Social Networks
Entries related to social networks, group psychology, anthropology, and really any of the social sciences.
Managing Personal and Corporate Brands Online
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 01/22/2011 - 15:17When I first started establishing my identity on the Internet, nearly thirty years ago, managing personal and corporate brands wasn’t an issue. The only people on the Internet were from universities and research institutions. There was supposed to be no personal or corporate use of the Internet. My identification was my initials and the host machine I was using, which was a weird amalgam of the location, operating system and on information about the machine.
Things have changed a bit in the past thirty years, and I’ve been thinking a bit about this as I read reports about Keith Olbermann leaving MSNBC and Geoff Fox leaving WTNH. Both of these people have very well developed personal brands, probably more developed as a result of their on air personalities as opposed to their online personalities, but the online persona plays an important part. Online communities have sprung up criticizing MSNBC and WTNH for letting go of these popular personalities.
Most of my work is online. Some people have faces made for radio. Others have voices made for writing online. I have focused on my online personal brand. ahynes1, Aldon Hynes, and Orient Lodge are the three primary aspects of my brand, and I try to tie all of them together, as much as possible using similar avatars, color schemes, and anything else that can make my personal brand consistent.
Now that I’ve taken a position with Community Health Center, Inc. in Connecticut, I need to manage both my personal brand, and what my contributions or to CHC’s brand. What I write here on Orient Lodge is promoting my personal brand. It is expressing my own opinions. What I write on the CHC Facebook page, is intended to promote the organization’s brand.
Different organizations have different relationships between the personal brands of employees and the brand of the organization. For media where an individual’s personality is important, the individuals brand get a lot of focus. For consumer goods, there is less likely to be a personal brand associated, unless there is some sort of celebrity endorsement. For realtor’s the individual’s brand is often more important than the agency they are working for.
The medical field seems a bit more complicated, in that both the brands of the providers and the brands of the organizations are important.
So, as I work on establishing the best relationships between personal brands and corporate brands where I work, I would encourage all my readers to think about their personal brands, the brands of the organizations they work at, and how they relate.
Exploring Pearltrees
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 01/20/2011 - 22:04A couple of weeks ago in a blog about post-delicious content sharing, I briefly mentioned Pearltrees. Since then, I’ve slowly started playing more and more with it, and I’m finding I really like it. I can get it to do much of what I’ve been looking for in a social bookmarking site.
First, the downside. It is primarily flashbased. I’m not a big fan of Flash so I view that as a downside. However, it does gracefully degrade for nonflash users, so it isn’t as much of a downside as other flash based sites are.
A second downside is that, at least as far as I’ve explored it so far, it is very hierarchical. I’m not a big fan of hierarchies, and I’m exploring to see how to subvert them in Pearltrees. Trailmeme seems to address both of these downsides fairly well, but it feels like newer, not quite ready product, and I couldn’t get Trailmeme to easily do some of the things I want, so I’ll save Trailmeme for later.
Now, the things that I like with Pearltrees. You can set it up so that when you treat a URL, the URL shows up in your Pearltrees drop zone. This is nice. You can then drag the URL into wherever you want in your Pearltrees. It has a bookmarking tool, so you can go to a webpage and automatically add it to your Pearltrees, your drop zone, or do a bunch of other things.
You can allow other people team up with you on a Pearltree, which I’ve done with one of my subtrees. You can also set specific icons for different trees. For the different pearls, you can add comments. This is important to me. I hate to go back over recent bookmarks and not be able to figure out why I bookmarked a site. It becomes even more important for collaboration.
When you add a comment, the pearl displays with a yellow ring around it, making it easier to find pearls with comments.
When you click on a pearl and bring it up within Pearltrees, you can click on ‘Pearls’ in the lower left corner to switch back to the Pearltree mode. There are arrows that you can use to scroll through pages you’ve added, and you can quickly add comments to the pages in this mode. You can also use tools to share the page or open the page in a new window. As a final note, you can export the data in XML to use in other systems.
I expect I’ll spend more time exploring this. Check out My Pearltree. If you’re using Pearltrees, drop me a note. Perhaps we can collaborate.
Culture Hacking with High-Quality Knowledge
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 01/15/2011 - 11:32Yesterday, @sebpaquet tweeted, “I suspect some of us will remember 2011 as the year in which high-quality knowledge began to attract attention.” I recently started paying more attention to Seb because of his interactions on Quora, and I find it interesting that Seb’s link on Twitter points back to his Quora answers.
Over the past few years, more and more people have connected via social media. They exchange Farmville and CityVille requests. They post about the weather and kids and what they are having for breakfast. Establishing and maintaining these friendships and connections are part of the underlying social fabric of our lives.
Politicians and marketers have used our social networks to appeal to our emotions to get us to buy political platforms and other commodities. They have used our social networks to get us to act in different ways. Yet the question remains, is that all there really is? Can we use social media to bring about real social change, and not simply more people signing one petition or another? Can we use social media to exchange “high-quality knowledge” that can be used to redesign parts of our social institutions to make our world a better place?
Last March, Seb posted a YouTube video on his blog about How To Become A Culture Hacker. Is the ‘high-quality knowledge’ that Seb thinks people are being attracted to in 2011 knowledge that will be used in culture hacking? Is simply spreading the idea that “some of us will remember 2011 as the year in which high-quality knowledge began to attract attention” a form of culture hacking?
