Visual thinking is quickly growing in importance as a strategy for attacking difficult business problems. But what’s driving this need and why should you learn about it?

That’s the purpose of this new mind map, which outlines the major drivers behind the growth of visual thinking (the “why”) and codifies the benefits of adopting this type of mindset (please click on the map to view a larger image).

What do you think? What would you add to this mind map? Please share your thoughts!

This mind map was created using iMindMap 5 Ultimate for Windows.

Investing time in improving your skill with mind mapping software can have a strong payoff in improved productivity, according to a deeper analysis of my survey research.

Last year, I conducted a survey that showed that mind mapping software is the ideal productivity tool for today’s busy executives. After writing about Biggerplate.com’s new training program on the blog this morning, I got to wondering about the connection between mind mapping skill level and the benefits enjoyed from it. Intuitively, it seems there should be a direct correlation between the two. After all, the more skilled you are with a software program, you can work faster and more efficiently, and apply it to a greater number of tasks. Wouldn’t it be great if I had some real-world data to back up that assertion, I wondered? Then I suddenly realized that I may have this data, embedded in last year’s survey results.

So I opened up the survey data, and sure enough, the first question asked respondents what their skill level with mind mapping software was. Perfect! So I filtered the results of the survey by skill level, and the data below emerged. The percentages above each bar in the charts indicates the percentage of respondents in each skill level who answered in this way – in each case, this represents the most popular response.

Time savings with mind mapping software

As you can see from the chart, there is a direct correlation between your skill level and the number of hours you can save per week. The time savings doesn’t increase when you advance your skills to become an intermediate user, stuck between 1-2 hours per week. After that, however, it becomes a hockey stick-shaped curve, with time savings more than doubling when you become an advanced or experienced user, and then nearly doubling again between there and the expert level.

Productivity increase with mind mapping software

At the beginner and intermediate skill levels, productivity remains steady at a 10% increase. As you transition to become an advanced or experienced user of mind mapping software, however, users at this level said their productivity increase was 3 times that – a remarkable 30% increase in productivity. Imagine what you could do with that kind of efficiency! Surprisingly, there was no further increase in productivity between advanced and expert users.

What does this mean to you?

The sweet spot appears to be at the advanced level. Growing your skills to this level of proficiency appears to have the biggest payoff.

What this means is that if you need more hours in the day to get your work done, or if you’re looking for a way to become more productive, you ought to consider investing in my Mind Mapping Insider membership program. The tutorials, reports and resources it contains are designed to help you become a highly skilled visual mapper.

Four courses are being offered initially:

• An introduction to mind mapping
• Mind mapping for marketers
• Mind mapping for business planning
• Mind mapping for innovation

Training will be provided on any one of the four mind mapping software programs that the website currently supports: MindManager, iMindMap, XMind and MindGenius, and can be tailored to the needs of specific clients and their needs.

I was curious about what’s behind this move, so I interviewed Biggerplate.com founder Liam Hughes via e-mail:

Chuck: What made you decide to launch this service? What unfulfilled needs did you see that you aim to fill with your training programs?

Liam: We have done various pieces of mind map training over the years, but it never quite felt like the right time to invest in making this a more structured and/or widely available part of the business. After the growth and success of Biggerplate.com in 2011 however, I felt that the offline side of our business was failing to match the standards set by the online side, and I wanted to change this. We felt there was a need (and a space) for more targeted training services that focus on particular processes or job functions using mind maps, and this is what our training products aim to do. We currently have a program focused on marketers, a program focused on business planning, and a program focused on innovation, with others in the pipeline. The idea is to provide a training experience that is entirely focused on practical contextual learning.

Another consideration was the huge disparity in the price of training services that we saw elsewhere, and the belief that we could be very competitive in this area due to the strength of our online business. We set ourselves the objective of designing a range of products that could be delivered worldwide at prices that were competitive, regardless of where the training takes place. With Biggerplate being a global community of mappers, it was extremely important for us to be global in our thinking about these services, which means ensuring people who want training overseas are not financially penalized for the fact that we are based in the UK! It’s taken a little longer than planned, but we are very happy with the outcome!

Chuck: Will you be the person who delivers the training worldwide, or will you hire others to do so outside of the UK?

