Tag Archives: laurent haug

Scale in Community and Social Media: Bigger is not Always Better

Posted on 09.04.2010 by Stephanie Booth

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Plus, ce n'est pas forcément mieux. Quand une communauté grandit, sa dynamique aussi. Un outil comme Twitter est peut-être plus gratifiant avec quelques centaines ou milliers de followers. Quand on arrive dans les dizaines ou centaines de milliers, le côté "conversation" disparaît. Au cours des dernières années, la blogosphère s'est aussi transformée: plus de blogs, plus de gros blogs, plus de lecteurs, et la disparition du sentiment d'être un peu "spécial" que l'on avait, tant lecteur que blogueur, au début.

Faire équivaloir le plus grand nombre au succès, c'est à mon avis faire fausse route. Ce n'est pas parce qu'un blogueur a plus de lecteurs qu'il est meilleur qu'un autre. Ou parce qu'on a plus de suiveurs sur Twitter qu'on exerce plus d'influence, comme l'a démontré une étude dont a parlé ReadWriteWeb.

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In his blog post Defriendization is the future of social networks, that I commented upon in Defriending, Keeping Connections Sustainable and Maybe Superficial, Laurent Haug mentions his previous article Openness is difficult to scale, about how the kind of community involvement that worked for Lift in the early days just did not scale once the conference became more successful. This is a rule we cannot get escape from. Scale changes things. Success is a double-edged sword, because it might bring you into a country where the very thing that made your success is not possible anymore.

Clive Thompson explains this very well when it comes to the number of followers on Twitter, for example, in his Wired piece In Praise of Obscurity. Even if as the person being followed, you don’t really care about the size of the community gathered around you, the people who are part of that community feel its size and their behaviour changes. Bigger is not always better. More people in a community does not make it a better or even more powerful community.

This is one of the reasons it annoys me immensely when people try to measure the value of something by measuring its size. More readers does not mean I’m a better blogger. More friends on Facebook does not mean I’m more popular. More followers on Twitter does not mean I’m more influential.

I think that this is one of the things that has happened to the blogging world (another topic I have simmering for one of these days). Eight-ten years ago, the community was smaller. Having a thousand or so readers a day already meant that you were a big fish. Now, being a big fish means that you’re TechCrunch or ReadWriteWeb, publications that for some reason people still insist on calling “blogs”, and we “normal bloggers” do not recognize ourselves anymore in these mega-publications. The “big fish” issue here is not so much that formerly-big-fish bloggers have had the spotlight stolen from them and they resent it (which can also be true, by the way), but more that the ecosystem has completely changed.

The “blog-reading community” has grown hugely in numbers. Ten years ago, one thousand people reading a blog felt special because they were out-of-the-mainstream, they could connect with the author of what they read, and maybe they also had their own little blog somewhere. Nowadays, one thousand people reading a blog are just one thousand people doing the mainstream thing online people do: reading blogs and the like. The sense of specialness has left the blogosphere.

If you want to keep on reading, I comment upon another of the links Laurent mentions in Log-Out Day: Victims of Technology, or a Chance to Grow?

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Posted in Thinking | Tagged bigger, blogging, change, clive thompson, community, laurent haug, publication, scale, size, twitter | Leave a comment

Badges at Conferences

Posted on 14.12.2007 by Stephanie Booth

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Laurent est tenté d'éliminer les badges lors de LIFT. En effet, il y a des tas d'aspects désagréables à ces badges: ceux qui font du réseautage industriel en cherchant tel ou tel type de personne, et aussi, tous les préjugés associés à certains noms d'entreprise ou types de badge ("presse", "marketing", "speaker").

Pour ma part, étant très peu physionomiste, je regretterais la disparition des badges. Souvent, lorsqu'un visage un peu familier m'aborde comme si on avait gardé les vaches ensemble, je n'ai aucune idée de qui il s'agit. J'ai besoin du nom pour me souvenir qu'effectivement, on a gardé les vaches ensemble l'été passé.

J'ai deux-trois idées concernant les badges, tout de même:

  • mis à part le nom, laisser la personne décider ce qui y sera écrit
  • faire de badges double-face, car ils ont la fâcheuse tendance à se mettre du mauvais côté
  • éviter comme la peste les badges autocollants qui se décollent ou à épingle qu'il faut accrocher pile sur le sein gauche
  • essayer de trouver une solution (bandeau! ;-)) pour que le badge soit plus près du visage...

Bref, les détails... c'est important.

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Laurent Haug blogs about conference badges and his desire to make LIFT a badge-free conference.

Funny, I was also thinking of badges at LeWeb3. But actually, the main thing I was thinking was: when are conference organisers going to stop making one-sided badges dangling at the end of a thingy that is designed to let them rotate freely?

I personally like badges and would be quite unhappy without them, because I’m a very bad physionomist. I index “person data” by name. Dozens of times at conferences, people come up to me saying “hey, Steph, how’ve you been?” — sometimes their face looks familiar, others it doesn’t even ring a bell. Half the time, I’m saved by the badge. I catch a glimpse of their name, and all I know about them, our shared history if we have one, comes back to me. I index people by name.

So, take away the badges, and I have to use the awkward “excuse me, before we say anything more, would you mind telling me your name, because I’m so bad with faces?” — I do it (I’m not one of these people who can pretend very well), but I really prefer the badges. I’m one of these rude people who’ll turn your badge around to read your name — but the presence of the badge makes it easier, because it suggests that we’re going around reading people’s names.

Also, I know a lot of people online without knowing their faces, and badges do help with that.

There are things I do not like about badges, though. I’d like to highlight two of the “cons” Laurent points to, because I agree with him:

> – Chest navigators. People who walk through the conference starring at badges looking for keywords like “CEO”, “Facebook” or “Press”, usually for bad reasons. You end up losing your time with these 95% of the time. > – Misconceptions from titles. This is especially painful for people working for big companies where you HAVE to have a lousy and arrogant title. From a really cool dude I met at Leweb working for Microsoft: “People see Microsoft on my badge, so their crap filter goes up one level. Then they see Marketing and they start to draw strategies to get away from me”. The guy is brilliant, open, helpful, all the opposite of the stereotype that his badge could push you into.

Laurent Haug, “Badges”

I would definitely go for the following:

  • get rid of “castes” on badges
  • get rid of formal company names or job titles: let people choose what they want written on their badge
  • print them on both sides!
  • look for creating solutions like headwear — or maybe stranglers?! — to get badges off people’s chests
  • absolutely avoid pin-on or sticky badges (as a woman, I have to say I really don’t like putting them smack on my breasts, I’d rather have something hanging around my neck)

Some thoughts in the “Devil’s advocate” department, though:

  • there are situations where it is useful to know what company the person you’re talking to works for, or what position they have
  • badges printed on only one side are handy: write something on the back, stick business cards in, or the programme of the day
  • no badges adds serendipity to networking, which is good.

Feel free to share your badge thoughts and experiences.

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Posted in Event Musings | Tagged badge, conférences, Events, identity, laurent haug, lift, nametag, networking | 7 Comments