Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon

Re-reading the part of Malcom Gladwell's book, Tipping Point, on connectors.  Connectors are those people that (1) know tons of people and (2) know people in different 'worlds'.  He tells about the experiment where 160 people in Omaha were given a package and told to send it to some guy in Boston - they didn't know the man.  Most all the packages got to him, but the interesting this was that half the packages went through three people with no connection to the original senders.
Remember the six degrees of Kevin Bacon?  This is where the idea comes from.  In this case it's where every actor in Hollywood is 'related' to Bacon by 6 movies.  Turns out that it's actually 2.6!
People that are connectors are powerful in the flow of ideas and communications.


While there's a natural talent that connectors have, the ability to create relationships with people, the interesting thing is that I think anyone can be a connector to some degree.  The keys seem to be:

• It takes some effort to systematically meet and reach out to people.  While this comes naturally to some folks, it's not to others, but they can still do it.  Maybe we think that it's easy for that person over there, but not us, then don't make the effort.
• We need to connect to people in different 'worlds' or contexts.  Just connecting with people in our work environment, while important, isn't enough - we need variety.  Twitter seems to be good for this, where as Facebook seems to emphasize people we already know.
• The connections with others don't need to be deep.  Obviously the more deep relationships we have, the more we're overloaded.  Sometimes we think we need to have these deeper relationships to be meaningful.  Granted if you don't have many of these things, that's not healthy - but that's usually not the problem.  We don't need to be able to go out to dinner with everyone we know, just need to know enough to be intelligent about the other person.

If we do this 10% better, we'll have a healthier set of relationships that we can use to more effectively help other people with and increase our ability to communicate.

#140cuse Social Media Conference - Part 1

Went to the 140cuse conference on social media and wanted to share some of my thoughts - I'll do this over several postings.


The first thing that's interesting about this conference was the format: each speaker got 10 minutes.  At first I thought that that wasn't going to work so well, but proved to be valuable since it forced people to get to the main point and got a lot more content.  It was also interesting to see what worked in presentations and what didn't.  Starting with a story was key - presenters that did this really engaged the audience quickly, like Alexis Ohanian from Reddit, who spoke on how the internet was used to protest against SOPA and George Couros who spoke on education and kindness on the web.  Slides with lots of bullets and text totally didn't work.  Maybe for a business meeting with lot's of data, but not with this crowd and 10minutes.  Maybe more business meetings should be 10 minutes!  Actually, any more than 4 slides, real simple - didn't usually work.   Another things that was interesting to was was those who were 'acting excited' and those who were really sincere.  I'm sure all the speakers sincerely believed in their projects and presentations, but some came across as fake.  Hype the idea, not me.


It was interesting to see how twitter was used during the conference.  There seemed to be three types of tweets: (1) cheer leaders, (2) repeaters, and (3) commentary.  The first seemed to be trying to get the energy level of the crowd up - for me, I got a little tired of it, but someone was excited, so let them be excited!  The second, the repeaters - a lot of traffic in this category - would repeat things that were being said in the meeting.  It was a like an online note taking.  I wonder if this was helpful to people who were only experiencing the conference via twitter.  It's a kind of reporting, so I'm sure it's helpful, if for nothing more than the public record.  Those tweets that were more commentary, were people trying to add value to what they were hearing, which I think was the most interesting.  This category didn't have a lot of traffic.  One interesting thing about the tweets was that there were all positive - which was good.  Maybe the cheer leaders had something to do with that!  I mean, who can be negative when every other tweet is 'yeah, this rocks!!'


So here's my review of two of the presentations.


How You Can Save Thousands of Dollars a Year Through The Use of Social Media
by Lauren Greutman
This was probably one of the most interesting presentations.  Greutman told her story of how her family was severely in debt - so she quit her job (!) and turned her attention full time to getting out of debt.  This involved getting really, really smart about coupons and sales.  She started to use social media to find out more info and spread the word on what she knew.  What it showed me was that the barriers to entry for social media are low and can be figured out by just jumping in and trying.  This was a super practical, positive and high impact effort that Greutman engaged in - this is what we in social media live for.


The War on Distraction 
by Matthew Koll
I was excited to hear what he said because I think this is a super big problem with social media.  I mean galactically huge.  Koll was trying to make a connection between distraction (lots of useless email, being pulled by the facebook red circle,...) and 'enemies of the enlightenment'.  He was referring to people that make false statements online and not letting that go by.  Like the number of people that don't believe in global warming and evolution.  Enemies of the enlightenment?  Huh?  No matter where you stand on these topics, the debate of science will always be with us - does he think the final word on those topics has been spoken?  It was kind of scary - like we need to shut those people down.  He seemed to be a big fan of fact checking sites.  What's funny is that the opinion columns of many papers mock those fact checking sites by showing that they are frequently not checking the facts themselves or are debating things are not intended to be facts.  If his point was that dialog and content that isn't well thought out is a distraction, I guess that could be an issue and we know there's plenty of that out on the internet - but who decides?  Koll was a huge disappointment.


More to come...