UPDATE: and now, there’s video! Thanks to the guys at Stick­yAds and Medi­aHunter.

Pub­Camp 2008 — Stephen Collins from Acid­labs social media pre­sen­ta­tion from Sticky Adver­tis­ing on Vimeo

These slides and the accom­pa­ny­ing text are my pre­sen­ta­tion from the Pub­Camp events in Syd­ney and Mel­bourne. Enjoy!

If you’re lis­ten­ing in, apolo­gies for how fast I talk. I was on the clock!

Through the Look­ing Glass

So, the Internet’s a teenager now — 16 years old and quite the rebel. As it hit puberty, we all started tak­ing real notice of how it was behav­ing. Not all that notice was good. Tra­di­tional media — tele­vi­sion and news­pa­pers — have made a point of high­light­ing that the ‘net is appar­ently full to the brim of pedophiles after your kids and scam­mers try­ing to expa­tri­ate your hard earned dol­lars to Nige­ria.

But really, if we take a long, hard gaze into Alice’s look­ing glass, what we see is nei­ther a meadow full of flow­ers nor a dark wood full of impend­ing dan­ger. What we do see is a tool, per­haps more pow­er­ful than we have ever had before, for con­nect­ing peo­ple and lever­ag­ing the almost infi­nite power of those con­nec­tions. . The power of, as my friend Mark Pesce puts it, hyper­con­nec­tiv­ity.

Let’s first wind the clock back a lit­tle for some per­spec­tive. Just five years ago, most of the social net­work­ing tools I rely on in my busi­ness today didn’t even exist — LinkedIn, Face­book, Flickr, Youtube, Twit­ter, Dopplr, Slideshare. Just five years ago, pretty much all I had was web brows­ing and email.

Now, the web and email were pretty pow­er­ful tools, but not nearly as pow­er­ful as the social net­work­ing tools I now use all day, every day. One of the very great­est ben­e­fits these new tools have afforded me is to be able to con­nect with a vastly greater num­ber of peo­ple who think like me, do work like me, like the same things I like, than I ever could before. The thing is now, that group I con­nect to — that I used to have to attend a monthly meet­ing of eight or a dozen of the same peo­ple every time and ulti­mately get bored by… That group is now spread over the entire planet. Despite that geo­graphic dis­per­sion, I get the dis­tinct priv­i­lege (and frankly, enjoy­ment) of work­ing, col­lab­o­rat­ing and just gos­sip­ing with them every day of the week using social net­work­ing tools like Twit­ter.

Humans, ever since the ear­li­est of us could com­mu­ni­cate with each other, have banded together in social net­works. It’s not a new phe­nom­e­non by any means. But now we have, lit­er­ally at our fin­ger­tips, a net­work that truly makes our vil­lage global. With no more dif­fi­culty than step­ping next door to my neighbor’s house, I can con­nect with peo­ple that share inter­ests with me — pro­fes­sional or per­sonal — no mat­ter where they are in the world. And I do.

Now, with a lot of those peo­ple, my con­nec­tion is pretty loose. This type of con­nec­tion is known as a weak tie and was ini­tially described way back before the Inter­net, in 1973, by Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity soci­ol­o­gist Mark Gra­novet­ter. What Gra­novet­ter was describ­ing is a loosely con­nected net­work, bridged by two or more peo­ple who know each other mostly in pass­ing, rather than inti­mately. At first blush, this doesn’t look like some­thing that can induce an “a-​​ha” moment. But if you look a lit­tle deeper at weak ties, you dis­cover some­thing a lit­tle earth shat­ter­ing. And it’s some­thing we should all be pay­ing atten­tion to, par­tic­u­larly in the con­text of the busi­nesses we work in.

Weak ties have a spe­cial super­power, you see. Because what hap­pens when peo­ple that come together based on weak ties — a project team from across a com­pany, for exam­ple — is pretty spe­cial. Those weakly tied indi­vid­u­als act as bridges between the var­i­ous strongly tied net­works each indi­vid­ual rep­re­sents. These bridges per­form a num­ber of func­tions — they import new ideas, they fos­ter inno­va­tion through diverse opin­ion, they solve prob­lems. Much more so than strongly tied net­works, which tend to homo­gene­ity — a death knell for inno­va­tion.

