Communicating, the ecosystem and "friends"
This week, I’ll be moderating a Twitter for business purposes tutorial at EMC with the help of my coworkers Jamie Pappas and Dave Graham. Here’s a pretty obvious statement, but one that I think is worth repeating - there is so much information out there and people are so busy, that you should never assume that someone knows a piece of teaching or wouldn’t benefit from hearing a certain story (and just as new ideas like can be useful, so can old ideas). The pace of change in the internet era is so fast that it is easy to follow a process and not change for years and you can be “out of date” very fast. Remember that social media has really only exploded over the last five years.
A couple of the main things that I want people to walk away from the tutorial is that:
- Twitter is just a tool and all of the same challenges that you have in other communications exist with some new wrinkles since it is public
- Don’t think of Twitter in isolation
- Focus on the connections to information and people
Here’s a great chart of various digital communication methods from Hutch Carpenter
Every communication method has the opportunity to be misused; hasn’t everyone sent an email out that they regret?
One of the big struggles that people have with understanding Twitter is that if they see it as “public IM”, why would they want to use it unless they are a narcissist? The value comes out where you are connected to people or information (usually through a link or connection to another person) that you wouldn’t find through other channels. Your interactions on Twitter can be an extension of the ecosystem of blogs, websites and other places where you might have dialogue.
In response to a question about social media, World Innovation Forum speaker Dan Ariely commented that he was concerned that people on Facebook and other sites are losing the meaning of “friends”. Dan was a great speaker and maybe I’m taking his short comment out of context (it’s even easier to take a Tweet out of context than spoken word), but I’d say that while some might only have very little interaction with their contacts on social media, there is also the opportunity to take connections deeper. When I connect with someone on social media, if the communication gets beyond what Twitter can handle, I switch to email (often I’ll add them on LinkedIn to get their email and it’s my online contact list), a phone call (I’ll especially do this with coworkers at other locations) or IM (I’ll either ask for their IM or add them on Facebook and use chat). Now with hundreds of connections on many social media sites, I’m not saying that all of them are close relationships. I probably follow the rule of the Dunbar number which says that at the center of the graphic below, you can only follow 150 people closely. At the outer ring are friends or associates that you might comment on every now and then, but don’t talk to much. Some people you build more relationships with and therefore communicate with more and they move closer to the center of your attention. It’s really no different than a community at work, school or your neighborhood. There are those that you’ll wave to while walking by and others that you’ll grab and have a conversation with. Is everyone in the online community a friend? Well that’s open for debate, but there is the opportunity to take communications beyond 140 characters.
Any EMCers interested in the Tutorial, please see the Social Media Club on EMC|ONE. If you’d like to find some of the EMC community on Twitter, see WeFollow #EMC.
Both graphics from Hutch Carpenter’s blog
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Stu
Twitter @stu
