Do You Hear An Echo?

For all the fuss and bother over Social Media, Conversations, Engagement, and Web 2.0 there is a huge swath of business totally oblivious to what’s going on in the Web 2.0 / SN “echo chamber” – or worse, totally apathetic to the proceedings.

What and Who am I talking about? The car dealers. The plant workers. The office workers behind firewalls denied access to MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn because they are deemed “dating sites” by the guardians of the corporate proxy server. The newspapers. Old media of all ilks.

This is just a small slice of the people who are not only not engaged, but even if they were predisposed to participate they would have to do so at their employment peril.

So, in the quiet pauses between slapping ourselves on the backs for being on the cutting edge and forging our way through new memes, paradigms, and finding new ways of “doing business” – remember that there remains a tremendous amount of work to be done before everyone is invited to the table.

Sometimes all we hear are the sounds of agreement and praise coming from the echoes of our walled gardens. Every now and then, open the garden gate and talk to the neighbors. We might learn something.

Absolutes and Relatives

Often as a sports fan, I can make the most ridiculous of assessments.

‘That guy is worthless!”… “You suck!”… “That guy is awesome!”

What I am really saying, or at least what is implied by what I am saying, is that relative to the other players on the field at the time, “that guy is worthless”… relative to the other players on the field at the time, “you suck!”… and relative to the other players on the field at the time, “that guy is awesome!”

We are all guilty of such imprecision, to the disservice of those we dis and those we praise. Even the most lowly of professional athletes are deserving or respect, for where they got in the game. They have met a minimum requirement to “get into the bigs”, beyond the ken of most of us mortals with much less talents and abilities.

This post is not in praise of professional athletics as a profession above all others, but rather, a recognition that when we become accustomed to a high level of performance from our entertainers, our co-workers, or family, our friends – we sometimes heap scorn (and praise) around with little regard for the absolute meaning of what it is we are really saying.

Because, relatively speaking, there stands the smallest of differences between success and failure; between the profane and the sublime.

There is a line in the movie Bull Durham where Kevin Costner is talking about the difference between loitering in the Minor Leagues forever versus making it to “The Show” being “just one more hit, one more ground ball with eyes.”

We all live precipitously on the edge of outstanding success and ignominious anonymity. Chance, preparedness, fortune, luck, talent, timing, the Universe – all of these, maybe none of these – separate the Great from the Rabble.

I was reading a post this morning about whether Web 2.0 was Repeating or Reforming from the excesses and mistakes from Web 1.0 – and this is really what got me thinking about Absolutes, Relatives, and how we don’t differentiate between the two when making assessments of successes and failures, in business and in our personal dealings.

Were the folks at WebVan really that less intelligent than those at Digg, Pownce, and Twitter? I mean, at least WebVan CHARGED something and could nominally be called a “business” (that is, they existed to accept money for goods and services).

Were the wonder boys at Google really that much smarter than Jerry Wang? Was Bill Gates really that much smarter than Steve Jobs, or was Steve Jobs really that much smarter than Bill Gates (don’t laugh – the answer would be different depending upon whether you asked that question in 1993 or in 2003).

We must be careful in our assessments of absolute good, when in fact what we are assessing is relative to the life and times of the present. Our praise of social networking and Web 2.0 must be carefully assessed in light of the times in which these tools and services exist, and carefully examined against the harsh absolutes of business.

Namely, at some point, the check will come due and someone will have to pay the bill.

That is not a relative assessment. That is an absolute fact.

General “Must Have” Requirements for the next “Killer” Web Service

Just my opinion, your thoughts welcome

1. Must have Twitter integration, in and out
2. Must be visible across all web services, using RSS as the universal glue
3. Must accept OpenID, if not also be an OpenID provider to boot
4. Must be SEO friendly, if not a downright SEO “juicer”

In short, openness, visibility, and portability are necessary and sufficient for its success.

My idea would be for an “open” data store based upon OpenID trusts to extend personal profiles across web services. Yeah – I know there are already groups out there trying to grok this in group thought.

Someone just needs to do it and let the market decide. The internet has enough committees.

Hate to think what Twitter would look like if designed by committee… or community for that matter.

Reliable Services

One bane of the social web is the unreliability of services that we depend upon more and more to extend our brand, connect with friends (real or imaginary), or flat out do our work (work? what’s that?).

Twitter (at least for me) is more noticeable when it is down, as it is one of the more immediate and impactful of all the social web services. I update all of my sites that have statuses using Twitter integration in one form or another. I regularly use 3 twitter clients a day (two browser based, one mobile based) to check tweets and update my status.

When Twitter is working, it is the best thing since sliced bread. When it is not… ah, there’s the rub. It is down ALL the FREAKIN’ time.

On the one hand, how can one complain about the uptime of a “free” service? And yet, how can I delegate more trust and business function to a service that is as unconstant as the moon (nod to Will Shakespeare)?

