While I don’t have time to blog about this in-depth, I found it compelling enough to post it just about completely in-tact, as it was sent to my by Ellis Simon via an email pitch to me as a blogger.

Location Determines Social Network Influence, CCNY-Led Team Finds: Number of Connections Less Important Than Proximity to Core

A team of researchers led by Dr. Hernán Makse, professor of physics at The City College of New York (CCNY), has shed new light on the way that information and infectious diseases proliferate across complex networks.  Writing in “Nature Physics,” they report that, contrary to conventional wisdom, persons with the most connections are not necessarily the best spreaders.

“The important thing is where someone is located in a network,” said Professor Makse in an interview. “If someone is in the core, they can spread information more efficiently.  The challenge is finding the core.”

That kind of information could help marketers and public relations practitioners conduct more effective of social media and social marketing campaigns.  It could also help epidemiologists target resources to reduce the spread of infectious diseases.

To identify the core, Professor Makse and colleagues used a technique call k-shell decomposition.  In this process, network nodes with just one link are removed until no single-link nodes remain.  The remaining nodes are assigned a k-shell value of one.  The process is repeated with higher k-shell values assigned to remaining nodes after each round of cuts.  Those nodes that cannot be reduced to a single link are identified as the core of the network and have the highest k-shell values.

In the study, the researchers examined four networks representing archetypical examples of social structures: members of LiveJournal.com; email contacts in the computer science department at University College London; inpatients of Swedish hospitals, and adult film actors.  The latter group was studied because it is a distinct subgroup of the acting profession whose members rarely appear in other genres, Professor Makse explained.

Each network member’s position in that network was plotted on a graph with the number of connections along one axis and the k-shell value along the other, e.g. (100, 5), (50, 25).  The team found that nodes with many connection hubs located at the periphery of a network, i.e. low k-shell values, were poor spreaders.

However, nodes with fewer connections but locations near the core, i.e. high k-shell values, were just as likely to spread information or infections as similarly situated nodes with more connections.  Hence, they conclude the most efficient spreaders are located in a network’s inner core.

“In the case of LiveJournal, someone with a thousand friends but a low k-shell level will have less impact than someone with a hundred friends but a high k-shell level,” Professor Makse said.  “Small players and big players spread just as well if they are at the core of the network.

For the spread of disease, nodes located in high k-shell layers are more likely to be infected and they will be infected sooner than other nodes, the researchers found.  “The neighborhood of these nodes makes them more efficient in sustaining an infection in early stages, thus enabling the epidemic to reach a critical mass such that it can fully develop.”

This knowledge could greatly help public health officials trying to head off an epidemic in situations where limited quantities of vaccines are available, Professor Makse said.  “You try to identify the most likely spreaders and vaccinate them first.”

The researchers explained the existence of hubs at the periphery of real networks as a consequence of their “rich topological structure.  In a fully random network, all hubs would exist near or at the core and they would contribute equally well to spreading.

While high k-shell value nodes were found to be the best single spreaders, regardless of their connectivity, this did not necessarily hold up for situations involving multiple spreaders.  In those cases, connectivity between hubs did not accelerate the spreading because of the overlap of infected areas created by the different spreaders.

“The better spreading strategy using (multiple) spreaders is to choose either the highest k or k-shell nodes with the requirement that no two spreaders are directly linked to each other,” the researchers wrote.

I have been a professional online community developer since 1993 on Artswire, TMN.com, Howard Rheingold‘s Brainstorms, and on The Well — this paper does a stellar job of explaining social ties in the context of online communities and social networks.

What this says to me is that no matter how well-hewn your social media news release, your email pitch, or your copy is, there are two things that are more important than any of that:  How compelling and interesting is the message? How targeted is the pitch?

For me, as a geek, a nerd, and as a social media marketer and digital PR executive, this is pretty amazing on both counts and directly relates to me and the future of Abraham Harrison — directly influencing the future of our services: what we offer and how we offer them.

What can we do as a social media marketing and PR company to get as close to the core of the social media as possible, which goes back to some OD studies that I did back in the day for my church.

There are apparently concentric rings radiating from a core.  The first ring might be called the “apostolic core.” These are the “apostles” of the church.

Each ring outside of the inner core have less stake in the organizational community.

There are always people leaving and moving on so keeping the organization relevant and vibrant required bring not merely more people but more of the right people with the same vision and passion for the community of faith as possible, so that they become not only stakeholders of the community but also the shareholders — owners, if you will.

This is important because they will become the stewards of the community and keep it healthy, happy, whole, and fed.

Organizational Development is not simply relevant to building a happy healthy Episcopal Church community or a Fortune 500 financial services company, it is essential toward building an effective, healthy, solid, stable, and empowered social networking site as well.

I always say that the most important people you bring into your social network are your first 20, then your next 200, then your next 2,000 — and by that time the DNA of your community has already been defined, especially since word of mouth and “invite your friends” is, by its very nature, very nepotistic and incestuous.

Warning: if you go for quantity and not quality early on — choosing the right fit and the best synergy — then the future of the community will have more to do with a vision not only quite a bit different than yours but sometime in direct conflict with your goals — to the point of being cancerous and harmful to the host: the community.

Sometimes this “corruption” of initial vision and goals can be a beautiful thing — it can signify that the members have taken it as their own and now have an ownership and investment in a future that is shared by owner and member.

However, there are also the tenants that trash the place and are impossible to even evict without razing the place to the foundation and starting again — and that never works because after a full community reinstall, there is always trust issues and a feeling of vulnerability and dread.  The scars can remain forever.

Tools don’t matter, and the best ones get out of the way, allowing people to connect more easily and effectively. That was my big takeaway from last Friday’s second-annual Blog Potomac.

Obsessing about “what’s next” in online services and technology saps too much valuable attention away from what’s really important: connecting with people. We need to stop obsessing on what comes after Twitter and focus instead on how best to connect to, communicate with and relate to our clients, colleagues and consumers.

