Aide-Memoire

Over the past few years a plethora of Social Media Experts* have cropped up and their tweets, posts, podcasts etc serve up a cacophony of advice and pontification.

Here’s a few of my thoughts on the matter, from the perspective of someone who sees herself as an apprentice on a learning journey.

Anyone who claims to be an expert in social media is probably talking through their hat.

Social media has been with us for only a few years. Expertise is not developed overnight.

Deep knowledge is founded on a basis of research and experience. Lessons learned, especially from failure and pushing of known boundaries, are key to development of expertise.

But research has shown that expertise in a particular field is achieved over many years of research and practice. Since social media has been with us for such a short time it is unlikely that any of us have gleaned more than primitive insights as yet.

As Wikipedia notes:

Some characteristics of the development of an expert have been found to include

• At a minimum usually 10 years of consistent practice, sometimes more for certain fields
• A characterization of this practice as “deliberate practice”, which forces the practitioner to come up with new ways to encourage and enable themselves to reach new levels of performance
• An early phase of learning which is characterized by enjoyment, excitement, and participation without outcome-related goals
• The ability to rearrange or construct a higher dimension of creativity. Due to such familiarity or advanced knowledge experts can develop more abstract perspectives of their concepts and/or performances.

Some people may have expertise in other areas that gives them unique insights into the possibilities inherent in social media. They may be able to fast track the development of expertise in social media by building on their previous knowledge and experience.

Further, social media is just media and communications on a new platform. I’m not quite sure if that fact privileges social media in some special way?

Rather it seems that what we are undergoing is experimentation with the new media publishing platforms – from hard copy to soft copy, from television to online, etc.

This is no different from the platform change that ensued with the move from radio to television. I wonder if there were a bunch of Television Media Experts running around back in those days too? And I suspect that those experts of olden times would have known just as much as the average Social Media Expert today.

Perhaps rather than being social media experts we are social media learners? If indeed social media is a real thing we should even consider in and of itself (but that is a topic for another day)?

* Updated: OzDJ also reminded me of the various “social media ‘luminaries’, ‘mavens’, ‘gurus’ et al”

Here are the slides from my presentation at the National Growth Summit in Sydney today.

I’m speaking at the National Growth Summit 2010 in Sydney this week about engagement marketing and running a workshop on Technology to drive Growth.

The line-up includes a number of international luminaries along with local experts, gurus and knowledgeable people such as: Mick Liubinskas, Stephen Collins, Mike Walsh & Stephen Belfer.

There’s also workshops available on day 2 of the conference – for a special discount on the Technology to Drive Growth workshop use this registration form (opens pdf)

Crowdsourcing is very trendy these days and is touted as the answer to many of the ills of poor design and the need to reduce costs. In these cash strapped days any way to make innovation better-cheaper-faster is extremely desirable.

But crowdsourcing is just one of the many tools we have at our disposal, and each tool is suited to particular kinds of applications. To simply adopt an idea like this without considering its suitability to the problem domain or to the desired results can be risky.

To assist with critical thinking about crowdsourcing I have collected a few alternative viewpoints & list five reasons why it might not always be the best approach to adopt. Please note I do not agree with everything in the articles linked below – they are meant as a thought starter & to provide different perspectives on crowdsourcing (i.e. if you’ve got any issues with the articles please contact the author directly).

• Innovation: The sinister powers of crowdsourcing
• G20 summit: How the bandwagon wrecked the wisdom of market crowds
• The trouble with Twitter
• The Myth of Crowdsourcing
• Forrester’s Social Technographics report

Since no single tool is the answer in all cases, here are a few times when crowdsourcing might not be the right solution:

1. When the crowd does not have sufficient understanding or knowledge

For crowdsourcing to work you need to find the right crowd.  If the technical or scientific knowledge required is rare then crowdsourcing might not be helpful unless you can find a crowd of people with the requisite foundational knowledge.

2. Where the problem is diffuse and complex

Crowdsourcing lends itself to solving clearly focused problems where there is little ambiguity or nuance – a great recent example of this was the DARPA balloon challenge.

For diffuse and complex problems it might be necessary to chunk up the challenge (if that is possible). And for problems that require painstaking layering of knowledge and information with long term focus it might not be commercially viable.

A good example of this is the discovery of longitude via crowdsourcing in the 18th century. It worked in the long run, but it took a really long time and was funded by the government. However, it might be argued that this kind of discovery would be much quicker today with computer power.

