• Why start StrongTi.es?
• What do you think of the other online and offline networking opportunities for independent consultants?
• How is StrongTi.es different to other networking sites? (read more here)
• One of the key features of StrongTi.es is around private groups – can you tell me more about this? (read more here)
• StrongTi.es also uses a unique psychometric called 4G – what is this and how is it relevant to StrongTi.es? (read more here)
• How has the site been growing and what are the plans for the future?

Towards the end, Tia and Andy added their own comments on their own experience of StrongTi.es. In particular, how it has helped their businesses and what other consultants and creatives can gain from StrongTi.es too.

Podcast 2: StrongTi.es – An Independent Network for Consultants and Creatives

Image credit: Acuzio

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Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring… It’s when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen.

Whilst it’s possible to debate the idea that Discourse might be technologically boring, or not, building better communities needs more than just new software tools. Richard Millington also picks up on this line of thought and in response to the Discourse announcement writes the following:

Too often, we jump straight to the conclusion that the platform is the problem. That’s rarely the case. It’s almost certainly the activity you’re doing on the platform that matters.

This is why new platforms have made it easier to build communities, but haven’t helped us build better communities. 

The answers to these questions are far more important than the platform or its features.

I couldn’t agree more with Richard. Combining this quote with the one above from Shirky suggests that when it comes to building better communities, we’re only really at the foothills. Of course, the software is vital and foundational. Without it, online communities are nothing. However, all the software ever gives you, at least in a community context, is a shell or a vessel, rather like the foundations and frame of a house, or the bare chassis of a car. While many successful communities have relied on their members to finish the “building” of their house or car, this method typically creates communities with a number of common features and drawbacks, perhaps best outlined by Shirky here.

Building Better Communities

When it comes to building better communities and in the same breath, helping people create better connections and professional relationships, I think two things have been missing.

1. Facilitation Instead of Moderation

Whilst moderation is almost always a key part of any community, moderation has typically taken the form of things not to do e.g. don’t spam, don’t be abusive etc., rather than actions or commitments that encourage members to actually do or to commit to something. By creating a community with an explicit set of actions and commitments that are encouraged and facilitated from the outset, expectations are set and greater levels of trust, engagement and group cohesion emerge from the outset, at least in the case of StrongTi.es! By putting facilitation and member commitments ahead of moderation, it’s possible to make inroads into the 1% rule and rapidly change the statistics around levels of engagement within a community.

2. Psychological as Opposed to Software Tools

The last 10 or even 20 years has seen a huge degree of evolution in the number and type of software tools that can be used to help build a community. Wikipedia currently lists 21 different categories! The point however is not that the software itself is critical (which it is) but the fact that given the focus on building different software tools, psychological tools have been overlooked and arguably, under explored. This is important because while software tools help shape our interaction from a rules based perspective (e.g. message length restrictions on twitter, displaying information in reverse chronological order on blogs etc.), software remains neutral from a psychological or personality perspective.

Software is Neutral from a Psychological or Personality Perspective

What does it mean to think about software being neutral from a psychological or personality perspective? Perhaps the easiest way to think about this is to consider that in essence, a great conversation is a great conversation, regardless of the software that is enabling it. Likewise, an argument is an argument whether it happens on a chat service, a micro-blogging site or in a forum. The point is that software only has a limited impact on our personalities. Sure, people prefer different sites and software and online conversation is never as rich as face to face, but the fact remains that software tools on their own are a bit hit and miss when it comes to helping us identify and develop new, purposeful professional relationships.

Psychological Tools that Help Build Better Communities

What is missing from this picture are psychological tools that, when combined with the right software tools, help us create stronger, more vibrant and more engaging relationships and communities. Community software is fantastic and Discourse looks like an excellent addition tio the mix but to answer Richard Millington’s question, new ideas around community facilitation and new tools that enhance the psychological experience may provide interesting additions to the tool kit.

From a StrongTi.es perspective, the use of 4G as an input in constructing small, trusted groups is one approach that can enhance community building. 4G makes it possible to create groups of people who share the same or similar values and that individual’s relationships within the group are supportive and cohesive whilst also containing a good mix of personalities. The use of a tool like 4G is quite different from the more traditional laissez faire approach adopted by online communities but in doing so, there’s a really interesting chance to explore new and different ways of building better communities.