Here’s why: The internet, with all of those fun time-sync tools, is supposed to make connecting with people more efficient. Social networks, blogs, microblogs and forums destroy the previously prohibitive barriers to efficient communications: moving people physically around the planet and making sure they’re in the same place at the same time. But the downside of all of this efficiency is that too many of us lose track of the forest for the trees.

Imagine obsessing the way we do about cool tools in the ballroom at the local Marriott, where many a meeting is held. The physically convenient, affordable hotel with rooms for visitors and plenty of elbow room and resources is not the focus, but encouraging connection, communication, brainstorming, relationship-making and business is.

Hotels, conference centers, message boards, instant messengers, social networks and blogs are just communication aids — the journey, not the destination. Even Second Life, World of Warcraft, Xbox Live, MMOGs and MMORPGs are more about real people spending their real lives with each other than about wanton sex or video games.

So, why has asynchronous global communications reduced living, breathing people into user IDs and handles? At Blog Potomac, folks like Shel Holtz, Liz Strauss and Scott Monty all mentioned how persistently important to their practices the humble, hundred-year-old telephone is when it comes to connecting, especially during a crisis. I moved back from Berlin primarily because folks wanted to get me into the room, take a look into my eyes and see how firmly I shake hands — all things I believed didn’t matter as long as I did the work. Not true!

I had started thinking about these sort of things at the Social Media Camp NY in 2008 when I heard a talk by Howard Greenstein and Dean Landsman on “What Old Media can teach New Media: Media Convergence & Integration, Social Media, and Professionalism.” Long story short, Greenstein and Landsman posit there is a direct evolutionary link between the Lascaux cave drawings and the blogger. I agree with them.

The conclusion is that what makes digital PR and social media marketing challenging and new is not the technology or the tools, it is the unique culture of online conversation. If you focus too much on the tools, you might forget that virtual communities are not virtual. If you don’t learn to love, respect and appreciate virtual online communities as real homes to real people, as real as the village square, the parish hall, the Paris Tabac or the alumni group, then you’re underestimating the passion, loyalty and deep personal relationship found there.

This lack of understanding and appreciation will almost always result in a tragic faux pas, the likes of which may result in brand suicide. You can easily avoid this if you understand the operative word in the phrase Virtual Online Community is “community.”

(Via AdAge DigitalNext)

Interesting new business book,  The Social Network Business Plan, is out, written by David Silver. It looks interesting because, in my humble experience, most people go into the world of Social Media and Social Networking with no business plan at all by either winging it or by reinventing the wheel:

In The Social Network Business Plan, social network expert, David Silver presents and explains 18 cutting-edge methods to create revenue for social network websites–none of which are advertising. He also predicts the demise of seemingly successful online communities such as MySpace and Facebook that rely on advertising as non-sustainable modalities. Silver describes and explains that in the future new products and services will be introduced, talked about, rated, reviewed and recommended – or killed – by online communities.

One example of the 18 new revenue channels that online communities are adopting is the sale to vendors of anonymized conversations of the community members concerning those vendors’ products or services. Another example is online communities who partner with the internet providers to receive payment when a particular online community’s information is downloaded using that providers service. The other sixteen revenue channels are equally head-turning!

Silver is the only angel investor, operating down where the rubber meets the road who is investing in online communities in their infancy, and writing about which ones will win and which ones will fail.

The future of Social Network Services (SNS) can be discovered on High School and College campuses. I believe that topic-specific “vertical” SNS’s are very important, but I also think that the model needs to be University-like – a modularized SNS. There needs to be a campus “brand” (or University) within which the topic-specific “clubs,” “houses,” “fraternities,” “dorms,” and “interest groups” can interact – somewhere where crossovers, cross-fertilization, and aggregation are encouraged – no, needs – to happen. I hate SNS sites like boompa.com – a site devoted to your favorite cars – because I am not JUST a car guy.

I am a car guy for sure but I am also interested in rowing, in biking, in Thomas Pynchon, and in talk radio – Boompa might be successful in the short term, but in the long-term, the real power would come from creating a open, creative, resource-rich platform/campus/university/high school and maybe create a school of engineering, a liberal arts school, a law school, a dining hall, and so forth, but then allow the SNS to find itself.

To allow the SNS and its members to find their own voice, their own interests, and their own passions – which may well be very different from what is first assumed by the creator. Google gets this, though not yet within the construct of the SNS’s. What Google did do successfully was to buy USENET – the original newsgroups – and then build an superstructure on top of that – make it modern, sustainable, durable, and more readable.

Google returned USENET to relevance in a world that considered newsgroups and IRC to be dead or dying. Each and every one of communities on USENET is amazingly vertical, but they could all back up and back out to the larger USENET community – to the equivalent of the “welcome new students??? meetings and gatherings colleges offer to entering Freshmen.

Communities that are too vertical tend to shoe horn the “general topics??? conversations into hidden “off topic??? eddies. That is just the opposite of what should be done. The conversation should be general, cross-pollinating, and then move, after a conversation starts, into another room.

Start with an amazing platform, collect users, listen and watch them to see how they’re playing with the software application objects, widgets, and tools (are they playing with the toy or the box?), and then build for the users base, withholding judgment. Digg is a case study for this: start small, grow organically, and allow your members to find themselves.

The developers of Digg realized that after initial vertical growth based on the general members of Slashdot (techie, geeky, teens, boys), digg would suffer from the same sort of vulnerabilities that Slashdot suffered when Slashdot didn’t evolve and grow and broaden itself.

People love talking about Linux, but when happens when the Dow drops or the elections come? Where will the conversation happen? Where is the “kitchen??? at the party where every eventually goes to just talk about general interest stuff? Unless there are opportunities to express and share so-called “off-topic??? conversation right there, within the community in which members are already committed, with members to whom they’re already committed, then they are bound to go elsewhere.

Starting small and allowing the community to design itself is much different than starting big and losing one’s focus. Other mistakes happen when community builders make assumptions as to what participants, members, and lurkers want. Another mistake is putting a wall up around the community so that non-members cannot get a full feeling for the community from without.

