In blog comments, on Twitter, all over Facebook, Yelp, YouTube, and several other sites, we’ve been groomed to give our opinion. We spit it out everywhere. We share, rate, criticize, deride, praise, and everything in between. Forrester’s Ladder graphic suggests that critics are second on the content ladder, just below creators.

But if you look at the ecosystem, and what we’ve built, are we “starting conversations” or are we inviting commentary? And what’s the difference? To me, one is an exchange of knowledge, whereas the other is more of an end product. Make sense? Commenting and giving opinions becomes an “object” or “artifact” or “creation” of its own. See where I’m going?

So the question becomes: if we’ve built all these tools, these comment buttons, these like buttons, these “share and add notes” buttons, how is this impacting our interactions and our communication? Now that we’ve gone from not having a voice to having tools to give our opinion about everything, how does this change us? How does it impact how we interact with people? What does it mean to the larger ecosystem?

Photo credit Hashmil

The site, Skip1.org is set up to allow people to build a profile and do repeat giving. For those of you who like challenges and game mechanics, there’s a leaderboard to see where your skipping stacks up. (That might not be for everyone, but lots of people are motivated by competitions, so I can see it working for them.)

Founder Shelene Bryan and I met a few months back in Orange County, CA, at the Brandtailers event put on by Cheril Hendry (who is helping with Skip1 as well), and we had a great conversation about how the cause intends to move things forward. Instead of telling you, however, I thought I’d use their own video to show you. If you can’t see the video, click here.

Now, if that works for you, and if it makes sense, let’s do two things next.

1. Go to Skip1.org, make an account, and skip something.
2. Tell your friends on Twitter, Facebook, your blogs, wherever, and let’s really spread the cause out there.

Fair? Let’s skip something.

If that’s true, and I believe it is, we have to really think about how we share, how we make our requests, and about what Dr. Stephen R. Covey called the “emotional bank account?” How can we share information beyond the first person? Let’s talk about the hand-carried letter.

The Hand-Carried Letter

In some ways, as we’ve shifted to this ubiquitous distribution world, where I can be a video maker, a radio host, a newspaper, a book, and a public speaker all from my couch, something else shifted as well. In a world where everyone can distribute information, that means there’s lots more information. That means data at Jackson Pollock velocity. Too much too read means much more goes unread.

We need “the hand-carried letter.”

A hand-carried letter means to me that the person choosing to share information with me believes in what she is sharing, and believes that it’s something I want to know about.

Think about the mail in your inbox (or clogging your social channels). Think about the mail you’re sending. Can you say this about the information you’re choosing to share?

Sharing and The Tax on Friendship

As time passes, we rely on our friends to vet and share information. Let’s use “friends” to include business colleagues, online personalities we’ve come to trust (me?), and others who we believe to have a handle on things. We look to these people for information that has already been considered once.

Example: I learn about the real time web from Louis Gray. I don’t even bother reading about it from other sources any more. When PR people send me info that seems like something Louis will cover, I either tell them to see Louis, or I delete and wait for Louis to cover it.

Example: I learn about interesting, thought-provoking books from Whitney Hoffman and Ann and Michael. I might or might not get other sources for this, but I trust the hand-carried letter of what Whitney and Ann and Michael are sharing.

But what about when people need something to travel far? Lots of us seem to have causes and needs and businesses to promote online. We have things we think are important, but sharing this information and spreading it requires that we find people who think it’s interesting enough to hand-carry to their audiences, their communities, their constituent masses.

Asking our friends to share things is a tax. If every person alive has what Dr. Stephen R. Covey calls an “emotional bank account” between us, this asking requires a small withdrawal. If things are going well between two people, and/or if the “ask” isn’t too big, this tax is small. But what if someone starts asking you to share every little thing all the time? Or, what if the person asking doesn’t really have much stored up in the emotional bank account between you? Just because you *can* reach me via email or Twitter doesn’t mean I support your causes. Right? How does your multiple asking tax those loosely-joined friendships? It taxes them at a much higher rate, is the answer.

It adds up quickly.

Ensuring Prompt Delivery

Thus, in this environment, we have to do several things, if we’re to rely on friends and loosely-joined connections to deliver hand-carried letters for us.

• Give much more frequently than you ask. This gives others a better feeling about who you are and what you do for the space at large.
• Share without being asked, when you consider information good. This builds up points in one’s emotional bank account (we talk about this in our pending book, Trust Agents, by the way).
• Make the requests simple, infrequent, and brief. (If you make it hard for me to share, why should I?)
• Ask only when you need it most. Asking others to share every little thing taxes the relationship.
• Don’t seek hand-carried letter service if you’re really intending a mass-mail message.
• Build your information such that it’s “hand-carried” friendly (brief, portable, shareable, addressable (with a URL).
• Thank people for sharing, as often as you can.

What’s Your Take?

Does this resonate? How do you see the information sharing world changing? What does this mean for you or your business?

Photo Credit the consumerist

First, A Note About Creative Commons

The photos that I use on Flickr for this blog are licensed to be used under Creative Commons. That means there are some rules to using them, but if you abide by the rules, you can use them. (More on Creative Commons.). There are multiple rules for these photos. I use the least restrictive photos, found by searching using this link, which will give you any photos posted by people who simply want credit attributed to them for their work.

Attribution

First off, this post by Steve Garfield should be required reading. He’s right that Flickr’s system needs some tidying up. That said, I’ll write from the perspective of how I’ve been using photos and how I attribute them.

The word “attribution” in this case means giving credit to a person for their work. The photo above was taken (or at least posted) by someone who goes by the name M@rg. If you note above, I’ve made the photo clickable, such that it takes you directly to the person’s Flickr page. Further, skip down to the bottom of this post, and you’ll see an italicized area where I point out the photo credit.

The best way to give credit would be to have the text of “photo by” or something directly under the photo, but I’ve yet to figure out the proper html syntax to accomplish that neatly for my blog. (You’re welcome to recommend how, in comments). That aside, I’ve at least give two ways for you to realize who snapped the photo, and how to find more about him or her.

Make Sure You Share As Well

I love that so many people make photos available for use on Flickr. You should be sure that your own settings in Flickr are set appropriately. I’ve written about that here. Simply, go into your Flickr account and adjust your settings here.

Quick Recap

To use great photos from Flickr for your blog posts:

1. Search for photos here.
2. Provide attribution by making the photo link back to the original source, and by adding a photo credit.
3. Share your own photos by updating your settings.

There. Anything else? Ideas? Thoughts?

Photo credit, M@rg

None of these bloggers are on your typical Top 10, but they’re people I read nonstop. I want YOU to read them, too. Not all of them will be your cup of tea, maybe. But they’re voices that deserve more attention than the stuff I write on a given day.

In our space, in the fishbowl business, it seems like there are a scant few people getting all the links and the references. We point to the folks on top of the charts all the time, and riff off their ideas.

Wouldn’t it be more cool if we found the less-known? Wouldn’t it be better if we collected some of our favorites into “starter packs” of interesting content we should be reading/watching/listening to?

And furthermore, even amongst the bigger names, how often are you sharing the good stuff other people are doing? I’ll tell you who’s on top of the heap who shares a lot: Robert Scoble. He points me to new stuff all the time, both on his blog, but very much in his Google Reader Shared Items.

So, my question to you: are you sharing and promoting others enough? Can you do it more? How can you bring more awareness of the people who deserve it?

Photo credit (stolen without permission) Glenda Watson Hyatt

I want you to share. I want you to take my posts and use them as part of your other work, to build on, to add to, to remix in other useful ways.

The only thing I want back is that you credit me for my work, with a link back to [chrisbrogan.com] at the least, and if you can, to the specific post. That’s how it works.

So, feel free to search through and find things you want to use as source material. How about some of these?

• My Best Advice About Social Networking
• My Best Advice About Personal Branding
• My Best Advice About Blogging
• My Best Advice About Social Media
• 50 Steps to Establishing a Consistent Social Media Practice
• 50 Blog Topics Marketers Could Write for Their Companies

And all you have to do is link back. Easy cheesy, eh?

So, swing by [chrisbrogan.com], look at the tag cloud to the right, and see if you can’t scare up the kinds of posts you want to run with on your own blogs. That’s what it’s there for: for you to learn from, for you to share, and for you to expand upon.

Happy sharing! : )

Photo credit, Okaggy

Photo site PicApp might prove useful for your blogging, especially if you’re looking for more legal-to-use pictures of famous people, like Jason Statham from the movie, The Bank Job. Though you often see pics of famous people on blogs, they’re usually there illegally. I read about it at GigaOm, and I think it makes for a nifty tool to add to the arsenal for certain types of blogs.

Mind you, I’ll probably never blog about Jason Statham again, unless he comments or something, and then, I’ll blog about the miracles of social media bringing him to me.

Bonus round: check out the nifty advertisement floating in the photo. Kind of a neat trick, eh?