Social Networking

How I Manage Facebook

chrisbrogan · August 19, 2009 ·

I can guarantee you that this won’t be as useful as How to Manage Twitter, but then, I’m telling you so that you have an understanding of what I’m doing with my personal time on Facebook. I’ll admit right up front that I was quite a Facebook hater for many years, but that I turned around in the last few months, due to two changes: the improvement of fan pages, and my personal discovery of lists. If I didn’t have these two things, I’d not be able to function.
I should also state that I don’t use very many tools. I know that Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop allow for FB updates, and I’ve sent one or two from there, but that’s not where I think the meat of Facebook is, and so I don’t use those tools in that way.

How I Manage Facebook

First, I should apologize. I probably can’t friend you in Facebook. I’m right up at the 5000 people limit (I removed about 600 and so I’m hovering around 4751). It’s not you, it’s Facebook. I’m sure you’re wonderful and I like you just as much, even though we can’t be friends. Now, on to the info.
I have three main areas I sit on, and I keep them open in 3 browser tabs. The first is my list called “Short List.”

This is approximately 185 people and it’s only for people I know personally and that I want to stay closely updated on. I read that voraciously. If I run out of updates, I drop into the general population and see what’s going on there. It’s changed how I see the world and what I know about people who matter to me. (It’s probably closer to how you use your Facebook).
From a “push” perspective, I update Facebook separately than Twitter. I talk much more personally on Facebook, and I’m not out to win any friends. I just say what’s on my mind there. My blog also imports there, as do my photos, as do my Google Reader Shared Items, as do my FriendFeed actions, and a few other things. I use Facebook to collect a lot of info from a lot of places, so you get a fuller view of me.
The second place I camp is on my own Profile, to chat with people in the comment stream:

I have enjoyed chatting with folks in the comments section, though again, it’s not in any kind of business perspective. It’s just me being people. What I feel is that Facebook is like the afterparty from the big performance, and I’m just chilling backstage.
The third place I camp is on the Trust Agents community, which is a Facebook fan page.

As of this writing, we have 2190 people, of which about 30 or 40 are actively talking about Trust Agents and ideas around the book. That’s been the most rewarding. You might recall that I deleted my fan page a while back. I still stand by that. But the passion of talking about ideas instead of “having fans,” is a really good thing.

I also love the birthdays feature. My secret is that I don’t wish people happy birthday in Facebook. I send a personal email and/or a tweet. It makes it more lovely, in my eyes.

What It All Means to Me

I don’t use Facebook for business. I tried buying a Facebook ad to test out how well it would convert new people to the Trust Agents community. I spent $500 and got hundreds of thousands of impressions and only a handful of new members. I tweeted once and got another hundred. In fact, I wouldn’t think of Facebook much for business, except that Louise Rasho of Microsoft Office Live showed me some great examples of fan pages that do seem effective and useful. Beyond that, I haven’t seen tons of great success on Facebook as a direct business conversion tool.
Where it shines, however, is as a relationship tool for business people in two areas: sales and customer service. In sales, it’s a relationship tool, not a marketing funnel driver. You use it to get to know more about your prospects, and to keep your customers warm. As service, it’s another outpost to talk with your customer base, and a place to share some extra information, should that be useful.
On sum, I use it mostly for personal, and it’s worked out well as a great augmentation to my LinkedIn presence. You might see it differently. I’d love to know.

And You?

How are YOU using Facebook? What do you like about it? What’s not so useful? What would you change, if you had the ear of the team?

Friending and Reputation

chrisbrogan · August 12, 2009 ·

You walk into a room full of people. Your first action, if you’re like most of us, is to scan the faces for someone you know. Barring that, you’ll walk towards whoever seems friendliest, or you’ll find a quiet space and observe. Imagine now that someone you know enters the room. Your eyes light up, and you probably smile involuntarily.
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

Cultivate an Active Network

chrisbrogan · June 26, 2009 ·

It’s never the number. It’s what you can do with it. This applies to lots of things. It doesn’t matter if you drive 3000 people to your store, if no one rings the cash register. Who cares how many people follow you on Twitter if you can’t motivate them to participate with you on any level? But how do you cultivate an active network?
It Starts With Being Helpful
I’ve come to realize something: there are people who can be helpful, and then there are people who offer their help over and over. Guess which one is really helpful?
If you can jump in and participate, or point out the kinds of people who you know can help others, that’s a great way to start cultivating an active network. We all respond well to someone who is quick to help.

Be There

Online and off, the person who gets the most out of a network is the person who is actively tapping it. You can’t always contribute to every event, but how often can you be absent from a network before it no longer “remembers” you?
Visit with your network and contribute on a regular basis. Notice that I say “contribute” and not “just leave a message.”

Touch As Many as Possible

One way to keep a network vibrant and response is to touch everyone you can. Talk to them. Absorb some of what they’re working on or inquire about their passions. The more you can contribute to others, if only by communicating and participating in some small way, the more likely you’re building reciprocal relationships.

