried there. Our parent’s parent’s generation communicated face-to-face. Our generation, and the ones that follow, communicate via technology. We are amplified.

I take a photo. I title it. Tag it. Post it. People comment on it. People add their own tags. People I have never met add to the signal. You write. I read. I write. Others write too. Amplification has unexpected effects, and unintended consequences.

Through this blog I met - in the on-line sense - a gentleman by the name of Galba Bright. Bright by name and bright by nature, he encouraged me to blog more and to think more. You’ll find his comments on many of the early posts here. I learnt about his interest in emotional intelligence and his amazingly positive outlook on life, as he blogged from his office on the other side of the world in Jamaica. Via his blog posts, his comments on my blog, my comments on his, and then conversations via Skype, I got to know Galba Bright.

Then one day he didn’t post. His comments didn’t come. Together with other bloggers in our network, I heard from his family that Galba had passed away, whilst working in that office. Whilst my sense of loss can not compare to that of Galba’s family, his parting left a gap. I never got to meet Galba face-to-face, but I suspect that we would have done eventually, one way or another - he had worked in England earlier in his life. On-line relationships eventually manifest themselves in the real world, and real world connections still create the most powerful bond. We want to meet those we have got to know, face to face, without the machinery in the middle.

Galba’s blog is gone now – the domain wasn’t renewed and a squatter has seized the opportunity to hijack it and fill it with a page full of ads. But his comments here and on other blogs remain. His Linkedin profile is still there, as is his entry on Facebook. Galba was an exceptionally intelligent and immensely encouraging person. He was amplified via the Internet. Galba may not be here anymore, but his words are still read by thousands of people around the world everyday. He might have been on the other side of the world, but our common interest, and the Internet, enabled us to find each other and to learn.

We are all amplified. We will leave a digital legacy behind us that will be larger than any previous generation. Our tiny signals are turned into larger ones. But we aren’t alone on the stage. We have fellow musicians plugging in too. Communities are forming in different ways, around different themes. The Tuttle Club is a community that I enjoy immensely. The London Flickr group enthused me to take photography more seriously. Wiki Wednesdays give me the opportunity to learn from other practitioners, likewise events like WordCamp, MediaCamp, Social Media Camp and CloudCamp.

This evening saw over 100 people from many of those networks gather together at Amplified08, meeting face to face to exchange ideas. Taking on-line off-line and building a network of networks, which is exactly what the Internet was and is. The event was streamed on the net, it generated 57 pages of twitter messages (and growing), and there will be megabytes of photographs and blog posts too I am sure. All this from a meeting at the little dot on the map that is London, England.

We are amplified. We are connected. Whilst this new media will not buy us immortality, it extends our influence beyond traditional physical constraints. It creates digital echos that last long after the moment, and perhaps long after us. In previous centuries we might have influenced several hundred people over the course of our lifetime. In today’s generation, we might influence millions. What will you signal be?

Most Commented Posts

• Why Don’t You See What You Can Do in an Hour?
• Watch out for the frogs!
• Gordon Brown at NESTA - The Innovation Edge
• How to Write a Speech in 5 Minutes
• iPod to Go - The iPod as a GTD capture device

New Services

Skip forward three decades and things are evolving in a different direction. Services like Fire Eagle enable a number of applications to understand where you are, and Brightkite (in closed beta - email me for an invite), Dopplr and a swarm of others mean that you can ‘discover’ nearby friends/contacts or even total strangers. Other services like Flickr (best known for its photo sharing - although it now does video too) and even Twitter are location aware.

The Benefits?

How does that help with productivity? The answer is: a lot. Dopplr can reduce travel by enabling you to identify fellow travelers, potentially sharing transport or eliminating trips all together. If I discover that Sharron, from the Paris office, is going to be in London this week that might save me a trip. Brightkite helps me quickly find a local Internet cafe or the hotel where friends are staying. At the other end of the spectrum, finding photos ahead of time on Flickr might save me getting lost, or change my holiday plans!

The Practicalities

Many of these location based services are dependent on access to data on your current location, but constantly typing in where you are can become a drag. However, with more and more devices having built in GPS, reporting your location (we’ll come back to that) and tagging photographs and videos with geographic information is now a relatively simple task. Geo-tagging has become a major geek fad. It is still not as seemless as I’d like on my Nokia N95, but perhaps that isn’t such a bad thing. This week I signed up to Pachube (currently in beta), which is a service that enables a device to stream environmental data and share it globally. I was hoping to get some wind data for my home hacking activities, in preparation for homecamp this weekend. No joy so far, but it is still early days.

Near Me

So, we have location based data behind location based services. Lots of data means an opportunity for lots of searching, an opportunity not lost on Google. If you use the latest version of the Google app for the iPhone (or iPod touch), it takes your location into account when it selects search results for you. Google searches have been location aware for a long time, but with more location aware devices, and the marketing fraternity on the case, it is going to a whole new level.

Google maps are an interesting way of discovering things. From a creating a ‘find us’ page with a pin in the map, to searching for local shops, Google’s map functionality has become almost as ubiquitous as their traditional web search engine. Putting your site onto Google Maps is relatively straight forward (give it a try).

Nice as all that is, that isn’t the most exciting thing about location based services. Back to those social networking services. Adding location into the mix provides the opportunity to rekindle local communities, connecting people in neighbourhoods, who might otherwise have never met. At this point, some of you might be perplexed. Meet people in the locality? Your either thinking “but everyone knows everyone anyway” or “but no-one talks to anyone”. There again, you might be comfortably in the middle of the two. It depends where in the country (and in which country) you live. Where I am, the commuter lifestyle and long working hours mean that much of the local sense of community has dwindled away. There is little engagement in local matters. A few brave souls attempt to keep a bit of a fire going, but it is a battle against apathy and that lack of time.

Cue location based services. From Facebook to Brightkite, from blogs to Twitter, local people are rediscovering each other. More than that, they are finding common causes. What is a community after all, if it isn’t a group of people centred about a common purpose? It was during a conversation with Tom Watson MP - Minister for Digital Engagement - last week that I realised the significance of these communities mapping on to geographical political infrastructures: influence. Just as the communities described in Cause Wired were able to organise on-line to create changes in the off-line world on an international level, local groups can affect the local level.

The space is not without its issues (see this post about post code data), with access to data and privacy being major concerns. However, the next few years will be about the Internet becoming an increasingly local phenomenon, rather than a global one. We have local community based blogs and websites, groups on social networking sites and local meet ups and that is all before the new wave of location aware devices are in broad use. We going hyper-local, and it may just be the most disruptive phase of the Internet yet.

Related Posts

• Not So Private Data
• Caught by CauseWired
• Mini-bar Meet Up - Some New Technologies
• Who’s are you? The Question of stolen (bits of) identity
• What will Enterprise 2.0 look like? Some Thoughts from Crystal Balls

Why Blog?

