Tag: facebook

Social Media & The Responsibility of Thought Leadership

Posted by Rich Harris – March 7, 2010

It’s so easy to get buried in information nowadays if you aren’t methodical about channeling, funneling, and organizing your incoming tweets, feeds, and messages. Even when you get organized, you have only made it to zero. How can you and your clients or company get above zero? How do you propel your company in a way that makes them visible above the others without looking like just another news regurgitating spammer junkie? For the sake of spewing at least one social media and business cliché in this post: How do you rise above the noise?

Some of the most well known thought leaders currently in the social media spotlight [@BrianSolis, @SethGodin, @ChrisBrogan, @Britopian, @Mediaphyter, @AaronStrout and many many many many more] did not get where they are by doing only what has been known to work. They’ve always focused on pushing us outside of the traditional approach, existing marketing patterns, and evolving the marketing status quo, focusing on the understanding of human behavior, it’s place in business. If there’s a calculated risk opportunity presenting itself that maybe others haven’t seen yet, they’ll try it and discuss it publicly. These folks know that business won’t get better and advance closer to that streamlined revenue utopia we all strive for unless they go ‘this way’ while everyone else is going ‘that way’.

Succeed and Expand

While being a copycat can be traditionally considered the purest form of flattery, I think it’s important for social marketers to realize that in the online marketing world, imitation is only imitation and offers no real value to what we are all trying to do if that’s all you do. News comes and goes fast and the competition for something fresh is fierce.

So You Have A Mountain…

…of data at your finger tips that you’ve accumulated. After lots of trial and error, say you’ve learned how to target and cultivate a niche market. What now? How can you aggressively capitalize on that market and get even more niche, dissecting it into more detail so that you can execute even more effective campaigns and conversations? You will need to get creative in the way that scientists had to when they worked towards dwindling physical matter down to molecules and eventually atoms. In some cases where there’s a mountain, there is a mountain range. After going to the top of one and slamming your flag into the dirt, set up a functional camp of explorers to delve deeper on said mountain, and then you should start heading down hill and start your next climb on the adjacent peaks to see what lies ahead (figuratively speaking of course). :-)

Be The Modern Day Lewis & Clark of Marketing

Social media for me has really been more of an expedition than it has been a job. I think it’s really easy to get mired down in the day to day, pulling the same old story of coming into work, checking out industry specific news and influencers, retweeting some cool stuff, having some convos with relevant and meaningful people on Twitter and Facebook, and then heading home to throw down a Guinness and do it for another hour or so before bed. While it’s important to recognize, acknowledge and maintain all the things you’ve discovered over the last quarter and even the last week, the successes should only make you hungrier for more ideas, new territories and new markets. Never stop.

The Personal Brand: The Balance of Give and Take

Lastly, social media is un-ending monster-sized manufacturer of the personal brand. It has given those of us that know how to promote ourselves, our talents, our hobbies, our lives and everything we do, as a brand. While I’d be an idiot that should be slapped if I produced “Rich Harris the T-shirt”, I’ve always had some inkling of narcissism in my hat. I acknowledge it. I roll with it. I embrace it. However, I am also very aware that not only does the world not revolve around me and everything I have going on, more importantly there is an amazing amount of value in what thousands of other people are doing around me. Their marketing and business ideas, their ambitions, are all extremely important to the big picture and the greater good of successful business and networking.

It’s a great thing for me to simply acknowledge that there are others around me, but as someone who is trying to shine in his own little bubble, it’s more important that I extend myself and elevate those folks around me who also have great (and hopefully even better) ideas than me as well as great ideals. Not to cater to my hippie side too much here, but it’s important that you pay very close to attention to the balance between 1. Giving back to social media, business and marketing and 2. Building your own legion of followers. In my opinion, your value is absolutely and ONLY equal to the amount of value you place on others and how much you lift them and their social capital up. In this life, you get what you give and I believe that couldn’t be more true in marketing and business. The social information age is the perfect time and place to do it.

Part of your priority menu as a social marketer should always be finding people that are smarter and better at what you do than you are……and sharing their thoughts and leadership with others.

Other sources…

Digital Marketing Today: Leverage Social Media to turn your Thought Leaders into Sales people

Redmond Channel Partner Online: Become A Thought Leader

Thought Leadership Times [blog]

[Image Credit: Paige's Arting & Scribbling Blog]

Onward.

Open API’s: Good for Syndication. Bad for Safety?

Posted by Rich Harris – February 18, 2010

Unearthing Another Reality

I’m usually not focused on writing about breaking news but being a regular user of Foursquare and then watching all the press and online noise yesterday about PleaseRobMe.com, I really started to think about open API’s, their possibilities, the good, the bad, and the bigger picture. While I’m not necessarily offended by what the PleaseRobMe.com guys have done (after all, we all have access to that data), it does remind us how a little creativity + ingenuity + behavioral data = influence. Regardless of how truthful or how it’s spun, we can essentially do whatever we want. I think the PleaseRobMe.com dudes used humor to reveal how ridiculous our assumptions are that we can just use all these tools so lackadaisically and believe that nothing bad could come of it.

It’s Just Data, Right?

There is a data collection procedure that they have done with small children when it comes to their exploratory behavior. I saw it on Discovery Channel years ago but I haven’t found a photo, video or article on it online yet. I will link out to it when I find it, or better yet if you know, send it to me and I’ll append it to this blog post and credit you with the find.

Basically, they would put a toddler in a big playroom full of toys. There would be a camera overhead in the center of the room. The child would also have a small concentrated red light affixed comfortably and safely to the child’s back on his/her shirt or overalls. For about an hour or so, as the child ran back and forth doing things, playing with different toys, hitting several different areas of the room every minute, the camera would capture the patterns of the child’s movements over a specified amount of time, drawing it’s movement patterns for the camera. Child psychologists would then analyze this crazy light pattern of movement to better understand attention spans and other developmental characteristics during playtime.

I think apps/sites like Foursquare are collecting the same type of data about adults and probably tech savvy teens too. I have two teenagers that are under my guidance with their data-enabled phones but it’s a little unnerving to think about how much easier it is now for the underbelly of society to learn about them. I’m not much of a conspiracy guy but there are some evil (and intelligent) mofos out there that see this kind of data as the framework for their silver platter of chaos that they can feast on to their heart’s content. API = Open book.

