Going Postal

I tried to track a recorded delivery on the Post Office website today.
When you Google 'Post Office' Track & Trace comes back as one of the four most important returns, as selected by Google, relating to the term Post Office.
On the Post Office site it is one of five (and listed at No4) of the Post Office Essentials.
Bear with me...
These to me are indicators of how important both the Post Office and its online customers view the Track & Trace function of the site.
So if you were looking after the Post Office twitter account you may think it worthwhile to stay abreast of its state of functionality - or at least have routes to hand to find out what the issues may be and the fix times estimated?
Or then again... you could regard it as someone else's problem.

This afternoon I tried to track a parcel and got the message that the system was down.
It gave no clue as to when it may return.
So I tweeted the Post Office.

This is how it played out:

1. David Cushman ‏@davidcushman  1h1 hour ago

   @PostOffice how long is your Track & Trace site going to be down for?

   0 retweets0 favorites
   

Post Office ‏@PostOffice  1h1 hour ago

@davidcushman Track and Trace is powered by @RoyalMail you may wish to tweet them about this. ~ Luke

4:49 PM - 20 Aug 2015 · Details

David Cushman ‏@davidcushman  1h1 hour ago

@PostOffice @RoyalMail It's on the PO site - one of the main links offered when 'post office' is googled. Perhaps in your interest to know?

Post Office ‏@PostOffice  54m54 minutes ago

@davidcushman That part is powered by Royal Mail, it would need to be investigated by them as it's their service.

5:02 PM - 20 Aug 2015 · Details

David Cushman ‏@davidcushman  9m9 minutes ago

@PostOffice Ah thanks. Does that get ticked as a customer issue resolved then?

In the mean time, I'd tested it for myself - and it was back online. I do wonder why 'Luke' hadn't found the time - I guess he was busy gathering evidence that my problem was nothing to do with him.
I was after a relatively simple answer to a relatively simple question. In return I was getting a lesson in organisational structure.
I'm sorry, but I do find this buck passing at the front line frustrating.
The Post Office and those representing it really can't take so little responsibility for what is clearly an important piece of real estate on their website - and a significant driver of traffic. Who cares who it's powered by - certainly not Post Office or Royal Mail customers.

Here's my advice for a quick fix: 1. Move the Powered By graphic above the fold (old newspaper folk will know what that means, it means in this case you shouldn't have to scroll down the page to discover the Powered By secret... 2. Add a link to Royal Mail customer service, if that's where you would like to point the traffic (aka blame).

Here's my advice for the right fix: Reorganise the business around putting your customer first, but I realise that may be a very large ask for a Thursday afternoon.

2015: The Year of Micro Private Networks - and a new threat to mass comms

Snapchat has just been valued at $12bn. PRISM and other forms of state surveillance of our social communications are driving a retreat to privacy.

The omnipresence of brands in our social streams is pushing some folk to do the equivalent of hitting the mute button when the ads are on TV – they are looking for ways NOT to be interrupted - not to be targeted or otherwise 'engaged' by ham-fisted, dads-dancing-at-weddings brands.

This preference for the private, for the small social groups of communication – six-person social networks, sms-based one-to-few interactions, all of these is piling on the agony for mass communication.

How does an advertiser slap banner ads into our private conversations – by their very nature we want to switch off anything that might reveal our preferences (key word matching of ad to content of conversation, in the style of G-mail or twitter ads, for example, even this will be unwanted by those headed for the small-private-network future).

It’s a fear-led place. It’s not something I want to see. But (and I say this is an As-Well rather than Instead Of scenario, it may be the dawning of a cultural lock-down. Sharing for some folk is less caring, more scaring.

Facebook active use is actually down at the end of this year (by 0.5% over all granted, though much more pronounced among younger segments) The way people are using it is changing too – much more voyeurism, much less sharing of their own input (images, video etc).

And the problem for mass comms?  How to get your message into those private conversations when they don’t want you to  know anything about them.

Relationship marketing remains the key. Create an easy and ‘right’ experience and the result isn’t a banner ad – it’s a heart won and a mind  made up.  We may want to switch off anything that would give an advertiser a clue when we go micro-social, but try as we might we won’t switch our beliefs off when we make our private connections.

You’ll recommend based on your experience just as heartily in private (perhaps more so) than you would have done in public.

This of course means the building of advocacy is even more important. It’s pretty much all that can work in this emerging micro-social world.

