Broadcasting Brain

Earlier this week I described some of my thoughts about how Web 2.0 technologies could help us remove degrees of separation between people. In particular, social networking allows individuals to make some form of connection with each other without meeting in person. However, there are some realistic limits on how readily or deeply individuals will widen their social circles to include people they’ve never met in person.

My most recent post ended on a bit of a negative note, suggesting that new technologies really aren’t going to help us get directly to the person that we’d like to communicate with if they aren’t willing and able to reciprocate.

Now I’m going to try to bring things back up to a more positive note. I don’t think that social media and Web 2.0 are completely useless; if you’ve been reading this blog long enough, you’d know I’m a believer, although I stop short of “drinking the KoolAid”. At the same time, I think that many people are becoming more open to communicating with people from all locations and walks of life, particularly through social media.

So, how can we succeed in this environment?

I think there are a few things that we can do to try to get in closer contact with the people we’d like to talk to by combining some tried and true methods of networking with today’s newer technologies:

Just try

Bloggers almost always have a contact form or an E-Mail address that you can use to contact the blogger. In some cases, these are for show but there’s little intent behind them. It’s understandable that some people don’t have the time or energy to respond to every request for contact and information. At the same time, don’t let that deter you if you think you have a valid reason for getting in contact with someone.

In my experience, there’s one blogger who’s extremely responsive to communication requests, despite what you might think to the contrary. This is a very famous A list blogger and author who is well known for not allowing comments on his blog. But, try E-Mailing Seth Godin and you may be in for a surprise. It’s likely that he will respond to you as long as you are not obviously spamming him. I’ve traded several different E-Mails with him and it’s been cool.

I’ve also gotten in touch with other people using E-Mail. That’s worked. With some people, you may need to change the medium. Maybe a Twitter message or an IM will be better. We know that some people are receptive to phone calls. Heck, blog comments can work really well. Check all of the different media and try to find one that works. Just don’t be obsessive about it.

Persistence and marketing through good (no, great) work

The best way to market yourself is to do great work. It doesn’t matter what it is: blogging, articles, audio, video, photography… just be the best you can be at any given point in time. Then try harder and work smarter next time. And keep repeating so that your skills and experience grow.

If you’ve done something good, great, amazing, or remarkable, it gives you a way to introduce and market yourself. There are lots of other blogs that you can read that can give you ideas about how to create better. I’ve got some ideas on this blog as well. The point is that you’ve got to work on it. Create, analyze, get feedback, learn lessons, and create more. Build your material over time.

People love talking to other people who do great stuff.

Connection, recommendation, and introduction

I think that recommendation, referral, and intermediate connections are potentially the most powerful way to remove some of the degrees of separation. Social networks have grown tremendously in the Web 2.0 era. MySpace and Facebook, and other applications, have really captured the personal, non-work site of networking (although in some cases they do include pieces of your professional life, depending on your profession.) However, I think that LinkedIn has the potential to be the most powerful personal recommendation application out there.

There are three major reasons why I think LinkedIn is the winner in this space:

1) Connections: I find that the Connection functionality in LinkedIn is superior to anything Facebook has. Between that and the detailed work and personal experience that you can store in LinkedIn, you get a powerful “social graph” that allows you to see how you are connected to other people.
2) Recommendation: in the past we had references that we put on our paper resumes. These references were the people who would vouch for our character and our performance. LinkedIn allows us to store public recommendations (in public view!) that persist over time. Giving and receiving a recommendation is like exchanging social capital (the ability to communicate and work with other people).
3) Referral: by maintaining a trusted and respected social graph, you can refer strangers to other people with a sense of trust and integrity. LinkedIn provides that kind of referral service. It also provides an Introduction service (only available to paid users, alas) to help you out in a cold-call situation.

Facebook or MySpace might have bits and pieces of this functionality, but (to my knowledge) they haven’t put it together the way that LinkedIn has. LinkedIn’s connection and recommendation network gives it a strength similar to eBay Buyer/Seller reputation – it’s golden if you follow the rules, but if you abuse it, you’ll lose it.

LinkedIn might not be the ultimate social networking application, but it’s great at what it does.

So how does this help us remove degrees of separation?

