I’ve started off this year actively pursuing an important part of my “kings” guiding words. One of my goals was to connect with more people who matter to me. At CES in Las Vegas, I spent a little time with Kris Smith, Marsha Collier, John Jantsch, Betsy Aoki, Tim Street, Steve Rubel, Bryan Rhodes, Lindsay Maines, Chris Brown, Rohit Bhargava, Alexis Rask, Ross Martin, Kenny Miller, Jeff Pulver, Jeffrey Hayzlett, and so many more.

I did this somewhat differently than usual. I worked my hardest to make time for as many people as I could who mattered to me, so that I could make some kind of personal touch to reinforce our relationship. This meant having a moment to chat comics and business with Justin and Eric from Coffeehouse. It meant watching demos with Ken Kaplan and Bryan Rhodes at Intel, and playing around with the new Bloggie video camera with Sukhjit from Sony. It meant getting into the AMEX Open booth (disclosure: I write for them), and sharing ideas on who’s a big thinker with Steve Rubel.

I love meeting new people. I’m always happy to talk about social media and writing and whatever else with folks. But I skipped every party except for the Las Vegas Hilton tweetup, because I knew that it wouldn’t be a value to stand around in a loud club, drinking and mostly just nodding my head while not really hearing what you were saying. Instead, I spent time learning from smart people who will fill me with ideas that I can share with you for your business goals.

I’ve also decided to stop using the phone as much as possible. Phones, Steve Rubel was telling me (and I forget who told him) make it so that someone else is setting your day’s priorities. That’s one problem. The other is, I’m in different time zones all the time. I’m on planes all the time. I have a bad memory, so things we agree about on the phone don’t always get written down. I’ve shifted a lot of that into Google Wave ( my new love).

To deepen our networks, we have to do a few things, and some of them aren’t exactly easy or simple to execute.

To Deepen Your Network

• Devote two hours a week to this effort. If, out of the 60 hours an average person works, you can’t find two for this, reconsider how you’re running your day.
• Pick small groups of like-minded people that you want to stay in touch with. List them in some way (in your contacts, on a spreadsheet, in a Twitter group – maybe all of those).
• Think the following whenever thinking about this group: “you are important. I care about you. I want to help you grow.”
• Reach out to these people once a week, if you can. Try not to make it about nothing, but do keep in touch, even if it’s in small clumps (I’m using Google Wave for that).
• Keep their names close at mind for when someone mentions they need/want some kind of help. I made two referrals in one meeting to people I think will appreciate them.
• Keep abreast of these people’s news via Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. Check in from time to time. Congratulate them on their success, and commiserate with them over their failures.
• When attending events, make SOLID plans to connect with the people attending that you want to deepen a relationship with (Jeff Pulver taught me all I know about planning my experience at events. I fail this sometimes, but he taught me well).
• When possible, find these people opportunities. Do the groundwork instead of asking how to help. (Want to know the king of this? Tim Sanders, author of Love is the Killer App).
• Remember to devote more time to these people who will enrich you than you do to less useful pursuits. You choose how you spend your time and attention. Make this an investment.
• Share the results of these rich interactions with your larger network in other one-to-many ways.
• Repeat. Always.

Both Julien and I think 2010 is the year people start paying much more attention to their networks. Part of my 3 words for 2010 is “Kings,” and part of how I’m describing that is to remind myself to spend more time with kings (and queens) who matter to me. Though your mileage may vary, I believe that people who work to deepen their networks instead of add numbers will find the best yield and value in coming years.

What say you?

How to Promote Your Work

The Mindset: Don’t Be That Guy

First, learn to promote, but don’t be that guy. It’s really important that you are participatory in the social space. If you’re here just to talk about you, your work just won’t get as much spread. People won’t take the actions that they might if they feel you’re “one of us.” By starting with this point, I’m saying this: your mileage WILL vary if you approach social media tools as just another channel exactly like what you were doing with marketing.

The Groundwork: Home Bases, Outposts, and Passports

Second, put into place a system where you have a simple presence framework set up. Make your blog (or the main site you need to promote) your home base. Build outposts that point people to this blog. That means, link your blog into your Facebook, into your LinkedIn, into your Twitter, into your email signature, and on every other relevant social network you belong to, so that people there can also see what you’re talking about. If your blog is unique and useful, consider submitting it to Alltop, too. (If your home base isn’t a blog, skip that step.)

