Welcome to the human network

Nice message from Cisco - I don't often repeat ads here, but this one speaks to The Power of the Network - that the internet is about connecting people.
We start with our social graph (our friends, family, peers) and through them discover people who interest us, people we come to trust and through them we discover content they trust and people they trust. And the less silo'd the metadata (the more easily and readily we share) the easier it becomes to connect with our communities of purpose - groups of people who care about what we care about right now.
That's what I'm thinking when I'm watching this. How about you?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Cisco's New Free iPhone App to Help You Have Web Conferencing, Business Meetings and More
• BrightIdea - socializing innovation
• Improve your marketing with the social media halo effect

What's the opposite of email?

I'm a member of 100 or more online communities. Come to think of it, it has to be more.

I pretty much sign up for everything anyone recommends to me. Keeping abreast of the latest developments in the networked world is important in my job.

But it's also important for all of us as we become the eighth mass media.

We store some pictures here, others there. We find some music here, some there. Video likewise. There are our profiles in ecommerce to manage, multiple blogs, our bank accounts, competitions we enter, events we plan on attending...

That's before we get to our multiple profiles and interaction on social networks and through social media. Representations of our digital selves - with a heap of helpful meta data attached, are spread throughout the web. And we merrily distribute all this with no considerations for silos. We go beyond them without even acknowleding they are there.

So if I asked you to write a list detailing what and where, you wouldn't be able to complete one.
And if I asked you to confirm your username and password for each of these - you'd struggle even more.

Few of us are organised enough to keep lists in secure places and back up multiple versions.

So how is that our networks don't collapse out of simple forgetfulness - or even through our failure to personally persist?

How do we keep track of all this? How do we open the doors when we lose vital passwords?

There are two hubs right now which go beyond the silos: your email address and your mobile phone number.

It's clear to me that right now that email address remains the core one.

In my case, my gmail address is where the alerts and reminders arrive, where lost account details can be sent to. It's a sign-in for some functions, too. Gmail even has todo lists now. Without my gmail account my network would be at risk of collapse. Your phone number performs a similar function in the other digital world of peer-to-peer - sms text messaging and calls.

So for all the demand for our own portable id we can take from social network to social network, we already all have a simple, ubiquitous id which acts to collate our disparate identities and metadata - our email accounts.

Yes email has its problems, email has its spam, email has its overloads. But even if you ONLY use it for registering yourself throughout the web, you can't deny its fundamental importance in your digital life.

No wonder google came up with a rival for hotmail. Email is the place you are MOST locked into - beyond any individual social network and beyond even the widest reaching of the Open ID-Open Social-Friend Connect continuum.

What we need for the arrival of the eighth mass media is something which is as good at expressing our id and metadata outwardly just as broadly and effectively as your email account can collate it centrally.

What's the closest thing you've found so far?

What is the opposite of email?

To advertisers: stop targeting, start broadcasting

We're getting better and better at targeting advertising - at sending users messages we think they'll actually find quite useful.

But the increasingly free expression of metadata changes the game regarding the way we 'target'.

Indeed, it may reveal that who-does-what-to-whom in this relationship can and should be turned on its head.

In the process we may have to let go of one of the grand promises of the digital world - that we can target individuals with such precision that they'll always want what we target them with.

In this world of freely-exposed metadata by all parties advertising is not about targeting, it is about making a message available as widely as possible.

Sounds counter-intuitive in the digital age, right?

But it starts from the notion that recommendation happens in the mind of the receiver, not in the mind of the person making the recommendation.
Simpler still: Marketing is not something advertisers can do to people (ie target and deliver at them), it is something people (with the assistance of other people) do to themselves.

A TV advert is a broadcast of metadata. If some of that metadata hooks up with your own then you find it useful. The advert transforms into recommendation in your mind. When it achieves that status you may transmit how useful you find it to other people.

Trouble is, you can't share how useful you've found it while sat alone in front of the TV.

Which is why the best place to broadcast advertising (as metadata) is in a digital social network. Again, sounds counter-intuitive, doesn't it? Banner ads etc have failed miserably in social networks (certainly in terms of click-thrus and/or engagement).