Image credit: gerard79

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It might be time to re-examine some of those 4,896 Facebook friends. Or are they “friends?“

Hat tip to Matt Petronzio at Mashable and Jerry King

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Seth Godin does an excellent job of re-framing and illustrating the increased value of connection and leadership and trust in both the digital and wider world. As the internet and social media continue to grow, the fact that connection, leadership and trust don’t scale in the same way serves only to highlight their role and increase their value.

From Seth’s post:

In the abundant digital world, what’s scarce? Where is the economy?

It’s in connection.

Who trusts you? Who wants to hear from you? Who will collaborate and support and engage with you?

These are things that don’t scale to infinity. These are precious resources.

When there was no power during Sandy, people had to decide (for the first time in a long time) if a song on their phone was worth listening to. Was it battery worthy? That’s the analysis that informs the connection economy–is it worth interrupting this person? Is my next action going to build a relationship or take from it? Am I earning trust or burning trust?

Connection and leadership and trust are going to get ever more valuable. Sure, go ahead and shake your head in agreement, but when you get back to work, are you busy working in the scarce universe or trying to build a place for yourself in the new one?

Connection, Leadership and Trust Today

Just as internet 1.0 was dominated by page views, banner impressions and number of user visits, the status quo of today emphasises followers, tweets, likes, re-pins and so on. Whilst this makes sense for retailers, celebrities and consumer brands, when it comes to independent consultants, the real value is in creating sustainable, meaningful and valuable connections for you and your business. Strong ties, if you will.

Image credit: hoefi

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While the New Spatialism metaphor draws inspiration from urban planning and re-conceptualising the built environment, it is the connection with the web that is most interesting.

The Never Ending Treadmill of “More”

Before reading the extract from Stowe, I’d just like to highlight the almost unrelenting focus on size and scale when it comes to the web at the moment. More readers, more followers, more re-tweets, more friends, more likes, more shares and on and on it goes. Of course, if you’re selling to consumers, or a celebrity, or are involved in anything that benefits from large crowds, then this is perfectly understandable.
While these trends and behaviours show no sign of slowing, there is perhaps another way to look at the web and social media, particularly when it comes to our own relationships and the idea of using social networks that operate at a “human scale”. Dunbar’s work around Circles of Intimacy is a great place to start in terms of exploring ideas around this.

A New Spatialism Movement

On to the extract from Stowe:

So, we need a New Spatialism movement, to rethink web media and reclaim the social space that is supposed to be central to so-called social media. Some web media may just remain what it is, like an industrial district at the edge of town. But at least some parts of web media should be reconceptualized, and reconstructed to get back to human scale. Just as New Urbanism is about organizing streets, sidewalks, and plazas to support the growth of social capital, New Spatialism would help us channel interactions on line to increase sociality, and thereby increase the growth of social capital.

New Spatialism is based on the idea that our primary motivations for being online are extra-market drivers: we are not online for money, principally. We have created the web to happen to ourselves: to shape a new culture and build a better, more resilient world. And we need better media tools than we have at present, to make that a reality.

Social networks are really about individuals and their personal relationships with others. So, if web media is to really become social — which it isn’t at present — we need to take what we have learned from other, more social tools, and take another run at social media.

The quote above prompts a number of interesting reactions and complementary thoughts, although it’s perhaps worth remembering that in 2009, the social network/web media landscape is broadly comparable to that of today. Facebook and Twitter were still the largest players, MySpace had lost relevance and Linkedin was and still is the dominant professional network. Admittedly Instagram wasn’t around yet and Google Plus had yet to launch but the relevance of this is debatable given how it’s user numbers are calculated.