The reasons for a personal and for a business blog are not all the dissimilar. A long ago I stated my reasons for blogging, and those haven’t really changed:

• Blogging enables me to clarify my thoughts, examining them and reflecting on them.
• Blogging enables me to think about my thinking - meta-cognition.
• Blogging forces me to gather information to support or dismiss my opinions.
• Blogging is a place to plan and reflect - it is much more than what ends up in the post.

Blogging really is just a form of writing, and by writing you will find your voice. And you get used to your voice - your unique way of communicating. Blogging creates a level of self-awareness that is otherwise hard to obtain, and it is a great form of self-actualization.

Don’t take my word for it. This the list of reasons that marketing guru Seth Godin gives for blogging:

• Blogging is free.
• It doesn’t matter if anyone reads it. What matters is the humility that comes from writing it.
• … and the meta cognition of thinking about what you are going to say.
• If you are good at it, some people will read it.
• If you are not good at it, stick with it you will get good at it.
• It forces you to become part of the conversation…
• …and that posture change changes an enormous amount.

Yes you say, but Seth is one of those marketing guys. He would say that wouldn’t he. How about Tom Peters then? Tom is well know as one of the leading experts in business management, he says:

“No single thing in the last 15 years, professionally, has been more important to my life than blogging. It has changed my life. It has changed my perspective. It has changed my intellectual outlook. It has change my emotional outlook. Parathesises: and it is the best damn marketing tool, by an order of magnitude, I’ve ever had.” Tom Peters

You can see Seth Godin and Tom Peters on that video here. If you haven’t started a blog already, start by commenting on the blogs that you read. Did you know that you are here with thousands of other visitors? You have a unique perspective, and know things that myself and others may never know, unless you tell us.

You can take the step that moves you from the audience and onto the stage just by leaving a comment. Step into the blogosphere, it really is the only way to find out what it is all about.

Related Posts

• You Can Predict the Future Too
• Thoughts Post MediaCampLondon
• It’s the Conversation - Isn’t It?
• Ways of Keeping a Record

 If you look at my copy of CauseWired, you’ll see that I’ve marked more than one or two pages out, and if you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know that I’ve been reading it for quite a while. Reading. Thinking. Reading.

It is worth remembering where I am coming from here. I got into the Internet because I was captivated by the power it had to connect people, and the things that happened when it did. I saw technology as a tool for creating positive change.

The companies I have worked for have lead me into commercial business. I’ve worked to create markets, fund companies, sell companies and buy companies, but in parallel to that I’ve also served on the board of trustees for a charity and run with the occasional social cause. I’m no expert on philanthropy or social action, but I do see it as an essential balance to the activities of the commercial world. It is something that the commercially-minded should be actively engaged in. It is no coincidence that some of the richest people on the planet are the greatest philanthropists.

CauseWired, or rather “CauseWired - Plugging in, Getting Involved, Changing the World,” to give the full title, makes a big statement for a book. It is about changing the circumstances of others, through your own actions, something that Tom Watson knows about. This particular Tom Watson isn’t the UK MP (here), he’s this one, the US journalist and media critic (fuller bio on the Changing Our World site). There is a link between them, I’ll come back to. The book charts how social networks, like Facebook and a range of more specialist sites, are changing the world of charities/nonprofits and social causes.

Let me take this post as an example of the new dynamic social media (and social networking) is creating. I found out about the book via twitter, got details via a blog post and contacted the publishers via email. I started following Tom, via twitter, as I was interested in his work. Through Twitter I realised that Tom (US) knew Tom (UK), who I’ve followed on twitter since the New York Digital Mission.

 I usually post pictures of my travels to photo-sharing site Flickr, and recently posted one of my good self reading CauseWired. Tom commented on the photo, tweeted about it and linked to it in a post on his blog [I hope you are still managing to follow the thread!] The Amazon site picked up that blog post, and so, currently, there I am reading in a picture on the Amazon page for the book (here). I’ve just put that link as my Facebook status update, and… To be continued.

Now, none of that has changed the world, although I’m hoping that someone who reads the book as a result will. However, there are now a few hundred people who know we have a shared interest and skills that can be brought to bear on a cause. Connections and conversations on this kind of global scale would have been unlikely before the web, or more specifically before social media came to the web. Activists can amplify their efforts, create awareness and join forces with like minded individuals. That, in essence, is what CauseWired is about: How new communications technology is revolutionizing the flow of money and talent in the third sector.

The book weaves a course across the short history and global geography of the CauseWired phenomenon. The introduction felt a little long, but I have been buried in much of the subject matter for a long time so that may just be me. Once I was through that, I started scribbling notes and pondering.

Reading the book was like seeing from the other side of a two way mirror. I know the technologies and many of the causes that Tom uses as examples, but in telling the inside story, he brings them freshly to life. The smaller examples were much more interesting than the larger ones. Traditional broadcast media often leads the rally for the big causes. Social media has created the bandwidth for the smaller ones to emerge, and that is a qualitative change in the way that things work.

The big take aways and aha’s for me:

• There is a big difference between being aware or interested and engaged and active.
• We’ve been doing this stuff ‘forever’ - I remember charitable activity on the Bulletin boards in the 80’s - it is the tools and scale that has changed.
• This is yet another inter-generational fault-line.
• The shift from anonymity to authenticity is high-impact. “On the Internet no-one knows you are a dog” was 90’s. “I am…” is the 00’s.
• The powerful stuff happens when the on-line meet off-line and the off-line comes on-line.
• Tom Watson mentions Tom Watson in the book, in the context of UK open government, a slightly surreal moment.
• There’s more… Which I’ll come back to in future posts.
• Reading this book will be expensive - I’ve added lots of the books mentioned on to my Amazon wish list, and found some interesting causes.

If you’re in business, and you plan to hire or work with millennials, you better have a cause and/or be involved in one. CauseWired is a good place to start understanding that world. This book doesn’t aim to dig into the depths of social media. It isn’t going to lose the uninitiated, and experts shouldn’t expect any great revelations in that domain. It does illuminate wired causes, and provide a wealth of illustrations. If you work for a charity or not-for-profit, read this book. Digest it. Then read it again. It is the new shape of your world.

For our own mental well being, all of us need to be involved in something that transcends the ‘me’ and engages with the ‘us’, something that reaches beyond the ‘now’ to the tomorrow and beyond. If you haven’t done that yet, then Tom’s book will give you insight into what can be achieved, together with a list of places to get engaged in a rewarding way.

Related Posts

• Going Hyper-Local - Location Based Internet
• WordCamp UK 2008 - A Qik Look Back…
• Five Quid and a Crate of Beer - Starting the New New Business
• Is Broadcasting Something to Shout About?
• Metcalfe’s Law - Really Useful, Not?

