These days we are all a bit social on-line. We have always been social creatures, but now we have technology to help us manage those connections, from well-known sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Digg, to photo sharing sites like Flickr , even virtual world applications such as Second Life.

Computer technology means we can start to map out the relationships an individual has. Certainly we could have done this in the past with paper and pen, but applications like Twitter, Linked-In and Facebook mean that a vast swathe of the population are now submitting details of their relationships into databases, where they can be graphed and modelled by computer. This idea of a social graph – a map of relationships that individuals have with each other – has applications in both business and consumer marketing.

In the early days of the Internet it was joked that “on The Internet nobody knows you are a dog”. However, on today’s Internet we do know who you are, what you do, and the relationships that you have. Depending on your privacy settings, this information is available to a narrower or broader set of people – but it is, nonetheless, available.

One of the most interesting things about making a graph of the relationships is looking at the connections of our connections. Taking an obvious example: I know a few people, those people know other people. With a social graph (or with social media applications) I can see that two of my friends don’t know each other, but they do know a third mutual acquaintance. That creates new ways of introducing people to each other, and strengthening relationships with mutual contacts (see the Dunbar’s Number – Groups, Language and Social Media post with reference to tribes and clans in this context).

In some ways there’s nothing new there. Social people have been doing this sort of thing for millenia, but what is new is that people can use computer technology to identify friends or contacts that might be relevant with information that might previously have been missed or unnoticed. I have two friends who live at the opposite ends of the country, who I’ve never seen at the same time, and I assumed never knew each other. It wasn’t until Facebook came on the scene that I realised they went to the same school as children. A detail that might not (and in fact did not) come up in years of conversation.

This idea is codified in the concept of friends of a friend or “FOAF“. It was an early attempt to capture a person’s social graph and publish it on the web. The idea is that I could embed a list people that I know on my web site, so that you can see who you know too – that way you can see if you are a friend of a friend. One hop away on the social graph. By identifying those mutual contacts it provides a way for us to come to know each other. That is the concept that business social networking site LinkedIn is based upon.

So how does FOAF work? It uses something called RDF – Resource Description Framework – to express metadata, that is information about information. In the case of FOAF that is information about people and their interests, relationships and actitivites.

FOAF uses RDF to express metadata about people, and their interests, relationships and activities. Founded by Dan Brickley and Libby Miller, FOAF is an open community-lead initiative which is tackling head-on the wider Semantic Web goal of creating a machine processable web of data.

Semantic web overlays data about data on the Internet so that computers can make sense of it. Because FOAF information is machine readable, computer applications can read it and process it to present information or bring things to our attention. So a very simple and idealistic view might be you come to my website or my page on Facebook and the web brouser automatically picks up that FOAF information and is able to notifiy you that there are some people we know in common. The idea is to build that information into all sorts of web pages so that many applications become, as it were, social or at least socially aware.

So FOAF, in the technical sense, is a very simple text structure, based on an XML format, which is machine and human readable – although not too pretty for a human. It is very easy to write applications to use it. A FOAF entry might include information such as my name, gender, title, what my preferred nickname is, separate out my family name, point to my home page or my blog, and include similar information for my contacts. It is a very simple piece of data, but we can add details about the nature of the relationships. It isn’t as complex as it probably sounds, it is flat text, which might look a bit like this:

<foaf:Person>
   <foaf:name>Benjamin Ellis</foaf:name>
   <foaf:gender>Male</foaf:gender>
   <foaf:title>Mr</foaf:title>
   <foaf:givenname>Benjamin</foaf:givenname>
   <foaf:family_name>Ellis</foaf:family_name>
   <foaf:nick >jamin</foaf:nick>
   <foaf:mbox_sha1sum>...(inverse functional property)...</foaf:mbox_sha1sum>
   <foaf:homepage rdf:resource="http://www.benjaminellis.co.uk"/>
   <foaf:weblog rdf:resource="http://www.redcatco.com/blog/"/>
   <foaf:workplacehomepage rdf:resource="http://redcatco.com/" />
   <foaf:depiction
           rdf:resource="http://benjaminellis/images/bmje.jpg" />
   <foaf:knows>
       <foaf:Person>
         <foaf:name>Joe Blogs</foaf:name>
       </foaf:Person>   
   </foaf:knows>
 </foaf:Person>

What does all this technology do? It give us opportunities to introduce people to other people, or to find people via mutual contacts. It might be computer-based, but the end goal is human to human social interaction. The power of my social graph, the map of my relationships, is not just in the releationsips I have, but also in that friend of a friend information – The relationships my contacts have, and they or I might have as a result of them.

