If you are looking for a great event to develop your marketing skills, you might want to check out the upcoming Chinwag Psych event, which covers psychology, neuroscience and big data for business and marketing.

Today is Posterous’s last day. Posterous started in July 2008 and was a great and easy way to share  short-form blog content, and it rapidly became popular. In fact so popular that Twitter acquired it last year. This was clearly a technology and talent acquisition rather than a platform one, and so a little while ago the Posterous team announced the inevitable:

On April 30th, we will turn off posterous.com and our mobile apps in order to focus 100% of our efforts on Twitter. This means that as of April 30, Posterous Spaces will no longer be available either to view or to edit. – Thanks from Posterous

If you were a user of the platform, you actually have until May 31th to retreive your data, although best to get it now while you remember.  It is fairly straight forward:

1. Go to http://posterous.com/#backup.
2. Request a backup (clicking “Request Backup” next to your Space).
3. You’ll receive an email when it is ready.
4. Go to http://posterous.com/#backup and download the .zip.

Importers are available for WordPress and Squarespace. If you used an earlier version of the WordPress importer, do check that your images were imported, not just hot linked, to avoid problems when Posterous finally shuts down. You can also migrate to Tumblr using  Justmigrate.

This month, Yahoo! has also announced the closure of it’s Upcoming service. Consolidation and churn is not unusual in the Internet space, but the closures serve as a timely reminder: Who own’s the land (platform) under your building (content). Today Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest are all hot properties, and it makes good marketing sense to use them effectively. However, they are only part of your overall communication strategy. While it might not be as ‘sexy’, don’t neglect your own real-estate. Your company (or personal) blog is built on your land (if you own the domain name) and is far more durable. Before leaping on to any new platform, it is always best to check how ‘portable’ your investment is going to be, before ploughing days and hours into building and growing a presence on a platform that someone else is looking to monetise.

The latest Technorati Digital Influence report says “consumers are turning to blogs when looking to make a purchase.” – ranking blogs above other forms of social media. Your own blog remains a critical component in optimising your discoverability on-line (including via search engines). The last few quarters in the Social Media world have focused heavily on platforms, but it is content that remains key. By all means use other platforms, but think carefully about how they are supporting (or weakening) your owned spaces.

Platforms come and go, and any thing that wants to call itself a digital strategy (rather than a set of opportunistic tactics) must be designed to take that into account.

In surveys completed by the winning organizations, on average, fewer than one in five employees (19 percent) reported experiencing chronic work stress, compared to 35 percent nationally, and 84 percent of employees said they were satisfied with their job, versus 67 percent in the general population. Additionally, 77 percent of employees said they would recommend their organization to others as a good place to work compared to 57 percent, and only 11 percent said they intend to seek employment elsewhere within the next year, compared to almost three times as many (31 percent) nationally.

Let me list that out:

• 35 percent of employees reported experiencing chronic work stress.
  
• 33 percent of employees are not satisfied with their job.
• 43 percent of employees would not recommend their workplace.
• 31 percent of employees intend to seek another job within 12 months.

If those were statistics from a customer survey, the management team and the board would probably be panicking. But this is worse. These are statistics on the working parts of the business, and health indicators across the working population. In this case, it is the US, but the UK has issues of it’s own.

“Good leadership has the power to energize, engage and motivate staff to go the extra mile for their organisation. Poor leadership will have the opposite effect, creating a demotivating environment and leading in time to poor team performance including high staff turnover and frequent absences.” Melody Moore, Hay Group.

Melody goes on to point out that leaders tend to use coercive leadership during times of crisis, and that the UK has seen a dramatic increase in the use of this leadership style:

“…a crisis is an event, not a prolonged state. Over-reliance on the coercive leadership style is unsustainable over the long-term, eroding innovation and creativity among employees.”

The current economic crisis has been on going for a long while, and shows very few signs of abating, so it is time to rethink how managers are leading. If you were told that a third of your workforcewas rendered ineffective, wouldn’t you want to do something about it?

The winners mentioned here, our good friends at DHL, and many others, are of course. It is often the best workers that are the least engaged, and so the most at risk of leaving or completely disengaging, leaving the poor performers to steer the ship.  Here are three steps to get your work place started:

1. Assign shared, senior responsibility for employee engagement and well being – it is often a leading indicator for customer satisfaction.
2. Assess employee engagement – we do this via surveys and social platforms, it doesn’t need to be expensive.
3. Actively identify and resolve engagement issues – this frequently comes down to better communication.

What one thing can you do today to improve your workplace?

Whose words are these?

2. Remember how you use Google to search for ‘stuff’: people do not search for adjectives / adverbs, they search for products, brands and product types.

The key here is use the language of your reader, not your own. Technology companies can be particularly bad at this, posting in company or product-specific terms that no-one is likely to search for, or that (in the worst cases) are completely unintelligible to potential customers. How do your reader’s talk about your topic? Do you need to explain some of your terms?

While I agree with the point about adjectives, my observation is that people search for problem/solution terms more frequently than they search for product names, unless they are a long way down the buying cycle.

How do you search?

Think about how you use Google yourself, and note what kind of language you use when you search. As an example, the most used search phrases related to “iPhone screen” are “iphone repair” and “iphone display”, which have  about the same monthly search volume as the phrase “how to repair an iphone.” By comparison, the phrase “iphone cracked screen repair” has only a tiny percentage of that volume. Have a play with the Google Keyword Tool.

3. Google does not understand inference, allegory, clever headlines or abstract content

It certainly doesn’t. But it does make assumptions based on what you link to and what links to you. Make use of relevant links in your posts, and write for humans first, search engines second. Having a precisely keyworded title is no good if no-one clicks on the post to read it.

How do you read?

Google measures which search results are clicked through to, so winning people’s interest and attention is key, especially in the age of social. While we are on the topic of Google, don’t forget that it isn’t the only player in search engine land, Microsoft now has a 16% share of the search space.

10. Try to summarise with a fact / top tips box-out copy

Writing for the web isn’t the same as writing a book or an email. People scan web pages, rather than reading them. Have visual anchors in your pages. Do you see how that worked? Bold text, call outs and images all provide places for readers’ eyes to rest, and potential entry points to your writing. Try the following techniques:

• Strong summary at the start.  Clear conclusion at the end.
• Highlight keywords or phrases - links are highlights too.
• Get a good site design with sensible colours, fonts and spacing.
• Add sub-headings that are meaningful to new readers.
• Include lists - oh how we love lists.
  
• One idea per paragraph – make it easy to skip and restart reading, and create more entry points.
• Be terse - less is more when you only have seconds.

Practice

Short and to the point – something I’m still working on! It’s an art, not a science. There’s only one real way to find out what works for you and your audience: Practice – Read lots. Write lots.

Get out there and write something – that might even be a comment here!

At the end of last month, NokiaAtWork got in touch and asked if I’d like to give the Nokia Lumia 920 a try. A couple of days later, the Nokia #switch box arrived, and the adventures began…

Two things that hit me straight away: The colour (yellow?!?) and the size (even in Stephen Fry’s hands, this phone would look big). I’ll come back to those two issues…

Within a few minutes I had the 920 on the network, my contacts, calendars and emails synced, and my social network accounts set up (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FourSquare and Flickr all built in). It’s the fastest phone on-boarding experience that I can remember. No downtime, no disruption. New phone out of the box, and back to work, within the time it took me to drink my first cup of coffee for the day. That was partly enabled by the wonders of ‘the cloud’ of course, but that’s a topic for another post.

If you come from the iOS or Andriod worlds, then you are likely to find the Windows Phone interface startlingly different. Once I got over the initial shock of a new way of interacting with the phone, I was won over. A swipe of the finger and you can get to any of the installed apps. And, get this, they are listed in alphabetical order. Radical. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve had to use the iPhone search facility to find an app, because I’d lost track of which page it was on. As you install more apps, there’s even an alphabetical index heading (‘a’, ‘b’, …). It sounds simple, but that one feature alone has saved a fair chunk of time.

On the main page, the Live Tiles are a game changer. They provide the ability to ‘grok‘ information with a quick glance at the phone. You can see at a glance not just that there is an update, but what it is, without even tapping/swiping/clicking. The ability to have large or small tiles gives much more flexibility over how you build the screen. It’s more like having an information dashboard, than the traditional ‘list of dead icons’ that populate the home page on other platforms. I think the app developers are only just starting to explore what can be done with live tiles, and I suspect there will be a range of apps that put them to very good use. Another neat little feature is the ability to ‘pin’ contacts to the home screen. Not only does that create a quick way to call or message them, but it also gives you quick access to all of the social feeds for that person. You can check where they are and what’s happening in their world before you make that call.

The biggest wow moment came when I was stuck in traffic, driving to a meeting. I’d paired the lumia with the rusty old bluetooth car kit in my car, and tucked the phone safely into one of the storage trays. Suddenly a voice told me I had a message from Twitter, and asked if I wanted it to read the message. I said read it. It did. No hands. It even asked if I wanted to delete it afterwards. When I got the next SMS message, from my other half, I had to chuckle when the Lumia correctly read out the ‘xx’ at the end of the message as ‘kisses.’ – this time I took it up on the offer of speaking a reply, which it captured and sent 100% accurately. Since then I’ve even dictated Tweets via the speech to text interface, as well as adding notes and diary entries. This was the sort of thing I’d hoped to do with Siri, but we fell apart after our first date. I’d even asked her to marry me. Siri was great for party tricks, but never seem to get to grips with business. My lasting memory is of her plaintif voice complaining about not being able to do various things in the UK. The Lumia seemed unfazed at being in a country where we spell colour as ‘colour’ and and pronounce metals in ways that have absolutely no bearing on their spelling. The Drive+ navigation application was great for getting around too. Maps that work when you don’t have a network connection? A massive productivity win when you are running late for a meeting.

Nokia have always lead the way with cameras. I early iPhone camera was a train wreck in low light, a key reason I ignored it. With the iPhone 4, it was meant to be better. I held out for the iPhone 4s, and gave in to the hype about it’s photographic capabilities. I was disappointed. To be fair, I am a demanding camera user. On one hand, I’m an (at least semi-) professional photographer. On the other hand, I like to take pictures of flip charts and meeting room board scriblings, receipts and all sorts of other artifacts that I come across in my day-to-day work. That means low light, and no flash. The Lumia 920 might not be an 808, but it’s a great camera, and excellent at video too. Two capabilities that are increasingly required, even in business use.

What don’t I like about the Lumia? Yes, I’d like a few more features in the email client (like being able to flag emails for action when I’m back at the laptop), but the email client feels faster and (actually) slicker than the iPhone’s. It has almost made email pleasurable again, and that’s quite an achievement. So, to the big question. Would I switch? Much as I enjoy the Nexus 7, I couldn’t go back to Android for a work phone. Picking the iPhone back up, it felt… Dated. I started by saying that the first two things about the Lumia 920 that hit me were the colour and the size. There’s something quite refreshing about having a phone that ISN’T black and white (although Nokia do those colours!). Somewhat ironically, the Windows Phone has become the ‘think different’, and more importantly, the ‘work different’ – and that size thing? The iPhone feels tiny to me now. Despite the wonders of the Retina display, it feels like I’m squinting at things. Nokia have done it. It’s time to switch.

