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.

Your Leading Thoughts

• What points in this interview resonant the most with you?
• How would you define ‘community’?

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.

Communities are made of micro-communities

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.

Facebook isn’t a single 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.

Groups in the status feed

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.

Groups are like contact groups in your email client

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.

The bigger changes

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?

Your Leading Thoughts

• Do you see a use for Facebook groups? Or is it effort that you just don’t have time or interest for?
• Do you observe my same observations about macro and micro community? What has Facebook taught us about how we really approach community?

If you can’t see the video, click here. You can see the video on YouTube.

At the moment we’re having a lot of discussions on the Like Minds LinkedIn group, and one of these discussions recently was about Facebook’s new Social Plugins and how people felt this created a new level of trust and social authority.

As you know, I did a video about this last week, in which I use lots of long words and jokes to basically point out this is move means we trust something more if we see our friends have liked it.

My friend Stuart Witts added the above video to the conversation, in which Levi’s have just used two of Facebook’s plugins to enable people to:

1. Like individual items in their catalogue
2. Invite their friends to connect to a storefront

This must’ve taken a developer no more than an hour to integrate into their site, and to be quite honest, doesn’t really do anything new: it just simply shows people what their friends like, and let’s their friends know when they like something.

Of course that in itself is very powerful. James Poulter, who I met at Like Minds Immersive in March, wrote yesterday about this new form of consumerism (what we could call ‘click-consumerism’?), and asks how this changes the purchase=self definition model that rose in the 60s and has been with us since.

My thoughts in the comments in James’ post were that this universal like button will also track what we like, as opposed to what we think we should like or say we like. Certainly, we’re seeing the early stages of Social Shopping.

How Can Local Businesses Use This?

The boast of social authority (the proof that their friends like, therefore they should like too) that this gives local businesses is huge. Seeing that 159 of my friends like Nike is no big woop – we all know of Nike and like Nike.

But seeing that 45 of my friends like that restaurant that I haven’t been to, or buy from that store that I’ve only just heard of, or are business people who use that service on the industrial estate – that has a lot of value.

Social authority is what big brands already have plenty of (they are well known), and is what local businesses are often struggling to get (they aren’t as well known), especially businesses that are off the beaten route.

The Main Point

If you’re skim reading, here’s the main point: the like button shows friends what you like. This gives that website more social authority, because if someone you know likes you, you will probably like it too.

Your Leading Thoughts

I still think that the like button is a pretty simple thing and that Facebook’s plugins aren’t feature strong – but there is certainly a lot of depth here, we just need to mine it. I value your feedback, so how about answering a question to draw the wisdom out of us?

• As a consumer, do you like things on Facebook often, and do you now like things on the web too?
• Would you ‘connect’ to a site like in the Levi’s video? If so, why?
• Scaling this up – where do you see this going? (with the tools we already have)

If you can’t see the video, click here.

In this video (filmed by Andrew Davies, and full of The Office jokes), I stumble through attempting to explain the idea that Facebook’s new Social Plugins are a powerful step for our post modern epistemology – in other words, the way that we get information.

In the Broadcast Age, based upon a modernist society, information came from one trusted source that informed our opinions and governed our understanding. In the Social Age, based upon a postmodern society, information is like a web, with multiple nodes that continually feeding and receiving information. You can read more about this in yesterday’s post.

In our Social Age, the webs of information with the most authority are those that are the most cohesive. Four scenarios to help explain what I mean:

1. Saying that your product is great is a Broadcast tactic – you are saying it about yourself, offering a structured reason why, but it’s ultimately modernist.
2. If you have a web of information about you, drawn from various sources, but many of those sources conflict and are perhaps hard to find, you have a not so cohesive web.
3. If you have a web of information about you that is easy to find, but it’s all positive, it may be cohesive, but it is also not genuine, because you’re deciding what gets seen.
4. If you have a web of information that says your product is great, but you aren’t controlling it and instead showing what people say, then you are more authentic and genuine, and therefore more cohesive.

