Faster Future: Possibilities now and beyond

Wednesday, July 08, 2009

Brands are failing the social media response test

Neil Perkin has just announced his short-list for post of the month and among them is my little project to test the social media response times of a handful of leading brands.

You may recall we set them a little test in the post What Does It Take To Get Some Service Around Here?
Would be wonderful if you popped over to see the other posts Neil has assembled on that short list.

Of course it would be very cool of you if you happened to vote for What Does It Take To Get Some Service Round Here? while you are there, but I'd recommend a visit in any event - because Neil's assembled a whole heap of blogging wonderfulness to dine on. Tuck in.

By way of an update; Qik won the race to be fastest re social media response. Ford was our honourable runner-up and taking the third place on the podium... well, we're still waiting.

It appears that in social media, the majority of brands, at least, can't hear you scream.

Shame for them that everyone else can....

(image courtesy)

Tuesday, July 07, 2009

Social media by the numbers

FasterFuture nestles at number 33 in the latest top 116(?) of UK Marketing Blogs as derived from the Adage Power 150

So yaboo sucks for me? Nah, seriously, this is a very literal example of being made greater by the sum of my connections (the more of you who visit, link here, follow me, talk to me... the higher we rise) so are my connections.

And while speaking of charts (terrible link...) here's Mark Earls on what the death of Michael Jackson tells us about ourselves (in the Spectator).

Monday, July 06, 2009

Welcome to the Futerati

Image via Wikipedia

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

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

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

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

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

Opening up the enterprise - powered by purpose

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

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

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

Thursday, July 02, 2009

What if everyone on twitter followed everyone on twitter?

Image via CrunchBase

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

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

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

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

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

But that's where improving Twitter search comes in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's where our future lies.