Increasingly, I’m getting mentions from people with whom I’m not familiar, asking to click on links to their work. I see this happening to my friends, too, so I thought I’d collect and share my responses to one Twitter user on why this doesn’t work that well.

“	.@gbedard1 ok, time for some free advice. People pay thousands for this (or they just buy my book, haha), so take notes:
	randomdeanna September 9, 2011

“	.@gbedard1 I don’t have a relationship to you or your work, so randomly tweeting me isn’t going to make me click your link
	randomdeanna September 9, 2011

“	.@gbedard1 when I check out who you are, I see you’re randomly tweeting a lot of ppl, so now you kinda look like a spammer. oh noes!
	randomdeanna September 9, 2011

“	.@gbedard1 Twitter isn’t a shortcut to popularity. It’s a means to build relationships.
	randomdeanna September 9, 2011

“	.@gbedard1 So start getting to know the ppl whose attention you want, and let them get to know you. *Then* pitch them shamelessly. :) /end
	randomdeanna September 9, 2011

 UPDATE: I got a little swipe about my ego being too big to click on links. Granted, my ego is ginormous (ask anyone who knows me intimately offline), but for once, it doesn’t have much to do with the situation at hand. I’m just explaining here how important the relationship mechanism is for sharing information– it’s called “social” media for a reason. Tee hee.

• Monday, 9:30am. Hyatt TX Ballroom 1.
  The best donuts you’ve ever had in your life will be served!
  People Power: Leveraging Personal Stories to Build Influence.
  http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP7037
  With: Twanna Hines, Jean Russell, Cheryl Contee and Andrea Miller.
  Now, social is personal. From finance site Mint.com’s anti-immigration blog post gaffe to YourTango CEO Andrea Miller’s “How to Date an Indian (Advice for the Non-Indian),” social media fuses personal with public in a way never seen before. Whether sharing taste in hiphop, dating preferences, provocative political ideas, or insider information about a soon-to-be-launched business, social media strategically develops personal and professional reputations. Stories can build audiences, grow support for campaigns and change mainstream ideas about social issues. They can also alienate various communities, compromise business information confidentiality or damage brands. If social media has shown us anything, it’s that stories still matter. This panel will be a concrete conversation on how successful online personalities have managed their personal and professional lives using social media: telling authentic stories about our experiences, and using those stories to build powerful, engaged communities.
• Monday, 11:30am. SXSW Bookstore — ACC Ballroom Foyer D
  Book signing! I’ll be there till 12pm.
  http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_OE00561
• Monday, 12:30pm. Icehauers, 83 Rainey St.
  Twitter for Good at SXSW and Beyond
  http://claire.us.com/twitter-for-good-at-sxsw-and-beyond/
  The lovely Claire Diaz Ortiz, who leads philanthropy and social innovation at Twitter, is hosting this lunchtime discussion and workshop to answer the question: “What 1 THING could Twitter, Inc. do to better help non-profits, causes, and anyone trying to make a difference in the world using the platform?” More details at Claire’s blog post.

So, you’re ready to sign up for Twitter! Sometimes the signup process can be a bit daunting, so I created this short guide showing you what you need to know. Let’s get started!

Go to http://twitter.com/, and you should see a screen like this. Click the yellow “Give it a try” button on the right.

STEP 1: Create your account

You’ll be taken to a screen where you’re asked to fill out your information. Fill in your real name, your username (what you’ll use to log in, and how other Twitter users will refer to you), a password, and your email address. Along the way, Twitter will tell you if each of your entries is valid or not.

There’s also a checkbox that reads “Let others find me by my email address.” This means that if someone already knows your email address, they can use it to find and follow you. Twitter never reveals your email address to anyone who doesn’t already have it, though.

I generally uncheck the “send me email updates” box, and then click “Create my account.”

Then Twitter needs to make sure that you’re a human. You’ll see a CAPTCHA box; type in the words that you see. Here’s an example:

STEP 2: FINDING YOUR PEOPLE

Twitter helps you find people that you think are interesting—either because you like the topic that they tweet about most often, or because you know them.

You’re first shown a screen where you are offered a series of topics, and if you click on the topic, it’ll show you people Twitter suggests for that topic. Click the “follow” button to the right to start following them.

Note that you don’t have to follow any of these people, and you can choose to stop following them at any time.

Click the blue “Next step: friends” button in the lower middle of the screen to move on. You’ll be taken to a screen asking you if you want to search any of your online contacts from Gmail, Yahoo or AOL. If you have an account with any of those services, and you use the address book there to store information, click on the service you belong to. (If not, click the blue “Skip import” button in the bottom middle.)

You’ll then follow the steps your email provider uses to connect with Twitter—I’m showing Gmail here. Twitter doesn’t store or save this information; it’s a one-time deal.

It then takes a few seconds for your contacts to load, and you’re shown a screen that it’s working on it. When it’s done, it shows you a list of everyone in your address book that are already on Twitter.

You can click on “follow” next to the people that you want to appear in your feed. If they haven’t allowed themselves to be found via email, you’ll see a message that says so, and you can request to follow them. You’ll be notified if the request was approved.

When you’re all done, click the blue “Finish” button in the lower right. You’ll then be asked to send an invite to all the other people in your contact list who aren’t on Twitter. Skip this! Don’t do it.

