Janet Fouts

The question of how many friends you can effectively communicate with goes round and round in social media circles. The “Dunbar’s Number” theory is frequently quoted as a measure of how many connections one person can really engage with at any one time. Usually by somebody who’s having trouble managing what network they have now and can’t imagine how they’ll do it when their network gets bigger.

Dunbar’s number is named after Robin Dunbar, a British Anthropologist who theorized that the average human brain can only effectively maintain a social relationship with approximately150 people at one time. (Dunbar never set an exact number, but this is the one most frequently quoted).You can learn a lot more about Dunbar and his theories here ( the presentation is fascinating), but I wonder how these theories really relate to the communication tools we use today. I argue that social media enables us to reach out to many more people and make more relationships at a time. Although many of those relationships may not be as deep as family or close personal friends, they still enrich our lives and expand what we are able to experience.

Currently I’ve got about 6,000 people at the first level of my various networks, and while I don’t communicate regularly with all of them, I work hard to have some kind of connection and refresh the contact periodically in some way. My connections range widely in interest areas, as does my business, so each of these interest areas has it’s own sub-network as well. I may share some information or a connection within one of these subgroups, thus nurturing the relationship with the group and the people I’ve connected. Generally there will be some feedback, some give and take or conversation resulting from this either on or off line. New introductions will be made and new conversations started.

I’m not supporting building humongous numbers of “friends” for the sake of the numbers. I will never support that kind of list building. What I am saying is–if you do have a large network it’s possible to connect with a lot more people than 150 effectively.

Don’t take my word for it, take Chuck Hester for example. He’s got over 9,000 people in just ONE of his networks, yet I know from experience he does actively engage a large number of his connections regularly. Ari Herzog is another good example. On his blog he talks about connecting with friends from social media connections face to face and it feels like beers with long time co-workers. Both are using social media to create real relationships with large networks and it works.

So what do you think? Are our meager brains limited in capacity to 150 connections? Or are they complex enough to a lot more. Do the tools we have now enable us to reach more people and still have real relationships? How do you manage your network?

Tim Ferriss did a presentation at WordCamp SF this year that really was just plain useful. “How to build traffic without killing yourself” is the title of the  video. You should watch it.

Recently I had a meeting with a top ranked sales person who wanted to understand what social media could do for his company. Now this guy is an old hand at sales and he told me most of his business leads came from referrals. He has a network of over 2,000 people that he carefully maintains with phone calls, emails, lunches, sales calls and sharing his connections to help the network thrive. He’s spent 20 years nurturing his relationships and they’ve paid off quite well.

After 5 minutes he understood the power of social media. “OH, so it’s a big referral network!” He got really excited, and we started bouncing ideas around. It was fun, and exactly why I love this job. Seeing somebody really “get it” and then being able to coach them through the ropes and watch them run with it is exciting.

Ok, but is social media a referral network? It can be. For someone who truly nurtures their relationships with contacts like this, social media is just that, the biggest referral network you could ask for. These seasoned sales people work for years on their relationships with potential, current and even ex-clients because you never know where that referral is going to come from.

They send gifts on holidays and special occasions. They know when your kid is graduating, that your wife likes dark chocolate and you like Scotch (only Highland Single Malt). He also knows this about your secretary, your partner and the competition, and he gives every contact some personal attention on a regular basis to keep in touch.

Imagine the power social media can have in the skilled hands of a relationship builder like this. He can be even faster to respond to events and news, cross reference his connections and make sure to introduce people to others they need to know to make their lives easier and better.

He can use the tools to listen to what’s going on in the market and be the first to share it with his connections and to share the solution to a problem before they even know they have it. He can send less Scotch (I prefer Springbank 12 yr old, thank you ) and spend more time in conversation.

Best of all, once he’s got his listening tools set up and a strategy to engage, he’ll have more time for sales.

Creative marketing and Twitter seem to go hand in hand and Blame Drew’s Cancer is an interesting example. On May 20th, 2009, Drew Olanoff was diagnosed with  Hodgkins Lymphoma. According to his website BlameDrewsCancer.com, he’s blamed everything that ever went wrong since then on his cancer. Losing his keys, misplacing his wallet, Twitter being slow, the Phillies losing, etc.

Now Drew’s not just your ordinary person. He’s an online community director for gogii, he’s an active Twitterer, He’s a geek, he famously funny, and he is using his skills to raise money for the American Cancer Society and the Make a Wish Foundation. The goal of the site is to find sponsors who will donate for each person who blames their own woes on Drew’s Cancer. Every Tweet with the Hashtag #BlameDrewsCancer shows up on his homepage in a nifty site built by the team at 9astronauts.

So, what are you waiting for. Blame your bad day, your fender bender, the lack of diet cola in the office fridge on Drew’s Cancer and use the Hashtag #BlameDrewsCancer. While you’re at it, if you know of a potential sponor pitch them an excellent opportunity to help fight Cancer and sponsor BlameDrewsCancer.com!

Memorial day strikes a different chord for everybody. For me–coming from a small town in Wisconsin–it brings back memories of buying red paper poppies to wear to the parade and every car antenna sported a flag to show our support. (We did that on Veterans day too) We had a very personal connection with the veterans in our town, and we all came out to honor and remember the
family and neighbors we’d known and lost.

It’s still like that back home, but it’s a little different in the hustle and bustle of the big city. We’re disconnected and the Memorial day events are less personal, at least when related to that tiny Wisconsin town.

Maybe social media can play a part in bringing that back a bit by restoring the personal connection. Tammy Duckworth, (@TammyDuckworth ) the new Assistant Secretary of Public and Intergovernmental Affairs for the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, gives some really good advice about connecting with veterans on-line and makes an excellent case for reaching out with social media to the veterans as a support network. If the Obama administration continues to build on their social media successes, the VA is looking for some big changes.

