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What Do We Lead About? - What Makes Up Participation vs Lurking vs Flair?

The owner of inSocialMedia.com made me a guest admin on Friday night.

Why did I accept? What did it mean?

How would I participate, or ADMIN? Below is the first discussion thread I created as an admin, where I created a "leadership" group and proposed the following questions to the growing group of 4.

1. What is inSM to each of us?
2. Why are we part of it?
3. What do we get from being a member?
4. If we were a guiding leader of inSM what would we do to make it better?

And then it was my turn to answer my own questions as a conversation starter.

1. inSM to me is a collection of folks working in SM who want to communicate and build discussions around making our SocialMedia interactions better. To me it is not about business or making money or reputation at being a part of it. It might be for others, I don't pretend to know.

2. I want to be a part of things that are larger than myself. I am an avid community participant. I love Posterious and inSM as my 2 adjunct communities that add more conversation to my own rantings.

3. What I get as being part of inSM is the connection with other SM professionals. Notice I don't use the term experts, cause if I'm an expert today, I am certianly not an expert tomorrow. Too much is changing for any of us to be experts. We are students and teachers, leaders and followers.

4. Engage a group of people in leading the community. Add additional tools or groups as needed. Begin actual dialogues on inSM, unlike the vacant "groups" and "affinities" of Facebook. Where we all join and nothing happens.

So if inSM is more like LinkedIN than Facebook we have done a good job. If we use inSM as part of our reputation validation then we have done a good job. If we build relationships and a level of TRUST on inSM for the discussions to be honest and challenging, then we have begun to build something of value for all of us.

We have begun to build a community.

@jmacofearth
permalink to the uber.la post: http://bit.ly/inSM

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The VIEW - A quest for the "evolved web browsing experience"

"The evolution of social media depends on the evolution of the browsing experience."

Open Source Collaboration is about Virtual Teams using web tools to manage and communicate asynchronously while still maintaining priorities and quality of communication. The first step on any new project (open or closed) is to define the goal. This post is only part of the challenge, but the goal of FFoFF has morphed into a process I refer to as The Cloud >> The View >> The App. And that process or workflow is the basis for a conversation I am intending to have with other simliar minded seekers.

The goal is not to create the next killer app, or uber browser, the goal is to define what that evolved web experience might look like. And then, using free plugins, apps and browsers (0riginally FFoFF or FriendFeed on FireFox) to get as close to the goal as possible. Through this discussion [preferably not a monologue] the intention is to articulate the needs and challenged of the next generation web experience.

The evolution of social media depends on the evolution of the browsing experience. Things like secure transactions anywhere, on-the-fly translated content, consolidated profile management (across all of your networked sites) and public and private personas are all part of the puzzle that will drive the next generation of social media connections and networks.

THE VIEW (an invitation to dialogue and collaborate to build the requirements and demo of the UBER UI for the "social web.")

1. The project
2. The tools
3. The rationale
4. The solutions
5. The view
6. The team
7. The genesis

1. The project

Defining the Evolved Browser or Uber App for Social Media

2. The tools

• FireFox 3 is the development platform and interface.
• The tools are widgets, social media sites, online apps, clouds of data and on and on.
• And FriendFeed is my current choice for uber aggregator of social content.

3. Rationale

• I believe we can iterate an Uber Interface (a VIEW) that will have amazing flexibility and require a ZERO DOLLAR dev budget.
• My Firefox bookmark bar is already a sort of streamlined UI. It is not good enough, and constantly changing and evolving. But it is FREE.

4. The Solution - Usage models for the solution.

• The uber social master VIEW
• BrainTraining and Teaching VIEW
• The newbie VIEW

5. The VIEW

A view is a design and grouping of FFoFF elements. A view is an iteration. A view is a proof and hypothesis.

6. The team

John McElhenney

7. The genesis

• First I posted a Question on LinkedIN. http://tinyurl.com/firefox-plugin-question
• Read a post by Steve Woodruff on his StickyFigure blog. And posted my comment to his One Interface to Rule Them All post. http://tinyurl.com/uber-search
• Next as I was contemplating Steve's question I was inspired to put together a PPT slide of what I imagined the uber app to be.
• Next, I created a room on FriendFeed http://tinyurl.com/globalsocialmedia
• Next, I built a feed of the GSMC room and invited most of my smart friends to join the room.
• Somewhere along the way, I read someone's post containing a reference to FFoFF as a joke. But in my mind it stuck.

Note: I am searching for that initial FFoFF person and will post the link here poste haste. And if it's you, please jump in and put yourself on the TEAM.

Also please see Socialwiki and Wikisocial for an evolution of this process to an open source directory project.

[Initial wiki page created 7-15-08]

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/theview-exploded

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THE new Formula for Social Media Success - Available Now

-- This post is a response to Larry Hawes post: The Seven “C”s of Social Interaction --

Humor me for a sec, I'm going to think out loud for a sec...

Conversations - well this is the topic, so I'd cut it,
Continuum - like the word, I'm not clear what you mean.
Container - don't like the word, but okay on this one.
Community I think this is the topic, so I'd scratch this one.
Currency - "one person desires something that another has" [let's come back to this one in a sec]
Credibility - the biggie to me - I use the word TRUST
Connectivity - nice, multiple meanings [physical connection via internet; connection to another person via the conversation]

I'm going to take a shot at simplifying the "framework" if I can. Platform People Trust or at a start up I once labored at we rallied around the forumula to "make it scale": People Process Software In order to evaluate the power/value of a social interaction I think the focus is on the "connection." And when I think of major connection I think of looking in someone's eyes and evaluating what I call the "connect." [Nice how that fit together.]

Online of course, we will be interacting and trying to connect with folks we have never met and may never meet. At the heart of this tension is trust. The software/platform can help, a skype connection could help, but at the end of the day, even my "friend" will have to ask themselves, "what's in this for me?" I think that's our basic instinct. And certainly as things have tightened up financially, the "how does this impact the bottom line?" question is becoming more urgent.

So to summarize a simplified formula I would express it like this. People [multiplied by] Platform [divided by] each Individual's ability to express themselves during the connection [minus] Misses or clash of style that degrades the communication.

So a simplified social media equation might be written like this: P x P / I - M = T [trust ratio of a connection/community]

[Oh, hey, I've got to get out of here, I need to get some t-shirts printed with this new formula on them. I'll send you the link to the order form when I'm done.] So, Larry, thanks starting the dialogue. And if I get any money off these t-shirts I'm working on, I'll give you 9.7% of the profits after tax.

[based on the above formula and this interaction that we've just had]

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/socialmedia-formula

Now available at cost ($10.99) as a t-shirt from Cafe Press.

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