Social Networker and Opinioneer
5 [rules | steps | ideas | propositions] on Social Networking
Posted on 10. Sep, 2009 by nikbutler in Commentary, blog
I promised people that one day I would actually write down these ideas and present them in a more human readable format so here goes. Feel free to mix up, mash up , mediate up the ideas or just ignore them
These are by no means fixed or ‘required’ rules and theres no official guidelines to say that this is any better than any others but from Observation, Experience, Experimentation and Evaluation I would say that these ‘rules’ provide an excellent guide to getting started in Social Media.
1. Arrive
You cant take part in the conversation if your not at the event so you need to Arrive , Sign up , Login , Observe. There is however more to signing up to a service than just a Username, Email address and a password. Consider the following when you Arrive at a new Social Networking Site.
Be Human, Be Genuine and Be Clear.
When choosing a Username for a site avoid using numbers or unusual characters in your name. You might want to add a space or use an underscore to create a more readable name but in the long run your making it hard for mobile users to interact with you. Further if you try to include Numbers or Initials into your Username then your probably going to be mistaken for a Robot or an Auotmated process rather than a human.
I use Loudmouthman because everywhere I go I sign up as Loudmouthman as a result people seeing Loudmouthman on a website are more likely to believe it is me. Further it stand out better than NikButler or NicholasButler. Its going to be easier to find Loudmouthman in Google than Nicholas Butler.
Whilst I dont always recommend the use of Nicknames for Usernames it does have a ‘added value’ of creating an additional way for people to easily tag and categorise you.
How will people know they have met you before ?
When signing up to a service I try to keep three things the same everywhere
Username : its usually Loudmouthman everywhere
Profile Photo : I have a profile photo I tend to use on every site. its a Picture of me.
Website : I tend to promote http://www.loudmouthman.com
Have you a clear association with the group or are you an observer ?
Understand your reason for accesing the site and its community. You might just be registering your Name and Username on the site just to ensure that another member cannot steal it away from you. You might be on the site because your looking to overhear the conversations or you might have recieved an invite. However if the group is utterly new to you and theres no one you know on the site then the Rule no 1 to 3 are going to help you integrate better.
2. Listen
Depending on the website your going to have a number of ways to listen to the conversation. We have seen a change to the front page of twitter that now indicates they are firmly moving into the live search and trending data field. For the end user this means there is plenty of ways to locate groups and individuals within a social network who are sharing your interests or ideals and follow them or just add them in. Listening allows you to find a way to overhear and then start a conversation with a user. its easier than a direct blurting or spamming. Bear in mind here its all about the listen, not the talking.
How to Listen ?
On Twitter you can use search.twitter.com to locate people talking about topics of interest. Twitter searches can be carried out from your profile page and from there you can save searches on your profile page.
On Facebook, Searching for groups to join where discussions match those which you are seeking. Use this listening as an opportunity to go outside your comfort zones. As you add more people to Facebook your going to see groups that they are joining or taking part in. as you join a group that information is shared on your facebook profile for your friends and fans to see. Its a useful way to see popular groups and communities especially mutual friends whom have joined that group.
On Linked-In groups similar to Facebook exist that you can join.
When Listening to groups and individuals use the Follow or Add Friend feature of the social network site to add that person into your group. Some sites dont require a mutual following to communicate ( like Twitter ) others may need them to approve your request. Dont forget to send a short message explaining why youd like to add them.
3. Ask
A good opening gambit in any conversation is to ask a question relevant to the group or community. Staying on topic or picking a topic recent to everyones awareness makes it easier for others to open a dialog with you. In turn their responses to your question will be seen by their friends, followed, groups and this bring you to the attention of a wider audience. All the while you are demonstrating an ability to listen and take part and be human, be genuine and be constructive. People love to have an opportunity to demonstrate knowledge or aptitiude and using a question is an invaluable way to open the door.
Consider your question though. It should not be personal, intergatory or invasive direct questions or ones which in hindsight are inflamatory can lead to you being percieved with a label or defintion you may not have sought.
Many people arrive in social networks and do nothing but Ask and they rarely progress into Provider, Delivers. Whilst they feel that they are consuming a lot of knowledge and understanding it soon becomes clear to the community that these users will constantly take from the community and rarely provide.
4. Provide
It suprises quite a few people that it takes this long in the process to be able to start responding and communicating well within a group. There is a subtle difference however between Provide and Deliver.
When Providing the aim is to answer questions of other users , effectively responding to people acting on Rule 3. you want to avoid using this as an opportunity to promote or spam the user with content core to your reasons for being online. Not every answer needs to be related to how you can provide a service, an answer or a solution.
Providing answers that borrow on the experience of Arriving and Listening within the group. Promoting other users content or directions earns you the respect of the social network in that you are not percieved as being selfish or simply trying to maintain an authority of your own.
5. Deliver
Having taken time to consider steps 1 to 4 of these rules the final process Deliver is where you are able to directly provide content and information that relates to your own agendas. It represents only 1 quarter of your activity in the social network and your conversation and oppotunties should reflect this. Quite a few Users ina social network grow a large community and after a while they clearly become just Deliverers. A large community around then may reflect and provide content around them but these ‘Deliver’ only mentality users soon burn the communication bridges they built. When using a network to promote your own agenda or opinions bear in mind that the group are more willing to accept and embrace this if they can see evidence of Steps 2 to 4 in your activities.