3. When you want to keep your plans secret

Clearly secrecy requires that only a few people know the secret. Thus crowdsourcing something that is meant to be a secret is probably a bad idea (unless you are executing a cunning hide in plain sight sort of plan).

4. Your problem needs to be compelling enough for contributors to care

Experience of Wikipedia indicates that people will contribute to things that are interesting to them. Thus if nobody cares about solving your problem then crowdsourcing might not be the answer.

To get an idea of how crowdsourcing works on an everyday basis there is a good discussion of how Wikipedia contributions happen by Henry Blodget in: Who The Hell Writes Wikipedia, Anyway?.

There is also a well known report by Forrester about Social Technographics that segments the participation of people within social networks. It shows that only a small proportion of people create or share content, a few active creators or editors, with the bulk of people lurking or not participating at all.

5. Crowdsourcing for complex problems requires dedicated resources

To undertake the kind of knowledge work required to solve complex problems contributors need uninterrupted time in the zone.

This is exemplified in some of the large open source software projects where companies pay people to work full time on open source projects for commercial advantage:

Many of the leaders of key projects (like Guido van Rossum, the inventor of Python, who works at Google (nasdaq: GOOG – news – people )) are paid by their employers to continue to lead their projects. Is there an open source community? Of course there is. But on the most prominent projects, the members of the community have jobs and are paid to work on open source because the software is so beneficial to their employers, even though it is not owned by them. True, there are hybrid models, and the smaller the project, the more likely it is unfunded. But when it becomes a big deal, open source becomes commercial.

2009 ranks as both the year that social media went mainstream and as the year that we saw a seismic shift in the comfortable world of traditional media.

Some evidence of the former is the fact that Dell made $6.5 million in direct sales via Twitter. Further evidence is the rise of the social media job, with titles like Emerging Media Manager, Senior Digital Strategist or Social Media Community Manager.

Many businesses as well as individuals now see it as normal to have a Twitter account, Facebook page, YouTube channel, a website and/or a blog.

It is also the year that MySpace lost out to Facebook – by focusing on eyeballs and advertising rather than ease of user interaction it marginalised itself.

Facebook went from strength to strength by year end picking up 700,000 new users per day; ending the year as the de facto social network for both geeks and non-geeks. Key to the growth and success of these social platforms among the mainstream population is ease of use, ease of connection with others, and ease of sharing. It is much easier for something to go viral when it is easy for ordinary people to share it.

Facebook is a clear winner on each of these criteria, while Twitter has had a slower adoption as the how-to is not as evident to the new user. However, Twitter is winning the day as the home of buzz and breaking news.

Another example of the mainstreaming of social media is the way it is now an integral part of traditional media such as newspapers, radio and television. Most newspaper sites now enable readers to share content on various social networking sites and to comment on the site.

Many television and radio stations supplement their regular content with additional content such as video, podcast and forums. The BBC has asked its viewers to provide video and image content, while other newspaper sites actively solicit reader photographs or videos for use on their sites.

To the chagrin of the traditional media power brokers much of the innovation in social media is coming from the public broadcasters – for example the BBC in the UK and the ABC in Australia.

Each of these has embraced podcasts, time shift video and active involvement on Twitter and other social networks. This has led to some lively debates between traditional media owners like the powerful Murdoch family and the public broadcasters (see Murdoch attack on ‘dominant’ BBC).

And it, in turn, has drawn spirited responses from the public broadcasters, for example: Mark Scott of the ABC in Australia in The Fall of Rome: Media after Empire One thing is clear from the events of 2009, the landscape and revenue models for traditional media have shifted and the industry is faced with threats to its very survival.

There have been many and varied responses to the shift in the traditional media landscape. Rupert Murdoch deciding to take his News Corporation content out of Google or put it behind a paywall; myriad local newspapers in the US closing down; and ordinary people not caring much at all as they continue to obtain good quality information from various online sources. One thing is certain; there has been a huge shift in purchasing patterns for traditional media. Newspaper sales are down as are free to air television audiences with associated reductions in advertising revenue for proprietors.

There have been some interesting responses to this shift in the traditional media landscape; including the Media140 series of conferences (please note I was live blogging the Sydney event). This is the brainchild of Ande Gregson and his grand plan is to have conferences around the world in 140 days.

Media140 is focused on bringing together practitioners from journalism, politics, advertising; new media and entertainment to consider how the real-time web is changing the way we communicate, socialise and do business. New business models will evolve to take advantage of the social media and real-time web. Their evolution will be driven by the conversations and business ventures that occur during this time of shift in the media industry.