The best SNS’s, virtual worlds, and online communities are honeypots. By honeypot, I am not suggesting, “a server that is configured to detect an intruder by mirroring a real production system. It appears as an ordinary server doing work, but all the data and transactions are phony. Located either in or outside the firewall, the honeypot is used to learn about an intruder’s techniques as well as determine vulnerabilities in the real system.” Although I am, sort of. The best SNS needs to be appealing, attractive, sweet, and compelling. Community-builders and SNS ASP developers need to be willing learn about member techniques, interests, processes, and needs, as well as determine “vulnerabilities” in the SNS platform that may repel, turn off, or limit the evolution and growth of the community.

To channel Chauncey Gardener for a second, one must do whatever one must to make sure that the earth in the garden is moist and well fed, one must seed well and completely, one must keep the garden in sun and water, one must encourage the garden to grow as it will for only in its growth will the garden be successful, and then, after rigorous growth, pruning and weeding must be done, only in order to allow the garden to be healthy, not to turn the garden into topiary. Okay, I am done.

Digg allows all of these things. Digg is perfectly useful and compelling even as an alien, but it is way more fun and interesting when you’re a citizen, that’s for sure. An SNS community needs to be as attractive as possible because exclusivity is no longer essential or even valuable. What is valuable is “useful,??? “interesting,??? and “authentic.??? They also have to have community buy-in and the best enjoy a certain fanatical devotion. Just like the best Universities and Colleges.

And Digg allowed its member to tell it when it was time to evolve past tech and geek news. Digg did not limit its scope or define itself too tightly with being “gear for geeks??? or “news for nerds.??? That would have ultimately been the death of Digg.

What the best Universities (such as Yale) understand is that it is not the student who is blessed and honored by being accepted by a top college (Yale College) but rather it is the college that should be blessed and honored (and should be grateful) that such a quality student is accepting its offers and actually attending – choosing – their particular school: Yale instead of Princeton, Brown, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Dartmouth, Stanford, Columbia, Berkeley, etc…

Harvard, too, is aware that although in the short-term Harvard makes the Harvard Man, over the long term, it is Harvard Men who made Harvard and continue to make Harvard. “Who have you graduated recently???? Unless the quality and character of its students and alumni remain top-drawer, Harvard is not guaranteed its position as “top three??? in USA Today alongside Princeton and Yale. No matter how grand its endowment.

So, Harvard and Yale spoil their students rotten! My friends who attended Harvard or Yale college swoon over those 4 years like I swoon over my first love.

Likewise, SNS’s, virtual worlds, and virtual communities need to realize that at any one point, their brand is only as good as the collective that is manifest in the users, the members, the lurkers, the stewards, and the alumni of the property.

This isn’t only true in SNS’s. The same thing can be said of the most successful message boards and online communities. The most important distinction, I think, is that all of these “rooms” and all of these “clubs” and all of these spaces where (and are) defined and created by the communities themselves. Sui generis. And this sort of ownership – “for us by us,??? as the slogan goes over as Howard Rheingold’s Brainstorms community – should never be underestimated.

The Well has Howard Rheingold as a member and alumnus, for example, and the credibility of all that he has made and done; over time, more and more virtual communities, virtual worlds, and SNS will be known for their members as well: who studies, who studied, and who wants to join.

“What’s in it for me??? (WIIFM) and the concept of pride of ownership are important – essential – ingredients of a sustainable, deep, thriving, and healthy community. The success of MySpace and of Facebook is that the verticals are not (were not) defined for them by their grand architects – they are self-creating, self-forming, and also self-destructing. They form, reform, mutate and disperse after they hit a limit of general conversation and then either break off and reform into an “interest group” or “club” or they self-check and work to “get back on topic.”

SNS’s and communities in general tend to be formed in one of two ways: like Paris or like London. Intelligence Design (architecture) or Emergent Design. The later never looks very beautiful or the way people – or the creators, investors, and architects – expect (or want) it to look, because investors and designers tend to not be able to control it – and when they do try to impost order, often in a heavy-handed way, they also tend to scare off all of their members, too.

This organic revolution has proven its success online time and time again. The Internet does not respond (well or at all) to command and control. The smartest Web 2.0 platforms allow the “masses of asses” (yes, the customer; yes, us) to define the platform and the experience – their own and collective environment and experience.

MySpace does this amazingly well and so does Facebook. Until recently, Friendster suffered from a vision and used command and control tactics to try to coerce its users that “it didn’t really want to do things that way??? and Friendster members abandoned in droves to platforms and experiences not so monitored by “mom and dad.???

A command and control grand vision doesn’t work when you develop an environment that needs to be truly both attractive and compelling much more than it needs to be informational or instructional. An SNS needs to be attractive, diversional, compelling, amusing, and entertaining – never limiting.

My analogy of college and high school never mentioned classrooms or classes for training or learning. People do enough of that at school and at work. An SNS needs to give its users a university campus without any expectations or concepts of dropping out, getting judged, doing homework, or being held accountable for anything.

A good SNS should be all late-night wine-influenced discussions of Descartes and Plato and the summer afternoons on the quad and the time playing Xbox with your roommates.

When I go onto my long-term online communities, the Well, The Meta Network, USENET, and Brainstorms, there are many very deep and very vertical communities, discussing things as frivolous as fashion and video games and as deep as how to survive cancer, how to get a post doc grant, and very deep discussions on “spirit,” “chaos theory,” and “world politics.”

What makes this amazing and sustainable is that there are an infinite number of ways to get along, to move into a space of intense conversation, and then to pull back into common areas, just to see who’s around. In a university setting, this could be the dining hall, the quad, the commons, etc. These spaces are very important.

If you think about all of this in terms of evolution, then we can think about the way things evolve in the most perverse ways when isolated from others of its kinds. So, if there are impervious walls – gaps or voids, mountains or ridges – between these vertical markets, SNS’s, and communities, then there may be an initial success, but there can also be a terrible volatility. One plague or drought can decimate a population completely.

Having a commons allows members and visitors to have a place to meet new people, have new experiences, and learn of new clubs, new opportunities, and new places – inbreeding versus crossbreeding. Ultimately, a diversity of visitors helps build a more resilient, invested, and self-identifing community. They will become “students for life??? at best and proud alums at worst. They will carry the brand awareness, even if their lives become too busy to participate any more.

