Open (finds, minds, conversations)...

Dell: social media most important element of marketing

2008-08-19T08:22:05+01:00

If you are working with social media and need a boost today, need a pick-me-up, a morale booster make sure that the next thing that you do is watch this video from Uberpulse.

It's an interview with Andy Lark, Vice President Global Marketing at Dell.

And you're as excited as I am by what Andy Lark says in it then hang around for a few moments, I've a couple of things I'd like to say (before I run the video again with a broad grin on my face). First up the headline quote from the interview:

“The social media stuff is probably the most important we do today, from a marketing stand point. The other elements of marketing mix has sort of become more and more transactional and more and more tactical in nature. Social media stuff is much more strategic… Use social media to power the fundamental of the business. That’s what we’re focused on”.

Understanding social media and its significance brings a point of view which changes everything about how marketing - and wider business - strategy is conducted.

Social media is key to developing a native digital strategy, that is an approach to marketing that is borne out of the the way that open networks on the web work as a medium, as a place with dynamics, possibilities that are utterly different to the channel media of print and broadcast.

So much digital strategy that I've seen is non-native, is imported, models and approaches borrowed from advertising or mass media. This kind of strategy begins with the wrong values, a channel media world view, that means that it will always be still born. They shift from strategy about media doing things to people, to "transmedia narratives" which still means media doing things to people, just online as well.

There are the same flaws in the idea of 360-degree or multiplatform commissioning by broadcasters or traditional media - so often what is meant by these phrases is that digital is the bolt-on to the legacy channel media approach of conceiving, designing, creating and then measuring the impact of content.

It's why we always return to our three values as a starting point and as reference points throughout a campaign: understand your networks, be useful to your networks, be live in your networks.

Social media gives us a perspective on the web that shows as it really is: a human network, massively complex, always shifting and evolving. It's not a machine.

These are raw thoughts, in need of crafting, and shaping - so let me finish this post with some more articulate and concise points/quotes from Andy's interview:

"[social media] changes everything"
"The risks and the downside are really insignificant when compared to the rewards and the upside."
He notes that Dell has taken flak from journalists for holding NDA briefings with a thousand customers, one of whom may then submit the screenshots to Engadget.
The vast majority of Dell's marketing will be online in future.
Check out the crowdsourced creative for advertising around Dell's Regeneration.org - this is the sort of thing that has gone badly for other brands so often, but Dell's learnt so much about social media (see the Chevvy Tahoe story for the classic example of this) and earned the right to connect in this communities (by understanding, being useful and being live in them). This started as a Facebook group that Andy says they expected to be small but really took off.
Andy says he sees BBC reporters as being from a organsiation that is adapting well to social web, illustrated by the fact that the first question he often gets from a BBC reporter is: "Can I podcast this?"

I am massively impressed by both Dell's execution and its strategic thinking in this area. The team there has really gone beyond understanding the tactical opportunities that social media might offer and are realising its potential to inform the company's strategy.

: : Via Strive PR's blog. Thanks a lot, Sherrilyne...

business, marketing, media, strategy, dell , marketing, socialmedia, social_media

Private to public: Where blog clogs come from

2008-08-18T06:44:59+01:00

Image: A stop sign, a subconscious variety of which has apparently been put up in front of whatever delicate mental ecosystem lets me be a blogger... (Credit: Afroswede (cc))

Let's be frank about it: I'm battling a severe, morbid case of necrotic blogger's blog, a.k.a blog clog, a.k.a. blog drought, a.k.a. losing my blog mojo.

Just because I'm blogging right now doesn't mean it's over. I think it's like one of those 12 step things - I've got to accept I've got a problem, talk about it publicly and then work on my long-term recovery.

Who knows what the causes are. Some blame blog blocks on Twitter - certainly it's been giving me some of the social networking buzz that blogging once did. I've sometimes suspected that leaving behind my beloved OneNote + Windows Live Writer workflow when I shifted over to a Mac upset my delicate blogista's constitution.

I was also feeling pressure to write elsewhere, which combined with other commitments. Well, I've dropped the Brand Republic blog a while back and I have a new plan for my corporate blog, so that's all feeling a lot clearer.

Blogging is something I have to squeeze in between a fairly demanding job*, equally demanding young family** and occasionally sleeping***. On that last point, I'd actually been sleeping more over the past six months - so we'll just have to knock that on the head...

I think in part it has been a subconcious drifting away from my philosophy of a blog as a public notebook. If the excellent Online Journalism Blog's notes on a book called Making Online News: The Ethnography of New Media Production is to be believed:

“More than one blogger said a key turning point in the way they practice blogging was the moment they felt the gaze of the public eye. Realizing that people are paying attention … has led these bloggers to adopt a more careful, dispassionate approach and tone.”

