Social Business: The Show

Great to see my good friend Stowe Boyd responding to the blooming and booming interest in the world-changing stuff of social business with a new kind of event.

Social Business Edge is a 'show' not a conference. And it's powered by a cast of great minds (see The Swarm here). I'm delighted to say Stowe has asked me to join that Swarm.

Stowe himself is directing, Jeff Pulver (140conf) is producing.

It's on in New York on April 19, 2010.

As I keep saying, social business (and organisation) innovation is what the money has been waiting to follow; it's what our social tools are for.

It's how we are changing the world niche by niche.

And that deserves a great show. I'm sure Stowe will do it proud.

While you're thinking about such matters, a quick reminder that the Social Business Innovation Awards are now open for nominations.

Maybe the show should get one?

To whet your appetite, here's Stowe himself talking about social business in October last year at the LA 140conf.

"The Social Business will be more like a village than an army... where reputation is more important than title... connections more important than rank and authority derived from connections not from control."

Related articles by Zemanta

• Social Business Online Panel: Stowe Boyd, Peter Kim, Jeremiah Owyang, and Joshua-Michele Ross (stoweboyd.com)
• Jeff Dachis, Social Business (conversationagent.com)
• A Call for Speakers (and Characters): The 140 Characters Conference: April 20/21 in NYC (pulverblog.pulver.com)
• Real Time Really Disruptive Media Conference in Stockholm (stoweboyd.com)

The Power in context

Dr Chris Thorpe has seen me present a couple times - once in New York and on another occasion in London.

We've got to know each other somewhat. In fact we've got to trust each other, so much so that he's agreed to join a network of consultants I'm bringing together who share a vision of the networked world.

I tell you this by way of disclosure because he's just published an exceptionally kind review of my book The Power of the Network.

"His insight into the current landscape... is fantastic and from it he provides a stunning vantage point into the networked world which is building minute by minute, connection by connection, conversation by conversation around us. For people outside of this networked world this vantage point could quite easily be daunting, even vertiginous. However through examples, quotes from other thought leaders and a very good and not overdone smattering of illustrative case studies he makes things simple. This is done without making things over simplified though, and the book can almost be seen as a way of talking someone from old marketing/advertising off the ledge they may currently be finding themselves on."

Chris has also identified some of the poetry that I've strived for in my writing from time to time.

"Themes running throughout the book often have a recurring linguistic motif... This makes the book almost like a piece of music where themes will come in and out of focus but remind you of their presence... it feels very well structured although in essence it is a collection of semi-connected essays."

It's something the thoroughly excellent Ted Shelton, also referred to when we met earlier this week.

And that's very interesting to me - and I hope to you.





But what you may find even more interesting is his discussion of the merits of reading the same words you can discover digitally, on this blog, in the context of a printed book - and how the print experience compares with the audio one (in Seth Godin's Tribe download).

Those who would replace our libraries with e-readers and kindles may do well to note.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Best Practice in Social Media? Best practice being human
• Seth Godin's Triiibe has Spoken

We're All Publishers Now: My presentation for Digital Asset Management?

I'm speaking at Digital Asset Management in London, tomorrow, June 25.

I'm on a panel in the morning and due to speak, on the topic "We're All Publishers Now" just after lunch - pay attention you at the back!

Please come and say 'hi' if you are attending.

The presentation I'll give is very similar to the one I gave in New York last week at widgetwebexpo - Media Transformative.

Here's the slidedeck for it (below), together with a transcript of my notes. Your comments, as always, very welcome.

Delighted to say SlideShare selected it for the top of its 'featured' list on the homepage on June 26.

The power of the network changes the traditional media model through two key disruptions. First it disrupts how, and by whom, content is created.

Second it disrupts how, and by whom content is distributed. Together these offer an opportunity for the traditional chasm between advertising and content to close. This session will consider how 'media' companies can reform themselves to change both what they do and the way they go about it to deliver products and services which are a better fit with the inhabitants of the networked world.

| View | Upload your own

Slide 2
One of the few images we have of William Shakespeare comes to us not because the artist charged with making the image was selected as the finest of his day, nor because this was the image chosen by Will’s adoring audience as the most accurate or representative (SMS voting of the American Idol variety hadn’t quite hit London in the early 1600s).

William Shakespeare was the most important play-write of his day – and this was a day when the play was THE primary form of entertainment. He was a big deal.

And yet the picture we have of him is… well it’s a bit rubbish really.