Last week Eaon Pritchard tagged me  (”best practices in social media“), and quite frankly it gave me a bit of writers block. Let me explain. Mitch Joel - Six Pixels of Separation - set the challenge to name one social media marketing best practice. That’s hard. For me it’s doubly hard, as I was looking for a productivity angle - being me and this being WOWNDADI - and pinning it down to just one thing is a big challenge.

The meme has produced some very thoughtful posts. Eaon mentions a post by Liz Strauss: “Watch what people actually do“. And that is what stumped me. Liz has been a great encouragement through my blogging journey, and a pleasure to meet in person, but the reason I pick out Liz’s post is that my first thought was around observing and matching prosody.

Prosody is the linguistic term for bits of speech that aren’t the words - the tone, the rhythm, the intonation. One of the challenges with any form of written media, be it a blog, a wiki or a white paper, is that the prosody of speech is lost. With it goes a much of the information that we use to derive meaning. That means we are left to try and interpret the meaning without that missing information. We read between the lines, based on what we expect. That isn’t a good thing, especially if it is an emotionally charged issue.

In social media, particularly when you represent a business brand, people assume they know you or at least bring assumptions into the communication. Prosody is implicit in Social Media, it comes out of the broader conversation. Not what is being said, but the traditions that have emerged over how and why it is said. It might be too early in the game to nail down best practices, but it is late enough that what constitutes bad practice is already established.

Marketers might want to join the conversation and gently nudge it in the direction they are hoping for. I think it is very hard to do that in a genuine way, and in the blogosphere, a fake will be spotted a few key strokes away. I’m going to agree with Liz, but I’m also going to go a step further. For all the hype, social media is JACM - just another communications medium. That means the first rule of communication still applies:

Seek first to understand. Then to be understood.

As Covey would have it. Do you know what? You’ll be more productive in the long run if you are really able to stop and listen. Really listen. Not leaving a gap in the communication whilst the other person talks. Really listening, with the intent to understand. Go beyond the words, to include the prosody and the intent.

When the whole world is shouting “Listen to me! Listen to me!” the one that gets an audience is the person who says “I’m genuinely listening, and I would like to understand.” Armed with answers, you only need few words to make your point. No backtracking or apologies needed.

Human communication is so complex that it is impossible to reduce it down to a formula or a list. For me, that is one of the amazing things about it. Of course, you could always go with Jeremy Toeman’s slightly less serious “The 20 Commandments of Social Media“. However, I’d like to hear an answer to this question from Steve Lawson, so I’ll tag him….

Related Posts

• How to Write a Speech in 5 Minutes
• Randomness, Virtualisation and Getting Things Done
• Do Your Employees Dance?
• What will Enterprise 2.0 look like? Some Thoughts from Crystal Balls
• The Rather Complex Issue of Identity

A number of times in my speaking career I have had to pull something together at very short notice, either because another presenter dropped out, or because I was visiting an office where the local manager unexpectedly asked me to make a speech to all of the local staff. Here is a simple process to enable you to prepare a speech at very, very short notice (or presentation - its a presentation tip too)…

Getting Started on the Speech

Ideally you will need eight post it notes. If you haven’t got them, just grab a sheet of paper and fold it in half. Fold it in half again. And once more. Quickly, there’s no time to waste! Now, tear along the folds. Either way, you now have eight pieces of paper, and hopefully a pen. You’re ready to star(t).

Who is the Speech for…

Always begin with the audience. What do you know about them? What do they know about you? Write down a few bullet points on the first piece of paper. Who you are, in the context of how it is relevant to the audience.

What is the Speech for…

Does the audience or the person who invited you have an expectation of what you will talk about? Be sure to meet it, or cover it as best you can. Failing to do so will definitely cause angst.

Now think about what will be in the speech. Let your brain free wheel for a minute. Write each of your main ideas on one of the remaining pieces of paper. You don’t want more than seven. Research suggests that we can deal with 7 things in our head at once, plus or minus two. This isn’t the time to go stretching your cognitive abilities, so stick with 5-7 main ideas.

If you come up with more than seven, look through your earlier ideas, then find the weakest one and cross it out, replacing it with the better new one. It is a neat way to refine your speech.

Think back to what you were expected to cover and sanity check what you have written. That clock is still ticking, so…

When and Where

Check how long the speech should be. 7-15 minutes is a great length. It will seem substantial, but shouldn’t drag on. Check where you are. Can you link your speech in to the location? Perhaps based on a piece of local news you have read.

Now, to the when and where of each of your main points. Lay out the pieces of paper. They should fit one of three structures: topical, chronological or spatial. That will give you a natural order for them. In a topical structure you will see that some things must be covered before you touch on the other topics, or that some link together. In a chronological structure you probably want to start at the beginning and more forwards from there. In a spatial one there will also be a natural flow too. You now have your main points arranged in order.

How

Now you have the sequence, think about how you will make each point, and how you will bridge between each point. Jot down your proof points, or for a longer speech your sub-points, on the relevant piece of paper. At the end of the piece of paper for each point, make a note of your bridge to the next point. The bridges should help to create the story, and will make your points more memorable if done well. If you can’t think of a bridge, the next step may help…

Why is the Speech Relevant

Why are you giving the speech? Look back to your first piece of paper where you wrote about the audience. Why are you making the speech, and why are you the right person to give it? This should constitute your introduction. For example,

“As I have started and sold a number of high value companies, Dave has asked me to say a few words about how to create a valuable business, now that you have secured your funding.”

Well, you get the idea. It should establish your ethos (in Aristotle’s Rhetoric this is your expertise and knowledge).

Check back over the pieces of paper with your main points. The ‘why’ should tie them together. You might need to make a quick adjustment if it doesn’t. In the introduction to a longer speech you can also briefly run through the points you will cover in it, if not, just a summary in a couple of sentences. Remember:

“Tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em. Tell ‘em. Then tell ‘em again.”

You now have your introduction and your middle (main points). Finally, think about your conclusion. Ideally it should draw on your key points, without introducing any new ones. It should also provide some sort of call to action: a response or a commitment. You aren’t speaking just to generate warm air, you are there to make something happen. Make it so. Note it down.

Say it!

You now have your completed speech, and read through the points a few times. Congratulations. If you have time between now and speaking, then practice your speech. Nothing beats a rehearsal for finding problems (it also helps with memory). Practice on the taxi driver on the way if you have to, but speak it out loud. The physical process of ‘out loud’ rehearsal is much more effective than just running it through in your head. If you need slides and have time, try this:

• Slide 1 - Your speech title and name. 
• Slide 2 - x. One bullet point in the middle of one slide, with that one point in bullet form. But without the bullet.
• Last slide - Copy and paste slide 1. Save it. Done.

If you know of an image that will effectively support your point, it is to hand, then add it. Otherwise, you’re done. Who, What, When, Where, How and Why - a speech in 5 minutes.

Enjoy!

