Hello, Mr Plod!

Today I received an uninvited email from LinkedIn, and unlike most uninvited emails, it was actually useful. I generally regard LinkedIn as a internet-based protection racket – you get nothing for your money except avoiding a threat that wouldn’t be there without them. But today they may have turned themselves into the neighborhood “bobby” – alert and passing on information that keeps us ahead of the game.

LinkedIn got off its . . .

I have done some digging and it seems that I have received a weekly Digest Email on a Tuesday morning British Summer Time (GMT or near as damn-it). I will continue to get emails if anyone writes directly to me.

The weekly email is extra, and tells me whom of my contacts has updated their profile or asked a question. I am not sure if LinkedIn edits the list. I am not sure if they consolidate the information. Generally, updates are kept for 5 days and are limited to 15 entries. So possibly I will know what happens on every day except Tuesdays and Wednesdays (!) and if you happen to be in the top (?) bottom (?) 15 on the list!

I liked it though. It was nice to see at a glance who is doing what. It is nice to know whether I should take time to log in or not. It is nice to have a reminder that my profile should communicate to people (give some idea who should beat a path to my door). It was nice to have contacts’ questions and though I have a packed day, I thought I had specific expertise or contacts that might be useful and I fired off five pretty comprehensive answers.

So LinkedIn has put in a cheap service that

• Saves me keystrokes
• Acts as an alert
• Reminds me of the game (communicate, don’t dump)
• Lets me show off expertise and gain expertise by phrasing professional material in answer to different queries
• Builds the community by reinforcing my own contacts and prompting me to introduce people to each other

This is a brilliant example of smart social media design.

• Keep it quick
• Keep my attention
• Engage me in an interesting task
• Help me learn
• Welcome my interaction

And how is this related to 140 chars?

The email I received from LinkedIn is an email – nothing more. They could have sent it sooner.

I perceived it as more though. The email has a Twitter-like quality.

So what are the great attributes of Twitter?

Instant, easy, personal – yep those are the obvious surface features.

I also see INFRASTRUCTURE.

• It is Just In Time.

We flick a light switch. We use it when we want and for how long we want. We pay for what we use.

And we don’t have to be too bothered. At Bucks08 Media Camp, we talked about social media being infrastructure. Twitter is definitely infrastructure. Proof? Look at how incensed we get when Twitter fails. It is supposed to be like lights and water!

By sending me an email, LinkedIn transformed itself from the equivalent of generator in my back garden that I have to fuel with diesel from a jerry can to the national grid. A light switch! Quick and easy to use. Ignored when I don’t want it.

I am redundant!

It’s a funny idea that I need to be redundant to get a good service. I suspect marketing guys get this all muddled up! It is a matter of “levels of analysis”. I might come-and-go, but the “flock” or the “crowd” must be there for the system to work, and as I come-and-go as me, marketers still need to talk to me and make me happy and to achieve the crowd effect.

The right metrics though are not “click-through”. The national grid doesn’t try to persuade us to flick our light switches on and off! I did not have to answer any of the questions on LinkedIn. What matters is that somebody answers them! We need to generate a handful of good replies. That is the metric of interest.

I could continue with the grid metaphor but a pub works better. I want someone friendly to be in the pub when I go in. I don’t want to have to be there if somewhere else is more exciting. A nd I don’t want to talk to the same people every time. The pub has to attract just the right number of people to make it likely a good friendly crowd will pitch up so that a good friendly crowd pitches up!

If I switch back to the grid metaphor, the national grid doesn’t care when I switch on and off. But if something happens which will change the pattern of switching one and off across the country, such as the minute’s silence before Princess Diana’s funeral, then the engineers have to quickly re-envision the service. They need to redistribute the load fast because the pattern of need has changed.

The metric we need is a system metric. Can the system respond rapidly to demand at many different points (all unknown in detail) with just the right amount of impact – not too much and not too little! .

It is public.

Well, LinkedIn isn’t. It still runs on the club model – ownership, exclusivity, 1.0. At the moment I have to manage my network. It is akin to keeping candles in every room in case the power goes off. Or akin to having a back-up generator complete with jerry can of diesel.

If the network was fully public, how would I receive questions I am interested in? I don’t know but I bet someone figures that out quite fast.

Ideas?

It allows division of labor.

Flicking on the light switch is easy. Using a wall socket takes a little more thought. Using the fusebox is more complicated but hey, in this apartment at least, you don’t have to re-wire the fuse (been there, done that!). There is some gradation in skill but we get to the point that being a consumer requires little skill.

There is some heavy duty engineering and finance behind the light switch, but as consumers, we don’t need to know much about it to play our part.

It is sophisticated.

The engineering and finance behind infrastructure is heavy-duty. A lot of people who know a lot of deep stuff have to work together and the system is no longer transparent to us, or necessarily to them. The credit crunch tells it all. We need some smart legislators to be able to see ahead and see what is necessary to keep us in the style to which we have become accustomed!

Social media for politicians! Who is seriously onto this issue?

So that is my offering for the first part of this week.

• Through no action of mine, I am getting a useful email from LinkedIn.
• One small, cheap action on their part, seems to me to be a giant leap from a platform in the cost-of-doing-business park to a far more attractive platform like Twitter.
• And the transition helped me think through some of the key factors concerning social media as infrastructure (any more that I haven’t thought of?)

As managers of infrastructure, we will be

• Just-in-time – seen and not heard – doing well when we are invisible and cheap to the consumer
• Thinking about a system in which individual demand affects collective demand, and v.v.
• Managing a system that has capacity points – sizes that allow demand, financing and technology to be in balance
• In the public domain, therefore requiring political input and political output
• Some sort of futuring because both our technology and our needs change

And all of this out of one email from LinkedIn?

Twitter sets a good example. It looks frivolous. Quite often turning on my lights is frivolous.

What else out there could learn from Twitter?

[Well this post could be 140chars for a start!]