Social media, identity, and civility

In today’s Austin American-Statesman, Michael Barnes says “second generation social media” - referring to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. - “encourage civility, congeniality and respect.”

Increasingly, I’m encountering just that sort of social chemistry at openings, parties and clubs. And this brand of socialilzing often begins with announcements such as “Hey, I follow your tweets!” or “Oh yeah, I know you from Facebook! How did that heart surgery go.”

Yes, indeed - the line between social media and socializing face-to-face seems blurred - because it doesn’t really have to exist. Increasingly people are building positive and productive networks of relationship online that reflect and enhance their offline social networks, and that’s really not new, but it’s new for many people, and we’re getting away from some issues that Barnes addresses, with some inaccuracy, in today’s column:

First-generation social media - e-mail, discussion boards, chat rooms - often spread social poison. The main reasons are obvious: anonymity and pseudonymity. One could “flame” with impunity as long as nobody knew who you really were. Combine that with an inability to ascertain precise emotional tones in digital exchanges, and one could be forgiven for avoiding all chat rooms and keeping e-mail conversations short and to the point.

I say this is inaccurate for a couple of reasons. First of all, the online anonymity/pseudonymity Barnes refers to here was not necessarily the rule. For example, the WELL, a seminal online community that has existed since 1985, has always verified the identity of community members and insisted that they make their real names available (though they also have pseudonyms by which they’re commonly known within the community).

Second, pseudonymous presences can establish clear and persistent identities even where identity isn’t published, and completely civil communities can exist where “real identities” are masked. It is better to require some kind of identity verification, if only clear association with a verifiable email address, to establish at least the possibility of accountability and reference, but you don’t necessarily have to share that with other users. Some have found the ability to create and play with alternative identities in online social spaces very powerful and helpful.

In systems like the WELL, where identity is verified and shared, you still see massive flame wars, just as you see, in physical networks and communities, minor and major arguments and wars. And while I acknowledge that it’s easier to “‘flame’ with impunity” in a context where no one connects your online identity with the identity you and most people think is real - the one you use “in real life” - anonymous flames have little weight. They’re no big deal. Those of us who’ve been online for years have learned to ignore them, just as we ignore traffic noise, smog, billboards (an early version of spam) and other forms of pollution.

All that said, it is interesting to see the effect of mainstreaming on social media, and the concurrent commitment to work out best social practices so that online experiences are most fruitful and productive, and minimally stressful and bothersome. We all have an interest in promoting civility and sane communication. It’s insightful for Barnes to note that this is being reflected in all of our communications and gatherings, online and off. Maybe this Internet thing will lead to a better world, after all?

Bootstrap Your Online Community

Bijoy Goswami and I have an ongoing conversation about the kind of community development that has worked so well for Bootstrap Austin. Our visions are well aligned, and we’ve evolved a presentation that explains our thinking. Here’s a current set of slides, our first cut at the presentation, which we delivered at a Bootstrap Web Subgroup meeting. We’ll present again soon (wathc this space.)

It takes a beehive

Dan Schawbel talks to Seth Kahan about building communities, which Kahan describes as beehives. [Link] The conversation includes a point David Armistead and I have been talking about quite a bit:

Do you think a company will survive the next decade without establishing a beehive?

Successful companies today require a social component to succeed. In the early stages a company may be able to get by with only command-and-control running operations. But, as soon as success starts to take place, knowledge sharing - which operates outside the traditional hierarchical org chart - becomes critical. Companies that prefer to isolate their members by keeping their noses to the grindstone, focused only on their work program lose valuable competitive advantage. I don’t know of a company today that can operate that way and succeed.

“Are you conversationally tone-deaf?”

At Conversation Agent, Connie Reece has a good and useful post about conversational skill in online environments. It’s important to emphasize the social in social technology: you can have the best technologies in the world undermined by participants’ lack of social skills; Connie suggests three issues to address in conversation or community management. She focuses on one-way conversation, hijacking, and lack of respect for other viewpoints. These can be detrimental to any conversation, but are especially detrimental online, where conversations can evolve to be complex stews of potentially inconsistent perspectives, and where there’s a lack of visual and audio cues.

What other issues should we consider as part of a “conversation 101″ set of best practices?

Ambient Awareness and Social Evolution

Twitter, Facebook, and other evolving social systems feed into our “ambient awareness,” which is, according to Clive Thompson in the New York Times Magazine, “very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does - body language, sighs, stray comments - out of the corner of your eye.” Thompson’s written a clueful article about computer-mediated sociality and its impact on self- and other-perception. Read his article, and you’ll “get” Twitter and, beyond that, begin to understand that the social web is transforming communications in a way that oddly restores the kinds of social relationships that existed before we had to “would adjust to the anonymity of life in the city, the wrenching upheavals of mobile immigrant labor - a world of lonely people ripped from their social ties.” Now we have a way to sustain social ties, almost aggressively, and we have another adjustment to make - to a world where privacy is limited and our actions online form a persistent and somewhat inescapable sense of who we are. Thompson concludes on a positive note - we begin to know ourselves better:

It is easy to become unsettled by privacy-eroding aspects of awareness tools. But there is another - quite different - result of all this incessant updating: a culture of people who know much more about themselves. Many of the avid Twitterers, Flickrers and Facebook users I interviewed described an unexpected side-effect of constant self-disclosure. The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you’re feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It’s like the Greek dictum to “know thyself,” or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness. (Indeed, the question that floats eternally at the top of Twitter’s Web site - “What are you doing?” - can come to seem existentially freighted. What are you doing?) Having an audience can make the self-reflection even more acute, since, as my interviewees noted, they’re trying to describe their activities in a way that is not only accurate but also interesting to others: the status update as a literary form.