In 2009 the familiar media world we knew from the past century shifted. The age of real-time, social, computer driven news and communications is upon us. It is powered by web 2.0 platforms and funded by emerging business models. Old empires are trembling and new ones are being born. We are in for an interesting time in 2010 as all of these trends continue and we get a glimpse of the winners and losers in this shift.

There are three areas that are relevant to both our society in general and to us as educators in particular. They are: (1) the overall landscape in which we are operating; (2) the social implications of the changes being driven by technology and how we are using it; and (3) the changing models that are beginning to impact on educational practice.

Landscape

Before we leap into a look at the landscape it is important to clarify some things about web 2.0 and some key trends that are impacting on the landscape. Key points about web 2.0 are that:

1. It is not new technology – the technology stack is decades old in many cases
2. It is new ways of using older technology – we are putting the technology together differently enabled by reasonable broadband access
3. It is not using the old mindset where technology was the province of gurus – now any script kiddie can make things happen with technology
4. It is democratizing technology – this is breaking down the old cabals of experts
5. It is applying new business models – we are seeing this with companies like Google and Facebook

In terms of the broader landscape I have identified five macro trends that are shaping both computing and our world at present:

• Next Generation Internet – semantics, contextual, geo-aware
• New interfaces – gesture, haptic, auditory, human-computer, voice user interfaces
• Hardware – Virtualization , cloud computing enabled by solid state drives, blade technology
• Social computing – It’s here and it will continue to grow
• Ubiquitous computing – Wearable, networks, convergence

Of these I will concentrate on social computing and the next generation internet as they are driving a lot of change that is impacting on the education sector.

But probably the biggest change over the past thirty years is the rate of change. Once it was completely acceptable to wait a week for a letter to arrive, to ponder one’s response for a few days and then write and dispatch a letter by post. Then the fax machine changed all of that. Now we receive emails immediately followed by a phone call asking why we have not yet responded.

The pace of change is increasing and has increased substantially over the past 30 years. Look at the mobile phone as an example of this. From the time the telephone was invented until the mid-1980s it remained recognisably the same device. Now, to a person who last saw a telephone in 1980, the iPhone or SmartPhone would not even seem to be in the same family of devices. And, indeed they are not. The modern mobile phone is really converged computing, telecommunications and entertainment device. They even have more memory than my first server.

The next thing to consider is the revolution of the internet. Originally conceived as a bulwark against nuclear war and as a way for academic researchers to communicate it has reshaped the world. Now many people use the internet every day as an integral part of their lives – for sending email, chatting online, shopping, entertainment and business.

Along with this growth in the pragmatic use of the internet, social networks are also becoming mainstream; with Pew Research from 2009 showing 46% of US adults have used a social network at least once, and 27% used one yesterday.

This area of social computing has been the real area of growth and the data clearly shows how social computing is changing how ordinary people share, communicate and interact.

Some examples of these changes include:

• In the past email and search engine internet traffic exceeded that of social networks. However, in December 2009 search traffic and social network traffic approached parity in Australia for the first time.
• Also previously in late 2007, social network traffic surpassed that from email in the UK for the first time.
• And adult website traffic was also overtaken by social networking traffic for the first time in late 2008.

The important thing to note here is that the behaviours of searching, sending emails or checking out p~rn did not change. What changed is the location in which it happens. Thus if you are in Facebook and so are all of your friends it simply does not make sense to leave the application to use another email client.

There has also been development of niche networks for different interest groups. For business there are LinkedIn and Plaxo (amongst many others) and Facebook is winning the war as the de facto social network for everyone else.

Another interesting characteristic of this landscape is that ordinary people are creating and participating online in ways that were once unthinkable. Without specialised technical assistance people are creating videos to share on YouTube or Viddler; they are creating blogs on Wordpress, Blogger or Typepad; they are sharing photos on Facebook or Flickr. Remixing music or visual materials is rife –questions of provenance and copyright remain unanswered. Video downloads, online shopping, banking and travel arrangements are becoming the norm.

Against this backdrop various researchers have mapped the generations:

• GI Generation aged 73+
• Silent Generation aged 64-72
• Older Boomers aged 55-63
• Younger Boomer aged 45-54
• Gen X aged 33-44
• Gen Y aged 18-32

And, while the notion of dividing up the population on the basis of age cohorts is useful for analytical purposes, it ignores some simple facts about people. In each age cohort is a bell curve for change adoption – with some members as early adopters, the mass as early & late majority, followed by the laggards. I fundamentally disagree with the idea that mere membership of an age cohort determines a person’s relationship to technology or propensity to adopt change. Rather the determining factor will become one’s willingness to be connected.