You’re now shown your home screen, with all of the tweets from the people you’ve chosen to follow in reverse chronological order (newest on top). You’re also asked to confirm your email address; do this right away to get rid of that nagging message.

STEP 3: FAMILIARIZING YOURSELF WITH TWITTER’S FEATURES

Let’s take a quick tour of the home screen.

1. This is the main navigation for Twitter.
   • Home:brings you back to this screen
   • Profile: shows you a screen of your own tweets
   • Messages: Private messages sent only to you; also called Direct Messages or DMs. Only people that you follow are allowed to send you DMs.
   • Who To Follow: brings you to the stuff we covered in Step 2
   • Click on your username for additional items: Settings, Help, Sign out
2. Here’s where you’ll enter your status update, in 140 characters or less. There’s a counter in the upper right of the box to tell you how many characters you have left.
3. This area shows you information about yourself. Click on any of the numbers next to followers, following, favorites and lists for detailed information about each.
4. Here’s your list of tweets from the people you’re following. This is called the Timeline. (Some people also refer to this as their Feed.)
5. This section is where you can look at how you’re interacting with the rest of the world.
   • @Mentions. Click here to see if people have mentioned you.
   • Retweets. Click here to see tweets that have been passed along by others in your timeline. You can also see which of your tweets have been retweeted by others.

STEP 4: ADJUSTING YOUR SETTINGS

Click on the Settings link in the main navigation. The first screen you’re taken to has things like your email address and time zone; adjust these if needed. Click on the “Profile” link in the Settings’ navigation, just below where it says, “yourusername’s settings.”

You’re taken to a screen where you can update how you appear to other Twitter users.

It’s important to fill these out as accurately (and un-ironically/un-sarcastically) as you feel comfortable with, so that other users who are either searching for you or who discover you will see quickly who you are, and what you’re about. You should also use a picture that’s you, a close approximation of you, or is otherwise distinctly recognizable as you. (I don’t recommend those avatar generators, for example; they produce generic looking cartoons that make it hard for people to distinguish one from the other.)

Let’s go back to the Home screen and have a look at two important conversation features.

STEP 5: LOOK WHO’S TALKING (WITH YOU)

At the top of the timeline, click the @Mentions link (in section 5 from step 3). This shows you a screen of everyone who’s mentioned your username, with the newest on top. It’s important to check these “mentions” regularly and respond accordingly. If you hover over any tweet, two links appear: “reply,” and “retweet.”

Click on “reply” to respond to the person; click on “Retweet” to share the content of that tweet with whomever is following you.

STEP 6: SEARCHING AND SAVING

If there’s a particular topic you’re interested in, Twitter allows you to search for that word (or words), and save the searches to your account. This is a good way to monitor tweets mentioning your organization’s name, topics in the kind of work that you do, or other things that interest you.

Way up top, there’s a grey box with a magnifying glass next to it. Enter the term you’re searching for, and click the magnifying glass. You’ll be given a screen of search results:

You can then save the search to your account, so you don’t have to keep reentering it every time you want to look, by clicking the “Save this search” button at the top of the search results. Then, to find it again, look at the top of your Timeline for the “Searches” link. Click on it, and you’ll be shown a list of your saved searches.

That’s pretty much it for the basics! Feel free to visit me at http://deannazandt.com/twitter-guides for more information.

Check it out: full text, audiocast with slides, and guerrilla video:

• The Free-for-All Web and the Secret Tyrants We All Are

You can also have a look at other presentations, workshops and talks that I’ve done.

Conceptually, encouraging dominant cultures to divesify is fabulous –I subscribe to the DNA model of ecosystems and social spaces, so I support it wholeheartedly. As I’ve said in my book and recent talks:

This is a big one: you need to find people who don’t look like you, don’t necessarily think like you, and don’t come from the same places that you do. Creating a thrivable ecosystem–whether that’s an organization or a whole society–is like the evolution of a species. If you have a bunch of the same DNA mixing together, the species mutates poorly and eventually dies off. But bring in variety–new strains of DNA–and you create a stronger species. It’s no different in idea generation. You get a bunch of the same people talking to each other and making the rules for a few millennia, and eventually you’re going to end up with a lack of meaningful advancement.

We need you to be aware of the privilege you bring to the table – whether that’s your race, gender or your tech privilege – and make sure you’re using it responsibly and thoughtfully. Diversity is a strategic imperative for achieving collective goals. As diversity scholar Roosevelt Thomas notes, we all make better decisions–as individuals and as a society–when we account for differences and tensions.

But Johnson sort of, well, pretty much derails from the outset in his attempt. First, and I’m not going to focus on this too much, but “stalking?” Really? C’mon, we know that the world is loaded, painful and supports a culture of dominant violence. Not okay. But, moving along…

Where the argument really goes awry for me is in Johnson’s othering of the woman he follows. He’s turned her into an exotic creature on display, and taken away a little bit of her humanity. For more on exocitization, check out Racialicious’ extensive archive of awesome. There are plenty of ways to talk about race without placing people into positions that feel more like targets than participants.

This is largely about power relationships. Pretending that they don’t exist or don’t influence our decisions on how we interact with one another — especially when we’re different genders, races, sexualities, etc.– just mires us in he-said-she-said. It also perpetuates our bias, prejudices and social systems into the wild, open frontier of the Internet, and that’s a crying shame.

