Netsquared, Here We Come!
Early Monday morning, Bob and I will be flying to San Jose, to join the Netsquared Conference, the coolest conference at which I ever had an honor to speak. Together with Youthnoise’s Ginger Thomson, and Ami Dar of idealist.org, we will talk on Tuesday night about social networks. I can’t guarantee anything, but I think this is going to be a blast. Judging from the vibrant activity on our topic page, we will have precious little time to fit all the questions, ideas, and concepts bouncing around.
In addition, the microformatters will try to get together for an hDinner, a small but ever-so important event where eating is just as good as the learning, except for all the calories. If you are interested in joining the crowd, just watch the event page on Upcoming.com for time/location updates.
The Transparent Generation
The stage is set for the next loop of the perennial conflict between children and their parents. Not unlike the divisive difference of old and new world in “Fathers and Sons“, this iteration is about the clash of cultures.
Only this time, it’s about privacy. While the helicopter parents are doing their desperate best to keep the cruel world away from the children, the kids are already changing it — online. While the fathers and mothers work hard to pass legislations at various government levels to protect the privacy of their daughters and sons, the millenials are publicly posting their most intimate thoughts and conversations along with contact information — online.
Google made privacy impossible. MySpace made privacy unfashionable. In trial and error of learning and creating the rules of social networks, the new generation is effectively giving up on the myth of privacy.
When SaltyCracker23 runs for senate in 2012, she won’t need to worry about opposition digging up dirt on her early years. All of that will be readily available, etched into the permanent stone of vast Web archives, indexed, catalogued, and accessible with one click to anyone remotely interested. And because the opposition (and pretty much anybody else) is likely face the same issue, one can only wonder about how this will change the way the world works.
Say hello to the transparent generation.
I Need to See Your Face
There is a good article on the Christian Science Monitor this week about how people are frequently misunderstood in their e-mail messages. You have probably had this happen to you; either some one misunderstands your meaning in an e-mail you sent them, or you misunderstand them.
“It’s All About Me: Why E-mails Are So Easily Misunderstood” csmonitor.com
According to the study, the problems occur because people need more than just words to interpret meaning and context. We loose clues to context like tone of voice and facial expression without face to face interaction. (I don’t think we needed a study to know that, but it’s nice to have our supsions confrimed)
I think this partly why things like emoticons caught on so early after e-mail hit the big scene. The need to have a cute little, “I’m not mad at you,” icon was needed to infer the tone of the sender. You could really knock some one down in an e-mail and as long as you used a simely face, everything was cool. How many times have I gotten a message like this:
“Jeff,
Got your proposal. It’s really a piece of c**p. You really don’t have a clue. I’m surprised they let you drive a car.
Call me to discuss, if you can operate a phone
“
This makes me think of one possible reason why social network sites that have lots of images on themm like Flickr, Facebook, and Myspace, are so popular. There is more than one medium for interpretation. Images, really help the visitor to understand where the writer is coming from.
Keep It Simple, Stupid
You have heard this phrase a thousand times…but nowhere does it matter as much as on your Web site. But you are thinking that a successful site is complex. It has to have great navigation, great content relations, and a user interface that does not get in the way.
Before I become a Neilson clone, let me explain what I mean by KISS. KISS is not necessarily design focused (Google). Only Google can get away with Google’s design. Your site may be way more focused than just providing a search. I’ve discussed how Google relates to higher ed web sites…doesn’t work. You are serving too many audiences with too many tasks and goals.
I ran across a great example of KISS in navigation…The Evergreen State College’s Admission site. Look at their left nav, which is in visitor speak. What they have identified (regardless of how they did it - that’s their business) are the primary goals and tasks and grouped them. Beautiful!
What about McDaniel College. There are certainly more goals and tasks than the “What’s it…” areas, but these are primary and may get in the heads of high school students worrying about fit.
