Redcatco » communication

People to People – Like Minds

Benjamin — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 15:53:56 +0000

I’m literally just back from the Like Minds conference in Exeter. I say I’m back, but between the ongoing conversations on Twitter and the comment exchanges on the flickr photos it does feel a little like I am still there. The event was an excellent opportunity to transfer the on-line conversations about business culture, technology trends and the social aspects of business to off-line, into face to face discussions.

Facebook and other social media are now the most visited web-destinations in the world. The way that employees and customers communicate has changed, it is now down to businesses to catch up. I caught (or maybe that should be cornered!) co-organiser Scott Gould on camera, at the end of an exhausting day, to explain some more about Like Minds:

I used my mobile phone to record the video, as I’d lost track of where I put down my HD video camera in all of the excitment, but it serves as a useful reminder that anyone in a business has the tools to be a content-creator. It doesn’t take expensive equipment, or huge amounts of time. We have the technology to enable anyone to communicate with everyone, and that changes how businesses should communicate. The pandora’s box is already open, and businesses and employees alike are riffling their way through its contents.

I’m very sure that Trey Pennington will have some excellent videos of his own, but I managed to catch him on the other side of the lens after his panel, and had him explain his perspective. The words at the end of this video are still echoing around my mind. As we emerge from the current economic challenges, however long it takes us, history suggests that there will be a shift in emphasis away from financial drivers towards the more ’social’ people-centred aspects of business. From employee retention and engagement, to new styles of marketing to customers, businesses need to be ready:

I enjoyed the opportunity of speaking on the panel after Olivier Blanchard. (aka the Brand Builder). I’ll share the thoughts from that in another post. As I took to the stage to speak, I was actually very nervous – here’s the back stage experience:

It can feel like that for many employees when they are asked to ‘do’ social media, or edit a wiki or write a blog. Not everyone is a natural communicator, and building effective people-to-people communication systems requires keeping that in mind. Not everyone wants to be ‘on the stage’. That means it’s not just about training people to use the tools, it is also about training them to understand how to use them effectively and responsibly. Most training seems to fall at that first hurdle, and never attempts the second. Like Minds has challenged me to raise the bar on the training we do, both the in-house workshops, and the more regular courses. There are broader issues to tackle. As one member of the audience explained, with his struggles to reconcile being a company director during the week and a partying rugby player at the weekend, the age of tagging friends in photos has no respect for neat work-life social boundaries.

I travelled down to Exeter the night before, which enabled me to meet the other speakers, as well as the local Lord Mayor – I have to say, from this speaker’s perspective, it was the most well organised conference I have ever attended. Scott and Andrew Ellis’ attention to detail is unrivalled and I am deeply grateful to both them and their patient team of assistants.

But back to that train journey the night before, and something that would have been most unlikely in the days before Twitter. I’ll let fellow speaker, the amazingly high energy A. J. Pape of Future Considerations explain the story:

Business success is intimately linked to an effective communciation infrastrature that not only allows knowledge to be gathered, stored and distributed, but also supports the working relationships that people need to function inside and across businesses. Social Media is becoming the de-facto communications medium, and while many businesses still have their head in the sand, an enthusiastic band of likeminded professionals are hard at work putting this new technology to good business use.

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It’s The Phone – Even in Crisis Comms

Benjamin — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:35:55 +0000

Back in June I wrote a post: “Twitter to Replace the Phone?” - suggesting that Twitter isn’t just another marketing channel, but it is a communications channel that may end up as important as the phone. It looks like that has come to pass faster than I had imagined. This post has loitered in drafts, but I’m going to put it out there. On a weekend late last year I watched a disastrous series of events unfold via Twitter and Facebook as Eurostar had a number of failures of their service that left friends trapped and stranded.

Techcrunch was quick to pick up on Eurostar’s lack of use of Twitter, and slam UK agency We Are Social:

“It owns a Twitter account at @little_break, allied to its marketing site Littlebreakbigdifference.com. This was registered and run by “conversation agency” Wearesocial.net. This is an agency which claims to be expert in the use of social media platforms like Twitter to communicate with the public. They appear to be slow to waking up to the crisis.”

Of course those that work in marketing in large businesses will know that there is a big difference between a marketing programs agency, a PR company and a crisis communications specialist. Campaigns-based agencies are rarely tasked with crisis comms, and in this case it would appear that We Are Social were retained around a specific campaign, rather than more general umbrella. Robin has responded on We Are Social’s Blog: A note about today’s Eurostar crisis – Within 24 hours the company had posted a video on YouTube and was tackling their communications.

In this instance, I’m fairly sure people affected weren’t asking for help on social media, and there was a more fundamental failure of communications and systems, but by day two people did want to know what was happening with their travel arrangements and bookings, and were asking on-line.

James Whatley of 1000Heads summed it up well in Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Brand Republic has a good write up on Eurostar’s next steps, which include cancelling their planned 2010 marketing activities, and re-aligning them, given where they now are.

All in all, it’s a pretty sorry tail, on one hand, Eurostar’s handling of the situation, logistically, seems to have left much to be desired, on the other, the focus by some blogs on the social media aspects shows a lack of maturity and understanding of big business. Just over a week on from the event you can see the ride that We Are Social has had.

The big take away is this: While social media might be many things, it is also another communications channel, which means it should be monitored (listened to!) and responded to. And that means not just on a campaigns basis. Also, in times of crisis, it can be a very effective, low effort, way to get information out – especially if you want to reach journalists!

Culture or Technology in Business 2.0

Benjamin — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:09:22 +0000

One of the unusual things about social media in the business context is the dramatic way it impacts on business culture. Dennis Howlett wrote a long and interesting piece on his Zdnet blog about the Enterprsie 2.0 debate, or lack thereof. It is one that is intertwined with much of what I do, using blogs and wikis to build communication networks. Dennis writes:

I don’t need to recrunch the ’social’ thing but it is an important factor that in my mind amply illustrates the lack of intellectual rigor around solution creation. It is good to see that in the discourse even my sharpest critics have acknowledged the emphasis and use of ’social’ as a dreadful mistake.

I think the ’social’ thing is such an issue because it is one that very few technologists are able to get to grips with. There are notable exceptions, Dennis and Stowe Boyd amongst others. In the business 2.0 context the word ’social’ has become burdened with a whole set of meaning that has little to do with the ’social’ (small ’s’) or ‘Social‘ aspects of business, but it is still an essential part of the debate, as Dennis goes on to say:

Last Friday I met a pal of mine who is in the business of implementing change. He argued that people don’t like change. It is too disruptive for many. Think about all those contradictory stats that talk about dis-satisfaction with technology but then the same people would not change what they have. Familiarity is comforting. At a time when many people are more concerned about job security than shiny new toys, it should be no surprise that implementing an E2.0 project will have a slim chance of success without the sponsorship and active participation of top management.

Finally, and here I am putting on my social psychologist’s hat. The nature-nurture debate that has rumbled on for more than 50 years among socpsych types shows no signs of abating. These key concepts have a place in our understanding of what can work but are largely ignored in the discourse.

The traditional nature/nurture debate Dennis mentions has formed the basis of many an undergraduate essay over the years (“Are you a product of your genes, or of your environment? Discuss”). However, it has been replaced by the more careful study of epigenetics – understanding the way that the environment interacts with our genes, enabling and disabling them. Conversely, our genetic make-up also influences our environment in a transactional sequence that changes it as it changes us. An irritable baby that never sleeps is eventually going to have tired, irritable parents. And how those irritable parents interact with the baby and nurture it may shape which of its genes become activated or deactivated, shaping its development.

And so, back to social computing, Web 2.0 and social media in business. When Dennis’ friend cites the importance of “the sponsorship and active participation of top management” it is worth thinking about why that is so important. The reason usually isn’t the obvious. Management sponsorship is a form of social proof that taps into the social dimension of business – culture. Business culture can help or hinder the adoption of 2.0 technologies, but 2.0 technologies are disruptive to the traditional power-bases and communication structures within the business. The two things dance an intertwined-transactional dance. Social software changes the cutlure, but culture also changes the way that the software is used. For me that creates a demand for careful ’social’ design, to get the technologies adopted, and then careful change-management to pick up the pace and the full benefits in creating a more dynamic and innovative business culture. A place where ideas emerge, are captured and nurtured, and delivered to customers.

Lastly, back to a comment in Dennis’ post that caused a wry smile as I sat reading it: “cult-ure” versus “culture”. Some businesses have very, very strong cultures. They resist change because they are as much cult as company. When the cult is working, that is amazingly powerful – they preserve their culture even with rapid growth, and smash through any obstacles in their way. I think you know the kinds of business we are talking about. But, and this is a big but, when the market changes, and the cult does not, the business heads for the rocks. Traditional change programs almost inevitably fail, but even in these toughest of environments, I believe that ’social’ tools can create change.

The traditional IT and management paradigm is that we are a collection of individuals using IT tools. That frame misses the most powerful forces that business leaders have at their finger tips. A business is a community, and sometimes multiple communities, that communicate and interact with each other (both intra- and inter-). That interaction is increasingly dominated by technology-mediated communication, and that communication (or collaboration) technology is less neutral than people think. It can be culture forming.

Social Media in Business in London

Benjamin — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:03:57 +0000

On October the 23rd I’ll be at The Strand Palace Hotel in London, talking about crowd sourcing with social media. Edelman, iPadio, chinwag and a host of folks are sponsoring what promises to be a very packed day – full details are here. The event description best explains why I’m excited about Friday:

The conference examines how social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, are having a major impact on business practices and culture. How can these tools be utilised, how can you employ strategies within your company to increase profitability, sustain reputation and empower your employees to be brand ambassadors? Indeed should you employ internal social networks within your own organisation as a means of facilitating a sharing community amongst your employees, or should you use public open platforms?

I’m looking forward to catching up with familiar faces and joining in a healthy debate about the way ahead for social media in business. There are over a dozen speakers, all active practitioners with hands-on experience, which should make for some good talks and lively panel sessions.

Over the next few days, with the help of iPadio, I’m going to do my level best to speak to each of them about their experiences and what they’ll be talking about on Friday. Here are the conversations I’ve had with folks on the phone so far (I’ve been on the phone a bit!): You’ll find more interviews, and can listen to them live as they happen on the SMiB site.

Trends of the 21st Century

Benjamin — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:33:14 +0000

This post was inspired by a paper by Jonathan MacDonald (of fluid world / JMA) ”The first 6 Macro Trends of the 21st Century” – it’s a reasonably straight forward read. It set me off pondering a different track. What do the six trends he lists mean for business, and business-to-business marketing, IT and communication?

1. Corporate Technology in the hands of Citizens

2. Physical is increasingly Virtual

3. It’s about Distribution not Destination

4. Mass Niche not Mass Groups

5. Broadcast Control is now Self Scheduled

6. C2C is more powerful than B2C Communication

I’ll tackle them one by one, together with liberal use of quotations from Jonathan’s paper:

1. Corporate Technology in the hands of Citizens

“The commoditisation of technology has enabled many of us to access, use and develop upon tools and resources that once were reserved only for large organisations – or those with deep pockets… …Creating trust and value is far different than raising money to spend on marketing. The skill sets required are rarely seen in standard business… …It signals a redefinition of products, services, marketing and advertising communication.”

Back at the start of the decade, when I held the strategic marketing role in a large IT company, I remember frequent discussions about the future consumerisation of corporate IT. Well, it has happened. Consumer technology is now far ahead of most business IT today. The users have stormed the castle, and they are now informed consumers.

2. Physical is increasingly virtual

“Now we have the tools to express, purchase and discover things without physical entities being necessary, we increasingly do so.”

The key here is the disappearance of “place” – a theme from “The Future of the Workplace“. Businesses, unconsciously, are built around “place” – employees meet together. They go to meet customers. They go to visit other employees. The implicit design of most businesses is based on staff “in the office”. This is in the same businesses that are turning workers into remote workers in droves. It is in the same companies where a huge chunk of the work force don’t even have a desk in the office anymore. “Place”? It’s dead.

Redesign your business so that it works regardless of place, before it becomes an island. Enabling remote working is only the first phase. The more important and challenging task is replacing the things that “place” used to give to staff. VPN technology, email blast communication and a shiny laptop alone do not provide it. If you believe they do, you are missing the way that informal communications glue your business together today.

“Technological advances in augmented and virtual reality will fundamentally redefine what our future generations perceive as ‘real’.”

3. Its about distribution not destination

I differ with some of Jonathan’s thoughts here. AOL and others existed because Google did not, at the time. In those days people needed an on-ramp to the Internet, a starting place. Today Google serves that purpose. There is a hideous phrase from my Business Technology 1.0 Days: “end-to-end.” Everyone was offering “end-to-end” solutions. I once joked, with my CEO present, that “end-to-end” seemed to mean “all the things that we make, and none of the things that we don’t”. His wry smile told he already knew how empty the phrase was. The reality is nothing is “end-to-end” in the business world. Anything that is, is a dead-end. Obvious, right? Less flippantly, money moves around. Create flows, not buckets, build ecosystems…

4. Mass niche not mass groups

“Individuals can be in numerous communities of interest – but the ‘age, gender and location profile’ may differ substantially.”

The marketing of the future is about psychographics, not demographics. That’s one of the main reasons I spend most of my time studying psychology these days. The future is more about groups and communities, than individuals. Marketing courses don’t teach marketeers and communicators the skills they need to deal with ecosystems, rather than people, at least none that I’m aware of.

“Any level of assumption when dealing in personality based communication will lead to negative experience which is damaging to all involved.”

The traditional marketing tone of voice is increasingly irrelevant, patronising, misdirected and little believed. That people write in a style they would be unhappy to be addressed in speaks to something very broken in business communications today, both internally and externally. It’s time to move on. We’re not running a TV station, and that’s probably just as well.

“The media that society is connected with – or social media as it is called – is a new science involving the inter-relationships of real people who are not a number or a demographic subset.”

5. Broadcast control is now self-scheduled

Broadcast is dead, or at least it will be significantly less dominant, especially if it doesn’t figure out a new business model. It was funded by interruption marketing (advertising 1.0), which can’t afford to support it anymore (thanks to Google and the on-line world), and is being strangled by technology (TiVo, Sky+, V+ and anything that looks like a PVR). The revolution won’t be televised, it will be time shifted.

“…the government of Singapore banned TiVo, citing the potential adverse impact on the local media industry if usage were to increase. Which it did. The Singapore government faced extreme difficulty in regulating the use of TiVo, as individuals were bringing in sets from overseas, over-joyed at the ability to finally control their own experiences.”

Deputy MD of Fox International Channels, Jason Thorp, said at the time: “There are a whole host of issues that broadcasters and advertisers are currently facing, and about to face, that are going to irrevocably change the business. A creative response will be the only solution to all of them.”

The result? Culture will simultaneously fragment and aggregate. Broadcast TV has created shared experiences and meaning for the post-war generations. The way it does this for the next generation will be different. In a world without broadcast, shared experiences will become an increasingly important part of people’s lives. Smart brands get this already (Magners UK, I’m looking at you).

