The conversation about social media, Twitter and Facebook is the wrong one to have, even though it’s the one most people are having.  It is now a normal everyday action to connect on the real time social web the same way you share with friends on the phone or by email; only now one action can reach thousands of people.  Though these topics were revolutionary a year or two ago, now they simply point out the obvious way these tools are ingrained in our everyday communication behaviors.

The conversation about Trust Communities is the right one to have.  You’re already a part of Trust Communities even though you may not call them that.

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I recently had a meeting with the other two founders of Oxstein Design Labs to get our messaging together before we launch a lot of what we’re doing to the world. We already have great partners and interested clients that are helping us to create our initial offerings which is nice place to start.

A big piece of this will be creating an open source framework to help people build, manage, measure and understand Trust Communities.  Beyond that, we’ll be playing in the spaces of tech, social media, education and entertainment. I put up our initial blog today.  It’ll be moved to our website when it launches very soon, but it’s time we started to share our vision and begin to connect to our tribe.

After being either a consultant or an employee for a couple of decades, it’s very exciting to be building a company that’s fully aligned with my interests and skill set with top level players.  Working with people who are smarter than me in their fields of expertise and who also value fun and integrity as much as money is a true joy.

When we met for the first time in person after months of Skyping, phone calls and emails to officially kick this company and project off the ground it was amazing to note how each of our respective talents came together and mesh so well to create and build our collaborative vision.  I’ll roll more of that out in the coming weeks and months.

It’s a change to be traveling a lot more and working the hours of a start up entrepreneur as we build the parent company and the companies under it’s umbrella.  I’ll be meeting interesting people as well as speaking and presenting much more.  (Blog posts and Flikr photos will undoubtedly be flowing like a waterfall.)  But most importantly, I’ll be doing work that fills my soul as it helps others to see and enjoy the bigger picture of what the social media revolution and niche Trust Communities are doing to transform our lives.

I’m very lucky.  Communication, relationships, technology and collaboration have been my loves all my life.  We are now at a point where these interests are overtaking the culture of control and competition that we were born into.  It’s a great time to be alive for someone like me.

As I blog about this and other adventures it will be great to connect with you on deeper levels than I have in previous blog posts.  My heart will have more to say as it’s song develops on this journey.  I’m getting for the first time how fun business can be.  It’s fun because when you play with the right people to do the right things that contribute in the right ways it’s a blast.

This the follow up to a post I wrote last week.  It seemed a little more palatable to serve this up in smaller chunks.  So here are more musings based on my research, experience and conversations with people confused about this whole social media thing.  I hope this helps you to understand the social media ecosystem better and to find where the value is in it for you.

The first thing to remember is that Twitter and Facebook are not the whole of social media, they’re just two tools getting a lot of attention.  The entire internet, and smart phones, are becoming socialized.  The conversations around social media are focused on tools and tactics, but it’s a much bigger ecosystem than that.

Our brains don’t have a precedent to understand the rapid changes and technological advancements being thrust upon us.  This confuses us and makes us say, “oh, that new fangled thing is a fad.”

This is  human nature and basic behavioral psychology.  When we’re confused by complex concepts we create black and white (old way ‘good’ / new way ‘bad’) judgments to dismiss, feel like we’re ‘right’ and move on.  This is how media, politics and religion control and manipulate people’s belief systems.

Yes, text messages can be misinterpreted, though part of the 140 character confusion is not realizing that it can touch people emotionally and psychologically.  If you read tweets from the woman in Australia watching her house burn in the brush fires with her kids and dog in the house you’d have to have been a rock to not feel what she wrote in 140 characters.

Also, if you didn’t know me and read 3 of my tweets that either gave you valuable information, made you smile or made you laugh, you would unconsciously consider me a warm person like your neighbor you wave to. Your brain thinks that’s the same as meeting me for coffee for an hour as long as I made you feel good.

When you read a tweet you receive little pieces of my personality and unconsciously weigh how much you like me.  You see if I’m a self-promoting narcissist who doesn’t ‘get it.’  You see if I just share innocuous information about things you don’t care about. You see if my words entertain or inform you.

Strangers approach me every week at local events because they saw my face next to tweets they liked and it gave them the courage to say, “Hi, I follow you on Twitter.”  Some of these people have become great friends of mine.  If I saw them in the same room without previous Twitter posts we would never have connected.  Compare this with the clinching of your stomach whenever you’ve entered an in person networking event and immediately searched out a familiar face to relieve your anxiety.

Photo source: PersonalizeMedia.com

Another misnomer is that online and IRL (in real life) relationships offline are separate.  I’ve met people on Twitter that helped me move, mentored me in business and meet up with me in person regularly. It’s been more beneficial to me than any slew of offline in-person networking events.

This blog is a social networking tool also.  Clients hired me after reading the blog.  If I didn’t think I had time to share here and across the web, I would have missed out on business as well as friendships. Investing time in creating online content beats any time spent watching TV or doing things that aren’t on the web for 24 hours a day connecting me to great people.

Twitter and Facebook are tools that probably won’t be here in 10 years, but their technology is the foundation for web 3.0 that will be a social web.   You can build a house of relationships with them or waste time playing goofy games and taking quizzes.  Either way, you determine the level of value you receive from them.

Photo source: Bilal Al-badry’s blog

The main conversations around social media are misguided by debating the usefulness of the tools based on people with limited knowledge misusing them.  Like all human communication, some of what people use the tools for will be nonsense and some will be valuable.

How people individually use social networking tools is the issue, but the focus is usually on whether the tools are worthwhile.  Don’t blame revolutionary tools for how dumb people misuse them.

The quality of the questions you ask and the quality of the conversations you participate in will dramatically affect the quality of your life. That said, the main questions around social media are the wrong ones.  Here are some examples:

“Why should I care about someone posting that they went to the bathroom on Twitter?”

“How can anything meaningful be written in 140 characters?”

“Who has time for that social media stuff?  I”m too busy for that.”

Our old filters of perception and lack of understanding about the bigger picture of what’s happening is misleading a lot of people.  Beyond that, I’ve found that if you aren’t educated on how social media tools and niche communities help your life, you probably won’t ‘get it’ when you experiment with it.

After not ‘getting’ Twitter for almost a year, I asked a friend who was building her business with it to show me the value because I knew I was missing something.  Just having someone tell me about Tweetdeck, hashtags, retweets, direct messages and explain how she used the tool made me ‘get it’ when I started to use it.

Most people over 25 don’t realize how personal branding, social web technology, smart phone technology and niche communities are evolving personal & business communications – which is how you build, manage and operate your personal and business lives.  We are fundamentally changing how we connect, communicate and collaborate.

The impact of this change is like the original impact of radio and TV when they were invented.  The level of usefulness of Twitter & Facebook is the wrong conversation.  That’s the micro conversation and it confuses people who aren’t educated on how these platforms can add value to them personally.

This is like trying to explain the value of personal computing to people in 1980 when they said, “but my typewriter has always worked fine.” (Can those people imagine life without a personal computer or the internet today?) Or explaining what a car could do to people in 1910 who said, “but I have a horse.”  It isn’t easy to understand for non-users until well after the technology moves from early adopters to the mainstream.

A lot of your friends probably don’t use Twitter today. They also probably didn’t use email in 1994, but they do every day now.  …and they might not in 5 or 10 years as it becomes antiquated technology. Twitter, Facebook and other social networking technology will be fused into an entire socialized internet along with many other technologies people do and don’t use yet.

The bigger conversation is the one to be having.  The one that acknowledges that tribes, niche trust communities, technologies like Google Wave and Google Sidewiki, old business systems failing, how Generation Y (which will be the dominant U.S. population as of 2010) operates & much more are the leading indicators that tell us what’s coming next.

What you now do on Facebook you’ll be doing on every website & it will all connect in ways you can’t fathom.  If no one has explained this & you don’t use the power of Twitter & Twitter search in your current relationships you can’t understand this.  In five to ten years everyone will get it because, like people under 25 today, it will be the water we all swim in.