They will become life long brand ambassadors for your community. Proud alumni.

And, in terms of “viral marketing,” it is also important when it comes to a member of an SNS “inviting his friends” – not all of my friends have the same vertical interests that I do… They could have very different interests – but as I explore the “commons” of an SNS, I can note that there are things happening online that “friend x” and “friend y” would love, and that would be my incentive to invite them on board.

Boompa? I am the only person I know in my entire community – that is not true, my buddy has an Audi S4 – who is into cars. My buddy is an Audi driver and I am a BMW driver. Does that mean we’re both drivers? Does that mean we love cars or our particular car? Do we cross over on performance sedans? On German cars? On luxury cars?

You have to offer the tools to allow the market to choose for itself, otherwise, you might never find out that the SNS needs all three, or none at all.

A “Modularized SNS” should be neutral like a university (unlike MySpace, which is pretty pre-defined as to what the demographic is), and there are lots of “vertical niche SNS’s” (e.g. car enthusiasts, gourmet cooking, travel, Rolex fans, Republican politicos, etc.) That way, everyone can form a SNS experience that actually fits them by modularly assembling the groups of people who have similar interests, (not just friends-in-common!)

I have collected a number of thoughts I have had on social media, blogging, social networking, blogger outreach & engagement, blogger activation, astroturfing, and other fun stuff I call Insights — 38 in all — that I just stumbled upon and I thought it would be lovely to share:

1. Activating Bloggers
2. Advice on Starting and Growing an SNS
3. Always Bring Something to the Party
4. Blog Community Outreach
5. Blog Messaging and Counter-Messaging
6. Blogger Outreach
7. Blogger Relations
8. Brand Ambassadorship Requires Authenticity
9. Campaigns Must Evolve with the Internet
10. Corporate Blogging and the Corporate Blog
11. Domain Name Registration Strategy
12. Don’t Be Seduced by the Lure of Astroturfing
13. Gift and Asset Distribution
14. Influence the Influencers
15. Influencer Identification
16. Initial Online Audit
17. Markets are Conversation
18. Message Creation
19. Online Advocacy
20. Online Communities are Not Virtual
21. Online Community Outreach
22. Online Outreach and Online Engagement
23. Online Universe Creation
24. Ping Servers and Pinging
25. Publicity and Corporate Blogs
26. Reciprocal Linking
27. Search Engine Brand Protection
28. Social Bookmarking Strategy
29. Social Network Profiles are Not Fancy Personal Home Pages
30. Social Network Services Encourage Competition
31. Social Network Services Should be Facilitated not Controlled
32. Talk Like the Locals
33. The Blogroll
34. The College as Model for Social Networks
35. The Internet is Vastly Hugely Mind-Boggingly Big
36. Tracking Online Conversation
37. When in Rome Do As the Romans Do
38. Wikipedia and Wiki Promotional Strategy

Please enjoy my latest AdAge Global Idea Network blog post, Social Media Are Truly Global — Just Ask a Slovakian: Don’t Underestimate the Reach of Twitter, Facebook: (Via Adage)

Social Media Are Truly Global — Just Ask a Slovakian: Don’t Underestimate the Reach of Twitter, Facebook

Recently, I was a speaker at a conference in Bratislava, Slovakia, called Daily Web. Everybody there was super-connected. Everyone was on both Facebook and Twitter. While I was at the conference, I received invites from my fellow attendees get connected on Twitter, Facebook and even LinkedIn.

During a break, I was told that there are about 60,000 Slovakian users of Facebook, using a mix of the available Czech interface and the English. They were all much newer to Twitter, but the conference did have a Twitter profile and I chose to create the hash tag for the conference, #dailywebsk. I was told Facebook is beginning to bogart the populations of local Slovakian communities and there are plans to localize Facebook into Slovakian the way that it is localized in the Czech Republic and Germany.

This got me to thinking. All of the Brits I have been meeting in Berlin are more keen on getting my “Facebook e-mail,” the e-mail that would allow them to easily find me on Facebook, rather than asking for a business card. Are cards going obsolete? Or, at the very least, are your Twitter and Facebook credentials more important on your site, your business card or your name tag than your e-mail, phone and fax?

All of my German friends are on Facebook as well, sharing images and adopting the social network with as much dedication and abandon as we do in the U.S. Same thing goes with my friends from Mexico and Colombia. When I attend conferences these days, I am likely to be recognized as @chrisabraham as I am by my name.

However, I admit that I live in a rarefied air and so there might be issues of connectivity, class and access that I am not addressing here. That said, I am still amazed whenever I take some time to click on over to Twittervision to watch a global representation of the whole Twittering world.

Because of the nature of Facebook and Twitter, localization works very well. Since both social networks allow you to easily communicate with your friends, and your friends are generally a lot like you. There isn’t a lot of cross-talk between English-, German- and Spanish-speakers.

There are no barriers, of course, between the different locales and the different languages. The barriers are emergent. Since I have quite a few Facebook friends and Twitter followers, 2,707 and 2,374 respectively, I get a lot of cross-talk between languages, and that pleases me. What makes me even happier is when I visit someone’s Wall, sort of like the publicly visible whiteboard that lots of students hang outside their dorm room. I often see a mixture of Spanish, German and English, all mixed up, according to each particular relationship.

The feeling I have, however, is that Twitter and Facebook are not perceived, worldwide, as American imperialism. And I think this is fantastic. Why is that? I think it’s because Facebook and Twitter created relatively neutral platforms and then got out of the way. This is especially the case with Twitter, which is perfectly inert: 140 characters. No context, only essential conversation.

After being a part of the Twitter community for a little while, the whole nature of it falls away and it becomes invisible, a simple communications vehicle, disassociated from its origins: like the phone, texting, TV, electricity, e-mail, the internet! Who cares who invented these things, after all, when each nation, culture and people ultimately make it their own. And this is what is happening with Twitter and Facebook — people are making them their own.