Those of us who have been blogging long enough, or passed their 5th anniversary on Twitter, will remember the Nokia N95. It was the blogger’s device of choice – great for media capture, and pretty much an office in your hand. Then the world changed, and the crown changed hands. Well. It might just be time to hand that crown back to the old king. Does the Nokia Lumia 920 have a thousand and one different games? No. Does it have the latest greatest app that does weird things with your photos? Probably not. Does it have the ability to make calls even where reception is weak? Oh yes, big time. Does it have good maps? Oh yes. Does it have great battery life? Definitely. Is the camera great, even in low light? Incredibly great. Does it have all you need to keep up in today’s incredibly networked business world? Most definitely. Now, I better find out how I buy one of these things, or there is going to be a bit of a fight when the courrier gets here!

In so much of the communication that happens in business we don’t get to see. We email, make phone calls, text, Tweet, Yammer and IM. All of these platforms loose the visual aspects of communication. Yes, they are using the written word, which is visual, but a few dozen characters doesn’t even begin to cover the facial expressions, physical posture, environmental surroundings, and all the other things that go towards providing contextual information. That information enhances and clarifies the communication.

We recently built an internal global video sharing platform for one of our clients. As it rolled out, I was struck by the power of video. It has an amazing ability to convey stories, bring remote events and locations to life, and place employees, or customers, at the front of people’s minds. It transports people to remote locations, in a matter of seconds, without them even having to move their eyeballs.

Last week I spent some time with the folks at brother, getting a view of their OmniJoin platform and products. It fulfils many of the functions of tools like Webex, but what struck me was its ability to deliver multi-party video conferencing, putting the faces of people from around the world on to multiple screens and enabling them to talk as if there were in the same room. While more and more laptops have webcams built-in, there really is something to be said for using a decent external speaker, microphone and high quality camera, so it was nice to see that brother include those in their portfolio. Sadly, the built-in mics and the webcams on most laptops leave a lot to be desired, although they are better in recent models.

equipment that used to cost hundreds of thousand of dollars/pounds (if not millions!) now costs just hundreds. The Internet has already proven that it can deliver voice and video, and social platforms like Facebook and Google+ have embraced them, so why are businesses not making more use of these technologies?

Yes, corporate networks used to be a challenge, but with falling bandwidth costs and better network infrastructures, that is less and less of an issue. The video sharing platform I mentioned earlier is delivering video streams to thousands of people across dozens of countries, using the corporate network infrastructure. A few minutes of streaming video uses less bandwidth than most of the photo-laden PowerPoint attachments that seem to arrive in my inbox these days.

It’s not just about real-time communications. Most mobile phones can now shoot High Definition video (in the case of the Nokia Pureview 808 I used recently, it can be like having a professional movie camera in your hands – see this video). So, businesses can’t say that they haven’t got the equipment. Similarly, video editing software that used to cost the same price as a high-end racing car now comes bundled free, putting professional video editing technology within reach. Of course it still takes time and skill to put even a short video clip together, but spontaneous video, either shot-as-live, or in a video conference, takes no longer to produce than the non-visual equivalent.

If you’ve been working with social media for any period of time you’ll know the importance of having a good photograph in your blog posts and Google+ updates. The world in turning visual. Check out the success of sites like Pinterest, Instagram, and a whole cohort of image-driven content platforms. People want images, and it’s no surprise when you realise that roughly two-thirds of the human brain is dedicated to processing visual information. Given that a fair portion of the rest is focused on keeping us alive (breathing, heart, and so on), that doesn’t leave a lot to deal with listening to that voice mail message you just left, or focusing on that (usually torturous) conference call.

Can you see how video could transform your communications? Get your message across more clearly, reduce miscommunication, engage people. Think about investing in video conferencing, and building so video-driving communication channels. It’s all about moving people from saying “I don’t get it” to saying “I see”.

• Personality Sorters and Social Media – Part I
• Personality Sorters and Social Media – Part II

They go into a lot of the theoretical background, but people have told me they’ve been helpful in understanding things like Myers-Briggs / MBTI, 16-PF and the myriad  of other tools in use. Tanya’s post, in that first link, was inspired by Susan Cain’s “The power of introverts” TED talk:

[Susan] argues that although introverts make up approximately 33-50% of the population, modern society discriminates strongly in favour of extroverts. Fifty years ago, our classrooms had individual desks, all in rows, and you worked by yourself. Now our classrooms are arranged around circular tables and you work in groups.

And, of course, there is the parallel in the work place, with open plan offices, huddle spaces, and a focus on teamwork and social interaction:

Currently, our work-places and schools make it easier for extroverts to excel because they are set up to focus on team work and discussion, with little time for silence or reflection. Our society values the extroverts, and the introverts have felt sidelined.

Understanding the Difference

In can be hard for Extraverts to understand that Introverts need time to recharge. Extroverts are energised by social interaction, introverts are drained by it. The mirror of that, is the ability of introverts to be energised by long periods of time spent alone digesting information, something that many extroverts find draining and demotivating. Hopefully the need for a mixture of personality types in any environment is clear – if it isn’t, then try spending a few hours in an environment that is dominated by one or the other!

Susan makes three calls to action at the end of her talk:

1.  Stop the ‘madness’ for constant group work.
2. Go to the wilderness – unplug a little more often.
3. Introverts and extroverts, value each other and understand your differences.

What’s Social Media got to do with it?

Many people view social media as a neutral tool. It really isn’t. Twitter (and almost any microblogging platform) is a very interesting lens for communication. It strips away the visual aspects, de-emphasises the emotion, and depersonalises the communication. It lets people communicate together, while remaining alone. I find it  interesting that often times Yammer is widely adopted in IT departments, but much more slowly in other groups. Guess where there’s a high concentration of introverts in the organisation? Is the reason for the adoption pattern perhaps more to do with personality types than technical affinity?

Tanya observes:

My friends who were quiet and withdrawn in ‘real life’, on Twitter were chattering away or SHOUTING REALLY LOUDLY. It was bizarre.

I decided to investigate further. I discovered (from my admittedly modest survey among mine and Vicky Beeching’s followers) that roughly 75% of Twitter users were introverts, and 25% of Twitter users extroverts.  Introverts outnumber extroverts on Twitter by 3:1.

That matches the original MBTI Twitter study I carried out a few years ago, which found that introverts were massively over represented on Twitter (that’s a good thing by the way ;) ).

Put in the social platforms

Put platforms in place in the business that enable the introverts to have an equal voice. If you are only getting interaction from a subset of your team, you are missing out on valuable knowledge and feedback.

Let people be alone, but don’t let them be lost.

If you make heavy use of on-line tools for communication, be sure to strike a balance between letting people work independently, and helping them out when they become stuck, but are too shy to say so. Even with the best tools and platforms in place, home/remote working can be a lonely experience for some, especially if they are used to working closely with a them.

 Shut the Lid, Stop the Crisis

Lastly, make space. Even in the middle of a crisis. The biggest mistakes I’ve seen this year have not been from being too slow to react, they have been from reacting too quickly. The constant barrage of information that we face daily makes everything feel like a crisis. Take a lid out of the introvert’s book: Shut the laptop lid(s). Turn off the phone for a few minutes. Breathe. Reflect. Think about what you know, and come up with a better set of solutions than you would have done otherwise.

What makes a good Facebook page?

What doesn’t work, is information. ‘We’re playing at the Crab and Dragon on Tuesday, come on down.’ Despite the fact that that type of information is crucial, it’s also boring. I can usually find it out from your website anyway, and you’ve probably got loads of bookings – very few of them will be relevant to me. That kind of update, followed by ‘We smashed last night’s gig at the Crab and Dragon,’ doesn’t do it for me either. You were hardly going to say it was a disaster were you? If I went I’ll have my own opinions about how it was, and if I didn’t, I’m possibly not interested, or possibly slightly gutted.

Yes, we as a fan base do want to know when the gigs are, but actually we’re also interested in you – what you’re doing, what makes you laugh, what inspires you. We’ve already connected at the level of the music, but it’s the personal stuff that brings us along on your journey. There’s a way of interacting that feels as though it is on the ‘friend’ level. A certain level of vulnerability, sharing things that matter, that injects ‘personality’ into a page and makes the reader at least interested, but usually want to engage.

By way of example

I’m going to take Nina Nesbitt as my example. Currently a little known singer, though I have a feeling it won’t stay that way for much longer.

She’s only just turned 18 herself and her audience are young. She microblogs her life, and allows everyone to be involved. All the information about her tour dates and music releases is in there, but it is wrapped up in her general enthusiasm for life and for her work, it isn’t broadcast.

We know about her cat who seems to be a fairly good photographer, the cheeky squirrel that’s causing a nuisance in her garden, the laughs she has with her producer, the euphoria when she got signed. We see pictures of her radio interviews, pictures of her rehearsing, pictures of her new guitar and the tortoise she is babysitting, pictures of her mum popping into the studio and singing on an album track, pictures of her A&R team deliberating over an album cover. She has a picture album entitled ‘People I met on tour‘ – she connects with her fans offline and online.

When she was planning her tour, she ran a competition to cover two of her songs, with the winners each winning the opportunity to support her at one of the gigs.

She’s full of mad ideas – she’s just posted a code generator on her website then posted her messages in code, which you have to decipher again using the tool on the website. Fans were responding in code and then using it to talk to each other. She wrote a message on a postcard and sent it to a fan with the challenge of sending it on – each time it was received by a different fan it was photo blogged, and it was fun to see the different countries it passed through and the embellishments each recipient made. Fans connected with each other, a community has begun to form, and each one feels that they know something about the artist, as well as her music. They are involved in what she’s doing, so when she announces a new single it flies off the shelves. So to speak. Perhaps it seems banal to you, but bear in mind the audience. She knows who they are and what is interesting to them.

I’m not going to give an example of an uninteresting page, that wouldn’t be fair and they are easy to find, but for a wider audience, how about Rodrigo y Gabriela as another great page? They may not be posting pictures of squirrels, but the principle is the same. They help you to become involved in what they are doing around their music. We get insights into rehearsals, recording, preparation for gigs. Announcements about new music and tours fold naturally into that.

Steve Lawson is fairly niche in his capacity as a solo bassist. He has however built a relatively large community, just by being his mad self. Yes, he gets very enthusiastic when he releases an album, no-one is left in any doubt when there is new music to buy, but he also regularly shares about the music he is listening to, shares about the politics of the music industry that he is involved in, the ups and downs of life as a musician, and the personal relationship he has with many of his listeners is self evident.

What about my business?

Does this apply to business? I think so. It’s the ‘in between’ bits that make the story. As a business you have dates in your year – product releases, events you organise – and these things have their place in your ‘page.’ But what goes in between? What takes those things from being announcements to being part of the natural unfolding of life? That will vary from company to season to product, but will probably include a glimpse of your people, things that are inspiring you, problems you are tackling and what’s going into solving them. It will ask questions and opinions of those that are following you and responding to comments that are made. There might be a Friday pizza, a competition to name a product, a light hearted review of the restaurants in the town you did your last exhibition. Alongside this there’ll be announcements, and perhaps advice sought about feature development choices for example.

But you’ll involve the folk who come along with you, share the journey and develop a community. Communities have a tendency to be loyal.

Crowd Sourcing

Crowds – large collections of unrelated people – can be highly effective at providing information to aid decision making. Although, in his book “The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few”, James Surowiecki makes the point that crowds are wise only as long has they have diversity, independence and are decentralized, otherwise crowds can become very foolish.

There have been some great examples of crowd sourcing data, one of my favourites being UK Snow, crowd sourcing weather information, how very British! As Clay Shirky observes, the problem now is not technical capability, it is legitimacy. Under what circumstances do you take the advice from user generated media and when do you ignore it?

From Talk to Action

All talk and no action obviously isn’t a recipe for change, the insights gained have to be put into practice to make a difference, but Social Media is closing that loop too. Back in 2010, Orange launched a “mobile volunteering” program, creating apps to turn people’s spare moments into useful actions. Again, many people doing something small to achieve something big isn’t by any means a new idea, but social platforms have drastically altered the mechanics and economics of self-organising groups. After the 2011 Summer Riots in London, something dramatic happened.

“Hundreds of people armed with brooms, binbags and rubber gloves turned out across London to help clean up the damage caused by a third night of rioting, looting and arson. Co-ordinated online on Facebook and Twitter, volunteers mobilised in the worst-hit parts of the capital to sweep streets, help local shopkeepers and show solidarity with communities thrown into turmoil by the violence…” The Guardian, 9th August 2011.

Social Platforms have demonstrated their ability to connect groups of volunteers with specific needs time and time again, and it is something that echoes through the history of The Internet (see Tom Watson‘s inspirational book, Cause Wired).

There is a difficult balance between use-case-specific platforms and general purpose social platforms. It is a challenge I come across many times in the design of social intranets: too use-case specific, and the platform doesn’t achieve critical mass, too generic, and needs fail to connect with resources efficiently. The same is true in the world of the public Internet: While platforms like Facebook and Twitter have millions of users, it is hard for specific causes to connect them, or vice versa. Specific applications are required to create a focus, and a mechanism, for the two to connect.

We Will Gather

The team at We Will Gather are bridging that gap with a hyperlocal approach. Inspired by the #riotcleanup hashtag, it’s an elegantly executed application built around Twitter. Created by Dan Thompson, it connects volunteers with projects in their specific area. At their launch last week, Lloyd Davis and Sophie Collard talked through how it works, and gave some examples of current projects. Like all good tools, it’s radically simple and surprisingly powerful:

• From Twitter: Tweet with the word ‘help’, the hashtag #wewillgather and a postcode.
• The website starts a page for your action, and Tweets you a link to it.
• Add any extra details you’d like.

There are great practical tips in there, as well as some useful context and background. Social Media is the future for SMEs. It gives access to resources and capabilities that were previously reserved for large businesses. It provides the ability to reach a global audience, and to create and distribute content globally. Combined with the dramatic technology evolutions that have happened in mobile phone technology, it allows even the smallest of businesses to put video and audio onto the web, in a very affordable way.

The future of social media is that we stop talking about it, at least we stop talking about it as a separate thing. It becomes integrated into how businesses work, not just in the marketing domain, but for customer support, product and service development, sales, supplier management, and even the way that employees communicate. It will become the way that business works; the communications glue that we take for granted, much as we treat the telephone or email today. Social media provides new opportunities too. It’s a great source for market research and customer engagement, enabling you to identify advocates and detractors of your business.

As a business owner, the scarcest resource that you have is your time, and the time of your team. Within that time, the most fiercely contended battle is the fight for your attention. That same is true for your customers and potential customers.  Social Media is all about attention; who you connect with and follow, what you read, and what you share. The key to success with Social Media is to get, and provide, a return on that investment in time and attention, which means connecting in the ways, and the places, that benefit both your business and your community. They are far more opportunities and possibilities than your business can pursue, so it is about choosing the great over the good, then experimenting and iterating.

Here are the links to the resources mentioned in the middle of the video as useful for the SME getting started in listening:

• Google Alerts
• Twitter Search
• Facebook Search
• Google+ Search
• Techmeme
• Mediagazer

Setting up some basic Google search alerts is a quick and easy starting point, the finding the platforms that are most relevant to your business and building from there.

Well, it’s twelve months on, so it’s an interesting checkpoint to see what sort of conversations we are actually having. There are some very human conversations, like this recent set of tweets from the Solihull Police: (read from bottom up, it being Twitter):

Whilst that was a very lighthearted set of messages, if you follow the Solihull Police tweet stream you’ll see they are also using it to help track down suspected criminals, and keeping their community up to date with local information. You’ll also see lots of two way dialogue, and inbound and well as outbound communication. At the other end of the spectrum, some organisations are being much more ‘commercial’ in their social media use, by ‘commercial’ I mean in the advertising sense of the word.

Last the weekend I went to the Olympic torch ceremony in Guildford. The Lloyds TSB ‘social media’ team were there, inviting people to “have their picture taken and posted to their Facebook page.” – a very nice ad insertion for them for sure, but really not very social (or for that matter, very imaginative). Traditional marketing is being shoe horned into social platforms left right and centre. Compare that with the Solihull Police example, or companies like Dell, who are using social media to encourage their customers to share business advice, and provide technical support. I’ll come back to Dell in a moment.

The revolution of communications from broadcast, to feedback channel, to conversation, to network is far from complete, and organisations continue to make steps and missteps as they adapt to the new technology. Organisational structures are changing, and so communications channels need to adapt to suit them.

What is now often called “social business” has its historical roots prior to the industrial revolution, which enabled process at scale. As a side effect, they set the dominant forms of business communication that are still in place today. However, the business challenge, like manufacturing, has moved on. The next challenge is to enable businesses to carry out innovation at scale. That requires re-humanizing organisations, rebuilding relationships and transforming them into more friendly, enjoyable places to work, that can foster and sustain cross-functional collaboration. If you’ve missed out on the Web 2.0/Social Business trend, this Harvard video with Andrew McAfee is a handy introduction:

There is a danger that businesses do nothing more than ‘go through the motions’ of using social software, failing to grasp the opportunity to transform their culture and communications, to unlock the discretionary effort of staff and customers, and create sustainable competitive advantage for themselves. Of course change isn’t  necessary, because, as Demming put in, survival isn’t mandatory. Some businesses will adapt, and some won’t; there will be winners, and there will be losers.

If you want to talk more about how social media can be used in your business, and you are in the UK, an event to have on your calendar  is the next Dell B2B Huddle, which will take place at Microsoft’s offices in London. Put together with Kerry Bridge from Dell,  Simon Hughes of Microsoft and the insightful, and independent, Neville Hobson. You can join the discussions about the event in the LinkedIn group, or leave a comment here.

There were quite a few things that Phil Libin talked about that caught my attention, but I was particularly caught by his descriptions for the way that things happen in their business, and the concept of the 100 year start up. He said that one of his key goals was that everyone in the business should know WHY they are doing what they do. Scroll forward a few days, and Farhan shared this video of Simon Sinek’s TED talk about “How great leaders inspire action.”  Simon’s premise, which bridges to his book, Start With Why, is that leaders in great organisations communicate the same way: Why? How? What?

• What – What you do. What needs to happen.
• How – How you do that, for example, your unique value proposition.
• Why – The REASON that you do it.

Simon says that 100% of businesses know what they do. As a side note, I’d actually dispute that, as I frequently come across employees who don’t know what the business they work in does, and others where even the leaders don’t seem! Back to the point: Very few businesses communicate ‘how’, and only a very very few communicate ‘why’. When we get to ‘why’ we often make use of “we believe” statements. Many researchers have pointed out the effectiveness of communicating at an emotional, rather than just at the level of facts. Communicating at the level of ‘why’ instead of functionally (what and how), achieves that. Simon points to companies like Apple as an example of how this works. By way of an update, have a look at how they market the new MacBook Pro, it’s not about its features (the Retina display) or how they built it, “it’s a whole new vision for the notebook” – apparently!

“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”

Simon makes what he claims is a biological, not a psychological, defence of his argument. Sadly he does it using a very questionable model of the brain, and some murky pseudo-psychology. Please, in the name of good science, disregard that part of the talk, he goes to the back of the class for that one. Similarly for the section on the ‘law’ of diffusion of innovation, read this post on Everett Roger’s book, Diffusion of Innovations.

There is a defensible set of arguments for the observation that our decision-making happens predominantly at an emotional level. We communicate and connect not with facts, but at the level of values and beliefs. If I understand just a few of someone’s core values, I will be able to predict their behaviour more accurately than if I am in possession of box loads of facts about their previous behaviours. It’s why you should hire people for their fit with the values of your business, not for the lines on their CV. Consistent values build a cohesive culture, and make communication significantly more efficient and effective. Shared values, as with as shared experiences, reduce misunderstandings, and improve the quality of communication.

Back to “Why?”

In communicating the “why” of something, we are more likely to convey something of our values and beliefs. In doing that, we are much more likely to pull the levers of personal persuasion. If you want to change behaviours,which most leaders do, then you need to change attitudes, and if you want to change attitudes, then look to the research, things like the Yale Attitude Change Approach, and the body of research that has taken place since then. Attitudes have been a core topic of study for psychology for decades, and while it is a complicated and often problematic area, it is has shown that influence is shaped by a number of factors, including something psychologists call ”source characteristics” – the things that we know about the speaker and their message, specifically:

• Source credibility – Is the source authoritative? What attitude do they suggest? Are they credible? Expertise is key: The novice and the beginner will communicate facts, the master will communicate principles.
• Liking / attractiveness – This isn’t just about looks, it’s about how we feel towards them – including winning humour, admiration, or believing they are like us.
• Affect – their mood. It’s not just about shiny happy people, it’s about how we think we will end up feeling. It the knowledge of the source has taken them to a ‘happy place’ people will tag along.

What’s in the message?

The next set of pieces are the ‘message characteristics’, which covers a number of factors, but mainly relates to the strength of the argument. Strong arguments are more persuasive, that might seem unsurprising, but you’d be surprised, it isn’t always the case! Think about the characteristics of strong arguments: They are usually specific, complete and credible. At the very least, they are coherent. In communicating the ‘why’ we instantly add credibility to our message. If I explain why I am doing something, it reduces the opportunity to doubt my motivation (source credibility) and greatly enhances the compliance. Try these two requests: “Please will you get me a glass of water?” or “Please will you get me a glass of water? I’ve pulled my back and I can’t move – I’ve had nothing to drink all day.”

Lastly, for now, is the impact of something called the ‘elaboration likelihood’ model. If I communicate at the level of “why” you are more likely to have to pay detailed attention, you have to give more thought to what I am saying. Look at the two sentences in the last paragraph, the second is more complex to process. Explaining ‘why’ causes people to stop and think, and if they have to think about what you have asked, they are significantly more likely to remember the request and carry it out.

Try adding the ‘why‘ to all of your communication. It’s worked rather well for Evernote, and I am very sure it will work well for your business, for even more reasons that the 1,000+ words here have outlined. Have you tried it? Have you seen it done? Do share your experiences with others in the comments.

Some People Like to Watch

I was interested in a recent study published by the BBC (with many thanks to Sophie Brendel for the pointer). It was looking at participation choice, and the percentage of people who participate, and the kinds of participation that they engage in. Holly Goodier also starts from the 90-10-1 theory, coming to the conclusion that it is outmoded too. She notes:

• Participation is now the rule rather than the exception: 77% of the UK online population is now active in some way.
• This has been driven by the rise of ‘easy participation’ …60% of the UK online population now participates in this way, from sharing photos to starting a discussion.
• Despite participation becoming relatively ‘easy’, almost a quarter of people (23%) remain passive – they do not participate at all.
• Passivity is not as rooted in digital literacy as traditional wisdom may have suggested. 11% of the people who are passive online today are early adopters.

