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

Whether it is written, or not, if you are using social media then you have a strategy.  The key to excellence starts with how much time you devote to something, and this area is no exception.

There has been advice out there on social media strategy for a year or more. Following up the strategy, there are lots of lists to help you plan. A strategy is important, since you can do anything with social media.

And it’s all free!

Not really. As the excellent slide deck below points out (see slide 38), it takes time. Time is not free, even if you are not getting paid. There is the opportunity cost of making a choice, as time spent on one activity prevents or delays another one.

  “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.

“Maybe“

is about the best answer possible now.

An earlier post on online social capital and influence touched on managing it as an asset, and certainly there is an increasing awareness of the value of online social capital in business and personal life.  (This is not to be confused with traditional social capital, an emerging industry)

But perhaps this is still the dawning of the age of online influence peddling, at least among the social networking crowd.

There are many ways to measure online influence, such as page rank. The current rage is one’s online social ranking.

People are proud of their top (or rising) popularity listings on Twitter Grader, Twitterholic, and other ranking services.  These rankings may not out-last the recession as sites like Tweeterboard shut down when there is no long-term sustainability model for it.  But blogs like Twitterfacts point to many services to rank these top “Tweeples” (Twitter people), some of whom I’m met in real life.  They are having fun as they engage on- and off-line with a large number of people.

In researching for this write-up, the term “social influence counter-measures” came up in a non-web context.  Yet, the online meaning of this term carries significance.  Every social media marketing campaign involves counter-measures.  The campaign goal is to influence, and to thus overcome/counteract/eliminate competing social influences.

Think this stuff is small potatoes? Not.  The largest search engine (and perhaps largest brand worldwide) is looking to patent social influence.  Perhaps this technique will allow social networks to monetize better.  Perhaps it will be the number that you use to rank & value yourself online.

A Chicago VC wrote about the possible profitability for those who can “effectively harness the power of influence across networks“.  But, this influence is classically not just about money.

Moreover, it could allow election campaigns to factor in and influence the popularity contest aspect in an unprecedented way.  How much would it be worth to know exactly who influences your opponents followers?  (It will always also depends on who actually votes.)  Or how would you combat a decline of confidence in leadership? But, for the individual who blogs or tweets their way to social stardom, there are established and emerging payoffs.  Paid blogging posts have been around for years, and now popular Twitter posters can earn some bling (although perhaps not a full-time income).

Better to be popular doing what you love… what you’re passionate about. Why? The solution for monetizing your online social capital or influence is still evolving. The economy may not support it en masse for years, although some people will make money. And the general advice given by many is to do what you love and the money will follow.

For a social network, community, or website you may be trying to grow, sometimes it helps to determine your goals for growth, and the reasons behind these goals.  This analysis may help in better planning for social media marketing campaigns & engagements. 

The objectives may include one or more of the following:

1. Participation – If your site has social features, having more visitors and/or members generates the multiplier effect: more people, ideas, and conversations pollinating for increased social participation.
2. Sales – in addition to promoting a product or service, a site that sells what it is bringing awareness & engagement to has a built-in goal.
3. Competitive advantage – sometime competition is fighting on other levels, and by claiming the online social audience, or mindshare, you get leverage that may be hard to unseat.  Just as the top social network platform in a particular country has an advantage due to its many members, your online social community can provide a balance of social power if you’re either first, or best, in growing the community in your niche.
4. Customer Interaction – beyond customer service, you want to interact with your customers and alongside them as they interact together.  A natural for this goal is to also provide standard reference information via social media so the interactions can link to the common questions and issues.
5. Attention / Traffic / Visitors - Do you want more people to visit your site?  Common reasons for more usage includes to promote a product, service, idea, or brand.  The side-effects can include:

• Online reputation impact – more attention and knowledge about your image, brand, or reputation (linkbait tactics included).

• Organic search traffic increase – from content alone, or adding in the benefit of many links to your content

• Viral information spread – your message is spread by others for you.  (and sometimes a different or negative-seeming message is spread… and that is another story).

There are many ways to present goals such as shown above, including tying social media marketing to long-term growth.  But there is still confusion among those who would be using social campaigns.  Chalk some of that up to ambiguous “buzz-speak” for a new technology.

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.

The modern version is quasi-physical, in most cases, as there are real people with real names that are linked together via relationships. Whether poking each other on social networking sites, or chatting via instant messaging, there is a basis in real relationships with real people in the majority of one’s online social wealth.

A bit more on defining the term, via what it allows… on Scales for Social Capital in the Online Era there is the indication that it creates benefits derived from relationships created by interactions of social actors. These individuals form “a network of individuals—a ’social network’—resulting in positive affective bonds. These in turn yield positive outcomes such as emotional support or the ability to mobilize others.”

This type of capital is not limited to one network, as it can bridge social networks. Bridging’s basic definition applies to when individuals from different backgrounds connect, and this is also extended to cover those that occur between social networks.

Utilizing tools such as facebook may have taken off in part because building social capital takes time, and it is easier to leverage the base of a large social network. Other newer tools allow quick building of the same. Even within networks, there is contrast between “introduction-model” sites such as meetup.com, and microblogging sites such as twitter.com, The first is designed for real-world useful social interaction and one for, well, short bursts of content (useful or otherwise).

The relationship networks that are built through different types of sites are not the same. It is useful to recognize how they are different as you consider the effort expended in building personal or organizational capital.While smart people such as Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam are focused on real-world social capital, there is the hyper-rapid growth of online social capital, as reported in this article.