This willingness and desire to be hyperconnected via technology will become the new generation gap. A great example of this is the loose confederation of people who meetup on Thursday mornings on the northside of Sydney for coffee. Most of them met originally on Twitter, decided that they liked each other and thought it would be good to catch up informally for coffee.

What has happened is that this has created a vibrant group of people who know each other in real life now. Business ideas are exchanged, family and social tips are shared and other connections are made and broadened. More can be seen at their Posterous site at www.nscm.posterous.com .There are now many similar groups all around Australia – I have attended them in Perth and Brisbane.

What is interesting here is that online and offline activities are blurring and the boundaries between public and private are no longer clear. The conflicts between the connected and the unconnected are already being seen in schools, colleges and workplaces around the world. Just try asking members of your class to turn off their mobile phones to test this hypothesis.

Social implications

The social implications for all of this are astounding. They reverberate across all areas of life from business to education to socialising.

This technology and the way it is being used now is creating massive interconnections between people and enabling the creation of groups and communities. This kind of community building and collaboration is similar to that we experienced when living in smaller villages rather than in large cities.

But think on this – the children of today will stay in loose contact with every group of people the meet throughout their lives from kindergarten onwards. It is going to be a challenge to manage over a lifetime. The only way to manage these masses of loose connections is by chunking them up into niches. This is where richer technologies that enable this to happen seamlessly based on use rather than manually based on effort.

Another feature of this interconnected world we live in is that we no longer need to wait. Delayed gratification is becoming a thing of the past in many respects. For example in the area of entertainment we used to wait for a movie to come out or wait until our favourite television show was broadcast. But now with the advent of decent broadband and streaming video there is no more waiting. Anyone can watch what they want when they want. And they do exactly that, as anyone with teenagers in the house with a broadband connection knows all too well.

However, against the backdrop of this explosion in connections, information and entertainment at our fingertips we remain unreconstructed human beings. This remains similar to our cave dwelling days.

We still retain our tribal brains that work best in small groups the size of a basketball team. Our brains are wired to deal with small chunks of information – like the magic number seven, which is the number of items we can retain in our short-term memory.

Also we are constrained in our ability to handle a great many close relationships. Many cite Dunbar’s number which is the supposed cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable social relationships: the kind of relationships that go with knowing who each person is and how each person relates socially to every other person.

Imagine how many contacts you would have if everyone you had ever met since kindergarten was a friend on Facebook. This is precisely what is happening to our young people today.

This means that we need to chunk up all of those massive networks we collect so as to manage them over time. It also means that we are maintaining increasingly loose ties with larger numbers of people.

Ultimately we are social creatures and want to create social networks either on or offline. I often use the example of Facebook, where ordinary people of all ages are routinely creating affiliation groups. These online groups are even creating real life relationships – for example the Twitter community in Sydney often meets up physically with most of us having met online originally.

Another element to the mix is the amount of information we are required to process everyday – email, news, social networks, entertainment, etc. We can no longer store all of this information in our heads.

This is not merely a gratuitous picture of Brad Pitt. It harks back to a time in the past when our societies used epic poetry to store and transmit important information, but now it is all in nearline or online storage. For example, many of us no longer recall the phone numbers of our nearest and dearest since they are stored so handily in our mobile phones.

Also the question of how we are going to retrieve a lot of that information in the future is open to question. I’ve got a floppy disk at home with some interesting photos of a data centre I built a few years ago, but no longer have any technology to access that information.

Changing models

So where does all of this put us as educators? There are some who talk of a nirvana where all students are self directed learners and we are coaches and facilitators. But I suspect that those people have not met some of my students.

Let’s look back to the web 2.0 meme map from O’Reilly’s Foo Camp a few years ago. It clearly talks about all of the things that have become part of social computing (and this includes social media and social networking).

The social web has developed a set of values based on that original web 2.0 meme map and this Wordle map shows some of those enacted in social computing at present.

But teaching has its own longstanding set of values. And today we are seeing a conflict between those two sets of values in classrooms and lecture halls around the world.

But first a few comments on the nature of these new tools. These tools are a great enabler for minority groups. It levels the playing field for them in many ways. However, it is well to note, as Grady Booch once said: “a fool with a tool is still a fool”.

