Here’s how it just happened to me: the same way it usually does, but tonight I noticed.

I went to my Home page on Facebook.  I saw a News Feed from my old friend Michael “Jude” Christodal (Jude IS his middle name). It should also be said that Jude is a trusted and valued friend, who also has great taste generally, and specifically in music.  Following the link, this is what I saw:

Jude Christodal became a fan of Oriana Fallaci.

698 fans - Become a Fan

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The thumbnail was so small I thought it might be some hot new singer my friend is into. So I click on the link “Become a Fan.”

Next thing I know I’m reading about a celebrated Italian journalist:

(Image courtesy of cathepsut on Flickr, used via Creative Commons license).

There is such a wealth of information about social media available, it can easily become a situation of paralysis, where so many cards are in your hand you get stuck on what to play first.  I found myself in this position thinking about this series and what next what to post.

I had the good idea to go back and revisit my last post, looking at the Invisible Theatre’s existing website and, as Social Media Guru Chris Brogan calls them, their “Passports.”  In his post “Starting Points for Online Presence,” Brogan lays down some excellent starting points.

As I’ve said, I am not an expert in this field.  I am, however, a good listener and I’m getting better at “editing” in the sense of having the ability to weed through a lot of existing content to find what’s valuable.  And I’m a software engineer who went to graduate school for Playwriting and Performance Studies.  Among several others, I have found Chris Brogan, through his blog, newsletter and the other ways in which he engages his community in a network of conversations, to be a remarkably valuable resource for the applications of Social Media.

There’s a lot of great advice in the post I linked to above but, in thinking about the staff at the Invisible Theatre (IT), I again realize the importance of bringing information to them in an immediately usable way.  Sure I could tell them as a next step to start “Twittering; to join a slew of other social media networks — but as I pointed out in my first installment, they already have an existing presence on some great sites.  Let’s start there.

I brought up IT’s MySpace account.  As a site in itself, it is nicely and simply designed. Over-garnishing your site is often a big issue on MySpace sites.  On this point, they are not guilty.  In fact, it’s quite good.  They’ve even got a nice bit of music that comes up when you bring up the site in your browser.

This is all important, and could be enhanced, as I mentioned in my previous post, by better cross-linking to their other “passport” sites, but I’ll come to that later.  In looking at their MySpace account tonight, what suddenly stood out for me was the fact that they already have 199 Friends!

With this observation came the epiphany for tonight’s installment.

(Image courtesy of krisdecurtis on Flickr, used via Creative Commons license).

Leverage your existing online network.  Obviously IT’s MySpace has been around long enough to have collected 119 friends.  That’s great, but amassing a bunch of “friends” is only the beginning.

Recommendation #1: Use your friends as a launching pad for understanding and increasing your Social Media Network.  How to go about this is pretty straightforward.  Begin my clicking on your friend’s picture, which will lead you to their pages.

CRITICAL POINT:  Engagement.  Your friends want to feel the love!

Recommendation #2: Investigate your friend’s sites and participate with them!  This will certainly take some time and effort but, after all, they’re your “friends.”  Investigating your friends will give you more insight into your Social Media network.  You’ll get to know them a little bit better. In researching them you may also glean valuable nugget of wisdom you never expected.

As a case in point, and to bring this installment to a close, I’m going to chose one of their friends in particular.  Given the fact that MySpace allows its users to make their site visible only to approved friends, I will find a friend with a publicly accessible page.

Good luck! A click on the first “friend” brings me to Shana’s MySpace page.  An interesting contemporary musical selection begins to play.  Without going into too much detail, let me summarize what I find directly on her page:

• Her choice of artwork and music, if I’m savvy enough, tells me something about her musical taste.
• Her tagline, “Never retreat… just attack in the opposite direction” gives me even more sense about her personality, her sense of humor, and how she wants to be perceived
• Her “About Me” section, “Who I’d Like To Meet” section, “Interests” section, and her MySpace Blog entries will also lead me more deeply into her character.

These are all great ways to get more free, publicly consumable insight in an existing fan of IT.  This is certainly gold.  But the real treasure lies in the fact the Shana, herself, is linked to 183 friends.  And you thought you were popular!  And in her “Friend’s Comments” section, it is easy to identify which of her friends are in conversation with her.

(Image courtesy of philchambers on Flickr,

used via Creative Commons license).

Recommendation #3: Traverse your friends networks effectively!

