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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.