Our learning institutions are sometimes slow to change and adapt to new ways. On the other hand teachers are often the ones in vanguard embracing change and pushing the boundaries. The institutions of learning in this country are pretty conservative and slow to adopt new fangled technology, usually quite sensibly on the basis of cost.  But now with web 2.0 social computing and open source the main arguments against new technology adoption are being destroyed.

Individual teachers are embracing change, but sometimes when I meet these visionary folks they seem more like revolutionary cells of the vanguard than part of the institutional mainstream.  But the learners will eventually force our hands by disengaging if we do not respond to the shifts in their cultural practices.

This leads into another area of contention, that of boundaries. These new tools are creating disputes about the appropriate times and places where it is appropriate to use the technology (for example, have you ever tried to get a Gen Y class to turn off their mobile phones?). Also questions about the content and authority of information created or shared. Think about the endless discussions about plagiarism and the appropriateness of Wikipedia as a research authority.

We are dealing with a radically different set of expectations – from our staff, administrators and students (or consumers). Many of these people were socialised in the old non-digital world; while others are digital natives.

As part of my preparation for this session I’ve been trying to distil my thoughts on the implications of new technology on culture and learning.  And for me it has all come down to sensemaking as the purpose of education.  Dan Russell provides a nice definition of sensemaking: “Sensemaking is in many ways a search for the right organization or the right way to represent what you know about a topic. It’s data collection, analysis, organization and performing the task.”

To a certain extent I think that these changes mean we need to become co-participants in the learning experience.  Become facilitators of the process rather than the experts.  This does not mean that our experience or empirical knowledge is not valuable.  We need to establish mutual respect and open dialogue. And luckily now we have the technological tools to facilitate that dialogue.

It is going to be an interesting balancing act between those different sets of expectations. Defining boundaries in a hyperconnected world is a challenge, but it is worth remembering that interesting discoveries are made at the boundaries of the currently known world. Some of the tools to help with this sense-making process are to embrace the values of web 2.0 as part of classroom practice.

But the challenges to the authority of the teacher and of the institution are not only coming from students and society in general. They are also coming from competitors.

By this I mean the institutions that are subverting traditional ideas of the university or college and putting their intellectual property out online for free.  The institutions doing this include the august (e.g. Stanford, MIT) as well as the ambitious (e.g. USQ) as Lifehacker so kindly lists.

Other challenges are coming because of the radical transparency that the web enables. Here I’m thinking of things like Rate My Teacher and Rate My Professor. No more hiding from bad appraisals by students it’s all out in the open now. But looking on the bright side it’s happening to kittens as well.

All of this brings us tremendous opportunities as both a society and as educators. It seems like we’re not in control any more. But I do question if the control we once had was merely an illusion. And I wonder if this new world might not be a healthier one for all of us?

The biggest shift is that we are dealing with connected individuals who are at the centre of a web of networks enabled and mediated by technology. This will give rise to power shifts that we will need to live through and embrace in order to survive.

Note: all data mentioned above is detailed in my slides here

I really enjoyed the opportunity to present to the TAFE teachers of the Western Sydney Insititute recently about social computing and its implications for education. Slides follow and more detailed notes will be posted shortly.

I spoke at Ross Dawson’s SME Technology Summit last week. Here are my slides & some brief thoughts about social media for business:

I had the pleasure of running into Jim Shomos the other night & he was telling me about his latest project – Mordy Koots.

This project is amazing in the way that it brings together so many of the threads of film, gaming, web and social computing. Lots of the ideas that people have discussed, such as the shifting consumption patterns for new media, are realised in this project.

Mordy Koots uses a different approach to telling a story. There are 10 x 3 minute action packed episodes delivered via web and mobile in partnership with NineMSN. It stars the very funny & endearing Shane Jacobsen (of Kenny fame) and is directed by Clayton Jacobsen.

This has not been launched yet, but Jim kindly gave me permission to use the clip. Check it out.

I suspect that this is a glimpse into the future of entertainment led by some Aussie ingenuity and the constraints of making feature films in smaller markets.

Really looking forward to speaking at the SME Technology Summit by The Insight Exchange on 1 December 2009.

There’s lots of interesting speakers:

• Tim Pethick – Entrepreneur & Founder, Nudie
• Mark Pesce – Inventor, Writer, Educator, Futurist
• WilliePang – Managing Director, Search Marketing, Yahoo! Australia
• Suzi Dafnis – Community Director, Australian Businesswomans Network
• David James – CEO & Director, Brasserie Bread
• Matt Barrie – Chief Executive, Freelancer.com
• Matt Bateman – Managing Director, Viva9
• Sharon Williams – Founder and CEO, Taurus Marketing

And some of the topics covered include:

• Using social media to attract customers and generate sales
• Building an online presence so customers can easily find you
• Generating revenue while you sleep with eCommerce
• Selling effectively with email marketing
• Leveraging your relationships with powerful CRM

For some great value access to ideas to help your business grab a 30% discount off the regular registration rate, that’s only $350+GST for a full day of education, by using code: CARRUTHERS here.