We Are A Giant Research Project

Think about all the sites and online tools that we love. Think about all those sites and online tools that we love and interact with often through multiple means that have open API’s. Think about the amount of data we are giving them about ourselves, friends and family. Just like when an MRI creates a 3D image scan of your noggin by collecting data, these types of sites are doing the same with your behavioral patterns and those you associate with. The funny (or odd) part about all of it is that we are voluntarily (and excitedly in some cases) providing this information to whoever wants access to it for whatever reason. More interesting is the fact that we are connecting apps like Foursquare to our Twitter accounts, which we sometimes connect to our Facebook accounts and other publicly available accounts like Tumblr, Identi.ca, etc.

Foursquare was designed to be a fun way for us to keep track of where are friends are (hopefully only the ones we truly trust), incorporating the fun/reward factor with badges, mayorship, etc. If you are diligent about using the app, it also is giving people an idea of what your daily routines are, good, bad, ugly and indifferent.

This behavioral data collection phenomenon is not just limited to Foursquare either. Think about all the areas now in which people make available data about themselves. MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and the fairly recent wider opening of LinkedIn’s API channels can you give you all the info you need, a 95% heuristic view of a person’s life, just shy of physically hanging out with them in their own living room. If you are a social/tech guy like me using all these services, people can now know your name, your aliases/monikers used (47project for instance), your work history, your hobbies, your music interests, what you look like, your schedule, social and business affiliations and the convos you have within those circles…..all of this is pretty much excessible through API’s. They can also, after finding all that out about you, wormhole into your friend’s lists and find out all of those exact same details about them if they’ve posted it anywhere online. This is a really gnarly concept. The gnarliest part about it is that we are feeding it by choice. It’s not all bad but there’s awareness and responsibility that comes with the use of all these cool apps and sites.

Mindfulness

If you are like me at all, waiting hungrily on pins and needles for the next new social app phenomenon to grace your news feeds, so you can be the first to slam it onto your Blackberry, iPhone, or Android, plugging in your login creds, getting on yet another grid, remember that the more of these sites and apps you use, and the more info you choose to reveal about yourself publicly online, should be kept proportionately equal to the amount of vigilance and proactive awareness you should have about the possibilities of your data being used and/or misused.

Other Great Articles on The Subject

ZDNet: Please Rob Me: Ethical or not? [poll]

Mashable: Are We All Asking to Be Robbed?

CNET: The dark side of geo: PleaseRobMe.com

Information Week: PleaseRobMe.com Solicits Social Theft

Onward.

Facebook’s Juxtaposition of Reality, Our Responsibility

Posted by Rich Harris – February 15, 2010

The Information Consumption Routine

Every morning I boot up my MacBook Pro, I start some coffee, throw together a quick breakfast, load up Gmail, Facebook, etc. and start observing,  joining, or creating conversations. You never have any idea what you are going to be talking about every day on Facebook, it just happens. The access to these conversations every day is starting a huge cultural shift in personal communication and all of it’s different levels of value and meaning. While there is no replacement for the real deal, we’re learning very quickly how to “read” the correct emotional tone of Facebook statuses, Tweets, IM chat sessions, based on who we are talking to, when we are talking to them, who their other friends are on Facebook, and what your history is with them.

We’ve also started joining groups and fanning pages en masse, not even for the sake of the participating in the group or page itself, but just to have an opportunity to announce publicly in an information stream….to let the world know….(diminuendo to a dramatic pause)….that you’ve just become a fan of “Standing On Your Head While Stacking Golf Balls On Tuesdays After 3pm PST” and you don’t care who knows it!

The Needle

There are a couple things going on now that I think we really need to pay attention to. There are benefits and inherent flaws in the mobilization power contained within an environment like Facebook. The feelings of immediate connectedness can almost distract us from the thought of what it really means to be connected and reciprocal with others around us.

Benefit

Facebook on one hand has made it possible for us to amass quickly with like minded individuals for a passionate purpose. It puts those that have always wanted to make a statement or do something big with their opinion but never had the right medium for it. They were too shy, too localized, or too overwhelmed at where to even begin. All understandable of course. This has opened doors for them and given them a voice that puts them on the map. This is a very positive thing.

Caution

There is another side to this coin however, a price or cost that is being paid. Unintentionally I think we are training ourselves, to some extent, to feel morally validated by joining a group on Facebook called “Cure Cancer” and that’s all. It’s as if somehow we’re giving back by joining the group publicly and opting in to messages/news from the group or fan page. Now I do believe strongly that the dissemination and forwarding of information by supporters is awesome and will never be a bad thing. It’s a tangible contribution and good reason to join a group. Fans of a cause on Facebook can get the word out quick and promote. But we can ALL do that on Facebook, with just the click of a mouse, and then we update our status with how much we love bacon and then play Farmville (FB games are not my gig).

I don’t have the stats but I just wonder what the ratio is of people on Facebook that ‘joined’ a great cause to the amount of people that have actually either volunteered 1 hour of their time or $1 to any charity anywhere within the last month. I very much include myself in the group of people that wasn’t really giving, and did so without really realizing it. I was joining, and still do, online communities with a premise that I support. I share their posts on my wall, I retweet stuff to spread the word. I just started to question myself on how much have I actually tangibly given back or made any real contribution to any of these philanthropic institutions or initiatives. When I looked back at my level of giving back vs. what I took for myself, it wasn’t looking promising. I was out of whack and am still in the process of scoping out a way for me to contribute that allows me to also keep the quality of the other things I’m doing in my career and family life extremely high. Both can easily be done. You just gotta get creative.

Balance

I realized I really need to step it up in the area of real, actual contribution. Even a dollar a month helps, or donating an hour of your time at a teen center, a homeless shelter, an understaffed public school, or an old folks home giving some people your conversation time to brighten up the tail end of their existence as they get ready to move on. Look through one of the big charity fan pages or groups you’ve joined on Facebook and see if there’s something in your local area you can check out and contribute to every couple of weeks for an hour or so.

Reciprocation, Social Responsibility

Not to get all preachy here but the online world is permanently infusing itself with our psyches, our communication, sense of belonging and community, all at the click of a button. We need to be careful to not get complacent with a subconsciously perceived substitution for physical interaction and presence, for actually going somewhere to help a perfect stranger that could really use someone to talk to for an hour, a family that could use a $20 bag of groceries this month, a dollar to Haiti, or donating some old books you’ll never read again to a school or two.

You know me, I love social networking and yammering on about nothing more than most of you probably ever will but I am reminded constantly by my kids how important it is focus on the tangible.

Onward.

Social Media: Stand By Your PR Crisis

Posted by Rich Harris – February 1, 2010

Bank of America is in the trenches right now. Like most B of A customers last week, I could not access my account info while attempting to login from www or via mobile device. Of course I jumped on Twitter to follow them for status. As I watched the stream on Twitter unravel, watching everyone’s opinions and complaints about B of A fly by on TweetDeck, I was checking out what Liliana Dumitru-Steffens saw before writing her article “Online PR Crisis: Bank of America Website Down, no Explanation from the Owner“. At first my thoughts were, “cool, they’re on Twitter, they’re gonna let us know what’s up.” Instead what I saw was the online bludgeoning of the folks who were running the Twitter accounts on behalf of B of A by all the customers, but Bank of America was not effectively backing them process-wise. While the customers were snapping at them right and left, shooting first and asking questions later, I realized a couple things. First, I could tell that their Twitter reps were genuinely wanting to help. The problem was the second issue -  they were probably to some extent not getting the info they needed from their own employer to respond accordingly with some details that would’ve at least given the B of A customers a little more patience during the crisis.

A Couple Tips for a PR Crisis

  1. Before choosing Twitter as an official and legitimate support channel for your company, make sure your PR/Communications team are ready to support your Twitter reps with a process for delivering details/status on issues expeditiously so that you don’t hang your social media reps out to dry for your customers to devour and lambaste them when there is a crisis. Sending your soldiers out to battle with no weapons or gear is bad.
  2. Always stay in front of the PR crisis publicly, with a sense of urgency, and mean it. When a bad PR hit goes down for your company or client on Twitter/Facebook, especially when there are customers being effected (and in this case, they’re hooked in financially which makes them extra edgy), this is your moment to shine and wave the flag of corporate transparency to put them at ease. Customers know that websites have issues, that they get hacked, that they crash or become unavailable. Welcome to technology! However, if they can’t clearly see that you are coordinated with your internal teams with the latest updates, rolling out practical sets of expectations every half hour or so with the latest news, they will hate you quickly and easily. Let them know you are fighting for their right to have a good customer experience.

Also check out the Huffington Post article: “Bank Of America Website DOWN: 2010 Outage Affects Online Banking“. There are some good nuggets in there as well.

Onward.

Is Facebook Too Much Ying?

Posted by Rich Harris – November 26, 2009

yin_yangLet’s face it, Facebook has no Yang. You can only “Like” something or “Share” with others. When an ‘unfriending’ happens, the ‘unfriendee’ is not notified so that the ‘unfriender’ can bow out of battle quietly, hopefully without anyone noticing. Socially, it’s almost encouraging denial of the fact that with all the average size multicolored elephants in the room (fun happy time content & conversations), no one wants to acknowledge the gigantic white elephant…..you know, that one with it’s left eye gouged out, open wounds from gunfire, and a severe limp.

The proof of a much needed Yang side of Facebook is obvious. With all the ‘positivity’ built into Facebook, human nature can’t hold the Stepford bridge up for long. We needed a Yang right now or everyone was gonna start freaking out.  So we found a way with rampant Fan Page creation representing strong thought or opinion instead of something tangible like a product or service. Out of this came feature recommendations from users that made a pretty bold statement: We socially can’t all be living in a fuzzy sugar-filled land where everything is made of cotton candy, every living thing frolics instead of walks, and the house band for every club or venue is the Partridge Family, pounding out happy fun tunes with blue birds on their shoulders.

The creation of a fan page has turned into the 2009 version of protesting and marching with picket signs against the grain of Facebook’s intention. The difference is, a petition function and lead generation is built in and it’s global.

Let the bitchfest begin.

The Feature Set of Darkness

There have been some funny fan pages that I’ve seen. Here are a few of those:

The Dislike Button - This call for the opportunity to publicly insert your WAHmbulance into a conversation or on some posted content has been around for awhile. It’s not enough for us to just not say anything if we don’t like it. Is being a pacifist against our true nature? I don’t know but it’s funny to see the thousands of people wanting something like this so bad.

The Hate Button – I interpret this idea as not just wanting to let the world know you are offended by a conversation or content, but to let the world know that if given the choice, you would cripple this conversation with a baseball bat if it had two legs and could walk around.

The I Don’t Care Button - This is one that was ‘recommended’ to me today when I logged in. Isn’t this the same as inaction? If we publicly need to announce our apathy to everyone about a conversational topic, it’s no wonder that humanity accuses humanity of being a group of lazy, whiny, little brats.

The Boring Button - I saw this fan page awhile ago but couldn’t seem to find it again. Anyway, this to me represents our inherent need to be publicly smug about something, tapping our inner Kanye. Brilliant.

Let’s Heat Up This Petri Dish: We Aren’t “Friends” Anymore!

I think an interesting social experiment, and one that would surely make people either quit Facebook, or would at least quadruple the amount of thought going into deciding if you will confirm a friend request or not, is to automate the delivery of a friendly notification to the “unfriendee”, letting them know that person X just unfriended them. Hell, might as well take it a step further and put it publicly in their feed…something like, “So and so just unfriended So and so.” Imagine the awkwardness you could witness with functionality like this. You could cut it like butter. More funny would be people’s interactions with that feed activity, commenting or ‘liking’ it. Think about the conversations that would be generated on THOSE threads. I wouldn’t get ANY work done. It would turn Facebook into a virtual gladiator event! Where’s my toga?

Onward.

Facebook: Are You A Stalker or Researcher?

Posted by Rich Harris – November 18, 2009

Stalking-TwitterSoooo…..Are You?

The general public is full of crazies. This validates our assumption that the online world is full of crazier crazies because now people can be more anonymous, and anonymity is the main survival tool of any genuine weirdo, allowing him or her to carry on. Of course, there’s the serious issue of stalkers on Facebook and MySpace, which is not to be taken lightly. There’s also the harmless stuff, the running joke of, “Hey, I’m glad we got to meet face to face finally, I’ve been stalking you on Facebook (tee hee). Let’s go hang out,” and all turns out friendly and good and you gain some new friends.

I was thinking about this the other day about how many people I’ve connected with online as acquaintances after meeting them through friends, or at business-related mixers or events. You know the routine…you go to a trade show while on a business trip, or a party somewhere, or even just a local watering hole and strike up a conversation with a perfect stranger. After you meet someone that doesn’t seem like Jeffrey Dahmer’s illegitimate love child, you ask if they’re on Facebook, MySpace or Twitter. You get back to your hotel room or home base and get online, find them, and add them. They accept your request and you are now “connected” or “friends.”

Presumptuousness Is The Bastard Child Of Fear.