People’s social graphs are exceptionally complicated. The FOAF proposal is a long way from providing even the beginnings of being able to express the relationships we have. I’ve played in a band with someone across the street, who baby sits for us on occasion. Are they my neighbour? A fellow musician? My baby sitter? Computers struggle with such vagaries, some people thrive on them. A social graph is not a simple star with me in the middle and people around the outside. It is actually a complex mixture of more and less connected individuals.

In using social networking platforms for marketing, agencies often seek out the person with the most ‘connections’ or ‘friends’. That is an error. Who is going to be more effective in propagating a message – someone with 350 contacts, or someone with 20? It depends as much on the second and third degrees of their social graph (ie out to the friend of a friend level) as on the direct contacts in the first.

One person might know 100 contacts, another might know 10. For the person who knows 100 contacts each of those people might know 100 or they might know a 1,000. Some of them may be very well connected , some may have a few tightly formed relationships, that are heavily meshed –  where all their contacts and mutual friends are related. Others may be outliers, or bridgers as I like to call them, sitting across different communities. They might only have a few relationships. but they bridge between large communities.

Social software, even in its current form, is effective in the ‘discovery’ phase of relationships. One of the reasons that Twitter is so popular with many is that it makes it easy to find new people, based on their interests or experience, and start exchanges with them. Browsers like Flock aim to integrate the social and data aspects of web surfing. The area certainly has a lot of potential, for example knowing that a web site is written by a friend of a trusted friend might have me interpret the information as more trusted than that of a total stranger (for better or for worse). There are applications that generate FOAF from your Facebook page , Firefox includes a built in FOAF browser.

FOAF also has the potential to act as a format for porting our social graphs from one social networking platform to another (as long as the platforms stop banning people for running export scripts). A number of platforms (at last a dozen at last count) already allow exporting data as FOAF information. The approach might also be useful in the Enterprise 2.0 context, where social graphs might need to be used across applications.

All of this is, of course, still in a nascent stage. Be it FOAF, or a functionally equivalent standard, we will be seeing a lot more activity around the portability and interpretation of social graph data in the coming year. In the mean time, don’t forget that it is all about connecting with people!

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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….

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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!

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There are big Redcatco projects in the wings, new blogs to feed, articles to write and a fair collection of other things to be done too. Is it all making sense, or is it random, like stones on a forest floor.

Do you ever get too many things in your head at once? Perhaps it’s just me, although given the popularity of How to Deal with Being Overwhelmed at Work, I’m not so sure.

When we get overloaded things start to look random. All the gaps get filled, and the patterns that gave us a sense of order start to disappear. Randomness is a curious thing. I’m not talking about the mathematical science of it, but rather its effect on the brain.

There’s a nice review of Nassim Taleb’s “Fooled by Randomness” here, which is a great read on the subject. Essentially we try and predict randomness. Its in our nature. Our brains see patterns everywhere, that’s how they work. The only way we can know if a pattern is valid is from its success in predicting future events. However, we rarely wait that long.

Some things that look random are actually patterns. I was trying to get a close up shot of a bee (in relation to “Do your employees dance“), when I realised that often life is only random until you study it carefully.

Getting the picture was either going to involve waiting at a flower and hoping to luck-out, or knowing where the bee was going to go next, and getting there first. After a quick trial, it was clear the former method was going to involve significantly more time than I had planned to spend. I needed to be able to predict the bee’s movements to get to the flower first. That or hope for a matrix-like moment of speed and dexterity.

