In many ways, the Globe isn’t really all that different from any other company. We have a product — namely, our content — and we have customers, except that we call them readers. Of course, unlike many companies, we also play a kind of public-service role, but that’s a service to readers and to the community as a whole as well. And just like other companies, we are trying to find our place in this new, more connected world, where our customers are not just looking to interact and engage with us, but are also interacting with each other, carrying on conversations that we theoretically helped to start. How can we become a part of those conversations? I think the Cluetrain message is a simple one: by being human, and by speaking the way that human beings do.

This isn’t as easy as it sounds. In fact, many companies suck at talking like human beings, quite frankly. Many corporations — including many newspapers and media entities — are structured in such a way as to make it incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for someone to respond to something in an authentic and human way. And that, of course, just makes it even more important that we try to do so. It’s not just the corporate bureaucracy in many companies either; it’s the cultural walls and hurdles as well. Newspapers, for example, have built up a reputation (in their own minds, at least) for infallibility. How does an organization like that respond to criticism? In many cases, not well. But newspapers, like so many other things, are composed of human beings, and human beings are fallible. Why not admit it? Provided you correct the error and try not to do it again, where’s the harm?

It’s not a popular viewpoint in many circles, but I think that admitting we are fallible can actually increase the trust that people have in what we do. Pretending to be infallible is a lose-lose proposition. Not only will you inevitably be proven wrong, but the fact that you are trying to convince people of your infallibility makes you untrustworthy as well — or at the very least, disingenuous. To me, the significance of what the Cluetrain Manifesto said is that human beings like to talk to other human beings, not to faceless and impenetrable institutions or brands, and the more you talk with them in that manner the better it gets both for you and for your business. That’s a lesson we continue to learn every day.

Someone suggested that all the revenue from tickets ($10) could go to the Daily Bread Food Bank, then another person said they knew someone at a local venue called The Mod Club (which has donated the space), another offered to put together a website, someone offered to DJ, and sponsors started crawling out of the woodwork. By the end of the week, almost $10,000 had been raised for Daily Bread, powered almost entirely by Twitter — a sign that the “flash crowd” phenomenon (which I’ve written about before) can be used for positive things as well as for negative things. There are now over 60 pages of Twitter messages about #hohoto.

In a similar vein, my friend Rachel Sklar — who until recently was the editor of Eat The Press section of The Huffington Post — has created a charitable site called Charitini.com. Using the occasion of her 36th birthday as an opportunity, Rachel decided to let people buy her drinks — but instead of buying them, donate an equivalent amount to a charity of their choice. One of the inspirations for this approach was a Toronto-based startup called EchoAge.com, which allows families throwing birthday parties to accept charitable donations (half the money raised goes toward a single present, and the other half goes to charity).

How do social networks like Twitter allow communities to form? Give people a cause they think is worthy, and then get out of the way :-)

Update:

Tamera Kramer of Wildfire Strategic Marketing has a great post along the same lines about #hohoto, and lessons for companies looking at social media strategies.

Eric Eldon has a good overview of the differences at VentureBeat, and there is also plenty of coverage at places like Read/Write Web, as well as All Facebook and the always excellent Gina Trapani at Lifehacker. Looking at both of them got me wondering about whether sites like the New York Times will integrate either Friend Connect or Facebook Connect and make them work with the paper’s TimesPeople network, or whether it will work with other distributed social tools like Glue from adaptiveblue.com, which I’ve been testing recently. It’s nice to see ways of connecting to networks without having to actually go to the respective websites all the time.

(Note: My Google Friend Connect box looks somewhat pathetic at the moment — so click on the “join” button and add yourself to my network)

“You’ve got to find what’s interesting in everything, you’ve got to be good at noticing things, you’ve got to be good at listening. If you find people (and things) interesting, they’ll find you interesting.”

The second point is related to the first: Be ready to share. Someone who doesn’t want to share their passion or knowledge with others is inherently uninteresting — except perhaps as some kind of icon or idol who is worshipped from afar. In order to be interesting on a genuinely personal level, you have to be willing to share some of your knowledge and interests with others. But as Russell notes, this doesn’t mean talking about yourself endlessly:

“Being good at sharing is not the same as talking and talking and talking. It means you share your ideas, you let people play with them and you’re good at talking about them without having to talk about yourself.”

That’s it, really. Two steps. Lather, rinse and repeat. Russell has some handy tips on how to help stay interested in people and things — blogging regularly, keeping a journal, getting a hobby, and so on. But it really comes down to variations on those two steps.

In doing so, however, La Gesse also removed all of the comments that had been posted — including some from Scoble (La Gesse says he didn’t know that would happen). The uber-blogger didn’t like that much: “@kr8tr you just deleted all MY comments. That was really nasty dude,” the Scobleizer said on Twitter. A heated discussion ensued both on Twitter, as well as on La Gesse’s blog and on FriendFeed. That in itself makes a statement about the fragmentation of comments that many people (including me) have written about in the past.

The big issue for Scoble, however, seemed to be that he felt he owned his comments — even if they appeared on a third-party service attached to a blog post from someone else. Does that make any sense? I’m not sure. It doesn’t feel right to me. I think if you comment on someone’s blog, or on a newspaper site like ours at the Globe and Mail, or on Slashdot or Craigslist or anywhere else for that matter, your comments effectively become public property. Not that the site owns them, but they are to some extent out of your control (although Disqus lets you edit them until someone else responds to them).

Robert says that he’s not mad any more, but the issue he has raised is an interesting one, I think. Who owns your comments on public sites like FriendFeed? Do you? Or are they public property?

Update:

I sent an email to FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit to see if he had any comment, and he said that this is the first time the subject has really come up. “In general, we want people to have control over their own feeds,” he said. “That said, it is unfortunate to have lost comments in cases such as this, rare as they may be. We’d like to make these comments available — it’s just a matter of finding the right ui.” Buchheit said that the comments haven’t been deleted, they just aren’t visible because they are no longer attached to anything, but that FriendFeed was working on a way to make them visible again.