It might not help with direction connections, at least not initially. However, through intelligent use of networking and social graph monitoring, you can find potential referrers that you never knew about before. These potential referrers may not be well known, but they may know a surprising large number of people. Some of these people are the “connectors” from Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point – they thrive on meeting and introducing different people. If you can get in contact and get their trust, they can help you get in touch with other valuable people. As these individuals become social media users, the ability to remove degrees of separation will only grow over time. You don’t even need to exclusively seek out connectors. You never know the value of any person who you might meet. The Golden Rule can go a long way in helping you make connections.

Some parting thoughts

As technology evolves to allow us to do more things faster and more easily, the importance of people skills and networking seems to become even more important. On the one hand, there are many more ways to contact an individual as we’ve evolved from type 0 to type 1 to type 2 communication methods. However, most people still have limits on their ability to build numerous relationships and to process data. That’s why, despite the limitations, it’s important to develop a broad-based group of contacts as well as to prove yourself to be trustworthy and talented.

This kind of strategic and tactical networking may seem manipulative or distasteful and that’s the way I used to look at it. To a large extent I still think it’s manipulative if the wrong (selfish, damaging, abusive) intent motivates interaction. However, if you keep reciprocity and respect as guidelines for conduct and look for the famous “win/win” situations, networking is a powerful tool which can do wonders when used correctly. I have a lot of respect for that and I’m no social butterfly!

These four posts have spent a lot of time discussing my thoughts and ideas on this topic. I don’t consider myself to be a social networking expert, but I have learned a few things that I thought were worth sharing. If they help you meet your personal goals and objectives, then that’s great!

And what do you think about these “six degrees of separation” thoughts and ideas? Why not share your thoughts in the blog comments section?

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When last we spoke, we looked at how people are gaining access to multiple communication methods that provide additional contact points. Many of you who read this blog have experienced this growth in websites, applications, and services that are Web variations on a personal conversation or telephone call. But does it really make it any easier to connect with people that you don’t know?

You may recall these three diagrams from yesterday’s post:

When you look at the diagrams in sequence, you can visualize how we have acquired more channels that allow us to “talk” and to “listen” to other people “talk” than those generations who came before us. The powerful thing about these channels is that different groups of people use them. With the right combination of contacts across services, you can effectively remove degrees of separation by going right to the source.

I used Robert Scoble as an example yesterday, but while he is certainly hyperconnected, he’s not necessarily the best example of the power of this phenomenon.

Why?

Simple.

As I mentioned yesterday, he publishes his cell phone number on his blog. That means that all you need to do to contact Robert Scoble is to give him a phone call. (It might not be THAT easy, but stay with me.) Of course, the easiest way to find that phone number is to get to his blog, which is less than ten years old. Prior to that, Robert Scoble might have been harder to find and he was a bit less well-known.

CEOs, professional athletes, actors, etc. generally don’t publicize their cell phone numbers, so they are harder to call. However, a number of them have blogs, so you can try to contact them via their blog comment section or by E-Mail. Type 2 communication tools come to the rescue again. Blog comments are the only way that I can think of to get Wil Wheaton’s attention, as an example, although we could have a mutual acquaintance that I’m not aware of.

If you’re really lucky, you might be able to take advantage of the “friend of a friend” phenomenon and get in touch with someone who you couldn’t normally contact. Web technology may allow you to build these intermediate contact points in ways that we couldn’t do previously. I might be able to get in touch with someone outside of my day-to-day existence if I tap into my network of contacts.

By tapping intelligently into my own personal network, I could halve the “six degrees” that separated me from a lot of other people before Web 2.0 was spun. Heck, maybe I could even reduce them to one degree.

The fly in the ointment in the Web

But, of course, this is all bullshit.

Newer communication technologies really aren’t making it that much easier to connect with people that we don’t know.

Actually, that’s not true.

The technologies aren’t the problem - we are. Here’s why:

Receptiveness or openness

Put simply, you can’t communicate with someone if they aren’t willing listen. Social media early adopters (hello you!) are willing to both talk and (normally) listen. Some people are really, really good at casting their ear into cyberspace and absorbing conversations. Others aren’t. To be really blunt, there are a lot of professionals or celebrities who probably don’t see any benefit in opening themselves up to multiple voices, so they won’t.