We’re living like fish in water on the Internet right now: We don’t know, or we’re not willing to recognize, that we’re soaking in the same social structures we’ve been living with for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years. We’re porting our understanding of the offline world–with all our prejudices, biases, and hierarchies–onto the blank canvas of the Internet. But all we can see is the blank canvas; we remain convinced that the Internet is a pure meritocracy and that if you just work hard enough, you’ll succeed at whatever it is that you’re trying to do. We’ve got to interrupt this pattern now, with conscious effort and action.

Lest I be a big ol’ bully and just rant about what’s wrong, allow me to offer some excerpts from my book that illustrate what I think is a healthier, more productive way to go about things. I’ll start with an example of where I was called out on my own voyeurism–shortly after the Philadelphia pool incident in 2009, and after listening on Twitter to lots of people of color share stories of childhood discrimination.

To share that kind of intimacy requires some sort of explicit or assumed “safe space”–a forum of sorts, where one can express views without threat of abuse or harassment. Safe space requires a tremendous amount of trust, and that trust allowed the people sharing the stories with each other to extend the conversation past the sound bite moments that get played out in media and other traditional public forums. “Usually when people of color talk publicly, it’s about our feelings, our mistakes, and being frank about our shortcomings,” says Ludovic Blain, director of the Progressive Era Project and a longtime social justice activist. “Often when white folks speak in the same setting, it’s about their initiatives and how they’ll make it right. That’s perverted. In the case of the racist pool, the scene was the same: people of color discussing heart-wrenching issues in front of whites. But those people were also doing a rare thing–publicly discussing what whites had done wrong.” The empathy based on shared experience, combined with trust that the conversation would be productive, brought this moment to a more necessarily intense place.

Additionally, people decided to share their stories for many reasons: to release a painful memory and get it off their chests, to connect with others who had experienced similar racism as children, to potentially educate those who needed to hear their memories, and more. Thus, the voyeuristic aspect of the experience was strong. My whiteness was hidden for a moment (via my silence, not sharing a common past experience), and social networks allowed me to enter a conversation that otherwise might have been altered by my presence. I was able to benefit regardless of whether the sharers intended for me to, and that cultural voyeurism needs to be clear when discussing issues that deal with bias around race, gender, class, and other kinds of privilege.

Later in the book, I discuss the kind of cross-pollination of culture that I believe Johnson originally intended to challenge his readers with.

To be clear, we won’t ever eliminate our biases. But we can begin to be explicit about what we learn about ourselves and our social spheres when bias rears its ugly head. Social technology researcher danah boyd suggests a series of questions for that explicit discovery process: “None of us is going to be unbiased. There is no way to be unbiased. The question is: Can you account for your biases? Can you recognize when they get in the way? Can you open up a dialogue, even if it makes you uncomfortable, with people who aren’t like you?” Opening ourselves up to that process and beginning to break out of the way we’ve been thinking about how we assume the world operates (simply because it’s operated like that for a long time) is crucial. We need to listen as selflessly as possible to what others are sharing and make sure that we’re not perpetuating restrictive social structures. … It makes me realize that often those moments are not about me at all–they are about larger injustices that I have a role in changing or stopping altogether, and it’s my job to figure out how to do that.

…

It’s important for people of all stripes and places to engage with those who are different from themselves, but to be blunt, it’s extra important for those who are a couple of notches up on the hierarchy to go through this exercise. Remember, you’re not there as part of some sociology experiment, but because you get that progress is possible only when we participate.

A crucial part of cross-pollination exercises is realizing that your role as ambassador is not to defend your position in the food chain. That’s where a lot of us get into trouble–I know I have. Your job is to recognize what privilege you bring–whether it’s your gender, your class, your race, your sexuality, etc.–and figure out how best you can use it to enable justice for people who don’t share your privilege. Jessica Hoffman, editor of make/shift magazine, pithily captured our collective responsibility to engage in self-reflection in an article she wrote about a white feminist’s role in other social justice movements: “Inexperienced because of privilege, we hadn’t thought well on our feet, and we’d been in a certain denial about how bad things might get; we’d been pissed and well meaning, but not useful [emphasis mine].” It’s the job of all of us to be useful.

Johnson’s utter failure to be useful is instructive of the larger systemic issues we face, not the least of which is the truism, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” A tweet from last year comes to mind on why this is true.

June 3-4: Personal Democracy Forum, New York City. This is one of my favorite conferences all year because it’s one of the few that blend many worlds well together: Technology, electoral politics, advocacy politics and cultural analysis. I’m giving a 10-minute talk on Thursday, June 3, that will (definitively!) answer the question: “Can the Internet fix politics?” Muwahaha. Other luminaries on the speaking roster include Howard Rheingold, Clay Shirky, Cheryl Contee, Jane Hamsher, Arianna Huffington, Esther Dyson, Anil Dash and many, many more. Register today — I’ve got a code to give you $100 off the registration; just email me and ask for it.

June 7-9: America’s Future Now, Washington DC. A yearly pilgramage to DC for progressives, where we talk strategy and tactics for challenging the right-wing agenda. I’ll be moderating a workshop on Tuesday morning, June 8, on social networking with Toby Chaudhuri, and we’ve actually turned it into a gameshow format: Social Media Jeopardy! Contestants will be Lizz Winstead, Garlin Gilchrist II, Scott Goodstein and Heather Holdridge. Also, Monday night, June 7, will see the DC launch of my book, thanks to Toby and Scott of Revolution Messaging, who are throwing me a killer party. Wooooo! Register today for all the goods.

