SOBCon 2010 Interview Series: Julien Smith on Freedom and Social Media as a Gateway Drug
ReveNews interview series with participants of SOBCon 2010 continues with a conversation with Julien Smith, co-author of Trust Agents, a New York Times Bestseller. Managing to mix idealism with the edgy ability to cut through the crap, Julien riffs on the future and the social shift it will bring. Enjoy.
What brings you to SOBCon?
Julien: It’s one of the few conferences you go where there is no sense of elitism. It’s easy to engage with people and very low-key, and there are few conferences actually like that. The only other one I can really think of is called Podcasters Across Borders in Canada. I hope to find more, but the reason I like going is it’s different than anything else.
Recently I’ve heard a lot of talk that social media as a term, as a concept, as a buzzword that’s being thrown out there, will die fairly quickly. Do you see social media fading?
Julien: I guess the question is: what are all the real estate agents going to go after social media is dead?
(laughs)
Julien: (laughs) Real estate agents are like, “Now we’re social media experts! And, like, oh no, social media is dead. Crap! What are we going to do?”
But seriously, I’ve never thought about social media in that self-defining way. I try to think about interesting ideas. Most of the people that are creating interesting ideas are off the social media bandwagon in the first place. Where does attributing the term social media to things end anyway? Is Foursquare social media? Sure, in a sense there’s a social aspect that is integrated into it and it is a kind of social network but it’s also about meta-location, among other things. So in a general sense, yeah, the expression is not even necessary anymore.
Recently Ad Age had this big article about Bank of America adopting the digital paradigm. I thought it was pretty funny that immediately there were a lot of Twitter comments from folks commenting that Bank of America hasn’t even figured out Customer Service, how are they going to talk differently to us on Twitter?
Julien: (Julien, pictured right, and some guy who jumped the shark on the left. Photo by jdlasica.) Exactly, right. If Bank of America’s reality is broken and they acknowledge their customer service problem and say they’re going to go into social media, well, then their social presence by definition will be broken. When Chris Brogan and I wrote Trust Agents, and we were preparing for our next book, we talked about the idea of this being an internal fix needed for most companies’ outlooks. A “Let’s talk about our Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn strategies” approach makes no sense if your internal reality is broken. The internal has to make sense.
Once that core is strong, then you can go out in any direction and be congruent, which I think is one of the things businesses need to do. Never mind the crazy notion that consumers are using Twitter, saying customer service doesn’t work for Bank of America. What are companies going to say, “We offer high-level, high-quality service to the people who are rich and on the digital divide, while everyone who is poor and on the wrong side of the digital divide, we offer poor service.” That doesn’t make any sense. One way or another it has to become congruent.
That brings to mind Southwest Airlines and the whole Kevin Smith fiasco. Are businesses in reverse in danger of listening too much to people like Kevin Smith, for example?
Julien: What is interesting is that we give people who have a platform really good service but then as soon as somebody becomes invisible we don’t care. For every airline there is one screwed up example because they are all so bad. It’s like that United Breaks Guitars song (below). Yeah, they broke a guitar but that is not why they cared; they cared when it hit a million views on YouTube, they cared once the platform existed. They assaulted Kevin Smith for being fat. I don’t know how fat he is but it’s a whole other thing if it’s a random anonymous fat dude, right?
What does that say to people? It says to the smart people, “I need a platform in order to deal with a corporate organization; I will be able to deal with it better if I have a powerful platform. I need a platform in order to be given any amount of respect.” It’s sad but it’s true. The thing with social media is that now everybody has a hammer and they are going to want to hammer a nail into something.
If you have a platform then all of the sudden the company is like, “Oh, it’s Kevin Smith! We are so sorry!” He called out on his Twitter platform, saying that it was so sad. “The only reason I got a call back is because of the fact I’m Kevin Smith.”
