Over 60 years ago, this effect was first verified in an experiment by psychologist Bertram Forer with some students. He constructed a personality assessment from various horoscopes, and gave the same assessment individually to every student who took a personality test.

The assessment included sentences such as:

At times you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved.

Almost anyone can find some truth about themselves in sentences like that.  And, in repeated experiments that tendency held true.  And with social media and other online (or offline) interactions, there is perhaps the same tendency to follow the Forer effect.

If a social media tool analyzes our online traits and provides us with a judgement, we probably will think it must have truth in it.  After all, it’s about us, based on our own input.

Even knowing that an interaction is non-human, such as interacting with a “bot” of some sort (or a voice response system), we still feel that the interaction is ours alone.  But perhaps like a credit score run amok with other people’s information, we should not accept the assessment without making sure it’s not co-mingling our information with others.

To some extent, what you believe becomes your reality, and certainly our belief can get us past otherwise-overwhelming challenges.

If a new tool tells you that you are #1,230 of all tweeters worldwide (on Twitter), you are inclined to want to believe it. But what if it were partly a randomly-generated number?

hmmm….

And in a perhaps orthogonal way, an online persona is our own Forer effect upon the world, and this can be bolstered using social networks.  It’s the same old technique put online: if enough people refer about someone as a visionary, then it is easier to believe to be true about that person.  And we can get others to say those nice things about us! (article continues below)

Sites such as Facebook & LinkedIn, along newer sites such as Philtro, are also trying to enhance their picture of who you are via your social network, in order to provide you with more relevant information (and, of course, advertisements).

While this social network assessment technology is still new, over time we are likely to expect our online services to deliver us what we like, without us having to do much to filter those information & media feeds.  Just say (one day) to your phone/PDA – “I want to watch a minute of the most interesting clips of my friend’s party last night, and after that chill out for about 30 minutes to some new music like what I heard there.  Go!” and you just might get what you instructed.

And you may believe it’s been done just for you.

The reasons behind being what could be called “semi-social” are varied, and include:

• Desire to be different
• Fear of (using) technology
• Not enough desire to socialize online
• Not enough time to socialize online – information overload
• Most friends or relatives not using online social websites
• Desire to cut back on online social activities

So, your choices on how to handle these miscreants – um, miscellaneous users – include:

• Acknowledge them – Show that you know that not everyone “gets” it and tone down the geeky/chic-y plug-ins and social media campaigns
• Help them – Provide work-arounds so that semi-socials can partake of your website’s offerings
• Ignore them – Don’t slow down the speed at which you use every possible social media tool to expand your reach, while risking alienating people who are semi-social.
• Invite them to socialize – Take a chance that you may find their moment to start socializing via one of your preferred methods. (This invitation can happen along with the first bullet point above – after acknowledging them.)

We’re all semi-social and even non-social during the course of a given day. So, it is easy to understand the mindset of someone who is routinely less social online. That is, if you can stop posting for a moment and ponder about them.

Times Square, New York City (2009), slightly altered. © 2009 ChiefSocialOfficer.com

  “Johnny, what were you saying to Eddie? ”

 ”Nuthin’” 

  “I want you to repeat it loud so the whole class can hear you!”

…this was the type of social experience that we sought to avoid.

Not all teachers were the same.  Some teachers really didn’t seem to care about our interactions.  And the most clueless ones didn’t flinch when we told jokes about them and laughed about them in plain sight.

The cool ones laughed with us, wisely, and we loved them.

Kind of like some brands are today, in the online social web. Some plug in, some are clueless.

There are lots of articles about how brands are using online social web tactics, successfully.  They use data and watch their markets carefully as they muddy the waters. 

Obvious comparisons to the childhood example – the teacher is an authority figure by position, but still has to earn the respect with every interaction with the students.  Yet she runs a risk every time she tries to mingle with the students on their turf.  A risk worth taking, and learning from. 

