Welcome to the Futerati

Image via Wikipedia

I'm liking Gerd Leonhard's Futerati initiative. Inspired by the value he feels he gets from shared wisdom; he's aggregated all his favourite twitter people and their posts (which you can then sort into types such as 'thought leader', 'author', 'activist', 'startups' and 'other').

Delighted to find myself under 'other'. That's about the most apt tag I've seen for me really... a kind of 'bits of all of the above'. As Dave Weinberger put it: "Everything is Miscellaneous"

Here's Gerd explaining why he's done it - and benefiting right away from the 'we are what we share, we are found via what we share' mantra.

Yep - totally agree. Our ever broader expression of metadata brings us together with ever more people we didn't know we needed to know.

Or as Stowe Bowd puts it "I am made greater than the sum of my connections, so are my connections".

Opening up the enterprise - powered by purpose

Here's a monumental post from change management consultant Si Alhir synthesising many great and powerful concepts including Seth's Tribes and my own Communities of Purpose, among others.

The Purposeful Enterprise also includes links to a great deal of valuable background reading.
The diagram here gives you a taste. It's from si's original post. Click to enlarge it.

Worth a read for anyone contemplating the role, form and function of organisations in the networked world.

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What if everyone on twitter followed everyone on twitter?

Image via CrunchBase

Having lots of followers on Twitter is a good thing. No really, it is. Don't knock it. I won't say no to more (but please don't assume that means I'd like regular spamming from those who promise they can find me 100, 1000 new followers a day... I'll stick to the organic and relevant, thanks...)

Managing real time relevance is the only issue: how do I find what matters to me, right now, among the deluge of human thought.

Imagine if everyone on Twitter followed everyone on Twitter (except for the spammers, obviously). That's around 40m people following everyone else. The number of peer-to-peer connections are calculator boggling.

Apart from giving @ev and @biz heart attacks, the result would be a very close match with the real-
time expression of meta data required to bring together communities of purpose on a global almost-out-of-the-silo; people who care enough about an issue and are available right now to collaborate to do something about it.

If all you do is read your own tweet stream this will prove difficult. Picking the relevant out of a 40m strong stream would be all but impossible.

But that's where improving Twitter search comes in.

The follow mechanism is a great way of lassooing a pool of people who are very likely to share your any- given-purpose. And through open conversation, this group is always fuzzy edged. In this way Twitter helps us find people we didn't know we needed to know.

But our focus on the followed/follower means we may miss out on the bigger win.

It is perfectly possible to go looking across the whole of Twitter for people sharing your purpose right now. That's search and automated alerts.

But how many of us are ready to try this in reverse? To understand that each tweet is to everyone and a can be a call for people like you to come together with them, to act?

That requires us to actively use search to search for people calling out for people like us to help them on something we collectively care about.

That's a search engine with some new and heavily human (and likely semantic) fields; such as -

• is like me; 
• is trustworthy;
• is helpful; 
• collaborates well 
• etc
  

Currently the followed/follower mechanism is our best human-powered version of just such a search engine. I'm sure it and our other recorded social interactions could and should be included in that future engine.

But what I'm also fairly sure about is that the followers/following model is not robust enough and can't, alone, scale to deliver the real time connections we need to access the greatest value enabled by global, real time communities of purpose.

Can it connect me with anyone anywhere who, like me, wants to solve problem x right now?


That's where our future lies.

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Damning with faint praise

So, I'm hearing this ad described as the 'best banner ad ever'. Not a trophy I'd like to lift.

In fact, it's just been awarded the Cannes Cyber Lions Gold. Lord help them all...

I speak of the Pringles 'Can Hands' ad in which you, dear interactor, are encouraged through the use of witty banter to continue clicking.

And clicking, and clicking... and I did... and I did... but I still can't answer the question:

To what end?

Well it's getting some online chatter. People saying stuff like 'it's the best banner ad ever'. Like I say, super.

I guess the idea is you think of Pringles as the witty, funloving FMCG to stuff down your throat. But more likely you rush to slap the agency on the back for a fun, innovate interruption. That's what the Cannes Lions award is. Puts me in mind of this Honda creative. People marvel at the ad. Rarely at the product.