People have got to be open to listening. Are you really as open to multiple conversations as you could be? Or should be?

Attention bandwidth

Much has been made about the collective onset of attention deficit disorders throughout modern society. Despite how you feel about that particular issue, there’s no doubt that the sheer amount of information and stimuli in our environments, especially if you use a computer or similar technology at work, has increased significantly during the most recent decades.

Even if you are open to listening, there’s a lot of people and things trying to get your attention. The same holds true for everyone else. Everyone’s fighting for fractions of attention share.

Quality of connection or Dunbar’s number

Dunbar was a researcher who did some experiments and theorizing to try to make some conclusions about the ability of human beings to form meaningful relationships with other people. Malcolm Gladwell used this idea, encapsulated in Dunbar’s limit of up to 150 meaningful relationships per person, in The Tipping Point.

There’s been some debate about Dunbar’s research, based partially on the study of simians, and his conclusions. Some researchers think that the actual number of relationships could be closer to 300.

Well. This is all fine and good. However… if you look at Twitterholic and check out the list of the Top 10 Twitters, they all have at least 27,000 followers (number 1, Kevin Rose, has about twice that number).

I’m sorry, but it’s just not possible to form meaningful relationships with that many people. You would spend all of your waking hours, and then some, trying to maintain relationships with tens of thousands of people. So, even if your target is receptive to being contacted and they have some attention share available, you’ve got to compete with the masses - again.

Are the six degrees of separation unbeatable?

So, to summarize:

• People have to want communication outside their normal set of connections (the first degree)
• People have to have attention time in order to be contacted
• There are already too many people wanting their disposable attention space

Maybe we just can’t get past these limitations. Maybe the technology is good, but human beings just fail at this problem. Maybe the average of six degrees of separation is a human limitation that we have to live with.

Or do we?

Tune in next time for the final installment, in which I try to suggest some ways to deal with this situation.

Will the myriads of social media applications serve to remove degrees of separation or will they make any difference at all?

In my previous post, I reviewed the six degrees of separation phenomenon and began speculating how our new era of hyperconnectivity might serve to remove degrees of separation between people.

Here’s a quick look at a definition of hyperconnectivity:

[Hyperconnectivity] refers to the use of multiple means of communication, such as email, instant messaging, telephone, face-to-face contact and Web 2.0 information services.
It has become more common for people to use multiple communication methods to stay in touch, with a growing adoption of Internet and Web based methods. New applications seems to appear regularly.

Let’s look at how communication methods have evolved.

Type 0 (pre-Web and pre-ubiquitous Internet access)

Examples of Type 0 communication methods:

• Postal mail and courier (letters and documents)
• Faxes
• Telephone calls (person to person or conference)
• Telegrams
• Internal network E-Mails
• Physical meetings
• Mass media

Many of us, and the generations before us, grew up in a world limited by type 0 communication methods. Or at least we did for part of our lives.

Type 1 (ubiquitous Internet access, Web 1.0 era)

Type 0 plus:

• Internet E-Mail
• Video conferencing
• E-Mail lists
• Usenet
• Private forums
• Static websites and the original weblogs

Those of us who belong to Generation X were the first generation to experience the onset of Type 1 communication methods as we went on to post-secondary education and then joined the workforce. In my case, I remember how company-wide E-Mail was first introduced into my company about 13 years ago. Generation Y would have seen these developments as they entered primary school.

Type 2 (ubiquitous high speed Internet access, Web 2.0)

Type 0 and 1 plus:

• Social media and Web 2.0 (social news, social bookmarking, and social networking)
• Microblogging, aggregators, lifestreaming, blog commenting
• Audio and video blogging
• Open IM clients (e.g. GTalk)
• Wireless connectivity

Communication advances have generally created faster and easier to use methods. In the pre-Internet era, nothing was faster than a phone call except for a face-to-face meeting (although travel time to arrange a face-to-face meeting was often prohibitive). Today we have a number of methods that allow virtually real-time interaction and more variations on them seem to appear on a regular basis.

A real-life example

Some people choose to embrace new forms of communication as they become available.