After watching the bee a while, I came to the conclusion that they were pretty random critters. So much for my pattern-making brain. But then I got a little closer in, and followed one of the more industrious looking fellows. I was just starting get a feel for what he was up to, then ‘whoosh’, he was gone. Ok, on to the next. As I got closer and started to see the world from a bee’s-eye view (minus ultraviolet sight capabilities), I suddenly spotted the pattern. Click.

This bee progressed around in a very orderly spiral, until the lavender flower was cleaned out, then hopped on to the next. The randomness? Well, the bee could see which flowers had accessible pollen and simply ignored those that didn’t.

Have you ever watched someone and thought ‘why on earth did they do that?’ – it may well have been for a very logical reason, part of a well ordered pattern. Until you understand the motives and assumptions athe person is working with their actions will seem random.

Patterns actually make us productive. At least, productive people seem to follow patterns (as a tangential piece in The Economist indicates: “Every move you make“). It might be cause and effect, or simply a correlation, but patterns do bring a sense of order, and a sense of order helps to get more done.

So, how to get order and efficiency out of business overload? Take a leaf out of the computing book. I was writing up a webcast for BusinessTechFeed on Data Center Efficiency, which included a section on virtualization. A very useful technology for making more efficient use of computing resources. Virtualization lets you move from lots of under-utilized machines to one efficient, highly utilized one. The machine runs separate instances that each behave as a fully fledged computer.

Taking the virtualization concept across to productivity, rather than looking at your life as a whole (which is a good thing to do by the way, so don’t stop!), spend a while dividing it down into chunks. What are your different roles and responsibilities? Are there distinct areas to your life? Try writing down a set of objectives for each area, if that is something you haven’t done before. Now try slicing your time into segments for each of these areas. When you are working in one segment, don’t let the others invade it, unless it really is an emergency.

After a few days the technique should result in a fresh level of clarity and efficiency. When everything is thrown together, it feels random and things are hard to make sense of. Separating out the different things helps you to see patterns and order more clearly, and reconnect with their purpose. Remember those stones on the forrest floor. Let me put a few of them off into a different pile. Does the picture make more sense now?

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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?

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I’m am convinced that the business technology of the future is the consumer technology of today. In past decades technology flowed from business use to consumer use. Think of things like mobile phones and email, which started off as business tools, then became affordable and accessible at home. That flow is now reversing. The productivity tools of the future are in use by the youth of today, and they will bring them into businesses as they join the workforce. It will be the consumerization of IT.

Back in December, I was at Chinwag Live, Xmas Futures, Crystal Balls, an event that gathers some of the most intelligent figures from the world of digital marketing to have a shot at predicting where the industry will be in 5 years time. Now, if property prices are anything to go by, the newspapers are having trouble agreeing on what happened last month, so predicting technology five years out is a long shot! But this is an arena that is on the cutting edge of change and gets to see just that little bit further ahead.

The event confirmed many of my current thoughts, as well as being a great chance to have some meaningful debate. Here I am with the legendary Sam Michel, CEO of Chinwag, at the end of the session as we mulled over the discussions (there is a podcast here).

Social media is becoming more and more prominent. Jon Bains – Co-Founder of Lateral – raised the issue of Facebook versus LinkedIn. For me, the two are complimentary. I use Facebook for personal friends and LinkedIn for work associates, and some people I connect to on both – you’ll find a link to my LinkedIn profile in the about page. They represent two very different faces, excuse pun, of social networking applications. The teen-laden, wild partying Facebook, and the straight-laced executive LinkedIn. Now I hear of more and more people using even Facebook for business networking.

Today’s business leaders and tomorrow’s will be very different. The fact is that social networking tools, in one form or another, are here to stay. I predict they will be standard tools for many large businesses in years to come, although run on private, secure intranets.

Today most IT managers and business leaders are missing out on the potential productivity benefits of these tools. They provide an amazing ability to create and strengthen social bonds in businesses and enable people to find the resources they need to get their job done. In years gone by, the resources we needed to get the job done were ‘things’. Where is the plough? Where is the hammer?

