The Brian Shaler Blog

Continuing the conversation on the Phoenix technology community, I wanted to describe what has been happening in the last year here in Phoenix.

More meet-ups are taking place around the Valley (of the Sun) and more people are attending them. Refresh Phoenix has been my favorite tech-related meet-up during the last two years and often draws the most people. Anywhere from 20-40 people from as far as 60 miles away would come out every month on the first Tuesday of the month.

This year, there has been a trend of increased attendance at Refresh Phoenix and other local gatherings. Refresh Phoenix seems to be maintaining an average of 40-50, jumping up to about 80 in February on Demo Night. There were about 47 people at last week’s Social Media Club Phoenix meeting, which was great to see.

Every Friday for the last few months, anywhere from 4-10 people have been meeting up at various local independent coffee shops. The meetings are casual, open, and planned in an ad-hoc style by whoever feels like showing up. They are organized on Twitter, sometimes as late as Thursday.

Meet-ups seem to be benefiting greatly from Twitter’s communication mechanism. It’s easier for people to hear about events taking place in their area, as long as they’re connected with enough people in their area.

Twitter is a catalyst for Phoenix. Phoenix has no shortage of talented and interesting folks. The problem is the network. People don’t know there are thousands of others in the city who share their interests. Twitter allows people to connect with a broader network and, most importantly, be subjected to conversations between people inside their circle with people outside their circle. This simple trait of an open communication platform does wonders for introducing people with similar interests to each other.

Thanks to Twitter, people are connecting — at least digitally — with more people. This means they have the opportunity to hear about more events going on in their area, thus increasing their likelihood of attending.

It is Friday, and I am half-way through my March trip to San Francisco. I made sure my return flight is Saturday night so I have all day Saturday to hang out with people I know in the area and meet some new people.

I missed the first Social Media Breakfast in Phoenix, AZ, and noticed that San Francisco was not listed as a SMB city. I figured Saturday morning would be a great time to try it out!

8:30am-10:30am Saturday, March 22nd, 2008
Town’s End Restaurant & Bakery
2 Townsend St, San Francisco, CA

To RSVP, go to the Upcoming event: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/460948 (You can still show up if you don’t RSVP, but if we can’t get a bigger table at the last minute…. Oh well..)

Here is a map: Town’s End Restaurant & Bakery

Bonus!
Breakfast is on me (within reason, like $20 each) for the top 3 most-followed Twitter users who show up. Ideally, we’ll verify by sending a text message from your phone to 40404 (Twitter) with “stats” and see what number it returns. It’s a good way to verify that you own the account and that we are comparing the latest stats on your account.

Technology changes the way we do things. The fact that it does is not an astounding revelation. However, it is always fascinating to see how it does.

When we think about “creativity” from a classical perspective, we might picture a person creating a piece of artwork, whether it is a painting, a piece of music, a novel, etc. In the past, creative collaboration occurred on a very small scale, if at all. Today, the creativity landscape is shifting, thanks to the tools we have at our disposal with modern technology. One of the key ways technology has changed the world is communication. This opens the door for a type of collaboration that was not possible before.

How does this impact our view of “creativity”?

Unlike the past, where a creative, highly-skilled individual — or a small group of highly-skilled individuals — would develop a work of art, we can now develop tools that allow millions of people to contribute to a single project.

One example of this is Drawball.com. Drawball, which launched in late 2005, allows anyone to pick up a virtual airbrush and paint graffiti on one giant digital wall. While the majority of users contribute little more than a mess of scribbles, there is a “hall of fame” area that showcases some of the best drawings spotted on the wall.

Another example, though on a much smaller scale, is BrainFuel.tv’s Caption Contest Fridays (with spin-off site Caption Fridays). Every week, there is a new photo that begs the question “What’s going on here?” and visitors are encouraged to make up a caption to explain what is going on in the photo. It is great to go through the comments at the end of the day to see what the blog’s readers had written.

This concept is fascinating and motivated me to start small, for-fun projects like Crappy Graphs (where visitors can draw their own ‘crappy graphs’) and TwitLibs (where visitors choose words or phrases to fill in the blanks in my sentences). I am constantly surprised by how great (or how terrible) the visitor submissions are.

Crappy Graphs started out as a blog where I drew and posted my own graphs. After releasing the user submission tool that allows users to draw graphs in my design/template, the best visitor-submitted graphs found their own way out onto the internet and now draw in more traffic than the main blog itself. That means collectively, Crappy Graphs’ visitors are funny than the original Crappy Grapher, me.

