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!

Twitter intergration has finally come to the world of mind mapping software, thanks to CS Odessa’s new MindTweet plug-in for ConceptDraw MINDMAP 7. This new tool enables you to brainstorm, organize and send Twitter messages from within the program.

MindTweet is available from the ConceptDraw Solution Park; it’s a free download. The app installs a new Twitter icon in the program’s main toolbar. Before you can use MindTweet, you must login to your Twitter account and authorize the app to communicate with it. Once that’s done, all you have to do is select a topic in your mind map, click on the Twitter icon and a dialog box pops up, containing the text of your tweet. It also displays the number of characters left out of the 140 maximum that Twitter allows. You can then edit your tweet as needed and send it. Before doing so, if you check the “done” box in the corner of the dialog box, MindTweet will automatically add a checkbox icon to that topic – giving you a visual indication that this tweet has been sent.

This app is the ultimate in simplicity. But how is it useful?

If your job involves managing social media for your organization, it’s a godsend. MindTweet enables you to brainstorm ideas, themes, keywords and entire tweets using ConceptDraw MINDMAP’s brainstorming mode. I can see how this could be very useful in small group brainstorming sessions. You can also use the program’s presentation mode to share your proposed tweet campaign with your boss or coworker, and annotate the map with their suggestions. You can categorize and organize topic tweets, noting priorities and adding notes for future reference. Icons can be used to denote tweets that are ready to send out, priority or order of tweets to be sent, and those that need additional work.

In other words, you can design an entire Twitter campaign and then send your tweets out – without leaving the mind mapping program.The radial format of a mind map makes it very easy to see the visual sequence of tweets you intend to send out. This approach is ideal for brand-building campaigns, where you want to be able to tell and build upon a consistent story over a series of tweets.

I’ve been using Twitter for several years now. To the best of my knowledge, there isn’t any program or online service that gives you the end-to-end power and flexibility that the ConceptDraw MINDMAP/MindTweet combo does. There are certainly many tools that enable you to write and schedule tweets, but nothing that gives you a palette upon which to brainstorm and organize an entire campaign like this.

A few shortcomings

There are three main features that I wish MindTweet offered, but I have to remember that this is a version 1.0 product:

First, MindTweet should have a link shortening tool built into it. If you have a long URL, you must use a link shortening service like bit.ly to generate a shortened URL, and then paste it into your tweet. This isn’t currently handled within MindTweet, but should be, in my opinion.

Second, it would be great if you could schedule tweets from within MindTweet, by turning topics into tasks and assigning a start date and time to them. But then you’d have to keep ConceptDraw MINDMAP open all the time, or would need to have tweets stored in an online repository. Perhaps future integration between MindTweet and HootSuite?

Finally, it would be very cool if MindTweet added a Twitter logo icon to the program’s symbol library. Why? So you could use it to differentiate between those topics that are tweets and others that are simply background information or raw ideas.

Conclusion

All things considered, MindTweet is a great effort by CS Odessa. It’s wonderful to see a developer who isn’t afraid to take the lead and develop an app that brings such valuable social media integration to the table. I can’t wait to see how MindTweet evolves – it should be quite interesting!

In a relatively short time, social media has quickly evolved into a major new channel for communicating with prospects, customers and potential industry partners. Like any other part of our business, we can’t just jump into it and hope for the best. We need to have a strategy or plan for approaching it. Fortunately, some very smart people have compiled a collection of best practices for planning and implementing a social media strategy, which I have summarized in a new Mind Mapping Insider report.

In this new report, I’ll walk you through each section of the map and explain the issues you need to think about and the questions you need to ask yourself as you formulate your own social media strategy – either for yourself or your organization. It will also lay out a common-sense process you can follow to build effective relationships in the social media space. Finally, you can download this mind map to use as a starting point for developing your own social media strategy.

If you don’t see a link above this paragraph, that’s because this report is only accessible to Mind Mapping Insider members. Why not make a commitment to make a bigger impact in your life and work? The resources in this program will help you to become a better planner, problem solver and project manager. You’ll triumph over information overload, and discover a clarity that will help you to make better decisions, faster. Sign up today to join the growing group of MMI members who have made selected the option to be more influential and creative in their lives. New introductory pricing is more affordable than ever: Only $1 for the first 14 days!