Liam: All training around the world will be delivered by myself and the Biggerplate team, which we are very excited about! (We don’t get out much…)

It’s important for us to ensure the style, tone, quality, and delivery of the training experience fits with what people associate with Biggerplate and expect from our brand. At this stage, this can only be achieved by keeping everything ‘in-house’, and that’s why we do not hire others to do training on our behalf. We have been fortunate enough to establish a strong name for ourselves in the mind mapping world, and I would not want to damage that by having anyone feeling short-changed by us, or having a training experience that falls below the standards we set.

It’s also important and enjoyable for us to meet mind mappers and our members in person, and this is something we have been more focused on over the last year. Our aim is to combine training assignments abroad (and in the UK) with opportunities to host small public events for our members in the local area, with a view to further strengthening the connection between Biggerplate and our users around the world, as well as the connections within the mind mapping community as a whole, which is a key part of our overall mission.

Chuck: A number of software resellers already offer mind mapping software training. How will the training from Biggerplate.com be different, better or unique?

Liam: Our aim is to be specific and focused on the practical use of mapping and mapping software within a particular context. This means if you are a marketer, for example, we’ll show you the ways in which mapping can be used in specific marketing situations and processes, rather than giving you the A-Z of everything a particular mapping program can do. Software training can sometimes be like being taught to drive by the maker of your car. By the end of it, you may know everything about the body, the engine, the lights on the dash, and the service plans available, but that information does not exactly prepare you for the reality of the open road, or even how to pull out of the parking lot!

Perhaps an advantage we have is that we don’t sell mapping software, and neither do we need to make it look great; it will do that by itself when left in the hands of someone who fully understands the contexts in which it can be put to use most effectively. Our job is to give people that understanding, and the confidence to explore mapping in ways that make sense to their everyday working lives. The mind map library and community at Biggerplate gives us truly unique perspectives on how people around the world are using maps in a variety of organizations and situations. It is this knowledge and understanding that enables us to help others do the same!

Chuck: What kind of training materials will participants receive as part of your on-site training? (such as a manual or worksheets)

Liam: We call it “The Playbook.” It’s a workbook or manual that is specific to whichever training program a person is taking with us. It is used for various exercises during the workshops, and also contains a huge amount of practical “when you want to do this, click here” type information, as well as numerous map examples and templates to provide food for thought. It has a distinct Biggerplate “tone” to it, and also contains suggestions, ideas, exercises and activities that can be carried out after the training is completed to try and reinforce learning once participants are back to the reality of daily working life. It also contains information about other sources of quality mind mapping information, such as this blog, and some of the other great sites that mapping experts around the world are running for the benefit of others.

Chuck: What is your experience in a corporate environment? How does this give you a unique perspective on the needs of business people?

Liam: In the early years of Biggerplate (2007-2009), my working life was divided between developing the Biggerplate website and working within my dad’s small consultancy firm, delivering training and consultancy services to businesses all over the world. The business is largely focused on change management, strategic planning and executive training programs. It was what you might call a baptism of fire for someone who was straight out of university and looking to build a mind map library!

The experience was invaluable in helping me understand the value of making information and problems more visible and visual. I gradually integrated mind mapping into more and more of the work we were doing, usually with great effect. From small to large businesses, a key problem that many people have is that information, learning and problems are largely buried on hard drives or in “the cloud.” Working with people to overcome these issues served to reinforce my belief that mind mapping is a powerful tool to overcome these issues, provided people could see the relevance of it to their particular department, job role or challenge.

This is something I think the mind mapping world has perhaps been slow to deal with, and in many cases we sing the virtues of mapping, almost as if the map is the end goal in itself. It is not necessarily the answer to everything, and in many cases is simply another tool to be used as part of a set in order to complete a particular process. However, my work in this area served to reaffirm that people are far more able to make sense of complexity when it is made more visually accessible, and maps are a great way to do this!

As Biggerplate has grown into a fully-fledged business, I have been fortunate enough to meet and work with a number of interesting individuals and businesses of all shapes and sizes around the world, who have helped me to further develop an understanding of where mind mapping can fit into daily life to improve performance, understanding and results. The training services we have designed keeps these ideas at their core, and when combined with the learning and experience we have from our library and community, we think the final products are unique in terms of their focus on context-specific learning and practical mind map training.

