One of the unusual things about social media in the business context is the dramatic way it impacts on business culture. Dennis Howlett wrote a long and interesting piece on his Zdnet blog about the Enterprsie 2.0 debate, or lack thereof. It is one that is intertwined with much of what I do, using blogs and wikis to build communication networks. Dennis writes:

I don’t need to recrunch the ’social’ thing but it is an important factor that in my mind amply illustrates the lack of intellectual rigor around solution creation. It is good to see that in the discourse even my sharpest critics have acknowledged the emphasis and use of ’social’ as a dreadful mistake.

I think the ’social’ thing is such an issue because it is one that very few technologists are able to get to grips with. There are notable exceptions, Dennis and Stowe Boyd amongst others. In the business 2.0 context the word ’social’ has become burdened with a whole set of meaning that has little to do with the ’social’ (small ’s’) or ‘Social‘ aspects of business, but it is still an essential part of the debate, as Dennis goes on to say:

Last Friday I met a pal of mine who is in the business of implementing change. He argued that people don’t like change. It is too disruptive for many. Think about all those contradictory stats that talk about dis-satisfaction with technology but then the same people would not change what they have. Familiarity is comforting. At a time when many people are more concerned about job security than shiny new toys, it should be no surprise that implementing an E2.0 project will have a slim chance of success without the sponsorship and active participation of top management.

Finally, and here I am putting on my social psychologist’s hat. The nature-nurture debate that has rumbled on for more than 50 years among socpsych types shows no signs of abating. These key concepts have a place in our understanding of what can work but are largely ignored in the discourse.

The traditional nature/nurture debate Dennis mentions has formed the basis of many an undergraduate essay over the years (”Are you a product of your genes, or of your environment? Discuss”). However, it has been replaced by the more careful study of epigenetics – understanding the way that the environment interacts with our genes, enabling and disabling them. Conversely, our genetic make-up also influences our environment in a transactional sequence that changes it as it changes us. An irritable baby that never sleeps is eventually going to have tired, irritable parents. And how those irritable parents interact with the baby and nurture it may shape which of its genes become activated or deactivated, shaping its development.

And so, back to social computing, Web 2.0 and social media in business. When Dennis’ friend cites the importance of “the sponsorship and active participation of top management” it is worth thinking about why that is so important. The reason usually isn’t the obvious. Management sponsorship is a form of social proof that taps into the social dimension of business – culture. Business culture can help or hinder the adoption of 2.0 technologies, but 2.0 technologies are disruptive to the traditional power-bases and communication structures within the business. The two things dance an intertwined-transactional dance. Social software changes the cutlure, but culture also changes the way that the software is used. For me  that creates a demand for careful ’social’ design, to get the technologies adopted, and then careful change-management to pick up the pace and the full benefits in creating a more dynamic and innovative business culture. A place where ideas emerge, are captured and nurtured, and delivered to customers.

Lastly, back to a comment in Dennis’ post that caused a wry smile as I sat reading it: “cult-ure” versus “culture”. Some businesses have very, very strong cultures. They resist change because they are as much cult as company. When the cult is working, that is amazingly powerful – they preserve their culture even with rapid growth, and smash through any obstacles in their way. I think you know the kinds of business we are talking about. But, and this is a big but, when the market changes, and the cult does not, the business heads for the rocks. Traditional change programs almost inevitably fail, but even in these toughest of environments, I believe that ’social’ tools can create change.

The traditional IT and management paradigm is that we are a collection of individuals using IT tools. That frame misses the most powerful forces that business leaders have at their finger tips. A business is a community, and sometimes multiple communities, that communicate and interact with each other (both intra- and inter-). That interaction is increasingly dominated by technology-mediated communication, and that communication (or collaboration) technology is less neutral than people think. It can be culture forming.

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On October the 23rd I’ll be at The Strand Palace Hotel in London, talking about crowd sourcing with social media. Edelman, iPadio, chinwag and a host of folks are sponsoring what promises to be a very packed day – full details are here. The event description best explains why I’m excited about Friday:

The conference examines how social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, are having a major impact on business practices and culture. How can these tools be utilised, how can you employ strategies within your company to increase profitability, sustain reputation and empower your employees to be brand ambassadors? Indeed should you employ internal social networks within your own organisation as a means of facilitating a sharing community amongst your employees, or should you use public open platforms?

I’m looking forward to catching up with familiar faces and joining in a healthy debate about the way ahead for social media in business. There are over a dozen speakers, all active practitioners with hands-on experience, which should make for some good talks and lively panel sessions.

Over the next few days, with the help of iPadio, I’m going to do my level best to speak to each of them about their experiences and what they’ll be talking about on Friday. Here are the conversations I’ve had with folks on the phone so far (I’ve been on the phone a bit!): You’ll find more interviews, and can listen to them live as they happen on the SMiB site.

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This post was inspired by a paper by Jonathan MacDonald (of fluid world / JMA) ”The first 6 Macro Trends of the 21st Century” – it’s a reasonably straight forward read. It set me off pondering a different track. What do the six trends he lists mean for business, and business-to-business marketing, IT and communication?

1. Corporate Technology in the hands of Citizens

2. Physical is increasingly Virtual

3. It’s about Distribution not Destination

4. Mass Niche not Mass Groups

5. Broadcast Control is now Self Scheduled

6. C2C is more powerful than B2C Communication

I’ll tackle them one by one, together with liberal use of quotations from Jonathan’s paper:

1. Corporate Technology in the hands of Citizens

“The commoditisation of technology has enabled many of us to access, use and develop upon tools and resources that once were reserved only for large organisations – or those with deep pockets… …Creating trust and value is far different than raising money to spend on marketing. The skill sets required are rarely seen in standard business… …It signals a redefinition of products, services, marketing and advertising communication.”

Back at the start of the decade, when I held the strategic marketing role in a large IT company, I remember frequent discussions about the future consumerisation of corporate IT. Well, it has happened. Consumer technology is now far ahead of most business IT today. The users have stormed the castle, and they are now informed consumers.

2. Physical is increasingly virtual

“Now we have the tools to express, purchase and discover things without physical entities being necessary, we increasingly do so.”

The key here is the disappearance of “place” – a theme from “The Future of the Workplace“. Businesses, unconsciously, are built around “place” – employees meet together. They go to meet customers. They go to visit other employees. The implicit design of most businesses is based on staff “in the office”. This is in the same businesses that are turning workers into remote workers in droves. It is in the same companies where a huge chunk of the work force don’t even have a desk in the office anymore. “Place”? It’s dead.

Redesign your business so that it works regardless of place, before it becomes an island. Enabling remote working is only the first phase. The more important and challenging task is replacing the things that “place” used to give to staff. VPN technology, email blast communication and a shiny laptop alone do not provide it. If you believe they do, you are missing the way that informal communications glue your business together today.

“Technological advances in augmented and virtual reality will fundamentally redefine what our future generations perceive as ‘real’.”

3. Its about distribution not destination

I differ with some of Jonathan’s thoughts here. AOL and others existed because Google did not, at the time. In those days people needed an on-ramp to the Internet, a starting place. Today Google serves that purpose. There is a hideous phrase from my Business Technology 1.0 Days: “end-to-end.” Everyone was offering “end-to-end” solutions. I once joked, with my CEO present, that “end-to-end” seemed to mean “all the things that we make, and none of the things that we don’t”. His wry smile told he already knew how empty the phrase was. The reality is nothing is “end-to-end” in the business world. Anything that is, is a dead-end. Obvious, right? Less flippantly, money moves around. Create flows, not buckets, build ecosystems…

4. Mass niche not mass groups

“Individuals can be in numerous communities of interest – but the ‘age, gender and location profile’ may differ substantially.”

The marketing of the future is about psychographics, not demographics. That’s one of the main reasons I spend most of my time studying psychology these days. The future is more about groups and communities, than individuals. Marketing courses don’t teach marketeers and communicators the skills they need to deal with ecosystems, rather than people, at least none that I’m aware of.

“Any level of assumption when dealing in personality based communication will lead to negative experience which is damaging to all involved.”

The traditional marketing tone of voice is increasingly irrelevant, patronising, misdirected and little believed. That people write in a style they would be unhappy to be addressed in speaks to something very broken in business communications today, both internally and externally. It’s time to move on. We’re not running a TV station, and that’s probably just as well.

“The media that society is connected with – or social media as it is called – is a new science involving the inter-relationships of real people who are not a number or a demographic subset.”

5. Broadcast control is now self-scheduled

Broadcast is dead, or at least it will be significantly less dominant, especially if it doesn’t figure out a new business model. It was funded by interruption marketing (advertising 1.0), which can’t afford to support it anymore (thanks to Google and the on-line world), and is being strangled by technology (TiVo, Sky+, V+ and anything that looks like a PVR). The revolution won’t be televised, it will be time shifted.

“…the government of Singapore banned TiVo, citing the potential adverse impact on the local media industry if usage were to increase. Which it did. The Singapore government faced extreme difficulty in regulating the use of TiVo, as individuals were bringing in sets from overseas, over-joyed at the ability to finally control their own experiences.”

Deputy MD of Fox International Channels, Jason Thorp, said at the time: “There are a whole host of issues that broadcasters and advertisers are currently facing, and about to face, that are going to irrevocably change the business. A creative response will be the only solution to all of them.”

The result? Culture will simultaneously fragment and aggregate. Broadcast TV has created shared experiences and meaning for the post-war generations. The way it does this for the next generation will be different. In a world without broadcast, shared experiences will become an increasingly important part of people’s lives. Smart brands get this already (Magners UK, I’m looking at you).

“Forcible relationships are never productive. The see-saw of control is never healthy if heavily stacked against one side.”

If your business is, in anyway shape or form, dependent on broadcast (internal or external), redesign it now. The people of the future will not stand around to be shouted at. You have to earn their attention, and then keep it.

6. C2C is more powerful than B2C communication

Read Jonathan’s piece, especially what he has to say about “buzz marketing”. There’s a herd of people out there doing untold damage to themselves, their brand and their customers. In the Broadcast Anomaly I attempted to articulate that the current changes are not about something emerging after the broadcast era, they are about things re-emerging, that have been suppressed. As Jonathan puts it:

“At the time of writing, the buzz-phrase ‘word of mouth’ is being lauded as an incredible new invention. The term ‘conversation’ is a very ‘2.0? thing, apparently. It’s almost like personal interaction is a new thing, whereas it pre-dates everything else.”

Person-to-person communication outweighs business-to-consumer communication by an order of magnitude, on any number of measures. In the media age, businesses have evolved their communications channels to be narrow, highly controlled funnels. In doing so they have left themselves ill prepared to deal with the skills and scale required to get  to grips with what many call “the conversation.”

For businesses to survive, they must get to grips with the fact that everyone is in PR now. Everyone is in Marketing. The fastest growing business I have worked for understood that, at the time. It was one of the factors that lead them to be the most valuable company on the planet, for a moment. If you haven’t already, check out Zappos and how they interact with customers.

“To accelerate communication power, businesses must learn from the way that citizens interact most effectively… …When we build relationships, we learn about each other. This is a two-way process… …Many of the practices I see heralded at conferences, are analogistic to hiding in the bushes outside someone’s house, breathing heavily and scribbling down notes on a pad for later use. When we best learn about each other, we find common ground. We look for areas in which we can be valuable to each other.”

The writing isn’t on the wall, it’s on the web, and from there, everyone can see it. Read it wisely.

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by moleitau (cc)

It has taken me a couple of days to write this post, because my brain is still crunching on its contents. It touches on so many different areas of the technology and business areas that I am passionate about, that I’ve had to give up covering them all in one post.

The historic destiny of data (and it’s big parent, knowledge) has been to be locked up; the constant struggle has been to set it free. From the formation of  the university to the API-rich Web 2.0 world, people have postulated ways to make it more available. Of course, not all data is going to be ‘free’ (as in beer), but much of it should at least be accessible and usable (’free’ as in freedom). The trouble is that much of today’s digital information is trapped in non-portable and hard to process formats.

It’s a vision at the heart of the semantic web, championed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee – particularly under the banner of Web Science, down the M3 from where I am writing, at the University of Southampton (this TED video is a useful primer).

Time to join some dots. Prime Minister Gordon Brown appointed Sir Tim to work on opening up government data, and last month Sir Tim talked to the Cabinet about a goal of delivering a single online access point to Government information, similar to the one introduced by the Obama administration in the US, and to what the Australian government has been doing.

Back in August I interrupted the weekend to visit Google’s London office and see a bunch of young folks, with a bit of help from some not-so-young ones, hacking together web-based services under the banner of Young Rewired State. It really was inspiring stuff. There were some familiar faces (including @grantbell) and plenty of new ones, all working on an impressive list of apps, adding to the list of Rewired state projects.

At the end of the weekend, an impressive list of judges (@craigelder @jobsworth @BenHammersley @helenmilner @marxculture and @danielheaf) judged the apps, and there are some good blog posts on what went off, as well as my usual collection of photos:

As a side note, I like the idea of hack days. Development sprints where you focus on one thing are a great thing – every business should have “hack days” – pick some key problems then get everyone together to spend a day working on fixing them. Hack days aren’t just for coders.

Back to that data, or more specifically the mountains of anonymised data that the UK government collects every year. Putting aside the usual “we paid to collect it, so we should have it” argument, so often espoused, there is a much better reason for putting all of that data “out there” – or there is to me at least. There are a thousand creative and useful things that could be done with it, most of which fall under the umbrella of  micro-business or hobbyist. These are things that the government, and most businesses, could never justify funding, but which a sea of enthusiastic developers could make happen – tackling all sorts of problems along the way.

Enter data.gov.uk. A surprise email last week meant, literally a few hours later, I was huddled around a projector looking at one of the most exciting things I’ve seen on the Internet in a very long-time. A very long time. With a very exciting team of people too. The previous day, via the Digital Engagement blog, the Cabinet Office issued a call for help:

From today we are inviting developers to show government how to get the future public data site right – how to find and use public sector information.

The developer community through initiatives such as Show Us a Better Way, the Power of Information Taskforce, MySociety and Rewired State have consistently demonstrated their eagerness and abilities to “Code a Better Country“.  You have given us evidence and examples to help drive this forward within government.

The new site will provide a way to access (eventually and hopefully) most of the UK government’s published data. There are already over a thousand datasets, in differing levels of accessibility from CSVs, to SPARQL end points, as well as XML and JSON. If those sound like alphabet soup, don’t worry, just be as excited as the developers who know what they mean.

The potential result is a wave of new applications, based on government data, that could do a wealth of things, from relating performance with class sizes in your local school to understanding how your local farming community is faring. Data.gov.uk is a very non-trivial project, and there is a long way to go, but what I was a very promising start. The early developer community is already very active, even though the site won’t really be in beta until the end of the year. As Harry Metcalfe puts it, the wraps are off.

There are four aims behind the project and opening up the data: 1) Aid transparency and accountability. 2) Empower citizens to drive public service reform. 3) Unlock the social and economic value in the data. 4) Stimulate the UK’s digital economy, with regard to technology and research in the web domain.

Certainly there are big commercial uses of the data, and I am sure big business will muscle in on the act, but underneath that, what a great opportunity to give a new generation of digital talent something to dig their teeth into. My hope is that the data will provide a platform for an ecosystem of businesses and micro-businesses, as well as non-profit organisations, to create value for UK Plc, both for the public good and for economic good. It will also be a proving ground for a new generation of geeks who can work with massive datasets and produce insights from them. Exactly the kind of folks the knowledge-based business of the future will need.