Some People Like to Engage

You can read the full report as a pdf here. It is interesting that our own observations of the social intranets we have been engaged in building over the last several years, is that the ratio tends to range very broadly. For every 100 people who are registered users, anywhere from 80-98 percent of people will read it regularly (which makes sense, given holiday patters), while contribution will range from less than 5% up to 25% for those who contribute comments, falling down to 1-2% who contribute longer form content on a frequent basis (e.g. blog posts, articles etc). It seems to depend on the corporate culture, and the nature of the business – knowledge based businesses typically seem to have higher contribution rates, while retail and manufacturing are lower. Again, we put that down to job design – opportunity to contribute – and the spread of job roles – manual versus managerial.

Now Break All The Rules

It is time to re-think the 90:10:1 rule, as it has become something of an urban myth, at least in the context it is usually cited in. The contribution ration really depends on the context, content and the type of on-line activity, and the experience. It is best to avoid the generalisation, and instead, attempt to understand what the benchmark is for the situation that you are operating in, and use that as a steering point.

Ultimately, in the intranet context at least, you are in a race against yourself. Set engagement targets, and measure yourself against them, then see if they can be bettered, always understanding that any context will ultimately have a ceiling. Not everyone will ever become a contributor, because not everyone needs to be – although more often than not, those who could and should be contributing aren’t. Even if that is a cultural problem, rather a technical one, there are ways to flatten the pyramid. Create different levels and styles of contribution, from comments, to recommendations, to ratings (see Bradley Horowitz Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers for some ideas).

Moving from an audience that is used to passively consuming, to one that is actively engaged in co-creating, is a long journey. If broadcasters like the BBC are embarking on that journey, shouldn’t you?

• Potential cross-site scripting vulnerability on WordPress sites configured directly by IP address.
• A couple of other potential cross-site scripting / redirect issues.
• Potential issue with privilege escalation for admin users in WordPress networks.
• Plupload issue – the code WordPress uses to upload files.
• SWFUpload issue – the old code WordPress used to upload files.
• SWFObject issue – code used to embed Flash content.

Although none of these are critical, the update(s) should be applied to minimise any potential risks. The two point releases also include some css and JavaScript tweaks, which save loading some images in the admin interface, and address a couple of cosmetic issues, including an upgrade to the hoverIntent and press-this code.

While we are on the topic of upgrades, WordPress 3.4 is just around the corner (currently in beta). The upcoming release features a number of enhancements to internationalization functionality, particularly of interest for non-English WordPress users, new features for theme designers (child themes and configuration for headers and backgrounds), and a number of performance enhancements and API tweaks, which will need a fair bit of testing with older plugins and themes before sites can be upgraded.

As ever, always keep regular back ups of your blog – you don’t want to lose any of those hard written posts, hard-earned comments or those pictures, videos and links you spent hours curating. For our business blogs, we back up databases nightly, and keep a rolling archive. Uploads and other content are mirrored to our standby servers in real-time. If you can’t afford that sort of protection, then at least take an export of your blog once every few posts, and do keep a local copy of any images or other files that you upload. And, of course, always do a full back up before any upgrade or adding plugins.

Happy, and safe, blogging!

Look at your company website on your mobile. Does it look beautiful? Does it give you the impact you expect? Is that hard to fix? “Preposterous” is Chris’s new favourite word, and it applies to much of what is done in marketing today. Does your email newsletter look like your website? Are you proud of that? If so, why! Your email marketing isn’t about the design, it’s about building relationships. Email newsletters with no reply address? Why! Email is a two way communication mechanism. Have a call to action, to communicate with a human (Chris has a 70% open rate on his email marketing). It needs to be 350 words or less – if you are reading it on your mobile device, your customers are probably doing that too. Make it readable.

Likes (and their kind) are not an end in themselves. Likes, says Chris, represent an opportunity for business. No more names to broadcast too, or financial capital, but opportunities to be developed.Your sites and online presence are ‘outposts’ – they direct people to where you would like them to be. Create interesting, usable content – and that includes YouTube content too. And remember, you don’t get paid on views, you get paid on business results – so make it useful to your customers. In the same way that business cards aren’t sales, neither are likes or views.

Find the most passionate people in the business (and that might be customer service, it might not) and help them produce content and connect them with your customers! Think about the on-going use of that content. Oh, and make heroes, says Chris, make your buyers heroes. There are three stages of your brand, and the customer is central to all of them:

1. What you are known for.
2. What people say about you.
3. They way people use you as part of their story telling about their brand

Social is where people are. Social is the way that information moves forward. Brands ARE social. The ones that will be successful in the future are the ones that recognise that this is already the case. And remember, people don’t talk to logos, they talk to humans!

Benjamin Zander talks about ‘one buttock playing’ – being pushed over by what you are doing, what you are communicating. There is a point at which what we are doing takes over our thinking about what we are trying to do. To a professional communicator, that might sound bad, uncontrolled even. But it is the point at which you connect with the passion, and that is the point at which what you are doing makes an impact. So much communication is killed by a lack of passion, a lack of conviction, and smothered in doubt.

We have to do the things we are uncomfortable with enough times that we get beyond that discomfort, beyond the conscious thought, and into a state of flow in doing it. Be it blogging, emailing, running meetings, playing music, whatever it is, push through the discomfort to find the place where you can just do it. Be practiced enough to be confident in your capability that you don’t look up (or look down) and drop your flow.

But there is something else in Benjamin’s talk. Notice how he is aware of what he is doing, and able to explain it, very coherently and eloquently. That comes through observation. In teaching others, and watching them practice, we learn even more – and learning from the mistakes of others is usually less costly! As we practice, we spot pattens that work, and patterns that don’t.

In short, we need to practice to get things right, that’s hopefully obvious, but that inherently means being comfortable with being uncomfortable. We have to make mistakes, and watch other people making mistakes, to get to the point where, in Benjamin Zander’s words, we are playing on one buttock. It’s a difficult one to explain to the boss, but ultimately, we need those shining eyes to make a great business.

• Jenni Wheller, SSP UK.
• Rebecca Richmond, Melcrum.
• Christian McMahon, Global CIO, Jamaza.
• Justin Hunt, Social Media Leadership Forum.
• Doug Shaw, What Goes Around.

Interesting snippet from Rebecca from their recent survey – 50% of people were unsure of the business case for social media within the business (although 50% were).

Question: Are the senior leaders the right audience to launch a social tool to?

Justin responded that a lot of senior executives aren’t big users of social media outside of work. Is it reasonable to ask your staff to use them if you (as a leader) aren’t using the tools yourself? Justin reiterated a point I drew out during my presentation: You need to create a (safe) place for people to fail. Tools can change people’s experience.

Rebecca noted that leaders are risk averse – that can make them a difficult group, but that their buy in can help with the broader roll out. Jenni strongly argued that you shouldn’t force social media on people – it’s about giving the people the opportunity to use the tools, in an integrated way. Doug suggested getting back to understanding “why” you are doing it, and that the answer is there. Understand what works for the users. Not all users in a business are necessarily even on-line – at least during the course of their business – for example, shop floor staff (although technology is increasingly closing those gaps).

Question: Is employee engagement a fad?

Doug said he’s just trying to make work better – maybe employee engagement is an unfortunate tag? But there is something about letting go of the ‘command and control’ Taylorist model that has dominated recent centuries. There have been bad, as well as good, things done in the name of employee engagement.

Justin said it was about the delivery, and giving people chances to contribute. Jenni said it is inescapable, issues of work-life balance and fostering discretionary effort was essential. Rebecca said it isn’t a fad, because it’s not new, it’s just coming to the fore again now because senior leaders are panicking. It’s about what the business’s “employee value proposition” is, and ties into transparency, corporate social responsibility. Employee’s want to have an impact on their customer’s experience – a key business issue.

A strong theme through out the day was: Problem first. Technology second. It’s all too easy to say “social technology is the answer. What was the problem?” – be pragmatic, and start with a well defined problem was the wise advice. As employees become more comfortable with using social media personally, they are more will and expectant about using it at work.

Finally, the issue of failure, and it’s inherent ties with innovation and experimentation, was revisited multiple times. Businesses leaders can be very nervous about failure, and often rightly so, but it is an inherent part of the learning process and innovation, I defer to Edison.

Time to Move Up

Now, to be clear, Microsoft itself dropped support for Internet Explorer 6 quite some time ago, and has even been running a campaign to get users and web sites to move from IE 6, and Google has dropped IE 6 support on its sites. The challenge, in the world of the intra-webs, has been that many IT departments are stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand they need to move up from Internet Explorer 6 (it’s over a decade old after all! Which is about 70 in Internet Years), but on the other there are many legacy web applications deployed in the Intranet 1.0 era that only work with IE 6. By the way, Internet Explorer 7 is no spring chicken either, at over 5 years old.

There is a clear lesson here, and for those that have missed it, a couple of solutions. Firstly, the lesson: If you are deploying a web application, make sure it isn’t dependent on proprietary web browser features. If it only works with one web browser, that is going to come back to haunt you down the line, as it effectively places an additional sell-by date on the application. When we build intranets, we test them with Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome, even if only Internet Explorer is in use. That way, if it works across multiple browsers, it’s much more likely to last, and to gracefully degrade. Next, some solutions…

The lack of IE 6 support in WordPress 3.2 needn’t be a huge problem. Support has only been dropped in the admin Interface – themes are still free to support IE 6, so it is only the people creating posts and approving comments that immediately need to move off of IE6. This is only buys a little time though, it really is time to drop IE6 from your network, at the very least, it’s a security risk, as it no longer receives security patches.

Living Without Internet Explorer 6

If your infrastructure is still burdened with legacy apps that require IE 6 to work, there are two other work arounds:

1. Desktop Virtualization – provide access to the legacy apps via virtual desktops or remove desktop access – Microsoft style or VMWare style.
2. Browsium – an interesting application that allows IE6 to run in a frame in more modern Internet Explorer versions – thank you to Mark at CDG for the pointer.

Minimum Requirements

I received my first apology email today – one of the above businesses had an account for me. While no financial details were lost, my email address (and perhaps postal address?) were disclosed. More than that, my relationship as a previous customer was disclosed. It is worthy of note that in the UK, this is a serious issue for a bank (customer relationships are afforded special confidentiality), but for me it is a serious issue full stop.

The apology I received, in my opinion, fell far short of what I would expect. As a minimum I look for:

• A genuine acceptance that what happened was wrong.
• In as far as is reasonable, an explanation of what went wrong and why
  (i.e. does the offender understand? Is it under control?) – Not everyone agrees with this one.
• A commitment to a) put it right and b) ensure that it doesn’t happen again (i.e. lessons learnt).

Sorry should go beyond words. Actions speak louder than words, as they say, so I personally like to see some commitment to action – or as we said to our kids around here, sorry means “I won’t do it again.”

I’m not alone. Here are some thoughts on what should be in an apology from some good friends on twitter:

ear1grey
@benjaminellis An apology should be personal, recognise the error, take responsibility for it, and explain steps taken to avoid a repeat

shefaly
@benjaminellis Ack of the problem without passing blame, clear scope of the problem, how it’s being resolved. Then follow-up on resolution.

