• Potential cross-site scripting vulnerability on WordPress sites configured directly by IP address (tested here).
• A couple of other potential cross-site scripting / redirect issues.
• Potential issue with privilege escalation for admin users in WordPress networks.
• Plupload issue – the code WordPress uses to upload files.
• SWFUpload issue – the old code WordPress used to upload files.
• SWFObject issue – code used to embed Flash content.

Although none of these are critical, the update(s) should be applied to minimise any potential risks. The two point releases also include some css and JavaScript tweaks, which save loading some images in the admin interface, and address a couple of cosmetic issues, including an upgrade to the hoverIntent and press-this code.

While we are on the topic of upgrades, WordPress 3.4 is just around the corner (currently in beta). The upcoming release features a number of enhancements to internationalization functionality, particularly of interest for non-English WordPress users, new features for theme designers (child themes and configuration for headers and backgrounds), and a number of performance enhancements and API tweaks, which will need a fair bit of testing with older plugins and themes before sites can be upgraded.

As ever, always keep regular back ups of your blog – you don’t want to lose any of those hard written posts, hard-earned comments or those pictures, videos and links you spent hours curating. For our business blogs, we back up databases nightly, and keep a rolling archive. Uploads and other content are mirrored to our standby servers in real-time. If you can’t afford that sort of protection, then at least take an export of your blog once every few posts, and do keep a local copy of any images or other files that you upload. And, of course, always do a full back up before any upgrade or adding plugins.

Happy, and safe, blogging!

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Look at your company website on your mobile. Does it look beautiful? Does it give you the impact you expect? Is that hard to fix? “Preposterous” is Chris’s new favourite word, and it applies to much of what is done in marketing today. Does your email newsletter look like your website? Are you proud of that? If so, why! Your email marketing isn’t about the design, it’s about building relationships. Email newsletters with no reply address? Why! Email is a two way communication mechanism. Have a call to action, to communicate with a human (Chris has a 70% open rate on his email marketing). It needs to be 350 words or less – if you are reading it on your mobile device, your customers are probably doing that too. Make it readable.

Likes (and their kind) are not an end in themselves. Likes, says Chris, represent an opportunity for business. No more names to broadcast too, or financial capital, but opportunities to be developed.Your sites and online presence are ‘outposts’ – they direct people to where you would like them to be. Create interesting, usable content – and that includes YouTube content too. And remember, you don’t get paid on views, you get paid on business results – so make it useful to your customers. In the same way that business cards aren’t sales, neither are likes or views.

Find the most passionate people in the business (and that might be customer service, it might not) and help them produce content and connect them with your customers! Think about the on-going use of that content. Oh, and make heroes, says Chris, make your buyers heroes. There are three stages of your brand, and the customer is central to all of them:

1. What you are known for.
2. What people say about you.
3. They way people use you as part of their story telling about their brand

Social is where people are. Social is the way that information moves forward. Brands ARE social. The ones that will be successful in the future are the ones that recognise that this is already the case. And remember, people don’t talk to logos, they talk to humans!

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Benjamin Zander talks about ‘one buttock playing’ – being pushed over by what you are doing, what you are communicating. There is a point at which what we are doing takes over our thinking about what we are trying to do. To a professional communicator, that might sound bad, uncontrolled even. But it is the point at which you connect with the passion, and that is the point at which what you are doing makes an impact. So much communication is killed by a lack of passion, a lack of conviction, and smothered in doubt.

We have to do the things we are uncomfortable with enough times that we get beyond that discomfort, beyond the conscious thought, and into a state of flow in doing it. Be it blogging, emailing, running meetings, playing music, whatever it is, push through the discomfort to find the place where you can just do it. Be practiced enough to be confident in your capability that you don’t look up (or look down) and drop your flow.

But there is something else in Benjamin’s talk. Notice how he is aware of what he is doing, and able to explain it, very coherently and eloquently. That comes through observation. In teaching others, and watching them practice, we learn even more – and learning from the mistakes of others is usually less costly! As we practice, we spot pattens that work, and patterns that don’t.

In short, we need to practice to get things right, that’s hopefully obvious, but that inherently means being comfortable with being uncomfortable. We have to make mistakes, and watch other people making mistakes, to get to the point where, in Benjamin Zander’s words, we are playing on one buttock. It’s a difficult one to explain to the boss, but ultimately, we need those shining eyes to make a great business.

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• Jenni Wheller, SSP UK.
• Rebecca Richmond, Melcrum.
• Christian McMahon, Global CIO, Jamaza.
• Justin Hunt, Social Media Leadership Forum.
• Doug Shaw, What Goes Around.

Interesting snippet from Rebecca from their recent survey – 50% of people were unsure of the business case for social media within the business (although 50% were).

Question: Are the senior leaders the right audience to launch a social tool to?

Justin responded that a lot of senior executives aren’t big users of social media outside of work. Is it reasonable to ask your staff to use them if you (as a leader) aren’t using the tools yourself? Justin reiterated a point I drew out during my presentation: You need to create a (safe) place for people to fail. Tools can change people’s experience.

Rebecca noted that leaders are risk averse – that can make them a difficult group, but that their buy in can help with the broader roll out. Jenni strongly argued that you shouldn’t force social media on people – it’s about giving the people the opportunity to use the tools, in an integrated way. Doug suggested getting back to understanding “why” you are doing it, and that the answer is there. Understand what works for the users. Not all users in a business are necessarily even on-line – at least during the course of their business – for example, shop floor staff (although technology is increasingly closing those gaps).

Question: Is employee engagement a fad?

Doug said he’s just trying to make work better – maybe employee engagement is an unfortunate tag? But there is something about letting go of the ‘command and control’ Taylorist model that has dominated recent centuries. There have been bad, as well as good, things done in the name of employee engagement.

Justin said it was about the delivery, and giving people chances to contribute. Jenni said it is inescapable, issues of work-life balance and fostering discretionary effort was essential. Rebecca said it isn’t a fad, because it’s not new, it’s just coming to the fore again now because senior leaders are panicking. It’s about what the business’s “employee value proposition” is, and ties into transparency, corporate social responsibility. Employee’s want to have an impact on their customer’s experience – a key business issue.

A strong theme through out the day was: Problem first. Technology second. It’s all too easy to say “social technology is the answer. What was the problem?” – be pragmatic, and start with a well defined problem was the wise advice. As employees become more comfortable with using social media personally, they are more will and expectant about using it at work.

Finally, the issue of failure, and it’s inherent ties with innovation and experimentation, was revisited multiple times. Businesses leaders can be very nervous about failure, and often rightly so, but it is an inherent part of the learning process and innovation, I defer to Edison.

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Time to Move Up

Now, to be clear, Microsoft itself dropped support for Internet Explorer 6 quite some time ago, and has even been running a campaign to get users and web sites to move from IE 6, and Google has dropped IE 6 support on its sites. The challenge, in the world of the intra-webs, has been that many IT departments are stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand they need to move up from Internet Explorer 6 (it’s over a decade old after all! Which is about 70 in Internet Years), but on the other there are many legacy web applications deployed in the Intranet 1.0 era that only work with IE 6. By the way, Internet Explorer 7 is no spring chicken either, at over 5 years old.

There is a clear lesson here, and for those that have missed it, a couple of solutions. Firstly, the lesson: If you are deploying a web application, make sure it isn’t dependent on proprietary web browser features. If it only works with one web browser, that is going to come back to haunt you down the line, as it effectively places an additional sell-by date on the application. When we build intranets, we test them with Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome, even if only Internet Explorer is in use. That way, if it works across multiple browsers, it’s much more likely to last, and to gracefully degrade. Next, some solutions…

The lack of IE 6 support in WordPress 3.2 needn’t be a huge problem. Support has only been dropped in the admin Interface – themes are still free to support IE 6, so it is only the people creating posts and approving comments that immediately need to move off of IE6. This is only buys a little time though, it really is time to drop IE6 from your network, at the very least, it’s a security risk, as it no longer receives security patches.

Living Without Internet Explorer 6

If your infrastructure is still burdened with legacy apps that require IE 6 to work, there are two other work arounds:

1. Desktop Virtualization – provide access to the legacy apps via virtual desktops or remove desktop access – Microsoft style or VMWare style.
2. Browsium – an interesting application that allows IE6 to run in a frame in more modern Internet Explorer versions – thank you to Mark at CDG for the pointer.

