Roll up roll up, it is Social Media Week. Obviously every week is social media week these days, but this is an extra special series of events all around the world. First of all, by way of full disclosure, I am on the advisory board for the London Events, which might make me even more enthusiastic than normal.

With that out of the way, let me share a little about what is happening. The first Social Media Week took place in New York last year and was a great success. This year Social Media Week is happening in six cities around the world. The schedule of events can be found on the London site, with more events being added all the time.

I plan to be at the Social Graph event at the IAB on Monday, followed by the opening night reception. I will be joining a fantastic panel including David Terrar, Ala Patrick, Euan Semple, Mat Morrison, Dr Sue Black, Shefaly and co on Tuesday Evening for a session on Social Media in Enterprise. Lightning 10 minute presentations, followed by Q&A, at Cass Business school. If you are working with social media in a business setting you’ll probably want to book here now! The week for me rounds off with  “Social Media Measurement” at Sun’s offices on Friday, where I will be chairing the afternoon session.

Key event details:  Mon 1st Feb – Fri 5th Feb, 2010

Location: All around London.
Website: http://socialmediaweek.org/london
Twitter: http://twitter.com/smwldn (for the latest updates)

In other news, the blog got into the Technorati top 100 for Small Business Blogs, which is a gentle nudge to blog some more. We’ve been doing some very exciting things with WordPress for Redcatco’s customers, and are adding in some new server infrastructure in the next few weeks as well!

Related Posts

• The Social Media Business Case?
• Social Media in Business in London
• The New Business of Business
• Do Your Employees Dance?
• Avoiding a Business Communication Crisis

Yesterday I joined Steve Lamb, Neville Hobson and a host of speakers at Dell’s B2B Social Media Huddle event. It’s always a bit nerve wracking taking to the stage after Neville and Steve, but good for getting the mental juices going – this time about making the business case for social media.

Business cases discussions seem to have narrowed down to ROI these days. The ROI of social media is a particularly hot topic – often accompanied by lots of hot air too. I like Trey Pennington’s take on the issue and personally I’m not sure that ROI is the right question – it’s far too easy to manipulate - Opportunity cost is a bigger factor in most business cases.

Not all cows produce milk

Donning a cow costume does not make you a cow. Think about it. Getting a traditional agency to do digital marketing via social media is not the same as doing social media marketing. You’ll get results, but no social media juice.

One of the advantages of executing your first social media project as part of an existing campaign is that it helps to make the distinction clear – just ensure you can identify the contribution of the social media component.

The upside of social media is huge, but hard to predict - @radiokate‘s fox (mentioned during my presentation) has now been viewed over 50,000 times: http://twitpic.com/sebvd – and it just jumped from social media to mainstream media. Could you have predicted that?

Which takes me neatly to my final points: Social media shouldn’t be viewed as an island. Without exception, every social media success story I have been involved in has worked exactly because in was integrated into a broader marketing and communication plan, and because it had a knock on impact into other channels.

‘Doing social media’ isn’t a case of walking through the blue door, never to see the old world again, it is a matter of organically building new skills and extending traditional marketing activities. See it as a gradual transition to a different way of engaging with customers, suppliers and prospects, one step at a time.

Related Posts

• Social Media Week London
• Social Media in Business in London
• The Social Media Expert – Wicked Problems And Failure
• The New Business of Business
• On-line Trust, More than Liking

Every so often something happens to bring a moment of clarity. Having literally just returned from New York (see The Digital Mission Blog), I headed to Coventry on Monday to the UKTI-organised Technology World 09 event. Aside from meeting UK and overseas delegates, I was there to speak on the keynote panel at the end of the day: “How can businesses use social media to create value.”

Far from the empty room I was expecting at the end of the day, the theatre was almost full. For a number of reasons the discussion was distinctly different than social media events I have spoken at recently: The audience were predominately business owners and investors, generally new to social media, and very focused on the business to business context.

The panel brought a very balanced tone, with views from both traditional and mobile agency perspectives, as well as more social media focused opinion. There were good questions from the floor – both via microphone and an SMS-based twitter wall behind us [thanks to mashup]  (which was very well behaved, with only one mention of my Movember tache). Topics included what social media actually is, how to get started, what the risks of social media are, what sort of returns a business should expect, and who should execute the strategy.

Pretty much the only bone of contention was about timing: When should a business get into social media? I am very much at the “Start now” end of the spectrum – the barriers are low and things are still at the stage where you can experiment and learn. Toby Constantine stuck a more cautious note: “Don’t feel that you have to rush in to it”. The UK Technology Live blog has a nice summary.

My closing remark was a suggestion for a three point “social media strategy” – I’ll expand on it just a little here – three things to get you started

1. Find your community

Building a community from scratch is hard, expensive and a long journey. It is better to find where the relevant community for you is already gathered, regardless of what platform they are on. Be there. Be it Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing or a Ning group. And when you arrive, remember: you are a guest in someone else’s space. Act accordingly. They say good manners cost nothing, but bad manners will cost you your reputation.

2. Add value

To paraphrase Flickr’s terms and conditions – you know that irritating person at networking events? Don’t be them! Rather than pushing your product or service, show that interacting with you is a pleasant and useful thing to do. Without showing off, answering questions and helping will demonstrate that you know your onions. Share your knowledge, ask about things you are genuinely interested in, provide pointers to useful resources and listen to responses. You’ll learn, and you’ll become a valued and valuable member of the community. Business will follow, I can almost guarantee it.

3. Make it part of your workflow

Leverage what you are already doing, and do it every day. For me it is mostly about Twitter these days, although I really must get back to more blogging. “Lightweight” activities that are not overly time consuming, provide a good return on effort and are enjoyable. If “doing social media” for your business is a chore, then you’re doing it wrong (the ‘it’ there might be your business or your social media)! Simply posting an observation, thought for the day, or the most interesting thing that you learnt that day is a great starting point, or maybe something you read reminded you of a related resource or tip – share it.

Let me know how you get on!

Related Posts

• Social Media Week London
• The Social Media Business Case?
• Culture or Technology in Business 2.0
• Social Media in Business in London
• In Search of the Habitat Intern

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.

Related Posts

• Dunbar’s Number – Groups, Language and Social Media
• Social Media – Do Conversations Scale?
• Tuttle and The Future of Work
• Authenticity
• The Rather Complex Issue of Identity

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.

Related Posts

• Social Media Week London
• The Social Media Business Case?
• The New Business of Business
• 3 Point Social Media Strategy for Business Folk
• Culture or Technology in Business 2.0

It seems an age since posting about Habitat UK’s mis-steps into Twitter. Since that post, Habit have apologised – although not yet on the place where the deed was done: Their @habitatuk twitter account.

One of the big differences between “traditional” media and social media is the almost infinite bandwidth of the later. Whilst mainstream stories come and go at high velocity, with only a fleeting moment in the spot light, in the social media world they linger and roll on, and on… And so it is with the Habitat story. While big media is on to the next story, Twitter users and bloggers of the world are still talking about “Doing a Habitat”.

The latest communications have laid the blame firmly at the foot of a mysterious intern who is ‘no longer associated with Habitat’. Who is this mysterious intern, and how did they get it so wrong? Enter Daren Forsyth (@DarenBBC), who has been campaigning (search #habitatintern on Twitter and see) to track down and help out the intern concerned, complete with the offer of a replacement internship and some training on using social media. That’s quite an offer, given Darren’s profile on Twitter – over 3,800 followers and growing, and more importantly he’s been a productive member of the community, connecting all manner of initiatives.

It makes more sense for me to let Daren explain the thinking behind #habitatintern, so here he is, caught on camera by my good self yesterday in London:

As I left him, he was awaiting a call from Habit’s PR team. Meanwhile there is still much for Habitat to do to get back on the right foot in the Twitter world. The story continues…

Related Posts

• Creating a Bad Social Media Habitat
• The Social Media Expert – Wicked Problems And Failure
• Replying Via Twitter
• Social Media – Do Conversations Scale?
• Social Media Week London

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.