Chuck: Any thought of delivering this type of training via GoToMeeting, WebEx or other web conferencing applications?

Liam: It’s certainly on our radar, because this is obviously the way that much of the world is going. On a personal level, I prefer to be in a room with people and engaging with them in person. You can feel and respond to the energy and interests of the group in a way that just not possible online, ensuring people get what they want out of a training session. However, the realities are that you can’t be everywhere at once, and some people simply won’t be able to access our training services, no matter how affordable we try to make them, because of budgetary restrictions or other factors. We therefore need to come up with an answer, and perhaps online training webinars are the way forward.

We may go part of the way to solving this issue when we rebuild the tutorials section of our website later in the year. On the old version of Biggerplate, which as retired in March 2011, this was a highly visited but poorly constructed area of the site, and we decided not to rebuild it until we knew we could do it properly. The new tutorials area will pull together the best video tutorials on the web from software developers and mind mapping experts, to provide a learning hub that will hopefully help numerous people to get to grips with mind mapping without necessarily having to engage with paid training services. While we will be sad not to see them in person, if they can become a mind mapping expert by spending time in the new tutorials section, then we’ll consider that a win, too!

The Noun Project is a large collection of over 800 open-source icons that you can use with your mind mapping program – with a little bit of modification.

“The Noun Collection consists of the symbols we feel best communicate the objects or concepts they are representing, while at the same time exhibit a high level of design skill and execution,” says an explanation of what the mission of The Noun Collection is. In the open-source spirit, this large library of vector art contains icons created by contributors from around the world, and the site has been translated into 25 languages. This library enables you to view graphics by topical categories, featured collections and keyword search. Because it’s open source, The Noun Collection is constantly growing, as designers and illustrators from around the world contribute their best icons and symbols.

Designed for use by illustrators, these high-quality images are in a scalable vector graphic (SVG) form – perfect for incorporating into an illustration. As their name implies, SVG files can be made larger, without any loss in quality. The problem for mind mappers is that most visual mapping software can’t import this type of graphic file. So you will need to use a graphics program (my preference is Adobe Fireworks – but it can’t open SVG files, unfortunately) to convert it to a format that your program can handle, such as JPG, GIF or PNG. From there, you should be able to import them into your mind mapping program. Click here for a post in which I summarized which programs enable you to add to their icon and symbol collections, and which do not.

If you don’t have a commercial graphics editing program that can handle SVG graphics, you may want to consider a free or low-cost SVG editor such as Inkscape or the browser-based SVG-edit.

If you’re handy with graphics editing software, you may want to consider adding some of these icons to your favorite mind mapping program.

There’s no such thing as information overload. That’s the audacious claim of the author of the Innovation Leadership Network Blog, Tim Kastelle.

Kastelle contends that there has always been too much information. It’s just that in the past, we developed methods of managing it, filtering it and working with it that were reasonably effective. What’s changed is that the volume and velocity of information we must deal with today have grown so much that our traditional methods of dealing with it don’t work any more.

That may be true up to a point. But I think we are truly facing an information glut today. The number of “channels” we need to pay attention to has expanded almost exponentially, including Twitter, Google+, Linkedin, Facebook, information streams on our mobile devices and more. But our ability to handle all of it as human beings hasn’t changed very much. We must be extremely selective about what we pay attention to, so we can find what we need and then be able to separate the wheat from the chaff, signal from noise, useless information from the nuggets that we need to do our jobs.

We need better filters

The bottom line is this: We need better filters to manage information today.Not surprisingly, I view mind mapping software as one potential solution. Here’s why:

Think about the process you follow when you’re conducting online research. Chances are, it looks something like the flow chart above. Mind mapping software is a powerful information capture tool. It then provides us with the ability to review what we’ve gathered, identify patterns and meta-categories within it, organize it into logical chunks and discard what isn’t really useful, add our interpretation to it and then share it with our key stakeholders.

What readers of this blog have to say

Data from my 2011 survey reinforces the idea that mind mapping software is a key tool for handling information overload. 52% of survey respondents reported that it’s a “significant” challenge for them. But 36%also said that their mind mapping software has helped them to a “significant extent” to manage this challenge. Another 20% called it “invaluable.”

