Experts and Gurus and Evangelists, Oh My!

I don’t know about you guys, but I’m sick to death of hearing people refer to themselves as “Social Media Guru” and “Social Media Expert”. Enough already. The fact is, that I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to actually claim those titles and have them be accurate. Our culture, this technology, and the amazing things people all over the world are doing with it – moves too fast.  One cannot be an expert if your field of expertise changes on a minute-by-minute basis. No can do, lovelies.

I really don’t care for the ‘evangelist’ title either, but at least I get that one and I feel it’s more accurate than others, even if it does conjure up images for me of religious fanatics that travel around in circus tents promising to cure people. Wait, maybe that’s exactly the point. Hm. Look at it this way though – if we’re reading and commenting on blogs, updating our status on Facebook, posting photos to Flickr, uploading videos to YouTube, and twittering like our lives depend on it – aren’t we ALL social media evangelists? I think so, even if it’s in a small way. If we’re doing these things, we obviously believe in these things and feel they’re worth our time to do. We may not be preaching the benefits of these things to conference rooms full of people, but we’re walking the walk and that’s the important part.

We’re not ‘experts’ – not any of us. We do the best we can and try to keep up as much as we’re able, but stuff changes fast these days and even if you know pretty much everything there is to know – someone else is doing something new that you’ve never heard about.

Do we call ourselves experts and gurus and evangelists to look cool? To try to stand out among the ever-growing crowd of people using social media? How much do you stand out when everyone and their uncle starts referring to themselves as an expert? Yeah, not much.

Maybe we should focus a little bit more on just doing our best at the things we really love doing. Not because it gets us a crowd of people following us, or worshipping us, but just because it makes *us* happy. Let’s not try to keep up with the Joneses, or the Brogan’s or the Scoble’s – let’s just do our thing and be all about it. It’s not a competition, peeps. Let’s just all do our best at being good people who love what we do.

This post inspired by the quote I’m about to get tattooed on my arm next month -
“Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.” – Rumi

The Popular Crowd

Doesn’t it seem like lately, there’s more and more discussion about twitter followers, being popular, and how to NOT be boring online? Maybe it’s just me, but I swear that every day I think I see more blog posts, tweets and discussions about this and I honestly just don’t get it.

It frustrates me to hear people talk about how many followers they have – there are people out there that seem to obsess over this and make a big deal about people un-following them – why? Why is that a concern for you? I guess I could understand it if you were a company and people were deciding not to listen to you – you might want to think about what your message is or how you might better engage your audience, but if you’re just you? Just a normal person like everyone else.. why does it matter how many twitter followers, or Facebook friends you have? Why is that important to you?

Just a few days ago I saw at least three different comments about how if someone isn’t listening to you, you must be ‘boring’ or not ‘worthy’ of being paid attention to. The other day on twitter I followed someone that I thought I could potentially learn something from and was greeted with an auto-response follow asking me if I’d seen a specific blog post on how to get more followers. It irritated me so much that I immediately unfollowed. It is NOT about the numbers, folks.. it’s about connections, networks, learning, growing, and listening. It’s about having conversations and expanding your perspectives. It’s about collaborating and interacting with each other. This is not junior high school – it’s not about your popularity.

Chris Brogan had a fantastic post today about exactly this sort of thing – perfect timing. Here’s an excerpt:

“I think people get confused by numbers. I am followed by 33,000 folks on Twitter. I had 245,000 unique visitors last month. I’m #6 in Advertising Age’s Power 150, #68 in the Technorati Top 100. Numbers, numbers, numbers. I think that’s part of the problem.

Because, even though I use those numbers as a gauge of what I’m doing here, what I spend my time and attention on is making connections. Many hours out of every day go into making relationships with you. Look at any given page of my twitter traffic. Realize that I’m my own #1 commenter on this blog. I spend hours every day answering email and phone calls from folks who often times want nothing more than to connect.”

Read the entire post here.

When I commented yesterday on twitter about this sort of thing, I received a response from a new follower that basically said “yes, but most people ARE boring!”. I just don’t agree with that. I think every single person on this planet has a unique story and if we had the time to listen to them all, I think we’d be amazed at how fascinating we all are.

