Walking out the door the other night to watch the Super Bowl last year was interesting. I walked past the Barking Dog (a local bar), past the Ale House (another bar), past the Carriage Wheel, and then into the Stage 2 Cinema Pub, which is normally a movie theater, but when there's a big sports event, it transforms into a great place to watch a game. I realized that any one of those places I walked past had people watching the game. I knew that each one of those places had "regulars" and "visitors" and a sense of what's okay and what draws disapproving stares. Sounds a bit like social networks, if you squint.
Laura "Pistachio" Fitton called Twitter a village.[169] That's one way to look at it, as lots of different things happen there, and her analogy works out well. I'm going to go another way. I'm going to compare Twitter to what happens at a pub. And I'm going to compare Utterli and Facebook and Seesmic and Yahoo! Groups and Digg to all kinds of other pubs. Jonathan Schwartz blogged recently[170] about Sun's intent to reinvigorate its software communities. Another pub.
Pubs are where people talk. There's news. There's gossip. There are deals and selling. There are pronouncements. There are silly moments. There are conversations and chance, random happenings. The thing is, pubs aren't places where you do things. They are places where you talk about things. Right? They might be where the seeds of ideas come from (lots of the work of the Founding Fathers of the United States germinated in pubs), but the actual work and doing took place elsewhere.
Yes! Pub is short for public house, and there is evidence of pubs serving as a valuable incubator in the history of several nations. They are places where people of all backgrounds can gather, although, as is true of most social situations, some feel left out or unwelcome at certain pubs. In general, pubs serve as common ground where people can come to be refreshed, to talk, to meet with both like-minded and dissenting people.
First, be ready to buy someone else a drink. Take that as a metaphor for sharing overall. If you're a marketer, share something of value to me. If you're an aspiring blogger, ask to hear my story first. If you're a salesperson, do something for me before launching into what's in it for you.
Second, mind the place. Pubs aren't run by the barkeep. They're run by the people who come there often enough to set the place straight, who know when a stranger might need welcoming, and who will keep an eye on the place while you're taking care of something in the back. This means a two-way relationship between the barkeep/management and the regulars. How you manage that makes all the difference in the world.
Finally, if you look through that lens and consider these networks as pubs and the other people there as pubgoers, one thing comes right to mind: It's not what you do inside the pub that makes you or changes you or gives you something to call your own; it's what you do outside the pub that counts in the long run.
With this in mind, let's talk about pubs. Where do you go for your drinks? Where is the conversation good? What discourse, new ideas, and challenges are you getting out of this pub of yours that you can then work on outside the pub? Or is my idea all suds and no beer?