Social Media - Servant of Chaos

Undercover Innovators: Ian Lyons

Smart Bloggers, Social Media, Undercover Innovators

I am always amazed that we often look overseas for inspiration or leadership before looking closer to home.

I see people being flown in to Australia from all over the world – to discuss topics, ideas and innovations. And while this is great. Inspirational even. It’s also disappointing to see that we ignore, fail to promote or support the innovation that is occurring in our own backyards.

Now, to be honest, I have also benefited from these types of programs. For example, I recently travelled to the US to speak to 50 of GE’s top global executives on the topic of digital and social media strategy. It was fascinating and challenging – and all over in a couple of hours.

But you’d be surprised who and what you can find close by. Sometimes you just need to scratch the surface.

This is partly why I am involved in youth not for profit, Vibewire – and a strong supporter of their monthly Fastbreak program (showcasing young innovators and entrepreneurs). It’s a constant reminder of just how talented and innovative people (and young people in particular) can be.

And it is also why I have started a new, regular section on my blog. Undercover Innovators is dedicated those talented people doing interesting and challenging things, often far away from public view (or in a niche area). I want to explore the way ideas can keep you awake at night, and what you need to do to make them a reality.

Last week I had the pleasure to speak with Ian Lyons, founder of SocialFocus.com.au, about his passion for innovation and the work he is doing with the Sydney Festival. Sorry about some of the sync problems – I blame Ian’s iPhone – but only marginally more than I blame my Flip video. Hope you enjoy!

Undercover Innovators looks beneath the surface to find and share the stories of innovators that you may know – or may want to get to know better. If you know someone who is a good candidate, be sure to drop me a line!

Is the Facebook Social Inbox for You?

Social Media

I remember when webmail first appeared. It seemed like a revolution. Gone was the clunkiness associated with in-office mail clients like Microsoft’s Outlook or IBM’s Lotus Notes. In was speed, flexibility and simplicity. And it also meant that I could read and respond to personal emails at work.

It took me some time, however, to fully shift over to webmail. The ingrained business behaviour of owning your own backup ran deep. I held on and held on to various versions of Outlook (as my operating system upgraded from XP to Vista and so on). But the time and effort (and sheer size of the mail files) associated with this behaviour eventually collapsed under its own weight. Why was I managing my own email data?

When I switched to Gmail things changed pretty quickly. Now I had a single place to consolidate my various email accounts. I had a simple way of logging on from anywhere in the world, and I could quickly and easily search my massive mail archive.

And when the Rapportive plugin for Gmail became available, I could suddenly see a whole world of social connections explode within my inbox. There were connection details about people I was communicating with – email addresses, Twitter IDs, LinkedIn profiles and a raft of other, publicly available information. And while this is a great extension, it only addresses part of the problem.

You see, email is just one of the ways that I communicate with people. I have my blog and the comment streams. I have Twitter. I have LinkedIn and the discussion forums. And I have Facebook. By default, everything is linked via email. That is, it comes back to that unique identifier that marks me out as an individual. But Facebook wants to change that – and has designed its new messaging product to bring a social world to your inbox.

As the video below shows, the Facebook social inbox is poised to bring a range of communication options into one place. You’ll need a Facebook email address first of all (and I am sure there will be a goldrush there). But once you have this, your messaging will be simplified, integrated, altogether more easy. Or so they say.

Now, there are some benefits to the social inbox. In the video, they talk about connecting you with your grandma. They talk about the social inbox being that box of letters that your grandma kept under her bed – a way of remembering all the important moments in your life.

This is a great concept – and a powerful, emotional story. But I don’t want Facebook to be that repository for me. I’d prefer, like a shoebox of letters, to be able to curate exactly what is important and why. In fact I do.

And while I like the privacy features – you can use the Facebook privacy settings to limit and manage who gets into your inbox (hooray for a positive use of the Facebook privacy settings), this is a filter that would not necessarily work for someone with a more open social graph. In that way, Facebook’s social inbox seems more like yet another place for communication rather than a replacement.

Will I use it? Probably (once I receive the special invitation). Will it change the way I communicate? Maybe. But at first glance, I see very little value in this for brands and businesses – unless you’re Facebook. And at a guess, we’ll see another spurt of membership arising out of this.

I Connect Therefore I Am

Flaneurs, Social Media, Strategy

When I was in my teens I found myself with pockets of friends. There would be those kids that lived close to my home – the boys I would surf, fish and hang out with. There were the smart, nerdy kids who I shared classes with. And there were some cool kids who would play guitar in the playground or were good at sport.

When I moved towns to attend university, these groups of friends fragmented even further. I had work friends, university friends and people I did drama with. I was living a patchwork, finding my way. Connecting.

I noticed my level of contentedness directly related to my place within my group of friends. Over time, I shifted, as perhaps we all do, to the centre of connected webs – investing time and energy in those places where my investment matches the investment of others.

Now, I am not saying this was conscious, but it was certainly a fact.

These days I see this most clearly demonstrated in the social networks. With social networking, we like to say that we are drawn to “like minds”. However, what we are actually looking at are clusters – not of “mind” or thinking, but clusters of behaviour. What causes this? As Nicholas Christakis points out in this TED Talk, there are three conclusions:

Induction – where my actions see a type of contagion or spreading within those strong ties within our personal network
Homphily – where our ties are based on our obvious similarities
Confounding – where the similarities in our behaviour are the subject of something other than the obvious

Where this gets interesting is where you look at “happiness”. It seems that when you map the clusters of happy and unhappy people, the happiest can be found in well-connected social networks, while the unhappiest are found on the fringes. Now, we knew this instinctively, right? But where it becomes fascinating is when we look at the role of the individual within network creation. Based on Nicholas’ research, 46% of the variations in an individual’s social network is genetic. Sure, some are born shy and others, extroverted, but some of us choose to CREATE a network of ties – we choose to place ourselves on the edge or in the centre of a network. This in turn determines our experience AS SOCIAL CREATURES.

In my own worlds, I gradually began weaving different social groups together. It was a risk – for me. But what I found was that all sorts of goodness arose from the connecting of these networks. There were unexpected alliances and new friendships. But there were also plenty of learnings:

Social shifts – people move in and out of groups, become active, cool off and re-engage. Sometimes they leave the group, the location or move beyond the reason the group came together. This is natural.
Community needs orchestration – in multi-group networks, the person who connects the groups MUST initiate and orchestrate engagement. You have to give people a reason to engage with each other.
It’s not dating – you aren’t trying to match-make people. You’re looking to align passions, not individuals. Find affinity first.

But what does this mean for brands?

We need to think through this in the same way. Think about the people behind your brand – the marketing directors, the agency, the brand managers and so on. Find their passion points. Allow them to express these within their social networks. It’s about finding the connection point into a network – not shouting at a bunch of disinterested online participants. And the strange thing is, do this right and you’ll make people happy. And isn’t that the whole point of what you do?