And, the teacher writes on the blackboard (“the wall”) and everyone can read it, re-write it, or start writing other ideas on other parts of the room.

These instructors are (usually) paid to be there, and the students know they get to move on to other teachers… that the relationship is only temporary.  Unless their teacher is so influential to their lives that they keep the relationship going for a long time.

And in another parallel with online brands, teachers can only effectively connect with students up to a certain class size. After that, they need helpers… teacher’s aides.

But in the modern world, will brands dilute the impact of their social media interactions as they run up against a corporate version of Dunbar’s Number (the theoretical limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships)?  For individuals, the number is claimed to be 150 inter-personal relationships.

Yet some people “maintain” thousands of relationships online.  They swim (as Robert Scoble said to me) since it’s not possible to interact with every bit of social media as your network grows gigantic.  But swim-strokes are okay if at the heart of it you’re a real person.

Brands have it both easier and harder… like a teacher, they have implied authority and a mutually-respected “I’m not really your friend” attitude in their core, yet they also have to reach people on a personal level.  Odds are, like teachers and their pupils, some brands will get it wrong, and some will work with each day to find something to evolve the relationship to have rewards for both sides.

Or, will we elect to stay in mostly same-thinking groups?  As we join up in communities online, the homophily aspect could kick in.  Homophily is defined as the tendency to be friends with others who are similar, and is described futher in this New York Times article.

Birds of a feather flock together… True?  Looks like it.  As stated in this 2001 paper “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks” the tendency shown is to connect with people who are like you: “Similarity breeds connection”.  If you’ve stumbled upon a MySpace.com profile that is for an artist in Los Angeles, you will likely see this tendancy at work as you see their friends and the interactions. The University of Wolverhampton in England determined in a study that homophily exists on MySpace (Homophily in Myspace – MS Word format).

Geese of a feather on the snowy Potomac River in Washington DC

In looking how a phenomenon, concept, or media can “go viral”, the virality aspect has to allow it travel along different groups, each with may have their own different patterns of interaction.

And political alignments can seemingly prove this “fact” – that birds of a feather flock together.  As has been seen increasingly online, getting the message out directly to small homogenous social groups has value, especially as it usually comes from a member of the group.

But this same social group limits your options. As you meet and interact with new people, via your social networks, they will pretty much be the same as your old friends.  Exceptions to this trend possibly include on-the-job interactions, networking for a new job, and ad hoc activities such as searching for a lost pet or person.

For support towards goals, this similarity within a group can be a positive aspect.  For a marketing campaign, it is both a hindrance and a help.  People resist ideas or concepts that come from outside their group, but if it is shared within a group it is helped by the peer-to-peer approvals.

As pointed out in this O’Reilly blog post & comments, social networking sites encourage you after you sign up to invite all of your friends to join (or at least load them up as contacts).  Is homophilus behavior a feature or a bug?  How about in one’s own life?

This depends on whether a person wants change, and to some extent if they are open to conflict.  Engaging with people who think and act differently from you often means conflict.

On sites such as Twitter, we can search and see different and opposing views to our own, but odds are that we are not following or friending these people, on average.  On a philosophical note, then, each can blame themselves for limiting their choices of friends.

In the trend of people to find their news via online social activities, the news we get there is filtered by our preference in friends.  The videos we get pointed to, the memes we share… they are going to vary among friend-lines.  This inbreeding of content perhaps goes contrary to the common belief that we are expanding our horizons by interacting with hundreds or thousands of friends online.  This trend may be also relevant to how mainstream news covers mostly the same events.

The people who become online web celebrities cross the boundaries of smaller social groups… or may define larger groups as they show commonalities.  They connect to us on levels that transcend simple small-group connections, and sometimes even transcend language barriers, and satisfy people’s yearning to be part of something bigger.  Even as we also apparently yearn to part of something similar.

A definition of social: the aspect of life that is lived in communities.

Another definition of social: belonging to organized groups, with a known or assumed boundary that defines the group.