So it’s no mystery that the human majority takes a look at someone they don’t know and absorbs what microscopic sliver of information about that person they can get their senses on (hair color, their interaction in a restaurant they just witnessed, the wedding ring on their finger). Then their next step is to make massive detailed assumptions about how/who/what that person really is about, their background, their personality, their life history, and so on. It’s human nature. We’re all (to various degrees) innately uncomfortable with not knowing everything there is to know about the people we see around us. Where there are informational gaps, our hearts and minds do their damnedest to fill all those gaps as fast as we possibly can with whatever so that we can comfortably continue to deny some of our own insecurities and the reason we are drumming up all this bullshit.

I understand that there are situations where your common sense forces you to observe a situation so that you can genuinely protect yourself. For example, going into a dark alley in the wrong neighborhood where you’ve just seen a drug deal or “transaction” go down, lends itself to some safe assumptions, the main one being: “I’m probably sacrificing my personal physical safety by taking that particular path to the grocery store.” I think those assumptions are warranted and backed by sanity.

However, for the rest of the non-criminally active portion of the population, think about how exhausting it is that we do that, walking around pigeon-holing everyone. Think about how much energy we spend latching our own neuroses onto something so silly and intangible. I think that tools like Facebook and MySpace and the social sites in general may be providing a positive spin on how we meet new people and form our positive and negative opinions about them moving forward.

Deconstruct. Reconstruct.

Over recent months I’ve had the opportunity to actually go hang out with people face to face that I had initially met on Facebook. Before we even got together I made the effort to comb through their photo albums, check out their status history, take a gander at content they had posted, and read about them on the info section of their profile. Since I’ve started to make a general practice of doing that with random people I’m connected with on Facebook, a couple of interesting things have happened for me.

  • First and foremost, it was a reminder that I don’t even know a fraction of what I thought I knew about people that I’m connected with online. This immediately set off the process of deconstructing my assumptions, pre-conceived opinions/notions, and heaps of information that I had assembled about these people. In an effort to protect oneself, these assumptions (more often than not) never give people the benefit of the doubt….especially if you are a skeptical, cynical bastard like me.
  • The next step is that I began to build up or construct a new picture of this person in my head based on the content that they provided about themselves online. Unless they’re all pathological liars, I felt like I had more valid info now and was able to fill in the gaps with data that was probably much closer to the truth about who they were than all the crap I had concocted in my head prior without any of their content.

The End Result.

So as I was starting to go through this exercise of researching someone before actually hanging out with them, I realized a message was being heavily reiterated to me. My experience when meeting this person for the first time, with me focusing on a more informed opinion about this person, made the get together way more interesting and smooth. I knew what topics would be better to avoid, which ones might spark really good conversation, etc. It’s funny too because people are almost surprised (and probably uncomfortable) that I went and crawled all their info beforehand. The sad thing is that the concept of me wanting to research them first so that I was better prepared socially to interact with them means that being unprepared and uncomfortable is a social standard for many. This to some extent means that it’s probably more comfortable to them if you just make the status quo assumptions because then I’d be going in blind, squirming to find our common ground right there on the fly, which always sucks.

I’m not the first to come to these conclusions by any means but my recent experiences with Facebook in particular have illuminated a lot when it comes to human interaction patterns and reminded me that, as a whole, when it comes to socializing, people have some serious work to do, myself included.

Social Media: Some Low Hanging Fruit For Newbies

Posted by Rich Harris – October 26, 2009

323436829_f6afb5c48eMany large corporations are still new to social media and are trying to figure out how it works, their short term plan, their long term plan, etc. After setting up your Twitter account and a Facebook Fan page for your company, now what? A company CAN do a few things almost immediately to expand their presence in social media with little effort/cost. This list assumes you already have a Twitter account, Facebook/MySpace or other sites that are built and established.

1. Spread Your Tweets Like Butter: Make sure all tweets are either manually posted or automatically posted to your other social sites. There are tons of widgets out there and just about everything posted on Facebook, MySpace, Tumblr, etc. has a URL that can be crawled by search engines. That’s money in the bank.

2. Let Your Social Media Hitch A Ride: Talk to any and every internal team in your company that manages outbound communications. At the very least text links to your primary social media accounts/profiles should be on there. You’d be surprised how many of your customers and partners didn’t know you were in the social media space, especially if it’s new for your company. With tens of thousands of emails going out per blast to customers that trust you and have opted in, every email without a link to you on Twitter, is a lost opportunity.

3. Welcome Aboard, Follow Us: Most established companies have an HR dept of some sort and those departments have a process for onboarding new employees. Your company’s social media info should be included in the welcome packet (whether virtual or paper). Most people are using the popular sites for personal reasons so they most likely don’t need to be recruited to use Facebook or Twitter. As long as employees aren’t a disgruntled loose canon, you almost get an extension of your marketing efforts when they can see stuff and contribute to it, even if it’s just ‘liking’ something on Facebook.

4. Let Search Do The Work: This one sounds obvious but even some of the biggest companies do not do this, at all. Some of the mainstay companies that have some of the strongest online consumer brands in the world, like Apple, usually don’t have to link to their social profiles as people will seek them out. However, if you are not Apple, it’s helpful to have text links to social media profiles somewhere as part of the standard footer or navigation on any of your web properties. I’m not saying plaster huge Twitter icons and logos everywhere, but just a text link can do you some good. Also make sure you have some kind of landing page or provision on your site’s contact page with all of your social media links. If you get decent traffic on your site from search engine referrals, there’s some easy intrinsic opportunity to show up in more search results that you are not currently in without those links.

5. C’mon, Everyone Is Doing It: Social media may not be for everyone. I still have friends who even barely have an email account. However, if you have a company that is marketing itself online and you have employees that are online, send out company-wide emails reminding them to join your company on Facebook, Twitter, or whichever sites you have made to be your social marketing avenues. If they are not on Facebook or Twitter yet, they may actually want to check it out and sign up. Your employees are part of your army, make sure they feel like it.

Social Media: Join The Convo or Instigate & Observe?

Posted by Rich Harris – October 22, 2009

talking-headsAn Interesting Question

I recently was sent a really interesting article posted at Adweek.com titled “When Silence Can Be Golden” written by Benjamin Palmer, co-founder and CEO of The Barbarian Group. It was an interesting commentary and perspective on how brands should consider utilizing social media. We’ve all heard everyone say stuff like “get your brand to ‘join the conversation‘ or ‘build a real direct relationship with your customers‘”.

That’s all fine and dandy and of course as a social media guy, I can’t disagree with that statement. However, the article I mentioned above discusses the potential absurdity behind having a static or inanimate brand engage customers directly or attempting to build a relationship with them. A couple lines from the article that I really liked and hadn’t thought about before were:

“Maybe some brands shouldn’t be conversational. Maybe most shouldn’t.