What I’ve always liked is ASOSReviews.com, which shows everything everyone is saying about ASOS on Twitter – whether good or bad. This instills trust and confidence – and the impressive high positive sentiment they have tells me that the people, the nodes, are pleased with ASOS therefore creating a more cohesive web of information.

What Facebook are doing, as I try to explain, is link the conversation and semantics – the nodes – from around the web to provide cohesive webs of information. This is what the internet is actually supposed to be. The internet is a not a medium for out data – the internet is our data.

Robert Coaldini, by the way, has 6 weapons of influence that I think contribute to making a more cohesive web: Reciprocity, Commitment and Consistency, Social Proof, Authority, Liking, Scarcity. I’d certainly say Facebook’s Social Plugins are heavily based around these.

I’m sure there’s far more here that can be discussed, but I’m just really stoking the intellectual fires and hoping we can talk this through more. Let me know what you think.

So there’s lots of buzz right now about Eurostar’s mass travel delays following a train failure mid-Channel Tunnel, and the subsequent issues surrounding the handling of their Social Media presence by self-called ‘Conversation Agency’ We Are Social.

I am not intending to repeat much of what’s already been said, nor lay out the background of the situation, which is neatly summarised at TechCrunch. You can read what I have found to the best articles on the theme of this being a Communications problem as opposed to a Social Media problem at BrandRepublic, Digital Stuffing and at Rob Fenwick’s blog, with thanks to Mack Pack for pointing me there with his good summarising post. My aim is to discuss the flawed view of the majority that is held towards Social Media.

Before I begin, I’ll say that this is in no way an attack on We Are Social. They have chronicled their trials and tribulations in the last days on their blog, and as they state, had no agreement in place with Eurostar for crisis management. The reason why I’m tackling this case study is because it’s current, and because it reveals what the majority mindset is.

So here are the flaws that Social Media Agencies and their Clients are facing that have been highlighted by the Eurostar situation:

Flaw 1: Conversations, not Communications

We Are Social are a ‘Conversation Agency‘, and if that’s what they are selling, then that’s fine. But the misunderstanding for many is that Social Media is just about conversations, and this is where problems set it in: because it’s not. First of all, Social Media is communications (of which ‘conversation’ is a part), and secondly, not all conversation, nor communication, is verbal, or written, or video, or audio, or links.

The fruition of this thinking means Social Media doesn’t do anything outside of ‘Conversations’ which is often code for ‘soft-sell marketing’. As we have seen, and as many are writing, this Eurostar debacle should illustrate once and for all that Social Media is not just about marketing – and any campaign that does so is an unbalanced and doomed campaign, because people – your users – are always going to ask you about things that are nothing to do with marketing, such as customer support – why? – because it’s a communication platform and that’s how they see it.

Neilsen identified 5 areas of use for Social Media (Customer Service and Support, Insight and Research, Product Development, PR Reputation and Influence, Marketing), all of which require both internal and external communications, which are probably managed by Social Media (you know, email, basecamp, etc.) This means communication infrastructure needs to be built – more on this later.

My other point is that thinking about ‘Conversations’ as a one-size-fits-all is another flawed mindset. Sure, Social Networks are a place for conversation – but users talk with their friends – not incessantly with brands. At Like Minds Immersive: Developing Social Media Strategy I pointed to a lack of profiling one’s actual Social Media audience as hit and miss quicksand. Just because a demographic will have a conversation with others about you doesn’t mean they want to have a conversation with you – perhaps all they want is a discount code? Correct profiling should prevent you from overestimating their participation with you. Also when we look at Social Media as Communications, we can stop thinking that the only lexicon we have is ‘engagement’, ‘conversation’, ‘participation’ and ‘discussion’.

Flaw 2: Little or No Strategy

We Are Social’s plan for Eurostar was a low-level, introductory experiment called ‘Little Break, Big Difference‘ (again they discuss this on their blog.) The site looks quite nice, but when I also consider their Twitter account and Facebook page, I am left feeling that there is little strategy here. I don’t get how this really connects with their audience, or in any way lifts restrictions to provide their audience with previously unrealised value.

