Another unfocused ramble about some ideas I can’t shift from my head…

One of the things I have to think about is how people or organisations who either can’t blog or don’t want to blog can engage with the blogging world. Say, for example, your company just can’t do the human voice thing without sounding really fake but people are talking about what you do online. Or say you’re dyslexic or just not very good with words.

I can’t pin down where this came from – it might have been an aside at SXSW or it might just be really obvious and just bubbling to the surface of my brain – but it strikes me that while people need stuff to talk about they also need stuff to talk around.

Ah yes, that was it. Hugh MacLeod talking about working with Stormhoek Wine on the Self Replicating Awesomeness panel. Amongst many other things he got them to send bottles to bloggers who were having parties, not with the intention that they then blog about the wonderful wine – that would be naive – but that the wine becomes part of the experience. Or something.

Now this seems blindingly obvious to me and I’m sure there’s more to Hugh’s strategy there, but the notion of throwing things into spaces where social activity is interesting, especially when it’s done in a passive way. I’m not talking about advertising or anything that shouts in an aggressive, attention getting way. In fact I’m not really talking about marketing strategies at all. It’s more like putting a surprising “thing” in the way of people that makes them think about their environment in different ways. That could be a piece of public art, a new idea, some constraint on their usual patterns of behaviour, anything really.

I’m sure this has been thought about before. Something related to Alt Reality Games?

One to ponder more on. (And, again, feel free to use this a jumping off point for your own musings should you have the desire.)

One of the jargon buzz words at SXSWi this year that kept cropping up was “Thought Leader“. It amused me greatly as it really doesn’t mean anything more than someone who has ideas which some other people listen to and in the online world where everyone is famous for 15 people such things are incredibly relative. I might be a thought leader to some regular readers of my blog but I’m not to countless others.

But it did get me thinking a little bit, especially as I started looking for new Twitter streams to follow. Without going through the long process of checking links and judging blogs, how could I tell if these people were worth checking out? I found myself gravitating towards the stats box on the sidebar. As an example, here’s mine:

Here you can see I’ve got a Twitter ratio of 53:91 which could be represented thus:

Now, my thinking is that one can only deal with following a certain number of people before it gets unmanageable which keeps the pointless collecting of “friends” which plagues the likes of MySpace at bay. I peg this at around 50, because that’s where I’m at, but let’s have a look at someone I learned stuff from who is probably leading my thoughts. Alex Hillman has a ratio of 325:922 which looks like this:

This implies he’s more of a thought leader than me but is still within my realm and thus someone I can talk to as a peer. Which is about right.

How about old school a-list blogger Anil Dash with 232:2599?

Certainly someone I can learn from but not necessarily a peer. Which, when I met him, was sort of how it played out. He was lovely and gave me some handy tips but, for whatever reason, we didn’t exactly bond. (And that’s not a problem in the slightest, I hasten to add!)

Of course none of this means anything at all – I’m just playing around. But when we look at these stats boxes we do use them to make lazy if useful judgements. A band on MySpace will be measured by how many “friends” they have, for example, and as I’m getting more people following me who I don’t know and, on checking them out, feel no need to follow, it does strike me as a way to measure my “success”.

But yeah, this is really as useful as quoting visitor stats for websites. Sure, you’ve got 100,000 uniques a day but who are they? What value to they bring? And what are they visiting you for? That’s the stuff that really matters.