Related Posts

• Preparing to Present - A Check List for Presenting at a Conference or Large Event
• Randomness, Virtualisation and Getting Things Done
• 10 Things Not To Do In Business PowerPoint Presentation
• A Presentation Lesson From Al Gore
• 10 Tips for better Powerpoint

This has happened before, but this ‘goops‘ is rather timely. What’s a ‘goops’? It’s my favourite term for semantic/contextual errors: Searching without sufficient attention to context.

Let’s say I’m looking for information on Birmingham. I might head over to Google and do a search on ‘Birmingham’. If I’m after a picture, I could click on image search and find myself one. So far so good. Hold that thought for a minute.

I met up with the London-based WordCamp UK crew last night (upcoming meet details). We talked about next year’s WordCamp event, forming a legal entity and how to best build the WordPress community in the UK. Tony Scott, Jeff Van Campen, Hugh Fraser and others were there - as you can just about see from my slightly over ambitious, dark venue, self-timer-taken photo.

Events are a key component of building communities (as in the OU’s community model), but it is a good social software platform that creates the bridge between those physical events and the on-line world. That bridging is key in order to keep the community going. That was a big part of last night’s discussion and a topic for a later post.

Back to looking for pictures of Birmingham. Attendees of the WordCamp event might remember that there are two Birmingham’s. The Birmingham where we had WordCamp UK, unsurprisingly in the UK. Then there is Birmingham Alabama, where folks had “WordCamp Birmingham” in the US. A little confusing in the run up to both events! That is a little detail that seems to have slipped by someone in Birmingham city council.

In choosing a picture for a recent promotional leaflet, over half a million copies printed, they managed to use a picture of the Birmingham Alabahama, US skyline, rather than their own Birmingham. A classic “goops” - a search based error. Just to add to this little PR stumble, they initially denied the error and claimed they had used an image of a ‘generic skyline’ (which just happened to be of the US Birmingham, of course).

That’s also a proof point for a good PR tip: “go ugly early” - if you’ve made a mistake, best to come clean about it quickly. In today’s high speed, search engine driven world, it’s all too easy to make a goops. A good job we have communities to keep us on the straight and narrow.

Related Posts

• WordCamp UK 2008 - A Qik Look Back…
• WordCampUK 2008
• June Top 10 Links and the Month Ahead

Like most people, I’ve not had much reason to study bees. At least, not until I started studying the psychology of language. Dave’s bees do fascinating things, like building the honeycomb pictured here. Bees are viewed as hyper productive, industrious creatures, working away industriously. The hive is the very model of business, full of busy bees.

But did you know that bees spend a fair bit of their time wandering about aimlessly, and a fair bit dancing too? Bees major product is honey. Producing honey requires nectar, which the bees stumble upon by foraging. This is where the dancing comes in. The dancing gets work done efficiently.

When a bee finds a source of nectar it comes back to the hive and does a ‘waggle dance’ for its co-workers. The dance communicates the location of the nectar, indicating the direction and distance. The dance also communicates the type of nectar, by including a sample of the newly found treasure as part of the communication process. The co-workers then mobilize to bring back the rest of the new find.

It is a process of innovation and discovery. A single bee, with the time to wonder, makes a discovery. It then shares the discovery with the hive. The process maximizes the return on the new discovery, while minimizing unfruitful searching by other bees.

Do your employees dance? Do they have the time and tools to communicate where the nectar for your business is to other employees? Do they celebrate and communicate success? It is as important to the modern business as it is to the bee hive.

It always makes me sad when I hear a business shutting down communication channels that employees use - be it instant messaging, video conferencing or a community forum. In the wake of that decision is a hive of workers with less information to make them successful, and a less productive community.

Internal blogs and wikis and open communication channels (rather than closed point to point e-mail systems) are an essential tool for showcasing the steps to success. Did you just make a big business win? Then make sure everyone in the business knows. Let them know why it was a big win, and what enabled it to happen. Do a waggle dance! 

It isn’t just for the benefit of current employees. Hopping back to the bees for a minute, the nature of the waggle dance is unique (if you want to know more, check out Karl von Frisch who pioneered the study of bee communication). If you take a different sort of bee and introduce it to the hive, it will not be understood. Although eventually, after some mis steps, the bees will learn to communicate again.

How are new bees in your hive able to learn the language to communicate with the existing bees? Wikis and blogs provide a place for new staff to come and absorb the culture and language of a business. That gets them productive more quickly. They are called business wikis for a reason.

New employee hire orientation isn’t a one off event. It is about binding people into a community and enabling them to be part of it. That is a two way process, requiring good communication tools.

Bees have a specific place where they can come to dance. For some species it might be at the entrance to the hive, for others it is vertically on the comb, but there is a place.

Does your business have somewhere for employees to dance?

Related Posts

• Avoiding a Business Communication Crisis
• Power up your business with a Wiki
• Best Practices in Social Media
• How to Write a Speech in 5 Minutes
• Randomness, Virtualisation and Getting Things Done

It used to be an issue in developing countries, where a few hundred Kilos of copper were worth a day’s wages. That equation now holds true in Europe as well. Systems do get broken, and good businesses should plan for that - see Seth’s post this week: “What do you do when your systems break?“.

Expect the unexpected isn’t just an aphorism, it is good business productivity advice. Many of these people that lost their phone lists also lost their broadband connection at the same time. That means people and businesses with no phones and no Internet.

Now that copper is so valuable, what’s your communications back up plan? Given that most people have mobile phones, the ability to make calls isn’t lost - it just becomes slight more expensive. Also, with many service providers it is possible to divert a landline number to a mobile one. Watch out for how you activate the divert - if it requires Internet access or the phone line, that’s going to be a problem. For the call centres I used to run, the divert process was automated.

So, what about Internet access? Well, the good news is that mobile data services are becoming more and more affordable, even here in the UK. Another alternative is to know where your local WiFi hotspots are, or have an exchange agreement with another business or friend in a nearby town. That way there is somewhere to go to get those critical e-mails out (or in!), and let people know what is happening, if you need to.

As Seth points out in his post, you also need to give staff (and yourself) flexibility about how to deal with the ‘normal’ day to day business. You may not have access to all of the usual systems and information, but make sure that remains your problem, not the customers.

It’s amazing how dependent us business people are on e-mail and web these days. Services can be vulnerable, so it is worth having a good recovery plan worked out ahead of time. That way you are prepared when things do go wrong, minimizing the impact on productivity.

Related Posts

• Do Your Employees Dance?
• Thoughts Post MediaCampLondon
• Is Broadcasting Something to Shout About?
• Power up your business with a Wiki
• E-mail 2.0

Last night saw me at the TechCrunch Pitch! event and in a camera happy mood (see Techcrunch pitch photos on Flickr), you’ll find some videos on techcrunch moblog  (I Qik’ed Mike Butcher’s intro here). The pitches were of a high standard, and I’ll be checking out a some of the companies.

Mike gave the companies a specific list of questions to work to. That isn’t completely unusual for a pitching situation, although I think it vexed a few of the speakers. Doug Richard, from BBC’s Dragon’s Den, did an excellent job of playing bad-cop.

On the way home, my thoughts turned to “what makes a good pitch?” Over the years I’ve been on both sides of the table, prepping the pitches and pitching businesses for funding, but also listening to company pitches with a view to investment or acquisition. As I was describing these to my ever astute COO, she said “That sounds like the seven habits of highly effective pitchers”, so here they are:

1. Know the audience, but don’t take them for granted.

What are their motives for being at the pitch? Who are they? These days there is little excuse for not having good background. Linkedin, Xing, Google and Blogs (if they blog) are useful tools. Obviously, don’t end up being a social media stalker, but be aware of the background. One last obvious point, don’t take everything you read as gospel, or make the mistake of believing you actually understand the audience.

2. Know the ideal outcome and shoot for it.

What is it that you want to happen as a result of the pitch? Have a very clear and specific idea of what it is, and make sure the pitch actually works towards it. If you are pitching to investors for cash, they are going to be more interested in how much you want, how good you’ll be with it and why. Not in how hot your Ruby-on-rails coding skillz are. 

3. Know the weakness(es) and head them off.

You suck. You genuinely do. There are things that you are not great at. There are areas where your company is exposed. Know what they are. What are the most common objections you get in the context of this pitch? You don’t want to sow seeds of doubt, but you do want to concrete over any ground where they might spring up.

4. Describe the value from a customer perspective.

What is it that you enable? In specific, quantifiable terms, how does it make things faster or cheaper for customers. For any business product it must do one, if not both, of these or there isn’t a proposition. If you are a consumer offering, then you have the luxury of grasping at being outrageously, additively fun. Don’t miss it.

5. Woo and wow, rather than beat and demand. 

Don’t sell to me, woo me - win me over. People (I include myself there) dislike being sold too. Get me on your side. Don’t tell me you rock, tell me about someone else who says that you rock. Appeal to my judgment, experience and objectives (see 1).

6. Know your time limit; stick to it.

Not over or under. When I first started running a Toastmasters club, I found one of the rules very harsh: If you run over time, you are out of the competition. It is a good discipline. The only way you can know if you are going to be in the time limit is to do a full talk-through. Do it and time it. Rinse and repeat. The audience, and you, will appreciate it. Failing to stick to time and being pulled off stage dents the impression you leave behind.

7. Tell stories.

Stories have narrative. They flow. Their linked structure (this, then this, then this…) make them memorable and easy to follow. Stories have colour and detail, which makes them engaging. People love stories, and if they are good they retell them - that is a marketing secret weapon.

And remember, good stories have a beginning, middle and end. Tell them what you’re going to tell them. Tell them. Then tell them what you told them. That’s the seven habits of highly effective pitchers.

Related Posts

• How to Write a Speech in 5 Minutes
• Five Quid and a Crate of Beer - Starting the New New Business
• 10 Things Not To Do In Business PowerPoint Presentation
• Preparing to Present - A Check List for Presenting at a Conference or Large Event
• Larry Lessig - Copyright and Great Presenting

MediaCampLondon was a very organised unconference (and I mean that in a good way), kudos to Chris Hambly, Social Media Mafia,  and the rest of the team that enabled it to happen. A big thank you to SAE for providing a great venue. It was a little disconcerting for me, as over twenty years ago I planned to study at SAE to be an audio engineer. Then I discovered the Internet and the on-line world and the rest, as they say, is history (mine at least).

There were familiar faces (see the photostream: mediacamplondon), but also some that I previously only knew as twitter icons and profile pictures on blogs. It is good to get to connect face to face - apologies to those I didn’t get to talk to in-depth. Jenny B, Whatleydude, Steve Lamb/actionlamb, deCabbit and a number of others ran some great web sessions.

My main interest in social media are as a means of connecting businesses with their customers, and connecting people within businesses, and there were some great sessions that pushed thinking there further.

I remain convinced that social media is the perfect tool to preserve company culture and communications in businesses that are increasingly dominated by remote or mobile employees, dispersed across large geographies. There is still much to learn, but it is clear that blogs, even internal ones, improve communication, efficiency and business in general.

‘Traditional’ office workplace designs include ‘huddle’ areas and social spaces. The virtual workspace and information infrastructure should as well. However, there are good and bad ways of rolling out social media. To quote one of my rare moments of lucidity “social media is something that you do with people, rather than too people” (thank you loudmouthman for capturing that). It needs to me a means to an end, because it is a very empty end in itself.

Jenny Bee’s thoughts on large organizations using video content spawned lots of discussion and set me thinking about the challenge of video again. Some of the discussion was along the lines of can brands be broadcasters (see “is broadcasting something to shout about?”), and also in some very different directions. Video format social media as a marketing tool still presents a number of challenges:

• You need quality content. That doesn’t necessarily just mean quality in terms of the filming (although that is important), but in terms of the information contained in the video. That means covering visual as well as audio aspects.
• Video production is time consuming. Unless you are an ace Qik’er and able to get everything done in the first take (as Documentally has a knack for), filming and editing is a 1:5 to 1:30 ratio (a few hours to produce a 6 minute video).
• A lot of what looks good but “quick and cheap” is actually expensive, agency produced footage. Don’t be fooled.

Judith ‘deCabbit’ Lewis shared her experiences with online reputation management, and those that follow her blog will be unsuprised to hear that chocolate came in to it as well. Businesses need to keep their eyes open these days. What are people writing about them. What are their competitors up to? What is going on in their industry. The good news is that it is easier to do than ever before. The bad news is that it takes time, and very few businesses are doing it.

Related Posts

• Why Blog?
• You Can Predict the Future Too
• Do Your Employees Dance?
• Avoiding a Business Communication Crisis
• June Top 10 Links and the Month Ahead

It stimulated lots of thinking, and there are certainly some big issues to deal with. The three speakers were:

• Charlie Robertson of Red Spider.
• Andrew Howells of Zype.
• Quentin Boyes of Honeycomb Software.

For those that missed then, Qik’s Mireira Fontbernat vidoed the sessions: Videos from “Should Brands be Broadcasters?”. I’m not sure the event being broadcast via Qik falls into the “ironic” bucket or not. Regardless, very useful, and a sign of the times: One person with a mobile phone can broadcast an event across the globe, receiving questions in real-time from the viewers. It feels a little like the future.

• Traditional broadcasters are moving into community building.
• The big brands are using their own broadcast media to create interaction.
• Individuals themselves are becoming broadcasters (via blogs, vlogs, Facebook, Twitter, …). 

Charlie spoke about some of his work in creating more interactive, community-based experiences for broadcasters. Enough to be worth a whole separate post on the nature of community. Andrew talked about Honda’s recent marketing (see the Honda channel on YouTube to see some of their content) and the use of Homechoice (owned by Tiscali) as an interactive TV platform. The fact that a company most known for being an Internet Service Provider bought an IPTV service provider tells you something about the changes afoot.

Of course, the idea of broadcasters and brands having a conversation is really an illusion. The problem with conversations, as Twitter users know, is that they don’t scale well. The reason brands used broadcast media in the first place wass the ability for a few people to reach several million.

There are costs to that efficiency. Traditional broadcasting is one-way. That makes broadcasting efficient for the sender, but not for the receiver. When I watch a broadcast, it isn’t tuned to my needs or where I am at right now. My only control is to turn it off, just as I turn it on. Broadcast is also a time sink. If 100 of my friends start broadcasting even 1% of their life, keeping up with it all would consume 100% of mine. I wouldn’t even have enough time left to do my own broadcasting! Shocking. Some would say that might be a good thing. Just one minute of broadcast video could consume hundreds of hours worth of other people’s time.

When media was expensive to create, there were man barriers - good and bad. Volume was low, quality was (usually) high. With low cost broadcasting, thanks to the Internet and much more affordable video kit, those barriers have moved. Loose a day watching YouTube and you’ll feel how.

New media is blurring the lines between broadcast and personalized two-way communication. I can watch a Qik video broadcast and send comments back to the person filming. With services like Blogstar the producer not only has chat, but they can also turn the camera on the audience members - as I discovered during Phil Cambell’s The Gravity show. It certainly ramped up my participation!

What conversations have, that broadcasting looses, is that ability to listen. Listening creates interaction and context. In a conversation, I can listen to the other person and understand where they are coming from. And perhaps what they want too. I can tailor what I say to take account of what they already know, and better explain what they don’t. That conversation is unique.

A conversation is a kind of negotiation, or a knowledge journey. Traditional marketing fails at this, spectacularly. That is why it wastes so much time (for the receiver and the sender). Being efficient is more about the listening than the speaking, and listening takes an investment of time.

In the workshop I ran this week, looking at creating service level agreements and managing to them, the big take away was the importance of listening. Companies and people are all too keen to ‘get their message out there’. More often that not, a little listening saves a lot of talking. We need some technologies to balance all of this new broadcast media - filtering or switching off is only part of the answer.

When we listen more, we need to do less.

Related Posts

• Authenticity
• E-mail 2.0
• e-mailing your way to oblivion
• Caught by CauseWired
• Do Your Employees Dance?

The first e-mail rule: Touch each e-mail message but once.

Unless it is an message that you want to re-read for enjoyment, you don’t want to waste your time by reading a message multiple times.

• Delete messages straight away.

If the e-mail is going to end up deleted, it is better to delete it sooner rather than later. This minimises the risk of reading it twice, and wasting your time. I keep deleted e-mails for at least a month, which means I can recover if I do get a little over enthusiastic with the delete key.

• Quickly delete messages.

Pushing the delete idea even further, speed deleting is especially useful for junk e-mail. You don’t even need to read the whole e-mail. Delete it in 10 seconds, rather than spending a minute reading it, mulling what you would do with the ten million dollars this nice stranger if offering to transfer into your bank account from a recently deceased king/general/prince. It will win you 50 extra seconds to do something useful! Given the number of these I have been getting recently, that’s worth about an hour a week to me. A word of caution here, don’t apply this technique to emails that might not be junk, tempting as it may be.

• Minimal filing.

I still encounter people that have e-mail dutifully filed e-mails in 100 or more folders. I used to me one of these poor individuals, until I woke up one day and said “why am I spending my time like this?”. The method is rarely time efficient for two reasons:

1. The sorting of the mail is cumbersome and time consuming at this level, especially compared with how often the e-mails are retrieved.
2. E-mails rarely fit into one of these 100+ categories exclusively, and so they end up at least partially misfiled.
3. E-mail rules can automate this filing, if it is really that necessary.

It is far better to have a minimal number of folders, then use the search facility of your e-mail software to find what you need, when and if you need it. This will be more time efficient, as well as saving ware and tare on your mouse and your brain, working out how to file everything.

The second e-mail rule: Don’t leave actionable e-mails with unactionable ones

• Move it out.

Avoid storing actions in the inbox at all costs. Unless you are a very light user of e-mail, they will get buried. Although I may sometimes e-mail myself an ‘action’ from time to time, these are actioned straight away or moved to a proper action list as soon as possible. This avoids ending up having to hunt through a swathe of e-mails trying to find the one that was actionable, or even worse, completely forgetting about it.

• Action it now.

If you can action the message now, then do. It may just be a matter of a short reply or forwarding on to someone else. It is much better to do these little tasks (1-2 minutes) straight away, than run the overhead of managing them as tasks. You’ll be amazed how much you can actually do in a minute or two, and how much this simple principle de-clutters an inbox.

• Put it in the diary.

If the e-mail is going to take more than a few minutes, then write time to process it into your diary, so that you book time to deal with it, and so that you remember to deal with it. In Outlook and some other e-mail clients, you can drag the message straight into the diary. This is also useful feedback about how overloaded you are. Likewise, if the e-mail is to do with an event, meeting or something else that belongs in the diary, write it in straight away. This minimises the chances of being double booked, and the associated stress.

The third e-mail rule: E-mail unto others as you would have them e-mail unto you.

It took me a long time to get to this one. It isn’t just a moral principle, it is a way of modelling the e-mail behaviours you expect to other people. Think before forwarding. Think before replying. Would it be better to schedule a call or exchange a quick IM message? Who needs to be cc’ed, if anyone. It is amazing how effect this is, and leads on to why writing efficient e-mails is so important.

It is always good to discover new e-mail hacks, as e-mail is such a time sink for so many these days.

Related Posts

• How to Write a Speech in 5 Minutes
• 10 Things Not To Do In Business PowerPoint Presentation
• E-mail 2.0
• 7 Common E-mail Mistakes and How Not To Make Them
• Preparing to Present - A Check List for Presenting at a Conference or Large Event

That means good isn’t good enough anymore. Great isn’t great enough, even best isn’t even best enough. You need to be remarkable in order to stand out and be remembered. Being remembered is a basic competitive advantage. Think about it, how did you choose that last product you purchased? I bet it was to do with memory, either yours or by someone else’s. We remember the things that are remarkable, the things that engage us in thought or in conversation. We can’t help it, it is how we are wired (Learning your way to a better memory).

The table stakes required to be remarkable keep on spiralling upwards. Yesterday a large brand, which shall remain nameless for the purposes of this post, resorted to chaining bright orange bikes to inanimate objects in Soho, London (they’ve done the same in New York). It certainly started some conversations, it was remarkable! However, you do wonder what they will have to do next to be noticed. I have to say, by the way, I didn’t see anybody listening back.

Being remarkable is a requirement in an attention economy, but the attention economy is also result of remarkable things stealing our valuable attention. If we aren’t careful, it will be a race to the bottom as more and more things compete for our attention, we compete with more and more things for other people’s attention too (hey, look here, not there, I’m talking to you!). We shout louder and louder to be heard, but people listen to less and less. What was once remarkable, sinks into the noise floor and is lost. Lots of people talking, but no-one listening. What to do?

1. Be remarkable, or you’ll be missed out.
2. But pay attention, and you’ll get noticed.

Most Commented Posts

• Why Don’t You See What You Can Do in an Hour?
• Watch out for the frogs!
• Gordon Brown at NESTA - The Innovation Edge
• How to Write a Speech in 5 Minutes
• iPod to Go - The iPod as a GTD capture device

At the time, networks were new and exciting things - they were the web 2.0. Ethernet, Bob Metcalfe’s technology, had some unusual properties, which are still true nearly 30 years on, now that it connects almost every computer in the average office:

• Everything ON an Ethernet network is connected TO everything on the network (hold that thought).
• All connections are equal, in as much as it didn’t matter where you connected, you got the same.
• Everything on the network receives everything sent to the network (this one has changed slightly).

Compared to point to point or ring based networks most of us fought with at the time, this was revolutionary stuff. Metcalfe asserted that the value of such a network was the square of the number of nodes on it: n^2 (or n x n for the benefit of Windows calculator in basic mode). A picture explains better:

Matcalfe’s law has been held up along side the likes of Moore’s Law as the foundation of Internet growth, but there are at least a couple of problems with that:

• A. It was never really an empirically proven law.
• B. If it was, we have well and truly broken it.

Alan points to some of the reasons for that, but I’d like to dissect it another way, in thinking about social networks and social media. There are some implicit assumptions in Metcale’s law:

1. All nodes start equal (a node here could be a computer, person, etc…).
2. Every node is equally connected.
3. The interaction of the nodes does not change their value (all nodes stay equal).

If these three things aren’t true for today’s Internet or for social networks, Metcalfe’s Law does not apply. Are they still true? Do they reflect a network with people as nodes? One by one:

1. In today’s Internet, as with many things, it turns out that not all nodes are equal. In fact it is often an inverse power law, or a 1/n rule (. You see this with blogs, where a small proportion account for the majority of traffic. On most computer networks you have desktop machines (clients) and servers. In people you have introverts and extroverts. Definitely not all equal.
2. The bandwidth or connectivity between nodes is not just about how much is available, it is also about how much is used. We may be able to phone each other, but do we? Also, today’s networks, social or otherwise, have nodes that are connected to more than others - be it Scoble or a Google server. This is the most asymmetric part of social networks and the Internet today.
3. Transactional models have made a huge difference in Psychology. They apply equally well to social computing. The way that nodes (or people!) interact with each other changes their value, and how they interact with other nodes. I start commenting on a blog, I change its value to others. This interaction is one of the very dynamic things in the blogosphere. A complex dynamic, but a key to the value.

By the way, I’m not throwing stones at the law, that would be far too fashionable, as a quick search would show! Two related laws, which Alan picked up on are Sarnoff’s Law (for broadcast networks - their value is proportional to the number of viewers, nice straight line stuff) and Reed’s Law (which is highly exponential, essential saying that Metcalfe’s law understates the value of a network). Somewhere inbetween Sarnoff’s Law and Reed’s Law is the value of a network. Remember, all of these Law’s say that the value is proportional, we aren’t talking absolutes - we can’t say your network is worth “12″ - whatever the units for such a measurement might be.

It was the thinking around uncapped exponential models which caused much of the dot com madness - the myth of infinite scale and near infinite value from huge scale. The reality is that networks actually reach a point of diminishing returns. Some have argued for an inverse of Metcalfe’s law for social sites. It is interesting to think about why this is, at least from looking at computer networks:

• Broadcast noise - this is the reason really big (Ethernet) networks don’t work well. Broadcast packets which go out to everyone, if you get too many devices on the network, sending too many, you end up spending your whole time trying to take it all in. Nodes have no processing power left to get processing done or to send data. This is probably familiar to Twitter addicts! For broadcast media to be two way requires ‘turn taking’ and that gets harder as there are more involved.
• Finite (global) bandwidth. Bandwidth is finite, based on technology and physical infrastructure (if you want to argue this one, go and look at how many under sea cables there are/aren’t). As you add more devices, they share than bandwidth pool, however it is constrained. That means less and less information can be sent. Think of it this way, what happens if you open 100 web pages at once, or if you had 4,000 friends and a single phone was your only means of communication.
• Networks in networks. The Internet provides universal connectivity - pretty much everything is connected to pretty much everything, give or take the occasional blip and governmental intervention. However, the network we experience is not the servers and routers that make it up, it is the applications on them. Web servers running blog software and other applications. These are not universally connected. At the high layers, we revert to point-to-point communication, which puts everything back to a linear model. When the conversation moves from the blog to IM or the phone, others loose out, but at scale that is how it has to be.

This all brings me to Dunbar’s number, which Alan just had to drag into it! For background see earlier posts on the complete bounds of our social networks: Part I and Part II. Many tout the Dunbar. I think they might be better off throwing around Metcalfe. The law was valid at the time, and in the context, but the way that networks work have changed and evolved means that Metcalfe’s law needs to be evolved accordingly, and many a postgrad is pursuing that one. Likewise with the Dundar number.

Dunbar took research on primates, then scaled the numbers to reflect our larger brains. We no longer interact as apes do. Our day to day communication is no longer face to face, but increasingly mediated by technology. Ambient communication (like Twitter), blogs, photosharing, Dopplr and Instant Messaging are changing the nature of our communications and relationships.

Welcome to the global beta program, there is no planned release date, little support, no product manager and no uninstall option. We need to take the best that we know, from psychology, systems theory and wherever else we can get hold of it, and hold on tight for the ride!

Related Posts

• The Complete Bounds of Our Social Networks - Part I
• Caught by CauseWired
• The Complete Bounds of Our Social Networks - Part II
• What will Enterprise 2.0 look like? Some Thoughts from Crystal Balls

Today I can pick up a phone and call anyone I know, anywhere on the planet. Many of us have known no different all our lives. Mobile phones are so engrained into our social fabric that even those who can remember a time without them don’t. The time before them seems like a bygone era from the history books.

Over the next few years we will experience a similarly dramatic shift in the way we communicate. One aspect of that will be video (The Truly Mobile Office), the other is communications that cross modalities - Text that becomes speech, and speech that becomes text.

Spinvox delivers on a key aspect of the unified communications vision, today. It is a great productivity tool, at personal level and a business one. Its capabilities also open up lots of philosophical discussion, and there was certainly plenty of that in the session with Anne Marie, Ciaran, Ewan, Francine, James & James, Jay, Laura, Lloyd, Rob, Roger, Rachel, Sizemore, Terence, Toby and myself. An amazing set of perspectives from a diverse and insightful group, you can read more on the conversation here.

