The risk of reliance on real time

I noticed , via the gift of twitter, that JP Rangaswami has been busy nailing it again – this time on the subject of hierarchy.
He was clearly speaking at some event or other – and illuminating the world with his thinking as he so often does (for I knew of his thinking from the tweets being sent from an admiring audience).
Thing is, what he was talking about was what he was shaping and had substantially published on his blog back in January.

Nutshell: Hierarchies are required when the cost of co-ordination is high; in the age of the web they are much lower so we need them much less. Read his original post in full (I recommend it and many other of his posts).

In a pre Twitter age I’d have read JP’s blog post the day it was published. As my flow of information sped up, so I missed it. That’s the risk of reliance on real time. (image courtesy Col_Adamson)
Blogs stand on the asynchronous side of connecting us. We do well to remember that organisations that fit the network best enable both synchronous (together, at the same time) communications alongside asynchronous (not at the same time).
Which re-emphasises the point I made earlier this week: Messages are meant to connect us, not to persuade us.
Connection has value to us both at the moment of need (real time) and at the point of discovery (there awaiting our moment of need).
For example; if I have a fault with my car and I can connect with 5 car mechanics right now, one of them may be able to answer my query. But if they and the 2000 other members of a forum have recorded their answers for later discovery that may offer a wider range of niche answers to niche concerns.
If everyone is connected all the time then real-time wins. But unless and until, then we also need asynchronous.

This perhaps illustrates another fine point – made again in a blog post, by Hugh MacLeod (Gaping Void) that

“Blogging hasn’t changed, you have. What’s happening on the Internet isn’t important; What’s important is that the world knows how you intend to change it. Right here. Right now.”

The point is that a tweet has much less opportunity to become a social object – a thing around which a community of purpose – folk who care about something enough to do something about it – can gravitate.
A blog post – at least one with purpose - stands as its own social object; a thing around which conversation happens; the aggregator of folk who care; the maker of change.
Tweets (and Facebook too) serve very well to point at these social objects – to spread the messages that can connect us. But it is rare that they are the social object itself.
I say rare – not impossible. We have all seen examples: We Love the NHS springs to mind.
However, if nothing else, my miss of JP’s blogpost combined with Hugh’s call to action will do one thing for me; I aim to rebalance my time spent blogging vs time spent tweeting and see what that does for my ability to connect.

By the way this is the 1002nd post on this blog. If I'd been paying more attention we'd have all had a party two posts ago...

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Landing a man on the networked moon

Gordon Brown's plans to 'create innovation and personisation (is that customer-centric for the public sector?) in the delivery of public services will require rather more than faster broadband and a centre to understand and exploit the semantic web.

"Companies that use technology to interact with their users are positioning themselves for the future, and government must do likewise. Mygov marks the end of the one-size-fits-all, man-from-the-ministry-knows-best approach to public services.
"Mygov will constitute a radical new model for how public services will be delivered and for how citizens engage with government - making interaction with government as easy as internet banking or online shopping. This open, personalised platform will allow us to deliver universal services that are also tailored to the needs of each individual; to move from top-down, monolithic websites broadcasting public service information in the hope that the people who need help will find it - to government on demand."

Gordon Brown, PM. read full transcript

For Government,this is truly a mission on the scale of landing a man on the moon.

Not because it seems almost impossible to do, but because the scale of change, the number of barriers to overcome are so large, that essentially the UK system of government, the control from the centre model that matched the industrial age, must be utterly transformed to match the demands of the networked age.

I fear the announcement Brown made today in London is fundamentally too focused on the technology, too little on the organisational changes required to deliver the vision.

The UK Government, like every other government, like every other business, like every other organisation, must be redesigned on the principles of a networked business to deliver its purpose through a platform approach.

In this way they reduce the transaction costs of making things happen; turning a shared idea into an efficient 'fit' through the bringing together of communities of purpose.

There are no hard edges to networked organisations. There can't be. To scale and to enable they have to go beyond traditional boundaries. And they are not made by technology.

The fact that the technology enables transparency and connectedness like never before IS critical. But the desire for, and organisational design for, transparency and connectedness (for sharing; for scale through participation; for search to discover and help us organise through connecting us and our data; and for enabling the always on/not-always-available nature of the web (asychronous/synchronous) is the critical part - not the technology enabling it.

So Government - and all organisations aiming for longevity in this networked world of ours - must adapt (funny how my diagram below looks a little like rocket... perhaps it could land a man on the networked moon...):

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How to build a business for the networked world

Former accidental economist turned accidental technologist JP Rangaswami was at his engaging best when he gave a keynote at the first European Social Business Summit in London yesterday.

JP - on twitter as Jobsworth and blogging as Confused Of Calcutta - is a big brain behind clever stuff at BT.

Yesterday he turned his attention to what it takes to be a business in the networked world.