A definition of community: a group of interacting people sharing one or more life aspects in common.

The wikipedia definition of community is longer than these definitions.  It delves into sociology, anthropology, psychology, and other areas.  One could derive from it that online communities fall into the general category of either “communities of culture” or “community organizations”, with the other  category being geography.

Yet online – and virtual – communities have evolved to a different blend that has not existed before.  The sheer number of virtual communities may grow to equal or exceed the population that supports it – i.e. the population of the world.  This growth won’t happen overnight.  But if you assume that 80% or 90% of the population may be candidates for virtual communities (including groups), and people usually join multiple groups, the case can be made for billions of groups existing in 5 to 10 years.

But what is the “blend that has not existed before“?  It is the interwoven way that community boundaries exist and change in the virtual world.

In the real world, communities are usually physical, and also non-overlapping.  The town of, for example, Fundale, consisted of the society that lived within its borders.  Physical borders defined geographical community borders.  And the teachers of Fundale would be the community defined by teachers working in the town’s borders.

In the virtual world, communities now overlap.   There can be a Teachers of Fundale group on Facebook, another one on MySpace, another one at TeachersOfFundale.org, and numerous other ones.  Membership is almost guaranteed to be different in each of these communities, as some of them may not even know about the existence of the others.

Oh, and what about the Instuctors of Fundale?  And the Professors of Fundale?  And don’t forget the Fundale Educators and the Coaches of Fundale.  Each of these communities may differ in name only from the functional boundaries of “people that instruct or teach other within Fundale“.

What’s the point?  Why should you care?

The largest social network is… the human race.  Some people reading this post may assume (or hope) that one day there will be one online social network that becomes #1 worldwide and that everyone will join.  We’re all members of the human race, after all, and we deserve our virtual platform with no walls for everyone on the planet, right?  But that one worldwide social networking platform is not likely to exist anytime soon, as there are hundreds of social networks launching each week (our estimate based on a few scattered stories and statistics).

Instead, envision an online world that mirrors – and expands on – the mix of communities in the real world.  Boundaries are mushy – membership fickle – and the human nature of competition is just as real as in the offline world.  (All your members are belong to us.)

You may believe you are the member of a particular community.  When does that membership cross into areas that are outside of the community?  How do you describe the essence of your membership? For many communities online, it becomes hard to define the boundaries, especially if anyone can join and quit at will.

The activity of the members creates the community.  Usually this description applies to the social activity, and it also includes activity that may not be on-topic for the community.  If an online community member (who is a member of 12 communities simultaneously) uploads a video to YouTube or a photo to Flickr, and links it to 4 or 5 communities, and then is removed from 2 of those communities…

…the boundaries and intersections of “community” may start to become more interesting. As does the strength or level of group participation, the distributed nature of community (including what is going to explode with technology such as Open Social and Facebook Connect), and mobile aspects.  Understanding the dynamics behind community boundaries is worth exploring, as that aspect has a lot to do with how community exists out of its ability to satisfy basic human needs (to belong, to be understood, to have meaning).

The community boundaries become defined by the members of the moment, and their activities and contributions.

Consider this post to be the first attempt to get words around how to manage the chaos of online communities, and that it is to be continued (link will be added when that happens).

Author’s Disclaimer: Fundale.com is a site that I’m involved in, and is not an actual town (that I know of).

Reportedly, many places block Facebook, including entire countries, and MySpace is blocked by many of these same places… plus hordes of well-meaning parents. There are perhaps just as many proposed workarounds for users to bypass the blocks. But for the world wide social web to work out, including monetization aspects, it will have to work in enough places to be considered ubiquitous. Adsense is pervasive today, and is not generally blocked in the way that social networks are. This situation is probably due to it’s origins, function, and the fact that it is not seen as linked to some of the issues such as malware and productivity loss that cause social networking sites to be blocked.