“Forcible relationships are never productive. The see-saw of control is never healthy if heavily stacked against one side.”

If your business is, in anyway shape or form, dependent on broadcast (internal or external), redesign it now. The people of the future will not stand around to be shouted at. You have to earn their attention, and then keep it.

6. C2C is more powerful than B2C communication

Read Jonathan’s piece, especially what he has to say about “buzz marketing”. There’s a herd of people out there doing untold damage to themselves, their brand and their customers. In the Broadcast Anomaly I attempted to articulate that the current changes are not about something emerging after the broadcast era, they are about things re-emerging, that have been suppressed. As Jonathan puts it:

“At the time of writing, the buzz-phrase ‘word of mouth’ is being lauded as an incredible new invention. The term ‘conversation’ is a very ‘2.0? thing, apparently. It’s almost like personal interaction is a new thing, whereas it pre-dates everything else.”

Person-to-person communication outweighs business-to-consumer communication by an order of magnitude, on any number of measures. In the media age, businesses have evolved their communications channels to be narrow, highly controlled funnels. In doing so they have left themselves ill prepared to deal with the skills and scale required to get to grips with what many call “the conversation.”

For businesses to survive, they must get to grips with the fact that everyone is in PR now. Everyone is in Marketing. The fastest growing business I have worked for understood that, at the time. It was one of the factors that lead them to be the most valuable company on the planet, for a moment. If you haven’t already, check out Zappos and how they interact with customers.

“To accelerate communication power, businesses must learn from the way that citizens interact most effectively… …When we build relationships, we learn about each other. This is a two-way process… …Many of the practices I see heralded at conferences, are analogistic to hiding in the bushes outside someone’s house, breathing heavily and scribbling down notes on a pad for later use. When we best learn about each other, we find common ground. We look for areas in which we can be valuable to each other.”

The writing isn’t on the wall, it’s on the web, and from there, everyone can see it. Read it wisely.

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Broadband Maslow and the Hierarchy of Human Needs

Benjamin — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 10:01:05 +0000

The BBC ran an interesting piece, based on an OFCOM survey, or rather OFCOM’s annual Communications Market Report. It features some rather ’startling’ findings about us Brits and our use of broadband.

“Britons are more willing to cut back on holidays and meals out than on spending on communication technology during the recession… … spending on mobiles, the internet and TV is regarded as a higher priority than almost anything except food.”

Time to revisit Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Needs

Curious indeed. I shared the link via Twitter and the ever provocative Camille Mendler of the Yankee Group (and I mean that in a good way) tweeted back. It struck a chord with a series of recent discussions, so I’ll share them here.

Let’s leave Maslow, just for a minute, we’ll come back to him. The way we are using the Internet is subtly changing. The study highlights a dramatic rise in the use of social networking websites. 19 milliom people in the UK, that is around 50% of the internet-using population, spend an average of six hours a month on Facebook. That is a 50% increase from four hours a month back in the previous May.

It’s not just a phenomenon among young people. Quite the opposite.The proportion of 25 to 34-year-olds claiming to have a social networking site profile grew to 46%, while the figure among 35 to 54-year-olds rose to 35%. The only group shrinking was the 15- to 24-year0old group, down by 5% to 50% – perhaps they are trying to avoid their parents on Facebook?

This shift in Internet use is relevant to Maslow’s Hierachy of needs. Just in case you missed, Maslow’s article ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’ appeared in Psychological Review back in 1943, and was the foundation of his book “Toward a Psychology of Being” (on Amazon US and UK). In it Maslow proposed a five tier model to describe human motivation. It is a theoretical approach, rather than an experimental finding, and Maslow himself revised the model in his later works. That said, it has become the foundation for a sea of thought, from sales theory to engaging employees. The five tiers are:

Self-Actualization
Esteem
Love/Belonging
Safety
Physiological

Essential, each level of needs has to be fulfilled in order to reach the next. If needs at a lower level are left unmet, we focus back down at that lower level, so the theory goes. Taking the levels in more detail, one by one:

Physiological Needs

We all need to eat, to drink, to breathe and to sleep. Without these, we rapidly fail to function and everything else becomes meaningless.

Safety Needs

We require shelter and protection from physical harm. Exposure to the elements or attack will obviously impact on your physiological needs. Beyond that we seek longer term security, for example paid employment or knowing that we will be provided for. We don’t want just to survive, we want to know that we will survive.

These first two tiers are reasonably well served in western society, although not as universally as one might home. Moving on from the lower levels it starts to get interesting, and somewhat surprisingly, we come back to broadband:

Social Needs

We need a sense of belonging. That might come through friendships, or membership of a group of some description. Something we are part of that is a place for giving and receiving love, in its various forms, is required to meet these social needs. Think: Belonging.

Esteem Needs

We all need to feel wanted and valued, consciously or not. Simple acts, like being recognised and receiving attention from others, protect our self-esteem. A healthy self-respect, a sense of having achieved things, keeps us going. Without these, we are unlikely to feel fulfilled. There are a raft of psychological theories that exist at this level. Simply remember: Attention.

Self-actualisation

This was the subject of much of Maslow’s later work, but that is something for another time. For now, suffice it to say that at this highest level, people become motivated by more social causes and issues such as justice, truth, wisdom and meaning. Operation at this level is often evidenced by the acceptance of facts and the celebration of capabilities like creativity and problem solving.

As a side note, this model seems to hold true at a corporate level as well as a human one. I believe there are companies that achieve “self-actualisation”. They are rare, but I have had the privilege of experiencing them. I recognise themes from the periods of peak growth at both Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks. There was a sense of meaning that was common across the who;e business, and values like justice and wisdom were held in high regard.

So, back to those British broadband users… Social Networking sites like Facebook, enable us to keep in touch with friends. Remember that requirement to belong? To be needed? Simple acts like commenting on a friends status update, or knowing that others might be waiting for our next status update, tick boxes in the hierarchy of needs. For better or worse, broadband is becoming the pipe that provides social fuel on that journey towards self-actualisation.

I’m not making an argument to justify broadband as some sort of basic right, or even an essential service – that is probably a step too far. I am pointing out that broadband pipes don’t just feed us with information, they provide us with much needed social contact too. The Internet of information has become the Internet of people. In doing that, broadband has moved itself from “nice to have” to “nicer to have.”

While people said that they would cut back on going out for dinner (47%), DIY (that most serious of British addictions – 41%) or holidays (41%), only a tiny minority (10%) would be prepared to cut back on their broadband. It would be intersting to know about more about the survey, as the identification of the surveyors may have skewed the answers.

Maslow’s hierarchy hasn’t changed, but the role of technology within it has. Businesses need to take note here. People have embraced ‘digital intimacy’ as part of their lives. Companies that don’t provide tools to support social cohesion will eventually suffer. Yes, I guess I would say that, but I’m happy to hear counter arguments.

Throwing your staff out on the road, or sending them off to work at home, without providing on-line social tools, will impact on the effectiveness of your business. Staff turnover will increase, communication will dry up, and the creativity that is so vital to innovation will disappear. Alarmist? I don’t think so. Look at how people are using technology at home. Those expectations are coming into the work place. Look at the importance people place on it. This isn’t a fad, it is a change in what the Internet is all about.

Tweetcamp London – Beyond 140 Characters

Benjamin — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 08:12:01 +0000

The recent Tweetcamp event was organised by Farhan Rehman (@farhan), Dees Chinniah (@cyberdees), and Jon Bishop (@jonin60seconds), I just ran around with a microphone on the day, and chatted with Farhan before hand! It was far from being another BarCamp. While many familiar faces from the social media space came along, it also reached people who hadn’t been to any sort of unconference before.

The idea that a community can get together and self-organise an event is still a refreshing one, but when Farhan first suggested the idea of Tweetcamp I knew it was going to be something a bit different, pushing at the boundaries between the on-line and off-line world. What was it about? I’ll let Farhan explain:

TweetCamp is about bringing communities together, in real life. It’s about accelerating the conversations that happen on Twitter, in real life. It’s about creating richer, more personal connections… …It’s all about bringing the people together who you know from and through Twitter, into a physical space, and then having some of those great conversations and interactions you would have online, but in real life.

You can get a feel for the day by watching the video I put together:

The process of on-line to off-line bridging is something I pursue in the corporate space. On-line platforms work best with people who have met off-line and interacted face-to-face. Similarly, on-line tools let people sustain relationships when time and distance – from remote working or hectic schedules – would otherwise curtail them. Tweetcamp was an opportunity to experiment with different ways of stimulating discussion and self-organising a very large group (about 150 people or so).

Amy Sample Ward has challenged the team to build on this start at bridging on-line and off-line communities in her thoughtful post. The conversations and activities were very varied. I met someone I knew by swapping a toilet seat for a wonderful water spray – you had to be there. You’ll also hear Ray mentioned in the video. He is a poet and ran a poetry workshop. Inevitably he was ‘dragged’ on to Twitter, where you can now find him as @TheEducatedfool. He was there as part of the BBC poetry initiative, which came up with an innovative live idea for the event, linking Tweetcamp to Glastonbury via Twitter. People tweeted short poems from the event, which were displayed live over there. I told you it wasn’t your usual barcamp!

As well as a wonderful lunch, and Muesli, from sponsors Mymuesli, Addlestones provided a wonderful end to the day with their cider. A big thank you to all of the sponsors. The day wasn’t about the food though, it was about the conversations, which covered topics as diverse as children’s use of the Internet to internal business communications, and a range of other topics between.

There are lots of photos from the day up on Flickr, including these by Adam Tinworth and some from Chris Heuer (who recently ebayed himself) as well as a few I took:

Social Media Inside

Benjamin — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:00:09 +0000

Last week’s workshop on using social media for internal communications at Melcrum was a packed house and a packed agenda. As intranets become less effective, and distributed working arrangements challenge traditional lines of communication, interest in social media is on the rise. Here are three examples of what people have been doing:

The JetBlue University, within the US Airline, picked up social media and ran with it as a business tool.

Notice how they allowed the structure to ‘evolve’ – social media allows “bottom up” development, which usually leads to a better fit with the needs of people within the business. Things like structures of tagging and information (ontologies) are very hard to get right with a top down approach.

IBM is often cited for their very effective use of social media both within the organisation and outside of it. In this short clip, IBM’s Jon Iwata, SVP of Marketing and Communication, talks about ”letting go” of traditional views of communication controls. He also points out that social media doesn’t create new problems, it simply highlights existing ones:

Best Buy might not be a name that springs to mind when it comes to social media, but the retailer has embraced the tools in all sorts of different areas within the business. This clip talks about “The Company as a Wiki” – an evolving on-line collaboration space:

If you haven’t already, then check out the “Collaboration in action” white paper from Redcatco partner theblueballroom, which talks about the different tools.

While there is no ‘template’ for deploying social media inside of a business, there are generally three clear phases:

Broadcast

Most businesses have built effective internal communications mechanisms that borrow from the broadcast world, from direct email and internal magazines to internal TV channels. These get the message out, but usually don’t provide a means to get meaningful feedback, or to gather and spread knowledge from the edges of the organisation.

Interactive

From “CEO Blogs” to interactive sites, providing the ability to comment on, or even just rate, communications gives a way for employees to start to interact. The interaction is very different from email, since it is visible across the organisation – rather than just between one or two employees. This phase gets people used to communicating “in public” – this is a much bigger cultural change than it sounds, and is the first step to less structured and less formal communication in the digital domain.

Social

In the final phase, communication moves from top-down with feedback, to a peer-to-peer model. All employees become content producers, and knowledge is shared in a very distributed manner. Social ties within the organisation become stronger, and become the predominant force for moderating behaviours and communication.

The video clips give some ideas of what can be achieved, and the nature of the journey. Ultimately, each business will follow a different path, and the adoption of social technology needs to be tightly aligned to existing business goals. It isn’t about the tools, it is about communication within the business, and building stronger relationships that enable effecive collaboration and sharing – that’s where the competitive advantage comes from.

Twitter to Replace the Phone?

Benjamin — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:40:29 +0000

Who needs telephones? We’ve got Twitter! Phone calls are all good and well, but by the time you’ve looked up the number, dialled it, listened to the ring tone and got through to the person you are trying to reach – or left the inevitable recorded message – you could have made a cup of coffee or had your next million dollar idea. Besides, it is so last-century… There must be a better way to make a restaurant booking.

Twitter might not replace the telephone any time soon, but for lots of things it can be a faster way to communicate. There are times when it is better to have a real time conversation. Hearing someone’s tone of voice, and seeing their face, helps to clarify potential misunderstandings straight away, providing a much better understanding of how the other person is really reacting. There is an emotional richness to a two way conversation which isn’t there in a short piece of text. If you have got into an exchange of more than 3 messages, then it is probably time to pick up the phone – it will be more efficient in the long run.

However, sometimes the message is straight forward, unambiguous and not emotionally loaded. Twitter is great for those sorts of things, very fast and efficient: ”Can I have a table for two at 8pm tonight?”. Less than 140 characters later… I had a dinner reservation.

I booked a table at the Landings Restaurant in Farnborough (@landingsrestaur). The outbound marketing potential of Twitter is constantly pushed, making it easy for forget that it is an inbound communication mechanism too. Popping up a window, typing a user name and message is much faster than scouring through a phone directory (electronic or otherwise) and making a call, so why wouldn’t someone want to communicate with a business that way?

I’m not sure if it is a UK first, it might well be, but I’m sure it won’t be the last such exchange. Businesses need to communicate on their customer’s terms. Twitter is my communications dashboard, and by being there the Landings Restaurant won my business on Friday night. More than that, I found them via my social network too (thank you @andypiper for the tip off – I saw your tweet and followed the restaurant as a result).

Landings Restaurant aren’t alone on twitter of course, there are tweeting bakeries, coffee shops and bridges already, but taking a booking via Twitter is a neat trick. As a business, you need to meet your customers where they are – don’t just wait around expecting them to come to you. If you do, you’ll find that your competitors may have got to them first.

Organisations need to be accessible, there is a big jump from a cold, corporate web page to a person to person conversation. Twitter provides a nice stepping stone in between the two.

Beyond Social Media Strategy

Benjamin — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:44:54 +0000

After being caught calling myself a social media expert during the BBC Radio 5 Live Pods and Blogs program this morning, I’d better explain what I’ve been up to. Having stumbled into digital communication in the 80’s, I was always captivated by the ability of technology to change things. In the 90’s I was able to play a part in building intranets that really did change how businesses operated, from car manufacturers like Renault and Volvo, to big banks in Asia and the US.

Something happened along the way, and I think that something may well have been email. Business went from information islands to an open sea of information. Then the sea turned to jets of water. Intranet’s dried up, as communication went from the intranet to email. The open sea became a mass of droplets, as staff retreated to their solitary inboxes, and closed point-to-point emails.

With intranets came extranets, and the idea of things being “inside” the firewall and “outside” the firewall. Deep inside the IT bunker phrases like “demilitarised zone” started to echo around. Information security thinking crept into marketing, and PR, as organisations started to talk about “controlling” and “timing” information flows.

Planning is all well and good, and control has its place, but businesses are ultimately about doing things, and doing them now. Outside of the corporate walls, people are sharing information like never before. News flows in real-time, from Iranian cyber war to Surrey swine flu. Its spread follows people’s social networks more closely than it follows fibre optics. It is granular, relevant and real-time. The corporate world has fallen behind the consumer world, but now it is time to catch up.

Deploying social technology inside of a business opens up the communications channels again. During deployments in recent years, I keep seeing that unless the external communication and internal communication are addressed at a strategic level, many of the benefits of an efficient, collaborative work style is lost. There’s certainly still a benefit, but it’s like driving with the hand brake on.

I’ve been searching for people with the same sense, and with the vision and skills to drive with the hand brake off. Having a “social media strategy” is all very well, but it often results in “bolt on” activity, with little return, and little benefit towards the strategic direction of the business. “Using social media strategically” is something different. Picking points of engagement, within the company’s strategic operations, when the tools will provide the best return. Social media is more than “one” thing. It is multifaceted and multi-skilled. It links internal and external, bringing the “publics” together, in a world were “personal” and “business” are increasingly blurred.

Given that the tools are about collaboration, it makes sense that collaboration should be the tool to help people get to grips with them. Imagine combining people-centric technology skills with those of an award-winning internal communications agency and a specialist PR and digital media agency. I have been imagining it for a while, and I have to say that the reality is even more exciting than I thought it would be. Two names to remember, and that you will hear along side redcatco:

the bluedoor

theblueballroom

ANNOUNCING: Consultancies collaborate to deliver businesses unique Web 2.0 and social media solutions for internal and external communications.

With collaboration, innovation and stakeholder engagement high on the business agenda, there is an increasing sense of urgency for businesses to embrace the opportunities offered by Web 2.0 and social media tools. One-third of executives recognise the importance of social networking by ensuring it is part of their business and operations strategy1. Yet a key block for business leaders and managers is a lack of strategic knowledge to analyse the business case for Web 2.0 and, moreover, ensure that the right social media tools are chosen to deliver on a company’s communications objectives.

1. Source: Deloitte ‘2009 Ethics & Workplace Survey’ conducted by Opinion Research Corporation 19/5/09

Looking for some social media action? Together, our three companies are enabling collaboration in action right now. Call or e-mail to get the full story, we are taking our strategic workshop offering out to businesses that really want to reap the benefits of using social media. I’ll be sharing what we learn together here.

Engaging Employees – Social Media Inside

Benjamin — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:18:52 +0000

Are you happy in your job? Do you know what is expected of you in your role? If you answered yes to both, you are in a privileged minority. According to John H. Fleming, Chief Scientist at Gallup Consulting, 43% of employees in the UK are not engaged at work, while 17% are actively disengaged – and over a third of employees are unsure what their job actually is.

The figures come from a 2006-2008 survey discussed during Melcrum’s 5th anual conference on employee engagement. Whilst social media wasn’t the focus of the event, it came up many times as a way to change company culture. “Collaboration in action” – a white paper on social media inside of organisations – was launched by theblueballroom at the event, more on that shortly.

In working with businesses in transformation, what becomes apparent are the strong links between the success of a business, and how staff and customers feel about it. The interactions between the three factors are far from intuitive, but social media is becoming the tool of choice for improving all three.

Although most of what is written about social media and social networking platforms is focused on external marketing activities these days, the most transformative uses are in internal communications. So, when the folks at theblueballroom invited me along the Melcrum Employee Engagement Conference, I grabbed my bag and headed along.

Employee engagement is a much maligned term, and provokes a negative reaction in many. It isn’t a well understood term, and I’ve certainly seen it misused. However I think all agree that how employees feel about the business that they work for is important. Are they bringing their “whole selves” to work, or fighting against the system? It just isn’t something that companies get right often enough.

John Fleming gave an overview of Gallup Consulting’s “HumanSigma(R)” program at the conference. It was originally published in Harvard Business review in July/Aug 2005, and is now a book in it’s own right. As with many Gallup tools, it aims to measure a complex set of dynamics, with a survey generated number. I’m not a great fan of the methodology, but John made some interesting points during his presentation. The employee-customer encounter is fundamentally an emotional one – “people are people first, and employees and customers second.” So it has to be understood that way.

Interactions that have an “emotional” element are increasingly squashed by high-velocity email and broadcast marketing techniques, even inside of the company walls. John argued that interactions should be managed locally – essentially a distributed form of management. Social tools support this working model. He suggested four levels of operation for employees:

Growth – how can we grow?
Team work – do I belong?
Individual contribution – what do I give?
Basic needs – what do I get?

It is loosely based on Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, but is a helpful framework for building communities. Disengaged employees expose company boards and owners to big financial risks – Choose your favourite horror story from the media. Social networking tools have amplified those risks (as Dominos Pizza disovered), by giving everyone access to a ‘global stage’. Inside of the business, social media can create effective communication channels that let staff feel part of a community, and actively contribute as part of a team. Yet very few businesses have got to grips with social tools, or training staff in using them responsibly.

There are businesses that are embracing the technologies, and embedding them into the business infrastructure to great effect. I’m leading a Social Media Workshop for internal comms on June 24th in Hammersmith, together with Abi Signorelli of Virgin Media. You can read more about the workshop on the Melcrum Blog and here is a Qik video I shot in the bustle of the Virgin Media offices with Abi on Friday:

From blogs to phlogs and wikis, used well, social technology creates open communication channels across a business, breaking down barriers between different organisations, and providing the feedback that leaders need to be effective.

I’m looking forward to being joined by Redcatco collaborator, Debbie Davies, who will be exploring how video can be used in the business context, so I’m sure there will be some clips coming over during and after the event!

Caught by a Spy – Easier Than it Sounds

Benjamin — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 12:19:14 +0000

If you are a regular Twitter user, you might have noticed that half of the world seems to have become a spy catcher of late. It turns that catching a spy via Twitter is easier than you might think. It also has some consequences for social capital, information security and general communication noise too.

You are a very fortunate individual if you have escaped the torrent of (somewhat spammy) messages from the spy catcher application. It is doing a rather good, and therefore bad, job of turning Twitter into Facebook – or rather the bad old Facebook of a while ago, with the legendary sheep throwing, pirates, vampires and sea of noise generated by that genre of social applications.

Got You! Via Twitter

The success of Spycatcher is a proof point of another unsettling trend: Notice how easily people hand over their username and passwords to a relatively unknown (and potentially untrusted) third party.

There has been a long term problem with twitter third party applications. The first generation of applications required users to enter their username and password on the third party site, where they were stored, so that the 3rd party could get access to the user’s Twitter stream, to do whatever wonderful things it did. It sounds relatively innocuous, but actually it sets a rather bad precedent. It is referred to as an anti-pattern, a commonly bad solution to a problem. It is bad because it teaches people how to be phished.

From Catching Fish to Helping Phishers

Phishers spend their time trying to get users to hand over password details, so that they can gain access to accounts. Twitter has a bad anti-pattern problem, and it knows it, since the Twitter ecosystem trains users to hand over their security details to third parties. To tackle the issue Twitter has added OAuth to the service. It provides a way for third parties to validate users, without storing the username and password. However, this doesn’t solve the whole problem. People are still handing over passwords. So, back to catching those spies…

Increasingly third party Twitter applications are not only logging in to pull down information, but they are actively sending tweets from users accounts (including @ messages and Direct Messages) on behalf of, and in the name of, the user. And why wouldn’t they? If a developer can get away with using a bit of a user’s social capital to promote their application, they probably will. Spycatcher is a particular case in point.

From Bad to Worse

The annoying messages it tweets are one thing, “captured this”, “assassinated that”, they can be blocked. However, over the weekend things took a turn for the worse when I started getting private direct messages from the people I follow asking me to join. Now, either my friends have suddenly all switched to the same writing style, or these were automated DMs. I’ll let you take your pick.

Twitter direct messages are my most trusted communications channel, since only people I have chosen to follow can send me messages (oh that my mobile phone was the same), and the messages generate alerts in near-real-time. So, when people start spamming me via that channel I sit up and take notice. There is another reason too. Because URLs that arrive via that channel are usually from a trusted human, I tend to trust the links. I shouldn’t of course, and neither should you. Combined with anti-patter behaviours, it is all too easy to receive a DM with a link and a “Benjamin, use your Twitter ID to check your security here” – you can see where that heads. If I was being dozy, 5 minutes later all of the people who follow me would be getting the same message. Injecting malware, or carrying out phishing attacks it all too easy. People need to realise that the twitter stream is part of their on-line identity, and to guard security credentials well. It was a little while back that Britney Spears and Barack Obama had their login details compromised.

What to learn?

Don’t hand over your user name and password unless you are 100% sure where they are going, and what will be done with them.
Use different passwords for different services. That way any damage should be limited to one service. If your Twitter password is the same as your on-line banking one, fix that quickly!
Change your passwords every so often. Yes, I’m sounding like the moaning IT guy, but this does make a difference to your security.

I expect to see more and more applications using the social capital of their users to promote them – that has been the model on Facebook, and now it’s coming to Twitter. As for Spymaster, I’m not sure if it should be called spam master rather than spymaster (if you want to play please turn off the notifications I hate having to unfollow people). I’m surprised their hasn’t been a bigger backlash against it.

Perhaps it is a sign of the shifting user. We have reached the “sheep throwing” phase of the social networking platfrom life cycle. It’ll take it as a sign of Twitter entering adolesence already.

Replying Via Twitter

Benjamin — Wed, 13 May 2009 11:07:17 +0000

Today’s Twitter rage prompts me to write about @Replies. The habit of putting an “@” symbol in front of a Twitter message, to ‘direct’ it towards another user – has a curious history. They weren’t part of the original design of Twitter, which started as a micro-blogging platform, not an instant messaging system.

As early users posted updates, they sometimes wanted to indicate that a message was directed at a specific user, or a reply to one of another user’s updates. The idea of @username was quickly adopted as the way of doing that. The @ notation has spread to other social media too – I’ve seen @name in blog comments, forums and even emails. Eventually the concept was incorporated into the Twitter system as a feature, and almost every Twitter client has an “@replies” column or a “reply” button.

Recently Twitter changed ‘replies’ to ‘mentions’ – something you can see reflected on the Twitter web interface. For me that was a retrograde step. Replies and mentions are very different, take these two tweets:

@BenjaminEllis I really don’t think that is the best answer.

Just saw @BenjaminEllis and others on BBC News today.

You can find either of them with a Twitter search, but they are semantically quite different, to my mind at least. I’m interested in the second, but probably need to respond to the first.

Yesterday Twitter went a stage further and removed a key piece of the reply functionality, which has caused an outrage on Twitter (see #fixreplies).

You would generally reply to other people, and it is tempting to think of @replies as just one type of message. They aren’t, and not just because of the mentions versus replies issue. If you take the perspective of someone who is following you, or that you follow, there are two big categories of @ reply:

Replies to them.
Replies to others.

Obviously you are going to be interested in replies to you – you’re on Twitter for the conversation, right? However the case of replies to others is a little more complicated, and understanding why reveals one of the most powerful aspects of Twitter.

If you think of your social graph on twitter (the ’star’ of people that you follow, and the ’star’ of people that follow you), together with each of those people’s graphs, you’ll see something startling in the way that conversations happen on Twitter. No-one (unless they follow and are followed by exactly the same people) sees the same conversation. Pardon the crude diagram, but hopefully it helps. Think about the two users at the middle of the stars, and also the two solid dots and circles on the edge for a minute:

Everyone on Twitter sees different things, and conversations swing from people to people. It is a very unique dynamic, and one not really replicated elsewhere. Now, back to @replies. Twitter has traditionally subdivided @replies to others into two types: replies to people that you follow, and @ replies to people that you aren’t following. The reason why becomes apparent when you think about the partially-overlapping social graph each person has (that diagram above).

While it is reasonably obvious that you would want to see @replies to yourself (although you might want to see those in your timeline, or see them seperately), what to do with the others isn’t so obvious.

One argument is that you would want to see all the @ replies of the people you are following. They are part of that person’s conversation after all. This option provides a way to discover other people that you might be interested in following, or finding mutual friends that you didn’t know were on twitter. I’ve had the benefit of both of those experiences, and for me it is part of what makes Twitter a great tool: serendipity is built in.

A second argument is that seeing all of the @replies of the people you follow is going to be far too ‘noisy’ and that the only ones that are meaningful are the @ replies to people that you also follow. This is a nice halfway house, in that you can still follow conversations between your friends (or rather between the different people that you follow), but there are far fewer tweets for you to read, as you don’t get the @replies to others. The downside? Sometimes you only see half of the conversation.

In actuality, you often only see half the conversation anyway. If someone you aren’t following @replies someone that you are following, you wouldn’t normally see that tweet. According to the post on the Twitter Blog the issue of one-sided conversation fragments was their reason for removing a very useful option in Twitter: The @ replies options: Until today, Twitter allowed you to choose which argument you accepted. Via an options setting you could:

See all @replies (ie @replies to you and all @replies sent by people you follow).
See @replies to people that you are following (the second argument above).
See only @replies to yourself.

This allowed a great deal of flexibility, and meant that if you were following a small number of people, you could choose to see all @replies and so gradually find new people to follow. If it all got too noisy, then you could limit what you saw down to the people that you followed, and just join in those conversations. If even that was too much, you could stick to just replies to yourself. A piece of design brilliance – leave the decision in the hands of the user. I’ll come back to that in a minute.

There is a school of thought that @replies are really just a matter between the two users involved, and that allowing people to butt into conversations is somehow wrong. From my perspective I really don’t agree with that. I quite enjoy people butting in from time to time. If the message is that private, then use a Direct Message (“D ” – although with care, one slip of the keyboard by you or the other person and that message is in the public timeline).

The issue of user choice is a tricky one for any product manager or a service designer. If you require users to make too many choices, your offering rapidly becomes hard to use, even confusing. If the choices require expertise that isn’t available to the new user, it is easy for them to get the wrong end of the stick and end up with a poor user experience.

I don’t think the @replies option has been well understood, neither have @replies in general, but I also don’t believe that is a reason to remove it. A simpler tactic (that probably wouldn’t have caused the same level of outrage in the Twitter community) would have been to change the default setting for the @replies option. It’s a neat compromise, since the ‘power users’ can still get to the setting, but those less interested in the technicalities can simply ignore it.

@EV (Twitter CEO) tweeted to say they will reconsider. Hopefully here ends the lesson, for us all. It is interesting to see a user community in action, but may also be an example of where ‘democracy’ and crowd sourcing does and doesn’t fit in with product design. I’ll come back to that one.

He’s a Qik video from a little while ago which explains more, and also shows the options that have been removed:

Creating Valuable Artefacts

Benjamin — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 17:41:04 +0000

Artefacts - things left behind by ancient civilisations. Tangible items that remain, things that you can see and hold, that give a sense of history.

“Create valuable artefacts.”

I’m not sure where the phrase originated, but it is one that has stuck with me for many years. It might have come from a conversation with a developer, in talking about coding methodologies, but the application goes far beyond programming. When you have a discussion, write some code, or hold an event: create valuable artefacts.

Artefacts aren’t just markers, like Stonehenge, pictured above. Valuable artefacts enable others to benefit from your thinking, and build on it. It took three phases and hundreds of people, over hundreds of years, to create Stonehenge. Conversations are transitory and private, confined to a moment in time and a small group of people, but artefacts are persistent and discoverable.

When artefacts express knowledge, it can be transferred to others. For me, books are still the ultimate knowledge artefact. There is something Information, organised, presented and committed on to organic matter.

Books still hold a special place in our society, even in this age of social media and user generated content. Perhaps it is because there is still a high barrier to creating a book. It is traditionally a long process, costly in both time and money, to get something in to print. Or perhaps it is because the format is associated with deep memories, right back to our childhood days. Either way, there is something unique about a book.

Thanks to Blurb, and the London Underground blog, I had the opportunity to publish my own book. For those that don’t know me, I have had lots of articles published (and I’m open to commissions!). I have contributed chapters to books, too. However, the experience of producing my own book was something quite different. Simultaneously daunting and exciting.

Technically, the process was straight forward. Download and install the Blurb software, Mac or PC, then drop in the images and text, and choose a layout. Tweak as necessary, and submit to publish. The difference was the emotional aspect of the production. Owning the creative process from start to finish. Even though my idea was a simple one – make use of my photography, and posts from this blog – it was still a daunting prospect putting it together.

Then, just a couple of weeks later, an unexpected birthday present arrived at the door step (purely by coincidence of timing)…

A book, beautifully bound, with 40 pages of pictures and words, on premium paper. In my hands, or actually in Caalie’s hands in the picture. It was a strange experience, holding a physical object, based on some of the digital media I have produced over the last few years. Then watching others thumb through it too. I don’t normally get to see people digesting my work.

It’s impact is hard to put in words, but it has spawned lots of ideas. I will publish a public book later in the year, since enough people have asked about buying copies of this one, but the technology has other applications too. Blurb opens the option of publishing a book to the masses.

Will everyone become an author? I’m not sure they will. Even if blogging is building the skills for some, not everyone is comfortable with writing ‘in public’ – a fact I’m very aware of when deploying wikis or helping businesses to blog.

One of the things about traditional book publishing is that it is a process – for better or for worse. Pitching an idea, writing a draft, editing and a whole set of other activities. It is a process, and a creative one at that. Having the right process for creating artefacts improves their quality, although care has to be taken not to stifle that creativity.

Much of the work in and around technology companies is a creative process, but people are not always aware of that. Ask staff if they are creative, and they will generally say they aren’t. It’s fun when you are able to evidence that they actually are.

Blurb enables the publication of short-form works, right down to 40 pages or even less, with mixtures of wonderfully printed pictures and words. I’m going to hunt out an opportunity to use Blurb to create a book as a project artefact. Something drawn from the materials of a project team – photos, wiki pages and blog posts – and given to each team member. Something to keep at their desk as a record of what they achieved.

That’s another thing with creating valuable artefacts, they provide physical evidence of your hard labour. Something that is increasingly rare in the information age.

Digital Britain Amplified

Benjamin — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 23:43:23 +0000

Yesterday was a day of three parts, so it seems apt that this post is too. A kind of triage of threes as it were.

Part I – A Digital Dawn

I crawled out of bed in the early hours for an 8am meeting in London, at NESTA’s offices. Lord Carter, Neil Berkett (CEO Virgin Media), Jonathan Kestenbaum (CEO, NESTA) and Peter Bazalgette (Media Expert) discussed the the interim Digital Britain report. Although sometimes refered to as the ”Carter Report”, it was pointed out that this is a report from government, not to government. Digital Britain is its correct title – A fact that makes it all the more important for people to provide their responses.

That title also means everyone expects something (different) from it. A fact that has drawn the report much criticism. The infrastructure providers are a broad community. The content providers are an ever bigger one. Then there are the users, which cover the bulk of the population. One of those “you can’t please all of the people…” situations.

Lord Carter at NESTA - by Benjamin Ellis

New Uses and New Skills

The report cuts across two industries familiar to me: Telecommunications and the Digital Media space. Although mature in some ways, they are also just at the beginning of a new era. Universal broadband, including mobile, and user generated/acquired content are transforming the landscape.

The report discusses both the “pipes and poetry,” as Lord carter put it during his speech. The country’s communications infrastructure (pipes) and the content delivered across it (poetry) are a large industry, especially in light of the rapidly contracting financial industry that used to fuel UK Plc.

The report also talks about digital inclusion; ensuring that people have the skills needed to use this ‘digital’ world proficiently. You can watch a recording of the video stream from the morning on NESTA’s site.

The report doesn’t go into the new generation of applications that are enabling user participation in on-line communities. For me, that is an obvious critical third area. The most exciting thing I heard was Lord Carter suggesting there should be a separate report into Digital Government and participation. There is huge opportunity to innovate in that space. Providing open APIs to government data and turning the new generation of Web 2.0 application developers loose on it. It is also worth checking out the Power of Information Task Force Report too (seeTom Watson’s blog post).

The Digital Britain report itself deserves more explanation than will fit into this post, so I will write a summary over on BusinessTechFeed, since it best lives there.

Digital Lunch

Back to the day. The middle consisted of some intense and stimulating face to face conversations with Nico Macdonald, Farhan and Alan Patrick / @freecloud, followed by Lunch with Lloyd Davis and Alan. It was a very timely introduction to “Beyond the Crisis: Debating the role of innovation“, worth checking out for the resources section, even if you can’t make that event itself. See, I do practice what I blog (One Thing To Get Through Tough Times)!

2. Being Amplified

From Lunch table to night club, as Tiger Tiger provided the afternoon venue for Amplified 09 London. For some it was a little distracting to be working in a night club, but the “booths and tables” arrangement served the open spaces meeting style well.

Toby Moores opened and closed, together with a few words of feedback from myself, Steve Lawson and Eileen Brown at the end of the event (see Eileen’s WordPress post or TechNet). Predictably, I joined the discussions on Broadband Britain.

From behind my screen - Amplified 09 - by Benjamin Ellis

Much of the conversation orbited around the central chicken and egg scenario: if you don’t have universal broadband, there isn’t a platform for content and applications. If there aren’t content and applications, there isn’t a driver for universal broadband. There is the additional layer as well: If users don’t have the skills (or confidence) to make use of the applications, the pipes and the poetry become irrelevant.

It makes for a Gordian Knot that is not easily solved. Joanne Jacobs was keen for action, as were others. I think it is in the area of transferring skills that the Amplified community can help most in building digital britain.

3. Down to (Digital) Business

The day left me with lots of takeaways, although more for business than for Britain. To take advantage of digital tools, a business needs:

The right Infrastructure – pipes must reach all of the participants, all of the time. Bandwidth and universal access are both important.
Content and Platforms to distribute and discover knowledge – staff need to be both producers, ‘capturers’ and consumers of content.
Proficiency – The right tools with the wrong skills won’t deliver results. The new skills are best learnt from modelling and practice, not from books and slides. Build learning experiences.

Just as there are different meeting styles, with their different strengths and weaknesses – from the formal ‘talks and three-questions-at-a-time’ at NESTA, through the open spaces style of Amplified, to casual lunch discussions – there are different digital tools too. Wikis, Blogs, email and IM each have their places in supporting business conversations, community and marketing.

Mixing and matching formats are the key to driving innovation, to identify challenges, and then to crack them. Even that Gordian knot can be hit and split, given the right people with access to sufficient information.

No Related Post

One Thing To Get Through Tough Times

Benjamin — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 03:25:07 +0000

There’s a spate of posts on “things to do to get through the current economic climate“. I have to confess most of them washed past me. It is not that they didn’t have good advice, it is just that it was mostly things that should be done at the best of times too. Likewise, at each business lunch and talk I’ve given recently, the discussion has been about what strategies should be used. How should businesses be marketing or managing differently? Then, three times in a row, the same piece of advice came up: Meet up.

I don’t mean the meetup.com service. I mean meet up for a coffee. Meet up for a lunch. Meet up for a drink. “Benjamin!” you say, “that’s a bit frivolous. Shouldn’t we be working harder, rather than out socialising?” But think about it. Business demand is down in many sectors. That means getting smarter about finding new customers and keeping existing ones. It means ensuring you have a good network in place, should things take a turn for the worse. It is about scarcity, not capacity. The long-term winners will be those with that extra insight that enables them to make smart decisions and avoid mistakes. It won’t be the ones running 10% faster in the wrong direction.

Keep on Meeting

Discussions are great for a business, especially in tough times. Identity your most important customers and meet up with them. Not email. Not a phone call. Arrange to meet for that coffee or drink. At a personal level, think about your most valued friends. Book in some time with them, just to meet up and chat. Find out how they are doing. It’s about protecting valuable relationships, as well as sharing issues and insights.

I’m a massive advocate of social media and technology-mediated communication. I blog, tweet and video my way through the day. Often I’m teaching others to do the same, or I’m building blogs and community sites, networks and communication systems. I love the stuff. However, I value face to face communication more. There are somethings that only face to face communication will provide, and they are things that we need right now.

Something is Missing

When you talk to someone, rather that type to them, you hear a sea of additional information. Technically, it’s called prosody. The inflection, rhythm and tone of their voice change, from “yes, things are ok” to “yes, things are ok”. Did you spot the difference? Of course not. There wasn’t any. But if you heard me say them, you’d be able to tell if business was turning good, or if business was turning bad. Not because I was trying to mislead you by what I was saying, but because words may tell you where things are, but emotions tell you where things are heading. You don’t need to consciously think about interpreting the information coded in the prosody of someone’s speech. You’ve been learning to do it every day since you started listening. It happens unconsciously, but only when you talk.

When you see someone, you see their body language. Their posture and movements tell you even more about what they are thinking and feeling. Are they looking at you, or gazing away? Are they fidgety or still? If you can’t see the person, you loose that information. I’m not talking about advanced body language reading skills, just understanding “how is my relationship?” or “am I spending enough time with them?”

And That’s Not All

I haven’t got to the most important reason for meeting up face to face. Non-verbal communication is great, but there is something else that only happens when you physically go somewhere to meet up. Chance conversations. When I was working in Asian cultures, it took me a while to realise the important conversations were the ones that happened when the formal ones were over. Actually it’s no different anywhere in the world.

While email and phone might be informal compared to the written letters of old, they still aren’t as informal as we like to think they are. We are trained to be efficient on the phone, and conversations are stilted, even in video conferences with the very latest high definition equipment. Our brain knows that valuable bits of communication are missing, and it longs to have the gaps filled in. A conversation, in a relaxed atmosphere, is something unique. We crave it, but too often we deny ourselves the opportunity for it. In difficult times, it is the only way to figure out what is going on. It is the only way to build strong relationships that will protect you and your business. It is the only thing that provides the confidence to get on and get things done. It also surfaces the extra nuggets of information that enable the entrepreneur to succeed. Trust your instincts on this one.

Balancing Online and Offline

There was a peace in the Mail Online today - How using Facebook could raise your risk of cancer. Ordinarily it isn’t something I would rise to citing, but it has been interesting to see the reaction on-line. Dr Aric Sigman, quoted in the article, probably hasn’t made any friends in the on-line world, but I doubt he is bothered about that. Don’t worry, he has written about how TV is killing us too. In case the comments people have added to the piece don’t provide enough entertainment for, you, check out the spoof “Daily Mail says Postal System Causes Cancer“ by the incorrigible Tom Morris. Needless to say, neither represents a systematic research piece!

I’m definitely not reducing the importance or the power of digital communication. The mass media makes much of ‘the battle’ between online (social media and social networking) and offline. While they might appear to be warring for our time – or budget in the case of business – in a healthy set up, they are complementary to each other.

As a business, for almost everything except on-line retail, you want to end up face to face with potential customers. You want potential customers and your sales channel to meet and transact business. For personal relationships, eventually you want to push past the technology and meet the people “in real life”. Social media scales your ability to reach out to new contacts, and preserve existing ones.

One Thing Leads to Another

Vibrant on-line communities lead to face-to-face meet ups. It is almost inevitable, and has been since the earliest digital communications. In the same way, online tools act as a sustaining mechansim for existing relationships, when distance or time limit contact. The best way to build an on-line community? Get people meeting face to face. Want to preserve a time-scarce or geographically dispersed community? Use on-line tools. One of the reasons that social media is such an effective tool for growing business, or your personal social network, is that it acts as an efficient funnel between “the big wide world” of contacts and our intimate circle of relationships. Which takes me back to where I started…

Meet Up

Now is the time to invest time into important relationships. Check in with your most important customers. Look up your friends. How are they doing? Is there anything that you can be doing to support them? “Chill out” away from the day to day hype and get a proper read on what is happening.

Twestival (updated)

Benjamin — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 17:55:53 +0000

It started with a conversation, and is ending in hundreds of events around the world. Tonight I am on BBC ONE talking about Twitter, and hopefully not sounding too much like a geek. I was on the evening news talking about Twitter: Twittering On BBC. People in the UK and all around the world have dedicated much of their daylight time (and midnight oil) into organising what must be one of the largest on-line-to-off-line charity events in recent history. Kudos to Amanda Rose, and to all those who made Twestivals happen around the world. I took a couple of pictures and answered some questions.

Twestival to aims to raise money and awareness for charity: water. It may net more than £1 million pounds before today is out, which is quite something for an on-line community of a tool that wasn’t even heard of a year ago. This is mass collaboration at work, CauseWired style. Thousands of people, amplified by technology, making a difference. A very exciting day. Well done people – with help from Twitter (which just closed its own $35 million round of funding).

As I mentioned in the BBC interview, one of the things I love about twitter is the diversity of the community, “Benjamin Ellis and Grannies.” If you want to read a touching post on that subject, do read Christian Pain’s post (aka @documentally): “My Gran is on Twitter“.

I headed out of London, over to Reading, to join the crowd there and meet some new faces:

Social Decision Making – Shirky JP and Democracy

Benjamin — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 10:29:50 +0000

This is the second post on Clay Shirky’s talk at LSE, looking at some of the same issues raised, but in the context of decision making and crowd sourced wisdom. I hinted at some of my thoughts in the previous post (Mass Collaboration Snow Joke), and JP has also blogged about it, based on Clay Shirky’s talk at the ICA the day after.

In his post JP shares some thoughts about systems for decision making. The ideas are interesting (and have been debated in other contexts). It is worth remembering that government’s influence on our lives goes far beyond spending from the state wallet. Government sets policy and makes laws too. Thinking about recent anti-terror and surveillance legislation, along with proposals in the Digital Britain report, arguably, policy and law affect our lives the most.

It is possible to build an on-line voting system to provide access to every policy decision, but as Clay noted in his talk, the results aren’t always the utopian ideal we would hope for. Controlling policy directly may not be a good thing. It becomes easy for a well organised minority to ‘out-influence’ a quieter, less galvanised majority. To avoid that problem would require compulsory voting, but do you want people forced to vote on issues they don’t care about or that don’t affect them?

The same issues exist for social decision making tools used in an organisational context. While “Voting” has become popular for making some decisions, generally we don’t run companies as democracies. Why not? Because we (or more specifically the business owners) prize expert decision making. Some of the larger companies I have worked with do have town hall meetings. These are loose approximations to the early Greek ideas of democracy, soliciting feedback and dialogue, but they are the exception rather than the rule. Businesses are, at least notionally, meritocracies. People gain authority based on their ability to make good decisions and to use authority well.

Several times in his talk, Shirky made the point that the democratic franchise grew up based on the ideal of one person one vote – actually one man one vote, but that’s another issue. Democracy requires a strong grip on identity. I must be sure of who you are before you vote, in order to enforce one person one vote. However, the voter’s opinion itself is afforded anonymity. I know who you are, but not how you voted. In the UK, more so than in US culture, most people’s voting intention is an intensely private matter, expressed in an intensely private ballot.

The Internet grew up as a very different type of franchise. Via NFSnet and FIDOnet (and communities like The Well) anonymity was accidentally implicit, if not deliberately and explicitly so. The systems had no way of knowing who someone was, in the sense that we would understand identity management. People frequently used synonyms, and even when they used a ‘real name’, verifying they were actually that person was a non-trivial exercise. As a side note, Twitter has been experiencing the same fun and games recently, with people grabbing Twitter accounts and masquerading as celebrities (from Tony Benn to the Dalai Lama).

Back to votes and opinions for a moment. In the on-line world we often know a lot about what someone thinks. There is anonymity of identity, but not of opinion. A mirror to the democratic franchise. Interestingly, from my own work with Wikis and from other academic studies, I have noticed that sites where people can post completely anonymously get significantly more contributions that those that don’t.

So, how can we make companies more democratic, and how can we make government more participative, in the social media sense? The answers come not from technology, but from understanding the nature of democracy itself. The art of an effective democratic system is to defend factions from each other. Tony Benn, articulates it well in this clip from “Big Ideas That Changed The World”, you might not agree with his views, but his argument is an informative one, if you are new to the concepts:

Incidentally, the video is also a good counter to Shirky’s statement that Democracy started in the UK with the Magna Carta, signed just up the road from where I am sitting right now now, in a a field in Runnymede. Democracy has evolved mechanisms to deal with working at scale. I can exchange a little information with a lot of people, or a lot of information with a few people. Information exchange doesn’t scale to both ends at once. Democracy tackles that problem by the use of elected, professional representatives as intermediaries. A vote is a small piece of information from a lot of people. A consultation process is a lot of information exchanged within a smaller group of people. Familiar mechanisms that tackle the problem.

What came before democracy was tribalism, which JP’s post alludes to with the description of the open source community. Projects are often run by a ‘tribal leader’ and rings of followers creating a social structure supporting them (see Dunbar and other anthropological studies). That structure does not work with anonymity of opinions. Visibility of allegiances is required to allow the structure to sustain itself.

Here is an apparent paradox: Anonymity promotes extremes of views, by taking away the moderating effect of social influence. We are compliant creatures by nature, and social pressure pushes us towards moderate, or normative, views. We adapt our views, based on our perception of other people’s views. It is a socially useful behaviour, since it makes it easier to form coherent groups. Johnnie Moore and Mark Earls, author of Herd, gave some great demonstrations of this during their session on social influence at NESTA yesterday, and Mark’s book is probably a good place to study it more.

In designing social decision making systems, one must take account of identity, anonymity and accountability. Systems must also balance the desire to have everyone participate, with the need for informed expert opinion. During the NESTA session, Johnnie Moore made an astute observation about organisational design: business design is about balance the need for efficiency, and the desire for full participation.

These are all thorny issues. In a representational democracy we vote for someone we believe is able to represent us. At least we should. In the workplace this is expressed in the form employee councils and so on. Can we place these things with social software? An old IT/programming adage springs to mind: Don’t mess with something unless you understand why it was that way in the first place. We need to apply new technology, with the benefit of understanding old ideas. Yet another thing to add to the list of important, but non-trivial tasks.

There are usually trade-offs and compromises to be made. No system is perfect. However, experience shows, from systems to products, that it doesn’t take perfection to win. In the early days of Cisco Systems, a group of consulting engineers got in to terrible trouble for having a T-shirt printed that said “Cisco – We suck less”. The positioning goes a little against the grain of modern marketing techniques, but it rings true. As Darwin would have put it, survival of the ones that are the best (least bad) fit for their environment.

Mass Collaboration – Snow Joke

Benjamin — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 03:08:27 +0000

Snow seems to be the theme of the week. My house is buried under the heaviest snow fall seen for 18 years. Inches deep. Now that might be a light dusting where you come from, but around here it is enough to bring the country to a standstill.

But unlike 18 years ago, this time I knew where the snow was falling, in real-time, and exactly what was happening with the trains too. How? Because of the power of mass collaboration. In a twist of fate, those new tools enabled me to embark on my journey to London this evening to listen to Clay Shirky talk about that very subject at LSE.

Clay Shirky delivers a précis of “Here comes everybody“ (now available in paperback: UK|US) in these 5 words: Group action just got easier. The book is something of a reference text for proponents of the power of social networks, and a concept will be familiar to readers of CauseWired.

Clay’s roots go deep back into the early days of the Internet. He has studied and written about them at length. Clay says that there are two things he has learnt from the last 15 years: Fast is different than slow and big is different than small. That might sound obvious, but it is actually profound in understanding these new tools.

“When it comes to networks, you can’t just extrapolate from small and slow to understanding the dynamics of large and fast.” Clay Shirky

Today’s networks, both in terms of telecommunications and social tools, are certainly both large and fast. In conversations I often frame the issue as quantitative change versus qualitative change. Technology that gains traction creates one or both of these. Quantitative changes are simply being able to do what we did before, but faster or larger. Qualitative changes are ones that fundamentally alter what we do or the way in which we do it.

It would seem logical that the linear nature of quantitative changes would make them much easier to predict (small and slow to large and fast), while qualitative changes would be more difficult, because of their disruptive nature. At least that is the commonly received wisdom. My experiences with technology say it doesn’t actually work that way.

People mis-predict technologies and put them into the wrong one of these buckets. Entrepreneurs usually believe they have something that produces a qualitative change, when it is actually a quantitative one. Conversely, many technologies that produce quantitative changes at first go on to affect society in a qualitatively way. The automobile changed how quickly we could get from A to B. Slow to Fast. Quantitative. But in doing so it changed where we could work, then our social circle and, ultimately, how society itself is constructed.

Lots of people view social media and social networking sites as agents of qualitative change. I think that doing so both overstates and understates them. Imagine, for a minute, that mass media had never happened. No radio. No TV. No newspapers. Wouldn’t it be quiet? You’d be able to hear the conversations.

Now, introduce social software. You’d have a nice linear move towards conversations that can take place across the globe rather than across the living room. From conversations with several people to ones that include hundreds. Sound familiar? They might include multimedia objects like photographs and videos too. The latter makes it tempting to compare phenomena like Facebook and Twitter to television or radio. That really isn’t a useful comparison. While they can, and do, turn into broadcast tools, with a single video receiving millions of views, they are misunderstood when viewed in that frame. What we are looking at is a return to a bigger faster version of conversations that were, rather that something that has never been.

Back to professor Shirky: We live in a time where tools like these, that lower the hassle factor of finding one and other and enabling collaboration, are changing the way that society works. Tools that started their life in the technical community have now spread out to touch every aspect of today’s society.

In the last 48 hours alone the BBC had tens of thousands of people sharing pictures and videos of the snow fall in the UK. I’ve watched myself and other Twitter users use the #uksnow tag, followed by the first part of their post code and a rating in messages to created data that produced a real-time view of the snow situation around the UK (thanks to an app built by Ben Marsh).

Another Ben, Ben Smith, has produced uktrains – a twitter feed with the very latest information on what is happening to train services in the disruption (there’s a wiki and a post about both of these on TechCrunch).

It’s all about the Benjamins, as a US rapper once said. Actually, it isn’t. These apps were both free. They might not be perfect – how do people agree on what constitutes a 4/10 rather than a 8/10 snow rating? – but they are more than “good enough” and certainly much better than the nothing that was before.

How much investment would have been required to build systems like this prior to web 2.0 and mass user contributed data? The user contribution of data is a major disruptor for traditional publishers and information services. If people are prepared to do what was once paid a job for free, that changes business models, at the very least.

We are in the midst of massive value destruction. Somewhere value creation is going on, but we haven’t quite found out where yet. On-line bulletin boards launched in the 1980’s, so the papers have had 20 years to get ready. While the world has changed around them, they have remained static. ”This isn’t the transition from business model a to model b,” said Clay, “it is the transition from business a to business models b-z.” While a paper might report that X has happened, social media says X has happened, and this is what you can go and do about it.

Clay cited the example of the MySociety campaign, via a Facebook group, that saw Parliament reverse its attempt to conceal MP’s expenses. He also recounted the counter example of President Obama’s change.gov website. Within a short time after its launch, legalising Marijuana (for medical uses) was voted as the top public policy question facing America. As Clay notes, perhaps it ought to be a little lower down the list with matters like two wars and some collapsing banks that have to be dealt with – although I wonder if there might be some correlation there.

Clearly mass collaboration isn’t going to solve every problem. For the first time in public, Clay said, “I don’t think the technology is ready for the mass legitimisation of initiatives… …There need to be checks and balances applied”. That is a big, and wise, shift from his previously utopian view of what could be achieved. I’ve posted about crowds not providing the wisest answer for every situation before. When we think about the idea of direct access into the political process, we might want to think carefully about what exactly we are wishing for. The tools are fantastic for gathering feedback and generating content, but decision making requires a degree of sophistication that the tools do not provide, yet.

The problem now is not technical capability, it is legitimacy. Under what circumstances do you take the advice from user generated media and when do you ignore it? On-line we can’t do “one person one vote” – the basis of the democratic franchise – so we can’t legitimise it.

The problem is one for business leaders too. The answer may end up coming from government. What (now President) Obama started on the campaign trail, he will have to continue into the Whitehouse. Having opened the door to mass collaboration, that crowd is still looking over his shoulder and will not accept being shut out. Once you build a community, it doesn’t conveniently go away when you no longer have a need for it, it has a life of its own (something to note for businesses that just dabble in social media).

This will be a new and interesting phase for the tools of mass collaboration. ”It is not just about politics, it is about government, and they are subtly different things,” observes Shirky.

FOAF – Building Networks With a Friend of a Friend

Benjamin — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 21:41:42 +0000

FOAF? What’s it all about then? Technology is terrible for having interesting things buried in acronyms or abbreviations. FOAF is one of those gems and I’ve been intending to write about it for a long while. Thank you to Dave Terrar (and weaverluke) for the nudge.

These days we are all a bit social on-line. We have always been social creatures, but now we have technology to help us manage those connections, from well-known sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Digg, to photo sharing sites like Flickr , even virtual world applications such as Second Life.

Computer technology means we can start to map out the relationships an individual has. Certainly we could have done this in the past with paper and pen, but applications like Twitter, Linked-In and Facebook mean that a vast swathe of the population are now submitting details of their relationships into databases, where they can be graphed and modelled by computer. This idea of a social graph – a map of relationships that individuals have with each other – has applications in both business and consumer marketing.

In the early days of the Internet it was joked that “on The Internet nobody knows you are a dog”. However, on today’s Internet we do know who you are, what you do, and the relationships that you have. Depending on your privacy settings, this information is available to a narrower or broader set of people – but it is, nonetheless, available.

One of the most interesting things about making a graph of the relationships is looking at the connections of our connections. Taking an obvious example: I know a few people, those people know other people. With a social graph (or with social media applications) I can see that two of my friends don’t know each other, but they do know a third mutual acquaintance. That creates new ways of introducing people to each other, and strengthening relationships with mutual contacts (see the Dunbar’s Number – Groups, Language and Social Media post with reference to tribes and clans in this context).

In some ways there’s nothing new there. Social people have been doing this sort of thing for millenia, but what is new is that people can use computer technology to identify friends or contacts that might be relevant with information that might previously have been missed or unnoticed. I have two friends who live at the opposite ends of the country, who I’ve never seen at the same time, and I assumed never knew each other. It wasn’t until Facebook came on the scene that I realised they went to the same school as children. A detail that might not (and in fact did not) come up in years of conversation.

This idea is codified in the concept of friends of a friend or “FOAF“. It was an early attempt to capture a person’s social graph and publish it on the web. The idea is that I could embed a list people that I know on my web site, so that you can see who you know too – that way you can see if you are a friend of a friend. One hop away on the social graph. By identifying those mutual contacts it provides a way for us to come to know each other. That is the concept that business social networking site LinkedIn is based upon.

So how does FOAF work? It uses something called RDF – Resource Description Framework – to express metadata, that is information about information. In the case of FOAF that is information about people and their interests, relationships and actitivites.

FOAF uses RDF to express metadata about people, and their interests, relationships and activities. Founded by Dan Brickley and Libby Miller, FOAF is an open community-lead initiative which is tackling head-on the wider Semantic Web goal of creating a machine processable web of data.

Semantic web overlays data about data on the Internet so that computers can make sense of it. Because FOAF information is machine readable, computer applications can read it and process it to present information or bring things to our attention. So a very simple and idealistic view might be you come to my website or my page on Facebook and the web brouser automatically picks up that FOAF information and is able to notifiy you that there are some people we know in common. The idea is to build that information into all sorts of web pages so that many applications become, as it were, social or at least socially aware.

So FOAF, in the technical sense, is a very simple text structure, based on an XML format, which is machine and human readable – although not too pretty for a human. It is very easy to write applications to use it. A FOAF entry might include information such as my name, gender, title, what my preferred nickname is, separate out my family name, point to my home page or my blog, and include similar information for my contacts. It is a very simple piece of data, but we can add details about the nature of the relationships. It isn’t as complex as it probably sounds, it is flat text, which might look a bit like this:


   Benjamin Ellis
   Male
   Mr
   Benjamin
   Ellis
   jamin
   ...(inverse functional property)...
   
   
   
   
   
       
         Joe Blogs

What does all this technology do? It give us opportunities to introduce people to other people, or to find people via mutual contacts. It might be computer-based, but the end goal is human to human social interaction. The power of my social graph, the map of my relationships, is not just in the releationsips I have, but also in that friend of a friend information – The relationships my contacts have, and they or I might have as a result of them.

People’s social graphs are exceptionally complicated. The FOAF proposal is a long way from providing even the beginnings of being able to express the relationships we have. I’ve played in a band with someone across the street, who baby sits for us on occasion. Are they my neighbour? A fellow musician? My baby sitter? Computers struggle with such vagaries, some people thrive on them. A social graph is not a simple star with me in the middle and people around the outside. It is actually a complex mixture of more and less connected individuals.

In using social networking platforms for marketing, agencies often seek out the person with the most ‘connections’ or ‘friends’. That is an error. Who is going to be more effective in propagating a message – someone with 350 contacts, or someone with 20? It depends as much on the second and third degrees of their social graph (ie out to the friend of a friend level) as on the direct contacts in the first.

One person might know 100 contacts, another might know 10. For the person who knows 100 contacts each of those people might know 100 or they might know a 1,000. Some of them may be very well connected , some may have a few tightly formed relationships, that are heavily meshed – where all their contacts and mutual friends are related. Others may be outliers, or bridgers as I like to call them, sitting across different communities. They might only have a few relationships. but they bridge between large communities.

Social software, even in its current form, is effective in the ‘discovery’ phase of relationships. One of the reasons that Twitter is so popular with many is that it makes it easy to find new people, based on their interests or experience, and start exchanges with them. Browsers like Flock aim to integrate the social and data aspects of web surfing. The area certainly has a lot of potential, for example knowing that a web site is written by a friend of a trusted friend might have me interpret the information as more trusted than that of a total stranger (for better or for worse). There are applications that generate FOAF from your Facebook page , Firefox includes a built in FOAF browser.

FOAF also has the potential to act as a format for porting our social graphs from one social networking platform to another (as long as the platforms stop banning people for running export scripts). A number of platforms (at last a dozen at last count) already allow exporting data as FOAF information. The approach might also be useful in the Enterprise 2.0 context, where social graphs might need to be used across applications.

All of this is, of course, still in a nascent stage. Be it FOAF, or a functionally equivalent standard, we will be seeing a lot more activity around the portability and interpretation of social graph data in the coming year. In the mean time, don’t forget that it is all about connecting with people!

Networks and Notworks

Benjamin — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 23:05:15 +0000

How about a taxonomy of social media platforms? In helping people understand the different social networking tools I’ve found it helpful to build a taxonomy of the components around social software. This is one way of viewing things, there are others that are equally valid, but for my purposes I was after something simple and functional.

This post is based on the talk I gave at Media Camp London 2 last month, with thanks to alex4d who diligently took notes and live tweeted the session. It was useful to see how someone else interpreted what I said. As an aside, in one of those “small world” incidences, Alex and I had worked at the same radio station back in the 80’s, although not at the same time.

It is a three layer model. Imagine a slice of a pie, with you on the outside, and digital media in the middle. Taking things one at a time:

The Media In Social Media

By media I mean media as in digital content, rather than “The Media” as in the press – the joys of overloaded words in English and the confusion they cause. Social tools use digital media based on the modalities of our senses. Today’s tools are built around the audio or visual modalities (or in the case of most video services, both). So far we are thankfully spared tools based around touch, taste and smell, but who knows what is around the corner!

I like the ideal of “VITAL”, which I first came across via Kosso, of Phreadz fame. VITAL stands for Video, Image, Text, Audio, and Links. I like it mostly because it is a memorable acronym, and is a good reminder that some tools might simply point to the media (with a hyperlink reference). Media deserves more discussion, but I’ll save that for the next post.

Social Tools

The biggest difference between platforms is not the media that they support, it is actually the tool they apply to the media. The predominant functionality of a social networking platform is in how it causes users to interact – that’s why it is called “social” after all. Social media platforms cause people to interact around digital media objects, by distributing them and allowing users to annotate them in different ways. Again, a fuller explanation is for a future post, but remember that the tools that the platform provides are a key differentiator. Specific tools drive behaviours and attract different types of users.

The Community

One of the most frequently overlooked, but obvious, differences between platforms is their communities. Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube et al all have their unique community. Individuals may belong to multiple communities, but it is almost impossible for two different platforms to have identical communities. Even if they did, the communities would still have distinct feels, based on how the tools cause people to interact. There is a further dimension to the issue of community. In the early days, a platform might only have a single “community”, but as they grow the reality is that the community fragments into multiple communities on the one platform. That is actually a good thing (see Dunbar’s Number and social media for more background), and these different communities aren’t completely separate.

Understanding the interaction between the community and the tool is essential to understanding how platforms evolve. A great tool with a poor community is unlikely to survive, while a mediocre tool with a great community can get off the ground – proof that, given sufficient thrust, pigs can indeed fly, on the Internet at least.

So, next time you are trying to understand the difference between two social networking platforms, try breaking it down into these layers:

Media – What sort of medium is it based around? Is it direct, or link based. Text or Image?
Tool – How does it operate on the media, and how does it enable users to interact?
Community – what is the user base, or are their different subsets of users? Who are they?

In answering these questions, you will be able to build a picture of what differentiates the platform, and what use it might be best suited to.

Pitching A Business – TechCrunchTalk

Benjamin — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 16:50:07 +0000

This week’s TechCrunch event was a rare treat: 8 European startups pitching. TechCruncheMike Butcher gave the start ups 90 seconds to pitch their business. The ‘Tech Factor’ panel then responded to the pitch – in very civilised way. Finally the pitcher had 10 seconds to even the score… Erm… I mean clarify their pitch. I love preparing pitches and I love watching them even more, given that some of the companies had had some coaching, I was itching to listen.

The Pitchers

You can see the pitch videos in all their glory here on TechCrunch (and my photos of NewsPepper / TechFluff.tv’s Hermoine Way filming them here). I’m not going to say much about the companies themselves, watch the pitches or visit their websites if you want to know more :- BookingBug, CardCode, Jupidi Date-Coach, Rendezviewonline, Socialibrium, Soundcloud, Quick.tv and Worldeka - a very broad range of company types!

Here are my thoughts on giving effective pitches, based on watching the companies in action (interesting to compare with The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Pitchers from last time).

Tackle The Obvious

In any situation there will be some obvious questions. Make sure that you head these questions off by answering them or neutralising them (by making them irrelevant). The best way to find out what these questions are is understanding the interests of you audience, ideally by sounding out some friendly advisors who have a similar perspective. If you are pitching your business to an investor, they’ll want to know how your business is going to make money and increase in value. Pre-empt any objections you are likely to encounter, and handle them up front, and positively!

Win The Audience

In a 90 second pitches there isn’t enough time to convince your audience what a wonderful person you are. Actually, people do a worse job of this given more time. Win the audience over by proxy: Get a laugh or get to you will make my life better. If you can do that, you’re likely to seen as a good egg, even though we’ve don’t actually know you. Make sure we can see the benefit (to us). Soundcloud used a recorded testimonial from Hammer (aka MC Hammer) to kick off, which won the crowd’s attention. There was more social referencing, in listing the company’s big name investors. Nick Bell, from Quick.tv , used a shock joke to very good effect and won the audience with laughter – Nick went on to win the evening’s voting.

Get The Good Stuff in – Early

CardCode got the biggest reaction and cheer for something that wasn’t in their 90 second main pitch: that they had built a QR code reader for the iPhone. It only came out during the Q&A. In a real-world elevator pitch, you don’t know when you are going to run out of time, so don’t leave your most compelling benefits until the end or for next time. If you do, their might not be a next time. Be sure you understand what people are most likely to get excited about, and get it in early.

Be Conversational – Not Corporate

By conversational I mean two way communication, look at how your audience is reacting. Frame things in a way that engages people as individuals (avoid this list of phrases as a minimum: most annoying business speak phrases in the UK). Watching the crowd’s face during Socialibrium’s pitch was telling. The sizzle and the human element was missing. Jupidi’s Date-Coach pitch was very human, perhaps overly so! It got laughs and silence (intense listening!). Both apps were people-centric, but only Jupidi told the story from a human perspective. Socialibrium spoke from a business/corporate angle. Whatever your product or service, always talk about it’s emotional impact. You’ll get listened to more.

Where Were We? Oh… Don’t Get Side Tracked

You only have a short time, be polite, but don’t beat about the bush. This isn’t the time to get distracted or fall down a rat whole. Mike gave (most of) the speakers a “30-seconds to go” prompt. Each speaker dealt with that differently – some were quite distracted by it. Don’t be put off by time running out or by interruptions. Use your time as best you can. If you have 90 seconds and you spend 5 seconds of it lost in commentary about somethingelse, then that’s 5% of your time wasted. Whenever you are presenting, don’t make interuptions any bigger than they need to be. Deal with them if they need dealing with, but then get straight back on track.

Be Concise – Keep It Simple

An elevator pitch isn’t the time to be wordy or elaborate a complex idea. You might feel compelled to talk about the unique object-oriented approach to PHP coding that you used to build your app, but do I really need to know about that to get why your product or service is compelling? If I do, then you better go back and redesign it, because your heading towards a sales and marketing fail. Most struggling start ups I have encountered were held back because they didn’t have a good, solid elevator pitch. It usually took several hours to figure out what it was that they did and why it was beneficial enough to purchase or invest in. That isn’t a receipe for business success.

Last, but not least…

Have a compelling call to action at the end of your pitch. What’s next? A trial? A cash investment? Tell friends about the company?

Not a bad set of pitches, but I’m sure each of the companies will walk away with lessons to be learnt. Nick Bell of Quick.tv had the added benefit of walking away with a nice bottle as a prize!

Dunbar’s Number – Groups, Language and Social Media

Benjamin — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 11:04:52 +0000

The Dunbar number regularly gets bandied around in social media circles, and for good reason. However, it is usually misunderstood.

In today’s hyper-connected world, where technology lets us have hundreds (if not thousands) of ‘friends’, people are increasingly interested in understanding what the human limits on maintaining human friendships might be, and why.

Real world relationships have been studied by psychologists, sociologists and host of other ‘-ists’ for decades. However, Dunbar, who works in the area of behavioural brain science, has emerged as one of the most frequently quoted figures, in the blogosphere at least.

Where did Dunbar’s Number come from?

One of Dunbar’s papers, published in 1993, wonderfully titled “The Co-evolution of Neocortex Size, Brain Size and Language in Humans” is cited for something commonly referred to as Dunbar’s number. Shock number one: There isn’t really any such thing as Dunbar’s number, in the sense that people normally refer to it.

The common mythology is that Dunbar said that people can only sustain a network of 150 contacts. Strictly speaking that is not what Dunbar’s paper said. Think of humans as brains on legs for a minute, and put your evolutionary psychology hat on. Dundar argued that, in evolutionary terms, there may be an upper group size that animals can and will live in, determined by cognitive constraints – specifically the processing capacity of the neocortex - and selected for based on various environmental constraints.

Effectively, from an individual animal’s point of view, the neocortex size sets a limit on the number of relationships that can be maintained. That in turn limits the maximum group size for the community that individual lives within, assuming they have the same constraints. At a simple level, if a species is made up of individuals that can only sustain 10 relationships, we might expect to see groups of 10 wandering around. If another member attempts to join the group, the individuals don’t have the capacity to support that extra relationship, and the member wouldn’t be accepted, or the group would fail.

The neocortex size is driven by all sorts of ecological factors that select for group size, but we could potentially use that relationship the other way round to predict group sizes, based on the neocortex. Take one group with a known group size and look at the size of its neocortex. Work out a ratio, then take another species and look at the size of its neocortex and use that ratio to predict how many individuals it would be able to support.

Would the Real Dunbar’s Number Please Step Forward

Dunbar took existing data from a number of primate studies, where typical group sizes can be observed. He then looked at the neocortex size for those primates and projected forwards to the larger human neocortex. His calculations predicted that human group sizes would typically be around 147.8. It should also be noted that Dunbar worked with average group sizes, not maximum sizes.

Now, the maths is much more complex than this summary indicates, but I’ll spare you the detail. Even so, the statisticians out there are probably gagging on their most recent meal at this point. Hang on in there. Some statistical juggling means that confidence limits around this number can be calculated, which ends up giving a range being between 100 to 231, hence my earlier comment about Dunbar’s number not really existing in the way most people expect. Think of it as a range of typical group size, rather than a number limit. Dunbar’s work has been criticised and supported. However, it is interesting to note that his suggested number does seem to match with studies of human group size from other disciplines. I commonly read both military and business books that suggest a number in this range as the typical or maximum size for a group.

Speaking of Language

There is an interesting aside here. Dunbar and others argue that social grooming is important for maintaining relationships, and for sustaining the coalitions that facilitate large group structures. While apes might spend their time picking insects out of each other’s fur, we waggle our tongues and use our voice boxes. Evolutionary psychologists often argue that we evolved language as a very efficient form of social grooming. Well, half of them would. The other half would argue something more along the lines that our brains got so big and heavy we had to do something useful with them, and language turns out to be a rather beneficial thing to have.

Think of it this way: If a large group of apes is only able to be large because they spent their entire time picking nits out of each other’s fur, it won’t be a large group for very long. While they have the advantage of being able to defend themselves and pool resources, they don’t have any time left for finding food. They will be an extinct bunch of apes in very short order.

One of the factors that gives us large group structures is our ability to use language in communication. Language is much more efficient than picking nits out of fur. I can deal with more than one person at once, for a start. That means we can be more efficient about maintaining relationships, using quick bursts of language, rather than all of the time being taken up with social grooming. Personally I find that a great relief. I love communicating with you, but I’d rather not have you dealing with my parasites!

A simpler summary would be that available time, combined with efficiency, determines the number of relationships that can be supported. Language enables us to be more efficient with our time. That in turn enables us to build a larger social world, and still have time to do other things.

Does Social Media Make Us More Social?

One of the (many) aspects of social media of that fascinates me is this: Can it enable us to be more efficient and effective in maintaining relationships? Can computer-based tools enable our brain to cope with more than it would be able to otherwise? If so, that has social ramifications, as well as organisational design ones.

So, if Dunbar’s number (or one of the equivalents from Anthropological studies) is so small, how do we end up with significantly larger groups, like 1,000+ person companies? It comes down to rings of friendships. Think of bands of 30-50, then clans of 100-200, and above that tribal groups of between 500 and 3000. Imagine that I have 30-50 relationships, and those individuals have partially overlapping relationships with others. You can now imagine an inner group and an outer group, with cohesion maintained by those individuals holding relationships across the different bands and within bands.

The way that large groups work is significantly more complex than suggested here so far. Dunbar and others argue for these layers or rings of friendships, with different strengths at each layer. This layered structure enables sustainable group dynamics. The coalitions mentioned earlier are important, since these stronger relationships provide the individual with others to protect them from potential hostility from members of the larger group, by individuals with relationships to both parties.

Bands and clans interact in a way that protects individuals and sustains tribes and population, and reflect different types and strengths of relationship. One of the challenges of today’s social media is that it doesn’t model this subtlety and complexity. Psychologists are still trying to understand the diverse nature of human relationships, and the complex properties that they have.

The Future is Still Social

It may be many years before social media catches up with even today’s understanding, and by then that understanding may have moved on – potentially due to social media itself. Social networking tools let us understand how we maintain relationships, by giving us greater visibility into how people interact, but they also potentially change the way that we do these things, a kind of social version of the schrodinger’s cat problem.

There are still going to be psychological limits on how many relationships we can maintain, whether we fundamentally change them or not. Perhaps technology enables us to have a feeling of maintaining more relationships, or it deepens relationships that have been weakened by our modern life styles. At a more human level, it is raising the question of what we mean by ’friend‘. It is certainly making qualitative changes to what we know about those around us, and our ability to discover new people to communicate with.