So please, can we move past the numbers and popularity game and just try to treat each other with respect and consideration knowing that it’s not about winning – it’s about connecting and learning from each other.

What meeting?

One of the rabbit holes that I jumped down today led me to this blog post entitled, “The Meeting Never Happens in the Meeting” that talks about the value of the conversations that happen outside the traditional ‘formal’ structure of meetings and how we should really consider how beneficial these sorts of social conversations really are.

The blog posts talks a bit about virtual environments and team collaboration in those spaces but when I first saw the title of the post I immediately thought about twitter and our local Penn State community.

I’m sure that you’re all sick to death of me talking about twitter but I really do feel that this one simple little tool has changed everything for me in a professional development and social sense.  At a recent work event, a friend sitting right beside me was someone I’d been chatting with informally on twitter for a few months but had never met in person.  There was already a familiarity and conversational ease that existed because of those informal chats via twitter.  I’m not saying this is different than the same sorts of meetings that occur online first before meeting in real-life, just that in this instance the tool was twitter.

Now, that being said.. those of you from the Penn State twitter crew know exactly what I’m talking about when I say that I honestly believe that if I weren’t on twitter and connected to the people that I’m connected to in my local community I would not be as effective at my job. I would not have the same knowledge, I would not be involved in the same collaborative projects and I would not have the same personal connections to people that work at other campuses and in other departments.  Twitter has changed *everything*.

I also strongly feel that people not involved in these local twitter discussions are missing out on great conversations, personal relationships, and problem-solving discussions that are taking place *only* in this venue.  In essence, the meeting is happening outside the meeting. We’re meeting on twitter day in and day out, and we’re having casual informal snippets of conversation that are changing our day-to-day lives.  The important stuff is happening on twitter, the formal stuff is happening in the structured face-to-face meetings.

The important stuff is the informal stuff. The off-handed comments about a particular musician that someone hates, the requests for recipes, the mention of a project that someone is working on that then leads to a discussion and collaboration on that same idea, the requests for help or advice from someone trying to decide what purchase would be best, or the sharing of the birth of a child – these are the powerful things. The things that change us as people and as a community. These are the things that feed our spirits and help us work creatively and collaboratively. This is our community. Join the meeting.

Educational Marketing with Twitter

I was just reading a post this morning about using twitter as a marketing tool. It talks a bit about how higher education might want to pay more attention to what companies are doing and how they’re using twitter to market their brand and interact with customers.

I must say that I’m feeling pretty good about how twitter is being used at Penn State. I think that we’ve got some pretty great communities coming together and with yesterday’s announcement that Penn State Live is now using twitter to send out news stories, I feel as though maybe we’re moving into the mainstream with things.

That being said, I think we have some work to do with thinking outside the box a bit and considering how we might start to engage people outside the normal groups.

Here’s an excerpt from the blog post talking about companies using twitter:

One of the most comprehensive lists of individuals or organizations who use Twitter is Jonathan Kash’s Twitter Brand Index.  This soon-to-be fellow alum from Norwich University’s MBA program has done a great job in compiling hundreds of cross-industry examples of organizations or individuals using Twitter.  Here are some of the highlights:

• Carnival Cruiselines, Delta Airlines, Southwest Air and JetBlue Airlines use it as a way to announce special deals and communicate with travelers.
• Amazon has both Amazon Deals, which offers special deals on a new product every day, and their Book Finder bot.
• Dell has a whole slew of people you can follow, from all various parts of the business.
• Home Depot has someone in their corporate communications office that is “moonlighting on Twitter to help out our customers”
• Wine Enthusiast posts “Twitter only” deals on wine, polls for followers and generally amusing wine-related articles.
• H&R Block has someone on Twitter to engage customers and give tax advice.
• Non-profits such as the American Cancer Society, American Heart Association, and March of Dimes, post news stories and announcements that are of interest to their users.
• Government agencies are also getting in on the fun – NASA has over 2,000 followers, you can get live updates from both the House and the Senate, and many state and local governments are providing updates as well (including my home state of Vermont!).
• If it’s culture you want, you can get it from a number of museums, including the Smithsonian and the US Holocaust Museum.