June 9-11: Making Media Connections, Chicago, IL. I’m thrilled to be keynoting this gathering of non-profit communicators, put together by the Community Media Workshop. This year’s theme is “Storytelling and Strategy in the Digital Age,” which hits home strong for me– it’s through our stories that we have always made change, and our shiny new digital tools give us unprecedented capabilities to tell them. Register today for this amazing conference. (PS — That Friday night, June 11, I’ll be reading at Women & Children First, and having a party afterwards nearby.)

(note: You can look at the slides and text here; here’s the video.)

A week and a half ago, I received an email asking me if I’d be willing to do an Ignite talk for the March 4 NYC event, part of Global Ignite Week. If you’re not familiar with Ignite, here’s the deal: You have 5 minutes to give your talk; you create a PowerPoint presentation to go with the talk, but here’s the kicker: You must do 20 slides, and the slides will advance automatically every 15 seconds. Talk about creative restraint inspiration! Not only is it an amazing challenge and a great place to flex your speaker muscles, but the Ignite platform also reaches far and wide into multiple communities, and can be a huge opportunity to reach lots of audiences with your message. Was I up for it? Sure.

Then the panic set in. Oh my God, what I have I signed myself up for?

Tikva Morowati, one of the organizers of the event, said she needed my topic and description by later that day. Yeep. I knew I would have a hard time getting this all together on my own, so, like any good social citizen, I went to my community. First thing I did was email a listserv I belong to, where I knew many of the women had given Ignite talks before, for advice. The takeaways:

• Practice. A lot. 5 minutes goes by fast, but those 15 seconds go by faster.
• Don’t use the slides to make your point. They can add humor, etc., but as the organizers say: they should be icing.
• Leave padding for both your own potential stumble and laughs/heckling.
• Know your audience. Igniters tend to come, at least in NYC, from the tech/startup community.
• Be smart. Don’t dumb anything down.

Next thing I did was beg the most entertaining stage performer I know, Baratunde Thurston, to spend a few minutes with me that day. I needed a crash course in both topic generation — how to create a message that was going to be true to how seriously I take my work, and be engaging/fun — as well as pointers on how to set up the talk itself. He generously took time to have a little lunch and run through some ideas. His advice? Make sure you tell a story people can insert themselves into. Also, consider giving counter examples to what you want to illustrate.

I knew I wanted to talk about how social networks are shifting our cultural consciousness, a huge chunk of what I cover in Share This!. Baratunde and I came up with the idea to base it around a pop song, make that the hook of the talk. On my way home from our meeting, I scrolled through my iPod looking for songs, and landed on, “It’s Not Easy Being Green.”

Of course! The Muppets! And who better to be my model social citizen than Kermit himself?

I quickly drafted a title — “What Would Kermit Do? How Being a Muppet on Social Networks Can Change the World” — and a description, and got to work on the actual talk. Now, a word about my prep: I’m a recovering overachiever. I was that kid in school that would do the most outrageous OCD acts to learn material and concepts inside out– think Tracy Flick for academics. I’ve been in recovery for a number of years now, but Ignite made me relapse. (In a good way, I hope.)

Melissa Pierce, who’s making an unbelievably awesome film called “Life In Perpetual Beta,” offered to bounce ideas around with me. I can’t stress enough how much the buddy system helped, here–throughout the process, every panic was eased by checking in quickly with my buddy. She sent me this great video, “Why and How to Give an Ignite Talk,” which stresses storytelling as the basis of every talk.

I looked up how many words a 5-minute talk was, and most sources agreed that it was somewhere around 700-800 words. So, I drafted a 750-word piece around what I wanted to say. Melissa and I moved things around a bit, and then I set to timing myself reading the whole piece and editing it until it was just under 5 minutes. Then, I timed out where the 15 second breaks roughly were, and broke up the talk in my document editor.

Then came the fun part. I knew that I wanted the visuals to be strong, and the words to be few. Thus, I set about to watching the Muppet Movie (which was the focal point for the whole talk) and finding stills that would work for each slot. Because I knew the movie inside out (I’m talkin’, nearly word for word), this part was easy. Once the stills were gathered, I dropped them all in Photoshop and added the text for each–I don’t like the way PowerPoint does text; Photoshop gives me much more control. All in all, this part probably took me 6-7 hours.

I also landed on doing the idea of a tshirt — playing off the “Jesus is my homeboy” meme, I created “Kermit is my homeboy.” The kind people at Neighborhoodies.com, just up the way in DUMBO Brooklyn, let me know they could have it printed by Wednesday. Yay!

The overachiever then kicked into high gear. This was a technique that I’ve used to memorize all kinds of things since I was probably 10 or 11 years old– scripts for acting roles, texts for oral exams, you name it. I made an MP3 of me reading the talk, and started listening to it whenever I could. On the train, walking around, etc. But the craziest part, which really seems to work for me, is that I listened to it on loop while I slept every night, from Monday to Wednesday nights.