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I had the privilege of spending a couple of days in the company of Dr’s Anne Marie McEwan and Marie.C.Puybaraud, discussing the future of the workplace. You can see the thoughts on line – “smartworkplace – the power of collective intelligence” – or digested in this article on BBC News. The physical workplace has been evolving for centuries, as we have moved from cottage industries, through the industrial workplace, to modern times. A steady stream of technological breakthroughs have lead us to where we are today. Inventions like the lift have enabled radical changes in the way that offices are designed and built, and how space is used.

Marie and Anne Marie have been projecting workspace needs forwards, to look at what the potential future workplace of 2030 might look like. It isn’t as big a leap as it might sound, 2030 is twenty years away, it’s like looking forward to now, from back in 1989. They propose three different scenarios. Our first meeting was at the grand, but very welcoming, One Alfred Place. Euan Semple, Dave Terrar, Anke Holst and others joined for a group discussion about the current forces affecting the workplace. Dr Marie Puybaraud talked through the research report (summary here: The Smart Workplace in 2030).

The Smart Workplace of 2030 will see:

• A complex and competitive world focused on collaboration, innovation and creativity.
• An industry focused on knowledge and co-creativity.
• A culture for collaboration and collective intelligence.

Both physical and virtual elements are present, and telepresence is very much the norm, with technology present in ALL human activities. That technology enables a greater range of choices about the physical location that work occupies – work may well become something that you do, rather than a place that you go. Taking the three proposed future scenarios in turn, the report suggests very different scenarios that might emerge:

1. The Hive… The Network

Agility, anonymity and access become key themes. Workers become highly mobile, and work comes to us, with technology providing the virtual connectivity that teams need to collaborate and co-ordinate. A mixture of synchronous and asynchronous communication tools enable collaboration on projects, and access to shared knowledge.

2. The Eco-Office… The Community

A radical form of industrial democracy and corporate re-engineering. The Eco Office depicts a sustainable world where the creation and sharing of knowledge drives economic growth. Operations centred around communities. ‘Employee villages’ create workplace communities, and support a shift from hierarchical to self-managed teams, with flexible work/life balance.

3. Gattaca… The Fortress

The rise of the corporate office. A ‘swarm’ society, grouped together on the basis of shared interests and commercial affinities, which would see a high concentration of economic growth in prosperous areas, with a mass migration towards them. A society with a ghetto mentality, defending itself from recurrent synchronised failures.

The discussion steered towards a view that these three scenarios might co-exist, with a widening gap between large corporates and independent co-operatives of professionals and micro-businesses. Interestingly, for me at least, digital communication is central to each of the three scenarios, which is a good reminder that the tools can create both positive and negative environments.

Sometimes a less utopian view of social media is worth contemplating, if for no other reason than making sure that we don’t go there.

The group in discussion, photos by Benjamin Ellis.

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Social Networking sites and social technologies have made it easier to ‘acquire’ and ‘keep in touch’ with ‘friends’. I use the quote marks advisedly. Most social platforms are focused on these aspects of relationships, but that might not be the best game in town.

This post is partially triggered by Euan Semple’s own post on friendships, but also by observations of social media relationships relative to ‘traditional’ ones. Euan says this:

“It is the classic problem of signal to noise. If I do nothing the number of people I end up knowing just causes noise in my life, if I put in a little bit of effort I can increase the signal to noise. A lot of this is about energy for me – how much certain people make me feel energised and engaged and how much energy I feel inclined to put into the relationships.”

From Collecting to Connecting

It is not a popular topic, but that doesn’t stop it being a critical issue. Social networking sites have undoubtedly distorted our social graphs. They have extended the “long-tail” of school friendships, and broadened the funnel of strangers that turn into friends. That isn’t without its issues, especially when social networking platforms tend to function as crab traps – easy in, tricky out.

There are cognitive limits on the number of friendships we can sustain (see Dunbar’s Number and the complete bounds of our social networks for more of a discussion). The tools may extend that number, but I am reminded of the instructions that came with the first car I had with an anti-locking break system: they said something like “This technology does not endow you with super-human stopping powers. The laws of physics and the road still apply.”

You can attempt to juggle 2,000 relationships, and some people may even manage that, but for most of us mere mortals we will simply end up with a collection of contacts and unconnected names. That is very different than having a support network of friends. It is not a plate spinning competition, and even if it were, those competitions usually end with piles of broken plates – not a great outcome if you are a plate lover. Time is the oxygen of friendship, and when there isn’t enough oxygen around, things die off. Our cash-rich, time-poor society tries to compensate for that in all sorts of ways, but it is still a basic rule.

Relationship Types

Research traditionally talks about three types of relationship: kinship, instrumental relationships and friendships. It is worth quickly reviewing them here.

Kinship refers to relationships with family members (biological or in-law). Because of social convention, these relationships are unique. Family social calendars, weddings, funerals and births provide touch points that sustain relationships that might not otherwise exist. Not guaranteed, but blood and marriage provide social bonds.

Instrumental relationships are brought to us as the consequence of life’s other structures. Neighbours and co-workers are products of where we live and work. Created and sustained by geography and the roles that we occupy, they rest in an uneasy transitory space between friendships and nodding partners. You might or might not choose to have your boss as a friend, but you undeniably have a relationship, even if it is the casual exchange of short sentences.

Friendships. Last, but most definitely not least, “the voluntary, ongoing associations between two persons that facilitates attainment of socioemotional goals” (Hays, R. B.(1988). Friendship. New York: S.W. Duck Edition.). Or, as I once heard “friend” defined: “someone you’d feel comfortable borrowing money from if you met them in an airport” – I’m not sure why the airport comes in to it, but it makes an interesting point about friendships all the same.

As a side note here, these differences are one of the reasons that building a social network to run inside of a business is very different than building one that runs outside – and why I groan every time a business says “can you build us a Facebook.” You need to build something quite different to support instrumental relationships and turn them in to friendships, if that is truely what you want to do.

Relationships – Endings and Pauses

Each type of relationship has it’s own way of being sustained, and its own way of ending. Kinships are sustained by the marriages, funerals, and births that accompany our lifecycle. Instrumental relationships are sustained by the encounters repeatedly created by the environment. Friendships are sustained by common interests and the rewards of mutual support.

Aside from tragic deaths, real-life relationships don’t switch off just like that, they gradually decay. Once we move away or change jobs, we keep in touch for a while, but contact becomes less and less frequent, until there is none at all, unless the relationship made the jump to a friendship. Even friendships fade away. I don’t know about you, but I struggle with taking people off of the Christmas card list. When you haven’t seen them, and they haven’t written back for a decade, it probably is time to save the postage, but it is still hard.

Ending a relationship on a social networking site is a little bit more brutal. Unfriend. Unfollow. Block. It is all a bit binary. Binary break points are hard, and unnatural. Unfriending someone on Facebook, or unfollowing someone on Twitter is the modern day equivalent of removing someone from the Christmas card list. Binary break points are hard and unsophisticated.

This isn’t just relevant to the “soft and squishy” world of personal relationships, it applies to businesses as well. Prospects turn in to customers through a process of relationship building, especially in the business to business space where Redcatco operates. Spread yourself too thin and you aren’t going to have any customers. There is a real cost to maintaining relationships too. Digital communication might have dramatically reduced those costs, but they are still there.

It makes good sense to create pause points for friendships, both digital and analogue ones. Closing off in a way that is open, and leaves the door ready should circumstances or situations change. Work relationships are often reignited when both people end up under the same business umbrella at a different company down the line. A friendship or a customer that isn’t going to work out right now, might work out in the future. Social software really doesn’t handle that well, today. No Auto-Unfriend. No graceful decay. Just <click>.

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“Britons are more willing to cut back on holidays and meals out than on spending on communication technology during the recession… … spending on mobiles, the internet and TV is regarded as a higher priority than almost anything except food.”

Time to revisit Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Needs

Curious indeed. I shared the link via Twitter and the ever provocative Camille Mendler of the Yankee Group (and I mean that in a good way) tweeted back. It struck a chord with a series of recent discussions, so I’ll share them here.

Let’s leave Maslow, just for a minute, we’ll come back to him. The way we are using the Internet is subtly changing. The study highlights a dramatic rise in the use of social networking websites. 19 milliom people in the UK, that is around 50% of the internet-using population, spend an average of six hours a month on Facebook. That is a 50% increase from four hours a month back in the previous May.

It’s not just a phenomenon among young people. Quite the opposite.The proportion of 25 to 34-year-olds claiming to have a social networking site profile grew to 46%, while the figure among 35 to 54-year-olds rose to 35%. The only group shrinking was the 15- to 24-year0old group, down by 5% to 50% – perhaps they are trying to avoid their parents on Facebook?

This shift in Internet use is relevant to Maslow’s Hierachy of needs. Just in case you missed, Maslow’s article ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’ appeared in Psychological Review back in 1943, and was the foundation of his book “Toward a Psychology of Being” (on Amazon US and UK). In it Maslow proposed a five tier model to describe human motivation. It is a theoretical approach, rather than an experimental finding, and Maslow himself revised the model in his later works. That said, it has become the foundation for a sea of thought, from sales theory to engaging employees. The five tiers are:

• Self-Actualization
• Esteem
• Love/Belonging
• Safety
• Physiological

Essential, each level of needs has to be fulfilled in order to reach the next. If needs at a lower level are left unmet, we focus back down at that lower level, so the theory goes. Taking the levels in more detail, one by one:

Physiological Needs

We all need to eat, to drink, to breathe and to sleep. Without these, we rapidly fail to function and everything else becomes meaningless.

Safety Needs

We require shelter and protection from physical harm. Exposure to the elements or attack will obviously impact on your physiological needs. Beyond that we seek longer term security, for example paid employment or knowing that we will be provided for. We don’t want just to survive, we want to know that we will survive.

These first two tiers are reasonably well served in western society, although not as universally as one might home. Moving on from the lower levels it starts to get interesting, and somewhat surprisingly, we come back to broadband:

Social Needs

We need a sense of belonging. That might come through friendships, or membership of a group of some description. Something we are part of that is a place for giving and receiving love, in its various forms, is required to meet these social needs. Think: Belonging.

Esteem Needs

We all need to feel wanted and valued, consciously or not. Simple acts, like being recognised and receiving attention from others, protect our self-esteem. A healthy self-respect, a sense of having achieved things, keeps us going. Without these, we are unlikely to feel fulfilled. There are a raft of psychological theories that exist at this level. Simply remember: Attention.

Self-actualisation

This was the subject of much of Maslow’s later work, but that is something for another time. For now, suffice it to say that at this highest level, people become motivated by more social causes and issues such as justice, truth, wisdom and meaning. Operation at this level is often evidenced by the acceptance of facts and the celebration of capabilities like creativity and problem solving.

As a side note, this model seems to hold true at a corporate level as well as a human one. I believe there are companies that achieve “self-actualisation”. They are rare, but I have had the privilege of experiencing them. I recognise themes from the periods of peak growth at both Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks. There was a sense of meaning that was common across the who;e business, and values like justice and wisdom were held in high regard.

So, back to those British broadband users… Social Networking sites like Facebook, enable us to keep in touch with friends. Remember that requirement to belong? To be needed? Simple acts like commenting on a friends status update, or knowing that others might be waiting for our next status update, tick boxes in the hierarchy of needs. For better or worse, broadband is becoming the pipe that provides social fuel on that journey towards self-actualisation.

I’m not making an argument to justify broadband as some sort of basic right, or even an essential service – that is probably a step too far. I am pointing out that broadband pipes don’t just feed us with information, they provide us with much needed social contact too. The Internet of information has become the Internet of people. In doing that, broadband has moved itself from “nice to have” to “nicer to have.”

While people said that they would cut back on going out for dinner (47%), DIY (that most serious of British addictions – 41%) or holidays (41%), only a tiny minority (10%) would be prepared to cut back on their broadband.  It would be intersting to know about more about the survey, as the identification of the surveyors may have skewed the answers.

Maslow’s hierarchy hasn’t changed, but the role of technology within it has. Businesses need to take note here. People have embraced ‘digital intimacy’ as part of their lives. Companies that don’t provide tools to support social cohesion will eventually suffer. Yes, I guess I would say that, but I’m happy to hear counter arguments.

Throwing your staff out on the road, or sending them off to work at home, without providing on-line social tools, will impact on the effectiveness of your business. Staff turnover will increase, communication will dry up, and the creativity that is so vital to innovation will disappear. Alarmist? I don’t think so. Look at how people are using technology at home. Those expectations are coming into the work place. Look at the importance people place on it. This isn’t a fad, it is a change in what the Internet is all about.

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August is meant to be a quiet month, but it definitely isn’t here – things are starting up left, right and centre. I like that.

I’m generally a fan of starting things, especially starting them with minimal means. I know that might sound less than exciting, but my experience has been that creativity starts where budgets run out – constraints can be one of the greatest spurs to creativity.  That, in a nutshell, is probably the main reason for last week’s Bootstrap Camp.

It’s a tough environment for startups at the moment, with VC money hard to come by and customer budgets tightened, so a little bit of creativity – and boot strapping – is called for. Boot strapping means starting up with what you have at hand. I first came across the term when I started designing computers back in the 80’s. It was used to talk about starting the system up from bare essentials to the point where it was fully functional, having loaded its operating system and connected to its support peripherals. It is an apt term to use for getting a business or project started these days. Grab what you have, and use it to connect to the resources you need.

BootStrap Camp is a community, and now an online service too, built and supported by a network of entrepreneurs from the UK’s digital sector. Its main aim is to help early-stage entrepreneurs and startups boot strap their businesses, by exchanging skills and knowledge. Last week’s meeting, hosted by the inimitable Stewart Townsend and Simon Grice, saw the launch of the new bootstrapuk.org application. As an added incentive, Ben Keene was on hand to offer up to 25 weeks on Vorovoro (the tribewanted.com Island in Fiji, South Pacific) in exchange for development, design and deployment service. Although personally he won me over with a copy of his book. I’m a sucker for books and food, but I digress…

The service enables entrepreneurs to list their needs and offers of services, it then enables them to find members with matching needs or offers. The demonstration video shows how it works today:

For me, the BootStrap Credits aren’t the main thing here, rather it is the concept of a community of entrepreneurs that can tangibly support each other. Community trading is much stronger than point to point trade, and potentially provides a richer form of protection for the businesses involved. A reputation with a community is more valuable than a reputation with a single individual or business. A connected community also offers greater opportunities to create value and discover opportunities.

If you want to get involved, then follow @bootstrapcamp on twitter and request access to the Wiki, and dive on in.

Benjamin’s Photos from Bootstrap Camp

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It seems an age since posting about Habitat UK’s mis-steps into Twitter. Since that post, Habit have apologised – although not yet on the place where the deed was done: Their @habitatuk twitter account.

One of the big differences between “traditional” media and social media is the almost infinite bandwidth of the later. Whilst mainstream stories come and go at high velocity, with only a fleeting moment in the spot light, in the social media world they linger and roll on, and on… And so it is with the Habitat story. While big media is on to the next story, Twitter users and bloggers of the world are still talking about “Doing a Habitat”.

The latest communications have laid the blame firmly at the foot of a mysterious intern who is ‘no longer associated with Habitat’. Who is this mysterious intern, and how did they get it so wrong? Enter Daren Forsyth (@DarenBBC), who has been campaigning (search #habitatintern on Twitter and see) to track down and help out the intern concerned, complete with the offer of a replacement internship and some training on using social media. That’s quite an offer, given Darren’s profile on Twitter – over 3,800 followers and growing, and more importantly he’s been a productive member of the community, connecting all manner of initiatives.