Minimum Requirements

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I received my first apology email today – one of the above businesses had an account for me. While no financial details were lost, my email address (and perhaps postal address?) were disclosed. More than that, my relationship as a previous customer was disclosed. It is worthy of note that in the UK, this is a serious issue for a bank (customer relationships are afforded special confidentiality), but for me it is a serious issue full stop.

The apology I received, in my opinion, fell far short of what I would expect. As a minimum I look for:

• A genuine acceptance that what happened was wrong.
• In as far as is reasonable, an explanation of what went wrong and why
  (i.e. does the offender understand? Is it under control?) – Not everyone agrees with this one.
• A commitment to a) put it right and b) ensure that it doesn’t happen again (i.e. lessons learnt).

Sorry should go beyond words. Actions speak louder than words, as they say, so I personally like to see some commitment to action – or as we said to our kids around here, sorry means “I won’t do it again.”

I’m not alone. Here are some thoughts on what should be in an apology from some good friends on twitter:

ear1grey
@benjaminellis An apology should be personal, recognise the error, take responsibility for it, and explain steps taken to avoid a repeat

shefaly
@benjaminellis Ack of the problem without passing blame, clear scope of the problem, how it’s being resolved. Then follow-up on resolution.

Modoufox
@benjaminellis sincerity, empathy, and an implied commitment to move forward in the relationship/avoid doing this again. #2centsworth

mistergough

tartancat
@benjaminellis The word ‘sorry’ in a genuine, heartfelt tone, and some offer to make amends for the wrong-doing.

ravinar
@benjaminellis 1) acknowledgement of issue 2) steps to ensure does not happen again 3) gesture of goodwill.

williamheath
@benjaminellis Acknowledgement, remorse, some sort of restitution. All wrapped in courtesy and humanity. Explanation/excuse not needed.

rachelbeer

“The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.”  P.G. Wodehouse, The Man Upstairs.

Which put me in my place :). Apologies should be given, not demanded.

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One of the recurrent themes whenever I get drawn into discussions around community, specifically the ‘on-line’ sort, is that of audience versus community. It is all too often that I hear marketing folks talk about their audience as if it was a community, and occasionally their community as if it was an audience. To my mind the two are very different things: an audience is gathered to listen; a community gathers to contribute. One is there to consume. One is there to produce. I don’t see one as any more worthy than the other – sometimes I want to be in an audience, sometimes I want to be in a community. You probably wouldn’t fancy trying to co-create with Take That or the Foo Fighters – you’re there to jump up and down and go deaf, or something like that. Conversely, if I go to a vendor’s user group event, I wouldn’t expect to get shouted at or drowned out.

What emerged from the evening’s discussions was that there are many different types of community. That might seem blindingly obvious, but you wouldn’t think so from much of the writing in the social media world. There are motivated communities – self motivated, or externally motivated (i.e. lead) – and there are unmotivated communities. Unmotivated communities rarely last, and are rarely ‘rewarding’ to be part of. Communities fundamentally exist to do something, or at least to support or preserve something.

My personal favourite minimal definition of community is ‘a group of people gathered around a purpose.’ I like it because of its simplicity, and because it is so actionable. The purpose might be to change the world (thank you to Misae Richwoods for raising the bar on that one), or it might be to exchange tips and stories about a new gadget. Another flash of the blindingly obvious was the realisation that communities are for a period in time. People join, their circumstances change, and they move on. They may stay for a long time, or they may move through swiftly. Similarly, a campaign-based community may have a relatively short life or a lifestyle-driven community a very long one.

The process of joining and leaving a community is not usually a binary one. It is a journey, and those who run communities need to be conscious of that. The moments of leaving or closing are points of difference, and potential friction (or explosion) if they aren’t handled well. That thought touches on many things, which the discussion came back too…

If you have an office without walls or desks, how would you know that you are in it? It’s the same with communities. While most on-line communities don’t have obvious rites of passage, they are there – even if they aren’t explicit. The users worked out how to get on-line, they found the site, they signed up, they managed to post a message. We’ll talk more about rites of passage and tokens of membership in a bit.

The higher the walls, the stronger the community. As the walls erode, the community weakens. Look at Usenet groups in the 90′s, and now Twitter. As the barriers come down, the community fragments, weakens, and finally is engulfed in relational noise. Of course, at the other end of the scale are communities that are [too] exclusive. Barriers to entry, i.e. exclusivity, can drive people’s desire to be in a community, as much as they keep them out. If it is hard to get in, people will stay. If it is too hard to get in, people won’t bother, and may even form their own ‘anti-communities’

Technology has radically transformed community life. The Internet has bulldozed geographic boundaries, eliminated cost and enabled even the most niche of interests to sustain sizeable communities. If you don’t believe me, go for a trawl through meetup.com (an online market place for arranging and managing community meet ups). There is something there for everyone – and I really mean everyone. Newer on-line services like Lanyrd and Plancast have made it easier to discover events and join the communities around them. See where your Twitter friends go to meet, search events in your area, or on your topic of interest. If you want a community, online or offline, you can probably find it, and if you can’t find it, you can create it for marginal cost and effort.

Social platforms like Facebook have made relationships objectively visible, and transformed ‘liking’ into more than just making a connection. They have become a means of association, and a form of visible badge. I ‘like’ Brand X says as more about my identity than just the fact that I have purchased their products. Communities have an ‘identity’ and people need to know what that identity is, so that they know what they are in, and more importantly, people need to know if they are ‘in’ the community or not. They also want to know if other people are inside or outside of the community too. It is all part of forming a group identity, and having a good sense of group identity is a key part of any thriving community. That identity might be supported by the shared stories that people tell, or by the provision of props (e.g. badges, uniforms, and so on). Having an iPad, an iPhone 4 and a MacBook identifies you as likely part of a certain community, just as having a suit and a Blackberry might identify you as part of a different one!

Some badges are ambiguous, some are not, some are conscious, some are not. All are earnt. The Flickr badge on my bag has started conversations, the WordPress badge has got me business. Those badges were obtained through relationships and through being at certain events. They have a story and meaning to them. They are explicit tokens, artefacts of being a part of something. They have a value far beyond their physical worth, they connect to memories and demonstrate participation. Most communities have some form of badges. They aren’t always as obvious as a piece of metal and paper, but they are there all the same.

Community defies our instant reward, popup culture. Communities take a LONG time to develop. Although sense of community can happen within 6 months, or even less, building a viable community, of any type, is a long hard journey. One of the things that definitely helps along the way is recognising the contributions of key community members. A big part of the evening’s discussion circled around the idea of making ‘heroes’ within the community. It works because it strengthens the identity of both the group and the individual, and also because it models the behaviours that are desired within the community. It is in our nature to copy leaders and those that we view as successful. That can be a constructive dynamic in a community, but it can also be a destructive one. An over reliance on the leader or key individuals can leave others feeling unwanted or even excluded.

There was and is much debate as to how much of community building is inductively learnt and subconsciously applied, and how much is conscious, constructed application. Many community leaders are ‘naturals’ rather than consciously constructed. It’s rare to find someone who learnt their community management skills in a classroom, and so that means passing on their skills is something best done through mentoring and working alongside, rather that in a taught course in a classroom. But you knew that already, didn’t you?

At one point there was a heated debate about WordPress versus Drupal. It was notable not for the technical content, but for how much of the debate was driven from the communities that were around each of them. There are certainly big technical differences between the platforms (I’ve built community sites using WordPress, BuddyPress, Drupal and Elgg), but the biggest difference is in the communities of users, developers, content producers and consumers around each. Products, inherently, have communities.

Looking at the ‘insides’ of a community, it becomes obvious that not all community members are equal. There are various different taxonomies that can be used to group members. I lean towards looking at levels of engagement: audience (the edglings), participants, contributors, through to co-leaders. Similarly, communication happens on a continuum from ‘top-down’ communication from leaders, to peer-to-peer discussion between members. Bernie talked about the impact of sending out weekly emails to one of his communities. The community became more active and engaged. People got more involved. Broadcast communication can be helpful, as well as harmful, in maintaining community cohesion and the energy levels within the community. It is all about striking a balance. Too little, and the community fragments and disperses, too much and it diminishes to an audience.

The spectrum for audience to community is a highly graduated one. We discussed many examples of the broadcast/performance vs community/contribution dynamic. For example, the Coke Facebook page that was started by two actors. Community or audience? Participation or entertainment? They aren’t dichotomies or dilemmas, they are  characteristics of moments in the story that becomes the community. How important is the brand of the community leader? Can they be invisible, leading from the shadows, or must they be known by name? Is there a continuum from audience to community? Real world examples don’t reveal simple yes’s and no’s. In the words of Ben Goldacre, “I think you’ll find that it’s a bit more complicated than that.”