Economists will know that the purpose of a company is to reduce transaction costs.

Starting from that view point, JP outlined three key elements that must be designed into a business from the word go to succeed in the networked economy.

There is much resonance with the platform thinking approach I advocate:

In a nutshell, organisations should use their resources to discover and bring together people who care about solving the same issues they do and support them in resolving those issues (reducing the transaction costs for all).

This platform approach means the company (the org) doesn't end at the edge of your premises, or at the firewall... and certainly not at those listed on the payroll. It's the Ninety10 way

JP's three tips for building a business for the networked world were these:

1. Design for sharing;

2. Design for scale through participation,

3. Design to take advantage of the synchronicity/asynchronicity the web enables.

Design for sharing: JP gave a neat example of how the ability to benefit from the value creation of sharing has to be part of the structure of the organisation: Food. (image courtesy Photo Mind)

He noted how in India he could always bring a few extra people home for dinner with him. It was never an issue. In England it is much harder to be as spontaneous because our food is structured differently. You may have four steaks ready at home to feed four people. If another three turn up, sharing becomes awkward.

Indian food is more granular, easier to redistribute. It is structured for sharing.

And it's this kind of thinking you have to embed in the structure of the networked org.

People aren't for doing stuff to, they are for doing stuff with
Design for scale through participation: The likes of wikipedia, facebook, twitter have hundreds of employees - millions of willing participants. They were designed from the off as a participatory business. If no one outside participates, they fail. Those outside aren't seen as people to do stuff to, they are seen as people to do stuff with. They are essential and integral.
To pick up on JP's food metaphor - think about a pic-nic. A pic-nic is a meal in which everyone attending contributes something. That can scale from 2 to a million or more.

Design for the Synchronous/Asynchronous:
JP says: "Things that were previously synchronous, like voice communications, can now be asynchronous, and things that were previously asynchronous [like knowing people, status, location or current work] can be synchronous."
In the industrial era people and resources had to be brought together not only physically, but also temporally, to create an outcome. In the networked world this is no longer the case. People all around the world, and at all different times, can contribute. Design this into the structure of your org.

I'm hoping that I've captured the key elements of JP's points here. And I'm sure that if I haven't he will be willing to clarify and/or expand. (UPDATE - JP has added to this in a comment below; with reference to reducing the transaction cost of information for an organisation through search - and the value of social search).

His approach gives an interesting check list for those of us building businesses, or attempting to make existing ones better adapted to the networked world.

And there isn't anyone in any business or organisation anywhere who shouldn't include themselves in that number.

After all, as JP put it: "Trying to create an industrial era firm in a network age is plain blind stupidity."

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Hamsters, information and the internet of things

I've been meaning to (find this and) post this ever since I saw JP Rangaswami speak at the London 140chars conference at the 02 on November 17.
JP was the reason I came back to the O2 for the afternoon session (I chaired a panel at Monitoring Social Media in the middle of the day).
He chose to spend 10 minutes talking about what it means that twitter is not a news service but an information service. And about traffic lights, the internet of things - and his family hamster.

Enjoy. And if you do, find JP as @jobsworth on twitter.



Thanks to Delymyth for shooting and sharing on Viddler.

The King of advice, alerts and assistance

I was fortunate enough to attend #140conf as one of the 'characters' at the O2 in London yesterday (courtesy of @jeffpulver).

I was therefore able to witness the crowning (quite literally folks) of one @stephenfry as 'King of Twitter'.

Stephen spoke brilliantly about many of the themes I hold dear and bang on about myself - though clearly not as well as the great Danceciser himself.

"It's up to business to accomodate itself to (the human shape) of twitter, not for twitter to accomodate itself to business," among the many bon mots.

Which I why I'm delighted to share this video of his talk, thanks to beegod (who shot it and posted it on his blog).



And if anyone recorded JP Rangaswami's wonderful words on twitter as a peer-to-peer information service at #140conf (for alerts, advice and assistance) please do point me - I would love to share that too.

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The impact and the etiquette of social media

Here's the slides I presented to the 157Group last week.
The 157Group are the marcomms pros from the UK's leading colleges (judged by size and quality).
I'm hoping I was able to help.

The impact and etiquette of social media

View more presentations from david cushman.

By the way, I'll be at the #140Conf at the O2 in London tomorrow mostly to see Stephen Fry, Andrew Keen and JP Rangaswami speak. Wanted to say a big thank you to organiser Jeff Pulver for my ticket.

Can't be there all day, I'm chairing a panel at Monitoring Social Media in central London at 12:30pm.

See you at either - or both!

The opposite of a snob is your mother

When I saw JP Rangaswami tweeting he was at the recent TED event, I had to ask, what the stand-out for him was.
This (below), was his answer. Given that TED is a pretty well curated collection of brilliance, that this should stand out for JP means a lot to me. I trust it will bring value to you, too.
Alain de Botton challenges what success means. Watch it and my headline will make sense...