This lack of strategy is now common place for Social Media campaigns. For me, I consider a large contribution to this is the lack of strategic frameworks for Social Media programs. Perhaps people are too busy trying to Social Celebrities. Anyway. Very few people seem to make frameworks and models, and most are really not that beneficial but just tactics. I’m sure it’s very arrogant, but I think this is something I do well. I’ve drawn up a number of frameworks that don’t just point out tactics but help you identify what strategic approach you should take.

Basic questions that should be answered by a good strategy:

• What purpose do the Social Media profiles have? Which of the 6 presence types are you using?
• How are your profiles lifting restrictions for your target audience?
• What provision are you making for non-conversation activity?
• What levels of participation is your audience profiled at?

We’ve all said it, but let’s say it again: tactics aren’t strategy. So please, Mr. I-Did-A-Twitter-Course, add some strategy to your understanding of the tools. And this goes for the agencies too!

Flaw 3: Little or No Integration

When it comes to Social Media you’ve got to know that, being a communications platform, people will tweet you for things that a marketing agency can’t resolve. If you view your Social Media activity as purely marketing you are stuffed. Case in point: people still reply to @SkyNews  with questions, even though it clearly states that it’s not there to provide responses and is automated.

Integration goes to your 360 degree management structure – who reports to who – where to go for information – classification of engagement to ensure correct responses and subsequent internal communications – ensuring that each message is systematically resovled.

Look at Eurostar’s Facebook and Twitter accounts and there is apparently none of this. Wall posts with no resolution (as per image above), Tweets with no responses – and if they are being done in private, then why aren’t they being done in public?

Where is the linkup between PR, Marketing, Support, C-Suite and Social Media? Who integrated this? Who thought ahead and considered some worst case scenarios?

When I work with clients at Aaron+Gould, we create guidelines that detail exactly how we execute everything and how we report, including classification of Tweets, Facebook messages, blog posts, scales of urgency and response, complete with the entire procedure for resolution and sample 140 character updates to use. Over time I’ll be sharing a lot of this with you, but if you want some great advice on crisis management and Social Media, read this article from FreshNetworks.

Flaw 4: Non Experiential

Question: do you think the user cares that, on the Eurostar Twitter, it says “Official Eurostar Twitter feed. Not Eurostar customer service but trying to help get information out to our customers as received. Thanks for understanding”

Answer: no one cares. In fact, few even read it. People just want answers – like I’ve said three times in this post on the same point now.

There is a real problem with delivering user experience for most Social Media campaigns, like this case above. I find it highly ironic that, seeing as We Are Social believe that, we, the people, are social, then why on earth is there a complete lack of Social Support? The message from We Are Social and Eurostar here is clear: “When it comes to marketing our message to you, we’ll talk and we are social. But when it comes to solving your problems that we marketed you into buying, then sorry, we’re not social anymore.”

So…

That’s my take on it. Like I said in starting, this isn’t an attack on We Are Social – and I really do feel that they have received the unfortunate brunt of what was a problem out of their control. But they had not architected a Social Media strategy correctly, and it is approaches like theirs that continue to muddy the industry and create further ‘conversationalists’ who lack any care for integration that actually benefits organisations and users in the long run.

What I haven’t done is said what I would’ve done. Firstly, because it’s too easy to say it, and secondly, because I think the correct actions fall into place when we change our thinking about Social Media as I have tried to do above.

Thoughts?

In case you didn’t know, the UK is experiencing, right now, one of the greatest Social Media case studies ever. The headline and subtext from the BBC is this: “Rage Against the Machine beat X Factor winner in charts: Rock band Rage Against the Machine have won the most competitive battle in years for the Christmas number one”

But the real headline here is this: that 3 months of prime time television marketing and audience engagement are beaten by Social Media.

Now, I’m going to try and say this all without too much waffle, but being such a landmark event, I’m going to make sure I fully unpack the case study, illustrate how things are changing, and also show off how my framework predicted this (hey, when you’re this right about something, you need to celebrate yourself, even if no one else will. It’s how you remain sane, right?)