So how about you? What tools are you using to manage information effectively?

Generation Y – young people currently in their late teens to early twenties – are the future of business. Based upon a story I recently read about how they engage with mind maps, it looks like a bright future, indeed.

Recently, my colleague Jeffrey Ritter shared a fascinating story on his blog: The son of one of his friends was visiting for dinner, and he was encouraged by the friend to show the young man RitterMaps – Jeffrey’s version of mind maps, adapted to the legal profession. To Jeffrey’s surprise, his young protégé grabbed the mouse and proceeded to explore the mind map on his own.

“My guest was asking questions, opening and closing topics, experimenting with restructuring and re-organizing the content, engaging and interacting with the RitterMaps naturally and without any training, instruction, or guidance on how to do things,” Jeffrey recalls.

Upon reflection, Jeffrey attributed this to the fact his guest is from Generation Y – he’s a millennial who is extremely comfortable with exploring and manipulating digital information. Interacting with it is second nature. It comes to them naturally, much like walking and breathing, because it has been a constant presence throughout their lives, not something that entered their lives at a later stage and to which they’ve had to adapt. As a member of the Baby Boomer generation, my contemporaries are either learning to embrace the near-constant advances in digital technology, or have shunned it, refusing to deal with its complexities.

“The current and future generations are simply being wired differently to interact with, explore, acquire and apply information,” Jeffrey explains in his blog post. “The inherent presence of the digital screen, and the near-infinite accessibility of information that can be transformed into knowledge, empowers individuals to point, click, explore, defy structure, and fearlessly persist in shaping the information into the knowledge structures they require to learn, work, and even play.”

Mind maps seem to be a perfect fit for this brave young generation, who aren’t intimidated by non-linear information structures and “playing” with them to see what happens. In fact, the act of drilling down into a mind map structure and then pulling back to a higher level view is quite similar to exploring linked web pages. We click on a succession of web pages, drilling down from Google search results into different web sites, then back up several steps and explore another “digital trail.”

Jeffrey concludea that mind mapping’s ease of use makes it very attractive to millennials like his friend’s son, who can explore information and use it to play “What if?” on their own – which makes it a powerful learning tool: “We are building tools that enable those ‘born digital’ to explore faster, to learn better and ultimately communicate with one another in a visual space that requires no training to navigate,” he explains.

But it may have an even deeper and more profound benefit. Mind maps “accelerate the capability of the learner to transform and share the information they have learned with others. A… mind map, allows the learner to immediately take the instrument from which they have acquired the knowledge, and present that same content to someone else – other team members (and) supervisors… It turns out this is one of the most important ‘knowledge strategies’ – to design and implement the means to share knowledge above the din of endless digital information.”

“If they can touch, edit, modify and adapt the content, each user becomes an owner of both the information and the knowledge they are experiencing. This control enables the user to construct their own architecture and, in the final analysis, use the knowledge to their best advantage,” he adds.

In other words, by interacting with the information at a deep level, we learn about it and can also interpret and mold it to our needs. That’s powerful, and it’s the essence of what mind mapping software enables. Sure, you can review, edit and track changes in a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet. But these tools don’t make it easy to alter the underlying structure of the information – the digital “skeleton,” if you will.

That’s even more powerful than it appears to be at first glance. When we interact with information and manipulate it, we come at it with our own unique perspective. That enables us to see connections, ideas and solutions that others on our team may have missed.

Creative solutions are needed in nearly every business and industry to help drive future growth. And mind mapping software can be the tool, in the hands of young, fearless Digital Natives like Jeffrey’s young friend, who will lead the way.

Many diagramming software programs today are like Swiss Army Knives – they can create almost any kind of diagram you could imagine, including mind maps. But mind mapping isn’t usually their strong suit. If you try to use Visio, SmartDraw or other similar programs to create mind maps, here are the shortcomings you will run into:

1. The map creation process is time-consuming: The process of dragging and dropping a shape to the workspace, typing text into it and then adding a connector line is too slow to capture the “flow” of ideas when you’re brainstorming alone – and completely inadequate for a group brainstorming session, where the ideas may come fast and furious. Contrast that to the typical mind mapping program, which enables you to use keyboard hot keys to quickly add topics. A number of the programs actually have brainstorming modes, which are designed to enable you to quickly add a succession of ideas to your map, helping you and your colleagues to keep the creative “flow” going.