Today, in a knowledge-led business world, they are the people with knowledge and skills. Where is someone who understands this? Where is the person who can interpret this data? Where is someone who has done this before? In a large company, with many staff telecommuting, you can’t get those answers by shouting across the desk anymore. Something else is needed.

Microsoft sponsored some recent research on skills businesses need, which is covered in an interesting BBC article here. The modern work place demands both people skills and IT skills. These two skill sets are becoming intertwined, as computers become the medium through which we communicate. Social Networking tools are powerful at expanding our social network, both in business and at home. Used badly, they can be a massive drain in terms of time and stress (see “web 2.0 as the new master” by Maz Hardy). Used wisely, they just might be one of the productivity tools of the future.

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Depending on your background, you might understand identity in the sense of personal identity, or in computer security or perhaps even corporate identity. What is your identity? Why is it so important?

From an IT perspective, identity is critical in making sure that the right people have access to the right information, protecting the user and the information. From a personal productivity perspective, understanding our identity helps us work with our nature, rather than against it.

The Start of Identity

When I began using computer systems, shortly after the dinosaurs roamed the earth, I had a ‘login’ and password. It was a curious set of letters and digits, dished out by some guy in a lab coat with a particularly bad haircut. It didn’t tell the computer much about me, but it kept the riff-raff out of the system and my data reasonably private. My first encounter with identity was when I started working in the security arena. There was a need for a more meaningful view of ‘who’ a user was. Identity captured additional information, such as the user’s role and their membership of various ‘groups’. This meant the system might know that the user was an administrator in the marketing department. Adding properties made life as an IT manager simpler, because the computer or the firewall had a better concept of who that user was. The users could be managed in groups, rather than as individuals.

As the Internet blossomed and more on-line services emerged, I ended up with multiple identities. Today the number of identities I manage has exploded. Thankfully things have started to converge on the email address as an identifier, although I have even built up a large collection of those. OpenID is an initiative that will simplify the management of identity on-line by pulling all of these identities together (see the article on Lifehacker here for an example). That may or may not be a good thing. If you want to understand where on-line identity is going, do check out the presentation “Identity 2.0” from OSCON2005, and also get an example of Dick Hardt using the Larry Lessig presentation method as a bonus.

Understanding Our Identity In The Real World

If you think identity is a complex issue in the computer world, just wait until you think about it in the real world of flesh. and blood If I put my psychology hat on, I get a completely different view of what identity means. Psychologists have been researching the human identity for over a hundred years, although there still isn’t a unified theory to understand it. One psychologist, Manford Kuhn, created the twenty statements test as a simple way to capturing a snapshot of our identity. Try it for yourself and see what you learn: Open up a text editor or grab a piece of paper and a pen and give yourself twelve minutes to write down answers the following question: “who are you?”, use statements starting “I am…”, you don’t need to write more than 20. That is, if you get that far in the twelve minutes. Give it a try now.

Look back at your answers and see if you can group any of them together or sort them. What do they tell you about yourself? Does it reveal what is important to you? You can use this information to inform your personal goals and to help yourself be more motivated, by connecting with who you are. Even in the real world, we have multiple identities. This is an interesting discussion tool in the business context for teams: “who are we?”, “we are…”

The psychologist Erik Erikson put forward the theory that we create our identity as we resolve various crises at different stages of life. This is the origin of the term ‘mid-life crisis‘. Well, I always wondered what that was all about. Whilst our core identity that remains fairly constant, our identity does evolve as we grow up and grow old. One of the big shaping factors is the social groups we relate to. By the way, that the twenty statements test only tells us what we bring to mind at a single moment in time. We are much more complex than that. You might write something completely different a few minutes later.

You Are Who You Are, Or Are You?

Our identity is a totally unique thing, computer IDs rely on that, but it is also true in the physical world. I can find a dozen Benjamin Ellis’ using Google. We might have DNA that is 99% identical, but we are still totally different. Actually, another 1% difference and one of us could be a chimpanzee. How unique are we? Even if you are a twin, you have a unique finger print and a unique set of experiences and values. To date computers have only just got as far as understanding fingerprints, increasingly used in computer security.

