Source: Wikipedia

Six degrees of separation

Do you believe that you are related to everyone in the world at no more than six degrees of separation?

Do you believe that you could set up you address book so that you could talk to anybody anywhere (with a little help from your friends)?

LinkedIn

I started using LinkedIn about a year ago when I migrated to the UK.  I arrive here with a handful (and I mean 5 or 6 contacts).  I started adding contacts, though I must say, not all that energetically.

As a newcomer to the UK, obviously I have been networking more than I would if I had been here a while.  This blog is a summary of key contacts I have met using 2.0 facilities, such as LinkedIn, and other services like Yahoo Upcoming and commenting on blogs.

I have more contacts than I have met via 2.0.  And I have more professional contacts than I have on LinkedIn (I have been a little slack).  My primary or first degree contacts on LinkedIn now stand at 46 - so let’s say a 800% to 900% growth in a year.  Not bad when you put it like that!

In LinkedIn terms, my network comprises those 46 and their contacts.  Some have few contacts and some have lots and lots of contacts.  LinkedIn stops counting at 500.   Let’s assume, though, that they are all like me.  A rough calculation that 50×50 means that the 50 people, who are connected to me, know 2500 people ,and this 2500 set of people know 125 000 people.

Actually LinkedIn says it connects me to over 1m million people.  That’s the people I know, who know someone else, who know someone else.  Sort of like my third cousins!

I must remind you that I started this a year ago, I have changed countries and moved across the world, and I have been slack.  I also have never lived in the States.

Surprising connections

I was looking for a plains-word account of what Barack Obama intended to do about the US economy when I picked up references to his entry in LinkedIn.

I searched for him and was amazed to see that he is connected to me at the third degree (so is Hillary Clinton). I know someone (actually 17 someone’s) who know someone who knows Barack Obama well enough to connect to him on LinkedIn.

What is your connection to the future President of the United States?

I’ve learned a very important lesson about 2.0 from Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino of DesignSwarm. I’ve admired Alex’s work for a while and subscribe to her blog. I noticed she was going to a meeting on Ubiquitous Computing at the Royal Society. I had never been to the Royal Society, and had never thought of going. I didn’t even know they had public events. Anyway, this meeting overlaps with my interest in Serious Games and in particularly my interest in multi-player games that can be played on mobiles.

Thank you Alex, and nice to meet you. I picked up a lot of links there which will keep me busy for days!

So what did I learn about 2.0?

In the world of 2.0, meetings are about who else is in the audience, not just who is speaking. I knew this before of course. When Chris Hambly organised Bucks Media Camp 07, he set up a wiki. Participants register publicly and provide their email addresses with develops the community before the meeting begins. There are systems available to trade mobile numbers safely. You dial in to the conference number which diverts you to the number you want.

It was this meeting that really brought the rule home to me. Organize meetings around your audience!

P.S. I have put various descriptions of the meeting here, here, here and here.

Another great story about Chris Hambly

I first met Chris Hambly via a Page Flake version of Yahoo Upcoming! and I went to the Bucks MediaCamp 07 he organise. I bumped into him again at the Chinwag event and . . .

he invited me to a Saturday evening get-together of ’social media mafia’ in Soho at the Slug n’Lettuce.

This was great. Several other people there had also been at the Bucks MediaCamp 07. One person returned from Sweden, no less! Others like me had driven in from the lower Midlands.

So who gets involved in social media?

Theater producers, marketeers in the third sector, educational technologists, electronic engineers, and would you believe, Conservative politicians!

What do they do?

Marketeers raise money for large charities - lots and lots of money. Educational technologists work in universities. Electronic engineers act quite normally and run online businesses. And theater producers and conservative politicians help businesses use social media.

If you need help with social media:

Contact Chris who is likely to know who might help you.

What do I do with social media?

I work at the purposeful end of local media in what are called peer producing networks. We might develop a P2P network within a workplace to provide direct access to what we have learned in the field. We might sponsor a P2P network as a place for people in our industry to compare notes. And we might organize P2P networks for local communities with a special interest.

P2P networks are often facilitated with technology (it is so cheap!). We also do old fashioned things like have get-togethers of like-minded people in suitable places (like Soho!).