More on Twitter here:

Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang posts how he uses Twitter (my list would be similar, how about yours?).

Owyang (on Twitter, naturally) points to a Business Week article by Shel Israel, “Getting Intimate (with Customers) on Twitter,” which talks about Ricardo Guerrero’s success using Twitter for Dell.

Community Platforms and Enterprise IT

Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang, a rich source of information about the evolution of social network and community deployments, reports the CIO’s perspective on community and social network platforms in the Enterprise. Enterprise IT departments have generally seen these deployments as one-offs by marketing and other departments and not as enterprise solutions, but they’re beginning to “ealize that fragmented communtiy software is going to lead to a disparate mess to clean up, and many are starting to make recommendations for enterprise platforms that will span the usage of the whole company… to reduce overall resources, ensure security, centralize data, and ensure, well that they are responsible and safe when it comes to their information.”

I could make the case that in 12-24 months we’ll start to see CIOs start to initiate projects to deliver enterprise social networking mandates, take ownership over these disparate projects, and wake up and realize the importance of these tools beyond marketing and HR.

This yields all kinds of questions regarding: security, what does enterprise-class entail, how will Microsoft/SAP/IBM respond, will Saas or on-premise software be required, governance, flexibility, allowance of third-party widgets, and costs. More to come on this as I dive further into this research project.

Who should own communities?

I won’t be at the Office 2.0 conference, but I wanted to note one session there that asks a question we’ve been thinking about at Social Web Strategies: “Who should own communities?” In this case, who should own communities within the corporation. [Link]

One of the exciting things about Social Media is that it gives everyone a stake in the game and makes the idea of communities relevant and invaluable to all audiences. The real challenge is breaking through departmental politics and barriers (within the corporation) to find ways to collaborate on community initiatives where there is shared ownership and success.

Here is a description of the session: “Online communities have become a cornerstone of any corporation’s strategy, changing the way it does marketing, customer support, or even product development. This panel will address some of the social, political, legal, and technical challenges of developing and managing large online communities.”

Best practices for online customer communities

Dion Hinchcliffe has taken traditional online community best practices as a foundation, and created a list of a dozen best practices for customer online communities. Will online communities help your business?

Numerous studies over the years have underscored the benefits of customer communities, ranging from the 2001 McKinsey-Jupiter Media Metrix showing that “customers of web community features generate two-thirds of sales despite accounting for only one-third of a site’s visitors” to the brand new Deloitte study recently highlighted by the Wall Street Journal that showed that over a quarter of community initiatives increased sales even while most business-sponsored customer communities struggled to achieve critical mass in terms of users.

Hinchcliffe goes on to say that “it’s clear from a number of sources that business are beginning to get community religion en masse,” pointing to Deloitte’s Tribalization of Business customer community study.

(Thanks to Charles Knickerbocker for sending a link to Hinchcliffe’s clueful article.)

“Why most online communities fail”

Just before I spoke at SEM for SMB last week, Bijoy Goswami sent me a link to a Wall Street Journal piece, “Why Most Online Communities Fail.” I referred to it in my presentation because it reinforced points I was making (I was presenting on the subject of online business communities).

Businesses launching online communities repeat a series of blunders. First, they have a tendency to get seduced by bells and whistles and blow their online-community budget on technology. Moran suggests that businesses spend resources identifying and reaching out to potential community members instead of investing in software that makes predictions, or even social-networking technology.

Moran also recommends that businesses put someone who has experience running an online community in charge of the project. This doesn’t sound particularly earth-shattering, but consider that about 30% of the businesses Deloitte studied have only one part-time worker in charge of their communities. Most other businesses put a single marketing pro in charge of their sites.

The article goes on to question community metrics: “Businesses say that their primary objectives are generating word-of-mouth marketing and increasing customer loyalty. Yet the metric that businesses use most often to measure success is the number of visits to the site.” The lack of clarity about metrics reflects inattention to strategy. Many companies have an idea why they want community, but they haven’t taken time for detailed discussion. It’s more “add this and see if it works” without sufficient investment of time, money and energy to ensure that community does, in fact, make sense and “work” to achieve well-considered goals. Prototyping is not a bad idea, but adding community as an experiment is pointless if there’s no commitment to the experiment’s success.

“You don’t build communities, you enable them”

This week I spoke on “Building Business Communities” at the SEM for SMB conference. One of my key points was that you can build a community platform, but the community builds itself. Techdirt has a post, referring specifically to news sites that add community features, that reinforces that point:

…simply yelling “community!” and thinking you can throw some “community features” on a site aren’t going to do very much. What the rest of the internet has shown is that you build community not by building a community, but by enabling a group of people to do what they want.

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