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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Broadcast

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

Interactive

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

Social

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

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

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

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

First Break all the Rules

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

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

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

Putting Things Right

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

thebluedoor

theblueballroom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time

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

The Innovators

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

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

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

The Early Adopters

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

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

The Early Majority

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

The Late Majority

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Got You! Via Twitter

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

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

From Catching Fish to Helping Phishers

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

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

From Bad to Worse

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

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

What to learn?

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

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

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

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Google Search?

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

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

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

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

From Web Search to (Re)Search

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

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

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

From Data to People

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

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

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

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

Going Real-Time

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

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

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

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

The End of The Beginning

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

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

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

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

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

Just saw @BenjaminEllis and others on BBC News today.

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

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

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

• Replies to them.
• Replies to others.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Award Winning Business

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

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

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

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

Social Separation

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

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

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

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

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

Corporately Responsible

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

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

Business Beyond Profit

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Business Tactics to Social Strategies

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

“Actions that generate trust generate greater value”

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

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

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

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

Throw Away the Rules to Get Mores

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Structures – Beyond Command and Control

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

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

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

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

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

Get Innovating

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Raising Finance

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

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

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

Customers Consulting and Product

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

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

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

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

Timing and a Plan

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

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

Not all cash is equal.

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

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

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

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

Be Innovative

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Free Attracts The Freeloaders.

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

2. Free Drives Value Out of the Market.

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

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

3. Free Spreads Across Markets.

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

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

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

The Way out of Free is Utility

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

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

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

What Does Trust Mean On-line?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Trust to Persuasion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summarising Trust for Businesses On-line

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Create valuable artefacts.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Part I – A Digital Dawn

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

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

Lord Carter at NESTA - by Benjamin Ellis

New Uses and New Skills

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

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

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

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

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

Digital Lunch

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

2. Being Amplified

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

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

From behind my screen - Amplified 09 - by Benjamin Ellis

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

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

3. Down to (Digital) Business

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

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

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

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

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I don’t mean the meetup.com service. I mean meet up for a coffee. Meet up for a lunch. Meet up for a drink. “Benjamin!” you say, “that’s a bit frivolous. Shouldn’t we be working harder, rather than out socialising?” But think about it. Business demand is down in many sectors. That means getting smarter about finding new customers and keeping existing ones. It means ensuring you have a good network in place, should things take a turn for the worse.  It is about scarcity, not capacity. The long-term winners will be those with that extra insight that enables them to make smart decisions and avoid mistakes. It won’t be the ones running 10% faster in the wrong direction. 

Keep on Meeting

Discussions are great for a business, especially in tough times. Identity your most important customers and meet up with them. Not email. Not a phone call. Arrange to meet for that coffee or drink. At a personal level, think about your most valued friends. Book in some time with them, just to meet up and chat. Find out how they are doing. It’s about protecting valuable relationships, as well as sharing issues and insights.

I’m a massive advocate of social media and technology-mediated communication. I blog, tweet and video my way through the day. Often I’m teaching others to do the same, or I’m building blogs and community sites, networks and communication systems. I love the stuff. However, I value face to face communication more. There are somethings that only face to face communication will provide, and they are things that we need right now.

Something is Missing

When you talk to someone, rather that type to them, you hear a sea of additional information. Technically, it’s called prosody. The inflection, rhythm and tone of their voice change, from “yes, things are ok” to “yes, things are ok”. Did you spot the difference? Of course not. There wasn’t any. But if you heard me say them, you’d be able to tell if business was turning good, or if business was turning bad. Not because I was trying to mislead you by what I was saying, but because words may tell you where things are, but emotions tell you where things are heading. You don’t need to consciously think about interpreting the information coded in the prosody of someone’s speech. You’ve been learning to do it every day since you started listening. It happens unconsciously, but only when you talk.

When you see someone, you  see their body language. Their posture and movements tell you even more about what they are thinking and feeling. Are they looking at you, or gazing away? Are they fidgety or still? If you can’t see the person, you loose that information. I’m not talking about advanced body language reading skills, just understanding “how is my relationship?” or “am I spending enough time with them?”

And That’s Not All

I haven’t got to the most important reason for meeting up face to face. Non-verbal communication is great, but there is something else that only happens when you physically go somewhere to meet up. Chance conversations. When I was working in Asian cultures, it took me a while to realise the important conversations were the ones that happened when the formal ones were over. Actually it’s no different anywhere in the world.

While email and phone might be informal compared to the written letters of old, they still aren’t as informal as we like to think they are. We are trained to be efficient on the phone, and conversations are stilted, even in video conferences with the very latest high definition equipment. Our brain knows that valuable bits of communication are missing, and it longs to have the gaps filled in. A conversation, in a relaxed atmosphere, is something unique. We crave it, but too often we deny ourselves the opportunity for it. In difficult times, it is the only way to figure out what is going on. It is the only way to build strong relationships that will protect you and your business. It is the only thing that provides the confidence to get on and get things done. It also surfaces the extra nuggets of information that enable the entrepreneur to succeed.  Trust your instincts on this one.