The fact is that your “friends” on your MySpace page aren’t always your real friends.  This is not to say that they might not be people or, in many instances, organizations or bands that would not be fruitful to pursue relationships with, but only time and experience will tell.

Do the homework, research your extended network of friends, figuring out who might be the best candidates to invite into your own network, and invite them!

If you don’t blog directly on your MySpace page, providing links to your website and blog and other “passport” sites will at least allow your visitors to check you out more thoroughly.  If they find you interesting, perhaps they will accept your friendship request and, voilà, you’ve expanded your network and hopefully, in the process, understood your potential audience a little better!

Recommendation #4:  Close the Deal: Develop a loyal readership.

The number one way I can think of to expand your readership, which is the next real step in expanding your social network, is to provide regularly updated content which your audience will find valuable.

Again, Chris Brogan is masterful at this.  He’s not a Theatre guy, he’s an engineer, but his bag is Social Media strategy, and he routinely gives away great knowledge for free.  Due in no small part to this, he has an enormous readership.  One thing which sets him apart, however, is the fact that he has a personal tone to his writing, and often posts personal entries.  Through this his readership gets to know him.  His blog feels authentic, which I think is a critical factor in creating an actual community.  Otherwise, at best, you’re just a  prolific reference point with a readership.

The question for the Invisible Theatre is what content to come up and how to present it so as to be of value to people.  As with MySpace friends, you don’t necessarily want lots of visitor traffic in itself — you want lots of the right kind of traffic.  You don’t want one-shot friends — you are looking to create an engaged community, and a directed one, so it’s important to center your content around to your main business which, in the example of the Invisible Theatre, the business of producing relevant and impactful theatre.

On Deck:  The flatland of SEO, and why worrying about it in itself should be your last concern when blogging.  Stay tuned!  You can expect the next installment of this series approximately within the next 10 days.

By virtue of being the husband of the latest staff member of the Tucson-based Invisible Theatre, I find myself their latest technology adviser.

What’s fun is that this provides me with the opportunity to work in the medium of social media.  This will be my first foray into the world of actually leveraging Social Media to expand an organization’s business.  The added bonus for me is that, in this instance, the business is actually something I truly value: art.

As part of this adventure I will be blogging about my experience and process.  Since the subject is social media, I invite you readers of this series to share your comments.

So let’s begin.

First off, with any marketing analysis, it is critical to know the business’ goals.  For the Invisible Theatre, they are looking to expand their existing and very loyal audience base.  Specifically, they would like to connect with younger generations.  Their current audience is fairly liberal, and is generally on the upper end of the scale in both age and education.

With that in the back our our minds, let’s dive right into their existing web presence:

It turns out that the Invisible Theatre has already made several Internet inroads.  Kudos!  Here’s the list:

• Invisible Theatre domain (with website)
• Invisible Theatre Blog
• Invisible Theatre MySpace account
• Invisible Theatre Facebook group

A quick review of their website tells me that, while they have all the right pieces, the organization/navigation is a bit awkward (Frames?!!!).  Recommendation 1: Might I suggest moving to a CMS?  Perhaps even WordPress!

Their About Us page looks a bit old school, and isn’t the most readable one on the planet.  But since any self-respecting CMS will take care of that, I’ll leave it be.  One thing I did take note of was that the “Email” icon linked to an email that isn’t at their domain.  Aha!  Recommendation 2: Google Apps for Domains.  The basic edition It completely free and, not even mentioning the plethora of other benefits it provides, it allows you to have gmail-hosted email service in the name of your domain!

Exploring a bit further, I could not find any direct links to their other web “presences” in the preceding list.  Under “News” you can find their blog but it is stuck in a sub-frame as if they didn’t want anyone to know it was a blog!  Recommendation 3: Make the islands of your online empire strongly connected.  You should be able to get anywhere else in the kingdom in a single click.

The next thing to check is their Googleability: Their website comes up first — High Marks!  Next in line, however, is a link to a Wikipedia entry on “invisible theater” with an “-ER.”  The article is not about them.

A quick check of Wikipedia shows no results at all for “Invisible Theatre” with an “-RE.”   Recommendation 4: Make (and keep updated) your Wikipedia article.

In the interest of keeping these posts somewhat brief, let’s bring this one in for a landing.

You can see that, with very minimal effort, we’ve already identified for the Invisible Theatre some simple, concrete steps they can take to start moving in the right direction.