Social media was not made for brands. Lots of other stuff on the Internet was, but not Facebook and not Twitter.”

I mostly agree with the above, with some exceptions. I agree that some brands maybe shouldn’t be conversational but I also think we need to remember that business IS people. People make products and then people pay for those products. ‘Tis life. Later on in the article he talks about how a company should probably evaluate their approach with social media. Your evaluation does not mean that you should wonder if your company should even get into social media at all (of course it should). The real question is: Does it make sense for you to promote your brand having the conversation with your customers OR does it make more sense for your brand to promote the environments where your customers have conversations with each other about your brand and it’s products/services?

What Are Your Options?

So based on what I’ve said above, you basically have a couple concrete options that could be considered a best fit for your company. You ALSO have a massive grey area that may need to be explored, demanding that you get creatively amorphous and nimble with your approach.

Join The Conversation:

This is the old adage, the trendy social media goto defacto standard tagline that any marketer uses to bring his/her newly discovered career path to the customers. It still has value and substance and has a proven track record for success when done right. Industry types where I think this would be most appropriate are ones whose business is serving human beings and their experiences, where tangible goods are just a facet of the overall experience. These would be anything like hotels (as mentioned in the article by Palmer), restaurants, airlines, general product support services like Geek Squad, etc. People pay for a good experience from other humans that represent or are employed by these industries so direct engagement with them via social media would most likely feel more natural.

Instigate, Observe, Tweak, Observe, Repeat.

Next up is the other concrete option that Palmer spoke of which is: create an environment, or mechanism, or medium, for your customers and target audience to hang out and discuss your brand with each other while you watch and learn and strategize your next moves. In many cases, you can learn how to humanize your non-human products. You can learn much more by listening to your customers as a fly on the wall of your company’s Facebook Fan Page, the stream of tweets containing your brand name (or your competitor’s for that matter), and so on. The industries or companies where this applies are pretty much any company where a tangible product represents their brand. A hard drive, a pack of gum, a bottle of water that supposedly has vitamins in it. :-)

Meet Me In The Middle

The third option is that your real triumph may require you to do a combination of both. You may have a static tangible product that you will sell the most of if you create environments for your customers to talk with each other about their experiences while also conversing with them directly in the same environment so they feel like the brand is their for them, backing it’s product(s). It all depends. Every company and audience is different and complex in it’s own way. It’s all doable but the intuition of your social media/marketing team is crucial to find that balance yielding the best return so that your compay’s foray into social media is worth the hype behind the lengthy social media pitch you just gave to your execs.

Onward.

[ Talking Heads image courtesy of, and borrowed from, 8ninths ]

Stats from The Solis

Posted by Rich Harris – October 13, 2009

Brian’s recent blog post: “The Great Social Divide: Twitter, Facebook Traffic Surges, Myspace Fades“, was chock full of some really great social media nuggets. The behemoth that is Facebook, the rise of Twitter, the process of the fall of MySpace. I highly recommend checking this post out. It’s always nice for us social media guys when someone else goes out there and pulls and the information we really care about into one location instead of the 8 different ones we have to go. The best quote by far from the post at the bottom that is in sync with the rest of the better known social media/marketers was this:

“This is why, in social media, digital anthropology, sociology, ethnography, and psychology prevail…”

Amen to that.

Automation Killed The Social Media Star

Posted by Rich Harris – September 1, 2009

So a short while ago the mighty Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan) tweeted the following: “Social media isnt cool. Human interaction is cool. Just fyi.”

Some people took that as him dogging Social Media but if you know Chris you know that’s not true. I think he’s just getting a little spent on the level of noise and clutter that is being slung around Twitter spammy DM’s and other social sites. I’m sure he’s also probably tired of all the new social media “experts” that have cropped up that are more savvy as used car salesmen than they are true marketers who actually care about the conversation. The buzz-word minutiae that won’t seem to let up when it comes to “Social Media” is…..overwhelming, like tidal wave :-) . When I hear or read that phrase now, it is starting to feel like I’m getting my first tattoo and the artist keeps going over the same spot again and again and again even though he should be moving on to another spot. “STOP I GET IT!” Shotgun marketing methods and not knowing the real point of Social Media is the cause of all this chaos.

Here’s How I See It

Now onto the main point of this post. Whether you are using Auto DM messages on Twitter or regularly and aggressively scheduling libraries of recursive tweet ads (twads? blech…) on TweetLater, you are tired of the time commitment and maintenance of this new “social media” fad that you are trying to convert into a “get rich quick” scheme. My humble message to those people: I have some news for you.

Automation (“in the recurring output of scheduled ads” sense) and Social Media cannot live in the same in universe philosophically with causing the apocalypse. This does NOT include one press release tweet being scheduled early one morning, an Auto DM set up to let people know you are on vacay, etc. I’m talking about the meager attempt, whether intentional or not, by low quality marketers who are trying to replace human interaction and relationship building, with scripts and automated tools.

We all know that the marketing relationships with our customers are only as solid (and lucrative over the long term) as the amount of time, effort and genuineness that we are willing to give to them. It takes time to cultivate real conversations and relationships in marketing. You can’t automate that. It’s like me trying to write a script that will raise my 3 sons for me…..as much as I’d like to have that lying around when they are bickering so I could go have a peaceful cup of coffee some place until my new bickering children script helps them figure it out, there will never be a time when marketing is not about real people having real conversations, especially in this day and age.

If you don’t like people, interaction with people, investing time in people, then please don’t get into social media. :-)

Corporate Facebook Strategy: Multiple Fan Pages.

Posted by Rich Harris – August 26, 2009

Growth, It Happens.

As the Social Media guy (manager, dude, whatever) at Seagate, I have seen social media go from something that was an incremental piece of the communications landscape to a “must have” for many functions within the company. While that’s all good and validates the understanding of the power of social media  it does pose a bit of problem: how does a large corporation strategically support all these functions without muddying the waters and turn people away from the communities it’s trying to build? The answer I’m finding is that through some trial and error, companies may need to constantly rethink their approach to social media particularly as new functions within the organization look for real estate in the social media world.

I began this journey by building a Facebook Fan Page in the summer of 2008. As I’ve watched over the last several months, the unavoidable requirement for Facebook to support companies and their passionate desire to market f themselves on social networks has become a tidal wave of opportunity for third-party developers, marketers, small to medium businesses, and huge global companies. In most companies the social media foundation has been laid, the frame built, drywall, sheetrock, plumbing, electrical, flooring, paint…you name it….it’s now done here. Now it is time to sit back and figure out the next steps that make sense for your company. In social media, specific strategies need to be applied to EACH social media tool that is used by a company. On top of that, global companieshave multiple market segments and personas that have to be tended to, all of which are sprinkled throughout the various platforms/social sites. In this case, it’s more important than ever to move beyond the main house you’ve built, containing the furniture and feng shui that is the current social media entity and to start building a community with different neighborhoods in certain parts of ‘town’. I know I’m speaking a lot in metaphors. I do that a lot and apologize if you are confused about this blog post. I just liken building a marketing effort, – short term and long term, with building a house from scratch, adding surrounding neighborhoods, and beyond.  Anyhow, this is the point where I believe you need to start modifying your strategy, one social site/network at a time, with the big and little picture in mind.

First Up: Facebook

Seagate on FacebookSo in the beginning, the Gods of Facebook created groups. We started one for Seagate. Shortly after, they created Fan Pages. The benefit to fan pages was the zing and marketing-esque options, they way they updated people’s feeds, etc. The Seagate Fan Page was born. Very quickly this page has grown in content, userbase (fanbase ?), and most importantly – the amount of interaction with peeps from all over the world.

Many companies are at this point in their FB plan. One big corporate FB Fan Page with a variety of company information. What happens then when other functions and departments want to promote their particular product of service that is very specific and unique? No, is probably not the right answer. But what is the right answer?  . With every company in the world looking to reduce their budgets to save money and become more efficient, many departments see Facebook fan pages as an opportunity to market their specific product or service.  It’s all good, but what are the paths that can be taken to ensure alignment and messaging without damaging your company’s rep? Initially, I thought let’s duplicate content and have a “the more, the better” approach. Then I thought about how duplicated content on multiple web properties for a company was something that had always rubbed me the wrong way. I’ve never liked the shotgun approach to marketing because I always felt like it was lazy and underestimated (publicly and bluntly) our customers. At the same time, as the Social Media point person, you want to support their efforts. There-in lays the rub.

I’ve been watching companies/entities like Dell, Zappo’s, and the USAA closely, and how they’ve been extremely proactive with social media, allowing themselves to get their hands dirty in fairly uncharted territory when it comes to marketing their brands on social sites (outside of normal banner adverts). Dell has multiple pages that are fairly niched out but I still don’t feel like there’s much of a coordinated effort there…lots of pages with tons of content all the time. I’d prefer an approach that attempts to more cohesively connect Facebook pages strategically. And that’s exactly the approach I’m taking. Is it the right or only answer? Maybe. Maybe not. As I said, companies have to constantly go through a bit of trial and error and make corrections along the way.

Before building something like this you have to ask a few questions to legitimize the usefulness and need that a business unit or department would have for creating a Facebook fan page under your company’s umbrella. Questions like, “Is there a business benefit to marketing your department outside of the company?” or “Are resources available that can tend to the administration, maintenance and content of your page?” should be asked. Just make sure everyone is wanting to do this for your company for the right reasons and the same corporate message.

A couple general rules I like to adhere to for these fan pages is stuff I’ve mentioned above:

1. Avoid grossly duplicative content from any other company fan page unless it’s relevant to the purpose/subject matter of the fan page in question. Keep the content focused and precise and relevant. When someone joins a fan page that has a certain title and description, they are there to get that content and not be upsold everything else that the company has under the sun. You lose people that way, quickly.

2. Overarching content ideas should always be funneled through the person or team that is the official holder of the social media keys to the kingdom for a large company. Social media is fast and furious and people notice problems and discrepancies with everything that companies post. The internet as we know is forever, so if silos start happening within your company, ESPECIALLY on a social network, Twitter, etc. you risk a PR nightmare and potential legal issues…plus your company looks confused and clueless internally. No bueno.

I’m interested in hearing from anyone who has or manages a multi-tiered Facebook Fan Page enviornment (or equivalent on another social site). Please chime in here also if you have feedback, other ideas, disagree etc….please post your thoughts. I’m open to new ideas here as well.

Thanks for reading and happy Facebooking!

iJango Facebook Ploy: C’mon now, we aren’t stupid.

Posted by Rich Harris – August 19, 2009

Ijango_banner_598_x_259So the other day I got a message from someone that I had accepted a friend request on Facebook for iJango. At first I thought, “eh, they are trying to get me to join so just ignore it” but then someone else in the list of people they had sent the message to (there was a group of about 20 of us) replied and tag teamed with the original sender also doing a sales pitch for iJango….like were all a bunch of morons ready to devour a polished turd on a silver platter. Here’s snippets for ya…I’ll leave the names of the people out of this as I tend to give everyone at least one “get out of social media jail FREE card”.

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First person/message:

“……What If you could multi-level Google, IJango just did!!!

THIS IS BIGGER THAN THE GROWTH OF FACEBOOK, MYSPACE, TWITTER ETC.!!!!

Ok, so i’m going to make this quick for you! If you are a network marketer, are interested in network marrketing, or never thought of it really but want an opportunity to make some serious money, then just keep reading……..”

Shortly after that post…another person chimed in with a response…

Second person/message:

“….Hi xxxxxx,

Thanks for the friendship. How is Ijango going for you? I have heard rumors that it is not going as well as people originally thought it was going to. I have two close friends who are leaders in it that are actually jumping ship. I hope that you are not experiencing the same results……”

First person’s response to that:

“…..Actually its going very well. Ijango is really taking off. we just got word that it is generating more prospects in this pre-launch phase than google did when it was first getting started. My heart is really in this. So thank you. With absolutely no product to sell, no change required in the way people use the internet, and its offering the site for free to everyone globally….this is definetely a gold mine….“

=========================

This is the kind of thing that will make Social Media fail. The point to social media is to assume and embrace the fact that consumers and potential customers are intelligent and NOT rock-headed lemmings, hungry to eat the next line of bullshit that you feed them. The method in which these iJango peeps used above was flat out insulting to any consumer that has an IQ of 45 or above.

To folks repping iJango: Be smarter about how you push your offering and do it through real relationships and not used car salesmen tactics from the 1950’s.