Balancing Online and Offline

There was a peace in the Mail Online today - How using Facebook could raise your risk of cancer. Ordinarily it isn’t something I would rise to citing, but it has been interesting to see the reaction on-line. Dr Aric Sigman, quoted in the article, probably hasn’t made any friends in the on-line world, but I doubt he is bothered about that. Don’t worry, he has written about how TV is killing us too. In case the comments people have added to the piece don’t provide enough entertainment for, you, check out the spoof “Daily Mail says Postal System Causes Cancer“ by the incorrigible Tom Morris. Needless to say, neither represents a systematic research piece!

I’m definitely not reducing the importance or the power of digital communication. The mass media makes much of ‘the battle’ between online (social media and social networking) and offline. While they might appear to be warring for our time – or budget in the case of business – in a healthy set up, they are complementary to each other.

As a business, for almost everything except on-line retail, you want to end up face to face with potential customers. You want potential customers and your sales channel to meet and transact business. For personal relationships, eventually you want to push past the technology and meet the people “in real life”. Social media scales your ability to reach out to new contacts, and preserve existing ones.

One Thing Leads to Another

Vibrant on-line communities lead to face-to-face meet ups. It is almost inevitable, and has been since the earliest digital communications. In the same way, online tools act as a sustaining mechansim for existing relationships, when distance or time limit contact. The best way to build an on-line community? Get people meeting face to face. Want to preserve a time-scarce or geographically dispersed community? Use on-line tools. One of the reasons that social media is such an effective tool for growing business, or your personal social network, is that it acts as an efficient funnel between “the big wide world” of contacts and our intimate circle of relationships. Which takes me back to where I started…

Meet Up

Now is the time to invest time into important relationships. Check in with your most important customers. Look up your friends. How are they doing? Is there anything that you can be doing to support them? “Chill out” away from the day to day hype and get a proper read on what is happening.

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It started with a conversation, and is ending in hundreds of events around the world. Tonight I am on BBC ONE talking about Twitter, and hopefully not sounding too much like a geek. I was on the evening news talking about Twitter: Twittering On BBC. People in the UK and all around the world have dedicated much of their daylight time (and midnight oil) into organising what must be one of the largest on-line-to-off-line charity events in recent history. Kudos to Amanda Rose, and to all those who made Twestivals happen around the world.  I took a couple of pictures and answered some questions.

Twestival to aims to raise money and awareness for charity: water. It may net more than £1 million pounds before today is out, which is quite something for an on-line community of a tool that wasn’t even heard of a year ago. This is mass collaboration at work, CauseWired style. Thousands of people, amplified by technology, making a difference. A very exciting day. Well done people – with help from Twitter (which just closed its own $35 million round of funding).

As I mentioned in the BBC interview, one of the things I love about twitter is the diversity of the community, “Benjamin Ellis and Grannies.” If you want to read a touching post on that subject, do read Christian Pain’s post (aka @documentally): “My Gran is on Twitter“.

I headed out of London, over to Reading, to join the crowd there and meet some new faces:

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In his post JP shares some thoughts about systems for decision making. The ideas are interesting (and have been debated in other contexts). It is worth remembering that government’s influence on our lives goes far beyond spending from the state wallet. Government sets policy and makes laws too. Thinking about recent anti-terror and surveillance legislation, along with proposals in the Digital Britain report, arguably, policy and law affect our lives the most.

It is possible to build an on-line voting system to provide access to every policy decision, but as Clay noted in his talk, the results aren’t always the utopian ideal we would hope for. Controlling policy directly may not be a good thing. It becomes easy for a well organised minority to ‘out-influence’ a quieter, less galvanised majority. To avoid that problem would require compulsory voting, but do you want people forced to vote on issues they don’t care about or that don’t affect them? 

The same issues exist for social decision making tools used in an organisational context. While “Voting” has become popular for making some decisions, generally we don’t run companies as democracies. Why not? Because we (or more specifically the business owners) prize expert decision making. Some of the larger companies I have worked with do have town hall meetings. These are loose approximations to the early Greek ideas of democracy, soliciting feedback and dialogue, but they are the exception rather than the rule. Businesses are, at least notionally, meritocracies. People gain authority based on their ability to make good decisions and to use authority well.

Several times in his talk, Shirky made the point that the democratic franchise grew up based on the ideal of one person one vote – actually one man one vote, but that’s another issue. Democracy requires a strong grip on identity. I must be sure of who you are before you vote, in order to enforce one person one vote. However, the voter’s opinion itself is afforded anonymity. I know who you are, but not how you voted. In the UK, more so than in US culture, most people’s voting intention is an intensely private matter, expressed in an intensely private ballot. 

The Internet grew up as a very different type of franchise. Via NFSnet and FIDOnet (and communities like The Well) anonymity was accidentally implicit, if not deliberately and explicitly so. The systems had no way of knowing who someone was, in the sense that we would understand identity management. People frequently used synonyms, and even when they used a ‘real name’, verifying they were actually that person was a non-trivial exercise. As a side note, Twitter has been experiencing the same fun and games recently, with people grabbing Twitter accounts and masquerading as celebrities (from Tony Benn to the Dalai Lama).

