Social Media | Kontrary

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I hate meeting people. I would prefer to be holed up in my apartment, lovingly arranged to every last detail purely to make me comfortable, than to present myself to the world. It’s not that I actually dislike people, but the whole process. The getting ready, the logistics, scheduling a time, finding a place – nevermind if you can’t meet me in my preferred five block radius. If it’s raining outside, I will cancel. If I have a blemish on my face, I will cancel. If you want to meet for no reason, I will cancel.

Meeting people is like writing is like exercise. All take convincing. You have to talk yourself into it, hype yourself up. Then things go fine. Great even. Sometimes amazing.

Last week, I was in New York for a media tour. That’s where you pack twelve meetings in two days and meet with anyone – editors, reporters, interns – who will listen. And oh, holy crap, how I loved it.

Sure, we could have saved a couple thousand in expenses, and done the same thing over email, or the phone, over web-ex or even text. But the power of face-to-face, to see these people in person, to meet and speak… to have a conversation. Well, if I could do media tours full-time, I would (except, with my own bed at night).

Technology is supposed to make it easier for us to connect, but it actually makes it worse to have a conversation. That’s the argument of Sherry Turkle, a psychologist and professor at M.I.T. and author, most recently, of Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other.

“We are tempted to think that our little ‘sips’ of online connection add up to a big gulp of real conversation. But they don’t,” Turkle argues. “Human relationships are rich; they’re messy and demanding. We have learned the habit of cleaning them up with technology. And the move from conversation to connection is part of this. But it’s a process in which we shortchange ourselves. Worse, it seems that over time we stop caring, we forget that there is a difference.”

Nowhere is this more important than if you’re trying to do something. Build a company. Launch your career. Get a raise. Do anything but settle. Meeting people is the quickest way to success. I used to say when you put yourself out there, the universe rises to meet you, but really it’s your network.

So if meeting people is like fruit, technology is like candy. And the longer we stay in front of our computers, the more sluggish we feel. The anxiety kicks in. So do the excuses. Then it’s just easier to stay home, send an email, and do absolutely nothing.

We convince ourselves that working works. But it doesn’t. So get up. Talk to someone. Have a conversation. Tell me how it goes. Tell me how things start happening for you. It is single-handedly the best thing you can do for your career, company, life.

(Technology gives us shortcuts. This isn’t one of them.)

Why E-Commerce Needs to Stop Aggregation and Start Getting Social

Most of us would agree that the internet is biased towards social connection, yet many e-commerce or f-commerce experiences are not. In the olden days, bazaars weren’t only about consuming “stuff,” but were a social space to meet up with friends and exchange information.

Today, instead of a peer-to-peer economy, we have relationships with our brands. We don’t learn what’s happening in our world, but instead learn how much smaller the new iPad is.

The mom blogosphere in particular has risen to fill that void, up to a point. Bloggers and readers exchange ideas, rumors and facts that matter to them, but companies quickly co-opt the majority of well-intentioned blogs to sell more stuff instead of creating more social value. Ultimately, such actions have degraded blogs to what we have today: a list of product features and giveaways.

Companies do this because of their inability to embrace nuance, being solely dedicated to the dollar. You can see this play out in how companies structure themselves. Many companies create an e-commerce site that is simply an inventory list with no social value whatsoever. This means that many other companies can then take advantage of those sites because they don’t offer anything except a price on a product. So those other companies rise up another level of abstraction and become a search engine or aggregator, which creates even less value than before.

What we’re seeing now, as a result of the recession, is that you can’t just keep abstracting how you make money at a higher and higher level. Indeed, each time we distance ourselves from the most basic of human interactions – that is, a face-to-face conversation – the more dangerous it is for our economy.

Take a look at Appaloosa, a hedge fund that employs 250 people and Apple, a company that employs about 35,000 people and earned around $6 billion in 2009. “Appaloosa, the hedge fund, earned about as much as Apple in 2009 by speculating on… well, we don’t really know,” argues Jeffrey Hollender.

And many would argue it was just that kind of speculation – or abstraction – that got us into all of our financial problems in the first place.

For e-commerce and f-commerce, this means an opportunity to pivot to new models by combining commerce with community to replicate the peer-to-peer economy, where value isn’t limited to dollars and point of sale, but expands to include the concept of sharing and access just as it would in real life.

Ultimately, that is what every e-commerce site should be doing – not attempting a relationship between brand and customer, but enabling connections and conversations between customers.

Which even in this age of social media, very few companies do successfully.