Ian M Rountree

Copywriter, Project Manager, Digital Marketing

The Bank of Social Capital

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photo by woodleywonderworks

Are all withdrawals from the bank of social capital account closures? Amanda Chapel seems to think so. It seems she may know something I don’t about how these things work, having sent out a tweet earlier today that bluntly calls Chris Brogan a hack.

[tweet] OF NOTE – @ChrisBrogan‘s scam how to, “Trust Agents,” falls to #3,133 in Books on Amazon. Surely a case study in short-lived fad.

In defence of hacks everywhere, let me riposte. Chris-gate has already with a lot of feedback, and it may certainly have affected Brogan’s credibility in the community centred around him, but does it prove the work he does is a fad? No. Does it make the work he did on Trust Agents with Julien Smith nil?

We bandy the idea of social capital around, but I’ve yet to hear anyone compare the concept to banks. We all know how stable they are lately. The reason this goes together is probably pretty simple; you have money/capital, you bank it somewhere. Duh. Only instead of institutions, we bank in ourselves.

Or do we?

We amass social capital with our every action. The ways we do this are fairly complex. And talked about. And acted on. But what we all inevitably see is people dropping the ball and making mistakes. Some of this is positioning and consistency. Everyone makes aberant posts sometimes; we forget to phrase things in a positive manner, we make too strong a request for action or perhaps we even demand, rather than request. Perhaps, in some instances, So often, when we run into a trusted image missing a step, we treat the transgression as a cardinal sin, fault the person for their mistake and terminate all contact.

Idiots. Yes. You, me, we’re both guilty of this.

People mess up. It’s total hubris in our own judgement of character to believe that this final judgement is an accurate, appropriate response to a single faux pas. Do I think Amanda Chapel’s a jerk? Yes. Does this mean I’ve stopped following her Twitter feed? No. Similarly, I’ll continue to read Chris’ blog, and comment as I feel is appropriate, because the usefulness of the information – the positive balance he retains with ME still outweighs how annoyed I’ve been with his recent trend toward self-service. But a single account-closing action still hasn’t occurred.

Because, as much as it’s easy to conceive of the Bank of Social Capital being you, and you, and me, all of us holding our own money in a virtual pillow case, our actions in the social network actually increase the value we have for and with others. The trouble in calculating this actual value is that we don’t hold the ledger. Every single person we interact with does, on our behalf. Just as we hold all of theirs.

Community is not a zero-sum game. Believing we can proclaim that any person’s single actions devalue them so thoroughly they become wholly irrelevant is pride at its best.

Personal Branding vs Brand Democratisation

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photo by Kane

Every time I hear the intro for the Six Pixels of Separation podcast (I’m that other listener), I hear Mitch Joel‘s voice rather reedily commenting on how “Consumers have never been so powerful” and making the note about how brand democratisation is a pre-eminent force in commerce these days.

Think about that for a second, and put it in the perspective of other marketing  bloggers talking about personal branding. Did you think they were talking about the same thing? For a while I did, but there’s a missing step here.

When Mitch talks about brand democratisation, I take it to mean the efforts that large corporations undertake to involve people with their branding, the community essence that is becoming so popularised thanks to the internet. How brands are taking advantage of Facebook pages, and what that means for the 350 or more million users. It also brings me to his own devil’s advocate position about the jump that people have in a lot of cases not yet made in recognizing the difference between collection and engagement. When brands, companies, engage in these kinds of shifts toward democratically developed business which is at the end more profitable and more beneficial to all parties. It’s a full-win situation.

But where does personal branding fit into this?

Over the last week, I’ve been watching the fallout of Chris Brogan’s Timberland rant. From the comments on his own blog post, to the reactions of others – Chris’ own admission of spazz and Justin Kownacki’s deconstruction of the situation come to mind – and the best part of it comes from the latter post, where Justin says “Online, everyone is an axe murderer.”

The short of this argument is that with the tools we as individual people have at our disposal, it’s possible for everyone to reach massive plateaus of celebrity in whatever circle we travel, if we do a good enough job of creating our own brand, controlling our presence, we can become hyper visible to whatever democratised brand we wish to engage. We can act as the spearhead for our followers to take action and become catalysts for change. It doesn’t mean we all get to be one-blog lobbyists, but it does mean that with enough care and feeding of our communities – both those we take part in and those we create – we can begin asking them for backup in our own endeavours.

It’s worth noting that it becomes very easy to fall into the trap of believing your own press. As Brogan says in his mea culpa about the Timberland post:

We talk about how individuals can earn trust and build reputation, but it never occurred to me that people might see others (me) as a trust agent in most things.

What Chris is getting at here more specifically is that we (those of us who are building and fostering community and networks) have to be wary of our own effects on the web we build. Spiders with heavy feet don’t catch many flies once they’ve ripped their nets. If you’re building your personal brand with anything in mind, any aim other than to get yourself out there and establish who you are online, eventually you’ll hit a crossroads like Chris’. Which direction will you go? Will you have caution and stray on the side of silence? Or will you err on the side of veneficus vox and ask too much of your community?

