Tag Archives: networks

Indiscriminate Interconnectivity

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No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main

In today’s “Uber” connected social world,  what makes things work  or why they work, is that we’re all now indiscriminately interconnected to each other. We share, we comment, we download, we upload and we consume the content of strangers in the same ways that we create it. It’s random, it’s purposeful, its meaningful and meaningless  sometimes. At the end of the day, all we are, are just real people with real names with real avatars or… real people with strangely made up names with odd avatars swimming around fish bowls of ambient connectivity.

But it works just like it does in the ocean. Thousands of species living and swimming in the same ocean without any limitations of where they can go or when. We’re curious and we have an innate desire to connect with others in that vast ocean either directly or indirectly.

It doesn’t work if we’re always in”take” mode or “bash” mode or “all about me” mode. That  quote from John Donne, the poet who lived in the 1500’s, sums up what is certainly a reality in today’s society. Whether you’re a brand trying to sell a product, someone trying to sell a book, or someone trying to get a job, or get a project, or build a book of business, you need networks, brand champions, supporters, advocates, friends and even strangers along the way to help you get where you need to go. You need us.

Its funny how in certain sports, like football for example, when success happens, you’ll invariably have certain players who will say out loud that they think that the reason why their “team” was great or why they won was because of them. Meanwhile you had 21 “other”  players who contributed to the cause. If you choose to go it alone in sports, just as in the digital world, and not embrace the networks and communities and people that helped get you there, well then, I guess you’re alone in more ways than you think.

When Familiarity Breeds Familiarity

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Everything seems hard the first time we do it doesn’t it? Until it no longer ceases to be difficult and then it becomes innate, routine and sometimes mundane. On the web, we as digital marketers and change agents, worry that the sites, applications and networks that we build, share and promote aren’t intuitive enough. Yet even the toughest of sites to navigate seem to succeed with massive amounts of traffic and uniques. Why is that?

Because people want to go there. People want to use that site. No matter how difficult it is. Sites that are providing some type of payoff to be there, can overcome design inefficiencies on large scales. Be it a utility like email, a social network like Facebook, or a site where we buy stuff like Amazon or sell stuff like Ebay, people who want to, neigh need to use that site, will figure out how to use that site, no matter how difficult is it.

What does this mean?

Besides the fact that those that create web content and applications have a tremendous opportunity to deliver to users who have been inundated with a plethora of bad web stuff, great content and deliverables- What it really means is that when building for a Web 3.0 world… Less is more, more is not better, better doesn’t mean simple, simple doesn’t mean good, good can be bad, bad can be worse, simple can be bad, assuming can be bad, knowing is good, asking is better, change is good, change is bad and change is constant.

So is it a good thing to change? Who’s more comfortable with bad, you or your users?

On Dependence of 3rd Party Platforms and Leaving the Grid

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We use Gmail to send email. We use Facebook to connect with our past. We use Twitter to let people know what we’re doing right now. Without technology, how would we connect with people? The phone, the written word via snail mail, and or lo and behold… face to face?

What happens if Facebook, Apple,  Twitter, Youtube, Pandora, Verison, Spotify, Evernote, Amazon, Google and Microsoft were to go away? What happens? Life goes on. Case in point, you’re talking to someone on your cell phone and the call is dropped, what do you do? You look at the phone, you may call them back, you may not, you shrug your shoulders and life goes on.

Have you ever thought about how dependent you are on the digital things that make your life go? I know I do. In fact, we often joke about what would happen if some of us were off the grid for any substantial amount of time.Would we  shrivel up like a raisin? Get a case of the DT’s? For some it’s possible, they can hop right off of the grid and shut it down no problem. Digital for those that can’t disconnect, resembles some type of ambient ubiquity which they cannot separate themselves from for any extended period of time-like 2 days.

But what if someone just disconnects

This morning I was looking for someone who I had gotten to know fairly well who essentially created a whole new life for himself  around social media. They created a slipstream niche around how to use social media for SMB’s. They wrote a book, they V-logged, they tweeted over 15,000 times, they created an active Facebook page, and then all of a sudden. No more. The sites are shut down, the social profiles are dormant and the person has just disappeared from the social ecosystem.

Did he die? Did he just decide that social media is so superficial that there has to be something better out there? Did he get a new job that necessitates that he not participate at all in social? I may never know because the only way I ever communicated with him were through 3rd party platforms and social networks. He doesn’t use those anymore. Maybe he wants to reconnect with his family? I don’t know. In a sense, he has gone from one extreme to  the other, and that’s OK. Why? I’m starting to think about the overall value of social as it pertains to our truly personal, social selves and maybe just maybe this person decided that it wasn’t worth it.

It makes you wonder though. What will social look like in 5 years. Is social in and of itself creating its own oxymoron? Where social doesn’t really mean social at all? Maybe there is something to Facebook Fatigue. All I know is that when someone ceases “to be” in social media either a life has ended or…maybe just maybe…life goes on.