The creator was a young man named Martin Droeshout. And while he may not have been possessed of a huge artistic talent, he did possess something more fundamental to his ability to form the rare and enduring image we have of Shakespeare. He owned the brass-plate printing gear required to print Will’s mugshot on the famous first folio.

He who had control of the means of production got to control the information – even if that information wasn’t particularly great.

The information, in this particular case was packaged up in books by the media business and distributed by the media business.

Slide 3
And this remained the case as media revolutions swept through the 20th century – print was followed by audio recordings, radio, cinema, TV.

And the model remained the same, the same rules applied.

Media controlled the production of content. Media controlled the distribution of content.

This was true right up until the arrival of the internet. Even while the internet remained in its 1.0-pre broadband incarnation it was still essentially true – while publishing remained relatively complex and expensive.

Slide 4
But with the arrival of web2.0, with its really low technical barriers and promise of the ubiquity of tools for creating and sharing, the grip on control has been shaken, loosened… broken.

There are new ways for people to gather.

Now we can all sit on the global hotdesk, forming into adhoc communities of shared purpose, sharing and learning in real time on a global scale.

As Stowe Boyd puts it: “I am made greater by the sum of my connections, so are my connections.

Slides 5-6
Who gets to control production of content now?

Anyone and everyone. Good and bad. It’s all relevant to someone.

Social networks are made of small groups of purpose. Groups of people looking at each other – not at you! This is not an audience.

So congratulations on the scale of the gathering - but you have to understand these are an aggregation of small groups sharing separate purposes.

Slides 7-8
Who gets to distribute content now?

Anyone and everyone.

Shared with who they choose, chosen by who wants to share.

Widgets lower the technical barrier of this and make the disruption explicit.

Those twin disruptions are serious for every media business model. Not just for content producers either, but for anyone employed in the business of being the middle layer, the mediator, the middle man.

We now have a way around you!

Slides 9-10
Who gets to control the user experience?

With a print publication we produce the content, we control the distribution, and through our editorial selection, our choice of what to include and how to present it, we control the user experience.

Same applies to broadcast media. The programme maker decides.

But in the digital space that control is lost. Building intuitive user journeys remains a wise investment of time, but we cannot rely on users following our breadcrumbs. In fact, expecting them to is a bit patronising – as if we think they are too stupid to work out where they want to go.

The digital world is formed of discreet units each of which can be accessed from any other and in what ever order the user chooses. The user controls their own A-Z journey. Actually it’s A-Anywhere now.

The old model was based on building destinations and harvesting eyeballs. In the digital networked world we continue to try to build destinations

The new world is a very different place…

Slide 11
If you want to evolve to survive in this world then your first step has to be to live in its environment.

So write a blog and you’ll understand how easy it is to be a publisher, how easy it is to create and share content, how easy it is to form groups of shared purpose in networks of trust, how easy it is to find relevant content and for relevant people to find you.

Build a widget and the process will illustrate that we are all distributors now.

You have to start by trying to guess who might choose to share your widget or be enthused or impressed enough to pass it on.

And that reveals something of the new challenges and opportunities for media.

Slide 12
Think about this in the context of traditional advertising (and by association we'll realise we face the same issues with content, because as we discover over and over again, in this world they are heading towards becoming the same thing).

My first thought, on discovering that I could build my own basic widget through the likes of Sprout Builder (I don't code) and publish it, and all for free, is to consider ways the media company I work for can take advantage of this for low-risk experiments in widget making.

A quick easy option: RSS feeds gathered into an easy-grab widget that users can place where they choose.

In other words, offer a simple way for users to choose to disaggregate our content and make it portable. RSS enables this itself, of course, but grab-this-widget functionality and sharing through the likes of facebook make this a possibility for those who find the technical barrier of RSS still a little high – and I don’t underestimate how many people that still includes.

This extends our reach and (if we limit the RSS character count) it calls those interested in particular content back to our sites where they could be fed in-context related ads. All good.

Slide 13
But what about revenue models integrated with the widget itself?

When I choose to distribute a widget that's been made on Sprout Builder every iteration carries a link back to Sprout. Want to make your own? Click here? Every YouTube video functions in a similar way. And if you have Google Adsense enabled on your site then it will display related advertising, too.

But these models still treat the ad and the content as separate entities. The distribution of the ad message relies on users choosing to view and to participate in the distribution of a separate ‘editorial’ content.

The ads piggy-back on the content that the user actually wants. Perhaps this is a bit parasitical, a little like sneaking in the back door?