What I have learned through blogging

The most important feature of blogging is first the feedback that you get from others, and second, that you only get feedback on what you do.

How does blogging work?

You blog and you tag.  You comment on other blogs and leave your blog address as a calling card.  People visit your site on the basis of what you put into the blogosphere as tags and comments.

Some examples

This is such a simple idea but so important.  One blog which is about diasporans from my country receives a lot of traffic about food.  But then much  of my early posts were about food.   I get considerable traffic around the word mbanje which only people who’ve lived there will understand.  I also get more traffic about Ethiopia than my own country because I’ve commented on their new commodity exchange.

This blog gets a lot of traffic about lawyers, Stephenson Harwood!  Oddly the most popular people that I have met in 10 months in the UK are lawyers.  Does that tell us something?

On Nouveaux Pommes, the line, ‘when you are tired of London, you are tired of life’, brings in visitors.

On Flowing Motion,  I get a lot of traffic following the poet David Whyte, whose poetry I quote in the title here.  Because I quote him a lot, I also know which poems are the most popular.  At the moment, people are searching for “Start close in”.

I have just started another blog on Serious Games called Mankala.  I  haven’t linked much there.  So far, the most popular link is a physics simulation of a large cloth on a washing line!

What you put in and what you get out

So there you have it.  It does help to understand your community at the outset.  That is what Search Engine Optimization does - it tells you popular words.

It is also interesting to learn which of your interests are interesting to other people.  It is fascinating, sometimes puzzling, but also fascinating to see the points you have in common.

The HR guy with red roses

I had read and posted on Jon Inghams’s blog on Human Capital for around six months when I offered to blog a conference he was chairing in London on talent management. Jon put me in touch with Tony Chapman at CIPD and hey presto, I got to blog a conference for the first time, to do a guest post for the first time, and to meet Jon in person.

Jon takes flowers to gorgeous ladies in men’s lives. Pink is in!

After going to a Chinwag meeting, when? was it two weeks ago now, I see another blog on metrics and social media.  I certainly don’t want to discourage measuring.   It’s always instructive.  And I love those Exclesius dashboards.  Cute as can be.

Metrics shouldn’t be boring though.  Let me explain.

You are flying along in one of those long haul airliners, and you bravely (in my opinion) have a look at the map telling you how far you have come and how far you have to go.  This is important stuff if you are the navigator and need to check the fuel (why are they doing that when there is sea in every direction) or you need to confirm your position with air traffic control (don’t they have radar and GPS?  OK I understand in some parts of the world the comms systems are sparse).  OK you are really brave to be looking at that map.  It is a copycat map.

It looks like a metric but it isn’t one.

What is interesting is what you might learn from the map.   I once learned that in crossing the Indian Ocean we loop down to the Antartic.   That improved my geography after all.  I am not sure that it was directly useful, but my geography is dreadful and any improvement must have some value.

Flying the other way, I learned about the wind patterns over New Zealand.  When you approach Christchurch (on the South Island) from the Australia in the west, you fly over the Southern Alps.  It is bumpy for a start, so buckle up - you can be thrown out of your chair.  Then depending on the wind, the pilots loop seem to loop down and in come in from the south on the long runway into the prevailing east wind.  Or alternatively, they fly over the town and turn back to fly into the famous ‘nor wester’ coming down off the mountains.

None of this gets me home faster.  Actually it matters not a damn if we arrive early or late.   What will be will be.  We still have to disembark, clear immigration, MAF (the dribbling beagles) and XRay machines, and customs.  Nothing I do and no information makes that faster or better.  It just is.  Chill!

So what with the metrics?

• I can learn about the various approaches out of interest.
• I can learn about the approaches for explaining Christchurch weather (always get home early when the planes fly over the city -the ‘norwester is dry and you must water your garden!).

What do the pilots learn?

When planes first start flying to Christchurch,  it was not the metrics that would have informed them, it would have been their actions.  Their actions would have led to the development of the famous long run way and short runway for landing into the ‘norwester.

If we were to collect information now, it wouldn’t be to confirm that we were right to have two runways.  It would be to tell us that we were wrong!

Imagine the weather is changing (well it doesn’t change fast).  When we seem to use one runway less, then the information is useful!  When pilots start agitating for different slots, their actions tell us that something interesting is happening.

