May 12 2009
circles of passion and influence in social media
A work in progress in my Infostream Strategies series. Here a visualization I am working on to explain the "circles of passion" concept and how different communication "channels" have reach into various spheres. And with FriendFeed, Facebook and iGoogle type tools we can build a strategy to engage in our personal social media landscape.
@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/circles
May 04 2009
I am not a target!
When you are doing "social media" what exactly are you spending your time on?
My current "social" make up.
The question is response to most requests for participation is WIIFM? (Or What's In It For Me?) And what this usually means, is "what's the business proposition for this particular interaction and how will it benefit me, cause I'm busy and I've got to make a living and there's a lot of stuff out here to pay attention to, so get to the point, and quickly."
But there are certain connection points in social media that have ZERO WIIFM value. ZERO.
Examples: gaming online, facebook groups, facebook causes, open social projects (wikipedia et. al), tagging photos of others, poetry, inviting FB friends to music events, blip.fm, 80% of twitter content (and I'd argue that about 50% of the WIIFM Twitter traffic is really about the ME who is tweeting the info rather than What's In It For You.
But that's where I am moving my own participation a little bit to the left of the WIIFM scale.
So I propose, WIIFY (What's In It For You) as the new standard by witch to judge your own "SOCIAL" media participation.
How do I provide YOU-centered content? What do I create that might make you SMILE. Not buy something from me, or promote me, but merely a smile on YOUR FACE. That gives me energy and ideas for 1000 more WIIFY engagements. And personally here's how I have been implementing it (not consciously until just now) on Twitter.
My Tweets fall in two main categories.
1. Links and Information that YOU can use. (Because I am into social media I try and make my learnings available to everyone I come in contact with. In fact I would guess I am overly enthusiastic about social media and I want to share EVERYTHING rather than miss that one little spark that might light you up.)
2. Links or thoughts that might make you smile. Beautiful images, random thoughts, Twitter Joker stuff, jokes (but not really the kind you forward around in emails to folks), songs that have struck me a certain way (and I try to add how the moment or music resonates with me – blip.fm), poetry (see haiku 2 twitter, songwriting (ways that I express myself both positive and negative sides of life experience), RTing stuff that resonates with me, promoting other's ideas, and finally just simple serendipitous joy! (and no I did not spell that correctly the first time, but WordPress didn't know the word either… so there! AND if I can't spell it I'd better do a good job of explaining what I mean. Oh heck, let's let the social mob do that for us, Wikipedia says "Serendipity is the effect by which one accidentally discovers something fortunate, especially while looking for something else entirely."
And here is my serendipitous add to your information today. The wikipedia goes on to say, "The word has been voted as one of the ten English words that were hardest to translate in June 2004 by a British translation company.[1] However, due to its sociological use, the word has been imported into many other languages (Portuguese serendipicidade or serendipidade; French sérendipicité or sérendipité but also heureux hasard, "fortunate chance"; Italian serendipità; Dutch serendipiteit; German Serendipität; Swedish, Danish and Norwegian serendipitet; Romanian serendipitate)."
Now if that isn't of value to YOU today, we might be on different planets. And that's okay too. Cause if our circles connect, even in a few places, we will find value in the "relationship" a some point. And that value, in my mind is more about hearts and sparks and inspiration than making sale.
That's it. I don't sell myself on Twitter. I don't ask you to RETWEET or FOLLOW me. I have not get 50k followers by the weekend strategies and I earn my followers by providing something of value to THEM. If you are just going for the numbers, have fun. If you are acutally participating in the "social" web you will find that there realy is NOT ENOUGH TIME FOR BS! So if my Whuffie is too low and you feel my tweets are boring, then by all means, follow me no more. But if I provide enough WIIFY juice, then I hope you have the prowess to RT or comment or DM me somewhere on some platform about something.
@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/WIIFY
Related links:
Unrelated but serendipitous links: [I had to check the spelling of serendipitous again, and eventually I copy-and-pasted from above.]
Mar 22 2009
The owner of inSocialMedia.com made me a guest admin on Friday night. Why did I accept? What did it mean?
inSocialMedia
How would I participate, or ADMIN? Below is the first discussion thread I created as an admin, where I created a "leadership" group and proposed the following questions to the growing group of 4.
And then it was my turn to answer my own questions as a conversation starter.
1. inSM to me is a collection of folks working in SM who want to communicate and build discussions around making our SocialMedia interactions better. To me it is not about business or making money or reputation at being a part of it. It might be for others, I don't pretend to know.
