Hello friends, it's been a while. Been a bit busy with work and havent found the time to blog lately, but today I have an alliterative motive to blogging. It's because I'm going to SXSWi and I want to be able to meet as many awesome people as I can while I'm there.

I've been working as a community manager for Sysomos for almost a year now (about 10 months) and I've built up a great network of people online, but haven't had a chance to meet many in person yet. I think a lot of these great people will be down at SXSWi beacuse it's a gathering of social media and tech people, and I want to meet as many as posible. I want to meet current clients, potential clients, social media writers and bloggers and pretty much everyone else that will be there.

On top of the Sysomos community, I have a great bunch of people in my online networks that I know from outside other places whom will also be down in Austin. I want to meet all of them too. If you can't tell I'm really excited to go down to Texas and pretty much meet everyone I can to expand both my company's and my own networks (although, they are kind of one in the same).

So if you're going to be down in Austin for South By South West Interactive, please let me know and lets meet in real life. If you're there and looking for me, because I hide my face in most of my online avatars, this is what I look like:

Meeting people isn't the only reason I'm excited to go though. I'm not sure if anyone knows this but I used to work in the music industry. Before there was an "i" on the end of SXSW, South By South West was a music festival/convention that I always wanted to go to. Tons of big bands and smaller emerging artists always play there and I always wanted to go down to check it out. I always attend NXNE which happens in Toronto, but I heard that SXSW was much crazier and better. I hope I can catch some wicked music while I'm down.

And of course, I'm also excited about the "geek parties". To go along with my wanting to meet people, I've heard the best way to do this is at the parties that go on during SXSWi. I have also heard many an epic story that has come from the parties for geeks at SXSWi and I can't wait to attend some of them. I don't think I have to say any more about this. You understand.

SO, if you're going to be down at SXSWi, I want to meet you. If you're not going to be there but know someone who is, chances are I want to meet them too. Leave me a comment here and let me know you're going. Also, tweet at me, I'm @40deuce, so I can add you to my list of people I need to meet at SXSWi.

See you in Austin!

[The great photo of me above is courtesy of Rannie Turigan]

Happy new year everyone!!

I've been meaning to write a post on the idea of online influence for a while, but every time I think I have all my thoughts in order I think of something else I want to say. This morning though, I read a great article in Advertising Age about the difference in popularity and influence and it really seemed to be on the same thought wave that I am about the whole concept. It really got my mind racing, so I thought today would be the day to sit down and bang this out.

A lot of people in the social media community seem to be talking a lot about 2011 being the year of "influence". The only problem, in my opinion, is that no one really has the concept down properly. And that's probably not just my opinion, as a lot of people have been up in arms after hearing that Klout, a company that measures online influence, claimed that Justin Bieber is one of the most influential people in social media. According to the way Klout ranks influence though, it's absolutely true (and they back up their statement well here) To me, I see the problem as this not being the true idea of influence.

Now don't get me wrong. I have nothing at all against Klout. I've participated in one of their campaigns and loved it. I've had the Klout people guest moderate on my #smmeasure chat. I even met a couple of the Klout employees here in Toronto and keep in touch with them. When we met, I spoke with Megan Berry and I believe that Klout really is intent on constantly refining their process for determining online influence. However, for now and from how I understand their metrics to work, it plays off a bit more like online popularity.

To me, the difference between popularity and influence comes from an internal motivation. Liking and respecting someone are different than being influenced by them. We as people like a lot of stuff. It's part of our human way of classifying things so that we can understand. One of the easiest classifications for us is "things I like" and "things I don't like". Things we like we tend to pay attention to and things we don't like we tend to ignore.

In the online world there is so much stuff floating around and we tend to be drawn to search out the things we like. This includes web pages, products and even people. In social media we tend to follow people we like, people we respect and people we think are interesting or have interesting ideas. Some of these people seem to have large followings because they do embody one of these categories. These people are popular. Are they influential though?

To some people, yes. But I think to a majority of people they are popular and because of that are likely to have more people hear what they have to say. They have the ability to make sure thousands or even millions of people hear what they have to say, which is great, but just because I hear you doesn't mean you necessarily influence me.

To me, influence means that I trust someone enough to have their thoughts and opinions actually motivate me to do something. The key for me is the word "trust". When I really deeply trust someone I let their thoughts affect my own. And trust, I mean real trust, takes time to build. This is why I think the only real influence we get as people come from our trusted social circles and not some of the big "talking heads" we like to read online.

