On November 16th at 7 p.m. we’re hosting the first social media book club. Space is limited. We currently have 6 registered, and we are looking for 12 more to join us. We’re meeting near our office in Kenmore Square in a beautiful conference room to discuss Brian Solis‘ “The End of Business as Usual.” Currently, we have a brand manager from P&G, a strategy consultant, two students from Harvard and BU, several members of the refine+focus team and a marketing practitioner joining us.

Everyone coming not only cares deeply about social media marketing and business strategy, they also are interested in developing personal and business relationships with other practitioners.

If you’re interested in joining us, leave a comment with your email, and why you are interested. We’ll meet for 2 hours and discuss the first 14 chapters (pages 1-169). We are especially interested in hearing your reactions to controversial ideas and your thoughts on applying Brian’s ideas to real business situations.

Many times this year, I’ve hosted events in the Oak Room at our office. We’ve hosted at least 5 roundtable discussions on social media strategy and 1 free workshop for Boston entrepreneurs to receive feedback from successful business owners and ambitious students. I love Boston and I am very committed to creating a space where social media, business practitioners and entrepreneurs can share ideas.

If you share this vision, I’d love to meet you sometime soon, better yet, join us on the 11/16.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed. It is the only thing that ever has.” –Margaret Mead

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Note the QR codes…

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I’ve learned to express myself in 140 characters or less. It’s not only how I write tweets, it’s also how I communicate in emails. Folks in my world want fast and simple communication. Analysis isn’t welcomed in these emails; long power point decks aren’t either. Actions and decisions are valued with short rationale.

What’s missing is time to reflect, and it’s evidenced in how we communicate. Writing an email we expect a response within 24 hours, same with a voicemail and a text message within two hours. We can cater our reply on how our audience responds to us.

Letters are different. You may not hear back from someone for days. You do not know whether they understoond your jokes or found your arguments persuasive. You imagine them in your head and write a letter to that person you imagine.

It’s day two of reading these love letters written in 1967, which I purchased at the flea market. We’re about 50 letters in and it’s clear than Johnny loves June. He writes her every week, often three times. June clearly doesn’t want to marry him, but he is not dissuaded. He goes on describing his world, which is really a device to bring her more deeply into it so he can ask the question again, like a song whose only merit is its catchy chorus.

If Johnny and June were Facebook friends, or even had email or Skype, this courtship would have ended within months not years. They would see each other’s lives openly and decide whether or not they were compatible. All the nuance of Johnny’s subtle asking and June’s not so subtle rejecting would have been lost as their relationship would have ended long before this courtship actually began.

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From the NYTimes: “Egypt is a reminder not to be suckered into the narrative that a place is stable because it is static.”

I’ve followed this debate between Malcolm Gladwell and others about whether social networks haved received disproportional credit for their role in fuel revolutions. I’ve particularly enjoyed Brian Solis’ response to Gladwell’s skepticism:

“Trufecki and Ingram are on to something, but they — and Gladwell — miss something very basic about the nature of Twitter and other social tools, something critical to revolution. Ideas spread more rapidly in densely connected social networks. So tools that increase the density of social connection are instrumental to the changes that spread.”

While the social networks are not creating revolutions, they create contexts in which conversations and connections occur which amplify revolution. Clay Shirky’s and Malcolm Gladwell’s debate this point in further depth following Shirky’s Foreign Affair’s article.

Gladwell offers: “What evidence is there that social revolutions in the pre-Internet era suffered from a lack of cutting-edge communications and organizational tools? In other words, did social media solve a problem that actually needed solving? Shirky does a good job of showing how some recent protests have used the tools of social media. But for his argument to be anything close to persuasive, he has to convince readers that in the absence of social media, those uprisings would not have been possible.”

To whick Shirky responds:

“So I would break Gladwell’s question of whether social media solved a problem that actually needed solving into two parts: Do social media allow insurgents to adopt new strategies? And have those strategies ever been crucial? Here, the historical record of the last decade is unambiguous: yes, and yes.”

In lighter reading news, David Edelstein’s review of Justin Bieber is a brilliantly written social commentary, here’s a highlight: “I find him such a bland, pious, profoundly unthreatening little Furby of a pop idol, but little girls’ celebrity crushes are not to be trifled with. And this sensationally engineered promo film makes Justin Bieber look like a true force of nature.”

The smack down of the weeks come in the form of this statement about Nokia’s engineers, ready? “The engineers at Nokia brag about the number of megapixels a new phone has,” he said in a telephone interview on Thursday. “But they don’t understand that if you can’t find the button to use the camera on the phone, it doesn’t matter how many megapixels it is.” Ouch.

As far as thought provoking, TechCrunch’s Jon Evan’s delivers a powerful piece called, “The End of History, Part II.” Here’s a highlight: “The Internet—in this case, though I hate to adm” it it, Facebook—lets oppressed people join in outrage, in shared fury and humiliation, in the sense of being part of a single mass of people with a single intent. Where else can you get that, in a blindfolded, fragmented nation?”

