Once a month, I run a form of private focus group called a monthly poker game.  It’s a handful of my friends from college and after, all men, ages 37-42.  All are college graduates, have kids, live in the suburbs, and I suspect make a good living.  Only one of them besides myself has a job with anything to do related social media or the Internet.  They are what people in the business call, “the normals”.

So, last night I asked, “Have any of you heard of Google+ and how many of you have used it?”  Here were the results, as I went around the table:

• Financial planner: never heard of it
• Home builder: never heard of it
• Criminal defense attorney: heard of it, but didn’t know what it was
• Friend who is a genuine social media expert and professional: using it, but thinks it’s a bunch of social media experts gazing at their navels
• Real estate developer: never heard of it
• HR consultant: heard of it, but didn’t know what it was
• Guy who runs the e-commerce web site for his family-owned retail business: heard of it, signed up, but wasn’t using it
• Lawyer at Microsoft: heard of it and understood that it was a competitor to Facebook, but hadn’t signed up for it
• Me: I have signed up for it, but I am not using it.  Why?  Because it is only tied to @gmail.com accounts, and I use a Google Apps account as my primary Google account.  (I have my @gmail.com account simply forward to my Google Apps account.) Until they fix that problem, it is very unlikely that I’ll be a regular user.

So, what’s that tell you about Google+?

I am in, what I will broadly call, The Internet Business.

If you’re in the business, what you hear a lot is that real-time and social (and geo) are the future.  Recently I heard this notion expressed as (paraphrasing, because I forget exactly where I read it):

Google and the other search engines are becoming irrelevant because, in the future, you won’t get most of your information from web pages, but you’ll get it from other people via social networks.

The prototypical example: the other day Lisa, my wife, called me at the office while she was in the car and said, “hey, traffic is horrible downtown…something is going on…will you look online to see what it is?”

As a dutiful husband, I did.  First, I looked on Google, then some of the local news web sites, and finally searching on Twitter gave me the result I was looking for: there was a protest march blocking one of the avenues.

That was very cool: getting real-time information from other people about what was happening.  There aren’t enough news reporters in the world to give the kind of coverage that everyone with smartphone and a Twitter account can give.

So, I’ll grant you the fact that in the future we might get a lot of information via social networks.  But, real-time and social networks isn’t everything.

Yesterday, I made a trip out to the University of Washington for a TEDx Seattle event.  (I am a UW alum, so it was fun to be back on campus—I hadn’t been there in a few years.)  At the event, I struck up a conversation with a faculty member who I know, and to make a long story short, as part of the conversation Karl Marx was referenced, as in, “well, isn’t that like what Marx said?”

What Marx said exactly is irrelevant to this story.  The real point is that Marx’ philosophies are still relevant today, yet a) they’re are not floating around real-time social networks, and b) they’re only marginally on the web.  Where are they?  They’re in books.

Typically, I read for awhile every night before bed, and last night was no different.  So, like a dutiful technophile, I grabbed my Kindle (for the iPhone) and downloaded Marx’s Communist Manifesto.  As I was perusing it, Lisa enters the story again:

Lisa: What are you reading?

Me: Karl Marx, he came up today and I wanted to remind myself about his ideas.

Lisa: Seems like that’s something that would be better read in a book.

Like usual, she has a point.  Marx seems best read in a café, with a cup of coffee and a cigarette (if you smoke, I don’t).

What I’m afraid of is the more we embrace real-time and social as a panacea, the more we’ll lose and forget valuable and vital ideas and information.  Important ideas that help us better understand the world and cause us to be better educated human beings, societies and civilizations.

I’m not saying real-time and social don’t have value—earlier in this article I have illustrated exactly how they do.  The point is they’re not everything: whether you read Marx on paper in a book or on a screen, you’re never going to read him in real-time or on a social network.

Yesterday I participated in “the shortest marketing conference ever”…The Influencer Project.  I was one of 60 people who discussed how to use social media to build relationships, develop influence and grow reputation.  You can register to receive a transcript and audio recording of the entire event.

The gist of my remarks were that the best way I’ve found to build influence online is to develop relationships offline.  In other words, solidify the relationships you’ve built online by making a “in real life” connection with those people.  Social media is excellent for building a broad network of friends and contacts.  But, in my view, real, genuine deep connections happen in real life.

