Faster Future: Possibilities now and beyond: Search results for wikifix

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Monday, November 02, 2009

90:10 - Open For Business

Today I can finally announce I've embarked on a new journey - as Managing Director and co-founder of a new business: 90:10.

It's a journey that emphasises a meme close observers will have seen emerging in my work for quite some time (it's described in my Communities of Purpose paper written in March 08).

That is, that in order to truly benefit from the power of the network we must think less about media (social or otherwise) and more about how and why people organise to get things done.

90:10 takes that to its logical business-oriented change-empowering conclusion. 90:10 is aimed at enabling efficiency, innovation and transformation through social technologies.

Efficiency - the big why

Efficiency is important to us not just for the obvious reason (the payback to the benefitting business's bottom line) but for the same kind of reason that quality is important to outdoor clothing maker Howies.

Howies believes in quality (read Mark Earls' Herd for the full story) because it makes their stuff last longer. If it needs replacing less often less resources are required to keep Howies fans clothed. It's better for the environment, better for all.

Efficiency is important to 90:10 because when people connect to wikifix or co-create something new we do so because we want that thing to exist. We want the outcome.

This closes the gap between supply and demand. In its final iteration, as a planet, we will only create what we need - with zero waste and zero need to 'create' demand.

In a world of limited resource plundering the things we have in abundance, to make the most of the things we don't, has to be the right thing to do.

Our creativity, our desire and ability to connect, to be social beings, these we have in abundance. Tapping them is both exciting in its potential and wise as a strategy for success. It is what 90:10 does.

It ultimately means there will be more of what all of us need. All of us.

Efficiency that is better for all.
Efficiency for a bigger reason.
That's why we believe in efficiency. Driven by innovation - leading to transformation.

It's not about the tech, it's about the people

We understand the tech doesn't perform the magic. People do.

The tech is simply the tools through which the business of new business (and new organisation) is done. It is the tools the crowd, this we species of ours, the edglings, us, are using to build our self-organised tomorrow.

I don't want to build the next Twitter, Facebook or Google (though I'll happily consult on how they could and should monetise) - I'm interested in what emerges from them and what comes after them - what communities of purpose can and will do with these tools.

Connecting people who care about the same stuff gets that stuff done better. It innovates best-fit solutions and gets to those best-fit solutions faster and cheaper.

It's Wikifixing. It's global. And it's because people give a damn - if only you'll let them.

As I detailed in Social + Media = Change, I believe the real RoI of social media is unleashed by the way it enables adhoc communities of purpose to form; This is what the money has been waiting to follow.

These communities exist. They want to make stuff better. They want to join in creating the things that matter to them.

Recently, inspired by Clay Shirky, I wrote: Media that publishes without a comment box, publishes broken

That is, publishing without being open to contribution, is the wrong model for the networked world.

There is a version for business - in fact for all organisations:

'A business that operates without a comment box, operates broken'.

That is, a business that fails to open up to the riches it could share in through the feedback loops, real-time co-creation and wikifixing of the power of the network is a business that is in peril - at risk of being disrupted and defeated by those that are.

Next to those from the self-organised, open future, it is broken.

90:10 is all about fixing that - becoming truly and effectively Open For Business.

Tuesday, March 02, 2010

Nominate a social business innovator

It's March. So it must be time for the next (the second!) monthly Social Business Innovation Award.
And, just as last month, they can't happen without you.
Right now we need to work together on nominations; making them and attracting suggestions from others. Later in the month we'll need to join together to vote.

Last month found a worthy winner in BusinessCard2.0.

This month let's focus on businesses and organisations which have created,, or significantly improved, their products or services using digital social tools - from forums, microblogs, blogs and ideas platforms to social networks, email and SMS.

As last month, please nominate, with any relevant links, by posting a comment below.
Those that appear in the final nominees list will be entitled to display the badge you see here.

Please call on your friends to join in.

What are these awards all about?

Social business innovation: Efficiency and tranformation through the use of social tools.