So what triggers action in a community? Conversation needs to be peer to peer, not just top down. It’s one of the defining differences between an audience and a community. People want to have meaning, and to make a difference. Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs came up quite a few times. People have a need for significance and people want to feel wanted/needed. Many community drivers are around human emotional needs.

The evening’s discussion touched on issues of mono-culture and sustainability. Consistency is important – it creates and supports identity – but difference is also one of the key drivers of community too.  Communities can be long lived. Like some strange insect that can go without food for years, even if left sleeping communities can sometimes be revived. One of the stories I have heard a number of times about the Obama campaign is how it managed to bootstrap itself from the communities formed during the previous campaigns. Once a community is made, the individual relationships and connections created by it persist, long after the community has gone away.

So what is the role of a community leader? Are they leaders or are they facilitators? The answer seems to be yes and yes. The more challenging question was about the ability of community leaders to establish new leads, and the way that can lead to communities fragmenting or taking on a different path – even splitting apart. Good community ‘managers’ are passionate about the growth of the individuals within the community. The pattern is not about the growth of the community, the community only grows by the growth of the members. Good leaders establish sustainable behaviours: ‘this is how we do things around here’ – and recognise and reward those in the community who are active in supporting it. Recognition goes a long way: It supports the contributors, and it indicates desirable models of behaviour to others in the group.

Communities aren’t owned, and unlike an audience, they can’t be bought. Did technology enable niche communities, or did it actually cause the fragmentation that lead to them? On-line communities, freed from geographic restrictions, can fragment and merge more easily. As humans, we’ve been doing community since we started writing on cave walls, but technology is making (and enabling) us to look at the processes of community differently. Community is part of a cultural megatrend. In the off-line world, many places have forgotten how to do community – The motor car, the television and the privet hedge have enabled use to live socially in the most isolated of ways. In the later part of the last century we learnt to become individual actors, rather than group players. As we escape from broadcast media, and discover the Internet, we are starting to rediscover togetherness. There is a growing desire to create communities, and reintegrate society.

Of course it is all ripples against ripples… We have always been in communities, it is the new lens of social media and the rise of Twitter and Facebook that have turned the cameras, quite literally, back on to ourselves.

In a cruel form of irony, it way well be the mass data from these platforms that starting to create mass customisation/personalisation that breaks up community again. What you read in your Twitter stream or in your Facebook updates is personalised for you. No one else reads the same things in the same context. In social networks, everyone is part of a community of one. It is a scale free network that puts you at the centre of your world. Traditional communities don’t work that way. They are about shared experiences and shared stories – they are more universal than personal. It’s all about creating the shared experience, the stories that people tell about the community and that they have in common. Shared challenges, external threats and common victories bind communities together. They create emotional connections between people.

The nature of what ‘global’ means is changing. Geographic barriers are breaking down…. However ‘Global’ has come to mean a trans-country set of niches… Physical communities are still challenged by geography, but global ones are challenged by a sea of niche interests and a dwindling commonality in what people are interested in.  As opposed to the universal markets that broadcast media and a global film industry created, social media creates micro-worlds with micro-celebrities and loosely bound connections.

Is community growth formulaic? There are certainly patterns. We discussed the early church, Toastmasters, the Mormons and dozens of examples of communities that have grown and persisted. Sometimes communities are for a reason, a season, occasionally for a life time. Communities and members aren’t forever. There is a time, a place and a purpose.

What does community mean to you?

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The evening was made all the more special by the judges personally coming over to say how impressed they were with what had been achieved. I shall stop typing and leave you with a photograph of myself, Sheila Parry and the amazing team from theblueballroom clutching our award, and the official press release.

DHL Express’ Innovative Online 40th Anniversary Celebration Scoops Digital Impact Award

FARNHAM, UNITED KINGDOM, Sep 21, 2010 — In 2009, a year of recession, DHL Express celebrated its 40th anniversary. To recognize this milestone and employees’ input with a splash yet without extravagance, DHL launched a global online employee photo competition, designed and built by internal communications specialists theblueballroom with social technology company redcatco. The competition and campaign won Communicate magazine’s Digital Impact Award for the ‘Best digital employee communication’ in the ‘Best use of digital to an internal audience’ category.

The competition generated a staggering 5.6 million hits and 2,800 photo uploads. The inexpensive, globally accessible online solution reached out to all 500,000 worldwide employees of DHL and parent company Deutsche Post DHL and sparked a truly cross-border, cross-level conversation: this user-generated ‘by the people, for the people’ platform saw 3,400 comments being made on the photos. Page views spanned the full three months of the competition, demonstrating ongoing engagement.

The competition showcased DHL Express’ amazing legacy and supported the company’s ‘One DHL’ brand positioning, which celebrates a diverse workforce, global expertise and uniqueness, and joint capabilities. theblueballroom’s expertise on inspiring communications for internal audiences, coupled with redcatco’s specialist knowledge on social technology, made DHL Express’ 40th anniversary a celebration to remember.

About DHL:

DHL is the global market leader in the logistics industry and ‘The Logistics company for the world’. DHL commits its expertise in international express, air and ocean freight, road and rail transportation, contract logistics and international mail services to its customers. A global network composed of more than 220 countries and territories and about 300,000 employees worldwide offers customers superior service quality and local knowledge to satisfy their supply chain requirements. DHL accepts its social responsibility by supporting climate protection, disaster management and education. DHL is part of Deutsche Post DHL. The Group generated revenue of more than 46 billion euros in 2009.

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Or are they? Who is the ‘me’ in ‘my own’? I could be Dave, the office burglar and still say this post is ‘my own’, and in doing so break no laws, and engage in no deception. You read this and assume that is it written by ‘me’. There’s a photo on the side of the blog, and a name on it too. It seems fair to assume that is me that wrote it. Surely if it was written by someone else, I, they or both of us would be deceiving you? What about if it has been edited and proofread by someone else in the office? Let’s step back a bit for a moment.

So, is ghost blogging ethical? It really depends on your definition of ghost blogging, and what it entails. I’m going to give you my answer before I give you a definition. To my mind, ghost blogging is rarely ethical, or at least it is rarely executed ethically. That’s partly a matter of my career path, in that ghost blogging, in the sense that many people mean it, is essentially allowing content written by someone else to be taken and passed off as your own original work. In the academic world that is plagiarism; a pretty fast way to end your academic career.

Now, you might argue that the original author has willingly given over their work – although more often that not a junior wage-slave was cajoled into producing the piece – and that that fact makes it alright. However, be it a staff member writing for a CEO or a PR company supplying copy to a professional blogger, to my mind it is still at the very least an act of deception. It is passing off a piece of writing as something that it is, in fact, not.

There is another definition of ghost blogging that is less commonly used, but that I am more comfortable with. The simple act of writing for somebody. Ghost writing has a long history. Often, celebrities or their agents will engage a ghost writer to produce their autobiography. It is slightly different than the most common form of ghost blogging, because increasingly often the ghost writer is acknowledged, and it is increasingly the case that people would assume a ghost writer has been engaged. Not to cast aspersions on Katie Price’s literary skills, but if you are reading her biography, you would probably assume that she had engaged the services of a ghost writer. Actually, Katie Price’s books are ghost written, by Rebecca Farnworth. And here is a distinction in the shades of grey in Ghost writing: Katie Price chooses the plots to her books. And the ghost is a shadowy entity; Not fully visible, but known to be present. That’s very different from the kind of ghost who’s existence is denied.

Here is the biggest danger with ghost blogging, especially for CEOs and senior figures: It’s the danger that a customer, business partner or other industry figure reads their blog that week. The believe, as they have been lead to, that the post represents the thoughts and views of the senior figure. Then they run into them in “real-life”. What happens as they strike up a conversation about the post that they read and enjoyed? The post that wasn’t written by the CEO, which doesn’t represent the CEO’s views. Firstly is the potential for the CEO to look like an idiot who forgets what he does from one minute to the next, and secondly it makes the customer look like an idiot for believing it was written by the CEO. Thirdly, it destroys trust between the two of them; Trust being the very thing blogging is meant to help with. That, for me, is the biggest no-no.

The roots of blogging were about being transparent, building trust, and ghost blogging goes against that. To be clear, I don’t think that is wrong for a busy CEO to have someone else write their post for them, particularly in the incidents where it is essentially based on an interview or conversation with them, or that they have at least defined the key points and main narrative. The idea of passing off writing that has never been past the eyes of the CEO as having come through the lips of the CEO is a dangerous thing to do. In the case of a speech writing, while the words might not have been the CEO’s, they have been spoken by them. The danger with ghost blogging is that the middle-man who is cut out is the person who should have been the messenger.