Fast Company.tv managing director Robert Scoble is a well-known (in technology and social media circles) example of a hyperconnected person. He is well-known for publishing his cell phone number on his blog and was one of the first prominent bloggers to do so, inspiring other bloggers to do the same. He also gained attention for autofollowing every Twitter user who followed him (although he later abandoned that practice after gaining over 20,000 followers). He uses other services and gains large numbers of followers on those services.

Robert Scoble is clearly a hyperconnected individual and has met a wide variety of people through his work and social activities. Not only does he use multiple methods of communication (from Types 0, 1, and 2), but he uses them to connect with large numbers of people. If you can connect to someone like Robert Scoble (or Leo Laporte, Kevin Rose, Jason Calacanis, Laura Fitton, Chris Brogan, or a number of other highly connected social media users), the combination of technology and social connectedness might allow you to skip degrees of separation and shorten the average path length between individuals.

Or so you would think.

In my next post, I’ll talk about some of the reasons why improved technology isn’t much help in removing those pesky degrees of separation.

The phrase six degrees of separation is permanently etched into our collective psyches. The idea that every person in the world is generally no more than six degrees or connections removed from each other is a powerful, sticky concept that resonates with many people. Web 2.0 technologies, a continuation of the advancement of communication capabilities, may be helping us cut that average in half, especially through social networking sites like Facebook and microblogging services like Twitter. Or will technology be stymied by human nature? In this series of posts, we’re going to explore the concepts of connections and networking and try to determine whether or not they effectively serve to flatten and shrink our world.

Six degrees of separation

This catch phrase was inspired by the results of the “small world” experiments conducted by social psychologist Stanley Milgram in the United States of America in 1967 in order to determine how long it would take to get a letter from one stranger to another. After the results of this test were analyzed, Milgram’s team determined that the average path length, or the number of connections required to get from one point to another, was approximately 5.5, which rounds up to six.

Over time, the phrase “six degrees of separation” was coined and made popular by the entertainment world. John Guare’s 1990 play of the same name helped to entrench the phrase into popular culture. The Milgram experiments were also referred to in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point in his descriptions of how fads and ideas can spread through society.

The limiting factors of the “six degrees” experiment

The small world experiments were conducted using postal mail in a limited number of scenarios. The world of 1967 did not have the same communications tools that we have today, not as dispersed and as highly used as we currently do.

However, subsequent research has yielded some interesting results. Researcher Duncan Watts tested this theory using E-Mail in 2001 and determined that “six degrees” was the average path length between participants located in over 157 countries. Jure Leskovec and Eric Horvitz used Microsoft Messenger as their medium of choice in 2007 and found an average path length of 6.6, which is similar to the findings in the other two studies.

It’s worth noting that in all three examples, the messages used a single transport mechanism (postal mail; email, and a single instant messenger service).

The potential shortening effect of hyperconnectivity

Those of us who work and/or play in the social media world have seen a significant growth in the number of communication methods that can be used via the Web. Although many of these services are variations of common functionality sets, they have separate communities of users with significant overlap. If you belong to one online community, it’s very likely that you’ll belong to several. In fact, in this “hyperconnected world”, many of us belong to multiple online communities and we use different communication methods depending on our needs.

Is it possible that we can shrink the size of the world further than the experiments of Milgram, Watts, and Leskovec and Horvitz have shown by using hyperconnectivity to remove degrees of separation?

In my next post, I’ll discuss the pros of using hyperconnectivity to remove degrees. Following that, I’ll look at the constraints on the effectiveness of hyperconnectivity and I’ll present some conclusions on the topic.

Stay tuned!

One of the changes that Web technology has helped to deliver to the world, in addition to all of this social media stuff, is electronic commerce for the consumer. We pay online with credit cards or PayPal and we can pay many of our bills online directly from our bank accounts using a Web browser. Nonetheless, these advances in technology, which require some trust and faith in the controlling institutions, aren’t always widely adopted.

Our attitudes towards allowing outsiders to have access to our finances vary by individual, but countries also seem to hold certain attitudes towards trusting financial institutions.