Now, let me stop all the haters here: I’m not saying real relationships can’t be built online.  There are endless anecdotal stories of this happening, so I’m not going to assert that it’s impossible.  (Along these lines, Mark Pilgrim wrote recently on the notion of 25-year friends.)

I’m simply trying to make this point: if you want to increase your influence online, then the way to do it is offline.  Strong offline relationships will lead to even stronger ones online.

I’m thinking of a conversation I had over Chinese food with a friend who is the manager of a camera shop in Seattle.

Let’s imagine you ran this shop. Obviously, you’ve experienced a lot of competitive pressure from e-commerce over the last decade. If someone knows they want the latest camera gadget there are all sorts of ways to find the best price online for the identical product. These types of businesses have been dropping like flies for some time now.

Lucky for my friend, they’re considered the leading retailer in town, primarily catering to professionals and enthusiasts who expect a high level of service and expertise. As a result, they’ve withstood the competition better than many because these qualities are hard to replicate online.

Of course, with social media these attributes are becoming easier to replicate. Online retailers can develop one-on-one relationships much better than they could have just a few years ago, and social media is still in it’s embryonic stages. Just wait another decade to see what it’s like.

This presents both threats and opportunities to my friend.

On the one hand, the tools of social media make it easier for online retailers to chip away at his competitive advantage by exposing service and expertise online.

Yet, on the other, the opportunity for him is to extend his reach—his customer base, his audience—beyond his local geographic area.

In my view, this opportunity is easier to achieve for him than the threat is for the other guy. In other words, it will be easier for him to put his expertise online through social media than it will for online retailers to develop the expertise.

To start, his store been in the business for 50 years or more…the competition has a lot of catching up to do.  Social media is, at most, five years old.  In addition, the same qualities that have made their store successful—knowledge, service and personal relationships–are those needed for successful customer development through social media.

All that being said, let’s forget social media for now and just think about a topic that has been on my mind quite a bit lately: audience. It was the notion of audience that came to mind over Chinese food.

My friend mentioned that he was going to the Consumer Electronice Show in Las Vegas like he does every year. I asked if he was having any sort of event for fans of his shop.

No, he said, and I pressed a bit further: I’m suggesting not a giant party like the big boys do. Just some sort of a meetup or gathering at a bar…something cheap and easy…for the people who are connected to your store to connect with each other and with you in person.

“No, Scott, you don’t get it. We’re the ones who get invited to the parties, we don’t throw them.”

Our conversation moved on, but I couldn’t help thinking: someone else is developing you as their asset because you’re part of their audience. Although, you’re overlooking an opportunity to further develop an audience of your own.

For your customers, especially your online customers, you would be strengthening their membership in your audience. Perhaps unnecessary, but you can always widen the moat around your island.

And for your vendors, the people who would normally be wining-and-dining you? Seems to me that the extent to which you can make that a mutually appreciative relationship…that you make them part of your audience…well, I don’t see how that can’t benefit you in the long run.

Even backing off from CES, what would happen if once a year my friend threw a party for his audience: his customers. Not a “buy stuff party”, but a genuine “thanks for being a friend of the store party”? To me, this seems like a no brainer.

In a world where audience is becoming everything (because so many products and services are becoming commodities) investments that strengthen the personal relationship you have with your customers seem to me like they would have an enormous ROI. It may be hard to measure directly, but to ensure that your customers don’t even think of looking for a camera elsewhere because they have a friend at the local shop seems priceless.

Ultimately, my point is that Internet and all of the changes it has brought is changing the dynamic of who and what is an audience. My view is that, these days, an audience is quite possibly the most valuable asset, and developing an audience is an important investments to make.

Here’s a really valuable lesson: if you had $5 and 2 hours to make as much money as possible, how would you do it?  That’s the question that Tina Seelig, a professor at Stanford, asked her class.

The nominal lesson that Seelig gains from the experience is that that one of the keys to entrepreneurship is to be flexible and think outside of the natural constraints of the problem.  She split the class in to three groups, and each set them about their challenge:

One group employed a loss-leader strategy: they setup a free bike tire pressure testing station on campus, and if your tires were flat then they offered to pump them up for a small fee.

Another group used an arbitrage strategy: they acquired reservations at popular restaurants, then sold them to people waiting in line.

But, the group that made the most money thought outside of the box: they sold a classroom presentation to a consulting firm that wanted to recruit students from their class.

Photo Credit: Steve McN.

Personally, I see a totally different less in this experience: the understanding that the asset is the audience.