If a blog post is described as ‘written for’, rather than ‘written by’ the claimed author, then we are the right side of the line. If it claims to be ‘written by’ someone who did not originate its content, then a deception with no ethical grounds has been carried out. It is also a deception that leaves the perpetrators with nowhere to go. If there is something in that post that is factually inaccurate or professionally naive, then the CEO must either accept the error as if it was his own incompetence, or admit to the error.

Let me leave you with some words from an article in The Independent earlier this year:

In the film, adapted by Polanski with Robert Harris from his 2007 novel of the same name, McGregor’s professional author is enlisted by former Prime Minister Adam Lang, played with a Blairish glint by Pierce Brosnan, to write his long-overdue memoirs. ”So, how do we go about this?” Lang asks casually, drink in hand, in an early scene. “I interview you and turn your answers into prose,” comes the sober reply. And there, in a nutshell, is the art of ghostwriting.

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If it’s an area you are interested in, then I recommend reading The Art of Game Design (Amazon US or on Amazon UK). The talk attracted a huge stream of comments. While you may or may not agree with Jesse’s hypothesis that everything ends up being a game to earn points – although some corporate work environments already feel like this – there is much food for thought in what he says.

The legendary Farmville app has achieved massive success, outgrowing even Facebook itself, but making a Farmville knock off isn’t easy. It’s not just a Facebook game – it’s leading a new business model. Games have become a part of the marketing mix for brands, and game design techniques are bleeding into everything from office software to employee compensation plans.

The intersection leads to unexpected things, and nearly all of them involve psychological tricks, migrating people from free gaming experiences, to being fully paid up customers. Club Penguin is one of my favourite examples. Their  ”elastic velvet rope” (around a $350million proposition) enables children to play and explore their game world, all the time rewarding them and leading them into the paid monthly experience beyond the velvet rope, with the constant lure of ‘more things you can do’ in the paid for version. A little while back, it was Mafia Wars – a text based game on Facebook that used ’real friends’ juxtaposed into a virtual domain, where users could trade cash for (virtual world) social advantage. All cunning stuff.

Games, and the ‘freemium” model in general, often work on the ‘sunk cost’ fallacy – the psychological bias that if you’ve spent time (or money) on something,  it must therefore be valuable. It’s a ploy that bridges gaming, virtuality, and reality. Games are no longer about escaping from reality, they are about breaking through it. Gilmore and Pine’s hypothesis, in the Experience Economy and Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want,  is that the most valuable thing about products today is authenticity. That might seem strange in the context of games, but we live in a world where ‘fake’ virtual worlds are almost as valuable as the real deal. The convergence and divergence of technology is blurring the domains (even if I’m not sure I agree with Jesse’s pocket theory, I think it is more about expansion and contraction). Pockets of time can be used for crowd sourcing, by making activities into games (interesting in the context of Orange’s mobile volunteering initiative).

The next revolution is all about sensors, think of things like the gyroscope in the iPhone 4, and tilt sensors that are now in most new mobile handsets. These allow games and reality to be further blended (see Augmented Reality). I hope we don’t degenerate into the ‘life as a game’ Jesse describes at the end, but you can already see the motivational tricks being used. From the Waitrose Charity Tokens Scheme, to business games, the techniques are already being used to shape human behaviour, and that’s before we factor in phones that can overlay real-world experiences with virtual ones.

I’ll be talking about this, and more at Chinwag Local in Twickenham on Wednesday September the 8th. If you are in the area and want to meet with other local business professionals, I hope you can come along!

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Do I need to ‘do’ accessibility?

The short answer is yes, you do, and for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s a basic part of being a good web citizen. You wouldn’t ignore someone who came up to you in the street because they were blind or missing an arm, so why build your web site in a way that they can’t get access to?

The reality for most businesses (including in the UK), is that basic web site accessibility is a legal requirement. That said, the UK law is a bit muddy. By building your website to make it accessible on a broader range of devices, and via a broader range of tools and presentations, you give yourself a bigger audience. That’s just plain good business sense.

Accessibility leads to better design

The process of thinking through accessibility requirements leads to better design. When most people talk about website design, they tend to talk about visual design – the static appearance of the site. However, websites aren’t a static visual. We interact with them, resize them, view them on different browsers and discover them via search engines that view them as raw text. A basic accessibility check list deals with all of these things, and that means better design (in a broader sense, including interaction design) and also inherently includes search engine optimisation.

80/20 Beats 100/0 – Every time

There is a danger that in striving for 100% perfection, we end up doing nothing. When it comes to accessibility, I’d rather see people do something, and get it 90% or 80% (or even 10%!) right, than do nothing at all. That may mean some of what I say here offends the purists, but here’s the thing: When I first started looking at accessibility, those purists were the ones that put me off. The dogmatic demand for 100% perfection can result in people deciding that dealing with accessibility is too hard, or too expensive, and that is tragic. Basic accessibility is quick, easy and very rewarding.

Many Dimensions – No One Answer

Disabilities take many many different forms. From visual impairment encountered in old age, to motor issues from birth. Each has their own unique requirements. Sight, hearing, learning, cognitive, motor and mobility impairements occur with a range of severities, and in different combinations. My own experience is through dyslexia. There are many websites that I simply can’t “get a fix on” – the layout and design makes it challenging for me to read them and hard to understand how I am meant to interact with them.

There are many different assistive tools to help, from screen readers and text magnification tools, to input devices. As well as third party tools, most operating systems include universal access technologies. If you’ve never tested them out, fire up systems preferences or control panel and give them a spin. You’ll find screen magnification, black and white / text inversion settings, contrast controls, speech technologies and keyboard for mouse controls.

Em don’t Err

When websites are built, there are a number of different ways of specifying the sizes of fonts and devisions on the page. For many years web designers used pixels, but pixels are fickle things. They vary in size from machine to machine, and while it makes it easy to align text to graphics (which are sized in pixels), it means that you loose the ability to let the user’s view make smart choices about how to display your page. Enter ‘em’s, which are more flexible and the preferred alternative these days. Building a page with ratios, rather than absolute sizes, enables users to use large fonts without breaking your site. Open up your favourite site and use the browser’s view settings to display it in a larger font. Does it still look ok? Then all’s good and well, but if the text goes off screen, or starts to overlap with graphics on the page, all is not well.

Choose Your colo(u)rs wisely

Colour blindness affects a huge portion of the population. Poorly contrasting, over opposing primary colour foreground/background combinations don’t only look poor, they are poor. Choose a sensible palette of colours that are discernible, even in black and white. Then stick to them.

Is a Text-Only Site the Answer?

The short answer is: No. While a text-only page can help, it is far from a full solution. In some cases, removing the images can make this worse. Well designed images can make navigation more intuitive, and provide important cues for people with reading difficulties. Good web-design separates decorative and functional images and places them in the style sheets or page HTML as appropriate.

Flash is Evil?

Apple’s Steve Jobs might like you to think so, but while the whizzy Adobe Flash animations slapped onto the front page of many sites have been an accessibility (and usability) nightmare, there is no reason for this to be the case. Adobe provide an excellent set of guidelines and tools to make Flash applications that are very accessible. It’s simply a matter of using them. Please make sure that you, or whoever you hire, does. Apple’s HTML 5 fuelled crusade against Flash is going to do little to improve accessibility – you are still embedding video, and still need to provide accessible controls and alternative content.

Run the Race Twice – Or Run it Once Well

There is a camp that argues for building a completely separate instance of your site to deal with accessibility issues. Personally I think that is a dangerous road. Firstly, it instantly doubles the amount of work involved in keeping your site up to date. Your site is completely up to date, right? Secondly, the result almost inevitably ends up with web pages that are trying to cater to Dave, with a reading age of 8, who is passionate about your products, and Sue who has a double first from Oxford and is partially sighted. It’s a result that is inevitably downright insulting to everyone involved.

Formal Guide Lines and certifications

The initial Web Content Accessibility Guidelines WCAG 1.0 received a mixed welcome.  The 2.0 contribution is a heavy read: http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/, you could start with: http://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/, although I read the “understanding WCAG20″ document, and didn’t understand that either the first time! You could also try: http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref/. The documents are a challenging read and feel quite onerous. In the UK we have the Disability Rights Commission (DRC): Pas 78. It used to be a paid for document, but now you can download it for free via that link. Don’t lose the will to live when you read these things! I’ll come back to some easy first steps that you can take, the guidelines are for when you get serious about accessibility – which I strongly urge you to do!

