Home Base and Outposts

What’s important, and where are your spending time?

I’ve written in the past about the dangers of outposts in terms of wasting effort and creating endless repetitive noise. I recently watched this nice little video from Darren Rowse over at Problogger and I want to highlight a very key observation “people sometimes give up on their Home Base and spend all of their time on outposts”. Don’t let that apply to you!

Are you feeling guilty? Well first, let’s watch the video…

Ok, so you should now understand:

Home Base = blog, web site, central presence – i.e. whatever is centrally important to you. It might well be a Social Networking site, but in my case it is the Technology Mashup blog.

Outpost = satellite presence, somewhere you hang out perhaps merely for fun or networking, but perhaps also with a wish to generate traffic back to your Home Base. Are you appraising effort v’s reward on this basis?

Now Darren explained his strategy with a ’satellite’ style diagram, but I’m all Mind Maps at the minute, so here’s a little sketch of my world (somewhat simplified). As I mentioned, Home Base is in the centre, my Core Outposts branch off towards the top of the map. This doesn’t really make transparent the amount of time I spend on each outpost, and I may attempt another map labelled with time spent per week on each site (that would no doubt scare me!).

LinkedIn is important to me, but I spend almost no time there. I spend ‘way too much’ time on Facebook and Twitter, in fact I recognise a danger that Facebook is becoming a surrogate Home Base.

Outposting Mind Map (click thumbnail to see full-size version)

I also label a Core Participation branch, as Darren mentions in his video this is where you meet, greet, share and comment on the established Home Bases of others. This is important, as blogs, sites, forums etc. are really just Social Networks ‘in disguise’.

My final branch I describe as Helpful. I spend much less time on these, but they are still part of my regular Social Media experience. To others in my many intertwined networks these ‘less important’ presences might be their ‘most important’, and hence the complexity of understanding and leveraging such is ’significant and multi-dimensional’.

So why is this interesting?

1. Understanding what is central to your goals is key to success

2. Understanding your outposting activity (it may not even be strategic) will expose any time wasting or developing tendency to abandon your Home Base in favour of satellite outposts

3. Thinking about your Core Participation is important as this will bring targeted traffic to your Home Base and help you share and discuss ideas with closely aligned people

4. Maps (such as above) for each person will vary wildly. My Home Base is a blog, someone else’s might be a Facebook Group or a Flickr Group, or any manner of other presence. Connecting is about understanding the goals and motivations of others, but this is not readily apparent across such a disparate sprawl of Social presence

5. In terms of the ‘Social Graph’ I can annotate links from my Home Base to my outposts with the “Me” attribute. This means I am defining that the outpost is one of my other presences. This is useful, but it doesn’t capture anything about the relative importance of each outpost to my ‘Social Web presence’. Presences on my Helpful branch cannot therefore be easily distinguished from presences on my Core Outposts (unless of course you see my Mind Map!).

So what does that mean?

1. Understand and sketch out your approach. There is wisdom in the adage, “there’s no point trying to grow the same crop in a bigger field.” In other words, endless outposts add more work and you expend energy for little benefit. Recognise the time you have available and tune your approach to fit. If you cant resist joining every Web 2.0 site, at least recognise your ‘core set’. Until we get true identity federation you really cant be ‘everywhere at once’. This will be Omnipresence 2.0, and I’m working on a theory

2. It is really difficult to see what outposts are important to others without expending some research effort. The easy answer is their Home Base is important and you should ’share some love there’. Remember, blogs, forums, sites etc. are really Social Networks (or have many such qualities)

3. We need to meet in the hub! Remember those Core Participation sites. They (for now at least) give us all a central lobby in which to rub shoulders. Chasing each other around outposts (of varying importance to each of us) is inefficient and liable to fail. Always come back to the Home Base and the hubs!

4. Take care on ‘fad outposts’. People ask me for opinions on ‘what next after Twitter’. Well I say “something for sure!”. Star gazing aside, before coming back into retro-chic, the skateboard languished in ‘un-coolness’ for the best part of a decade. If you get tempted into an outpost that ‘goes pop’ there may be tears before bedtime. Also remember, on an outpost you might be one click from a ‘violation of terms and conditions’ that could seriously ‘precipitate on your picnic’. If you’re ’spit balling’ for the sake of it on the microblogs this might seem irrelevant, but if you’re a serious blogger or site admin this might be a serious knock. If you understand what’s important and spread your time accordingly then all should be well (or at the very least, resilient).

Was that an idea?

I’m sure there’s an idea here to build an automatic visualisation of outpost importance for individuals. It would work by exploring “Me” links (as I mentioned above in point 5), and then deducing through number of friends, updates, comments, posts etc. the amount of time and ‘conversation’ they were having. Given all the aggregation that’s going on this would be a neat little addition to Social Graph visualisation. Hint, hint Google!

Let me close again by recapping on Darren’s words and take care not to “abandon your Home Base” to what may in effect be a transient outpost.

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