Spreadability beats Reach

I presented a framework a while ago that illustrates how spreadability is increased the more ‘dynamic, home-made, personal relationship’ and less ‘static, factory-made, public relations’ a message is. The thrust of my argument was that word of mouth has always been about spreadability rather than reach – and whilst reach can get the message before lots of people’s eyes, spreadability gets the message into the right people’s mouths and in turn into the right people’s ears. This is important, obviously, because in order for people to spread the message, it needs to be in their mouth, not before their eyes.

I’ll share the framework in a moment, but first lets look at the facts of the case study and the associated stats.

The X-Factor 2009 took 17 weeks of primetime 1.5 hour Saturday and Sunday night TV programming (as well as spinoffs, etc), with an average of 13.9 million viewers per show and an average 45.9% of the viewing audience (from Wikipedia). Every Monday the papers were full of either front or second page news from the drama surrounding the contestants and the judges fuelled from a rumour mill designed by the world’s best (bar-politicians) to keep media coverage and reach as high as possible. The peak audience was for the final show, totally 19 million viewers and 53.2% of the viewership. The maths are that an average 13.9 million people watched over 50 hours of The X-Factor.

So certain had the tradition become that the X-Factor winner would be the UK Christmas number 1, that bookmaker William Hill was planning to abandon its 30 year tradition of betting on the outcome. Until as you know, some guy (Jon Morter, to be exact, who had attempted a similar stunt the year before) decided to push Rage Against The Machine’s ‘Killing In The Name’ through Facebook to be top of the charts.

Jon and Tracy Morter created a Facebook group and started promoting, and then made a back-up group due to some glictches that the main group on Facebook seemed to experience. There were also a number of ‘fake’ Facebook pages and groups created that made it hard to distinguish which ones were created by Jon. These two ‘official’ groups contained the latest news, carefully instructing people to not buy the single until the week commencing Monday 14th December, as well as warning people that “bulk purchasing will disqualify that entire purchase you’ve made form the chart count”. The tipping point, according to the The Guardian,was:

…helped by the comedian Peter Serafinowicz, who on 15 December urged his 268,000-plus Twitter followers to join in, and it snowballed from there. By the time Paul McCartney and former X Factor winner Steve Brookstein had pledged their support, poor McElderry seemed doomed.

When I spoke to Jon on Twitter he said that it was actually UK celebrity Phil Jupitus who first tweeted about the campaign to his 50,000+ following when he retweeted a request from a follower.

Their numbers, in contrast to the X-Factor’s mainstream medium reach, were almost 1,000,000 members when combining their two groups – however this does not include the members of ‘unofficial’ groups and pages. The Twitter hashtag, #ratm4xmas, was a trending topic for a large part of the week – however the TweetReach stats are very low: just over 12,000 (#likeminds had over 200,000.) What’s also certain is that none of these people spent an hour, let alone 50 hours, on consuming the contents of the Facebook group of page.

The numbers come down to this:

1. A reach of an average 13.9 million (peak 19 million) viewers, with over 50 hours of consumption, purchase 450,000 copies of Joe McElderry’s single.
2. Spreadability, of not even 1 million locked-in, sharing individuals, leads up who knows how many impressions, purchasing 500,000 copies of Rage’s single.

That fact that a Social Media induced campaign, that admittedly did get attention in the press in the sales week, beat the weight of an average 13.9 million people consuming 50 hours of ‘message’ over 17 weeks, is not only a case study, but the case study to illustrate the power of Social Media. I really am astounded that people aren’t making more of a song and dance about it because this is huge.

Luckily, here I am to make a song and a dance.

I’ve been writing about this for most of the last 6 months (a collection of links here), but a lot people kicked back against what I was saying. Now, we have the case study. I wrote, also a while ago, that personal relationship is the new prerogative over public relations, and that Social Business heralds the shift from managing people like machine parts in a factory process to developing people and accessing the potential they have to learn and grow. In quite a poetic sense, this really is rage against the machine.

