An Bui, Spelled An With 1 N

This post is the fifth in a series of my interpretation of Social Media Principles. More to come in the near distant future.

Previously, I discussed karma in social media, and touched on a case study of the use of blogging to drive sales. Because social media interactions are repeatable, they can give rise to patterns of behavior and over time which lead to shared, common understanding, such that:

Rules beget rules:

At some point, organization happens so that common understanding of interactions are possible.

In concrete terms, much has been written about social media etiquette. Tamar Weinberg wrote The Ultimate Social Media Handbook, covering Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Social News sites, FriendFeed, YouTube, StumbleUpon and blogs. Chris Brogan also covered social media etiquette with respect to email, blogs, Facebook and Twitter.

How did these guidelines come about?

Twitter: From Broadcasting to Sharing

Twitter asks: “What are you doing?” Users respond to that question in 140 characters or less. Over time, they realized “Eating lunch” is not as interesting as “Talking about crisis mapping over lunch with @patrickmeier“

Smoked Trout Salad from Crow anbui.tumblr.com

Which has turned into “Talking about crisis mapping over lunch with @patrickmeier http://zi.ma/b9d8de”

Twitter has rapdly evolved from broadcast mechnism to an informtion sharing application which can provide someone with many quick slices of information about someone’s life. As a dynamic, digital interaction paradigm Twitter provides rapid iterations of concise idea sharing that can inspire those involved in, or watching, the interactions.

You end up with patterns for interaction because you learn what resonates with individuals and the broader community.

However, social media tools may establish different interaction patterns because they serve different purposes and the features determine what types of interactions are possible.

Whrrl: From Information Source to Social Discovery

Whrrl enables you to:

1. See where your friends are/have been;
2. Share where you are/have been;
3. Provide a persistent opinion of experiences, tied to public places.
   

When I first started using Whrrl, I used it for local search and real world location bookmarking of restaurants, stores and museums I liked. With time, I added people to my Whrrl network and its utility as a social discovery tool increased so I could find out which restaurants, stores and museums my friends enjoyed.

Whrrl’s real world location broadcasting feature can cause privacy concerns, which the developers and product managers have tried to address via privacy and security settings.

Which means…

The social rules and norms that develop in online communities are influenced by the features and functionality of the social media tools used. Understanding the tools and their users help you understand how your actions may be perceived in the digital realm.

Businesses that understand the importance of online communities can participate thoughtfully, using the appropriate online etiquette, and incorporate social media data when making business decisions.

Update: Read Jim Benson’s perspective on Social Media Principle #5: Rules Beget Rules

This post is the fourth in a series of my interpretation of Social Media Principles. More to come in the near distant future.

Previously, I discussed findability and searchability in Findability is Power, touching briefly on connections, crowdsourcing and community as pathways for surfacing good information. Because using social media means the information comes from people, I find it timely to expand on the next principle:

Karma is real:

The more you give, the more you get. You just don’t know what at the point at which you’re giving.

One of the main values social media provides is the means to connect people to people as well as people to information.

Thanks to OneRedPaperclip.blogspot.com

Tara Hunt of Citizen Agency has written some interesting thoughts about karma in her blog, Horse Pig Cow. Her idea of karma centers on “gifting,” or the idea that an object gains value as it is passed from person to person, as in the example of One Red Paperclip. From one red paperclip to a house in Saskatchewan, Kyle didn’t know (and couldn’t know) when he would get the house. He did know that he had a red paper clip, and that paper clip had value.

Mack Collier, a social media consultant who started the Z-list, also has interesting thoughts about the give/get dichotomy:

As with anything else involving social media, I think when you start thinking about Ok…what do *I* get out of this?, then it all starts going to hell in a handbasket.

When Mack started the Z-list, he wanted to help spread link-love to marketing blogs with great content. Mack started a meme to help the community by surfacing lesser known bloggers with great content. In doing so, he created a lot of value as others added blogs they liked to the list. Did he have expectations of personal gain? Knowing Mack, no. Did he personally gain from it? Yes, by discovering blogs he didn’t know about previously, as well as any incidental links back to his own blog as the meme spread.