An example I like to use while talking about this with people is the online wine community. There is no doubt that Gary Vaynerchuk is one of, if not the most, popular online wine aficionados. People all over the world watch his Wine Library TV to see what he has to say. However, while Gary may bring new and interesting wines to the world's attention, does he necessarily influence what people think of wines?

In what I know of the world of wine (which really isn't too much) I've found that wine lovers are small communities of friends and acquaintances that like together and sip wine. They are usually like minded people who trust each others opinions and thoughts. These people influence each other on their wine thoughts. While Gary Vaynerchuk may bring new wine to their attention, it's when someone in their social circle recommends the wine that really gets people to act on it (in this case it would be buying or trying a wine).

It's through these much smaller social circles that I think real influence comes from. These social circles are made up of people whom we like, respect and most importantly trust. The trust is the key to motivation, meaning influence. I think that that if marketers and communications people really want to get a handle on influence they will need to find ways to penetrate these smaller social circles and reach out to the people there rather than go for the big popular talking heads.

I also want to point out here that I do think that popularity does have a part in the role of influence, but not nearly as much as a concept like trust does.

Going back to Klout, I think that they are working on ways to find these people that are influential within these smaller social circles. A problem they face though is that a lot of these social circles exist more offline than they do online. It's not to say that they aren't online, but there is something that these offline bonds have that just isn't found as much online.

In the meantime though, are a lot of people still going to see what popular people like Justin Bieber and Gary Vaynerchuck have to say? Of course. But are these people really having true influence over those that hear what they have to say? I don't think so. They may turn our heads to something we previously didn't know about, but true motivation to do or buy something new will come from inside of us and our feelings of trust towards who is telling us.

I know personally I trust my actual friends a lot more than the word of someone I've never met or spoken to but follow on Twitter.

And that's my rant on the idea of online influence. What do you think? Are we ever going to be able to truly measure the idea of influence?

I was planning on writing my year end blog tonight, but I'm now saving it for a few days so that I could write about this great documentary I saw yesterday.

Yesterday I was invited over to some friends' place to watch the documentary We Live In Public. It's dubbed the story of the greatest internet pioneer you've never heard of. The tag line does not lie.

We Live In Public is the story of an internet entrepreneur named Josh Harris. Josh Harris was a leader in the dot-com scene/ explosion in the end of the 90's. He started the first internet television network called Pseudo, but was obsessed with the idea of putting people's lives on the internet. He hit the hight of his obsession with two projects, or experiments as he called them, both with the title of We Live In Public.

The first "experirment" was actually called Quiet: We Live In Public. For this project Harris took 100 people and had them live in an underground bunker like building he specially built for a month. Inside the bunker he had set up pods for sleeping and hundreds of cameras and TVs that only showed what was on the cameras. The people were given free food, drink, board and even artillery (they had a shooting range in the bunker) in exchange for Harris being allowed to tape everything and probe for information from the inhabitants. The thing that was unclear to me was if this whole thing was streaming to the outside world on the internet, but I assumed it was given the nature of the man. It looks like it started off fun, but people eventually started to go a bit nuts with their whole lives being viewed publicly 24/7.

The second "experiment" Harris tried was just called We Live In Public. This was the first ever reality show almost. For this project Harris wired up his entire home with cameras and streamed the life of him and his then girlfriend to the world along with an interactive chat feature. Again, the pressure of being in the eye of the public 24/7 proved to be too much and his girlfriend left him and he eventually became frustrated with it and shut it down.

While these experiments on their own seemed really interesting, it was the commentary of the film and how ahead of his time Harris was that really struck me.

Today, social media is exactly like Harris' dream of what the internet would become. It's people talking about and sharing their lives with complete strangers via the interwebs. Through the use of blogs and Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and Flickr and other forms of web 2.0 we are all sharing our lives. Some more than others, but still enough of us that it's become almost the norm. Harris saw this happening over 10 years ago.

I don't want to ruin the whole film for you because I really think that everyone who lives and plays on the interwebs should see this film, but I need to give you one more quote from the movie. Harris makes a great play on Andy Warhols' famous "15 minutes of fame" idea by saying (and this may or may not be an exact quote as I'm working from memory), "people want their 15 minutes of fame... every day." I think that perfectly summarizes how some of us internet folk are everyday.

