There is a constant buzz of conversation about online strategy and how it can either improve or disrupt an organizations effectiveness both online and in the broader court of public opinion. Obviously it makes good sense for organizations to have strategy and personally I find strategy building exercises to be very stimulating and overall very enjoyable. With this in mind I started thinking about what my personal strategy is and if it matters.
While I am not an organization [I'm an individual - for the record] I do have a lot going on in terms of my online presence. How do I keep it all in order, or at least on this side of chaos? First let me invite you to take a look at my Blogroll – yeah, over there in the sidebar. See all of those sites that start with “Andrew’s”? Those are all my personal sites however I like to think of them as resources. Beyond those many of the other links you’ll see are also either my creation or something that I am directly involved in editing and creating content for. Looking at it in that perspective seems daunting however, so lets go back to my statement about how these are all my resources.
A resource is more akin to a tool and that’s how they should be treated. Skimming the list you’ll notice that most of those resources are some sort of social network. But aren’t social networks only effective if you are a participant? Just read the Cluetrain Manifesto or any of its successors about social networks and you’ll hear the same thing, over and over – if you don’t participate in the social network you’ll never get your message out and you’ll be burned at the stake (or something like that). The reality is that you need to only immerse yourself in those networks that actually make sense for your to be in, but you can use aspects of as many social networks as you like as resources.
Let’s think about it like this. If you drive a vintage car then you have several communities that you belong to that someone driving say a Hyundai doesn’t. You both belong to the sphere of people who own cars and from that group you recognize the fact that you have this resource, the car, which is a tool to get things done or whatever. Unlike the Hyundai owner though you also fit into a subgroup of people who own a vintage car, and then perhaps another subgroup of people who own a particular kind of vintage cars. Owning a vintage car requires a certain level of care which means that you may need these subgroups at the very least to provide access to mechanics, or maybe you do your own work and need parts or advice. However you look at it you must involve yourself on some level within that social network in order to effectively keep your car doing whatever you want it to do for you. All of the other communities however may not be something you need to involve yourself in but you may keep touch with some of them because they can offer you certain resources that the precise subset can’t.
Online social networks are very similar. I try out many of them month in and month out and find which ones provide me with the community I need and which ones provide me with tools or similar resources that I want to use but can’t otherwise be bothered with. Let’s look at how I break these down then.
Email and Email Lists
I have several email accounts that I use depending on what kind of communications I’m engaged in. Honestly I’d love to narrow this down to a single account but that just isn’t realistic and doesn’t really make sense in my strategy. My @yahoo.com account is the oldest, I’ve had it since about 1995 I’d guess or whenever @yahoo.com started hosting free email accounts. Due to the age of this account it is just too intigrated into my life to give it up (unless yahoo started charging then I’d dump it). My @elephantsonbicycles.com address has served me well as a conversation point for the things that interest me and as a way of driving interest in my site elephantsonbicycles.com. Finally is my @andrew-miller.com address which has taken the place of an older and less effective @yahoo.com account I had primarily for business and professional contacts.
Email gets used primarily for long winded information and conversations that require a great deal of information but are private to the individual or list that I am communicating with. I like email still because as a BB user I find it the most convenient and efficent way to hold conversations that I can’t be activily engaged in at any single given moment. Email lists are still useful as a way to group work but as a medium for community building I feel like the era of email list has mostly passed by. I’m still active on a few but generally find them less effective than some of my other resources.
IM
I’m not a big fan of IM unless I’ve got nothing better to do or I’m using it to talk with a support person. I’ve used IM as a group tool and it works pretty well except there are packages that are much more effective than your standard IM and many of them are free to use online. My primary use of IM is to keep up to date with my scooterist friends around the world and blow off some steam with whichever of them happen to be online at the time. Some people liken IM to a phone call but you have to remember you have time to edit your responses in IM (albeit not much time) whereas you don’t on the phone.
*I’m starting to think this discussion would be a fun flow chart activity, I may take up that challenge in the near future.
Twitter is a great tool for getting out a message in under 140 characters that has some immediate relevance. I use twitter to the extent of saying that I do participate in this social media community. I don’t have to get bogged down in a lot of details unless I choose too. In a way it is like an RSS feeder except that you can talk back to it, and crack jokes with it. While I choose to participate in the twitter community on a daily (moment by moment) basis it serves its purpose in my toolbox as well. When I blog a quick headline is dumped to twitter with a link. When I know about an event happening (today Wendy’s is giving away free food downtown) I post it to Twitter. These aren’t things I care to go into detail about on my blogs and are topics that are only immediately of interest. I don’t know exactly who they are of interest to and that’s why I dump them to Twitter where the interested person will likely bump into it – or I may bump into something of interest someone else tweeted.
ColumbusUnderground
This is a very local community site which is well kept by Walker and Anne. While many of the things that I post to this discussion board are either the same as or closely related to what I put on my blog I only post things that I want local feedback on. While I should strive for that on my actual blogs I know that realistically this is where everyone hangs out. Why would I invite people over to my house where only so many can fit when there is already a big party happening at the community center? This is how I view CU. ColumbusUnderground is my local newspaper2.0 and my community calendar2.0 more than anything but also a community that I actively participate in.
