Aide-Memoire
This video of Dr Deming discussing the state of management in the US from 1984 is strangely prescient. I think this is rather important!
Definitely worth watching and pondering for all of us …
Seth Godin wrote about the the attention economy. But it seems to me that we are also seeing the evolution of an online social recommendation economy.
When we all lived in villages there was a strong recommendation economy, and it was fuelled by the fact that everyone knew each other and their reputation. Word of mouth drove choices about which business to patronise and which individuals with whom to socialize. Reputation was everything, and it was protected fiercely on olden days.
With the shift of population to large cities we became disconnected from the hyperlocal reputation economy. But with the digital revolution and the growth of social networking platforms we are seeing a return to the reputation economy for both individuals and businesses.
There is also a growing recommendation economy developing via social media and social networks. This growing recommendation economy is no longer volitional. Instead you are a participant even if you never signed up (refer to my previous post on Klout for some examples).
We are now seeing the growth of explicit social recommendation networks. However, a number of other social networks serve to provide insight into the influence of individuals or brands but these recommendation networks aim to aggregate and rank user’s influence.
Some of the players in this space include:
These networks are all aimed at measuring online influence, and this need is largely driven by marketing needs. As traditional media continues to fragment marketers are seeking to identify those influencers who can help them to connect with audiences.
As Mashable summarised back in 2009, mostly these platforms use metrics to assess influence:
“Incoming Traffic – Pageviews, Incoming traffic from search engines, rss subscribers
Incoming Links – Primarily manual links such as blogrolls, in-post deep links
Reader Engagement – Internal searches, time on site
Recommendations – Retweets, share stats
Connections – Number of mutual connections, number of mutual connections on multiple sites
Track Record – Age of domain, number of blog posts, length of engagement
Engagement – How often and long a person has engaged with a service online”Source: HOW TO Measure Online Influence, Micah Baldwin, 2009
This means that everything we do online is potentially subject to analysis of this nature. And, even if we are participating in ‘private’ social networks, there is the chance that our activity can also be subject to this kind of analysis.
Even if we do not choose to participate in the recommendation economy it is happening, just like it used to happen to everyone in a village.
Along with all of this we are seeing the development of recommendation markets, where people connect and exchange information about the quality of information, connections, work, etc of people or businesses within their networks. Increasingly this kind of recommendation network is driving job search, new business, business connections, and innovation.
This means we need to work out how to benefit from this new environment.
WHAT TO DO
Probably the best advice about managing one’s reputation comes from Maslow via Wayne Dwyer:
“Self-actualized people are independent of the good opinion of others.”
And he goes on cite Dr Seuss:
“Be what you are and say what you feel, because those who will mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.”
From my point of view the only practical response is to keep doing your thing, whatever that might be. To analyse results and take feedback from reliable sources.
But, as I know from experience, if you try to please everyone then everyone ends up unhappy (I’m sure Oscar Wilde said something along those lines too).
Above all we need to accept that we now dwell in a panopticon, and like the villagers of old, we are always under observation in the digital world. This new reality has implications for our comportment online. It means that we need to monitor responses to our activity and adjust our own responses to the current situation.
It also means that even those who do not choose to play in the online arena are playing (whether they like it or not). Reputations are no longer a private matter, instead we live in a digital global village where our reputations are common currency and we rise or fall on the recommendations of others.
This new environment means that we need to remain vigilant, stay connected, and build up social capital to enable us to survive when things do not go well. Just like in a village it is the quality of our relationships that will make life easier.
READING
Some other interesting analyses of this phenomenon include:
- Bertrand Duperrin, Is reputation a new currency?
- Sidneyeve Matrix, Social Job Search
As we move away from the power structures and ways of thinking that governed the twentieth century we are seeing a desperate rearguard action from the power elites who ruled that time.
Dying Dinosaur Industries in their Death Throes
A good example of this is the film and music industries, whose centralized model of creation and distribution is breaking down.
The proposed US anti-piracy legislation to protect film, music and other intellectual property from unauthorized distribution – SOPA in the House and PIPA in the Senate – has shown deep divides between modern hyperconnected businesses and old world centralized, command-control industries. And it is now reported that the SOPA bill has been shelved after global protests from Google, Wikipedia and others.