Related Posts

• Social Media Week London
• The Social Media Business Case?
• 3 Point Social Media Strategy for Business Folk
• Culture or Technology in Business 2.0
• Social Media in Business in London

The Campaign That Went Oops…

The @habitatuk Twitter account looks all nice and shiny today, but that isn’t how it started out for the UK retailer. Last week an account in their name started spewing messages about their Spring/Summer collection, but tagged with random keywords from Twitter’s trending topics items.

It isn’t a great mental leap to work out that the connection between the Habitat’s new furnishings collection and things like the #iranelection, #iran and #Mousavi is at best tenuous, and at worst a blatant bit of opportunism. Here’s some of the “re-printable bits” from the Twitter stream:

First Break all the Rules

After that it started to turn very ugly. Habitat UK broke almost every rule in the Twitter book.

• Don’t abuse hash tags to try and drive traffic. It doesn’t work. This isn’t search engine optimization. It is social media.
• Don’t retweet the same thing over and over. People heard you the first time, and they can always see your last tweet. It makes following your Twitter stream very unattractive. How long would you stay with someone at a party if they repeated themselves over and over?
• Don’t just jump in. Listen, learn, then join in the conversation. You’re not advertising. You’ve been invited into someone’s web browser. You are just one click away from leaving it.

On Twitter, if no-one is following you, no-one hears you – that spam goes into dead-air. It is why I rate Twitter above email. Twitter has a visible feedback mechanism – people can follow or unfollow. Spamming hash tags is a desperate way to get people who aren’t following you to read your messages. It is the Twitter equivalent of nuisance calling or public vandalism, it isn’t going to make you any friends.

Putting Things Right

Over the weekend, the error of their ways obviously came to the attention of the grown ups at Habitat. They wiped the Tweets and started over, just as if nothing had ever happened. Huge error. The legacy of their mistake is all there to be seen in Twitter search – something that any power Twitter user is aware of: When you delete tweets, they disappear from the Twitter timeline, but they remain, stubbornly, in search results. It’s one of those curiosities of the Twitter platform.

As The NextWeb and the Social Media Today posts point out, deleting the messages and making as if nothing had happened is very much the wrong approach:

Habitat would probably have come out of this a lot better if they had admitted the problem and apologised before moving on. By deleting the tweets and starting afresh they haven’t ‘cleared the air’ with those upset about their actions.

And today it got Habitat on to the front page of the Sky News – “UK Firm’s Mistweetment Of Iran Is PR Disaster”

A spokesman for Habitat told Sky News Online: “This was a mistake and it is important to us that we always listen, take on board observations and welcome constructive criticism. We will do our utmost to ensure any mistakes are never repeated.”

That really isn’t much of a response. @habitatuk only had a few followers when they started spamming. Somewhat ironically the account now has about 1,000, all waiting to see what Habitat will do next.

This is the age of saying sorry, and the Habitat UK Twitter account is the perfect place to do that. Whoever was operating the account has shamed Habitat in front of tens of thousands of people (by spamming some of the most monitored hash tags on Twitter – as well as the account’s own followers).

“You can’t talk your way out of a problem you behaved your way into!” — Stephen R. Covey

Mistakes in social media aren’t like mistakes with the traditional press. Putting them right requires a sustained engagement with the community. Dominos Pizza didn’t make a mistake with social media, but they had a couple of employees who did. They recognised where the harm had been done, and engaged in the relevant places to put it right. It would have been better if they had been there beforehand, but regardless, they didn’t do a bad job.

Companies like IBM are reaping the benefits of their employees using platforms like Twitter everyday – Andy Standford-Clark was on Radio Five Live this morning and will be was on the BBC news this evening with his @andy_house project. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is heading towards a million people following him on Twitter. It is possible to make a big impact, but you need to be there to add value and engage with your customers, not to shout 20% discounts at them.

Don’t leave your social media strategy in the hands of an agency that doesn’t have expertise in it. I’ve said what I’m going to say about Social Media Expertise, for now it is a very specialist area. I am seeing more and more activity from Search Engine Optimisation players edging in to social media. SEO is about engaging with machines. Social Media is about engaging with people. They are very different things.

I’ll leave you that cartoon from Jim Anning again…

Related Posts

• In Search of the Habitat Intern
• The Social Media Expert – Wicked Problems And Failure
• Replying Via Twitter
• Dominos Pizza – Why Everyone is in PR Now and Employee Engagement Matters
• Social Media – Do Conversations Scale?

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:

thebluedoor

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.

Related Posts

• Social Media Week London
• The Social Media Business Case?
• 3 Point Social Media Strategy for Business Folk
• Culture or Technology in Business 2.0
• Social Media in Business in London

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!

Related Posts

• Community Relations
• Social Media Week London
• The Social Media Business Case?
• 3 Point Social Media Strategy for Business Folk
• Culture or Technology in Business 2.0

Twitter played host to a passionate discussion about social media experts earlier this week, kicked off by a blog post:  6 Reasons You Shouldn’t Brand Yourself as a Social Media Expert by Dan Schawbel, who describes himself as “the leading personal branding expert for Gen-Y” – reading the post I would say he’s wrong on most of the points he makes, but  what do I know, I’m just a social media expert.

Suw Charman-Anderson wrote a thoughtful post that provides a narrative on the issues, of which there are many. Picking up from a tweet in Suw’s post:

In the Twitter conversation this morning, @BenjaminEllis said  “@Suw It’s hard for the true experts when people with 6 months experience and no results to show for it call themselves experts too.”

Sadly, the social media scene is full of self-proclaimed experts. As opportunists jump on the TwitterLinkedFaceInMySpaceBook bandwagon, much of Twitter and the Blogosphere has become a torrent of misinformation and blatant  nonsense, most of it promulgated by “experts” – it is frustrating for those that have been making a living, rather than a noise, with the technologies.

Dan’s post says “When everyone in the world is a social media expert it loses meaning” I agree with the sense, but strictly speaking he’s wrong. When everyone calls themselves a social media expert, including people that clearly aren’t, it causes people to question the credibility of people making the claim. At least it should, and that isn’t a bad thing. It also makes it much harder to find the people who are actually the experts. Suw continues:

I can’t think of any other professional field where is is frowned upon to simply call oneself an expert. Indeed, in every other field I can think of, we actively seek out experts. If you have a bad problem with your drains, you call a drainage expert without even thinking about it. If you want to learn about the nuances of the Bard’s great works, you seek out an expert in Shakespeare. If your MacBook conks out, you take it to an Apple expert.

There’s nothing wrong with being an expert in these fields, so why is it wrong in social media?

Now we get to the troublesome thing about being an expert, and it’s a problem that isn’t specific to social media: How do you know you are an expert? How do you know if someone else is an expert?

You start off knowing, roughly, nothing. You learn something. You learn some more things and you start to feel a bit of an expert. You learn a few more things, and you start to call yourself an expert. You learn a lot more things and you realise that you weren’t an expert before, and you probably still aren’t one now. You learn a huge amount more things, and you aren’t so bothered about calling yourself an expert anymore, but everyone else starts to call you one, so you start to call yourself one too. You’ve earned the right too.

I’m trying to gently say that expertise is generally established by a third party. Traditionally, it was a matter of formal qualifications. However, the academic system struggles to keep pace with technology. It will be a while before we see the first degree course in social media, and even the thought of it causes an uneasy sensation in the pit of my stomach, so don’t get any ideas. Academic qualifications aren’t it then, although there are some highly relevant ones.