We have the best set of tools in history for people to find each other and act together to create and improve on the things that matter to them.

What are we doing with them?

Some businesses and organisations are grasping them to wikifix their products and services, to deliver best-fit R&D and NPD and join in waste-free people-powered communications and marketing. The wikifixing of the world has begun.

Those engaging in the process reach new levels of efficiency thanks to an ever-better fit with the needs of their partners - those formerly known as the customer. (By way of disclosure, that's what we at 90:10 Group help organisations with).

I hope you will join with me to celebrate the best of them - and through this find a path to the communities-of-purpose-driven future of the organisation.

So each month this blog will host a Social Business Innovation of The Month award, nominated by you and voted on by you. The format is very much inspired by Neil Perkin's ThinkTank.

The awards are to recognise great work in open/social business/organisational design/innovation/tranformation/efficiency using social technologies.

The winners will enter a case-study Hall of Fame to be shared with all - and in which the winners can revel in the glory of their peers' admiration ;-). More importantly, we can all get inspiration and guidance.

Monday, November 23, 2009

Putting people first remains the winning strategy

For many a long year, sensible CEO's have recognised that their greatest asset is their people.

Certainly it was something drummed into managers back in the day when emap was growing fast (I worked in what started as a few East Midlands local papers and ended up as a North American and European empire before it hit the great structural media slow down experienced everywhere else).

"Our people are our greatest asset".

The fact that we are undergoing huge structural change does not diminish that truth. The networked world doesn't mean that suddenly our digital towers of tech are our greatest asset, or anything similar.

No. People remain top of that list. The shift is that the ones creating the bulk of the value aren't necessarily 'ours' any more.

So lose the 'our'.

"People are our greatest asset".

Because successful businesses are now far from limited to the power of the people within the silo, those that, traditionally, they pay the wages of.

Now everywhere the crowd can touch your processes and supply chains, people both external and internal are your greatest asset.

Think of any supply chain within your organisation. What could be disrupted or improved on by the crowd - by people coming together online and from both inside and outside the silo to provide a wikifix?

There are far more external assets available than internal.

Adapting to the connecting, real-time power of social technologies means better connection with those external assets; greater contribution from them.

And if they bring you greater efficiencies and greater rewards through those contributions it is wise that we consider how they can be rewarded and what they seek by way of reward.

It may not (always) be cash. It may be the value and power of becoming part of something they care about.

But they are not there to be exploited.

Just as sensible CEOs always placed value on their people, so now must sensible CEOs place value on all the people their organisation interacts with and shares in the production of value with.

Putting people first has always been a winning strategy - the better connected world of the network just writes that large.

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Reflections on my first 20,000 tweets

I just clocked up my 20,000th tweet. A moment perhaps to pause and reflect on what's going on here.

According to twitter I've been tweeting since June 20, 2007 but I'm pretty sure I didn't get serious with it until maybe six months later.

In any event, in the same period I have blogged 763 times. That is, for every blog post since I signed up for twitter, I have tweeted 26.2 times.

I tweet so much that Twournal (which turns your tweets into a book) can't cope. All it'll handle is the last 3200 - which I now make available for download should you so desire.

I suspect the same limitations are imposed on the word cloud I generated of my tweets. But then I guess twitter is all about real time, so what the hey?

The rate of decline in my blog posting is huge. In Jun-Dec 2007 AT (After Twitter) I posted 152 blog posts. 2008 saw a roughly similar rate/month (348 for the year). But in 2009 I posted just 159 times. And this year to this point just 104.

This is partially because Twitter has replaced one of blogging's functions for me; microblogging. In those days of 300-plus posts a year some of the posts would have been a throwaway comment and a link to something I found interesting. Now I do that on Twitter - and I can do that anywhere anytime - something which wasn't available to me on blogger.com back in the day (though now is through some useful iPhone apps).

