Category: Social Networking

Naked on the Fourth Plinth

In London’s famous Trafalgar Square there are a set of plinths with sculptures on them, there is also another plinth – known as the fourth plinth – which doesn’t have anything permanent on it.

Jimmy and Granddad visit Alnwick GardensThis fourth plinth has, in recent years, been used to host all sorts of art projects and installations.

The installation that gained, probably, the most public interest was Anthony Gormley’s One & Other.

In this project people were invited to apply for a sixty minute slot on the fourth plinth. The intention was to “create a collective portrait of humanity”, this translated into people doing all sorts of things for their sixty minutes of fame. Many people chose to carry plaques with a message on them others performed an activity, all of them were videoed.

The people who gained the most fame were, not surprisingly, the people who chose to spend some, or all, of their time naked.

I sometimes ask myself the question when I’m posting something to Twitter or Facebook or even this blog:

If I were stood naked on the fourth plinth and the whole of London were watching would I still be comfortable saying this?

There are a lot of people who could do with a similar checkpoint before they write and post.

(The reality of posting to Twitter or Facebook (or any other ‘social’ site) is actually a whole lot scarier than standing on the fourth plinth with a plaque but for some reason the scariness doesn’t translate into caution)

Micro-celebrity

The other day I wrote about Social Currency and some of the ways that we could potentially be measured for our online presence.

BorrowdaleOne of the things that I’ve been pondering while playing with these different tools has been the social impact of these changes.

This kind of change always has extremes and today I’ve been reading about some of those through an article by Danah Boyd (apophenia) called “Publicity and the Culture of Celebritization“.

This article comments on an article in Rolling Stone about a 14-year-old teen in Florida who has created an online persona called Kiki Kannibal.

You’ve probably never heard of Kiki Kannibal but she’s created quite a stir in her sphere of influence, but it’s not all been good.

In many ways she’s created a level of online celebrity without any of the protection that wider celebrities often receive and the internet can be a very unforgiving place.

Danah makes some really interesting observations about the growing “attention economy” and our ability to deal with “micro-celebrity” and in particular the social and cultural capabilities available to us:

Widespread celebritization is the flipside of the “attention economy” coin and I think that we have a lot of deep thinking to do about the implications of both of these. Both are already rattling society in unexpected ways and I’m not convinced that we have the social, psychological, or cultural infrastructure to manage what will unfold. Some people will become famous or rich. Others will commit suicide or drown attempting to swim in these rocky waves. This doesn’t mean that we should blockade the technologies that are emerging, but it’s high time that we start reflecting on the societal values that are getting magnified by them.

I agree.

We have a long way to go before we understand what we are doing to ourselves in an online world and how we deal with it.

(Charlie pointed out Klout as another way of measuring your social connectedness. It’s interesting to see the score of people I connect to)

Social Currency

I’ve been playing with a couple of tools recently, both of them focussed on assessing someone’s social value.

Williamson ParkThe first one is Empire Avenue which is an online market game where you can buy and sell shares in other people’s social media presence.

My share value is currently running around 25 eaves up from a starting price of around 17 eaves. Not a bad profit Smile.

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Your value is influenced by a number of things but primarily by your online social interactions.

I’ve now got 8 share holders too who’ve made some good eaves out of my share price rise. My portfolio is doing quite well too.

The other tool is My Web Career which seeks to measure your online presence in terms of a ‘Career Score’:

A Career Score is an indication of the strength of an individuals career brand, professional accomplishments, and relationships.

Here’s my current score:

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It would appear from this that I’m not doing too badly at creating an online presence Smile.

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There’s also some really interesting visualisations of my connections which have been quite interesting to nosey around. Who knew that they were connected to them?

Both of these tools raise some interesting questions about the value and the perils of the read-write web and social media.

We all need to remember that our online presence is available around the world and to millions of eyes.

We each need to decide what kind of presence we want to have online.

We also need to realise that our online presence is a differentiator in the workplace with both our customers, employers and potential future employers. It’s a social currency.

(If the truth be known – I thought twice before I wrote this post because I wasn’t sure that it was a good thing to write)

Old Dogs and New Tricks

One of the challenges I find as I get older is how I continue to be open to new ways of doing things.

Surveying the landThe world of work is consistently changing and in order to stay valuable we need to change with it. An example of this has recently become evident to me. I used to do a job that was very valuable within the business, I can now see a situation where the business no longer requires people with that role. It’s not just that the role is being diminished – it’s no longer needed at all.

