The ENTiPping Point

As bright as we all proclaim ourselves to be, we are woefully inadequate at helping ourselves and each other manage personal relationships.

I don't mean to imply that we don't know how to interact socially, either online or offline.  But I think there is a great opportunity for us to crowdsource our relationships together. 

I wrote about the idea of "metafolksonomy" a few months back.  It was the notion that if you crowdsourced Delicious-like tagging of people in the social space, that you could define an aggregate social profile of that person.

Businesses have embraced the idea of customer relationship managment (CRM) for years.  Converse with Jeremiah Owyang and he'll tell you that the concept of "social" CRM is going to be key as we move the concept of CRM forward with added social profile management components.

But what about those people who aren't in the social space that are part of my network?  How do I keep track of them, categorize their relationship to me and, even more beneficially, make my relationship to them useful to you?

I Need A Tool

There are some interesting tools out there to help you manage personal relationship and contacts for sure.  Tools like Gist and Rapportive help you manage your social network contacts and intergrate the management of those into your Gmail, Outlook or even Salesforce.com environments.

Several weeks back, I came across an interesting product called Jigsaw that integrates into the Salesforce.com CRM.  It's a jointly-maintained database of business contacts at companies all over the world; think of it as a "Wikipedia for business contacts".  So if I have a phone number for an executive at a company that I feel is more "up to date" than his profile that someone else has entered in Jigsaw for him, I can update the information to the most current data, and everyone who has that person as a contact will now have the new information.

So why does this have to be for business only?

If I have a contact in my network (think "personal" and not "social" for a moment), wouldn't it be great if I made the context of my relationship to that person available to everyone so that my connectivity to that person could be utilized by others?

This is the intent of LinkedIn from a business perspective.  But not everyone's on LinkedIn and the relationships I'm referring to may not suit LinkedIn.  Let me give you an example... 

"I had no idea..."

Let's say you have really been trying to made inroads in Company X.  You and I are friends because we were on a board together for a local charity.  You've tried and tried to get a consulting gig with Company X, but it'd be great if you knew someone there.  You check your LinkedIn profile and have no contact there.  Wouldn't it be good if you knew that my wife was a 3rd generation descendent of the man that founded Company X?  My wife's not on LinkedIn -- she's just someone you know because of me.  How many times have you found out this kind of information and thought, "I had no idea..."?

Now you know about that relationship -- how do you make this newly-discovered fact available for others that may know me?  This isn't something that Outlook's "contacts" area is going to help manage.  And even if I can manage my own relationships that way, it's certainly not going to benefit anyone else.  These "relationship affinity traits" somehow need to be captured and shared if we're all truly going to benefit from our personal networks.  If a Jigsaw-type repository for personal contacts and the relationships these contacts were involved in were available publicly, we could all benefit;  we might truly be but "six degrees of separation" away from anyone. 

Remember: Social Doesn't Mean "Online"

The world isn't completely "socially networked" yet.  Get involved in your local community and you will realize that the knowing how people interconnect and knowing how to leverage those connections is key to becoming integrated in making things happen.  But it's also important to remember that who you know offline can be just as important to those relationships that are primarily online.  We should find a way to combine the two so that all can find value in those interactions that we nurture.

So, what tools do you use to manage your personal relationships and network offline?

Previous Posts:
- Introduction
- Relationship Traits
- Making It Happen

Up to this point, I’ve written about what “metafolksonomy” is, how it is defined by our relationships with one another and how we might practically integrate this into our daily interactions within the social web.  The potential uses for a system that could help to organize and maintain contacts is large.  By interacting with each other, over time, we could build these great profiles that would let us find other people that we connect with; call it “crowdsourcing the crowd”.   But there are always pitfalls to new ideas.

Can People Benefit from Ratings Like Products?

What if the crowd doesn’t favor you?  People are not always going to find you interesting.  What if you were tagged as a “hypocrite” because of something you did during a single relationship with someone else?  If you translate this to the marketing world, research shows that people actually want to see some negativity in reviews and ratings because they find the product’s assessment to be more believable.  Is this true for people?  If not, why?

One thought to help combat the impact that a negative tag is weighting tags based on comments.  If you have 50 tags of “hypocrite” then maybe that’s more true to your nature than if you just had one tag, who may just be an old ex-girlfriend trying to lash out at you.  Think about a tag cloud representation and it becomes clear.

Sponsoring Profiles Might Be Next

How hard, then, would it be to sponsor favorable tags for certain individuals?  Maybe a stealthy PR group pays a firm to sponsor tags for a political candidate.  Suddenly the human tag cloud is skewed and people searching for a given hot topic from within a certain geographical area find a political candidate in their area instead of legitimate friends to connect with.