2. No ability to attach documents, links and notes to individual topics: This is where a lot of the value of mind maps in business resides. If you’re working on a project or conducting research, you can attach many different types of resources to your mind maps – in effect, creating a flexible visual database of all of the resources you’ve collected. Diagramming software enables you to create a set of shapes and connect them to each other in different ways. That’s all.

3. Limited ability to expand and collapse branches: One of the unsung capabilities of mind mapping software is the ability to expand and collapse branches, either on an individual basis, or by level. This enables you to see a high-level overview of your topic (with the lower-level branches closed) AND drill down to the details (with all of the branches opened) within the same visual document. Diagramming software only does this on a rudimentary, topic-by-topic basis.

4. Limited ability to export your map’s contents to other formats: Most mind mapping software enables you to export all or part of your maps to other types of productivity software, such as Word, PowerPoint and Project. This enables you to utilize it as a “front end” tool, where you gather and organize your information in skeletal form and then export it to one of these other applications to put flesh on the bones. Diagramming software can’t do this. At most, you can export your diagram in a view-only, image-based format, such as a JPG, GIF or a PDF. I just tried this in SmartDraw, for example. Exporting a simple mind map to Word opens a new document and simply copies the map into it as an image. You can’t really output your diagrams in a format where you can still manipulate its elements.

5. No ability to import data: A number of the high-end mind mapping programs enable you to pull data from other applications into your mind maps, such as Excel spreadsheet ranges, e-mail messages from Outlook, RSS feeds and the results of SharePoint searches. Diagramming software is self contained. This limits the number and type of business applications for which you can utilize it. If you want to create an art element that will be placed within a report, that’s fine. But if you want something you can interact with, a diagramming program won’t help you.

6. No project or task management capabilities with a mind map: Most mind mapping software enables you to treat selected topics as tasks, adding start and end dates, status (percentage complete), priority and any resources assigned to it. Some of these programs enable you to convert your project map into a Gantt chart, where you can see a visual timeline of your project and any dependencies.

7. Not easy to embellish topics: Mind mapping software enables you to embellish topics with images, symbols and icons – which add visual interest to our mind maps, but more importantly, help us to visually classify the information contained in our mind maps. Mind mapping software ships with hundreds of symbols and icons, which you can use to designate urgent items, priority levels (A,B,C or 1,2,3), flag items as needing additional research or attenion, and more. Diagramming software doesn’t usually contain such symbol libraries.

So there you have it. Clearly, diagramming software leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to mind mapping. If you think you’re going to need to do both mind mapping and other types of diagrams, then I would consider investing in both types of software. I personally use SmartDraw 2012, and highly recommend it for producing many types of business diagrams.

Mind mapping software is often dismissed by linear thinkers as being somewhat frivolous and not worthy of their attention. But by ignoring it, they’re missing out on one of the most powerful productivity tools of the modern age. This infographic explains why (please click on the image to view the full-sized image).

The creation of this chart has a twisted but interesting history:

A few days ago, I had the privilege of listening to an excellent TED talk by visual thinking expert Nancy Duarte, in which she talked about how to craft persuasive, engaging stories that will have an impact when you present them to the people and groups you need to influence. Her breakthrough in understanding what makes an effective story is when she realized that the world’s best speeches followed a common pattern: They oscillated between describing the present conditions to which the audience can relate – the problem state, if you will – and a compelling future state in which the problem has been solved – a utopia where everything is ideal. In the process, these speakers literally compel their audiences to want to achieve that ideal future. An example of what this looks like appears below:

This visual model is marvelously simple!

The examples Duarte shared were Steve Jobs’ launch of the Apple iPhone in 2007 and Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream” speech. In the case of the iPhone launch, the inimitable showman compared the state of affairs of cell phones at the time with a utopian picture of what these devices could be – a telephone, music player and much more. In the case of Dr. King, he compared the challenges that African Americans were facing at the time of his speech and a future vision of equality for all men, regardless of creed or color. Who would have guessed that these two famous speeches had so much in common?