Yes, we do it for the social interaction and to share ideas in ways we couldn't 10 or 15 years ago, but we also do it for personal reasons. We all want to do something extraordinary and more than that, we want to be recognized for it. Even I'm guilty of this. In a world where we can be known around the world for something small, why wouldn't we constantly try to stand out?? Why wouldn't we try anything to be in the eye of as much public as we can if we have the means to??

The question will soon become though, like it did in the movie, how long can live our lives in public?? How long will social media be like it is?? How much of our lives can we share before we NEED to pull back??

Check out the trailer for We Live In Public here:

If you've seen the movie, leave a comment and let me know your thoughts about it. If you haven't seen the movie, see it, then let me know what you think. If you haven't seen the movie and don't want to see it, I'd still love to know your thoughts about living our lives in public through the internet, so leave me a comment and lets talk about it.

I'm by no means a big fan of politics. I pay attention enough to have some idea of what's going on here and there, but not much beyond that. But, like a large portion of the world I've become kind of enthralled by WikiLeaks. (I linked to a Google search because the web address for the site keeps changing)

While some of the things that have been released by the information leaking organization are chock full of interesting information about some of the most powerful countries in the world, I don't want to talk about that in this post. I don't want to talk about the continuing adventures of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. I don't even really want to talk about WikiLeaks specifically. What I do want to talk about is how from a social media slash PR perspective, the world was ready for something like WikiLeaks.

While some of the world has a certain perspective on PR people as "spin artists", those in the industry know different. One of the first things they told me in PR school was "don't lie." People want the truth. If you're going to give the public information about something, don't lie. There are certain ways to handle certain situations, but most seasoned PR professionals will tell you that lying usually comes back to bite you in the ass.

Then, In social media we talk a lot about transparency. Transparency is almost the exact same thing as "don't lie", but people in social media like to use it more. It also goes a bit beyond just don't lie and covers ideas like don't hide information, full disclosure and be accountable for your own actions. People now demand transparency from companies and celebrities and pretty much everyone in the world through social media.

If we demand these things from companies and people we look up to, why would we not demand the same from our governments?? The answer is we do, most people just wouldn't know how to act on that. Luckily though, some do.

While I don't believe some information should go out, such as releasing the names of spies or anything that really puts lives at risks, there are some things that people wanted to know their governments are up to. Sometimes governments do things that are morally wrong and more and more people are starting to stand up against this. There is no way to make them stop if we don't know about these things. The release of this information helps to hold people accountable for their actions. This is what the majority of people demand today.

Of course the people involved in the information released are upset, but that's what happens when dirty secrets get out. It's no different from when anyone's secrets get out. And when secrets get out we (usually) call people on them and want them to be accountable for their actions.

When companies do things that are immoral we call them out for it. To think that the same shouldn't be done with governments is just silly. People always want more information and when they find things that are wrong they want people to take responsibility for it. WikiLeaks has helped to bring some of that information to light for people to see.

That's why I think the world was ready for something like WikiLeaks.

I wanted to get this blog out a little while ago, but I lost the key component. I've found it now, but it's a little crumpled up, but at least I found it. So, without further ado, here it is and the blog post begins...

So you think your company needs to get more involved with social media, but they're not willing to? How do make them understand? The best answer I've seen from many other social media people is to show them what's going on online involving the company.

A few weeks ago I was speaking at something for the Ontario Government about social media and I met William Young, a senior issues analyst for the cabinet office. He showed me a little report that he makes up every week for his office he calls "Blog Watch."

Every week William puts together a report that highlights some things going on in the social media space that relates to his specific office. He splits it up into three sections:

• Featured Blog Topic of the Week: Here he writes about the most prevalent issue he found being talked about in the blogosphere or the one he thinks is most important. He gives a breakdown of what was being said and a couple quotes.
• Weekly Blog Report: In this section William takes other subjects being talked about in blogs and gives a brief description of each.
• Social Media Themes: In this last section he highlights issues from Twitter.

Your can always switch around the categories in these types of reports to focus on areas most relevant to your company.

I like the idea of doing this in a report for a couple reasons. It's much more professional looking than just telling your boss. It separates social media areas to show just how many places the talk could be going on. Most importantly, it shows specific examples.

I think if you can put something like this together your boss may just see what you're talking about.

What do you think of this idea? Do you have a better idea for getting your higher-ups to believe you that you need to be more involved in social media?