Social Media is a form of currency.  It’s a Social Currency.  It works based on the exchange of information, in exchange for your attention.  If I give you my ears, I let you tell me something, and equally, I will only listen to you, if I value your contribution.

For the longest time ever (perhaps as early as 2004) I’ve been actively using and advocating social media as a tool, or mechanism to build ever stronger relationships with the people you know and trust, as well as start screening across the many people who you know, to discover potential business relationships, potential customers, friends, and peers.

Pretty quickly the online space is starting to fill up, and it becomes increasingly difficult to start finding “real” value in exchanging meaningless messages in the ether we know as the Internet.  Slowly, for me, I’ve been starting to wonder just what does it matter, or how useful is it to just “talk” with, or exchange messages with completely random people who I hardly know?

In actual fact, it doesn’t.  It doesn’t matter one bit.  And then it hit me.  “Social Media”, unlike traditional online presences are not about hiding behind an anonymous identity.  Instead it’s about amplifying the presence we have in real life.  It’s all about being more of who you really are.  Which means that if in real life, you’re generally anti-social, or prefer to be introverted, and keep yourself to yourself, the moment you start to use Social Media, that doesn’t somehow magically change.  It doesn’t suddenly make you a public extrovert.  It does however allow you to stay more visibly connected to the people who you know, and meet, and want to engage with.

Since using Social Media, I’ve come to find many interesting and wonderful people, who I definitely would never have met in person, in real life, in the same way.  Common interests, mutual recognition of other colleagues in the same field as me, and also just generally people who I work with are all visible and present on the Social Web.  The difference is, that on the social web, what I say can be picked up, and can be left unnoticed.  There isn’t any necessity for everyone in all of my communities online to read every word that I post, blog, tweet, email, or communicate online.

There is however, something in having people’s attention online.  That I give mine, and in exchange receive other people’s attention in return is already starting to bring up questions of quality over quantity.  Given that the number of hours in a day are finite, that there’s only so many people I can reply to, and that there’s only so much I can do, until my primary motivations of income, survival, and relaxation/chilling kick in.  So far, I’ve been “playing” on this merry-go-round of Social Media, joining upto new services, and new sites, that are popping up, a dime a dozen.  But now, I’m starting to get “saturated”.  Saturated with noise, with media, with messages, with adverts, and with stuff that I don’t want to have to deal with.  I have to manually filter through all of this noise, before I get to the stuff that matters to me.

This has a cost associated with it.  It’s my time, it’s my energy, it’s my effort.  I don’t want to sound harsh, uncaring, or ungiving, but I only have so much time and attention to give. The same is true for everyone else.  Sooner or later, when you hit rock bottom on that bank account, you feel depleted, and drained, and you step back from it all.

Don’t worry if you don’t understand what I’m talking about just yet.  You could still be in the “oohh, shiny new toy” phase when it comes to Social Media.  Which is great! Enjoy it while you can.  It’s just sooner or later, it get’s old.  Sooner or later, you hit a low, or a bottom, or your account runs out.  This account, this balance, is the Social Currency I’m talking about.  It’s what happens when you give, give give, and get nothing back in return.

It’s a part of learning and growing… You stretch beyond your limits, you go as far as you can, you look everywhere with an enthusiastic, zestful gaze.  And then, one day, it hits you.  Or slowly, it starts to dawn on you, that as much fun as it is to just give, give give, and as much as you enjoy just “hanging out” online, with all these thousands or hundreds of cool friends, you actually have a life to live.  You actually have “real work” that you want to get done.  You have dreams, you have aspirations.  Things you actually want to accomplish.  And when that moment comes, suddenly you start questioning the real value of Social Media.  What have you been building up? What have you been putting all this time, and energy into?

Is it really all just a popularity contest where it only matters how many people are following you on twitter? Is it all about just blogging, and getting hundreds of comments?  Or is it really about regular people just talking with regular people?

Sooner or later, once the realisation kicks in, that relationships as great as they are, don’t put food on the table, keep a roof over your head, or keep you warm, and clothed, you may start to look at it all very differently.  I could be wrong.  It could be that Social Media is a great way to escape the world that provides you with your sustenance, and lets you look onto the world that you would love to work in, if you had the means to support yourself, or a job taht paid enough.  But for me, that’s not the case.