Search is Your Friend (and Your Enemy)

“Transparency” and “openness” seem to be emerging concepts as we dive deeper into the social space.  What would a metafolksonomic system of publicly identifying your persona do to the human interaction and relationship process?  If I could search and find someone that was a good match for my personality, how would our first few interactions change?  I’d have a whole host of information before I met you – would I be less interested in digging deeper to see if the “taggers” had missed something?

How about the longevity of this information being available?  What if I change over time and lose bad habits that I’m tagged with?  Surely, that needs to be reflected in my profile, but how?  Do we weight present-day information higher so that older tags get “stale”?

Are We Ready?

You tell me.  I see great benefit in this concept and yet approach it with intrepidation.  Just as the privacy conversation has been expanded due to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s comments in January about privacy not being a “social norm” anymore, so too can the conversation about how much we want to allow others to help define us.  Metafolksonomy is the utmost in social. -- it’s classifying the classifiers.  It’s a thought that goes beyond tagging events, places and websites.  This is not rating a dining spot for its al fresco seating.  It’s rating you.

Are you ready for us to hold you up?

(Photo by Billie Joe's Entourage, modified with permission)

Previous Posts:
- Introduction
- Relationship Traits

During my last post, I wrote about “relationship affinity traits” – those reasons that you are drawn to have a relationship with a person and the reason Person A wants a relationship with Person B can be completely different from what B wants from A, or it may be the same because of some commonality.  We step into a relationship initially usually due to a singular trait and then expand the quantity of relationship traits over time with the individual.  We know more about them – their likes, dislikes, things that interest them, skills they’re good at and other miscellaneous information that help us build a picture of who they are.  People across the globe are making these mental notes of human characteristics every day.  We find out more about people so that at some point we can leverage that knowledge and make it beneficial to ourselves and others in our network.

Use Relationship Affinity Traits to Organize Your Social Network

By discovering more about people in my network, I’ve found that it would be great to be able to make notes and tag people along the way.  I may run across that rare skill you have during a sidebar conversation and want to tuck that away for future reference.  With hundreds or thousands of followers, the prospect of retaining all of this information in my head is daunting.

What if I had a tool that would help me do this?

People Can Be Delicious

What if we had a tool that allowed people to publicly designate these tags, much like we do with categorizing websites on Delicious?  I jokingly call it “Delicious People”.  Instead of website URLs, we have individuals and those individuals have tags and notes.  So when I find out that you grew up in Alaska, I could tag you with this information and when I plan a vacation there someday, I could dial you up and ask for recommendations on where to go.

This is wonderful information to have at my disposal based on what I know about you.  But let’s think broader.

Use The Power of the People

When you put a 1000-piece puzzle together with friends, the picture becomes clearer more quickly when you divvy up the subject areas and different people focus on one area; when everyone’s done, you join the individual perspectives and the full picture takes shape.

What I know about you is probably not the total view of you.  During your conversations with others, you’ve probably shared things that I don’t know about.  So to get a real *total* picture of you would require combining all of the tagged and noted profiles that have been created on you by everyone.  All of this information would be searchable by anyone with a Delicious People account.

By combining Delicious People profiles of you, we get to see the aggregation of perceptions:

• Notes:  As people make notes about you, we see what they’ve learned during your relationship with them.  Maybe they note an experience karaoking “Eye of the Tiger” with you at a conference.  It humanizes and gives perspective on your relationship.


• Tags:  Tags could be combined and given weight, which becomes an incredibly powerful representation of the magnitude a given tag.  Think of the traditional keyword “tag cloud”.  If 90% of people tag you as “brilliant”, then you just might be.

Ideas for other uses?

• Finding Friends: Need to find people who are like you that you might want to follow on Twitter?  Go searching for tags that interest you and there’s a complete list of people who have the same hobbies, interests or personality types.


• Marketing: Marketers should be salivating -- imagine being able to mine this information for peoples’ skills, preferences and who they are related to and how.


• Location-Based Offers:  What if location-based services like Yelp were able to link into this data?  Imagine not only getting a restaurant near you, but one that also had great spaghetti, which is a favorite food of yours based on someone's tag of you.  Get Foursquare or Gowalla involved and now you can show other people who might be like you who have also checked-in nearby.

In the final part of this series we'll look at some of the issues that might surround the concept of metafolksonomy.  What happens when you get negatively tagged?  How do you control or prevent it?  Would we see paid-for or sponsored profiles?  How do we handle astroturfing when the people are calling the shots?