LWOAM

“Life without a mouse” – from mobile phones to office workers with RSI, it isn’t just cats that are chasing the mice away. Understanding what it feels like to interact with your site without a mouse is a solid way to improve your site’s layout and navigation structure. Make sure you have access keys set (Twitter does!), that web forms have tab indexes, and that your site isn’t over reliant on hovers.

Some Simple Heuristics

As a very basic, minimal set of checks, here is what you can do in less than five minutes for your site or sites that you build:

• View it at your lowest screen resolution
• View it in black and white
• View it without stylesheets turned on
• View the page source

If viewing in any of those modes leaves you perplexed, then you probably need to fix it. Make sure your images have ALT text, and that the fonts on the web page scale sensibly and you’ll be making the web experience. There are some on-line testing tools (for example T.A.W.), although none of them are perfect or instant magic..

Coming up in Part II Web 2.0, HTML 5, AJAX and building for accessibility from the start…

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OpenStack, as they are calling the initiative, includes the code from Rackspace’s Cloud Files service, and will include their Cloud Servers code later in the year. The initiative has a web, of course - openstack.org -  and participant names include the likes of Citrix, Dell, Right Scale, AMD and Intel already. That’s an impressive set of names at launch.

What does this mean for the industry? Well, hopefully it means the emergence of a real market for cl0ud computing services, enabling businesses to build applications that run in the cloud, safe in the knowledge that they aren’t completely dependent on just one vendor. Cloud computing has been growing for a number of years now (the first blog post here on “Living in the Cloud – Computing” was back in July of 2008), and I’ve argued for the importance of standards in cloud computing since the start. Today’s announcement potentially ushers in the next phase of maturity for the technology. If nothing else, it is a very important first step in enabling the multitude of technology providers to work together. I’ll be watching with a keen interest.

If you have, or are developing, applications for your business that require computing power that can stretch and flex with highly variable demands, it is a must-deploy technology. Cloud computing isn’t for everything – I see more ‘standard’ Internet hosting being around for a long while yet – but there are places where the transaction-based costs of cloud computing make much more sense. Hopefully the OpenStack initiative will mean that developers only have to write their applications once to deploy them across a number a different clouds. That also potentially means more robust, independent infrastructures, reducing the number of big single-provider outages we’ve seen in recent years from the likes of Amazon.

Update: Here’s a statement from the openstack.org blog describing the initiative’s commitments:

• COMMITMENT #1: We are producing truly open source software. No artificial limits will be placed or performance limitations maintained. No licensing model – one free, one paid – will be introduced. We are releasing the code under the Apache 2.0 license which allows the community to do with the software as they see fit, including implement into other distributions or “for fee” offerings.
• COMMITMENT #2: We are committed to an open design process. Rackspace will provide dedicated project leads to guide the roadmap on behalf of the community. We will hold regular design summits—open to anyone—which will produce a roadmap to guide development.
• COMMITMENT #3: All development will be done in the open. We will maintain a publicly available source code repository to simplify participation.
• COMMITMENT #4: We will maintain an open community. Healthy, vibrant developer and user communities are the basis of any open source project. Most decisions will be made using a “lazy consensus” model. All processes will be documented, open and transparent.

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On the last day of the event, I was talking with James Moffat (of Organic Development) and Glenn Le Santo. Rather than let the conversation float away, I caught it on video, and it’s been heavily retweeted and viewed:

And there in is my proof why you want Social Media at your event. Without the blogging team you might not have heard of the event, or seen that talk. Here’s my top 5 reasons to add social media to your event:

• It extends the reach of your event. People who couldn’t make it physically, can still see it.
• It extends the duration of your event. Why create all that great content to only last a day. Get it on-line. Let it last.
• Create conversations. Get feedback. People pay tens of thousands for focus groups. Find out what people think for a fraction of that cost.
• Have expert voices translate your message. All businesses speak in their own corporate speak. Bloggers from your customer base can translate your speak into customer-speak.
• Being direct. Unpolished. And credible. Yes, you can create a polished corporate video, but a 2 minute live on-camera interview pushed to YouTube is significantly more credible.

There’s plenty more. The fact is that having a social media team at your event is a very cost effective way to multiply the value of your event. Orange Business Services is one of those leading the way. Many others will follow.

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Amsterdam is a handy place for Orange Business Services to have an event – not so much because it’s one of the most connected hubs in Europe, but because the place is swathed in orange! It feels like they have branded the entire city. Location aside, it has been a timely moment to reflect on what has happened in the last 12 months since Orange Business Live 2009.

Helmut Reisinger, Senior Vice President Europe, Orange Business Services, kicked off the event, setting some local context, reminding us that 25% of the Netherlands is below the water level (the airport, where I landed, yesterday is 4m below sea level). Broadcaster Sarah Coburn, who is anchoring the event, joined Helmut for a review of the last year. It’s easy to forget how much the world has transformed in the last couple of years.

Post-Lehman Brothers, business attitudes and the financial systems have been transformed. In some ways, not as dramatically as some would like, but never the less they have changed. How are businesses now? “Cautiously Optimistic” is the phrase on people’s lips. We’ve gone down the waterfall, and are looking at the river ahead. But it isn’t just finance that has changed. From volcanos to oil spills, the environment is in sharper focus than it ever has been before. The impact for the CIOs here is two fold:

• Firstly, deploying technologies like telepresence to reduce travel and its associated carbon footprint.
• Secondly, looking at the environmental impact of the IT infrastructure, from data centres, to more efficient desktops.

Geography has changed too. Helmut talked about the shift to the emerging economies, and Yee May Leong, from Orange Business Services in Asia Pacific, joined him on stage to give some startling insights to China. I know China is big, but it is easy to forget how quite how big it is, and more importantly how big it will most likely become. And China is just one piece of the Asia Pacific puzzle, especially when you add India into the mix. ICT decision making is increasingly moving to China, and that is influencing service offerings for providers, with the focus moving from “5 star service” to “fast service” – getting new cities and locations up and running super-fast. The Asian economies, on average, are forecast to grow 2-5 times as quickly as the US and Europe over the next few years. That changes things.

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Benjamin Ellis and Sam Michel - Photo (cc) Janet Davis

Two CEOs, three days, 8 hours of train journey and one Thinking Digital 2010. Talking technology, ideas and the future in Newcastle. I’ve been wanting to go to Thinking Digital for a number of years, and this year I finally made it, joining long-time Thinking Digital attendee Sam Michel (CEO of Chinwag, who were also one of the conference Media Partners).

It’s rare to find a conference these days that really pushes at the envelope of what’s happening, pulling together the leading thinkers in a stimulating environment and given fresh food for though. In the age of blog posts, on-line videos and Twitter, new ideas spread rapidly, and all too often one ends up hearing what one has already heard before, but #TDC10 did manage to produce some genuinely unique thoughts and experiences.

Not only was it a chance to catch up with folks like Documentally and the familiar faces of the Newcastle digital collective, but also an opportunity to meet and talk with people like Brian Solis (who took a very nice portrait shot) and many others that I have only previously encountered on-line. There are too many people to name in one go, but let me point you to at least two speakers, by way of their previous talks at TED :- Surrey local Julian Treasure (of the Sound Agency), and Andy Hobsbawn (and the inspirational dothegreenthing)

I caught organiser Herb Kim, to have him explain what Thinking Digital is about, via Qik, at the bustling after party (excuse the wind noise and music!)

“…What we try to do is bring in a lots of extra stuff… …from the arts and sciences and make it different… …it produces an experience where it opens people’s minds not just to new ideas, but to new people…” Herb Kim.

The next event is the 24th-26th May 2011, and booking is already open (this year sold out well beforehand). The venue, the Sage Centre, provided an excellent photographic backdrop, and people have had fun tagging and adding notes to the pictures – if you were there you might be in this one.

Thinking Digital was a great example of the journey that conferences are now on, moving from didactic broadcast, to digitally-enabled, network-building events. While you can watch a live stream, you miss much of the benefit of the event unless you are physically there. It might be about the on-line world, but the valuable action happens off-line, in the corridors, the dinners and the lunches. We’re face-to-face people, on-line tools simply provide a way to enable, bridge and extend our real-world experiences.