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How will they market the 10th Anniversary Cluetrain?

Ted Shelton brought together a small group for dinner in London last night (for which many thanks) including one Doc Searls.

If you've hung around this blog for any length of time you'll know I regularly reference Doc's ongoing work (particularly re the Vendor Relationship Management) and his seminal contribution to the now 10-year-old Cluetrain Manifesto.

A 10th anniversary Cluetrain is about to go on sale.
Doc told me something I didn't realise about the new edition: It will contain a new chapter each by each of the original co-authors (Chris Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger, Rick Levine) PLUS a chapter by the man who has become known as 'the fifth Beatle' of the cluetrain: JP Rangaswami.

JP works at BT in London and writes the exceptional Confused of Calcutta. His insights will be a huge addition.

So: Five new chapters. Updates learned from 10 years of post-cluetrain thinking.

A must buy.

I did warn Doc (pictured top) the world will be watching to see how this book is marketed.

One thing seemed sure from what Doc said last night - there's no online preview of the new elements before it goes on sale in print. It won't even be available on kindle at launch.

Embarrassing oversight? Or a clue to some of the new content of the book?
I'm confused by how it may fit with The Because Effect JP has referenced on many occassions (and with which I agree).

In this example that would play out as 'you don't make money with content, you make money because of it'.

The original cluetrain was (and remains) free to read online.

Perhaps the way for the launch of an updated cluetrain to generate most conversation among converts is to do exactly what we don't expect - a straightforward print-first launch?

Whatever the case the reality is the five authors have done their thinking outloud over the past decade. There may be few surprises for those on board.

But that this thinking has been distilled and decanted into one small book is likely to make it incendiary stuff for a whole new generation.

Who will you do a favour by buying a copy?

The motley crew in the lower of the iphone-rendered images with this post show (amid the blur...) l-r Ted Shelton, myself, John Willshire and Doc.

10 people to learn about social media from

I got asked yesterday for people who it would be good to follow if you wanted to learn about social media.

This is a list that could be 1000s long for me. Everyone I follow, am a friend of, read, link to, talk to... everyone teaches me about social media.

But I was asked for a list of 10. Not wishing to disappoint, here they are, completely as they fall from my fingers and onto the keyboard). I'd love to see yours shared as a list in the comments below. More people we can learn from.

Seems appropriate for a #FollowFriday on twitter... (Picture shows Euan and Stowe in London last week...)

1. Clay Shirky (@Cshirky on twitter) - Doesn't blog and tweet often, but when he does...
2. David Armano (@armano) - Brilliant for those of us who need diagrams.
   
3. Hugh McLeod (@gapingvoid) - Social marketing with menaces. Built on Purpose.
4. Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd) - Operating manual for the social revolution. With a beard.
5. JP Rangaswami (@jobsworth) - Warm, open and real.
6. Mark Earls (@herdmeister) - Anti-brandist, Purpose personified.
7. Euan Semple (@euan) - Clue-ridden and blessed with the gift of KISS
8. Neil Perkin (@neilperkin) - Marketing strategy with chickens.
   
9. Tony (@Zappos) CEO of Zappos - A case study in the value of being human on a moment by moment basis.
10. Alan and Tomi (@alansmlxl @tomiahonen) Seminal communitarians.
    

Just realised the only people on that list I haven't met are Hugh and Tony. Must fix that.

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LinkedIn; looser ties and adhoc communities of purpose

Image via Wikipedia

Ok. Stick with me on this. Today's is a long post including gems from Reid Hoffman (CEO LinkedIn) and JP Rangaswami (Confused of Calcutta) and shock revelations (at least to me) from a British Goverment minister (Tom Watson).

I was lucky enough to be invited to The Guardian/The Conversation Group's evening with Reid Hoffman, last night in London.

Reid is both CEO of LinkedIn and a serial innovator. He sits on more boards and advisory boards than he's had hot dinners.

Before Reid took the floor I had a chance to meet and chat with him, and also to catch up with JP Rangaswami and Tom Watson MP.

Tom's an interesting chap: the first politician I've met who really gets the depth of the coming disruption and its potential to reorganise politics.

Watch his next moves!

JP is busily expanding his personal Dunbar number. He thinks he's up to 380. He won't claim these are all intensely maintained relationships but they can be activated to become so. All digital relationships have resulted in face to face meetings to build to that number.

We mused that this may be a male-favouring model. Our shared experience being that women tend to allocate more time to maintaining relationships between these bursts of intensity - and are therefore likely to maintain less, but stronger ties.

Men (perhaps because our relationships, our knowledge of each other, are shallower) can 'pick up where we left off' after long gaps in contact, as if the intervening time has simply melted away.

We are good at loose ties.

What our digital social tools are enabling is a way for all of us to extend those loose ties.

And because it's a light-tie model, perhaps it favours the male psyche?

This seems to run contrary to the idea that 'the web is female' in that networks are feminine while linear models masculine.

It does and it doesn't (to answer in a less binary, more networked way :-)

The digital tools we now have enable both the deep and loose tie models. Their real power is in the way our deep-tie focus can rapidly shift and reform in communities of purpose.

These are the periods of intense relationships with an adhoc group from among your ever-growing Dunbar Number.

The web gives us more opportunity to build the right loose ties so that when the time and the purpose are right those ties can switch from loose to deep.

Or as Reid put it later: "Sorting signal from noise means participating in the right groups: Wisdom of the right crowd vs the stupidity of the masses."

Which takes us neatly on to Reid's talk. I tweeted a few highlights and invited questions for Reid from followers.

Here's the result of that, some Reid Hoffman highlights:

• Companies can tell employees not to have info online about as much as they can stop them having mobile phones. Having a profile means you may be recruited and that makes companies nervous. But it's a benefit - it reveals the companies presence - it's access points and specialities.
• All companies need a social media policy since EVERYONE will end up using it in some way. Linkedin insists if its employees are going to blog about Linkedin they run it past the PR department first.*
  
• What the Internet means for management, companies and careers: It helps pros become more efficient.
• How I get new ideas is that I talk to people. Add the power of online and (you get to talk to more people, more efficiently).
• Every individual is becoming a small business. Part of what makes a professional good at what they do is knowing where to go to assemble a problem solving team around them - deploying networks of people around you.
• I think we'll see the assembly of collective intelligence to make good strategic decisions in companies.
• Businesses fail when they only depend on resources within their firewall. Look at what Microsoft is doing trying to be relevant online! Too many long-serving Microsoft-ingrained people in charge and believing they know best.
• Speed of iteration is key. Linkedin releases every week. Doing this teaches new techniques about how to execute in that cycle.
  
• We live in a networked world. Don't compete late.

*This seemed contradictary to me since Reid also spoke about the value in trusting your employees.

My take - you don't need separate and new policies you need reminders of the same ones we've always had which govern how we talk about our employers - ie you don't share the things that give your company a competitive advantage and you don't publish bitches about the boss, the brand, the products etc.

Grown-ups know how to do this. People you trust should be allowed to get on with that. I called Reid out on this. His response was that there are cases where such policies protect the naive employee (one case saw a woman tweet to ask followers if she should take a job she hated at Cisco in return for a fat paycheck. She hadn't realised that Cisco would be listening for mentions of its brands and that her tweet could go beyond her followers.).

I also accept there are some professions for whom guidelines are essential because having a political bias or being seen to tout for business could get them slung out of their profession. But again, this would be the same if they wrote a letter to their local paper. You don't need a different set of behavioural guidelines simply because more of us have access to publishing.

We got a few questions tweeted during Reid's talk:

@Aage_Reerslev asked about Reid's take on the development of mobile going forward, which we didn't really nail. Sorry. TBC

@soverpeck asked how Linkedin would remain relevant as more people start to use Facebook for business. Reid's response is that it will revel in its specialisation - you will always know why you are using linkedin; and it won't be to play poker!

@chadcat asked about Linkedin making its API more open. Given Reid's rapid iteration mantra, the process of getting accepted (for developers) seems slow and restrictive.

I suspect Reid's thinking on this is focused on that specialisation idea. Linkedin's focus on the individual (ascendent over the needs of the company) and on business efficiency over 'anything else you may want to do online', is the real evolutionary funnel here.

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Seven from around the bend

I'm sorry, but I can't let a festive season approach without making a few predictions. It's all that pausing for thought we do at this time of year (that and the fact I'm often asked to do some long range forecasting for company strategists in December!).

Worth trusting? That's up to you to judge.

So here's a few. Not to be taken to seriously - more to provoke you into a making a few of your own - crowd-sourcing the future if you like. (Image courtesy)


Of course, you can always back your thoughts with something like hubdub (in fact, I just might).

1. Broadband providers will start trying to differentiate themselves by upload speeds.
Inspired by a lunch with JP Rangaswami. It's a pet gripe of his that the internet is built all wrong at the point of use - ie it's a medium for participation yet our download speeds are often 10 times or more faster than our upload speed. So, as we get increasingly creative, and (at least the advertised) download speeds get faster and faster, the key differentiator for ISPs won't be a free laptop or 24mb, it'll be how fast I can upload and share my video collection. Watch for the shift this year.

It's an end to placing value in the ability to broadcast and a start to valueing the network.
2. Expect the same rules to apply for mobile devices. I want my iPhone to upload as fast via 3G and wifi as it can download (actually I want the 3G way faster up and down!!).

3. A daily national newspaper will stop printing (finally). In the UK. The shift to network plus the deepening recession will do for at least one. It'll attempt to live on online.

4. A large broadcast media (print, radio or TV) company will go bust (not be sold, cos no one is buying). Btw, it won't be bauer media.

5. There will be a social media backlash.
I do think 2009 is the year a realisation will dawn that social media is less a cause and more a symptom of a changed world.

Having said that, getting a 'social media strategy' is not only fashionable, it IS all important in taking a business, brand or organisation on its journey to the networked world.

And there aren't enough people who genuinely understand this seeming chaos to go around.

With so many bandwagon jumpers coming into the field, many a customer will get their fingers burned. Quick tip, avoid those who try to sell you exploitation of social media rather than participation in it.

The good guys will have some damage to repair.

6. Twitter will monetize in a ham-fisted way. Aggrieved participants will form an open-source co-operative version with funding based on the wikipedia model.

7. Microbanking will get Government backing in a response to growing loan-sharking in the worst hit parts of the economy. (kiva.org for the uk?)

That's enough from me. What do you think 2009 has in store for us?

My Christmas Wish List

The fabulous Dan tagged me in this little bit of fun.

If you get tagged you have to blog your Chrstmas Wish list too - and link back to the person who tagged you (me, if you're reading this - that's me :-).

But just because you aren't tagged here and now doesn't mean you can't join in; it just means you don't HAVE to!

These mid-winter thoughts also remind me the year is coming to an end. So it will soon be time to drag out my annual predictions from last year (not much time left for some of those now!) and make another wild stab for next. (image courtesy)

Always fun!

But back to my Christmas wish list. Of course at the top is health and happiness for my nearest and dearest - and for you and yours.

But beyond that, what else could Santa deliver. (appropriate on a day on which its entirely possible I may be spotted in a Santa outfit myself... More of which another time.

1. An end to silos.
The more our metadata can leak beyond them the more we can bring value to one another. Maybe I want one big silo everyone can swhirl around in. Less structured database, more primordial soup.
I happen to believe it would go a long way towards us understanding each other and caring about eachother. Which would help with my next little request.

2 Peace.
Peace has a great chance when it's powered by the flattening of inequalities. Inequalities are the result of exploitation. Exploitation is a good deal harder when we are all publishers, advertisers' marketers and ultimately producers. It's tough to exploit people in the world of the eighth mass media.

3. One more node to share my network, doubling the value for all of us.

4. More of you to pledge to undertake some community action in the offline world. You'll be giving us examples of the generosity of spirit emerging from and required of the networked world.

5. To finally meet Jp Rangaswami in person and hand him the signed copy of The Power of The Network he flattered me so much by asking for. :-)

And I'll tag

Alan
Neville
JP
Stowe
Andrew

The great disruption of social networks reaches its tipping point

I feel like I've been warning that global warming was about to reach its tipping point - and suddenly images of the arctic glaciers collapsing, crashing into the sea at an alarming rate, are being broadcast around the world, providing hard evidence for all to see.

The great disruption of social networks has reached its tipping point. The theory of the impact of the networked world has become real. The evidence is now with us.

A short time ago I wrote that the disruption caused by social networks had only just begun. I thought we'd been guilty of over-estimating the change that the internet heralded - and of underestimating the significance of the rapid charge toward ubiquity of social connectedness - via the easy-to-use tools of 2.0 - social networks in their various guises.

But it looked to me like a two-speed 'social' world had emerged:
1. UGC-powered broadcast models (where 99% of the 'audience' consumed what 1% created)
2. Total Communities: where to take part you have to create part (eg twitter, secondlife, facebook (reversing the 99/1)

But now, Via JP Rangaswami's Confused of Calcutta, comes evidence of the inconvenient truth of the speed with which the networked world is emerging - a shock for those of us who perhaps thought the UGC-powered broadcast model was something more persistant than a hangover of the broadcast world.

It's evidence of the speeding up from broadcast to networked, from centre to edge.

It concerns youtube - one of the models I placed firmly on the UGC-powered broadcast side of the equation.

In the past our assumptions were that it followed the 1% create, 99% audience model.

That may be changing - and very rapidly indeed.

JP Rangaswami tells us that Dr Michael Wesch, (of The Machine is Us/ing Us and A Vision of Students Today) is speaking on the Anthropology of YouTube at the Library of Congress in Washington DC.

And this, according to the Library of Congress news release is what he will be talking about:
"More video material has been uploaded to YouTube in the past six months than has ever been aired on all major networks combined, according to cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch. About 88 percent is new and original content, most of which has been created by people formerly known as “the audience.” "Wesch will discuss the three-year-old video-sharing Web site in a lecture titled “The Anthropology of YouTube” at 4 p.m. on Monday, June 23, in the Montpelier Room on the sixth floor of the Library of Congress’ James Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C."

Update: www.twitter.com/mwesch: " finishing highly experimental presentation for Lib. of Congress ... 50 minute video made of over 300+ YouTube vids that I will narrate live"

I think this part is worth repeating:
"In the last six months...About 88 percent is new and original content, most of which has been created by people formerly known as “the audience.”

The numbers were so impressive that I thought I ought to check with Dr Wesch. I am extremely grateful for how rapidly he has responded:

"The numbers are as fuzzy as the distinction between professional and amateur. We are very confident that at least 80.3% of all content is UGC ... and as much as 95% (depending on how it is defined).
"The difficulty comes because many "users" are now creating near-professional-level content and are often getting paid for it - even if they did not expect to get paid for it when they started creating videos. I would consider myself one of these people in this fuzzy category (see my youtube account "mwesch")
"And one more clarification: the 88% figure refers only to what is new and original (and may be ugc or pro) - the other 12% are repeats, reloads, or stuff that was copied from TV, etc.. I think 80.3% is the safest figure for what we call "unambiguously user-generated content"

The notion that we are all publishers now (and that also means we are all advertisers now) has taken a giant leap from theoretically possible to actually happening.

The networked world is becoming reality before our eyes.

The end is in sight for the silent majority
When all is said and done Youtube may yet remain a UGC-powered broadcast model, attracting large audiences to consume that which is created by ever-larger numbers of user-creators. But as surely as participation rises towards the norm, so those who would passively consume will fall into a silent minority.

They'll get as much as they ever got from the broadcast world, which is to say, rather less than those of us enjoying the fruits of the networked world.


I'll be speaking about some of the implications of this in New York next week. Find me at WidgetWebExpo I'll be in NYC from Saturday evening.

Recommending the thoughts of JP Rangaswami...

JP Rangaswami (one of my personal recommendations in the Rock Stars of Web2.0 list) has been considering the idea of twitter 'tweets' as recommendations.
I've had my own musings about marketing in this medium. Among others.
JP's take is to define what makes a recommendation different from an advert.
He says:

1. The tweet must be unbiased, it must be about an entity that is in no way connected financially with the tweeter
2. The tweet must be clear in signalling something sufficiently positive about the entity
3. The tweet must be actionable, it must link to somewhere that the tweetee can do something about the recommendation
4. Most importantly, a tweet becomes a recommendation when the tweetee decides it is one

He says his fourth point is the most important. I'd argue it could stand alone. It stands out and alone because it is the one that is all about how much you trust the recommendor. Trust is what transforms what might otherwise be seen as an advert into a valued recommendation.

We build that trust on a whole super-structure of metadata. The ability of one factor to bring that house of cards tumbling down will vary from instance to instance (and it is a precariously constructed structure, one which requires we don't lean too heavily on its walls, or over load it by piling card after card on top).

Yes it helps if there is no financial connection between you and the product or service you recommend if you want me to trust your recommendation, but not as much as it matters that I trust (or don't trust) your opinion in the first place.

I'll take the chef's recommendation in his restaurant, for example. I'm particularly likely to take it if he knows my taste. And I'll take a friend's recommendation on the right mobile phone package for me - even if he works for one of the operators. I trust him to do the right thing for me more than for the organisation he has a financial interest in.

I'm not that fussed about number 2, the clarity issue. In the conversational mode of twitter you can always ask for clarification. A recommendation would typically require this.

Even number 3 is of low importance to me. Adding links is a kind of nice-to-have, make-life-easy function. But we have google. And we like to control our own user experience. Direct links are fine if helpful - but lead me to your checkout page on amazon and I might gag.

No, for me, point 4 is king: "a tweet becomes a recommendation when the tweetee decides it is one".

The tweetee makes that decision based on whether or not they trust the tweetor, and whether or not the tweetor is talking about something they are interested in today.

In fact, the most effective manifestation of this is when the tweetee is the tweetor (sorry!) ie the person wanting a recommendation is seeking a recommendation. I ask my network of trust which small wifi-enabled decent-sized keyboard device to buy, they tell me the asus eeepc.

And it is this that led me to the idea of Conversations of Intent

It's very much inline with Doc's VRM (I believe) and also with JP's conclusion:
"It is the “follower” who imbues the “tweeter” with the “recommender” tag about a particular class of social object."

So here I am sharing the thoughts of JP Rangaswami, Doc Searls, Hugh MacLeod and Mark Earls. You can choose to treat this as recommendation. But only if you trust me.

Marketing is not something you do to people.

How many 14 year olds use email?

The deathknell for email has been rung loud and long by the likes of JP Rangaswami. But we (and I count myself among those who have long said farewell to their teenage years) continue to use it.
Who could do without it, we ask?

I spoke at Informa's Mobile Internet Portal Strategies in London today. Chairman Dr Ian Wood reminded us that there were very senior analysts who, not so long ago, had questioned whether or not mobile phones would ever take off - because there were big red telephone boxes at the end of most UK streets.

It's very easy to stick to what we know, and make predictions about the future based on it.

Which brings me to those 14 year olds. I met with Conor Mc Kenna from Taptu today. Forgive me if I confuse the detail, Conor, (and by all means correct me) but the gist of his story was as follows.
A relative of his, a teacher, asks her class of 14-year-old Irish girls who uses email.
Among the 20 in the class the answer came back: 1.
Teenagers are far from backward in adopting social technologies.
A fellow user asked (on twitter last night) for guesses on which application his teenage daughters were demanding was installed first as he set up a new pc for them.
Answer: IM.

I had 20 minutes of free wifi time at King's Cross station in London today before catching a train home. Every one of those 20 minutes were spent deleting spam from my work email account.

I dare say spam can reach me in ways other than email (see this morning's post for a user experience version, for a start). But if you're looking for the president of spam right now, email wins by a landslide.

Tomi Ahonen sent me a gmail last night to say he was at Heathrow. Tomi's a connected guy. I responded by gmail. But the thing that got our conversation reconnected was an sms text.

There's too much wrong with email. 14-year-old girls know this. I'm just trying to catch up.



By the way, Paul Golding presented some brilliant advice for the design of user experiences at MIPS, so I feel comfortable recommending his book.

He also said the nicest thing anyone said about me all day during his presentation.
He described be as: "The UK's foremost evangelist for twitter (probably)"

I'll live with that. Follow me there - it's a better bet than email for a start!

From fear of the random to joy of complexity

Thanks to a free download over at MobHappy I've been discussing the Black Swan with colleagues.
If you haven't read the Black Swan - go get a free summary download now.
There are similar ideas also to be found in The Origin of Wealth. Simply, big changes are caused by unusual events that no one saw coming.
Confused of Calcutta makes the point in another way today, quoting Howard Schneiderman:

When you turn down a request for funding an R&D project, you are right 90% of the time. That’s a far higher rate of decision accuracy than you get anywhere else, so you do it.

And that’s fine. Except for the 10% of the time you’re wrong. When you’re wrong, you lose the company.

The 'frozen accidents' thesis described in the Origin of Wealth references Annie Oakley. At the end of her sharp-shooting show she would ask for a volunteer from the audience brave enough to let her shoot a cigarette from his (or her, I guess) lips.
Because few would ever be foolhardly enough to risk this, her husband would pose as an audience member, step forward and allow the show-stopping finale to take place.
However, on one occasion Crown Prince Willhelm of Germany confounded the usual routine and stepped forward when a volunteer was called for.
Annie had been on the sauce the night before. Now imagine if her trigger finger had been just a little shaky that day. Potentially world war 1 would never have happened... Germany wouldn't have been defeated, Hitler wouldn't have had a platform to prosper etc etc.

One frozen moment in time, one seemingly random chance, could have gigantic impact.
The difficulty for those of us trying to predict the future, trying to strategise... is that this kind of cause and effect can only be seen when you look backwards.

Derren Brown pulled off a great illustration on his Channel 4 TV series recently. He convinced a group of people he had a fool-proof system for backing the horses. His evidence - the results of his tips so far. The show focused on one woman who had used his system to back six winners on the trot. He now convinced her to gather all the cash she could borrow to back winner number seven.

Only once the bet was placed did he reveal to her how his system worked.

Imagine the speed with which her jaw hit the floor when he revealed that she was simply one of thousands of people who had been recruited for this TV programme. That each time he chose a race with six horses in. He gave one sixth of the group a different horse to back each time. Only 1/6th of the group could be right. The other 5/6ths were thanked for taking part and the remaining 1/6th divided by six once more, and given another tip (each 1/6th getting a different tip) and so on. Only the losers knew the system was flawed. The winners in each round were convinced it was a sure fire hit - and by the time race seven came round there were just a handful of excited punters left.

The fact was they had just got lucky in a random series - and now this last lady was putting her shirt (almost literally) on what amounted to no more than faith in a completely random outcome (in which she had a 5/6 chance of failing).

The Confused of Calcutta example could be seen as applying this to the backing (or otherwise) of R&D projects.

The Black Swan leads us to understand that those who have been stunningly successful in business (Bill Gates for example) do not have a secret we should all follow, instead they were in the right place at the right time to benefit from a series of random events (in Gates case it was the happenstance that IBM wanted an operating system, the people they wanted to work with preferred to go ballooning than meet with them and so Gates and Microsoft got asked as a second choice. Gates didn't even have experience of OS. He licensed someone else's. And in the end his company was worth more than IBM.

This sounds depressing for those trying to predict. And it is if you want certainty in the long run. But the case made by the Origin of Wealth suggests that the best solution is to make your company more able to cope with evolution, more able to evolve.

Rather than random events, The Origin of Wealth suggests that business plans are selected for fitness by the market. This is far from random. But it does involve trying things to see how well they fit the market, and changing them in response to the market. Bill Gates was the right individual to take advantage of the fitness landscape (the market) presented to him.

I would, as you might expect, substitute the word 'community' instead of market.

The Origin of Wealth argues the economy is a complex adaptive system - just as evolution is (it is the daddy of all selective processes). I suggest the web is a complex adaptive system too.
Which is why (as I've said before) we live in an age of the fastest growing company in history (Google). It is the arrival of a system of distribution and value creation (the web) which matches the evolutionary performance of the economy which has enabled this.

The problem for most of us is that company hierarchies and silos stand between our business plans and the community. The fitness of a plan is more often than not judged by the guys saying no 90% of the time (as in the Confused of Calcutta example), rather than the community of people for whom it is intended.

The challenge is to find a way to allow the community/market to make its own selections more of the time. In short, we must find ways to act more like complex adaptive systems ourselves - to enable evolutionary practices and processes.

Do your current processes and systems get in the way, or do they assist in this process?

An example:

A company measured its absence rate. Its overall absence rate had risen. It decided to impose a draconian regime of withdrawl of sickness pay across the board (just to be clear, we're not talking about anyone I work for).

Often our first response is to supply a one-size-fits-all solution. We seem to think it's fairest. Evolution doesn't.

The reality in our example was that the rise in abscence rate was accounted for by a pocket of localised lead-swinging (with most likely a viral effect... some people started taking time off, others locally perceived that as granting permission for them to do likewise). Dealing with the local issue slashed the whole company's over all rate. A fit solution for the particular environment.

Evolution isn't interested in what is fair - it doesn't share out a little bit of death across all organisms, or even across all species in hard times. And it doesn't do half pregnant.

Music Industry: Making money because of content rather than with it

Radiohead offer their new album for however much you are willing to pay. Madonna ditches her record label to connect more directly with her audience.(more) The Charlatans offer their next release free to download.

Previously we've seen how the music industry has demonstrated that the price of content is collapsing more vividly than any other sector (Selling Content Sucks If That's All You Do). But perhaps it also demonstrates the new ways in which value is created - and content has a part to play in this.

Radiohead fans will pay what they think the content is worth - and then pay more for the limited edition box set version.

Prince fans scoop up their free CD on the front of the Daily Mail - and then pay a fortune for his concert tickets.
Madonna's new deal is with a concert promoter - not a record label.

The Charlatans see the wood for the trees.

All of these examples are about using content (the thing that in and of itself has little value because it is so freely and widely available) to promote the demand for the thing which is scarce (Radiohead's box set, Madonna and Prince's concert performances).

It's that Because Effect all over again (more here)

This from 'Confused of Calcutta' (see recommended blogs, left)

"When something that was originally scarce starts becoming abundant, something strange happens. You find that you start making money because of that thing rather than with that thing. That’s the Because Effect." Click here to read it in its original context.

When the vanguard becomes the frontline (the network comes with them)

There were some brilliant minds in London and all at the same time last week.

Ajit Jaoker organised a dinner for ForumOxford members to hook up with Howard Rheingold.
Stowe Boyd, JP Rangaswami, Euan Semple and Doc Searls all got together in various combinations.

If you don't know who these people are - or about their work - it's time you got yourself up to speed. Really. Not next week. Today.

I'm not listing all this for the sake of name-dropping.

The point is these people have been at the vanguard of thought about the seismic changes we are all undergoing - in social, economic, political and business fields.

They have represented the bleeding edge. And as Alan Moore likes to warn, people with a message from the future don't often get a warm welcome from the status quo. "Pioneers often get shot," as he puts it.

But I get the feeling the bleeding edge, the pioneers, are increasingly becoming the frontline.
They aren't out on their own anymore. The status quo is finally learning to embrace them and what they represent.

These guys all do work with bluechip companies. The bluechips aren't shooting them any more.

And if your organisation still thinks their thinking is all a bit "out there", it's time for a serious reappraisal of what you consider the norms.

I met Stowe a fortnight back. I met Euan last week. I hope I'll catch up with the others in person soon. I'm aiming to introduce Alan to Euan very soon. The connections have all come through blogging first. We are an example of a self-forming community of interest in action.

This community understands the power of the network. It lives by it.

I'm reading Systems Thinking (Creative Holism for Managers) by Michael C Jackson at the moment. It's a hard slog. But here's a gem that's kept me going:

• "Everyone can talk to everyone and should"
• "Everyone is responsible"
• "Network extensively"

I'll just corrupt that last one, if I may (sprinkle in a bit of co-creation...)

• Network extensively - with purpose