I was talking to an independent consultant who wanted to get better at using social media to expand his network. I suggested that he put together articles and presentations that he can share with his contacts (mostly executives) that are useful and that they would probably share with the right people in their companies.

Thinking about this, I realized that imagining the ideal scenarios can help people recognize the value of investing in sharing knowledge or building a social media presence. You can say that sharing is important, or you can imagine a story that goes like this:

CEO of small business: Oh! It’s an e-mail from __. He always sends me useful information, so I’ll take a look at this one. Hmm, this whitepaper looks like something our company could learn from. Let me send it to the director in charge of that.

Director: Hmm, an e-mail from the VP, I better read it. Ah, an article that looks like it will help with one of the challenges I’m currently working on. Hey, this guy has some great tips. I wonder… Oh, he has a website with other articles and presentations! Great. I’m going to flip through the presentations that look immediately useful. I should probably bookmark this site so I can come back to it later. Hey, he’s on Twitter. Let me check out what he posts… He’s got an upcoming seminar – that looks interesting, maybe I’ll attend. I think I’ll follow him on Twitter so that I can hear about other updates. Hmm, maybe he can do some consulting for us for this project – that would save me a lot of time, help me get the results I need… (and if he’s as good as he seems to be, I’ll look like a star).

Someone else searching on the Net: Hmm, I need to learn more about ___ if I’m going to be able to deliver those results. Oh, here’s an article that might be useful. Those are good points. Let me save this. I wonder… ah, he has other articles and presentations. Those are useful too. Let me read them… I wonder if he’s available to do some consulting. Oh, look, he’s in Toronto too. That makes it easier. I should give him a call.

Think about what success looks like. Tell yourself a story about what could happen. It’s probably less about just increasing the number of your followers or posting at least one blog post a week, and more about actions and results. What’s that story? Walk through it in your head, check if it’s plausible, and identify the pieces you need to build in order to make it happen. Doesn’t investing in those pieces make more sense now that you can see how they’re related to your end goals?

That led me to think about the ideal stories I tell myself. When I write for my blog, this is what I hope will happen:

Me: “Ah! Now I understand things a little better. Let me go try that and see what happens. … Yup, that works, and here’s how I can make it even better.”

Someone: “I need to figure out something. Let me search… Hmm, that look interesting, let me try that. Hey, that works. Oh, that looks useful too. And that one! And that one! I’m going to add this to my feed reader. … Oh look, another post from Sacha. She reminds me that it’s possible to be cheerful and have fun doing awesome things. =) Hmm, I know someone who might find this useful too…”

Someone: “Can you help me with __?” Me: “I could’ve sworn I’ve written about that around here… Ah, there it is! Here’s the link.” Someone: “Awesome. Thanks!”

What are the stories you imagine, and what do those stories help you learn about what you can do to make them happen?

Stian Håklev is passionate about education – and in particular, the richness of different cultures and perspectives. Here are some notes from a fascinating conversation I had with him at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, where he’s doing his PhD.

(larger version)

… and it wasn’t all questions, either – he has lots of ideas!

You can read his thesis at reganmian.net or check out the peer-to-peer education site he’s working on, where they’ve partnered with the Mozilla Foundation and other people to offer web development and other courses. Sample creative assignment: draw the Internet!

Stian’s passionate about open access, open research, multiculturalism, peer-to-peer education, and other interesting things. He’s hooked into Mozilla Foundation and the Center for Social Innovation. What else can he look at and who can he talk to? Possibly related: Open Notebook Science, LearnHub, Third Culture Kids, DemoCampToronto (to show his peer-to-peer education site and ask for tips?)

Do these questions strike a chord with you? Get in touch with Stian and make cool stuff happen! reganmian.net

Do you miss the serendipity of hallway conversations at conferences and events?

Online conversations can be more powerful than offline ones. Here’s why I think so.

In person, you start with people, and you look for common topics. Conversation participants all see each other. The possibilities are limited to who’s there and what you can discover in time.