I spent most of my waking practice time–probably an hour each day this week–trying to memorize the talk without looking at the presentation or my script. I made 20 index cards with 3-4 keywords to help me keep going when I’d start to stumble, and each time, I found myself using the cards less. By Wednesday, I was able to get through most of it on the train. Over Wednesday evening, I started measuring it with the presentation timing, and it was pretty much spot-on. Doing that part over and over showed me where I was likely to run long, and where I had room to futz. I even made myself a cocktail and practiced it a little buzzed, just in case I went on stage last.

Thursday, I had a whirlwind day of other speaking gigs, so I didn’t get that much time to practice during the day. The hour or so before the show, though, I went over to the Bowery Poetry Club. I used to work there, so as long as there’s no one using the stage, friends are sort of allowed to use it for unofficial practice space. This helped me get used to the lights, as well as the distractions of people walking around, talking, etc., through my spiel.

By the time I arrived at Galapagos, my brain was pretty much fried and I found it impossible to keep practicing. Thus, I unleashed my nervous energy being super chatty with my fellow speakers (thanks to Noel and Andy for humoring me, heh). I also found out I was going on first– this panicked me initially, but then I realized I could (a) get it over with, and (b) not have to worry about following someone truly spectacular. (And whew, because there were some rockstars last night!)

Then, the big moment came, and there I was onstage. Once it got going, I was shocked to find it rolling out of my mouth. I worry that it sounded *too* rehearsed at times, but mostly, I’m really pleased with how I did. People laughed at the things I hoped they would, and many have reported back that they really enjoyed it. Looking forward to sharing the video with you all!

For background, here are the series of posts that sum up the first discussions on Twitter, and subsequent responses:

• An argument about crowdfunding, Quiet Babylonian
• Crowdfunding & Micropatronage Part 2, Quiet Babylonian
• Crowdfunding books, PD Smith at Kafka’s mouse
• Is ‘crowdfunding’ really the way ahead for author advances?, Michelle Pauli at The Guardian UK’s Books blog

There seem to be two sets of argument made against crowdfunding in much of the discussion I’ve seen: one, it reveals the funding seeker as a shameless self-promoter and snake-oil salesperson; two, it destroys the ethos of publishing either by allowing publishers to never have to produce advances again, or by allowing just any ol’ work to be produced without blood/sweat/tears.

What this revealed to me were first some fundamental misunderstandings of my own project, and later, some fundamental misunderstandings–or even outright denial–of the massive upheaval all of media is experiencing. To clarify some points about my own project, for those who are new to the discussion or new to my corner of the world, my professional life as a technologist has largely been spent in industries that accept the ethos of community-supported work: arts organizations, independent media, non-profit advocacy, etc. In these spheres, we’re used to receiving regular appeals for ongoing organizational support, or emergencies, or proposals for new projects. So, it certainly wasn’t a stretch for me to reach out in a similar way to the people who make up that community and believe in that tradition.

Also, some people seemed to think I was “charging” $100 for my book up front, before actually writing it. Mais non! I was using the PBS model of fundraising, where you donate $100 and feel good about yourself, and then you also get the bonus tote bag. (Tell me if you find someone that believes they purchased a totebag from PBS for a hundred bucks. Heh.) Because my community is familiar with the work I’ve done over the years, they understand that the project I was proposing (writing about a fundamental, progressive cultural shift) was ultimately beneficial to our community for their ability to thrive in the new tech era. Many decided to support that, shockingly, without needing me to hold guns to their heads. (Also worth noting is that every person I received a donation from, save one, has a personal relationship with me.)

The focus on who-gave-what-why revealed just how deeply entrenched an exclusively market-based mindset is in our culture. People in the discussion are so focused on the transactional moment–who gave to the project? how much did they give? what did they get in return?–that they are unable (or unwilling) to see both how market forces have long tainted the media process. It’s hard for many to imagine a scenario where someone cooks up an idea, a bunch of others support it, the work gets produced, and everyone lives happily ever after. There simply must be quid-pro-quo or sleight-of-hand somewhere in this process, because that’s how markets work.

As my friend Steve pointed out in his comments, there is a different economy at work–the gift economy. Using that model, people do things because they think they’re generally a good idea. (I wrote about this in my book, since the gift economy is so fundamental to how healthy social networks operate.) To some, I get the sense that they think I’ve stolen my donors’ money–what happens if my book becomes successful enough to make some money? Then I’ve doubly won! My evil plan will have worked. World domination next. No, seriously… I’ve thought about that, and I have made plans to account for it and will reach out to my awesome people if that happens. Which of course, you can say, of course you say that now, but it’s up to you to believe me or not.

Which is the whole point of the gift economy: do you trust me? Do you believe me? What kind of track record have I built up in this economy? Do I donate time and money to other projects? Do I reach out to my connections when someone else is in need? Am I known to have influence in a particular crowd, and use that influence justly? Do people consider me talented at what I do, and I able to get access to more talent from others when needed? All of those things make up my social capital, and I chose to spend my social capital on the crowdfunding of my book. It could have flopped miserably if I hadn’t been a pretty alright person in the world. People made their assessments on their belief in the value of my project and my reputation, and either gave me money, or didn’t. It’s as simple as that.