Now, here’s some ideas they put forth for educational uses:

Think about how your institution can use the tool beyond syndicating news releases and sports results.  How can you create value for prospective students, current students, parents, and alumni?  Here are a few ideas to get your started:

• Give out an application/interview/campus visit tip of the day
• Offer quirky advise to students who have enrolled and are going to be moving onto campus soon
• Negotiate with your bookstore to offer occasional coupons and specials just for Twitter users

I personally love these ideas. I’ve been toying with some ideas to use twitter for World Campus students and the first idea I had was to use it to announce new sections or additional seats of courses that would be opening the following day. We have a lot of students that are desperate to get into a class that’s full, but if they knew that more seats or an additional section of a course was opening the next day, they’d have a chance to enroll before others. That’s value-added, for sure and would give students a *reason* to follow us.

I’m also considering making “special” announcements over twitter and Facebook so that students following us in those venues will learn about the ‘fun’ things before we use normal means of communication like email or newsletters.

Lots to think about, and I’m sure we can come up with many interesting ways to use twitter. I can’t wait to see how it all plays out.

Collaboration

I spent yesterday (yes I know I didn’t do my blog post yesterday, I’m making up for that now) in an all-day session reflecting on the past year in my organization and talking about where to go from here. Apparently one of our focuses for the upcoming year is “Collaboration”. Imagine that.

I think that those of us heavily involved in online communities have been collaborating for years, so it was nice to see that was a theme for our organization this year, but I wonder what that really means to the organization as a whole.

I’m quite sure that for some people “Collaboration” means that they’ll try to work a little better with the person beside them, or down the hall, or in another area of the department and don’t get me wrong.. we need to do that. We all – *ALL* – need to make an effort to be a little nicer, a little kinder, and a little more caring in our daily lives, myself included. I do think, however, that the idea of collaboration goes far beyond our cubicle walls and extends outside our building, university, town and state.

Every day that I think about the friendships, connections and relationships I’ve built just over the past year in online community I try to imagine what it would be like if that sense of ‘belonging’ and desire to work together encompassed the entire world. Can you imagine what it would be like if the whole world was on twitter? (We’d see that fail whale a lot, no doubt)

Imagine someone from a small country saying they needed medical supplies. How quickly would those supplies arrive from someone in another country that had the means and desire to provide and help? The collaboration we’re seeing in our local online communities are just the smallest, tiniest ripple of what we truly could do if everyone was connected.

Let’s collaborate with the world.

How “Friendly” are You?

We’ve had some discussion recently among the local twitter community here at Penn State about how many people we all follow on twitter.. and why.  The consensus was that most of us try to follow no more than 100 people and all for the same basic reason… it’s not beneficial. At more than 100 people, conversations begin to become fragmented and you can’t really feel connected to more than that many people.  While this may not be the case for everyone, the majority of the people I’ve spoken with at Penn State feel this way.

It was interesting then, to read this post from ReadWriteWeb today discussing this very thing. An excerpt from the post here:

“Research by Robin Dunbar indicates that 100 to 150 is the approximate natural group size in which everyone can really know everyone else. “Human beings ought to live in groups of around 150 people, judging from the logarithm of our brain size; and sure enough, studies of hunter-gatherer groups, military units, and city dwellers’ address books suggest that 100 to 150 is the natural group size within which people can know just about everyone directly,” writes Jonathan Haidt in the book “The Happiness Hypothesis,” drawing on research by Dunbar.”

The post also discusses the difference between the amount of friends a person might have on Facebook as opposed to twitter and for me there’s a difference.  I feel as though I could have a million ‘friends’ on Facebook and be fine with that because it’s not conversational in the way twitter is.  It’s like the difference between a dinner party and attending a Penn State football game. I’m ok hanging around with thousands of people as long as I don’t really want to get to know all of them. If I want to spend quality time with them.. then I’d prefer the dinner party.

Vivaty and Possibilities

A few weeks ago I received an email asking me if I would be interested in trying out a new tool/technology called Vivaty.  I did a quick twitter poll asking if anyone knew anything about Vivaty to which NO ONE responded (Seriously people.. what the heck). So that told me that either no one knew anything about Vivaty, or no one felt like telling me about it so I figured I was on my own and I’d give it a whirl just to see what it was about.