I jokingly mentioned the word “pundit” as a substitution in the maligned “social media expert” phase. Strangely it didn’t go down too well! Interestingly through, it is one of the words listed under “expert” in my trusty Mac OS X Thesaurus, and whilst I’m in that reference library, here is a quote from the dictionary definition of expert:

In specific fields, the definition of expert is well established by consensus and therefore it is not necessary for an individual to have a professional or academic qualification for them to be accepted as an expert. In this respect, a shepherd with 50 years of experience tending flocks would be widely recognized as having complete expertise in the use and training of sheep dogs and the care of sheep.

Please note, for the avoidance of doubt, someone who got their first sheep 6 months ago, herded them into a pen once using their dog, and tells lovely stories about herding sheep, is not an expert. Twitter account or no. 30,000 followers or not.

There is still the Naive Consumer Problem: Say I need to buy a skateboard. Shocking as it may be, I know very little about skateboards, other than they have wheels attached to a board, and that you skate with them. After talking with a few people that seem to know about skateboards, I quickly grasp that I may be missing some details. The kind of important details that justify a set of wheels costing slightly more than my first car. Perhaps.

I know just enough to know that I don’t know enough, so I rely on other (independent) people to tell me who the experts are. Usually we really on other experts to tells us who the experts are. The nature of social media makes that process hard. As new entrants scramble for links, mentions, follows, retweets and generally anything that will give them credibility – that much needed “social capital” – objectivity flies out of the window, and everybody calls the person with three months more experience “an expert”. Meanwhile, new tools and best practice move on like an express train, on a day without strikes or leaves on the line.

Social media is such a young space that in some areas there may not be anyone with direct experience or knowledge. This is a new frontier, still under construction in many places. Someone once quipped that “everyone wants an expert, even when there isn’t one to be had” – I remember seeing an ad wanting someone with 5 years experience in a web application. I’d been the product manager from the start of its development, and I didn’t have 5 years experience with it.

BenjaminEllis: @euan When I needed surgery that involved going close to my optic nerves, I was looking for someone who was called an expert in the field.

euan: @BenjaminEllis and I was nearly fitted with a pacemaker I didn’t need by someone who was also called an expert.

The nature of expertise means that experts still make mistakes. Expertise is domain specific too. Social media is a huge and vaguely defined area, covering much of what constitutes the web today. I don’t think many would argue against calling Sir Tim an expert on web matters. However, even he says that we know longer understand the web. An expert knows their bounds.

Incidentally, Gordon Brown has appointed Sir Tim Berners-Lee to help “open up” government data. Great news.

Back to a definition then, since finding a social media expert is starting to have all of the characteristics of a wicked problem. The root of the word expert is  ”expertus”, which means to have tried. Trying implies something else: failing. As noted by Charles Cohen at Being-Digital this week, the most valuable lessons come not from success, but from failing.

The advantage of getting into the game early is that you can make mistakes that enable you to learn. That’s one of the reasons that business should get on board now, not later. Another couple of years and you’ll be doing the equivalent of putting animated gifs on your home page in 2003.  The fact that I didn’t “get it” when I first saw Sir Tim’s prototype browser didn’t matter… Two years later and I was building web sites. By the time I was designing connectivity and security for on-line banks, making mistakes was no longer an option, for anyone. The web had matured.

I got to know what worked and what didn’t, not because somebody had told me, but because I had done both. There is more to expertise than just experience tough, back to Suw’s post:

A super-user is not the same as an expert – it’s not about knowing how the tools work, how to make a new blog post or set up a new wiki. It’s a much more nuanced job and involves constant learning from sometimes unexpected sources. I never thought I’d end up talking to psychologists about email when I started as a consultant, but understanding why people are wedded to their inbox helps me to understand the problems I will face when trying to introduce them to a wiki. Being an expert in social media means that you are constantly pushing to understand the non-obvious, constantly questioning the assumptions and the so-called common sense explanations for why things happen the way they happen.

I have to confess that I had retreated to calling myself a social media practitioner recently. It was a vague attempt to make the point that I have “walked the talk” as opposed to just talking it. However, “practitioner” isn’t it, as friends have gently pointed out. Mastery is a process, and doing is just the first step. Being an expert means knowing when to break the rules, and eventually helping to making the rules. That only comes from experimentation and experience.

Perhaps the best question to ask the next expert you meet is “tell me about your failures, and what you’ve learnt from them.” The answer will tell you a lot.

Related Posts

• The Social Media Business Case?
• In Search of the Habitat Intern
• Creating a Bad Social Media Habitat
• Replying Via Twitter
• On-line Trust, More than Liking

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:

1. See all @replies (ie @replies to you and all @replies sent by people you follow).
2. See @replies to people that you are following (the second argument above).
3. 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:

Related Posts

• In Search of the Habitat Intern
• Tweetcamp London – Beyond 140 Characters
• Creating a Bad Social Media Habitat
• The Social Media Expert – Wicked Problems And Failure
• Caught by a Spy – Easier Than it Sounds

In 20 years of working in industry I’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly, as well as the amazingly brilliant when it comes to business operating models. I have worked in organisations that have practised new models, to different degrees. The results were some of the fastest growing, and most successful, businesses in history. Social media will, and is, making new models of operation mandatory, rather than optional.

Business needs a new model that is better for shareholders, employees, customers and suppliers. We are striving towards that at Redcatco, and helping businesses that want to do the same, restoring the balance between the different stake holders. If your customers genuinely appreciate your business, and your employees act out of community, then the shareholders will receive all the value that they can handle.

Award Winning Business

A business that is a living example of doing things differently is Justgiving.com. I was at the RSA to see Zarine Kharas, the company’s co-founder, receive the 2009  Albert medal, joining holders that include Sir Tim Berners Lee in their number. She gave a lecture about what businesses need to do to create lasting social value: ”The New Business of Business” (audio and video on The RSA site). Anne-Marie, Justgiving’s other co-founder was also there.

On a show of hands, around 95% of the audience had sponsored someone through the JustGiving site. That’s a very impressive market penetration for a business that didn’t exist a decade ago. There are over 7 million users on Justgiving now, and they have helped to raise over £400,000,000. Yes, I did get the 0′s right. 0.4 Billion, if that is easier on the eye.

I’ve written about philanthropy, and you might remember that I was Caught by CauseWired. That isn’t the topic here. Zarine was on to broader questions and the nature of business:

“Where are the moral questions in today’s economic dialogue?”

Social Separation

She cited the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams’, recent speech in which he  pointed to the downturn as a reality check, but said that we are shrinking away from getting a (much needed) new perspective.

Zarine argued that we separate working and personal lives – Work is what you do to make a living, our good life, our moral life, is lived elsewhere. I would argue that our lives are even more fragmented than that, based on what we see with consumer behaviours.

I find it hard not to observe that social media and the growing popularity of personal-branding is blurring these bounds between work and play. Are you connected to your boss on Facebook? Do you blog at work under your own name? Are you that ‘snowboarding marketing’ person?

“What is needed above all is an understanding of how a variety of institutions can together contribute to producing a more decent economic world.”

Business and ethics are not incompatible, they go in hand in hand. That should be obvious, but has been blurred through recent corporate sagas. Ethics build trust, and, ultimately, business is based upon trust. In the same way, art and profit are also not mutually exclusive. Innovation itself is a creative process, and a markedly profitable one at that.

Corporately Responsible

In Zarine’s view, CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) is a charade. In the vast majority of cases it ends up so divorced from the core business that it becomes almost meaningless, she says. I would agree. Whilst many businesses are doing some well intentioned things, the danger is that one ends up with a situation where “they, over there” are responsible for the social responsibility and tackling issues to do with sustainability. It is the same danger that businesses face when they create “innovation teams”. These are functions that have to be embedded into the heart of the business, as a shared responsibility.

It is time to relook at the purpose of business itself. Zarine reminded the audience that it is a debate that goes back to the reformation. R H Tawney ”Religion And The Rise Of Capitalism” was cited as a must read on the origins of the idea that “The business of business is business, and should be kept separate from the business of society itself.” We haven’t had businesses, as we know them today, forever. There is no reason that they are necessarily part of our long-term future, in their current form.