Each of us being able to make our own decisions about what we value and what we don’t, and then seeing work produced based on our values, seems to be one of the underlying themes that threatens many in the publishing and journalism industries. Book publishing in particular is seen as this time-honored tradition of creating works that go into that Big Canon in the Sky. I know I felt this when I first considered the prospect of writing a book — something else that’s different about my situation is that I was approached by a friend and colleague at the publisher, Johanna Vondeling, who had been asking for some time if I’d ever considered writing a book. Part of the reason I rejected her for at least a couple years was because I was plainly terrified of that idea of producing something to a state of perfection that it would need to be in, in my opinion, to be part of aforementioned canon.

The way this process has traditionally worked is that publishers and others with power/influence deem someone worthy enough to be part of that. Someone (actually, a group of people at the publisher) did that for me, too, but instead of taking their money, I decided to take their process instead, and work out the money on my own. One of the reasons I wanted Berrett-Koehler’s process, over being tossed a pittance–if anything at all–is their committment to producing the author’s vision of the work. So, if I were to go to a publisher who offered me an advance, how much would I have had to change the work I produced based on what the publisher wanted me to do? Too often I’ve heard from friends and colleagues who’ve written books that they were forced to make changes to make it more commercially viable… so that the publisher was guaranteed making up the advance.

That’s another big sticking point right there: one side of this debate feels that allowing “just anyone” to donate their money to my project will give them undue influence over the work that’s produced. First of all, that assumes I’d let that happen. Which, as anyone in my community knows, I sure as hell wouldn’t. Outside of that, it also assumes that works produced in the traditional model have the purest intentions and zero monetary influence. I find that hard to swallow, and there’s certainly enough evidence out there that says otherwise. A multinational company throwing money at little old me isn’t going to have a say over what I’m able to do under their umbrella? Working with Berrett-Koehler, the only restraint I experienced is that Johanna wouldn’t let me even come close to swearing, and my mom thanks her for that. (I wanted to use “BS” at one point.)

So now, it’s not just up to institutions to bless or dismiss projects outright–it can be any conglomeration of people pooling together to fund someone or something they believe in. In many circles, we consider this a part of community building, and are happy to participate when all of our values align. Others don’t see fundraising as community-building, they clearly only see money in the transactional terms I spoke of earlier. That’s a shame. But what’s an even bigger shame is that most of those disagreeing with my tactics don’t seem to believe in community-building at all–they are largely stuck in an old model of broadcast and response, of pedestals and ivory towers… ultimately, of cliques and isolation. Those people will be left behind as the rest of us work on connecting, creating, and conversing.

I’m reminded of when the Publisher’s Weekly story about my crowdfunding was first published, and a stranger on Twitter called the whole thing “tacky.” Curious as to how she ended up there, I asked her. In the following discussion, she came around to the fact that it wasn’t me or my tactic that she was frustrated with, it was the fact that authors are expected more and more to do everything for a book–write it, market it, sell it… and now fundraise for it? This is a painful part of the change process, for sure. Everyone’s roles are changing. Editor’s don’t just edit, for example; this I can tell you for sure from my experience with Johanna the Wondereditor. Anyone working in just about any aspect of media today is expected to have a far wider skill set then ever before: writing, some knowledge of HTML, bonus if you can do online video, etc., for less money than ever before. And many are suffering because of that.

Which brings me back to an earlier point: maybe market models are failing information and media altogether. I had this conversation about possible similarities of journalism and art paradigms with Andrew Golis, who works for Yahoo! News building a blog network… a key point I want to bring into this discussion:

For eons, there have been many avenues the artist can follow: commercial (Hallmark cards, pop music, etc), government-funded (NEA grants, NYSCA grants, etc), foundation funded (Yaddo retreats, what have you), family funded, collective supported, street selling (a form of commercial, for sure)… and any blend of those above is becoming more and more prominent.

Art, despite the instability that Andrew rightly calls out, hasn't disappeared, tho. Art hasn't even gotten worse, just more available. There is always cynicism about popular culture, but that's too easy of a target. There's just more of everything available to us. If you're a musician, for example, it's easier than ever to get your work heard by more people than just your friends. But not paid for by a whole bunch, probably. That's the sticker, eh? A few years ago, as Napster started ticking off the recording industry, someone said that it was clearer than ever what the musician's job is: not to sell records, but to travel around and play for people. That's what they've always done, and that's what they're returning to.

Journalism is grasping at straws for a new model to pay everyone's salaries. The old model, though, was in many ways distorted, and probably distended. Maybe it's not, however, that journalistic endeavors are going to be the new starving artists… maybe it's that news producers and art makers need to get their heads together and figure out how we're going to create not a model, but a whole new system that creates thrivable conditions for creators to get their jobs done.

I created the conditions to have a thrivable summer for producing my book. Nothing extraordinary: I paid my rent, I ate sufficiently, and I visited my parents, all while writing the first 30,000 words of a book. This makes people angry. I’m not entirely sure why; some have pointed to jealousy but I’m not sure that’s quite right. Other people do this all the time; people’s spouses work while they finish their dissertations, trust funds allow for children of rich people to have a good time, etc. It’s something about asking your friends that bothers people. Reaching out to those who already support you most is culturally problematic. Why? What is it going to take to overhaul the way we’re doing business now, in the media industries, to create cultural situations where artists, journalists and authors can thrive? Crying endlessly about the demise and shunning potential for innovation is definitely not a good place to start.

That’s what I want to leave this discussion with: more of these ideas to throw something on the wall and see what sticks. Already, hundreds (thousands?) of people are doing it on Kickstarter for their books, films, records and more. How many other ways can we think of to open up the process of creation to more people? I’m tired of the same ol’, same ol’, and I know I’m not the only one.