Outposts are essentially places where crowds might be gathered, but not specifically gathered for your blog/site. Giving your social networking participants a chance to interact with your material is a great way to find new audience.

Some people ask if you should automate your blog posts to dump into Twitter. Google recently added this feature to FeedBurner, and before that, several people were using the RSS-to-Tweet apps of a few other groups. I’ve never been a fan. I like hand-delivering my posts to Twitter by asking a question related to the post. (Most recently, however, I’ve started a new Twitter account called @broganmedia, where I am automating my tweets, and no one seems to be expressing a negative opinion. Test it, if you’d like.)

Passports are just accounts on sites where you might not feel like maintaining a full blown presence, but where having an account will be helpful, should someone start a conversation on that platform about you. Swing by this post to get some starter sites where passport accounts might be useful.

Find Your Audience

The first steps to finding the people you need relates to growing bigger ears. Your audience isn’t the person with the largest Twitter following. Your audience isn’t the person who “likes tech.” Be better than that. Find the people who seem to be talking about what you’re talking about.

And then, COMMENT. Comment on their stuff, and don’t talk one lick about your site. Share your passion on that person’s site. More often than not, you get an instant new relationship where you’ll see eye to eye.

Here’s a hint: people aren’t exactly sitting around wondering what else to read. They’re thinking, “what else will equip me to do my stuff better?” That line of thinking will change EVERYTHING. It should change how you create content, and how you go about finding people to promote your work to, in the larger run.

Details of the Promotion Itself

If you’re promoting blog posts or other content pushes, the goal is to attract eyeballs. My best advice here is to be helpful. People want information that will equip them. Whenever I write something about myself, people are polite. Whenever I write something you can use, people are voracious in their sharing.

If you’re promoting an event, use multiple tools. Build a Facebook following and promote it there. Use Upcoming.org and Eventful.com and consider tools like Tweetbrite.com. Be everywhere, if the event is open to everyone. Look at Google Groups and Yahoogroups for the area where you’ll be holding the event and determine if there’s any value in your joining beyond just promoting your event. (Don’t just join to promote, but become part of the community and see what else you can do BEFORE promoting).

If you’re promoting a product or service, it’s better if your audience are the types of people who might want to use such products. It’s amazing the kinds of things people try promoting to me. I get invited to try out make-up and vegan food dishes and all kinds of things that have nothing to do with my lifestyle. I guess the best I can tell you here is that if you’ve built a blog and social following, hope that they’re the people your stuff is built to support.

Promoting for Others

Here’s where things get crazy. I get asked to promote for other people dozens and dozens of times a day. Most times, it’s just a bold request to help someone get attention, whether or not it even relates to my typical audience and community. Smarter people know I’ve a soft spot for causes and charities, but even that can get tiresome. Think about all this before you ask for help promoting something, and think about it when you start promoting for other people.

Promoting for others isn’t just a matter of passing information along a stream. In some way, by passing the information, you’ve agreed to spread that word. Think on that before saying yes. Is it something you’re willing to stand behind? I’ve sometimes fallen prey to this one, as sometimes, I just want to support a friend, and I don’t necessarily realize what their project is fully about. Rest assured that I take a few moments to see where I’m sending people.

One big point of getting others to promote: make it EASY. The more you make someone do, the less likely it is that they’ll do it.

Make sense?

Above All Else

Keep it always in your mind that we’re not at these social networks for the same reasons. Some of us are there socially. Some of us are there for business. Some of us are working our passion jobs on social networks while our “real” jobs are something completely different. So bear in mind that there is no one-size-fits-all method for connecting, no “audience” the way marketers like to think of “lists.” This is all a matter of connecting one relationship at a time. It takes longer. It’s messier. it requires more work to do.

And yet, it’s working pretty darned well for lots of us, and could potentially do the same for you. It just requires heart.

What Did I Miss?

What else do you want to know? What else are YOU doing that works for you? How else can people promote better?

Photo credit Tiago Ribeiro

The Emotions Around the Data

What strikes me is that this is a potentially emotional exchange to what should be a simple choice of data management. Think about it. If you remove someone as a friend, it says something more than just a line of data, doesn’t it? There’s an emotional transference. Some of you will argue that there shouldn’t be, or that someone should get over it, or whatever, but for the most part, I’d say that people who use social networks extensively (versus people trying to plumb the system for business purposes) would feel a little something, should they find themselves defriended.

