SOCIAL SILK

Social media has undoubtedly changed the way we share information and our voices, exchange our life stories, lend approval and criticism. There’s no arguing that things are different now, and for better or worse, things will continue to evolve, and at a faster rate than ever before. Of course, social media has its critics, and we are still working on translating social into business results as an industry. One thing that’s clear is that the unfettered, and oftentimes, unfiltered dialogue has changed the way we talk to each other as friends, family, colleagues, sellers, buyers. The cultural values are changing in favor of openness, honesty sharing, accountability and a greater connectedness.

I think social has done a lot for community building as it’s lowered some barriers to entry; communities are more participatory as structure can melt away quickly. They come together and disband to support ad-hoc models of conversation and collaboration. In some ways, communities are multi-platform, as well as platform-agnostic. At the same time, the lowering of barriers has weakened the ties and the loyalty that community members feel towards each other. For example, coming together for a tweetchat or a hashtagged conversation is usually a wonderful experience by which you can build real and lasting relationships with people. However, sometimes these events fall victim to unscrupulous users “hijacking” a hashtag and using it for blatant self-promotion without much concern for the community. Of course, looser connections are partially to blame, as is the fleeting nature of some social channels. As a result, lack of forethought going into tweets generates a consequence-free environment. This consequence-free environment is, of course, erroneous for several reasons ranging from personal branding to professional reputation.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have some big news to share today. I have accepted a new gig as Head of Community at Yammer, where my first day will be a week from today —  next Monday. For those of you that don’t know, Yammer is the enterprise social network that allows employees to collaborate, share knowledge and achieve better business results by doing so. It launched in 2008, and is already used by 100,000 organizations, including more than 80% of the Fortune 500 companies.

To me, this is not just another job. In many ways, I feel like everything I’ve done up until this point was to give me the tools and skills to do this job effectively. Also, all of my prior work has helped me appreciate the importance of internal collaboration and communication, in order to deal with the demands of today’s business.

Read the rest of this entry »

I got to have a chat with my idol and friend Paul Greenberg over the holidays and we had a fascinating discussion about self-interest in life and in business. I’m rather ashamed that it took me a month to publish this post, but I guess that’s how life goes when you work for a startup and are starting a newly married life. Not making excuses; rather, I’m going to focus on publishing more original content for this blog.

So.. Back to self-interest. Since I was quite young, I remember coming to terms with my own, and overall human, selfishness. Since childhood, I remembered how good it felt to do something nice for others, and I wanted to do more of it. The reverse is, of course, also true — when you mistreat others, willingly or not, you feel bad. This is why participating in charitable activities is such a win-win, in my opinion — you get to feel good while doing something good for others. The benefactor of the charitable activity benefits from the product of the activity, while you benefit from the good feeling. Even though you do charitable activities with the goal of helping others, the real reason why people do them, is because they feel good. Even though altruistic readers of this post may get up in arms over this last statement, I do think that self-interest rules all other human emotions.

Read the rest of this entry »