Maybe you’ve worked out your own personal Dunbar number, or found ways of recreating those different circles of friendship with social media? Do you see tribes and bands in action on-line?

Social Media – Do Conversations Scale?

Benjamin — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 22:21:41 +0000

I should start by explaining how I come at this problem space. By history I am a network guy. I spent most of the 90’s thinking about networks, breaking networks, building networks and alternating between creating the mess and clearing it up as the Internet grew. More recently I’ve buried myself in the human aspects of technology, leading in businesses and studying psychology. My primary interest is in perceptual psychology – how we interact with the world and how that affects cognitive functions like communication.

Social media smashes all of these worlds together in a wonderful way. It can be challenging at times, as most of the people I interact with come from that funny bit in-between the two worlds: the applications. This post draws on a talk I gave at Social Media Camp London, under the tongue-in-cheek title “six-degrees-of-separation-now-3″ – It is also a clarification of the Twitter exchange between myself @timoreilly and @monkchips and subsequent RedMonk Post: “Asymetrical Follow: A Core Web 2.0 Pattern“. Just for good measure, it also includes some thoughts from the film US Now, which I had the chance to see at the RSA this week:

I’m not going to touch on the eGov issues raised in Us Now – that’s a whole other post. I do want to share some thoughts on the way that relationships and communication are modeled in social software, and the blending of “conversational” mediums and broadcast ones.

First, let’s clarify some terms about “relationships” in social media / social software. I’m blogging, you are reading. Great. A blog with no comments is something I used to call a narrowcast model – a bit like TV (broadcast), but with less viewers. Information goes to a select bunch of subscribers. Twitter and a number of other social platforms codify this reader-driver subscription model as “following”. You follow people on twitter, or follow a blog via RSS, which means you choose to receive communication from that person.

In other platforms this type of relationship is referred to as being a ‘fan’. Whilst that term has a lot of baggage, it expresses a specific social communication desire nicely: Let’s say someone is a fan of Stephen Fry (in the traditional sense). They probably want to read all about Stephen Fry’s exploits, see photos, read stories, you get the idea. However, I’m guessing that they would be a little weirded out if Stephen Fry started asking for photos of them, etc…, etc… OK, there’s a whole bunch of issues in there, but just hold this one thought: We have a construct of a ‘fan’ relationship in society, built from the prevalence of broadcast media. It is an asymmetric relationship. Broadcast, like narrowcast, means I consume, but I can not (easily) respond. I listen, but I don’t speak. Or framed differently, you can send to me, but not receive from me. For better or for worse, it is asymmetric.

The standard relationship model in Facebook, Instant messaging systems, and pretty much every collaboration tool out there is that of a ‘friend’. I follow you and you follow me. It is a mutual agreement for bi-directional communication, a symmetric relationship. A ‘friendship’, in social media terms at least, is a mutual ‘follow’. Friends can have conversations – two way communication – in a way that fans (and broadcasters) can not. Facebook introduced fan pages to deal with ‘fans’, and create an asymmetric model. In blogs, the fan model is inherent. Unless you choose to comment on this post, I know nothing about you, aside from some aggregated behavioural data.

OK. Fans. Followers. Friends. Symmetric. Asymmetric. Broadcast. Conversation. A useful vocabulary, even if some of the terms are loaded, and you can walk around sounding like a social media ‘expert’. Let me just say something here:

Broadcast is good!

There, I said it. Depending on your background, you’ll have either shrugged your shoulders, nodded in agreement or screamed at me and immediately unfollowed me on Twitter. The wonderful thing about language: Words are more than words. They have complex mappings on to all sorts of meanings and memories in our minds. Some of those meanings are shared, and some are not. Let’s unpick ‘broadcast’.

If you want to get lots of (hopefully important) data to lots of people, then broadcast is the most efficient way of doing it. That’s why networks – from Television to computing – use broadcast. It is good and efficient. It is also one of the reasons marketers have traditionally loved broadcast. However, broadcast carries an association with asymmetric communication. Shouting as some would have it. If you have read the clue train manifesto (and you should), you’ll know that it’s all about the Conversation, not about shouting or broadcast. The difference comes in the listening – communication with symmetry.

Broadcast is bad?

So, in social media, throwing the ‘B’ word around is bad. For me, it is still just a technical term, and a very efficient form of communication. Anyway, with that, now on to that twitter exchange:

monkchips: symmetrical Follow is a core pattern in social networking, so much so it can cause Scaling Problems for networks not designed for it

timoreilly: RT @monkchips: Asymmetrical Follow is a core pattern in social networking; it can cause Scaling Problems for networks not designed

bmje: @timoreilly @monkchips Asymmetric follow is a hack in social software to enable ‘relationships’ to scale. It is broadcast, not conversation”

timoreilly: @bmje Not so. I follow 400; am followed by 16,000. But I respond to lots of people (like you) who I didn’t know before. Not just broadcast.”

bmje: @timoreilly the wonderful power off twitter and good people – its asymmetry is only partial, due to the power of @’s

A side note, James cites my quote saying:

There are those that would would say their is something “wrong” with Asymmetrical Follow, which I would argue is just a function of the power laws you see in any community. For example, yesterday Benjamin Ellis…

I definitely don’t think I said it was wrong – quite the opposite. It’s a very useful hack for enabling conversations to scale. I’m guessing that Tim also missed what I meant, since his tweet reads like he thought I was accusing him of the ultimate social media sin – “broadcasting” – see above – and having briefly met Tim, it isn’t the answer I’d have expected from him. Of course I could be wrong. The joys of theory of mind and the limitation of 140 characters. On the contrary, Tim is a very active listener. Asymmetric follow is a way of allowing a form of broadcast, and thus allowing scaling, but all is not what it seems.

The conversation demonstrates something quite different. It shows an unusual property of the Twitter platform:- its ‘follow’ function is not really asymmetric. Tim responded to my message, but Tim isn’t ‘following’ me on twitter – which is fine by the way – although I’m sure I’d be happy if he did, I doubt he’d find me very interesting though!

So, how did Tim get my message if he wasn’t following me? Here’s the magic: If you are on Twitter, anyone can ‘@’ you – essentially directing a message towards you, even if you aren’t following them. It is actually quite a complicated hack and in the great traditions of a good hack, you can fiddle with the settings - see this post on the twitter blog - what people see depends on how they have set up Twitter and what client they use to read messages. This partial symmetry is one of the things that causes Twitter to work so well, and it gets around one of the issues that stops conversations from scaling. Twitter has cracked the broadcast problem with a clever filter.

The Broadcast Problem.

That broadcast stuff. I said it was efficient, but that isn’t the whole picture though. Back in the early 90’s I was responsible for looking after a particularly large computer network. Over the course of a month or two, something strange started to happen. The computers got slower. And slower. And slower. It was a mystery. We hadn’t changed the applications on the computers, or done anything else we thought might slow them down.

After digging around, we found the problem. Some of the applications on the network had started to use broadcast messages rather than the usual unicast (directed) messages. This reduced the traffic on the network, since each message was only sent once, rather than individually to each machine. Very efficient. However, because it was broadcast, EVERY machine on the network had to listen to all of those messages to work out if they were relevant or not. That took a reasonable chunk of their processing power. One machine sent a message, several hundred had to receive it. A little bit of processing power consumed a lot of everyone else’s. Now that is asymmetric.

Conversations Don’t Scale (well).

Imagine if everyone you knew sent you every communication they wrote during the course of their day. Your inbox might feel like that sometimes, but it is nothing compared to what it would actually be like. Now imagine that you had to reply to every single one of those messages. I don’t know about you, but I’d break out into a sweat just thinking about it. Imagine if every viewer of a TV program wrote in with a question. Hang on a minute. You don’t have to wait, it already happened “Strictly Message Board: What Happened”. The result: communication melt down. And that wasn’t even with everyone writing in.

Conversations are tricky things. Huge chunks of our brains are dedicated to making conversations work. I’m not even talking about understanding the conversation, just the sequencing of it. Conversations involve “turn-taking“. Turn-taking is one of the basic mechanisms that enables conversations. Try talking to someone and listening to them at the same time. Oh, you know someone like that already? OK. More seriously, I hope you see the issue, our brains aren’t wired that way.

Now, think about a group conversation. That turn-taking is still going on, just like an old mainframe computer switching between multiple tasks, the listening is divided between the group members. Now think about that group getting bigger. What happens to the amount of listening time? Well, the available listening time stays the same, but the number of people who want to talk grows. Everyone has to make do with a smaller slice of the pie. Conversations don’t scale. Really. Unless some of those new members are just listeners, but then we are back to broadcast.

You’re still reading? Deepest respect! Let me stitch some of these threads back together then. Do you remember “Us Now?” – scroll back to the beginning and watch at least the first few seconds if you missed it.

“More people can say more things to more people than ever in history,” Clay Shirky.

I’d not dispute that, but we must remember that it doesn’t extrapolate to everyone can say everything to everyone. Let’s not kill ourselves trying. Technology has cracked the problem of enabling someone to say something to (almost) everyone. However, we are tired of TV and of broadcast marketing.

Now, technology must find a way for everyone to say something to someone, without breaking that ’someone’ in the process – be they a politician in government, a genius CEO, or an ever so slightly eclectic techno-psychologist. That requires some very clever filtering.

Has social media cracked the problem? I’d say not yet, but I will exit stage left with this thought from Erica Grigg, of Carbon Outreach, who said this to me (via twitter of course):

carbonoutreach: @bmje maybe social media does goodness to scale!?

That it does.

We Are Amplified

Benjamin — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 00:27:57 +0000

Guitars, historically, weren’t a loud instrument. To become the loud things we know today they had to be plugged in to amplification. Cunning bits of electronic wizardry that took a tiny signal and made it much much larger. An amplified guitar is definitely heard!

These days we (at least those of us reading this) are plugged in. We are heard. Our voices are carried by The Internet to countries and continents we may never have visited, and may never visit. Nevertheless, we are carried there. Our parent’s parent’s generation communicated face-to-face. Our generation, and the ones that follow, communicate via technology. We are amplified.

I take a photo. I title it. Tag it. Post it. People comment on it. People add their own tags. People I have never met add to the signal. You write. I read. I write. Others write too. Amplification has unexpected effects, and unintended consequences.

Through this blog I met – in the on-line sense – a gentleman by the name of Galba Bright. Bright by name and bright by nature, he encouraged me to blog more and to think more. You’ll find his comments on many of the early posts here. I learnt about his interest in emotional intelligence and his amazingly positive outlook on life, as he blogged from his office on the other side of the world in Jamaica. Via his blog posts, his comments on my blog, my comments on his, and then conversations via Skype, I got to know Galba Bright.

Then one day he didn’t post. His comments didn’t come. Together with other bloggers in our network, I heard from his family that Galba had passed away, whilst working in that office. Whilst my sense of loss can not compare to that of Galba’s family, his parting left a gap. I never got to meet Galba face-to-face, but I suspect that we would have done eventually, one way or another – he had worked in England earlier in his life. On-line relationships eventually manifest themselves in the real world, and real world connections still create the most powerful bond. We want to meet those we have got to know, face to face, without the machinery in the middle.

Galba’s blog is gone now – the domain wasn’t renewed and a squatter has seized the opportunity to hijack it and fill it with a page full of ads. But his comments here and on other blogs remain. His Linkedin profile is still there, as is his entry on Facebook. Galba was an exceptionally intelligent and immensely encouraging person. He was amplified via the Internet. Galba may not be here anymore, but his words are still read by thousands of people around the world everyday. He might have been on the other side of the world, but our common interest, and the Internet, enabled us to find each other and to learn.

We are all amplified. We will leave a digital legacy behind us that will be larger than any previous generation. Our tiny signals are turned into larger ones. But we aren’t alone on the stage. We have fellow musicians plugging in too. Communities are forming in different ways, around different themes. The Tuttle Club is a community that I enjoy immensely. The London Flickr group enthused me to take photography more seriously. Wiki Wednesdays give me the opportunity to learn from other practitioners, likewise events like WordCamp, MediaCamp, Social Media Camp and CloudCamp.

This evening saw over 100 people from many of those networks gather together at Amplified08, meeting face to face to exchange ideas. Taking on-line off-line and building a network of networks, which is exactly what the Internet was and is. The event was streamed on the net, it generated 5 7 pages of twitter messages (and growing), and there will be megabytes of photographs and blog posts too I am sure. All this from a meeting at the little dot on the map that is London, England.

We are amplified. We are connected. Whilst this new media will not buy us immortality, it extends our influence beyond traditional physical constraints. It creates digital echos that last long after the moment, and perhaps long after us. In previous centuries we might have influenced several hundred people over the course of our lifetime. In today’s generation, we might influence millions. What will your signal be?

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Going Hyper-Local – Location Based Internet

Benjamin — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 16:33:35 +0000

Over the last year I’ve been playing with a number of location based services. I should explain my fascination, since it is even stranger than you think. Way back when I first encountered communications networks I was gripped by the way they enabled me to reach across geographies. Suddenly I could speak with people all around the world. This was in the days when international phone calls were the reserve of the few, and even speaking to people ‘all around the UK’ was prohibitively expensive. The Internet was a global thing, transcending governments and breaking down national boundaries – and all the challenges that came with that.

New Services

Skip forward three decades and things are evolving in a different direction. Services like Fire Eagle enable a number of applications to understand where you are, and Brightkite (in closed beta – email me for an invite), Dopplr and a swarm of others mean that you can ‘discover’ nearby friends/contacts or even total strangers. Other services like Flickr (best known for its photo sharing – although it now does video too) and even Twitter are location aware.

The Benefits?

How does that help with productivity? The answer is: a lot. Dopplr can reduce travel by enabling you to identify fellow travelers, potentially sharing transport or eliminating trips all together. If I discover that Sharron, from the Paris office, is going to be in London this week that might save me a trip. Brightkite helps me quickly find a local Internet cafe or the hotel where friends are staying. At the other end of the spectrum, finding photos ahead of time on Flickr might save me getting lost, or change my holiday plans!

The Practicalities

Many of these location based services are dependent on access to data on your current location, but constantly typing in where you are can become a drag. However, with more and more devices having built in GPS, reporting your location (we’ll come back to that) and tagging photographs and videos with geographic information is now a relatively simple task. Geo-tagging has become a major geek fad. It is still not as seemless as I’d like on my Nokia N95, but perhaps that isn’t such a bad thing. This week I signed up to Pachube (currently in beta), which is a service that enables a device to stream environmental data and share it globally. I was hoping to get some wind data for my home hacking activities, in preparation for homecamp this weekend. No joy so far, but it is still early days.

Near Me

So, we have location based data behind location based services. Lots of data means an opportunity for lots of searching, an opportunity not lost on Google. If you use the latest version of the Google app for the iPhone (or iPod touch), it takes your location into account when it selects search results for you. Google searches have been location aware for a long time, but with more location aware devices, and the marketing fraternity on the case, it is going to a whole new level.

Google maps are an interesting way of discovering things. From a creating a ‘find us’ page with a pin in the map, to searching for local shops, Google’s map functionality has become almost as ubiquitous as their traditional web search engine. Putting your site onto Google Maps is relatively straight forward (give it a try).