A new generation of web applications, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Plaxo are changing this. They are enabling computers to add social information to their concept of identity. They map out our relationships or “connections”. This is sometimes referred to as social graphing, an exciting new technology with lots of possibilities. These new services aren’t a passive thing, because they feedback into those relationships and affect our identity, by changing our relationships.

Early services, such as Friends Reunited, create ‘long tail’ relationships (thanks to Jon Bains and Fred Bassett for the conversation at a recent Chinwag Live event). They have enabled us to resurrect old friendships by reconnecting us. In the case of Friends Reunited, it was friendships from school days. With services like Facebook and Linkedin, it is via friends of friends, as the social graph grows.

The services also make it easier to sustain a greater number of relationships, by narrow-casting our lives to each other, and supporting an ‘outer ring’ of friendships that would not otherwise be sustainable, using traditional communication methods. They affect the inner ring of relationships too, by increasing the volume and reach of our daily ‘chatter’; we know more of what is happening in our friends’ lives, enabling us to communicate within more of a common context.

The Social Media Social Experiment

We are all unwitting participants in a grand experiment that will profoundly affect identity in the next decade. Who we are connected with affects who we are, because it affects what we know and how we view ourselves. Change your friends, and you change who you compare yourself to.

With the advent of social media, a new set of social norms are forming. As a blogger, I am watching with interest as this new medium and its norms evolves. Ann Michael’s recent post, connections and respect raises an interesting point. Bloggers blog about each other, but they don’t blog about business associates. For people who straddle both worlds this can be a fine line. Recently I had a discussion with Sarah Blow on this, but I’m still not sure how it will all map out. I’ll have to ask Mike of Techcrunch UK next time I see him, as he runs around with his 3G connection. If my business is blogging, or I am blogging for my business, what goes and what doesn’t? What is ‘private’ and what is ‘public’. It isn’t just blogging. Another of Ann’s posts raised some of the workplace challenges of Facebook: “your boss on facebook“. Who to connect with and what to share with them on social networking sites? Facebook has some granularity with its “view limited profile” feature, but this is hardly matches the complexity of our real-world relationships. This just the tip of an iceberg. The boundary between what is private and public is increasingly fuzzy in the new world of social media and Internet search engines. Recently, the mystery of where a man that had been missing for five years had been was solved. Someone found a picture of him with his wife on the Internet: Google solves the missing man mystery.

New Rules for New Media

There is a whole new set of social rules to evolve in this complex world. If I post a comment to a friends wall on Facebook, all their friends see it, but some of them aren’t my friends, they might be people I’ve never even met. Communication is becoming increasingly asymmetric and unbalanced in nature with social media. What parts of your identity are personal, and what are ‘public’? It isn’t binary, we have different ‘roles’ and ‘groups’ to our real identity, different pieces of information that we share with different people. If there is a feint line between the persona you have at work and the one you have for your friends, it will blur – just look at Facebook’s beacon. How do you feel about your Facebook friends all knowing what you have been buying? For those that don’t blog or do facebook, you aren’t immune. Digital information is leaky (just ask HMRC, who write a rather sad letter to me about loosing my personal data). It can be copied, pasted, forwarded and it doesn’t decay. There are comments on-line that I made in email conversations two decades ago, that is another form of long-tail. We all leave digital artefacts behind us on a daily basis.

One thing is for sure, we are heading for a time of increased and extended transparency, regardless of wanting it or not. Computers and other people may end up with a better sense of what our identity is than we have ourselves: “you are a blogger, you are a fan of Snow Patrol, you are a purchaser of violent games, you are friends with…”. There is a positive side to all of this. Through social graphing, we can more easily discover new friends, reconnect with old ones and keep in touch with new ones. We can gain a greater sense of our identity and be part of a community. Without blogging, I wouldn’t have met any of the people mentioned in this post.

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