Back to votes and opinions for a moment. In the on-line world we often know a lot about what someone thinks. There is anonymity of identity, but not of opinion. A mirror to the democratic franchise. Interestingly, from my own work with Wikis and from other academic studies, I have noticed that sites where people can post completely anonymously get significantly more contributions that those that don’t.

So, how can we make companies more democratic, and how can we make government more participative, in the social media sense? The answers come not from technology, but from understanding the nature of democracy itself. The art of an effective democratic system is to defend factions from each other. Tony Benn, articulates it well in this clip from “Big Ideas That Changed The World”, you might not agree with his views, but his argument is an informative one, if you are new to the concepts:

Incidentally, the video is also a good counter to Shirky’s statement that Democracy started in the UK with the Magna Carta, signed just up the road from where I am sitting right now now, in a a field in Runnymede. Democracy has evolved mechanisms to deal with working at scale. I can exchange a little information with a lot of people, or a lot of information with a few people. Information exchange doesn’t scale to both ends at once. Democracy tackles that problem by the use of elected, professional representatives as intermediaries. A vote is a small piece of information from a lot of people. A consultation process is a lot of information exchanged within a smaller group of people. Familiar mechanisms that tackle the problem.

What came before democracy was tribalism, which JP’s post alludes to with the description of the open source community. Projects are often run by a ‘tribal leader’ and rings of followers creating a social structure supporting them (see Dunbar and other anthropological studies). That structure does not work with anonymity of opinions. Visibility of allegiances is required to allow the structure to sustain itself.

Here is an apparent paradox: Anonymity promotes extremes of views, by taking away the moderating effect of social influence. We are compliant creatures by nature, and social pressure pushes us towards moderate, or normative, views. We adapt our views, based on our perception of other people’s views. It is a socially useful behaviour, since it makes it easier to form coherent groups. Johnnie Moore and Mark Earls, author of Herd, gave some great demonstrations of this during their session on social influence at NESTA yesterday, and Mark’s book is probably a good place to study it more.

In designing social decision making systems, one must take account of identity, anonymity and accountability. Systems must also balance the desire to have everyone participate, with the need for informed expert opinion. During the NESTA session, Johnnie Moore made an astute observation about organisational design: business design is about balance the need for efficiency, and the desire for full participation.

These are all thorny issues. In a representational democracy we vote for someone we believe is able to represent us. At least we should. In the workplace this is expressed in the form employee councils and so on. Can we place these things with social software? An old IT/programming adage springs to mind: Don’t mess with something unless you understand why it was that way in the first place. We need to apply new technology, with the benefit of understanding old ideas. Yet another thing to add to the list of important, but non-trivial tasks.

There are usually trade-offs and compromises to be made. No system is perfect. However, experience shows, from systems to products, that it doesn’t take perfection to win. In the early days of Cisco Systems, a group of consulting engineers got in to terrible trouble for having a T-shirt printed that said “Cisco – We suck less”. The positioning goes a little against the grain of modern marketing techniques, but it rings true. As Darwin would have put it, survival of the ones that are the best (least bad) fit for their environment.

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But unlike 18 years ago, this time I knew where the snow was falling, in real-time, and exactly what was happening with the trains too. How? Because of the power of mass collaboration. In a twist of fate, those new tools enabled me to embark on my journey to London this evening to listen to Clay Shirky talk about that very subject at LSE.

Clay Shirky delivers a précis of “Here comes everybody“ (now available in paperback: UK|US) in these 5 words: Group action just got easier. The book is something of a reference text for proponents of the power of social networks, and a concept will be familiar to readers of CauseWired.

Clay’s roots go deep back into the early days of the Internet. He has studied and written about them at length. Clay says that there are two things he has learnt from the last 15 years: Fast is different than slow and big is different than small. That might sound obvious, but it is actually profound in understanding these new tools.

“When it comes to networks, you can’t just extrapolate from small and slow to understanding the dynamics of large and fast.” Clay Shirky

Today’s networks, both in terms of telecommunications and social tools, are certainly both large and fast. In conversations I often frame the issue as quantitative change versus qualitative change. Technology that gains traction creates one or both of these. Quantitative changes are simply being able to do what we did before, but faster or larger. Qualitative changes are ones that fundamentally alter what we do or the way in which we do it.

It would seem logical that the linear nature of quantitative changes would make them much easier to predict (small and slow to large and fast), while qualitative changes would be more difficult, because of their disruptive nature. At least that is the commonly received wisdom. My experiences with technology say it doesn’t actually work that way.

People mis-predict technologies and put them into the wrong one of these buckets. Entrepreneurs usually believe they have something that produces a qualitative change, when it is actually a quantitative one. Conversely, many technologies that produce quantitative changes at first go on to affect society in a qualitatively way. The automobile changed how quickly we could get from A to B. Slow to Fast. Quantitative. But in doing so it changed where we could work, then our social circle and, ultimately, how society itself is constructed.