I really don’t use MySpace very much at all. In fact, I embarrass myself every time I look at my MySpace profile. That said, every band in Berlin has a MySpace profile, just like every other band in the entire world. Globally, you’re likely to see a MySpace address if the band you’re digging on has an internet presence. Even if your favorite global brand has its own website, there’s a good chance that they also have a MySpace address. A couple weeks ago, I checked out three bands here in Berlin and they all has MySpace URLs: Orchestre Miniature in the Park and Tim and Puma Mimi.

None of these bands think about the gross imperialism associated with their decisions; they have adopted all of this American innovation with complete ease. Back in the day, Friendster had a terribly time sorting out its business model internationally. Its success in Asia bogged down its servers while confounding its salespeople on how to make any money from all these community members who were dedicated participants but not generating any local revenue. It was probably because the worldwide ad networks and the global sales of ads were not there yet, focused mostly on the U.S. market. Now times have changed. Here I am in Berlin being served not simply German ads but also geo-targeted ads based on exactly where my data is being served.

I have taken all of this in due course and just considered it normal; however, I realized tonight that it isn’t normal. It occurred to me that folks might not know how thoroughly adopted these Web 2.0 platforms are worldwide. How many people around the world refresh Facebook and Twitter many times an hour at their workplace, the same way everyone does it, even among an ever-growing population in the Slovak Republic.

Leo Bottary, SVP at Mullen, asked a pretty great question over on LinkedIn, What motivated you to learn about social media?  I took a stab at answering in my own way (via Marketing Conversation):

I came to social media PR the other way around. I have been online since the world of the bulletin board systems (BBS) and the Well, later in the 90s. I have been a deep member of social networks forever. Anyway, in 2003 I became a social media marketer at New Media Strategies and then moved onto Edelman.

Now, I am a social media native-speaker learning more and more PR and marketing practices.

So, I guess my question is, what motivated you to wait so long? Social media and online social networks have been alive and well since at least the early 80s in the form of message boards, forums, USENET, MUDs, MOOs, and IRC.

My fear is is that there will be loads of PR practitioners who will only invest in social media and online community because they have to and not because they’re passionate about it. I think this will all change when people stop making as much of a big deal about online social media and just take the mad communications and relationship skills and passions and just map them onto another forum: the Internet.

Why can’t PR practitioners do this? Short answer: “we” don’t consider all of those voices and all of those people and all of that text to be connected to real, powerful, and passionate people.

Leo, thanks so much for asking this question. I don’t know if I answered but I am happy to have thought through it.

So, what motivated you to learn about social media? Also, what motivated you to go into marketing or PR, if that’s what you do with yourself these days?

Here’s Leo’s complete question-in-full:

From: Leo Bottary

Date: August 11, 2008

To: Chris Abraham

Status: Viewed

What motivated you to learn about social media?

I don’t believe you can serve today’s public relations client without a working understanding of social media and the broader discipline of digital communication. Why should clients pay hundreds of dollars an hour for PR-lite? As PR professionals, it’s our responsibility to understand all the relationship tools at our disposal, not just some of them.

I got started because I felt like a fish out of water when the subject came up during a client/prospect meeting. And of course, I’m learning every day. What motivated you?

My business partner and CEO, Mark Harrison, boiled our, Abraham Harrison’s, elevator speech down into bullet points.  Let me know what you think!

• Abraham Harrison, LLC is a Public Relations company dealing solely in online media
  • AHLLC has two practices: Promotional online PR, and Defensive online PR
    1. Promotional online PR is about getting the client’s message out
       1. Three methodologies:
          1. Top-down Online Influencer Outreach
             • Blogger and community gatekeeper outreach in order to get those influencers to be the mouthpieces for our clients.
               • We do the elite A-lister high-touch, personal relationship management
               • And B-Z lister “long-tail” outreach
          2. Social Networking Site (SNS) presence creation and management
             • Creation, development, and upkeep of profiles, groups, and friend relationships
          3. Bottom-up Online Conversation Engagement
             • Going to where the conversations are happening online (in forums, newsgroups, blog comments, etc.) and directly engaging the conversation that is happening online.
    2. Defensive online PR is essentially crisis management
       1. Two methodologies:
          1. Making bad stuff disappear: Online Reputation Clean-up/Search Results Cleansing
             • Establishing client’s hegemony over their search engine results and making the negative content a “needle in a haystack”
          2. Countering bad stuff too big to make disappear: Direct Misinformation Correction via Online Conversation Engagement
             • Finding negative conversation online and engaging it in order to bring the client’s message into the dialogue
             • Quiet and/or neutralize vitriol by bringing the detractors into positive relationship

Jennifer Mattern just wrote a great post answering some of your questions regarding the important question, Should You Jump Into Social Networks to Promote Your Business? over at RedFly Marketing:

There’s a lot of buzz in the online PR world about social networking, whether that be traditional social networks like MySpace and Facebook or social networking through microblogging services such as Twitter.

Should you jump into social networking to promote your business? And if so, with so many options available, how do you choose which social networks to participate in?

Benefits of Social Networking

I’m not much of a supporter of diving into every new or large social networking environment or fad to promote a business. However, social networks do have some benefits that make them worth considering as an addition to your online PR efforts:

1. Social networks and microblogging services can serve multiple roles with a single tool. For example, you can network with colleagues, while also promoting offers or information to clients and potential clients of your company.

2. Social networking is cost-effective. Most networks are free to join.

3. Social networks and microblogging services can help you get news or a message out very quickly to a targeted audience.

Problems with Social Networking

Despite its benefits, there are also some drawbacks to social networking for promoting a business.

1. Social networking can be a productivity killer. Many businesses simply try to do too much – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, etc. The multiple updates aren’t always reaching different audiences, and it’s a waste of time that could be spent elsewhere if you’re simply targeting the same groups with the same messages, but in different locations.

2. It’s easy to get too personal, or too off-topic, when social networking, Twittering, etc. You may divulge more information than you wanted to (or than you should), and once you’ve said it, you can’t take it back. The instant gratification factor also makes it easier to communicate without thinking things through; contributing to negative “Web wars” at times.

3. The bulk of the population still hasn’t embraced these technologies, meaning your target audiences may not yet be well-represented there.