Let me leave you with this Memorial Day thought. Why not reach out right now to your network and remember the family of someone they’ve lost? Then think of how we can help Ms. Duckworth create support for living veterans and their families. Maybe if my nephew had gotten the support of a community like the one Tammy Duckworth speaks of, my sister wouldn’t be remembering him today and every day for the rest of her life as someone who just didn’t have the tools to deal with life after the war.

If you were around back in the early days of the web, you probably had conversations on IRC. Everybody had cute IRC names and we had raging conversations about all kinds of things. Chat rooms popped up all over the place and the only people who could find them either knew how to search or they were referred there by people with the same interests. Twitter is really IRC on steroids. It’s better than IRC was in lot of ways, but you can still see it’s roots in the old IRC channels.

• These days instead of hiding behind a pseudonym we’ve come out in the open and there is some transparency in the communication.
• Conversations are stored and shared across networks where the discussion continues and deepens.
• The networks are huge, and because of the advances in search they’re easier to find and listen to.
• We can share links to resources and discussions that create a swirling mass of information, but instead of disappearing once the discussion is over, these conversations are archived in numerous places all over the web and continue to be referenced and re referenced as the issues evolve.
• People drift in and out of the discussions, think about them and re-join them or carry them into different social media networks or on to their own blogs, web sites and social platforms.
• Once you start the conversation you no longer own it. It takes on a life of it’s own. You can join in again, but it belongs to the crowd now.
• There is no anonymity now. People can and will discover who they’re talking to.

So where am I going with this thread? Simple. People are saying Twitter is dead now the masses have adopted. I’m saying Twitter is another rung on the evolutionary ladder of online conversation. The way we talk to others online, the way we get our news, the way we discover new tools and interests  has dramatically changed.

What’s the next step?

I ‘ve been through quite a few Twitter clients of late and I’m starting to settle on my favorite for the desktop at least. You may remember my review of Destroy Twitter and the glowing review of Nambu, the Mac Twitter client? Well that glow waned pretty fast and not for lack of trying.

For whatever reason Nambu simply draaaaags on my machine and I end up watching the multi-color beach ball of doom more times than I like to see (that would be none). The interface is a little bare for a Mac client, but that’s OK if it works smoothly. I’m not sure if it has to do with the number of messages or the app itself, but it’s kind of irrelevant at this point. Unfortunately I just don’t have the patience to stick it out. Maybe it will get better in the next iterations.

So now I’m down to two favorites. Both are Adobe Air apps which makes them cross platform and easy to install.

Seesmic Desktop

As soon as I saw Seesmic’s shiny new desktop I gave up Nambu. The only things I miss are the link list, (you can scan all the links you’ve received or sent) and the notes indicating how many messages were in the lists in the left-hand nav.

Seesmic recently introduced a host of new features and the app is iterating at a mad rate. Loic Le Meur presented at the Inbound Media Summit and was very frank about the development process at Seesmic. Get the thing launched, be prepared for a lot of feedback, listen and respond to your users as best as possible. Repeat.

How can you not support a team like this huh? Every release adds new features. Most recently:

• Facebook Integration
• Following and Un following Twitter users
• Ability to “Favorite” tweets and “Like” Facebook posts
• Clearing the timeline from a “USERLIST” with the “CLEAR” button
• Validation messages (url validation for short url, credential validation to share images)

Tweetdeck

My long standing (what is history with Twitter?) best buddy Tweetdeck also takes the input of users into account. They use UserVoice to gather feedback and users vote on the next features. Tweetdeck is also iterating fast, and they recently updated with nifty features like in-line viewing of Twitpics and short URLs, the ability to record videos directly into 12Seconds.tv and view and update Facebook statuses.

So which is best? pretty hard to say. If you’re on a small monitor like a netbook or a 12 inch screen then Seesmic has an advantage. You can cut the number of columns down to one and then use the left hand navigation to move through your groups. My vote for add-ons are for getting that list of links and the number of messages in each group from Nambu.

On the other hand I generally keep my Twitter client open in it’s own monitor all day. (yes I’m an addict) so it doesn’t really bug me that Tweetdeck takes up more space, and it still seems the easiest to use. It’s a tad bit faster than Seesmic, and it’s easier to quickly scan the columns.

For the moment I’m switching back and forth. How about you?

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Twine is a social bookmarking site that allows you to save your bookmarks, then group them in a way that makes sense to you and let your friends discuss them. There’s been a lot of marketing buzz about Twine taking over the bookmarking space, but frankly I signed up a while back and didn’t really get too excited. With the re-design I decided to take another look.

So what’s new? Hmm, first there seem to be more ads, but at least they are contextually based so that might be useful. At least I’ll see ads related to what I’m thinking about and hey, everybody has to have a revenue model right? And to go along with that the recommendations seem to be improved so they are a closer match. Then there are substantial changes to the UI.

A quick look at Compete stats shows there’s been a lot of growth in the site, and it’s passed up Mixx, but it’s still got a ways to go to make Delicious nervous. The news reader view is sort of Google Reader like, with a much easier way to quickly scan titles and graphics for something that grabs you, and the ability to quickly filter results by content types. This is pretty cool if you’re researching something. You can quickly assemble a Twine about your subject and either make it private or share it with the rest of your team or the world.

While I was writing this post the site was up and down quite a lot, and then I saw a post in the forums that they’ve rolled back some features due to stability issues. Maybe they pushed the release a little hard, but overall I like the new Twine. I’m going to give it a spin on the next couple of projects and see how it goes.

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