Epiphanies

 THE SOCIAL MEDIA FORMULA

and expressed as

THE SOCIAL MEDIA EQUATION  : P x P / I – M =  T [trust ratio of a connection/community]
Like the formula? Get it on some swag from the WikiSocial [zero-markup] Store 

+++

DEFINING THE SOCIAL MEDIA MATRIX or WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA:

• Twitter = broadcast sharing and filtering of information via your followers and following network (better network, better filter)
• IM/Chat = intimate real-time and potentially asynchronous conversation where I am giving a few people access to the RAM of my working conscious brain
• Email = longer sharing, connecting, reflecting and networking with my either my personal or professional networks.
• and now
• Blog = where I get to explore and expound on ideas that have been driving me for months or seconds, depending on the post.
• Forum = i’ve got questions do you have answers – either company or community driven
• Website = where the best of the infostream I am writing via the other “channels” gets distilled into pages, wikis or books, depending on the need.
• Search = w w encyclopedia-wiki of truth and lies that I can dip into and probe with google and various other tools
• Online Community = places on the web where I maintain and update my profile, content, comments and links, and where I meet and connect with others depending on the nature of the community.

+++

One Social Media Strategy – Be Everywhere Online

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary defines “ubiquitous” as: “existing or being everywhere at the same the same time: constantly encountered.” Translated to the online world of business, this means very simply that you want your business to be constantly encountered. You want people to figuratively bump into your brand – your trade name, your logo, your domain name, your products, your services – every time they turn around online. In other words, you want to be EVERYWHERE online. – LookSmart

+++

The Twitter Formula

 My Twitter Formula is Twitter Satisfaction = Following smart folks to learn – Unfollowing low-value twitts + looking at who’s following who to Discover.

TS=FUD (not to be confused with Fear Uncertainty and Doubt)

+++

I tend to have a lot of ideas, which is a kind way of saying that I’m easily distracted. The way I control this impulse is by recognizing that most ideas aren’t worth much without the solid execution to bring them into reality. So when I talk to someone about an idea, I will assess our ability to work together with a set of rules like this:

• Do we have the skills?
• Do we have the time?
• Do we have the resources?
• Do we have the chemistry?
• Do we really have the motivation?

It’s amazing how many ideas don’t make the cut, if you’re being truly honest. In a lot of cases, I’ll do something because I’m actually not sure…in the process of doing, I’ll find out. Of course, I have to disclose this fully to any involved parties, because otherwise the second battery of tests will fail:

• Are we maintaining momentum?
• Are we setting our expectations correctly?
• Was our initial assessment accurate?
• Do we keep going?

Not many personal projects make it past the second battery either, at least in my limited experience. That’s why if you ever find someone to team up with that can repeatedly pass this test, you should make every effort to work together. You have found something magical.

+++

Of the Tail and the Snout

The Long Tail: Chris Anderson famously named the long tail – the idea that in the internet era, success belongs to companies that can address the end of the demand curve that is populated by millions of low-volume products, rather than a small number of high-volume products.
The Long Snout: Rael Dornfest somewhat waggishly pointed out that there’s an analogous phenomenon on the front end of product creation, which he called “the long snout.” That is, there are millions of emergent products and technologies that may or may not catch on (consider the fact that there are over 100,000 projects on sourceforge alone), and that we needed a lightweight way to document and present information about those projects, so we could start publishing about them early on, and track them up the development curve as well as the demand curve.

+++

Project Manager/Producer Role Parallel:

Because directing is almost like an alchemy. There are so many different factors, so many different skills involved, the most important being communication and some visual sense.

The designers of these systems are engaged in embedded observation. They are living in the culture that they are helping to frame. They are aware of the others living in that culture and constantly engaging with them to really understand the emergent behaviors. They recognize their power as designers and try to use it to benefit the collective rather than their own personal goals. Their design process is stemming from this embedded observation, producing a state of “flow” to use Cziksentmihalyi’s term. The designers love what they are doing and infuse their passion into the systems. This is a very powerful way of doing design.

But if the goal is to build community social software, this is a dreadful approach. You cannot segment the people who engage with the users from those who build for them. You cannot test for community practices by running user studies on individuals. You cannot populate a community by marketing to people who have used similar software before. You cannot boil down culture into static representation of people. You must live the culture that you are creating.

Joss Whedon on screenwriting and directing “firefly” and “serenity”

+++

Getting to This Moment of Happiness and Lessons Learned Along the Way
This is my version of Henry Miller’s “Books in my Life.” I attempt to capture resources and lessons that have brought me this far thus far.