The thing about weak ties, as opposed to strong ties, is they take very lit­tle effort to main­tain. Con­se­quently, there’s no rea­son to not make a lot of weakly tied con­nec­tions with peo­ple. Social net­works make this weak tied con­nec­tion incred­i­bly easy to do. The cog­ni­tive hur­dle imposed by the Dun­bar Num­ber that lim­its your abil­ity to main­tain strong ties is medi­ated by your abil­ity in a social net­work to main­tain weak, but eas­ily acces­si­ble ties to poten­tially hun­dreds, or even thou­sands of peo­ple that might be able to help you solve a prob­lem (or you solve theirs) at any moment.

What you’re doing at a time like this, is engag­ing in what’s termed par­tic­i­pa­tory cul­ture. Par­tic­i­pa­tory cul­ture is a break from the Tay­lorist Indus­trial Age model many of us have become used to in our com­pla­cency — a cul­ture where value is derived from what you’ve already pro­duced, end­lessly re-​​produce like a fac­tory wid­get and are care­fully pro­tect­ing, hid­ing and rest­ing upon in the vain­glo­ri­ous hope that oth­ers will con­tinue to per­ceive your value based on your past.

This is not par­tic­i­pa­tory cul­ture.

What par­tic­i­pa­tory cul­ture is — whether at work or in our social, non-​​work lives — is based upon not only what we have estab­lished our rep­u­ta­tions on given our abil­ity to pro­duce, and more impor­tantly openly share in the past, but what our rep­u­ta­tion in this new econ­omy builds expec­ta­tion for us as yet to pro­duce. The econ­omy of par­tic­i­pa­tory cul­ture is based on shar­ing, on dis­tri­b­u­tion of exper­tise and knowl­edge and on social cap­i­tal, traded amongst the geo­graph­i­cally and infor­ma­tion­ally dis­persed mem­bers of our com­mu­ni­ties as we exploit the power of our weak ties to solve prob­lems, inno­vate and drive quan­tum leaps in knowledge.

Tick Tick

It’s a fact that the past few years have seen a marked drop off in the num­ber of hours each week peo­ple are lis­ten­ing to the radio and watch­ing tele­vi­sion. Just a few weeks ago, NYU pro­fes­sor, Clay Shirky, described the past 50 years of West­ern humanity’s pas­sive con­sump­tion of media as an enor­mous “cog­ni­tive heatsink”. I couldn’t agree more.

While TV cer­tainly has its place — and I’m no stranger to veg­ging out on the couch — there’s prob­a­bly no argu­ment that pas­sive con­sump­tion of media — TV, radio, news­pa­pers — is pretty unpro­duc­tive.

Shirky’s prime exam­ple was Wikipedia. Recent research has estab­lished Wikipedia to be as or more accu­rate than the pre­vi­ous gold stan­dard, the Ency­clo­pe­dia Bri­tan­nica. And, for the Eng­lish lan­guage ver­sion, it’s esti­mated that around 100 mil­lion hours of human effort have gone into its pro­duc­tion. While that seems like a lot, it’s actu­ally equiv­a­lent to just the num­ber of hours Amer­i­cans spend each week­end watch­ing ads.

Does that make you feel a lit­tle ill? Because it does me. Think about it for a moment… Human­ity in North Amer­ica alone, could be pro­duc­ing work of the value of Wikipedia every week­end, if peo­ple just par­tic­i­pated on sub­ject mat­ter in their area of exper­tise dur­ing the ads!

Our kids get this. They expect to be able to par­tic­i­pate. To inter­act. They don’t respond to pushed mes­sages. They pro­duce their own media and post it to YouTube for their friends to enjoy. They watch mea­sur­ably fewer hours of tele­vi­sion than many of us did at their age.

It doesn’t much mat­ter if today your 15-​​year-​​old is play­ing a few hours of Grand Theft Auto a week, because he’s also prob­a­bly con­tribut­ing to and shar­ing in a vast pool of player knowl­edge about it that oth­ers also share and con­tribute to. In a few short years he and his class­mates of both sexes will be in the work­force — and the kids ahead of them already are — and they’ll expect to share, to par­tic­i­pate and con­tribute and to build social cap­i­tal and recog­ni­tion through their abil­ity to do this.