This past week I was able to take part in a conference call and demonstration with Keith McCurdy, the President and CEO of Vivaty, and I gotta say.. I think this has potential. Keith introduced himself by saying that he worked previously for Electronic Arts and had developed Vivaty as a platform and wanted to get my impressions.  We used WebEx so Keith was able to walk me through some “scenes” and show me what you’re able to do while we discussed it.

In a nutshell, from my point of view, Vivaty allows you to log into a ’scene’ which is your own personal virtual environment. You have an avatar that you create with very simple choices.. not great amounts of avatar customization right up front but in my opinion.. that’s a good thing. Sometimes that stuff can be a little (a lot?) overwhelming at first. So anyway.. you log into your ’scene’ and you’re able to invite others to come join you. The scene that Keith showed me was sort of a patio area with a pool and some outdoor furniture but apparently there are/will be many others to choose from as well.  As we were hanging out at Keith’s pool he showed me how users can move objects/furniture around to customize their area and make it more unique.  It felt to me very much like a Second Life environment, but with one difference.. it’s web-based. No intensive graphic requirements, no huge processor, no leaving people out because they don’t have a powerful graphics card capable of running it.. very nice.

Another fantastic thing Vivaty can do is take YouTube URLs and allow them to be embedded in the scene and viewed by anyone that’s present in that area. There were also photos on the wall that were brought in from a Flickr RSS feed.  Vivaty is almost like a big mash-up of web content in a fantastically neat virtual package.

Vivaty is currently in beta and being used in Facebook. I’ve been invited and if any of my readers are interested, I do have some other beta invites that I can toss your way and get you included.. PC only at this point, it seems. I was a little disappointed with that because I do prefer my mac, but it’s not a deal-breaker.

Vivaty Pros:
Web-based
Immersive
Customizable
Can pull web-content from other sites into environment (YouTube, Flickr, etc)
No risk of ugly, inappropriate ’scenes’ to interfere with your space
Seems to be very user-friendly and easy to understand/navigate
More control over your environment/space

Vivaty Cons:
Still in beta
Other than the discussion with me, there was no real consideration about educational uses, but in all fairness, they did say that these were things they hadn’t thought about, but would now consider.

From my perspective, Vivaty has a lot going for it. If you can restrict your logins to a specific group (or class) you can easily have a defined, secure, virtual environment that’s community-based where groups of people can meet, discuss and view web-content together. If we were able to use a tool like this within ANGEL, for instance, allowing each online class to have their own virtual room where the entire class could meet I can see a lot of potential there for some really wonderful interactions.

I’m pleased to have been asked to provide some input and check things out and I’m looking forward to playing around with Vivaty.  I’m hopeful that they’ll keep educational institutions in mind as they progress forward and I can’t wait to see what opportunities this will present.  A big thank you to Raksha, Keith and Heidi.

Social Media Better Than Traditional Media?

Just came across this post on ReadWriteWeb that references a study that will appear in New Scientist Magazine that has found that things like blogs, instant messaging and social media sites are better than traditional media in times of emergency because they connect people and provide warnings in real-time.

It’s a really great post and definitely worth reading. I love that they’ve used real examples of how all of these sites and tools have really been useful recently. They’ve also shown the real value of using these things in emergency situations.

I wonder.. with the proliferation of blogs, twitterers and people using these tools, if at some point “traditional” media will disappear. It seems, at least for myself, that more and more I’m tired of the ‘drama’ that old-school media brings to the table and I just want to get the quick, honest assessment from a ‘real’ person on the front lines.

The power of “Community”

Today’s my post-TLT recovery day and I’m feeling like there’s so much I want to say about it, but I’m having trouble finding the words to express it.

The keynote from the event was delivered by Lawrence Lessig and was something I was really looking forward to. I did not come away disappointed as it was even more than I’d hoped it would be. The one thing that did surprise me, however, was how emotional his words were for me. I’ve found myself overcome with emotions at other times in my job.. typically when I’m trying to express something that I’m very passionate about, and I think my emotions at the keynote yesterday reflected those same things. I could hear and feel the passion in Lessig’s voice as he talked about creativity and expression and how desperately important it is that we truly *rethink* the way we look at things and create policy. I could feel the energy in the room as we all sat there, and I felt it carry through the day as we broke into our sessions and met, learned from and connected with people from all over our university.

