How I participate in Social Networks

Inspired by a Google Wave related blog by Chris Brogan, I thought I would jot down some thoughts about how I participate in social networks and suggest a framework for describing collaboration preferences.

Facebook - Friends and Family

Twitter - Life, the Universe and Everything. Overstated for sure, but Twitter is a great modern radio station of ideas, and it offers a huge variety of perspectives from people I might never meet (but would certainly like to) on topics of interest. As much as I enjoy reading my twitter stream, I try to answer questions and pose questions of my own in hopes of generating some 140 character interactive dialog. I'm also using twitter to try to generate some longer (than 140 characters anyway) discussions in this blog.

Blog - Still working out my blog brand, but certainly where I'd like to share ideas and interact with a thoughtful participative audience on topics of mutual interest.

LinkedIn - Home of the resume. I do have friends and family on LinkedIn, but to contrast with Facebook, this is where I connect with business colleagues.

Yammer is a tricky one. I do have a Yammer account, but it is not owned by my company and there are policies about what can be shared on Yammer as a result. However, it is a great place to hear what is going on inside the company from an individual view and has been a good place to make some connections and have some rich dialogs.

There are a lot of other collaborative technologies to consider, such as email, instant messaging, phone, videoconferencing (telepresence!) and the start of it all, face to face communication.

Where do all these social networking tools fit in with collaboration? Well, thanks to phone clients and TweetDeck, I keep an eye on my twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook feeds multiple times a day. Its still not natural to me to update my twitter feed as often as I see others I follow, and I am also beginning to dabble with FourSquare a bit. The real key to all these tools is to not lose sight of the core idea, which is adding value to the conversation. I mentioned earlier that twitter was a great radio station of ideas- an area of focus for me is continuing to listen while increasing what I broadcast.

What about Google Wave? For me, Google Wave is a bit of a challenge. I see a huge amount of potential, but like email, IM, twitter, Facebook, etc, the value of Google Wave is directly related to how many people you know that are using Google Wave. Today, the value of Google Wave is limited based on a limited number of people I know using Wave. However, this to me is a good illustration of how social media networks are actually enhanced by participating in multiple mediums- reading Chris Brogan tweet and blog about the value he is seeing today in Google Wave gives me hope that once Wave reaches critical mass it will offer value to a wider audience.

One area that I think would certainly enhance all our interactions would be a "Myers Briggs" type description of personal collaboration preferences. I'd label this descriptor as the Collaboration Preference Matrix Profile, or CPMP. :-)

For me it would certainly be:

1) Face to Face
2) Telepresence / Videoconference
3) Phone
4) Instant Messaging - only for urgent / important conversations!
5) Online Social Media tools (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Wave, Yammer, Foursquare, Gowalla - big category!)
6) E-mail - only for asynchronous communications

I am sure that I could expand the list, but this makes my CPMP- FVPISE.

I'd make a guess that a "typical" CPMP might look more like EIPFVS- more and more it seems that people are reliant on e-mail and IM, and seem to avoid engaging directly with others in person or via voice or video. When you can't be face to face, video (whether via IM, Webex or other tools) is so much more engaging than voice alone, but there seems to be a reluctance to turn on the webcam. If the majority of communication is non-verbal, you and your collaborators stand to gain so much more by sharing your video as the opportunity to be misinterpreted is dramatically reduced.

Over time, as we see voice and video continue to converge, phone and video will shrink CPMP from P/V to just "V". Social network experience will continue to expand, resulting in a "typical" CPMP shift to ESIFV.

I'd like to expand my thoughts on email as an asynchronous collaboration medium. The world would be a much better place if everyone would take a deep breath and abandon the assumption that 2 seconds after you've hit send on an email that all your recipients have read and absorbed all the content you've just sent. I'd highly recommend reading Timothy Ferris' book The Four Hour Work Week for his perspective on email alone. I'm still trying to break bad email habits, but I find it a great aspirational goal to only check email once a day, and not first thing in the morning.


How do you participate in social networks? Do you have a particular strategy or approach that is working well for you? What's your CPMP?