Anastasia Ashman
February 7, 2014

Use Social Context To Connect

Is it just me (and my timelines), or is everyone suddenly talking about the unignorable power of social context?

I often see patterns emerging across all my information feeds, from thousands of sources in my realms of culture, media and publishing, technology, marketing, entrepreneurship and leadership. What bubbles to the surface across multiple fields is what’s in my larger future.

A reminder: you’re the curator of your own timelines. Let them be your advance warning system for sea-changes and meaningful shifts of all kinds.

Besides social context, other strong signals I see are trends toward simplicity, anonymity, and finer control of our online expression

That’s what larger populations of people are looking for, and solving for, and choosing.

The fact that I know the direction my worlds are moving is a valuable insight into the cultures I’m part of and the communities I’m actively working on making connections in. Social context is culture.

Here are some examples of what the social context signal looked like to me last week.

In my inbox, one music tech startup’s newsletter critiqued the high profile launch of a new streaming service that fails in its playlist suggestions to incorporate all the social data its users have already shared online. 

“There’s no longer any excuse for service providers not to make use of the data and the technology for better connections,” says that startup founder, who also happens to be my husband.

There’s no longer any excuse for generic music suggestions, or for treating us like we’re interchangeable. We have taste and a unique combination of interests, experience and background. Show us you know what we like, and we’ll come closer.

Over at Social Fresh, Nick Cicero from real-time conversation service Livefyre was on a similar track. “If 2013 was the year of social content, 2014 is the year of social context,” he writes. Brands have more avenues to tell their stories, and consumers want to be an integral, relevant part of it.  

Then came CMO of Extreme Networks Vala Afshar’s tweet noting that your culture is your brand. Yes it is.

 

So imagine that each person out there you’d like to connect with has his or her own social context — or culture.

 

Each of those individual cultures are distinct and made by us.

That’s what Gina Rudan, author of Practical Genius, was talking about last week. She writes that we hack culture to make room for ourselves, to make our lives work and matter.

“What we’re experiencing isn’t a trend, it’s an anti-trend. Traditions aren’t being challenged, they’re being ignored. Rituals are no longer an expression of what ‘we’ do, but rather an intensely personal expression of who ‘I’ am,” says Rudan.

We’re not all cut from the same cloth. Many of us have been mixing and matching our own lives for years.

These days we’re hyperenabled to hack our own cultures online — and that’s where we want to connect to you.

 

We hack our way into online spaces and experiences that look and feel like our distinct combination of interests and inclinations and experiences. We do this by choosing where we go and who we interact with online, what brands we allow onto our timelines and which ones we are compelled to engage with, what newsletters we receive in our inboxes. Every day we’re creating our own individual culture with our online life.

When I glimpse my sister’s cat-infested Facebook feed I barely recognize the service. Hers is speckled with premium media from businesses and causes she follows and participates in, from animal rescue operations to Catster. It’s so different than my experience of Facebook filled with stories from photography blogs and journalism organizations. That’s because her feed is a reflection of her culture, not mine.

When we think about building online community, what we’re really thinking about is the culture we’re each creating for ourselves. That’s where we’re most alive. That’s where we are ready to connect. And that’s our social context.

What we should also be mindful of is where our culture intersects with the cultures of other people. That’s where communities are gathering.

Care to share a trend you see across your digital communities? How is it informing your particular online culture?

 

Image first used here: http://vantagepoint.com.sg/tag/social-justice/

The following two tabs change content below.

Anastasia Ashman

Social Community Builder at Selfish, Inc.
Digital life trailblazer. Author/editor/producer agented by Foundry Literary & Media. Entrepreneur drawing on New York publishing & Hollywood entertainment industry experience with unique global dexterity from 14 years of international living. Connecting people through content and culture, empowering you around the web's new vulnerability, visibility and voice. Get my on-demand, self-paced GlobalNiche social web curriculum for free.

Latest posts by Anastasia Ashman (see all)