Mass Relationship

Posted on March 19, 2010 by Scott Gould

In the comment section of our discussion this week on Social Media not being ‘social’, Robin Dickinson and I discussed the future of conferences, namely that the future could be a future without them altogether. Robin and I have been discussing this on Skype since July and his point is, ‘why in the 21st century are we still using 1950s conferencing models?’

Many of the ideas of Social Media, like engagement, conversation, friendship, follower, social and discussion, are based around relationship. That’s the whole point: it’s social and it’s relationship.

But I notice a few things that don’t line up that I’d like your feedback on:

Despite all this talk of community, why do we still idolise content over everything else? Talk about hypocritical!
Conferences are good becuase they allow people to make and strengthen relationship, but the conferences aren’t actually made for this. Should they be? Or should we be building relationships ourselves anyway?
The idea of conversation, when considering Dunbar’s number of 150 friends is the max you can handle, means we have to enter into mass relationship. Can we have an ‘online gathering’ whilst still retaining connections? What if people get lost? Or is that their fault?
How do we operate in a world where we have micro relationships and mass relationships? Do mass relationships just send us back to pushing content again?
Some people say face to face is best, others say should evolved. How do you scale face to face into mass relationship?

Did you see what I said there? Micro relationships and mass relationships. It brings me back to this diagram from my article on Preaching to the Converted:

I’m unsure about where we go from here, and what the implications of mass relationship are. I’m hoping we can talk it through.

P.S. If you are wanting to get past content and into real connections with real people to really collaborate, you might want to read this.

The Issue With Social Media Events: They Aren’t Social

Posted on March 17, 2010 by Scott Gould

Let’s be honest today.

The feedback is coming in from some events running right now – SxSWi, SMWF and some reviews from Like Minds, and something is clear to me: we still are thinking top down.

Yesterday Valeria Maltoni posted “SxSWi in Quotes“, which comprised mostly of people saying their favourite thing at South By SouthWest (SxSW) was, lo and behold, meeting people. Chris Brogan made similar conclusions in his commentary entitled ”We Could Do So Much More“, when he negatively saw people not connecting, as well as panels that weren’t attendee centric. Some how it seems the people come for the people, but the event isn’t organised for this.

Update: Jay Bear has added his thoughts on SxSW today, which also echo the same sentiment. Jay writes that “the feeling of community, and ‘we’re all in this together’ is slipping away.”

Social Media World Forum (SMWF) struggled at the beginning of the week with criticism over the same old content, and poor focus on the attendees. From what I’ve heard, this wasn’t just the event organisers, but the general attitude of many involved (all all levels: sponsors, speakers, delegates) who saw it as another event to push their content – and from what I’ve seen on the #smwf hashtag, this does seem to be true.

The feedback we had for Like Minds was overwhelmingly positive, but the criticism came, and I’m very mindful of it, that there was still lots of talking heads and not enough application. Despite our innovations with the Like Minds Lunchtime Talks, I know many people still didn’t connect and get what they needed to go and implement on Monday morning. More theory than action.

Even at the beginning of the year at the Media140 Meetup in January, there was a point where Glenn Le Santo stood up and broke the broadcast from the panel and actually started some open, honest, two-way communication – which turned it into, again from what I heard, an exceptional evening.

What’s Wrong?

The whole point of Social Media is that it is supposed to be social. Non-broadcast. Non-vertical. But… Social Media events are very broadcast, very vertical, and aren’t social.

Perhaps I should say that they aren’t social enough – and stop being so polarising - but I’m not talking about the social aspect that happens around the content. What I mean is that the foundational concept of the event is not social, it is broadcast. It doesn’t need to be, but it be. And I have a few thoughts why:

1. We idolise content, so the organisers give it.

People who say event organisers do it for money haven’t organised an event. The reason why we are so heavy on broadcasting content is because we so idolise content above comments.

This is another contradiction that irritates me, that we focus on the content not the comments – which is again broadcast over conversation.

2. Speakers and panelists want their 5 minutes.

“Screw where the panel is going, I want to say my bit on what I did” is in the back of many minds, and then out goes the idea of ‘what is helpful to Joe Bloggs in the audience?’ This is why we have our panels planned at Like Minds – because value needs to be thought through. Otherwise, everyone just says the same thing.