I’m picking on Twitter in this regard, though there are plenty of other examples out there in Web 2.0 land (the Bloglines Plumber and the LinkedIn Wizard – who made an appearance last night, BTW – are just as recognizable as the Twitter Cat and Robot screen). Bebo had some ungawdly downtime number, measured in the double digit HOURS for a two month period, and that just ain’t gonna cut it ongoing.

The relative unreliability of social networking services, free though they are now, are real stumbling blocks to wider adoption by businesses that need reliable up-time “always there” access. Web services should STRIVE for the level of service and reliability that we expect from our phone service, water systems, and electrical grid.

Strive is the key word.

Think I am overhyping this? What if you were trying to alert a campus emergency ala Va Tech with Twitter or a service like it, and got the Cat and Robot screen? What happens when Skype goes down for a day?

Real world high availability systems are just as vulnerable as the virtual systems I’m ragging on. Just ask the people on the East Coast of Florida about their half-day blackout a couple of days ago.

Again, we must strive for a higher level of service from the online services to which we are devoting large chunks of our lives and intellectual capital.

Now, forgive me. I have to go interact with real people until Twitter allows me to chat with my imaginary friends.

Social Networking’s Big Disconnects

I am a relative latecomer to the Social Networking party, really jumping feet first into the fray last October with a flurry of activity releasing several Facebook applications to see what kind of traction actually existed in the marketplace and to see if there was any “There, there.”

Over the past five months or so I have uncovered several surprising (to me) truths about where Social Networking suffers significant disconnects:

• The vast majority of “the business world” is oblivious to social networks, either passively or actively ignorant of the potential reach and impact of these networks,
• Most of my colleagues / contemporaries (grew up in 70s, college in 80s) are absent from social and professional networking, and
• Businesses that do engage heavily in social networking are media, HR, or web-invested.

Editorial Note: These so called “truths” are of course my personal observations. Your truthiness will vary.

In short, while the numbers of people actively engaged in social networking activity are hyper-aware of the space and what’s going on, there is seemingly no middle ground of those businesses or persons passingly familiar with social networking; they either get it, or they don’t. A great deal of the people who don’t get it – in fact, I would argue they represent a VAST majority of businesses – are the decision makers for technology training, direction, and expenditures.

There are many times I would like to engage my contemporaries with something exciting that I have uncovered or discovered on the social web, only to to find that I don’t share their frame of reference and that I have a many hours, days, or weeks task of bringing them up to speed on the ecosystem before I can begin to discuss the relevancy of this world to what they are (or should be doing).

It’s like discovering that people under 30 really don’t use email like those of us over 30 do. Discovering that nobody gets your “Marsha! Marsha! Marsha!” rant (for me, this happened first in college when my landlord’s son asked me who “Yes” was while thumbing through my albums).

HR people definitely “get” social networking. LinkedIn is the SN equivalent of the Rolodex for these folks as they hungrily hoard their network connections and chum with the best of them. Media types (PR flaks, marketers, political activists, RSS geeks, news organizations, bloggers, conference goers, echo chamber yodelers, attention whores, and the like) “get” social networking for its ability to reach audiences. The web-invested (the Facebooks, MySpaces, Bebos, LinkedIn, Twitters, QIKs, Plaxos, web startups, VCs, etc.) “get” social networking as another fresh field to “flip and fly.”

Where does that leave the vast majority of the “real” business world? You know, the business world of retailers, bakers, butchers, car repairmen, soldiers, doctors, lawyers, firemen, policemen, government cogs, Walmart greeters, teachers, factory workers, engineers, dry cleaners, convenience store clerks, TSA screeners (TSA Gangstaz, holla), and the like? Disconnected and disenfranchised.

This is not an argument that for social networking to be successful, all of these (and more) need to be connected and engaged – I simply am pointing out that what the echo chamber of the social web deems to be important and all encompassing really only represents a small fraction of the “real” economy that the “knowledge based” economy willingly or unconsciously fails to consider any time we’re slapping each other on the back for Google Juice.

If social networks are about making connections, and meaningful connections, we will need to extend beyond the self-congratulatory echo chamber silos that we have built for ourselves and figure out how all this stuff we are building can be used for meaningful and long lasting purposes; raising our kids, feeding the poor, paying tuitions and mortgages, providing insight to the masses, leaving the world a better place than how we found it.

Stochastic

Stochastic – from the Greek “stochos” or “aim, guess”, means of, relating to, or characterized by conjecture and randomness.

Source: Wikipedia

If there were a word to most aptly describe the state of the Web today, Stochastic comes pretty darn close.

The Web is not linear, it is not predictable, and it is far from knowable in its entirety. It is always surprising, random – stochastic.

I have a childhood friend, Pete Wilson, who works for the Vanderbilt University Library and is arguably one of the smartest people I know or have ever met in person. In addition to being a very smart guy, he hosts a weekly Jump Blues radio show on the VU student radio station, Friday mornings. Pete has an encyclopedic knowledge of blues and musicology, gained over many years of listening. Pete has a built in sense for tying together seemingly disparate and unconnected sets of influences and sounds into a cogent thread. Not everyone can do that, and it seems like magic to us lesser beings who stand in awe at such talent.

