Yes, I Do Mind the Gap: Tara Hunt (aka @missrogue) at ConnectNow

I'm at the ConnectNow conference in Sydney. The following are my notes from Tara Hunt's talk on closing the gap between company values and community values.

She doesn't want to talk about social networks anymore or social capital; instead she wants to talk about why people either love or hate the brands that are interacting with us on social media. Why is it that sometimes we get a tweet from a brand and we're more than happy, and sometimes we're disgusted by it?

The reason is that most business values don't align with community values.

Only 18% of us trust what we read in ads is the truth. Only 21% of employees are truly engaged in their work. It's slightly more encouraging to know that 51% of Americans trust business to do the right thing, until you realize that 42% believe in ghosts and 76% believe in miracles. 89% of people expect to be able to interact with brands. So how do you? If you're working for a company, how is it that you need to interact?

Most businesses are online community tourists. They're tourists in the space that we in the community call home. Here are some of the telltale signs of tourism: "These natives have quite the life! Kia ora, baby!" That translates in the online world to: "S/he spends her whole day socializing and having fun on Twitter! I wish I could get paid for that!" and "When you cut through all the inane babble, there are some useful tidbits!"

There's subtext in them there tweets. So if somebody says, "Eating a fennel salad with miso dressing. Nom nom," the subtext is, "I care about my health, so I eat well; I want my friends to admire my good eating habits; I want to connect with other vegetarians."

The subtext of 4square tweets is, "I want my friends to know where I came so they can come and join me," "I'm keeping track of where I go out and with who," and, "Where I go and who I hang with may tell you a little about who I am."

When people send multiple tweets at multiple times of the day, sometimes the subtext is: "I'm lonely. Hear me. Value me. Connect to me."

We as human beings, more than anything, need to connect to others.

You are what you tweet (sorta).

Why and what do people share? She asked that question in a survey. She put it out on Twitter a Sunday night at close to midnight, and got 1,238 responses in under 24 hours. 1,709 of the respondents came from email/IM (she had put it out on Twitter, but people were engaged and sending it around). And she found some fascinating information. Amongst the people who were engaged with her survey, 80% use Twitter daily, 26% use 4square daily, and 59% use Facebook daily. 82% responded that they post 'random thoughts' most often, as compared to 76% articles/biz essays and 75% random links.

52% were iPhone users. 60% say sharing has been good for their professional lives, 57% for their personal lives.

We are sharing a phenomenal amount of information online. On March 4th 2010, @bitstrategist took a screenshot of the ten billionth tweet:

Social networks are now more popular than email (67%-65%). Women are more active in most social networks (avg. 53%), and social networks have bypassed porn in volume of activity. The amount of time on Facebook increased 566% in 09; 3.5 billion pieces of content are shared each week. There are more than 500k Facebook Apps made by more than 1M developers -- this is a HUGE OPPORTUNITY.

There's a lot of activity going on here, and it's not showing any signs of slowing down. But the problem is, there's a huge values disparity going on. On the one side, we've got the business values, on the other side we've got the community values, and in the middle we've got a big freakin' gap.

When addressing a large group of managers I often challenge them to stand up for love (or beauty or justice or truth) in just this way. "When you get back to work, tell your boss your comapny has a love deficit." Gary Hamel, from the Wall Street Journal.

The Bohemians said, "You've gotta stand your ground for freedom, beauty, truth and love."

Google = truth. Apple = beauty. Craigslist = freedom. Zappos = love.

It's no coincidence that these companies that espouse human values are also the darlings of online communities. Google is the 2nd most mentioned brand on Twitter (after Starbucks), with a 97% neutral to postive sentiment rating.

She went to a conference in Paris last year with 2,200 attendees, and 64% of the laptops were Apple, with 1,008 iPhones.

Craigslist gets more traffic than either eBay or Amazon.com. EBay has more than 16,000 employees, and Amazon more than 20,000. Craigslist has 30.