All very interesting questions as we move forward.  In the mean time:  What other uses could we find for a metafolksonomy process?  What do you see as some of the issues we might encounter?

• Puzzle image by Jared
• Delicious icon by IconTexto

Previous Posts:
- Introduction

In my previous post, I introduced the idea of "metafolksonomy".  Let's see if we can get to a quick definition of the concept before we dive too far into it...

Metafolksonomy: the classification of an individual by one or more other individuals based on inbound relationship affinity traits.

Now, that's just a heady way of saying:

If I want to have some kind of relationship with you, then obviously there is some kind of appeal in your personality or your social capital that makes me want to connect with you.

Others might find these same things about you interesting too, or they very well might have other traits on which they base their relationship with you.

Now, take all of those reasons that people wanted to connect with you and list and weight them, you have a profile of yourself in the social space.

Relationship Affinity Traits

What exactly is a "relationship affinity trait"?  The concept is core to the idea of metafolksonomy.  As seen in the diagram, there are two different elements of affinity at work in our relationships -- inbound and outbound.  There is a reason that you want a relationship with me, and I with you.  These reasons are the "relationship affinity traits".

But just like yin yang, the reasons that we may have a relationship with one another may be completely different and this is why it's important to classify the relationship not as a single pipe connecting two people, but rather as a pair of connections that each satisfy a unique need for each individual involved.  I, for instance, may find the fact that you juggle intriguing and yet you find the fact that I live in the same city with you as a reason that you want to have contact with me.  They're very different reasons, but still cause a connection.

We Define You

As you become "stickier" in the social space and communicate with more people, the sum of your relationships contain valuable information about who you are and how people see you.  Take a quick glance at your LinkedIn profile, your Twitter bio, or your 'About' section on your blog.

Guess what?

That probably doesn't include everything about the way that we all see you.  Sure, there are probably a few things in common, but there are probably hundreds of small pieces that you'd find trivial to leave out.  Some of these trivial nuggets, though, might be the complete basis for someone having a social relationship with you.

...And You're Defining Others

Remember that relationships are two-way and while you're being defined by inbound affinity relationship traits, you're involved in the "outbound" aspect of the relationship as well.  Why do you interact and have relationships with those around you?

In my next post, I'll go through some practical applications of this concept in the social space.

In the mean time...

Do you consider a relationship as a singluar piece of social conduit or do you see it as something else?

Next post in series --> "Making It Happen"

When you start to have more than a couple dozen folks that you follow on Twitter, the prospect of managing the relationships you're creating starts to get a little overwhelming.  We've all met great people on social media sites.  And there is usually some singular trait that drew you to interact with these great people.  However, as you get to know them, watch their Twitter stream and see who else they interact with, you probably get to know more interesting things about them.  So what may have started out as a business relationship interest, over time, the total picture of that person starts to become clearer.

You may notice an industry pro talking about his grandmother who just used to live next to Abraham Zapruder.

Maybe you find out someone went to pastry school while they "searched for identity" before becoming a CPA.

You might discover that someone who has been so hard to get a response from on Twitter actually shares your love for collecting frog figurines.

This is the joy of building your social network -- you find out all of these great nuggets that help shape a picture of each person in your network.  You begin develop perceptions of personalities based on interesting traits about your new relationships.  Hopefully, you're sharing bits and pieces with your followers along the way as well.

But what's intriguing is that while you value one set of traits in a new friend, another person could value that exact same friend for a completely different set of traits.  While I may value our shared love for collecting frog figurines, another person might be following you because you just live in the same city that they do.  So neither I nor your local friend have a complete picture of the value of your online presence.  Therefore, each person has created their own taxonomy of you -- a classification based on certain characteristics that are derived from your relationship with them.

A "folksonomy" is a loose term used to describe the process of people collaborating to tag and organize items, much like you see on sites like Flickr, for example.  The theory is that by putting our heads together as a social media community, we're more likely to accurately describe photos using tagging with keywords and that the totality of these tags yields a more legitimate description of that item to the rest of the world.

In this blog series, we'll take the notion of folksonomy one step further to "metafolksonomy" -- the process of classifying the classifiers;in short -- people tagging.  We all have our own taxonomies that individuals have created based on our relationship with them.  We create "folksonomies" of objects on sites like Flickr and Delicious based on a join effort of humans classifying objects.  And at the deepest of collaboration is humans classifying humans jointly.

How does metafolksonomy fit into the social media environment?   How could we benefit from solutions that implement this concept?

And to you, the reader -- what questions do you have about this concept that we should explore?

Next in the series -- > "Relationship Traits"