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Meet Alex Howard. He’s a journalist and Gov 2.0 correspondent for O’Reilly Media. We met a few years back at Steve Garfield‘s Boston Media Makers, and ever since, I’ve literally learned from Alex every day on Twitter. You can follow him to hear insights about the government and technology. You’ll learn about trends before they become such, and things you ought to – and probably will – read. Here are a few examples of follow-worthy tweets from Alex:

1. Thank you, @rrichard09. I bought the Foreign Affairs with this @cshirky essay http://fam.ag/g0QfJ3 in (gasp) print last week.
2. 1000+ people watching #PdFleaks livestream: http://t.co/cckXL8q @wikileaks has retweeted the link. Little Brother is watching.
3. Delhi Police Use Facebook to Track Scofflaw Drivers http://nyti.ms/9eSdSO ”Cognitive Surplus at work”-@atul. #Gov20
4. @bostonmarketer Sadly, I overwhelmed @apsinkus with volume. He said he transferred me to RSS, a shift I’ve heard from others, honestly.
5. FYI: When I add PRT to the beginning of a tweet, it means it’s a Partial Retweet http://bit.ly/Ftomu | Important to signal modification, IMO

We spoke via email about his field and the ways he personally uses social networking.

1. In a recent talk (State of the Net Panel), you mentioned how U.S. policy for our own people may be different from what we are promoting in places like Tunisia. Can you elaborate those differences and their implications?

Good question, and a difficult one to answer. We’re in a dynamic historical moment, with respect to how quickly the traditional relationships between government institutions, citizens and media is changing because of disruptive technologies. The tools for publishing have been democratized and accessible to millions, from blogs to video to Twitter to mobile smartphones more powerful than early NASA computers.

The tension here, with respect to government, is that the same tools that enable distributed publishing, encryption or broadcasting that the State Department is supporting or funding for “Internet freedom” abroad under autocratic regimes can be used to gather and distribute information about the United States government that many in government do not wish to see made public. The motivations for those wishes vary from potential embarrassment to inefficiency to national security concerns. The State Department and Department of Defense have been challenged by that changing information environment, as the world knows well at this point.

The Obama administration made a statement about open government in 2009 by issuing an open government directive, which agencies have been working to address in the month since. At no point, however, have open government policies, pledges or support for connection technologies meant threatening national security or the radical transparency that some advocates urge.

That said, the default position has been towards over-classification or secrecy in many levels of government. There’s a middle ground here. Data or information that that shows fraud, incompetence, crime or proves otherwise embarrassing is naturally not something any institution wants to release. The challenge is the policy choices that United States federal, state and local government entities make with respect to open data, privacy, security or online identity can and will be seen by others around the world. If there is support for Internet freedom abroad, including protections or support for citizens sharing information about corruption or other malfeasance, that same policy should in theory apply within borders.

Every nation state has a strategic interest in controlling damaging information and exposing others. The issue is immensely complex and does not lend itself to easy analysis nor solutions. More thoughts on Wikileaks and open government here.

2. Citizens are becoming more influential through social networks and influencing their peers. Is this a good thing?

On the whole, yes. New research from Pew suggests that this is an important trend, with respect to our understanding of what it means to be a citizen and how our actions influence those of others. The role of the Internet as a platform for collective action is growing but the authorities that control the levers of power offline still matters immensely. Congress is using social media to talk, not listen. As Doyle McManus observed, considering the role of the Internet in the Tunisian revolution, “it’s nice to have Twitter, but it’s even nicer to have the army on your side.”

Revolutions aside, emerging research around how these new connections influence citizens is fascinating. The use and sophistication of these platforms is its infancy. If you look at emerging social media health trends, however, there are notable patterns around behavior, lifestyle and influence. Whether those trends extrapolate to more vibrant civil society or participatory democracy relies on much more than the social networks themselves. That means that digital and information literacy will become even more important, along with the evolving role of teachers and librarians in societies. The Knight Commission on the information needs of communities in a democracy drives home how difficult this issue is, given the massive disruption to traditional platforms for news. A crucial part of this story in the future will be founded in how communities collectively discover, share, filter and analyze social data.

3. Do you agree or disagree that geek culture online is being dismantled?

I disagree, although with caveats. There are many, many places online where geek culture is alive and thriving. Given that geeks build most of the most popular social platforms, the conventions of the culture are often literally coded into the conversation. What’s important to recognize here is that what used to be “geek” culture has been massively democratized. It’s no longer weird for someone to have a powerful smartphone, write online, upload video to the Web, meet a date online, watch Internet videos on a TV at home or play video games. These are the new norms. In many ways, it might be fair to say that we’ve met the geeks, and they have become us.

I asked Alex a few questions about his personal social media strategy. The word influencer is often overused, but it does apply to him. And I asked him to share his own strategies for engagement online.