Blogging remains very important to me for a number of reasons:

1. Blogs are the least silo'd of all the social media: Anyone can find one of my blog posts. Yes with google now indexing tweets that is becoming more possible for twitter, but the 'real time results' window of opportunity for discovery is small. Anyone can discover my blog posts any time and from any where. This increases my ability to connect.
2. Blogs have longevity. What I post here remains until either I delete it or blogger.com goes pop. My tweets are gone before you can say "where's my first tweet"? Most tweet recall and compilation services appear only to be able to index the last 3200 tweets you post. Pah - a drop in my trivial ocean!
3. Blogs are your personal url - a home to store and share everything you care about. Neither twitter (with its light weight architecture) or Facebook (with it's silo'd approach) can match them for that. Doc Searls said it best: "Blogs are the single best representation of the sovereign self".
4. Blogs offer more depth and exploration: Most things can be said in just a few words (hence twitter) but not all. Exploration of ideas obviously benefit from interaction but ideas also need a chance to breathe, to wander, to digress. Blogs are good at this.

Tweeting offers something new. We tweet 'the trivial' - the snarky, the wisecrack. Twitter (and trailing along behind Facebook status updates) lowers the technical barrier to publishing what we think - and in its mobile guise particularly - where and when we think it.

For example there are tens of thousands of tweets in the UK every week in which people tell us they are having a drink. I never once wrote a blog post to say I'm having a beer - I've certainly tweeted that I have.

This creates a new value in aggregation - we express our metadata much more readily, systems, brands and orgs can learn from this about what we want, what we don't like, when we want it and where. And all without positing a single question. Market research without the waters muddies by point of view.

People have always said this stuff to their nearest friends 'in the real world'. Now they publish it for all their friends - and for the world to learn from. It's giving orgs the ability to wikifix by gathering realtime expressed metadata that was never available before.

And I'm part of that - moaning about train delays here, download speeds there, reporting on service good and bad - as it is happening to me.

But that's not my motivation for tweeting - at a rate of almost 16 a day - as I'm sure it's not yours.

Neither is it a desire to gain an audience - just as that's not my motivation in blogging.

What motivates me is the desire to connect with people who care about the same stuff I do.

The trivia is there for two key reasons: First to create that connection with someone else having an 'I know what you mean' moment - or someone who has a solution or a step towards it.
Second, it functions as our rather more sophisticated equivalent of picking the nits out of the next monkey's fur - we maintain our social connectedness through small talk - the weather, the pleasure in a cup of coffee, last night's game or even - to my shame - the X Factor.

Small talk is a very very human thing to do. Twitter is a very very human medium. To succeed in it as business or individual you have to take a very very human approach.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

How to make more pegs, more round, more often

Providing things that people need/want is at the core of any business. If there are round holes, you provide round pegs. That's the plan.

Trouble is, life is a little more complex.

The holes are rarely consistent in size or roundness. The pegs become best approximations.

So we take the hammer of advertising and marketing, mass media lowest common denominator comms of all forms, and bludgeon away. (image courtesy)

Sometimes some of the pegs even appear to fit. Hit enough, hard enough and long enough and - hey presto! Demand met.

Ahem.

Ok, more like supply supplied, then. All very wasteful. And noisy.

The fitness landscape of any complex adaptive system (from evolution to the economy) requires something, well, more adaptable.

It requires something more maleable - more open to change - to make a better fit.

If the pegs can be reshaped to fit the holes, they just drop in. No mass media hammering required. No energy wasted.

Businesses have always used the tools available to them to make the best approximation of those round pegs - market research, focus groups, the black-sweatered CEO's gut feel.
Those whose approximations are closest to round, find they need less hammering.

Now we have access to better tools - the social technologies that enable groups to form. That is, better access to people.

Now groups can form to wikifix a problem they share - such as your peg not fitting their hole.

Now you can let them, together, reshape your peg so it drops beautifully into place.

But it will only happen if you accept that the best people to shape a product or service to any fitness landscape you encounter are those who make up that landscape.

Advertising isn't (just) the tax you pay for being unremarkable (some products inspire such excited human interaction that the fitness landscape changes to accommodate them) it is also the tax you pay for trying to fit square pegs in round holes.