It says you’re not important. It says you’re no longer relevant. It says you’re no longer entitled to a more intimate view and sharing. There are lots of potential combinations to feel when one is unfollowed or defriended.

And yet, the decision is almost always unemotional in nature to the person doing the trimming. Barring little arguments, it’s usually a momentary judgment of, “I’m not really interacting with this person, so I don’t see the big deal.”

Right?

So there’s a disparity between what the act means to the person removing versus the person who feels removed. And yet, what’s the value of keeping every name listed that you’ve ever friended? Is there some historic quality? Does it mean something different?

Clustering and Other Sorting Mechanisms

In a way, Facebook is flawed in this way. Unless you work your news stream through a series of filters (I do), you see ALL friends as equal. There’s no real clustering that says “I’m spending more time and interest on these friends,” and yet, that’s how we do what we do as humans. True?

What about proximity (as per my other post)? It strikes me that it would be useful to pop in some location data and have Facebook clump up my friends for the region (especially as I’m typing this from Paris, France).

It’s All A Strange Synthetic

Our friend behavior matches what software developers have designed. It’s not exactly written by sociologists. In some ways, the software forces us to behave in certain ways. In others, it opens up new ways to think and build relationships. It’s a mix of benefit and drawback (like all innovation, I suspect).

There’s more to this. I’m only just starting to see it, but I’m also acutely aware of what needs fixing in social databases.

You?

I tell you this because I woke up realizing that this makes an apt analogy for why people often have trouble finding jobs.

Your capabilities don’t matter much if you don’t have a robust enough network to get them out to where they can do the most good.

It’s great that you know how to do all kinds of things. It’s wonderful that you’ve got all kinds of experience. If people don’t know you, if your name doesn’t readily come to mind, it doesn’t matter a lick.

At the end of 2008, I wrote a free ebook to help you understand how to use the social web to find work. If you or a friend needs work right now, please give it a read. It might help.

What do you think? Does that analogy make sense? If you can’t transfer your power to the ground, what good is it?

Now here’s the thing: if this person knows most of these people in the room, he or she suddenly has an equation to work out FAST: should he or she introduce you, and if so, how will he or she do so? What’s the appropriate level of social capital that will become exchanged in the process? Does he or she endorse you, or just know you?

This is difficult in the face-to-face world, but it’s even harder online.

Let’s look at LinkedIn: officially, the service suggests that you have a strong professional relationship with everyone you connect with on the service. I disagree. I’m a promiscuous connector. I invite people to connect with me on LinkedIn via Twitter all the time. The reason is this: I don’t consider friending (the act of adding a connection to you on a social network) the same as endorsement.

How I’m Managing This

I like to friend with people on social networks. I don’t consider these connections as automatic endorsement. Instead, I feel like a phone company employee, threading up new connections, building new dialtone, so that you can reach out to me in different ways.

On services like LinkedIn, I will connect with anyone, but I will only write recommendations for people whose professional work I can vouch for myself in some capacity. To me, this is a matter of how much of my reputation I’m willing to extend to the other person.

During a recent conversation, someone said to me, “I just follow who you follow on Twitter.” I said, “Oh no! That’s not necessarily a good idea. For a long time, I used a tool to follow back anyone who followed me, because it was easier than manually parsing through the multiple requests.” The person didn’t realize that a “friending” or “following” did not equal an endorsement of that person. Or at least, that’s not my interpretation.

How YOU Might Interpret Friending, Endorsement, and Reputation

First, don’t get caught up on the term “friend.” It’s just what the software calls the connection between two people. Most reasonable humans realize that the word doesn’t exactly mean the same thing as it does in the face-to-face world. And let’s just use the word “friend” to mean “connect with people on a social platform” and accept that there are somewhat different terms on all the networks.

Now, some ideas:

• Friend people you find interesting.
• Friend your customers.
• Friend your prospects.
• Friend your competitors (why not?)
• Search for friends based on interest (easy on Twitter, by using Twitter Search.
• Unfriend spammers.
• Unfriend folks who bother you.
• Unfriend people who talk too much if they’re swamping your stream. (I swamp people often.)

Endorsement and Reputation

Your reputation is one of the biggest assets you have, especially in this online space. Endorsing someone in any fashion is a withdrawal from your own reputational store with others. Meaning, if you vouch for someone and that person turns out to be not as respectable or reliable or civil as you originally thought, and this is all experienced by others in your various circles, your reputation (potentially) takes a hit for the other person’s efforts.

