As I learn more and more about the social science behind Social Media I am still baffled by how many experienced individuals there are in this field that still swap and maintain multiple identities online. I’m not talking about those happy go lucky individuals who use Twitter as a fun social tool/game, rather I’m talking about those who use it primarily for serious knowledge management and community engagement or to fulfil their innate passions.

I’ll just for the record define what I mean by; changing your identity, as best I can. I know there are many ways to look at identity and I won’t do it justice in this blog post but hopefully this stimulates the topic. Your user name is an identity as it helps identify you. Your avatar photo is a representation of your identity and both these together define your identity online. If you suddenly stop Tweeting and focus on Re-tweeting or you start to rant a lot more online that is representative of your personality and is less about your identity. The government is serious about you maintaining one identity off-line and that’s the whole reason you have a passport and why it’s a crime to forge another person’s identity by creating another passport with your photo and a different person’s name in it. 

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Scholarly thinking has nearly always preceded the definitions tailored by the software industry. Definition's on terminology are important but will differ depending on what side of the balance sheet the definition now sits. KM is now being defined by the people making money from it and who are being paid to evangelize.

The crux of KM comes down to how the company can be more effective and efficient and pay higher dividends to share holders. Staff attrition costs companies millions and is far more prevalent now than it was 30 years ago. That's a paradigm shift! You lose your people you lose your knowledge and often to your competitor. Companies have to get their heads around this and technology has helped. Corporate knowledge attrition is only one aspect of the KM field but I want to relate this comment to it. By capturing the "deltas" of argument / discussion / creation on a daily weekly monthly basis in systems which relate to the particular "environment" in which they are being captured and then aggregating these, provides a knowledge pool. Web2.0 helps capture the "deltas" as well as creating tools which relate and appeal to the "environment" in which they are used. Systems can then aggregate and provide the ability to search and share experiences to prevent reinventing the wheel and slowing the operations down. The skill will be to present the knowledge pool back to the employees in a way that works for everyone. Dr Martin Porter at Cambridge University helped develop some very interesting Natural Language search algorithms back in the late 90's which disappointingly have still not been incorporated into our favourite search engines.

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I have found that the more I Tweet the less I Blog. I'm not the only one as I hear it from other Social Media inspired individuals. Now is this a valid excuse well I'm still not sure. You see I do now find myself trawling the internet more easily for valuable content as my online community has become more honed into my way of thinking so they feed me with all the types of articles I would have taken ages to find a year ago. I also find that my Google Alerts have a brilliant relevance and it musters articles I stand is awe of as they are better written and more publicized than anything I would have done at this point in time. I can then share these easily through my Microsharing/blogging platforms and gain kudos from my community. All my writing concepts tend to now be in Wiki's and proposals and less and less on my Blog. A pity I hear you say.....or maybe not.

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The concept of ambient ties fascinates me and it became all apparent this last weekend. My wife and I were invited down the coast to a friend’s seaside cottage for the weekend. Our friend used to work and live in the small coastal town where the cottage is but has since moved to the city. This was her first time back in about 5 months and we shared the experience of returning with her.

I’ll put my social media hat on for a second and then I’ll get back to the weekend story. When my wife and I first moved to the city we live in now eight months ago we knew only a couple of people. I struck up a local Twitter network rather fast as the city of Melbourne I found opened its arms up to me and made me feel right at home both on and offline. After being here for only a month though I needed to go and visit the dentist. I asked my Twitter network if there was someone in my area who they could recommend. @emilyfreeman came to my rescue and let me know her dentist was great and really professional. Turned out she was right and my wife also went there soon afterwards. I had never met Emily before yet I knew some of the people who followed her on Twitter who I trusted.

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 I had been waiting in anticipation for the show since I booked it a month ago. Silly pun and unintended there, as the booked show I'm referring to was an event "The future of the Book" held as part of the Melbourne writers festival this week. Straight off the bat I'll let you know that I'm mildly dyslexic and even though I have always had a massive respect for books I'm not the type to plunder my way through a glorious stack of books in a weekend. My mother used to take me by the hand around the library with a basket which she piled high with her weeks reading so it wasn't for lack of being shown the way that I didn't do the same. I am an Audio book person and Audible.com is my friend. Friend in the way it points out what other books I would probably like if I enjoyed the one I just listened to and friend in the way that it takes me to reviews by other people who share my interests. I know you're all probably laughing, yes at me and not with me, thinking you probably have no real friends. We'll get to that in another Blog post when we discuss what a friend really means to us but here's a little insight by Cameron Marlow about Online Social Media and friends in Facebook http://tinyurl.com/aapjq2

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Social Media is nothing we can hide behind. It exposes us in areas we didn't know we even had areas. I wanted to introduce you to what I call the "coffee shop syndrome" of Online Social Media:

Remember those times we skived off from school pretending to be sick so we could have a day off. Remember then how your parents would tell you "well if you're too sick to go to school you're defiantly too sick to go to the shops." You tended to agree only because if someone from school saw you out and about they would wonder why you were not in class. Well the coffee shop syndrome relates to this concept but I just wanted to set the scene offline first.