The challenge facing digital marketers now then is, how can you apply the rules of advocacy creation to any marketing activities beyond that delivered by their one-to-one- social media activities. And if you can't, where should you focus your spend instead?

This charge to privacy is, in my view, a road bump on the journey to Open (as in The 10 Principles of Open Business) which I think we will come to look back on as the time when a lot of people came to the realisation that they didn't NEED control from the centre.

It's an important learning, but something of a cul-de-sac in my view unless the outputs for all improve (and that is a road that always leads us back to collaboration, an Open road).

But for all that - it is happening - and marketeers must adapt to cope.

Twitter: Where investors can have their cake and eat it

Image courtesy: Bakerella.com

Things I wish I'd done... registered for the Twitter IPO. I took interest far too late. By the time I was ready to put my money where my mouth was I discovered I needed to jump through some hurdles (filling forms, sending them to a postal address etc) to be allowed to trade in US shares.
Oh well. Yesterday (before the float) I thought they'd rise about 15-20% on day one (I was guestimating they'd hit $30 to anyone who'd listen).
As it happens twitter went ballistic - up 93% on the day. I expect a lot of profit taking over the next few days as the market takes stock of that.
For the record - I warned against investing in the Facebook IPO at the time.
Personal investors in Twitter would be wise taking enough profit to cover what they've paid - and perhaps leaving the rest in for the journey. Essentially you get to have your cake and eat it too.
And it looks like it's going to be some journey - there are more than 200 new jobs being advertised by Twitter on Linkedin.com right now - more than a dozen in London. From what I recall of the size of the London office, they're going to have to find new premises. Scale that around the world and you can see this is going to be an exciting few months for twitter.
It's rather wonderful that a company that describes itself as operating at the 'extreme of the open wing of the open party' is finding a very significant place in the world.
For why I think Twitter is worth its IPO asking price (and a little bit more right now) take a look at the post I wrote here.

Why are so many culling their follow counts?

I thought it time to trim out the deadwood among those I follow on twitter today:: Those who have stopped tweeting, or who have shifted channel, or turned out not to be the interesting folk I thought they may be initially, etc.

image via http://www.charlesstone.com

In the process I spotted a disturbing trend. Using one of the many twitter management tools I found several people who I follow and quite regularly engage with, who don't follow me.
I'm not talking about the 'too much attention to cope with' folk, the @stephenfrys  or @bbcbreakingnews of this world (for example), I'm talking more the moderately interesting or those who may have done a lot of conference speaking, or (heaven forfend, and trust me, I'm aware of the risk in every word of this, those who have puiblished a book). It's not that they aren't simply following me back (quelle domage), it's that they appear to be following almost nobody.
I mean if you are following sub 500 and your follower level is closer to 50,000, well something seems to have gone wrong there.
For a start, that doesn't happen organically. You take the decision to cull.
Some may do it for ego and aesthetic reasons - look at the ratio on that!
Most would wrap this in the reason of 'signal versus noise'.
Which is just so much bs unless you happen to be using twitter 24/7 and have text alerts pinging on your phone each time you get an @message. I need back up in case I miss the thing that's important to me being tweeted or retweeted. 3000 folk gives me that cover. Always has so far.
It also gives me diversity. If I don't open up to outliers, how will I see the extreme moments that often have the most impact on our world (the Black Swans for those of an Anti-fragile bent).
I've always tried to follow back pretty much everyone who follows me. But even  in this I have started to hit a limit. Mine is around 3000. If I start following more than that I go seeking to clear out some deadwood - the folk who are not, or hardly ever, contributing to my time line.
And this is where I find it odd that folk with big follower numbers to feed (for surely their's is a broadcaster-audience relationship) feel that they can learn enough about their world from following less than 500 folk to provide a credible curation.
I salute their ability to select. I salute their trust in those they choose. I salute the trust their audiences confer on them.
But I can't help thinking they are helping to accelerate Twitter towards being the place where broadcast and self-promotion dominates rather than a place where adhoc communities of purpose form to get things done (which remains its promise).
Culling those you follow is - in extremis - like limiting your view to that from a prison cell. Why volunteer for that?
I would be delighted to hear from people who have taken this radical approach (culling those they follow) to reduce their exposure to noise or for whatever reason they have, and how it'
s working for them.
But until I hear a very good case I'm going to stick with the theory that one extra node on your network doubles its value: and that this 2n proposition can only happen if the connection between nodes is two-way.