Voice was the ultimate disposable medium. Conversations are spoken and lost, aside from the occasional podcast, voicemail exchange or a video. A voice conversation is an amazingly rich form of communication, compared to something like e-mail or a blog. The tone of voice, intonation and real-time interaction engages our brain and connect us. They are the reason that the Dunbar number is so high - while apes pick nits out of each others hair to form social bonds, we chatter. Not all chatter is meant to be disposable, but to make something permanent, we had to write it down.

The technology to record every single conversation we have exists. Cheap digital audio equipment and an explosion in the size of hard drives make it affordable and possible. But what would we do with it all? Today you can’t Google your way through the world’s podcasts, you’d have to listen to them to find out if it contained what you want. Certainly you could tag every conversation recording, but all that digital editing and tagging wouldn’t leave much time for a social life. As a side note, I wonder how it would change what we do and say if every word was recorded, not just by you, but by everyone in the conversation?

Unlocking the power of the spoken word isn’t about recording it, valuable as that is. Not only can we not search those recordings, but we also loose one of the great benefits of reading: speed. We read faster that we can talk or write. Not much of a defence against the torrent of information we have to consume these days, but a useful one never the less.

We can also read in places and at moments where we couldn’t listen. Reading an SMS message in a meeting is relatively unobtrusive, compared to answering a call or listening to a voicemail - not that that seems to stop some people doing that.

Spinvox takes voice messages and makes them textual, and that is what makes it a powerful. You can create a searchable archive of text, including jotting voice notes (which are a key piece of my GTD workflow) - no excuse for loosing thoughts. You can read a voicemail message rather than having to listen to it - faster and less obtrusive. Yes, you might loose the expression of the voice - tone, pitch, volume, pauses - but you experience the spoken vocabulary still. We speak in a different way than we write, and that survives the conversion. Powerful stuff.

Related Posts

• How to Write a Speech in 5 Minutes
• Randomness, Virtualisation and Getting Things Done
• From Low-Tech to Hi-Tech - Lifehacking with SpinVox
• It’s the User Experience as much as the Technology!
• Happenstance and productivity

The village is a social concept that most of us are familiar with, at least theoretically. An early village was social network, with bounds. Without modern communications and affordable transport, villages were isolated communities, with the occasional messengers travelling between them carrying news. The social network in a village was tightly meshed. Not only did you know someone, you knew everyone that they knew - mutual friends and friends of friends. People had a strong shared context too (culture, history and other knowledge).

Cheap transportation, followed by electronic communication, has enabled ‘villages’ to grow into global communities. In communication terms, I am as close to someone on the other side of the planet, as someone on the other side of the office - sometimes closer. For me this has been one of the joys of using enterprise Wikis and digital media in the business context. Productivity is increased, there is a reduced need to travel, and greater access to a global talent pool.

However, we have lost that shared context and deep meshing of the village. The village model enforced symmetry in people’s networks - knowing people outside of the village boundary took great effort. That isn’t the case anymore. In recent years we have come to live with more fragmented networks, as people commute long distances to work, and travel more. For a while, mass media created a shared context for us: We read the same news and watched the same television programs. But today, with hundreds of channels and more and more micro-publishers (e.g. podcasts) even the media is now fragmented.

We can end up becoming more and more ‘niched’ into our areas of interest and expertise, but less and less deeply connected. What little shared context we have is dwindling. Perhaps that is why celebrities are so lauded these days - they are one of the few remaining things that we universally share.

Facebook, twitter et. al have held a mirror up to us. Now we can see our social networks for what they are - fascinatingly complex, frighteningly large and increasingly fragmented. We are pushing the bounds of our social attachments, not so much in the number of people we know, but rather in the depth of context that we share across the network.

We need shared context and history for efficient communication, to preserve relationships - especially in the work place. The right use of social media can create this. Sharing news stories and updates, as well as a good old face to face meet up, even just to have fun, are investments. They strengthen our social network s and improve communication in the long run.

Related Posts

• Caught by CauseWired
• Metcalfe’s Law - Really Useful, Not?
• The Complete Bounds of Our Social Networks - Part I
• What will Enterprise 2.0 look like? Some Thoughts from Crystal Balls

Paul Graham wrote an essay “You weren’t meant to have a boss” which is really about large versus small companies, and it raises some good questions - if a little controversially.

However, it is Robin Dunbar (now teaching at Oxford) who produced the most famous research, back in 1993. His work was popularised in Malcolm Gladwell’s book ‘The Tipping Point’ - to such extent that many in the social media space talk about “Dunbar’s number”.

Dunbar took research on non-human primate social groups and used some (fairly finger in the air - by his own admission) statistical methods to extrapolate this to humans. Based on our brain’s larger neocortex size, he predicted 150 as the mean size limit for a human’s meaningful social network.

This has been widely used as a sound-bite, even featuring in The Wall Street Journal (article written by Carl Bialik - it must be a good publication, I got into it once, [cough... cough...]). In a later paper (2003), Dunbar talks about a number range of 100-300 as the number of people in our social world (defined as the people we might turn to in severe stress, or at least approach at the airport).

Now that we have social software, we can study people’s social graphs in ways that were very difficult previously. That said, some of the research is a little esoteric, for example Christopher Allen has an interesting post with links to research on the playon blog, looking at data from groups on World of Warcraft (for the non-gamers out there, this is a massively multiplayer on-line role playing game). We have to remember that on-line games and social networking sites like Facebook don’t directly relate to real life relationships - much as the average Facebook addict might find that hard to accept.

Researchers also have the concept of subgraphs - essentially tighter ‘cliques’ that exist within the social graph, as clusters of more tightly meshed relationships, that is individuals who have more mutual friends. In his book ‘Evolutionary Psychology’, Dunbar talks about circles of intimacy - different rings of friendship, with different levels of intimacy. We can map that to our own lives, where we usually have a smaller group of people that we are closer to.

Although Dunbar doesn’t use social networks, his view is that they might help our brains push past this limit. However, on-line networking doesn’t replace the social grooming required to maintain relationships. We still need to meet ‘IRL’ (in real life). He isn’t sold on the idea that social networks make his number outdated. Language may provide a cheaper form of social grooming - it certainly beats picking nits out of your friend’s hair - but it isn’t clear if communication technology provides even greater short cuts. The research, Dunbar says, “made us realize people don’t know what these wretched things called relationships are — and that helps explain why we’re so bad at them”.

Continued in Part II >>

Related Posts

• Metcalfe’s Law - Really Useful, Not?
• Caught by CauseWired
• The Complete Bounds of Our Social Networks - Part II
• Not So Private Data
• Who’s are you? The Question of stolen (bits of) identity