5 ways to find people, the ultimate source of insight

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Let’s say you’re working on something that would benefit from the perspective of a really knowledgeable person in addition to yourself.  In fact, you probably are.

I think people, especially smart ones focused on particular fields, are the ultimate source of knowledge and insight because they are dynamic.  They just keep going.  Books and articles and such are great – but there’s nothing like finding a really great person for taking your understanding of the work you’re doing to the next level.

I’ve been in the people-finding business for almost a decade now, but today online a friend asked me how to find people who aren’t on social media.

I came up with this list of 5 ways.  What am I missing?

Ask people who are on social media

Social media is the easiest way to discover relevant people, either based on what they’ve published or based on who is connected to them.  The easiest way to find people is on the internet, and one of the best ways to find people who aren’t on the internet is to ask the people you find who are, who else you should talk to.

Search news

It would be great to extract this automatically, but just for a fresh test: I searched for “artificial intelligence” and “social justice” on Google News and the first result that wasn’t a TED Talk was an article about a conference and the first name in it was of an important college professor who has no Twitter account, 9 contacts on LinkedIn, and a blank avatar on Facebook.  He’s got a big CV though.

Search books (try Google Talk to Books)

Google’s new semantic search engine of books, called Talk to Books, is a pretty great way to explore around any topic.

Go to events

You know who the king of going to events and finding incredible people is? Kent Bye, host of Voices of VR and Voices of AI.  Thats where he gets his interviews.  And he has done hundreds, if not thousands, of interviews.

Leade.rs

Loic Le Meur’s new startup Leade.rs is a great looking way to find public speakers on hot topics.  It’s a directory. Is it social media?  Maybe.

 

Also: From the remarkable new Pew study titled “The Future of Well-Being in a Tech-Saturated World,” based on responses of more than 1,000 experts, some perspective:  Stephen Downes, a senior research officer at the National Research Council Canada, commented, “The internet will help rather than harm people’s well-being because it breaks down barriers and supports them in their ambitions and objectives. We see a lot of disruption today caused by this feature, as individuals and companies act out a number of their less desirable ambitions and objectives. Racism, intolerance, greed and criminality have always lurked beneath the surface, and it is no surprise to see them surface. But the vast majority of human ambitions and objectives are far more noble: people desire to educate themselves, people desire to communicate with others, people desire to share their experiences, people desire to create networks of enterprise, commerce and culture. All these are supported by digital technologies, and while they may not be as visible and disruptive as the less-desirable objectives, they are just as real and far more massive.”

One key step in effective influencer engagement: A good system for seeing opportunities

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When it comes to cultivating long-term relevance and quality relationships with industry thought leaders, showing up is key.  Here’s my advice on how to make that easier to do.

I’ve been engaging with influential people online, building relationships, learning from them, and collaborating when it makes sense, for more than a decade. The number one tactic I always recommend is this: set up a really easy way for you to see the updates that your people of interest are publishing throughout the course of your day.  Not all of them, just some of them, regularly.

This should be something you can’t help but trip on as you’re looking at your email inbox, or you’re visiting Twitter, or when you’re opening a new tab in your browser. I have a VIP Twitter list I’ve organized and I’ve dragged the link to that list’s tweets down to my browser toolbar. Whenever I want to visit Twitter, that’s where I start. That’s pretty casual, for my heavyweight business needs I use enterprise software from Sprinklr of course, and it is the best interface for influencer monitoring I’ve ever seen. But the point is, you’ve got to have the opportunity to engage right in front of you.

Now once you’ve walked past your email folder full of influencer newsletters, or your Facebook Group you use as your Facebook landing page, or your awesome social media listening dashboard, don’t just rush past that point to get to where you intended to go. Linger a little. Make a habit of slowing down to look at a few recent updates from the influential people you’re monitoring. You don’t have to read everything, but you won’t engage with anything you don’t read. There are probably 1 or 2 opportunities to reply, reshare, or otherwise engage with something in the first 3 to 5 items you’ll scan over at the top of your list.

Wash, rinse, and repeat. Regular engagement with influencer content isn’t sufficient to build a relationship, but I’d argue that it is one essential part if you’re really focused on building long-term relationships and learning from these top thinkers in your industry.

A fun advanced tactic: sometimes I like to pretend I’m at a party offline and someone walked up to me and said the first thing I see on a list of tweets, right to me personally. What would I say if they said that to me? I think about that a little, and then I say it on Twitter.

If you like podcasts, you should try the Breaker app

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Discovering a great new podcast is a real thrill and a relatively new app called Breaker makes it easy to do. It uses your friend list from Twitter or other social networks to tap you into a stream of podcast listening activity. And the interface is beautiful.