BT holds its hands up and pays out credits

In my previous post I shared how I felt BT had got their CRM badly wrong - making an offer to current customers it then appeared reneged on. You can read the whole sorry saga here.

The very encouraging news is that after making my feelings known via twitter and blog, BT admitted it had got it wrong, said sorry, and has been brilliant at putting things right.

And for this we should heap praise. I publish this today to thank them for that - and to make sure others who received the same misleading mail-shot are empowered to benefit as I have.

Here's what BT had to say:

Having now looked into this matter in detail, I can confirm that we had two different direct mailings (DM) for Essential Extra [The extra channels and HD deal the letters promoted]. One of which was aimed at customers on our “free Vision Essential for one year” offer, and the other at customer paying the standard £5 a month for their Vision Essential subscription. 
We had an error on our mailing system that meant the latter group of customers were incorrectly sent the DM containing the claims “from just £2 more a month” and “£2 extra on top of your current TV subscription”. 
We appreciate that the overall impression of this mailing was therefore misleading for customers who are not currently paying for their Vision subscription. Please accept this letter as a sincere apology for our mistake. 
It is of the upmost importance to BT that we are clear and honest with our customers and to ensure that they are not misled by either marketing or customer service communications. We are in the process of reviewing how we target marketing communications to ensure that errors like this don’t happen again. 
We will of course honour this price point and arrange a bill credit of £60 should you sign up for Essential Extra (this being the difference of £5 per month, over the 12 month minimum term). You will therefore pay just £2 more a month, as was stated in the mailing you received. 
If you would like to go ahead with Essential Extra please let me know and I can place the order and arrange the credit for you. I hope you find this satisfactory but if you require any more help or information, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

And I have done - and the customer service team have been excellent at making sure everything has happened as it should have done.

Neil O'Shea and Colleen McElhatton from the BT Social Media Team deserve particular praise.So well done BT - it's great to hear you are reviewing how you target.

Other companies would do well to take note - getting your CRM wrong can not only annoy customers - it can end up adding hefty costs.

I've no idea how many more people will now be able to claim a £60 credit - but I'm guessing it'll be rather more than a handful.

2 years and 7 months that persuaded the PM to join Twitter

The picture I took at Starbucks. And tweeted

Two years and seven months after I collared Prime Minister David Cameron on the subject of his position on Twitter ("Too Many Tweets Make a Twat, to quote from his Absolute Radio interview before the last election) he has finally taken the plunge and started his own account.

His opening tweet - for those who have lost the connection in the mists of time - is a reference to that very "Twat" faux pas.

"I'm starting Conference with this new Twitter feed about my role as Conservative Leader. I promise there won't be "too many tweets..."

When I bumped into Cameron in a London Starbucks he took the view that politicians should think before they speak - which makes Twitter risky.

Politicians, he said, needed to think about what they said, before they said it.

He worried that those who tweeted all the time were sharing a stream of consciousness.

I said politicians ought not think too hard before they speak, they should tweet their stream of consciousness. I'd prefer the direct honesty.

For the rest of the original post, (and some interesting issues about the realities of privacy in today's connected world), go here.

By co-incidence I was retelling the story of my chance encounter with the PM at one of the panel sessions of London Social Media Week a couple of week's back. Which has led to some confusion:

While it is perfectly possible that I set a small flame burning in Cameron's mind back in 2010 (the power of John Prescott's ability to disintermediate the media may have had growing resonance post the whole Murdoch melt-down) I cannot claim to be behind this latest sorte into social media. If I had been he'd be following more folk back than a handful of echo-chamber Tory MPs. And he wouldn't have an underscore in his Twitter handle (it's @david_cameron). I mean, have folk there never used an iPhone???

Also I'd have been making his move on to Twitter part of a much larger shift from centre to edge.

Inspired by my new connection, I wrote an Open Letter (with the emphasis on Open) to Mr Cameron after our meeting (and after he'd come to power). Given the 2 year 7 month delay between our Starbucks enounter and his Twitter account, it would be wonderful to think that he'll be acting on the contents of the Open Letter by Christmas... Here's hoping!

Related articles

• David Cameron joins Twitter
• "I promise there won't be too many tweets": Prime Minister David Cameron joins Twitter
• PM @David_Cameron joins Twitter
• @David_Cameron joins Twitter ahead of Tory conference
• David Cameron joins Twitter, might now be a twat
• David Cameron's Twitter flunkies
• British PM Cameron joins Twitter despite reservations
• Cameron's Corkers: Exposing the PM's miscellany of untruths and u-turns

Judgment Call: Do Prepared Tweets Miss the Point of Social

I'm part of the Financial Times' Judgment Call panel - a group of business people called on from time to time for advice on the burning issues of the day for publication online and in print.
On Wednesday this week the panel consisted Don Tapscott (author Wikinomics) WhipCar.com co-founder Vinay Gupta and myself (as Co-Founder of 90:10 Group).

You can read the column in full in the print edition of June 27, 2012 or online (nb: the FT has a metered paywall model for content).
Or you can click on the images here to see larger versions.

click image to enlarge

The Problem was framed:
"Morgan Stanley Smith Barney has announced that it will allow its financial advisers to use Twitter and Linkedin, providing they tweet from a library of pre-written messages. Does this defeat the purpose of should it be commended for embracing technology?

Here's what I had to say (which was lightly edited for publication):

They appear to be thinking of social media as little more than a way in which they can indulge in direct selling. It’s a reductionist approach to human interaction which seeks to simplify the possibilities to: buy/sell. In doing so it misses out on the customer-led insight and innovation those prepared to be more human benefit from.

Indeed, you could ask why they bother attaching humans to the Twitter accounts at all when selecting from a library could as easily be achieved by a bot – and with less room for risk via human error.

Click to image to enlarge

This crippling desire for control (also found elsewhere in the financial sector) could undermine the whole enterprise. It’s humans that people are likely to trust and buy from. This too-controlled version of humanity will provide a confusing and eerily corporate view of the collection of people inside Morgan Stanley Smith Barney.

It also carries the risk of becoming the banking world’s equivalent of Apple’s Siri – and we all know how much fun people have had trying to catch Siri out.

On the plus side at least they have a control group of 20 who are being given a freer hand to be themselves. My guess is they will out-perform their bot-like brethren.

I was also on the Judgment Call panel when Morgan Stanley first started its twitter experiment a year ago (the recent interest is in a global roll-out to 18,000 staff after a year long trial). Click here to compare.

Related articles

• Morgan Stanley to Expand Access to Social Media

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• Morgan Stanley Employees Now Allowed to Say Boring Things on Twitter

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• Morgan Stanley Unlocks Social Media for 17,000 Financial Advisors

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• Welcome to the open world: Don Tapscott at TEDGlobal 2012

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Google's skyscraper?

There is a fascinating theory (from Barclays Capital) that where-ever there is a boom in skyscraper building you can be sure rapid economic collapse will follow.
This measurable proposition echoes one of Parkinson's Laws (for which I am indebted to @jobucks on Twitter.) which states that when companies start building monuments to themselves, their precipitous decline is just around the corner.

How is the new Apple HQ coming along, I wonder?
Perhaps this trend has been repeated through history. Perhaps that's why the phrase 'pride comes before a fall' is so well used - and often so accurate.

And then I think about Google Plus. Is it an essential reconfiguration of google's business model? Or one helluva showboat?
Time will tell.
In any event I'm going to be watching what Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook build for themselves with renewed interest.

Related articles

• Skyscrapers have 'unhealthy' link to financial crises: bank (calgaryherald.com)
• The Shard - London (seeker401.wordpress.com)
• Skyscrapers Bad (theawl.com)
• China's skyscraper craze 'may herald economic crash' (guardian.co.uk)
• China, India skyscraper boom may herald downturn (seattlepi.com)
• Tech's Doomsday Plots: How Your Favorite Tech Giants Could Lose Their Edge (readwriteweb.com)

10 ‘trend type things’ you really won’t care about by the end of 2012

Image courtesy: powerisastateofmind.blogspot.com

 I've learned over the (many) years not to take predictions too seriously. Or lists. So here's mine for Christmas 2011. I offer them if only to help you learn not to take predictions, or lists, too seriously.

