There is no insight button

I really worry about the turn-key, one-size-fits-all tech and tool solutions for social media being churned out by software and SAAS vendors for baffled brands and companies right now.

For example, this from a press release I saw on Thursday January 19:

“[Brand X’s] enterprise marketing technology allows global brands and agencies to easily activate social audiences and impact consumer actions on all major social media ecosystems simultaneously.”

My  translation: With one button you can broadcast at anyone fool enough to have followed you so far. If they happen to have stayed around since you bought them, that is.

Job done then?

What worries me is that hassled execs will take the magic bullet being offered – we all like to make ‘life simplifying’ decisions. It’s very seductive to sign up for a one-stop solution because it’s easier than understanding what they really need to. It’s unlikely to be more cost-effective though.

As I wrote previously for a piece with Ninety10 Group CEOJamie Burke (note and disclosure, we co-founded that international business consultancy together.)

Business as usual wants a set of turn-key tools to make everything all right. But the future isn't about tools. It is about behaviours - understanding changes, learning from them and responding to meet those changed needs.

Business as usual wants ever-more efficient ways to exploit customers. But the most efficient way of meeting need is delivered by a shift in mind-set not in technologies; a shift that thinks of customers as your partner in producing what matters to both of you.

Business as usual wants to exploit channels to deliver messages. Click to deploy. But the future resides in better understanding why people would want to share 'your message' - getting to grips with the idea that marketing isn't done to people, it is done with people.

A tool or set of tools won't - of themselves - deliver the change you need to shift out of business as usual. And unless you take the holistic view, unless you go through the culture shift, the organisational change that is required, the tools will lead you back to square one.

As Ninety10group Head of Innovation Steffen Huck points out “There is no ‘insight’ button on any dashboard.

There is no ‘Cultural Change’ button, either.

Ditch the customer if you want to transform business

At FT Innovate in Londom this week much of the conversation was about the role of social media in innovation.
Martha Lane Fox advocated business leaders get themselves involved in social media in her keynote.
But it was clear that for most the best this means is the opportunity to get an ever-better understanding of the customer.
Which sounds on the face of it a very excellent thing - a step up from social as 'earned media' or attempting to use people as your choice of broadcast channel.
But there's something missing. And the missing bit is one of the three quick indicators of the difference between what gets referred to as 'social business' and what I urge you to consider instead, Open Business.
Open Businesses are purpose-led platform-thinking organisations. They use their available resources to discover people who care about the same things the org does, bringing them together to surface their concerns and working with them to support them in resolving those concerns. It means outcomes which are a better fit with the real needs of those for whom they are intended.
There's little wrong with social business and much that is good. But it rarely inspires business leaders. In fact I know a very senior business journalist who has never even heard the term.
And when I was invited in to IBM to talk about Social Business in London last week I made the point that few CEOs will feel comfortable with turning their business into a social one. The term creates unhelpful mental blocks. IBM folk reported similar concerns.
Why make life more difficult when what we all want is change for the better?
So what's the difference between Social and Open Business?
Here's three distinctions I see:

1. It's not about the tools - it is about Behaviours:
Often social business conversations focus on implementing software. Open Business urges you to think Behaviours first. What are people doing, what can and will they do? If you are starting with tools you'll likely starting in the wrong place.

2. Think less about messages and more about products. Open Business urges you to consider ways of making things with the people for whom they are intended; for the best possible fit with real need; for efficiency; for results people care about. Messages are an outcome of this process - not its purpose. Talk 'social' and all roads will lead you back to messages.

3. Ditch the customer.
No, really. Stop thinking about customers. Customers are people you intend to do things to. Open Business urges you to think about the long-suffering customer as partners to work with instead. It pushes those people deep into the production process - right to the start, to join with and be supported by the org in delivering the things all parties want - all partners want.

Tools/Behaviours
Messages/Products
Customers/Partners

There are differences: Critical ones in transforming how business is done.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Related articles

• Understanding social media for businesses (marketing.yell.com)
• 11 Ways To Explain Social Business Benefits - The BrainYard - InformationWeek (informationweek.com)
• The cost of sharing and the risk of the wrong rewards (fasterfuture.blogspot.com)

Community defined? You can't take part without creating part of it

My buddy Badgergravling got me thinking with a question on twitter this morning.

I don't know the 'why' of what he wants to know at the moment ( "Still researching content creators vs audience figures/ratio...anyone got examples/figures etc?") but the question itself made me think about our definitions, and valuation, of community.

Wikipedia and YouTube provide great examples of products made entirely from user generatated content. The question often thrown at them is "yeah but, how many people create content compared to those who simply consume it?"

The answer is thought to be a consistently low number (1%?) who contribute while 99% consume. I'll gladly update this with more accurate stats if you happen to have them.