The evolving integration of the social web puts choices into the hands of website owners trying to see the ROI (return on investment) of adopting and adapting the technologies to their websites. The technology is not yet available to the public, and competes in various ways with OpenSocial, OpenID, MyBlogLog, and other services as the effort to evolve identity management on the web continues. If one’s website audience primarily accesses the site at work locations that might block social networking sites, form a social network integration strategy and implementation plan that accounts for these hurdles.

How will webmasters decide what works for them?

The effort to implement “social connector” technology on a website, plus the possibly-problematic ability of these technologies to to integrate with each other, may have the war of the social web won based on webmaster adoption. What platform will bring them the most reward (users, money, attention, etc.)? The ROI of time and money, plus compatibility, becomes important.

The first major text-ad service, Goto.com (which became Overture and was bought by Yahoo!), has given up it’s first place market position to Adsense. Being huge, successful, and in first place (and then getting bought) does not mean ultimately winning the war. The battles now in the social platform space include fighting to be the preferred (or only) identity-holder for people when they are online across the entire social web. The “first place” position of social networking sites & services is in flux this year. And the ability of each site to monetize it’s social base, and thus survive, may rely on sharing their success with thousands of website operators.

The near-term winners will likely be those that have a compelling ROI for website and social application owners, enough to get them to make the effort to write for a particular social platform. Facebook Connect seems to have this ROI coming out of the gate.

The popularity of social networks varies by country. The adoption of social networks within and by website owners may follow similar patterns. And, like sports popularity varying by area, with baseball, soccer, football, basketball, cricket, and others all competing for similar passion & purchases from fans, it may simply be a multi-player game with multiple fields.

Photo (c) 2008 Chief Social Officer

I also added in some information about social media marketing. Which is, of course, what the post on Knol is doing. In trying this platform and others (especially new ones), there is the opportunity to further build on the brand, which in this case is myself, providing illuminative Chief Social Officer advice for the entire world. (Or, at least those who are online.)

Below is an extract and a link to the definition on Knol:

Social Media

When content interacts via relationships & sharing to influence even itself

What happens when you take stand-alone media and add sharing and collaboration? The result allows participation and conversation which builds new meaning around the content.

Social media can be explained as a term in several ways, and also expanded by its use in terms such as social media marketing and social media consultant. This writeup starts first with some elementary definitions, and then goes to examples, to allow an understanding of this term.

Continue to read the rest of the definition.

Too much information running through my brain
Too much information driving me insane

… and this was penned before there was cable TV with 500 channels, mobile phones (with or without text messaging & voicemail), and before there was any of the billions of spam emails (worldwide) per hour! My hunch is that today we have 10 times more information to deal with on a daily basis now, and there is more information arriving with (couldn’t resist) every breath you take.

As the information glut continues, organizations – and people – who succeed and excel will be the ones who recognize the importance of managing information efficiently.

And for those many people who have a portion of their social life online, with many friends, updates, events, and activities, the too-much-information aspect extends into a new term: social clutter.

Socially, many of us now suffer from information overload. For some people, quality time has been replaced by quantity, as we now keep up with more people and have more interruptions in our time with friends and family. Anyone with a mobile phone been asked to silence their ring or set it on vibrate for an event?

It’s kind of like asking people to filter out each of their own social clutter to keep the event from being overwhelmed.

Too much information? Since when?

Our information now is typically electronic data, at one time or another. This is new. Only 20 years ago it was still a very analog world. But now, magazines and newspapers are composed using computers. Digital cameras & photos now exceed film cameras. CD’s that were overtaking vinyl are now being replaced by digital files. And email and online text are essential information sources for most of the people reading these words in this post.

And every year, many of us produce a lot of digital material (emails, videos, photos, slide decks, documents) that we don’t need, yet we have to save it, file it, organize it. We don’t know what we won’t need, so we may try and save it all.

As the volume of online social interactions grow, and with these interactions all saved in the online cloud of data, the social clutter will continue to grow.  What to do?  Use tools, such as filters and folders (online or offline), to be more efficient.  And don’t be afraid to unfriend or unfollow people who are cluttering your life.  More on the social clutter handling in future posts.