Nice as all that is, that isn’t the most exciting thing about location based services. Back to those social networking services. Adding location into the mix provides the opportunity to rekindle local communities, connecting people in neighbourhoods, who might otherwise have never met. At this point, some of you might be perplexed. Meet people in the locality? Your either thinking “but everyone knows everyone anyway” or “but no-one talks to anyone”. There again, you might be comfortably in the middle of the two. It depends where in the country (and in which country) you live. Where I am, the commuter lifestyle and long working hours mean that much of the local sense of community has dwindled away. There is little engagement in local matters. A few brave souls attempt to keep a bit of a fire going, but it is a battle against apathy and that lack of time.

Cue location based services. From Facebook to Brightkite, from blogs to Twitter, local people are rediscovering each other. More than that, they are finding common causes. What is a community after all, if it isn’t a group of people centred about a common purpose? It was during a conversation with Tom Watson MP – Minister for Digital Engagement – last week that I realised the significance of these communities mapping on to geographical political infrastructures: influence. Just as the communities described in Cause Wired were able to organise on-line to create changes in the off-line world on an international level, local groups can affect the local level.

The space is not without its issues (see this post about post code data), with access to data and privacy being major concerns. However, the next few years will be about the Internet becoming an increasingly local phenomenon, rather than a global one. We have local community based blogs and websites, groups on social networking sites and local meet ups and that is all before the new wave of location aware devices are in broad use. We going hyper-local, and it may just be the most disruptive phase of the Internet yet.

Why Blog?

Benjamin — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 18:43:24 +0000

This post has been lurking in my drafts folder for a while, but watching a video on openforum provided me with the stimulus to post it.

Why Blog?

The reasons for a personal and for a business blog are not all the dissimilar. A long ago I stated my reasons for blogging, and those haven’t really changed:

Blogging enables me to clarify my thoughts, examining them and reflecting on them.
Blogging enables me to think about my thinking - meta-cognition.
Blogging forces me to gather information to support or dismiss my opinions.
Blogging is a place to plan and reflect – it is much more than what ends up in the post.

Blogging really is just a form of writing, and by writing you will find your voice. And you get used to your voice – your unique way of communicating. Blogging creates a level of self-awareness that is otherwise hard to obtain, and it is a great form of self-actualization.

Don’t take my word for it. This the list of reasons that marketing guru Seth Godin gives for blogging:

Blogging is free.
It doesn’t matter if anyone reads it. What matters is the humility that comes from writing it.
… and the meta cognition of thinking about what you are going to say.
If you are good at it, some people will read it.
If you are not good at it, stick with it you will get good at it.
It forces you to become part of the conversation…
…and that posture change changes an enormous amount.

Yes you say, but Seth is one of those marketing guys. He would say that wouldn’t he. How about Tom Peters then? Tom is well know as one of the leading experts in business management, he says:

“No single thing in the last 15 years, professionally, has been more important to my life than blogging. It has changed my life. It has changed my perspective. It has changed my intellectual outlook. It has change my emotional outlook. Parathesises: and it is the best damn marketing tool, by an order of magnitude, I’ve ever had.” Tom Peters

You can see Seth Godin and Tom Peters on that video here. If you haven’t started a blog already, start by commenting on the blogs that you read. Did you know that you are here with thousands of other visitors? You have a unique perspective, and know things that myself and others may never know, unless you tell us.

You can take the step that moves you from the audience and onto the stage just by leaving a comment. Step into the blogosphere, it really is the only way to find out what it is all about.

Caught by CauseWired

Benjamin — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 18:38:39 +0000

Hang on to the furniture, this post is going to be a bit of a ride. I’m holding Tom Watson and his CauseWired book responsible. I normally read a book very quickly, I’m almost legendary for my tree digesting abilities. I read. I mark with scraps of paper. I digest, note and move on.

If you look at my copy of CauseWired, you’ll see that I’ve marked more than one or two pages out, and if you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know that I’ve been reading it for quite a while. Reading. Thinking. Reading.

It is worth remembering where I am coming from here. I got into the Internet because I was captivated by the power it had to connect people, and the things that happened when it did. I saw technology as a tool for creating positive change.

The companies I have worked for have lead me into commercial business. I’ve worked to create markets, fund companies, sell companies and buy companies, but in parallel to that I’ve also served on the board of trustees for a charity and run with the occasional social cause. I’m no expert on philanthropy or social action, but I do see it as an essential balance to the activities of the commercial world. It is something that the commercially-minded should be actively engaged in. It is no coincidence that some of the richest people on the planet are the greatest philanthropists.

CauseWired, or rather “CauseWired – Plugging in, Getting Involved, Changing the World,” to give the book its full title, makes a big claim. It is about changing the circumstances of others, through your own actions, something that Tom Watson knows about. This particular Tom Watson isn’t the UK MP (here), he’s this one, the US journalist and media critic (fuller bio on the Changing Our World site). There is a link between them, I’ll come back to. The book charts how social networks, like Facebook and a range of more specialist sites, are changing the world of charities/nonprofits and social causes.

Let me take this post as an example of the new dynamic social media (and social networking) is creating. I found out about the book via twitter, got details via a blog post and contacted the publishers via email. I started following Tom, via twitter, as I was interested in his work. Through Twitter I realised that Tom (US) knew Tom (UK), who I’ve followed on twitter since the New York Digital Mission.

I usually post pictures of my travels to photo-sharing site Flickr, and recently posted one of my good self reading CauseWired. Tom commented on the photo, tweeted about it and linked to it in a post on his blog [I hope you are still managing to follow the thread!] The Amazon site picked up that blog post, and so, currently, there I am reading in a picture on the Amazon page for the book (here). I’ve just put that link as my Facebook status update, and… To be continued.

Now, none of that has changed the world, although I’m hoping that someone who reads the book as a result will. However, there are now a few hundred people who know we have a shared interest and skills that can be brought to bear on a cause. Connections and conversations on this kind of global scale would have been unlikely before the web, or more specifically before social media came to the web. Activists can amplify their efforts, create awareness and join forces with like minded individuals. That, in essence, is what CauseWired is about: How new communications technology is revolutionizing the flow of money and talent in the third sector.

The book weaves a course across the short history and global geography of the CauseWired phenomenon. The introduction felt a little long, but I have been buried in much of the subject matter for a long time so that may just be me. Once I was through that, I started busily scribbling notes and pondering deep thoughts.

Reading the book was like seeing from the other side of a two way mirror. I know the technologies and many of the causes that Tom uses as examples, but in telling the inside story, he brings them to life with a new freshness. The smaller examples in the book are even more interesting than the larger ones. Traditional broadcast media often leads the rally for the big causes. Social media has created the bandwidth for the smaller ones to emerge, the ones that don’t get big media air-time, in their early days at least. That is a qualitative change in the way that things work.

The big take aways and aha’s for me:

There is a big difference between being aware or interested and engaged and active.
We’ve been doing this stuff ‘forever’ – I remember charitable activity on the Bulletin boards in the 80’s – it is the tools and scale that has changed.
This is yet another inter-generational fault-line.
The shift from anonymity to authenticity is high-impact. “On the Internet no-one knows you are a dog” was 90’s. “I am…” is the 00’s.
The powerful stuff happens when the on-line meet off-line and the off-line comes on-line.
Tom Watson mentions Tom Watson in the book, in the context of UK open government, a slightly surreal moment.
There’s more… Which I’ll come back to in future posts.
Reading this book will be expensive – I’ve added lots of the books mentioned on to my Amazon wish list, and found some interesting causes.

If you’re in business, and you plan to hire or work with millennials, you better have a cause and/or be involved in one. CauseWired is a good place to start to understand that world. This book doesn’t aim to dig into the depths of social media. It isn’t going to lose the uninitiated, and experts shouldn’t expect any great revelations in that domain. It does illuminate wired causes, and provide a wealth of illustrations. If you work for a charity or not-for-profit, read this book. Digest it. Then read it again. It is the new shape of your world.

For our own mental well being, all of us need to be involved in something that transcends the ‘me’ and engages with the ‘us’, something that reaches beyond the ‘now’ to the tomorrow and beyond. If you haven’t done that yet, then Tom’s book will give you insight into what can be achieved, together with a list of places to get engaged in a rewarding way.

Best Practices in Social Media

Benjamin — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 11:02:17 +0000

Last week Eaon Pritchard tagged me (“best practices in social media“), and quite frankly it gave me a bit of writers block. Let me explain. Mitch Joel - Six Pixels of Separation - set the challenge to name one social media marketing best practice. That’s hard. For me it’s doubly hard, as I was looking for a productivity angle – being me and this being WOWNDADI - and pinning it down to just one thing is a big challenge.

The meme has produced some very thoughtful posts. Eaon mentions a post by Liz Strauss: “Watch what people actually do“. And that is what stumped me. Liz has been a great encouragement through my blogging journey, and a pleasure to meet in person, but the reason I pick out Liz’s post is that my first thought was around observing and matching prosody.

Prosody is the linguistic term for bits of speech that aren’t the words – the tone, the rhythm, the intonation. One of the challenges with any form of written media, be it a blog, a wiki or a white paper, is that the prosody of speech is lost. With it goes a much of the information that we use to derive meaning. That means we are left to try and interpret the meaning without that missing information. We read between the lines, based on what we expect. That isn’t a good thing, especially if it is an emotionally charged issue.

In social media, particularly when you represent a business brand, people assume they know you or at least bring assumptions into the communication. Prosody is implicit in Social Media, it comes out of the broader conversation. Not what is being said, but the traditions that have emerged over how and why it is said. It might be too early in the game to nail down best practices, but it is late enough that what constitutes bad practice is already established.

Marketers might want to join the conversation and gently nudge it in the direction they are hoping for. I think it is very hard to do that in a genuine way, and in the blogosphere, a fake will be spotted a few key strokes away. I’m going to agree with Liz, but I’m also going to go a step further. For all the hype, social media is JACM – just another communications medium. That means the first rule of communication still applies:

Seek first to understand. Then to be understood.

As Covey would have it. Do you know what? You’ll be more productive in the long run if you are really able to stop and listen. Really listen. Not leaving a gap in the communication whilst the other person talks. Really listening, with the intent to understand. Go beyond the words, to include the prosody and the intent.

When the whole world is shouting “Listen to me! Listen to me!” the one that gets an audience is the person who says “I’m genuinely listening, and I would like to understand.” Armed with answers, you only need few words to make your point. No backtracking or apologies needed.

Human communication is so complex that it is impossible to reduce it down to a formula or a list. For me, that is one of the amazing things about it. Of course, you could always go with Jeremy Toeman’s slightly less serious “The 20 Commandments of Social Media“. However, I’d like to hear an answer to this question from Steve Lawson, so I’ll tag him….

How to Write a Speech in 5 Minutes

Benjamin — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 20:59:33 +0000

Making a really great speech or presentation requires a great deal of preparation and practice. In an ideal world, you would always have time to plan, rehearse and perfect your words of wisdom. However, sometimes things don’t work out that way.

A number of times in my speaking career I have had to pull something together at very short notice, either because another presenter dropped out, or because I was visiting an office where the local manager unexpectedly asked me to make a speech to all of the local staff. Here is a simple process to enable you to prepare a speech at very, very short notice (or presentation - its a presentation tip too)…

Getting Started on the Speech

Ideally you will need eight post it notes. If you haven’t got them, just grab a sheet of paper and fold it in half. Fold it in half again. And once more. Quickly, there’s no time to waste! Now, tear along the folds. Either way, you now have eight pieces of paper, and hopefully a pen. You’re ready to star(t).

Who is the Speech for…

Always begin with the audience. What do you know about them? What do they know about you? Write down a few bullet points on the first piece of paper. Who you are, in the context of how it is relevant to the audience.

What is the Speech for…

Does the audience or the person who invited you have an expectation of what you will talk about? Be sure to meet it, or cover it as best you can. Failing to do so will definitely cause angst.

Now think about what will be in the speech. Let your brain free wheel for a minute. Write each of your main ideas on one of the remaining pieces of paper. You don’t want more than seven. Research suggests that we can deal with 7 things in our head at once, plus or minus two. This isn’t the time to go stretching your cognitive abilities, so stick with 5-7 main ideas.

If you come up with more than seven, look through your earlier ideas, then find the weakest one and cross it out, replacing it with the better new one. It is a neat way to refine your speech.

Think back to what you were expected to cover and sanity check what you have written. That clock is still ticking, so…

When and Where

Check how long the speech should be. 7-15 minutes is a great length. It will seem substantial, but shouldn’t drag on. Check where you are. Can you link your speech in to the location? Perhaps based on a piece of local news you have read.

Now, to the when and where of each of your main points. Lay out the pieces of paper. They should fit one of three structures: topical, chronological or spatial. That will give you a natural order for them. In a topical structure you will see that some things must be covered before you touch on the other topics, or that some link together. In a chronological structure you probably want to start at the beginning and more forwards from there. In a spatial one there will also be a natural flow too. You now have your main points arranged in order.

How

Now you have the sequence, think about how you will make each point, and how you will bridge between each point. Jot down your proof points, or for a longer speech your sub-points, on the relevant piece of paper. At the end of the piece of paper for each point, make a note of your bridge to the next point. The bridges should help to create the story, and will make your points more memorable if done well. If you can’t think of a bridge, the next step may help…

Why is the Speech Relevant

Why are you giving the speech? Look back to your first piece of paper where you wrote about the audience. Why are you making the speech, and why are you the right person to give it? This should constitute your introduction. For example,

“As I have started and sold a number of high value companies, Dave has asked me to say a few words about how to create a valuable business, now that you have secured your funding.”

Well, you get the idea. It should establish your ethos (in Aristotle’s Rhetoric this is your expertise and knowledge).

Check back over the pieces of paper with your main points. The ‘why’ should tie them together. You might need to make a quick adjustment if it doesn’t. In the introduction to a longer speech you can also briefly run through the points you will cover in it, if not, just a summary in a couple of sentences. Remember:

“Tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em. Tell ‘em. Then tell ‘em again.”

You now have your introduction and your middle (main points). Finally, think about your conclusion. Ideally it should draw on your key points, without introducing any new ones. It should also provide some sort of call to action: a response or a commitment. You aren’t speaking just to generate warm air, you are there to make something happen. Make it so. Note it down.

Say it!

You now have your completed speech, and read through the points a few times. Congratulations. If you have time between now and speaking, then practice your speech. Nothing beats a rehearsal for finding problems (it also helps with memory). Practice on the taxi driver on the way if you have to, but speak it out loud. The physical process of ‘out loud’ rehearsal is much more effective than just running it through in your head. If you need slides and have time, try this:

Slide 1 – Your speech title and name.
Slide 2 – x. One bullet point in the middle of one slide, with that one point in bullet form. But without the bullet.
Last slide – Copy and paste slide 1. Save it. Done.

If you know of an image that will effectively support your point, it is to hand, then add it. Otherwise, you’re done. Who, What, When, Where, How and Why – a speech in 5 minutes.

Enjoy!

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