Slide 14
What if the advert was the content the user chose to distribute? That makes life interesting, doesn't it?

If ads and content are coming together, and everyone is a content producer now… doesn’t that make everyone an advertiser now?

With that in mind,would anyone choose to place 95% of 30-second slot TV, banner ads and the usual 'creative' solutions on their own (user-generated) content? Would they choose to grab it from where they see it and share it with others?

Slide 15
Take my simple widget (please!); it is an editorialised version of how widgets should be. First – I've decided the content. I have edited your choice, I've been the filter on the way in.

And that's hardly enabling a personalised outcome.

I would have preferred to make it a 'my favourite fasterfuture post chooser' in which you could make up your personal outcome from the full selection of my outpourings. Maybe those posts that get chosen most often would rise to the top of the list the community of users is then offered? You get the general idea.

The widget should allow the user to make the choice: That which we create we embrace. If we participate in the process we're more likely to share the outcome and to actively promote it.

This is obviously true of the marketing, too. I am more likely to choose to display the results of my personal choice of content and my personalised version of that content (or advertising message).

Because that which we create, we embrace (Alan Moore, et al).

Slide 16
It’s worth noting that this works because we live digitally in a community context. It's what the network is all about.

There is little point in me sharing what I think is cool unless I expect you might think it’s cool, too. We do this by sharing within our networks of trust. Just as we share links in twitter or thoughts on blogposts.

There is residual mass media thinking in the notion that you should create a place on the web for people to show off what they have done with ‘your content’ – for example the ‘for everything else there’s mastercard’ campaign - (all those personal outcomes) as if just anyone, any old set of eyeballs, might be interested.

The collective site might not rate your personal take – your friends will.

The real value is in the sharing of results with friends, who will be interested because that personal outcome involves a friend - in whom they are personally interested.

Then if they take the results and create their own personalised iteration, they'll have friends they may choose to share with, and so the iterations repeat, amplifying the original.

This builds on the understanding that the advert transitions into a recommendations. This is most likely to occur in communities of purpose, places where people share cool stuff with others because they believe those others think it’s cool, too.

The receiver decides if the advert is a recommendation – not the would-be recommender (the sender).

Marketing is not done to you, it’s done by you.

Slides 17-21
The outcome relies heavily on three things:
1. A willingness to relinquish control.
2. Toolkits users can play with.
3. Creative users.

2 and 3 are in place. Are you ready for No1?

The people best-placed to make the most effective iteration for their peer group are outside of your control.

Slides 22-26
The disruption to control revealed by widgets brings us back to that really tough question:

If media’s role is no longer about controlling who makes the content, and it’s not about controlling how content is distributed and it’s not even about controlling the user experience, what role can media play?

I think there are three potential plays.

Slide 27
1. Be the thing that’s paid for at the end of the ‘user experience’
2. Be a discreet element of the digital experience
3. Be the menu from which those experiences are selected.

1. Is obvious. 3. Is our default2.0 response: we are the aggregators – the nuancers of your experience. And there’s certainly mileage in this.

Number 2 is the part that we often neglect and it is the part that can be well served by widgets. Create something so useful that users choose to make it part of their own personal user journey from A-anywhere. A service.

And if you can do all three, be the menu, be on the menu and be the meal that’s consumed and paid for as a result, media has a great triple play.

Slide 28
It’s worth us getting our heads round this and perhaps more rapidly than we may have thought necessary. I’m starting to believe the impact of change wrought by the internet has been seriously underestimated while the impact of social networks has been underplayed.

This has much to do with how tools turn from geeky high tech oddities to the familiar items of everyday life.

Slide 29
The telephone didn't make us communicate. It’s a tool for communication. The internet doesn’t make us form groups. It’s a tool for us to do this through.

Yes, the internet is a tool for forming groups.

The tool that is the telephone didn’t change the way society functioned - until it was in the hands of the majority - and until that majority was comfortable using it.

It moved from being an odd piece of high technology to being a familiar tool. We certainly needed the network in place for this to happen. But we also needed a really easy way for us to understand how to use that network - an interface.

Once we had both, everything changed; from how fast news travels through networks, to how widely it gets distributed, to how many bank clerks and insurance salesmen need to be employed (witnessed through the dread edifice the 'call centre'). Emergency services, journalism, military activity, shop delivery systems, politics... you name it, the ubiquity of the telephone as a tool alongside a wide network to make that tool useful, changed our world.

Telco networks aren't a tool, they are the medium. The handsets are the tools.

Slide 30
And social networks are to the internet what the handset is to the wires of the phone network. They are the easy-to-use interface which allows the majority of people to access the disruptive power of the network.

Email 'newslists' and forums may have been with us since deep into last century but there was a reason people who used them were considered 'geeky' or 'nerdy'. You had to be of a particular type to early adopt. They were flat two-dimensional implementations brought with us from a flat broadcast world.

Social networks have been spluttering into existence since about 1995 but they certainly weren't ubiquitous back then. It took lesson-learning and the explosion of broadband to move them into the 'familiar tool' category.

By 2005 MySpace was clocking up more page impressions than google.
This perhaps marks the watershed in the move out of 'geek' and into 'familiar tool' for social networks.

Slide 31
In other words, we haven’t had 15 years of disruption caused by the internet – we’ve had 3.

Social networks reveal to the users the new and very disruptive low overhead cost of forming groups. Easy-to-use social networks reveal this, and allow large numbers of people to experience this, in ways that previous connecting software and technologies could not match.

And as more and more people become more and more familiar with the power of the network through the familiar tool of the social network, so the disruption will bite deeper - the one that will remove the mediators in supply chain after supply chain as new networks form supply and demand webs. It will remove the mediators.

Slide 32
The 'familiar tool' social networks (of which facebook and twitter appear to me the easiest to use and best at revealing its group forming nature) do a different job. They put group-forming at their heart. They allow the user to dial D for disruption the moment they start a group.

How fast does the change happen when ubiquity arrives? I spoke at EPublishing in London in May, where Vin Crosbie gave the keynote.

Vin showed pictures of a London street just before the internal combustion engine became ubiquitous. Streets filled with horses, a transport infrastructure to support all those horses, how far and how fast people, goods and ideas travelled controlled by those horses. 20 years later the horse was all but gone from London's streets. They were filled with cars, buses, taxis and trucks.

What do you expect the pace of disruption to be in the digital space in the 21st Century?

Consider this. YouTube launched from scratch a little over 3 years ago. How differently do we think about TV three years on?

Dr Mike Wesch says 83% of YouTube content added in the last six months is user generated. This accounts for more content than has been broadcast on TV – ever. More than half of teenagers are creating UGC.

We are only a few short years into the real disruption – the one being wrought by the arrival of the social network as a familiar tool.

Slide 33
How many people are familiar with using social networks today?

Among online American teenagers, according to Pew a year ago, 55% were using social networks. Comscore stats in April this year suggested 60% of Latin Americans online use social networks.

40% of US Mothers are on MySpace.

Facebook claims 40% of online canadians use its service, alone.

In the UK, Ofcom found a quarter of 8-11-year-olds already have profiles on social networks. They are growing up fast and they are growing up connected in Total Communities – communities in which to take part you have to create part.

They are growing up understanding the power of self-forming communities of purpose - with a tool in their hands to access it.

They are growing up with different expectations not only of media, but also of business, politics, education and society and their own role within each of these. And this will change everything.

The silent majority have had their day. The participating majority are coming.

Slide 34

Widgets give us a mainline into the DIY distribution element of this revolution – an opportunity to enable and facilitate.

And through this we will discover our place in the new world.

Through this we may adapt to it.

Through this we may earn our place in it.

OMFG! Even when we're looking (hard), we can't see

I was lucky enough to be in New York's Times Square on Sunday. It is the most message-intense place I know in the physical world.
I was there to vist ToysRus for some daddy's-away-on-business guilt shopping.
I've been to the ToysRus on Times Square before - last year when I visited with my wife.
I'm sure I remembered exactly where it was. But I couldn't find it.
I just couldn't tune out enough of the visual noise of Times Square to find what I was looking (hard) for.
Turned out I was stood right slap bang outside it. (About where that A-board is in the picture below).
The wood is so, so, so hidden in the trees.

Which is why I like the picture of the OMFG billboard (left) I took. Dunno what it means in the US but it's pretty explicit in the UK.
A very loud signal, you might expect? Yet no one, no one! was looking.

Times Square is quiet compared to the totality of messages we have thrown at us daily. That's why we no longer see them. But, just like those pedestrians walking by, we are looking where we are going.

Which is where I'm headed with some widget strategy work I've been doing: The user is the destination now.