An interesting aside, in February this year Stowe acknowledged that his piece in 2009 was ahead of the curve, but that the idea is still relevant and perhaps even more so today:

I wrote about the need to take back the social space on the web, because the massive companies operating there/here want to own it, and by extension, own our interactions. It elicited nearly no interest at the time, but I think this is a case of being too far ahead of the curve. It might be time for a New Spatialism movement. We need to (re)occupy the web:

Nothing Else is Built for a Human Scale

As mentioned in this post, I’m not aware of any sites that focus on small groups and are explicitly built for “Human Scale”. Circles on Google Plus are perhaps the closest to this but given the overall feature set, as mentioned elsewhere, it’s not really a fair comparison.

On a tangent, there’s a mis-match between how we keep and retain relationships with friends and colleagues in the offline, as opposed to the online world. Anecdotally, different relationships come and go as we move house, change jobs, lose address books and so on. There is no informal equivalent of this in the online world. Of course, people will “de-friend” others on Facebook and remove contact details from online address books, but in essence, this is a much more formal process than the offline equivalent.

Less is More when Thinking about Human Scale Social Networks

When thinking about New Spatialism and human scale social networks, it seems that less is almost always more. This holds true whether thinking about restricting group size, or when it comes to the feature sets of different social network tools.

The success of twitter is due in part to the deliberate constraints placed on each tweet. Viewed as a combination of part IRC, part SMS text messaging and part web, Twitter’s success has been phenomenal. Yet at it’s core is a 140 character limit on each tweet. By extension, Twitter is almost certainly the kind of offer that would never have got past the focus group stage, had it been designed by a committee!

Psychological Tools, rather than Social Tools offer New Experiences and Outcomes

Since the rise of the web from the mid nineties, there has been a huge amount of development put into social software tools. Wikis, blogs, forums, photo sharing, internet telephony, twitter-like micro blogging and more have all emerged as new classes of software. What there has been far less of though are any tools or techniques that enhance the psychological and behavioural factors, rather than just the technological.

One of the unique elements of StrongTi.es is the use of the relationship profiling tool, 4G. 4G makes it possible to predict how our relationships with people will evolve in advance of us meeting or getting to know people. It is also possible to use this information to create small groups of people which are optimised for group cohesion and valuable relationships.

By focussing on the psychological as a complement to the technical, 4G enables the creation of a unique group and networking experience, one that acknowledges both the importance of human scale and the need to build strong, meaningful connections with others.

You can read more about 4G here.

Image credit: FSG777 and hartini

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Andy Paice joined StrongTi.es in May of this year and has seen the site develop from it’s very earliest days. Through his business, Natural Insight Coaching Andy works as a coach and facilitator, along with his practices in Dynamic Facilitation and Deep Democracy.

Andy and I sat down to talk about StrongTi.es, how it has helped his business, the value of the 4G tool and how his group has developed a sense of trust, camaraderie and support as the months have passed.

Andy’s Thoughts on StrongTi.es

“Connecting regularly with professionals from a variety of fields through the StrongTi.es social network has been a positive and supportive experience. The group skype calls have developed organically and the trust has grown so that we now offer each other constructive feedback on our websites, exchange business opportunities and ideas. As an independent coach starting my own business the experience has been invaluable.”

 Listen to the Interview with Andy Paice

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Over and above the fascinating background, the interesting part from StrongTi.es perspective is that Shirky outlines a number of factors that are important when looking at creating and growing online groups. Some of these have been incorporated into new sites but others remain elusive and some might argue, have yet to be fully explored.

Learning the Lessons of Online Groups

The first half of Shirky’s piece outlines how previous lessons from building communities are largely forgotten when people come to create new ones. If you’re a fan of internet and community history this is well worth a read,  although the extract below sums things up rather well.

Now, there’s a large body of literature saying “We built this software, a group came and used it, and they began to exhibit behaviors that surprised us enormously, so we’ve gone and documented these behaviors.” Over and over and over again this pattern comes up… Learning from experience about the alligators is lousy, compared to learning from reading, say. There hasn’t been, unfortunately, in this arena, a lot of learning from reading. And so, lessons from Lucasfilms’ Habitat, written in 1990, reads a lot like Rose Stone’s description of Communitree from 1978.