Online, start with the topic you’re interested in. You find people, and people find you. The conversation goes on, asynchronously, for weeks, months, years.

I rarely talk to just one person about something. Most of the time, other people are interested. These people may have never met. The conversation brings them together. We learn even more.

I rarely talk to just people I know. Often, someone de-lurks and joins the conversation. People come in through searches or links. The conversation is much more open, more far-reaching.

This makes for interesting conversations. Amorphous, because I don’t know who’ll be in it or when it will end. Serendipitous, because we make unexpected connections. Efficient, because sharing serves many.

Do your online conversations look like this? How can you take advantage of being online? How can we translate these strengths into the offline world?

• I put “Sacha Chua, @sachac, livinganawesomelife.com” on my nametag because putting “Sacha Chua, @sachac, sachachua.com” felt a bit repetitive. It made a number of people smile, although some people asked me if I was no longer working with IBM. I told them I’d gotten an alternate domain name for my blog because it’s a bit easier to spell.
• Kristan Uccello pointed me to the red glowsticks near the stage. I stuck one in my hair. That and my white blazer made me slightly easier to spot in the club, although it was still quite, quite packed.
• Ian Irving told me about some Twitter data analysis and visualization he’d like to do. I promised to send him some information about Many Eyes, Wordle, and other visualizations.
• I introduced Elena Yusunov to Patrick Dinnen, who regularly spends some time at the Center for Social Innovation. Elena is interested in social media for nonprofits, and would like to check CSI out. I should get Elena and Jane Zhang together for coffee next week. Also, I should check out those capoeira lessons.
• I told James Walker about the Drupal hacking I’m having a lot of fun with at IBM. =) I also told him about hacklab.to after he mentioned that he occasionally drops by the Center for Social Innovation to hang out and print stuff.
• Saleem Khan mentioned spampoetry.com.
• Eva Amsen mentioned that she’d heard about me from Jen Dodd and Michael Nielsen, and that she was one of the organizers of SciBarCamp. I think she’d have a great conversation with Elena Yusunov about organizing events and about social media for nonprofits. She also explained the meaning of her Twitter ID, easternblot – it’s a biochemist secret handshake thing.
• Sunir Shah asked me if I’d been to Toastmasters lately. I haven’t, but I might try exploring some of the downtown clubs with him after he’s done with house-hunting.
• James Woods said he’d been to Mauritius, and he found it interesting to hear unexpected people fluently speak French. Gabriel Mansour mentioned that Sameer Vasta had been to Mauritius recently.
• Gabriel Mansour told me about http://cupcakecamp.ca, which looks interesting. I promised to e-mail the details to Greg Frank, who is interested in cooking but doesn’t bake much.
• David Crow’s 15-month-old daughter is getting quite good at sign language, and tends to string signs together like sentences.
• Adam Schwabe turned out to be the guy doing my usability test this week. We talked about the challenge of finding out what other people are doing when it comes to Web 2.0 at IBM. I promised to send him info about our upcoming Web 2.0 for Business community call, and to connect him with a few people. (I actually talked shop at a party; meep!)
• Brent Ashley’s on his third ultra-mobile PC. He handed down the rest to his two daughters. Reminds me of the way my dad goes through Swiss knives…
• Kieran Huggins should definitely look into getting one or two external flashes. They’re portable and they really make a difference in pictures. For photography awesomeness, buy glass (lenses) and light (flashes). And practice, of course, which he obligingly let me do.
• Mike Miner runs into all sorts of interesting stories as a producer. He wants to go to Africa or South America.
• Pete Forde’s planning a dinner party. I’m looking forward to it!
• Bryan Watson can dance swing! That was lots of fun. I may have accidentally stepped on someone’s foot while finding this out, though.
• I promised to e-mail David Crow and Jay Goldman about volunteering to help out with events so that I can learn how to organize external events.
• I caught up with or met a whole bunch of other interesting people. =) (Hooray! I’ve been in Canada long enough to have old friends!)