4. Why did you decide to create an Alex Howard Facebook page? Good move?

When I created the page on Facebook to share my work, it was because I saw clear trends that supported the move, with respect to information consumption behavior and inbound traffic. I wanted to create a virtual space there where I could interact with readers without having to be their “friends.” I also didn’t want to overwhelm the friends I do have there with the volume my writing. So far, results from the move are a mixed bag. I’m extremely grateful to the 46 people who have “liked” the page, as it’s same to assume they really do want to keep track of what I’m working on. That said, I’m not catalyzing the level of engagement with the work I’d like to see. When you look at how a world-class journalist like Nick Kristof is using Facebook to report on Egypt, you can see how much further I have yet to grow!

5.  How do you read? Do you use an RSS reader? Just read links shared links on Twitter? Are you constantly reading or do you set time to read?

We have a Kindle in the house, although I still prefer to read books and long form journalism in print, although I do read long articles on my laptop or iPhone using Instapaper.

How I read largely depends on the subject. For some topics, the Web is best. For, say, congressional testimony, that’s not always true. I still read a lot of books in print. Ditto magazines, especially the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Economist or Foreign Affairs. I’ve shifted almost all of my ”newspapers” consumption to digital form, either on a tablet or laptop, though I still enjoy reading an entire Sunday paper in print over brunch.

I use Twitter to discover and share a lot of what matters to me professionally but still keep an eye on the journals that aren’t available online. I listen to the radio while I work as well. And yes, I still use an RSS reader to make sure that I never miss new content from certain sources.

6. Who are a few people whom you learn from on Twitter?

Look at who I’m following. I learn from all of them, plus my lists. Individually, I might include people like @MarcAmbinder, @SusannaFox, @TimOReilly, @SteveSilberman, @acarvin, @alexismadrigal, @BrainPicker, @MarkKnoller, @rmack, @ethanz, @mathewi, @JayRosen_NYU, @palafo, @TimOBrien, @NYT_JenPreston, @NiemenLab, @participatory, @louisgray, @evgenymorozov, @patrickmeier and @ahier, though I could list dozens of other people.

7. Do you have a favorite new social media tool or two you can recommend?

I’m trying out trunk.ly for links. I’m curious about pinboard.in. I’m now a fan of instagr.am.

8. Do you have a favorite historical moment that you shared on Twitter?

When my fiancee said yes to my proposal. Still the most retweeted tweet I’ve ever posted.

—

Make sure to connect with Alex (http://twitter.com/digiphile). I promise you you’ll learn something insightful!

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1. A Twitter mention by Shaq is worth more than someone who has 1/30 his followers right? Not if you’re a technology start up and that person with 1/30 of Shaq’s followers is Walt Mossberg.

2. It’s important to increase Facebook followers. Not if your followers are outside of your core demographic, have no ability to buy your product, fail to provide useful insight and are not interested in contributing to the community.

3. Share of conversion is a useful metric. Don’t mistake the % of mentions for influence or quality. However, deciding in which conversations you want to be mentioned is a useful exercise. It enables you to develop strategies to increase the mentions within the conversations by influential targets after you determine their value.

4. Twitter followers is the most important metric? Are they more important than lists that require a user to consider how they should categorize you; or @ replies, which demonstrate a desire to communicate?

5. Let’s drive traffic with SEO to non-ecommerce sites. Hope you have defined the value of the traffic first and how you measure conversion.

It’s an excellent idea to develop a social media scorecard; however, realize that scorecards support value systems of what is and is not important; the value system needs to be developed before the scorecard.

In terms of measurement, here’s are a few insights you might enjoy:

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Dr. Rosenzweig quotes McNamara’s autography:

“Uncertain how to evaluate results in a war without battle lines, the military tried to gauge its progress with quantitative measurements…we failed then—as we have since—to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces and doctrines in confronting highly unconventional, highly motivated people’s movements.”

Social media is a highly motivated people’s movement without lines. McNamara’s sentiments echo the problems we now face with social media metrics. We have more tools to understand how and why ideas spread. However, measurement is only a part of insight. Metrics are indicators not strategies.

In his 1967 speech quoted in the article, McNamara places measurement in the context:

“But to argue that some phenomena transcend precise measurement which is true enough—is not excuse for neglecting arduous task of carefully analyzing what can be measured. A computer does not substitute for judgment any more than a pencil substitutes for literacy. But writing without a pencil is no particular advantage.”

What are you measuring? What are you missing?

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What my team benefited from this year was conversation & strategy time, and real case studies, examples and experience to draw from. Since then I’ve become a collector of how companies respond to small crisis. I hunt for them in Facebook. It’s a part-time obsession. Here’s a few juicy ones I’ve found to share with you.

1. Southwest Airlines presents: “the deflection”

2. Southwest Airlines presents “The Apology”

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Five years later a similar issue happened again. This time I was challenged on baby boomers who are sixty plus use Facebook. I did not cite facts (more 15 million US adults 60-64 use Facebook). Rather asked the person challenging me how would she knew if this audience did or did not use Facebook. And I shared this example from the AARP’s Facebook page demonstrating that the this audience responses to complex request on Facebook:

I’ve learned to determine how reasonable (and informed) the person I am speaking with is before deciding what, or how much, information to share with them.

BTW, if you’re interested in the pulse of Boomers online, start with the hashtag. And then check out the Boomer blog. It’s an excellent resource with a robust blogroll.

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