Collect information about actions that inform action.

To collect information to tell accountants that we were right to build the runway  .   .  .  We’ve built it!  Now we are spending money to congratulate or to blame.  So yesterday!  We need to summon the sociologists to explain this preoccupation.

Metrics people, try getting your ahead around what we want and try selling that.   You may be pleasantly surprised!  (We are more interesting too!)

A google search that brought a visitor to my site, welcome, or rather thanks for coming, as you are gone by now, was looking for “how to make connections and use them”.

Yes, meeting people through 2.0 is in that category. I had hoped this site was more in the “broaden-and-build” spirit of Barbara Frederickson. While she talks of emotions, I am interested in engagement with life. We both relate, I think, to the metaphor offered my Matthieu Ricard that well being is the depth of the ocean, and emotions are the waves on the surface, large or small.

So how does broaden-and-build differ from making connections and using them.

Firstly, I don’t look around for someone who will help me. I look for who and what interests me and I join in on that basis. I introduce myself on that basis: “You are interesting. What you do is interesting. This is why I find you interesting”.

Secondly, I follow up and I pass on information I have that they could use. The foreigner helps the native.

Thirdly, I stay in touch.

Now some people I contact are not interested in what I do. I haven’t counted the proportion. But because I am interested in what they do, I continue to follow their work. It enriches my life! And I continue to send them anything that is helpful to them.

Only a few people pass information to me. They really stand out. It may be an English-thing. English people will say thankyou, but they may not generate another opportunity to work together. Other cultures are the opposite. Their thanks will be perfunctory but they will suggest ways to do business together again. Celebrate the people who “return the ball”. They are precious and you have like-minds.

And I stay in touch. I notice English people send a lot of notes: thank you cards rather than emails and loads of Xmas cards even if they will see you on Christmas day or thereabouts. But they don’t follow up on business cards , or even exchange them necessarily. There also seems to be UK, of the deep ocean perhaps, and UK of the waves on the surface, maybe. New media and creative people in Britain are fast, quick, cosmopolitan. Have two sets of stationery! Calling card, expensive notepaper, cards and a set of postage stamps for some. And email, Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, RSS feeds and “moo” cards for others.

On Monday, I went to a Chinwag meeting on measuring social media. This was 2.0 cubed: I found the meeting through 2.0; Chinwag is very much 2.0 (check their job board); and social media (Facebook, etc.) is 2.0

The meeting was held in the basement of Slug n Lettuce on Waldour Street, just up from China Town. Being just after the Chinese New Year, I got to see Gerrard Street festooned with Red Lanterns. Great pub, but not such a great place for a meeting. It was physically difficult to circulate and the acoustics are terrible. Networking by shouting.

That said, there were five speakers, if I recall, and Jim Sterne had flown over from California to chair.

It was interesting. The audience wanted to talk to the dynamic nature or social media and Jim, I thought, was batting us down.

Here is a quote from a book on complexity theory and management that captures, what I thought, was the sentiment from the floor

” . . it is not enough for managers to adjust their behaviour in response to feedback on the success of their actions relative to pre-established targets; they also need to reflect on the appropriateness, in the light of unfolding events, of the assumptions (the mental model) used to set up those actions and targets,”

A metric that provides feedback tells us about yesterday. We need metrics that encourage double loop learning - that change the questions we ask. Metric suppliers need to be brave enough to interpret the data they collect, do a bit of scenario planning, and initiate conversations which enhance marketers understanding of what consumers want.

15 years ago, double loop learning might have been what Professor Ralph Stacey of University of Hertfordshire called extraordinary management. Today, double loop learning is ordinary management.

What the floor was interested in was feed forward. Not whether you achieved sales. But whether you can monitor in real time what consumers want. And take part meaningfully in a conversation with them.

Thanks to Gautam  Ghosh, I picked up the story about Ryan who twittered his layoff from google and found his job search on the from page of the  LA Times!  Who could ask for a better platform to say what kind of role you are looking for!

It is so Gen X and boomerish to drop Web2.0 for a holiday; but for once I think all the generations are together. Traffic is down today, as it was over Christmas.

Have a wonderful evening!