I think it speaks to your earlier point. If the internal parts of the company’s customer service are inherently broken they won’t have the right process in place. What social media has done allows people, former non-entities in the corporate mind, to be able to broadcast. That’s made a big difference to how corporations are reacting. However, with more and more people adopting social media will it create a sort of blindness due to the amount of noise?
Julien: Absolutely, there is no question about it. Things are already better, right, because at least at some level there is some personal attention because of social tools. But the fact that it doesn’t scale means we will get blindness, because if it’s in scale you can’t pay attention to it the way you used to be able to.
Let’s say you own a barbershop. Every time someone comes into the barbershop you strike up a conversation, say, “Hey what is going on? How’s life,” you acknowledge them by name if you know their name; all of these things are not scalable. I can say, “Thank you for coming to my barbershop, Angel,” but I can’t scale that, or [I can] use an auto responder, in some quasi-zero effort way, but then it’s essentially spam.
I can’t create that personal relationship one hundred fifty million times over. It’s just not scalable. I’d run out of resources unless I resort to spamming, which is not the right answer.
What we will begin to develop is a very sophisticated understanding of when people are sacrificing and truly devoting their personal attention versus creating the false impression of personal attention. I think three or four years ago, early on in the game, when there were not that many people on Facebook you could do it to scale to a certain degree. Anybody who brings it to a high enough level will, over time, lose the ability to create personal relationships. They say that popularity is an inequality between supply and demand of a person; so what ends up happening is you have to create less demand by increasing price, or you have to cut out newbies, or you have to cut out somebody to keep the level of personal attention with the existing people that you already have.
The people who aren’t getting personal attention have the same expectations for true personal relationships that the rest of us do. They’ll know when they’re not getting personal attention and they will switch off; they will become “blind” to the half-effort social media stuff that isn’t really causing any type of sacrifice.
You’re also implying there that there is going to be a change in the cultural paradigm about how we communicate on this platform.
Julien: I think so. Normally in person when we talk to people we are very sophisticated. I’d like to think we have sophisticated bullshit sensors. We know when people are really paying attention and when they are not. Some people are better at faking it than others but we can see when somebody cares about us and when they don’t. We are going to be able to see those signals in the digital realm once we get a better understanding of how the online is part of our everyday life, it’s a part of us, and it’s a way that we communicate pretty much from this point forward. People will grow up in it and they will understand it.
I know people who say to me, “Hey did you see what I put on your Wall?” And I say yeah. And they complain, “But you didn’t “like” it so what’s the deal?” It’s an example of people developing alternate signals for appreciation and sacrifice online. Did you really look at my thing? Did you like it? Yeah, I did like it. Why didn’t you press “like” then?
This is a very rudimentary example but it illustrates that there develop a level of sophistication and an understanding of detail that we don’t have right now with regards to social interactions and expectations online.
With on so much emphasis in social media and its growth, it always surprises me more that folks are not talking about net neutrality. Why do you think that is?
Julien: Yeah, they don’t care. (laughs)
Why? Doesn’t it seem to affect their livelihood?
Julien: No, because they are not web people. It’s reached a mass where most people do not come from the Internet the way you or I do. I’ve been online since I was thirteen years old. I was on BBSs and shit like that. My whole life is online, right?
So when I think about it, the future of information and control, I think, “Oh god, this is such a huge issue!” But most of these people are not Internet people; we just talked about this, they’re real estate agents, you know what I mean?
It’s like all these people are adopting social media but they are simply very bad thinking about the future. They don’t save enough for retirement even though they know that they should. How could they possibly think on any sophisticated level about net neutrality? They may say, “Oh I can see why that is important,” but will they go and do something about it? It’s really, really unlikely.
One of my favorite examples is during a live interview in front of a conference audience, I asked Steve Rubel about net neutrality.
Julien: But he didn’t know?
He was interviewing Guy Kawasaki when I asked this question and both of them said they didn’t feel it was a big issue because it’ll just be taken care of.
Julien: Taken care of by whom?
Right, who’s going to take care of it?