Down to my Framework

So, it’s about time we got to my framework and just a lil bit of bragging. I put this together in September this year to illustrate how spreadability is increasingly more important than reach, as I said above (“whilst reach can get the message before people’s eyes, spreadability gets the message into people’s mouths”, remember?)

As per the image below, you’ll see that I place TV as the pinnacle of spreadability for a static and governed medium. However with a dynamic and guided medium, a far higher level of spreadability is achieved. Note that this is not reach, it is spreadability. Spreadability is not about the message getting to everyone, it’s about the message getting to the right ones. By taking hands off of governing the message, and instead allowing the community to guide the message, the message becomes dynamic rather than static, entering the realm of ‘personal relationship‘ as opposed to ‘public relations‘. Anyway, here’s the framework:

Why this guidance, dynamic, homemade, personal relationship talk matters is because it allows the message to take on multiple forms and therefore becomes more personal and more relevant to more people. Quite litterally, people can make it their own. Another word for this is ‘translating’ – the understanding that you need people who can take your message and translate into the right motivational language for the hive that they influence. It’s like taking your message that’s 2D and then making a a multi-faceted diamond, each different facet communicating the same message in a slightly different way to meet the needs of a slightly different audience.

When you look at the X-Factor campaign, it has governance all over it. Professional at the highest level, every bit of hype, buzz, drama and emotion is factory-made and manipulated to push the audience towards financial commitments (just how the audience can take multiple sob stories of how “this is my whole life” every week just baffles the mind.) It’s also worth pointing out that the X-Factor is incredible expertiential and itself a very good example of the personalisation and Glocalisation that is happening in marketing.

Meanwhile the Rage campaign is not at all professional, but it is personal. Then didn’t create a Facebook vanity-url, have any kind of branding or copywriting expertise, or even run some kind of strategy from a centralised website full of share buttons. But when you look at their Facebook group you see community. You see people uploading the videos that motivate themselves, and in turn motivate others. You see people pitching in ideas, feeding back on sales and numbers, and warning each other not to buy bulk copies of the single. Other than a small note on both presences saying “Jon and Tracy”, you’d never know who was running the thing – the whole message belongs to the community – compared to the X-Factor, which has 13.9 million average viewers, none of which are under any impression that the X-Factor could ever belong to anyone else other than Cowell.

I’d like to be able to pull apart for you the exact components of how the Rage campaign won, but the mechanics are pretty simple:

• The climate was one of some unrest about the predictability (and the factory-feel) of the mainstream. This helped the campaign tip, and for any Gladwell fans, illustrates the Law of Context.
• The song choice mattered. The mainstream had well oiled machine with vast momentum, meaning the Rage campaign song had to be provocative in order to get any kind of attention – which is was. This meant more was at stake and a more emotional response was provoked, meaning there was a higher chance of action.
• Converting passion into action happened. There had to be little inertia between joining the Rage campaign on Facebook and then purchasing the single – which there was in the form of digital download. This meant people could quickly turn their passion into action, and buy the single in a few clicks seeing as they were already sat at their computer. This probably wouldn’t of worked if people had to go and buy the single instore.
• The campaign secured the right kind of online viral status through the above points. What helped it become viral was the totally homemade feel, and complete lack of branding, vanity urls, professionalism, etc. This makes it even more newsworthy, and more in line with the renegade spirit that it attached itself too.
• The community was pretty tight, as seen by the high degree of commenting on wall posts on the Facebook page and group. This signifies self-moderation by the community. At this point, information travels very quickly between the community and subsequently out of the community. The fact that any action taken inside the group or page comes up on the users’ newsfeed means the message was continually being spread to their friends even if they didn’t intend to be do so.

So

In the end, Simon Cowell purportedly offered jobs to Jon and Tracy, but Jon says that haven’t received any offer (as far as they know), but have spoken to Simon on the phone. What if Simon Cowell has offered them the job? Wise move? What do you think? Do you think this kind of thing can be reproduced by corporates? Or does big business lack the authenticity and personal relationship to pull off not only viral campaigns but movements like this?

What lessons can be learnt here?

