Don’t forget to share your story

Sharing. It’s the new rock and roll. Everyone’s doing it, giving away their knowledge and ideas left right and centre. Not a moment goes by without me coming across somebody who’s telling me to check out a cool link to a thing that will be really useful. The problem is it’s often like someone enthusiastically giving me a book (“you must read this it’ll change your life honestly it’s fab!”) and then immediately giving me another book (“this fab book changed my life honestly you must read this!”) and then seconds later another book (“honestly you fab must this changed my read it’ll book life!”) and another and another and all I’ve got is a pile of unread books, a sense that I really should read them all and a bit of a headache. Meanwhile I’ve no real idea who this person who’s handing me all these books is.

And that’s the crux of the matter. It’s not enough to have a nice and comprehensive About page on your site. While important it’s the brochure and no matter how hard you try it’s not going to pick up what’s really interesting about you. What you do for a living or what your favourite movies are tells me nothing. In order to really get to know you I need something else. And this is where it gets a bit counter-intuitive.

This afternoon I was in a pub with a bunch of people who use Twitter. As is our way the conversation moved onto Twitter and why it worked so well at creating connections between people. I posited that people bond around pointless, transient, silly and fun things, then once those bonds are formed they can be used for serious stuff. This is how Twitter works. It’s a stream of inane, ephemeral and daft utterances that bond people to the degree that they’ll voluntarily create plain English translations of government documents amongst other things.

But it’s not actually that weird. Look at us in the pub. We sit here with our drinks and pretty much talk bollocks, but not exclusively. Amongst the nonsense I had some really useful conversations about serious stuff. This is how conversational environments work. If every five minutes we’d all distributed printouts of guides on how to get the most out of a pub conversation to each other those conversations wouldn’t have happened.

The value of sharing doesn’t just come from the content. You also need context. If a complete stranger tells me I shouldn’t eat prunes I’ll nod but probably carry on eating prunes, but if someone I feel I know well enough to trust tells me I’ll pay attention. And how do I get to know someone well? By sharing inconsequential stuff with them.

Here’s an example of what I mean. I consider Steve a good friend even though I probably only see him once a year, if that. Beyond friendship he’s one of the people I get music recommendations from. If he were to mention a new band or album on his blog I’d investigate. Loads of people recommend music all the time but I only listen to a few. How does Steve earn my trust? Does he write loads of in-depth articles about the history of obscure bands? Does he constantly post links to Pitchfork et al? No, he writes stuff like this:

We were walking into town near the JobCentre. There was a wall outside about a foot high, but instead of being level, it had a 45 degree angle.

I jumped onto it. “Look”, I said. “This is the sort of thing we will have to watch out for when we come to town with the little man…”

And fell arse over tit. Turns out that standing on a brick wall that is not level is not a good idea at the best of times, less so when the wall is slippery and mossy, and maybe less so when there’s just been a bugger of a frost.

As I ably demonstrated.

On its own this is a pointless, useless piece of writing. It serves no purpose. It does not set Steve up as an expert in anything other than falling over. And yet cumulatively all these snippets add up and create the sense of a person, someone you can identify with (or not) and make an informed judgment about. Not everyone will chose to follow up what Steve might recommend but those that do will invest a lot more in it.

If you’re looking to set yourself up as an expert in some field and want to use social media tools to build a reputation it’s not enough to simply spew out links and tips. All you’re effectively doing is standing in the library throwing books at people. You need to add context. You need to share a bit of yourself.

Have a look at the people you’re willing to learn from, in particular those you only know online. Think about what you know about them as people. What are their hobbies, their quirks, their mannerisms? If you met them in person what nugget of information might start the conversation? (How’s the new puppy? Did your daughter get on okay at the new school? I see you gave up on growing the beard then.) Look at the qualitative stuff they surround their advice with. The pointless, transient, ephemeral and daft things they say. That, I’d suggest, is why you trust them. Because they’re evidently human beings, not info-bots.

In my case the ASH-10 blog doesn’t do this very well unless you read it in tandem with peteashton.com and my other blogs and it’s the realisation that maybe I’m getting this wrong myself that prompted this post. A post which, irritatingly, is all advice and very little story. But hey, we’re all figuring this stuff out together!