Scale Kills Conversation, a.k.a Metcalfe’s Law is a Drag

The second half of the piece is where things start to get really interesting, most specifically around how scale is a double-edged sword. Shirky writes, “…we blew past the interesting scale of small groups”. As above, this is one part of the online community experience that hasn’t really been explored much to date, at least not as far as I can tell.

The downside of going for size and scale above all else is that the dense, interconnected pattern that drives group conversation and collaboration isn’t supportable at any large scale. Less is different — small groups of people can engage in kinds of interaction that large groups can’t. And so we blew past that interesting scale of small groups. Larger than a dozen, smaller than a few hundred, where people can actually have these conversational forms that can’t be supported when you’re talking about tens of thousands or millions of users, at least in a single group.

One could argue that Google Plus is a good approach in light of this. While this is true to a point given the Circles concept, Google Plus is not explicitly focussed on small groups. I don’t know if there is a limit on the number of people that can be in a circle but I’d be surprised if there was. Or perhaps the limit will be so large that it turns “conversation” into “broadcasting” as per the comments on this post.

Shirky’s Recommendation’s for Creating and Growing Social Networks

The real meat of “A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy” comes when Shirky writes about four things you need to design for. Of the four, the last two are particularly relevant.

3.) Three, you need barriers to participation. This is one of the things that killed Usenet. You have to have some cost to either join or participate, if not at the lowest level, then at higher levels. There needs to be some kind of segmentation of capabilities.

Barriers to participation are very interesting and the lack of them may well be a factor in the famous 1% rule of participation in online communities. The “90–9–1″ version of this rule states that 1% of people create content, 9% edit or modify that content, and 90% view the content without contributing¹.

Despite this “rule of community engagement”, the vast majority of sites still don’t use any barriers to participation. While this is understandable, especially if the site is looking to grow it’s user base, it can often create a sense of emptiness. The flip side of course is that once overcome, barriers to participation serve as an excellent vehicle for ensuring member engagement and a much more active community. Put another way, barriers to participation are counter intuitive, at least if member engagement, rather than size is the goal.

Creating Engagement via Barriers to Participation

From a StrongTi.es perspective, there are two things that are used to create high levels of engagement via barriers to participation. The first evolves around the 4G personality questionnaire². Asking people to complete a personality questionnaire as a pre-requisite to joining a Premium Group on StrongTi.es is itself an interesting barrier. Of course, some people will be put off by this but equally, 4G ensures that small groups are cohesive and that members will enjoy excellent relationships with each other.

The second barrier to participation comes from premium member’s making a commitment to themselves and each other to make a daily status update to their group. This encourages conversation and helps ensure that people who join the small, private groups on the site are committed and are open to supporting and networking with other members.

Combined, the use of 4G plus the commitment to a daily status update makes for a very different and highly engaging small group networking experience.

Creating and Growing Social Networks – The Problem of Group Size and Scale

4.) And, finally, you have to find a way to spare the group from scale. Scale alone kills conversations, because conversations require dense two-way conversations. In conversational contexts, Metcalfe’s law is a drag. The fact that the amount of two-way connections you have to support goes up with the square of the users means that the density of conversation falls off very fast as the system scales even a little bit… This is an inverse value to scale question. Think about your Rolodex. A thousand contacts, maybe 150 people you can call friends, 30 people you can call close friends, two or three people you’d donate a kidney to. The value is inverse to the size of the group…

From a StrongTi.es perspective, this is achieved by deliberately restricting groups to around 10 – 15 members. While this number isn’t set in stone, experience will teach the right number in time. This of course has been done in part due to the research on Dunbar’s Number and the “second circle of intimacy“.

Closing Thoughts

A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy is, for my money a classic piece and one that has stood the test of (internet) time. While some of the ideas within it have been incorporated into other sites, my feeling is that the web as a whole has yet to really push the ideas that Shirky articulated in 2003, whether creating or growing social networks (if I’ve missed any sites that have done this, please let me know!). That said however, this piece has been a big influence in the creation and design of StrongTi.es and time will tell if these ideas specifically and the site as a whole is a success.

Footnotes

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_%28Internet_culture%29

2. For more information on 4G, please visit the Four Groups website

Image credit: ctr

The post Creating and Growing Social Networks – A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy a.k.a. Inspiration for StrongTi.es part 2 appeared first on StrongTi.es.