Business Beyond Profit

The idea of ‘maximising shareholder value’ as the sole objective of the business needs to be thrown out. None other than Jack Welch, famed business champion, himself said that shareholder value is “the dumbest idea in the world“. Profit is a result, an output, not a strategy.

“Your main constituencies are your employees, customers and products.” Jack Welch

It is only when companies move away from the maximisation of profit as their primary goal that lasting value can actually be created. Profit is a by-product of something much greater, argued Zarine, and that is: creating a great product, serving customers, employees and all stakeholders in a balanced way.

“There needs to be a concensus that success is not only measured in profit, not only in growth.”

Perhaps the recent financial crisis can shake us into that? Huge profits. Uncharted risks. Immeasurable destruction of value. I’ve served on audit and disclosure committees of some big businesses. The more deeply I understand modern accounting, the more I see how profit is a short-term variable, manipulable through the magic of accounting, even when that accounting is conducted under strict guidelines. 

“Shareholders need to cease their folly of a relentless quest for growth at unsustainable levels.”

From Business Tactics to Social Strategies

That also means understanding that decisions that have a short term negative inpact on profit can have a long term positive effect. For me this is the essence of strategic thinking: Lose the battle, but win the war. Quarterly profit targets drive behaviours that are focussed on winning every battle. Eventually the company looses the bigger war, with chapter 11 or simple oblivion following shortly afterwards.

“Actions that generate trust generate greater value”

People need to stop seeking the best price, argued Zaraine, but instead start looking a best value, and long term impact. “Cheap” often turns out to be expensive. I know from my experience in running manufacturing functions that this is very true, but little understood.

Where does the change start? Zarine says it must start with companies themselves, and with the behaviour of all employees – how they interact with each other and with others outside the business. That means you and me.

Interestingly, Zarine is unconvinced about the idea of social enterprises. She said, “consider not what a company does, but how it does it,” and was very clear that Justgiving is a business, not a charity. There are profits, which are invested back into  the business, and there is a small profit share for employees.

Profit is a sensible goal, when it is not the only goal. Zarine says what has been lost is the central purpose of a business: a satisfying life for employees and a reasonable (emphasis on REASONABLE) financial return. 

Throw Away the Rules to Get Mores

Justgiving have thrown away the rule book, instead they trust people to do the right thing. I know some other businesses that have done the same, and I’ll be writing about them soon. Imagine no expenses policy. No holiday rules. HR people will faint, but Zarine cites other businesses, including Ricardo Semler of Semco, who also run a very different model. Ricardo says the obsession with control is a delusion, and increasingly a fatal busness error. 

“We reach for rules and controls. We all succumb to the temptation. Companies, charities, on and on… …The idea that we can control these things is a vain hope”

It reminds me of something that I first read in a Covey book: Rules can never make up for mores (social norms). To put it another way, you can never legislate for good behaviour. Good behaviour comes from accountability, and accountability comes from transparency. That is one of the reasons that I believe social media can be so transformative in a business.

Justgiving isn’t perfect, and they know it “we fail at this every day.” – Rules become obsolete almost the moment we write them in today’s fast paced business environment. Rules bring out the worst in us, and to that end Justgiving have one rule: to have as few rules as possible. They have even experimented with letting employees set their own salaries.

What ensures that people do the right things? It isn’t rules, that is for sure. Zarine quoted the UK Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, who was recently in hot water over her  expenses. When questioned about suspect claims, she said, “I followed the rules. I sought advice. I followed that advice. I have done nothing wrong.”

Because she followed the rules she had done nothing wrong. Imagine that in the context of trying to build a high-risk, innovative business. In an environment based on mores, shared understandings and values, people come to work to do the right thing. Trust, and peer pressure, combine with the desire to do the right things, to provide the glue that holds people together. Rules, argued Zarine, breed mediocrity. She describes the Justgiving environment in this way:

“We aim to have honest conversations with each other – difficult ones, to endlessly debate how to serve customers better.” Far from being a soft environment, it is a tough one, “Decisions are made on facts, not on egos; [it is a place] where innovation happens without fear of failure.”

New Structures – Beyond Command and Control

They don’t have an org chart for the business, they work in project teams which dissolve and reform. People you have relationship with hold you accountable, not distant managers. I would go along with Zarine’s view that the structures of the Victorian age and the production line are not appropriate for the Internet era.

This all sounds simple, but is very difficult in practice. We are educated to be compliant, rather than questioning, but innovation starts with questioning, and compliance does not breed trust. Creating a more ‘open’ organisation is a long journey. It took over seven years for Semco. One audience member asked how this might work in their National Health Service trust. There are definitely challenges.

When people feel themselves to be highly accountable to their peers, when they are motivated by a sense of involvement “That’s when they perform to the best of their abilities, out  of respect for and commitment to their team, to their customers, to their shareholders. Where they have a meaningful say in the business, they do not have to be told what to do.”

Adam Smith, 250 years ago, recognised that an economy requires other values and commitments, such as mutual trust and confidence, in order to work.

“We don’t need ethics workshops or corporate citizenship lectures, just good old fashioned trust and the freedom to do the right thing.”

Get Innovating

Social innovation is open to all businesses that truly want it. Whilst employees might be more geographically dispersed than they once were, the technologies exist to re-integrate them and rebuild the relationships and trust that are so essential to running an effective business. Those relationships can be extended beyond company boundaries, to build effective communities with customers, partners and shareholders. Social media is making businesses more accountable than they have been in living memory. Consumers are becoming activists and campaigners, and what goes on inside of the walls of a company no longer remains there (see Dominos Pizza – Why Everyone is in PR Now and Employee Engagement Matters).

The best way for businesses to respond, is to embrace the new communication media that the Internet has enabled, and use them to build trusted relationships and to transform the business.

Related Posts

• Social Media Week London
• The Social Media Business Case?
• Social Media in Business in London
• 3 Point Social Media Strategy for Business Folk
• Culture or Technology in Business 2.0

I wouldn’t normally blog about a Pizza chain, but this week Dominos have turned themselves into an example of why businesses need to get to grips with social media, and why employee engagement really matters.

The best place to start, if you’ve missed the story so far, is with the blog post on The Consumerist - Domino’s Rogue Employees Do Disgusting Things To The Food, Put It On YouTube. If your stomach is a little delicate, then let me summarise it like this for you: Some (now very ex) Domino’s employees do some pretty unspeakably unhygienic things to food during its preparation. We’d know nothing about this, and they wouldn’t be world-famous if they hadn’t, for good measure, posted a video of them doing said activities on to YouTube.

Whin a couple of hours of Consumerist publishing the blog post, reader’s had tracked down the branch and the offending employees. They are now claiming that this was a prank, and the food was never served to anyone. Meanwhile, six thousand views on the video is gradually turning into over 500,000 views.

Domino’s responded on the original blog, but by then the story had propagated and the video was already embedded in dozens of blogs, and in people’s Twitter streams and Facebook status updates. The company issued a statement, somewhat slowly, and in a very quiet corner of their site “update to our valued customers” it said.

While the employees have been terminated, and the franchise is looking to file a criminal complaint against them, it is too late. The damage has been done. The nature of the blogosphere is that it is disperate, and doing what Domino’s did (responding on the original blog) simply isn’t enough. Stories propagate from blog to blog and you can’t get to all of them during this sort of incident. Twitter accelerates the process even further – the pace of micro-blogging makes traditional blogging look positively sedentary. 

Whatever your view of Twitter, for now it is where the news stories are made and fed – it’s where PRs and Journalists live alongside millions of people who do “other things”.  It is also where the Domino’s Pizza story took off . Shel Holtz has a great set of thoughts on the handling of the incident  ”Domino’s needs to get out in front of this situation.” he says. I’d agree with that. The only way to do it is to create a focus for the response, and a place for it to be heard. It’s also the time to mobilise customers who are  passionate about your band to respond too. You have got customers like that, haven’t you?

