I’m speaking next Tuesday (Jan 8) at the Sonoma County Web Developers about how to use social networks to achieve adult/professional goals.

Social Networks for Adults
Date: Jan 8, 2008
Location: Volunteer Center of Sonoma County
Time: Networking 6:30 PM to 7:00 PM
Program 7 to ~9pm (break, raffle ~8)

It’s inspired by a snippit from danah boyd’s ETech keynote about life stages and how they are reflected in social network behavior. A lot of early social network adopters were young. So a lot of the behavior looked immature or like it was without-value to people who were in a “more mature” stage of their life.

Here’s the trick to unlocking the value of social network: imitate people who have the same values as you. According to danah, once people have passed through life stages focused on identity creation (finding yourself) and integration/coupling (finding a career/spouse) they start to focus on societal contribution. For almost everyone, the main societal contribution is work.

There are a lot of ways social networks can help your career, company, professional association. I’d tell you now, but I’d rather see you in Santa Rosa.

As a side note, Sonoma County Web Developers is my favorite group to talk to. They are pragmatic practitioners and give great reality checks for people who spend too much time in Silicon Valley. I spoke about web2.0 two years ago and got a great piece of feedback:

Tony, our customers are small businesses, and by definition small business owners are control freaks. This empowering users thing is great, but can you give us a different benefit to sell.