What “Karma is Real” Means for Business:

Giving and Getting requires at the very least, interaction with your customers. If you have a budget for feedback cards, do email marketing or run pay per click campaigns, you are already budgeting for customer interaction. Why not take it one step further and reciprocate with your customer base? Why not offer them information about who you are and what you’re up to?

Because people have a tendency to anthropomorphize or ascribe human tendencies to brands or products, providing customers with information about who you are and what you do enables them to start building a relationship with you. Tim Jackson, Masi’s brand manager, used social media to connect with customers and double sales. Tim posts about cycling, what Masi has in development and a bit about his personal life to help consumers connect with him and Masi.

Social media interaction patterns tend to mirror real life interaction patterns. People will know you by what you say online - on blogs, forums, and other communication tools. Karma tends to be the great leveller, by rewarding good behavior and condemning bad. Social media shows us that the community is a great karmic instrument.

The difference between online and real life is that Google remembers. And if Google doesn’t remember, archive.org does.

This is a companion piece to 10 Principles of Social Media series. This post provides a framework around understanding Free Information in the context of a private, pre-IPO/aquisition organization, Amalgamated Suckup dot com.

Company: Amalgamated Suckup dot com

Industry: Startup

Location: Anytown, US

Corporate Environment:

Amalgamated Suckup Dot Com is an organization that just closed their second round of funding and is tasked by investors to create a new widget for a market of users. The primary revenue model is contextual advertising/user data.

Situation:

The organization chart for Amalgamated Suckup Dot Com follows:

McOrg Chart courtesy of ourfounder.typepad.com

Each level of the org chart represents a gate through which information can pass, depending on the decisions made by information holders. In other words, Do I cc the whole team, or just the leads? Do I use bcc so others on the thread don’t know I’m sharing it with others?

At the bottom of each silo, you see those tasked to execute - these are the people who push the hypothetical button to create a widget.

Why were the widgets out so very different from the widget vision, widgets users wanted and used, that the VCs funded?

Analysis:

The scared and the clueless are scared and clueless due to the lack of information and/or barriers to access. They’re clueless because they don’t have the right information to make high judgement decisions. They’re scared because they’re making decisions and executing tasks on a daily basis and integrating new information is a decision about their pay grade.

They understand that they’re supposed to be making VC-funded widgets. The charts, graphs and managers all say that the market will love widgets and their options will be worth something.

What if customer service learns that the extra ‘e’ is problematic and that users really want widgts? Do they, can they tell marketing and product development? What if marketing realizes that widgts can be used to address users’ needs in a very different way than originally thought? What if producing widgts cost 1/7 of the cost of production for widgets?

What would happen if it were easier for customer service to talk to marketing and product development?

Social media provides another pathway for information sharing within the organization. Information sharing will enpower people to make better decisions on what work to do, how to do their work and move product. Employees feel good about their work, users love the product, VCs make their money and everyone is happy.

Read more about Amalgamated Suckup on Jim Benson’s blog, Evolving Web.

This post is the third in a series of my interpretation of Social Media Principles. More to come in the near distant future.

Having discussed information evaluation in Information Wants to be Free, this discussion of findability expands via discussion of content creation.  

Findability is Power:

Without findability, the information’s ability to provide and create value is greatly diminished.

Search (and searchability) gets us only partially there. Searchability, in this context, is an attribute of a piece of content (text, video, sound and so forth) that means it can be indexed such that when a user uses a search engine to ask for information, content with relevant information is returned.

For example, I needed my mother’s address and asked my younger brother to email it to me. He sent:

Searchable Email?

The information sought came without a subject, without a city, without a state, without context. Even with Gmail’s search, this particular content is not highly searchable because I’d have to remember my mother’s street, house number, or apartment number.

Great. Even if there were more information such that I could search “mom’s address” or “address MN” and have it return my mother’s address, the information isn’t necessarily findable.  In the above email, I can very quickly find the information I’m seeking. The nformation sought, while not highly searchable, is highly findable.

What if the needed information was buried in a 1,000 word email? Maybe there’s important information there, maybe there isn’t. The email is easy to search, but the information may be hard to find.