I was making a similar point last week when I talked about how important it is to get your product in front of the right customers:

…once you know your potential customers, how do your reach them? Effectively, this is sales and marketing. Typically, product development types detest the marketing types as slick, do-nothing, blowhards. But, it turns out, they have a pretty tricky job which is, “how do I put my product in front of my potential customers in a cost-effective way”. Turns out this is easier said than done.

The bottom line is that when you have an audience what you have is a set of consumers, and when you have a set of consumers there is inevitably a set of sales and marketing people who will pay to get in front of them.

Of course, this is not revolutionary: it is the fundamental premise by which media companies like Cheezburger work.  Media companies offer content so that an audience is attracted to their broadcast, and then sell visibility to that audience to advertisers.  However, and this is why I’m writing this post, it’s an asset that is often overlooked.

I basically have one thing in mind when I use Twitter:

Listen to what people are saying, so I can help them out if I am able.

Actually, I suppose I have that in mind all the time.  But, it comes to the forefront when using Twitter because the tools (i.e. the different Twitter clients and applications) are still so embryonic, and often make it so difficult.

The introduction of Twitter Lists is a major step forward, in my point of view.  Lists allow me to create different listening contexts which reduces noise.  In other words, when I am listening to my “friends” that’s different than listening to “social media opinion leaders”.

That being said, at the moment there are a few features that would make Twitter immensely more useful to me.  I’ve listed them below in order of priority.

Feature Request #1: Follower Stream

At present, the basic usage model for every single Twitter application is to show the tweet stream of the people I follow.  That is, it shows my followee stream.

However, the means for listening to my followers are really limited.  I can either follow them all back (which I don’t want to do…because they might not be someone I want to follow), or I can very manually listen to their tweets by viewing each of their Twitter pages individually.

What I would like is an app that shows the stream of the people who follow me—my follower stream.

As far as I’m concerned, I feel like this is a major deficiency in the clients available.  If any client—twitter.com or otherwise—introduced this feature, then that app would instantly become my client of choice and I would most likely become it’s loudest evangelist.*

Feature Request #2: Question Filter

I take a lot of pleasure in helping people out, especially by answering their questions.  I think it it would be awesome if there were a Twitter app that showed me a stream of the questions that both my followees and followers asked.  In addition to just looking for question marks, the filter would have to look for key phrases as well.

(Someone suggested using Twitter Search for this, but that doesn’t work because I want to search only the tweets from my followers.)

Feature Request #3: @reply filter

When looking at another users Twitter page, e.g. http://twitter.com/<username>, I want a checkbox that filters out any @replies.

Why do I want this?  When I’m perusing someone’s tweet stream, I’d like to quickly be able see the things they said “out loud”, as opposed to the things they said “to someone”.

Feature Request #4: Increase the DM Character Limit

Why are DMs limited to 140 characters?  In my view, this is just silly.  There’s no reason why I shouldn’t be able to send someone with whom I have a mutual following relationship a message longer than 140 characters.  At present with the limit, at some point the conversation just ends up moving to e-mail which is inconvenient.

Feature Request: Yours??

Those are the things I’d like to see from a Twitter app.  What would you like to see?  Please, leave  your ideas in the comments.

* – I favor web-based apps over desktop clients.  I use many computers, and I don’t want to have to install something on each of them.  In fact, lots of times I’m using computers that don’t even belong to me, so by having everything on the web, I can sit down at any computer, anywhere and instantly have the tools I need.

In the New World (the world of social media, the Internet, online, whatever you want to call it)…which is basically NOW…technical capability on the web isn’t really the limitation any longer.  I’m a web developer, so I hate to say it, but for the most part technology has become a commodity.

When I started doing this 15 years ago (“this” meaning, building web sites as a profession), that basically wasn’t the case: you had to have specialized skills to publish on the web.  Ward Cunningham had introduced the wiki in 1994, but very few people knew about it or understood it. Even so, it took technical skill to set one up.

Then, a few years later Dave Winer’s UserLand introduced Manila which, to my understanding, was the first widely available edit-in-the-browser blogging tool that was provided as an online service.

Now, just look at WordPress.com: 5 minutes and you have your very own self-published web site.

So, my point here is that once technology was the gating factor for simply being online, and the winners in the online marketplace were those who developed the technology the fastest (all other things, mainly quality and marketing, being equal).

