As I stated in an earlier post, I believe that 2008 will usher in the age of the personal social network. Every method of online communication (email, bulletin boards, instant messaging, blogs, etcetera) has had that initial period where only the early adopters used it and then it suddenly gained widespread exposure and exploded into use. This next year will be when that happens to personal social networks.
The real question, though, is WHY would you want your own personal social network? Or, why would you join a personal social network? The reason is because they provide a new tool to facilitate the gathering of a smaller, niche group of people. We have always had these niche groups. Families are a niche group of people. The company you work for is a niche group of people. Your artist friends are a niche group of people.
A personal social network uses the technology of the web to help form these niche groups of people and then help them communicate easily.
Let’s look at an example.
There is a small group of painters that get together once a month to talk about what they are doing and learn from each other. They are all watercolor painters and they usually each bring a recent painting and share techniques, etcetera. They all have friends that would love to join the group, but a lot of these friends do not live nearby. They decide to form their own online social network and invite all of their friends.
Now anyone can join the group and easily share with anyone else. They can form sub-groups that are based on location or interest or anything else they can think of. They can easily stay caught up on what everyone else is doing and easily set up their in-person meetings. They can hold live, online meetings or they can make them time-delayed so anyone can contribute at a time that works best for them. There are many different ways that people can communicate through social networks and therein lies their real power.
Social networks combine many different forms of communication into one package. Because several forms of communication are combined, there is a synergy that takes place which creates entirely new ways of communicating based on those combinations.
A Deeper Explanation
The online world is changing and growing FAST! Because of the nature of the underlying structure, the web grows geometrically. What this means is that when you look at the change from one year to the next, it’s not a doubling of information and new technologies that you see, but a quadrupling or… well, whatever 8x and 16x and 32x is called.
And what is our interaction with the web mostly about? Two things: information and socialization. Think about it… at one time people completely downplayed using the telephone because it just wasn’t the same as meeting someone in person. Yet the telephone is much more personal than email as a means of communication. The early days of the web were truly less personal than talking to someone on the telephone.
No longer!
A social network combines text, photos, video, voice (e.g. Skype), and so many combinations of those that the interaction can actually become overwhelming. And this is just the beginning of this trend. We can guess from past experience that at some point in the very near future, social networking will seem archaic. Imagine when we start to use virtual reality and can interact “physically” with each other. Have you ever read “Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson? That is not as far away as you might think.
And yet we have only thought in terms of re-creating the reality we currently live in. Even virtual reality will only emulate the experience of actually meeting someone in person. The truly amazing part will come after that when we start to imagine completely new ways of interacting.
When I first heard about virtual reality, I was a chemical engineering student. The first use I thought of back then was to imagine physically interacting with atoms to combine them in new ways. With virtual reality, I could be in the same room with the atoms which would now be large enough to handle, perhaps the size of Legos. As I tried putting them together in new ways, they would either fit together or not based on what we knew about their properties. These new molecules could then be played with in this virtual setting and new emergent properties would be seen on a macro scale.
I also imagined streams of data from a chemical process (or any process or system, for that matter). If you could virtually insert yourself in that stream and start guiding things into different patterns, you could go back to the sources of that stream and figure out which sets of input would produce the desired results.
The real point of all of this rambling is that 1) things are changing fast, and 2) we will see benefits arise from these changes that we never expected or imagined.
Immerse yourself today in a social network. Come to understand it as only an involved insider could. Use it to tell your story and connect with more people in more ways. Let go of the idea that you are there to sell. More than that, you are there to connect and build relationships. If you have something to offer that is wanted by your connections, they will buy from you. Don’t hide the fact that you have something of value to offer, if you truly believe that it is of value you will make sure that people know about it and will make it easy for them to acquire it. Just don’t come into a new relationship doing nothing more than pushing your product.
Chris O’Byrne
OnlineArtsMarketing.com
Posted by: Chris
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