Looking at “social media”, and making sense of what it really is, and what it really means to me, has really been put into perspective recently.  I’ve realised that I’ve actually put a lot of time energy, and attention into my online social network.  I’ve built up my social capital.  I’ve earnt currency and favour with many people on line.  Some I’ve had the pleasure of meeting with in person too.  Not everyone is necessarily the type of person I would want as my best friend.  But then that never was or is the point.  I’ve built up this pool, this reservoir of a network or community, and occasionally, I can tap that with some of the social capital that I’ve built up in that community.  For those times when I feel a bit low, or just need some moral support, I can find friends to confide in, or peers, to encourage me on.  It’s a tight knit community, in my mind, in that I feel tight with many of them, and hope they feel the same with me.

Now, that social capital that’s been built up is a bit of a nebulous, unclear currency.  Something that doesn’t have a clear boundary, or delimitation at present.  Typically, you can tell your generating value, and contributing more into your online community when you start to draw more attention, and people into the conversation.  Likewise, the reverse is true too.  When people start dropping away, or stop following, or unfriend you, more often, than not, then you are clearly milking your Social Capital more than you’re contributing into that pool.

It seems I’m actually a bit slow with my thinking and ideas, since there’s already people out there who had understood this social capital as something of value, before I had gotten to it.  Eiso Kant (@eisokant), and Mac Taylor (@macwind) had already figured this out, and put into motion the beginnings of a tool or mechanism to help capture, and measure this inherent social capital that exists in our communities.  Their project Twollars, is a “gratitude currency”, that helps to start capturing some of the gratitude and thanks that people feel towards someone in their community.  At present the system works only on Twitter, and all you do is send out a tweet, using certain words, in a certain order, and the Twollars platform picks up your message, and adjusts the balances of your and your recipients twitter account accordingly.  Try it out say “Give x twollars @USERNAME [give reason]” where X is the number of twollars you want to give, and USERNAME is the twitter ID of the person you want to give twollars to.  By default, everyone starts out with a balance of 50 Twollars, and there’s no need to register to start using the service, since it is listening to the twittersphere stream of conversation all the time.

The idea behind twollars is that when someone is grateful, or want to show their appreciation to someone else, they can show that appreciation by giving twollars.  Then, companies can sponsor a charity, who can then receive twollars as donations, from people, and the sponsoring company would then buy the twollars, and give the charity $1 for each twollar they buy from them.  The idea being that then companies can gain some kudos in the community by making a positive contribution to the charity, and gain access to some of the social capital within the online sphere.

Of course how those companies then use twollars, and give them out to people will affect any real success they have with their social media campaigns.

It’s interesting, given that this week is the Charity SmackDown, where celebrities are competing to get as much money raised using social media tools as possible.  It’ll be interesting to see the fallout, and where the social capital that these celebs have built up, will land.  I’m gonna hazard a guess, and say that most of these celebs have all established such a strong bank account of social capital and goodwill with their communities, that they’ll have no trouble getting people to fork out, and participate, and contribute in the causes.  If anything, their requests, and appeals to their communities will build an even stronger bond, and make them even more liked, and loved by the people already following them.   It’s times like these that everyone’s social capital becomes a positive asset in it’s own right.  Of course, if someone with hardly any community were trying to accomplish something as simliar, it’s still entirely possible.  Look at Amanda Rose (@amanda), organiser of the Twestival fundraising event that happened globally.  Whilst her personal following isn’t more than a few thousand followers, her social capital and the social capital that was built up around Twestival made a readily available pool to tap into, and build upon.  This pool of social capital allowed the Twestival team to generate a tremendous amount of potential social good, with all the money that was raised (at least $250k) from just a single night of events, happening around the globe, on the same day..

I think Twollars is an excellent way of starting to calibrate some of the social capital that we take for granted, and never really appreciate, and will help us, in days to come help put some baby training wheels on brands and big business, as they start to tip toe their way through the minefield of social media faux pas, and start using their own money to buy some social capital to start building some of that trust for themselves.

Obviously translating this social capital into a currency, like Twollars, isn’t going to remove the need to learn the basics of Social Media etiquette, and it certainly isn’t going to be a substitute for real relationships.  But now that there’s a way to measure and give away Social Capital on Twitter, perhaps now people will start accounting for their time in terms of real value that gets generated for them, or that they contribute back, rather than engaging in mind numbing conversations, just for the sake of talking.  Only time will tell, I guess.