Social media tools such as Twitter, Slideshare, and Facebook enable users to find information by helping users connect with each other. While Google, Yahoo and Live Search still serve valuable content, social media tools facilitate connecting, crowdsourcing and community and provide another avenue to augment available information and add more value by introducing other ideas and perspectives.

This post is the second in a series of my interpretation of Social Media Principles. More to come in the near distant future.

Building upon my previous post, with freedom facilitated by decentralization as a necessary precondition for information exchange, my second principle follows:

Information Wants to be Free:

The cost of obtaining information is rapidly declining, but still capable of providing and creating value. Freedom is necessary for free information.

City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, from anbui.tumblr.com

Search enables us to find information incredibly rapidly. Thus the question has shifted from how can I get the information to how good is the information?

Social media enables us one avenue to begin to answer the information quality problem. Before we had virtually 24/7 access to others, regardless of geography, we were constrained to those in our geographic locations. With telephones (and answering machines) and cell phones (with email) we’ve increased our ability to communicate with others. Others who know different things, have different ideas and bring different perspectives to the metaphorical table.

With social media tools, the barriers to access to individuals (points of knowledge) have decreased and costs of information sharing have decreased as well. However, information still provides value (and thus remains an exchangeable commodity) because of the value we can create with good information. Data drives decisions, on strategic and tactical levels. Good (accurate) information enables one to make better decisions. The real value is in one’s ability to sort information into signal and noise before executing based on information of value.

Before, we relied on people we trusted to help us validate information, people such as teachers and experts.

Now, social media has flattened the world by providing us with tools to find or discover others and build mutually beneficial connections and thus surface good information for decision making. Increasing access to information can create an environment for pushing boundaries on creative thinking, problem solving and accomplishing goals.

Restricting or siloing information is appropriate in context. Communicating that to information holders and those from whom the information is withheld preserves relationships built on trust, respect and reputation.

Read Jim Benson’s thoughts on Information Wants to be Free

This post is the first in a series of my interpretation of Social Media Principles. More to come in the near distant future.

From my 10 Principles of Social Media. The Remix:

Freedom enables us to pursue our thoughts and interests in a social space. Thus decentralization is of primary value.

This formulation of freedom recognizes that freedom is necessary for individuals to pursue their values. Constraints limit one’s ability to pursue values. Some constraints are part of reality, such as Newton’s Laws of Physics. Other constraints can be attributed to circumstances or context. In the context of this post, centralization and the degree of is one such circumstantial constraint.

High Authority Network Map from Snurb.info

Thinking about centralization in terms of network, connection, and nodes, the fewer number of nodes in a network, the more centralized the network. These few nodes serve as the conduit of information and power. Should something happen to one of the nodes, the power dynamic and balance of the system would shift, if not outright splinter. The other nodes would bear more responsibility and there would be fewer pathways to information. With more barriers to information, the greater the challenge of obtaining information and the greater the possibility of an ill-informed decision.

In a decentralized system, more connections means less reliance on any one node for information. Redundancies protect against information loss should any node be removed from the system as well as provide options for information sources. Thus, one is free to choose which node, connection, pathway will serve as the information source and validate that information against other resources in the system.

Decentralization Leads to Social Freedom

This lack of dependence also provides social freedom. The less one depends on any given node, the more freedom one has to exercise any one of the greater number of options.

For example, take a group of three friends. If this group had no other friends, the personal relationships between them all are of high importance and each individual would need to provide the social resources and interactions the other two need. Should one go away, that impact will be felt - mathematically, there is a 50% decrease in friend choices for those remaining. Considering others’ reactions may have greater importance in decision making, given social consequences of public action.

Take a group of 30 friends. Any given individual now has 29 friendships. If one-third of of this group leaves this system, each of those remaining now have 19 friendships. I solved the first example, I’ll leave this one as an exercise for the readers.

What does this all mean?

Decentralization = Freedom due to lower barriers to information access and risk spreading in social relationships, thus creating a virtuous cycle that more freedom –> more decentralized network –> more freedom… and I look forward to your thoughts/questions/remixes.

Food for Thought - Social Media from An Bui

Jim Benson and I spent this morning discussing Principles of Social Media. Throughout the course of the morning, the list went from 10 to 13 before we folded various thoughts into the others to make room for the thoughts resulting from my feedback.