Joel Postman argues that A Blog is a Better Social Media Hub Than Twitter. I tend to agree, especially from a business perspective. His post got me thinking about the critical elements for a business social media toolkit.

1) A Blog or a Website (it’s the same thing really)

A business or personal brand needs to have a home base – it’s the virtual equivalent of an office or post office box.

However, the reason that a website (powered by a blogging tool or by handcrafted HTML or whatever) is a necessary part of your social media arsenal is that you control it and all of the content therein. This assumes that you to host your own site & have access to all the data. If it is hosted or managed by someone else then your data is at risk if the relationship breaks down or their business has a failure.

Many businesses put their websites/blogs into the hands of third parties & often don’t even know the passwords to access their own information. This is a huge risk!

One thing that is rapidly becoming apparent to me is a convergence between blogs and websites. Someone asked me the other day: what is the difference between the two? It really made me think. And the answer was they are the same thing. This is because the platform – blog as content management system – does not matter any longer.

What is important is the content delivered on the site. We can also see this convergence in the number of websites that now use a blogging platform as their content management system.

2) Social media & social network presence

Social networks and social media are the elements that bring website or blog content alive.  These are tools that enable sharing of messages with communities of people who are interested.  They also provide an opportunity to move from a monologue publishing style to a conversational dialogue style of interaction.

Even if your business does not want or need to use social networks it makes sense to own your corporate identity. What happens if someone who hates your business registers “YourBusinessName” on Twitter and starts sending out messages?

Also it is worth setting up a social networking presence as a low cost distribution channel for your website content. Think of the website as a publication platform while social networks are the distribution channel.

A big challenge for websites until now has been letting people know that they exist and have useful or relevant content.  Social media helps to solve this problem for businesses and personal brands.

The other important thing is to store the content of your social networking interactions for later analysis and reference. For example, on Twitter it is possible to create an RSS feed of a particular user’s or hashtag’s Twitter stream. Just go to search.twitter.com, enter your search term & there is an option to create an RSS feed of that search.

Also a number of plugins are available that enable posting of social network activity to a website/blog. And if all this information goes back to your website it can be backed up and remain available even if the original source network is ephemeral.

3) Social media reputation tracking
Once you take a brand out to play in this socially connected world monitoring what is going on becomes important. I’ve written about this before, giving a few examples where social media has both helped and harmed brands.

An implicit social contract is created by brands when they participate in social networks. Your brand becomes more accessible and people will interact (even if you would prefer that they did not).

There are some great paid services that can monitor your online reputation. However, here are a few free tools that are available:

1. Google Alerts
2. TweetBeep
3. Social mention
4. Google search

This kind of monitoring should be setup and reviewed regularly.

Regular participation, care and feeding of social media is necessary as it is now part of the marketing mix. Social media and social networking are part of both the place and the promotion of a brand or product.

Online should be monitored similar to the way we used to monitor customer feedback, newspapers and magazines in the past.

Have been chatting online with Evan from Sency.com and decided to experiment with his new gadget using the Media140 Twitter feed:

#media140

The Media 140 Conference in Sydney has offered a vast amount of food for thought my brain is buzzing with ideas, issues and concerns.

The first thing that struck me was the level of fear and fear-mongering by some of the print journalists on day one. For example in the session titled How Social Media is Changing Political Reporting Caroline Overington and Chris Uhlmann both seemed close to arguing that the end of the free world as we know it is nigh should one of the major east coast newspapers in Australia fail.

There seemed to be little idea amongst these panelists that changing media platforms might reinvigorate media and create new revenue or career opportunities.

This notion that unless “proper journalism”, that is journalism as we have known it since the mid-late nineteenth century as practised by employees of the great media barons, exists then no valuable news will exist seems odd.

When one considers why news came to be produced in that particular way in that particular time it seems clear that technology and cost constraints prohibited new entrants to the news creation and sharing market.

However today those barriers to entry are rapidly disappearing and ordinary people are creating their own news. But, while the need for professional production facilities is diminishing, there seems to be ample space for journalists and news organisations to explore business models based on aggregation, curation and clarification of issues and perspectives.