Stripping away the more mystical aspects, one could assume that the current path of technology is to create an actual akashic record of all events of our world – everything that can be recorded. Road traffic, transactions, conversations, and with microblogging all the rage… apparently every thought (as in, tweets on Twitter.com and updates on sites such as facebook.com and myspace.com).

What about recording thoughts from within the brain? Possible, as EEG (electroencephalography) and MEG have shown. And this development will continue to develop, as who would not want to control a computer – and thus other mechanical devices – with their brains, as shown in the video below about the Neurosky controller:

Assuming technology will evolve and refine thought-reading further, then it also will allow thought-recording. Initially it would be a stream of simple commands such as “move mouse up”.

But how about the future? Less than 40 years ago the large computers that filled an entire room contained less information than fits on a CD or on a memory card for a camera or mobile phone. Today’s personal computers are 100 times smaller, and 1000 times cheaper, and run laps around their ancestors in terms of speed & performance.

So by one stretch – and it is a stretch – the crude EEG game controllers of today will evolve in 20 or 30 years to devices that will read and extract our ideas and concepts. And there will be storage media to record this brain activity, and likely also record a 3-D representation of real events, continuously. These events would include human activity, and nature, weather, etc. While we may not be able to capture past events or the thoughts of someone like Shakespeare as he was writing, we have already started capturing this arguably permanent record of human consciousness.

Going back to the definition of akashic, it contains: “…adherents describe the existence of various akashic records (e.g., human, animal, plant, mineral, etc.) that in their summation encompass all possible knowledge.” There is a counter-balance in that “the akashic records have been rejected by the scientific community, due to a lack of any independently verifiable evidence.”

Evidence lacking, that is, until the scientific community creates it. Or, actually, as we all create it.

My own online social interaction has always had a strong connection to the physical (real) world.  My instant messaging was always with people I had met physically, until it wasn’t.  My email messages were always exchanged with people I had met physically, until (quickly) they weren’t. 

And now, years later, there is a growing churning sea of connection with people I will never meet.  And organizations whose offices or stores I won’t get to visit. Online social has exploded, and offline social can expect to continue to reap the benefits of connections that start online.  Tomorrow I’m attending an event that I learned of through online social networking, because people I had met in the real world were also going.  But, curiously, I met those people because of an event organized via a different online social networking site. 

That type of synergy is perfect, in a way, to illustrate what will hopefully be more than just this short snippet today.  For me, online social works only because it has positively affected my real world.  The same way that I enjoyed going to sites that focused on my interests, such as filmmaking, I now belong to groups with people local to me who want to get together to share those interests.  

But, that’s for a person.  Organizations are different.  They seem to like to aloof, online available via toll-free numbers, email, and occasionally online chat (but only via their chat).  

Should online social campaigns just be virtual?  Having benefited from the friendships that come from online social groups that meet in the real world, and vice versa, I can say “no, bring them into the real world.”  Brands and organizations looking to to use social media may be slow to understand that while everyone won’t be able to connect in the physical world, it can be invaluable to try.  Mostly they should abandon the thought that a social campaign can be all done at arms-keyboard length. 

Recently I spoke with a new media executive from a major league sports team, and this person was specifically interested in making online social work in close connection with offline acitivities & events.  Right on.  It takes more effort and surely can’t be 100 percent automated, but it also will build lasting involvement.  A sports team understand fans, but other businesses are coming around to an understanding of fans, conversations, and participation. 

This is likely part one of a multi-part series, as I have yet to organize the rest of what I’d prepared – a list of positive ideas and bad ideas for getting the offline and online worlds to mix.  I’d write more now but there is an offline event starting shortly… one where I’m looking to meet some people who are at this point only virtual people I’ve found via activities such as Twitter tweets and online message exchanges.

[for now I'm here on twitter]