On deck:

Coming up in the next post in this series we will try to make sense of this whole thing about placement in search engine results, otherwise known as Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.  Hopefully we will come out of our investigation with some practical advice for the Invisible Theatre.  Also, we’ll look into some of the tools available for measuring SEO.  As always, we’re shooting for options which are as close as possible to being free (as in beer).

Being Integral can get downright technical, but on its simplest level correlates to the notion of “balance.”

This post is just a beginning, and I’ll endeavor to keep it brief.  It is also intended to be shared with people who are interested expanding upon the emerging wave of social/community media and networking.

First a very brief history.  The Integral phenomenon has its roots in the oddly phrased “human potential movement” which emerged in the 1960s, but has been made most widely known and expanded upon by Ken WIlber and his affiliates who are banded together under the umbrella of the organization Wilber formed, the Integral Institute.

It aim is noble, and can perhaps be best understood by starting in terms of a model that attempts to reconcile the pluralism of truth across the diverse (and, indeed, often dissociated) branches of human knowledge, and encompassing the diversity of personal truth inherent to individuals both in their own right and in the way such truths play out in the communal and social spheres.

As you might infer from the preceding paragraph, the model delves into both the interior (subjective) domains of experience as well as the exterior (objective) ones.  The model makes another important distinction, however, between the individual and collective aspects of experience.  These two pairs of distinctions are as far as I’ll traverse in this posting.

This aspect of the model is normally visualized as an area (typically a circle or square) divided up with “cross-hairs” into four quadrants, as depicted in the following diagram, and the four quadrants correspond directly in terms of how we perceive them in everyday life to the four personal pronouns, “I,” “It,” “We,” and “Its”.

(Image Credit: ~C4Chaos on Flickr.  Original image here)

In terms of social/community media and networking (or interrelatedness), the social dimension exists in the Fourth Quadrant, or Lower-Right (LR/”Its”), which is a group related to from its exterior (not a part of, bit an outside observer), whereas the community dimension corresponds the the Third Quadrant, or Lower-Left (LL/”We”), which is a group related from a perspective of one “inside” the group.

The distinction between social and community is critical.  If you are not part of a community, you are outside of it, and can observe and study it only as an outsider.  I could move to Paris, for example, as an American (the community I was raised in), and even if I lived there for many years, I would never share the same perspective as a born-and-bred Parisian.  At best, I might share part of their experience, but it would never be foremost in my experience.

The emergence of the global commons of the Internet and global media in unique in the history of the world in that new communities are being born in which we can participate as insiders, whatever our upbringing.  The emergent phase of community media and networking is one of pure facilitation.  The intricacies of what such communities might involve and require remain, I would suggest, to be explored.

The goal of this posting is, then, to promote a consideration of what these intricacies might be, and to encourage their exploration.

We are only now even waking up to the reality of the Internet and the global commons.  Vast possibilities remain untapped and even unrecognized in the dizzying technicalities of simply making them possible.

Arguably the most useful resource for writers is their writing community. Having a writing community certainly distinguishes one from others who choose creative isolation. To have reliable feedback from peers is invaluable. Community is equally important for other good reasons that have less to do with writing and more to do with life.

I’ve recently begun investigating web-based writing network systems. More specifically, I’m currently trying one on called “Urbis,” and another called “The Next Big Writer.” I am interested to see how they work and I intend, at whatever point my experiences begin to round out, to share some impressions.

While one can’t really expect, from an on-line writing community, to have the sorts of benefits afforded by a local, in-the-flesh (and in-your-face) community, such as grabbing several pints at the local Irish Tavern, there is no reason that true community can not develop through the on-line medium. To say that such a community is virtual is mistaken — it is quite genuine. The artifacts of community are conversations, and that it is somehow (and this is the miracle) through such shared conversations that the mutual understanding and appreciation requisite to a real community develops. I am not saying that true community necessarily emerges from on-line social networks; just that it is possible.
In examining how these writing-based social networking systems work, the questions below will provide the lens through which I will see:

• How are they structured to manage writers and reviewers at different places in their development?
• How do they enable communities to emerge within their overarching social network?
• How do they generate and reward interest in participation?
• How do they connect into the business communities which rely upon writing?

Wish me luck. If you care to join in on the fun, feel free to visit my profile on Urbis, or my profile on The Next Big Writer.