As you probably already know, one of Twitter’s shortcomings is that it is something like dipping your toes into a fast-moving river of tips, insights, status updates and much more. It’s ike trying to drink from a firehose, as the saying goes. A tweet you read an hour ago has scrolled out of view, and may not be all that easy to save, depending upon which application you’re using to view your “tweetstream.”

This simple mind map elegantly solves that problem.

In my latest report in the Effective Mind Maps series, we’ll take a closer look at what’s notable about this mind map, as well as some ways to improve it. I also analyze how well six major mind mapping programs support dragging and dropping the text of tweets and their URLs to this type of mind map. The results will surprise you!

In these reports, I deconstruct mind maps and analyze what’s good about them and what could be improved – all in the interest of helping you to understand the principles of effective mind map design.

To access this report, you must first login to the Mind Mapping Insider area. If you don’t have one, please click here to learn how to get one.

Here’s a simple but powerful way to use mind mapping software to help you build more effective Twitter relationships.

Social media, as best-selling author and speaker Chris Brogan is fond of telling us, is all about building relationships – about bringing a human element to business. If we can connect as people and build trust, then we can more easily understand others’ needs and serve them better.

Twitter is a great place to build a network of people who share common interests, to help each other find answers to pressing questions, commiserate or simply chat about life. So when I read Susan Percy’s entry in my “amazing mind mapping stories” initiative, I was blown away by her simple but profound application of mind mapping software:

Susan has used MindManager to create a mind map of the people she wants to keep track of on Twitter, along with details about what their interests are and what’s going on in their lives – ideal fodder for chatting with them. Here’s how it works, in her words:

“I write the name of the person on a branch and hyperlink that branch to the person’s Twitter page. I create main branches to organize the users by groups, for example: clients, prospects, friends. I create sub-branches from each user to add information about them, such as “likes sushi.” This helps me to easily organize who I want to stay in touch with and also information about subjects which to chat.”

Above is my attempt to re-create this concept with some of the key people I follow on Twitter (please click on the image to view an expanded version of this map with clickable links to each person and Twitter account).

At right is a close-up of one branch, where I have added details about several of them. These sub-branches are the key to this map’s value, because they help us to build more valuable relationships and greater trust. If you can refer to this “mini-dossier” when you’re chatting with someone on Twitter, doesn’t it make sense that your actions will create a higher level of trust? You cared enough to remember something about that person, and they will undoubtedly appreciate you for that.

Thanks for sharing this brilliant idea, Susan!

Accordingly, I have just produced another helpful mind map that gathers over 80 of the best mind mapping resources into a single visual map that you can use as a jumping-off point for exploration. To the best of my knowledge, this is the largest collection of links gathered in a visual form anywhere on the web. To access this mind mapping resource map, please click here or on the image to the right. I hope you find it useful!

This mind mapping resources map includes the following categories:

• Mind mapping blogs
• Key mind mappers on Twitter
• Twitter feeds you should follow to keep up with this innovative software niche
• Notable books on mind mapping
• Mind mapping resource pages
• Mind map galleries
• Discussion forums
• Mind mapping experts

To explore these valuable resources, simply click on the name of the website in the map; to return to the map, simply use your browser’s “back button.”

In addition, this clickable mind map contains links to the other two resource maps I previously produced:

• A clickable mind map of all software vendors, for all computing platforms
• A map of mind mapping applications

Combined, there are links to over 160 mind mapping resources here. If I’m missing anything, please let me know in the comments area below and I’ll add it to a future edition of this map!

UPDATE: You can now download this popular resource in MindManager’s .MMAP file format. Just right click on this link and select “save as…”

The discussion was fast and furious, with many threads of discussion going on simultaneously (there was an agenda, but participants had many questions about mind mapping). Imagine being in a room where 30 people were all talking at the same time, and trying to keep up with all of those conversations and answer as many questions as possible. Whew!

The 2 hours went very quickly, and there was a lot of excellent discussion. The people who participated in this Social Media Chat weren’t all current users of mind mapping – but everyone seemed to grasp its awesome potential as a business tool. A number of participants preferred hand-drawn maps to those produced using mind mapping software, and they brought a slightly different perspective to the group.

If you would like to view the raw transcript of the “tweets” from this session, please click here. Also, here is a list of links to the wealth of websites and resources that were mentioned in the course of the chat (you’ll have to scroll down to the last post in the discussion thread to see this list). I also understand that one of the participants is in the process of summarizing the key points of the chat in – what else – a mind map! I’ll let you know when I have a URL for that.

Thanks to Social Media Chat organizer Chris Jones for inviting me to this chat. It was a great experience, and I look forward to doing it again. Also, because social media is another area of interest for me, I’m sure I’ll be participating in more of these weekly confabs!

• Links to specific web pages and search tools used to track performance on each service
• Links to third party tools
• Links to the Excel spreadsheets that are used to capture the data from each social media site; in MindManager 8, the open in the viewing pane, which is quite convenient!

I think this map is going to be a real time-saver for me!

You can download this map as a MindManager .mmap file or as a PDF. I hope you enjoy it!

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Here’s a list of the people who are “tweeting” about mind mapping, and links to help you to explore what they’re talking about. Some of them post quite frequently, while others are “lurking” quietly, absorbing the flow of ideas and resources that others are sharing. My recommendation is to click through to view each person’s Twitter page, and consider “following” them for a time. If they’re not adding any value to you, you can easily “un-follow” them. I look for thought leaders, who are sharing articles, websites, tips and resources that I wasn’t aware of. I urge you to do the same!

Bloggers

Chuckfrey – Yours truly, of course (you gotta follow me!)

Mindmapblog – Chance Brown, who writes the excellent Mind Map Blog.

Assistivetek – Brian Friedlander, author of the AssistiveTek Blog, which covers mind mapping with a special emphasis on its educational applications.

Lucianop – Luciano Passuelo, author of the excellent LiteMind blog, which covers creativity, problem solving and mind mapping.

Rogercparker – Author of books and resources about getting yourself published, with a heavy influence on mind mapping as an organization and story outlining tool.

Pascal_venier – Dr. Pascal Venier blogs about mind mapping and a variety of other topics.

Ajwilcox – A UK-based MindManager trainer and author of the Applications of MindManager blog.

Mindmapswitch – Matthew Lang is author of the Mind Map Switch blog.

Trishussey – Tris is a social media expert who publishes a blog that occasionally covers mind mapping topics.

Jkendrick – James Kendrick blogs about mind mapping on the Tablet PC, among other high-tech topics on his JKontheRun Blog.

Jamienast – Jamie is a well-respected mind mapping trainer and the author of the book, Idea Mapping.

Software developers

Gideonking – the founder of NovaMind Development Pty. and “father” of the mind mapping program of the same name.

Michaeldeutch – Michael is Director of Solutions Marketing for Mindjet.

Mindjet – Gaelen O’Connell at Mindjet posts to this account, which contains frequent posts about what’s new in the MindManager universe.

Melindavenable – Works with Gaelen O’Connell in the area of customer advocacy for Mindjet.

Voxenable – This is the developer of an application that works with Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 to “voice enable” MindManager 8.

Webspiration_TG – Webspiration is a web-based mapping application from the same people who brought us Inspiration.

Meadmap – Developer of a web-based mapping tool that is focused on the educational market, based on the technology behind Comapping.

Fafner – Markus Müller, developer of MindNode for the Mac.

Have fun exploring and learning!

Chuck

If you want to keep up with what someone is doing, you can “follow” them. This adds their Twitter messages (called “tweets”) to the main page of your Twitter account. It’s a nice way to track all of the people whose thinking and ideas you admire. You can also comment on people’s tweets, which makes it a way to solicit feedback from your followers. I’m a bit skeptical about how practical this service really is, but I’m giving it a shot.

I recently set up a Twitter account, which will be used to keep everyone up to date on the latest posts to my Innovation Weblog and this Mind Mapping Software Blog, as well as to alert you to other things I’m working on. Please click here to read my Twitter postings or sign up to “follow” me.

See you on Twitter!