Getting nostalgic about social networking.

My love of online community-building and social networks began a long time before the packaged communities of MySpace and Facebook. When I was a kid, your online popularity was quantified in the number of e-mails you received daily and whether or not your zine won any awards in online contests.

For example, here’s the award my zine won in 1997, which I found recently while poking around on archive.org:

Honestly, I ran around the house when I got this thing. I was in seventh grade, and it was a big deal. After hours of aligning size 10 Arial font and bolding only the most compelling words (I learned quickly that comic sans and abuse of capitalization were the staples of amateurs), I had not only reached out to 600 readers of my zine, but I had been recognized by the zine community.

Today, however, community, recognition and online popularity mean you are a YouTube star like the laughable lonelygirl15, or your friends listing on MySpace numbers well within the thousands (with the names reading more like a black book than a telephone book). It’s still networking, but not quite the authentic experience I began exploring more than a decade ago.

Back then, social networking was self-regulated to keep its authenticity and operate openly and organically. It seemed like a great after-school activity for a klutz who loved to write and had no hopes of making the basketball team.

I never thought my work would someday involve online marketing. It’s been fascinating to see how what I did for fun in middle school still has relevance today. One of the best parts has been connecting with people I knew years ago–Sam for example. He was from Kentucky, and we probably met on a message board for teen writers. We IMed for years, exchanging our work and talking about getting published.

Sam and I never met in person, and we stopped talking in high school, I think. Then last year, I had a surprising friend request on Facebook: Sam. There he was–no more braces and a wife to boot! I was incredibly impressed and ran to tell my husband… unsurprisingly, his look was a lot like my mom’s when I announced my zine award. A mix of trying to be excited but being mostly confused.

Even more exciting was the fact that Sam is studying media at MIT. I’m always interested in finding people who were online geeks and are now making a career out of it (well, more the online part than the geek part)… I would love to know where some of the other online editors and writers are.

A good place to start is by finding what they’re saying today. Sam keeps a blog at the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium site. If you care at all about social networks and the like, you should check it out.

One post that I think is particularly intriguing and relevant is “Xerox Touts Viral Marketing Drive…” It’s always tricky commenting on early “viral campaigns” because to be viral suggests some level of having generated appeal or buzz already.

I find it ironic when companies like Xerox “announce” a viral campaign in a traditional press release. It feels counterintuitive and therefore tends to lack authenticity… undermining and co-opting social networks rather than leveraging them to better understand and engage an audience.

It’s the A-B-Cs of social networks–just ask the zine editor in your kid’s class.