People ask why we choose to connect our members in multiples places and not just ride the wave of large existing social networks. The answer is because we want to build a consciously social community.
On the one hand — every piece of advice tells you to go to where your members are and speak to them there. For us that would be looking towards the traditional social channels, posting our updates there and accumulating follower counts and likes. The benefits with this approach, is that potentially more people would see our updates and be able to interact with us there. We would get more views and possibly even some likes when people saw our updates as they mindlessly consumed their feeds. It would not be another place to go in our increasingly busy lives. The downside is that we would not get much beyond that. No deep interaction, connection or collaboration. No diversity or serendipity. Our community needs more than that.
Having other places to go — whether it is with our Connectle Con conversations, our Connections Map or the self-organising Circles within our network — means that when people do connect in Connectle, they are deliberately coming to interact and contribute. They are taking time out to be consciously social. They are connecting beyond the “like-minded” filters.
When social technologies were first introduced, the attraction and excitement was around being able to extend your network beyond your cubicle and friendship circle. Our inboxes were full of spam and we wanted a way to escape our emails and collaborate. Social offered a way to connect with people across the globe, discuss what you were working on, extend your learning and share stories. Social was a promise of building relationships and innovative ideas.
Much of what we see on our feeds today, are promises of how to make more money, personal gloating, sponsored products or filtered news for our mindless consumption. A stream of information to absorb. We are interacting and collaborating less with real people and our relationship with social is increasingly conflicted. Building relationships and collaborating is something that now must be done consciously. Not just in our personal networks, but within our professional networks too.
We need to break through the filters and create collisions beyond the algorithms. We need to create a human algorithm.
Our mission is to evolve Connectle into an enabler of intuitively cocreating connected work. To be social again. Where we can learn together (colearn), work together (cowork) and create together (cocreate). It is not one app, or one platform, or one place to go — instead it is a stitching together of real conversations, meaningful connections and self-organised circles. A trusted network based on shared values. A community.
If we are to embed next stage organisational thinking into our work environments, we need to step out of the passive consumer mode many of us are stuck in and step into activation mode.
We need to consciously improve our collaboration and self organisation skills to unlock the mindset needed to lead and participate in next stage ways of working.
It’s time to go beyond consuming social and move towards being consciously social.
Join us: http://www.connectle.com