Disclaimer: I am currently being paid by Twollars to help them raise awareness around the Twollars concept, and whilst these ideas, and thoughts are my own, I do want to declare that I am being paid to write this content.  That being said, I do firmly believe in what I’ve written, and were the Twollars guys just good friends, I would probably still write something very similar to what’s been written here.  The thoughts insights, and ideas, shared here are all my own, with the exception of the concept and implementation of Twollars, which remains the product of Eiso Kant, and Mac Taylor, the founders of Twollars.  I have also drawn upon my experiences of my Twitter community online, without which these insights and thoughts through reflection would not have been possible.

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I recently changed my main twitter ID.

I used to be known as @magitam, and now I’m known, as @farhan. I got tired of having to introduce myself as both myself, and my twitter alter ego.

It all started, back at the first ever twestival in London.  If I remember correctly, I got asked by @matthagger how my twitter ID of @magitam related to my name?

It didn’t..

Magitam was a legacy reference to something I’d come up with when creating my “yahoo” account, back somewhere around 2001, or perhaps it was before that, when I first discovered IRC in 1997.  Either way it was my “handle”.  It had been something I’d been using to identify myself, anonymously when I first started to go online.  This is long before facebook, and myspace, and twitter.  This is going back to the days before gmail, when you might have had AOL as your main email account, and yahoo and hotmail were just getting started.  Days when you would hang out in IRC, because that’s where all the cool people online would be.. and this is back in those days when you would use “newsgroups”, to find stuff out, instead of RSS feeds from blogs, and news sites ;)

Back then I wanted my identity to be pseudo anonymous.  There weren’t enough people on the internet to ever think that I would ever be meeting in real life the people I’m having conversations with.  It just wasn’t something that you ever thought would happen.

Besides, you would put people through a vetting process, of getting to know them, of engaging and interacting with them virtually, and given enough time, you would start to have a familiarity with someone, you would know them, and be able to distinguish their personalities, and respective identities, as being synonymous with these anonymous tags, or handles that everyone used.

It wasn’t an internet that was meant to be real life social, or allow you to actually meet real people, it was an internet that was a refuge for the people who felt alienated and alone, or wanted to find friends with similar thinking to their own, or with common interests, who they could turn to, knowing that these were a crowd you could trust, and say and share pretty much anything, and there would be no serious repercussions.  It was a store of information, an online library, with talking in the corridors, and disused corners.  In some ways, it was a place where people would practice being themselves, with no pretense, and no barriers to being themselves, unless they chose to have them.  The worst repercussion could be that you’d be ostracised or alienated by your community, but then you would always be able to find a new group of people to connect with online.

Fast forward to 2008, and the Internet is a very different place. Now it’s a world of greater transparency, and visibility.  We now use the internet to stay connected with people we meet whilst travelling the globe.  We manage to make friends, all around the world, and now as we all travel globally, we actually try to meet the real people we made friends with online.

This is a very different world.  This is a very different internet..

Whilst I wasn’t consciously thinking about it I had actually assumed and brought forward the traits from the old internet with me to the world of Social Media.  It was cool.. My “identity” in this online world was “MagiTam” – and as I met more people, IRL (in real life), I started to build this brand and identity of MagiTam.  It was my online twitter persona, it was how people knew me.  It was all about creating this brand, this identity, associated with this label, or term, of MagiTam.  I was creating my own international brand, just like Nike, only with a team of 1 at the helm, and my logo was my profile photo of me.

Well, it finally dawned on me, that perhaps my “identity” of MagiTam just complicates things.  Having to introduce myself as @magitam and Farhan, was just double effort.  I didn’t really care to “hide” the person that I am.. And to be fair, I have my full name on my profile on Twitter, so it wasn’t like I was trying to hide my personal identity.

Then, it just clicked that perhaps I should see if I can get hold of @farhan.. and lo and behold, I asked Farhan Mannan, if he would mind terribly if I could have the twitter name of @farhan, since it was an integral part of my work, and if he wouldn’t mind terribly I’d like to be able to brand myself with that name..  Well, he kindly agreed, and a few hours later, I had set up a new account with the twitter ID of @farhan ;)  Thanks @farhanmannan!

Once I’d secured this identity (I already had @farhanrehman, in a seperate account), I realised that I wasn’t quite sure when or how to switch the name across, and if I should just switch it, or start tweeting from the new account, and re-start my twitter life. 

