Doug Kreitzberg

Pancake People

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There’s a lot of buzz around social media these days and, of course, the Internet has become the de-facto platform for communication and commerce.   We have the ability to connect and interact in ways never thought possible. Customers have become Fans and the Fans can determine quickly whether your product or service wins or losses.  Facebook and Twitter and texting have replaced e-mail and voice-mail (and does anyone ever remember the written letter, or the “while you were out” notes anymore?).  As a result, our stories, our ideas, our dreams and our passions can only exist if they fit into 140 characters.

There are some individuals who are challenging the direction we are heading.  Futurist Jaron Lanier writes that the concept of  reputation has been reduced to the quantity of connections and how one’s persona on the web is often a fiction compared to one’s persona in real life.  Journalist Nicholas Carr describes that, through the internet, we have become playwright Richard Foreman’s “pancake people”, “wide and thin as a pancake because thanks to the next link we are constantly jumping from one piece of information to another. We get wherever we want, but at the same time we lose depth because we no longer time to reflect, contemplate.”

These are not the voices of stone-age luddites decrying technological advances.  There is value to engage your customers or friends using the tools of Web 2.0.   But there is also danger in expecting that the quality of that engagement will be enough to sustain meaningful relationships over time.

To be fair, the internet is not the sole villain in this play. For years, businesses have tried many ways to reduce the depth of their interactions with their customers and prospects via direct mail, call centers and all forms of mass-media.  Indeed web 2.0 tools can increase the possibility of a two-way conversation.  The challenge is being able to both listen and have something of value to say during that dialogue.

The key is to provide the opportunity to engage and inform with a depth and to a degree that one can’t get elsewhere.  Individuals and businesses that can combine Web 2.0 with Contemplation 1.0 will be the ones with the strongest and most authentic relationships.

From the Stadium to the Living Room — Is micro-social where it’s at?

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This past week, Google unveiled its new application, “Google Wave” which will be released later this year. (To see the presentation of Wave by Google, click below.)

Wave at once makes communication and collaboration easier and makes it more personal.  Think of it as combining the intimacy of e-mail and chat-rooms with the malleability of wikis and organization of Flickr or Facebook.

In an interesting post by Mitch Joel of  twistimage.com, the fact that the Wave is a more personal form of social media may require marketers to rethink (again) how to approach social media.  What might count is not the quantity of links, friends or followers (sorry Ashton), but the quantity of the relationships. The key for marketers (or organizations), therefore, is not to focus on broadcast social media (getting on all media, measuring numbers of unique links/friends/followers) but to focus on micro social media, smaller disparate groups bounded by strong trust.  Think Tara Hunt’s whuffie factor or soup metrics.

The question is, what metrics do you therefore us to define success?  If we’re focused on the quality of the relationship more than the quantity of the relationship, perhaps we should focus on repeat visits more than unique visitors.  If Person A has 20 friends that she speaks to, but they don’t speak back and Person B has 5 friends, but they all speak back to her on multiple occasions, which person do you want to market to?  Conversely, if you are a business, how much time and money do you want to spend expanding your universe rather than engaging the clients you currently have and let them talk about you (or invite you) to their friends.

I initially thought that the beauty of social media was that you could scale conversations from the living room to the stadium, that you can extend yourself to the world.  Regardless of what new technology is out there, I think, however, that the beauty of social media is to enable us to create rich, engaging “living room” experiences with a discrete group of trusted individuals (and, perhaps, firms) regardless of setting.

Think micro-social and the whole world might not be yours.  However, the world that is important — your world — might be.

Did Dave Eggers create the social web?

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Actually, it’s silly to talk about anyone creating the social web.  Ideas get added, mixed, discarded, mutated and something emerges.  However, the social web requires some sort of notion of what identity is, and how it is shared. In his work, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Eggers writes about the freedom in sharing who you are, because there is always a separation between the who that you share and the who that you are.

“I give you all the best things I have, and while these things are things that I like, memories that I treasure, good or bad, like the pictures of my family on my walls I can show them to you without diminishing them. I can afford to give you everything…We feel that to reveal embarrassing or private things….we have given someone something, that, like a primitive person fearing that a photographer will steal his soul, we identify our secrets, our pasts and their blotches, with our identity, that revealing our habits or losses or or deeds somehow makes one less of oneself. But it’s just the opposite, more is more is more–more bleeding, more giving. These things, details, stories, whatever, are like the skin shed by snakes, who leave theirs for anyone to see…Hours, days or months later, we come across a snake’s long-shed skin and we know something of the snake, we know that it’s of this approximate girth and that approximate length, but we know very little else. Do we know where the snake is now?”

When I grew up, there was a respect for those who maintained a veil of privacy over their inner-selves — indeed it was viewed as a liberty or right.  Of course, that veil also led (and leads) to a tension between with inner- and the outer- self which can lead to bad things.

Eggers’ view is that there is not a constant, platonic inner-self to protect.  That, because the self is mutable, nothing is actually lost if it is shared with others.  In fact, it is unlikely that that shared self is actually useful to define who one really is.

It is this willingness to share that Eggers describes, this realization that sharing information does not lock in identity,  but frees it that forms the basis for how the social web evolves.  We post on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Linkedin, blogs, retail sites, etc.  Each post is a piece of who we are, but no one can aggregate all the pieces to truly build another version of ourself because we are always just to one side of this aggregation.  These strobe light slices of ourselves are, in essence, little fictions which have an identity of their own and which are added to by others through interaction and amplification in the virtual space.

But they are still fictions.  Or are they?  Certainly compliance officers would disagree. But I would argue that it is the wrong thing to be asking.  What is important is that each piece of what we share is a fiction in that it can never contain who we can be.  That is the freedom of identity that helps fuel the social web.  Thanks, Dave Egger, for showing that to me.