How we do business

Here are a few personal observations:

• Credit cards are very widely adopted across all walks of life where circumstances permit. B2C (business to consumer) commerce would never have become as widely adopted as it has become without a credit card, or something similar.
• Electronic payments (manual or automated) directly from checking accounts are less widely adopted in certain countries than others.
• Payment by debit card varies in popularity as well, although transaction fees have an impact on adoption as much as anything else.
• Direct pay deposit to your bank account is another one that may have mixed adoption rates. It’s very popular here in Canada but I expect that it’s less popular in places like the United States, as an example.

I believe that Canadians are more trusting of their financial institutions, and electronic banking in general, than our neighbors in the US. I don’t know what it’s like in the European Union, Australia, Africa, Asia, or other parts of the world.

Your personal financial situation also influences your trust in financial institutions and your openness to electronic commerce. I would argue that people who aren’t living paycheck to paycheck to get by in life are more open to things like direct deposit, automated payments, debit cards, and so on because they have some disposable income.

Would social media make us trust the banks more?

Sometimes we find it hard to trust financial institutions because they either seem to make insanely large profits for what appears to be little effort or because they seem to screw things up enough to make us nervous.

Could social media play a role in building trust between consumers and financial institutions?

As ridiculous as this question may seem, it would be an interesting test to see how mainstream and relevant social media would be.

What do you think?

Could the community management, customer service, and communication tools in Web 2.0 help banks and other financial institutions inspire trust, loyalty, and enthusiasm in consumers?

Tumblelogs… what to do with them?

Tumblelogs, such as Tumblr, are used to quickly assemble a stream of links, text, images, etc. Tumblelogs harken back to some of the original intent of weblogs - sharing links to interesting, useful, or cool websites with an application that is also faster and easier to learn that the standard blogging platforms like Wordpress, Blogger, or Moveable Type.

The thing is, once you’re used to using one of these other blogging platforms and dabbling in HTML/CSS a bit, you might not be inclined to use a tumblelog. There’s a tradeoff: while you gain ease of use, you lose some of the flexibility and customization power that you get from traditional blogging platforms.

I use a Tumblr account to track certain items for future reference but I have at least two other bookmarking means to do that:

• StumbleUpon
• Deli.cio.us

This week I thought of a different idea for using a tumblelog and I thought I’d share it with you.

I’m using this tumblelog (powered by Soup.io) to act as a portfolio of guest posts that I’ve written for other blogs. It took me less than one hour to set up the tumblelog with links to my guest posts, as well as some formatting of the basic tumblelog template to get the look that I wanted.

I’ve changed the My Writing page of my blog to refer to the tumblelog and removed the original text entries.

Now that I’ve set it up, here are the possible benefits and disadvantages of using a tumblelog for this job:

Pros of using the tumblelog for my portfolio:

• I don’t have to update my own blog anymore whenever I write a guest post; I just add it to the tumblelog.
• It’s very easy to add the links to the tumblelog.
• If a potential employer wants to see samples of my blog writing, I can just give them the link to the tumblelog.

Cons of using the tumblelog for my portfolio:

• The tumblelog template isn’t as flexible or powerful as I might like.
• It encourages readers to click out of my blog when, ideally, I’d like to keep them there.

Next steps

I’m going to try using the tumblelog as my portolio for one month and see how it goes. If the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, I’ll expand the concept to some other writing.

What do you think? Do you have any innovative uses for tumblelogs? Why not share them with the rest of us?

And, while you’re here, please subscribe to Broadcasting Brain (either with an RSS reader or by E-Mail) so you can stay up to date on other good ideas from this blog.

Jeff Pulver wrote a post earlier this week called So Who Are YOU that has kind of been sticking in my Broadcasting Brain this week. Here’s an excerpt for your consideration:

There are times when you may look at yourself in the mirror and you may not recognize the stranger you have become.

This is a sign to sit down, take a deep breath and ask yourself “How did I get here?”

What scares me is that I’m not sure if the Jeff of 2008 would even be friends with the Jeff of 1995. But I hope we could find enough things in common to connect and maintain an active friendship.

This is a good mental exercise to go through. Throw aside the social media apps, blogging, technology, and other trappings and compare yourself now to then. Or should you discount it? Has today’s technology helped to change the kind of person that you are? Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe it has amplified certain skills and personality traits. Maybe it has dampened others.