It makes more sense for me to let Daren explain the thinking behind #habitatintern, so here he is, caught on camera by my good self yesterday in London:

As I left him, he was awaiting a call from Habit’s PR team. Meanwhile there is still much for Habitat to do to get back on the right foot in the Twitter world. The story continues…

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The recent Tweetcamp event was organised by Farhan Rehman (@farhan), Dees Chinniah (@cyberdees), and Jon Bishop (@jonin60seconds), I just ran around with a microphone on the day, and chatted with Farhan before hand!  It was far from being another BarCamp. While  many familiar faces from the social media space came along, it also reached people who hadn’t been to any sort of unconference before.

The idea that a community can get together and self-organise an event is still a refreshing one, but when Farhan first suggested the idea of Tweetcamp I knew it was going to be something a bit different, pushing at the boundaries between the on-line and off-line world. What was it about? I’ll let Farhan explain:

TweetCamp is about bringing communities together, in real life.  It’s about accelerating the conversations that happen on Twitter, in real life.  It’s about creating richer, more personal connections… …It’s all about bringing the people together who you know from and through Twitter, into a physical space, and then having some of those great conversations and interactions you would have online, but in real life.

You can get a feel for the day by watching the video I put together:

The process of on-line to off-line bridging is something I pursue in the corporate space. On-line platforms work best with people who have met off-line and interacted face-to-face. Similarly, on-line tools let people sustain relationships when time and distance – from remote working or hectic schedules – would otherwise curtail them. Tweetcamp was an opportunity to experiment with different ways of stimulating discussion and self-organising a very large group (about 150 people or so).

Amy Sample Ward has challenged the team to build on this start at bridging on-line and off-line communities in her thoughtful post. The conversations and activities were very varied. I met someone I knew by swapping a toilet seat for a wonderful water spray – you had to be there. You’ll also hear Ray mentioned in the video. He is a poet and ran a poetry workshop. Inevitably he was ‘dragged’ on to Twitter, where you can now find him as @TheEducatedfool. He was there as part of the BBC poetry initiative, which came up with an innovative live idea for the event, linking Tweetcamp to Glastonbury via Twitter. People tweeted short poems from the event, which were displayed live over there. I told you it wasn’t your usual barcamp!

As well as a wonderful lunch, and Muesli, from sponsors Mymuesli, Addlestones provided a wonderful end to the day with their cider. A big thank you to all of the sponsors. The day wasn’t about the food though, it was about the conversations, which covered topics as diverse as children’s use of the Internet to internal business communications, and a range of  other topics between.

There are lots of photos from the day up on Flickr, including these by Adam Tinworth and some from Chris Heuer (who recently ebayed himself) as well as a few I took:

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Last week’s workshop on using social media for internal communications at Melcrum was a packed house and a packed agenda. As intranets become less effective, and distributed working arrangements challenge traditional lines of communication, interest in social media is on the rise. Here are three examples of what people have been doing:

The JetBlue University, within the US Airline, picked up social media and ran with it as a business tool.

Notice how they allowed the structure to ‘evolve’ – social media allows “bottom up” development, which usually leads to a better fit with the needs of people within the business. Things like structures of tagging and information (ontologies) are very hard to get right with a top down approach.

IBM is often cited for their very effective use of social media both within the organisation and outside of it. In this short clip, IBM’s  Jon Iwata, SVP of Marketing and Communication, talks about  ”letting go” of traditional views of communication controls. He also points out that social media doesn’t create new problems, it simply highlights existing ones:

Best Buy might not be a name that springs to mind when it comes to social media, but the retailer has embraced the tools in all sorts of different areas within the business. This clip talks about “The Company as a Wiki” – an evolving on-line collaboration space:

If you haven’t already, then check out the “Collaboration in action” white paper from Redcatco partner theblueballroom, which talks about the different tools.

While there is no ‘template’ for deploying social media inside of a business, there are generally three clear phases:

Broadcast

Most businesses have built effective internal communications mechanisms that borrow from the broadcast world, from direct email and internal magazines to internal TV channels. These get the message out, but usually don’t provide a means to get meaningful feedback, or to gather and spread knowledge from the edges of the organisation.

Interactive

From “CEO Blogs” to interactive sites, providing the ability to comment on, or even just rate, communications gives a way for employees to start to interact. The interaction is very different from email, since it is visible across the organisation – rather than just between one or two employees. This phase gets people used to communicating “in public” – this is a much bigger cultural change than it sounds, and is the first step to less structured and less formal communication in the digital domain.

Social

In the final phase, communication moves from top-down with feedback, to a peer-to-peer model. All employees become content producers, and knowledge is shared in a very distributed manner. Social ties within the organisation become stronger, and become the predominant force for moderating behaviours and communication.

The video clips give some ideas of what can be achieved, and the nature of the journey. Ultimately, each business will follow a different path, and the adoption of social technology needs to be tightly aligned to existing business goals. It isn’t about the tools, it is about communication within the business, and building stronger relationships that enable effecive collaboration and sharing – that’s where the competitive advantage comes from.

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The Campaign That Went Oops…

The @habitatuk Twitter account looks all nice and shiny today, but that isn’t how it started out for the UK retailer. Last week an account in their name started spewing messages about their Spring/Summer collection, but tagged with random keywords from Twitter’s trending topics items.

It isn’t a great mental leap to work out that the connection between the Habitat’s new furnishings collection and things like the #iranelection, #iran and #Mousavi is at best tenuous, and at worst a blatant bit of opportunism. Here’s some of the “re-printable bits” from the Twitter stream:

First Break all the Rules

After that it started to turn very ugly. Habitat UK broke almost every rule in the Twitter book.

• Don’t abuse hash tags to try and drive traffic. It doesn’t work. This isn’t search engine optimization. It is social media.
• Don’t retweet the same thing over and over. People heard you the first time, and they can always see your last tweet. It makes following your Twitter stream very unattractive. How long would you stay with someone at a party if they repeated themselves over and over?
• Don’t just jump in. Listen, learn, then join in the conversation. You’re not advertising. You’ve been invited into someone’s web browser. You are just one click away from leaving it.

On Twitter, if no-one is following you, no-one hears you – that spam goes into dead-air. It is why I rate Twitter above email. Twitter has a visible feedback mechanism – people can follow or unfollow. Spamming hash tags is a desperate way to get people who aren’t following you to read your messages. It is the Twitter equivalent of nuisance calling or public vandalism, it isn’t going to make you any friends.

Putting Things Right

Over the weekend, the error of their ways obviously came to the attention of the grown ups at Habitat. They wiped the Tweets and started over, just as if nothing had ever happened. Huge error. The legacy of their mistake is all there to be seen in Twitter search – something that any power Twitter user is aware of: When you delete tweets, they disappear from the Twitter timeline, but they remain, stubbornly, in search results. It’s one of those curiosities of the Twitter platform.

As The NextWeb and the Social Media Today posts point out, deleting the messages and making as if nothing had happened is very much the wrong approach:

Habitat would probably have come out of this a lot better if they had admitted the problem and apologised before moving on. By deleting the tweets and starting afresh they haven’t ‘cleared the air’ with those upset about their actions.

And today it got Habitat on to the front page of the Sky News – “UK Firm’s Mistweetment Of Iran Is PR Disaster”

A spokesman for Habitat told Sky News Online: “This was a mistake and it is important to us that we always listen, take on board observations and welcome constructive criticism. We will do our utmost to ensure any mistakes are never repeated.”

That really isn’t much of a response. @habitatuk only had a few followers when they started spamming. Somewhat ironically the account now has about 1,000, all waiting to see what Habitat will do next.

This is the age of saying sorry, and the Habitat UK Twitter account is the perfect place to do that. Whoever was operating the account has shamed Habitat in front of tens of thousands of people (by spamming some of the most monitored hash tags on Twitter – as well as the account’s own followers).

“You can’t talk your way out of a problem you behaved your way into!” — Stephen R. Covey

Mistakes in social media aren’t like mistakes with the traditional press. Putting them right requires a sustained engagement with the community. Dominos Pizza didn’t make a mistake with social media, but they had a couple of employees who did. They recognised where the harm had been done, and engaged in the relevant places to put it right. It would have been better if they had been there beforehand, but regardless, they didn’t do a bad job.

Companies like IBM are reaping the benefits of their employees using platforms like Twitter everyday – Andy Standford-Clark was on Radio Five Live this morning and will be was on the BBC news this evening with his @andy_house project. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is heading towards a million people following him on Twitter. It is possible to make a big impact, but you need to be there to add value and engage with your customers, not to shout 20% discounts at them.

Don’t leave your social media strategy in the hands of an agency that doesn’t have expertise in it. I’ve said what I’m going to say about Social Media Expertise, for now it is a very specialist area. I am seeing more and more activity from Search Engine Optimisation players edging in to social media. SEO is about engaging with machines. Social Media is about engaging with people. They are very different things.

I’ll leave you that cartoon from Jim Anning again…

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Who needs telephones? We’ve got Twitter! Phone calls are all good and well, but by the time you’ve looked up the number, dialled it, listened to the ring tone and got through to the person you are trying to reach – or left the inevitable recorded message – you could have made a cup of coffee or had your next million dollar idea. Besides, it is so last-century… There must be a better way to make a restaurant booking.

Twitter might not replace the telephone any time soon, but for lots of things it can be a faster way to communicate. There are times when it is better to have a real time conversation. Hearing someone’s tone of voice, and seeing their face, helps to clarify potential misunderstandings straight away, providing a much better understanding of how the other person is really reacting. There is an emotional richness to a two way conversation which isn’t there in a short piece of text. If you have got into an exchange of more than 3 messages, then it is probably  time to pick up the phone – it will be more efficient in the long run.

However, sometimes the message is straight forward, unambiguous and not emotionally loaded. Twitter is great for those sorts of things, very fast and efficient: ”Can I have a table for two at 8pm tonight?”.  Less than 140 characters later… I had a dinner reservation.

I booked a table at the Landings Restaurant in Farnborough (@landingsrestaur). The outbound marketing potential of Twitter is constantly pushed, making it easy for forget that it is an inbound communication mechanism too. Popping up a window, typing a user name and message is much faster than scouring through a phone directory (electronic or otherwise) and making a call, so why wouldn’t someone want to communicate with a business that way?

I’m not sure if it is a UK first, it might well be, but I’m sure it won’t be the last such exchange. Businesses need to communicate on their customer’s terms. Twitter is my communications dashboard, and by being there the Landings Restaurant won my business on Friday night. More than that, I found them via my social network too (thank you @andypiper for the tip off – I saw your tweet and followed the restaurant as a result).

Landings Restaurant aren’t alone on twitter of course, there are tweeting bakeries, coffee shops and bridges already, but taking a booking via Twitter is a neat trick. As a business, you need to meet your customers where they are – don’t just wait around expecting them to come to you. If you do, you’ll find that your competitors may have got to them first.

Organisations need to be accessible, there is a big jump from a cold, corporate web page to a person to person conversation. Twitter provides a nice stepping stone in between the two.

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After being caught calling myself a social media expert during the BBC Radio 5 Live Pods and Blogs program this morning, I’d better explain what I’ve been up to. Having stumbled into digital communication in the 80’s, I was always captivated by the ability of technology to change things. In the 90’s I was able to play a part in building intranets that really did change how businesses operated, from car manufacturers like Renault and Volvo, to big banks in Asia and the US.

Something happened along the way, and I think that something may well have been email. Business went from information islands to an open sea of information. Then the sea turned to jets of water. Intranet’s dried up, as communication went from the intranet to email. The open sea became a mass of droplets, as staff retreated to their solitary inboxes, and closed point-to-point emails.

With intranets came extranets, and the idea of things being “inside” the firewall and “outside” the firewall. Deep inside the IT bunker phrases like “demilitarised zone” started to echo around. Information security thinking crept into marketing, and PR, as organisations started to talk about “controlling” and “timing” information flows.

Planning is all well and good, and control has its place, but businesses are ultimately about doing things, and doing them now. Outside of the corporate walls, people are sharing information like never before. News flows in real-time, from Iranian cyber war to Surrey swine flu. Its spread follows people’s social networks more closely than it follows fibre optics. It is granular, relevant and real-time. The corporate world has fallen behind the consumer world, but now it is time to catch up.

Deploying social technology inside of a business opens up the communications channels again. During deployments in recent years, I keep seeing that unless the external communication and internal communication are addressed at a strategic level, many of the benefits of an efficient, collaborative work style is lost. There’s certainly still a benefit, but it’s like driving with the hand brake on.

I’ve been searching for people with the same sense, and with the vision and skills to drive with the hand brake off. Having a “social media strategy” is all very well, but it often results in “bolt on” activity, with little return, and little benefit towards the strategic direction of the business. “Using social media strategically” is something different. Picking points of engagement, within the company’s strategic operations, when the tools will provide the best return. Social media is more than “one” thing. It is multifaceted and multi-skilled. It links internal and external, bringing the “publics” together, in a world were “personal” and “business” are increasingly blurred.

Given that the tools are about collaboration, it makes sense that collaboration should be the tool to help people get to grips with them. Imagine combining people-centric technology skills with those of an award-winning internal communications agency and a specialist PR and digital media agency. I have been imagining it for a while, and I have to say that the reality is even more exciting than I thought it would be. Two names to remember, and that you will hear along side redcatco:

thebluedoor

theblueballroom

ANNOUNCING: Consultancies collaborate to deliver businesses unique Web 2.0 and social media solutions for internal and external communications.

With collaboration, innovation and stakeholder engagement high on the business agenda, there is an increasing sense of urgency for businesses to embrace the opportunities offered by Web 2.0 and social media tools. One-third of executives recognise the importance of social networking by ensuring it is part of their business and operations strategy1. Yet a key block for business leaders and managers is a lack of strategic knowledge to analyse the business case for Web 2.0 and, moreover, ensure that the right social media tools are chosen to deliver on a company’s communications objectives.

1. Source: Deloitte ‘2009 Ethics & Workplace Survey’ conducted by Opinion Research Corporation 19/5/09

Looking for some social media action? Together, our three companies are enabling collaboration in action right now. Call or  e-mail to get the full story, we are taking our strategic workshop offering out to businesses that really want to reap the benefits of using social media. I’ll be sharing what we learn together here.

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Are you happy in your job? Do you know what is expected of you in your role? If you answered yes to both, you are in a privileged minority. According to John H. Fleming, Chief Scientist at Gallup Consulting, 43% of employees in the UK are not engaged at work, while 17% are actively disengaged – and over a third of employees are unsure what their job actually is.

The figures come from a 2006-2008 survey discussed during Melcrum’s 5th anual conference on employee engagement. Whilst social media wasn’t the focus of the event, it came up many times as a way to change company culture. “Collaboration in action” – a white paper on social media inside of organisations – was launched by theblueballroom at the event, more on that shortly.

In working with businesses in transformation, what becomes apparent are the strong links between the success of a business, and how staff and customers feel about it. The interactions between the three factors are far from intuitive, but social media is becoming the tool of choice for improving all three.

Although most of what is written about social media and social networking platforms is focused on external marketing activities these days, the most transformative uses are in internal communications. So, when the folks at theblueballroom invited me along the Melcrum Employee Engagement Conference, I grabbed my bag and headed along.

Employee engagement is a much maligned term, and provokes a negative reaction in many. It isn’t a well understood term, and I’ve certainly seen it misused. However I think all agree that how employees feel about the business that they work for is important. Are they bringing their “whole selves” to work, or fighting against the system? It just isn’t something that companies get right often enough.

John Fleming gave an overview of Gallup Consulting’s “HumanSigma(R)” program at the conference. It was originally published in Harvard Business review in July/Aug 2005, and is now a book in it’s own right. As with many Gallup tools, it aims to measure a complex set of dynamics, with a survey generated number. I’m not a great fan of the methodology, but John made some interesting points during his presentation. The employee-customer encounter is fundamentally an emotional one – “people are people first, and employees and customers second.” So it has to be understood that way.

