Hey all. I’ve had so much support and encouragement from you all that I wanted to share how things are going. It’s late as I write this, so I won’t be typing it up, so enjoy this video:
Photos are on my Posterous and videos on my YouTube.
Tomorrow I’ll be updating you and also getting out the final draft of my participation (not presentation) for final feedback and thoughts.
Back in 2003 when we started running Feedback (a youth charity attached to my church), our first event wasn’t the sell out that I had hoped. Serving gourmet coffee, fresh donuts, jazz performances, and me retelling something I’ve heard on a Tony Robbins tape, it wasn’t exactly the definition of “youth”.
In fact, it was the definition of me.
But over the course of a year, we changed as a team and became far more in touch with what the youth needed, resulting in a packed event with 350 people exactly one year later.
I tell this story because to start it is exemplifies what it is to go fishing with a fishing rod. When we take a fishing rod approach, we can only catch one fish a time and intensely hunt for the single best fish that we can. A good fishing trip bears with it a good story of catching that fish – you know – the one that you hold in the photo and is the length of your body if not more.
The trouble with fishing with a rod is that it’s only ever one at a time, and I’ve found that when we do this, we seek to find what we want as a provider, not what other’s want as an end user. This isn’t always the case, but it tends to be so in my experience.
The alternative, as became as a team after a year, is to fishers who fish with a net. When you take a net, you trall in everything and anything that you can catch, and then sift through it after. It is an undiscriminating way to go about fishing – you don’t pick and choose – you fish. We started to do this when we changed to having coffee to having a bunch of cold drinks and hot drinks. Before it was “you have to the kind of fish that likes gourmet coffee”, but after it was “if you want a drink, we’ve got one for you.” You see the difference?
Sifting through it after means once you’ve pulled up the net, you understand that not everything will stick. This is fundamental to a volume or value based approach – no matter what, people will opt out of certain levels of participation with you, and that’s fine – it’s just where they want to be.
We value your inputs – both your experience and your insights. Talking about Fishing Rods and Fishing Nets,
Photo credit.
On Monday 15th November 2010, I’ll be in London speaking at the Social Not For Profit Summit, organised by the most excellent Barry Furby. It’s a part of the techMAP series of events, which is a community around technology, marketing, advertising and PR.
I did say to Barry at first that I didn’t think I was a good fit, but as he reminded me, I’ve worked in small non-profits for 10 years! My work at The River Church, as well as our offshoots, like Touch Conference, He Saved The Day, others that no longer have websites, and our upcoming project To-Get-Her, which aims to double the number of rooms available for those rescued from Human Trafficking.
In the true spirit of Scott Gould and Friends, I’d like to hear from you what you would share and what you think would add value to this summit.
Barry has asked me to speak on two things, the first of which is about making humanistic campaigns. For me this goes down to Social Authority. Anything campaign we do at church (and with Like Minds) always profiles people of various demographics, as the number one question people ask when it comes to community is “who here is like me?”
The second topic is one that we speak about a lot here through our conversations on participation. By inviting people to be involved, and putting the kids in the show, you increase people’s emotional investment and thus they become advocates with you. Of course, this only works if you genuinely believe in them. You can’t cheat your way to this.
Leadership expert John Maxwell always says that the strongest leadership is needed in church, where people are not paid to work and cannot be threatened to work. I agree – the non-profit realm is where really leadership is needed, so I’m sure there’s some debate to be had here.
If you’re in London on Monday 15th November, then I’d love to see you there. All directions and details are on their website. If you’re wondering if it’s for you, the type of things being look at are:
What about Charities and Not for Profits?
What about those with small or no budget to capitalise on the digital and social landscape?
What about those who struggle to achieve advocacy for their cause and look to Social for a source of inspiration?
How can Social Media turn supporters into advocates?
How do you bring together your community online?
As I said, I’d like to take your insights and present them.
Photo credit
Recently, a woman by the name of Phyllis Wills passed away.