The social discovery is awesome – I’m finding new shows and new episodes to listen to that I really enjoy. It also prompts me to listen to popular things I’ve never bothered to listen to before, like The Daily from the NYT. Everyone likes it and so it was easy for me to give it a try once. There are far more shows and specific episodes being published now than anyone can listen to, it’s really overwhelming, and this is a good way to filter.

This is what sharing your social data like your list of friends with third party apps can do for you, by the way. This is the upside of that kind of capability, ways it can improve democratic values for a change.

I’ve used Huffduffer for years for podcast discovery but it’s web based, nerdy, sparse, and not nearly as popular. It’s still cool though, as is the HuffDuffVideo bookmarklet that strips audio from YouTube videos and puts it on AWS for 30 days, then pushes those audio files over to HuffDuffer to listen to on my phone or Sonos. Biggest bummer at Breaker? My Huffduffer feed didn’t get imported, for some reason.

Also disappointing about Breaker: I don’t see a privacy option for specific shows. There are some podcasts I listen to that I don’t want all my friends knowing I listen to them.

Further critique could be offered of the less useful push notifications. Some of the push notifications are amazing, like “your friend X was a guest on this podcast!” But other ones say things like “many of your friends like popular things” – and that’s just annoying. I’d also like it to do downloads a little differently so it supported the Sonos “on this phone” feature beter.

So that’s four things I don’t like about Breaker – but there are far more that I like a lot. I think you’ll like it too.

 

The Rise of Influencer Listening

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I’ve been doing “influencer marketing” for more than a decade, and calling it that for more than 7 years. I’m not a big fan of what you’re probably thinking about when you hear the phrase “influencer marketing.” What I’m really excited about is not so much outbound marketing and promotion – but inbound value capture through listening to market influencers and thought leaders. Listen to them and learn from them! That’s far more valuable than asking them to share links to what you’re selling!

I did a webinar about it with the American Marketing Association today and I was thrilled that 600 people registered, more than 200 attended live, and almost all of them stayed through the entire hour – not dropping off until we were done. You can check out the presentation on demand here. Related: AdWeek ran a contributed article I wrote on the same topic the next day.

That attendance and the responses we got suggest this to me: the market is ready for this. Marketers are ready to go beyond influencer marketing 101, the presumption of shallow last minute paid endorsements. I sure hope so!

What is strategic, listening-powered influencer marketing? It’s really a two-way conversation and it goes far beyond driving traffic to your company’s website. It does do that, in small part through the advocacy and sharing of “influencers” and in larger part through increased relevance for your more-informed brand, but it does a lot more than drive traffic.

As super smart marketer Leah Kinthaert puts it: “True digital transformation requires new ways of thinking and doing marketing, rather than simply enhancing and supporting the traditional methods. Social media – and more specifically two-way conversations on social media – is a crucial part of it.” Yes!

Below: A network map of the AI thought leadership space on Twitter.

Interested in Artificial Intelligence? Who isn’t these days? If you’re creating content and ever mention AI, you should make sure you know about Andrew Ng and Yann LeCun. They will probably never talk about you. But you’ll be a lot smarter if you spend some time listening to them. Everyone in AI does.

If you want to see some great examples of network-savvy influencer marketing by marketers winning the right to be trusted advisors to their customers, discovering emerging trends early, researching the heck out of their named accounts, targeting ads based on past wins, and yes even smart paid influencer engagements – come spend an hour with my recorded voice and a pretty deck on this AMA webinar.

I hope we’re seeing the beginning of a big change toward smarter, more informed, and more authentic marketing.

Screenshots from the new app Molly.com: Chris Messina and team help you teach a robot about yourself

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In the future there will be far more opportunities to engage with recommendation and other types of systems than we can keep up with – and we’ll want those systems to quickly and easily know about our interests and tastes.

Molly.com is a new system launched today that will allow you and your friends to teach an AI system about your interests and preferences so that it can answer questions about you and make recommendations for you in the future.  The AI system is forthcoming, it seems – but if there’s anyone (beside myself) I’d trust to hold my data about my interests and make it available in a developer platform – it’s co-founder Chris Messina.

If it can’t be an open source community standard like the Data Portability Project from days of old, then a startup with Chris Messina in a leadership position sounds real good.

You can ask me questions via this link. Feel free to try it!

It’s a child of Silicon Valley, more than a year and a half in development, funded by YCombinator, and lead by CEO Esther Crawford (formerly of the awesome Coach.me) and Chris Messina, a serial inventor who’s led the creation of many cool things, including but not limited to, the hashtag. (I wrote the so-far definitive profile of Messina eight years ago.)