Lots of people view social media and social networking sites as agents of qualitative change. I think that doing so both overstates and understates them. Imagine, for a minute, that mass media had never happened. No radio. No TV. No newspapers. Wouldn’t it be quiet? You’d be able to hear the conversations.

Now, introduce social software. You’d have a nice linear move towards conversations that can take place across the globe rather than across the living room. From conversations with several people to ones that include hundreds. Sound familiar? They might include multimedia objects like photographs and videos too. The latter makes it tempting to compare phenomena like Facebook and Twitter to television or radio. That really isn’t a useful comparison. While they can, and do, turn into broadcast tools, with a single video receiving millions of views, they are misunderstood when viewed in that frame. What we are looking at is a return to a bigger faster version of conversations that were, rather that something that has never been.

Back to professor Shirky: We live in a time where tools like these, that lower the hassle factor of finding one and other and enabling collaboration, are changing the way that society works. Tools that started their life in the technical community have now spread out to touch every aspect of today’s society.

In the last 48 hours alone the BBC had tens of thousands of people sharing pictures and videos of the snow fall in the UK. I’ve watched myself and other Twitter users use the #uksnow tag, followed by the first part of their post code and a rating in messages to created data that produced a real-time view of the snow situation around the UK (thanks to an app built by Ben Marsh).

Another Ben, Ben Smith, has produced uktrains – a twitter feed with the very latest information on what is happening to train services in the disruption (there’s a wiki and a post about both of these on TechCrunch).

It’s all about the Benjamins, as a US rapper once said. Actually, it isn’t. These apps were both free. They might not be perfect – how do people agree on what constitutes a 4/10 rather than a 8/10 snow rating? – but they are more than “good enough” and certainly much better than the nothing that was before.

How much investment would have been required to build systems like this prior to web 2.0 and mass user contributed data? The user contribution of data is a major disruptor for traditional publishers and information services. If people are prepared to do what was once paid a job for free, that changes business models, at the very least.

We are in the midst of massive value destruction. Somewhere value creation is going on, but we haven’t quite found out where yet. On-line bulletin boards launched in the 1980’s, so the papers have had 20 years to get ready. While the world has changed around them, they have remained static.  ”This isn’t the transition from business model a to model b,” said Clay, “it is the transition from business a to business models b-z.” While a paper might report that X has happened, social media says X has happened, and this is what you can go and do about it.

Clay cited the example of the MySociety campaign, via a Facebook group, that saw Parliament reverse its attempt to conceal MP’s expenses. He also recounted the counter example of President Obama’s change.gov website. Within a short time after its launch, legalising Marijuana (for medical uses) was voted as the top public policy question facing America. As Clay notes, perhaps it ought to be a little lower down the list with matters like two wars and some collapsing banks that have to be dealt with – although I wonder if there might be some correlation there.

Clearly mass collaboration isn’t going to solve every problem. For the first time in public, Clay said, “I don’t think the technology is ready for the mass legitimisation of initiatives… …There need to be checks and balances applied”. That is a big, and wise, shift from his previously utopian view of what could be achieved. I’ve posted about crowds not providing the wisest answer for every situation before. When we think about the idea of direct access into the political process, we might want to think carefully about what exactly we are wishing for. The tools are fantastic for gathering feedback and generating content, but decision making requires a degree of sophistication that the tools do not provide, yet.

The problem now is not technical capability, it is legitimacy. Under what circumstances do you take the advice from user generated media and when do you ignore it? On-line we can’t do “one person one vote” – the basis of the democratic franchise – so we can’t legitimise it.

The problem is one for business leaders too. The answer may end up coming from government. What (now President) Obama started on the campaign trail, he will have to continue into the Whitehouse. Having opened the door to mass collaboration, that crowd is still looking over his shoulder and will not accept being shut out. Once you build a community, it doesn’t conveniently go away when you no longer have a need for it, it has a life of its own (something to note for businesses that just dabble in social media). 

This will be a new and interesting phase for the tools of mass collaboration. ”It is not just about politics, it is about government, and they are subtly different things,” observes Shirky.

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Argue to The New from The Old

Too often change makers expect people to jump from A to B on the basis that “B is better for all of these reasons about B”. From marketing materials to social innovators, from business managers to parents, that’s what you see. Here’s the thing: That kind of approach is highly unlikely to create change.

Switching to the new approach requires starting from the existing one. Many of the social media advocates I meet and debate with describe a wonderful utopia of conversation and information flow, based on its use. It’s great. However I don’t know of a single business that can “jump” to that spot. Whilst social media will definitely change the way that businesses interact with customers, and even how intellectual property is managed, businesses have to operate within today’s legal frameworks. As the old joke goes, ”Well, if I was going to there, I wouldn’t be starting from here.”

You Must Get There From Here

I’m absolutely not saying that new methods shouldn’t be persued. Quite the opposite. They have to be, but within today’s frameworks. That means the transition isn’t always smooth. Ask David Schlesinger of Reuters. Recently he broke a news story via the Twitter service, posting it before it had hit the Reuter’s wire (see the story on Silicon Alley Insider - although David’s own post explains more):

I’ve been tweeting from the World Economic Forum, using the microblogging platform Twitter to discuss the mundane (describing crepuscular darkness of the Swiss Alps at 5 a.m.) or the interesting (live tweeting from presentations). Is it journalism? Is it dangerous? Is it embarrassing that my tweets even beat the Reuters newswire? Am I destroying Reuters standards by encouraging tweeting or blogging?

(These aren’t rhetorical questions – I’ve been challenged by many people who would answer those questions as No, Yes, Yes, and Yes! I answer them as Yes, Potentially, No and No.)

Although the example is based on twitter and journalism, it applies across many domains, and David illustrates it well. Effective change pushes at the barriers of the existing system. It doesn’t ignore them. It tests them, validates them, and then expands them where they are found wanting.

That kind of change is adaptive. It promotes growth. If you aren’t adaptating and changing, growing, then be sure that others are. Very soon you’ll be left behind. As David puts it:

If I don’t beat the Reuters wire with a live tweet because I deliberately hold back, someone else will. If I don’t beat the Reuters wire because I’m slow or inattentive, someone else will.

Taking No Risks Is The Best Way to Guarantee Failure 

Several times a week I have conversations with businesses terrified about using social media, “what happens if we let something out via a blog by accident?” It’s a valid concern, especially for a listed business (if you are in any doubt read the  SEC rules on Selective Disclosure - nothing like a multi-million dollar fine to focus the mind). Business do have to operate within today’s legal frameworks. However, many of the “barriers” that traditional businesses market and communicate under are not really barriers at all. If they are tested, they will be found wanting. The old rule was: “Appear great.” The new rule is: “Be great.” Actually, it isn’t a new rule, it is just one which mass media allowed to be bent for a while. Social media (generally) makes things more transparent. Are you ready for people to see inside?

The Best Way to Look Great is to Be Great – One Step at a Time

Here is the rub: This applies at the personal level too. Let’s say I want to be fantastically fit and wonderfully organised. It’s easy to see the benefits of the new system. The “position B” looks like a great place to be. I read the fitness books. I read the books on being organised. And what happens? Well, nothing of course. That’s not how you change from A to B. Start with A, find the boundaries and push them.

Maybe you don’t feel you can be organised? find a place where you almost are – a routine that exists already – and build from that. Every Saturday morning I drive the kids to a class, where I wait for them to finish. It was the perfect place to plan in a weekly review, looking back at my diary and planning the next week. I was there already, I just needed to push. I know I’m not going to make it out to a gym, but I know that I can choose to walk. Walk up the stairs. Get off the train a stop early (see this lovely post on the London Underground Tube Diary). Then I might even be ready to run too.

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A Tortoise Enclosure

John Cleese talks about creating an enclosure, a safe space where it is safe for the tortoise – our creative mind – to come out of its shell without its head being knocked by a passing object. An oasis in which we can be creative – free from interruptions and distractions (like the constant drip of incoming emails and other interruptions):

“You have to create boundaries of space, and you have to create boundaries of time.”

Boundaries, and the space that results from them, are essential. For me, that means taking a walk out of the office – either in my local woods, or wherever I can get away to. For others, that might be closing the office door or putting in ear phones and playing music.

After space, the other dimension is time. Creating time boundaries, a defined starting time and a stopping time, is actually great for productivity and creativity. After a brief twitter exchange with Amanda Rose (organising the Twestival for charity:water) and Bastian Lehmann  I realised I haven’t specifically blogged about time boxing (although it is the idea behind “…see what you can do in an hour“). Setting aside a fixed chunk of time enables you to focus on getting something done.

Learning New Things

The talk touches on learning, and that is really my subject here. John says:

“To know how good you are at something requires exactly the same skills as are required to be good at something.”

He then states that in reverse: if you are not good at something, you lack the skills to know that you are. A much better way of stating something I often have to tackle: We don’t know what we don’t know.

“Most people who have no idea what they are doing, have absolutely no idea that they have no idea what they are doing.” John Cleese.

The Science of Lifelong Learning

Behind his usual dry humour, he is making a very serious statement. Learning, life long learning, is an essential skill. We need to be like tortoises, not like hares, when it comes to our education. I was brought up in a generation where we hared our way through school, and for the privileged few, university. A learning sprint, then work. The pace of change in society and business, and the speed at which new knowledge is being created, means that is no longer sufficient. Learning must now be a life long process. Like the tortoise, we need to plod on, in a steady and sustainable way. As John Cleese says, again with his unique humour:

“I try, today, to learn something new. Each day I want to learn something new – because I am very, very old… and I’ll be dead soon. So, I want to be as well informed as I can possibly be, when I die.”

Part of what drove me to start Redcatco was the concept of build learning organisations empowered by technology . Disparate communities linked by what is often called collaboration or social software today.

Businesses need to be places where people learn new things everyday. The only sustainable way for that to happen is as a result of people gaining knowledge from each other by sharing it. Those learners then build on that knowledge and share it in turn. That process is at the heart of innovation and development, from design and marketing to effective sales. I believe that learning best takes place in a social context (and Bandura and a number of other Psychologists would tend to agree).

This week I attended a panel at the RSA on the subject of life long learning, looking at what new research, especially in neuroscience, can tell us. There are lots of questions: What is the scope for lifelong learning, and what are the best methods to support it? We live in an ageing society, where people are staying in the work force for longer and longer periods of time. Can we still learn, even when we are old? Is the explosion in brain training (from 10 minute newspaper mental workouts to Kawashima’s brain training game) based on good science?

The speakers included Andrew Pollard, ESRC Institute of Education; Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL; Paul Howard-Jones, University of Bristol; Usha Goswami, Centre for Neuroscience in Education, University of Cambridge; Matthew Taylor (Chief Executive of the RSA); and was chaired by Tom Schuller, Director of IFLL -  the Inquiry into the Future of Lifelong Learning. The session was recorded – will be on the RSA website in due course. You can read Matthew Taylor’s blog post on the evening too. 

From my own investigations of brain plasticity (the ability of the brain to adapt and change), I know that understanding has changed dramatically in the last few years. Developments like Project Prakash (which restores sight to people who with life-long blindness) has shown that our brains can learn and relearn significantly later into life than previously thought. 

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, UCL institute of cognitive neuroscience, asked if it was meaningful or helpful to reduce accounts of educational events to neural level. All the current “brain training products” are sold with the promise, but there have been no randomised, controlled trials on most of them. She talked about an article from Weisberg et al, “The Seductive Allure of Cognitive Neuroscience“, from 2008 which shows an interesting psychological phenomenon: we are suckers for pseudo science. We fall victim to specious explanations. Adding “brain words” into a bad explanation made people believe it more. Sarah-Jayne finished her talk with a slide of images of developing brains. While scientists used to think brain development stopped early in life, scans show that the brain actually continues to develop for decades. 

Andrew Pollard argued from a very  different perspective, saying that we need to acknowledge the place of biography and identity in the learning process. It can’t just be studied at the neurological level, although such study does help – a point that all the other speakers seemed to agree with.

Matthew Taylor hypothesised that neuroscience will make a huge difference to our lives. The only threat is that there is too much hype around neuroscience. By the way, the same could be said for social media and Web 2.0 as well. What are the things that give us a desire to learn? “Collaboration and the use of technology are the meta-learning skills that will be critical to life long learning.” We can learn from arcade games. If we get up to 85% we are motivated to try again. How many people in schools are at that point? We need to keep ourselves at the point where we are doing well, but know we could do a bit better. Then we are motivated to try.

Usha Goswami, centre for neuroscience, University of Cambridge (who specialises in developmental dyslexia) talked about the developmental origins of flourishing. It is a well know list, including warm, responsive, contingent care and a family embedded in social network. I think that actually extends out to businesses that want to be learning organisations. They need to be supportive environments, with good networks into a broad community that can support their learning.

New research will and should be more interested in the emotional self regulation system. Early capability makes later learning more efficient. So  enhancing early capability at the outset of learning also increases the complexity of what can be learned. Small differences in perceptual systems can make big differences in the developmental trajectory. Think about a ship going off course. 1 degree off course, caught early, makes little difference. If it isn’t caught for a long time, you are miles from where you need to be. Early intervention is important – something else that extends out to be a business truth as well.

The interventions which promote cognitive reserve and resilience education might surprise you. It is a case of use it or loose it, another reason that we should be lifelong learners like John Cleese – learn something new everyday. Another very significant factor is physical exercise. Yes, you heard it. Before you go chasing after those cognitive enhancing drugs, get out for a walk or a run. Neurocognitive activation or cognitive training may be useful (i.e. brain games), but it really remains to be determined. What is known is that poor nutrition and poor quality of sleep can impair cognitive function. So, if you want to learn well, eat well and rest well too.

Paul Howard-Jones,  University of Bristol,  asked if brain training can help. There is research to show that practice on a cognitive function can improve that cognitive function, the bigger question is does that generalize out to other activities. Does your executive team being great at Sudoku mean that you are going to be better at strategic planning? The ACTIVE Study (Willis et al., 2006) showed some improvement in  ”fluid intelligence.” That is a good indicator of how well you will do academically.  Jaeggi’s results showed that some training improved working memory and fluid intelligence, so there is the possibility to produce brain training products that do work, but products on the market today have insufficient published evidence. Again, Paul noted that exercise helps with learning, academic achievements and motivation. Psychology is the link between neuroscience and education.

The Q&A was lively, with Peter Cook asking about “learning, unlearning and relearning” for businesses – something institutions like banks are going to have to do quite a bit of after recent events. One point that came up is that if you believe that there are hard neurological limits, you are actually less likely to reach them. Disposition and agency (believing in and taking responsibility) are critical learning factors. Likewise, learning is better when there are discussed objectives and clarity.

The word education literally means to bring on, in the sense of “to bring out” or “lead on”. It is something that we can continue to experience, and to expect for others, for the duration of our working lives, at the very least.

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We have the technology!

As it turns out it is very easy to build a blogging mirror, and there are a number of different ways to do it. It is useful not just for blogging, but for anyone who has to produce a large amount of text content. Sometimes it is just easier to talk, rather that type. It leaves our brains free to think great thoughts, without having to try and remember where the ‘j’ key is, or check the that the spacebar is still working after the last cup of coffee was spilt on it. Unless you are a touch typist, you can talk faster than you can blog (see the figures in IM or E-mail? How to get your point across?).

How can you turn your speech to text? Speech recognition software. This is another one of those technologies that will become a more and more familiar part of our lives over the next decade. The major OSs already support text to speech (reading text) and speech to text (voice recognition). Both OS X and Windows (at least Windows XP on my tablet PC) have some of these features built in, even if a little hidden away in the accessibility settings. You’ll need a good quality mic, and a reasonably quiet environment.

Beyond what’s in the box.

The built in software isn’t always been the best – it can’t always keep up with full speed speech, and can take a while to train. In the case of OSX, it is for controlling menus, rather than transcription. There are more specialist applications around that out perform (and predate) bundled software. The most well known of these is Nuance’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking software. These packages give very high performance and they work in even tricky application areas, such as legal dictation.

Putting it in the cloud?

There are other routes too, for example Internet or phone network based services. You don’t need to buy anything, it lives out “in the cloud” My favouroute example is Spinvox (see “Never Loose Your Voice Again”), which allows you to call a dedicated number and then dictate a short memo. This is converted and emailed to you. It is a great way to capture thoughts, or send yourself reminders, when you are on the run. A quick phone call, utter a couple of sentences, and then relax in the knowledge that your thought is captured and waiting for you in your inbox when you get back on-line.

There are ever more options, such as commercial transcribing services. The wave of outsourcing and global connectivity has made these services more affordable by providing access to lower cost skilled labour (see what Matt Cornell did with $100 a while back). You record your speech as a wav or mp3 file, then email it  or upload it to the service. They usually email the results back to you after a few days.

Speak once, read twice.

For all of these methods, you’ll need to set apart a little time to proof read it and correct the inevitable mistakes. If you talk technobabble like me, a 100% transcription is very unlikely – I even mistype myself. Unless you are a 100% accurate typist, this is something you would have had to do anyway.

Mirror mirror on the wall…

So, there you go, a blogging mirror! Perhaps you should put one in your entrance lobby? The great thing about converting speech to text is that it can be archived, searched, sorted and annotated to anyone’s heart’s content. Combine it with any of the ways of keeping a record and you get to reap the benefits of the sort of blogging mirror I started out thinking about. You can look back on your thoughts and ideas and see how they have evolved, building on what you have learnt and marking your progress.

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These days we are all a bit social on-line. We have always been social creatures, but now we have technology to help us manage those connections, from well-known sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Digg, to photo sharing sites like Flickr , even virtual world applications such as Second Life.

Computer technology means we can start to map out the relationships an individual has. Certainly we could have done this in the past with paper and pen, but applications like Twitter, Linked-In and Facebook mean that a vast swathe of the population are now submitting details of their relationships into databases, where they can be graphed and modelled by computer. This idea of a social graph – a map of relationships that individuals have with each other – has applications in both business and consumer marketing.

In the early days of the Internet it was joked that “on The Internet nobody knows you are a dog”. However, on today’s Internet we do know who you are, what you do, and the relationships that you have. Depending on your privacy settings, this information is available to a narrower or broader set of people – but it is, nonetheless, available.

One of the most interesting things about making a graph of the relationships is looking at the connections of our connections. Taking an obvious example: I know a few people, those people know other people. With a social graph (or with social media applications) I can see that two of my friends don’t know each other, but they do know a third mutual acquaintance. That creates new ways of introducing people to each other, and strengthening relationships with mutual contacts (see the Dunbar’s Number – Groups, Language and Social Media post with reference to tribes and clans in this context).

In some ways there’s nothing new there. Social people have been doing this sort of thing for millenia, but what is new is that people can use computer technology to identify friends or contacts that might be relevant with information that might previously have been missed or unnoticed. I have two friends who live at the opposite ends of the country, who I’ve never seen at the same time, and I assumed never knew each other. It wasn’t until Facebook came on the scene that I realised they went to the same school as children. A detail that might not (and in fact did not) come up in years of conversation.

This idea is codified in the concept of friends of a friend or “FOAF“. It was an early attempt to capture a person’s social graph and publish it on the web. The idea is that I could embed a list people that I know on my web site, so that you can see who you know too – that way you can see if you are a friend of a friend. One hop away on the social graph. By identifying those mutual contacts it provides a way for us to come to know each other. That is the concept that business social networking site LinkedIn is based upon.