Choosing Social Networking Services for Your Needs

There are good things about social networking for PR. There are negative things as well. So how can you strike a happy balance? How do you choose the best social media communication tools for your business, without over-extending your resources to reach only a small portion of your audience?

1. Target, target, target! It doesn’t matter what the largest social network is if your specific audience isn’t represented there. Niche social networking tools may be a far better option than simply going with networks that always seem to be getting the buzz. For example, no network yet beats Myspace for promoting to musicians. If you’re trying to reach an adult audience as opposed to teens, you may be better off using a service like Gather.com. If you want to network with other professionals in your industry, LinkedIn might serve your needs more effectively. There are also smaller social networks targeted to very specific niches (webmasters, photographers, etc.). There’s no reason to try to “do it all.”

2. Understand the numbers. Don’t join a social network simply because they say they have X number of members. Those numbers mean absolutely nothing. What you should care about is not the total membership, but instead the “active” membership (and those specifically within your target audience – it goes back to targeting).

3. Get to know a network’s policies on promotion, as it applies to your plans. The last thing you want is to be labeled a spammer. Understand that these tools are more about networking, building relationships, and communicating than blatant promotion, as in marketing and sales.

No matter how deep you decide to delve into social networking and / or microblogging, always make sure you’re making the best use of your time, and reaching your intended targets.

Here are her other suggested articles:

• Online PR vs. Internet Marketing
• The 5 Easiest Ways To Get Search Engines To Trust You
• Ten Tips for Building Authority Status in Your Niche or Industry
• Web Credibility Factors You Need To Keep In Mind
• SEO And PPC Should Be Friends – PPC Management & SEO Crossover
• DMOZ Submission Guide

My Director of Client Service, Daniel Krueger, wrote an insightful blog post over at Abraham Harrison’s PR and marketing blog, Marketing Conversation, called Marketing in the New Millenium. The story is in growing response to the fine article from Norman Birnback over at PR Backtalk, including Spread The Word: Blogs Matter We Just Can’t Measure It!!, Blogger Outreach is PR and Not Marketing and On Survivor Corps’ Blogger Outreach. Check it out:

TV & print are soooo 1900’s ;). Welcome to the new millennium. We’ve been here for some time now, but I think all of the social media and new initiatives for marketing – like blogger outreach and online campaigns – are really just starting to flourish.

I am currently managing a project for Abraham & Harrison for a non-profit company called Survivor Corps. The purpose of this campaign has been to promote the transition of the Landmine Survivors Network into Survivor Corps and to promote the book, ”I Will Not Be Broken,” written by Survivor Corps co-founder Jerry White. The book is a fascinating story of Jerry’s own personal tragedy of losing his leg in a freak accident and then the rebuilding of his life. Jerry has interviewed thousands of victims and in this book shares what he and they have learned about living and thriving after a tragic event.

The main way we have handled this campaign has been through an online blogger outreach to demographics we thought would be receptive to the message that Jerry and Survivor Corps are trying to spread. Each blogging demographic we reached out to, was crafted a message for that particular group. Norman Birnback wrote a very insightful post about the method we used for this campaign and I think he hit the nail right on the head. While his article was focused on how to establish metrics in a blogging initiative, he saw that we didn’t cookie cut a mass email, but crafted our message to the particular group we were reaching out to. Two other very important parts of this campaign were the creation of multiple social networking groups and presences along with the creation of two social media news releases which basically give a “who, what, why” in a neat and tidy format.

Some companies and agencies, like Survivor Corps, are starting to look outside the box at alternative methods of reaching targeted audiences. As the blogging communities continue to grow, outreaches like this one are essential to make sure that the the group you are targeting is aware of your campaign.

Via Marketing Conversation

• 43Things Profile
• del.icio.us Profile
• Digg Profile
• Facebook Profile
• Friendster Profile
• Flugpo Profile
• Dodgeball Profile
• Flickr Profile
• LinkedIn Profile
• Jaiku Profile
• MySpace Profile
• YouTube Profile
• Vox Profile
• Twitter Profile
• Technorati Profile
• StumbleUpon Profile
• Reddit Profile
• Pownce Profile
• Orkut Profile
• AIM: ChrisPhur
• MSN: christopherabraham@hotmail.com
• Y!: chrisabraham
• GTalk: cabraham@gmail.com
• Skype: chrisabraham
• Chris Abraham
• Marketing Conversation

Social Networks are being rolled out in support of Time’s weekly magazine sites, according to Time, Inc., according to Media Week: “Time Inc. will roll out online social networking to some of its weekly magazine sites by the end of this year or early ’08, following Sports Illustrated’s success in that area, said John Squires, executive vp, Time Inc.” Considering the language, it sounds to me more like they’re adding message boards and other virtual online community hooks, now lumped into the concept of a Social Network in much the same way that “blog” once encompasses Groups, Forums, Message Boards, and Online Communities. We’ll see, over time, what these Time, Inc., Social Networks look like. I am curious. Via Marketing Conversation

Blogging Basics One-Day Workshop: “Writing for online consumption is much different from writing for the page. Learn how to write for the Internet and the blogosphere in this one-day class focused on the unique and powerful way the blogosphere communicates and how you can best leverage your own personal passion, your own personal artistic voice, and your unique perception of the world into an online organ that could change the world,” via The Writer’s Center

Blogging Basics Course at Bethesda
4/24/2007 Writer’s Center Workshop

Description

Writing for online consumption is much different from writing for the page. Learn how to write for the Internet and the blogosphere in this one-day class focused on the unique and powerful way the blogosphere communicated and how you can best leverage your own personal passion, your own personal artistic voice, and your unique perception of the world into an online organ that very well could change the world!

Instructor

Chris Abraham, Founding Partner, Abraham Harrison LLC
Blogging since 1999 www.chrisabraham.com
cabraham@chrisabraham.com +1 202-657-4063

Blogging defined
A blog (short for web log) is a user-generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. Most blogs are primarily textual and are part of a wider network of social media

What is a blog?