Online Social Capital and Reputation Managment

Once you have online influence, it becomes as asset to manage, in the sphere of online reputation management. Newbies – people have a handful of online friends and a small network – have less to worry about than people with 5,000 or 10,000 people who are tuned into their online activities & ideas.

Can celebrities really do social media & networking? No, not in the current “traditional” method of social networking, or at least not for the long-term. It’s not really feasible, because as a personal-interaction-based form of communications, it requires hundreds of responses per day. It is possible to engage, but not via having others post for the person, as that quickly becomes apparent for it’s “fake” quality.

Banking

There is no “Central SocialCapital Bank”, and one’s network is quickly spread across the hundreds or thousands of sites. As opposed to the bank model, you can’t build up this type of wealth and have it sit. It exists by being used, but necessarily by being spent.

[More on this to come - this post will be continued and expanded with content that was not ready at the time of publishing ]

What catches our attention easily? Something familiar.

What also catches our attention? Something different.

Recently I’ve seen – randomly – cases where two familiar “things” were together, but they were different things.  This caught my attention in a halting sort of way, positively changing my train of thought and action.  It wasn’t only online that this happened, but it can apply very well to people trying to create buzz on the web.

A definition of juxtaposition from reference.com refers to placing things close together or side by side, epecially for contrast or comparision.

What I’ve run into lately is juxtapositional contrast… things that are different that contrast each other. Some of these things are social things.

Social Juxtaposition – placing contrasting stuff (i.e. media) together in a social situation.

In promoting – a cause, a product, a service, an idea – it is challenging to stand out from all of the other promotion, especially in a crowded market.  For example, trying to showcase one’s awesome website design skill is shouting into a concert of voices saying similar things about their own design skills.  How to differentiate?  Add some juxtapositional zest.

We’re talking fairly uncontroversial stuff here… but what is new now for marketing online via social web promotion will be how to allow for contrast that gathers attention in positive and perhaps conversational new ways.  This technique would also fall into the social viral engineering category.

For one example of differentiation, that perhaps is more in the techie appeal area… as blogging became popular and then crowded, some bloggers turned into or started as video bloggers to get attention, and some now are doing live video shows.  Beyond simply live with a web cam, the cutting edge now for some is live video from mobile phones in interesting locations… allowing several contrasting juxtpositional intersections:

• Some of the audience will be in different time zones and countries, allowing for a “it’s morning here” vs. “it’s midnight here” feeling of contrast
• Some live feeds (Ustream, Mogulus, others) allow for real-time chat in the same web browser window, sometimes in contrast with the video stream.  Sideways chat traffic can also enhance the video, but a lot of time it goes off in other directions, which via social interaction actually seems to keep interest when the video has normal lulls in activity.
• Using tweets to alert the people following you on Twitter.com that you’ve just started an interesting live video stream… this is in contrast to the alternative of stuff like work, or cleaning the dishes, or whatever one was doing before being interrupted.
• Finding locations that match – or contrast with – the subject of the video stream.  Try interviewing someone on a seesaw (aka teeter-totter) about some otherwise dry subject like project management and deriving earned value.  Or, now that in the northern hemisphere the pools are starting to open up, interview someone who’s in the water.

So interrupting this post now is a short clip taken earlier today of some recreational water activity.

As you are probably reading this sentence while watching the some of the clip, you’re going to try and link the context of the video with this writeup. And, your mind will automagically create some thought to link the video with what you are reading… maybe the water… the idea of video blogging…. or perhaps wondering if this writeup is leading to a marketing pitch. Or, maybe the link your mind creates is that this subject is confusing you a little too much.

Regardless, without creating a time-consuming animation, or slickly producing a video, a clip (taken by chance when stopping to avoid some road traffic) can be used to enhance via juxtaposition someone’s memory of this page. Just use a more exciting or compelling clip.

Furthering this issue one last bit… explaining that I’ve done canoeing and kayaking in that same water will lock in more interest – in a long-tail way – by those people who enjoy those activities. It was this type of contrasting linkages over the last few days that caused me to think how online social web activities are a mesh of random juxtaposed media, to which services (such as friendfeed, mefeed, socialthing, and other lifestreaming services) try to help organize our social clutter.

Yet as always I’ll be looking for and reacting to the interesting social juxtaposition buzz instead of the harmonized feed!

There are an increasing number of social technology conferences, like this one, and anyone who has been reading about web technology in the last 12 months has been reading about the thousands of applications launched in the last year on social networking sites, such as facebook and, more recently, MySpace.

From a high-level perspective, it’s all about information.  Information that flows as data, from the social applications to the servers run by the people who own the application.  Information being data – data about people, data about actions taken by people, and in many cases data relating to monetization.

One way to look at the data interactions is shown in the social application data architecture diagram below.

Non-technical readers can look at this diagram as food for thought: do I know where my data is going?  Will my data be safe?

Technical readers and entrepreneurs can go beyond those questions and ask: what will create a leap of usefulness – and business or social opportunity – in recognizing how this “data footprint” can be leveraged to profoundly change our interactions?

With social applications being about a year old, the chart above will be very dated in another year.  (Additions expected: LinkedIn is projected to have social applications later this year.  White label social platform kickapps supports OpenSocial, and ning does as well.) 

And, over the course of the next year and beyond, the promise of implementing new and unique social data flows will present challenges and opportunities.  While this may or may not be a series, there will be more on this to come in future posts.