It is clear to me that none of us are as creative as all of us.

Recently, I have been brainstorming ways to spur more interaction from my friends on Twitter.com. I have always tried to post questions, conversation-starting statements, and interesting links, all in hopes of getting more and more people to respond.

Problem

The problem I am facing is that a very, very low percentage of my “followers” (the term for users who receive your updates) on Twitter actually know who I am. An even smaller percentage interact with me in any way. This is a problem because if my friends on Twitter don’t know who I am, then the following I have built up there is pretty pointless.

As of this writing, I have over 7,400 users receiving my messages. When I pose a question, I can get anywhere from zero to forty replies. With a maximum of about forty people responding, my participation percentage (on a good day) is 0.54%.

That’s not good.

Inspiration

One of my favorite blogs, BrainFuel.tv, holds weekly “Caption Contests” on Fridays. They post an image and users are encouraged to comment with a caption for it, the funnier the better. It is great to see the level of interaction the blog gets because of those contests.

That is something I wanted to replicate in some way on Twitter. It would be great to play some sort of recurring game where I would post a Twitter message up to 140 characters and people could participate by replying with a creative answer.

TwitLibs

I have decided to try out a simple weekly game that could be fun and amusing. It’s like Mad Libs, but instead of asking for words then filling in the blanks, I will just provide a sentence with blanks for people to fill in. While the game itself is played entirely on Twitter, TwitLibs.com will be the main resource for archives, suggestions, and discussion. I will post the TwitLibs starting statement as well as any Twitter replies I receive.

Only time will tell if people will enjoy the game and interact with me more because of it.

While at a party last night in Manhattan, I was involved in an interesting group conversation about social networking. I was thinking on my own thoughts on the subject. We were discussing where to draw the line for adding new “friends” on social networks.

Like most people who actively participate in social networking, I have come across quite a few different philosophies on friend-adding.

“This Network Is Too Small.”
Starting on one end, there is the type that only adds close friends to their networks. They have a valid point about the definition of the word “friend” and keeping that definition consistent both online and off. However, the main problem I have with this is that it prevents many benefits of social networking. One of the most important aspects of social networking is creating potential business connections with people you otherwise would not have met.

“This Network Is Too Big.”
On the other end of the spectrum, there is the type of networker who seems to be out for nothing more than being popular. This means adding anyone and everyone, with no intention of ever communicating with them. With this perspective, social contacts are treated much like a currency that cannot be spent. They fight to get to the top for no other reason than to be so wealthy with this currency that they can swim in it. This strategy, much like the previous one, renders social networking nearly useless.

It is important for one to find a sweet spot in the middle, to harness the power of social networks. Within the last year, I have made very visible changes to my social networking strategy. A lot of people will disagree and have disagreed with my approach as of late, but I think my current position is well-justified.

I have found that two key principles of social networking can open the door for a lot of (mutually) beneficial business relationships. As you should notice, these are derived from the two extremes above, and must be implemented together.

Principle 1: Think Outside The Circle
You must reach out beyond your circle of friends when using social networking tools. If you constraint yourself to only connecting with people you know well, you will not be able to use this platform for meeting new people. If you are not meeting new people, you might as well stay off social network sites. Email, instant message, and the phone are much more efficient tools for communicating with your circle of trusted friends.

Principle 2: The Law Of Probability
If you connect with more people on social networks, you improve your chances of making very valuable contacts. This could come in the form of a skilled professional that you can work with, the CEO of a large company in your industry, or a Connector that knows those types of people and can match you up. If you do not put yourself out there, you are stifling the chances of meeting these people.

Based on these principles, I have taken a fairly unmoderated approach of connecting with people on social networks. At least 95% of my Twitter network consists of people I have never met or directly communicated with. Thanks to that large pool of individuals, I have been able to connect with quite a few relevant people in my industry, both online and in person.

“This Network Is Just Right.”
The vast majority of my social network contacts will never benefit me in any way. But for the few, highly beneficial connections I have gained because of the large, open-invitation network, it is well worth it. What makes my approach different from the popularity-seeking networker described earlier? I am not building a network to be popular. I am trying to start conversations, connect with new people, and build relationships — albeit with a shotgun approach.

My strategy might not work for everyone, but for me, it has been more successful than I expected.