Modoufox
@benjaminellis sincerity, empathy, and an implied commitment to move forward in the relationship/avoid doing this again. #2centsworth

mistergough

tartancat
@benjaminellis The word ‘sorry’ in a genuine, heartfelt tone, and some offer to make amends for the wrong-doing.

ravinar
@benjaminellis 1) acknowledgement of issue 2) steps to ensure does not happen again 3) gesture of goodwill.

williamheath
@benjaminellis Acknowledgement, remorse, some sort of restitution. All wrapped in courtesy and humanity. Explanation/excuse not needed.

rachelbeer

“The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.”  P.G. Wodehouse, The Man Upstairs.

Which put me in my place :). Apologies should be given, not demanded.

One of the recurrent themes whenever I get drawn into discussions around community, specifically the ‘on-line’ sort, is that of audience versus community. It is all too often that I hear marketing folks talk about their audience as if it was a community, and occasionally their community as if it was an audience. To my mind the two are very different things: an audience is gathered to listen; a community gathers to contribute. One is there to consume. One is there to produce. I don’t see one as any more worthy than the other – sometimes I want to be in an audience, sometimes I want to be in a community. You probably wouldn’t fancy trying to co-create with Take That or the Foo Fighters – you’re there to jump up and down and go deaf, or something like that. Conversely, if I go to a vendor’s user group event, I wouldn’t expect to get shouted at or drowned out.

What emerged from the evening’s discussions was that there are many different types of community. That might seem blindingly obvious, but you wouldn’t think so from much of the writing in the social media world. There are motivated communities – self motivated, or externally motivated (i.e. lead) – and there are unmotivated communities. Unmotivated communities rarely last, and are rarely ‘rewarding’ to be part of. Communities fundamentally exist to do something, or at least to support or preserve something.

My personal favourite minimal definition of community is ‘a group of people gathered around a purpose.’ I like it because of its simplicity, and because it is so actionable. The purpose might be to change the world (thank you to Misae Richwoods for raising the bar on that one), or it might be to exchange tips and stories about a new gadget. Another flash of the blindingly obvious was the realisation that communities are for a period in time. People join, their circumstances change, and they move on. They may stay for a long time, or they may move through swiftly. Similarly, a campaign-based community may have a relatively short life or a lifestyle-driven community a very long one.

The process of joining and leaving a community is not usually a binary one. It is a journey, and those who run communities need to be conscious of that. The moments of leaving or closing are points of difference, and potential friction (or explosion) if they aren’t handled well. That thought touches on many things, which the discussion came back too…

If you have an office without walls or desks, how would you know that you are in it? It’s the same with communities. While most on-line communities don’t have obvious rites of passage, they are there – even if they aren’t explicit. The users worked out how to get on-line, they found the site, they signed up, they managed to post a message. We’ll talk more about rites of passage and tokens of membership in a bit.

The higher the walls, the stronger the community. As the walls erode, the community weakens. Look at Usenet groups in the 90′s, and now Twitter. As the barriers come down, the community fragments, weakens, and finally is engulfed in relational noise. Of course, at the other end of the scale are communities that are [too] exclusive. Barriers to entry, i.e. exclusivity, can drive people’s desire to be in a community, as much as they keep them out. If it is hard to get in, people will stay. If it is too hard to get in, people won’t bother, and may even form their own ‘anti-communities’

Technology has radically transformed community life. The Internet has bulldozed geographic boundaries, eliminated cost and enabled even the most niche of interests to sustain sizeable communities. If you don’t believe me, go for a trawl through meetup.com (an online market place for arranging and managing community meet ups). There is something there for everyone – and I really mean everyone. Newer on-line services like Lanyrd and Plancast have made it easier to discover events and join the communities around them. See where your Twitter friends go to meet, search events in your area, or on your topic of interest. If you want a community, online or offline, you can probably find it, and if you can’t find it, you can create it for marginal cost and effort.

Social platforms like Facebook have made relationships objectively visible, and transformed ‘liking’ into more than just making a connection. They have become a means of association, and a form of visible badge. I ‘like’ Brand X says as more about my identity than just the fact that I have purchased their products. Communities have an ‘identity’ and people need to know what that identity is, so that they know what they are in, and more importantly, people need to know if they are ‘in’ the community or not. They also want to know if other people are inside or outside of the community too. It is all part of forming a group identity, and having a good sense of group identity is a key part of any thriving community. That identity might be supported by the shared stories that people tell, or by the provision of props (e.g. badges, uniforms, and so on). Having an iPad, an iPhone 4 and a MacBook identifies you as likely part of a certain community, just as having a suit and a Blackberry might identify you as part of a different one!

Some badges are ambiguous, some are not, some are conscious, some are not. All are earnt. The Flickr badge on my bag has started conversations, the WordPress badge has got me business. Those badges were obtained through relationships and through being at certain events. They have a story and meaning to them. They are explicit tokens, artefacts of being a part of something. They have a value far beyond their physical worth, they connect to memories and demonstrate participation. Most communities have some form of badges. They aren’t always as obvious as a piece of metal and paper, but they are there all the same.

Community defies our instant reward, popup culture. Communities take a LONG time to develop. Although sense of community can happen within 6 months, or even less, building a viable community, of any type, is a long hard journey. One of the things that definitely helps along the way is recognising the contributions of key community members. A big part of the evening’s discussion circled around the idea of making ‘heroes’ within the community. It works because it strengthens the identity of both the group and the individual, and also because it models the behaviours that are desired within the community. It is in our nature to copy leaders and those that we view as successful. That can be a constructive dynamic in a community, but it can also be a destructive one. An over reliance on the leader or key individuals can leave others feeling unwanted or even excluded.

There was and is much debate as to how much of community building is inductively learnt and subconsciously applied, and how much is conscious, constructed application. Many community leaders are ‘naturals’ rather than consciously constructed. It’s rare to find someone who learnt their community management skills in a classroom, and so that means passing on their skills is something best done through mentoring and working alongside, rather that in a taught course in a classroom. But you knew that already, didn’t you?

At one point there was a heated debate about WordPress versus Drupal. It was notable not for the technical content, but for how much of the debate was driven from the communities that were around each of them. There are certainly big technical differences between the platforms (I’ve built community sites using WordPress, BuddyPress, Drupal and Elgg), but the biggest difference is in the communities of users, developers, content producers and consumers around each. Products, inherently, have communities.

Looking at the ‘insides’ of a community, it becomes obvious that not all community members are equal. There are various different taxonomies that can be used to group members. I lean towards looking at levels of engagement: audience (the edglings), participants, contributors, through to co-leaders. Similarly, communication happens on a continuum from ‘top-down’ communication from leaders, to peer-to-peer discussion between members. Bernie talked about the impact of sending out weekly emails to one of his communities. The community became more active and engaged. People got more involved. Broadcast communication can be helpful, as well as harmful, in maintaining community cohesion and the energy levels within the community. It is all about striking a balance. Too little, and the community fragments and disperses, too much and it diminishes to an audience.

The spectrum for audience to community is a highly graduated one. We discussed many examples of the broadcast/performance vs community/contribution dynamic. For example, the Coke Facebook page that was started by two actors. Community or audience? Participation or entertainment? They aren’t dichotomies or dilemmas, they are  characteristics of moments in the story that becomes the community. How important is the brand of the community leader? Can they be invisible, leading from the shadows, or must they be known by name? Is there a continuum from audience to community? Real world examples don’t reveal simple yes’s and no’s. In the words of Ben Goldacre, “I think you’ll find that it’s a bit more complicated than that.”

So what triggers action in a community? Conversation needs to be peer to peer, not just top down. It’s one of the defining differences between an audience and a community. People want to have meaning, and to make a difference. Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs came up quite a few times. People have a need for significance and people want to feel wanted/needed. Many community drivers are around human emotional needs.

The evening’s discussion touched on issues of mono-culture and sustainability. Consistency is important – it creates and supports identity – but difference is also one of the key drivers of community too.  Communities can be long lived. Like some strange insect that can go without food for years, even if left sleeping communities can sometimes be revived. One of the stories I have heard a number of times about the Obama campaign is how it managed to bootstrap itself from the communities formed during the previous campaigns. Once a community is made, the individual relationships and connections created by it persist, long after the community has gone away.

So what is the role of a community leader? Are they leaders or are they facilitators? The answer seems to be yes and yes. The more challenging question was about the ability of community leaders to establish new leads, and the way that can lead to communities fragmenting or taking on a different path – even splitting apart. Good community ‘managers’ are passionate about the growth of the individuals within the community. The pattern is not about the growth of the community, the community only grows by the growth of the members. Good leaders establish sustainable behaviours: ‘this is how we do things around here’ – and recognise and reward those in the community who are active in supporting it. Recognition goes a long way: It supports the contributors, and it indicates desirable models of behaviour to others in the group.

Communities aren’t owned, and unlike an audience, they can’t be bought. Did technology enable niche communities, or did it actually cause the fragmentation that lead to them? On-line communities, freed from geographic restrictions, can fragment and merge more easily. As humans, we’ve been doing community since we started writing on cave walls, but technology is making (and enabling) us to look at the processes of community differently. Community is part of a cultural megatrend. In the off-line world, many places have forgotten how to do community – The motor car, the television and the privet hedge have enabled use to live socially in the most isolated of ways. In the later part of the last century we learnt to become individual actors, rather than group players. As we escape from broadcast media, and discover the Internet, we are starting to rediscover togetherness. There is a growing desire to create communities, and reintegrate society.

Of course it is all ripples against ripples… We have always been in communities, it is the new lens of social media and the rise of Twitter and Facebook that have turned the cameras, quite literally, back on to ourselves.

In a cruel form of irony, it way well be the mass data from these platforms that starting to create mass customisation/personalisation that breaks up community again. What you read in your Twitter stream or in your Facebook updates is personalised for you. No one else reads the same things in the same context. In social networks, everyone is part of a community of one. It is a scale free network that puts you at the centre of your world. Traditional communities don’t work that way. They are about shared experiences and shared stories – they are more universal than personal. It’s all about creating the shared experience, the stories that people tell about the community and that they have in common. Shared challenges, external threats and common victories bind communities together. They create emotional connections between people.

The nature of what ‘global’ means is changing. Geographic barriers are breaking down…. However ‘Global’ has come to mean a trans-country set of niches… Physical communities are still challenged by geography, but global ones are challenged by a sea of niche interests and a dwindling commonality in what people are interested in.  As opposed to the universal markets that broadcast media and a global film industry created, social media creates micro-worlds with micro-celebrities and loosely bound connections.

Is community growth formulaic? There are certainly patterns. We discussed the early church, Toastmasters, the Mormons and dozens of examples of communities that have grown and persisted. Sometimes communities are for a reason, a season, occasionally for a life time. Communities and members aren’t forever. There is a time, a place and a purpose.

What does community mean to you?

The evening was made all the more special by the judges personally coming over to say how impressed they were with what had been achieved. I shall stop typing and leave you with a photograph of myself, Sheila Parry and the amazing team from theblueballroom clutching our award, and the official press release.

DHL Express’ Innovative Online 40th Anniversary Celebration Scoops Digital Impact Award

FARNHAM, UNITED KINGDOM, Sep 21, 2010 — In 2009, a year of recession, DHL Express celebrated its 40th anniversary. To recognize this milestone and employees’ input with a splash yet without extravagance, DHL launched a global online employee photo competition, designed and built by internal communications specialists theblueballroom with social technology company redcatco. The competition and campaign won Communicate magazine’s Digital Impact Award for the ‘Best digital employee communication’ in the ‘Best use of digital to an internal audience’ category.

The competition generated a staggering 5.6 million hits and 2,800 photo uploads. The inexpensive, globally accessible online solution reached out to all 500,000 worldwide employees of DHL and parent company Deutsche Post DHL and sparked a truly cross-border, cross-level conversation: this user-generated ‘by the people, for the people’ platform saw 3,400 comments being made on the photos. Page views spanned the full three months of the competition, demonstrating ongoing engagement.

The competition showcased DHL Express’ amazing legacy and supported the company’s ‘One DHL’ brand positioning, which celebrates a diverse workforce, global expertise and uniqueness, and joint capabilities. theblueballroom’s expertise on inspiring communications for internal audiences, coupled with redcatco’s specialist knowledge on social technology, made DHL Express’ 40th anniversary a celebration to remember.

About DHL:

DHL is the global market leader in the logistics industry and ‘The Logistics company for the world’. DHL commits its expertise in international express, air and ocean freight, road and rail transportation, contract logistics and international mail services to its customers. A global network composed of more than 220 countries and territories and about 300,000 employees worldwide offers customers superior service quality and local knowledge to satisfy their supply chain requirements. DHL accepts its social responsibility by supporting climate protection, disaster management and education. DHL is part of Deutsche Post DHL. The Group generated revenue of more than 46 billion euros in 2009.

Or are they? Who is the ‘me’ in ‘my own’? I could be Dave, the office burglar and still say this post is ‘my own’, and in doing so break no laws, and engage in no deception. You read this and assume that is it written by ‘me’. There’s a photo on the side of the blog, and a name on it too. It seems fair to assume that is me that wrote it. Surely if it was written by someone else, I, they or both of us would be deceiving you? What about if it has been edited and proofread by someone else in the office? Let’s step back a bit for a moment.

So, is ghost blogging ethical? It really depends on your definition of ghost blogging, and what it entails. I’m going to give you my answer before I give you a definition. To my mind, ghost blogging is rarely ethical, or at least it is rarely executed ethically. That’s partly a matter of my career path, in that ghost blogging, in the sense that many people mean it, is essentially allowing content written by someone else to be taken and passed off as your own original work. In the academic world that is plagiarism; a pretty fast way to end your academic career.

Now, you might argue that the original author has willingly given over their work – although more often that not a junior wage-slave was cajoled into producing the piece – and that that fact makes it alright. However, be it a staff member writing for a CEO or a PR company supplying copy to a professional blogger, to my mind it is still at the very least an act of deception. It is passing off a piece of writing as something that it is, in fact, not.

There is another definition of ghost blogging that is less commonly used, but that I am more comfortable with. The simple act of writing for somebody. Ghost writing has a long history. Often, celebrities or their agents will engage a ghost writer to produce their autobiography. It is slightly different than the most common form of ghost blogging, because increasingly often the ghost writer is acknowledged, and it is increasingly the case that people would assume a ghost writer has been engaged. Not to cast aspersions on Katie Price’s literary skills, but if you are reading her biography, you would probably assume that she had engaged the services of a ghost writer. Actually, Katie Price’s books are ghost written, by Rebecca Farnworth. And here is a distinction in the shades of grey in Ghost writing: Katie Price chooses the plots to her books. And the ghost is a shadowy entity; Not fully visible, but known to be present. That’s very different from the kind of ghost who’s existence is denied.

Here is the biggest danger with ghost blogging, especially for CEOs and senior figures: It’s the danger that a customer, business partner or other industry figure reads their blog that week. The believe, as they have been lead to, that the post represents the thoughts and views of the senior figure. Then they run into them in “real-life”. What happens as they strike up a conversation about the post that they read and enjoyed? The post that wasn’t written by the CEO, which doesn’t represent the CEO’s views. Firstly is the potential for the CEO to look like an idiot who forgets what he does from one minute to the next, and secondly it makes the customer look like an idiot for believing it was written by the CEO. Thirdly, it destroys trust between the two of them; Trust being the very thing blogging is meant to help with. That, for me, is the biggest no-no.

The roots of blogging were about being transparent, building trust, and ghost blogging goes against that. To be clear, I don’t think that is wrong for a busy CEO to have someone else write their post for them, particularly in the incidents where it is essentially based on an interview or conversation with them, or that they have at least defined the key points and main narrative. The idea of passing off writing that has never been past the eyes of the CEO as having come through the lips of the CEO is a dangerous thing to do. In the case of a speech writing, while the words might not have been the CEO’s, they have been spoken by them. The danger with ghost blogging is that the middle-man who is cut out is the person who should have been the messenger.

If a blog post is described as ‘written for’, rather than ‘written by’ the claimed author, then we are the right side of the line. If it claims to be ‘written by’ someone who did not originate its content, then a deception with no ethical grounds has been carried out. It is also a deception that leaves the perpetrators with nowhere to go. If there is something in that post that is factually inaccurate or professionally naive, then the CEO must either accept the error as if it was his own incompetence, or admit to the error.

Let me leave you with some words from an article in The Independent earlier this year:

In the film, adapted by Polanski with Robert Harris from his 2007 novel of the same name, McGregor’s professional author is enlisted by former Prime Minister Adam Lang, played with a Blairish glint by Pierce Brosnan, to write his long-overdue memoirs. ”So, how do we go about this?” Lang asks casually, drink in hand, in an early scene. “I interview you and turn your answers into prose,” comes the sober reply. And there, in a nutshell, is the art of ghostwriting.

If it’s an area you are interested in, then I recommend reading The Art of Game Design (Amazon US or on Amazon UK). The talk attracted a huge stream of comments. While you may or may not agree with Jesse’s hypothesis that everything ends up being a game to earn points – although some corporate work environments already feel like this – there is much food for thought in what he says.

The legendary Farmville app has achieved massive success, outgrowing even Facebook itself, but making a Farmville knock off isn’t easy. It’s not just a Facebook game – it’s leading a new business model. Games have become a part of the marketing mix for brands, and game design techniques are bleeding into everything from office software to employee compensation plans.

The intersection leads to unexpected things, and nearly all of them involve psychological tricks, migrating people from free gaming experiences, to being fully paid up customers. Club Penguin is one of my favourite examples. Their  ”elastic velvet rope” (around a $350million proposition) enables children to play and explore their game world, all the time rewarding them and leading them into the paid monthly experience beyond the velvet rope, with the constant lure of ‘more things you can do’ in the paid for version. A little while back, it was Mafia Wars – a text based game on Facebook that used ’real friends’ juxtaposed into a virtual domain, where users could trade cash for (virtual world) social advantage. All cunning stuff.

Games, and the ‘freemium” model in general, often work on the ‘sunk cost’ fallacy – the psychological bias that if you’ve spent time (or money) on something,  it must therefore be valuable. It’s a ploy that bridges gaming, virtuality, and reality. Games are no longer about escaping from reality, they are about breaking through it. Gilmore and Pine’s hypothesis, in the Experience Economy and Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want,  is that the most valuable thing about products today is authenticity. That might seem strange in the context of games, but we live in a world where ‘fake’ virtual worlds are almost as valuable as the real deal. The convergence and divergence of technology is blurring the domains (even if I’m not sure I agree with Jesse’s pocket theory, I think it is more about expansion and contraction). Pockets of time can be used for crowd sourcing, by making activities into games (interesting in the context of Orange’s mobile volunteering initiative).

The next revolution is all about sensors, think of things like the gyroscope in the iPhone 4, and tilt sensors that are now in most new mobile handsets. These allow games and reality to be further blended (see Augmented Reality). I hope we don’t degenerate into the ‘life as a game’ Jesse describes at the end, but you can already see the motivational tricks being used. From the Waitrose Charity Tokens Scheme, to business games, the techniques are already being used to shape human behaviour, and that’s before we factor in phones that can overlay real-world experiences with virtual ones.

I’ll be talking about this, and more at Chinwag Local in Twickenham on Wednesday September the 8th. If you are in the area and want to meet with other local business professionals, I hope you can come along!

Do I need to ‘do’ accessibility?

The short answer is yes, you do, and for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s a basic part of being a good web citizen. You wouldn’t ignore someone who came up to you in the street because they were blind or missing an arm, so why build your web site in a way that they can’t get access to?

The reality for most businesses (including in the UK), is that basic web site accessibility is a legal requirement. That said, the UK law is a bit muddy. By building your website to make it accessible on a broader range of devices, and via a broader range of tools and presentations, you give yourself a bigger audience. That’s just plain good business sense.

Accessibility leads to better design

The process of thinking through accessibility requirements leads to better design. When most people talk about website design, they tend to talk about visual design – the static appearance of the site. However, websites aren’t a static visual. We interact with them, resize them, view them on different browsers and discover them via search engines that view them as raw text. A basic accessibility check list deals with all of these things, and that means better design (in a broader sense, including interaction design) and also inherently includes search engine optimisation.

80/20 Beats 100/0 – Every time

There is a danger that in striving for 100% perfection, we end up doing nothing. When it comes to accessibility, I’d rather see people do something, and get it 90% or 80% (or even 10%!) right, than do nothing at all. That may mean some of what I say here offends the purists, but here’s the thing: When I first started looking at accessibility, those purists were the ones that put me off. The dogmatic demand for 100% perfection can result in people deciding that dealing with accessibility is too hard, or too expensive, and that is tragic. Basic accessibility is quick, easy and very rewarding.

Many Dimensions – No One Answer

Disabilities take many many different forms. From visual impairment encountered in old age, to motor issues from birth. Each has their own unique requirements. Sight, hearing, learning, cognitive, motor and mobility impairements occur with a range of severities, and in different combinations. My own experience is through dyslexia. There are many websites that I simply can’t “get a fix on” – the layout and design makes it challenging for me to read them and hard to understand how I am meant to interact with them.

There are many different assistive tools to help, from screen readers and text magnification tools, to input devices. As well as third party tools, most operating systems include universal access technologies. If you’ve never tested them out, fire up systems preferences or control panel and give them a spin. You’ll find screen magnification, black and white / text inversion settings, contrast controls, speech technologies and keyboard for mouse controls.

Em don’t Err

When websites are built, there are a number of different ways of specifying the sizes of fonts and devisions on the page. For many years web designers used pixels, but pixels are fickle things. They vary in size from machine to machine, and while it makes it easy to align text to graphics (which are sized in pixels), it means that you loose the ability to let the user’s view make smart choices about how to display your page. Enter ‘em’s, which are more flexible and the preferred alternative these days. Building a page with ratios, rather than absolute sizes, enables users to use large fonts without breaking your site. Open up your favourite site and use the browser’s view settings to display it in a larger font. Does it still look ok? Then all’s good and well, but if the text goes off screen, or starts to overlap with graphics on the page, all is not well.

Choose Your colo(u)rs wisely

Colour blindness affects a huge portion of the population. Poorly contrasting, over opposing primary colour foreground/background combinations don’t only look poor, they are poor. Choose a sensible palette of colours that are discernible, even in black and white. Then stick to them.

Is a Text-Only Site the Answer?