/Onward

Social Media: The Kids Are Alright (but make sure you talk to them)

Posted by Rich Harris – August 14, 2009

It Started With My Skate Shop

st05-boy-computer-240-g-skd227302sdcA few years ago, around 2005, MySpace was at one of it’s most optimally active times with teenagers. I had opened up a local skateboard shop and teens were in there hanging out all day, checking their MySpace pages, talking about MySpace, etc…I had actually avoided MySpace for a year or so after that and even then now I don’t use it that much. One thing I did get exposure to since I wasn’t their parents and had the street cred as a funny tattooed skate shop owner guy that listened to all their problems (and let them complain about the world), was an unfiltered view into what these kids were really thinking about and doing on MySpace. I unfortunately also got a glimpse into how much their parents didn’t know about it, and more sadly, how much their parents didn’t communicate with them about what they were doing on there. They weren’t engaging them about something that was consuming 60% of their teenager’s week socially. As I started my own foray into Social Media for business and personal reasons, I realized that there’s this whole other social element that will be a defacto standard in less than a couple years for all teenagers and kids – having a ‘profile’ somewhere…anywhere..that is accessible to their friends and family, but also accessible to some of the wackos that roam the earth. At the time I owned the shop, my kids weren’t old enough to get started on MySpace so I kind of steered them away from Social sites as long as I could so I could spend more time on the sites to figure out the risks as well as the benefits (there are lots of cool reasons to be on these sites for adults and kids).

NOTE TO PARENTS: Just because you don’t understand or know about something does NOT make it bad for your child. If you see that it’s popular and it’s a trend, get involved as soon as possible. Our culture STILL supports too much reactive parenting in my opinion and that is what drives a huge wedge in between us and our teens….but that’s another blog post. :-)

The Bad

We already know about online predators. We know about hackers stealing personal information from websites and your home computer. With social media it’s more complex and nebulous because predators and assholes in general know how to create multiple accounts and very subtly get connected with people that don’t know them. They’re smart, bored and insane to an extent. Social sites have continued to put some controls in place for administering your accounts but it will always be a battle that we need to be proactive about. Twitter, Facebook and MySpace are no exception and STILL have major issues with predators, spammers, stalkers and hackers setting up multiple impostor accounts, using some racy female profile photo so that they can request to add your teenage son as a friend…and out of hormones and curiosity, your teen might accept it…unless you get engaged and educate them on the etiquette and red flags….which I’m getting to……

The Excellent

Whether you like it or not. These current generations are being raised in the information age and setting up an account on Facebook/MySpace is one of the first things they’re gonna want to do to look cool and will probably be pressured to do in jr. high and beyond. Social sites are a great thing for kids. They’re a creative expressive place for them to stay in touch with their friends all over the world and with relatives that don’t live close by. More importantly, for us parents, is that if we embrace it, we can be ‘friends’ with them online, stay out of their business, but still be able monitor/observe their interactions with their friends, see who else they are friends with, etc.

Just remember that your pre-teens/teens need their space and time to have their own social lives without mom and dad interfering all the time, getting all up in their biz. Another cool thing is that I’ve added my son’s friend’s parents to my list and we can all kind of keep tabs together forming a big protective space for our kids to all be teenagers and do what they do.

In a nutshell, if you aren’t privy to social media/sites, your kids probably already are and if they are not legal adults yet, get involved and talk to them about it. Embrace it and get informed and watch what is going on. They (and you) will benefit from it later. Just don’t micromanage them and post crap on their Facebook wall all the time. They need their own space. :-)

The Rules

Set up some basic rules for them online about what’s appropriate online and what isn’t. Because teens typically don’t realize the entire world is watching them while they’re online B.S.’ing with their friends, we need to remind them to avoid and/or be careful about publicly joking about topics like sex, religion, race, sexual preference, murder, suicide, etc.

In your mind you might be like, “What??? My children don’t do that! They’re only in Junior High!” I’m telling you all right now that public or private school, healthy or unhealthy home life, they hear about it, sometimes participate in those discussions, and are surrounded by those conversations and that kind of humor every day at school.

Denial is a parents’ worst enemy….and denying THAT is even worse.

At the End of the Day

Your kids don’t run the show online. You do…but you can do it while letting them enjoy the information and all the social stuff that comes with it.

I’m sure my teens are cringing, reading this now and rolling their eyes. :-) I’m almost positive I’ll get crap for it later.

Here’s a good link (there’s tons’ more just Google stuff) for Teens and High Tech:

Keeping Teens Safe Online

/Onward

Facebook: Excavating Our Identity Crisis

Posted by Rich Harris – August 10, 2009

Where Did All Mah Peeps Go? Am I Being Abandoned? Did I Leave The Iron On?

I know I’ve done a lot of write-ups that appear to be “about” Facebook but honestly they’re more about behavioral psychology and what Facebook has tapped into when it comes to the human condition. I’ve been noticing a couple other things that have come up with Facebook and all of our behavior with it.

Being the socially whorish and obnoxious guy that I am, I have several friends and acquaintances that run the gamut of ethnicity, lifestyle, religion, sexual preference, socio-political opinions, apathy, workaholic, passive, aggressive, passive-aggressive, naivete, over-education to the point of pretentiousness, sensitive, tactless, creative, logical, lawless, and clueless…..the list goes on.

I’ve also noticed over the last few months that certain friends who I had connected with on Facebook from high school, places of employment from the past, etc…have un-friended me even though there was no negative incident or interaction with them that would be grounds for: “well screw you we aren’t friends anymore.”

They just…..simply……quietly……….with ninja stealthiness…….”unfriended” me. Where’s my WAH-mbulance?

Actually it doesn’t bother me at all….I’m about to tell you why….

In The Words Of The Great Philosopher Jackie Chan – “WHO AM I?”

(with hands in the air, insert cheesy echo from top of mountain here)

identity_crisis-291x300I realized after taking a look at the people that did “unfriend” me that they were probably offended by certain parts of Rich Harris (or just hated the fact that I filled up their Facebook feed, I’m cool with that). For example, I have some very right-wing fundamentalist Christian friends on here that I know would not be down with certain things I’ve posted, my sarcasm and openness to Buddhism, assessing it as probably borderline blasphemous. I know that I have some hessian metalhead friends that think I’m too emo. I have emo friends that think I’m sometimes too harsh and too much of a metalhead. I have blue collar friends that think I’m too geeky and dorky and geeky friends that think I’m too blue collar, gritty and rough around the edges for their liking.

Then, it dawned on me….I realized that I had established these relationships with these people on their terms, or what was comfortable for them. I had built that bridge from them to a facet of who I am but not who I am as a whole. One of my strengths is diplomacy, and dealing with small talk, total strangers, etc. So when I meet and relate with people it’s on topics that are comfortable or appropriate for that specific person. While I’m not dishonestly interacting with them socially or necessarily “hiding”, I am not revealing all of myself. Is this lying by omission about who I am or is it me being appropriate socially, showing tact, filters and self-control….and who the hell decides that definition?