Type her name into Google, and you’ll find nothing about her. Ask people on the street about her, and you’ll find no body knew her. In fact the only person I know who knows much about Phyllis is my dad.
About 21 years ago, in response to a desperate phone call from a drunken and depressed man who had reached the end of himself along with his wife, Phyllis went down to their home with curlers still in her hair (as she was mid-perm at the point of the phone call), and spent time counselling them. That was the night that my family became Christians, when I was 5 years old.
My dad knew Phyllis because when he was 3 years old, he was run over in a car accident. The doctors told his mother (my grandmother) that he wouldn’t make it through the night, so she went to the local church and it was Phyllis who prayed with her late at night that my dad wouldn’t die. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to know what happened!
The point was that she was there for him. She mattered.
The reason why I write this is it’s just one way that someone has effected my life – without whom I wouldn’t even exist. In other words, Phyllis mattered to my life. My life was built on her contribution.
I had the chance to catch up with Matt Young last week, who runs Rokk Xpress, a company dedicated to creating websites only under the value of £2,000 and thus filling a huge gap in the market for quality low cost websites.
I really like what Matt is doing, because let’s be honest, most people forget about the little guys and instead look on to being the next big thing.
What’s particularly special to me is that as Matt mentions, he got connected with my friend Adam Stone who runs the Rokk mothership through Like Minds. It’s what it’s all about. It’s a sterling reminder to me to MATTER.
I had a video interview with Dan Blank last week on how to serve and grow communities. We talked about what communities really are, how Facebook community rarely exists, and how communities are full of micro-communities, among other things.
The interview came at just the right time, as I’d written about communities in a number of recent posts, with regards to Facebook Groups, and again with regards to Warmth and Light in Church.
Thanks to Dan for conducting the interview. I gained a lot from the discussion and it’s really helped me frame some of what I was thinking.
You can watch the video of our interview here.
Yesterday Facebook released a new version of Groups. So what?
Well firstly, phew!, finally Groups and Pages are different again and groups appear to have functionality that would make you want to use them! I don’t know about you but as a marketer and community builder, I struggled between knowing which to use for what, based on the benefits of both.
However now these new Groups have been built from the ground up with a new resolution to facilitate real world groups and communities that already exist, something that gets back to the core of Facebook’s early mission of ‘helping you connect with the people you know.’ And within this, I think there is not only opportuniy, but also it acts as a confirmation about what we’re now thinking about communities in general.
Let me take church as an example, seeing as I used it recently already to illustrate community. A church meets every Sunday for their service, which is the macro community, where all the people come together, no matter what age, demographic, class, gender, ethnicity, etc. But it isn’t the virtue of Sunday in itself that brings this community together nor holds it together. In actual fact, we find subsets of communities within this community, micro community if you will, where people exchange life on a more frequent and deeper level.
Therefore, macro community is the product of micro communities. The strength of this macro community is the strength of these micro communities – the strength of the bonds between the people in them, and the strength of the bonds that link these micro communities together.
This isn’t just a church thing. Take #LikeMinds and you’ll find we have micro communities within our macro community. Take your school, your family, your friendship groups, and so on.
What this reminds me of is this slide below from “The Real Social Network“, an exquisite and mind-shifting, a-ha moment presentation from Paul Adams at Google. It basically says that we can’t approach social networks from the point of view that we have one community, because we don’t. We have different sets of friends who we might say totally different things to. In other words, micro communities that make up our own personal macro community.
Whilst Facebook isn’t a single community, we currently have to treat it like it is. I have to send my Church updates to everyone, and my work updates to everyone. It’s just one community. And when I do share any of this content, it is quite clearly owned by me, not by anyone else.
What Facebook now appear to be doing is giving us a way to groupalise content. Remove my made up word and you’d have ‘co-owned content’ or something similar. The groups allow you to have group photos, group tags, group emails, group documents – a space where no one is really the owner but where everything is shared.
This means, it I use the image above, I could now form a group for each of those 4 communities above, and govern or guide it accordingly.
