Why do we share (social data)?

I know, I know, three posts already this year, I'm getting sick of myself too. I had one of those amazingly geeky SF days a few weeks ago that mostly happen to people you follow on Twitter and not you. Well, not me anyway. It happened a little like this (cue the dream sequence music with Matt Damon as your hero).....

I was running a bit late on Wednesday morning rushing to get into work for a 9:30 sales call (yes I see the irony). As I parked and headed down 2nd Street towards Misison, I realized as I was halfway to the office that I left my phone in car. Doing the quick math of where I was (midpoint) and lead time for my call (about 15min) I decided to double back. One the walk back, I looked over my right shoulder and saw someone that looked slightly familiar. I've never met him before but I was sure it was Eric Reis, who, for all intents and purposes is, if not the godfather of the customer development community, then he's Steve Blank's right hand man. He may even be Rocky to Blank's Apollo. I've seen him at meetups, follow him on Twitter, read his blog etc., but never met him, so I introduced myself. We only chatted for a few minutes but I asked about his book, we chatted about "pivoting" and "failing fast" and then with him thanking me for saying hi, we shook hands when I got to my lot.

On the walk back down 2nd St., phone in tow, I ran into a colleague who I'm doing a business deal with. One of my goals during the day was to try to get this person on the phone --no need. We chatted about our project and timelines and I was back on my way down 2nd towards Mission. A truly serendipitous few moments all because I left my phone in the car.

Why is this post not titled "Serendipity on Second"? Good question. The reason is because the geekiness continued later that afternoon when I attended the SF New Tech event --The Social Data Revolution. It was my first time attending one of their events but certainly won't be my last. It was $40 at the door but I had two beers and two tacos and managed to find a great lead (we're in discussions now about an opportunity). Still don't get the title? I know, here it comes. The panel with folks like Joe Stump, Founder of SimpleGeo and Eric Ly, Founder of LinkedIn with Reid Hoffman, was moderated by Andreas Wiengerd, former Chief Scientist at Amazon.com and was on the topic of social data. If I can use the word 'fascinating' without my friends spitting our their food, I think that may be a good description. The content was filled with interesting nuggets like the collection of data on the internet, how ALL content is relevant and that every 1.5yrs the amount of data we're working with doubles. In a year and a half, the amount of data online doubles and that timeframe is only shrinking. The big question that I took away was a simple one --Why do we share?

Why do we share our typically private information on social networking sites? There were plenty of answers and all seemed acceptable --from showing others how awesome we are, to looking to be a part of something. I thought Andreas had a good way of explaining it --ABC. A)Attention B) Belonging and C) Two-way communication. Opposed to the traditional A) Advertising B) Branding (bullshit) C) One-way communication (how a typical business communicates with its consumers). Other than maybe taking the consumer approach myself and using C) for Creativity, I think this does a good job of explaining why it is we're comfortable putting personal data online for all to see. As a people we're narcisstic and this is a perfect outlet for that --we also just want to belong to something, a group or similar -something that we can align ourselves with, to be part of something bigger.

There was one aspect that wasn't discussed, and that's the notion of social capital. The idea is you gain by sharing --well the real idea is you gain by facilitating a positive outcome for someone else. In doing so, you gain social capital that you can either bank or let naturally burn down through serendipitous events ("is that I point I smell coming around?") Tara Hunt wrote about this in the Whuffie Factor, how to be a better social capitalist, My cousin Vincent calls it "surfing the karmic wave". Either way, by putting yourself out there, by sharing what it is you know, your experiences, hopefully you're improving the outcome of someone else's experiences. If you can do so, you're increasing your social capital, your whuffie, and are opening yourself up to positive experiences you might not have had originally coming to you following a mistake of leaving your phone in the car.

I know this is a broad subject, there's the whole privacy implication that I didn't touch on. If Mark Zuckerberg had his way, there would be no privacy online and everyone would share everything on their wall. But surely that is not the case, and not simply because of the status of my current employer. So I'll leave it with that question --why do you share? To date, sharing and participating has served me well, so I'll continue doing so. What about you?