Let me hear you comments below.

Image courtesy of Kıvanç Niş

“Cast your bread upon the waters, for after many days you will find it again.” That’s from the Bible, believe it or not. A seemingly contradictory statement, I have indeed found on many occasions that when I have put something ‘out there’, it has unexpectedly come back to me. Today I want to look at social media in the light of this principle, because as many of us no doubt have found, what we have said on Facebook, tweeted, or posted on our blog, has often yielded unexpected results.

Yesterday I wrote this comment on Jeremy Epstein‘s blog. I’ll quote some below, but to set the scene, Jeremy was talking about influencers vs fans, and the fact that very often you do not know who your influencers are, but you do know who your vocal fans are, and therefore, you should put more eggs into what he calls the “Raving Fans basket”.

Stop. For anyone who isn’t a digitall, let me clarify the language. A influencer is a certain type of person who influences other people to partake of your brand / idea / organisation / party / friendship. Notice this isn’t just about business – influencers are active in every area of life – brands and businesses are just trying to work out who the influencers are in order to gain from their influence. Jeremy makes the point that, as I have said above, very often we don’t know who these people are because they might not be too vocal, unlike the “raving fans”, who are very vocal about their support of a brand / idea / organisation / party / friend, even if they are not as influential.

In other words, an influencer is The Fonz – cool, calm and collected, but not in your face all the time. Whereas a raving fan is comparable to any girl who adores the latest boy band.

Ok. So, my comment went, in part, like this:

There is something to be said, as well, for your fans that you don’t know of. My blog is fed to my Facebook notes, as is the case with many bloggers. On Friday I didn’t post an new entry, and had an outcry from Facebook friends – none of them what I call ‘Digitalls’ (i.e., using digital technology like most of use savvy social media users). I had never even had so much as even a comment or ‘like’ on Facebook from them before, yet they were loyal readers with an expectation for a daily read from me.

My point is this: in life, and also in social media, we are continually ‘putting stuff out there’. We sow seeds of effort, energy, finance, time, etc, into people, and are sometimes unsure whether we are actually adding value or not. But just like casting your bread on the waters, the effort does indeed return to you, and very often it is when you don’t expect it, that you discover just where you have been adding value.

But I’m Just Using Facebook For Fun

No doubt many of my readers are. Textbook Digicools. But consider that Facebook, whether you like it or not, is an online extension of your social self, and can and does yield a similar return as your friendships do offline.

Getting in touch with your very first friend, finding out about people who otherwise you wouldn’t know, unexpectedly learning something new about someone – these are just some basic cases of your bread returning to you on the water.

So, enough concept. What are my examples? I’ve made business contacts from across the atlantic who’ve become friends. I’ve rekindled old relationships. I’ve made friendships with people in Exeter I never would’ve otherwise. People have come to my church because they saw me on Facebook. I’ve connected with like minded people from the other side of the world, as well as earning new clients.

The number of people who tell me weeks or months after I’ve tweeted or blogged to say ‘that really helped me’, or ‘that hooked me up with another person’, or ‘that off the cuff video had one line that has rung true with me’, is astounding. There are more people who don’t comment or this blog, don’t comment on Facebook, yet receive a lot of value from my thoughts, than those who do comment and respond. And that isn’t just me, I’m convinced all of us are unaware of the difference we are making in different places with different people.

The Act Of Casting My Bread

So enough talk and now some action. How do we practically cast our bread?

1. Be on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. The world is only going to become more connected, not less, so it is a wise decision to invest your time into them now. Start by following these people. Then, Spend a small amount of time on each of them, maybe 10 to 15 minutes a day at least. Get to know how things work, and listen to people, so that when you speak, you’ll know what to say.
2. Develop a 160-character summary of yourself and use it across all your social networks. This isn’t about making some super brand for yourself, it’s about helping people understand roughly who you are quite quickly. You can include life goals, values, humour, etc. Mine is: “Creator and marketer of today’s currency: experience. Husband to a hottie, but not a father yet. Christian and love revival.”
3. Realise that it is all about accumulation. Social media is like building with Lego bricks. One brick is worthless, but many bricks create a building that others see.
4. Be open. Our fake-overloaded society desires authenticity. Be you, share your scars as well as your successes.
5. Treat each person who comments, responds and retweets with due respect. Because you don’t know which one is carrying your bread back to you.