The rearguard action by the old industries is also clear in threats against those who fail to support the old industries:
“Consumer group Public Knowledge on Friday accused the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and its head, former Sen. Chris Dodd, of trying to intimidate lawmakers into supporting a pair of controversial anti-piracy bills.
In recent days, Dodd and other top Hollywood figures have threatened to cut off campaign donations to politicians who do not support their effort to crackdown on online copyright infringement.”
We are seeing increased efforts from the old guard to control people and their communication. But the genie of a hyperconnected populace is out of the bottle. And it cannot be put back. Even if they remove the internet as we know it – free flowing and accessible to all – we will invoke Gilmore’s Law and route around that damage
The Economy and the Death of the Western Middle Class
The death of these old industries has important implications for society. These industries enabled the creation of a well-off middle class in the latter half of the twentieth century.
But with the digital revolution many the economic drivers that created the twentieth century middle class have disppeared, as outlined in this article about Apple and US jobs.
And even in Australia we are seeing the gradual shift of middle class jobs overseas, as in this recent example from Westpac, Ultimate insult: Sacked Westpac workers forced to train replacements.
It is becoming apparent that even new businesses no longer guarantee jobs like they used to. For example: ‘No new jobs, dollars’ in bulk stores.
The truth about job creation is only now beginning to dawn on us, and we are seeing the inevitable social and economic consequences of transferring work from high cost to low cost economies.
People are even starting to ponder which jobs will disappear next – for example Will these 10 jobs disappear in 2012?
The old industries employed sufficient numbers of the western populace to keep them in comfortable consumerist peace. Their children could afford an education and thus improve their lot in life. The idea that each generation would be materially better off than the previous seemed unassailable.
But now it seems that truth might no longer hold. The #Occupy movement is seeking to bring attention to the economic bifurcation of society between the the very well-to-do and the strugglers.
Embracing the Future
Those who are not trapped in the old model are embracing the evolving world that is fuelled by the digital revolution. They are accepting the dispersed, decentralized, and peer-to-peer future. The old intermediaries are dying (or are in their death throes), and in their place new ones are arising.
The future is about human beings connecting with each other. It is about collaboration and cooperation. It is about sustainable growth. And it is about making space for people to create new possibilities unconstrained by the behemoths of centralized command and control.
Author Paulo Coelho summed it up nicely on his blog recently:
“As an author, I should be defending ‘intellectual property’, but I’m not.
Pirates of the world, unite and pirate everything I’ve ever written!
The good old days, when each idea had an owner, are gone forever.
First, because all anyone ever does is recycle the same four themes: a love story between two people, a love triangle, the struggle for power, and the story of a journey.
Second, because all writers want what they write to be read, whether in a newspaper, blog, pamphlet, or on a wall.
The more often we hear a song on the radio, the keener we are to buy the CD. It’s the same with literature.
The more people ‘pirate’ a book, the better. If they like the beginning, they’ll buy the whole book the next day, because there’s nothing more tiring than reading long screeds of text on a computer screen.”
Source: My thoughts on S.O.P.A. by Paulo Coelho on January 20, 2012
Zooniversity is the home of one of my favourite animals online – Teddy Bear the porcupine – and he’s celebrating the New Year …
Recently I was re-reading Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, a moving letter from prison that looks at spirituality and faith from the depths of despair and degradation.
This particular quote stood out for me, especially the notion that we do not know ourselves very well.
“But with the dynamic forces of life, and those in whom those dynamic forces become incarnate, it is different. People whose desire is solely for self-realisation never know where they are going. They can’t know. In one sense of the word it is of course necessary, as the Greek oracle said, to know oneself: that is the first achievement of knowledge. But to recognise that the soul of a man is unknowable, is the ultimate achievement of wisdom.
The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?
When the son went out to look for his father’s asses, he did not know that a man of God was waiting for him with the very chrism of coronation, and that his own soul was already the soul of a king.”