Talk About Them

If you’re communicating in some kind of “one to many” way with your network, make it peppered with stories about them. In our Trust Agents community, Julien and I look for what our group members have shared on their own Facebook networks, and we pull in the occasional related piece. Because we’re asking people to participate in our community, we make sure to keep the chairs turned in so that we interact instead of pontificate and preach from the pulpit.

Deliver Value Back

For every time you ask your network for something, try and give something back in return. The more you can leverage the contributions of your network such that they serve you and return a value, the better things work. If I join the Sharpie Uncapped community, not only can I contribute my art and ideas, but I can benefit form the people who have also shared. The creators of the community (Sharpie markers and their agency) have this built such that everyone gets something for their interaction.
Can you deliver value back for the value you asked?

Active Networks are Your Capital

You probably do know the difference between being connected to a network of sorts versus participating in an active network of like-minded people who share disparate but compatible goals. In the first case, you feel great until you need something. In the second case, you know that people have your back and that you can deliver as much help as possible until the time when you, yourself, might have to call on the network.
Invest and you’ll see a return. Start an account without much interest and you’ll get back only what you put in.
Do you belong to an active network?
(Want to see an active network in action?)

What Nine Inch Nails Knows About Tribes

chrisbrogan · April 16, 2009 ·

This week, I watched Siobhan Bulfin birth a new tribe around her. ( I’ll use Seth’s word for it, though I go back and forth on the analogy I prefer.) The seeds planted at Marketing Now will surely bloom into a small community of people who care about each other and who will help each other develop new voices in the new media and marketing spaces.
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?

Template for Building a Small Powerful Network

chrisbrogan · December 15, 2008 ·

This post is somewhat inspired by a thought Jeff Pulver tossed out as an aside at his Social Media Jungle prototype in Long Island a few weeks ago. Hat tip to you, Jeff.

Jeff Pulver said this: “We’re making our own dial tone.” In such a typical Jeff Pulver way, he tossed out a little idea that had been bouncing around his head, but that he hasn’t rolled into any particular context yet, so I’m going to run with it. I’ve got an idea that came to me tonight about Twitter (amongst other social networks), and I’m going to share it with you: take that dial tone idea and build your own network. We’re sitting on something because we’re still in the “gee whiz” mode. Let me explain.

Where We Falter – Solo Efforts Versus Scale

I asked Twitter tonight about what people were working on for goals. Several people had remarkably similar goals, including, sadly, the fact that several of them were looking for work. 2008 is the easy year compared to what 2009 is going to be. I saw the same thing passing through everyone’s stream, and I saw connectivity that would be missed. And that’s when it stuck me. I tweeted this:

Do you realize there are thousands of great minds all plugged into the same conversation who could help each other with your goals? Activate
The trick is this- don’t make me or anyone the hub. Lead. Find your groups. Reach out. Set group goals. Execute. Move to a new group. Fluid.

You see, you’re all out there. You’ve got goals, you’ve got needs, you’ve got sources of information, and you have the tools to connect it all. You’ve got every piece of a network except for the directors.
So, what if you had the templates to building a small but powerful network? Here’s my starting ideas on this. I’ll talk in somewhat technical terms, but I promise this has everything to do with the human elements. I hope it sparks something in you. More so, I hope you run with it.

Build a Small Powerful Network

First, think about your goals in 2009. Build the network with two purposes on mind: how you can achieve your goals, and how you can help others achieve theirs.
You need authentication in a network. Start with a blog as a home base. Make it such that your about page tells people lots about you.
It doesn’t hurt to have a picture of YOU on the blog, as this will deal with building a trusted network.
Start a Google Doc spreadsheet with the following fields: name, twitter ID, cell, capabilities, notes. Think of this as your routing table, your database of records of where resources reside.
Ask some probing questions on Twitter. If no one responds, ask again. See if there’s interest out there. What you’re doing at this point is sending out a signal that you’re looking for resources. (Like a computer, only you’re human.)
Use Twitter Search to find some like-minded people. Work at this. Try all different kinds of queries until you find the right response.
Send @ messages to these types of people. Ask them if they want to talk about collaborating.
Invite them to your document, if you want. Let them share the resources. Get them into the mix.
From here, collaborate. Figure out how you can helpful. Understand each other’s needs, and share the resources. Try to build your goals and businesses together.

It’s not exactly simple. But to me, it’s all there. You build the mechanisms (very simple ones), and you go after the goals together. You can feed it. You can encourage the edge points of the network (the other people) to be their own hub. You can build out more capabilities.

Scribbles from The Sidebar

What if you thought of these small networks in terms of games? Games have goals. They have a point. What if you set goals and points to these networks? What if you went at this network-building and empowerment as something very active, instead of using tools like Twitter as another place to chat?
In 2009, you need your networks. It is not a solo act. I need mine, too. And I plan to do exactly what I’ve laid out here.
Does it make sense? Can you see this as a template for how you might start getting your goals met for 2009? Are you planning to ally and make new relationships? What do you think?
Photo credit, Jared