Howard Rheingold – Digitrad – Traveling Geeks from Micha Benoliel on Vimeo.

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Facebook simplifies privacy settings, removes regional settings, and upsets the experts. But what do its users think?

Personally my take on this is simply to converge my identity to one username: stuartgh — for this blog (and new url stuartgh.com), for Twitter, and following the vanity url release, for Facebook. That it turn brings up my real name so that people who want to network with me do so on that more personal identity.

Note that in Twitter the real name field is somewhat space restricted so I can’t write my middle name in full! I see they have an account on GetSatisfaction where I can log this as a change request, so here it is.

After all technology is supposed to do the integration for us, but as recent issue with the Twitter’s own Facebook api shows, it’s sometimes best to do the connecting for oneself!

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Amplified Individuals and Business Resilience 18th June 2009

Originally uploaded by suethomas

We’re all looking thoughtful at the recent #nlab event on 18 June!

RT @suethomas Thanks to @Solobasssteve for recording AudioBoos at the 18 June #nlab day. Here come the Boos: http://is.gd/1lOxx

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While I like and use Facebook and Twitter, there’s enough hype and abuse of words like innovation, transformation and revolution around all things social media that a critique is warranted – if only to  take a shot at calibrating how people talk about this stuff. I hope this post is used whenever someone feels they’re being sold something phony or that makes little sense and wants a skeptical opinion to help calibrate where the truth is.

For starters: social media is a stupid term. Is there any anti-social media out there? Of course not. All media, by definition, is social in some way. The term interactive media, a more accurate term for what’s going on, lived out its own rise / hype / boom cycle years ago and was smartly ignored this time around – first rule of PR is never re-use a dead buzzword, even if all that you have left are stupid ones. I’ve been involved in many stupid terms, from push-technology to parental-controls, so I should know when I see one.

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I received an account creation email, but I’m already registered.
If you have received a Facebook account confirmation email in error, it’s likely that someone has mistakenly attempted to register using your email address. As long as you do not click the link contained in the email, no action will be taken, and no account will be created.

But here’s the weird part I also have an email confirmation saying ‘Hi…’ your account has been created, even though I didn’t click the create confirmation link (or whatever the tech boys & girls in the back office call this activation event;-)

So just to be on the safe side I clicked on the report link in the email confirmation for the new account. What did I get, but an error. Watch this space?

Sorry, an error has occurred.
We’re working on getting this fixed as soon as we can.

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This nicely shows the range of issues businesses should consider with social media implementation and ROI. But what’s the quick and easy version? I have uploaded this one slide which focuses just on the use of KPIs (key performance indicators) to track value. Obviously the results each need to be owned and actionable. Also I have just used two examples from the four Balanced Scorecard (BSC) perspectives, when you’d need to use all four.

So after deciding your business objectives, group them under the four BSC perspectives, trying to if possible allocate across all four:

1. ‘Financial’

How do we want our shareholders/trustees to see us?

2. ‘Customer’

How do we want our customers to see us?

3. Internal ‘Business processes’

What business processes must we excel at to satisfy our customers, shareholders/trustees?

4. Internal ‘Learning and growth’

How do we sustain our ability to change and improve?

Then set measures and targets against each, both quantitative and qualitative, with a regular review of results set up, and with ownership to enable actions against these to help improve under-performance for example.

This balanced approach to setting up a way of monitoring SME social media effectiveness is my recommendation for demonstrating ROI in the simplest way possible.

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1. The Primal Scenario or Basic Datum of Experience: Systems in general work poorly or not at all. (Complicated systems seldom exceed five percent efficiency.)
2. The Fundamental Theorem: New systems generate new problems.
3. The Law of Conservation of Anergy [sic]: The total amount of anergy in the universe is constant. (”Anergy” = ‘human energy’)
4. Laws of Growth: Systems tend to grow, and as they grow, they encroach.
5. The Generalized Uncertainty Principle: Systems display antics. (Complicated systems produce unexpected outcomes. The total behavior of large systems cannot be predicted.)
6. Le Chatelier’s Principle: Complex systems tend to oppose their own proper function. As systems grow in complexity, they tend to oppose their stated function.
7. Functionary’s Falsity: People in systems do not actually do what the system says they are doing.
8. The Operational Fallacy: The system itself does not actually do what it says it is doing.
9. The Fundamental Law of Administrative Workings (F.L.A.W.): Things are what they are reported to be. The real world is what it is reported to be. (That is, the system takes as given that things are as reported, regardless of the true state of affairs.)
10. Systems attract systems-people. (For every human system, there is a type of person adapted to thrive on it or in it.) [eg: watch out for contributors who dominate your community]
11. The bigger the system, the narrower and more specialized the interface with individuals.
12. A complex system cannot be “made” to work. It either works or it doesn’t.
13. A simple system, designed from scratch, sometimes works.
14. Some complex systems actually work.
15. A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works.
16. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.
17. The Functional Indeterminacy Theorem (F.I.T.): In complex systems, malfunction and even total non-function may not be detectable for long periods, if ever.
18. The Newtonian Law of Systems Inertia: A system that performs a certain way will continue to operate in that way regardless of the need or of changed conditions.
19. Systems develop goals of their own the instant they come into being.
20. Intrasystem [sic] goals come first.
21. The Fundamental Failure-Mode Theorem (F.F.T.): Complex systems usually operate in failure mode.
22. A complex system can fail in an infinite number of ways. (If anything can go wrong, it will.) (See Murphy’s law.)
23. The mode of failure of a complex system cannot ordinarily be predicted from its structure.
24. The crucial variables are discovered by accident.
25. The larger the system, the greater the probability of unexpected failure.
26. “Success” or “Function” in any system may be failure in the larger or smaller systems to which the system is connected.
27. The Fail-Safe Theorem: When a Fail-Safe system fails, it fails by failing to fail safe.
28. Complex systems tend to produce complex responses (not solutions) to problems.
29. Great advances are not produced by systems designed to produce great advances.
30. The Vector Theory of Systems: Systems run better when designed to run downhill.
31. Loose systems last longer and work better. (Efficient systems are dangerous to themselves and to others.)
32. As systems grow in size, they tend to lose basic functions.
33. The larger the system, the less the variety in the product.
34. Control of a system is exercised by the element with the greatest variety of behavioral responses.
35. Colossal systems foster colossal errors.
36. Choose your systems with care.

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Plus read my own choice of article ‘Plectics: The study of simplicity and complexity‘
Murray Gell-Mann, Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, USA/Europhysics News 33, 17-20 (2002).

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So what does that confusing set of choices mean please? To me that simply says “don’t apply”! Wonder if anyone else thinks that?!

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PS: The Chancellor said there were no simple solutions. Wrong, there are no easy solutions. Simple is part of complex. There therefore logically must be simple solutions.

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