A corporate blog and a twitter account would have provided that focal place for a response, but instead information is turning into out of date misinformation and spreading over the blogosphere, oh, and that video of the employees doing unspeakable things? It is well on its way to 1,000,000 views. Of course it might get taken down, but that would simply remove a focal point for getting information out (the video now carries a sub-title to the effect that the employees have been terminated) or it might just  result in the video being reposted.

This isn’t the first saga in the fastfood chain to hit social media. Kentucky Fried Chicken staff showed employee innovation at work, by turning a deep fat fryer sink into a hot tub. Similarly, Amazon suffered a Twitter-fuelled backlash at the start of this week over a “cataloging error” which resulted in a number of books being de-listed and cries of a censorship-foul.

This why I am so focussed on building brilliant businesses, with communities around them. Businesses need ‘friends’ looking out for them on-line. Businesses also need a strong sense of internal community. Employees who are passionate about the business and its reputation will work to preserve it. Someone, rather unkindly, referred to fast food establisments’ staffing policies as “hire on a heart beat.” I’m sure that isn’t true, but businesses need to think differently about hiring in a world were every employee is now working in PR.

PR is no longer about a few staff managing relationships with some journalists. PR is about every member of staff looking after relationships with the “Public” – the sea of people who are customers, prospects, suppliers, partners, potential future employees and friends and friends of friends of all of those. One company that really seems to get that is Zappos. Not so familiar in Europe, but growing massively in the US, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh has built a company that seems perfect for these times. ReadWriteWeb has a recent interview with him, by Loic Le Meur:  Zappos CEO Talks Culture Fit and the Importance of Creating a ‘Wow’ Experience. Staff don’t have scripts to interact with customers, but they do get Employees get substantial initial training, and are hired and fired based on the company’s core values.

“Any idiot with a webcam and an Internet connection can attempt to undo all that’s right about the brand. In the course of one three-minute video, two idiots can attempt to unravel all of that.” Domino’s Spokesperson Tim McIntyre in Ad Age.

He’s right, and the only way to prevent it is to have a strong employee and customer communities, who are passionate about the business and united around a common set of values. That way, even if one employee does turn rogue, the rest of the community will bring things into line. Businesses must be ready to engage with social media, to know how to handle it, and to have the staff who are up to the task. You don’t want to be starting to figure it out at the same time as dealing with a crisis. Start to build the skills now.

Businesses need to build effective communication channels with employees. They need to understand that everyone in the business is in public relations, and companies’ values need to be demonstrated in living communications – not just pinned to a wall.

If ‘rank and file’ employees don’t have a feedback channel to management, malcontent can quickly turn into misbehaviour, and these days that puts you three clicks away from being on the front page for all the wrong reasons.

Listen to Tony Hsieh’s opening remarks at SXSWi. – one of the highlights of SXSWi for me – you might want to skip in a little to get past the intro. It’s a very different sort of business, embracing many of the tenants of social media into the heart of the business. You can pitch up any day and take a tour. The staff use Twitter and are active in the community. Somewhat ironically, Tony ran a Pizza business at college. I bet that was a very different sort of pizza business.

UPDATE (24 hours on): Just after this post was written, a Domino’s Pizza Twitter account was set up: DPZINFO. They are disseminating updates and engaging with the Twitter community via the account. A little stilted, and a brutal start, but good on them. I’d noticed a couple of Twitter ID’s starting with DPZ. The story has jumped to the mainstream media (USA Today, the BBC and Sky News). The apology on the Domino’s page has been updated. The store has been shut and Patrick Doyle, Domino’s CEO, says that they will re-examine their hiring practices. The original video has been taken down (at the request of Kristy, who featured in the video) and The following video posted by Domino’s:

Neville has posted a follow up on the incident, if you would like to read more. The comments on the video are the usually YouTube class act. As I write this, that video has had less than 20 thousand views, showing another asymmetry in social media: It makes a better tool for opposition than it does for defence. Alan puts it well in a post today, “Now! Big! Risk! Fear!” spread fast. That’s why social media calls for a very different approach to traditional PR, one that reaches deep inside the company.

Related Posts

• Creating a Bad Social Media Habitat
• Social Media Week London
• The Social Media Business Case?
• 3 Point Social Media Strategy for Business Folk
• Culture or Technology in Business 2.0

This post might be a little heavy going, but the topics are important in understanding how we can be (and are) manipulated, and how businesses can (and should) go about building trust in an on-line, social media driven world. Last week I attended the Wealth of Networks conference, looking at the challenges of Next Generation Internet. Ian Delaney’s post sums up some of the issues.

Today’s Internet is a curious mix of problems seeking answers and answers seeking problems. Later in the week, the EPSRC Research Cluster on Innovative Media for the Digital Economy held it’s Springboard Event. Both were thought provoking, and I will come back to them, especially the session with Charlie Leadbeater in another post. First though, some thoughts on the recurring challenge that came up in both events: The issue of trust in the on-line world.

What Does Trust Mean On-line?

Trust is a troublesome topic to study, partly because it occurs in so many different contexts, but also because it is so hard to nail down a definition. Rousseau and her colleagues offered up the following definition:

“Trust is a psychological state comprising the intention to accept vulnerability based upon positive expectations of the intentions or behavior of another.” Rousseau, D. M., Sitkin, S. B., Burt, R. S., and Camerer, C. (1998). “Not so Different After All: A Cross-Discipline View of Trust,” in Academy of Management Review, 23, 393-404.

Quite a mouthful. Let me simplify a little: Trust is being ready to do something (risky), in the hope that it will work out. It is something we do everyday, especially when we carry out a interactions on-line. However it is something we probably understand less well than we would like to think.

Personality theorists have argued that some people are more likely to trust than others, based on how their trust has been rewarded in the past. That doesn’t tell us much about the mechanisms of trust, at least not in a way that we can action personally, or use in running a business.

Most academic papers divide trust into two types. At the early stages of a relationship, trust is “calculus-based“. We carefully calculate how the other party is likely to behave, looking at the rewards and punishments for being trustworthy or untrustworthy. In other words, trust is driven by some form of accountability. We are more likely to trust if we know that when the other party does something ‘bad’, then something ‘bad’ will happen to them in response. In these days of blogs, on-line review sites and social networks you can see how that can work on-line – even if imperfectly.

As a relationship develops, shared values and goals start to emerge. This allows trust to move to a different level, towards what is sometimes called “identification-based trust“. At this point, both sides have grasped and digested the other’s desires and intentions. They understand what the other side cares about to the point where they can act in each others interest. This kind of trust forms an emotional bond between the parties, one that drives valuable things like loyalty and the desire for mutual satisfaction.

In one direction, trust, in the on-line world at least, points towards accountability, and from there to transparency, openness and confidence. Trust is traditionally based on social relations, but in the on-line world that anchor is often substituted for another one: Confidence – the belief that things will unfold as expected. There are distinctions between trust and confidence. Confidence is based on familiarity, and it is something that can be designed for. An important point when building websites.

In the other direction, trust points towards compliance. This is perhaps not as obvious, but think about it for a moment. If you carry out a transaction on-line, you have effectively complied with the desires of the other party. Be it purchasing something via a web site, registering for a whitepaper or just signing up to join the latest social networking site, you essentially did what that other party wanted you to do. That might sound a little oppressive, but it is never-the-less a fact, and a very useful one if you want to understand how that happened.

From Trust to Persuasion

The more friendly face of compliance is persuasion, and recently I reread an old Robert B. Cialdini book “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion“, although I’ve lost my copy somewhere between London and Austin. I hope I can replace it, as it’s a good read. Cialdini introduces six principles of ethical persuasion:

• Reciprocity
• Commitment/consistency
• Scarcity
• Liking
• Authority
• Social proof

These concepts have become so popular that you are probably familiar with the terms. They are techniques used by sales and marketing professionals day in and day out around the world.