And to be fair – why shouldn’t the speakers and panelist get their 5 minutes? Given how much we worship content, it makes sense they’d want to get theirs out too.

3. Much of the audience wants to make money tomorrow with Social Media.

When people say that “it didn’t help me”, what they really mean is “it told me Social Media is hard work and didn’t tell me how to make money from Twitter tomorrow.” They are also the ones with business cards that they throw in everyone’s face…

Of course this isn’t just an issue with Social Media events – it’s an issue with Social Media itself, namely that we focus on content far more than action.

This is top down. It’s not audience centric, it’s author centric. I could so easily use Like Minds to push my personal purposes, but I don’t. I chose to not be author centric.

Solutions?

First: Can we not be a Social Media conference, but a conference that uses Social Media? This distinction alone changes the whole way you promote the event, because Social Media becomes a means, not an end. Therefore you can relax about whether you trend on Twitter or not. Yeah, it’s nice when you do, but it doesn’t actually make a shred of difference.

Second: Drilling down even further, our aims need to shift from providing more content to promoting more connections. Seeing as we already know more than we do, our aims should be to unite people not with more knowledge they don’t use, but with like minded individuals with whom they can make things happen. Seriously – for how much longer can we continue to preach to the converted?

Another way to say this would be to simply to say: make events about people, and action.

Third: We must dare to be different. We’re running the same 1950s conference model with 21st Century ideas. The unconference model is a step towards it, but these tend to be poorly organised and not accessible to those who are newcomers. I consider ‘unconferencing’ to be a part of the event as whole, but not the whole event, as I describe in Creating A People-To-People Conference.

I began to feel the echo chamber effect in December. I guess now it’s really echoing. The days of events riding on the back of Social Media and expecting to just succeed are over – at least for London anyway.

The Change Begins With You

As I described, I think this is stinking thinking that we’ve all got a little of. Stuck on the content wagon.

The first way to break it? Go away and do something.

What do you think?

Be Useful: The 6 Social Media Presences

Posted on March 16, 2010 by Scott Gould

[slideshare id=3441935&doc=6socialmediapresencetypes-100315195225-phpapp01]

If you can’t see the Slideshow, click here. You can view the slideshow by itself here.

Today I’m giving you a little teaser of just some of the content I’ll be going through at Like Minds Immersive on Thursday in London.

I wrote an article a while ago on the 6 Social Media presence types, which aimed to provide some kind of model for differentiating the different ways you can run a Social Media account. The above slideshow is what an updated version that includes more examples and tighter commentary on how to run them using what I call the PRE stance (the blend of personal, relational and expertise for that presence.)

A Note on Being Useful

You’ll remember we spoke about the purpose of Social Media is to be useful. We have the phrase ‘value’ which I think can become too much like jargon – especially when asking “what is useful?” or “what is helpful?” is so much more to the point.

With all the content online, you don’t need another blog post from me. The idea today is that I’m sharing this with you because I truly believe it will be useful for you.

So here’s the challenge:

in order for me to be useful to you, I will help you practically apply this all I can in the comments below and on the phone.

The 6 Presences

The idea of each of these presences is to provide a useful way for your audience to engage with you, depending on what their needs are, so we have:

Leadership, which is useful because it leads. Names, causes, passions – we follow them.
Active Authority, which is useful because it directs. Here’s the expert in that niche area who provides targeted, practical advice.
Solution Support, which is useful because it assists. When something doesn’t work, these guys are ready to fix it in a heart-tweet.
Platform, which is useful because it gathers. Where like minded individuals get together around commonality.
Passive Publishing, which is useful because it notifies. If I want just the news updates, this is what I’ve subscribed to.
Monitor & Response, which is useful because it initiates. When someone asks if I need help, before I’ve asked, this is that presence.

How Can This Be Better?

I’m aware that I’ve missed out lots of examples – so please add any examples you know of that fit the 6 presences. Of course, if you know of a 7th presence, let me know!

Otherwise, I’m ready to assist you and talk this through more to make sure I’m being useful to you!

1. The Focus: Change Perception

1. A Social Media presence doesn’t inherently fix your offline problems and perceived questionable ethics.