Caroline Overington also discussed the News Ltd plan to charge for content. It will be interesting to see their plan and how it unfolds. My experience indicates that online micropayments are not as easy to use and intuitive as they need to be for mass adoption. Also the nature of the content must be compelling enough on a continual basis for people to subscribe.

Amusingly at the same time as Ms Overington was delivering her apologia for News Ltd they announced a revenue slump of 4.1%.

#media140

I attended the afternoon sessions for day one of the  Media 140 conference in Sydney today as a live blogger/twitterer and have  been consolidating my thoughts. Here’s a summary of the speakers that resonated for me in the afternoon sessions:

Julie Posetti (a.k.a. @julie_posetti) did a nice job of chairing the panels – a warm and friendly style

John Bergin (a.k.a. @theburgerman) displayed a splendid vocabulary and deep insights into the interplay between traditional media platforms and new media platforms.  He noted that the “the act of speaking should not be privileged over the act of listening”and that “passive news consumption is all but extinct”.  Wish he’d been able to share his thoughts for longer.

Bronwen Clune (a.k.a. @bronwen) discussed the changing nature of a journalist’s place in the world, admirably encapsulated as: “journalists – the audience formerly known as the media” (and she wore some fabulous red shoes ).

Leigh Sales (a.k.a. @leighsales ) talked about the how she approaches having an active social media presence and some of her techniques for balancing personal and work personas online, noting a simple rubric “if in doubt, leave it out” (she also wore some extremely funky white shoes ).

Stilgherrian (a.k.a. @stilgherrian) spoke about his puzzlement as to what journalists actually do, and noted that “90% of what journalists and bloggers do overlaps”. He pondered the decline of the 19th century style “media factories” and the rise of “social media” and did not mention #goats at all. The full text of his talk is available here.

Kudos to the ABC and to all the sponsors for a very thought provoking conference so far. Overall the logistics of the conference were great – well organised plus a nice venue with good parking & transport nearby. It will be interesting to see what tomorrow brings.

Still pondering why none of the men wore interesting shoes or clothing & was delighted to finally meet @wolfcat in real life.

#media140

An email for a conference arrived the other day, and it enticed me with the tag line:

Learning how to leverage Web 2.0 and Social Media sites to market your brand and control your message

This got me wondering can brands really control their message using social media?

One thing I know from experience with social media is that it is like quicksilver, easily slipping around barriers and constraints. The behaviour of people in social computing situations is mercurial and whimsical.  Sudden memes arise, become active and then die off as quickly as they came.

Social computing environments enable highly reactive and emotionally driven behaviour.  For example, often a rumour will circulate, followed by a wave of anger and reaction.  Then as facts filter through a more reasoned response develops.

However, these platforms also enable groups to mobilise quickly to address concerns and to take action on issues that galvanise them. In short, a bunch of people on a social network can sometimes behave just like a mob in real life.

This can work against brands very easily. Two great examples of this are the ‘Cotton On Kids saga‘ and ‘Motrin Moms mess’.

On the hand social media has enabled some true success stories, like Zappos and Comcast.

People who’ve been used to ‘controlling‘ their brands never had much opportunity for direct contact with their customers (apart from behind the glass at the odd focus group).  This seems to have reinforced the illusion that they were really in control of their brands. However, it is questionable if they really had control at any stage. Perhaps the absence of feedback simply provided an illusion of control?

But how can brands get their message out effectively using social media? Paradoxically, it seems that this can be achieved by letting go of attempts to control the brand in relation to social media.

This paradox of relaxation of control is exemplified by Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh. By letting go and allowing customers interact with staff the brand was built up to such a degree that it was recently sold to Amazon for mega bucks. But this kind of approach requires a strong and confident CEO and a corporate culture that supports and nurtures the dialogue, openness and interaction.

The problem for brands is that navigating this hyperconnected and networked world requires a paradoxical relaxation of control. And not everyone has nerves strong enough to let go and to let people be free to interact.

As a humble member of various social networks including Twitter it never fails to amaze me how lame some businesses are in their approach.

I don’t know what is happening inside the brains of the people behind this behaviour on behalf of companies. But it is like they’ve forgotten what it is like to be a real person.

Here are five sins that I’ve seen businesses commit in social networks:

1) No foreplay

Social networking is precisely that ’social’, that means it works just like real life.  How many times in real life do you just walk up to someone and say: “Hi I’m X, do you want to buy my product?” without saying “hi”, making some eye contact & introducing yourself?