Hang up your hammers. Start opening your doors.

Saturday, March 27, 2010

Publishers should abandon both paid content AND advertising to survive

I'm glad that some Murdoch publications are going back to the failed experiment of paywalls - if only because it will reveal once and for all how far from right they've got their strategy for the networked world.

I understand completely why they are doing it - they've done the math (I've been through it with similar orgs). With only small audiences who pay they can make more money than with vast audiences who don't.

That's because those who advertise online don't pay as much as those who advertise in more traditional mediums. There has been a race to the bottom on advertising pricing which made certain of that.

Mass media publishers have learned that they can't make as much money in the networked world (where everyone is publisher, distributor and creator of their own user journey/experience) as they did in the world of control. So, they are attempting to go back to the world of control (when that genie is well and truly out of the bottle and showing no signs of wanting to return to it).

Information is free. But the way it is packaged - the experience of it - you can add a price to. Music, for example is commoditised. People don't pay Apple for music at iTunes. They pay for the packaging, the user experience, ease of usefulness. If this is what the TimesOnline etc will deliver for news content, they may have a business case. I struggle to imagine the parallel myself.

And if all they are going to do is offer access to information in the way they have done until now - but behind a paywall - then they will lose. They can only ever offer access to limited information with limited sources and processes of verification (and trust creation). The rest of the open web is unlimited in both these key respects. Open wins.

But I think through all this publishers are avoiding the key questions. Why do people pay less to advertise online than they did in traditional media? Online the Times et al can acquire greater audiences, more eyeballs. Why isn't that of higher value than print to those taking the broadcast approach to advertising? More eyeballs = pay me more - surely? Why is an online 'eyeball' worth less than an offline one?

Is it that the many digital innovations in advertising that the internet has enabled has lifted the wool from many eyes? It has shown that an eyeball doesn't equal a sale. Never did. But when you are able to measure the lack of transaction, the lack of interest, the scale of your interruptive spam - as the internet has enabled like no other medium - then the wastage of 'Advertising' becomes ever more clear.

Yet publishers persist with pay-for-my-content/pay-for-adverts-on-my-content as their only experiment - as if the solution can only be one or other, or both. Perhaps it's time for them to try a new experiment rather than repeat a failed one? Perhaps it's time to try not one, or other, or both... but neither.

How can publishers create value if they do not charge for content and do not take adverts?

Micro-contributions? Nah - that's just paying for content by novel means (as was Radiohead's pay what you like for our album) Sponsorship? Nah - that's just placing adverts on my content, by another name. Affiliate deals - just another digital ad innovation.

What can they do? Start with the Because Effect. Don't try to make money with content, try to make it because of it.

Content can be the social object around which communities of purpose form - co-creating communities ready and willing to wikifix solutions with brands and organisations - instead of having them imposed on them and fed to them through advertising.

Publishers can become platform organisations: platforms for creating outcomes with genuine ROI rather than platforms for pumping out things people may find useful attached to ads for things they rarely do.

Pay for content/Place ads on content, worked in a world of mass production and distribution - of mass media. But a new 'neither' model is required in a world of niche, of communities of purpose, of active rather than passive consumers - in a networked world.

Platform could be it.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Announcing: Social Business Innovation Awards

Social business innovation: Efficiency and tranformation through the use of social tools.

We have the best set of tools in history for people to find each other and act together to create and improve on the things that matter to them.

What are we doing with them?

Some businesses and organisations are grasping them to wikifix their products and services, to deliver best-fit R&D and NPD and join in waste-free people-powered communications and marketing. The wikifixing of the world has begun.

Those engaging in the process reach new levels of efficiency thanks to an ever-better fit with the needs of their partners - those formerly known as the customer. (By way of disclosure, that's what we at 90:10 Group help organisations with).

I hope you will join with me to celebrate the best of them - and through this find a path to the communities-of-purpose-driven future of the organisation.

So each month this blog will host a Social Business Innovation of The Month award, nominated by you and voted on by you. The format is very much inspired by Neil Perkin's ThinkTank.