Connection with mind mapping software

I was blown away by Duarte’s keen, simple insight, and got to thinking about how I could apply it to this blog and the field of visual mapping. What if I painted a picture of the present challenges that executives face without a visual thinking tool like mind mapping software, and then compared it to what an ideal future with it could look like? I further realized that I had a wealth of excellent data from last year’s survey that I had communicated with you back then, but perhaps I needed to do a better job of “unpacking” it to help you understand what it means, and why you should care. That would lend credibility to these ideal future benefits.

So I combined these two sets of elements – the present/future comparison and the survey data – into a single infographic that I think does an excellent job of telling the story of why executives who aren’t utilizing mind mapping software should be.

If you want to share this infographic with others (and I encourage you to do so), you can download it as a PDF file here.

Mind mapping software is often dismissed by linear thinkers as being somewhat frivolous and not worthy of their attention. But by ignoring it, they’re missing out on one of the most powerful productivity tools of the modern age. This infographic explains why (please click on the image to view the full-sized image).

10 Ways to Make It Great is an inspirational book written by a good friend of mine, Phil Gerbyshak. It offers a set of simple, no-nonsense tips on how to live an exceptional life. This marvelous little book is like having 10 mini-workshops at your disposal, helping you to move toward a more positive and purposeful life.

Phil is an energetic, passionate person who deeply cares about others – and I mean this in the very best sense, not in an annoying, in your face kind of way. Phil is the real deal. This comes through in his writing style, which is thoughtful and encouraging. No new-age, self-improvement mumbo-jumbo. Just practical, real-world advice that you can use to become a better, more positive person who contributes in all of the roles of your life at a higher level. He’s the same way in real life, inspiring me to take all of my online efforts to the next level of contribution and effectiveness.

As a life-long learner and big believer in constant and incremental improvement of my own life, I thought Phil’s book would be the perfect topic for a mind map (click on the image above to view a larger version).

The Kindle version of this book only costs US$2.99 on Amazon. Why not load up your smartphone with 10 Ways to Make It Great so you can carry this inspiring tome with you, wherever you are?

Mind map created using NovaMind 5 for Windows

If you cultivate your social media relationships with care, you can develop a personal learning network that will put you in contact with a steady stream of valuable ideas. So says Howard Rheingold, a critic, writer, and teacher who specializes in researching and sharing his findings on the cultural, social and political implications of modern communication.

Rheingold has spent a lot of time thinking about the ways in which people network and share ideas online. He even offers an online course called the Social Media Classroom on the most productive ways to use these online tools. In a recent Twitter conversation, he laid out 8 key thoughts on how to build your own personal learning network from your social media channels. Here they are, along with my thoughts on each:

1. Explore: It’s not just about knowing how to find experts, co-learners, but about exploration as invitation to serendipitous encounter.

Whether you’re viewing the latest posts to the social media channels in which you participate or conducting a Google search, be open to encountering ideas and new knowledge that you didn’t expect to find. This happens all the time for me; the bits and pieces of information I discover online take my thinking in exciting new directions, and force me to ask, “How can I use this?” and “What does this mean to me?” It never fails to challenge my thinking. Rheingold’s advice is well taken here. You need to be open: To new people, opportunities, possibilities, to knowledge.

2. Search – Use Diigo, delicious, listorious, to find pools of expertise in the fields that interest you.

The tools that Rheingold describes in this tweet enable you to capture what you’ve found for your own personal reference (Diigo, a browser plug-in that enables you to capture web pages and portions of them), for sharing with others (delicious, a social sharing tool) and for finding relevant Twitter lists and subject matter experts in your areas of inquiry (listorious). Your goal is to identify people and potential sources you can add to your personal knowledge network.

3. Follow candidates through RSS, Twitter. Ask yourself over days, weeks, whether each candidate merits continued attention

Once you’ve identified people who are posting information that appears to be relevant to your areas of intererst, follow them. Add them to your network. This is the only way you can vett them, to determine if they are worthy members of your network. Analyze the quality of their social media posts. What is their point of view? Is the information they’re posting accurate? Are they focused or scattershot? What is the “signal to noise ratio” of their feed? In other words, out of everything they post, how much useful information?