Stick a picture of a girl with her hand stuck in a can of Heinz Baked Beans and you get the exact same result.

Point is - it's all about the creative - not really about the product at all.

At least no one is claiming it's social media.

So I have to ask; What group of people are being brought together to act to achieve something they care about by this particular piece of content?

Thought not.

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The cocaine of discovery - everyone should get a hit...

You may or may not be aware that I'm a Trustee for Citizen's Online - part of which is EverybodyOnline.
EverybodyOnline helps communities and individuals in disadvantaged areas across the UK to engage with digital technology.
It aims to help communities overcome any barriers they may have to computers and the internet so they can take advantage of the wealth of opportunities digital technology and the internet has to offer.
'Simple' things that so many of us take for granted. Like this:

What does it take to get some service round here?

What does it take to get the attention of a brand using social media these days?

By which I mean - what does it take to get some service around here?

The reality is that any brand or organisation that gives a shiney one about its customers, members or collaborators should be listening to what we have to say - and ready to act upon what it hears.

If you know a brand or org that isn't - (assuming it's one that does care enough to consider it ought to) then by all means (shameless plug) point them at the kind of social media listening services the likes of Brando Social (where I work) offer.

But assuming any kind of half decent blue-chipped customer wrangler is already equipped to listen/search/audit its reputation online, let's perform a test.

Let's see how fast a real live human representative of any of these brands get back to the community that is FasterFuture (ok, responds to this blog post).

It'll be a fairly straightforward test. I'll post about a series of brands (etc) below. And we wait for a response from a representative of the brand or org in question. That response should be a comment made on this post (moderation remains on - but I have pretty much 24/7 access and I'll publish them in the order I receive them).

So:

• Qik. I love your customer service. Don't let me down.
• Toyota. Surely you have representatives doing the listening in the UK too? I'll help by using the term Toyota Yaris (good little motor my wife runs :-)
  
• Apple. I'm pretty sure you're listening. Just staggered you don't capitalise by responding. iPhone reference to help you out.
  
• Ford. I'll help you out by saying Ford Fiesta. You have the advantage of Scott Monty. Make it count.
• UK Government Director of Digital Engagement (he's never responded yet to my tweets or my article in PR Week for that matter). There you go, PR Week - you can play, too!
• Macdonalds - had another bad experience with you this evening... (inspiring this post)
• Tesco - I dread my required and oh too regular visits
• Sainsbury's - just to put you head to head. Shopping. There.
• Coca-Cola - you better believe this is the real thing
• Disney - I am about to pass off many of your characters as my own (if that doesn't get their attention...)

That's your starter for 10. (image courtesy)

Let's see how the first batch get on. By all means let's hear your suggestions for round two. I quite fancy making this a regular test...

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We're trying to change the world - not report on it

Some time ago Neil Perkin asked me to contribute some best practice ideas for social media. ( I must be thinking about that because i'm meeting Neil today - and you really should check out his latest post).

My response was 'best practice being human'.

I've been thinking about the skill sets required to 'do' social media. Many (though not all, as a quick quiz on Twitter revealed this morning, see image, right) of the people I know who have landed up in social media come from a media background one way or another - pr,  advertising and journalism.

But of course the key skills required are not the abilty to craft a good piece of content.

We're trying to change the world here, not report on it.

Look at what's going in in Iran. All the fabulous social media activity Is NOT for our passive consumption, our entertainment. It is individuals using the tools to express what matters to them - and through this to organise without and around those who would control from the centre.

A BBC correspondent prophesised, as the post-election fury uncovered in Iran, that there would be no coup.

"You can't have a revolution without proper organisation", he opined.

If he meant without 'from the top' organisation he was and is, wrong.

Humans organise to do things. Things they share a belief in achieving.  Always have. Now they have tools to do this more rapidly and effectively. And they don't wait for permission from the boss.

The ability to use these tools is an important tactical skill for anyone right now. Understanding the value of real-time self-forming communities of purpose is the more strategic requirement.

Because bringing people together to build stuff they care about is the most important part of this thing we call social media (and it ain't social media if it don't change your organisation!)

How much has that got to do with creating content?

How much has it got to do with media at all?

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