2. I want to be a part of things that are larger than myself. I am an avid community participant. I love Posterious and inSM as my 2 adjunct communities that add more conversation to my own rantings.
3. What I get as being part of inSM is the connection with other SM professionals. Notice I don't use the term experts, cause if I'm an expert today, I am certianly not an expert tomorrow. Too much is changing for any of us to be experts. We are students and teachers, leaders and followers.
4. Engage a group of people in leading the community. Add additional tools or groups as needed. Begin actual dialogues on inSM, unlike the vacant "groups" and "affinities" of Facebook. Where we all join and nothing happens.
So if inSM is more like LinkedIN than Facebook we have done a good job. If we use inSM as part of our reputation validation then we have done a good job.
If we build relationships and a level of TRUST on inSM for the discussions to be honest and challenging, then we have begun to build something of value for all of us. We have begun to build a community.
@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/inSM
Feb 23 2009
[Update: 2-23-09: ZDNet looks at the Red Dog in the Blue Cloud, a little bit more about Microsoft's Azure and the dog that hopes to hunt there.]
"The RoR community spans hundreds of sites and thousands of user groups because the tools are easier to use and more agile."
First there was the cloud. And everything in the cloud was good.
the internet is like a big cloud
An then came the ASP model, sometimes referred to as hosted applications. Now more commonly called SaaS, for Software as a Service. Salesforce is the poster child of SaaS. You can buy into Salesforce's online services and now with hundreds of "salesforce authorized" vendors you can pick and choose the additional services you want. Salesforce has even launched "The Force" which is basically a framework for building applications on top of Salesforce's Cloud and having access to their resources and connectivity with other Salesforce developers and customers. But I am jumping ahead.
So more recently the industry started referring to Cloud Computing™ as the new paradigm. Sounded like the original web paradigm to me, but hey, let's look into what Cloud Computing™ is all about.
Cloud 1: initially the Cloud was simply a big group of servers where you could store and run your website or email programs. Hosting companies like Rackspace, still call them managed hosting, but the sexier term is definitely Cloud Computing.
Cloud 2: is more about processing power and distributed bandwidth and storage. So in addition to getting a server farm you get some hardware and software goodness that allow you to run your mission critical applications across hundreds of servers at once, providing redundancy and dynamic scalability, when that is necessary to cover the traffic load. Google's Apps and their new development platform, is of this variety.
Cloud 3: tries to blend the best of 1 and 2 and offer something more holistic that combines the scalability of numerous on-demand servers AND then adds a "platform" for application development or deployment. And as a whole this system is then supported by the technical infrastructure of the "cloud" rather than the company. So if you move your computing requirements into Cloud #3, theoretically you will lower your IT overhead significantly.
So the challenges for clouds #2 and #3 are not unlike the challenges a managed hosting company (Cloud #1) has been facing for 10+ years.
1. Convincing the business customer that their data is safer and will maintain a 99.999% uptime.
2. Giving the backup responsibilities and server maintenace duties to a vendor.
3. You don't need to own the server.
4. You don't need to keep the data inside your firewall, we can protect it, better and cheaper than you can.
But Cloud #3 also commits you to a development platform.
Recently asked about concerns I might have about moving a major project onto Azure (Microsoft's Cloud #3) my first response was why. Why would I want to do it?
Of the developer friends I run with, open source applications and open source development "platforms" are where the excitement is. While I am sure there are .NET circles of passion, the Ruby on Rails, or Python communities seem to be where the momentum is. WordPress and Drupal are evolving quickly with the combined development cycles of thousands of users and programmers. Google Analytics, while not exactly open, has open API's allowing a growing community to assemble and evolve reporting and analytics packages that are low cost and flexible.
And everyone on the closed side of the development world will continue to struggle to keep up. How many developers would Omniture or Coremetrics need to employ to match the power of the combined Google Team and the adjunct open source Google team?
It's an open world out there. Free tools to work on a closed system verses free tools to work on an open system. A system that is not OS dependent or processor dependent or language dependent. And saying you are going to build a community around the development environment is a lot different than watching the community develop itself around a better freer environment. The RoR community spans hundreds of sites and thousands of user groups because the tools are easier to use and more agile.
And the marketing budget for Ruby on Rails is… ZERO.
@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/3-clouds
Update for clarification 2-23-09: I was not meaning to compare Azure and Rails as similar platforms, but merely making the case for Open rather than Closed development environments, cloud-based or OS based. In defining Azure, Microsoft makes it clear what they intend their cloud to be, an extension of everything Windows. Here is a screen shot from their dev conference back in Oct. 08 when they were unveiling Azure.
Azure Outline
future posts