Let me be clear. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The 99% now have something they want to consume, created by that busy 1%. It didn't exist before. It's been carved from that cognitive surplus that Clay Shirky introduced us to. New value has been created.

Of course, it could achieve twice the scale and value should another 1% of the consumers become creators. But then, the theory goes, each time you double the number of creators, you'll scale up the number of consumers, too. That means the ratio of creators to consumers will remain static. Let's call it 1:100 for the sake of argument.

So, the more people who join the community by creating, the more 'audience' you'll grow. Clearly worth getting the tools of creation right then? If nothing else the audience gets to connect with the community through repeated exposure... and that drip-drip effect may inspire some to cross the theshold from audience to community.

All good, of course.

What made me pause for further thought was the fact that I was having this discussion on twitter.

Without creators there is no twitter. Same with YouTube or Wikipedia of course.

But twitter is made with communities of creators as its primary concern, not for consuming viewers. It is built for communities of purpose to form in a networked conversation-driven way, not for an audience to consume what they are creating. It's about small numbers sharing their conversations.

SecondLife follows that formula, too.

In both cases you can't take part without creating part of it.

I'm not about to claim there's no value in products which mix creation with consumption - YouTube and Wikipedia stand as testimony to the folly of that line of argument.

But I do think this raises questions about how uniformly we can apply laws of creator/consumer ratios. The purpose of the tools has a huge influence on this.

I imagine there are some twitter users who only 'follow' (ie only read the content others have created). But I'll make a wild guess: That number is way closer to 1% than the number of people who create content on twitter is.

In really community-focused models (from the architecture up) the creator/consumer ratio is likely to get turned on its head.

And that clearly hasn't done any harm to the likes of SecondLife and Twitter.

So being part of a community is to take part in creating it. All the rest is broadcast - sharing the community's metadata with a world of self-selecting potential members.

It means of course that twitter must come up with a monetising solution which fits the networked world. Can't wait to see which way they jump.

Google's collaboration tool now free for all

Google Sites is now available for all to use. It lets you make a basic webpage, embed pics, docs, pics, and videos and invite others to see or edit the page depending on the access you allow.

It's a simple way people can collaborate (share tasks) either within clubs, companies or beyond silos. Think of wikis made easy.

Here's the video explanation:

Video is poor media - until it loses TV envy

Jeff Jarvis shares his thoughts on extreme story-telling and well worth a read they are, too. But the part of his post that made me pause for thought was this:

"So far, video is being used online mostly to tell a complete story: here’s the story in text, there’s the story in video (or there’s a slideshow or a podcast or a Flash thingie). The video is almost always a packaged piece, self-standing. It wants to be television."

And that is a problem - and a waste - in a networked world. Video in this TV-envy form is for passive consumption. But the networked world is about participation and the co-creation of value.

Jeff points us to prezvid for an example of a more mashed-up approach.

The video efforts of so many default centre-out sites cling to the mantra of video as 'rich media' while missing out on the value-creating truth of the networked world - where media really gets 'rich'.

In order to make the most of the networked value of video we really need a new set of tools, tools which lower the technical barriers so everyone on the network can participate with the same ease with which they can post text or a link.

On a blog or a forum, pretty much anyone who can read the content can engage with it. Don't like what I've written - you can post a comment. Think there's another angle to explore? You can post a link etc etc. There is little in the way of technical barrier preventing you from joining in the conversation.

But if I post a video... well you can respond with a comment, or a link (at least, you can on a blog). So I offer rich media, you get to respond with text. Many sites don't even offer that, not even an opportunity to rate what you've just watched, either.

Wouldn't it be better if you could:

1. At least rate and comment on any video content (an absolutely minimum requirement).
2. Insert your comments as text overlaying the video at the point they were relevant (subtitles if you like).
3. Add your comments as video at any point you choose (upload a quick clip from your phone or webcam)
4. Insert other peoples videos to make their or your point
5. Add an image, or draw a picture, if that's the way you prefer to 'talk'.
6. Change the soundtrack to one of your own devising.
7. Connect to discuss in real time with other (like-minded) people watching it right now (youtube offers this without the brackets...)
8. Some other cool stuff you've just thought of (post as a comment!)
9. Save it all as your own version to post or share as and where you wish.

All this requires is the lowering of technical barriers. Some new tools. And if you know where they are already available or coming soon, please share.

Resources reorganised - your suggestions for more, please!

I've reorganised the 'resources' section you'll find in the left-hand navigation of this blog (a fair way down the page!).
Now the items included (downloads and specific links) are loosely categorised under the following:

• Disruption
• Engagement
• Futurology
  
• Mobile
• Networks
• Thought Leadership
• Tools
• Video

I hope you'll find them useful. And if you have a suggestion for something else that should be included (something you've found useful!) please share.