Moving forward, Jim will discuss each principle in turn and I’ll be offering my thoughts in response or conjunction with his.

My approach to social media considers information and relationship hiearchy and prioritization, so that you can make decisions that are optimal for you, given desired impact, value and the constraints of life/business.

Jim says:

These principles help us communicate and relate better. With these principles we can establish networks and understand our place in them. These principles give coherence to the creation and exchange of value. All of these help us build better communities and working relationships.

These principles help us communicate and relate better to each other and surface ideas, thoughts, formulations we find interesting and that we can build upon. Quick iteration of ideas plays like a high speed game of telephone. As they spread, the value proposition changes, with new (or more) information. The ability to make optimal decisions (and what those decisions are) also changes.

My interpretation of the principles follow, in a different order of importance:

1. Decentralization is freedom: Freedom enables us to pursue our thoughts and interests in a social space. Thus decentralization is of primary value.

2. Information wants to be free: The cost of obtaining information is rapidly declining, but still capable of providing and creating value. Freedom is necessary for free information.

3. Findability is power: Without findability, the information’s ability to provide and create value is greatly diminished.

4. Karma is real: The more you give, the more you get. You just don’t know what at the point at which you’re giving.

5. Rules beget rules: At some point, organization happens so that common understanding of interactions are possible.

6. Economies have currencies: Trade is possible with Karmic infrastructure and rules of engagement.

7. Communication is blood: Communication is the transport mechanism for information flow.

8. Immediacy in all things: Acting on new, validated information when appropriate moves things forward more quickly than before.

9. Context is fluid: Things change more often, as does your frame of reference. Think about the information you have at various points and look at developments along a continuum.

10. Associations are inherently good:
I’m not sure I believe that they are inherently good. I’m leaning towards associations are agnostic - it’s the value you add that make them good.

Note: I’m using principle in the philosophic sense, to guide my thinking about social media and by extension, digital culture.

Data fascinates me - at any given moment in time, I’m processing a multitude of information from my physical and digital environments. Sometimes these worlds overlap. When this happens, the information relevance stems from context.

What is context? Context is the space, role, and place in my life of related information. For example, I talk a lot. I talk a lot about companies, productivity, Twitter, value and qwitter. I care about community, relationships and social media. The multiple (and some would argue redundant) social media tools I use to integrate physical and digital worlds provide meaningful data because the communities from which this information comes tells me about exchange constraints and the information source. Likely, I’ll think about 140 characters from a tweet differently than I’ll think about a 140 word blog post differently than I’ll think about a 140 word comment. I’ll consider other easily accessible information when processing the information provided.

I can minimize points of misunderstanding by having redundant, related information attached to geographic places that I relate to by virtue of professional or personal roles in my life that is temporal and spatial. For example, if I were still living on the East Coast and talking about a short, weekend trip to Portland, is that Portland, Maine or Portland, Oregon?

Would your answer change if you knew that I had an older sister (with whom I enjoy a close relationship) living in Portland, Oregon and no relationship to anyone in the state of Maine?

Would your answer change if you knew that I were dealing with a personally challenging experience and felt incredibly overwhelmed?

Ok, enough about the hypotheticals - to get to the point:
What I fail to understand is how brand managers or evangelists can fail to link their companies’ products or services to each touch with a consumer or user. By dropping this link in interactions, consumers/users lose context behind the interaction and derive less meaning and value from both the interaction and the product. SnagIt’s Betsy Weber will always have a place in my heart because she’s an awesome person who lets me know to let her know if I have problems with SnagIt. She’s also interesting - she travels, lives in the midwest, shares her life with me. I don’t abuse my access to her because of context. I have an arm’s length, personal relationship with her and that’s enough for me to understand why she reaches out to me and engages me about the product. She doesn’t abuse my ear with shameless self-promotion because of context. Understanding that value makes me want to share this story.

Brand isn’t what you’re saying about yourself. It’s what others are saying about you.

Thanks to Jim Benson, for providing the conversation that sparked these thoughts on context. Read his thoughts on context on his blog, Evolving Web.