Daily Dose of Pras

I’ve come to a bit of a quarter-life crisis. Questions have been raised that I don’t have good answers to. “What’s the next step? “Where do you want to be in 5 years?” It seems we are all struggling with such questions. I can’t tell you how many amazing young people I know who have been axed in the past month - and how many more I’m talking to every day, who are 22, graduating, ready to take on the world, but can’t find a place to start. One recently came to me, asking for tips on how to approach his job search. I told him I wasn’t an authority on the subject, but I’d read a ton and talked to plenty of people who did know a thing or two. I decided to write some ideas down, especially the more unlikely ones.

There are better places to read about finding mentors; I’m going to teach you how to take over a small South American country, and how to turn bar buddies into valuable connections. I’m going to share with you what I learned from Seattle’s finest connectors and some of my wisest friends back in Texas. So here are a few ideas, none of them mine, to help you and I both get better at networking:

1. Build Your Personal Brand

I was recently talking to a friend and recent transplant to Seattle, and he said that he had gotten really aggressive about cultivating his social brand, and that he was now going to do the same thing with his professional one. Personal brand is a lovely buzz word, but I wanted to know, what did he really mean? “You’re actually really good at this,” he told me. He had looked at some of his friends who were more established in Seattle, and had modeled his personal brand on theirs. He started with amping up his presence on Facebook - more pictures, more activity, more effort to reach out to friends. He said he wanted to start a blog - which now he has. Now he was going to move on to his professional brand, and was stepping up his efforts to connect to people on LinkedIn.

I personally am a fan of blogging because it’s healthy for me, it’s how I sort out my issues, and I enjoy writing. But one of the things that Career Distinction, a book Ahmed recommended, taught me, is that your blog also becomes an extension of your personal brand, it becomes your online portfolio, a platform from which you can demonstrate your business acumen or tech savvy. I believe that everyone should start a blog. And if you’re interested, here are some tips on getting started.

In a world where we use more plug-and-play services than ever, where we plug people in and out to solve specific problems, where there is reduced friction and companies are adaptive (see a previous post on this concept: My Vendors Have Vendors) your personal brand becomes the way people gauge your value, and how they chose who needs to get plugged-in in order to solve a particular problem.

2. Pay it Forward

Last weekend NetIP Seattle (the Network of Indian Professionals) recently hosted a networking workshop with Hoan Do, an up-and-coming speaker who talks to young people about time management, networking, and success. One of Hoan’s key points was the idea of paying-it-forward, reminding me of one of my favorite recent reads, Never Eat Alone, by Keith Ferrazzi. The idea is that when you meet a new person, rather than asking all the usual dull biographical questions like where are you from and what do you do, ask them what they are passionate about. If they came to a networking event, ask them what brought them there? Then ask “how can I help you in your passion?”

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Twitter built a powerful service - a great tool for communicating. And then one day looked up and realized their best shot at monetization - searching through tweets and people for information - was being done by someone else. They went and bought that company, and incorporated it as Twitter Search. The fact that they did so highlights the importance of search as the go-to monetization strategy that companies like Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, and Google see as the next big “vertical” within Search.

There was a fantastic blog from Jon Battelle where he discussed this idea that Twitter was the next YouTube - the next search vertical with huge traction - and that Google would do everything in it’s power to own this new search vertical. Meanwhile, we saw attempts by Facebook to acquire Twitter, and when that failed, we saw Facebook lightning-quick roll-out FriendFeed and Twitter-esque features to compete and build out it’s own microblogging platform. And sure enough, yesterday TechCrunch had a post on acquisition talks between Twitter and Google. Biz Stone today responded with a blog post stating “Sometimes We Talk” with companies about acquisition, but “Our goal is to build a profitable, independent company and we’re just getting started.

So far, no one seems to have released a fantastic and powerful search coupled with a good monetization strategy, but one must imagine that Facebook, Google, and Twitter are all working on. There are signs at least Twitter is advancing in that direction. As my friend Akshay stated last week, in a moment of insight around who would win the war to own your lifestream, “Facebook can become Twitter, but Twitter can’t become Facebook.”

I recently met Danah Boyd at a Microsoft Research event called TechFest (you can watch some of the coverage of cool new gadgets here). She was giving a talk titled “Social Media is here to stay. Now What?” Rather than just regurgitating what she said, I thought I’d tell you about how her thoughts struck me. What neurons (mis)fired as a result. And basically what her ideas knocking around inside my head for a few days have produced.

First off, I love what she does. She’s a Cal alum with a Ph.D from Berkeley’s School of Information, who studies new media and is currently a Microsoft Researcher at their New England campus.  I love the idea of being able to spend your days actually researching social media, group interaction, and the changes happening in how we interact as a result of technology. I’m a mere casual observer in comparison, and perhaps I wouldn’t love trudging through the data, but I love building models for how things work and interact.

She also had a great presentation style. For an academic, she’s very down to earth. I felt like we could go have a cup of coffee no problem. I also felt like she had an elegance and style to her presentation - the use of Flikr photos to liven-up the presentation - calling them “three acts” instead of “bullets,” “buckets,” or some other mundane list metaphor. Finally - I loved the way she closed. Not the usual “Q&A” end-slide, but the simple words that perhaps all of us should live by: “question everything.” It has an elegant double-meaning here - telling her audience that she is humble and encourages - expects - debate, criticism, and opposing ideas.

I loved the way she laid-out the history of social networking. I was amazed at how many of the conclusions she came to parallelled my own two-parter Treatise on the History of the Wall. As a digital native I take it’s evolution for granted - I lived it - but from her perspective she was able to live it but also analyze it while it was happening - and reached some fascinating conclusions.

For example, she painted a picture of the death of Friendster at the hands of it’s own harsh policies - it apparently evicted two highly-connected groups of people - fakesters & bands - who fled - taking their social graphs with them - and found refuge on MySpace. I loved that she compared the cultures of Facebook & MySpace and came to the same conclusions as me.

I also loved that she analyzed the differences between Twitter & Facebook - pointing out something I hadn’t been fully cognizant of - that Twitter has pickup among adults, while Facebook has traction with youth, and that youth will never stay on a network frequented by parents - and that this - not innovation around new features - is the biggest challenge Facebook will face as it continues to grow. Here’s the argument: Essentially, Facebook for people who were born digital represents a way for them to connect in the present. However, for the growing number of parents on facebook, it represents a way to connect with their past, to “show their old highschool friends how cool they’ve become.” Twitter, because of it’s traction among the media and integration into media outlets like CNN.com, has had much more success among adults.

Danah Boyd also points out that after the death of Friendster, the digerati abandoned social networking, and instead spent their time on media-sharing sites - hence the popularity of Flikr among grown-ups - whereas Flikr has almost no users under 25 - because we use Facebook. Similarly, the digerati picked-up Twitter, and, indeed, Twitter is a darling among tech blogs like TechCrunch, which is constantly defending it’s heavy coverage of all things Twitter. Moreover, the content is different. Facebook for youth is about what we’re currently doing. Pictures. Music. Movies. Partying. Nonsense. Because of who is on Twitter - political junkies and tech junkies - that’s not where youth want to spend their time. In fact, Danah Boyd suggests that youth find the whole concept of Twitter “kinda stupid.” All super-fascinating to me, and in-line with my earlier entry “If These Walls Could Talk.”

The challenge Danah outlines at the end of her talk is one around how we - the users - will deal with the changes that result from social media. The nexus of these changes will be how we deal with our information - what we’re doing - being accessible forever, by anyone, searchable, and out-of-context. As friends today often joke: thanks to Facebook, we’ll never be able to run for president. There’s too much dirt out there.