If I’d stayed doing what I was doing I would now be feeling very sensitive about my position going forward.

Here are the things that I do to stay open to change:

  • Experiment – try new things out it’s a great way finding something out.
  • Read and watch widely – I try to get a broad view on as many things as I can.
  • Converse – other people’s points of view influence my point of view and it’s always better to converse with someone who has a different opinion to you.
  • Listen – conversing involves listening but it’s worth highlighting that it’s the listening part that is the most important.
  • Help – in helping others work through things I get to understand a different perspective
  • Be Open – I try to stay open to someone else having a better idea about something than I do
  • Lay down – I try to stop doing things that are no longer important. This is probably the thing I struggle with the most.
  • Respect – people are rarely the stereotype that they might look like so I try not to prejudge what someone might have to offer.

The Merging of the Lines

I’m sitting here with a device that can plug me straight into the list of activities that await me for my working time.

But I’m not working, this is definitely not the time to be thinking about those activities.

I can take that device with me wherever I go, whenever I go.

The lines in my life become more blurred every day.

Facebook – Reducing the Noise and Losing the Interest

As part of my return to online life after my decontamination over the holidays I went through my Facebook wall and marked anything and everyone I wasn’t really interested in and clicked: “Hide all posts by…”

This had the effect of significantly reducing the number of updates on my wall. It also had a more significant impact – it removed much of the interest too.

I’m not talking about real interest.

I’m talking about the interest I give to all of those times I’ve found myself looking at photos of someone I vaguely know with their dog, cat, budgie, etc.

I’m talking about the interest I give to all of those petty conversations between people who should really be excluded from using a keyboard by virtue of the way in which they waste everyone else’s time.

I’m talking about all of the interest I show to status update messages from the applications that people are using because they don’t have anything better to do.

In short – I lost interest because I significantly reduced the “variable interval reinforcement schedule” of Facebook.

Try it someday you might actually enjoy it.

Monopoly: Social Media Edition

Loving the thought of a Social media Edition of Monopoly, particularly like the idea that Jail has become The Real World.

Monopoly: Social Media Edition
Flowtown – Social Media Marketing Application

Not sure about Blogger being higher up than WordPress? Surely not.

How different would this have looked 5 years ago?

How different will it look in 5 years time?

Business Networking – Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and the Cigarette Shelter

I was reading  the Michael Sampson: Currents blog the other day when I read this:

Is Twitter / Yammer / Socialcast the "new cigarette?"

Your Minster in the SunshineHis question was based on a posting by Joel Stein in Business Week titled “The Secret Cult of Office Smokers”

Joel observes the power of the meetings that occurring every day in the huddles of individuals sharing in the smoking habit.

One of my first bosses was a smoker and I used to marvel at his ability to know things – it didn’t take me long to work out the source of all of his inside information. If something was going to happen he always knew way before it actually occurred, sometimes he would tip us off, but on many occasions he would leave it as a surprise. He’s always be perfectly positioned to take advantage though.

I’ve worked alongside other smokers and without exception they have been well connected, and normally connected above their station in the organisation. There are times when I’ve joined them for the chat because I’ve seen the potential.

Back to Michael’s question: are the social media tools replacing this kind of interaction?

To a certain extent I have found that my connectedness has increased through the use of social media, twitter has connected me with all sorts of knowledgeable and influential people within the IT industry.

Internal connectedness is a bit different, but similar. We run a system based on Jive internally and my ability to connect across the organisational structure has been great. I’ve written more extensively on some of the topics I write about on this blog, on the internal system, resulting in a number of very valuable connections with highly connected people in the organisation.

I have to say, though, it’s still not the smoking corner. There’s still not the serendipitous moments that you get from a chat over some tobacco in a paper sleeve, and I’m not sure why. I’m sure some of it is because the level of honest and openness on the lies of twitter is nothing like the honest we’d display in a much smaller group. But I think there are other factors too.

Playing a new game

Some wisdom from Seth Godin today:

Spring Flowers 2010A car is not merely a faster horse.And email is not a faster fax. And online project management is not a bigger whiteboard. And Facebook is not an electronic rolodex.

Play a new game, not the older game but faster.

I work alongside IT organisations who are often so focussed on getting “more for less” they completely miss the game that is changing around them.