A nurturing social network is always going to be an interesting topic given some of the ideas behind StrongTi.es. StrongTi.es is all about creating a social network where real, trusted and meaningful relationships are forged and nurtured. In practice, this means ensuring that the small groups people belong to are supportive, collaborative and that they sustain themselves over months and perhaps years.

Tools v. Content

With the above in mind, I was struck by a post from Chris Brogan with the provocative title of “Social Media Isn’t Dead: It’s Boring“. The gist of the piece is that when it comes to social media, people are still talking about ‘tools’ rather than ‘content’. Brogan uses the examples of restaurants, where food is the content and bands, where music is the content. So far so good, but hidden away in the article was a sentence that caught my eye.

Where people have the most ground to make up is in nurturing a network of people who care about what you choose to share.

Given the widespread popularity of other networks, I thought this extract was very telling. In my mind, the assumption must be that if everyone is still, for the most part, talking about tools and not content, then surely there’s something that the tools themselves are missing. Is it a case of an itch that the tools can’t scratch?

Social Tools Speed Up, Rather than Raise the Quality of Our Interactions

Perhaps another way to look at social tools is that regardless of the feature set, from a human interaction and relational perspective, they basically just speed up our interactions¹. Put another way, maybe people are still talking about tools because they believe that it is the tools themselves that will allow them to “nurture a network of people who care about what they choose to share”.

Given the promise of social media and its addictive nature, it’s natural to see why people would continue to explore the tools as a means of improving their own experience.

Ongoing Changes around Social Tools and Social Networks

Although I haven’t read the Impact Equation (it’s on the list!), the book is focussed on;

Helping people get attention, understanding, and eventually a relationship of value

Whilst this is clearly different to StrongTi.es and seems to be implicitly aimed at businesses, it will be interesting to see where the discourse around tools and content develops in the coming years. Building on some of the assumptions I’ve made in this post and with crystal ball in hand, I suspect people will demand more and more from their social tools and social networking. Falls in levels of Facebook user engagement and the rise of App.net as a paid for social network are just two examples that have emerged this year.

How else can we Create a Nurturing Social Network?

Building on these shifts in social tools and the original extract from Brogan, will we start to see tools, content, facilitation techniques or a combination of all three and more actually help us all build stronger and more collaborative relationships? This of course is a question that’s central to StrongTi.es and one that will be interesting to follow over the coming months and years.

Footnotes

1. Of course, this isn’t strictly true. Social tools do open up new ways to analyse data and make predictions e.g. the flu, dengue and stock markets)

Image credit: sveres

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Back in March 2010, I read a great piece on HBR called The Social Media Bubble. Written by Umair Haque, the basic point is that despite the great proliferation of social networks and social media (aka a social media bubble), in reality the internet is not helping us achieve more fruitful, stronger and more valuable relationships.

This extract gets to the heart of the matter.

I’d like to advance a hypothesis: Despite all the excitement surrounding social media, the Internet isn’t connecting us as much as we think it is. It’s largely home to weak, artificial connections, what I call thin relationships.

During the subprime bubble, banks and brokers sold one another bad debt — debt that couldn’t be made good on. Today, “social” media is trading in low-quality connections — linkages that are unlikely to yield meaningful, lasting relationships.

The article then goes on to explore a number of internet-centric themes such as  Relationship Inflation, Trust, Disempowerment, Hate and the Value of Relationships. Reading the comments, I’d argue that responses have been broadly positive and in agreement with the key points in the piece. The point however remains, that despite the promise and allure of social media, building trusted, sustainable, reciprocal and valuable relationships is hard. It’s harder still if you don’t work for an organisation that has a brand and/or an existing network you can leverage yourself.

The Social Media Bubble as Inspiration for StrongTi.es

So what does any of this have to do with StrongTies? One of the key components of StrongTi.es is the focus on building and creating new trusted and valuable relationships. While other sites typically focus on building larger and larger collections of followers, “friends”,  people you already know, or people you’ve only just met (and may never speak to again!), one of the objectives behind StrongTi.es is to deliver on the promise that the internet and social media can be a catalyst for creating new and important relationships.