I happened to read recently about how @jimconnolly had just re-set his twitter account having inadvertently become a bit of a celebrity in the twitterverse, and mistakenly found himself following many internet marketers that were all asking him to tweet their websites, and share their products, or offerings.  Eventually, out of desperation, he decided to re-start, and just follow people who were clients, or actual friends.

I was going through one of these moments of desperation myself recently, where because I’ve reached a 2k limit on twitter, I can’t follow anymore people, until more than 2k people follow me back.. Which is quite annoying.. But my solution around it right now, is that I go to Twitter Karma and just unfollow people, based on who isn’t following me back.  Some people like @amanda or @paulwalsh I stay following, regardless of whether they follow back or not.  They appear to be staples of the london tech community, and so worth keeping an ear out for.  But others, who I don’t really know or recognise too well, and generally are based some place outside of the UK/London, are people who I start to unfollow, just so that I can start to follow more people who I’ve actually connected with in person, in some way shape or form.. 

The thing is, these are “real” connections, with real people, around conversations that I would actually have in person with them, if I were in the same locality.  In fact, thanks to tools like twitter, it actually makes it ever more likely that I will be able to actually meet more of these people that I engage and interact with on Social Networking platforms such as Twitter or Facebook.

With this much transparency, and this level of real world visibility, to the point that I can sometimes tell where people are, based on their tweets, and reference to events happening in and around London, I actually am looking for ever more opportunities to connect with people in person.  Especially people who I’ve spoken with, or exchanged messages with on platforms like Twitter, and Facebook.

This means that unlike Improbulus, who consciously chooses to maintain a certain level of anonymity and privacy, with regards to her real identity, I’m actually interested in being as open, visible and transparent as I can be.  Perhaps too much so, but given that my identity online is intrinsically woven into the persona of me, even if someone wanted to steal or imitate me, it wouldn’t last very long, at least I don’t think it would be.  But I guess, I just don’t go there. 

Perhaps I believe a little too much in the innate goodness of people, but one thing that I’ve found, especially more so since using twitter, is that people want to talk with people.  They want to interact with the person.  They don’t really want to speak to an “identity” without knowing the person behind it.  Those days of virtual identities, and anonymity online are starting to be of a bygone era. Now we look at ever more increasingly effective ways of using Social Media to amplify our voices, and throw our messages out into an ether, that connects it to the right people at the right time, and brings us back, so much of what we need, when we need it.

With this current day internet, and world of Social Media, you want your name on twitter to be representative of you the person.  Some people might be happier being a brand, or a product, but I think unless you happen to embody that brand or that company, you’ll probably find it easier to just be yourself.  Think of a name that you want to be known as, in real life, when you meet with someone, who you might already know really well on twitter.  Will you have to introduce yourself as something other than your twitter ID?  Do you want to or care about that?

I guess for me, especially being a Social Media Consultant, I’m often advising people and learning myself about what works.. My name works best for me.  I’m happy to be known as Farhan in real life, and now that I’m also known as @farhan on twitter, I don’t have to worry about trying to explain who I am.  Even better, when I meet people who follow me, instead of them wondering what my name is, if they recognise me from twitter, my twitter id will be enough for them to remember who I am.

I sometimes find it a challenge, when you meet someone who doesn’t have their actual name in their twitter id, to remember or figure out who they are.. Like the girl with a one track mind (@girlonetrack).  Fortunately, I’ve seen her at events enough times, that I finally figured out her name as Zoe Margolis (though sneaking a peek at her twitter profile kinda helped ;)

I guess it’s always going to be cool to have a “label” or a “cool” twitter handle, when you’re using it amongst your friends, and people who know you, but then when joe bloggs starts using it, then it may or may not be as useful, or helpful to still have the same cool, “in” joke of a nick name.

I guess in some respects, it’s not really any different to having a nickname, versus your real name.  In my case, because I use twitter with people who I would want to do business with, as well as friends, and generally just want to be remembered, I choose to now use my actual name as my twitter identity.  At least now when people come upto me and ask me if I am my twitter ID, the answer will be a resounding yes, without having to then say “and also, my real name is…” ;)  Now I just have to sort out new Moo Cards, for the new Twitter handle…

Next I have to figure out what to use for my custom flickr url, since the magitam reference doesn’t apply anymore :(  Suggestions welcome below ;)

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