So, let's be clear. I'm not advocating broadcasting any old-style, fixed, centre-out message will get you endorsed by an adoring public.

No. You have to understand that when you are invited into the 'huge crowd' of a social network you are invited into one of thousands of small groups, each one made up of people looking at each other - not at the stage.

Getting the signal right for each of those small groups is close to impossible (hello 0.01% CTR!) - if you try to do it yourself.

So let the receivers' adapt it. Let them shape it so that its likelihood of being passed on within that receiver's peer-group goes through the roof. Who better to put the message in the most effective terms?

Nutshell: I pass things on that I think are cool, to people who I believe will also think it is cool.

If I get this wrong I lose some of the trust and authority I have built up with my group. So I do this with care and judgement. Much more care and judgement than the one-size-fits-all brand-control-driven centre (the broadcaster of a traditional ad message) can hope to muster.

Critically, emotions are at risk. I don't want to look bad to my peers. I'm a social creature. A human being. An ad message is not. This informs my decisions about what to pass on. Data has a hard time understanding this.

By targeting, the advertiser starts selecting where they are going to choose to share their metadata. They are saying they know who the message is for and who will respond best to it.

Fine. But they are reaching the tip of an iceberg. If you allow the receiver to decide for themselves whether your advert is a recommendation, they will take that message with them deep within their peer groups - where iteration after iteration of your message can spawn - where the next generation of receivers are available to decide if the message is an advert or a recommendation for their peers and so on...

In this context broadcast ain't all bad. We all broadcast our metadata all the time in social networks and mediums - advertisers and receivers all.

The advertiser can't assume they can calculate what it is that the receiver will decide to morph into recommendation today, right now, in the social context they are in. Their peers may be better placed - their current adhoc community of purpose.

The sharing of metadata encourages us to form into groups - communities of purpose no matter how adhoc in nature.

And groups with whom I share purpose are in a great position to spread advertising messages that morph into recommendation when I receive them. They share stuff with me they think I'll think is cool.

Targeting tries to calculate this. It rationalises our preponderance to respond in certain ways.
People, however, can feel this. Which is useful; because we're rarely entirely rational when it comes to purchase (or any other) decisions.

As Mark Earls suggests in Herd - we're post-rational creatures. We do stuff and then try to rationalise why we did it, later. If this were not the case you wouldn't smoke and I wouldn't be overweight.

So, given all this. Why spend the time and trouble targeting? Put your metadata out there - as widely as possible - and hope to be pulled to the people who find it useful, who can shape it to be useful to other people they know.

Messages don't do marketing. People do.

Please, help me on the journey with this one...

Why the next web matters. Asserting who we are

Stowe Boyd has made his NextWeb presentation available on his blog. Worth your time.

Stowe's thinking about flow and the value of connections resonates with me and lives in my own thinking. You'll often hear me quote his: "I am made greater by the sum of my connections, and so are my connections."

At NextWeb he said: "As the edge grows, the center dissolves. Mainstream journalists begin to act like bloggers, editors begin to drop the veneer of objectivism, and immediate, first person voice becomes the standard not some radical minority."

He also has a much more elegant way of describing the importance of sharing our metadata in less and less silo'd ways that I detail in my white paper: Communities of Purpose Are The Business Units of the 21st Century. In that paper I share the understanding that exposing our metadata is the key to allowing us to rapidly form and reform adhoc communities of purpose.

Nutshell: The reason we go online is to connect with other humans. The reason we share our metadata is to make that process easier. Our metadata asserts who we are. The more widely it is shared the more we can connect with others who share our immediate purpose.

Stowe says: "We are seeing the next web start to appear today, away from the heavily annotated and mashed web of pages that is the primary reality today.

"The first glints of that new web is starting to emerge from the lineage of instant messaging and RSS feeds: the development of tools and technologies on top of ubiquitous connectivity that allow the artifacts of conversation between us to flnd us instead of us having to dig through the archives of the web of pages.