There are several opportunities we have at hand, and before I run off to a morning meeting, I wanted to address some of the ups and downs of dealing with disasters via technologies. The biggest thing we need to be aware of right now is the role our own egos play in these situations. We have a desperate need to feel useful in situations that make us feel helpless, and the ease with which we can share our thoughts and stories amplifies ways we think we’re being helpful when we’re dealing with emotionally charged material. We need to be aware of our impulses and sort out what’s good and what’s not so good. Here’s my take:

• Getting the word out, the good stuff. People have been passing along word from the Red Cross, Mercy Corps, Yele and other organizations on easy and fast ways to donate money to relief efforts– especially via txt message. You can send a text message on your phone, for example, to 90999 with the word HAITI, and that will donate $10 to the RedCross’ fund. The charge will appear on your next phone bill.
  
  The abilitiy to read and see news coming from inside Haiti via everyday people, like many other situations recently, is also fascinating, and incredibly powerful. We aren’t reliant on potentially corrupt or broken information structures (like government news agencies, for example) to find out what’s happening in real time.
  
  
• Getting the word out, the challenging stuff. The other side of the ability to share information quickly and easily is that the potential for the spread of misinformation is high. We aren’t physiologically equipped to deal with highly charged situations via new technologies, in many cases– our brains are built to rely on a variety of cues to filter and respond, and those cues are often missing when reading updates on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere.
  
  Because we’ve established trust with the people that we communicate with online, we automatically assign that trust, or authority, over to situations that don’t necessarily warrant it. Because I generally trust my friends to post smart/thoughtful things, the urge to repost what seems like important information from them in times of crisis without verifying it first is high. We have to change this behavior, and look for ways to establish authority of sources (without falling back on old models of only giving institutions like news orgs and governments the authority) and to verify what we share before doing so.

I wrote about this a whole bunch in Share This!, and I’m going to post those sections this afternoon when I return. Stay tuned…

UPDATE: The relevant sections from the book are now up. Start with “Stop, Drop and … Think.“

I'm gonna start off by telling you a little story from the spring that I wrote about in my book, "Share This! How You Will Change the World with Social Networking." It comes out in June 2010.

It's a Saturday afternoon, Easter weekend, Passover is going on, things are pretty quiet in the world online and off. A lotta digitally-oriented people, when they're bored, will do things like Google themselves and check website stats and whatnot. Authors tend to go to Amazon and check their sales ranks. Now, the sales rank is not just about how many books they've sold, it's also the key to the whole Amazon system. If you don't have a sales rank for your book or product, you don't turn up in search results on the site, for example.

Well, that Saturday afternoon, some authors were surprised to find that they no longer had sales ranks on their books, and that suddenly their books weren't appearing in search results. Murmurs began on Twitter as authors posted their findings here and there, and consumers started posting about failed searches. Someone started using a hashtag to express their extreme dissatisfaction. Who knows what a hashtag is? [If you want to learn more about the power -- and fun -- of hashtags, go watch Baratunde Thurston's video, "There's A #Hashtag For That."]

That hashtag was #AmazonFAIL. ("fail" is a really fun snarky catchall word for "this sucks" events.) Because of that, people participating were able to track all of the related posts about Amazon. Within a few hours, enough information had been gathered to show the types of books that were being flagged: LGBT, feminist, and disability themed sex-positive books. They mysteriously received an "adult" flag while heteronormative sexual books, like Playboy calendars, and anti-gay screeds, remained untouched.

The flames fanned higher, and soon various "web celebrities" took up the cause, using their social capital and influence to share stories about books that were being, in effect, digitally banned. Not long after, several newspapers caught wind of the firestorm… the LA Times blogged the de-ranking Sunday.

The mob stormed the castle all day Sunday. By later that night — Easter Sunday, no less — Amazon was forced to make a statement in response. A spokesperson told Publisher's Weekly that the de-ranking problem was a "glitch," and that Amazon was looking into it.

Now, imagine the same scenario just 10 years ago. Amazon, even then, was a popular online retailer with a good amount of credibility. If a huge swath of books had been removed from the site in 1999, how would people have protested? It would have been through angry emails to the corporate offices. Perhaps op-eds might have been pitched to various newspapers, and over several days and weeks various civil rights groups might have gotten involved somehow. In short, everyday people would have had to rely on a slow-moving hierarchical system with lots of gatekeepers along the way deciding if this was a worthwhile issue.

Instead, in 2009, these voices slipped into the consciousness of the web, created a campaign without any organization or funding, and forced Amazon to respond within 12 hours. And to ice that cake, the mainstream media played catch-up in the following days, hoping to catch the scraps of the story. [Postscript was that Amazon said it was Amazon France's fault; they were updating the catalog over the weekend and accidentally flagged all these books. Which to me sounds a lot like "oh you guys, I totally have a girlfriend, she just lives in FRANCE." But whatever. I digress.]

You've learned about a ton of new tactics and strategies today. But one of the biggest things to understand is that something very fundamental has not changed at all about organizing. Before any organizing happens, online or offline, before you get your phonebanking, your petitions, your door-knocking, your lobby days, your email campaigns, your anything– change starts with stories. Our stories. Storytelling has been the most powerful building block for social change since the beginning of time… think about how long we've been sitting around the campfire! What these tools that you've spent all day hashing out do is give us unprecedented power to share our stories to many more people than we could have imagined.

