Tyler’s Toolbox

If you haven’t heard of MTV’s newest reality show: “Jersey Shore,” then you might be living under a rock. It follows the (mis)adventures of 7 Italian-Americans spending the summer partying at the Jersey Shore.

I wasn’t a watcher, but I got to enjoy some of the more choice quotes through my co-workers (thanks guys!). However, yesterday my roommate threw a few episodes on during a lazy Saturday morning.

What hit me is how much I was reminded of a line from Goodfellas where Karen starts getting introduced to the culture of being a mafia wife:

“there was never any outsiders around, absolutely never… being around each other all the time made everything seem all the more normal.”

Any community that engages in activity that the general public finds unsavory, faces a lot of pressure to conform to the group. Avoiding the general public is an effective defense mechanism against this pressure, but ends up creating a feedback loop where that group becomes more isolated and gets less feedback from the general public.

Is isolation a requirement for counter-cultural groups?

Just to be clear:
The show has caught a LOT of flack for promoting negative Italian sterotypes. These 7 self-described “guidos and guidettes” are definitely pretty polarizing figures. It’s hard to justify their status as nationally televised personalities (read: potential role-models), but I’m not going to pass judgement on them. They are young party-goers who are not particularly unique in prioritizing the fun of a highly-sexualized party lifestyle over more socially redeeming pursuits.

My take is that any blame here fits squarely with the network execs who are exploiting the choices of these young adults through a slew of reality programs (Real World, Road Rules, etc.).

This is my 100th post on this blog.  While I’ve written several blogs over the last 5 years, I wasn’t smart enough to migrate posts over when I switch blogging platforms, so… I’m back at lucky number #100!

Humans like to evaluate at round numbers, we find milestones give good reminders to review behavior.  So, why do I blog?

Here are the 5 reasons I came up with:

1. Shaping my own thoughts – writing makes you clarify. Someone once said: “If you can’t write something, you don’t understand it.” Spot on.
2. Sharing ideas – I think often about topics outside of my expertise.  I share these thoughts because I probably won’t be able to follow them (focus is about saying no).  Also: you help me evolve the ideas, that which is deprived of sun does not grow.
3. Sharing best practices – I am helping establish the best practices of social marketing. I learn everyday from people who are kind enough to blog about the things they are knowledgeable about, I’d like to share my knowledge, like this and this.
4. Define myself – If you are meeting me, it will be helpful for you to know who I am, how I think, how I talk, what I like.  My twitter, tumblr and this blog give you a good idea.
5. Recognize amazing achievements, important thoughts, or other significant moments – The attention economy works because we like sharing significant ideas or moments with each other. We should all recognize when people make awesome things.

So, what will my 100th post be about?  Mostly #4 above this line, and #5 below this line.

I read “The five things I’d tell my entrepreneurial self” by Jon Bischke today.  Jon gives a 5 pieces of advice that are lessons best learned early, and one of them was so good I wanted to share it here:

Simply put, if you want to succeed, surround yourself with people who (a) are succeeding and (b) expect you to do likewise. That simple piece of advice will do more to put you on the path to success than anything else I can think of. [Read more]

…is something my dad used to say all the time when trying to corral the dispersed Willis children into giving up their “way to busy for family” lives for a few days and making a communal trek somewhere for a very untraditional Christmas. We were usually pretty successful in making this holiday a fun one, but that’s neither here nor there, since I’m not going to be talking about any of that in this post. It’s just a nice story.

Instead, I want to talk about presence as it pertains to recording who you are online. I’m not talking about branding or building reputation here, but rather presence in the most pure expression: participation. As Malcolm Forbes once said, “Presence is more than just being there.”

Just as a sulky family member at Christmas is worse than an absent one–an online friend who seems uninterested in interacting with you unless it benefits them, worse then someone who abstains from hanging out with you on the interwebs.

I love when people create a hub for you to look for interactions with them. Some Examples:

• My friend, Andrew Hyde, lists very clearly on his site most of the things he’s working on (Startup Weekend, VC Wear) and provides a good bio and links to his profiles on different web services. If you spend 20 minutes on his site, I guarentee you’ll find something to strike up a chat with him about next time you see him.
• My friend, Ben Casnocha, has a slightly more “company” version of essentially the same thing. He’s a little more conscious of creating a brand for himself so the site reflects that. At it’s core it’s similar to Andrew’s site, a hub for “all things Ben.” You can find out what he’s thinking about from his blog, find his accounts (twitter, FB, del.icio.us, etc.), even sign up for a newsletter digest he send out (which is very good incidentally).
• New Friend, Amit Gupta, will probably serve as inspiration for me in building this site. He hosted smaller projects on his domain, instead of a separate domain. Talk about centralization! Of course, once projects hit a certain size, it needs to be spun out, but while it’s a baby idea – why not let it live at home?
• This site now has tons of information about me. Not sifted, carefully chosen and cleared information – but rather a bevy of information about who I am and what I do. So does my Facebook profile.

So, if real presence is equal to participation — it only makes sense that your online presence should reflect all your participation. I used to think it was a good idea to create a separate corporate web page that can be separated from my personal page and cleaned of any personality so that I can be sure I’m not making the wrong impression, but likely because of that I ended up making no impression at all.

The alternative is, I can build a hub that is open, inviting, and full of possible talking points that may drive interactions. That’s how I’ve decided to go about it this time around.

I’ve created this as a web hub, and while it’s not complete, tonight I am working on building a Facebook Hub using pages. Since I use Facebook so frequently, it seemed logical to have an aggregation of data like events, groups, stories, etc. using one of FB’s most robust tools. So here’s my page, it should stay up to date with community projects I’m working on and events I’m putting on. Fan me on Facebook if you want infrequent updates about this stuff.

I’ll continue to build out both my Facebook page and this website with as much information as possible, until I’m documenting almost all my online participation, as a way of extending my digital hand to you for what might be the start of a beautiful future.