Growth Through Marketing:
Growing Your Business Community

Social Networking is one aspect of the Societal Web, and an important one.

This article (Want vs. Need for Social Media, by Jay Deragon – here >) about how businesses can use various Social Networking sites is insightful, and a useful prompt for businesses not sure where to act, nor the tools to use for the impact that they seek.

The analogy that doing this stuff without reference to needs is like “… playing Tennis by watching the scoreboard. How you play is How you score, scoring does not happen unless you play a good game” and I think that applies to all Social Networking. It is really important to do what you do in a strategic, focused, way, if you want to get the results to meet those needs. Recognising that, depending on need, your approach and strategy may need to be very different is important too, that’s clarified well in the article by looking at the needs of different departments in the business.

One aspect of the Societal Web is that there is much that we don’t yet know and more that we don’t understand, or at least understand how to make the effort we apply work. In a truly Societal Web though there is both the knowledge, the means of understanding it, and the people to apply it to help you. The challenge, then, is not inventing the wheel, but finding the wheelwright. We’ll return to this point in the future I’m sure.

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Where did all my business go?

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There’s a number of add-ins and programs which are a boon to users of The Societal Web and all social media. We’ll be talking about a few of them from time to time here. I talked about typing replacement programs in this Tools to simplify Social Media – Part 1, and Scribefire in Part 2

Another tool that we thoroughly recommend is YooNo. This is an add in for Firefox which allows you to link your facebook, twitter and several other accounts to put the update stream in the left hand panel of your browser. When you don’t want it disturbing you you can just shrink it to a narrow strip on the left hand side which still tells you how many updates are unread.You can post back to all the sites at once or one at a time and get all the direct messages and references so you can manage them too.

It’s a great tool for Social Media.

There’s a number of add-ins and programs which are a boon to users of The Societal Web and all social media. We’ll be talking about a few of them from time to time here. I talked about typing replacement programs in this Tools to simplify Social Media – Part 1.

Another tool that we thoroughly recommend is Scribefire. This add-in to Firefox let’s you edit and publish directly to a blog such as ‘The Societal Web’ but it also automatically stores posts on your local machine as well as including tools to make using Twitter easier too.

Posts are stored locally using SQLLite so it’s easy to go back to old posts and refer or reuse text. If you lose connection or power, or navigate away from a page on may social networking sites you can lose your text. Not with Scribefire.

You get a WYSIWYG editor, but you also get access to an HTML editor window to do the more complicated layouts – if that’s what inspires you, and for most social networking sites where Scribefire can’t post directly you can take the HTML and cut and past it easily.

It’s a great tool for the Societal Web.

There’s a number of add-ins and programs which are a boon to users of The Societal Web and all social media. We’ll be talking about a few of them from time to time here.

One programme that I don’t think I could live without now is a typing replacement program. I’m a Mac user by choice and my chosen tool is ‘Typinator’ (I also have windows machines and there I use Shortkeys). Read about Typinator on the Ergonis Website Typinator page.

Typinator means that for the things that you say often (like a signature block) you can define the block once and then type it all with a couple of keystrokes which the programme recognises. That really saves time. In addition it allows you to record specific blocks of HTML which can make formatting pages, posts and messages to a common look and feel a breeze.

Typinator also tracks the time it has saved compared to a normal typing speed, 49 hours so far and counting.

Some time ago in this post on Seth Godin’s excellent blog he concluded :

Every person who encounters your organization for the first time comes with beginner’s mind. She knows nothing about yesterday or how hard you worked or your financing or what it took to build it. She’s here now, she’s first, let’s go.

That got me to thinking about how true this is for our Social Networks too.

When people join your social network (or the Societal Web in its widest sense) are they going to wade through all your previous posts or are the going to start from now. When a new person joins an individuals social network to them it is new – Your first message to them is the first message they have had. You are judged on what they see and not what others have seen over time.

Sometimes we meet people for whom our experience seems at odds with other people, this is probably why. We need to be aware of ‘newness’ in relationships built through on-line social networks and recognise the need to adapt our messages and not assume that people know about what we have done before.  They don’t.

Un-bound your ideas.

Un-bounders always let go – they refer their ideas fast, and listen to the feedback. They redesign based on what others are saying and recycle elements of the ideas in new contexts seeking improvement. They do this as fast as they can.

Un-Bounders aren’t attached to ownership of their ideas, they want to get them out there fast. Ideas are legion, good ideas are rare, great ideas are elusive. Your ideas aren’t bad ideas but they are likely to be improvable.

Un-bounders know that their ideas are likely to be good but not great, and taking ownership of them denies the possibility of others easily improving those ideas collaboratively. First they would have to convince you to let go.

A willingness, nay, a passion to refer redesign and recycle are key signs of un-bounder-ness

It struck me that one of the things that many of the social networks and social media cognoscenti do is remove boundaries. Mark Zukerberg and Facebook unbounded their code and made applications applications and extensions a significant part of their system. Now most of it is written by developers, in an unbounded framework.

Then the guys at Apple unbounded their developers with the App Store as part of iTunes and the iPhone unbounded the transactional element of applications and made them easily monetisable, so unbounding time for developers to devote to the application. They unbounded payments as well and with further in application (optional) charging just around the corner they’ll unbound that further still. 35,000 apps and counting – 1 Billion downloads.

Twitter’s developers unbounded short text and released an API that enabled a myriad of ways to view and add to the twitterverse. So Tweetdeck, Tweetmeme, Tweetie and many others were born. Search, trends, location and more – all being unbounded faster than ever.

Bounders create closed, selective and controlled environments, Un-bounders free the space for others to deliver outstanding, and unexpected results. Bounders control, un-bounders collaborate. Bounders are selective, un-bounders are supportive.

A question we must each ask, in this Societal Web World is whether we are “bounders” or “un-bounders”.

Don’t lose sight of the value.

It’s very easy to consider working as a collaborative group and losing sight of the value additions and transfers that are going on within the companies of the group.  The temptation to work for the group and therefore, perhaps, not raising invoices internally to the group means that some aspects of the collaboration may fail if one or other member of the group feels they’re not getting a fair return for the effort that they are adding to the collaboration.

Our recommendation is that whilst companies remain separate, it is important to maintain an invoicing and payment structure internally as well as externally to ensure that those imbalances are fairly dealt with.  For example, a group that includes a graphic designer who provides services to all of the other companies of the group may feel that they are providing far more time and effort than a group which provides some strategic analysis support for the group and is used intermittently, whereas if all of the parties invoice and are paid as normal then, in the round, the flows of money will cancel out within the group and the collaborative effect is identical, but any imbalances in terms of effort, inputs or costs also gets properly handled in the books of all of the businesses so that their results truly reflect the impact of the collaboration and not the impact of their mutual goodwill.

The key message is that money was invented as a means of measuring fair exchange, and exchanging it in the context of a collaboration works well. When the collaborators know their value is being fairly rewarded, then they will commit a fair effort to delivering the best result they can.