What happens when you tell stories? Two very magical things: you build trust with other people in your network, and from there you build empathy. It's very important to note that I'm not talking about sympathy. Sympathy is where you feel bad for someone who's had something bad happen to them. Empathy is where you actually share in the emotions that other people have and express. It's a powerful, deeply primal experience.

The trust we create with one another on social networks is what fuels the empathetic response we have to one another, even if we don't know each other that well. That trust-created empathy is what will lead us away from the isolation, and thus apathy, that we've experienced as a culture in the last century's focus on mass communications and market demographics… siloing people and separating them. These technologies are all about connecting, engaging, sharing.

Your presence is required in this work: we need you here in the online social space. Desperately. We are confronting a tremendous opportunity to bring in voices previously marginalized or dismissed when it comes to shaping public conversations. But change won't happen on its own… it requires you to show up, and to participate. Tech will not solve our problems. We will solve our problems, using technology.

If you choose to sit this one out, though, there's a ripple effect caused by your void. Because you're not contributing to the larger, very public conversations about what's happening in the world and how problems should be solved, the conversation will go on without you. Others will be defining and directing the conversation without the benefit of your experiences and knowledge. Y'know, like what's been going on for most of us for the last few thousand years.

Here's the thing: Creating a just society is sort of like the evolution of species. If you have a bunch of the same DNA mixing together, the species mutates poorly and eventually dies off. But bring in variety — new strains of DNA — and you create a stronger species.  It's no different in idea generation. You get a bunch of the same people talking to each other and making the rules for a few millennia, and eventually you're going to end up with a lack of meaningful advancement.

It's time to bring fresh life into the conversations that we're having about social change, and sharing our stories are our strongest bets for doing so.

I think we can change the traditional power dynamics. In fact, I think you will change the traditional power dynamics. But it's not all shiny happy rainbows and butterflies, though.

We're living like fish in the water on the Internet right now: we don't know, or we're not willing to recognize, that we're soaking the social structures we've been living with for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. We're porting our understanding of the offline world… with all our prejudices, biases and hierarchies… onto the blank canvas of the Internet. Especially in spaces that are focused on relationships and social features, we have to be aware of this. Research like that of noted tech rockstar danah boyd shows that people self-segregate online–white people hang out with white people online, even tho, for example a Pew study showed that an African-American online is more likely to use Twitter than a white person online. A Harvard study showed us that men are twice as more likely to follow another man on Twitter, etc., even tho women make up more than have of all social networks' memberships. We've got to interrupt this pattern now, with conscious effort and action.

This is where the storytelling comes in. Lemme tell you another.

In the summer of 2009, a private country club in Philadelphia banned a group of African-American children from swimming in its pool, despite the fact that the kids' camp had paid for their swimming privileges. Capturing the public’s tremendous shock and outrage, comedian Elon James White, host of the popular web series “This Week in Blackness,” opened an episode with the words: "Hi, I'm broadcasting live from 1952…"

When I heard about the incident, I signed petitions, I passed the info along on Twitter and Facebook, and I talked about it with my friends, both online and off. As the dialogue continued, people started to share stories on social networks about the first time they had been discriminated against. I read story after unfiltered, unedited story, written by friends and people I barely knew. Each time, the stories were devastating; so was the fact that I hadn't heard them before.

I realized that without social media, I probably never would have heard those stories. Or, I might have heard one of them, isolated from others. Being white, I have never been the victim of racism, and since many of my friends are white, they haven't either. Prior to social media, I mostly likely wouldn't have ended up in the company of a group of people of color sharing their childhood discrimination stories so openly and honestly.

Social networks offer a huge potential for overlap between groups of people. Even though humans will always be drawn to others that they think are like them in one way or another, sharing powerful stories with one other has the potential to reach across social boundaries and create new kinds of safe spaces.

So yeah, we'll always look for people who are like us, but we'll never be able to isolate ourselves completely from those who are different from us. Social media tools make it easier than ever to dip in and out of social circles. In that space of relatively pressure-free exploration is where the overlap can start to occur.

In the case of sharing stories of childhood discrimination, there was an assumed level of safety through the trust and empathy we had established with one another. I trusted the people I follow on Twitter, and in turn, they trusted me to listen.

I received an education that day. It's one thing to read stories in the newspaper and get upset; it's an entirely different, deeper experience to read friends and colleagues sharing intimate, painful, raw moments in real time. Those shared moments left me feeling not just more passionate about addressing racism, but also more willing to hear what’s being said when I need to listen.

Change does not, and will not, happen in isolation or on an individual basis… we need each other to produce results. As we start to explore with social media, we have the potential to deepen our understanding of one another's life experiences, and in turn, ourselves. Telling our stories in real, authentic ways becomes critical to moving others toward progress and change.

So! To sum up some takeaways for you all:

1. Organizers: you are not reaching everyone if you are just going to the most popular social network of the moment.
2. Don't forget that you bring bias to the table. When you enter a space that doesn't have formal structure, like a lot of the Internet, our own biases will take over.
3. Your stories matter. The stories of your community members matter even more. I hereby knight you with an ambassadorship to a more democratic future. Do you choose to accept this mission?

Thank you!