The best political operatives and junkies operate in the same way; they have the innate ability to take seemingly disconnected and discontinuous events, past and present, in order to conceive a cogent narrative for his or her campaign. What may seem like a random morass of chaotic events, people, and places to most seem to these folks like a crystal clear picture of things “as they are.” They have the ability to extricate the context from the chaos.

For the sports minded, this is the same phenomena you hear from Quarterbacks who say that after a few years in the Pros the game “slowed down for them.” What this really means is that, after years of being deluged by the fast moving “facts” of the game, with enough experience, the background context of what happens in a game becomes internalized until it is visceral and not cerebral. If you’ve ever wrestled (not ‘Rasslin, wrestling) or played hockey at a high level, you understand – it takes many hours of sweat and repetitive workout so that the mental ANTICIPATION of doing subsumes to the ACT of doing without conscious thought.

What does this all have to do with the Web and Stochastic processes?

Well, for one thing many of us long for a unified means of messaging (IM, Twitter, Email, Voice, SMS, Video, …) – or long for a single social network that will aggregate everybody we know and are interested in – something that in fact will never occur.

Why will this never occur?

Because all of us gather and understand context about the world around us differently; some of us are visually oriented, some of us are verbally attuned, and some of us have to accumulate mass amounts of data before the skies part and all is made clear. No single network, no single communications mechanism, no single channel will ever be able to do this for us. We have to “grok” it on our own, and it is those people who can do this “out of band”, now, that are the social media superstars.

If you want to find the next winner on the web, it will be the person who can make the distance between unrecognizable chaos and understandable context attainable by the common man.

Until then, we’ll have to continue to admire the talents of people like Pete Wilson who can contextualize chaos for our enjoyment and entertainment.

And hope some day to slow down the game.

Getting Beyond

Perhaps the question I am asked the most when approached by connections I make on the web is a variant of “how do you make money doing what you do?” A close second is “what in the hell are you doing?!?” – but that’s a different topic for a different day.

In short, I make money by pimping myself (or those that work for me) on an hourly basis (sometimes per diem, rarely fixed bid). Simple.

That model has altered a bit with the advent of the social web. In that arena, I have sent forth development sorties in directions I would ordinarily not have done in the past, in the name of Business Development and brand building for (a) myself and (b) for my company, Sumner Systems Management (SSM).

The vast army of social network widget code monkeys (present company included) toil away trying to find a way to make this nonsense pay. Some do it by trying build traffic and eyeballs for ad revenue, or to pawn off their traffic and eyeballs to another code monkey trying to build his or her little empire in some corner of the semantic / non-semantic web.

My take is slightly skewed from the majority.

If I am going to invest time, capital, sweat, and intellect to the cause I need to know that there is a tangible long term benefit beyond dwarf tossing, ghoul poking, and general time wasting. Is there a business market for social networking applications, and if so, how does one bridge the gap between the early adopters and the mainstream majority vis a vis businesses engaging the social web to build and extend their brand?

I try to look across the wasteland that is the current state of Social Network applications development and identify (a) underrepresented brands in the social networking sphere, (b) underrepresented features in the social networking sphere, (c) underdeveloped marketing channels in the social networking sphere, or (d) a melange of all of the above.

Having made such an identification, the next step is to determine a way to embrace and extend the underrepresented (let’s say in this case) brand. What is the brand about? What makes the brand special? Is there already community of loyal customers / followers / fans existing around the brand that are simply waiting for an outlet on the social web?

Having answered that, I try to determine the best way to express the brand on Facebook, or Bebo, or whatever network I am targeting in a way that repects the brand. By that I mean, whatever I intend to do OR do, it must add value to the brand and not detract from it; complimentary to this end, if I am doing a “spec” type social application for a brand that I do not own it is important that I do not drawn attention to myself as someone trying to “hijack” the brand for my own profit (other than attracting the attention of the brand owners for the purposes of directly engaging them with me). I have found that it is easier to do this with smaller brands than larger ones, because it is an order of magnitude easier to reach the decision makers at the smaller startups / boostraps, and the decision makers are usually more engaged on the social web that their larger company counterparts (I say usually, not universally true).

What is the end game? To attract and engage business / brand owners underrepresented on the social web, by doing either what they will not, cannot, or want to but have other pressing priorities: build a ready made social network presence for them that they may either acquire outright or negotiate for engagement our esteemed (harumph) insight and wisdom.

This strategy of brand engagement has had mixed results. I have had some satisfying successes, some disappointing near misses, and some downright cones of silence from brand owners.

But where it has been stunningly successful has been in the building of my personal brand. Someone DOING in the social networking arena. Not talking, speculating, bitching, moaning, complaining. Doing.

As John Lennon said, Life is what happens while we are making plans.

To get beyond, you gotta do.