Delivering against the Promise of Social Media

There are several approaches that the site uses in order to make this possible. In essence though, it comes down to a combination of; small groups of 10 or so people, every group member making a commitment to a daily update and the use of the 4G personality profiling tool. Each one of these factors on their own is unlikely to make much of a difference, but when combined, the three factors complement and reinforce each other.

Let’s take a look at each one in more depth.

Small groups of 10 or so people

Small groups have an advantage over larger groups in that everyone can get to know each other. It’s much easier staying in regular contact with 5 – 15 people, than it is with 50 or 100.

Allied to this is the often quoted research from Robin Dunbar of Dunbar’s Number fame. Dunbar’s Number is typically familiar due to the fact that people can, only average, only maintain friendships with c. 150 people. Over and above this however, there is a related but less well know part of his work which in essence states that

“The next circle is your sympathy group, 12-15 people with whom you have a closer relationship.”

The sympathy group, as illustrated in the diagram, is the core node around which group’s form in StrongTi.es.

Image credit: GlocalReach

Every group member making a commitment to a daily update

Building on the deliberately small group size, the second factor is a commitment to make a daily update. Knowing that a group is small enough that everyone can get to know each other, along with the fact that people make regular updates ensures that the conversation is vibrant and relevant.

The use of the 4G personality profiling tool

The 4G tool is unique in that it makes it possible to predict people’s relationships and group values. The upshot of this being that is it possible to create groups which are optimised to ensure the greatest levels of rapport, cohesion and collaboration for everybody. Given that relationships are key in any small group, 4G is the essential third step in ensuring that StrongTi.es is able to deliver on the promise of social media as a means to build strong, trusted relationships.

The video below offers a brief introduction to 4G.

I Want to Join!

If you like what you’ve read so far, please go ahead and join the site. If you’re not convinced or want to find out more about this new social network, you’ll see more on the homepage and this blog will be updated regularly.

Image credit: quartarolo

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Why Start a New Social Network?

Does the world really need a new social network I hear you ask? Well, if you’re an independent consultant or freelancer, I’d say an unequivocal “Yes”!

StrongTi.es is a new social network that has been designed and built for portfolio workers, freelancers, independent consultants and anyone who doesn’t work as a full time employee for a company or organisation.

Whilst the large social networks are great, they don’t cater explicitly for the networking, support and business development needs of the independent and freelancer communities. How often have you joined a new group or forum expecting it to be buzzing away with activity and useful ideas, only to find the place is like a ghost town with virtual tumble weed blowing about the place? Likewise, there’s no shortage of guides and lists on how to achieve a certain business objective. What seems to be missing from this picture though is a network that understands and knows what its like to be working independently.

A Little Bit of History

StrongTi.es has been up and running since May of this year. About 30 or so very kind souls have helped us iron out the kinks, squash some of the bugs and generally work out what’s useful and what’s not – so thank you very much for your patience, help and feedback. During the past 6 months or so, a lot of learning has taken place around the groups and site experience on the one hand and around the technicalities of running BuddyPress and WordPress together on the other. So far so good, but now the plan is to open the site up to a wider audience.

What’s Unique and Different?

There are a number of things that make StrongTi.es unique when compared to other networks. There is a brief list below, but you can read more if you want to.

• People belong to small, private groups of around 10 people
• Each group has a shared purpose and engaged members – at the moment the topics are around
  • Leadership/Change/OD/Coaching/Development
  • Social Media/Social Business
  • Grow your Own Business
• Groups make use of the 4G predictive relationship tool to ensure the best possible relationships and group dynamics (please see http://fourgroups.com for more information on 4G)
• Everyone makes a daily commitment to update the group of their status, add a comment or to share an article or link
• There is an optional weekly catch up and problem solving call that group members can join.

 I Want to Join!

If you like what you’ve read so far, please go ahead and join the site. If you’re not convinced or want to find out more about this new social network, you’ll see more on the homepage and this blog will be updated regularly.

Image credit: svilen001

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