It seems, as we move into the interesting year of 2012, that this is a good time to turn our efforts towards understanding ourselves more fully. And, along with that, to discover how to accept ourselves as we are, both flawed and fabulous in parts.
I have come to suspect that our good relations with others hinge more upon our own understanding and acceptance of our own self than upon any other thing.
Hopefully we are not fated to suffer – as did Wilde (or Verlaine or Prince Kropotkin) – similar trials to achieve clarity and understanding.
Each year, instead of making new year resolutions, I pick a theme for the year. That way when I get sidetracked (as often happens)
I can simply return to the theme. Also with a theme there are often many different things I can do to support it.
This year my theme is: compassion, composure, and flow.
This theme came to me as a I wrote a recent blog post, 2012: Not the end of the world, but perhaps the end of the world as we know it, where I discussed some of things we can do to change the world.
Some of the things that popped out for me were around mindset and lifestyle, and these themes fit nicely into that.
Mindset?
Kindness. Compassion. Love. Community. Dignity. Composure. Peace. Grace. Flow.
Lifestyle?
Find our tribes. Build communities.
Sustainability. Grow a garden. Simplicity.
Walk with a friend. Slow down. Eat fresh food. Share a meal. Breathe.
Wishing everyone a happy, safe, and prosperous New Year.
Recently Jason Jordan called me on my limited ways of thinking.
ARE YOU SUGGESTING IT CANNOT BE BOTH? RT @kcarruthers: @jasonjordan but. but. it’s already Caturday. #cakeday
— Jason Jordan (@jasonjordan) December 23, 2011
Then I realised that he’s right. It can be both #caturday and #cakeday on the same day!
see more Lolcats and funny pictures, and check out our Socially Awkward Penguin lolz!
As we come up to the year 2012 many prognosticators are predicting the end of the world. I suspect that this will not come to pass.
But I do think that we are seeing the end of the world as we’ve come to know it during the latter years of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first century. Many of the verities upon which we’ve relied will be falter or disappear.
Doomsayers talk about the Mayan calendar ending in 2012. However, The Guardian kindly reassures us that an “expert” says: Mayan tablet does not predict end of the world in 2012.
No matter what one thinks of these predictions of doom it is clear that we are moving into a new world next year on several fronts, mainly due to the global economic situation.
The economy
The global economy is not looking well – the British, European and US economies are mired in problems that seem insurmountable. Austerity measures are starting to bite in the UK and Eurozone. We are starting to see the breakdown of normal social bonds. For example, in Greece, there are even stories of parents giving up their children to the state because they can’t feed them: Greek economic crisis turns tragic for children abandoned by their families.
The US is coming up to a Presidential election and the deadlocks between Republicans and Democrats are likely to continue thus blocking any possibility for change. The economic situation in the US does not seem to be improving, in spite of the ‘green shoots’ some speak of. Instead the charts tell a sobering story (source: Financial Armageddon) for the US:
Australia has been sheltered from all of this by the strength of China, and it remains to be seen if this continues into the coming year.
What can we do?
It seems that there is not a lot we can do as individuals to address these larger global problems. However, what we can do is adjust our own lifestyle and mindset to better suit these challenging times. Since we are moving into a different kind of world it seems prudent to prepare proactively rather than sit and wait.
We are moving into a world where the rule of law is shifting, where the rights we’ve assumed were ours are being stripped away, where the social contract between the government and the governed is dissolving.
In this kind of environment the only source of solace is individuals who join together to create positive change in the world. We must join together to create a new kind of polity that rejects control and inequity. We must join together to create tribes and communities that embrace peace and reject anger.
Here are some of my thoughts about how we can approach this challenge:
Mindset?
Kindness. Compassion. Love. Community. Dignity. Composure. Peace. Grace. Flow.
Lifestyle?
Find our tribes. Build communities.
Sustainability. Grow a garden. Simplicity.
Walk with a friend. Slow down. Eat fresh food. Share a meal. Breathe.
Business?
New models. Innovation. Doing good. Creativity. Collaboration. Consensus.
Profit with honour. Nurture people and the environment.
And?
It is good to remember that there is strength in the people when they join together for the common good…