A rare handful of things are so important to us that we are prepared to look really, really hard for them - like ToysRUs in Times Square. What has made them important is an awesome experience. Think how awesome the Times Square ToysRUs has had to be to achieve this. This is a toy shop. A toy shop with a ferris wheel, giant Barbie House and animatronics dinosaurs throughout. Oh, and a brand...

If you can't match that we won't come looking. Because looking is becoming increasingly Times Square-hard. And if you make us look too hard, we'll give up and go elsewhere. Or ask a friend.

For the rest, if you want your message to be part of our walk through the Times Square of life, you are going to have to be something so useful to us that we're prepared to take it with us and place it where we always head back to, or somewhere our friends will take us by the hand and guide us to.

See you at Telecoms Multi-Platform Content and Delivery Forum?

Apologies for the flurry of posts. Been having a bit of a late spring clean of the blog's left-hand column. Now the 'resources' section isn't listed in full down the left, it's available from the link under the 'resources' title. I've done similar with the 'ones to watch'.
Guess I'm finally waking up to the fact that the internet isn't made of paper...

I'm speaking at Telecoms Multi-Platform Content and Delivery Forum in London tomorrow (June 12, 2008). Snappy title huh? If you happen to be there, please do say hi.

This weekend, New York.

Here are the slides for TMPC&DF (phew...)

| View | Upload your own

Customers from Mars, Companies from Venus

Alan Moore and Tomi Ahonen describe the difficulty companies have listening and responding to their customers in their book Communities Dominate Brands under the heading 'Customers from Mars, Companies from Venus'.
Here's an example - an email I've had to send a Toyota dealership today. So far, the only response has been of the automated variety... Where's my two-way flow?

"I turned up this morning with my car to be told you had expected me on May 23.

"My diary only ever showed one date, May 31, I can absolutely assure you.

"I believe May 23 may have initially been offered but was rejected because a courtesy car was not available.

"Whatever the case, can I suggest two ways in which you can improve both your customer service and your internal efficiencies. It cost me the best part of 45mins in additional and wasted travel time. It's just the kind of thing which may also cost Toyota my custom long term.

1. Confirm your appointments in writing - either by post, email or (my preference) text. Offering this service would also build you a database of mobile numbers and email addresses.

You send me letters to ask what I think of your customer service. Is it much of a stretch to make the same effort to actually OFFER that customer service in the first place?

2. If you are faced with a 'no show', call the person in question. In my case you must have ordered an expensive part to be fitted, and scheduled in several hours of labour time. Is it really more efficient not to make that call and to have that part sitting there for who-knows-how-long? I can't believe you have the number of no-shows this approach appears to indicate.

UPDATED JUNE 5, 2007: Still no response from the dealership!!

Reminds me of a recent delay I had with British Airways on my way to New York. The flight got delayed four hours because their new - and no doubt meant-to-be-engaging (in some vague and skewed notion of the concept) - entertainment system had failed.

When - after considerable digging via mobile internet and calls to locations far removed from Heathrow - I discovered the cause for the delay, I pointed out that I'd rather get my entertainment by arriving on time to take in Times Square, Broadway, etc etc. It sure beats watching re-runs of Little Britain - even if it is on cod IPTV.

I suggested if they asked all the other people now faced with a four hour delay what they'd prefer they might get a similar response. The bonus might be that by listening to their customers they'd save the cost of a considerable delay (which necessitated the prep of another 747!).

I found it very difficult for anyone to even take note of my suggestion.

As we all know, information in airports appears to be jealously guarded when it comes to reasons for delays. Perhaps they just couldn't cope with the idea of someone giving them some for free?

Where am I?

Name this city in 2007:
1. Completing a call from start to finish on a mobile is something to be celebrated. Having the least number of 'dropped' calls is used by operators as a USP.
2. Big money is being spent on advertising by the banks to tell people all about their new free current accounts - a whole new concept for the locals.
3. Getting a 3G signal on your phone is er... well... I never saw one in four days in the city.
4. Chip and Pin is a far off dream for credit card companies. You still have to sign for purchases - twice - on two separate receipts.

It's that cutting-edge soaraway skyscraper of a city... New York. Yes, really. Yes, I've been away for a few days - and now you know where.

UPDATE: Having blogged with mobile expert Tomi Ahonen at Communities Dominate Brands, I now know why I couldn't get 3G in New York. It's because "New York does have 3G, but its the "other" 3G variant used by about 15% of the world's 3G networks, the so-called American 3G, ie CDMA2000 EV-DO for example on the Verizon network in New York." And that won't work with my '3' Nokia N73.