If the person you recommend turns out to be a stellar performer who really delivers for the people you referred her to, then your reputation for being a connector adds interest back into your account.

Gambling in the online reputation space is not a good recommendation.

So, what happens when someone who you list as a “friend” seeks out a recommendation or endorsement?

• Thank them for asking.
• Write a very brief and simple note that explains your position on referrals and endorsements.
• Sample: I’m very thankful that you connected for a recommendation, and I appreciate the opportunity. I have some very tight rules about who I recommend online, and I just don’t feel comfortable endorsing you, as I don’t know enough about your work history or your reliability. You’re probably amazing, but I can’t provide my recommendation at this time. I’m sorry.
• If they press for more, it’s your choice whether you want to open up and provide constructive feedback, or whether you want to simply restate your statements above.

Your Take

I’m curious what experiences you’ve had with this, and what it means to you, this whole friend situation.

Has your mileage varied? Do you have any questions from examples that have happened to you or a friend?

Let’s open this up and talk about it.

Photo credit C.C. Chapman

It revolves around quid pro quo, or “something for something.”

The basic premise of quid pro quo is that people attempt fair/equal transactions. This makes perfect sense when the exchange is obvious: I’ll give you $1.00 for that soda pop.

It’s a lot harder when it comes to situations between humans. Let’s start simply: if I follow you on Twitter, you’ll likely follow me back. Right? If I choose to friend you on LinkedIn, a professional network, will you be so quick to reciprocate? Well now it depends. How about Facebook? We’re friends on Twitter. Why not Facebook?

And this is just “friending” in the online world.

Here’s where this gets tricky:

If I invite you to join the Facebook group for Trust Agents, it’s because I think you’ll get some value out of participating there. Say you join the group. If you now invite me to join your real estate company’s fan page after you’ve joined my book’s group, what should I do? Should I say yes because you said yes to me?

But I have no interest in real estate, except for when I’m making a transaction.

I was asked to join someone’s new social media application, but because I have a lot of stuff on the go, I politely declined. What I got back as a parting shot was, “Thanks. I’ll still buy your book.”

It left me feeling a bit awkward.

Do we expect reciprocal behavior all the time? Is it easy enough to see that I participate as much as I can in both directions, and that it’s not all about me?

What do you do in these situations?

Photo credit Mr Mystery

I just checked out Scitable and think it’s yet another cool velvet rope social network just like yesterday’s Black Box Republic post, only where Sam Lawrence and team want to make the sex-positive world feel safe, Vikram Savkar, Nature Education’s publishing director, wants the folks doing big work in genetics to feel comfortable.

Oh, and the site is very student-friendly. Want to build some classroom materials to teach your students genetics? This is the place.

Again, what interests me is that this is another kind of “velvet rope social network,” which means a social network that has a bit of a gate on who would enter, who would participate, and what matters to the people inside. With that in mind, the creators of such sites can build more targeted experiences, tools that are specific to the users, and build value that doesn’t exist in commons-based sites like Facebook or Twitter.

What’s your take?

What makes this fascinating to me is that it points to my long-standing belief that “velvet rope social networks” is the big trend in 2009. Instead of “commons-minded” sites like Facebook and Twitter, which are interesting enough, Black Box Republic is something a lot more intimate that has its members at heart. It’s built with a lot of weight put on reputation and a system called “vouching,” where members allot authority on each other with their “vouches” or votes.

The super duper exciting stuff will be forthcoming, but after a very long talk with Sam as well as April Donato (cofounder and VP of digital relations), I’m excited to see where they talk this.

Because, if you squint, you can see the OTHER kinds of communities such a system will benefit. Sports comes right to mind.

Get your Black Box on, and best of luck, Sam, April, and team.

She has started a tribe. What I’m excited about is how some new technologies (and some that we’ve already been using) will enable even more useful interactions. I’m particularly excited by what Nine Inch Nails have done (more below).

Last week, I saw community building in Detroit. The week before, I was at the heart of it in Southern California. In all of these places, little tribes formed around thoughtful leaders. They are intentional communities. Seth taught me a bit about the leader’s role in all this. In fact, while reading the advanced copy of Tribes on the side of a lake while my daughter took swim lessons, I read the part where Seth told us that all tribes needed a leader. It was the subtitle of the book, actually: “we need you to lead us.”