10 ‘trend type things’ you really won’t care about by the end of 2012

1. FourSquare
Seriously. I’ve just spent a week using it in a half-hearted manner and find myself close to the top of ‘my friends’ leader board. Checked in at London’s Kings Cross station the other night. Just me! Not saying location based won’t matter. Am saying FourSquare won’t.
2. News breaking first on Twitter.
Come on – it’s commonplace now, the battle is over. Which gives traditional media a clue about what it should do next. (Hint, relevance = news)
3. The number of voice minutes in your mobile phone package. 
Bet you already have loads more than you actually use.
4. Google+: 
There, I said it. I know lots have people have ‘joined it’ by how often do you actually go there? Add a year and think how it’ll look from there. (Buzz, Wave...Plus)
5. Big Data:
Because we’ll have started to figure out the important bit – getting the insight out.
6. Influence:
At least as a static 'you’re influential for one, you’re influential for all,' thing. Folk might finally work out that what they actually mean by that is: ‘famous’. Peer to peer distribution of trust on a moment-by-moment, context-by-context basis will become more valuable – and finally seen as such. The flock rocks. So...
7. Klout.
I’ve stopped caring already. So have you. Haven’t you?
8. Text to vote.
Who needs it? I Always said the X-Factor should be decided by who gets the most down-loads anyway.
9. Using digital as a channel to manage costs
(we’ll be participating in social to create value instead).
10. Social Business (I hope).
I hope we can talk more about Open Business instead. And if you want to know why – click here.

Related articles

• Your Klout score is killing YOU (babyfruit.typepad.com)
• Forget Klout: you can't measure influence on Twitter (telegraph.co.uk)

Top Stories reveal Facebook’s broken strategy

Some quick thoughts on Facebook’s latest iteration (as revealed at F8 last night).

The moving 'stream of news' from folks you know has been pushed into the wrong place. It should be in the centre. Facebook should instead push top stories to the edge (as Twitter does with Trends).

The reason they have got this wrong is the reason Facebook is headed in the wrong direction full stop. It can’t find a way of making value without slapping ads on. It is therefore forced into thinking it is a mass media play.

When you think like that you get led by the lowest common denominator (most ‘liked’ over most relevant) that leads you to ‘top stories’ and to placing them in the centre.

Facebook is treating your ‘friends’ as one big community. You only get to choose who you share with once. It should at least be every time you share.

Twitter’s trends is another (in some ways worse) case in point. It surfaces the most shared, not the most relevant - among everyone.

Top Story is kind of ‘trends among friends’. Which is something I previously advocated twitter should do. But now I see it in the flesh and actually working, I realise how even this delivers most liked, not most relevant – even if it is ‘most liked/shared’ among your friends.

For example, when I checked in on Facebook this morning my experience of it was a top story which was a very funny video involving British chef Nigella Lawson (also available on Youtube, on the open web).

The video is entertaining. It would entertain many. But it sure ain’t relevant. Because it gets liked and shared by many of my friends (and presumably their friends) it stays on top story position.

Meanwhile, in a side-thought at the side of the page potentially more relevant stuff ticks by.

What is needed is a way in which you can select, every time, who you wish to share with. Friends may have things in common but that does not mean they share common purposes. Communities do.

And communities of purpose are much more adhoc in nature than Facebook is built for. They are much more like the way conversations develop in twitter – aggregating around a common thing for the time that thing matters to those taking part, moving on to the next as and when the need is solved or the next emerges.

Communities of purpose get together to achieve things – from answering a quick question to making a solution to shared need. Friends hang out.

And this is Facebook’s challenge. Communities of purpose have to be much more adhoc than it is built for – yet this is where the true value (making things with people rather than sending messages at them) resides.

The Top Story thing reveals how far off Facebook is from cracking this, or perhaps even understanding it. It is why, instead, they must attempt to be a media platform. Because media platforms are nice and simple for selling ads on - instead of coming up with ways of creating real value with communities.

Related articles

• The New 'Top' Story: Facebook's Flow Of Change (npr.org)
• Facebook Enhances News Feed and Introduces Ticker (hubspot.com)
• Facebook Now Has 800 Million Users (mashable.com)
• We don't connect to be marketed to (fasterfuture.blogspot.com)

We don't connect to be marketed to

Facebook's announcement that it is to enable a 'subscribe' button so you can follow interesting things and people (provided they are sharing publicly) is the latest shot in the battle for hearts and minds among the big players. 'Subscribe' is essentially Twitter's follow (or Google +'s for that matter).

So it's yet another case of Facebook being late to the party. The extra it adds is enabling you to select how much of someone's stream you want to subscribe to - giving a little control to the follower (though frankly this has varying value depending on your personal experience of the volume of content - which has always been controlled by who and what you friend or follow in any event).

But it got me thinking: Subscribe takes us back to our online social roots: You just have to love blogs and blogrolls, RSS and hypertext linking. A glorious place of freely forming communities of purpose.

All the rest; Facebook, Twitter, Google +, etc etc, all the rest are at best filters of simplicity or, at their worst, silos of data. Some sit further along to the left of that scale, some to the right. But sit on it they do, in a way that blogs and rss well, don't.