Notice I haven’t said ‘set your expectations’. Why? Because the whole point I’m making is it is often the unexpected return.

Otherwise, thank you for reading through what is still an infant thought of mine and I haven’t worked through into a fuller framework. So with that in mind, what would you say?

Right now, famous technology evangelist Robert Scoble is talking through all the nuances and possible outcomes of this deal. The post is worth a read. For those of you who don’t know, Scoble made FriendFeed popular among the geeks, and has promoted it tirelessly and ceaselessly, whilst spending pretty much most of his working days on there for most of this year. Now, it appears, all those thousands of hours, all those ideas, all the marketing, all the effort of his life for the past year or so, will fade into time as FriendFeed gets sucked into Facebook.

The thing I find funny about all these Digeratti, as I call them – the top innovators and Digitall elite – is that they make so much noise about every big and every little thing. Reading Scoble’s article, many things that he is now saying he simply wasn’t saying early this year. One minute they are all expending energy on one thing, and now it is being expended on another. Blogging is dead, they cry, meanwhile, the mass market hardly knows they were ever alive. So, while I was reading Scoble’se article yesterday, I kept asking myself – “Does the mass market care? Does it even matter to the mass market? Will history change for it?” Because it certainly appears that all that effort is, well, much ado about nothing.

So it appears.

Fast forward a year or so and see the then half a billion Facebook users – the Digicools and Digitools of the mass market – now grappling with more changes and updates to Facebook. See 6 months after that, when all the ‘I hate the new, new Facebook’ pages have died down, and this mass market will be using Facebook in new ways with new technologies, based on what the Digitall have been using for years prior. And all that effort from all those FriendFeed users and engineers finds its place – it was thinking the way forward into the future.

That’s innovation.

Innovation – creating new ways to do things – is all about thinking way ahead of your time, and way ahead of the mass market.

Perhaps you’ve been wondering what that picture of a chair above is meant to be doing. That, my friends, is known as the ‘Wassily’, a chair designed by Marcel Breuer for Wassily Kandinksy at the Bauhaus. I have one in my living room. Want to know when he designed it? 1925. That’s 84 years ago. Can you imagine how innovative his thinking was to create something that is beyond even contemporary design? 84 years ago people were sitting on wooden chairs but Marcel was a thinking person who saw beyond even the imaginable future.

That’s the thing about innovation – it takes place years, and even decades before it makes sense.

Before it makes sense. Ah, there’s the rub.

There’s something that I do that, to some, doesn’t quite make sense. I run an Experience Agency. I talk about compelling experiences. But it’s ahead of where the mass market is right now. And when you’re ahead, what do you attract? Criticism. Misunderstanding. Just plain mockery. And you experience fear. You make mistakes. At times, you even doubt whether you’re even on to something at all. But then you reach down to the innovator’s compass inside of you. Your gut. And you know. You know that, given 5 years, it’ll be all the more relevant. Make it 10, and they’ll all be kicking themselves that they weren’t listening. Give it 20, and it’s a non issue.

Know that your innovation and your thinking is not much ado about nothing – but just like Scoble and FriendFeed – it’s much ado about something, the reward just comes later.

The decision you have, then, is to continue to innovate or imitate. Do the daring. Do something new, or line up and be the next cheap copy of a great original. But if you are doing something new, then beware that all the effort you put in will not have immediate return on investment. Understand that people will look at you and think what I was thinking about Scoble – “Will it work?” “Does it matter?” “Who even cares?” My recommendation, if you do innovate, is to buy yourself a Wassily chair. And every night when you sit in it and reflect and think things through, realise you are sitting in someone else’s innovation, and one day, others will sit in yours.

So here’s to all the innovators in the crowd. We are the future. My chair tells me so.

What are you are innovating?