Thibaud
Cail­let, founder of the RMS net­work on Linkedin, orga­nized a con­fer­ence on busi­ness net­work­ing last week, where I was invited to talk. The speak­ers were,

• Nico­las Bermond, founder of PME-multimedia and author of
  “Le Net­work­ing social” spoke about 6 degrees of sep­a­ra­tion, types of net­works and the move from social to busi­ness online networks;
• Alain Lefeb­vre, founder of the French social net­work 6NERGIES spoke about man­ag­ing one’s rela­tion­ship capital;
• Yann
  Mauchamp, spoke about the Open BC plat­form, where he’s serv­ing as the French Coun­try Manager;
• Christophe Lan­glois, Thom­son Finan­cial and Ecad­emy in Lon­don, spoke about net­work­ing events;

• I spoke about cul­tural dif­fer­ences between the French, Anglo-Saxons (US/UK) and South Amer­i­cans (par­tic­u­larly Brazil­ians) in their approach to net­work­ing and then gave a brief intro­duc­tion to object-centered social­ity along with the think­ing behind my nascent project, Social Object.

I tried to pod­cast the entire event but my newly down­loaded “Audio Edit” appli­ca­tion crashed after 90 min­utes of record­ing. Some jour­nal­ists were present, as was recruiter and LinkedIn’s top French net­worker Jacques Frois­sant, Marie Hulin (and Boris!) from UneIn­vi­ta­tion (think Evite), Fab­rice Epel­boin from Plan­et­Moi — Ago­rami (net­work plat­forms) and Andre Pitie from Trombi (think Classmates).

Tech­no­rati Tags: social­soft­ware

Here’s a sum­mary of my presentation:

On dif­fer­ent cul­tural approaches to networking:

• I drew my obser­va­tions on my own expe­ri­ence as a half-Brazilian,
  half-Finn who has lived for a num­ber of years in the US, the UK,
  Brazil, France and other countries.
• My online expe­ri­ence includes 18 months of active net­work­ing on LinkedIn, Ecad­emy, Orkut (includ­ing com­mu­nity man­age­ment), OpenBC, Via­duc and pres­ence on Ryze, Spoke, Tribe, 6nergies and Friend­ster, among others.
• Gen­er­ally speak­ing, Brazil­ians are the most open to new con­tacts, Ang­los are the most direct and to the point, and the French the most wary and attached to their exist­ing net­works, such as their schools. The other speak­ers chimed in to say the French rely too much on their old net­works and are gen­er­ally not open to devel­op­ing new social ties with peo­ple that are not rec­om­mended to them by their exist­ing network.

On devel­op­ing your online social networking:

• For those new to online net­work­ing, the cre­ation of your pub­lic pro­file can be daunt­ing. Yet this is your vir­tual self that works for you 24/7: take the time to do it right, add some per­son­al­ity, include a photo and revisit your pro­file frequently;
• There’s a (steep) learn­ing curve in con­nect­ing with oth­ers and cre­at­ing effec­tive and mean­ing­ful busi­ness / social rela­tion­ships online, so don’t expect imme­di­ate results.

On object-centered social­ity:

• Offline, peo­ple give off enough cues through their clothes, behav­iour, etc., that make it easy for them to start a con­ver­sa­tions with each other (the blink is easy).. Online, the blink is harder … although sea­soned online social net­work­ers have fine-tuned their “blink-ability”;
• Rec­om­men­da­tions have been the tra­di­tional method to get to know peo­ple. For instance, you might refer me to a friend who works in the same indus­try. Online, this need not be the only way and there are mean­ing­ful ways to con­nect with oth­ers online besides the 6 degrees of sep­a­ra­tion method used by LinkedIn and most other social networks;
• For instance, I may con­nect with peo­ple eas­ily on Flickr by com­ment­ing on a photo they’ve taken. Like­wise, I may meet peo­ple through themed photo-sharing groups within Flickr (Sunrise/Sunsets, etc.). Flickr also has a photo-sharing chat room and inevitably, a con­tact list. Inter­est­ingly, Flickr’s pho­to­stream allows you to get to know and keep up with peo­ple (and your friends) through the pho­tos they post … it becomes a visual blog of sorts, a visual record of your friend’s activities.

On social currency:

• The abil­ity to safely con­nect with strangers through shared objects becomes an impor­tant online com­pe­tence. It is akin to attend­ing an indus­try con­fer­ence and meet­ing some­one who shares your same inter­est in the field. Except that online, it need not be a con­fer­ence (forum) and can occur one-to-one;
• Social Cur­rency (devel­op­ing on Dou­glas Rushkoff’s arti­cle in the now defunct “The Fea­ture”) denotes the objects and totems that pro­vide strong ref­er­ences between peo­ple, as well as implicit behav­iors. Per­haps it’s best explained by the fol­low­ing ques­tion: “what online social cur­rency have you devel­oped (dis­played) to attract oth­ers (qual­i­fied oth­ers) to con­tact you?”

On the ratio­nale for Social Object:

• Social Object is a con­cept in devel­op­ment and the com­pany may not see the light of day;
• Social Object is about com­bin­ing col­lab­o­ra­tive tech­nolo­gies in mean­ing­ful ways to allow for spon­ta­neous, con­struc­tive, col­lec­tive action among your employ­ees, with your sup­pli­ers and ulti­mately with your customers;
• Bound­aries between the com­pany and sup­pli­ers had bro­ken down with the deep inte­gra­tion just-in-time man­u­fac­tur­ing required (taken even fur­ther nowa­days with RFID sup­ply chains). Now, the “wall” between the com­pany and its cus­tomers is becom­ing opaque and the bound­aries are becom­ing more fluid;
• Your employ­ees, sup­pli­ers and cus­tomers: the objec­tive is to help these stake­hold­ers col­lab­o­rate and innovate;
• There is more to do than just set­ting up and com­bin­ing wikis and blogs;
• Social Object brings these tech­nolo­gies together to help you inno­vate and grow.

The link between social net­work­ing and col­lec­tive action is evi­dent, and col­lab­o­ra­tion is indeed the out­come of link­ing up with oth­ers, exchang­ing infor­ma­tion and par­tic­i­pat­ing in online con­ver­sa­tions. For more about this and the Web 2.0, see here (Via Jyri and Marie).