Reciprocity is an extremely powerful influence. That’s hardly surprising, since it is one of the underlying behaviours that enables us to have a society where we can have specialist roles and engage in trade. People generally feel obligated to return a favour. This tendency is often played on by offering a small gift to potential customers. Studies show that even if the gift is unwanted, it will influence the recipient to want to reciprocate, usually by buying something. A variation on this theme is to ask for a particularly big favour. When this request is turned down, a smaller favour is then asked. Having refused the first request, it becomes that much harder to refuse the second.

Ever been given a “free” taster and then ended up buying something you wouldn’t have otherwise? Or recommended or helped out as a result of a service that gave you a “free” account. You were probably motivated by reciprocity.

Commitment and consistency are important factors in trust, and also compliance. Our desire to appear consistent in our words, beliefs, attitudes and actions is very strong. Society values personal consistency exactly because it enables trust – if we are consistent, our future actions are predictable, and that leads to confidence and so to trust.

Being consistent in our decision making also provides a useful shortcut: By sticking with decisions that we have already made, we don’t have to go through the stress and effort involved in continually reprocessing all the information that enabled us to make the decision in the first place. Consistency gets us through the complexity of our modern existence. One merely needs to recall the earlier decision and respond in keeping with it. Given the choice between deciding we are wrong, and simply changing our opinion by rearranging the facts to support our existing opinion, we will generally re-arrange the facts. As an additional shortcut, we are completely unaware that we re-arranged the facts. Google ‘cognitive dissonance’ if you want to scare yourself.

Scarcity is a fairly self-evident motivator: Offer closes today. Last 5 places remaining. That exclusive event that has tickets that always sell out before you get a chance to buy them. We hate missing out, and that influences our decisions.

The last few factors (liking, authority and social proof) can also be interpreted in terms of social influence or social trust. People trust, and comply with, people they like and that they perceive are like them (i.e. have similar values). That is why broadcast media advertisers pay large sums of money to have celebrities feature in them. Similarly, sales people look for shared interests between themselves and you.

This is simply another way of reducing the complexity we are faced with daily, using the decisions other people have already made, to reduce the ones that we have to make. People affect other people and are affected by other people. Social media and social networking sites almost codify this practice. We conform and comply based on the perceived views of others. Social Impact Theory (Latane, 1980) suggests that the amount of influence depends on:

1. The number of people who agree (although as the number of people increases, the number is less significant).
2. Strength (the status, expertise and power of the influencers).
3. Immediacy (the proximity of the influence).

Conformity from social proof is immensely powerful. If you are in any doubt, look into the origin of the phrase “Don’t drink the Kool – Aid” often kicked around in tech circles. It comes from the Jonestown tragedy, a mass suicide in 1978.

The most common form of social proof used in marketing is case studies – people like you purchased this product. Social proof is most influential at moments of uncertainty. If a situation is ambiguous, people are more likely to look to other’s behaviour and follow it. Further, people are more inclined to follow the lead of ‘similar’ people, see liking, above.

We also respond to perceived authority and expertise. The exact nature of our compliance varies by the situation, but generally we are most influenced by job titles, clothes, and even the cars that people drive. Again, these are techniques commonly used in advertising. Thumb through the adverts in any glossy mainstream magazine and count the examples.

There are two takeaways here. Firstly, as a company looking to build trust in an increasingly on-line world, there are a number of mechanisms open to you:

• Be open and transparent.
• Be predictable and consistent.
• Be visibly accountable.

Summarising Trust for Businesses On-line

In short, be part of your customers’ community. Yes, in the short term, you could get away with just the ‘appearance’ of these activities, but if you want to get to the highest levels of trust with customers, you will actually need to carry them out fully.

As individuals, we need to pay careful attention to how social media influences us, and where we place our trust. Social media plays curious games with otherwise highly effective psychological mechanisms. Just because a number of people write a positive review about a product on-line doesn’t actually make it good, although it may feel that way. At the very least, you are looking at a self-selecting group: people who chose to buy the product, rather than ones who chose not to because they perceived it to be poor.

People writing reviews are prone to exactly the same mechanisms that you are: Consistency and commitment means that they are unlikely to write a bad review for a restaurant they have patronised, since they have already paid for a meal there. Sometimes trust is broken so much that other forces come in to play, hence the occasional ranting negative review.

In face to face communication, as an effective barrier against many of these compliance techniques is to congratulate the persuader on their skill in using them. That isn’t so easy when you are dealing with a website. Give yourself time and space when making decisions. A simple self-enforced cooling-off period can work quite well.

Our life experience has probably made us suitably cynical about advertising in broadcast media. The on-line world is evolving so rapidly that we haven’t yet settled on well-adapted behaviours to deal with it.

I’m not intending to be negative here, just keen that we build real trust and real communities via the on-line world. With that in mind, I am off to the Centre for Applied Positive Psychology’s Creating Flourishing Communities Conference this week (details here), more on that later.

Related Posts

• The Social Media Business Case?
• The Social Media Expert – Wicked Problems And Failure
• Replying Via Twitter
• Networks and Notworks
• Caught by CauseWired

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.

Related Posts

• Replying Via Twitter
• On-line Trust, More than Liking
• Caught by CauseWired
• Social Media Week London
• The Social Media Business Case?

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?

Related Posts

• Culture or Technology in Business 2.0
• The Complete Bounds of Our Social Networks – Part I
• Social Media Week London
• The Social Media Business Case?
• 3 Point Social Media Strategy for Business Folk

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.

Related Posts

• Culture or Technology in Business 2.0
• In Search of the Habitat Intern
• Creating a Bad Social Media Habitat
• The Social Media Expert – Wicked Problems And Failure
• Replying Via Twitter

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.

Related Posts

• Replying Via Twitter
• On-line Trust, More than Liking
• Networks and Notworks
• Social Media Week London
• The Social Media Business Case?

I’ve been ‘doing’ startup technology businesses for over 20 years now. During that time lots of things have changed, and lots of things have stayed the same. It can get confusing as to which is which, so l took myself along to the SocialMedia Business School to catch up with current consensus thinking in the social media space.

SocialMedia Networks produced the event, which included panels with some familiar faces, including Joshua March. One of the highlights for me was Stefan Glaenzer, with his Fidelity Ventures hat on. Whilst he gave solid advice, in his usual straight talking style, it got me thinking about the place of VCs in the new open-source-social-media-powered technology world.

For the greatest part of my career, startups have depended on venture capitalists for a number of reasons, mostly contacts and cash for:

• Marketing, to get the company and product known.
• Development, to get the product or service developed.
• Funding the build out of a sales force ahead of revenues.

Related Posts

• Social Media Week London
• The Social Media Business Case?
• 3 Point Social Media Strategy for Business Folk
• Culture or Technology in Business 2.0
• Social Media in Business in London

What is happening to traditional broadcasters? Who are the new broadcasters? How should we use broadcast media? What is broadcast media becoming? How do companies communicate in the emerging broadcast world order? These were just some of the topics from the Rebecca Caroe/Creative Agency Secrets ”Should Brands be Broadcasters?” event.

It stimulated lots of thinking, and there are certainly some big issues to deal with. The three speakers were:

• Charlie Robertson of Red Spider.
• Andrew Howells of Zype.
• Quentin Boyes of Honeycomb Software.

For those that missed then, Qik‘s Mireira Fontbernat vidoed the sessions: Videos from “Should Brands be Broadcasters?”. I’m not sure the event being broadcast via Qik falls into the “ironic” bucket or not. Regardless, very useful, and a sign of the times: One person with a mobile phone can broadcast an event across the globe, receiving questions in real-time from the viewers. It feels a little like the future.

