the hurricane inside my brain

photo: ~my aim is true~

I’ve been giving quite a few talks at colleges, and the day after one of those a student named Kelly contacted me with a request which I think is a sign of the times:

“Hi….I am applying for a business program this summer and the application requires a LinkedIn account with a minimum of 40 contacts and three recommendations. It is proving to be quite a challenge. I asked a friend today why she wasn’t on LinkedIn and her response was, “What’s that?”

A few interesting things going on here.

My first thought was “Uh-Oh” for the friend who said “What’s LinkedIn”, although some trend-followers speculate that the younger generation is not embracing Social Networking as much as the – er – older generation. Should they be? I just passed judgment on someone for not having heard of LinkedIn. Am I being overly judgmental, or is it just common sense in this day and age?

Second, it’s interesting that Social Networking is starting to be seen as a “cost of entry.” How soon will it be before companies looking to hire you will be checking out how large your network is? How soon before they start asking you to use your network to promote them? (more on that debate here.)

Third, anyone who has been doing this for a while knows how easy it is to get 40 connections, once shown how. I quickly gave her a strategy: Find profiles of companies that she has worked for on LI and search for old colleagues; find professors at her school, connect with them; and then, after you have a dozen connections you can start searching their connections to see if you know anyone THEY are connected with. Heck, I even found several alumni at her school that were part of my network and made introductions – explaining that she needed to treat my connections well and suggesting ways she could add value to them. 24 hours later I got a reply back from her: “Thanks! 42 contacts and growing!”

While Kelly’s group of 40+ connections may help her get into business school, I wonder constantly about the implications of all this. My 14-year old daughter and I sometimes compare notes about how many friends we have on Facebook. A recent conversation began: “Mom, I’m proud to say that every single one of my 950 friends is a REAL friend. Unlike yours.” Ouch! This led to quite an interesting debate over the definition of “real friend,” a discussion I am bound to have many, many times before figuring it all out.

I believe that having a lot of connections is a cost of entry for me as a Creative Strategist who is immersed in the world of Social Media. How else can I advise my clients on how to interact with tens of thousands of connections unless I myself know what it’s like to interact with tens of thousands of connections? My view is that I need to see what it’s like, I need to make mistakes, I need to learn how difficult it is to always treat my network as the valuable asset it is. I value both the quality and the quantity of my network. But…will there ever be a point when it feels like it’s safe for it to stop growing? That is completely unclear to me.

Your thoughts? Do you wonder whether employers, schools, colleagues, will judge people on the size of their networks in the future? I can picture sitting in an interview across from someone who scribbles down “15,000 followers on Twitter.” Am I being realistic or paranoid?

Conversely, will friends judge each other if their network is not filled with “real friends”?

Where do you see it going?

photo: wetwebwork

I used to think that the word “value” was the most overused, least meaningful word in the English language. People kept telling me: “In social media, you need give people something of value.” But what was that? Information? News? A how-to guide? Entertainment? Just something random and bizarrely interesting? A beautiful sentence? Surely there could be value in ANY of those things.

But then I discovered a meaning that makes sense to me.

And in the end, it seemed so obvious, that I felt a little stupid for not getting it before. So with that said, I will share it with you. : )

People come together in a community because they share common values. It may be common interests (knitting, photography, golf). It may be shared ideas, such a political views or religion. It could be  excitement around a product, or even a shared sense of humor. But whatever it is – people come together because they realize they only have a limited amount of time in this world and they want to spend their time doing the things they think are most important. And it’s nice to have others who share those values – people who think the same things are interesting or equally important.

So when I think about what to give a group of people that *has* value, I think about what values they share that brought them together in the first place.

This leads me down the following paths when creating things of value:

> Advice, information, how-tos that help the group as a whole will have value.

> An idea that is relevant to your group but gets them to see things in a new light will have value.

> Things that are funny because only people who are in that group really understand what you’re saying will have value.

> Something random and bizarrely interesting will have value only to those people in your group who happen to find that particular thing also interesting. Another way to look at this is that if your group is large enough, everything will have value to *someone* in it.

> News about what’s going on out there in the world has value when either: a) it relates back to the group or b) you are one of the first to pass it on. (it’s truly NEW, and thus the newness itself connects people).

> Sometimes advertisers try to connect their product to a group of people by associating it with what’s happening in the world. They try to jump on trends as a way of connecting people to their product. It works when there truly is a connection between the product and the trend. It rings false when there isn’t.

> If something has value to my group, I have a public conversation about it. If something has value only to an individual, I have a private conversation.

> If you have created a community, or group, or following or whatever that was created randomly, haphazardly and does not share certain values, it will be *extremely* difficult to figure out what is valuable to them.

There are those of us (and some days, I admit to being one of them) who want to find the one thing that *everyone in the world* will find interesting. And there are some things that are universally appeally: stories of men landing on the moon, or a pilot landing a plane on the Hudson.

But it’s really really hard to send a man to the moon or land a plane on the Hudson river every day.

And if you want to get out there and talk to a group of people every day, in a way that has value to them, I’d try this: first, think about what their shared values are.