· An online journal (as in “periodical”)

· A web application (as in “program”)

· Easy to use (as easy as webmail)

· Communicative

o Syndicated (RSS, ATOM)

o Link aware (Trackback)

o Comments

o The “search engine advantage”

· Okay to be subjective and opinionated

· Blogs can influence culture and mainstream media

What isn’t a blog?

· A blog is not “just a website”

· A blog doesn’t require editing or oversight

· A blog does not offer privacy

o True anonymity is a myth

· A blog is not a great American novel

o Be brief and to-the-point

o Keep each post to a single topic

Why is a blog different than a website?

1. Ease of publishing

2. Discoverability (Pings weblogs.com or technorati or another ping server)

3. Conversationality (Trackbacks or as-they-happen referer logs, or now being part of Technorati and other blog search engines)

4. Linkability (All posts should have permalinks)

5. Syndicatability (All content should be available in RSS feeds)

6. Commentability (All posts should welcome comments)

Types of blogging

· Web logs – provide commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries

· Collaborative blogs – A collaborative blog is a type of weblog which publishes posts written by multiple users. The majority of high profile collaborative blogs are based around a single uniting theme

· Corporate blogs – A corporate blog is a weblog published and used by an organization to reach its organizational goals. Although there are many different types of corporate blogs, most can be categorized as either external or internal.

· Political blogs – A political blog is a common type of blog that comments on politics. In liberal democracies the right to criticize the government without interference is considered an important element of free speech

· Flogs – a marketing tool designed by a professional advertisement company to promote a product in a fashion one might find on a fan site or in regular blog entries

· Splogs – artificially created weblog sites which the author uses to promote affiliated websites or to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites

Popular blogging fields

· Political – Daily Kos, Red State, Instapundit, Wonkette, Michelle Malkin

· Gossip – Perez Hilton, Gawker, Wonkette, Defamer, Stereogum, Valleywag, TMZ

· Advocacy – Boing Boing, Lifehacker, Treehugger,

· Fashion – The Superficial, Go Fug Yourself, Manolo Blog

· Tech – Techcrunch, Ars Technica, Scobleizer, Joel on Software, Engadget, Gizmodo

Variations on the blog

· Photoblog – a form of photo sharing and publishing in the format of a blog, but differentiated by the predominant use of and focus on photographs rather than text

· Video blog (vlog or video podcast) – a blog that includes video. Regular entries are typically presented in reverse chronological order and often combine embedded video or a video link with supporting text, images, and other metadata

· Audio blogs (Podcasts) – a digital media file, or a series of such files, that is distributed over the Internet using syndication feeds, for playback on portable media players and personal computers

Where can I blog?

· Free blogging services

o Blogger www.blogger.com

o WordPress www.wordpress.com

o Friendster www.friendster.com

o MySpace www.myspace.com

o LiveJournal www.livejournal.com

o Vox www.vox.com

· Subscription blogging services

o TypePad www.typepad.com

o iWeb www.apple.com/ilife/iweb/features/blogging.html

· Install your own blog software (requires web host)

o WordPress www.wordpress.org

o Movable Type www.movabletype.org

Who is a blogger?

· Everyone!

Why blog?

· Zero barrier to entry

o Technology is no longer a restriction to entry

o Blogging is often free but is always “cheap.”

o Any type of blog host makes you a blogger

· Participate in global conversation

· “Jump the rails” to mainstream media (MSM)

What is a good blog?

· Short, pithy, entries

· Constantly updated

· Only one long work a week

· Shameless, assertive, opinionated, unapologetic

· Give more than it takes

Reputation as a blogger

· Techniques for building prestige and influence

o Reciprocal links and linking

o Blogroll and blogrolling

o Citations

o Comments

o Pinging ping-servers

o Press releases

o Email requests

Important reading

· Naked Conversations by by Shel Israel & Robert Scoble

o redcouch.typepad.com

· The Cluetrain Manifesto by Chris Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger

o redcouch.typepad.com

· Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents by Reporters without Borders

o www.rsf.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=542

· Applied Blogging Workshop is a collaborative blog for all of us

o www.appliedblogging.org

Competition and one upmanship are natural in SNS’s. I think they’re essential and happen whether they’re designed into the SNS or not. One of the natural competitions that emerge when there isn’t a competitive activity such as is offered in the form of a pool on Facebook or a sport competition such as is offered in Protrade, the competition happens anyway, oftentimes in a competition for being cool or being among the elect. How many friends do you have?

Are you in Chris’ top 8 friends on MySpace? On MySpace, collecting friends is huge sport. Also, getting a certain type of friend is important. The most important competition surrounds getting into a popular band, celebrity, or cool kid’s profile’s “top 8 friends,??? the number of faces that are shown on the MySpace member’s main profile page.

(Do be honest, I don’t even know how to move certain friends into my top-8 on MySpace.)

The MySpace users, be he a band or a person, gets to choose the “top 8??? from amongst the hundreds or thousands that are often collected into friends. If you’re not in the top 8, you’re noone; and, if you were on the top 8 and get bumped, that is a severe insult and can start thunderous gossip.

Seriously. I was watching diggnation, the wildly popular video blog sponsored by digg.com, Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht, co-hosts, spent a large chunk of their podcast talking about the very important politics surrounding who is and isn’t on their respective top-8. If you start dating a girl, she might insist that you put her into your top-8.

If you dump her and start dating someone else, your new girlfriend may insist that you dump your ex off of your 8 and then put her on the top of the list of 8. It is all very serious stuff. I am not joking. Some of the biggest wars on MySpace have to do with not merely becoming someone’s friend (as friendship is pretty promiscuous since everyone is trying to collect the most friends) but becoming someone’s inner-circle, posse, and best friend.

After the first 8, there is of course a proximity prestige – how close to the top-8 are you? Are you on the first page of the friends page? This is a BIG thing, who would have known?

So, after all your friends have 9000 friends, there are 8 spaces for friends that show up on your profile and they are your 8 — and people hunger to be put into the 8. They talk about it on Podcasts and so there are lots of emergent games, and the emergent games should be encouraged, co-opted, and developed for.

No, adding more than 8 isn’t the answer, but it should be an option, right? All of these things should be available options and choices.