But that is no longer the case.  Now, it’s not about developing the technology, but figuring out how to use it effectively.  In some ways, that’s where the New World is right now…searching to figure out the most effective ways to use these widely-available tools.

I remember the first time I looked up something in the c2 wiki, and, as a matter of fact, I am proud to say that I was a Manila user.  But, in both cases I didn’t know how to use them.  I mean, I knew how to operate the dials and make the machine whirr, but I didn’t know how to make the machine do something useful for me.  I didn’t know how to apply the technology.

Which brings me to my point: in the New World, it’s the people who figure out how to make these technologies do something for them that are going to succeed, going to win the race.  And, like any race, it’s the people who do it fastest that will win.

In other words, if you want to win in the New World–and you do want to win, right?–then the way to do it is to become a really fast and effective learner.  Get really good at testing and experimenting, and applying the results to iterate, innovate and improve.  And, get really good at doing it fast.  That’s the path to success.

All the widgets and tools and technologies are just a distraction at this point.  Implementing them, if they’re the right solution for your problem, is largely mechanical.  The name of the is learning as fast as possible.  Everything else is just commentary.

Chris Pirillo by Randy Stewart (@stewtopia)

Chris Pirillo gave a great talk on community at WordCamp Seattle last weekend.  These were the text on his slides, as recorded in my notes.  For the most part, they are verbatim.   [The portion in brackets is my annotation.]

1. Community has always been there, inside all of us. [Connecting to others is a natural part of the human condition.]
2. Community — it’s about the culture, not the company. [Can't just throw a blog platform up there and expect a community to form.]
3. Community is becoming increasingly distributed. [You used to have to go to specific places online, but now with mobile, aggregators, etc., the community comes to you.]
4. Community requires tools that can’t be built. [Passion, caring, engagement, effort.]
5. Community is a commodity, but people aren’t. [The tools for a community, blogs, message boards, etc. are a commodity...but people are the key ingredient.]
6. Community cannot be controlled, only guided. [When you try to control your community it dies.]
7. Community is no longer defined by physical boundaries. [It has always been about who you are, but there were limits based on where you were.  The Internet changes that.]
8. Community will grow it’s own leaders.
9. Community is the antithesis of ego. [It is about *everybody*...Twitter is not a community, Twitter is a commons.]
10. Community is everywhere, inside you. [All of life is making connections, and making connections is part of everyone's life.]
    

At Gnomedex this weekend, and I had a chance to connect with Chris Brogan again.  I met Chris for the first time earlier this spring–we had dinner together in New York.  I asked him to summarize his world for me and he broke it down like this:

1. Typically, he works with enterprise clients because it’s easier to sell one large contract than it is to sell ten small ones.  This reminded me of an old Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin is selling lemonade at $300 per glass.  Hobbes suggests that’s a bit expensive, to which Calvin replies: I only need to sell one.
2. Unlike other marketing consultants, he doesn’t suggest that marketing organizations throw away the “old way” for the “new way”.  Rather, he understands that a company has a sales pipeline and that social media tools have an appropriate place to supplement and improve that pipeline.  This makes sense to me because it’s less threatening and more effective for them.
3. As dinner and our conversation wandered, I realized that I never got the third point: “What’s the third point, Chris?” “I’m glad you asked…that’s my book,” he said, and you’ll have to wait.

Well, the book–Trust Agents–is finally out and available at Amazon.com.  I picked up a copy of it this weekend, and read the first few chapters.  While I can’t offer a full review yet, it’s certainly a must read for anybody who is “[u]sing the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust”

I spent most of Friday and Saturday at Gnomedex 9.0–the most recent version of Chris Pirillo’s conference about the intersection of technology and humanity.  In my view, there are two reasons to attend an industry conference, regardless of industry:

1. To gain some practical skills or information.  For example, attending a training or sales conference.
2. To develop relationships with industry peers.

Without a doubt, Gnomedex is #2.  There were many excellent sessions, but what I value most from the experience is the people I met, and the exchange of ideas.

I’ve come to understand in a more personal way the age-old axiom that “it’s not what you know, but who you know”.  At a certain point, business is not a meritocracy–there are lots of smart people with good ideas.  It’s the relationships you have, and the ability to enlist others to support you, that separates the good ideas from the successful ideas.

Most companies don’t encourage their employees to attend industry conferences.  I would encourage you to make an effort to do so, even if you have to pay your own way.  The connections made at events like Gnomedex are worth every penny of the price of admission.