… I feel like a gossip columnist with all these names in my blog post. Odd!

Also, I need to port my BBDB-auto-hyperlink-to-people’s-blogs-or-websites code over to Org mode. Ah, Emacs…

Ushnish Sengupta was interested in exploring social media consulting. He picked my brains over hot chocolate at the Bluestar Cafe. Here are some rough notes from that conversation:

• The first tip I gave him was to blog. I think it’s a good idea for consultants to keep a blog because it’s an easy and nearly-free way to help establish credibility and build connections. The blog can contain success stories, articles, lessons learned, announcements of upcoming events, tips, tidbits, and other pieces of information that can help both potential and existing clients. Besides, it’s awfully hard to do social media consulting if you’re not immersed in the space and you don’t have a presence.
• Business cards: I told him about putting pictures and interesting conversation hooks on business cards, showing him mine as an example.
• Ushnish was interested in potentially getting a PhD looking at consulting services and similar areas. I recommended that he check out services science. A recent conference we both attended (CASCON) had a number of sessions about the topic, so I suggested reviewing the proceedings to find people and topics of potential interest. I also recommended that he get in touch with people like Kelly Lyons – she’s currently doing research in this field.
• Twitter backchannel: He asked me how the City of Toronto’s Web 2.0 Summit went. I told him about the interesting conversations that happened in real life and on the Twitter backchannel, and suggested that the next time he’s at an event, he should find the tag that people are using and tune in to search.twitter.com for some lively conversation.
• Professional networking: He asked me which professional social networks I’m on. I told him that I’m active on LinkedIn and I use it to connect with people so that I can find out about changes in e-mail addresses and positions. He asked me if I was on Plaxo. I told him that I never got into Plaxo because it started off with a bad value-proposition for people who entered their data and that it had been fairly spammy. I haven’t looked into Plaxo Pulse in detail, but LinkedIn and my personal addressbook handles most of my needs.
• Multiple networks: He asked me about being on multiple networks and how networks become popular and then fade away. The key things I shared with him were that ideas and skills tend to be transferrable between networks, and that an external profile such as a personal site or blog is important because it ties all the networks together. I also told him about something I picked up from Rahaf Harfoush’s talk on the Obama campaign: produce a piece of content and then distribute it through different channels.
• Partnership: Ushnish asked me if I preferred to work with people I know well or if I preferred to work alone. I told him that I definitely prefer to work with other people because I learn much more in the process. I also told him that I actually enjoy working with people I don’t know that well yet, because it gives me an opportunity to develop a new relationship and spread the skills. If I’m asked to give a presentation, I often look for ways to enable other people to give the presentation, perhaps with a little coaching from me. I want other people to develop wonderful skills, too.
• Teaching as I learn: The point on partnership segued into a discussion of how useful, fulfilling, and effective it is to try to teach everything I know how to do. I recapped some of the points from “If you can, teach; If you can’t teach, do“.
• Event management: I told him that I’m interested in learning more about hosting external events in 2009. Alex Sirota does a lot of events for the New Path Network (which Ushnish belongs to), so I might see if I can use some of those events as models.
• Address book: Ushnish was curious about how I manage my network. I told him about my wonderful addressbook setup (automatically tracks who I send mail to, automatically inserts notes into my mail), and the visualization improvements I’d like to make. I also told him of my plans to try porting some of these ideas to Drupal so that other people can experiment with them.
• Social media and change management: I told him about the spectrum of social media consulting, and that organizational change plays a large part in it.
• Rough notes: We ended the conversation with a homework assignment: he’s supposed to blog the lecture he was also going to that day, and perhaps the notes from the conversation as well. I reassured him that rough notes are fine, and that he’ll make things clearer and clearer as he writes about them again and again.

What did I learn?