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At Dell’s second Business to business social media event, Neville Hobson gave a great overview of the current status quo in social media. My synopsis:

Social media is about relationships. Word of mouth has an increasing impact on purchasing behaviour, and social media accelerates word of mouth like nothing else. With social media, we enabled people to move from an awareness of our businesses, to becoming an ambassador for it. We aren’t just building a connection, we are entering into someone’s personal network.

People are using all sorts of tools, and the tools providers are providing resources and education to help businesses. YouTube has its own set of guidelines for Best Practices for the B2B Marketer. Businesses should investigate all the relevant Social Media tools and channels.Test them, integrate them and build on them.

Neville’s Formula for social media success:

• Knowledge – understand your marketplace
• Clarity – listen and learn with precision
• Influence – identify the exact locations of influence and influencers
• Content – adapt and re-use.

I followed on, talking about the business case for social media and the real ROI. The Microsoft team did a great job of capturing the talk. Here is the video on uStream:

My own photos from the event, to give you a taste for the event. It was excellently put together – kudos to Kerry and Neville:

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The theme of this year’s event is community relations. I think the term nicely encapsulates how “forum moderation” has grown up through community management to community relations. The relationship between businesses and their customers has changed, and the relationship between businesses and their employees is changing too. People expect engagement, and that means listening as much as talking.

Recent Redcatco projects have shown us, and some brave pioneers, that creating engagement works for a business, bringing massive returns from a modest investment. What happens when you give tens of thousands of employees a place to rate, comment and share what your business is about? Our experience has been that it creates huge value, a sense of community, and a great deal of success.

Earlier today I spoke with Heather Taylor about her work at PayPal. She has been living at the forefront of community building for a business that has to deal with both the positive and negative experiences around users transacting money. Her key takeaway? Be adaptable. You might not get what you initially set out to achieve, but if you adapt, you’ll end up with a stronger business. Focus on putting the community, rather than the product or service, in the middle, and on listening rather than telling. Lots of really sound advice from Heather, click and have a listen.

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The bonus from all this activity has been lots of face to face interaction and debate, from the Information World keynote with Elizabeth and Mia of the Continued Communications research team, through speaking at UKTI’s TechnologyWorld, to the amazing LikeMinds event in Exeter, Web 2.0 Expo and the recent Digital Surrey event. The next few weeks feature a huge number of events, as we escape election (and post-election) fever. The schedule for just the rest of the week is:

• 13th May - Being-Social – , 2-6pm, London. Where I will be chairing the ‘How Social Media is changing how we communicate’ session, joined by Andrew Davis Antony Mayfield Chris Thorpe David Cushman Jamie Riddell.
• May 14th – Higher Ground:The future of social and digital media in HE - London, for CASE. Opening, and joined by Abigail of The Blue Door.

With much more coming up, but more on that later. There is still time to book for Being-Social tomorrow, with just a few spaces left. The full speaker list and programme are here:

• http://www.being-social.com/programme/
• http://www.being-social.com/speakers/

And I am looking forward to getting back to my roots in the Education community on Friday. All of this has required some careful diary management! It is amazing how much backwards and forwards email and phone calls a simple shared diary system can save, likewise, sending event participants a diary invite with the event logistics in may seem a bit cheeky, but at least you know they have the details somewhere that they can find them on the night before. Standards like iCalendar have made diary sharing and synchronisation relatively easy, even in mix Mac/PC/Linux environments.

Here’s to a busy (social) life!

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Success has its challenges. Anyone who has a web presence already popular with visitors, but wanting to increase the use of the site, as well as attracting new audiences, has a tall order on their hands. On Thursday I spent an evening in the company of the Gumtree crew at their Richmond offices, along with a number of notable UK bloggers. It turned out to be an even better evening than expected, as I won a pair of Bose headphones and came home with a nice bag of goodies too.

A New Web Look For an Old Friend

Gumtree just celebrated its 10th birthday, having started as a local London classified ads and community site. It has grown into an international business covering 6 countries and 60 cities, hosting 2 million on-line ads in the UK alone. Clearly it’s not a business that is standing still, and has learnt a lot in 10 years of the on-line world.

Regular visitors to the site might have spotted the “Gumtree’s changing” message and link at the top of the site. Clicking on it lets users take a sneak peak of the site new design. They have managed to pack in lots of new features without completely crowding out the page. It is busy, certainly, but not confusingly so.

Collecting Feedback – Taking Users on the Journey With You

The way that Gumtree are managing the migration is a model example of how to do it:

• Giving early adopters the chance to opt-in.
• Explaining the changes and gathering feedback.
• Providing the option to opt back out,  with the option for feedback.
• Discussion forum for users to share their thoughts with each other.
• Rapid iterations, based on customer feedback.

The look and feel of a web site has a huge impact on users’ trust levels too, and Gumtree knows it. The new look feels more ‘solid’ in terms of its appearance and more ‘transparent’ in terms of exposing features and what the site it about. Key functions are grouped together logically and the graphics and icons make things more intelligible. The graphics add, rather than distract. I wish more web designers thought this way. Simplicity should always win.

Even More Local

Back in 2008 I wrote a blog post about going Hyper-local. Location based services weren’t new even back, but now services have matured into location aware (Rummble, foursquare and Gowalla to name just a few) and location-based (services based around a particular locality). While the spotlight has been on the explosive growth of the location-aware services, a quieter revolution has been happening in the location-based arena.

If you have a business with offices, it is fairly straight forward to put them on the various mapping services, and create a page to let users know how far away they are from you, and even to provide directions. Go ahead, scare yourself with the Geo IP Tool.

Things become significantly more complicated for a listings site like Gumtree. Listing and searching by a location name is a complicated matching process. How do you define where you live? It isn’t a simply post code or a city name, e.g. Angel in London, is that NW1? If I am on the edge of a postcode, postcode lookups become fairly meaningless.

Over the last 10 years Gumtree has amassed a huge amount of data about how people describe localities, and they are working on applying this to more user-friendly geographic and radial searches. Doing so will enable then to expand their emphasis from the more central city locations, out to the sprawl of suburbia. It’s clever stuff.

The Old Guard

Going back to where I started this post. The challenge with change is the old guard. Even if something is broken, there will always be people who like it that way. It’s their broken, they know it and are comfortable with it. Whenever you make changes, you are going to upset people. The key is to win the old guard over, and bring them along. It seems like Gumtree are doing a great job of that. A great example for others to follow.

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Gordon Brown - photo by Paul Clarke

Well, he didn’t say Gov 2.0, but he may as well have done. This morning UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced a sweeping set of changes to the way that technology is used in government. In a speech on Building Britain’s Digital Future, he was talking about digital technology’s role in a plan to secure recovery, growth and jobs in the global marketplace.

A telephone levy has been introduced to support the roll out of 100% broadband, a hotly debated topic here in recent times. Gordon Brown said that we can’t rely on an open market to look after all Britons, but rather the country must depend on an open partnership of business, economics and government. If this sounds like ‘light touch’ regulation, then that is a fair description. “We will support the independence of Ofcom and the BBC to encourage competition and innovation in the digital sector,” he said.

Gordon Brown’s speech touched both on those that do not have Internet access for physical or economic reasons, as well as for challenges in digital literacy. Not much was said about those that simply don’t want to interact with the government on-line, other than the implication that the services will be so good that they will change their minds. The topic of ‘digital exclusion’ will become an even hotter one after today, for reasons that will become clear…

The Prime Minister is seeking a more open and interactive model for the UK’s public services. Today he said that he is prepared to cancel current projects unless they can deliver results, saving huge sums of money. He sees the “Digital Britain” agenda as essential to economic recovery, aiming to place Britain as a world leader in the new age of digital economies. Underpinning this “next generation” of Britain is the next generation of the web – semantic web technology. Sir Tim (Berners-Lee) and his associates have clearly been a strong influence on Gordon Brown’s thinking, and that came across clearly in today’s announcement. £30m of funding is being made available to suport an Institute of Internet Science, headed by Sir Tim and Professor Nigel Shadbolt

A significant percentage of the UK jobs are already IT related, and Gordon Brown believes that the UK is uniquely equipped to lead a digital age. A new “MyGov”  initiative, starting with central government, will expand to local government, to support public engagement at both national and local levels. Brown cited £11bn of savings through using the web, as part of a£20bn of budget savings.

The ‘next stage’ of (UK) Government is an expansion of two-way communication between providers and consumers of government services, Brown mentioned smart energy meters, e-doctors/e-medicine and virtual classrooms. Increased efficiency and transparency will come for the open use of linked data web to provide visibility and access into these new services. Gordon Brown hailed the Internet as a “fundemental freedom” and the “electricity of digital age.”

The Prime Minister believes that opening up government data is central to building a more efficient, open and honest government. A new condition of future franchise partnerships will be that data is open and released (which sounds like a direct knock at TFL who have been slow in providing data for transport applications). From next month, bus stop location data is being published and Ordinance Survey data is coming too. There will be a new tendering portal for all contracts  over £25k. A prize comment on Twitter:

“Gordon almost rapping his speech he’s got so much good news in such a short period of time #gov20 #bbdf” DominicCampbell

Gordon Brown announced that all future government websites must have digital engagement functionality built in, and new websites would not be allowed unless they meet a strict set of criteria. This sounds like a big step forward for communication, and potentially accessibility too. The government will close 500 more .gov websites, as new services are consolidated around the new infrastructure.

“No more one size fits all,” he declared, as he proclaimed an agenda centred around personalisation, transparency, feedback and ease of use, and a potentially radical new model for public service delivery. The aim is that MyGov makes interacting with government as easy as banking and shopping online – co-opting commercial levels of functionality into the government’s infrastructure.

Martha Lane Fox will broaden her existing role and become digital champion for the UK, launching a new digital government department within the cabinet office.  ”The digital net will become the safety net,” said Brown. A clear nod to Martha’s work on digital exclusion. The PM also announced that in the autumn all non-personal government data will be released – a “New Domesday book” – but it isn’t just about the data. The Digital Public Services unit will have a big efficiency emphasis, looking at restructuring government services themselves. Traditional departments have a three part structure including a policy unit, a public facing (transactional) functional, and a back office. Digital technology, in the form of business services, will be used to transform the back office, and also used to open up the policy making function. Gordon Brown talked about breaking down silos and increasing cross-functional working. Make no mistake, these are big changes, with huge challenges.

I did have one “groan” moment during the press conference, when an iPhone app was announced. A bit of overly trendy glitz – a much better investment would have been a mobile friendly portal that works across all smart phones rather than the closed, minority player that is Apple. Other than that, this was government being “with it” in regard to technology.

The Digital Economy Bill came up in the question and answer session, and the Prime Minister offered up the minister responsible for a Q&A session with those interested afterwards – I look forward to the notes from that meeting! – the brief answer to the question was that disconnection, and more generally technical measures, were a last option. However, it did highlight the gap between the backward looking UK Digital Economy Bill, and the forward looking use of open standards and open technology that was a central part of today’s announcement.

What does this all mean? It’s too early to tell. There are clearly aspects of today’s announcement that are re-announcemnets of existing initiatives, but over all the picture is one of a strategic and systematic embracing of digital technology to create a more efficient and more open government here in the UK.

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The group includes around 90 people, and there will be other UK companies over in the US for the event as well, making the UK the biggest country group outside of the USA and Canada.

South-by, as it is known to it’s friends, does an amazing job of bringing together the digital media industry (and, yes, social media is a subcategory of that ;) ). I’ll be posting photos on Flickr and blogging on the Digital Mission blog throughout the event, and you can follow the DigitalMission on Twitter for real-time updates. The full list of companies is here:

Amberlight Audioboo Blueleaf Digital Brainient Codegent Codility Cube Interactive Face Group FreshNetworks GigLocator Howard Baines Illumina Digital KMP Digitata Likecube Little World Gifts Littleloud Mendeley Mobilized MOFILM Moonfruit MusicMetric Nsyght oneDrum Orange Bus PageDo Pixeco Plug-in Media Qhub Rummble Silence Media Skimlinks Slicethepie Smidgn SubHub TweetJobs UberVu Vibio Videojuicer Wolfstar WorldTV

I am looking forward to getting to know each of them, and sharing the wonders of SXSWi as we head through a packed agenda of events focussed on understanding and engaging with the US market. Newspepper will be there, so expect video updates from Hermione Way – they’ve already put together a trailer:

Digital Mission 2010 from Newspepper on Vimeo.

Many of the companies met up for a pre-event mixer last week, slideshow below, which gave people the chance to get to know each other before we head over to Austin Texas. Digital Mission really is a team event, and over the last couple of years it has been amazing to watch a strengthened network of hundreds of digital businesses emerge here. While the attention might be on London, the companies are from all over the UK, and watching them support each other to become international players has been, and continues to be, a real privilege.

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I’m literally just back from the Like Minds conference in Exeter. I say I’m back, but between the ongoing conversations on Twitter and the comment exchanges on the flickr photos it does feel a little like I am still there. The event was an excellent opportunity to transfer the on-line conversations about business culture, technology trends and the social aspects of business to off-line, into face to face discussions.

Facebook and other social media are now the most visited web-destinations in the world. The way that employees and customers communicate has changed, it is now down to businesses to catch up. I caught (or maybe that should be cornered!) co-organiser Scott Gould on camera, at the end of an exhausting day, to explain some more about Like Minds:

I used my mobile phone to record the video, as I’d lost track of where I put down my HD video camera in all of the excitment, but it serves as a useful reminder that anyone in a business has the tools to be a content-creator. It doesn’t take expensive equipment, or huge amounts of time. We have the technology to enable anyone to communicate with everyone, and that changes how businesses should communicate. The pandora’s box is already open, and businesses and employees alike are riffling their way through its contents.

I’m very sure that Trey Pennington will have some excellent videos of his own, but I managed to catch him on the other side of the lens after his panel, and had him explain his perspective. The words at the end of this video are still echoing around my mind. As we emerge from the current economic challenges, however long it takes us, history suggests that there will be a shift in emphasis away from financial drivers towards the more ‘social’ people-centred aspects of business. From employee retention and engagement, to new styles of marketing to customers, businesses need to be ready:

I enjoyed the opportunity of speaking on the panel after Olivier Blanchard. (aka the Brand Builder). I’ll share the thoughts from that in another post. As I took to the stage to speak, I was actually very nervous – here’s the back stage experience:

It can feel like that for many employees when they are asked to ‘do’ social media, or edit a wiki or write a blog. Not everyone is a natural communicator, and building effective people-to-people communication systems requires keeping that in mind. Not everyone wants to be ‘on the stage’. That means it’s not just about training people to use the tools, it is also about training them to understand how to use them effectively and responsibly. Most training seems to fall at that first hurdle, and never attempts the second. Like Minds has challenged me to raise the bar on the training we do, both the in-house workshops, and the more regular courses. There are broader issues to tackle. As one member of the audience explained, with his struggles to reconcile being a company director during the week and a partying rugby player at the weekend, the age of tagging friends in photos has no respect for neat work-life social boundaries.

I travelled down to Exeter the night before, which enabled me to meet the other speakers, as well as the local Lord Mayor – I have to say, from this speaker’s perspective, it was the most well organised conference I have ever attended. Scott and Andrew Ellis’ attention to detail is unrivalled and I am deeply grateful to both them and their patient team of assistants.

But back to that train journey the night before, and something that would have been most unlikely in the days before Twitter. I’ll let fellow speaker, the amazingly high energy A. J. Pape of Future Considerations explain the story:

Business success is intimately linked to an effective communciation infrastrature that not only allows knowledge to be gathered, stored and distributed, but also supports the working relationships that people need to function inside and across businesses. Social Media is becoming the de-facto communications medium, and while many businesses still have their head in the sand, an enthusiastic band of likeminded professionals are hard at work putting this new technology to good business use.

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With that out of the way, let me share a little about what is happening. The first Social Media Week took place in New York last year and was a great success. This year Social Media Week is happening in six cities around the world. The schedule of events can be found on the London site, with more events being added all the time.

I plan to be at the Social Graph event at the IAB on Monday, followed by the opening night reception. I will be joining a fantastic panel including David Terrar, Ala Patrick, Euan Semple, Mat Morrison, Dr Sue Black, Shefaly and co on Tuesday Evening for a session on Social Media in Enterprise. Lightning 10 minute presentations, followed by Q&A, at Cass Business school. If you are working with social media in a business setting you’ll probably want to book here now! The week for me rounds off with  “Social Media Measurement” at Sun’s offices on Friday, where I will be chairing the afternoon session.

Key event details:  Mon 1st Feb – Fri 5th Feb, 2010

Location: All around London.
Website: http://socialmediaweek.org/london
Twitter: http://twitter.com/smwldn (for the latest updates)

In other news, the blog got into the Technorati top 100 for Small Business Blogs, which is a gentle nudge to blog some more. We’ve been doing some very exciting things with WordPress for Redcatco’s customers, and are adding in some new server infrastructure in the next few weeks as well!