Tony Hsieh from Zappos core values like "create fun & a little weirdness, be adventurous, creative & open-minded, be passionate and determined, be humble".

What are some of the community values? What are the things we can start to look at that web communities espouse that we can bring into corporate culture? Generosity abounds in online communities, but so does RECIPROCITY. Online communities operate as a gift economy -- the more you give, the more you receive. It's not a direct reciprocity, it's an indirect reciprocity. Chris Brogan has a formula for this -- something like you have to show you're generous 10x before you can ask for a favor. Tara calls these whuffie deposits and withdrawals.

Examples of deposits:

• Helping someone solve a problem
• Attending community events
• Showing real interest in what someone else is working on
• Using your network to do something good for the community
• Demonstrating you implement people's suggestions.

Examples of withdrawals:

• Asking for a favor
• Promoting your own events or sales
• Asking for an introduction to someone in their network
• Acting competitively
• Name dropping
• Pitching someone.

Withdrawals are fine, and that's basically a big part of the reason why we share (even if we don't want to admit it). We need to make withdrawals; when we're working on a project, we need people to support us. But the important thing is that we need a surplus in our whuffie bank before we can make a withdrawal.

Measuring this in a community point of view is quite different to ROI-type measurement, which is all about quantity and numbers. A better way to measure on social media is through stories -- the quality of engagement. Meaningful numbers have stories behind them. Even more important than stories is the end result.

The below picture is from Beth Kanter. You've got a lot of Facebook fans -- how does that help you achieve your goals?

Barry Schwartz did an amazing TED talk about our loss of wisdom. I've embedded it below, but here's the summary: he told a story about a professor in his 60s who took his son to a Detroit Tigers game, and his son was thirsty, so he asked for some lemonade. So the father went and bought some lemonade and brought it back, but it was hard lemonade and the dad didn't realize it. The son goes to take a sip, the security guard comes down and grabs it out of his hand. The guard calls the police who come down and take the kid to the hospital (even though he has no alcohol in his system), and social services get called in, and the procedure includes taking the child from his home, he can go back with his mother but the father had to go to a hotel for a few weeks, and the whole time, people keep saying to the man, "Sorry sir, this is procedure." And what Barry was trying to illustrate with this example is that we rely way too much on the rules.

How many times have you called a company saying, "Please can you help me?" and someone is reading off a sheet saying, "We can't help because this is our policy." Even if you get transferred to a manager, by this time you're feeling this small, and like you're not important to the company. What we need to learn as people who are working for or within companies is that rules and guidelines are not substitutes for human interaction, and improvising is a form of art. Real life is full of ambiguity. Only maybe 10% of things follow a rule book. You can't deal with ambiguity out of a rule book.

How can we teach wisdom instead of increasing the number of rules?

Tara's new Turing test: any action that prioritizes procedures over compassion = robot. (This is different to my new Turing Challenge: on social media, it is incumbent on you to prove you're not a robot). We love robots, but only when those robots exhibit treasured human emotions: love, compassion, remorse, generosity, etc. They're not like the robots in iRobot or Terminator. So why the heck do we have to go and get all evil robot so much of the time?

Instead of a personal brand, why not get a personality? If you try to create a personal brand, people will Google you, and she has two words for us: "Tiger Woods". Fabulous personal brand -- but it wasn't who he was. If he was a bad boy from the beginning, we would have been taking him at face value. (This ties into my comments about integrity on Social Media Insider this morning.)

What we need to do is de-robotize, start the human revolution where being a human being is cool again. She told us this wasn't a talk about social networks; it's a talk about the social world which we're all part of. We have choices to make right now, because we have a lot of power -- the technology is growing every day. You can take a picture of people on your smartphone and find out more about people. The singularity is predicted to come in 2040, and if that doesn't excite you, it's because of the robotization -- systems that are built on efficiency over compassion. Our choice is that we can be part of the human revolution, or we can let those with money and power today decide which way it's going. When we value money over human beings and then add technology, she gets really nervous, so, yes, she does mind the gap.

And here's the slide deck itself: