Just posted a review of Grouped on the Brilliant Noise blog. It is such a fascinating book, I think I could happily blog about it all week – in fact I may do…

One of the insights which tickled me, was the idea that increasing amounts of information and complexity could make us more reliant on social networks than ever before.

When we are uncertain about what to do, we turn to others to help us make a decision…. In a world of exponentially increasing information, decisions will be harder because our capacity for memory will remain the same. With exponentially increasing information, and limited capacity for memory, we will increasingly turn to others to help us decide.

We are becoming hyper-connected: we are using online networks to stay in touch with more people. These may be more people who are on the periphery for us, but we are connected all the same.

These networks, along with the wider increase in available content that the web brings, means there is more noise out there. More choices, and more complexity in trying to make decisions.

Accord to Paul Adams, author of Grouped, this means that we will rely on our social networks to help us make those decisions. We do this a lot of the time anyway, but with more choices and more complexity we will do it more so.

Which means the complexity which is revealed and created by our living in bigger networks, will in turn make us more reliant on those networks.

I’m going for a lie down in a dark, un-networked room now. But it is an interesting phenomenon, isn’t it?

Networks are an abiding obsession for me. So I love this…

This data visualisation video illustrates how Amazon applies the power of networks to selling more books (and everything else) – by tapping into the networks of purchases of books to offer more.

The visualisation was created with a tool from Christopher Warnow, which is available to download, if you want to try it out yourself.

Amazon Recommendation Network from Christopher Warnow on Vimeo.

In his blog post about the project, Christopher talks about his surprise when using the tool to find that “milieus of interest”. A milieu is a “a person’s social environment” – we jargon-debased marketing types would have said “communities of interest” or started bleating about “interest graphs”, but I definitely prefer “milieus” (and yes, I had to look it up to make sure I understood it).

When Christopher was looking at books he noticed differences in the recommendation networks of Germans and Americans (on the .com domain). For instance, with Linked, the brilliant popular science book about network theory…

The similarities are the complex theory and network dynamics. But the differences are interesting as well. The english milieus contain politics and collective systems, wheras the germans are more into successful marketing and economics.

Network theory is a good place to look at where different communities of interest converge. Earlier this year i attended a conference on how opinions move through networks at the University of Warwick. Sociologists, mathematicians and physicists were all there, swapping ideas and trying to see the same problems from the point of view of their own discipline.

Via O’Reilly Radar.

Interesting train of thought set in motion by an excellent blog post from Chris Thorpe.

He makes a case for “frictionless sharing” (stuff you read or see or listen to being shared automatically with your social network) as promoted by Facebook, being “noisy and for robots” while “declarative frictionfull sharing” (deciding to share things and putting a little effort into doing so) as being meaningful.

It is one of those arguments that you realise you agree with and have agreed with, without ever really thinking it through.

Frictonless sharing is just data. When it is coming into your stream – its annoying. Sometimes when people – and I have almost certainly done it – post too frequently on Twitter it feels like theres not too much friction going on between thoughts and screen – they are just talking without thinking…

Chris says:

It’s aspergic social software. I always think that good social software is where you can picture yourself having that conversation with someone – where they have edited their subconscious in some way before the stream of data emerges.

He talks about Instagram as an example of sharing that is purposeful, calls for a little effort, and I know exactly what he means. Since my business partner, Jason, nudged me into giving Instagram a propoer go, i have utterly fallen for it.

I thought it was just Twitter for pictures before – it can be and some people use it like that – and decided that the last thing I needed was another type of Twitter in my life. But it isn’t -it’s slower. It slows you down, it focuses you and takes into a more mindful, calmer place.

As I became more used to using it, I noticed these behaviours:

• I played with Instagram instead of checking Twitter updates. I was using it to distract myself from noise.
• Walking anywhere could become a mini-photowalk. And when you’re looking for great photo-opportunities, you’re noticing more, really seeing things, instead of rushing past.
• My stream was something I reviewed and was proud of… I have a few times retrospectively deleted a photo from the stream, because it didn’t fit. It wasn’t as nice as the others.

All very different to how I used Twitter and Facebook. It was all about the noticing and sharing something thoughtful, composed, something you were proud of…

Chris talks about some other social software that works like Instagram – mainly new ones that are in private beta – and it feels like a little movement back toward meaningful social media might be taking place.

One slightly unexpected but pleasant surprise for me in the launch of the new Brilliant Noise was how energising I found it to have the new website and its blog go live.

Developed with craft and care by Endless and Brighton’s patron-saint-of-Wordpress David Lockie, the site looks and feels right. But it’s what’s to come that I found excited – I realised that I had a real imperative to start blogging more often, as part of helping it come to life.

Blogging’s going to be important for Brilliant Noise, because it is a new venture that needs to find its voice. Blogging’s perfect for that, with all the benefits that come from thinking, writing and working in public with a network that I’ve learned about on this blog.

But blogging’s important to me too. This blog will continue, as ever as my personal public notebook. Somewhere where I can worry less about the rough edges on a post…

Even when I’m quiet for a while, blogging’s a big part of how I think and work. Every time I come back to it with a re-newed focus and new energy I feel thrilled to be doing it.

: : By the by, Perhaps fittingly, this blog was completely stripped down and re-built this week. Again David Lockie’s work, but unfortunately neccessitated by having been hacked and infested with a whole bunch of spam and black hat SEO nastiness.

It was a tough lesson to learn though – and a relatively expensive one.

I’m now paying for a service called VaultPress which automatically backs up Open… for me.

Thanks to everyone who spotted the problems and offered advice. I think we’re back in business…

It was a big week for me, with my business Brilliant Noise entering a new and very different phase.

I’ve been joined by two amazing partners – Maddy Wood and Jason Ryan – who have become equal partners in what I can’t help thinking of as the new Brilliant Noise.

For the past year, Brilliant Noise has been in discovery mode. We’ve done everything from pitching pilots of TV shows to coaching senior executives. There was a TEDx Talk, there was some fantastic work with the planning guys at AKQA, there were lectures to Exec MBAs, and the last few months have featured a really cool social media strategy project with Nokia and the geniuses at Blast Radius. Fun, fun and fun…

While there were broad themes that connected all of the work, it was open, loosely-coupled stuff. Divergent, as the IDEO chaps like to call it. Well, after divergence comes convergence, focus and direction.

We are laying out our stall as a digital strategy agency. What that means is clear, where it will take us, is less clear.

On the week that Brilliant Noise is starting the cover of UK edition of The Economist’s headline is Into the Storm…

We’re launching this business into uncertain times. That’s a polite way of putting it.

I should probably feel more nervous than I do. But all I feel is excitement – there’s no doubting it will be tough out there, but there’s nowhere I would rather be in my career right now, than facing it with with the team that’s now ready to make Brilliant Noise into something amazing.

Do take a look at the new website if you have a moment, and let me know what you think. The positioning, perspective and services will doubtless evolve in the coming months, but I’m really excited about the direction in which we’re headed.

These are the notes and slides from my talk at SoCon 2011 conference today, 20th October 2011.

Social business?

What do we mean by social business? It’s hard to get a hold of the term. The term itself may not survive.

Quite quickly in my work in social media marketing we found ourselves borrowing from management consultants, change consultants in the models and methods we needed to use. It was pointless to look at the value and practice of social media without looking beyond the limits of boundaries that were laid down, in effect by an old media reality.

It’s all to do with the hullaballoo that is social media…

Significance of social

In all the noise around the social web and business, two trends emerge: we both overstate and understate the significance of social.

“It is difficult, indeed dangerous to underestimate…”

There’s a quote from Rupert Murdoch that I used to refer to a lot five years ago, to give a sense of mainstream business legitimacy to the strategic significance of social media. Five years later it still resonates – but slightly differently…

“It is difficult, indeed dangerous, to underestimate the huge changes this revolution will bring or the power of developing technologies to build and destroy not just companies but whole countries.” – Rupert Murdoch, March 2006

He wasn’t wrong

It was an insight, a prediction of sorts, which came to haunt him. It was of course the courage of campaigners like Tom Watson and the tenacious and brave journalism of Nick Davies and his colleagues at the Guardian that brought the empire-shaking scandal of phone hacking to Murdoch’s door. Social media was used by both – and suprised, i suspect – to bring a the weight and momentum of massive public interest and anger to bear. The news cycle accelerated, there was no time or opportunity for politicians to sweep the issue under the carpet. Social media brought a threat to News International that was nothing to do with commercial competition, business models or attention shifts.

#yourrevolutionhere

As to the “whole countries” part of Murdoch’s uncanny prediction? I’m not going to gift any of the buzzword bingo players out there a point by mentioning this years’ many challenges to state power that have been enhanced, augmented etc.

Social as a useful proxy

Social business, a.k.a. social business desgin, is a useful phrase – for now – but its is effectively a proxy for dealing with a lot of other things – for dealding in the round, with the modern, globally-hyperconnected world.

We mean networks

For the sharp-memoried and quick-eyed among you, this is where the networks thinking part comes in. There’s more detail on this idea in a lecture I gave at Warwick Business School’s executive MBA course on complexity theory.

We mean complexity

Social Business Design to an academic looks like either (a) a nice tag to sell more books/consultancy/technology/conference tickets or, if they in a more charitable mood, a catch-all, a proxy, a simplified way of talking about the business application of networks theory, complexity theory – fields which combine the thoughts and challenge the minds of accomplished people physics, mathematics, sociology and business departments of our universities.

Social is the shift

In Brilliant Noise’s work with Nokia recently, we realised that the bigger business case for social busines, then, could be summarised in the phrase “social is the shift”. It is the change, it is causing the change, it is accelerating the change.

If an organisation is investing people and time in understanding what social media means for it, then it is alive to the pace of change and to the implications of an accelerated, hyper-connected world.

Pace & scale of change

This is what Deloitte’s John Hagel and John Seely-Brown pinpoint in their brilliant book, The Power of Pull. The sum effect of a social web world is to speed up the arrival of edge trends – whether it is fashions or disruptive innovations – from the edge to the mainstream.

Even before I had talked about working with Nokia earlier this year, I was using Stephen Elop’s quote:

‘Chinese OEMs are cranking out a device much faster than the time that it takes us to polish a PowerPoint presentation.’ - Stephen Elop, Nokia CEO , Feb 2011

What would start ups do?

One theme that kept returning for me and my colleagues was: given how dramatic a shift social represents for things like communications and customer relationships, what are companies doing who are not encumbered with legacy structures and systems?

It is useful to ask “What Would Start-Ups Do?” and in fact to take a close look. It’s why we hear names like Threadless, Zappos, etc. all the time in discussions about this field.

What can big organisations do?

While looking at start-ups can be inspirational, useful even, when we turn back to reality of the organisation we are working in, the challenge can seem overwhelming.

Never mind “turning oil tankers”, we start to wonder if the oil tanker isn’t just the wrong kind of ship. That’s the conclusion Luke Johnson seem to reach in the FT yesterday [paywalled content]…

What they need to do is create the business case for change, an internal movement of kinds…

Hierarchies vs. Networks

In large organisations we look at social business design and we see that this is about hierarchies vs. networks. Not that one should win out, but that we should look at and challenge the balance of power between these two ways humans have of getting things done (Three Ways of Getting Things Done, by the way is the title of a useful book about networks and hierarchies).

Hierachies are good at heavy lifting, do big things, permananence. But they are slow and can become sclerotic. Networks are good at change, speed, adapting.

When we talk about social business design often we are talking about shifting the balance of power back in favour of networks.

I urge you to read and listen to whatever you can find of Dan McQuillan‘s work. Dan is a sociologist, who recently set up the MA in Creating Social Media at Goldsmiths.

Dan talks about the NHS as an organisation that is so big, that sometimes bits of it seize up. The hierarchy is so ingrained people don’t have options – they literally can’t do anything because they are locked down with policies and systems, designed with the best intentions, but that have ceased to be useful. The role of digital tools, Dan says, is to help loosen up these structures, create new ways of doing things, new habits.

There’s a video and notes about Dan and some thoughts of my own about networks and hierarchies in a blog post I wrote earlier this year.

Assemblages

One way of understanding that networks and hierarchies have to co-exist is to look at a sociological idea called “assemblages” – ad hoc collaborations between formal, hierarchical organisations and loose networks.

This diagram – and again it was Dan that introduced this idea to me - represents the assemblage that was put in place around the Haiti disaster. Learning the lessons from Katrina, the Red Cross and the US Navy connected with ad hoc networks using tools like Ushahidi to help them coordinate the relief effort.

US Navy

And if we want inspiration that large organisations can change, adapt and use social well, look no further than the US Navy. Brian Solis published the transcript from a speech by Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Gary Roughead.

Social Markting / Brand / Business

Working with the planning team at AKQA earlier this year, we saw a pattern in the progress of big companies getting to grips with social medial. Obviously we’re looking for marketing angle on this, but it is often marketing where social happens first in the organisation.

• Social marketing: Campaigns are successfully developed in social media. Often these are pilots, or add-ons to existing campaigns.
• Social brand: Social media becomes a part of  the “how”, planning for the brand, how it operates, part of how it thinks about its brand communications from the outset.
• Social business: The business case for investing in social media becomes so compelling the business has made it a part of its strategy.

What do leading social businesses have in common?

Things we have noticed about brands like Dell, Starbucks, Ford and other leaders in this are:

• Piloting: The only way to do it, is to do it, as Amelia Earhart put it. They learn by doing.
• Systems: To scale they need to put in place systems to be able to listen, act, evaluate.
• Frameworks: Ways of understanding and making decisions about social are put in place and shared.
• Board sponsors: To get momentum, senior sponsors seem to be really important. If the board isn’t on board…
• Digital literacy: It’s a skills thing. They focus on spreading the skills and abilities to get things done in social.

We begin with good intentions

Especially if it is led by planners, then we get into frameworks pretty quickly. It’s fun – and to a certain extent – very useful. What we realised working on these projects though, was that the process was as important as the policies and frameworks that came out. The frameworks sometimes felt like a useful excuse to (a) get people together from across the organisation and (b) brief and empower them to get things done with social media.

Digital literacy

What Howard Rheingold does so well in articulating is that you need these skills personally, and that you need practice and experience to become literate rather than just aware about social media and networks.

And that goes for everyone. It is in our organisations’ interests to have literate, able people using social media. We just need to find the right hook to get them to experience them…

Productivity

One benefit of using social media that appeals to most people is productivity. Learn to use the tools right and they can help you manage information better, get work done faster, benefit from the serendipity engine effect (being luckier) that John Hagel talks about.

Managed badly of course, they are a distraction, bring on information overload etc. All the more reason to take charge.

I have outlined some ideas about how we can do this in a TEDx presentation called “Web Super Skills”, if you want to know more.

Reputation

The other compelling reason for everyone to develop skills in this area is their personal reputation – what the web says about them – and that of their friends and family.

That’s one of the reasons I wrote a how to guide to managing personal reputation.

“Digital driving licence”

One executive who was using social media well at Nokia – Chris Schaumann – used the phrase “digital driving licence” to sum up the need to training and policies. They are to get you started, aware of the risks but able to make your own decisions, set your own course.

Companies like Dell, Nokia and other are doing this well. Giving people the opportunities to be trained and helped to use social media.

Connecting people with consumers

Again, this is from Nokia: an amazing example to my mind, of combining customer needs with people in the organisation who can help them.

Socializer is a platform that seems to act as a filter and a connector between social media listening technology and experts inside the company.

It’s also a licence, an imperative, for more of Nokia’s people to connect directly with their customers.

Image: Visualisation of Nokia’s Socializer system

This system, and the evolved versions of it, is something I’d expect to see lots of organisations looking at in the near future. It’s the logical extension of listening and encouraging wider engagement with social media.

Find your reason to engage

In summary, social business is a very broad term. It may be too broad. It may not last. But the opportunities and challenges for every business, every individual within a business, are there. Find yours and get on with it…

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So here are some links and notes from my week

Weeknotes

It’s a few weeks to go until the new website goes live for Brilliant Noise (see a preview in the brand treatment from Endless), and I’m thinking one of the things I may well do is have weeknotes. It’s a simple idea which I cam across via Robin Sloan. Companies like Berg share some thoughts about their week every Friday.

Worknotes: attention patterns

Now the idea is echoed in an post from Matt Locke: he calls it worknotes, as he’s not quite prepared to give us weekly updates yet. I ended the week with a really interesting chat about his current projects, which are a fascinating charades category collection of film/book/TV show projects. Matt’s got some really insightful ideas about how attention works – you can catch a flavour of them in his worknotes post…

Serendipity and your career

Last week’s Economist had some articles about the way that work is changing. They got me thinking this week, not least John Hagel being quoted once again about the power of Twitter as a serendipity engine, especially for the growing movement of independent knowledge workers.

Actually the article put it another way, talking of the network of peers that Twittter lets you maintain as a…

…“big-ideas crowd” who can keep them mentally fresh. This echoes the discussion of “managed serendipity” in last year’s business bestseller, “The Power of Pull”, in which John Hagel and John Seely Brown argued that the successful worker of the future will live in clusters of talented, open-minded people and spend a lot of time going to thought-provoking conferences. Third, they need a “regenerative community” to maintain their emotional capital, meaning family and friends in the real world “with whom you laugh, share a meal, tell stories and relax”.

There’s a lot more in that article and also the Got Talent? article from the same special report that is really interesting.

Three wonderful videos…

A time-lapse of the Likeminds meeting in Brighton I missed as I had to head up to London. I really love Likeminds, so even though I wasn’t there it gives me a little thrill to watch the precedings…

Welcome to the moon from Curtis James on Vimeo.

And some beautiful dancing, via Jenny Reina of Hunter Gather – who I know through Likeminds – so it all ties together nicely…

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I managed to take half an hour to sneak round the corner from the Brilliant Noise offices to check out the Semiconductor exhibition at the Phoenix gallery. Part of the Brighton Digital Festival, it’s free to get in, so do yourself a favour if you’re in Brighton and take a look… This clip is from Heliocentric, which I was deeply entranced by… It’s a series of time-lapse videos of a camera following the arc of the sun across the sky…

Heliocentric from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

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At the Edinburgh International TV Festival last month, Google executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, told delegates to “ignore Lord Sugar” and bring more engineers, more science, into the TV industry. This was essential, he argued, if they wanted to break the pattern of UK innovating things that would be scaled up into global businesses elsewhere.

Over the past year or so I’ve been working on some ideas with a production company about how to re-design from the ground up what a TV show is. How you design the experience,  the online community and creative processes to take into account the opportunities that the web presents, from inspiration and insight at the outset, to distribution and commercialisation.

It has been fascinating to come from the digital marketing agency world and look at the similarities and differences of the TV industry. The biggest similarity is that businesses in both sectors are labouring with commercial models which constrain them, systems of creation which need to be (and are) being re-thought for the age of the web.

It occurs to me that media and marketing businesses are like the master craftsmen of old. Master masons in the middle ages created cathedrals and castles of staggering scale and beauty.

Image (cc) Wikimedia Commons

When science – and especially mathematics – began to make its influence felt more, though, a whole new world of possibilities opened up – what we think of as the modern discipline of architecture. Projects of scale and ambition were led by architects.

Architects brought together science and the art. That’s not to say that master masons wouldn’t and didn’t have a future – but it was a future within the context of architecture as a discipline, as a world view.

And that’s what’s needed to create the media – and marketing, its all part of the same game – industry for this century. New thinkers who bring the science, the engineering into the equation.

Bringing in the science and engineering doesn’t have to drive out the beauty – it can create new opportunities for it to exist, new spaces for craftspeople and artists – but there can also be a genius and a thrill about looking at the whole.

image credit: (cc) Aurelien Guichard

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Image: Getting discovery engines to work is an uphill struggle…

Discovery engines are, as Farhad Manjoo for Fastcompany has it…

the word du jour in tech

Or…

the search engine’s smart-ass cousin that tries to answer vague queries (like “funny video”–one of the top searches on YouTube).

…the discovery engine remains a mythical beast. Today’s personalization tools are built on several faulty premises. There’s still too much presuming that we want a steady diet of what we just consumed. Just because you clicked on one post of Sarah Palin reinterpreting history doesn’t mean you want to hear all she has to say.

Another is that we’re interested in everything that our friends are. (I like my friends despite their inexplicable devotion to Mad Men.)

You’ll never know exactly what people want, because they often don’t know themselves. If they knew – they’d ask for it…

You can be in the right area, be luckier (serendipitous sounds posher) at serving the right content, make them luckier at finding it, but personalisation is nowhere near as much an exact science as algorithm-obsessed engineers think it might be.

Too many variables. Too many people. Too many variable people.

But the alchemical pursuit of the magical what-people-want formula will continue. Farhad quotes the Washington Post’s chief digital officer:

“It’s sort of like drilling for oil,” he says. “The oil companies don’t exactly know where it is, but they’re always going to be drilling because the value of finding that oil is so high.”

Truth be told about new social media tools, I feel a little jaded sometimes.

Even with Google+, which I emphatically, utterly agree with and want to succeed, I can barely find the time or the energy to play with.

Call yourself a social media expert? Well, no, I don’t so much, really. I’m more interested in things we can do with the web, and since I wrote Me and My Web Shadow, I’ve tried to keep to my own rule of making the tech work for you, rather than the other way around…

But today I completed a profile for Amazon Kindle and genuinely felt a deep thrill, a sense of excitement that was heavily laced with trepidation. Like this could be dangerous as well as powerful, like it could be the beginning of something…

My what profile?

When you read books on the Kindle platform, as i have done since buying an iPad a while a go, you can highlight the text. I do  this instinctively, even though I sometimes never re-visit the highlights or notes. It’s the translation of my offline approach to reading books where I will bookmark the bottom of a page and mark passages of interest with my thumbnail.

On your Kindle profile you can see all the passages you’ve marked and all the notes you made.

So can anyone else.

You might know this already. But even knowing what is technically possible, have you thought about what this means? What it will make possible?

Reading books for me has been part of my inner life since I was five years old. Its a part of my way of thinking and learning that me and the grey matter have been going at for nearly 35 years.

Even as blogging and the social web began to change my media habits, reading books remained related but separate. Reading books would be where I went for depth, for a kind of meditation on a subject as well as to be informed and inspired.

Some books, The Origin of Wealth and The Power of Pull for instance, are almost like places in my mental landscape, a set of ideas, frameworks and a kind of mood music where I go to work things out. I return to them when I am, for instance working on a big strategy project, or in the case of The Art of the Start, when I am building the foundations of my new business.

I’ll reference books I’ve read in blog posts, recommend them in Tweets, but what goes on between my brain and the text on the page (or latterly screen) has remained very private.

Then last week I Tweeted from a book.

As I highlighted the passage I realised i could share it with my network and I did.

Speaking with my long-time collaborator and partner-in-crime, Jim Byford last week, he shared some of his exctiement about the potential for this for education and for intellectual life in general.

Not only can you share your thoughts on a passage in an e-book, you can see who else has highlighted it. Not who has bought the book, red the book, like the author. Who has has been excited or interested enough in that nugget of knowledge or insight to mark it…

Right there you have a community of interest around a sentence. Around a thought. An idea.

Interest graph doesn’t come close to being an adequate way of explaining these kind of connections, the potential of reading as a group, thinking as a pack, a hive, a herd…

: : Bonus link: wrote this post in draft before I had read The Art of Thinking in Public. That makes this the third time I’ve linked to that post in a week…