From my early testing, these new Groups insert the updates into the news feed for those who are following them, meaning I have a new way to keep track of information that relates to an area of my life. Previously, it was this ability that gave Facebook Pages a competitive advantage over Facebook groups. Facebook Social Plugins, however are currently still only with Pages or customised content, so Groups don’t have a weigh in there yet.
When I use Mail to send an email to certain teams, I can type the name of that group. Now, I can do the same with the new Facebook Groups, as well as see it in the news feed. This is a powerful move towards what The Real Social Network was talking about when it said that we don’t have one single community.
The way that I plan to use them is like I’d use this email contact group, a place to foster micro community through curation of people (not so much content.) The difference over the old format of groups is that I get notifications on all the activity. This is really lacking when it comes to Pages, but now means I can track everything in that group. Considering that for many Facebook has replaced email, and is their top communication method other than talking, it makes sense for me now to conduct work through a Facebook group that will automatically keep me up-to-date on all the activity.
Facebook making this change tells me a lot about how we are changing in our knowledge economy. Facebook has become strikingly powerful at both reflecting and shaping how we think and interact. I’m interested to see how this changes us. ‘Friend’ was their first big thing, then ‘wall’, and then most powerfully with ‘like’. Whats the new verb or noun going to be now?
Light might bring someone to you, but it’s warmth that keeps them. When it comes to church in particular, people don’t just want great direction – as in teaching, a well run service, professional handouts, great songs – they want connection – the warmth of friends, family, shared interest, prayer groups, etc.
Consider your blog. It might be the light and great insights that gets them to read it at first, but it’s the warmth and sense of community that will have them stay. I would certainly say that any success that I have with building this blog is because I’ve provided warmth to those who regularly contribute here.
Providing warmth in business is much the same. It might start with a Christmas card, but it becomes about caring for your clients and thinking about how you can not only provide a great product (light), but the service and care that makes it work (warmth.)
I love our blog. We had a wonderful discussion this week about the reformation of this blog into “Scott Gould and Friends” as a place of collaboration, where comments and equal to blog posts, and where regular contributors can have a voice.
One of my thoughts around this is that this blog is only part of the conversation. If I’m on James Poulter’s blog, I’ll be discussing the recommendation economy, whereas if I’m on Jeff Hurt’s blog, I’m discussing event design. It’s one big conversation that I’m having with similar people, but the topics at Scott Gould and Friends are different to the topics elsewhere.
If I think like this, then I realise this is just one a many corners for conversation. But the best most blogs come to realising this fact is a blog roll or aggregating posts – neither of which are a particularly meaningful way to join conversations together.
In the comments on Tuesday, Robin said so truly that “the currently available blog templates are designed around the self-centric web-logging.” That means we need to address how our blogs work from a design standpoint if we want to adopt the idea that conversations are happening across multiple blogs, not just in one place.
I want to provide every regular contributor here, every Friend, a profile on the WordPress installation. Then they could have a profile so you can find out about the main people adding to the conversation here. That would also mean that their posts are pulled into this site (but linking to their sites), meaning that the homepage on this blog is more about showing the best conversations across multiple places.
It would mean that these Friends can also write posts for this site and add to the conversation. This would go hand in hand with a new way to display comments, ideally, as just as important as posts themselves, with the ability to tag those posts.
This is just the beginning, but I think it gets in moving in the right direction towards the future of blogging – collaboration and sharing.
I then like the idea of having a digital book club, whereby we have conversations about a particular book say every Friday, where people can read up before hand and come to the conversation prepared. This could subsequently ooze into video interviews and such.
At 5pm today UK time (which is 12:00 ET), I’m on a live video interview with Dan Blank, a writer and consultant who I’ve really come to respect over the last 6 months.
The show is “We Grow Media“, which is also Dan’s consultancy. You can watch it live, which means you can pitch in with questions and insights during the interview.
Seeing as this is our blog and all, then this is our interview, and I’ll be talking about our community. Keep in touch while it’s live and give plenty of feedback!