Today AJ Leon stops by to share his thoughts on chasing the human web.  AJ is co-founder of The LaC Project, a regular contributor to workshifting.com (client project) and spends a lot of his time traveling the world helping impoverished communities.  You can connect with AJ on Twitter and Tumblr.

So, I’m about to walk on the stage at my first international speaking engagement.  It’s a pretty damn big deal to me.  I mean, I’m a nobody.  Our company has not even reached it’s first birthday, dammit.  I’m just some dude that is ridiculously geeky and is passionate about social justice.  I’ve been attempting to construct a business amalgamation of these two loves for almost a year, and bam, here I am in London, staring at a room replete with hard core NGO fundraisers.  They brought me over because of an exclusively web-based project we lead to build a school in Leer Sudan earlier that year.  We raised over $100k.  We had no budget.  We had no HQ.  We had no staff.  We broke ground.  They’re looking at me. Craving. Lusting.  I know what they want.  They want me to proclaim the “Social Media is the golden ticket” gospel, that if you do A, B and C you too can raise $100,000 on Facebook.  They want me to tell them that they can hop on Twitter and in a Midas minute, they’re every tweet shall deliver gold.  Then they want me to sell them a $29 5-point pamphlet to Online Fundraising Success…  And then there’s me.  I’m about to drop a Manhattan project style bomb on these blokes (wait that’s British, right). A paradigm that is well understood in geek circles, but is uber au courant in this neck of the woods (Old School Non-Profit World). The Social Web is more about humans and less about tech.

The session actually went pretty well.  Based on my experience perusing blooper reels of British Parliament on YouTube, I thought there was a better than average probability that I would either get booed off stage or punched in the face.  After the talk and the glad-handing, Melissa and I went to nab some lunch.  A lady, who’s name I cannot for the life of me remember, asked if she could join us.  She was in the session and wanted to delve deeper into the subject matter presented.  We chit chatted a bit.  At one point, I said “Well, it’s not about what you can acquire with social media, it’s about the connections themselves, they are the value”  Then she looks up at me, with what seemed to be half of her salad in her mouth, and inquired, “Well then how do I use social media to raise money?”

It hit me, while speaking about the social web and it’s inherent ability to connect with supporters, collaborate with and mobilize them I was using phrases like “use the social web” or “leverage the social web”.  But by using this vernacular, I was depicting an image of the Social Web that made it more like a handy dandy, shiny new Tool that can you can use to get stuff and less like a new opportunity to connect with people who are impassioned by the same things as you are.  I was like an artist that pulls out a canvas and tries to sketch his best friend, but ends up drawing a robot.  You don’t use your friends.  You don’t leverage your friends.  And if you do, you are most likely an asshole, and your “friends” know it.

I hear people say it all the time while speaking about social web technology, “these are just tools”, and they are right.  ”Twitter, Inc” is just a pile of servers and a repository of complex code, but Twitter is useless save the people that embrace and uphold it.  Although the technology is the glossy exterior we see, the people, the community, the relationships, the friends, the connections, the human interaction…these are the “real” elements, the “real” value, without which Twitter would be relegated to obscurity at worst and a tech geek circle jerk at best.  The “tools” empower relationships.  And these relationships are not to be “used”.  They are not to be “leveraged”.  You don’t use your friends.  You don’t leverage your friends.

You share with your friends.
You collaborate with your friends.
You are honest with your friends.
You empower your friends.
You listen to your friends.
You partner with your friends.
You ask your friends for their advice…maybe for their help.

The idea is to embrace the social web not use it.

I know it’s only a matter of semantics.  But you know what, salad mouth lady taught me that semantics kinda matter…

In reality what matters infinitely more, just as in personal relationships, is motive.  Those that approach the social web seeking to “use” and “leverage” are not so different from the MLM‘ers of the 80′s that sought to take advantage of every relationship they possessed to make a buck.  They are no different than the televangelists of the 90′s that sought to take advantage of every network in which they maintained authority in order to raise a buck.

Chris Brogan calls it the Human Web.  He’s right.  That’s it.

It’s not Web 2.0.  It’s not the New Web.  It’s not even the Social Web.  It is the Human Web.  And as it continues to evolve and transmogrify, we should seek to inform those that are new to the party, that although what has happened may appear to be a story of technological advancement, it is most certainly not.  It is the same story it has always been. The setting has changed.  The backdrop may be all helvetica font, and lime greens and sky blues, and sleek UI’s, and cute looking birds, and iPhone apps.  But it’s the same story it has always been, humans finding new ways to connect with each other.

How do you describe the New/Social/Human Web?

Is motive as important in the Human Web as it is in “real life”?