4. Always keep tuning your network, dropping people who don’t gain sufficiently high interest; adding new candidates

That’s the beautiful thing about many of the social networks: You can not only see what your new-found online friends are posting, but you often get exposed to the ideas of their friends as well. Look for interesting people you can add to your personal network. At the same time, cull those who seem to be posting too much “noise” and not enough “signal.” It’s like an old analog radio, with a tuning dial. When you tuned in a radio station, you had to slowly move the tuner knob until the radio station was strongest and the static was the least. The same goes for “tuning” your personal knowledge network.

I follow about 900 people on Twitter. But I’ve developed a list I call “rockstars” who consistently provide the best ideas and resources in their feeds. That’s the tweetstream I visit first, because that’s where I’ll find the best stuff in the least amount of time. Next, I view the topical searches I have set up, looking for gold among the dross. Then finally, if time permits, I’ll view my entire Twitter feed. That’s how I get the most out of my time on Twitter.

If you treat social media strictly as a numbers game, following thousands or tens of thousands of random people in hopes they’ll follow you back, then you’ll end up with an incoming feed that is so filled with useless “noise” that you won’t stand a chance of finding the needle in the haystack, the great idea you can use to help fuel your next project or to solve a vexing problem you face. Sure, you can brag about having a gargantuan follower count, but how valuable is it, really?

5. Feed the people you follow if you come across information that you suspect would interest them.

This step is critical to relationship building within your social media channels. As you begin to understand what motivates some of the key people you follow, you will naturally encounter nuggets of information that may be of value to them. Make the first move. Share it with them. That increases the odds that they’ll share good stuff with you. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. It’s just like in real life: If you’re open and generous, you’ll tend to build more and better relationships than if you’re stingy and selfish. So be proactive – share FIRST. Don’t wait for someone you’re connected with to share something with you.

6. Engage the people you follow. Be polite, mindful of making demands on their attention. Put work into dialogue if they welcome it. Thank them for sharing.

Tools like Twitter and Google+ aren’t just a powerful “radar” for discovering great ideas and
sharing cool resources with others. They’re also a platform for dialogue and discussion, going beyond information exchanges into deeper levels of communication – sharing insights and experiences. Rheingold reminds us to be kind and show gratitude; please and thank you count even more in cyperspace, where we can’t see our colleauges face-to-face.

7. Inquire of the people you follow, of the people who follow you. But be careful. Ask engaging questions – answers shd be useful to others

Rheingold emphasizes once again that there should be a productive give and take. Give value, receive value. If all you do it take information from others, or give them cursory bits of attention and throw-away answers, people won’t want to engage with you. If we don’t feel valued in a relationship, online or offline, we’ll take our time, attention and ideas and focus them elsewhere. It’s human nature. Being mindful of being useful to others helps to ensure that we build mutually productive and gratifying relationships in our social channels.

8. Respond to inquiries made to you. Contribute to both diffuse reciprocity and quid pro quo

Pay it forward. Be the kind of person that you’d like others to be. Set a good example and influence others, so they’re more likely to do the same for you. The same rules that we’ve all heard about writing effective e-mails applies just as much if not more in social channels:

• Beware of unintentionally sounding curt or sarcastic.
• Watch your tone and tenor.
• Remember, these electronic communication channels are missing the non-verbal elements of communication. The other person can’t see your eyes or expression, and so they can’t make judgments about how you’re reacting to what they’re saying. So they interpret your words, and that can lead to trouble if you’re not careful.

By reminding us to respond to inquiries, Rheingold is also encouraging us not to ignore others. We hate to be ignored. So don’t do it to others. Ignorance doesn’t build relationships; it destroys them. People won’t share their ideas and insights with you if they think you’re an asshole.

Howard Rheingold is a fascinating guy. He’s been exploring and writing about online communication since the early days of The Well, an online community that predates the web. He done some things in his life that in have given him an incredible worldview on modern communications, and he is quite generous in his engagements with others. He practices what he preaches. I’ve been impressed with him, and I think you will be, too! I’m seriously thinking about investing in his online research course. Here’s how you can engage with him online:

• Website
• Twitter
• Google+

Enjoy!