In real life, apart from outbound telemarketers, we typically shoot the breeze for a while before launching into the hard sell.

2) Not being real & not letting staff be real

One of the reasons that @comcastcares and @zappos have worked on Twitter is that there were real people behind those accounts & they backed it up with consistently having real people there. Some companies forget that the social nature of these networks means that they need to be more transparent and open up to the outside world. It’s time to personalise the experience in the social world. This also means letting your staff be real people too.

3) Not being interesting

Are you interesting? What have you got to offer? Besides your products why would anyone bother interacting with you socially? Many companies seem to assume that their products are fascinating – but let me assure you, apart from a few special brands like Apple, most people don’t give a toss about your product especially in a social context. That means you will need to be interesting on a personal level. Being helpful & friendly can go a long way on this front.

4) Not getting the culture

Each social network has its own culture and mores of behaviour. Woe betide a company that messes with these. Important questions to ask about your social network presence: Are you interesting? What have you got to offer? Does your brand make sense within the social network context? There is nothing worse than being in the wrong place in the wrong outfit – it’s like walking into a biker bar in your best preppie outfit.

5) Lack of consistency

Are you consistently friendly, helpful and real? If not it jars with the human beings that you’re interacting with in a social context.

One thing that characterises all the problems listed above is that they reflect a lack of understanding of the social contract inherent in social network participation. Social networks mean that the traditional marketing context & the social contract that goes with it are absent.

For example, in the traditional marketing context there is social contract – you try to sell stuff to me & I consume your media, potentially taking up your offer. But in social networks the social contract is more like you’ve joined me in my living room. The social contract here is about being sociable and making human-like contact with other people.

The essence of the social web is that it enables humans to be human.  Where in the past we had to conform ourselves to the constraints of the technology and participate within a pure business or marketing context now we are free to be human.  The people in businesses need to reimagine how to interact with customers on a human to human level.

In  a similar vein check out Louis Gray’s post: The Era of the Faceless Giant Corporation Is Over

Here is a jovial @nickobec showing off his fail whale t-shirt in front a genuine Yiying Lu fail whale print at the recent Australian Web Week 2009 event:

Taken with the Flip Mino HD http://www.theflip.com

Here’s @Warlach’s perspective on the recent conversation cafe at AMP Sydney (more info about David Gurteen’s concept here)

Taken with the Flip Mino HD http://www.theflip.com

At the recent Sydney Knowledge Cafe I managed to catch up with a few buddies & ask them why they were there. Here’s Katie Chatfield explaining why she attended.

The video was taken with the new Flip Mino HD (an extremely nifty gadget).

The format of this event was created by David Gurteen & there is more information here.

I always like to keep up with what Dion Hinchcliffe’s thinking and recently he’s been talking about How the Web OS has begun to reshape IT and business, and particularly about how businesses are driving the change almost by accident, in spite of the IT department.

For example:

These days in the halls of IT departments around the world there is a growing realization that the next wave of outsourcing, things like cloud computing and crowdsourcing, are going to require responses that will forever change the trajectory of their current relationship with the business, or finally cause them to be relegated as a primarily administrative, keep-the-lights-on function.

What Dion describes really aligns with what I’m seeing in lots of companies and their IT departments. For many IT departments there seems to be a feeling of “if we just ignore it, ban it, or block it then it will all go away”.

The issue of what I tend to refer to as the shadow IT department is beginning to loom large.  This shadow department offers many of the IT department’s capabilities, but they are accessible by ordinary business users outside of the normal IT and procurement channels.

Once upon a time the IT department were the custodians of technology. Selection, implementation of new systems and access to them was like joining a mystery cult. New users were indoctrinated into special language and special ways of making things work. The IT department staff were the high priests of the cult and they controlled access very strictly.

All this was reinforced by the high cost and complexity of IT systems.

But now technology has undergone a revolution. And it is a revolution akin to those of the Russians back in 1917. We are living through a sudden change in accessibility of technology. With web 2.0 and social computing ordinary users now have access to the same kind of technology that was once the province of the high priests of the IT department.

Everything you need is at your fingertips, for example:

• Want a scalable web platform? Amazon S3 is there.
• Want to reach out and find your customers? Try Facebook or Twitter.
• Want a CRM to track all those customers? How about Salesforce?
• Need a finance application? How about Saasu?

Each of those examples is readily available to the average person who can use a web browser & who has a credit card. No more seeking the advice (even if it might help) of the IT specialist. Just notice the need and get a solution right away.

I wonder how all of this fits into our fine Enterprise Architecture models?