• I seem to have learned something about social media consulting after all. =) Hooray! I need to package that into some kind of internal blog post and presentation so that my coworkers can make the most of it.
• I should find a way to package up these social networking tips into a blog post, a presentation, and maybe an event.
• In an alternate future, I could probably keep myself very busy building and selling tools for making all of these things easier…

• Spam haiku – Jeff has the book
• Richard Florida – I hadn’t recognized the name, but I remember reading The Rise of the Creative Class.
• Jeff – Story about Bell landline problems, difficulty with system, running outside and talking to a Bell technician who helped fix it
• Gregory told us about this London restaurant that projects dishes and uses a touchscreen table.
• Writing and reflection
• Diffusion of innovations as applied to career resources
• Brand and clarity

Politeness

I’m going to start off with a story about embarrassing myself, because it’s something worth thinking about, I learned a lot through it, and it shows you that I’m human and there are many things you can teach me. <laugh>

Jeff invited me to this talk, and I was really looking forward to it. I had been somewhat frazzled that afternoon (oy, paperwork!), though, and by the time I arrived at Rotman, I realized I didn’t clearly remember what Jeff looked like. I couldn’t pick him out of the rapidly growing crowd. I did, however, see a few other people I recognized a bit (including Darren from the summit I’d attended the day before), and after some reintroductions, we sat near the front of the audience. (More on this later; see “The best seats in the house”)

Darren brought a number of friends over, so the seats in front filled up quickly. I kept looking around, but I didn’t see the people I was looking for – Jeff, who had invited me, and Sabrina, who I had met on the subway last Monday. I suppose it would’ve helped if I had a clearer memory of their faces – another argument for using a smartphone for taking people’s pictures and associating them with my address book records. ;)

Jeff walked up to me and reintroduced himself (thank goodness!), and promised that we’d get together afterwards for coffee or tea so that he could pick my brains and introduce me to his other guests. Then it was time for the session to start. =)

Over tea later that evening, Jeff told me about possible generational differences in etiquette, and how he had been surprised (but not offended because he was expecting these generational differences) that I hadn’t sought him out–or lacking that, saved seats for him and the other guests. In retrospect, it would’ve made sense for me to stand near the back and look for him (or look obviously lost, in which case I’m sure he would’ve found me easily). He asked me what it looked like from my perspective, and I told him about the interesting conversation I found myself in with the folks I’d met at the other event, my understanding that he’d probably be really busy as an organizer, and how I wasn’t sure how many other guests he had invited or who they were. =) It all worked out quite well, although I’m sure I must’ve blushed quite a bit.

There, Jeff – it’s not that Generation Y isn’t aware of these things. It’s mainly that I’m a little fuzzy-brained when it comes to people’s faces, and that I trusted we’d meet up some way or another during the event – which we did, thanks to you. =)

The best seats in the house

I like sitting in the front row, near the center aisle – the best seat in the house for most lectures, seminars, and other events. This usually means that I need to arrive early, which also allows me to chat with other early-birds, the event organizers, and the speakers. Even when I arrive late, though, I sometimes still squeeze into a seat near the front if the talk hasn’t started yet. There are usually a couple of empty seats there, and I still get a great view.

There are several benefits to sitting in front, and you should consider these the next time you’re attending an event. =) Here are a few of my reasons:

• People who sit in front tend to be really interested in the topic. I can’t count the number of great conversations I’ve had with people, just chatting with people around me before the start of an event. (Yes, I still think of myself as shy. I figure that other people are shy too, so talking helps people settle into the event a bit.)
• I’ll probably think of a question for the talk, and it’s easier for organizers to see me and hand me a microphone if I’m near the front or near an aisle–or sitting front-and-center, a real keener!
• I can help influence the energy of a speaker or of the room. I love actively listening to sessions–being interested and enthusiastic, reacting to what’s being said, keeping my body language open and encouraging. As a speaker, I also really appreciate it when other people bring a lot of energy to the room, too.
  