So how does FOAF work? It uses something called RDF – Resource Description Framework – to express metadata, that is information about information. In the case of FOAF that is information about people and their interests, relationships and actitivites.

FOAF uses RDF to express metadata about people, and their interests, relationships and activities. Founded by Dan Brickley and Libby Miller, FOAF is an open community-lead initiative which is tackling head-on the wider Semantic Web goal of creating a machine processable web of data.

Semantic web overlays data about data on the Internet so that computers can make sense of it. Because FOAF information is machine readable, computer applications can read it and process it to present information or bring things to our attention. So a very simple and idealistic view might be you come to my website or my page on Facebook and the web brouser automatically picks up that FOAF information and is able to notifiy you that there are some people we know in common. The idea is to build that information into all sorts of web pages so that many applications become, as it were, social or at least socially aware.

So FOAF, in the technical sense, is a very simple text structure, based on an XML format, which is machine and human readable – although not too pretty for a human. It is very easy to write applications to use it. A FOAF entry might include information such as my name, gender, title, what my preferred nickname is, separate out my family name, point to my home page or my blog, and include similar information for my contacts. It is a very simple piece of data, but we can add details about the nature of the relationships. It isn’t as complex as it probably sounds, it is flat text, which might look a bit like this:

<foaf:Person>
   <foaf:name>Benjamin Ellis</foaf:name>
   <foaf:gender>Male</foaf:gender>
   <foaf:title>Mr</foaf:title>
   <foaf:givenname>Benjamin</foaf:givenname>
   <foaf:family_name>Ellis</foaf:family_name>
   <foaf:nick >jamin</foaf:nick>
   <foaf:mbox_sha1sum>...(inverse functional property)...</foaf:mbox_sha1sum>
   <foaf:homepage rdf:resource="http://www.benjaminellis.co.uk"/>
   <foaf:weblog rdf:resource="http://www.redcatco.com/blog/"/>
   <foaf:workplacehomepage rdf:resource="http://redcatco.com/" />
   <foaf:depiction
           rdf:resource="http://benjaminellis/images/bmje.jpg" />
   <foaf:knows>
       <foaf:Person>
         <foaf:name>Joe Blogs</foaf:name>
       </foaf:Person>   
   </foaf:knows>
 </foaf:Person>

What does all this technology do? It give us opportunities to introduce people to other people, or to find people via mutual contacts. It might be computer-based, but the end goal is human to human social interaction. The power of my social graph, the map of my relationships, is not just in the releationsips I have, but also in that friend of a friend information – The relationships my contacts have, and they or I might have as a result of them.

People’s social graphs are exceptionally complicated. The FOAF proposal is a long way from providing even the beginnings of being able to express the relationships we have. I’ve played in a band with someone across the street, who baby sits for us on occasion. Are they my neighbour? A fellow musician? My baby sitter? Computers struggle with such vagaries, some people thrive on them. A social graph is not a simple star with me in the middle and people around the outside. It is actually a complex mixture of more and less connected individuals.

In using social networking platforms for marketing, agencies often seek out the person with the most ‘connections’ or ‘friends’. That is an error. Who is going to be more effective in propagating a message – someone with 350 contacts, or someone with 20? It depends as much on the second and third degrees of their social graph (ie out to the friend of a friend level) as on the direct contacts in the first.

One person might know 100 contacts, another might know 10. For the person who knows 100 contacts each of those people might know 100 or they might know a 1,000. Some of them may be very well connected , some may have a few tightly formed relationships, that are heavily meshed –  where all their contacts and mutual friends are related. Others may be outliers, or bridgers as I like to call them, sitting across different communities. They might only have a few relationships. but they bridge between large communities.

Social software, even in its current form, is effective in the ‘discovery’ phase of relationships. One of the reasons that Twitter is so popular with many is that it makes it easy to find new people, based on their interests or experience, and start exchanges with them. Browsers like Flock aim to integrate the social and data aspects of web surfing. The area certainly has a lot of potential, for example knowing that a web site is written by a friend of a trusted friend might have me interpret the information as more trusted than that of a total stranger (for better or for worse). There are applications that generate FOAF from your Facebook page , Firefox includes a built in FOAF browser.

FOAF also has the potential to act as a format for porting our social graphs from one social networking platform to another (as long as the platforms stop banning people for running export scripts). A number of platforms (at last a dozen at last count) already allow exporting data as FOAF information. The approach might also be useful in the Enterprise 2.0 context, where social graphs might need to be used across applications.

All of this is, of course, still in a nascent stage. Be it FOAF, or a functionally equivalent standard, we will be seeing a lot more activity around the portability and interpretation of social graph data in the coming year. In the mean time, don’t forget that it is all about connecting with people!

Related Posts

• What will Enterprise 2.0 look like? Some Thoughts from Crystal Balls
• The Complete Bounds of Our Social Networks – Part I
• Not So Private Data
• Who’s are you? The Question of stolen (bits of) identity
• The Rather Complex Issue of Identity