If I had to pick one thing that I will take with me from this symposium, it’s the feeling that I now belong to a community that values the same things Lessig spoke about. People that are energized, connected, and wanting to make changes. Many of the people I connected with at the symposium were people I’d never met face-to-face, but had come to know on twitter in the weeks prior to yesterday’s event. Having met this group online, through a social networking tool added such amazing value to the symposium for me because I was immediately welcomed as part of that group when I arrived and I spent the whole day strengthening my ties with that group and connecting with others that I didn’t previously know.

In my first session, we talked about encouraging social networking for our students to allow them to make connections online, outside the classroom. As a social networks adviser, I obviously believe in the power of online connections and I have a little different perspective than a faculty member who’s considering using these tools in the classroom. There was a woman sitting in front of me who truly did not understand how using social networking in her classroom would benefit her students. She also felt that it was rude for us to sit there using twitter and text and chat to connect with others and share what was going on with our session while we were there. She felt it was more important for us to listen and pay attention to the speaker and not use these technologies during the session. It made for some very interesting discussion and that carried throughout the day. I met that same woman again in the afternoon, and she said “So if I were going to sign up for this twitter thing.. how would I go about doing that?”. I laughed, and several people around explained to her how to do that, and we all shared cupcakes and laughter and connected again. I love to think that after a day at TLT, seeing how all of the ‘twitter’ peeps were connected, conversing, and learning.. she felt that perhaps indeed there might be some value to using it. I truly hope to see her on twitter soon. I’d love to connect with her.

Online communities built through social networking are synergistic, powerful, amazing groups that have the power to change lives, policy, and perspectives. Sometimes we just have to build these communities one person at a time.. and that’s fine with me.

Classroom 2.0

One of my feeds (academhack) led me to this fantastic post about Classroom 2.0 and the use of twitter in class. I’m an avid user of twitter, but I must say that when I was first introduced to it I didn’t “get it”.  I gave it some time and when I came back, I realized that twitter did serve a purpose. Not only did it allow me to connect with and meet new friends, but it gave me the opportunity to hear perspectives from people that I’d never hear from otherwise.  I can follow along as the President visits Africa (thanks @newmediajim!) and I can read where Barack Obama’s headed next on his campaign.  This is what twitter does for *me* but you can make it work for you as well.

The blog post I was reading today talked about participatory learning and using twitter, YouTube and blogs in the classroom. I especially loved this section of the post:

“And then it struck me that since I was showing Howard Rheingold’s vlogpost, we might actually be able to FIND Howard on Twitter and, perhaps, use Twitter to allow the students to ask him about his video. To do so would, in my view, convey the immediacy of social and participatory media in a way that nothing else would.

To my delight, Howard was not only available but sent a message to our class! It was very cool to move from the recorded Howard to the live-virtual Howard. So I said to the class, “That was Howard Rheingold. And here he is in our Twitter! Do you have anything to ask him about that video we just watched – or about Twitter?” … a couple of the students took the plunge and Howard graciously replied (one had even read his Virtual Community book for a prior course). This was a very generous gift of time from a guy who is teaching three courses and functioning as a human server for a most inhuman volume of requests for time, insight and connection. Thank you Howard!”

I *love* this. This is exactly what makes Web 2.0 in the classroom and in education so exciting and amazing. To think that we still have our children sitting in front of textbooks reading things that were probably already outdated decades ago and yet we still continue to teach them in the same way, from the same materials.  When I think back on my days in middle school and high school I remember certain moments from my classes and any and all of them involved participatory learning. Whether it was making up my own version of the “12 Days of Christmas” that involved tossing Barbie Dolls off a filing cabinet, or acting out scenes from Hamlet in a Fisher-Price Little People Castle while “King For Just One Day” by the Thompson Twins blared in the background, they stuck with me – they had an impact.

I’m not saying that I think every teacher or every subject is best taught using Web 2.0 technologies, I just think that we’re doing a disservice to our students if we don’t at least learn about and try to incorporate participatory learning into our classes to make things a little more relevant.