If your organ­i­sa­tion isn’t geared up to let this hap­pen, sadly, you’ll be well behind the 8-​​ball. You need to make it hap­pen now — break down silos, encour­age open par­tic­i­pa­tion, treat staff like grown ups and stop using the fire­wall as a stick to block access to social net­work­ing tools. The fact is, if you don’t encour­age par­tic­i­pa­tory behav­iours at work, you sti­fle inno­va­tion, reduce employee engage­ment and risk huge value in tacit knowl­edge walk­ing out the door as valu­able employ­ees leave in search of clued up employ­ers who do encour­age par­tic­i­pa­tory cul­ture within and across their organ­i­sa­tional walls.

Boom!

So, I’ve been rat­tling on about par­tic­i­pa­tory cul­ture, and social net­work­ing and how much value I think there is in all of this, but where’s the real world story? Well, it’s here.

Just last week, I attended a major con­fer­ence on Enter­prise 2.0 in Boston, Mass­a­chu­setts. The con­fer­ence cov­ered issues, suc­cess sto­ries and tools that can be used in busi­ness to forge the types of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and knowl­edge shar­ing that many of us are already doing in our per­sonal lives by using social net­work­ing tools. The 1500 del­e­gates shared four fairly intense days together — hear­ing sto­ries, see­ing demon­stra­tions and doing face-​​to-​​face social net­work­ing.

One of the major ben­e­fits to me was the chance to meet in per­son over 50 peo­ple I’ve been col­lab­o­rat­ing and com­mu­ni­cat­ing with online for as much as the past two years. These peo­ple came from as far away as the Canary Islands, Ger­many, the UK and across the USA. I didn’t need to meet them in per­son to be able to con­tinue to col­lab­o­rate with them, but the chance to do so was too good to pass up. It really was an oppor­tu­nity to crank the dial to 11.

So, how did I meet these peo­ple in the first place? The answer, as you’ve prob­a­bly guessed, is social net­work­ing and par­tic­i­pa­tory cul­ture. There’s a con­stant pulse of con­ver­sa­tion, col­lab­o­ra­tion and par­tic­i­pa­tion with the peo­ple I con­sider, in some cases, my extended fam­ily — as I’ve forged rela­tion­ships with them as strong as any I have in my local cir­cle of friends.

When I get up in the morn­ing, the Aussies are all ris­ing with me — I get to talk to Ali, Jodie, Jed, Mark and a bunch of oth­ers here on the east coast. But at the same time, I get to talk to the Amer­i­cans who are close to the end of their day — Tara in San Fran­cisco, Laura and Chris in Boston, Paull in New York and oth­ers and, as the day pro­gresses, I begin to encounter the Euro­peans — Luis in the Canary Islands, Mark in Ger­many, Justin in Lon­don. And every day is like this! It’s almost a priv­i­lege to be involved with all these smart, engaged and engag­ing peo­ple.

We heard a bunch of amaz­ing, real suc­cess sto­ries from organ­i­sa­tions as dif­fer­ent as the CIA (I met two real life CIA ana­lysts), Lock­heed Mar­tin, Good­win Proc­ter (a 1500 per­son full ser­vice legal firm) and oth­ers. All of these organ­i­sa­tions are real­is­ing tan­gi­ble ben­e­fits by encour­ag­ing an open, engaged cor­po­rate cul­ture where use of social net­work­ing tools is encour­aged — some­times com­pletely inside the wall, some­times across cor­po­rate bound­aries.

And in your per­sonal and pro­fes­sional lives, too, there are great sto­ries to be told. Sto­ries of expe­ri­ences, knowl­edge, adven­ture, rela­tion­ships.

You all have the power to return tomor­row to your organ­i­sa­tions and com­mu­ni­ties and encour­age peo­ple to start work­ing this way. To build rela­tion­ships, to estab­lish weak ties, to share and par­tic­i­pate and to build your rep­u­ta­tions based upon the next big thing you’re going to come up with, rather than that which you’re rest­ing on today.

For our soci­ety to take the next big step, the power of par­tic­i­pa­tory cul­ture; a cul­ture where every­thing is inter­twingled, needs to be exploited. It’s not 2020 Sum­mits that are going to fling us for­ward, it’s the power in the net­work of oppor­tu­nity we immerse our­selves in.

Go forth and participate.