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Advised by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt and others, government are opening up data for reuse. This site seeks to give a way into the wealth of government data and is under constant development. We want to work with you to make it better.

We’re very aware that there are more people like you outside of government who have the skills and abilities to make wonderful things out of public data. These are our first steps in building a collaborative relationship with you.

A Short Long Journey

It feels like a long journey since October (“Set our Data Free and Create a (Digital) Economy“), but it reality it has only been a dozen weeks and some snow. In between-times, civil servants and some very civil technologists have been hard at work making thousands of sets of data accessible. I’ve just glanced back at my email folder – there are a good few thousand messages that have gone backwards and forwards between a large community of developers and the folks in Whitehall who have been making things happen. Amazing stuff.

It Matters Because…

I tuned into Radio 4′s Today program – normally bastion of great Radio – and was very disappointed to hear an odd piece which implied civil servants were battling to avoid releasing the data, and that the ordinance survey data might not get published. While I am sure that there are some who are, it’s the very opposite of what I have seen.

Why does data.gov.uk matter? It matters because:

• Open data encourages transparency in government. I see that as a very-good-thing.
• The datasets will stimulate innovation in services – from mapping accident black spots to finding cross-service opportunities.
• Data.gov.uk will be a nursery for a new generation of semantic-web software developers. If the community isn’t where the next Google comes from (it might well be!), it will at least nurture a pool of developers who will bring great data processing and visualisation skills to business.
• Supporting a digital Britain. The initiative provides a first step in helping to UK catch up and over take countries like Australia and others who are a long way down the track. Knowledge-based services are a big part of the future.

Just the Start

There is a better piece on the BBC website (it might be by Rory Cellan-Jones), talking with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who has been helping to drive the initiative:

…from traffic statistics to crime figures, for private or commercial use. The target is to kickstart a new wave of services that find novel ways to make use of the information.

The official press release is on the COI site:

“Making public data available for re-use is about increasing accountability and transparency and letting people create new, innovative ways of using it. Government data should be a public resource.  By releasing it, we can unlock new ideas for delivering public services, help communities and society work better, and let talented entrepreneurs and engineers create new businesses and services. ” Sir Tim Berners-Lee

Conversations are flowing on Twitter under the #opendata hashtag. Sir Tim and Nigel Shadbolt have also written a longer piece in The Guardian and the data.gov.uk site has a list of apps that have been written using the data already. I suspect we’ll see many more in the coming months.

[a couple of additions, post launch event]

There is now a set of resources listed in a blog post on the data.gov.uk site, including some background on SPARQL (the query language used to access the data) and how to list and search the datasets. The site itself is built using open source software – the main stay of what we work with here – under the action plan announced by Tom Watson last year: Open Source, Open Standards and Re–Use: Government Action Plan. There is a brilliant long post by Paul Clarke on his blog, which provides some good context and outlines the next set of challenges

It was interesting to read the US perspectives on the announcement. The US have their own initiative and there is some controversy about who is furthest ahead! The OPSI posted explaining the licensing terms for the data and how these relate to creative commons in the UK. All in all, a great achievement for Professor Shadbolt and Sir Tim.

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Techcrunch was quick to pick up on Eurostar’s lack of use of Twitter, and slam UK agency We Are Social:

“It owns a Twitter account at @little_break, allied to its marketing site Littlebreakbigdifference.com. This was registered and run by “conversation agency” Wearesocial.net. This is an agency which claims to be expert in the use of social media platforms like Twitter to communicate with the public. They appear to be slow to waking up to the crisis.”

Of course those that work in marketing in large businesses will know that there is a big difference between a marketing programs agency, a PR company and a crisis communications specialist. Campaigns-based agencies are rarely tasked with crisis comms, and in this case it would appear that We Are Social were retained around a specific campaign, rather than more general umbrella. Robin has responded on We Are Social’s Blog: A note about today’s Eurostar crisis – Within 24 hours the company had posted a video on YouTube and was tackling their communications.

In this instance, I’m fairly sure people affected weren’t asking for help on social media, and there was a more fundamental failure of communications and systems, but by day two people did want to know what was happening with their travel arrangements and bookings, and were asking on-line.

James Whatley of 1000Heads summed it up well in Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Brand Republic has a good write up on Eurostar’s next steps, which include cancelling their planned 2010 marketing activities, and re-aligning them, given where they now are.

All in all, it’s a pretty sorry tail, on one hand, Eurostar’s handling of the situation, logistically, seems to have left much to be desired, on the other, the focus by some blogs on the social media aspects shows a lack of maturity and understanding of big business. Just over a week on from the event you can see the ride that We Are Social has had.

The big take away is this: While social media might be many things, it is also another communications channel, which means it should be monitored (listened to!) and responded to. And that means not just on a campaigns basis. Also, in times of crisis, it can be a very effective, low effort, way to get information out – especially if you want to reach journalists!

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Business cases discussions seem to have narrowed down to ROI these days. The ROI of social media is a particularly hot topic – often accompanied by lots of hot air too. I like Trey Pennington’s take on the issue and personally I’m not sure that ROI is the right question – it’s far too easy to manipulate - Opportunity cost is a bigger factor in most business cases.

Not all cows produce milk

Donning a cow costume does not make you a cow. Think about it. Getting a traditional agency to do digital marketing via social media is not the same as doing social media marketing. You’ll get results, but no social media juice.

One of the advantages of executing your first social media project as part of an existing campaign is that it helps to make the distinction clear – just ensure you can identify the contribution of the social media component.

The upside of social media is huge, but hard to predict - @radiokate‘s fox (mentioned during my presentation) has now been viewed over 50,000 times: http://twitpic.com/sebvd – and it just jumped from social media to mainstream media. Could you have predicted that?

Which takes me neatly to my final points: Social media shouldn’t be viewed as an island. Without exception, every social media success story I have been involved in has worked exactly because in was integrated into a broader marketing and communication plan, and because it had a knock on impact into other channels.

‘Doing social media’ isn’t a case of walking through the blue door, never to see the old world again, it is a matter of organically building new skills and extending traditional marketing activities. See it as a gradual transition to a different way of engaging with customers, suppliers and prospects, one step at a time.

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Far from the empty room I was expecting at the end of the day, the theatre was almost full. For a number of reasons the discussion was distinctly different than social media events I have spoken at recently: The audience were predominately business owners and investors, generally new to social media, and very focused on the business to business context.

The panel brought a very balanced tone, with views from both traditional and mobile agency perspectives, as well as more social media focused opinion. There were good questions from the floor – both via microphone and an SMS-based twitter wall behind us [thanks to mashup]  (which was very well behaved, with only one mention of my Movember tache). Topics included what social media actually is, how to get started, what the risks of social media are, what sort of returns a business should expect, and who should execute the strategy.

Pretty much the only bone of contention was about timing: When should a business get into social media? I am very much at the “Start now” end of the spectrum – the barriers are low and things are still at the stage where you can experiment and learn. Toby Constantine stuck a more cautious note: “Don’t feel that you have to rush in to it”. The UK Technology Live blog has a nice summary.

My closing remark was a suggestion for a three point “social media strategy” – I’ll expand on it just a little here – three things to get you started

1. Find your community

Building a community from scratch is hard, expensive and a long journey. It is better to find where the relevant community for you is already gathered, regardless of what platform they are on. Be there. Be it Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing or a Ning group. And when you arrive, remember: you are a guest in someone else’s space. Act accordingly. They say good manners cost nothing, but bad manners will cost you your reputation.

2. Add value

To paraphrase Flickr’s terms and conditions – you know that irritating person at networking events? Don’t be them! Rather than pushing your product or service, show that interacting with you is a pleasant and useful thing to do. Without showing off, answering questions and helping will demonstrate that you know your onions. Share your knowledge, ask about things you are genuinely interested in, provide pointers to useful resources and listen to responses. You’ll learn, and you’ll become a valued and valuable member of the community. Business will follow, I can almost guarantee it.

3. Make it part of your workflow

Leverage what you are already doing, and do it every day. For me it is mostly about Twitter these days, although I really must get back to more blogging. “Lightweight” activities that are not overly time consuming, provide a good return on effort and are enjoyable. If “doing social media” for your business is a chore, then you’re doing it wrong (the ‘it’ there might be your business or your social media)! Simply posting an observation, thought for the day, or the most interesting thing that you learnt that day is a great starting point, or maybe something you read reminded you of a related resource or tip – share it.

Let me know how you get on!

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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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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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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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