On distaste for serial ‘networkers’.

Traditional face-to-face networking can be fairly accurately described as “the cultivation of weak social ties for either personal or professional objectives”, or more colloquially as “looking for people who might be useful”.

People who go to events only to network, generally suck.

I realized recently why I have a problem with this: the technology I work with every day makes cultivating weak social ties in person something of an affront to my values.

Social networks are first and foremost useful for reinforcing and maintaining existing social ties. Secondarily, they are stunningly effective at building weak ties based on industry, professional interests, or skill set. The kind of networking that is done in person has, to an extent, been made obsolete in my life by integrating social media into my day to day interactions.

The reason this is a problem is simple: when I commit to maintaining and cultivating weak ties online as part of my day to day routine, it starts to bother me when someone attempts to form a social tie, based entirely on perceived benefit, in my somewhat limited face-to-face interaction time.

If my time on the Internet isn’t going to be focused entirely on interacting with friends, it bothers me when someone tries to make my in person social time about helping them achieve a business objective.

The best advice regarding networking is not to network; make friends. And when I see the pursuit of weak social ties invading what I consider time with friends, I can get hostile, whether visibly or subtly.

The Death Of Comments

Blog comments are dying off.  This isn’t sad, it’s a natural evolution.

Many of my favourite bloggers, and people, have been reduced to flat out asking people to comment more, in posts, on twitter, and sometimes in conversation.  It makes sense, commenting was currency at one point, it was an indicator you’d said something intelligent, conversation starting, insightful or controversial.  But I’ve been noticing something of a trend of declining comments, and I think it’s probably a good thing.

Comments are an attempt to corral the conversation, which is generally the worst plan in social media.

The refrain has been coming for a few years now - the brand of the future won’t have a web page, it will have a dozen presences on existing sites, each tailored to the audience that dwells there.  I have a feeling this is related to the decline in blog comments - the people who most want to interact with content, use it to start a conversation, or discuss it with the author - they have their own forums.

Blog comments have moved to twitter, or youtube, or facebook, and to our own blogs.  They’ve moved to places where we can bring the conversation, and our ideas, to the audiences and friends that we have established individually.  When I comment on your blog, I am talking to you, and maybe, if both of us are lucky, the community of people who read your blog on the page where it’s published, rather than in RSS.  In realistic terms, other than a means of speaking with the writer, commenting on a blog is putting your words into a corner, and forgetting to tell them time out is over.

When a friend, company or colleague suggest building their own social network, building their own place to host a community and a conversation, I always ask why.  I almost never receive a satisfactory answer.  Are you going to build a community better than Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn has?  Are you going to attract more users than them to yet another service, but this time with such a niche focus that you’re asking them to segment their lives another step further?  If your product, your brand, your niche so essential that people will craft another online persona just to interface with it?

If so, we should really go for coffee ;)

And if not, you need to stop trying to own the conversation and the community.  You need to start feeling lucky that you get to participate in it, and start figuring out how you’re going to serve it.

Most importantly, you need to stop being disappointed that people are talking about how much they like you in public, rather than waiting until they are inside your living room to do so.

Narratives and Communication.

I gave an impromptu talk last night, at Refresh Events in Toronto. I may have been enticed to the front of the room with the promise of free beer, but in all honesty just watching others speak about their passions, and the lessons and challenges they’ve faced, got me up and talking about the transition I made from studying English Literature, to studying (and now working in) Communications.

I’m not going to repeat that talk here.

But I’m going to mention something related; the importance that my understanding of narrative has on my understanding of communication, in terms of marketing/communications disciplines. We can talk about messaging, or branding, or badge theory. In the end, we’re all talking about narrative. Everything has a narrative, is composed of smaller things with narratives, and can combine to form a meta-narrative. You don’t sell products, you sell expansions to the personal narrative of customers. Very few people buy a Tom Ford suit because they like the Tom Ford story. They buy it because they want their story to include the signifiers and meaning of Tom Ford suits.

Don’t create meaning for the product, or even the brand. Create meaning for the final narrative, that of the consumer. Create something that can be remixed and integrated into established lives and identities.

Narrative, and the tools and tricks of narrative, are what I loved, and still love, about english literature. In terms of durable, repeatable and distributable content, the written word, the written story, is the most developed medium our society will encounter. Learning to dissect that system, learning what it’s like to develop meaning in a format that often references ideas and concepts from an earlier century, another continent, from our collective cultural memory, taught me more about how to develop meaning from a patchwork of different influences than I realized.

To properly analyze a novel, you need to be able to understand the major references, regardless of how subtle or obtuse. I can’t think of any better training for building compelling narratives in the current media landscape, or for picking apart messages created and distributed in any other medium, all of which have had less time to develop and establish technique and idiom.

Except for a long string of self-effacing jokes, I’m very proud of my past studying English Lit. I’m certain it makes me a better communicator and strategist than I would have been otherwise, just as I’m sure it’s the only reason I ended up focusing on communication strategy.

alternate reality games as an outreach model.

I’ve written about this on my old blog, but it’s worth revisiting in short, concise format. Background on ARGs can be found here, but I’m guessing anyone reading this can get themselves to a suitable level of familiarity fairly quickly.

Building a narrative is about building an experience that people can take where they want. If you do this with something real, rather than something fictional, the line between ARG and creative, interacting outreach gets pretty blurry. but if you are doing something sufficiently interesting, and find the right mix of transparent (when important for building trust / relationships) and opaque (whether for suspense or security) you can engage people, while creating an environment of exploration around your narrative.

Any product has an experiential narrative. Most of them amount to: hear about it, get interested, learn about it, find it, obtain it, use it, (and if you are lucky) talk to the people in my life about it.

If you work in the attention industry, your job is, at core, to make either hear about it, learn about it, find it or use it as interesting and remarkable as possible, whether that excitement is innate to the product, or based on related (curated) experiences.

But if you want to do something exciting, build a new, unexpected experiential narrative framework. And watch what happens when people take the tools that you provide, and use them to supplement their own personal narrative.

Trust.

There are a lot of reasons to avoid mistakes. For personal reasons, my focus is on trust at the moment.

It can only be built over time, though action. It can be destroyed nearly instantly. Stepping outside of the pattern you’ve trained people to expect, doing something that violates the trust you’ve built, can’t be undone. Moving past it is infinitely more complex, because trust comes into play when deciding whether or not things can be rebuilt.

Building trust with a community or audience is the same. You aren’t owed forgiveness. All you get from building trust, is getting to be trusted. It’s far too simple to overlook, because it’s not measurable, it just exerts an effect on everything. You’ll notice when it’s gone.

Ask yourself: does this action violate the trust placed in me. You answer dictates your next steps.