"I call this the web of flow.We are seeing an explosion in flow applications -- the Facebook minifeed, RSS streams, Friendfeed, Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, and my own Workstreamer project (coming soon)"

I agree. And it's just the beginning. The future is outside of the silos, where we become the mediator and the medium.

Twitter vs FriendFeed: Conversation vs Convenience?

Twitter has been suffering growing pains in recent days and weeks. Outages aplenty.

I noticed they are trying to control things by switching off some functionality from time to time. And what they choose to switch off indicates what they see of least value.

When times are hard, it is the archive, of previous posts, and direct messaging which get booted out.

Turning off the archive shows that they recognise the primary importance of synchronous communication. You might be interested in what someone said in the past, or what they were asking about in the past, but you can respond less effectively now than you could at the time the request or share was made. Twitter gets that; being prepared to drop anything to assist with a community of purpose is high on the list of useful value creating stuff.
Dropping IM's indicates they also understand that closed communications have less value than open.

This thinking pervades twitter and drips from its architecture.
They are all about the current, right now conversation and connecting people.

Blogs were described by Doc Searls as the best example of the sovereign self. Twitter (distributed microblogging), imho is the best example of our communal selves.

FriendFeed, surely makes that conversation even more communal, with its aggregation and friend-of-a-friend/fuzzy-edged groups form of sharing and distribution?

No wonder some tout it as the next-gen twitter. But I wonder if it is more about convenience than conversation?

Some have described FriendFeed (and I'll add links when I have more time - sorry) as distributed conversation.
I'm not clear that's delivered. At least it isn't delivered in the right-now and in one place synchronous way that twitter values so highly.

What FriendFeed does deliver is the convenience of compiling and redistributing huge amounts of an individual's metadata.

Not only do you get to see what I'm 'doing' on twitter, you also see the feeds I'm reading on googlereader, or videos I post on youtube, or images on flickr etc etc.

So now there's even more reasons for conversations to start.
More metadata on show to each other means more opportunities for us to find we share a right-now purpose and act on it. (Communities of Purpose are the Business Units of the 21s century).

All good. But there's a risk in distributing the conversation. Where ever you follow the flag to, that's where the conversation risks being taken - and silo'd.

Twitter's value is in keeping the conversation open, visible, synchronous and consistent.

Friendfeed is a useful broadcast of our metadata - and potentially a step towards us becoming the url. The key will be connecting the conversations in a coherent human-focused way.

Right now the conversation is at risk of being disrupted more than distributed.

So I'll happily broadcast my metadata through FriendFeed, and have others broadcast their metadata at me, but when the conversation flags are raised where will the conversation be hosted which creates most value for all parties.

For this post, I'm hoping it'll be right here. If FriendFeed were to offer me that control...

More questions than answers I'm afraid.

How NOT to do search

I liked this post for the real life example (poor Nike!) it offers.

AND it's got a great link to this SEO tool to help with keyword research.

Anyway - the mistakes big brands make with search are (according to writer Wil Reynolds, and detailed in his article):

1. Missing out on the long tail: Search daddy Danny Sullivan says: "Typically, big brands want to target the big unbranded terms like "tennis rackets," "golf clubs," or "running shoes." I do recommend that they target such terms as a way to position their brand in the minds of people who are searching. But they often miss terms like "golf club reviews" or "women's trail running shoes." Typically, these long-tail terms are the ones that convert best.

2. All-Flash sites with no alternative.

3. Not reinforcing search query results on landing page.

4. Not developing a descriptive meta description tag.

5. Making things 'cool' rather than easy to find.

6. Driving a user with a very specific query to the homepage - a waste of pay-per-click budgets

7. News flash—you can't pay to be No. 1 on Google anymore. An algorithm that decides how well your landing page matches with the user's search mission will affect where you rank (along with your cost per click, and other factors). Yahoo is apparently going this route as well.

8. Flash sites adversely impact natural search rankings

9. Flash sites do poorly on froogle

10. Great tools are a mistake without investment to drive traffic to them