"The Coffee Shop Syndrome" relates to our level of Emotional Intelligence and how we act upon these skills in the world of Online Social Media. Remember that Emotional Intelligence refers to how often we demonstrate certain behaviours.  It's a set of skills that define how effectively we perceive, understand, reason with and manage our own and others' feelings.  It's all very well believing we demonstrate a high level of EI but if we don't have an outward display of this behaviour then others may have a different opinion!!

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I felt compelled to write this post in light of the recent Twitter crazed support of the most popular reality show in the history of Australian TV, MasterChef. Something fundamental was uncovered for me and it relates to a change which we are all going to have to face up to. Twitter is crossing boundaries and these are quite serious ones indeed which Media companies such as Channel 10 are going to have to face up to.

The MasterChef final went to air on the East coast of Australia at 7:30pm last night. It was only to be aired two hours later on the west coast of Australia when it would be 7:30pm there, due to the time zone difference. MasterChef, during the series, gained a massive following on Twitter. If you don't believe me do a search in Twitter on #masterchef and see for yourself. The series for many who use Twitter was made that much more special when shared with new and old friends alike on the Twitter Social Media platform. The advertisement breaks for once became useful as Tweets spun between the lounge rooms of viewers. This is entertainment and we will see this concept grow and grow.

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Is it relevant? 

There are plenty of studies around which demonstrate that Emotional intelligence has been linked to better staff morale, increased productivity, higher job satisfaction and organisational commitment.  However as we move more and more to the use of on-line mechanisms of communication what does that mean for our ability to communicate … as people?

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With regards to authenticity in the Tweetspace: Earlier this year on the 5^th of March there was an earth quake in the Melbourne region which shook everyone a little as it's not a common occurrence. Tweets started to steam out about the occurrence and our local vetted ABC radio/TV channel which has a Twitter account @774melbourne followed it furiously trying to get the "right" story and doing a good job of it. The size of the tremor was being reported as 5+ on many accounts and this was starting to become official. A month earlier there had been a quake a few thousand km away in the pacific and people who were Googling "earthquake Australia" were in their haste seeing the size of a quake as 5.7 . Chinese whispers took this into the Tweepspace and I heard people talking about it in town the following day giving this statistic. There had been an Earthquake on the 14^th of February near Fiji which measured 5.7 and from what I can gather the two occurrences were being linked. The actual size of the quake in Melbourne was 4.6

Following on from this another story: On the 18^th of march @Wolfcat from the The ABC (Australia) was asked to present how Twitter had been used during the devastating Australian Victoria bushfires to locate lost loved ones and deliver critical information to those under threat. @Wolfcat had established and oversaw the Twitter channel for this part of the ABC. He was not given long to present and asked the audience to please understand that he could not give it its due in the short time he had allocated to him. Instead he would present on the Earthquake which occurred on the 5^th of March and how the ABC had operated in order to feed the relevant information out to the Tweetspace. It was really interesting as he explained how he had developed a method of establishing the Epicentre of this seismic event based on his mapping of the regions the relevant Tweets were coming in from.

As is happening more and more during seminar sessions there was a Twitter Tag #v21 which the audience were including in their Tweet threads out to their followers to keep on topic. I was sitting in the audience and started to feel the room shake while @Wolfcat was explaining all this. I immediately blamed it on a strong black coffee I had had during the break and having missed lunch earlier. Low and behold the streams of Tweets from outside the room started to come back in on the #v21 that there had just been another Earthquake. More and more tweets came streaming in and the session room started to buzz with this massive coincidence. http://tinyurl.com/n7nsx5  .

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These days there is a lot of talk around this thing we call “Emotional Intelligence’ but what is it really and what does that mean in the context of Social Media?

According to Mehrabian, the actual words we say only account for 7% of our communication, tone of voice is 38% and body language is 55%.  For effective and meaningful communication, these three parts of the message need to support each other – in other words they have to be congruent.

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