The social platforms have taken down some serious technical barriers to entry - itself a silo of some significance. My wife would never have written a blog. But she's at home and connected with facebook. This is a good thing.

But ultimately we will call time on the nannying. The tech difficulties the platforms solve for us will become problems no longer. A level of what we now call technical know-how will simply become common sense. Like being able to cross a road, most folk will grow up knowing how. They'll call it common sense rather than know-how because it will, of course, be common.

At that point we no longer need the platforms. We'll need and will have the common sense to publish, to discover those who share our needs, problems or desires. And the ability to connect in self-forming groups.

And guess what Facebook et al? We won't be doing this to be marketed to.

Related articles

• Facebook Launches Twitter-Like 'Subscriptions' (techcrunch.com)
• On Google+, circles and silos and internal communications (sharemarketing.wordpress.com)
• How to use Twitter and tweet like a bird (vodafone.com.au)

Size - not growth rate - matters for communities

Tokyo - by http://www.flickr.com/photos/oimax/

I read all the claims about the rapid growth of google+ ‘use’ and I still feel unmoved.

Perhaps it’s for the reason that I put ‘use’ in quote marks: Google + feels very much in its nascent, gave it a try, walked off, may-be-back-if-enough-other-folk-find-it-interesting-to-remind-me-about-it-later, phase.

Which, to be fair, is how I started with Twitter. But also with a hundred other new kids on the block.

But perhaps my reticence is also because of a remarkable scaling effect which happens in communities. I say communities, it looks to me like this has only been applied to cities thus far, so bear with me...

I came across an interesting article by Marcus Du Sautoy at the weekend. This is the chap who has written and is presenting the current BBC series The Code (http://www.bbc.co.uk/tv/features/code/)  – which looks at the mathematics which appear to govern, well pretty much everything.

Du Sautoy cites the work of British-born theoretical physicist Geoffrey West who used maths to discover fundamental laws governing cities. 

“...it can be understood by a single magic number: 1.15. Each time the population of a city increases by 100 per cent (in other words doubles) the social and economic factors scale up by 115 per cent.

“So, if you compare a city with a population of one million people to a city of two million, then instead of the larger city having twice as many restaurants, concert halls, libraries and schools, you find instead an extra 15 per cent on top of what you’d expect. Even salaries are affected by this curious ratio...”

In other words the value of being part of a community (my derivation) grows by an extra 15% each time that community doubles in size.

And while Google+ has reached its first 10m users in a spectacularly fast period of time (16 days compared with Twitter’s 780 and Facebook’s 852) its value to the members of that community is similarly spectacularly limited by its relative lack of scale.

Let’s try the maths (not my strongest point so feel free to point out flaws and correct me:

Based on Facebook having 640m users and Twitter having 175m (Wikipedia August 1, 2011). Then the social/economic advantage conferred over Google + users is: approximately 200% greater for Twitter users and 230% greater for Facebook users.

Simply – Facebook and Twitter ought to prove at least twice as valuable to current users thanks to the scaling up of value delivered by the sheer size of community.

Growth rate has no impact on that.

So until we have a Google + with at least 100m users (and likely twice that) there’s little chance of it delivery the user experience either Twitter or Facebook can.

The dodgy maths bit:

How did I get to this? I took 10m as the base value (Google + users after 16 days). I doubled this, then doubled the outcome and doubled that (etc) until I reach the scale of Twitter and then Facebook (an approximate in the case of Twitter).

Taking ‘1’ as my base value for ‘social-economic factors’ generated, I multiplied by our magic number (1.15), for every time the base community doubled in size.

eg 10m users x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 640m (= Facebook).

Therefore social-economic factors multiply thus: 1 x 1.15 x 1.15 x 1.15 x 1.15 x1.15 x 1.15 = 2.3 (therefore a growth of 230% compared with original 10m strong community).

Related articles

• Marcus du Sautoy interview: 'There's a geek chic about maths now' (telegraph.co.uk)
• Google plus invite and DMS thoughts on Google+ (dms-internetmarketing.co.uk)
• 5 things Google+ does better than Facebook and Twitter (venturebeat.com)
• Opinion: Why Twitter is obsolete (macworld.com)
• Why size isn't everything - at least for communities... (thewayoftheweb.net)
• Google+ grabs record 25M unique visitors, but it's not fair to compare to Facebook (venturebeat.com)

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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