You can have the lengthy navigation if you can’t win the political battles on campus, but the focus of each page on your site should be SIMPLE and AUDIENCE FOCUSED.
You Are Context
Context is an interconnected web of all of your experiences, compounded into one perspective — you. Context is what makes up the “I”. Context is a reaction of a subject to an object. Context = subjectivity.
Whether you are ready to admit it or not, you had never, ever been able to only deal with content. The ability to completely separate context from content is not something that humans are capable of. Nor are the machines. Indeed, we are their creators. Objectivity is often simulated, but never quiite truly achieved. Objectivity is only possible in a complete absense of thought.
Context is a result of life and experiences. Context is extremely individual and near-impossible to capture precisely.
Hold a rock in your hand. Whether it’s childhood memories, flashbacks from movies you saw a while back or just plain strange thoughts, you are experiencing the rock. Your mind artfully, instantaneously, magically compiles relevant thoughts, memories, ideas, augmenting the content of your reality with the context of you.
Experience is a journey through context. Content is only the medium.
This journey is recursive and never complete, as every step along its course adds new context, thus revealing new steps, new opportunities to experience.
Attempting to qualify and quantify experience into some form of a science is probably futile and laughable. But we will try anyway. We’re human, and after all, it’s all about the journey.
More on the Fray
Dimitri and I are attending the NetSquared Conference at the end of May. We’re publishing some ideas here after we work them up over there. We need to bounce our ideas around a good bit more as we refine our presentation. So feel free to comment and join our fray by commenting below.
Embrace the Fray
“How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Trust My Audience!”
To us, embracing the fray means to stop worrying so much about what people are doing and saying and worry more about what we are doing and saying as an organization. Embracing the fray is acknowledging that the fray exists and welcoming it as an important part of this thing we call an economy. (Forget about the future of the ‘net. It is already here.)
It is basically awareness that YASNS is always looming, and we should be happy about that. Typically getting to this point means joining or at least lurking around some typical sites:
Tap Into the Fray
Tapping into the fray means getting ready to jump in the pool. Tying the string on your swim suit, checking the water temperature and PH levels and slathering on the sunscreen. Tapping into the fray means you have some work ahead of you. Right now we’re thinking along these lines.
Your Objective
- Strategic management of and coordinated use of disparate sites to create a suite of open communication tools for your staff AND advocates.
- This provides transparency. Transparency leads to credibility. Credibility equals authenticity. Authenticity is gold when it comes to brands, marketing and online identities.
Illuminate and Support These Goals
- Identify who and what the organization is and what its objectives are then distill those down to keywords and tags that will resonate with key audiences.
- Support these keywords and tags by living up to them as your audience defines them.
A Couple Possible Tactics
- Create a personae of the organization including the favorite movies, music and books of key staff and advocates.
- Build or expand a keyword campaign and supplement (or replace) that with a coordinated tagging campaign.
Going Gonzo!
This is more than jumping on the latest net-based bandwagon. There’s more going on this time around than IPO’s. And the point is bigger than flipping a company site to Google or Yahoo!
The Teeming Web is happening right now. The words “Teeming Web” are actually irrelevant except to those who are on the outside. If you’re on the inside, you’re just a person. You’re not participating in some large movement or improving the lot of mankind on the Internet. You’re just doing what you feel like doing. You’re doing what you know works.
That’s the way it is with Millennials. They are not “using social networking tools.” They are hooking up online. We need to catch up to them. But once we do, we must be very careful to not try too hard. Authenticity is the key. Our audience will tune out if we’re doing more than sharing or communicating.
We need to participate in order to understand. This is the true essence of what Hunter S. Thompson called “gonzo.” Like HST, we need to be fearless, but we need to act with purpose. Fearlessness without purpose is uninteresting to readers and calamitous to organizations. Going gonzo means baring it all, being ready to play by someone else’s rules and accepting the consequences when you misstep.
Misguided rationalization of the next over-hyped Internet boom? We don’t think so. What do you think?