  Story: I was going down on an escalator at a research conference and a guy on the other escalator waved to me and told me (quickly) that he wanted to talk to me. After he doubled back and met me at the other end of the escalator, he explained that he was giving another session soon (I told him it was one of the ones I was looking forward to). He asked me to sit in the front row. I was surprised by this request, so I asked him about it. He told me that he really appreciated my energy and enthusiasm, and that I made it easier for him to speak! So next time you’re in the audience, think about the fact that you can influence the speaker, and through the speaker, the entire mood of the room. =)

• I’m in a good position to overhear interesting questions asked after the session. =) I like standing on the periphery of the crowd that usually gathers around speakers after their sessions. People ask all sorts of interesting questions, and I learn quite a lot from what people are interested in and how the speakers respond.
• Sitting in front keeps me more engaged.

I’m not just looking at the slides or hearing a voice come out of the speaker system. I’ve got a full view of what’s going on. Hey, if you had rink-side tickets to a game, wouldn’t you take them too? =)

Conscious competence and knowledge sharing

We talked about the Johari window, or how learners progress through:

1. unconscious incompetence – when you don’t know what you don’t know
2. conscious incompetence – when you know that you don’t know
3. conscious competence – when you need to pay attention in order to do something, and
4. unconscious competence – when you can do something without thinking

Jeff shared how he had used this concept when applying for the position he currently has. The discussion reminded me of the challenge of expertise: it’s difficult for experts to share what they’ve learned because they’re no longer conscious of what they do and they find it hard to explain all the steps. (Try explaining something you know how to do to a five-year-old.) When you’re unconsciously competent in something, it’s difficult for you to teach it to other people because you don’t think about all the things you do in order to achieve a result. People can still learn by observing you, and if you think about things and consciously break them into smaller steps, you can still teach other people, but it takes effort.

This discussion reminded me of one of the things I recommend to organizations interested in blogging and other forms of knowledge sharing. People are often interested in these tools as a way of sharing expertise, and they hope that they can get subject matter experts to blog or contribute to a wiki. I think that a much more practical and effective way to approach this, though, is to encourage learners to share what they’re learning. Not only do they get the immediate personal benefits of understanding topics more clearly as they take notes and find ways to explain things, but they also help other people learn and build their own reputations at the same time. Get the newbies to do the sharing, with subject matter experts reviewing things for accuracy and clarity. Everyone will learn more. Going back to the Johari window – you’re enabling the consciously competent to teach the consciously incompetent who want to learn, and in the process, you help everyone move forward.

Tied in with that idea of knowledge sharing, then, is the reflective practice of blogging or writing what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, and how you can do things better. That conscious, continuous attention to improving competence is one of the key effects that regular, intentional blogging (or wiki-ing, or whatever else) has on a person’s skills. Jeff was initially discouraged by the thought of trying to find an hour each day for blogging, but maybe if he spent an hour each week telling stories into a voice recorder (or his Blackberry) or writing down his weekly review, he’ll start enjoying the benefits of this approach.

The conversation also reminded me of another reflection I posted: “If you can’t, do. If you can, teach.” I shared with them how I’m always trying to teach myself out of a job, sharing as much as I can of my conscious and unconscious competencies so that other people can learn and so that I free up more of my time to focus on things I don’t know how to teach yet. For some people, this is a scary thought because job security means differentiating yourself through knowledge or expertise, not trying to bring everyone up to your level. For me, I think that greater security and fulfillment comes from helping lots of people grow, and because I also get to practice my ability to learn and share, I’ll have plenty of things to keep me busy. =) I create more value and I have more leverage on that value by sharing with others, and that means more opportunities flow to me and other people as well.

Speaking of conscious competence – it’s really cool that Jeff consciously develops his social networking skills. He’s curious about the way I do it, too. I’ve blogged a fair bit about social networking, and I’ll keep posting my notes as we all learn more.

Plenty of other notes about technology adoption, social bridgebuilding, storytelling, and things like that, but I need to work on some other stuff first. More to follow!