What it comes down to honestly is at first I had an anxiety attack wondering how many people I offended and should I reach out and contact all those people making sure we were “all good”. But I realized that that is bullshit. The social mechanism, Facebook in this case, forces you to just be one person in front of all your various flavors of friends, family and acquaintances. I can’t be spiritual sometimes, and other times not be. I can’t only be a musician and other times only be sarcastic and other times only like Jameson and other times only be an internet geek and other times only be creative and other times only be white collar and other times only be blue collar……I am all those things at the same time and I shouldn’t have to hide that. Everyone else on Facebook has all their only little simultaneous facets. That’s what makes life and the world interesting. The universe would suck if we were identical robots, created in some factory somewhere.

We all have a choice when it comes to how much of ourselves we want to share with the world and it can be daunting to some people because they know that the internet is forever so they have to decide how far they’ll put themselves out there. Everyone’s comfort level is different. Everyone’s level of desire to share who they really are publicly is different. There’s no right or wrong here. We all have blood-spitting demons and cute white fuzzy bunny rabbits all inhabiting the same closet that is ourselves. Being the socially shape shifting guy that I can be, Facebook has forced me to be comfortable publicly in front of everyone of every ilk, to be ok with that..to be ok with the fact that some people from long ago may not be into who I am now….and to start shedding any insecurities I have about that.

At the end of the day the people that will stick with you are the ones that appreciate all aspects of you, even if it makes them uncomfortable. The rest of the people will ‘go away.’ – not cause they hate you or because you did anything wrong, but just because it’s trying to put a putting a social square peg through a round hole. Sometimes it’s just not a good fit. It’s ok and normal and ethical to be socially incompatible with people without hard feelings. We already know this…but I said it anyway.

Onward….

Facebook Is A Chemical

Posted by Rich Harris – June 12, 2009

FacebookWhat has always existed…

Human beings have always wanted to connect. It is the nature of who we are. You may have seen some of those documentaries where babies were not given the proper physical/emotional connection with their mothers. They end up rocking uncontrollably in the corners, cerebral synapses needed to function correctly just couldn’t connect, and it can’t be undone in most cases at that level.

Then as children, kids automatically start trivial little clubs with their friends….the desire to connect with others and identify with others. Whether it’s a negative environment (teenage gangs, etc.) or a positive one (communities coming together to help those less fortunate than themselves). We can’t help it. We convene, we group together, we reach out. When we don’t connect with other human beings at least on some level, I don’t care how ’solo’ you THINK you are (for those self-proclaimed loners out there reveling in themselves), we as individuals head down a destructive path…from mild depression to suicide or other violent behavior if we don’t connect with other people somehow. This one of the few common elements in every single human being.

I know at this point you are probably wondering if I’ve fallen off the deep end and “where the hell is he going with this?”

I’m a kooky bastard but I’m getting to that I promise.

Facebook On It’s Own

I use Facebook A LOT, more than your average dude for sure. All my ‘friends’ know it. I’m sure about 80% of the people who are my friends probably thirst for a way to effectively filter Rich Harris. I’m ok with that. :-) I do stuff on Facebook for a living so I’m on it all day, making it easy for me to be active for long periods of time. When I created my Facebook account awhile ago, I first started reconnecting with current co-workers, then co-workers from my previous job, then with as many co-workers as I could remember in my entire career.

Slowly I started finding people from high school, then junior high school, then elementary school, and of course my own immediate and distant family members.

Now, whenever I attend an event for business, almost every new business contact I make is on Facebook. I then find and connect with them.

Facebook is Way Bigger Than Facebook Whether They Realize It Or Not – Keeping Humanity Up-To-Date In Realtime

I realize that MySpace is one of the originals in this social frat party phase of the web but I’m going to use Facebook here since it’s more sophisticated, refined, and people are starting to at least subconsciously feel how it has unlocked something amazing that was hindered before, and rumors about that peeople are starting to bail on MySpace.

The lack of technology: essentially the great wall that existed due to limitations in communication methods, coupled with the shear size of this planet, and lastly, the randomness that holds true when it comes to where each individual ends up geographically while living their lives as adults.

While I do credit the overall Information Age with opening up doors to people/places/products in other parts of the world that we never got to see before, Facebook has started gluing humanity together. It has proved synergistic in catalyzing something that has always been in our genetic makeup since humans first walked the earth: Connecting with other humans.

PeopleIt blows my mind that I now have friends all over the world, to varying degrees of closeness, that I now always know what is going on with them, with their kids, their careers, their health, their hobbies…with pictures and video. If there is someone that I knew that was associated with that person, regardless of where THAT person maybe, I actually have a decent shot at reconnecting with them. This is really cool for an obsessively social bastard like myself and maybe scary to those who are much more private.

While I don’t feel obligated to communicate with some of the almost 1000 people I’m connected to on Facebook/MySpace via email or private/public messages more than once a month, if even at all, the fact that I can “like” something they posted or quickly comment and nothing more, puts me in touch with everyone worldwide on some basic level at almost any given moment without really invading their privacy. They’ve kind of ‘opted in’ by posting it. I now get such an amazing 360 view of the world, where everyone’s paths have gone and continue to take them and their families…and they are sharing it, almost constantly. I’ve even noticed that friends of mine who are  much more introverted in-person, have no problem throwing it out there on Facebook for everyone to see and comment.

One dynamic that is hilarious to me is that I have pockets and clusters of friends, with varying degress of spirituality, believing in different religions or none at all, different types of humor at various levels, progress in their career, different types of careers, developing chapters in their lives, etc. No matter what I say or post, how liberal or conservative, how right brain or left brain, how logical or abstract, how sensitive or harsh, various clusters of people are drawn in to comment or participate who have commonality with each other and with what it is I had just posted…..affirmation that we are all very different but we all have something to say.

Human beings could never interact like this before. It used to be that after high school, you graduated (hopefully) :-) and then people went to work or to college and just kinda got lost out there in the world. It used to be a freak of nature moment to re-connect with a childhood friend that had gone away from the town where ya’ll grew up to go to college or to travel on some exchange-student program. Now it’s almost expected that we get to stay in contact with these people the rest of their lives instantaneously.

My 3 sons will never know what it’s like to not be able to find someone as all their friends are being raised to use Facebook/MySpace. I think it’s gonna be one cool way to keep their minds open to new ideas and paths that they can take in life. Life is about choices and the nature of Facebook helps remind us that you can do whatever you want in life at any time.