So often the question is focussed on upgrading rather than transitioning – “if I upgrade the corporate email system will it be cheaper” rather than “what opportunities do we have for delivering communications in a better way”. People don’t want corporate email they want communication, and while they are all looking at the corporate email system this thing called social networking comes up behind them and changes the game.

The unwanted results of Social Networking

The other day I was contacted by a friend saying: “Do you know Bob McBill?” (Not his real name)

Light through a filter“I don’t think so” was my reply.

“Well he appears as one of your connections in (insert social networking tool)”

“Oh, really, why?”

“He’s just been sent to prison for (insert serious crime)”

Now it turns out that Bob McBill wasn’t actually one of my direct connections, he was a connection of a connection, but still, it got me thinking.

What does it say to other people that I have a social networking link to a criminal?

Would anyone infer something about me from this connection?

What would it do to my reputation if they did?

In what ways am I handing over control of my reputation to individuals outside my control?

How many other potentially embarrassing connections do I have out there?

Just to be clear, there isn’t anything to infer, this person wasn’t a direct connection anyway, but still…

And yes, I am going to be more careful about my social connections in the future.

Social Networks – Unexpected Results in the Snow

I continue to be surprised by how deeply engrained in our day to day life social networking has become. I had another example of this last week.

Snow in the TableWe’ve been having some extreme weather in the UK over the last few weeks (just to be clear, this is extreme for the UK, it’s normal for other places in the world).

We had for the third time this year a lot of snow starting last Monday, travelling from Scotland and working its way to the South – or so I thought.

We’d already had our snow on Monday evening and Tuesday morning so continued with my plan to travel north to Edinburgh on Wednesday. Having check the weather forecast and road information I concluded that I’d be fine to travel. No more snow was expected and the roads were clear.

This is where social networking kicked in – on Tuesday I had twittered:

Tomorrow I am supposed to be in Edinburgh – what do you think the chances are?

As it happened I had a lovely drive up the M6 as far as Carlisle, enjoying the view of the snow over the Lake District. Passing Carlisle, it started to snow and by the time I’d got to Lockerbie we were down to a single lane and managing to do little more than 20mph. At that point I again twittered:

Did I get to Edinburgh ? No. I got to Lockerbie before turning back.

That evening I received a phone call from my Mum – who isn’t on any social network. She was wanting to make sure that I was OK and that I was home.

I had deliberately not twittered that I was setting off because I didn’t want some people to worry, but still my Mum had found out even though she has no simple way of seeing my updates.

How did she know? She’d been speaking to my sister, who’d seen my original update in Facebook. That wasn’t something I was expecting.

I’m going to have to be even more careful in the future.

http://www.flickr.com/slideShow/index.gne?set_id=72157623171858968&text=Winter%202009/2010
Created with flickr slideshow.

We’re all journalists!

Yesterday Jonathan was involved in a bit of a news incident. One of the buses at his college exploded into flames as it was sitting waiting to leave the college where he studies.

This happened around 4:30pm. According to the local press the fire services were called at 4:26.

By 17:44 the first comments were being added to a Facebook group.

A bit later than this an article was being written on the local newspaper’s site featuring photos and videos taken by students on their mobile phones. The article was posted to Twitter at 18:17.

By 18:44 one of the students (Sam Pratt) posted:

Within two hours and 10 mins since the Runshaw bus fire, a Facebook group was created, 4 videos and 12 photos were on it and the LEP had already covered it on their website. How’s THAT for social media?

By 20:48 it was in the BBC web site with what looks like a security camera picture.

The BBC site has a single 150 word article with a single picture.

The Lancashire Evening Post site has a 650 word article a single video and 7 photographs. There’s also 8 comments (mostly pointing people to the Facebook group)

This morning there are nearly 1200 members of the Facebook group. There are 30 photographs and 8 videos. There are are over 180 different comment threads as well as comments on lots of the photos and videos. Some videos have also been posted to YouTube.

I’m sure that this scenario is being played out all over the world right now because we’re all reporters of the news now.

The Lancashire Evening Post sites say: “See The Evening Post on Friday for exclusive pictures and comments from eyewitnesses", why should I? I’ve already read the eyewitness reports from hundreds of students and seen more than enough photographic evidence.

I’m sure that there is still a need for journalists, but it needs to be about adding value.