Social networks are no place for control freaks

Time to confess. Despite being active in online social networking for several
years, recently I have discovered that I’m really a bit of a control freak.
This became evident when I got together with some others to plan the
inaugural meeting of the Creative Coffee Club (CCC). The others seemed quite
happy to see what happened when a bunch of disparate people met in Foyles’
café in London.My ideaswere different.

Inside organisations, we are all trained to prepare for meetings, to have
agendas, objectives, checklists and actions. The theory is to conduct the
proceedings as efficiently as possible and have a means of control if things get
out of hand.

Accordingly, my thoughts about the CCC were to let people mingle for a
while, then tap a glass to attract their attention and make an objectives-type
announcement. My colleagues were much too polite to call me mad. They
just said: “Hmmm. Not quite what we had in mind.”

Let’s step back and look atwhat led to this point.

The three of us had met at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco last
year. Toby, the boss of an ideas company and a visiting professor at De Montfort
University, had some terrific ideas on how to apply creativity profitably within business. A bookwas planned, but we realised we couldn’t pull it off because of our
busy and conflicting schedules.

Since a book is for the purpose of spreading ideas across time and distance, a social setup seemed a good alternative, albeit on a smaller scale to start with. The CCC was mooted to appeal to creative types. It was set up using Facebook.

Of course, we emailed and pinged people we thought might be interested.

And, suddenly, people in England and the US who couldn’t get to Londonwere
asking if they could set up their own chapters.

Never mind command and control, this was social networking in action.
People, for their own reasons and with their own ideas, were responding to this
birds of a feather group-forming idea.

“Nothing new in birds of a feather,” I hear you say. This is true. But, in 36
hours, from a standing start the Facebook group attracted 100 members,
many of them strangers to the organisers. And bear in mind that Facebook is
far from ubiquitous, despite the hype to the contrary.

The 18 or so peoplewho turned up for the inaugural London event were a mix
of writers, analysts, publishers, techies, broadcasters and entrepreneurs. Given
the topic and the time of day (10am midweek), it automatically filtered out
people in regular jobs.

NETWORK DEMOCRACY

Forget the announcements that I’d mooted. People just chatted enthusiastically,
constantly forming and dissolving newcombinations and gaining newperspectives.
No formal objectives at all were achieved – except that we now knew a whole bunch of people we didn’t know before, and lots of new thoughts
were engendered.

In that sense it was the same as any other networking event. But it was different
in that there wasn’t the usual bunch of people at the edges pushing
accounting services, insurance, personal coaching or whatever.

Where’s this all heading? Well, it shows the speed at which a community
can form both online and offline. It shows that you don’t have to work with
formal agendas – the purpose can be laid out online. It’s part of how people
decide whether to join in the first place.

Toby, the instigator, describes the CCC as “a creative and conversational
sandbox, away from the constraints of measurement and results”.

It gives people who wouldn’t normally meet because of position, discipline or
geography, an opportunity to collaborate formutual benefit.

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