Interactions that have an “emotional” element are increasingly squashed by high-velocity email and broadcast marketing techniques, even inside of the company walls. John argued that interactions should be managed locally – essentially a distributed form of management. Social tools support this working model. He suggested four levels of operation for employees:

• Growth – how can we grow?
• Team work – do I belong?
• Individual contribution – what do I give?
• Basic needs – what do I get?

It is loosely based on Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, but is a helpful framework for building communities. Disengaged employees expose company boards and owners to big financial risks – Choose your favourite horror story from the media. Social networking tools have amplified those risks (as Dominos Pizza disovered), by giving everyone access to a ‘global stage’. Inside of the business, social media can create effective communication channels that let staff feel part of a community, and actively contribute as part of a team. Yet very few businesses have got to grips with social tools, or training staff in using them responsibly.

There are businesses that are embracing the technologies, and embedding them into the business infrastructure to great effect. I’m leading a Social Media Workshop for internal comms on June 24th in Hammersmith, together with Abi Signorelli of Virgin Media. You can read more about the workshop on the Melcrum Blog and here is a Qik video I shot in the bustle of the Virgin Media offices with Abi on Friday:

From blogs to phlogs and wikis, used well, social technology creates open communication channels across a business, breaking down barriers between different organisations, and providing the feedback that leaders need to be effective.

I’m looking forward to being joined by Redcatco collaborator, Debbie Davies, who will be exploring how video can be used in the business context, so I’m sure there will be some clips coming over during and after the event!

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Twitter played host to a passionate discussion about social media experts earlier this week, kicked off by a blog post:  6 Reasons You Shouldn’t Brand Yourself as a Social Media Expert by Dan Schawbel, who describes himself as “the leading personal branding expert for Gen-Y” – reading the post I would say he’s wrong on most of the points he makes, but  what do I know, I’m just a social media expert.

Suw Charman-Anderson wrote a thoughtful post that provides a narrative on the issues, of which there are many. Picking up from a tweet in Suw’s post:

In the Twitter conversation this morning, @BenjaminEllis said  “@Suw It’s hard for the true experts when people with 6 months experience and no results to show for it call themselves experts too.”

Sadly, the social media scene is full of self-proclaimed experts. As opportunists jump on the TwitterLinkedFaceInMySpaceBook bandwagon, much of Twitter and the Blogosphere has become a torrent of misinformation and blatant  nonsense, most of it promulgated by “experts” – it is frustrating for those that have been making a living, rather than a noise, with the technologies.

Dan’s post says “When everyone in the world is a social media expert it loses meaning” I agree with the sense, but strictly speaking he’s wrong. When everyone calls themselves a social media expert, including people that clearly aren’t, it causes people to question the credibility of people making the claim. At least it should, and that isn’t a bad thing. It also makes it much harder to find the people who are actually the experts. Suw continues:

I can’t think of any other professional field where is is frowned upon to simply call oneself an expert. Indeed, in every other field I can think of, we actively seek out experts. If you have a bad problem with your drains, you call a drainage expert without even thinking about it. If you want to learn about the nuances of the Bard’s great works, you seek out an expert in Shakespeare. If your MacBook conks out, you take it to an Apple expert.

There’s nothing wrong with being an expert in these fields, so why is it wrong in social media?

Now we get to the troublesome thing about being an expert, and it’s a problem that isn’t specific to social media: How do you know you are an expert? How do you know if someone else is an expert?

You start off knowing, roughly, nothing. You learn something. You learn some more things and you start to feel a bit of an expert. You learn a few more things, and you start to call yourself an expert. You learn a lot more things and you realise that you weren’t an expert before, and you probably still aren’t one now. You learn a huge amount more things, and you aren’t so bothered about calling yourself an expert anymore, but everyone else starts to call you one, so you start to call yourself one too. You’ve earned the right too.

I’m trying to gently say that expertise is generally established by a third party. Traditionally, it was a matter of formal qualifications. However, the academic system struggles to keep pace with technology. It will be a while before we see the first degree course in social media, and even the thought of it causes an uneasy sensation in the pit of my stomach, so don’t get any ideas. Academic qualifications aren’t it then, although there are some highly relevant ones.

I jokingly mentioned the word “pundit” as a substitution in the maligned “social media expert” phase. Strangely it didn’t go down too well! Interestingly through, it is one of the words listed under “expert” in my trusty Mac OS X Thesaurus, and whilst I’m in that reference library, here is a quote from the dictionary definition of expert:

In specific fields, the definition of expert is well established by consensus and therefore it is not necessary for an individual to have a professional or academic qualification for them to be accepted as an expert. In this respect, a shepherd with 50 years of experience tending flocks would be widely recognized as having complete expertise in the use and training of sheep dogs and the care of sheep.

Please note, for the avoidance of doubt, someone who got their first sheep 6 months ago, herded them into a pen once using their dog, and tells lovely stories about herding sheep, is not an expert. Twitter account or no. 30,000 followers or not.

There is still the Naive Consumer Problem: Say I need to buy a skateboard. Shocking as it may be, I know very little about skateboards, other than they have wheels attached to a board, and that you skate with them. After talking with a few people that seem to know about skateboards, I quickly grasp that I may be missing some details. The kind of important details that justify a set of wheels costing slightly more than my first car. Perhaps.

I know just enough to know that I don’t know enough, so I rely on other (independent) people to tell me who the experts are. Usually we really on other experts to tells us who the experts are. The nature of social media makes that process hard. As new entrants scramble for links, mentions, follows, retweets and generally anything that will give them credibility – that much needed “social capital” – objectivity flies out of the window, and everybody calls the person with three months more experience “an expert”. Meanwhile, new tools and best practice move on like an express train, on a day without strikes or leaves on the line.

Social media is such a young space that in some areas there may not be anyone with direct experience or knowledge. This is a new frontier, still under construction in many places. Someone once quipped that “everyone wants an expert, even when there isn’t one to be had” – I remember seeing an ad wanting someone with 5 years experience in a web application. I’d been the product manager from the start of its development, and I didn’t have 5 years experience with it.

BenjaminEllis: @euan When I needed surgery that involved going close to my optic nerves, I was looking for someone who was called an expert in the field.

euan: @BenjaminEllis and I was nearly fitted with a pacemaker I didn’t need by someone who was also called an expert.

The nature of expertise means that experts still make mistakes. Expertise is domain specific too. Social media is a huge and vaguely defined area, covering much of what constitutes the web today. I don’t think many would argue against calling Sir Tim an expert on web matters. However, even he says that we know longer understand the web. An expert knows their bounds.

Incidentally, Gordon Brown has appointed Sir Tim Berners-Lee to help “open up” government data. Great news.

Back to a definition then, since finding a social media expert is starting to have all of the characteristics of a wicked problem. The root of the word expert is  ”expertus”, which means to have tried. Trying implies something else: failing. As noted by Charles Cohen at Being-Digital this week, the most valuable lessons come not from success, but from failing.

The advantage of getting into the game early is that you can make mistakes that enable you to learn. That’s one of the reasons that business should get on board now, not later. Another couple of years and you’ll be doing the equivalent of putting animated gifs on your home page in 2003.  The fact that I didn’t “get it” when I first saw Sir Tim’s prototype browser didn’t matter… Two years later and I was building web sites. By the time I was designing connectivity and security for on-line banks, making mistakes was no longer an option, for anyone. The web had matured.

I got to know what worked and what didn’t, not because somebody had told me, but because I had done both. There is more to expertise than just experience tough, back to Suw’s post:

A super-user is not the same as an expert – it’s not about knowing how the tools work, how to make a new blog post or set up a new wiki. It’s a much more nuanced job and involves constant learning from sometimes unexpected sources. I never thought I’d end up talking to psychologists about email when I started as a consultant, but understanding why people are wedded to their inbox helps me to understand the problems I will face when trying to introduce them to a wiki. Being an expert in social media means that you are constantly pushing to understand the non-obvious, constantly questioning the assumptions and the so-called common sense explanations for why things happen the way they happen.

I have to confess that I had retreated to calling myself a social media practitioner recently. It was a vague attempt to make the point that I have “walked the talk” as opposed to just talking it. However, “practitioner” isn’t it, as friends have gently pointed out. Mastery is a process, and doing is just the first step. Being an expert means knowing when to break the rules, and eventually helping to making the rules. That only comes from experimentation and experience.

Perhaps the best question to ask the next expert you meet is “tell me about your failures, and what you’ve learnt from them.” The answer will tell you a lot.

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Yes, it’s a YouTube video. But do watch it, it’s a 3 minute 6 second lesson in launching a product or building a community. Filmed during the Sasquatch music festival last weekend, the character in this video danced his way to a following. However, the lesson isn’t about him, it is about the crowd. Here’s a graph of the number of dancers over time (as best as I can do from the clip and a couple of other videos of the event):

Time

It’s a type of graph I use in lots of training session. Now I can explain the same things in three minutes, without saying a word. Perfect. The video shows what happens to most products from their launch, and to most on-line communities during their introduction and growth phases. It is a classic view of the Rodgers bell curve.

The Innovators

For the first 20 seconds of the video there is just the person we shall refer to from here on in as “the Sasquatch Dancing Man” – or SDM for short. SDM is a little different from the rest of the crowd. If you are unconvinced just check out some of the footage in the related videos at the end of the clip. That’s all I’m saying on the matter!

After those first twenty seconds he isn’t alone, but it is still a small group of people, prepared to do ’something different’ – they certainly aren’t the crowd – They are the anti-crowd.

Everett Rogers, in his 1962 book Diffusion of Innovations, suggests that innovators make up less than 2.5% of the population. You aren’t going to make a mass market or a huge community out of them, but they certainly get the party started!

The Early Adopters

These folks would like to be the innovators, and probably think of themselves as such. However, they don’t have the appetite to be first with something unproven, but they are happy to be ahead of the crowd. For me, these people are the critical glue in the process, I’ll explain why in a moment.

You see the early adopters kick in at about 80 seconds, just a few at a time. Rogers puts them at 13.5% of the population. They were in the crowd, but only loosely. Now they are out of it, they are with SDM in an elite group of their very own. Hang on, what’s this next?

The Early Majority

There’s a sudden burst. So many new people it’s hard to count. It seems there are  more people dancing than not. There’s little social risk in standing up and dancing now. The early majority make up about 34%, so here come…

The Late Majority

They’ve been sitting on the floor, but now they are in danger of being in the social outcrowd, rather than the incrowd. So, up and dance they get. You can see oa tipping point – a term made famous my Malcolm Gladwell’s eponymous book, but pre-dated by much social theory - see Thomas C. Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior - 25 years later, in 2005, he won a Nobel prize. So, suddenly everyone wants to dance. The movement has reached critical mass.

Many, if not most, products and communities never get to reach their tipping point. The transitions from innovators to early adopters to the majority are hard ones to make. The innovators are all about not being in the majority. The majority are all about not being innovators. Bring the right people to the party at the wrong time, and it’s all over.

The challenge of moving between the groups was codified in Geoffrey Moore’s 1991 book “Crossing the Chasm“. A book that I despise, not because of it’s amazingly long title: “Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers” but because the concept was badly applied by so many product and marketing managers. If you don’t know your innovators from your adopters and the majority, then it is far too easy to end up thinking you are on a different side of the chasm than you really are. The result? #fail as they say on the interwebs.

So, back to SDM. Paul Johnston has a nice take in his post how to start a movement:

1. Go somewhere people can see you
2. Start Dancing
3. Hope that (or invite) 1, 2 and 3 others to join in with your dance… start small – if they’re as crazy as you, don’t worry!
4. Attract and invite other small groups to join in
5. Make room for growth
6. Keep engaging with your new movement even if the music stops

The knack is helping “the crazies” and the growth (the majority) to co-exist with each other, at least for a while. That is why early adopters are so important. They form a kind of neutral glue between the innovators and the majority, transforming “the crazies” into “the crowd” – without them growth is almost impossible.

A side note on point 3 and SDM: I don’t know for sure, but from watching the video I would say the first few dancers knew SDM. You need a few innovators, even just to get started, so don’t ignore them or leave them standing alone.

Although this dance was a one off, products and communities aren’t one shot events. In real-life (if you can call marketing that), the very thing that causes the majority to join, will cause the innovators to leave and go to dance with someone else: The innovators came to be different, while the majority came to be the same. When you’ve cracked that paradox, you’re ready to cross the chasm.

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If you are a regular Twitter user, you might have noticed that half of the world seems to have become a spy catcher of late. It turns that catching a spy via Twitter is easier than you might think. It also has some consequences for  social capital, information security and general communication noise too.

You are a very fortunate individual if you have escaped the torrent of (somewhat spammy) messages from the spy catcher application. It is doing a rather good, and therefore bad, job of turning Twitter into Facebook – or rather the bad old Facebook of a while ago, with the legendary sheep throwing, pirates, vampires and sea of noise generated by that genre of social applications.

Got You! Via Twitter

The success of Spycatcher is a proof point of another unsettling trend: Notice how easily people hand over their username and passwords to a relatively unknown (and potentially untrusted) third party.

There has been a long term problem with twitter third party applications. The first generation of applications required users to enter their username and password on the third party site, where they were stored, so that the 3rd party could get access to the user’s Twitter stream, to do whatever wonderful things it did. It sounds relatively innocuous, but actually it sets a rather bad precedent. It is referred to as an anti-pattern, a commonly bad solution to a problem. It is bad because it teaches people how to be phished.

From Catching Fish to Helping Phishers

Phishers spend their time trying to get users to hand over password details, so that they can gain access to accounts. Twitter has a bad anti-pattern problem, and it knows it, since the Twitter ecosystem trains users to hand over their security details to third parties. To tackle the issue Twitter has added OAuth to the service. It provides a way for third parties to validate users, without storing the username and password. However, this doesn’t solve the whole problem. People are still handing over passwords. So, back to catching those spies…

Increasingly third party Twitter applications are not only logging in to pull down information, but they are actively sending tweets from users accounts (including @ messages and Direct Messages) on behalf of, and in the name of, the user. And why wouldn’t they? If a developer can get away with using a bit of a user’s social capital to promote their application, they probably will. Spycatcher is a particular case in point.

From Bad to Worse

The annoying messages it tweets are one thing, “captured this”, “assassinated that”, they can be blocked. However, over the weekend things took a turn for the worse when I started getting private direct messages from the people I follow asking me to join. Now, either my friends have suddenly all switched to the same writing style, or these were automated DMs. I’ll let you take your pick.

Twitter direct messages are my most trusted communications channel, since only people I have chosen to follow can send me messages (oh that my mobile phone was the same), and the messages generate alerts in near-real-time. So, when people start spamming me via that channel I sit up and take notice. There is another reason too. Because URLs that arrive via that channel are usually from a trusted human, I tend to trust the links. I shouldn’t of course, and neither should you. Combined with anti-patter behaviours, it is all too easy to receive a DM with a link and a “Benjamin, use your Twitter ID to check your security here” – you can see where that heads. If I was being dozy, 5 minutes later all of the people who follow me would be getting the same message. Injecting malware, or carrying out phishing attacks it all too easy. People need to realise that the twitter stream is part of their on-line identity, and to guard security credentials well. It was a little while back that Britney Spears and Barack Obama had their login details compromised.

What to learn?

• Don’t hand over your user name and password unless you are 100% sure where they are going, and what will be done with them.
• Use different passwords for different services. That way any damage should be limited to one service. If your Twitter password is the same as your on-line banking one, fix that quickly!
• Change your passwords every so often. Yes, I’m sounding like the moaning IT guy, but this does make a difference to your security.

I expect to see more and more applications using the social capital of their users to promote them – that has been the model on Facebook, and now it’s coming to Twitter. As for Spymaster, I’m not sure if it should be called spam master rather than spymaster (if you want to play please turn off the notifications I hate having to unfollow people). I’m surprised their hasn’t been a bigger backlash against it.