Will you remember 2011 as a year in which high-quality knowledge began to attract attention? Are you finding high-quality knowledge online? If so, where?
Honoring Christina Green
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 01/11/2011 - 07:46Note: Like other areas in this blog, in this post, I am talking about politics and my job. I work for a 501(c)3 which cannot and does not support or oppose specific candidates. The political opinions expressed here are my own and do not reflect those of the organization I work for.
Christina Green was a few weeks older than my daughter, Fiona. Like Fiona, Christina was interested in politics and went to hear her congresswoman at a local meet and greet. Fiona has over heard a little bit about the terrible tragedy that happened in Arizona but still plays with her puppy before heading off to see her friends at school.
Tears come to my eyes as I think about Christina and her family. I do not know how I could handle such grief. I listen to the news and hear reports of conservative talk radio hosts saying that their vitriol has nothing to do with the tragedy and criticizing liberals for trying to use this event to shut up conservatives. They say that it wasn’t their vitriol that caused this tragedy, it was the act of a sick and deranged young man. As I listen to them and think about Christina and think about Fiona, they sound pretty sick and deranged themselves.
The only sense I can make of it is that they are so impotent and their arguments so weak that they cannot express themselves or gather support without resorting to violent vitriol. Perhaps we have reached our generations’ Joseph Welch moment. On June 9th, 1954, Joseph Welch issued his famous line, “Have you no sense of decency sir”. I only hope so.
So, how do we handle grief? We continue on with our daily lives. The news reports say that Christina Green wanted to grow up to help other people. She will not have that opportunity now, so we must take a little more of that on ourselves.
I am blessed. My job is to help others. I am the social media manager for a Community Health Center. Yesterday, I received emails from a person in our Nurturing Families Program with pictures of their most recent graduation and celebration.
I then posted on the CHC Facebook wall
Nurturing Connection is recruiting volunteers to mentor and support first time moms in the Meriden and Wallingford area. Volunteers are asked to mentor a new parent by telephone once a week for a period of three to six months. Ongoing training with the Nurturing Connections Coordinator is offered to each volunteer for support and guidance as a mentor. Please contact Alejandra Godaire at (203) 237-2229 ext 6035.
Can you help first time moms raise children as wonderful as Christina or Fiona? If so, for Christina’s sake, please volunteer.
I also spent some time working on the CHC Community HealthCorps Facebook page. Community HealthCorps is part of AmeriCorps. Volunteers spend a year helping at health center. CHC has some GREAT AmeriCorps volunteers, and it has been wonderful to get to know them, to share information about what they have been doing, and to encourage others to also volunteer with AmeriCorps, and particularly with CHC Community HealthCorps.
I also spent time talking with people at Domus and at Rushford, two other groups that CHC interacts with, about how we can all work together to help make our world a better place.
I still grieve for Christina. I pray for her and her family. I pray for those who seem incapable of working for good without spewing worlds of hatred and violence. I pray for Fiona that our world may become a little safer. I pray for the Nurturing Families volunteers and the CHC Community HealthCorps volunteers, past, present and future, that they may all find ways to live the dream of Christina. Join me in my grieving and prayers.
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The Demise of Delicious and The Growth of Other Knowledge Collaboration Sites
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 01/04/2011 - 21:33Well, everyone has been talking about Yahoo’s decision to pull the plug on Delicious and about where they will share bookmarks next. It seems like a lot of different sites have been going under, and I’ve been moving my data from one site to the next.
I recently saved my delicious bookmarks and loaded them into a few different sites. One was Diigo. I’ve played with it a little, including loading a Chrome extension, but it hasn’t really grabbed my attention. I also loaded them into another site, but I forget which one.
Meanwhile, I’ve started playing with Pearltrees. It is a fun graphical way of bookmarking sites and linking the bookmarks together. It has been more interesting to me than some of the other sites, but I haven’t loaded a lot into it yet. It has some nice collaborative functions, and I’ll probably keep playing with it for a while.
I’ve also been using Rockmelt which has a nice share box on the top, as well as some nice side panels for social media. I’ve found I’m actually using it a bit to keep up on different sites. In a similar way, I’ve been playing with OneTrueFan which also has some nice sharing functionality. Now if only I could get OneTrueFan to share to Pearltrees and Diigo.
Besides organizing links, there is another set of sites that has caught my attention recently. Quora is a well done site for people to ask questions and share answers. Many of the early questions I’ve been reading are around technology startups. However, it seems to be broadening out a bit. Some of that may also be, because I’ve been adding a lot of friends and topics.
Then, there is Fluther. Fluther feels a bit like a me too Q&A site and just isn’t doing it for me. They were acquired by Twitter, which might give them a little staying power, but they remind me a lot of Plurk, another cute Me Too site, that I played with for a while and mostly forgot.
Slightly more interesting is Healthysparx. It is a health oriented Q&A system. However, I always worry about systems like this. How many people are getting inaccurate health information and perhaps making poor health choices as a result based on a system like this?
So, knowledge gathering and sharing systems continue to evolve. While others are focusing on mobile or location aware websites, and mourning Yahoo’s plans for Delicious, it may be that this is a good time to be looking more closely and knowledge collaboration.