Back in 2000, Amy Jo Kim wrote the best book on best practices and strategies on how to start, build, grow, and maintain online communities in Community Building on the Web : Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities. If you can find a copy, buy one. Everything Amy Jo Kim recommends can be mapped perfectly to web2.0 and platform-based Social Network Service (SNS); namely, her belief that communities need to grow organically and not be rigid, planned, communities: more like London than Paris.

Start out as a boutique and then grow in response to the “neighborhood??? and the market. A toy store in a retirement community might sound like a bad idea because a toy store should be marketed to parents; actually, grandparents so a lot of the spoiling so allowing grandparents to easily and effortlessly shop for and buy toys for their grand children is a really great idea.

You community, as it grows, is not really your choice. A lot of the decision as to who and what your community becomes depends on the initial members. Your first 10 members will define your 100 will define your 1,000 will define your 1,000,000. The only choice you have as a business and as a host is who you invite to be your first 10-100 members. After that, you sort of have to get out of the way and then meet the needs of this new thing you have created.

I had an online community about memetics, memes.org, which I wanted to be a place in which to discuss memes, memetics, popular culture, and other social- and pseudo-scientific stuff. Well, after a couple years, the community evolved itself into a community that was really fetishing the existence of alien life, of a global conspiracy, of the reptilian aliens, and of the Bilderberg’s control of all commerce and all choices, the New World Order.

If I hadn’t let the community find itself and kept on steering the community back to my vision, I would have pruned memes.org too dearly, I would have starved off the members and their interests, and I would have alienated the real core of my users, the 1/1000 who spent a lot of their time making the community ultimately a success.

Most SNS’s, such as Friendster and Orkut, end up “losing control??? of their communities and then spend their entire life trying to being the mission back into line. Orkut evolved into a Brazilian SNS and Friendster is not an Asian SNS. Instead of selling the sites to Brazilian and Asian investors, they instead try desperately to steer them back into line.

A community is indeed a family. In order to really have a successful family, you have to let its members to be themselves and trust you. Family members have to feel that their patriarch and matriarch are disappointed in them.

Do all of your scheming before you launch. After you first hundred members get started, you pretty much should get the hell out of the way and let the community self-organize. You can be a gardener but don’t practice bonsai.

Don’t alienate your SNS, don’t alienate your community. Let them grow and have fun and play. Give them the gifts they want not the gifts you want to give; offer them, your members, the toys with which they want to play, even if it is the cardboard box in which the toy was packaged. And, at the end of the day, don’t judge your community.

Play with them. Enjoy them. Love them.

The beauty of an SNS is that it can easily be built in stages. In fact, building an SNS in stages is preferable, and here’s why: Users don’t like their user experience dictated to them, they want their user experience and preferences to define the innovation of the SNS.

It makes everything easier, actually. There have been many applications and virtual spaces that have been very expensively designed, like a terrarium or like a theme park, only to be rejected by the members. Usually, at this stage, too much money, time, and investment has been put into the project, so all the energy is spent to try to persuade the members of all the untapped potential and value they’re missing by not doing as they’re told.

Orkut & Friendster are great examples of Social Networks that were too rigid in their design, expecting the users to adopt their tools, their styles, and their values of community.

Actually, Friendster is a perfect example. The creators of Friendster made it quite closed and structured, and the designers felt a certain amount of stewardship over its users’ experience. Friendster wanted to define what a community was and should be… People you know and who are either your personal friend or a friend of a friend.

Children do not like having the toy’s box taken from them just because they’re playing with the box and not the toy. It all comes down to play. People who want to build deep, important, and intimate relationships should be allowed; people to who want to compete should have lots of ways to do so, and people who want to date, meet single, and flirt should be able to do that, too.

Creating a space for your members to “show off” or “express themselves” is less important than giving members to interact. They crave connection and will pursue any perceived connection such as shared interests, hometowns, movies, orientation, or schools.

They’re not at all about sharing, they’re about connecting. The best of breed SNS’s are primarily concerned with three things: finding your current friends, reconnecting with old friends, and making new friends. In that order. Current friend connections are the most essential, offering the most energy.

The best SNS’s are like an office ski trip. Out of the 30 people who choose to chip in on the trip, maybe four or five of them are pretty good friends. The remaining 25 have only a few things in common with you, including being in the same industry, being at the same company, liking skiing, and being probably within ten years of each other in age and a shared experience of going to college.

When you get to the ski slope, there are plenty of diversions planned to help you relax and feel comfortable among your colleagues. You may rent a very large home together near the slopes, you might stay at a big hotel together. You might all travel up there together in a chartered bus. And when you arrive, there is a cocktail party, and a social, and in the morning there is breakfast, etc. The people who come up who don’t want to ski have board games and the spa.

So, an SNS is about creating artificial and intentional ways of starting a conversation. Office pools and work happy hours. They’re all affectations. There are so many web sites and blogs and so forth out there that successful SNS’s can’t follow that model.

So, when it comes to building a valuable personal profile for an SNS, it is important that the profile isn’t just pretty and isn’t just the equivalent of a questions-based, template-based personal website. For example, modern SNS’s tend to request an exhaustive list of favorite movies, favorite books, favorite TV shows, etc. These are props that allow registered members to find each other based on a love of LOST, 24, or the Matrix.

People love to connect based on shared interest and shared memories. People also love to compete. A friendly competition is always a very powerful way to allow people to both connect and create shared memories.

One of the most successful methods of connecting people in a very strong way is through bringing them together through “pools.??? Fantasy football is popular; Oscar pools, college basketball pools, etc, are very powerful ways of bringing people together and allowing them to “ski??? together, allowing them to interact in a very powerful, visceral, way.

I have friends who have powerful, shared memories, of Oscar and football and basketball pools; even stronger are the shared memories of seasons of fantasy sports, fantasy football in particular. Unlike catching a real game together, fantasy football can happen 100% online.

Virtual online communities are neither virtual nor are they exclusively online. They are real, powerful, communities of real people building real connections that can, and often do, result in marriages, children, businesses, jobs, and emotional support when times are rough.