Julien: Maybe the only answer to that is Google. That is the one answer, right? So it might be that our ace in the hole is Google. But if Google doesn’t deem it worthy to save then nothing is going to. Google is the only company powerful enough to “save us.” Why do we need somebody to save us? It’s baffling to me that the likes of Kawasaki or Rubel…but then again I’m being a hypocrite. I’m not out there, I’m not on the streets posturing shit either.
The power of internet entities, like Google and Facebook, is huge and it’s interesting for me to find social media suddenly becoming a governmental policy. The fact was that we wanted China’s firewall to come down and social media was the way to do it. What do you feel about the idea of social media as a tool of foreign policy?
Julien: I don’t know about social media specifically, but I happen to consider information as the great liberator. It allows you to bring water to your well faster. It allows you to get technology to fix your house or to protect yourself from the unexpected, whether you’re suddenly stuck in the Amazonian jungle or trying to find a way to build an electric fence. Whatever it happens to be, information will set you free.
So social media is just another way to access that information through crowd sourcing, Wikipedia, the ability to ask Twitter anything, Aardvark, things like Foursquare which in minute, insignificant ways will make your life better by introducing you to more people in your own neighborhood. That has actually happened to me. There are people who are walking around my neighborhood right now that have friended me on Foursquare and we live around the same area and we end up meeting up because of Foursqure.
Social media is like the gateway drug for the rest of the internet. Once they are addicted, people will contribute in their own unique way to the greater pool of all information online and freely accessible for everyone to use.
I believe it could be socially significant; it could generate paradise on earth. It’s totally like I’m a super sci-fi geek at this point. I guess I have this level of idealism. But that is actually something that I really believe. With all of this shit out there, people are collaborating and creating these founts of knowledge that will soon be accessible by mobile phone to everybody. People are working on these huge social issues, leveraging digital itself to produce resources to eliminate the digital divide of the poor versus the rich. There are so many problems they’re taking on.
I can now see the title of this interview piece: Julien says that technology will cause you to trip the light fantastic.
Julien: Yeah, that’s exactly right. (laughs)
Over the last five years what’s the biggest lesson coming out of the Internet?
Julien: If it’s out of the social space then the answer is that the Network will bring you everything you need. I have access to everything, and all I’ve done is put myself into the Network. I put myself into a leadership position by adopting early, doing podcasts, always running sessions, and writing Trust Agents with Chris, but the Network I’m referring to is accessible to everyone. Chris Brogan was not always “Chris Brogan.” He was just some guy, well he still is some guy, but you see my point, right? His brand and access is different.
But what I think Chris would really agree with me on is that the “Network” is everything. Once you get access to the “Network”, all of a sudden it’s this fast thing which develops ideas into reality. The Cluetrain Manifesto would say it’s that hyperlink subverts hierarchy, and in a way, the social space are hyperlinks to people instead of hyperlinks to pages and information.
Once you have direct access to people you can get to a point where it’s much easier to get things done, regardless of distance. It reduces friction between individuals because you can talk to each other on a more human than rather hierarchical level. Once everyone gets a point that is accessible then what you’re doing is creating unparalleled access to the network. We’re the first people to really experience that, you and me. The Network is becoming ridiculously powerful and all we have to do is plug into it.
If you looked at your magic eight ball for the next five years what would the biggest paradigm shift be?
Julien: I try not to be this person, (laughs) but I think that the social network is built around all kinds of meta-data. Location is a piece built around meta-data, which a social network was built upon, several actually, but Foursquare is the biggest example. And Kiva is a social network around which people gather for the purpose of creating good deeds which is another kind of meta-data. They are all social objects.
Basically, it’s this idea that we’ll be able to create some type of social network around anything that people care about, whether it’s location or causes or anything else. That will start to grow faster as people leverage the network to create these networks around social object. When you add that to the ubiquitous computing through stuff like the iPad, I feel the meta-data will push things in an interesting direction.
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