The awards are to recognise great work in open/social business/organisational design/innovation/tranformation/efficiency using social technologies.

The winners will enter a case-study Hall of Fame to be shared with all - and in which the winners can revel in the glory of their peers' admiration ;-). More importantly, we can all get inspiration and guidance.

We'll have some (digital) badges for nominees and winners too (logos etc in production, and if you want to contribute ideas/creative talent please drop my 90:10 colleague Ilkut a line. Make them better than my hastily assembled effort.)

I'm less concerned at this stage about the niceties of defining specific rules (they will emerge), more with encouraging your participation - and that of those you know will care.

So at this stage, let's just nominate what we think is great from anything that's been done right up until now.

I hope one of the side effects will be discovery for those of us working, or planning on working, in this space, too.

But, before we get a chance to vote, we need some nominations.

Just post yours as a comment with a link to anything relevant (slidedeck, blogpost, video etc) and at the end of January we'll open the voting.

Please share with those who will care.

Monday, February 01, 2010

Vote in the first social business innovation awards

Name the Social Business Innovation Award winner for Jan 2010(polls)

The nominations are now closed and the voting is now open in the first ever Social Business Innovation Awards. Don't worry if your favourites aren't on the list, we all get the chance to nominate again for the next month's when the voting closes on this round on Feb 11.

For those who missed the nomination phase, to reiterate, this is what it's all about:

Social business innovation: Efficiency and tranformation through the use of social tools.

We have the best set of tools in history for people to find each other and act together to create and improve on the things that matter to them.

What are we doing with them?

Some businesses and organisations are grasping them to wikifix their products and services, to deliver best-fit R&D and NPD and join in waste-free people-powered communications and marketing. The wikifixing of the world has begun.

Those engaging in the process reach new levels of efficiency thanks to an ever-better fit with the needs of their partners - those formerly known as the customer. (By way of disclosure, that's what we at 90:10 Group help organisations with).

I hope you will join with me to celebrate the best of them - and through this find a path to the communities-of-purpose-driven future of the organisation.

So each month this blog will host a Social Business Innovation of The Month award, nominated by you and voted on by you. The format is very much inspired by Neil Perkin's ThinkTank.

The awards are to recognise great work in open/social business/organisational design/innovation/tranformation/efficiency using social technologies.

The winners will enter a case-study Hall of Fame to be shared with all - and in which the winners can revel in the glory of their peers' admiration ;-). More importantly, we can all get inspiration and guidance.

The winner will enter a Hall of Fame where we can collectively gawp upon fine thinking, share opinions and get inspired.

So, here are this month's nominees (note they do not have to be from the last month (at least initially), the monthly cycle is just to keep this rolling and keep us collectively scouring.

The Nominations are:

1. The City Square Project

Proposed by Eaon Pritchard
Eaon said: Tiny steps but i was interested to see this initiative from developers in my home town of Aberdeen using the web to gather input from the people of the city into making a plan to potentially transform a city centre space.

2. Best Buy (Twelpforce)

Proposed by Ted Shelton: I'd like to suggest that large companies should get kudos for doing brave things and Best Buy has really gone all out. Every Best Buy store now has a sign up on the front door about their Twitter initiative, Twelpforce.



3. Local Motors

Proposed by Neil Perkin

A great example that I have been recently obsessing about is Local Motors in the US who crowdsource design for their models, and whom I wrote about here: http://bit.ly/7v8eBq




4. BusinessCard2 Nominated anonymously (?): BusinessCard2 is helping make small business, social business. Check them out here: http://BusinessCard2.com

5. Snausages
Nominated by me and shared by Josh Bernoff; Del Monte developed the newest product in its Snausages line, Breakfast Bites, using input from a social network of dog owners it formed. According to an Advertising Age video and article, Del Monte developed its new Breakfast Bites product in just six weeks with the guidance of the exclusively formed group of pet consumers.

VOTING CLOSES ON February 11, 2010. Nominations for the next (February 2010) award will open shortly after.