Flickr Utterz YouTube and Vimeo
These social networking communities are strictly tools for me. All of these serve very specific uses: Flickr is where I put my photos, Utterz is where I audioblog, YouTube and Vimeo are where I video blog depending on the size of the video I’m uploading. All of these are very strong communities and many people use them as such. The way I interact and build my personality/reputation/relations online at Twitter and CU is the same as what many people do on these sites. That being said I do have small communities at these sites but they all originated from my other communities.
I definitely use Flickr the most out of these, followed closely by Utterz as a way of recording thoughts or feelings when I’m alone with my cell phone. There in lies the strength of these tools, the ability to use my cell phone to capture and upload the content without much fuss. As a pingback of sorts I also set these to update my Twitter feed automatically and have the ability to directly deposit content to my other sites if I want to go more in depth and expand on the content.
Del.icio.us and GoogleReader
There isn’t a lot to say about del.icio.us except that it happens to be the link repository that I use. There are many different choices out there (Digg being a favorite of many) and you can interact as a community but this really is just a tool. My Del.icio.us is set to dump to my elephantsonbicycles.com blog once a day which helps me to share my finds but I’m mostly concerned with keeping the list around for future reference.
Google Reader can be used to share and act in community with others based on the RSS feeds you read on a regular basis. Personally I find the reader itself to be a great tool but couldn’t be bothered to use it as a community device. Of the 50 or so feeds I have I couldn’t imagine trying to keep up with what everyone else is reading as well. I see the value in that if you have the time but when your time is on a budget like mine the value is outweighed.
Friendster Myspace Facebook and LinkedIn
These are the heart of what social networking is all about and I honestly get little value out of any of them as resources. I have a home on each of these and I use them strictly as a place to reconnect with people or reach out to people I’ve met in person who I can easily track down at these sites. The clutter associated with these sites and their clunky interfaces trying to do too much for people of the lowest common denominator knowledge makes for a frustrating experience for me personally. I do exist on these sites however because I know that my experience is my own and I want to have the ability to connect and converse with people who’s online nationality is that of “facebook” or “linkedin”, etc.
I guess that is one way of looking at it from a physical world mindframe. Each and every one of us has the ability to be multi-lingual and international, to break out from single online community syndrome. Otherwise we are just as welcome to wall ourselves into one single community and one view. So are you local or are you international? I’m feeling pretty international myself.
SecondLife now GoogleLively
As I mentioned I try out many different social networking sites and if I don’t find value I just move on. LastFM is a great site but I like regular radio (well, NPR and the ilk) and LastFM requires some level of participation to make it work so I gave up on it. SecondLife was very interesting to me but was so system heavy and I had to be so focused on it (SecondLife is just as time heavy as RealLife(tm)) that I didn’t find value in it. Obviously it is wildly successful but this is the point I’m trying to make. Just because a medium is wildly successful doesn’t mean that you HAVE to participate. If it isn’t a fit then move on and don’t worry about it.
My Websites
As I’ve said I have a couple of websites (this one you’re reading and Elephantsonbicycles.com) and I edit/contribute to several others. I use these sites to promote my ideas, express my thoughts and feelings, and point out things that I find to be really cool. The primary difference between this and say Twitter is that I want to be able to go into depth on the subject (such as this post which if you’re still reading at this point you are a trooper) and I want my content to be indexed so that it is added to the collective knowledge of the internet imperpetuity. I believe that we are feeding this machine and that someday the knowledge we feed the system will have a direct affect on how society looks in the future. For this reason I feed knowledge that I hope will have a positive influence on society both today and in the future.
Each of the websites that I run or contribute to have a specific purpose. Elephantsonbicycles.com is a site that I put up my ideas and thoughts about my general interactions in life. There is a good deal of political thought out there and family life, art and food issues, and some pretty mundane stuff. This blog, Andrew-Miller.com is where I focus on issues related to my professional development and projects I’m currently working on. Other sites such as scooterparking and conversationarlington are more specific to volunteer organizations I’m working on issues with.
Bringing it All Together
I guess I defer back to my earlier comment that I should consider flow-charting this and perhaps I will. I guess the glue that sticks this all together is that my day often starts by checking my email and responding to what I need to. I follow that up with a quick check of Twitter to see what’s going on. These are the things that may require a quick response and can either be prioritized off easily or may spur me on to a new idea that I’ll research.
Then it is off to my Google Reader to catch up on what I missed overnight. This may lead me to comment on some topics and will just as likely get me thinking about a new or specific topic. I can easily find myself researching something before even finishing my list of articles here. I will likely pop back into Twitter to make any useful updates at this point; I may also send off emails if appropriate.
Finally I make my way to Columbus Underground where I scan for interesting topics or replies to my comments where I feel I have more to contribute or learn about. This too may end up being a place that I dump news I’ve gather from the previous sources (and lets not forget from my own experiences that day).
All of these inputs and discussions then lead me to decide on whether a topic is worth creating a full article, a resonable blog post or even just another index in the collective knowledge of the web for one of my websites. Throughout this process I may be building my content by uploading pictures/audio/video/or links using those particular resource “tools”. This cycle occurs several times a day.
So that is the long answer to how I strategize and how it has provided me with a level of comfort in the communities I participate in. For this reason Elephants On Bicycles is relatively speaking a known local “brand” and Andrew Miller (that’s me) is the “personality” behind that brand. I hope that my efforts make me an attractive personality as opposed to strictly a popular one.