The short answer is: No. While a text-only page can help, it is far from a full solution. In some cases, removing the images can make this worse. Well designed images can make navigation more intuitive, and provide important cues for people with reading difficulties. Good web-design separates decorative and functional images and places them in the style sheets or page HTML as appropriate.

Flash is Evil?

Apple’s Steve Jobs might like you to think so, but while the whizzy Adobe Flash animations slapped onto the front page of many sites have been an accessibility (and usability) nightmare, there is no reason for this to be the case. Adobe provide an excellent set of guidelines and tools to make Flash applications that are very accessible. It’s simply a matter of using them. Please make sure that you, or whoever you hire, does. Apple’s HTML 5 fuelled crusade against Flash is going to do little to improve accessibility – you are still embedding video, and still need to provide accessible controls and alternative content.

Run the Race Twice – Or Run it Once Well

There is a camp that argues for building a completely separate instance of your site to deal with accessibility issues. Personally I think that is a dangerous road. Firstly, it instantly doubles the amount of work involved in keeping your site up to date. Your site is completely up to date, right? Secondly, the result almost inevitably ends up with web pages that are trying to cater to Dave, with a reading age of 8, who is passionate about your products, and Sue who has a double first from Oxford and is partially sighted. It’s a result that is inevitably downright insulting to everyone involved.

Formal Guide Lines and certifications

The initial Web Content Accessibility Guidelines WCAG 1.0 received a mixed welcome.  The 2.0 contribution is a heavy read: http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/, you could start with: http://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/, although I read the “understanding WCAG20″ document, and didn’t understand that either the first time! You could also try: http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref/. The documents are a challenging read and feel quite onerous. In the UK we have the Disability Rights Commission (DRC): Pas 78. It used to be a paid for document, but now you can download it for free via that link. Don’t lose the will to live when you read these things! I’ll come back to some easy first steps that you can take, the guidelines are for when you get serious about accessibility – which I strongly urge you to do!

LWOAM

“Life without a mouse” – from mobile phones to office workers with RSI, it isn’t just cats that are chasing the mice away. Understanding what it feels like to interact with your site without a mouse is a solid way to improve your site’s layout and navigation structure. Make sure you have access keys set (Twitter does!), that web forms have tab indexes, and that your site isn’t over reliant on hovers.

Some Simple Heuristics

As a very basic, minimal set of checks, here is what you can do in less than five minutes for your site or sites that you build:

• View it at your lowest screen resolution
• View it in black and white
• View it without stylesheets turned on
• View the page source

If viewing in any of those modes leaves you perplexed, then you probably need to fix it. Make sure your images have ALT text, and that the fonts on the web page scale sensibly and you’ll be making the web experience. There are some on-line testing tools (for example T.A.W.), although none of them are perfect or instant magic..

Coming up in Part II Web 2.0, HTML 5, AJAX and building for accessibility from the start…

OpenStack, as they are calling the initiative, includes the code from Rackspace’s Cloud Files service, and will include their Cloud Servers code later in the year. The initiative has a web, of course - openstack.org -  and participant names include the likes of Citrix, Dell, Right Scale, AMD and Intel already. That’s an impressive set of names at launch.

What does this mean for the industry? Well, hopefully it means the emergence of a real market for cl0ud computing services, enabling businesses to build applications that run in the cloud, safe in the knowledge that they aren’t completely dependent on just one vendor. Cloud computing has been growing for a number of years now (the first blog post here on “Living in the Cloud – Computing” was back in July of 2008), and I’ve argued for the importance of standards in cloud computing since the start. Today’s announcement potentially ushers in the next phase of maturity for the technology. If nothing else, it is a very important first step in enabling the multitude of technology providers to work together. I’ll be watching with a keen interest.

If you have, or are developing, applications for your business that require computing power that can stretch and flex with highly variable demands, it is a must-deploy technology. Cloud computing isn’t for everything – I see more ‘standard’ Internet hosting being around for a long while yet – but there are places where the transaction-based costs of cloud computing make much more sense. Hopefully the OpenStack initiative will mean that developers only have to write their applications once to deploy them across a number a different clouds. That also potentially means more robust, independent infrastructures, reducing the number of big single-provider outages we’ve seen in recent years from the likes of Amazon.

Update: Here’s a statement from the openstack.org blog describing the initiative’s commitments:

• COMMITMENT #1: We are producing truly open source software. No artificial limits will be placed or performance limitations maintained. No licensing model – one free, one paid – will be introduced. We are releasing the code under the Apache 2.0 license which allows the community to do with the software as they see fit, including implement into other distributions or “for fee” offerings.
• COMMITMENT #2: We are committed to an open design process. Rackspace will provide dedicated project leads to guide the roadmap on behalf of the community. We will hold regular design summits—open to anyone—which will produce a roadmap to guide development.
• COMMITMENT #3: All development will be done in the open. We will maintain a publicly available source code repository to simplify participation.
• COMMITMENT #4: We will maintain an open community. Healthy, vibrant developer and user communities are the basis of any open source project. Most decisions will be made using a “lazy consensus” model. All processes will be documented, open and transparent.

On the last day of the event, I was talking with James Moffat (of Organic Development) and Glenn Le Santo. Rather than let the conversation float away, I caught it on video, and it’s been heavily retweeted and viewed:

And there in is my proof why you want Social Media at your event. Without the blogging team you might not have heard of the event, or seen that talk. Here’s my top 5 reasons to add social media to your event:

• It extends the reach of your event. People who couldn’t make it physically, can still see it.
• It extends the duration of your event. Why create all that great content to only last a day. Get it on-line. Let it last.
• Create conversations. Get feedback. People pay tens of thousands for focus groups. Find out what people think for a fraction of that cost.
• Have expert voices translate your message. All businesses speak in their own corporate speak. Bloggers from your customer base can translate your speak into customer-speak.
• Being direct. Unpolished. And credible. Yes, you can create a polished corporate video, but a 2 minute live on-camera interview pushed to YouTube is significantly more credible.

There’s plenty more. The fact is that having a social media team at your event is a very cost effective way to multiply the value of your event. Orange Business Services is one of those leading the way. Many others will follow.

Amsterdam is a handy place for Orange Business Services to have an event – not so much because it’s one of the most connected hubs in Europe, but because the place is swathed in orange! It feels like they have branded the entire city. Location aside, it has been a timely moment to reflect on what has happened in the last 12 months since Orange Business Live 2009.

Helmut Reisinger, Senior Vice President Europe, Orange Business Services, kicked off the event, setting some local context, reminding us that 25% of the Netherlands is below the water level (the airport, where I landed, yesterday is 4m below sea level). Broadcaster Sarah Coburn, who is anchoring the event, joined Helmut for a review of the last year. It’s easy to forget how much the world has transformed in the last couple of years.

Post-Lehman Brothers, business attitudes and the financial systems have been transformed. In some ways, not as dramatically as some would like, but never the less they have changed. How are businesses now? “Cautiously Optimistic” is the phrase on people’s lips. We’ve gone down the waterfall, and are looking at the river ahead. But it isn’t just finance that has changed. From volcanos to oil spills, the environment is in sharper focus than it ever has been before. The impact for the CIOs here is two fold:

• Firstly, deploying technologies like telepresence to reduce travel and its associated carbon footprint.
• Secondly, looking at the environmental impact of the IT infrastructure, from data centres, to more efficient desktops.

Geography has changed too. Helmut talked about the shift to the emerging economies, and Yee May Leong, from Orange Business Services in Asia Pacific, joined him on stage to give some startling insights to China. I know China is big, but it is easy to forget how quite how big it is, and more importantly how big it will most likely become. And China is just one piece of the Asia Pacific puzzle, especially when you add India into the mix. ICT decision making is increasingly moving to China, and that is influencing service offerings for providers, with the focus moving from “5 star service” to “fast service” – getting new cities and locations up and running super-fast. The Asian economies, on average, are forecast to grow 2-5 times as quickly as the US and Europe over the next few years. That changes things.

Benjamin Ellis and Sam Michel - Photo (cc) Janet Davis

Two CEOs, three days, 8 hours of train journey and one Thinking Digital 2010. Talking technology, ideas and the future in Newcastle. I’ve been wanting to go to Thinking Digital for a number of years, and this year I finally made it, joining long-time Thinking Digital attendee Sam Michel (CEO of Chinwag, who were also one of the conference Media Partners).

It’s rare to find a conference these days that really pushes at the envelope of what’s happening, pulling together the leading thinkers in a stimulating environment and given fresh food for though. In the age of blog posts, on-line videos and Twitter, new ideas spread rapidly, and all too often one ends up hearing what one has already heard before, but #TDC10 did manage to produce some genuinely unique thoughts and experiences.

Not only was it a chance to catch up with folks like Documentally and the familiar faces of the Newcastle digital collective, but also an opportunity to meet and talk with people like Brian Solis (who took a very nice portrait shot) and many others that I have only previously encountered on-line. There are too many people to name in one go, but let me point you to at least two speakers, by way of their previous talks at TED :- Surrey local Julian Treasure (of the Sound Agency), and Andy Hobsbawn (and the inspirational dothegreenthing)

I caught organiser Herb Kim, to have him explain what Thinking Digital is about, via Qik, at the bustling after party (excuse the wind noise and music!)

“…What we try to do is bring in a lots of extra stuff… …from the arts and sciences and make it different… …it produces an experience where it opens people’s minds not just to new ideas, but to new people…” Herb Kim.

The next event is the 24th-26th May 2011, and booking is already open (this year sold out well beforehand). The venue, the Sage Centre, provided an excellent photographic backdrop, and people have had fun tagging and adding notes to the pictures – if you were there you might be in this one.

Thinking Digital was a great example of the journey that conferences are now on, moving from didactic broadcast, to digitally-enabled, network-building events. While you can watch a live stream, you miss much of the benefit of the event unless you are physically there. It might be about the on-line world, but the valuable action happens off-line, in the corridors, the dinners and the lunches. We’re face-to-face people, on-line tools simply provide a way to enable, bridge and extend our real-world experiences.

At Dell’s second Business to business social media event, Neville Hobson gave a great overview of the current status quo in social media. My synopsis:

Social media is about relationships. Word of mouth has an increasing impact on purchasing behaviour, and social media accelerates word of mouth like nothing else. With social media, we enabled people to move from an awareness of our businesses, to becoming an ambassador for it. We aren’t just building a connection, we are entering into someone’s personal network.

People are using all sorts of tools, and the tools providers are providing resources and education to help businesses. YouTube has its own set of guidelines for Best Practices for the B2B Marketer. Businesses should investigate all the relevant Social Media tools and channels.Test them, integrate them and build on them.

Neville’s Formula for social media success:

• Knowledge – understand your marketplace
• Clarity – listen and learn with precision
• Influence – identify the exact locations of influence and influencers
• Content – adapt and re-use.

I followed on, talking about the business case for social media and the real ROI. The Microsoft team did a great job of capturing the talk. Here is the video on uStream:

My own photos from the event, to give you a taste for the event. It was excellently put together – kudos to Kerry and Neville:

The theme of this year’s event is community relations. I think the term nicely encapsulates how “forum moderation” has grown up through community management to community relations. The relationship between businesses and their customers has changed, and the relationship between businesses and their employees is changing too. People expect engagement, and that means listening as much as talking.

Recent Redcatco projects have shown us, and some brave pioneers, that creating engagement works for a business, bringing massive returns from a modest investment. What happens when you give tens of thousands of employees a place to rate, comment and share what your business is about? Our experience has been that it creates huge value, a sense of community, and a great deal of success.