• Traditional broadcasters are moving into community building.
• The big brands are using their own broadcast media to create interaction.
• Individuals themselves are becoming broadcasters (via blogs, vlogs, Facebook, Twitter, …). 

Charlie spoke about some of his work in creating more interactive, community-based experiences for broadcasters. Enough to be worth a whole separate post on the nature of community. Andrew talked about Honda’s recent marketing (see the Honda channel on YouTube to see some of their content) and the use of Homechoice (owned by Tiscali) as an interactive TV platform. The fact that a company most known for being an Internet Service Provider bought an IPTV service provider tells you something about the changes afoot.

Of course, the idea of broadcasters and brands having a conversation is really an illusion. The problem with conversations, as Twitter users know, is that they don’t scale well. The reason brands used broadcast media in the first place wass the ability for a few people to reach several million.

There are costs to that efficiency. Traditional broadcasting is one-way. That makes broadcasting efficient for the sender, but not for the receiver. When I watch a broadcast, it isn’t tuned to my needs or where I am at right now. My only control is to turn it off, just as I turn it on. Broadcast is also a time sink. If 100 of my friends start broadcasting even 1% of their life, keeping up with it all would consume 100% of mine. I wouldn’t even have enough time left to do my own broadcasting! Shocking. Some would say that might be a good thing. Just one minute of broadcast video could consume hundreds of hours worth of other people’s time.

When media was expensive to create, there were man barriers – good and bad. Volume was low, quality was (usually) high. With low cost broadcasting, thanks to the Internet and much more affordable video kit, those barriers have moved. Loose a day watching YouTube and you’ll feel how.

New media is blurring the lines between broadcast and personalized two-way communication. I can watch a Qik video broadcast and send comments back to the person filming. With services like Blogstar the producer not only has chat, but they can also turn the camera on the audience members – as I discovered during Phil Cambell’s The Gravity show. It certainly ramped up my participation!

What conversations have, that broadcasting looses, is that ability to listen. Listening creates interaction and context. In a conversation, I can listen to the other person and understand where they are coming from. And perhaps what they want too. I can tailor what I say to take account of what they already know, and better explain what they don’t. That conversation is unique.

A conversation is a kind of negotiation, or a knowledge journey. Traditional marketing fails at this, spectacularly. That is why it wastes so much time (for the receiver and the sender). Being efficient is more about the listening than the speaking, and listening takes an investment of time.

In the workshop I ran this week, looking at creating service level agreements and managing to them, the big take away was the importance of listening. Companies and people are all too keen to ‘get their message out there’. More often that not, a little listening saves a lot of talking. We need some technologies to balance all of this new broadcast media – filtering or switching off is only part of the answer.

When we listen more, we need to do less.

Related Posts

• Social Media Week London
• The Social Media Business Case?
• The Social Media Expert – Wicked Problems And Failure
• On-line Trust, More than Liking
• Authenticity

Lloyd Davis organised an excellent Tuttle Breakfast at at OneAlfredPlace (which I would recommend looking into, if you are after membership of an executive London Club). The theme was the future of work, and social media’s place in that future.

Lloyd reminded us that our careers won’t be like our parents, or even like those of our older brothers and sisters, if we have them. This is definitely a theme across all of the industries I am involved in. Workers are changing, work places are changing, and the style of career development is changing. In my parent’s generation, people had at most three or four ‘careers’ in their lifetime. That meant shifting between industries or skill sets was an infrequent occurrence, definitely not the norm. But these days some people have that lifetime of changes within a couple of years of each other.

There isn’t just an increase pace, there is an increased flexibility, and a commitment to learning, that is required. Self-career management is no longer an option, it is a mandatory requirement. In the media industry, cheap distribution of content and social media are turning existing business models upside down. In the tech industry, off-shoring to India and China are ringing the changes. Each sector can recount its own tale of change, as we more to a ‘flat(er) earth’, driven by cheap global communications and increased mobility.

How do you embrace this globalisation at a personal level? The social media world has embraced the change, celebrating our increased connectedness and openness, so there is always insight from the folks at the Tuttle Club. Dan talked about a change from work, to passion. I think some people may struggle to find passions that pay, but I agree that we are seeing an evolution from institutional job design to self-designed careers. Then Rob spoke about moving from business 1.0 networking to the shared creation of ideas, and the emerging opportunities for new and old. Unused desk space in larger businesses can be turned into cash, and incubate a new generation of companies. Unusual skill sets working together can fuel innovation.

However, it is still not clear to me how ideals like open source, creative commons and unconferences will mesh with the ‘traditional’ business and leadership world. I joined a discussion with a group conversation that included David Wilcox, Jemima Gibbons and Anne Marie Mcewan and others (sorry crew, I didn’t capture all of the names – if you would like, please add yourself or others in the comments and I’ll edit you in).

There was some passionate talk about leadership, and how social media surfaces the ‘shadow network’ that exists insides businesses and allows them to operate, and emerging leadership styles, such as quiet leadership.

One thing that is foremost in my mind at the moment is how ‘anti-commercial’ models like open source and business can co-operate with each other, beyond just a marketing-lead engagement. We already know that they can co-exist, witness Wikipedia and hundreds of opensource software products in use, but these things are like oil and water.

We need an emulsion of these different philosophies to enable new innovation – taking these two valuable, immisible liquids and shaking them together until they mix with each other. Maybe that is Enterprise 2.0? Corporate governance, trading and employment laws and business models need to adapt to our increasingly knowledge driven world, just we ourselves must adapt, but the Internet-enabled collaborative world also needs to adapt as well.

When we encounter situations that don’t fit, change needs to happen. Being maladaptive isn’t a sustainable position, and it certainly isn’t a productive one. We need to change the environment, change ourselves, or most likely change both, to create sustainable careers and workplaces.

Related Posts

• Culture or Technology in Business 2.0
• Social Media Week London
• The Social Media Business Case?
• 3 Point Social Media Strategy for Business Folk
• Social Media in Business in London

There are some conversations that we are afraid of. An awkward subject raised with a boss. A difficult exchange with a close relative. Explaining bad news. These are understood.

There are also conversations that are awkward for a business. A discussion on the web about problems with a product, poor financial results, internal conflicts – all made public. I have seen all of these recently, and as a marketeer I know that they ‘damage the brand’. The conversations may or may not be factually accurate. Regardless, people still take something away from them, and a mark is made.

Most people see PR as about getting the message out. It has turned into Press Relations or Media Relations, rather than Public Relations. The new world of PR will be about engaging in conversations to persuade people, which was the very old world of Public Relations.

If you are in the business of persuading people, it is much easier if you are persuading them of something that is believable, credible. Something that is true and defensible. Thus the demand today for authentic companies, for ‘authentic brands’.

I observe, with an ironic twinge, the parallel growth of the personal branding industry. Will people and companies swap places? Will we end up with a juxtaposed world of authentic businesses, with people trying to project an image? Don’t misread me. I think that personal branding has a contribution to make, but as a marketeer I know that it also opens up Pandora’s box.

Good branding today is about being authentic, but most branding theory comes from the old ‘one way’ days of “sticking lipstick on the pig”. There is a big difference, one focusses on the message, the other on the messenger. You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people, all of the time. With one way media and PR, the branding conversation was a tricky one to manage, but it could be managed.

With social media, some of the people are connected with some of the other people. Customers are better connected and the media doesn’t own the conversation anymore. It isn’t clear who will own it, if anyone. And, actually, it doesn’t matter. A new set of skills is required. Now we are all PR people, but we must focus on the messenger, more that the message. Who is it that you are? What’s your brand?

Related Posts

• The Social Media Business Case?
• Culture or Technology in Business 2.0
• The Social Media Expert – Wicked Problems And Failure
• On-line Trust, More than Liking
• Social Media – Do Conversations Scale?