Here’s a write-up on TechCrunch, and a better one on Venturebeat – but I thought a bunch of screenshots might be the best way to give you a sense of what the app is like.

The app learns about you through social Q&A, prompted question cards, and analysis of your linked social services. Based on what it learns, it can make suggestions for answers to questions you’re asked – and someday it will be able to stand in for you when another system wants to ask a question about your tastes. Perhaps it’s building a personal version of what the enterprise industry analysts call a “digital twin.”

Here’s what the app looks like so far, click any of these images to see them full-size.  It’s quite nice.

Interested in AI? Check out this incredible new podcast: Voices of AI

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Do you want to hear leading artificial intelligence practitioners talk through long detailed descriptions of their work? I do! Especially now that I’ve begun listening to AI researcher Leora Morgenstern explain the creation of systems for machines to read and understand tables in scientific research literature. It’s awesome!

Voices of AI is a brand new podcast made by Kent Bye, longtime publisher of the in-depth podcast Voices of VR – which is currently at episode #622! Episode 622 looks intense, too. (Trigger warning: discussions of sexual violence and fighting back.)

The first episode of Voices of AI I’m listening to is fascinating and fun. Kent Bye has become one of the 3 most influential people online in the world of Virtual Reality, so he knows what he’s doing connecting with industry leaders.

Bye said by Twitter DM, “my strategy is to find the best experts, ask them questions, and don’t hold them back from getting too technical. The mind is able to fill in a lot of the gaps and discover the deeper story, and repeat listens will reveal more info as you start to uncover the structures of knowledge and figure out the open questions.”

“It’s been my strategy in covering VR, and I’ve done the same with AI. I’ve even tested this to the limits by covering abstract mathematics. And what I’ve found is that the structure of language allows to find the deeper story of complicated topics. And full interviews with the full context allows you to tune into the deeper stories that headline-driven coverage misses. Podcasts as a medium allow you the flexibility to dive deep into a topic.”

Love it.

Imagine AI that can read and understand all the knowledge held in tables published in scientific research. Eeeek! That and more amazing things to ponder in one of the inaugural episodes of this new show.

Check it out.

An Excellent Book: “How to Fix the Future”

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Author and entrepreneur Andrew Keen has just launched his latest book, titled “How to Fix the Future.”

The book argues that we’re faced with a historic threat to individual and social wellbeing in the form of big tech monopolies building addictive tech. To avoid the worst possible outcomes will require a combination of regulation, innovation, social activism, consumer choice, and education. Keen travels the world to meet people leading each of those types of work.

Here’s what I wrote about it on Amazon. “An optimistic map of a distributed future with humanity at the center? Yes please and thank you! An informative, inspiring book. Keen’s range of interviews here are remarkable. His historical references are delightful. This is a really important book. It’s also fun to read.”

It’s really a good book and if you’d like to see what people are doing all around the world to make a better future, where technology serves us instead of us serving our technology, I highly recommend it. The way it’s put in historical context is very compelling, too.

I was honored to get to interview Keen at Powell’s Books the day after launch. (A Little Bird monitoring system I’d set up to watch the top 1000 futurists online for any mention of Portland alerted me to his plans to come through town about 6 months prior.) A great crowd attended, with smart questions.

Particularly important was Amelia Abreu‘s question about the impact of black, queer, disabled, and women futurists’ work on our understanding of the present and what to do about it. To his credit, Keen had done some important interviews with really impressive women tech leaders, from investment to regulation, but there’s never enough discussion of the deep critiques and radically different cultural futures so often articulated by people at the margins of political power. And Keen is a political moderate, a reformer, he himself acknowledges, concerned about the potential for authoritarianism from both radical ends of the political spectrum. The perspectives he misses out on from anti-racist, 3rd wave feminism, the disability rights and related movements are his, and our, loss. (One view into these other perspectives is this list of 120+ influential women futurists.)

That said, what he has covered in the book is pretty incredible and very important. From Estonia the Singapore, from Stephen Wolfram to John Borthwick, the EU’s brave Margrethe Vestager to the lawyer suing new economy companies over workers’ rights, Shannon Liss-Riordan – it’s a really great book.

If you’d like to follow along with the incredible group of people he interviewed for the book, I put together a Twitter List of 40 of them I was able to find on Twitter. You can click to follow it, bookmark it, and keep an eye on this dynamic group of global innovators resisting monopoly power.

A distributed, networked-based, platform of a future, with humanity at the center. Let’s build that.

From Keen’s blog, 45 seconds from one of the most influential people in the world of Data Science, Hilary Mason: