Build your own communities for valuable engagement

Social networks combined with blogs represent opportunities we’ve never had before to network and collaborate. The fact that the networks with huge numbers of people can create a lot of noise ought not prevent us from worthwhile engagement — if we create our own communities on these networks.

Greg Storey (@brilliantcrank), CMO of Happy Cog and former creative director of LexBlog, shared yesterday that as the World Wide Web gets wider, the quality of interaction tanks.

Greg’s post was prompted in part by two friends of his, both widely respected, Jason Santa Maria (@jasonsantamaria) and Erin Kissane (@kissane) ditching Twitter. They found Twitter had evolved into something impersonal, lacking in conversation and even toxic.

Greg laments, acknowledging he may be a curmudgeon (me too occasionally):

There was a time when blogs and their related discussions were engaging, sometimes enraging, but otherwise fun and interesting to take part in. These exchanges of ideas, thoughts, and their related discussions helped to create the foundation of today’s web design and development community. Twitter helped to extended and then eventually replaced the platform for discussion within the community. And our discussions and connectedness has never been the as it once was.

Times have changed in networking and collaborating online. I am not sure anyone could have imagined blogs when we were using Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). I certainly didn’t forsee Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn when blogging 11 years ago.

Blogs, especially Greg’s Airbag, generated significant comments. Some collaborative, others in rage. Blogs were a conversation among themselves. We listened to other blogs in our RSS readers and for longer form responses posted on our blog, rather than in comments on the other blog.

Whatever we were doing, it was, as Greg calls it, an exchange of ideas, thoughts, and related discussion that formulated the business practices we have today. For Greg, design and development. For me, networking online for business development in the law. For lawyers, advancement of legal ideas.

Like it or not, today we have new platforms for community engagement. Facebook and Twitter by far the largest.

It’s up to us to leverage these new social networks to create our own communities — to friend and follow those who can add value to our lives. To develop our own personal feel for how to use these networks to get what we need – that exchange of thoughts and ideas.

I find Facebook an excellent place for professional and personal engagement. My experience is getting better as I work at the “Friends” I have and how I like and comment on what they share.

Twitter works for me because I have worked to follow a relatively small number of people and have grouped many others into Twitter lists for easy perusal.

My blog remains my needed hub. It’s the rock where people can hopefully see that I am of substance on the matters on which I help folks. It’s also a place where people can go for research, generally via a Google search.

My blogging usually follows the same regimin as 11 years ago. Pick up commentary in my RSS reader, like here with Greg, and engage.

But the discussion on what I have posted has moved to Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ (when I share at the last). Engagement, ideas, learning, and advancment of knowledge coming in spades via the folks who follow me on Twitter and who are my Friends on Facebook.

Rather than something impersonal, lacking in conversation and toxicity, I find the discussion to be the most valuable I’ve ever had on the net.

Harness the gifts we have in open social networks. Build your own communities on these platforms. Communities that will serve, as Greg calls them, as inspiring and supportive places for your community to exchange thoughts and ideas.