Community spirit in social networks
‘Tis the season for reflection on 2008 coming to a close and looking forward to 2009. On this blog, I’ve talked about a bunch of Internet tools (web 2.0, social media) that I’ve found useful or that save time. I recently wrote a post about Twitter, discussing how outside of the 5-6M people using it, that people are mostly either unaware or misinformed about Twitter. Web 2.0 social media is still very new; consider that we only need to go back a couple of years to predate Twitter or have Facebook only for college students.
For 2009, what I plan to do is talk less about the tools (I’m more likely to post a link or article as there are some great people who already spend a lot of time on the tools) and talk more about the information, community and impact of what’s going on in the space.
For this post, what I wanted to mention is the community spirit that you can join in the social networks. On Facebook or MySpace, it’s common that people start with friends and family, so they have existing relationships. On Twitter and FriendFeed, from what I’ve seen, you might know some of the people that you first get online with, but usually your circle of people that you follow and that follow you will grow to include people in similar lines or work or interests. If you form relationships by commenting/replying to people online, communities form and most people on these sites are open to not only sharing information, but also helping to promote others in the community. I’ve found it to be rather refreshing that even competitors tend to be very friendly online (with a good dose of sarcasm and disagreements).
A recent example for me was the FCoE video that I posted just 2 weeks ago. In that short time, the video received over 1k views on YouTube. For a viral/funny video that wouldn’t be a lot, but for an educational video, it’s a very nice audience. Normally my company just posts the video to YouTube and sends out a couple of emails. I supplemented this with a blog post, Twitter post and a couple of emails of my own. Someone that follows me on Twitter posted the video, it also got posted on the FCoE.com website and Cisco blogs (they probably got notified about it via email). I think the video was a good one, but even getting a good video noticed isn’t easy. I only have 100 followers on Twitter, but a good percentage of them are people that would be interested in the technology and also pass it via Twitter, RSS or blog to others who might be interested. I know that I’ve seen plenty of good articles and bits of information through this peer network that would have slipped through my filters if it wasn’t that someone highlighted it. It was powerful to me to see that some of my content got passed around too.
So, thanks for stopping by my blog and wishing you a happy, healthy and prosperous 2009!
Stu