What do you think?

As a bit of a follow-up from my guest post at LouisGray.com, where I talk about ways to enlarge the social media audience size, I have a simple thought for today.

Sometimes another social media user says something really dumb, ignorant, or otherwise embarrassing. These statements can make that other person an easy target. You can use their moment of weakness to attempt to show that you are better, stronger, faster, or otherwise superior to them by cutting them down.

The next time you see that happen, take a minute to think of a constructive response, then try contacting that person privately and let them know what you think. Show them the error that they’ve made, but don’t rub their noses in it either.

Don’t use a moment of weakness to promote yourself by leaving your footprints on the perpetrator’s back. Who knows? That act of kindness may turn out to be a beautiful thing.

And, if they reject you, just let it drop. Live and let live. Move onto something more constructive.

I don’t believe that any of my readers would engage in this kind of behavior. However, if you know someone who could get some value from this lesson, why not pass this thought onto them?

Mass media marketing thrives on controversy and chaos to get ratings. What century is this again?

Today I’m just going to give a quick update on recent and upcoming activities:

Last night I attended the Third Tuesday Social Media Meetup in Fredericton, NB at the offices of Radian6. I had a chance to socialize with some local social media enthusiasts and learn a few new things. I dragged a co-worker along and he seemed to enjoy himself, too, so that’s all cool. I learned a bit more about LinkedIn, which I’m sure will be useful in the long run.

Two guest Brain appearances this week:

Blogging: Bored With Your Feeds - Try Toluu - guest post at Geeks Are Sexy (mentally sexy, anyway) where I give a quick overview of the up and coming Web application Toluu.

Podcasting: I was a guest on the most recent Social Blend podcast on Friday, July 18 - the podcast should be up and available later this week. It was a lot of fun! I’ll link to that as well when it’s available. My podcasting debut!  EDIT:  here’s the link to the Social Blend podcast that I’m on.

Note: I did Q&A sessions with SilentJay74, Bdog2g2, Nomadelle, and CGT2099 at this blog a week or so ago.

Have a good day, explore the world, and doing something special.

Image credit: Christina Snyder.

I think it’s the sloganeers that win most of my respect and admiration. In the advertising world, that is. Perhaps it’s the act of writing sales or ad copy that can really show what you’re made of. Finding that magic blend of brevity, wit, and power is yet another of those tempting grapes that I keep leaping for, yet it seems to keep eluding me.

Every now and then I see something and a little phrase pops to mind. Normally it’s a pun or wordplay that lands softly on my tongue and leaps out at the first opportunity. I want to be first to introduce the latest and greatest neologism to grace the minds and hearts of my peers and neighbors in social media. (I’m incredibly jealous of James Chartrand for inventing “niebu”. Well, he didn’t really invent it; his fat fingers did. But I digress as the envy express loads up for the next ride.) Or anywhere, really. As long as it’s clever and (here it comes) I get some credit for originating the pithy phrase, I’ll take what I can get.

This is turning into a more serious condition for me, though. I think I have coinage envy (see, I can’t stop trying!) Or punitus. Here are some (overlooked) examples of mine that I saved in Twitter:

• Q: What song do pirates sing when they’re outnumbered/outgunned by other pirates? A: “You’ve got to fight, for your right, to parlay!”
• If Saturday night’s all right for fighting, is Monday morning all right for moaning?
• There is only one thing worse than not being talked about and that is not being Twittered about - apologies to O. Wilde
• I saw the phrase “shrinkage enhancement” in a doc. at work today and thought, hm… oxymoron?
• Air conditioning - the miracle that ultimately made Web 2.0 possible.

And then there’s the attempts at pseudo-technical terminology!

• Idea injection method
• Rookiememe
• Chattercrack
• Humpday Linkage (an actual weblog that I used to post on Wednesdays)

But of course, other smart minds are out there grabbing the terms like “Twebinar”, “Plurkcast”, “Plurker”, “Clowd”, and Facebook and Twitter and… Google… and…

[deep breath]

OK, what to do? Should I abandon this pointless quest for sentence success? Or should I keep trying for something shining that “sticks”? (more on this later)

EDIT:  and, most importantly, should I get a life?