It has been a great week, I have done lots of things and met lots of people. However, I haven’t blogged, and I feel the poorer for it. Writing is gradually becoming a part of my identity. This post is with thanks to Ann Michael of Manage to Change and Liz Strauss of Successful Blog, who started the chain of thought when I had the pleasure of meeting them. It also relates to a couple of posts on Ann’s blog. By the way, Ann and Liz are two excellent people that I highly recommend spending time with. So, from writing to identity… Technologist or not, it is a critical issue today. It is a fascinating topic too.

Depending on your background, you might understand identity in the sense of personal identity, or in computer security or perhaps even corporate identity. What is your identity? Why is it so important?

From an IT perspective, identity is critical in making sure that the right people have access to the right information, protecting the user and the information. From a personal productivity perspective, understanding our identity helps us work with our nature, rather than against it.

The Start of Identity

When I began using computer systems, shortly after the dinosaurs roamed the earth, I had a ‘login’ and password. It was a curious set of letters and digits, dished out by some guy in a lab coat with a particularly bad haircut. It didn’t tell the computer much about me, but it kept the riff-raff out of the system and my data reasonably private. My first encounter with identity was when I started working in the security arena. There was a need for a more meaningful view of ‘who’ a user was. Identity captured additional information, such as the user’s role and their membership of various ‘groups’. This meant the system might know that the user was an administrator in the marketing department. Adding properties made life as an IT manager simpler, because the computer or the firewall had a better concept of who that user was. The users could be managed in groups, rather than as individuals.

As the Internet blossomed and more on-line services emerged, I ended up with multiple identities. Today the number of identities I manage has exploded. Thankfully things have started to converge on the email address as an identifier, although I have even built up a large collection of those. OpenID is an initiative that will simplify the management of identity on-line by pulling all of these identities together (see the article on Lifehacker here for an example). That may or may not be a good thing. If you want to understand where on-line identity is going, do check out the presentation “Identity 2.0” from OSCON2005, and also get an example of Dick Hardt using the Larry Lessig presentation method as a bonus.

Understanding Our Identity In The Real World

If you think identity is a complex issue in the computer world, just wait until you think about it in the real world of flesh. and blood If I put my psychology hat on, I get a completely different view of what identity means. Psychologists have been researching the human identity for over a hundred years, although there still isn’t a unified theory to understand it. One psychologist, Manford Kuhn, created the twenty statements test as a simple way to capturing a snapshot of our identity. Try it for yourself and see what you learn: Open up a text editor or grab a piece of paper and a pen and give yourself twelve minutes to write down answers the following question: “who are you?”, use statements starting “I am…”, you don’t need to write more than 20. That is, if you get that far in the twelve minutes. Give it a try now.

Look back at your answers and see if you can group any of them together or sort them. What do they tell you about yourself? Does it reveal what is important to you? You can use this information to inform your personal goals and to help yourself be more motivated, by connecting with who you are. Even in the real world, we have multiple identities. This is an interesting discussion tool in the business context for teams: “who are we?”, “we are…”

The psychologist Erik Erikson put forward the theory that we create our identity as we resolve various crises at different stages of life. This is the origin of the term ‘mid-life crisis‘. Well, I always wondered what that was all about. Whilst our core identity that remains fairly constant, our identity does evolve as we grow up and grow old. One of the big shaping factors is the social groups we relate to. By the way, that the twenty statements test only tells us what we bring to mind at a single moment in time. We are much more complex than that. You might write something completely different a few minutes later.

You Are Who You Are, Or Are You?

Our identity is a totally unique thing, computer IDs rely on that, but it is also true in the physical world. I can find a dozen Benjamin Ellis’ using Google. We might have DNA that is 99% identical, but we are still totally different. Actually, another 1% difference and one of us could be a chimpanzee. How unique are we? Even if you are a twin, you have a unique finger print and a unique set of experiences and values. To date computers have only just got as far as understanding fingerprints, increasingly used in computer security.

A new generation of web applications, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Plaxo are changing this. They are enabling computers to add social information to their concept of identity. They map out our relationships or “connections”. This is sometimes referred to as social graphing, an exciting new technology with lots of possibilities. These new services aren’t a passive thing, because they feedback into those relationships and affect our identity, by changing our relationships.

Early services, such as Friends Reunited, create ‘long tail’ relationships (thanks to Jon Bains and Fred Bassett for the conversation at a recent Chinwag Live event). They have enabled us to resurrect old friendships by reconnecting us. In the case of Friends Reunited, it was friendships from school days. With services like Facebook and Linkedin, it is via friends of friends, as the social graph grows.

The services also make it easier to sustain a greater number of relationships, by narrow-casting our lives to each other, and supporting an ‘outer ring’ of friendships that would not otherwise be sustainable, using traditional communication methods. They affect the inner ring of relationships too, by increasing the volume and reach of our daily ‘chatter’; we know more of what is happening in our friends’ lives, enabling us to communicate within more of a common context.

The Social Media Social Experiment

We are all unwitting participants in a grand experiment that will profoundly affect identity in the next decade. Who we are connected with affects who we are, because it affects what we know and how we view ourselves. Change your friends, and you change who you compare yourself to.

With the advent of social media, a new set of social norms are forming. As a blogger, I am watching with interest as this new medium and its norms evolves. Ann Michael’s recent post, connections and respect raises an interesting point. Bloggers blog about each other, but they don’t blog about business associates. For people who straddle both worlds this can be a fine line. Recently I had a discussion with Sarah Blow on this, but I’m still not sure how it will all map out. I’ll have to ask Mike of Techcrunch UK next time I see him, as he runs around with his 3G connection. If my business is blogging, or I am blogging for my business, what goes and what doesn’t? What is ‘private’ and what is ‘public’. It isn’t just blogging. Another of Ann’s posts raised some of the workplace challenges of Facebook: “your boss on facebook“. Who to connect with and what to share with them on social networking sites? Facebook has some granularity with its “view limited profile” feature, but this is hardly matches the complexity of our real-world relationships. This just the tip of an iceberg. The boundary between what is private and public is increasingly fuzzy in the new world of social media and Internet search engines. Recently, the mystery of where a man that had been missing for five years had been was solved. Someone found a picture of him with his wife on the Internet: Google solves the missing man mystery.

New Rules for New Media

There is a whole new set of social rules to evolve in this complex world. If I post a comment to a friends wall on Facebook, all their friends see it, but some of them aren’t my friends, they might be people I’ve never even met. Communication is becoming increasingly asymmetric and unbalanced in nature with social media. What parts of your identity are personal, and what are ‘public’? It isn’t binary, we have different ‘roles’ and ‘groups’ to our real identity, different pieces of information that we share with different people. If there is a feint line between the persona you have at work and the one you have for your friends, it will blur – just look at Facebook’s beacon. How do you feel about your Facebook friends all knowing what you have been buying? For those that don’t blog or do facebook, you aren’t immune. Digital information is leaky (just ask HMRC, who write a rather sad letter to me about loosing my personal data). It can be copied, pasted, forwarded and it doesn’t decay. There are comments on-line that I made in email conversations two decades ago, that is another form of long-tail. We all leave digital artefacts behind us on a daily basis.

One thing is for sure, we are heading for a time of increased and extended transparency, regardless of wanting it or not. Computers and other people may end up with a better sense of what our identity is than we have ourselves: “you are a blogger, you are a fan of Snow Patrol, you are a purchaser of violent games, you are friends with…”. There is a positive side to all of this. Through social graphing, we can more easily discover new friends, reconnect with old ones and keep in touch with new ones. We can gain a greater sense of our identity and be part of a community. Without blogging, I wouldn’t have met any of the people mentioned in this post.

Related Posts

• Who’s are you? The Question of stolen (bits of) identity
• What will Enterprise 2.0 look like? Some Thoughts from Crystal Balls
• Culture or Technology in Business 2.0
• FOAF – Building Networks With a Friend of a Friend
• Social Media – Do Conversations Scale?