Summary
Use the rules to build out your interactions with online networks from Linked-in, Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and it gets easier to build a credible online profile that people will recognise ( as a brand ) and respect. It will be easier to take part in discussions or launch new websites since the community will add credence and visible history to your involvement.
Thanks for Reading
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How Evernote tracks the digital detritus of my life
Posted on 05. Sep, 2009 by nikbutler in blog
Ive written before about Evernote. It is one of a number of online note collecting and organising services which like the system ‘Getting things done’ you either understand why you need it or you learn you cant live without it. I signed up over a year ago and like many others who subscribed to the service my notes remained empty and unused for several months. This blog post is about how that changed and how Evernote is now as important to my everyday organisation as my Moleskine or my Google Mail.
I should thank Robert Scoble for introducing Evernotes purpose to me. I cant remember who he was interviewing but when they demonstrated the ability to take a picture of a business card and how Evernote would tidy the image and index all the words on the card I knew it had an immediate role. It was clear that I could pass all my collected business cards into Evernote and have a indexed and searchable archive of contact details, accompanied by the images of the cards as they were snapped.
What followed was an exercise in Document Image Management as I used a flatbed to scan a collection of cards into tiff files. I then cut and paste each card back out of the A4 image and added them to my Business Cards Notebook folder in Evernote. Within a few hours I could search on phone numbers, names and locations as well as add additional meta information like tags and titles and notes to the cards.
From there the next regular routine usage for Evernote was to grab information from emails and licensing cards and keep a record of software license purchases and codes. Effectively storing a list of serial keys, activation codes and purchase orders for software. Whenever I need a windows license key or a shareware activation code I could just enter the name of the product into Evernote search and find all the notes related to that item.
After this process came the obvious need to use Evernote to track online payments, tax office documentation and purchase orders from suppliers. All the while im letting Evernote carry the workload of indexing and archiving the information that it is gathering from each note.
One interesting outcome of my Evernote usage was integrating Spinvox voice to text feature with Evernotes inbound email. Its served as two usefull applications by setting Spinvoxes notification emails for Voicemail and memo to deliver direct to Evernote it can track voicemails and index numbers and names automatically. Using spinvox memo I now speak the shopping list as I create it then I have a shopping list Memo in Evernote. Each of those lists being archived lets me check previous lists to see if I have missed anything more popular.
A more recent development in my Evernote usage has been the Public Notebook feature which has allowed me to create a ‘Wishlist’ of shopping items found around the web. Here Evernote lends itself to the web2.0 philosophy as I can mash up the different wish lists of separate sites and create a single list of multiple retail websites as well as add additional purchasing information and notes.
After that came the realisation that if I could build a wish list for anniversaries then I could use Evernote to track the various items requires in a complex build ( for example a Hackintosh computer ) to track the items and to note the build costs. Sharing that note book with the community to provide direction and guidance for other users.
The value in Evernote for me has come from its ubiquity to my working environments. It exists as an application for my Windows and Mac desktops and as an IPhone app I can use Evernote as a research tool collecting notes and thoughts on the move and collating them to the desktops when back home. Id love to see an Ubuntu Linux version for the future but for the moment the webinterface suffices .
One such incidence involved a potential returns issue I thought I would experience with a faulty games console. Having gathered information from the Web and captured and clipped the relevant articles into Evernote on my Mac which mean in turn they would be to hand on my IPhone I went all prepared with Evernote and source materials to defend a claim for a replacement console, only to have the wind blown out of my sails by a very helpful and agreeable member of the sales team. I was more upset that I missed an opportunity to show off Evernote on the iPhone as a tool to win an argument. Still I have it in Evernote so if the discussion of Statutory rights and purchases ever arises im sure it will spring to hand.
Im not a premium user of Evernote since my regular monthly usage rarely exceeds the allowance and my collection of less than a 1000 notes barely scatches the surface of where I can go with Evernote. This though will change as I am beginning to see a use for Evernote as a collaborative tool for the Household Butler as well as with many of my clients.
Im a guilty of not spending as much time in the Evernote community of Blogs and Facebook though in many ways thats a positive for Evernote since im not spending as much time preaching to the choir but praising Evernote to new users. An interesting aspect of which is many I have met have tried other tools and I suspect this is more due to the desire to no ‘apparently’ follow a crowd or in some attempt to be bleeding edge.
My personal practice in using software is to use the tool that gives you the most freedom, the most feedback and the most interaction. If you can integrate a tool with your working habits and get great feedback from service then its going to be a constant use for your working habit without getting in the way of your work. When explaining to a client why it would be useful to them its easy to be flippant ‘oh its the clipboard for your life’ or ‘its a personal organiser that is organised’ but in reality its a magic digital pocket that knows what you dropped into it and can find it when you want it.
There may be many more features in the pipeline for Evernote but for now its ahead of the drag curve in functionality for me with its OCR, Free text indexing, PDF integration, Public and Private Notes, Collaborative shared notebooks and an API as well as import and export functionality. Screen capture and Email reception make short work of capturing the data so what more would I like ? just one more thing.
Id like the OCR’d text for that note to be associated with the note so that I could use Evernote to do some OCR and Document Imaging work for a few more detailed documents.
That being said, you can count me as one of the more vocal proponents for the use of Evernote more in your digital daily life and you can quote me on that.
Now go download Evernote and … thanks for reading.
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