True story: when the point Seth was making sank in, I emailed him and said something very much like, “You bastard. You’ve just explained several of my own personal failures of the last few years.” He did.

The thing was, I was trying to build autonomous communities, where I felt they could run themselves. I tried it with several of my projects starting in 2006. I’d build something, get a bunch of people excited, and try to let it go to the wild. Every time, it would falter almost at once, no matter how passionate people were. Transferring ownership was never the same as finding a leader. (Again, nothing bad about the people involved, and everything bad about my inability to understand this point).

What’s Next: nin:access

I am blown away by nin:access, the iPhone application for Nine Inch Nails fans. On the surface, it’s not immediately obvious why it’s sexy. Here’s what they say about it:

• Exchange messages and photos with other NIN fans in your neighborhood and around the world

• Access NIN news, photos, custom wallpapers, and your nin.com inbox

Here’s a few screen captures:

Look at that second one. Location-based. It is a listing (opt-in) of fans of Nine Inch Nails geographically, so that you can, should you wish, connect up with other fans in an area. (Yes, I know that the example text isn’t all that enlightened, but think beyond what you see.)

You Can Have It All

Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails have it figured out. Empower fan-to-fan interaction. They’ve had that with their message boards, with their nin.com mail service, with all their other actions over the last years. But with the location-enabled iPhone app, it just feels even more super powered.

You can do this, too. There’s not a lot of super high end tech in what they did (not dissing NIN). It’s just good marketing for a great community. Not ready to plunk down some money on an iPhone app that will do this? You could always use BrightKite as a starting point to understanding what it’ll do for you. (If you want to build an iPhone app that does this, I could get that done for you.)

Location plus peer-to-peer interactions = a huge win.

A Quick Community Checklist

What if you’re Siobhan Bulfin or someone else looking to empower a little community of intent? What would be a way to do it? Here’s a quick little roadmap that might be useful:

• Name the Community Something Inclusive. (In the case of Nine Inch Nails, they’ve self-selected to gather around the band. Sometimes, it’s not as easy to make it about a product or company. Find a name that folks feel like they can own, something they can put on a flag of their own and hoist high (if that makes sense).
• Buy the URL for that name or something close.
• Make sure you understand the value to your prospective members for joining the community. Are you an information-sharing site, a business networking group, a creativity group? What are the ways in which everyone will be able to participate and contribute? What’s the “fire” that you’re gathering around? ( This is the “Channels vs. Communities argument that Stephen Saber makes.)
• Start with a simple Ning community, if you expect your group to be fairly small and if you don’t need high end power community tools.
• Put up a Flickr group so that there’s a place to put community photos.
• Think up a few meaningful tags that people can apply to any media, should they want to write about your group, the events, whatever as it relates.
• Start an email list by asking folks to opt in. Email marketing is still very successful in building community and driving relations. If you want everyone to have the ability to mail the group, consider using a simple service like YahooGroups for people to opt into to receive messages.
• Would a location-based tool like BrightKite be useful?
• Should you hold Tweetups?
• Do people want to publish a shared list of users on other social services, like Twitter and/or LinkedIn?
• Find ways to deliver value.
• Find ways to deliver more value.
• Find ways to encourage participation (another blog post in its own right).
• Find ways to gather the tribe around your various issues of interest.
• Find ways to facilitate peer-to-peer sharing, as well as member-driven media making.
• Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

I’m encouraged by the “nin:access” application released by Nine Inch Nails. It points towards another way to enable communities of passion. I think there’s great value in building around these ideas, and that there’s much more to be done here in this space.

What’s your take? Does the above list help? What other elements have you built into your community building?

Take note of this idea. They’ve given voice to a segment of their community that matters to them. It’s obviously the sign of things to come, and not a bad way to show that you’re listening. It’s also great for your product marketing teams as well as better customer service.

It’s a win, provided your community rushes in to respond and do their part. Remember, it’s not exactly sexy for customers to talk about you and your product unless they come away with the feeling that they’re being equipped for further success. Meaning, people love when you listen by giving them exactly the product they want/need/crave.

Tricky, eh?

Watch this space. I look forward to seeing what Dell reports about this, and glad that the gang are still delivering innovations in the space of social tools for human interaction. Now, the interesting question is, “what comes next?”