And, out of curiosity, what would you say Chris did by voicing his troubles? Or about the method by which he responded, not just to the criticism, but the constructive and informative mea culpa? Has Brogan jumped the shark, or has he done exactly what this new system of democratisation and personal branding is set up to address: called out a problem and received an appropriate, if ad hoc, response?

Corporate brands, democratic brands, and personal brands are very different, but the differences between these concepts are becoming an integral part of how the individual can interact on a new plane with a business. Each of the three have authority for different reasons, and authority must be earned; it can never be out and out claimed.

Who do you give the benefit of authority to? How much time to you spend considering why?

Caveat Lector.

Why People Lock horns Over Twitter

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Photo by Jennifer Boyer
Photo by Jennifer Boyer

If you do anything in public, you likely get a lot of exposure to arguments. I’m not necessarily talking about actual, empirically provable points here; social animals love tests of prowess, and people place a lot of weight on debating skill. People grumble over parking spots, evangelise for coffee spots and hotels, There are many varieties of tiff, but one of my favourites to stumble on is people who are arguing for the exact same point, from different positions.

This week, Robert Scoble picked on Chris Brogan, about the king of You’re Doing It Wrong’s Twitter habits.It was a running gag from the Web 2.0 Expo, but if the helpful advice in the comments is any indication, not a lot of people got the joke. Scoble being usually so inscrutable, it’s not surprising.

The crux of the argument (I’m picking, here, because this rift is everywhere) is that both of these guys, very smart dudes that they are, picked up the same instrument and proclaimed it was useful for two different songs. And we’re not talking about any froittoires here, we’re talking a ninety-voice electronic keyboard. From the original:

Because I can’t find his good blogs and videos. Why? Because he does so many conversations. Look at his Twitter home page. All you see is @replies. This is what makes Brogan Brogan, because he’s going to answer you no matter how popular he gets. But, that means I can’t find the good stuff he publishes.

Big deal, right? If you’re having a conversation, it’s a conversation. Obviously this appeals to me, look at my Twitter home page and you see a lot of the same thing. As Chris says in the speech Scoble had embedded;

There’s this great opportunity for serendipity. It’s the one thing that I use to describe Twitter that’s different than what we were doing before. […] Twitter does add new people all the time. […] There’s so much value in not what your friends are saying, but in what people are saying topically about a location. […] What should you be doing on these platforms? Number one, you should be listening far more than you should be worrying about what to say. Spend twelve times as much time talking about other people as you do talking about yourself.

Ah, there we are. Chris just told us what to do. Now, what he’s suggesting is what anyone who knows anything about being a compelling conversationalist has been saying for ever: be the one asking the questions, and you’ll be the one people are interested in. How often does Brogan answer questions? All the time, when asked. How often is he asking questions of others? All the damn time. Forget the @replies here, every link I’ve seen is a retweet – but everything good always ends up being a directed, short, worthy of thought question. It’s a very potent approach to beginning and maintaining conversations.

But why does this particularly bother other people? Well,

Actually it was that realization that made me open up two new Twitter accounts: scobleblog is a feed of just my blog posts and scoblemedia is a feed of just my videos and podcasts I’m on.

It’s this approach that finishes the entire argument for me, and really tells me it’s all about the same thing. Scoble has a massively tech-based background. He works at Rackspace after all. It’s no surprise that he sees Twitter as a massive opportunity to aggregate wisdom and distill information into indexable, findable glory. You know what? He’s totally right.

But what about Brogan? Well, he’s a media dude. He’s all about human business. Published a book about the things companies – from the people up – can better themselves by being trustworthy agents of change. Does anyone question why he’s doing what he does, connecting with people every chance he gets, communicating with people, being a person before a businessman? Here’s the kicker. He’s totally right, too.

So where does this leave us? Simple: “To someone with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” This is how everyone seems to approach social media as a whole, not just Twitter. Truth is, web applications are more like Swiss Army knives, every one of them. And then they connect, as Facebook and Twitter do, to other applications. That’s where the real fun begins. But that’s another post.

Convergance and Blogs

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The first three blog posts I read this morning are all about problems with scaling public image. Is there a trend I’m missing, somewhere? Ok, example:

Chris Brogan, Chewbacca of Marketing – “How Frameworks Improve Your Business Thinking”

Mitch Joel, Han Solo of Marketing – “The Irresponsible Marketer”

Seth Godin, perhaps Yoda? – “Launching Brands in Public”

Now granted, Seth’s post is about a new service, but it raises a valid point about controlling versus organizing public opinion. Mitch, as always, has some good insight into the shift between old-format and new-format, which ties fairly well to Seth’s idea about aggregating information and providing it to people who are actively looking for it. And then, of course, is Brogan, naturally providing a layman’s perspective on business.

So what’s my point?

If you want to learn about business, read a business blog. If you want to learn about better business, find a number of different voices and read all of them, at once, daily. It’s like a focus group, only it’s free, and you’re not paying top dollar for recognized experts.

It’s even better when you can pull convergance out of the air like this. I know Chris and Mitch have some ties – but their sites and their clients are their own; and I’m fairly sure Seth doesn’t interact with them often enough for there to be real association. But sometimes, they all build on each other’s work. Can you spot the co-operative point? I’ll check in after the break to see if you’ve done your homework.