Earlier today I spoke with Heather Taylor about her work at PayPal. She has been living at the forefront of community building for a business that has to deal with both the positive and negative experiences around users transacting money. Her key takeaway? Be adaptable. You might not get what you initially set out to achieve, but if you adapt, you’ll end up with a stronger business. Focus on putting the community, rather than the product or service, in the middle, and on listening rather than telling. Lots of really sound advice from Heather, click and have a listen.

The bonus from all this activity has been lots of face to face interaction and debate, from the Information World keynote with Elizabeth and Mia of the Continued Communications research team, through speaking at UKTI’s TechnologyWorld, to the amazing LikeMinds event in Exeter, Web 2.0 Expo and the recent Digital Surrey event. The next few weeks feature a huge number of events, as we escape election (and post-election) fever. The schedule for just the rest of the week is:

• 13th May - Being-Social – , 2-6pm, London. Where I will be chairing the ‘How Social Media is changing how we communicate’ session, joined by Andrew Davis Antony Mayfield Chris Thorpe David Cushman Jamie Riddell.
• May 14th – Higher Ground:The future of social and digital media in HE - London, for CASE. Opening, and joined by Abigail of The Blue Door.

With much more coming up, but more on that later. There is still time to book for Being-Social tomorrow, with just a few spaces left. The full speaker list and programme are here:

• http://www.being-social.com/programme/
• http://www.being-social.com/speakers/

And I am looking forward to getting back to my roots in the Education community on Friday. All of this has required some careful diary management! It is amazing how much backwards and forwards email and phone calls a simple shared diary system can save, likewise, sending event participants a diary invite with the event logistics in may seem a bit cheeky, but at least you know they have the details somewhere that they can find them on the night before. Standards like iCalendar have made diary sharing and synchronisation relatively easy, even in mix Mac/PC/Linux environments.

Here’s to a busy (social) life!

Success has its challenges. Anyone who has a web presence already popular with visitors, but wanting to increase the use of the site, as well as attracting new audiences, has a tall order on their hands. On Thursday I spent an evening in the company of the Gumtree crew at their Richmond offices, along with a number of notable UK bloggers. It turned out to be an even better evening than expected, as I won a pair of Bose headphones and came home with a nice bag of goodies too.

A New Web Look For an Old Friend

Gumtree just celebrated its 10th birthday, having started as a local London classified ads and community site. It has grown into an international business covering 6 countries and 60 cities, hosting 2 million on-line ads in the UK alone. Clearly it’s not a business that is standing still, and has learnt a lot in 10 years of the on-line world.

Regular visitors to the site might have spotted the “Gumtree’s changing” message and link at the top of the site. Clicking on it lets users take a sneak peak of the site new design. They have managed to pack in lots of new features without completely crowding out the page. It is busy, certainly, but not confusingly so.

Collecting Feedback – Taking Users on the Journey With You

The way that Gumtree are managing the migration is a model example of how to do it:

• Giving early adopters the chance to opt-in.
• Explaining the changes and gathering feedback.
• Providing the option to opt back out,  with the option for feedback.
• Discussion forum for users to share their thoughts with each other.
• Rapid iterations, based on customer feedback.

The look and feel of a web site has a huge impact on users’ trust levels too, and Gumtree knows it. The new look feels more ‘solid’ in terms of its appearance and more ‘transparent’ in terms of exposing features and what the site it about. Key functions are grouped together logically and the graphics and icons make things more intelligible. The graphics add, rather than distract. I wish more web designers thought this way. Simplicity should always win.

Even More Local

Back in 2008 I wrote a blog post about going Hyper-local. Location based services weren’t new even back, but now services have matured into location aware (Rummble, foursquare and Gowalla to name just a few) and location-based (services based around a particular locality). While the spotlight has been on the explosive growth of the location-aware services, a quieter revolution has been happening in the location-based arena.

If you have a business with offices, it is fairly straight forward to put them on the various mapping services, and create a page to let users know how far away they are from you, and even to provide directions. Go ahead, scare yourself with the Geo IP Tool.

Things become significantly more complicated for a listings site like Gumtree. Listing and searching by a location name is a complicated matching process. How do you define where you live? It isn’t a simply post code or a city name, e.g. Angel in London, is that NW1? If I am on the edge of a postcode, postcode lookups become fairly meaningless.

Over the last 10 years Gumtree has amassed a huge amount of data about how people describe localities, and they are working on applying this to more user-friendly geographic and radial searches. Doing so will enable then to expand their emphasis from the more central city locations, out to the sprawl of suburbia. It’s clever stuff.

The Old Guard

Going back to where I started this post. The challenge with change is the old guard. Even if something is broken, there will always be people who like it that way. It’s their broken, they know it and are comfortable with it. Whenever you make changes, you are going to upset people. The key is to win the old guard over, and bring them along. It seems like Gumtree are doing a great job of that. A great example for others to follow.

Gordon Brown - photo by Paul Clarke

Well, he didn’t say Gov 2.0, but he may as well have done. This morning UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced a sweeping set of changes to the way that technology is used in government. In a speech on Building Britain’s Digital Future, he was talking about digital technology’s role in a plan to secure recovery, growth and jobs in the global marketplace.

A telephone levy has been introduced to support the roll out of 100% broadband, a hotly debated topic here in recent times. Gordon Brown said that we can’t rely on an open market to look after all Britons, but rather the country must depend on an open partnership of business, economics and government. If this sounds like ‘light touch’ regulation, then that is a fair description. “We will support the independence of Ofcom and the BBC to encourage competition and innovation in the digital sector,” he said.

Gordon Brown’s speech touched both on those that do not have Internet access for physical or economic reasons, as well as for challenges in digital literacy. Not much was said about those that simply don’t want to interact with the government on-line, other than the implication that the services will be so good that they will change their minds. The topic of ‘digital exclusion’ will become an even hotter one after today, for reasons that will become clear…

The Prime Minister is seeking a more open and interactive model for the UK’s public services. Today he said that he is prepared to cancel current projects unless they can deliver results, saving huge sums of money. He sees the “Digital Britain” agenda as essential to economic recovery, aiming to place Britain as a world leader in the new age of digital economies. Underpinning this “next generation” of Britain is the next generation of the web – semantic web technology. Sir Tim (Berners-Lee) and his associates have clearly been a strong influence on Gordon Brown’s thinking, and that came across clearly in today’s announcement. £30m of funding is being made available to suport an Institute of Internet Science, headed by Sir Tim and Professor Nigel Shadbolt

A significant percentage of the UK jobs are already IT related, and Gordon Brown believes that the UK is uniquely equipped to lead a digital age. A new “MyGov”  initiative, starting with central government, will expand to local government, to support public engagement at both national and local levels. Brown cited £11bn of savings through using the web, as part of a£20bn of budget savings.

The ‘next stage’ of (UK) Government is an expansion of two-way communication between providers and consumers of government services, Brown mentioned smart energy meters, e-doctors/e-medicine and virtual classrooms. Increased efficiency and transparency will come for the open use of linked data web to provide visibility and access into these new services. Gordon Brown hailed the Internet as a “fundemental freedom” and the “electricity of digital age.”

The Prime Minister believes that opening up government data is central to building a more efficient, open and honest government. A new condition of future franchise partnerships will be that data is open and released (which sounds like a direct knock at TFL who have been slow in providing data for transport applications). From next month, bus stop location data is being published and Ordinance Survey data is coming too. There will be a new tendering portal for all contracts  over £25k. A prize comment on Twitter:

“Gordon almost rapping his speech he’s got so much good news in such a short period of time #gov20 #bbdf” DominicCampbell

Gordon Brown announced that all future government websites must have digital engagement functionality built in, and new websites would not be allowed unless they meet a strict set of criteria. This sounds like a big step forward for communication, and potentially accessibility too. The government will close 500 more .gov websites, as new services are consolidated around the new infrastructure.

“No more one size fits all,” he declared, as he proclaimed an agenda centred around personalisation, transparency, feedback and ease of use, and a potentially radical new model for public service delivery. The aim is that MyGov makes interacting with government as easy as banking and shopping online – co-opting commercial levels of functionality into the government’s infrastructure.

Martha Lane Fox will broaden her existing role and become digital champion for the UK, launching a new digital government department within the cabinet office.  ”The digital net will become the safety net,” said Brown. A clear nod to Martha’s work on digital exclusion. The PM also announced that in the autumn all non-personal government data will be released – a “New Domesday book” – but it isn’t just about the data. The Digital Public Services unit will have a big efficiency emphasis, looking at restructuring government services themselves. Traditional departments have a three part structure including a policy unit, a public facing (transactional) functional, and a back office. Digital technology, in the form of business services, will be used to transform the back office, and also used to open up the policy making function. Gordon Brown talked about breaking down silos and increasing cross-functional working. Make no mistake, these are big changes, with huge challenges.

I did have one “groan” moment during the press conference, when an iPhone app was announced. A bit of overly trendy glitz – a much better investment would have been a mobile friendly portal that works across all smart phones rather than the closed, minority player that is Apple. Other than that, this was government being “with it” in regard to technology.

The Digital Economy Bill came up in the question and answer session, and the Prime Minister offered up the minister responsible for a Q&A session with those interested afterwards – I look forward to the notes from that meeting! – the brief answer to the question was that disconnection, and more generally technical measures, were a last option. However, it did highlight the gap between the backward looking UK Digital Economy Bill, and the forward looking use of open standards and open technology that was a central part of today’s announcement.

What does this all mean? It’s too early to tell. There are clearly aspects of today’s announcement that are re-announcemnets of existing initiatives, but over all the picture is one of a strategic and systematic embracing of digital technology to create a more efficient and more open government here in the UK.

The group includes around 90 people, and there will be other UK companies over in the US for the event as well, making the UK the biggest country group outside of the USA and Canada.

South-by, as it is known to it’s friends, does an amazing job of bringing together the digital media industry (and, yes, social media is a subcategory of that ;) ). I’ll be posting photos on Flickr and blogging on the Digital Mission blog throughout the event, and you can follow the DigitalMission on Twitter for real-time updates. The full list of companies is here:

Amberlight Audioboo Blueleaf Digital Brainient Codegent Codility Cube Interactive Face Group FreshNetworks GigLocator Howard Baines Illumina Digital KMP Digitata Likecube Little World Gifts Littleloud Mendeley Mobilized MOFILM Moonfruit MusicMetric Nsyght oneDrum Orange Bus PageDo Pixeco Plug-in Media Qhub Rummble Silence Media Skimlinks Slicethepie Smidgn SubHub TweetJobs UberVu Vibio Videojuicer Wolfstar WorldTV

I am looking forward to getting to know each of them, and sharing the wonders of SXSWi as we head through a packed agenda of events focussed on understanding and engaging with the US market. Newspepper will be there, so expect video updates from Hermione Way – they’ve already put together a trailer:

Digital Mission 2010 from Newspepper on Vimeo.

Many of the companies met up for a pre-event mixer last week, slideshow below, which gave people the chance to get to know each other before we head over to Austin Texas. Digital Mission really is a team event, and over the last couple of years it has been amazing to watch a strengthened network of hundreds of digital businesses emerge here. While the attention might be on London, the companies are from all over the UK, and watching them support each other to become international players has been, and continues to be, a real privilege.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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