Perhaps it is a sign of the shifting user. We have reached the “sheep throwing” phase of the social networking platfrom life cycle. It’ll take it as a sign of Twitter entering adolesence already.

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You can’t so much as sneeze on the web at the moment without hearing about Wolfram Alpha - it is a veritable Swine Flu of the Interwebs – lots of noise, but very hard to sift out real facts. Wolfram Alpha describes its long-term goal as “[making] all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone.” Smells like Google? Perhaps.

Google Search?

It isn’t Google though, and it isn’t trying to be Google either. If you type “Benjamin Ellis” into Wolfram Alpha, you don’t get a list of web pages, you get some curious statistics about the names Benjamin and Ellis:

And so on… If you want to really understand what WolframAlpha is about, I suggest watching Stephan Wolfram’s Screencast about it (thanks to @ryancarson/Carsonified for the pointer). Stephan is the man behind WolframAlpha, and the reason for its strength in computational data – as  the screencast shows wonderfully.

Google, on the other hand, is a web search engine which has become so successful that it has become THE search engine. That is a little ironic given that Google is really in the advertising business. Once upon a time there were many different ways of searching the web (and in reality there still are), but Google has come to define the way that we think about ’search’ in the context of the Internet, and what we expect a search engine to do. That’s the power of being a leader.

We’ve even evolved a specific way of interacting with Google that we inflict on other search tools “good places london photograph” “cheap photocopying surrey” – or may be it is just me that does Googlish queries like that? Actually, I’m sure that it is not, based on some of the searches that journalists and bloggers have written trying in WolframAlpha this week.

From Web Search to (Re)Search

No, Wolfram Alpha is more akin to Wikipedia in it’s nature, as Paul Bradshaw points out, but it isn’t that either. Wikipedia is a Wiki. Wikis have an audit trail that enables you to see who made changes and when. Yes, you can click through and see what WolframAlpha used as sources for its calculations, but raw number sources don’t give much of a story.

Wiki entries emerge and evolve organically as people contribute to them. Wikipedia is a means not an end, and very useful if it is viewed as a work in progress. You can click on the “history” tab and see how a page has been modified over time, and who changed fragments of text. There is a discussion page for conversation about the entry, so users can interact without changing it. This kind of background information is invaluable meta-data that gives insight into the provenance of the information, and answers important questions like: Is it controversial? Has it been kept up to date? And so on.

Those same attributes make Wikis great tools for collecting and managing knowledge inside a business, or for working collaboratively with people outside of it. People can interact, make small additions, corrections or deletions. All with a clear audit trail. The collection of knowledge grows organically, and becomes available to anyone with access to the site.

From Data to People

There is something more important hidden in the nature of Wikis. They add a social dimension to information, and to search as well. Knowing who offered a piece of information and where it came from is essential if you need to rely on it. That sounds like a job for social technology.

“when computers were young, people assumed that
they’d be able to ask a computer any factual question, and have
it compute the answer. I’m happy to say that we’ve successfully
built a system that delivers knowledge from a simple input field,
giving access to a huge system, with trillions of pieces of
curated data and millions of lines of algorithms. Wolfram|Alpha
signals a new paradigm for using computers and the web.”
Stephen Wolfram, Wolfram founder and CEO

That sounds very nice, but I think it misses the challenge of managing and accessing knowledge. Very little of what we deal with day-to-day is hard, quantifiable data. Even the things that appear to be, quickly crumble under inspection. It isn’t that there are no hard facts, there certainly are, it is that we rely on heuristics like authority to shortcut the process of fact checking.

We are more connected than we ever have been. Twitter, Facebook and even SMS mean we can get a message out to hundreds of friends and contacts in just a few seconds. These days I will usually send complex questions out via Twitter, rather than searching via Google. The answers I get back aren’t anything like those I’d get from a Google, Wikipedia or even a WolframAlpha. They are tailored to me, and I get them in the context of the person providing the answer. If I asked for good places to take a photograph in London, and I get answers from people I know to be brilliant and experienced photographers, then I’m probably  on to a good thing.

Going Real-Time

Search Twitter for answers then? Well, yes and no. Search Twitter, but not for the reason I’ve just given. If you use Twitter search the results you get are “real time” – as new messages are added  the results update “3 more results since you started searching. Refresh to see them.” bleats the results page.

Twitter search values fresh, recent content; Google search values mature, old content. Pages go up in the Google search result rankings based on how many people have linked to the site, and even how long the site has been around and is registered for. That has served Google well, until now.

As the web moves from a giant document archive to interactions on real-time social media, real-time search is becoming the in-thing, and with good reason. There is a danger that Google may have missed the Real-Time Web, and they know it. At their recent (and excellent) Zeitgeist conference Google’s Larry Page admitted they had done a ‘relatively poor job’ in making the most of real-time trends – even praising Twitter for cornering the market. Twitter isn’t standing still, they are already discussing their plans to extend their real-time search beyond Twitter itself.

Search is evolving, after a long period with little progress. It is no longer one-dimensional. Whilst you can entertain yourself with the Top 10 Easter Eggs in Wolfram Alpha, or these 10 even better ones, it is a tool that aims to give one-time answers, with data. Google will help you find pages on the web. Twitter search will let you explore real-time conversations (or monitor the most popular topics of the moment). Tools like Yahoo! Answers make use of user contributed answers to answer questions. Microsoft are jumping in with a new tool for search as well.

The End of The Beginning

It isn’t clear that Google’s reign is anywhere near over, much as that makes for a good headline. While WolframAlpha might not knock it from the top spot, there is a huge opportunity for new technologies that can embrace the real-time nature of today’s Internet, and link into social concepts related to trust and relevance.

In the mean-time, there is plenty of opportunity to explore a range of search tools to see if they give you better results than the obvious.

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Today’s Twitter rage prompts me to write about @Replies. The habit of putting an “@” symbol in front of a Twitter message, to ‘direct’ it towards another user – has a curious history. They weren’t part of the original design of Twitter, which started as a micro-blogging platform, not an instant messaging system.

As early users posted updates, they sometimes wanted to indicate that a message was directed at a specific user, or a reply to one of another user’s updates. The idea of @username was quickly adopted as the way of doing that. The @ notation has spread to other social media too – I’ve seen @name in blog comments, forums and even emails. Eventually the concept was incorporated into the Twitter system as a feature, and almost every Twitter client has an “@replies” column or a “reply” button.

Recently Twitter changed ‘replies’ to ‘mentions’ – something you can see reflected on the Twitter web interface. For me that was a retrograde step. Replies and mentions are very different, take these two tweets:

@BenjaminEllis I really don’t think that is the best answer.

Just saw @BenjaminEllis and others on BBC News today.

You can find either of them with a Twitter search, but they are semantically quite different, to my mind at least. I’m interested in the second, but probably need to respond to the first.

Yesterday Twitter went a stage further and removed a key piece of the reply functionality, which has caused an outrage on Twitter (see #fixreplies).

You would generally reply to other people, and it is tempting to think of @replies as just one type of message. They aren’t, and not just because of the mentions versus replies issue. If you take the perspective of someone who is following you, or that you follow, there are two big categories of @ reply:

• Replies to them.
• Replies to others.

Obviously you are going to be interested in replies to you – you’re on Twitter for the conversation, right? However the case of replies to others is a little more complicated, and understanding why reveals one of the most powerful aspects of Twitter.

If you think of your social graph on twitter (the ’star’ of people that you follow, and the ’star’ of people that follow you), together with each of those people’s graphs, you’ll see something startling in the way that conversations happen on Twitter. No-one (unless they follow and are followed by exactly the same people) sees the same conversation. Pardon the crude diagram, but hopefully it helps. Think about the two users at the middle of the stars, and also the two solid dots and circles on the edge for a minute:

Everyone on Twitter sees different things, and conversations swing from people to people. It is a very unique dynamic, and one not really replicated elsewhere. Now, back to @replies. Twitter has traditionally subdivided @replies to others into two types: replies to people that you follow, and @ replies to people that you aren’t following. The reason why becomes apparent when you think about the partially-overlapping social graph each person has (that diagram above).

While it is reasonably obvious that you would want to see @replies to yourself (although you might want to see those in your timeline, or see them seperately), what to do with the others isn’t so obvious.

One argument is that you would want to see all the @ replies of the people you are following. They are part of that person’s conversation after all. This option provides a way to discover other people that you might be interested in following, or finding mutual friends that you didn’t know were on twitter. I’ve had the benefit of both of those experiences, and for me it is part of what makes Twitter a great tool: serendipity is built in.

A second argument is that seeing all of the @replies of the people you follow is going to be far too ‘noisy’ and that the only ones that are meaningful are the @ replies to people that you also follow. This is a nice halfway house, in that you can still follow conversations between your friends (or rather between the different people that you follow), but there are far fewer tweets for you to read, as you don’t get the @replies to others. The downside? Sometimes you only see half of the conversation.

In actuality, you often only see half the conversation anyway. If someone you aren’t following @replies someone that you are following, you wouldn’t normally see that tweet. According to the post on the Twitter Blog the issue of one-sided conversation fragments was their reason for removing a very useful option in Twitter: The @ replies options: Until today, Twitter allowed you to choose which argument you accepted. Via an options setting you could:

1. See all @replies (ie @replies to you and all @replies sent by people you follow).
2. See @replies to people that you are following (the second argument above).
3. See only @replies to yourself.

This allowed a great deal of flexibility, and meant that if you were following a small number of people, you could choose to see all @replies and so gradually find new people to follow. If it all got too noisy, then you could limit what you saw down to the people that you followed, and just join in those conversations. If even that was too much, you could stick to just replies to yourself. A piece of design brilliance – leave the decision in the hands of the user. I’ll come back to that in a minute.

There is a school of thought that @replies are really just a matter between the two users involved, and that allowing people to butt into conversations is somehow wrong. From my perspective I really don’t agree with that.  I quite enjoy people butting in from time to time. If the message is that private, then use a Direct Message (”D ” – although with care, one slip of the keyboard by you or the other person and that message is in the public timeline).

The issue of user choice is a tricky one for any product manager or a service designer. If you require users to make too many choices, your offering rapidly becomes hard to use, even confusing. If the choices require expertise that isn’t available to the new user, it is easy for them to get the wrong end of the stick and end up with a poor user experience.

I don’t think the @replies option has been well understood, neither have @replies in general, but I also don’t believe that is a reason to remove it. A simpler tactic (that probably wouldn’t have caused the same level of outrage in the Twitter community) would have been to change the default setting for the @replies option. It’s a neat compromise, since the ‘power users’ can still get to the setting, but those less interested in the technicalities can simply ignore it.

@EV (Twitter CEO) tweeted to say they will reconsider. Hopefully here ends the lesson, for us all. It is interesting to see a user community in action, but may also be an example of where ‘democracy’ and crowd sourcing does and doesn’t fit in with product design. I’ll come back to that one.

He’s a Qik video from a little while ago which explains more, and also shows the options that have been removed:

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The post on Three Reasons Free Will Eat Itself drew a fair bit of attention. To be clear, I’m not anti-free by any means – I think it can be a great marketing tool – it’s just that it is a very slippery one.

For your business (or even yourself) to stand out, you need to be noticeably different from the rest of the crowd, in a way that is sustainable. Your strategy needs to be based on defensible differentiators, things that you can maintain and that others can’t copy. At least, not easily.

It turns out the free is easy to copy, and that means it doesn’t make for a sustainable differentiator. Even worse, people get used to it. As Seth puts it in Too much free:

If you want to know who’s a newbie on a film set, just watch what happens at lunch. Major films have huge buffets laid out for cast and crew, and the newcomers can’t resist. It’s FREE! Over time, of course, the old-timers come to the conclusion that it’s just lunch, and the crew gets a bit more jaded and learns some self-restraint as well.

Seth goes on to argue that the next logical step on from the offer of “it is free” is “I’ll pay you to try it” – I’d say that is arguably happening already, with the way that some companies and social media agencies are engaging with bloggers and the digerati. It might be a great short-term tactic, but it isn’t one that is sustainable in the long-term. That isn’t in the best interests of either the businesses or  users. What’s that? Gmail went down again? Where do I send my Paypal details?

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In 20 years of working in industry I’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly, as well as the amazingly brilliant when it comes to business operating models. I have worked in organisations that have practised new models, to different degrees. The results were some of the fastest growing, and most successful, businesses in history. Social media will, and is, making new models of operation mandatory, rather than optional.

Business needs a new model that is better for shareholders, employees, customers and suppliers. We are striving towards that at Redcatco, and helping businesses that want to do the same, restoring the balance between the different stake holders. If your customers genuinely appreciate your business, and your employees act out of community, then the shareholders will receive all the value that they can handle.

Award Winning Business

A business that is a living example of doing things differently is Justgiving.com. I was at the RSA to see Zarine Kharas, the company’s co-founder, receive the 2009  Albert medal, joining holders that include Sir Tim Berners Lee in their number. She gave a lecture about what businesses need to do to create lasting social value: ”The New Business of Business” (audio and video on The RSA site). Anne-Marie, Justgiving’s other co-founder was also there.

On a show of hands, around 95% of the audience had sponsored someone through the JustGiving site. That’s a very impressive market penetration for a business that didn’t exist a decade ago. There are over 7 million users on Justgiving now, and they have helped to raise over £400,000,000. Yes, I did get the 0’s right. 0.4 Billion, if that is easier on the eye.

I’ve written about philanthropy, and you might remember that I was Caught by CauseWired. That isn’t the topic here. Zarine was on to broader questions and the nature of business:

“Where are the moral questions in today’s economic dialogue?”

Social Separation

She cited the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams’, recent speech in which he  pointed to the downturn as a reality check, but said that we are shrinking away from getting a (much needed) new perspective.

Zarine argued that we separate working and personal lives – Work is what you do to make a living, our good life, our moral life, is lived elsewhere. I would argue that our lives are even more fragmented than that, based on what we see with consumer behaviours.

I find it hard not to observe that social media and the growing popularity of personal-branding is blurring these bounds between work and play. Are you connected to your boss on Facebook? Do you blog at work under your own name? Are you that ’snowboarding marketing’ person?

“What is needed above all is an understanding of how a variety of institutions can together contribute to producing a more decent economic world.”

Business and ethics are not incompatible, they go in hand in hand. That should be obvious, but has been blurred through recent corporate sagas. Ethics build trust, and, ultimately, business is based upon trust. In the same way, art and profit are also not mutually exclusive. Innovation itself is a creative process, and a markedly profitable one at that.

Corporately Responsible

In Zarine’s view, CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) is a charade. In the vast majority of cases it ends up so divorced from the core business that it becomes almost meaningless, she says. I would agree. Whilst many businesses are doing some well intentioned things, the danger is that one ends up with a situation where “they, over there” are responsible for the social responsibility and tackling issues to do with sustainability. It is the same danger that businesses face when they create “innovation teams”. These are functions that have to be embedded into the heart of the business, as a shared responsibility.

It is time to relook at the purpose of business itself. Zarine reminded the audience that it is a debate that goes back to the reformation. R H Tawney ”Religion And The Rise Of Capitalism” was cited as a must read on the origins of the idea that “The business of business is business, and should be kept separate from the business of society itself.” We haven’t had businesses, as we know them today, forever. There is no reason that they are necessarily part of our long-term future, in their current form.

Business Beyond Profit

The idea of ‘maximising shareholder value’ as the sole objective of the business needs to be thrown out. None other than Jack Welch, famed business champion, himself said that shareholder value is “the dumbest idea in the world“. Profit is a result, an output, not a strategy.

“Your main constituencies are your employees, customers and products.” Jack Welch

It is only when companies move away from the maximisation of profit as their primary goal that lasting value can actually be created. Profit is a by-product of something much greater, argued Zarine, and that is: creating a great product, serving customers, employees and all stakeholders in a balanced way.

“There needs to be a concensus that success is not only measured in profit, not only in growth.”

Perhaps the recent financial crisis can shake us into that? Huge profits. Uncharted risks. Immeasurable destruction of value. I’ve served on audit and disclosure committees of some big businesses. The more deeply I understand modern accounting, the more I see how profit is a short-term variable, manipulable through the magic of accounting, even when that accounting is conducted under strict guidelines. 

“Shareholders need to cease their folly of a relentless quest for growth at unsustainable levels.”

From Business Tactics to Social Strategies

That also means understanding that decisions that have a short term negative inpact on profit can have a long term positive effect. For me this is the essence of strategic thinking: Lose the battle, but win the war. Quarterly profit targets drive behaviours that are focussed on winning every battle. Eventually the company looses the bigger war, with chapter 11 or simple oblivion following shortly afterwards.

“Actions that generate trust generate greater value”

People need to stop seeking the best price, argued Zaraine, but instead start looking a best value, and long term impact. “Cheap” often turns out to be expensive. I know from my experience in running manufacturing functions that this is very true, but little understood.

Where does the change start? Zarine says it must start with companies themselves, and with the behaviour of all employees – how they interact with each other and with others outside the business. That means you and me.

Interestingly, Zarine is unconvinced about the idea of social enterprises. She said, “consider not what a company does, but how it does it,” and was very clear that Justgiving is a business, not a charity. There are profits, which are invested back into  the business, and there is a small profit share for employees.

Profit is a sensible goal, when it is not the only goal. Zarine says what has been lost is the central purpose of a business: a satisfying life for employees and a reasonable (emphasis on REASONABLE) financial return. 

Throw Away the Rules to Get Mores

Justgiving have thrown away the rule book, instead they trust people to do the right thing. I know some other businesses that have done the same, and I’ll be writing about them soon. Imagine no expenses policy. No holiday rules. HR people will faint, but Zarine cites other businesses, including Ricardo Semler of Semco, who also run a very different model. Ricardo says the obsession with control is a delusion, and increasingly a fatal busness error. 

“We reach for rules and controls. We all succumb to the temptation. Companies, charities, on and on… …The idea that we can control these things is a vain hope”

It reminds me of something that I first read in a Covey book: Rules can never make up for mores (social norms). To put it another way, you can never legislate for good behaviour. Good behaviour comes from accountability, and accountability comes from transparency. That is one of the reasons that I believe social media can be so transformative in a business.

Justgiving isn’t perfect, and they know it “we fail at this every day.” – Rules become obsolete almost the moment we write them in today’s fast paced business environment. Rules bring out the worst in us, and to that end Justgiving have one rule: to have as few rules as possible. They have even experimented with letting employees set their own salaries.

What ensures that people do the right things? It isn’t rules, that is for sure. Zarine quoted the UK Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, who was recently in hot water over her  expenses. When questioned about suspect claims, she said, “I followed the rules. I sought advice. I followed that advice. I have done nothing wrong.”

Because she followed the rules she had done nothing wrong. Imagine that in the context of trying to build a high-risk, innovative business. In an environment based on mores, shared understandings and values, people come to work to do the right thing. Trust, and peer pressure, combine with the desire to do the right things, to provide the glue that holds people together. Rules, argued Zarine, breed mediocrity. She describes the Justgiving environment in this way:

“We aim to have honest conversations with each other – difficult ones, to endlessly debate how to serve customers better.” Far from being a soft environment, it is a tough one, “Decisions are made on facts, not on egos; [it is a place] where innovation happens without fear of failure.”

New Structures – Beyond Command and Control

They don’t have an org chart for the business, they work in project teams which dissolve and reform. People you have relationship with hold you accountable, not distant managers. I would go along with Zarine’s view that the structures of the Victorian age and the production line are not appropriate for the Internet era.

This all sounds simple, but is very difficult in practice. We are educated to be compliant, rather than questioning, but innovation starts with questioning, and compliance does not breed trust. Creating a more ‘open’ organisation is a long journey. It took over seven years for Semco. One audience member asked how this might work in their National Health Service trust. There are definitely challenges.

When people feel themselves to be highly accountable to their peers, when they are motivated by a sense of involvement “That’s when they perform to the best of their abilities, out  of respect for and commitment to their team, to their customers, to their shareholders. Where they have a meaningful say in the business, they do not have to be told what to do.”

Adam Smith, 250 years ago, recognised that an economy requires other values and commitments, such as mutual trust and confidence, in order to work.

“We don’t need ethics workshops or corporate citizenship lectures, just good old fashioned trust and the freedom to do the right thing.”

Get Innovating

Social innovation is open to all businesses that truly want it. Whilst employees might be more geographically dispersed than they once were, the technologies exist to re-integrate them and rebuild the relationships and trust that are so essential to running an effective business. Those relationships can be extended beyond company boundaries, to build effective communities with customers, partners and shareholders. Social media is making businesses more accountable than they have been in living memory. Consumers are becoming activists and campaigners, and what goes on inside of the walls of a company no longer remains there (see Dominos Pizza – Why Everyone is in PR Now and Employee Engagement Matters).

The best way for businesses to respond, is to embrace the new communication media that the Internet has enabled, and use them to build trusted relationships and to transform the business.

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In some senses, this post is a part II to raising finance for your business. Tuesday’s TechCrunch Geek n Rolla event brought together business start up hopefuls and experienced old hands from around Europe. The passion and enthusiasm of TechCrunch’s Mike Butcher in supporting the European start up scene is a joy to see. The scene needs more of that.

Update: Mike has other talents too, as we found out at the after party (thanks to @Itamarl for the video):

Here are the highlights and key take-aways from the event, at least the ones that caught my ear:

Andrew, of Huddle, gave an invaluable talk on “Hiring a group of peers” with points that are good ancient valley hiring wisdom:

• Have 100% agreement on hiring decisions – if anyone is in doubt, best to say no, and say no early.
• If in doubt, don’t hire – however tempting.
• Personal referral beats all other forms of hiring, by a mile, even finding people via Twitter.
• If you have to use recruiters, pick just one or two to work with, and build a quality relationship.
• Paying below market rate is a false economy, people will come and steal your good staff.
• You don’t always get the right team in the first place. Get over it.
• Follow the correct procedures – make sure you have staff trained in HR, the ROI is compelling.

Andrew talked about Huddle’s desire to create “a place I’d want to work at” :- great people + nice surroundings = WIN. Hard to argue with that! Reminds me of an old post from a Mike Smith on startups and hiring. It is so important and so hard to get right.

I’ve written a separate post on Joe Drumgoole’s “get off of my cloud” – it is good to see the topic of cloud computing for start ups getting some air time, done right it is a brilliant success-based cost model. 

Joe Stepniewski, Skimlinks, talked about monetisation for start ups – I can’t seem to find that word in my spell checker… Revenues perhaps? . Joe reminded the audience that CPM has taken a 6% drop in the last year, but performance marketing has gone up. The changing numbers and dynamics mean that ad-funded start ups need to paddle faster just to stay where they were. You need lots of traffic. Lots – A million impressions a month is needed just to cover the cost of a desk in London (about £500/month).

The lesson? Don’t rely on advertising – CPMs are the lowest they have been for years, and dropping. Go direct (if you are going to go with advertising) and look for monthly tenancy from targeted sponsors. Choose ones that you are passsionate about and create interative promotions where the audience participate. A note to marketing managers and businesses looking for promotion: There is huge opportunity for you here. SAP and others have done very well off of sponsoring blogs.

Joe strongly encouraged start ups to look at affiliate schemes, which I’d hope he would, given Skimlinks business. They have low barriers to entry, are quick to get going, and work with lower traffic volumes. It is also a more level playing field, as small sites can get the same deals as larger ones. Social Media and user generated content can convert well, since user opinions and recommendation drive the buying decision. Forums and Twitter convert very well. Again a note to outbound marketers: don’t miss out. Affiliate marketing encourages sites to be more considerate of their users. A very good thing. More in Bash’s post on TechCrunch.

Jof Arnold, Gymfu.com, gave an insider’s view of developing apps for the iPhone and marketing via the iStore. It isn’t as pretty as it looks, with multiple platforms to develop for and the intricacies of the Apple approval process. People are already gaming the system, and there are lots of pirate installs on iPhones. The peak revenues mean that it is still too small a market to really interest VCs. Self-funding and Angels are the way to go here.

Leisa Reichelt, Disambiguity, spoke about user experience. She’s been a long-time favourite blogger for me. Her key points apply to all marketing, not just to user experience:

• Step 1: Pick an audience.There is no such thing as “the general public”.
• Step 2: Know your audience. Don’t assume, and beware of stereotypes. Find them. Watch them. Talk to them.
• Step 3: Design for your audeince. e.g. use customer personas. Having some ‘pretend’ customer identities, based on what you learnt in step 2, is a great psychological hack to shape and improve your thinking. Question every product and design decision against your users’ needs. Hire a (good) designer to make you a style guide.
• Step 4 Think big and think small. Simple things like moving a button can make multi-million dollar differences. Likewise, don’t loose site of the ‘big stuff’ either.

The panel on getting more women involved in tech start ups has been amply covered almost everywhere. I started using computers in the 70’s. Things are better now, but we still aren’t there. Sophie Cox, of Worldeka,  made some good points about the sexualisation of youth culture. In the UK we have an issue with getting people involved in tech, regardless of gender. I find the falling numbers on science courses alarming. Paul Walsh didn’t make the panel, so he was replaced by a banana in a bin. No, I have no idea. Anyway… A future topic for a blog post.

William Reeve, experienced entrepreneur and investor, talked through his LOVEFiLM.com experience, with some sagely advice in his slides:

• More cash doesn’t mean more customers. It is how you use it.
• Can you afford success? If your costs are ahead of revenues, do some creative thinking
• Boot strap cash - cash flow beats money.
• Choose your partners well to manage your cash flow.
• Look for performance based spend.
• Think about your burn rate. How much cash you are consuming each month controls your future.
• Pick the metrics that matter, and manage tightly against them – if your key metrics slide has 50 things on it, you need to re-think it!.

Lesley Eccles, Co-founder of Hubdub shared their experiences of launching, and tackling the US market from the UK. Think: lots of flying, careful with the humour, and find good local partners. Ian Hogarth, Songkick.com, stated the importance of focus well:

Focus is working out what your start up is best at, describing it accurately, and nailing that thing.

As a VC once said to me: focus like a laser beam. Dissipation of effort will rip success out of your hands. Ian pointed to a good wiki with a list of free/opensource tools for start ups: startuptools.pbwiki.com. He also made a point, as did Mike Butcher, that networking with other start ups is key. This is something the valley does well – sharing experience, supporting other companies. We are social here in Europe, but don’t seem to be as good at leveraging other people’s experience.

Nick Halstead, Favorit, talked on Funding and how to handle Angels should be compulsory reading for anyone looking to get funding that way. Angels are hard to spot – they don’t advertise themselves – for very good reasons – and they can be both difficult and rewarding to work with. There are angels that have fins rather than wings, you have been warned. Likewise, Fred Destin, Atlas Venture, gave some solid advice on dealing with VCs. Key take away: You need to build a relationship and credibility. Dropping a business card isn’t going to get you anywhere.

I’d agree with Alan Patrick’s take on the event. I see encouraging signs of greater maturity and experience in the UK’s tech startup scene, and that is a very good thing. It would be nice to think that in the next few years we’ll see some successful exits, which will free up cash and experience for the next, even bigger and better, wave of UK-based start ups.

Next up… Feedback on the start up pitches, and tips on pitching.

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It’s a big week in London this week, and it’s not just me saying that, it’s a quote from TechCrunch’s Mike Butcher. Yesterday was SeedCamp, today is Geek’n'Rolla and last night I chaired the Mobile Monday London session on “Financing Your Mobile Business in a Credit Crunch.”

Raising Finance

Raising finance is an almost inevitable part of running any business, large or small, in good times (to fund growth) or in bad times (to get through). It is something to understand, whether you are a new employee or a seasoned CEO. This post captures some of the discussion and my thoughts from last night’s diverse and talented panel, that included:

• Chris Padfield, from London Business Angels.
• Carl Uminski, long time entrepreneur (CTO of Overture, TruTap co-founder and involved in Flirtomatic).
• Pamir Gelenbe, from Newton Moore – entrepreneur and VC.
• Rose Lewis, from Pembridge Parnters LLP – again with a VC background and businesses finance experience.

The evening kicked off with presentations, including Vodafone launching their mobile clicks competition in the UK, a session on business modelling, an overview of the DKTN and also Gateway to investment - www.g2i.org – a scheme which helps prepare businesses for funding.

Customers Consulting and Product

A lot of the discussion centred on customers and consulting. Customers are clearly an important piece of the funding equation. Paying customers not only provide revenue to fund the business, they also provide evidence that the business has a credible proposition. Clearly something that is important to potential investors. While a single customer doesn’t prove you have a business (almost anyone can sell something to someone once), a few key references are a good indicator that you might be on to something.

Some businesses are funded pre-revenue, as was the case for many of the businesses that I have been involved in. If you are developing patent-able technology, or a product with a long development cycle, then clearly you are going to need funding to get through to first revenues. However, with changing development models and costs, and the more modular nature of Web 2.0 technologies, it is becoming the exception rather than the rule in the web and social technology space. Businesses are getting customers on board with early versions of the product, and after that seeking funding to accelerate growth. That means less dilution for the company founders – since the company will have a higher valuation, you don’t have to give as much of it away to raise money.

The general consensus from the panel was that web-based businesses really do need to get customers before they go for funding. With the cost of prototyping applications being so low, early development can be self-funded. Customers are key to showing that there is a market for the offering, rather that it just being a ‘good idea.’

There is a temptation for technology companies to slip into being a consultancy business, rather than a product business. Not that there is anything wrong with a consultancy business, but it has a very different valuation and structure to a product one. Consultancy can provide short term cash, but products provide revenue streams that can more easily be leveraged and grown, once up and running. Many businesses do start with consultancy and use that to build expertise and IPR that leads to a product – it takes great skill.

Timing and a Plan

The session on business modelling, and a few questions from the audience, brought up the issue of business plans. I think it was Pamir who said: “Business plans are like sausages, if you knew what went in to one you wouldn’t touch it.” In my experience, that is very true, but you still need them! Rose pointed out something that many people I speak to seem to miss: “Once you have raised the funding, what are you going to do with it?” She likes to see a 90 day plan detailing how the investment will be used.

Timing for investment was another central topic of discussion, and its always a tricky one. There are pros and cons to going early of going late, but Pamir reminded us of the truism: “The time to get money, is when you don’t need it” – If you don’t need funding, you can be more selective about who you get funding from. That gives you the opportunity to choose “better quality” money.

Not all cash is equal.

Just as some customers are a better source of revenue – either because they are prepared to be references or can help with critical product issues -  some angels and Venture Capitalists are going to be able to bring more relevant expertise and contacts into your business. It isn’t just about their money, in fact almost anything but. Also, remember that headline valuation is one thing, but terms are another. Sometimes the terms of the funding can kill you down the line, or at least greatly limit your options.

If you ask a VC for money you get advice, if you ask a VC for advice you get money.

Much of the art of investment is about controlling risk, and that came up as well. As a business person you need to manage your risk, but you also need to manage (and reduce) investor’s risk. 

There are lots of different options for raising money. There are 15-20 key groups of Angels  in the UK, a smaller number of VCs (with funds that are active), then there are banks, competitions (ike Vodafone Clicks) and grants – many of which are regionally specific in the UK. Banks are clearly putting money into businesses, but generally only into larger, mature businesses. If you already have VC funding, then venture debt is also an option. It’s newer and more esoteric, but can be advantageous in certain circumstances – I’ve had good and bad experiences with it. 

Be Innovative

There other ways of funding your business too, and you can be really innovative in ‘raising funds’ – sometimes adjusting cash flow, for example moving to success-based cost models for sales and marketing, or choosing suppliers that will work in ways that free up your cash.

Although we don’t say it so much on this side of the Atlantic, the recession is great for entrepreneurs – Brits talk about it more conservatively. In down times there is more talent available, sales and marketing costs are lower and things are more open to negotiation – for example office space. If you are driven by costs, not revenues – usually the case for early stage start up – then hard times can be good. Not so great for businesses with big established revenues and high margins. 

A big thank you to Farhan for liberally tweeting notes whilst I was chairing – another great use for Twitter, real time session notes.

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I wouldn’t normally blog about a Pizza chain, but this week Dominos have turned themselves into an example of why businesses need to get to grips with social media, and why employee engagement really matters.

The best place to start, if you’ve missed the story so far, is with the blog post on The Consumerist - Domino’s Rogue Employees Do Disgusting Things To The Food, Put It On YouTube. If your stomach is a little delicate, then let me summarise it like this for you: Some (now very ex) Domino’s employees do some pretty unspeakably unhygienic things to food during its preparation. We’d know nothing about this, and they wouldn’t be world-famous if they hadn’t, for good measure, posted a video of them doing said activities on to YouTube.

Whin a couple of hours of Consumerist publishing the blog post, reader’s had tracked down the branch and the offending employees. They are now claiming that this was a prank, and the food was never served to anyone. Meanwhile, six thousand views on the video is gradually turning into over 500,000 views.

Domino’s responded on the original blog, but by then the story had propagated and the video was already embedded in dozens of blogs, and in people’s Twitter streams and Facebook status updates. The company issued a statement, somewhat slowly, and in a very quiet corner of their site “update to our valued customers” it said.

While the employees have been terminated, and the franchise is looking to file a criminal complaint against them, it is too late. The damage has been done. The nature of the blogosphere is that it is disperate, and doing what Domino’s did (responding on the original blog) simply isn’t enough. Stories propagate from blog to blog and you can’t get to all of them during this sort of incident. Twitter accelerates the process even further – the pace of micro-blogging makes traditional blogging look positively sedentary. 

Whatever your view of Twitter, for now it is where the news stories are made and fed – it’s where PRs and Journalists live alongside millions of people who do “other things”.  It is also where the Domino’s Pizza story took off . Shel Holtz has a great set of thoughts on the handling of the incident  ”Domino’s needs to get out in front of this situation.” he says. I’d agree with that. The only way to do it is to create a focus for the response, and a place for it to be heard. It’s also the time to mobilise customers who are  passionate about your band to respond too. You have got customers like that, haven’t you?

A corporate blog and a twitter account would have provided that focal place for a response, but instead information is turning into out of date misinformation and spreading over the blogosphere, oh, and that video of the employees doing unspeakable things? It is well on its way to 1,000,000 views. Of course it might get taken down, but that would simply remove a focal point for getting information out (the video now carries a sub-title to the effect that the employees have been terminated) or it might just  result in the video being reposted.

This isn’t the first saga in the fastfood chain to hit social media. Kentucky Fried Chicken staff showed employee innovation at work, by turning a deep fat fryer sink into a hot tub. Similarly, Amazon suffered a Twitter-fuelled backlash at the start of this week over a “cataloging error” which resulted in a number of books being de-listed and cries of a censorship-foul.

This why I am so focussed on building brilliant businesses, with communities around them. Businesses need ‘friends’ looking out for them on-line. Businesses also need a strong sense of internal community. Employees who are passionate about the business and its reputation will work to preserve it. Someone, rather unkindly, referred to fast food establisments’ staffing policies as “hire on a heart beat.” I’m sure that isn’t true, but businesses need to think differently about hiring in a world were every employee is now working in PR.

PR is no longer about a few staff managing relationships with some journalists. PR is about every member of staff looking after relationships with the “Public” – the sea of people who are customers, prospects, suppliers, partners, potential future employees and friends and friends of friends of all of those. One company that really seems to get that is Zappos. Not so familiar in Europe, but growing massively in the US, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh has built a company that seems perfect for these times. ReadWriteWeb has a recent interview with him, by Loic Le Meur:  Zappos CEO Talks Culture Fit and the Importance of Creating a ‘Wow’ Experience. Staff don’t have scripts to interact with customers, but they do get Employees get substantial initial training, and are hired and fired based on the company’s core values.

“Any idiot with a webcam and an Internet connection can attempt to undo all that’s right about the brand. In the course of one three-minute video, two idiots can attempt to unravel all of that.” Domino’s Spokesperson Tim McIntyre in Ad Age.

He’s right, and the only way to prevent it is to have a strong employee and customer communities, who are passionate about the business and united around a common set of values. That way, even if one employee does turn rogue, the rest of the community will bring things into line. Businesses must be ready to engage with social media, to know how to handle it, and to have the staff who are up to the task. You don’t want to be starting to figure it out at the same time as dealing with a crisis. Start to build the skills now.

Businesses need to build effective communication channels with employees. They need to understand that everyone in the business is in public relations, and companies’ values need to be demonstrated in living communications – not just pinned to a wall.

If ‘rank and file’ employees don’t have a feedback channel to management, malcontent can quickly turn into misbehaviour, and these days that puts you three clicks away from being on the front page for all the wrong reasons.

Listen to Tony Hsieh’s opening remarks at SXSWi. – one of the highlights of SXSWi for me – you might want to skip in a little to get past the intro. It’s a very different sort of business, embracing many of the tenants of social media into the heart of the business. You can pitch up any day and take a tour. The staff use Twitter and are active in the community. Somewhat ironically, Tony ran a Pizza business at college. I bet that was a very different sort of pizza business.

UPDATE (24 hours on): Just after this post was written, a Domino’s Pizza Twitter account was set up: DPZINFO. They are disseminating updates and engaging with the Twitter community via the account. A little stilted, and a brutal start, but good on them. I’d noticed a couple of Twitter ID’s starting with DPZ. The story has jumped to the mainstream media (USA Today, the BBC and Sky News). The apology on the Domino’s page has been updated. The store has been shut and Patrick Doyle, Domino’s CEO, says that they will re-examine their hiring practices. The original video has been taken down (at the request of Kristy, who featured in the video) and The following video posted by Domino’s:

Neville has posted a follow up on the incident, if you would like to read more. The comments on the video are the usually YouTube class act. As I write this, that video has had less than 20 thousand views, showing another asymmetry in social media: It makes a better tool for opposition than it does for defence. Alan puts it well in a post today, “Now! Big! Risk! Fear!” spread fast. That’s why social media calls for a very different approach to traditional PR, one that reaches deep inside the company.

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It’s the meme that wouldn’t die, but die it should… Last week I attended the Chinwag Live ‘Freeconomics’ session in London, and not long before that I listened to Guy Kawasaki interviewing Chris Anderson at South by South West. While Chris dodged Guy’s low-ball questions out at SXSWi, and focussed on promoting his new book (which may or may not be free), the Chinwag Live panel got a bit more stuck in.

The whole ‘free’ thing is worth wrapping your head around. It is probably worth starting with Chris Anderson’s article from last year, but then reversing out a bit with Alan Patricks two great posts on Freeconomics: PART I and PART II and his notes from the panel: CHINWAGGING or the podcast). You can read a journal of the panel session on the Bluedoor blog, where Abigail has blogged her tweetage, as it were, and there is a full write up at Brandrepublic.

You see, ‘free’ isn’t really free at all. It’s been funded by the VCs and selling data, and the VCs aren’t playing anymore. The concept of Anderson’s free is that transactional costs (the price of ‘doing things’) tends to zero on-line and at scale. However, transactional costs tending to zero is very different then them being zero see… Someone’s got to pick up the tab, see Nic Brisbourne’s post, and I quote:

The other takeaway that I hadn’t considered fully is that for many services in reality the marginal cost of delivery is not zero.  This was made most forcefully by panelist Alan Patrick, but also by panelist Bruce Daisely of YouTube who made the point that the worlds favourite video service now accounts for 10% of total bandwidth consumption – which I’m sure costs Google a lot of money.  This point knocks a sizeable whole in the ‘free’ argument, although ‘free’ fans would argue that these costs are going down all the time.

So, I threw in a question at the end, on the basis of these three forces “Won’t free end up eating itself?”

1. Free Attracts The Freeloaders.

If you advertise your service as free, hoping to up sell people to a paying service later (the freemium model), you may well be attracting the wrong crowd. I don’t mean in the sense of bad people, but rather the people that want something for free. That leaves those who want to pay as potential customers for a competitor. More importantly, you have probably attracted ‘customers’ that choose on price (free), rather than features. I put the word customers in quotes there very deliberately. Since they aren’t paying you anything, they aren’t really customers. They are prospects. And that is where ‘free’ is interesting: As a marketing ploy. It is a good one. But wait up…

2. Free Drives Value Out of the Market.

Imagine there’s a nice bar. A really nice bar. They charge £10 per drink, but it’s nice and you like it there, so you pay your £10. Now, someone opens up a bar next door. The drinks are free. I mean £0 free. You’re going to check it out aren’t you? Seriously. At least once? The £10 bar is going to loose at least some revenue, if not customers. You’re running the £10 bar. What will you do? Drop prices? A buy-one-get-one-free offer?

Markets are elastic. If someone enters the market with a lower priced offer, it drags prices down. It’s called competition, and it’s generally a good thing. As customers, we like it. However, when someone enters the market at ‘free’ it isn’t the usual ‘more efficient competitor’ entering. No, it’s a value destroying monster. Value will disappear from the market. That inevitably means that companies will too, which will reduce competition in the long run – and that isn’t good. And the competition that’s left? Oh, it’s bad…

3. Free Spreads Across Markets.

Traditional competition focusses on price. As marketers, we try and combat price competition by introducing features that (in our minds at least) create value and preserve the price. Some choose to build more efficient businesses, so that they can compete on price, but maintain margins. In the world of ‘free’ you can’t compete on price. You have to compete on features (or quality, which I’d argue is a feature anyway). That means wherever two players are in the same market with a ‘free’ offer, the temptation, if not the action, will be to gradually add more and more features. Think about the value for the market. More and more of what was revenue, ends up as ‘free’. Remember those ‘freemium’ businesses, giving you free stuff, hoping to upgrade you? There is less and less to upgrade you to that isn’t free.

Free is a Short-Term Win and a Long-Term Lose

‘Free’ feels good, but it is really an inevitable race to the bottom, ensuring that markets are destroyed by low price expectations and poor (service) quality. Watch the providers of ‘free’ – as advertising revenues (and tolerance for advertising) falls, and VC money dries up, expect them to come asking for money or to start selling your data to the highest bidder. The end of ‘free’ might well come from the strangest of places: mobile e-commerce. The latest iPhone software let’s you make payments within iPhone apps themselves. That’s iPhone apps that you probably paid for in the first place too! Nokia, Microsoft and a host of others are planning similar offers.

The Way out of Free is Utility

As much as product marketers bang on about the latest much have feature, one thing that we do pay for is utility. I can make a local phone call very cheaply, if not for free – depending on where I am. That same phone call costs significantly more on a mobile/cell phone, and yet the technology took off. People were paying for utility: being able to make calls from anywhere, not just when they were stuck in the house or the office. It made great sense as people became more and more mobile. And, as the technology took off, people got more and more mobile in their work and social lives, driving the technology even faster.

So far, the Internet is just catching up with the whole mobility thing. Web browsers are improving in leaps and bounds, as is the provision of mobile-friendly websites and improved screens on phones. Mobile Internet is taking off. And do you know what? It probably isn’t going to be ‘free’.

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This post might be a little heavy going, but the topics are important in understanding how we can be (and are) manipulated, and how businesses can (and should) go about building trust in an on-line, social media driven world. Last week I attended the Wealth of Networks conference, looking at the challenges of Next Generation Internet. Ian Delaney’s post sums up some of the issues.

Today’s Internet is a curious mix of problems seeking answers and answers seeking problems. Later in the week, the EPSRC Research Cluster on Innovative Media for the Digital Economy held it’s Springboard Event. Both were thought provoking, and I will come back to them, especially the session with Charlie Leadbeater in another post. First though, some thoughts on the recurring challenge that came up in both events: The issue of trust in the on-line world.

What Does Trust Mean On-line?

Trust is a troublesome topic to study, partly because it occurs in so many different contexts, but also because it is so hard to nail down a definition. Rousseau and her colleagues offered up the following definition:

“Trust is a psychological state comprising the intention to accept vulnerability based upon positive expectations of the intentions or behavior of another.” Rousseau, D. M., Sitkin, S. B., Burt, R. S., and Camerer, C. (1998). “Not so Different After All: A Cross-Discipline View of Trust,” in Academy of Management Review, 23, 393-404.

Quite a mouthful. Let me simplify a little: Trust is being ready to do something (risky), in the hope that it will work out. It is something we do everyday, especially when we carry out a interactions on-line. However it is something we probably understand less well than we would like to think.

Personality theorists have argued that some people are more likely to trust than others, based on how their trust has been rewarded in the past. That doesn’t tell us much about the mechanisms of trust, at least not in a way that we can action personally, or use in running a business.

Most academic papers divide trust into two types. At the early stages of a relationship, trust is “calculus-based“. We carefully calculate how the other party is likely to behave, looking at the rewards and punishments for being trustworthy or untrustworthy. In other words, trust is driven by some form of accountability. We are more likely to trust if we know that when the other party does something ‘bad’, then something ‘bad’ will happen to them in response. In these days of blogs, on-line review sites and social networks you can see how that can work on-line – even if imperfectly.

As a relationship develops, shared values and goals start to emerge. This allows trust to move to a different level, towards what is sometimes called “identification-based trust“. At this point, both sides have grasped and digested the other’s desires and intentions. They understand what the other side cares about to the point where they can act in each others interest. This kind of trust forms an emotional bond between the parties, one that drives valuable things like loyalty and the desire for mutual satisfaction.

In one direction, trust, in the on-line world at least, points towards accountability, and from there to transparency, openness and confidence. Trust is traditionally based on social relations, but in the on-line world that anchor is often substituted for another one: Confidence – the belief that things will unfold as expected. There are distinctions between trust and confidence. Confidence is based on familiarity, and it is something that can be designed for. An important point when building websites.

In the other direction, trust points towards compliance. This is perhaps not as obvious, but think about it for a moment. If you carry out a transaction on-line, you have effectively complied with the desires of the other party. Be it purchasing something via a web site, registering for a whitepaper or just signing up to join the latest social networking site, you essentially did what that other party wanted you to do. That might sound a little oppressive, but it is never-the-less a fact, and a very useful one if you want to understand how that happened.

From Trust to Persuasion

The more friendly face of compliance is persuasion, and recently I reread an old Robert B. Cialdini book “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion“, although I’ve lost my copy somewhere between London and Austin. I hope I can replace it, as it’s a good read. Cialdini introduces six principles of ethical persuasion:

• Reciprocity
• Commitment/consistency
• Scarcity
• Liking
• Authority
• Social proof

These concepts have become so popular that you are probably familiar with the terms. They are techniques used by sales and marketing professionals day in and day out around the world.

Reciprocity is an extremely powerful influence. That’s hardly surprising, since it is one of the underlying behaviours that enables us to have a society where we can have specialist roles and engage in trade. People generally feel obligated to return a favour. This tendency is often played on by offering a small gift to potential customers. Studies show that even if the gift is unwanted, it will influence the recipient to want to reciprocate, usually by buying something. A variation on this theme is to ask for a particularly big favour. When this request is turned down, a smaller favour is then asked. Having refused the first request, it becomes that much harder to refuse the second.

Ever been given a “free” taster and then ended up buying something you wouldn’t have otherwise? Or recommended or helped out as a result of a service that gave you a “free” account. You were probably motivated by reciprocity.

Commitment and consistency are important factors in trust, and also compliance. Our desire to appear consistent in our words, beliefs, attitudes and actions is very strong. Society values personal consistency exactly because it enables trust – if we are consistent, our future actions are predictable, and that leads to confidence and so to trust.

Being consistent in our decision making also provides a useful shortcut: By sticking with decisions that we have already made, we don’t have to go through the stress and effort involved in continually reprocessing all the information that enabled us to make the decision in the first place. Consistency gets us through the complexity of our modern existence. One merely needs to recall the earlier decision and respond in keeping with it. Given the choice between deciding we are wrong, and simply changing our opinion by rearranging the facts to support our existing opinion, we will generally re-arrange the facts. As an additional shortcut, we are completely unaware that we re-arranged the facts. Google ‘cognitive dissonance’ if you want to scare yourself.

Scarcity is a fairly self-evident motivator: Offer closes today. Last 5 places remaining. That exclusive event that has tickets that always sell out before you get a chance to buy them. We hate missing out, and that influences our decisions.

The last few factors (liking, authority and social proof) can also be interpreted in terms of social influence or social trust. People trust, and comply with, people they like and that they perceive are like them (i.e. have similar values). That is why broadcast media advertisers pay large sums of money to have celebrities feature in them. Similarly, sales people look for shared interests between themselves and you.

This is simply another way of reducing the complexity we are faced with daily, using the decisions other people have already made, to reduce the ones that we have to make. People affect other people and are affected by other people. Social media and social networking sites almost codify this practice. We conform and comply based on the perceived views of others. Social Impact Theory (Latane, 1980) suggests that the amount of influence depends on:

1. The number of people who agree (although as the number of people increases, the number is less significant).
2. Strength (the status, expertise and power of the influencers).
3. Immediacy (the proximity of the influence).

Conformity from social proof is immensely powerful. If you are in any doubt, look into the origin of the phrase “Don’t drink the Kool – Aid” often kicked around in tech circles. It comes from the Jonestown tragedy, a mass suicide in 1978.

The most common form of social proof used in marketing is case studies – people like you purchased this product. Social proof is most influential at moments of uncertainty. If a situation is ambiguous, people are more likely to look to other’s behaviour and follow it. Further, people are more inclined to follow the lead of ’similar’ people, see liking, above.

We also respond to perceived authority and expertise. The exact nature of our compliance varies by the situation, but generally we are most influenced by job titles, clothes, and even the cars that people drive. Again, these are techniques commonly used in advertising. Thumb through the adverts in any glossy mainstream magazine and count the examples.

There are two takeaways here. Firstly, as a company looking to build trust in an increasingly on-line world, there are a number of mechanisms open to you:

• Be open and transparent.
• Be predictable and consistent.
• Be visibly accountable.

Summarising Trust for Businesses On-line

In short, be part of your customers’ community. Yes, in the short term, you could get away with just the ‘appearance’ of these activities, but if you want to get to the highest levels of trust with customers, you will actually need to carry them out fully.

As individuals, we need to pay careful attention to how social media influences us, and where we place our trust. Social media plays curious games with otherwise highly effective psychological mechanisms. Just because a number of people write a positive review about a product on-line doesn’t actually make it good, although it may feel that way. At the very least, you are looking at a self-selecting group: people who chose to buy the product, rather than ones who chose not to because they perceived it to be poor.

People writing reviews are prone to exactly the same mechanisms that you are: Consistency and commitment means that they are unlikely to write a bad review for a restaurant they have patronised, since they have already paid for a meal there. Sometimes trust is broken so much that other forces come in to play, hence the occasional ranting negative review.

In face to face communication, as an effective barrier against many of these compliance techniques is to congratulate the persuader on their skill in using them. That isn’t so easy when you are dealing with a website. Give yourself time and space when making decisions. A simple self-enforced cooling-off period can work quite well.

Our life experience has probably made us suitably cynical about advertising in broadcast media. The on-line world is evolving so rapidly that we haven’t yet settled on well-adapted behaviours to deal with it.

I’m not intending to be negative here, just keen that we build real trust and real communities via the on-line world. With that in mind, I am off to the Centre for Applied Positive Psychology’s Creating Flourishing Communities Conference this week (details here), more on that later.

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South by South West Interteractive was even more of a whirlwind than I imagined it would be, and I had imagined it being frenetic. The event brings together people from the film, music and digital interactive spaces, which provides a rich context in which to talk about the future of marketing.

In between the Digital Mission events I caught a few panels, and (in true SXSW style) had lots of corridor conversations with industry verterans. For me, one of the highlights was meeting with Hugh MacLeod, aka GapingVoid. Hugh was one of the first bloggers I started to read, and I’ve been a long-time admirer of his cartoons (a warning: some strong language). I think it would be fair to describe him as an accidental artist – in fact I’m sure those are his words not mine. I have come up through an engineering and technology route to the marketing world, or as Hugh put it, I’m a “geek.” Hugh started in the marketing agency domain, before arriving into the technology world via blogging, back at the beginning of the century. That gives him a unique perspective on both the old and new marketing worlds.

As we sat in a favourite SXSWi watering hole, the Ginger Man, I quizzed him about where he saw marketing going and listened to his stories. I also sat in on the blog to book panel towards the end of SXSWi, but more of that later – and on Hugh’s upcoming book Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity (sample excerpts  and pre-review)

Over the last year I’ve come to the conclusion that it is best to interpret broadcast media, and the broadcast marketing that comes with it, as an anomoly. Since the invention of radio and TV advertising, marketers have been able to “buy” our attention by inserting adverts into content that we choose to consume. I distinguish radio and TV from earlier billboard and poster advertising, since they are media that already have our attention before the advert. With poster ads, marketers had to win our attention; with broadcast ads marketers simply need to make sure that they don’t loose our attention.

Arguably, broadcast media has laid waste to innovative marketing and made marketers lazy. Big brands have lived off of the program-ad-program sandwich “bait and switch” format for a generation, but we aren’t playing the attention game anymore. About the time that our second child was born we got a large screen TV. Not for us – the TV is hardly ever on when we are home – but for our baby sitters. Having a big screen TV made us an attractive employer for sitters.

Times have changed. Just before I headed over to the US for SXSW, our baby sitters arrived. They didn’t ask for the TV remote, they asked for the WiFi password so they could surf the web on their laptops. The younger generation is increasingly switching from watching TV to surfing the Internet. The older generations are too. The story is just by way of example, the broader trend is supported by industry statistics too.

Along with the switch from the big screen to the “small screen” we’ve become increasingly immune to advertising. Experiments that monitor eye-scanning patterns of web surfers show that they quickly learn where ads are placed in the page, and avoid looking at them. Our attention can no longer be so easily bought. The web doesn’t support bait and switch. If people (and the brands that employ them) want to get our attention, then they are going to have to be much smarter than they have been in the past. They either have to get better and better at grabbing attention, or to switch from interuption-based marketing, to conversational marketing.

In parallel, the growing domination of web search as the means of information gathering has changed the way that people look for products. Marketing is increasingly about discovery, rather than broadcast. A transition from from push (broadcast) to pull (discovery) seems increasingly inevitable.

Of course, we know all this, but old marketing habits die hard. The short term answer has been for companies to do more and more (broadcast) advertising, aided by the falling cost of media. That has simply exasperated the problem, saturating audiences and diluting attention. There is no point carrying on with the old model and hoping that it will still work. It won’t, at least not unless you have a huge budget. You can compensate for efficiency by pushing harder, but eventually things will still break.

The future of marketing lies in its the past. Companies have to switch back to authentic conversations with customers, building communities and finding the influencers and amplifiers within them.

Some shots from the Ginger Man and out and about in Austin.

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Artefacts - things left behind by ancient civilisations. Tangible items that remain, things that you can see and hold, that give a sense of history.

“Create valuable artefacts.”

I’m not sure where the phrase originated, but it is one that has stuck with me for many years. It might have come from a conversation with a developer, in talking about coding methodologies, but the application goes far beyond programming. When you have a discussion, write some code, or hold an event: create valuable artefacts.

Artefacts aren’t just markers, like Stonehenge, pictured above. Valuable artefacts enable others to benefit from your thinking, and build on it. It took three phases and hundreds of people, over hundreds of years, to create Stonehenge. Conversations are transitory and private, confined to a moment in time and a small group of people, but artefacts are persistent and discoverable.

When artefacts express knowledge, it can be transferred to others. For me, books are still the ultimate knowledge artefact. There is something Information, organised, presented and committed on to organic matter.

Books still hold a special place in our society, even in this age of social media and user generated content. Perhaps it is because there is still a high barrier to creating a book. It is traditionally a long process, costly in both time and money, to get something in to print. Or perhaps it is because the format is associated with deep memories, right back to our childhood days. Either way, there is something unique about a book.

Thanks to Blurb, and the London Underground blog, I had the opportunity to publish my own book. For those that don’t know me, I have had lots of articles published (and I’m open to commissions!). I have contributed chapters to books, too. However, the experience of producing my own book was something quite different. Simultaneously daunting and exciting.

Technically, the process was straight forward. Download and install the Blurb software, Mac or PC, then drop in the images and text, and choose a layout. Tweak as necessary, and submit to publish. The difference was the emotional aspect of the production. Owning the creative process from start to finish. Even though my idea was a simple one – make use of my photography, and posts from this blog – it was still a daunting prospect putting it together.

Then, just a couple of weeks later, an unexpected birthday present arrived at the door step (purely by coincidence of timing)…

A book, beautifully bound, with 40 pages of pictures and words, on premium paper. In my hands, or actually in Caalie’s hands in the picture. It was a strange experience, holding a physical object, based on some of the digital media I have produced over the last few years. Then watching others thumb through it too. I don’t normally get to see people digesting my work.

It’s impact is hard to put in words, but it has spawned lots of ideas. I will publish a public book later in the year, since enough people have asked about buying copies of this one, but the technology has other applications too. Blurb opens the option of publishing a book to the masses.

Will everyone become an author? I’m not sure they will. Even if blogging is building the skills for some, not everyone is comfortable with writing ‘in public’ – a fact I’m very aware of when deploying wikis or helping businesses to blog.

One of the things about traditional book publishing is that it is a process – for better or for worse. Pitching an idea, writing a draft, editing and a whole set of other activities. It is a process, and a creative one at that. Having the right process for creating artefacts improves their quality, although care has to be taken not to stifle that creativity.

Much of the work in and around technology companies is a creative process, but people are not always aware of that. Ask staff if they are creative, and they will generally say they aren’t. It’s fun when you are able to evidence that they actually are.

Blurb enables the publication of short-form works, right down to 40 pages or even less, with mixtures of wonderfully printed pictures and words. I’m going to hunt out an opportunity to use Blurb to create a book as a project artefact. Something drawn from the materials of a project team – photos, wiki pages and blog posts – and given to each team member. Something to keep at their desk as a record of what they achieved.

That’s another thing with creating valuable artefacts, they provide physical evidence of your hard labour. Something that is increasingly rare in the information age.

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Yesterday was a day of three parts, so it seems apt that this post is too. A kind of triage of threes as it were.

Part I – A Digital Dawn

I crawled out of bed in the early hours for an 8am meeting in London, at NESTA’s offices. Lord Carter, Neil Berkett (CEO Virgin Media), Jonathan Kestenbaum (CEO, NESTA) and Peter Bazalgette (Media Expert) discussed the the interim Digital Britain report. Although sometimes refered to as the ”Carter Report”, it was pointed out that this is a report from government, not to government. Digital Britain is its correct title – A fact that makes it all the more important for people to provide their responses.

That title also means everyone expects something (different) from it. A fact that has drawn the report much criticism. The infrastructure providers are a broad community. The content providers are an ever bigger one. Then there are the users, which cover the bulk of the population. One of those “you can’t please all of the people…” situations.

Lord Carter at NESTA - by Benjamin Ellis

New Uses and New Skills

The report cuts across two industries familiar to me: Telecommunications and the Digital Media space. Although mature in some ways, they are also just at the beginning of a new era. Universal broadband, including mobile, and user generated/acquired content are transforming the landscape.

The report discusses both the “pipes and poetry,” as Lord carter put it during his speech. The country’s communications infrastructure (pipes) and the content delivered across it (poetry) are a large industry, especially in light of the rapidly contracting financial industry that used to fuel UK Plc.

The report also talks about digital inclusion; ensuring that people have the skills needed to use this ‘digital’ world proficiently. You can watch a recording of the video stream from the morning on NESTA’s site. 

The report doesn’t go into the new generation of applications that are enabling user participation in on-line communities. For me, that is an obvious critical third area. The most exciting thing I heard was Lord Carter suggesting there should be a separate report into Digital Government and participation. There is huge opportunity to innovate in that space. Providing open APIs to government data and turning the new generation of Web 2.0 application developers loose on it. It is also worth checking out the Power of Information Task Force Report too (seeTom Watson’s blog post).

The Digital Britain report itself deserves more explanation than will fit into this post, so I will write a summary over on BusinessTechFeed, since it best lives there. 

Digital Lunch

Back to the day. The middle consisted of some intense and stimulating face to face conversations with Nico Macdonald, Farhan and Alan Patrick / @freecloud, followed by Lunch with Lloyd Davis and Alan. It was a very timely introduction to “Beyond the Crisis: Debating the role of innovation“, worth checking out for the resources section, even if you can’t make that event itself. See, I do practice what I blog (One Thing To Get Through Tough Times)!

2. Being Amplified

From Lunch table to night club, as Tiger Tiger provided the  afternoon venue for Amplified 09 London. For some it was a little distracting to be working in a night club, but the “booths and tables” arrangement served the open spaces meeting style well.

Toby Moores opened and closed, together with a few words of feedback from myself, Steve Lawson and Eileen Brown at the end of the event (see Eileen’s WordPress post or TechNet). Predictably, I joined the discussions on Broadband Britain.

From behind my screen - Amplified 09 - by Benjamin Ellis

Much of the conversation orbited around the central chicken and egg scenario: if you don’t have universal broadband, there isn’t a platform for content and applications. If there aren’t content and applications, there isn’t a driver for universal broadband. There is the additional layer as well: If users don’t have the skills (or confidence) to make use of the applications, the pipes and the poetry become irrelevant.

It makes for a Gordian Knot that is not easily solved. Joanne Jacobs was keen for action, as were others. I think it is in the area of transferring skills that the Amplified community can help most in building digital britain.

3. Down to (Digital) Business

The day left me with lots of takeaways, although more for business than for Britain. To take advantage of digital tools, a business needs:

• The right Infrastructure – pipes must reach all of the participants, all of the time. Bandwidth and universal access are both important.
• Content and Platforms to distribute and discover knowledge – staff need to be both producers, ‘capturers’ and consumers of content.
• Proficiency – The right tools with the wrong skills won’t deliver results. The new skills are best learnt from modelling and practice, not from books and slides. Build learning experiences.

Just as there are different meeting styles, with their different strengths and weaknesses – from the formal ‘talks and three-questions-at-a-time’ at NESTA, through the open spaces style of Amplified, to casual lunch discussions – there are different digital tools too. Wikis, Blogs, email and IM each have their places in supporting business conversations, community and marketing.

Mixing and matching formats are the key to driving innovation, to identify challenges, and then to crack them. Even that Gordian knot can be hit and split, given the right people with access to sufficient information.

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