One blogger is quoted as saying this “has led to less opinionating and more reporting and thoughtful analysis:”

“I was more creative when I started, now I’m more deliberate … I started trying to be more professional … Once I got to 100 readers I started to get more organized and started to take more responsibility for what I posted. Then I started to restrict what I put up there … I’ve ducked a couple of issues recently … because I wanted to be better informed. I didn’t want to be wrong … so I just avoided the topic.”

I totally buy that. And it's ridiculous. And I've written so little recently I doubt many people are listening anymore, so that should make a blogging reboot fairly starightforward, no?

Anyhow, point is, blogging's worth working at, fighting for, hanging on with all my strength.

I know that sometimes people blogging about blogging is the most dreary thing in the world - just skip over 'em, it just me trying to piece my blogging back together.

Every day in every way...

* Which I love.

** Which I love even more.

*** Overrated, but necessary.

blogging, bloggerstediouslybloggingaboutblogging, blogs, navelgazing, selfobsessedanalysis, mememe, attentionseeking

A blue chip and a true blue blogger compared

2008-08-05T08:10:42+01:00

Sifting through my feeds yesterday, I came across two blog posts from two ostensibly very different bloggers on the same topic: why they blog.

Now, blogging about blogging comes dangerously close to navel gazing, I know, but these two have interesting things to say.

On the one hand there is James Gardner with his Bankervision blog, Head of Innovation at LloydsTSB, a major UK bank, reflecting on the question of where he gets the time (and implicitly in that question, why he bothers).

And on the other there is Fraser Nelson, political editor of the Spectator, a right wing politics and business magazine in the UK. In the just over a year since the magazine started its Coffee House blog, he "had no idea I’d end up writing far more as a Coffee House barista than for the magazine".

Their reasons and their blogging pay-offs are interesting to compare and contrast. For Gardner the pay-off has been access and attention - both within his organisation and in competitors' organsiations, both of which have helped his work. Without the blog he might not have had a way to "reach out to other banks. I've had lots of banks come through to London to visit us, and the value of those visits is extremely high (for both parties I hope)."

In a way by blogging he put part of his and his bank's thinking into the commons, into a neutral place where everyone who was interested could add a little to the conversation, benefitting them all.

"There's always this fear that whenever anyone speaks in public, we're in danger of giving away the game to competitors. But I've found that when you keep things secret, it actually takes much more effort to get things to happen. Talking about things creates the reality. Doing social media has made a lot happen here at the bank."

There's something else for Gardner as well - he says that social media helps to avoid "the Curse of the Incumbency - while still being in-house he gains awareness of how things are working elsewhere:

"The Curse is the situation where stakeholders turn to outside consultants rather than relying on internal knowledge. There is quite a lot of validity in this, by they way. Consultants have the advantage of seeing how many institutions work. But through this blog, so do I."

Meanwhile the Spectator's Fraser Nelson's basically a self-proclaimed addict. What's the drug? He reckons it's all down to the comments:

There’s something gratifying (and, I admit, addictive) about writing an idea at 2pm and having CoffeeHousers – a strikingly smart, diverse, eloquent and well-informed group of people - comment by 2.15pm. And if I’m trashed, it’s normally for a good reason. In newspapers, writers normally get only two forms of feedback: promotion or a P45.

So what he gets is the best feedback on his writing and his thinking that he's had in years. He needs a thick skin to take some of the spicier assaults on his arguments and style, but it's worth it. For someone who is serious about political debate he sees the blog as somewhere his views are challenged, honed, refined: "the flabbier points in my arguments are noticed and skewered".

Last word on blogging, touchingly, to Fraser Nelson: "My wife says she can tell when I’m blogging, because I smile when I type."

I never noticed it before, but I do too.

blogging, blogs , socialmedia, UK, banking, banks, lloydstsb, thespectator, politics

New yummy del.icio.us interface

2008-08-01T06:00:25+01:00

Del.icio.us is one of those social media things I don't even think about anymore, it's so usefully, unnoticeably embedded in my life.

So it was a lovely surprise to see that for the first time ever - since I started using it a few years back - there's been some improvements to the interface.

Here's my del.icio.us page:

Looking forward to playing with it. But for my purposes, this morning, wanting to find something I had tagged it was immediately, incredibly easier to do so - with the search function making suggestions as I typed. Brilliant.

What's always puzzled me about del.icio.us is why Yahoo! hasn't done more with it since it bought it. As a tool, as a pool of collected pointers to interestingness, usefulness around the web it seems like it has so much potential.

Maybe there are some other things happening behind the scenes in parallel with the redesign. But I believe that when I see the evidence....

Meantime, check out the del.icio.us official blog's post on the relaunch.

del.icio.us

The fame formula (how the other half of PR lives)

2008-07-28T08:24:24+01:00

Image: Celeb aggregator, We Smirch.com ("automatic dirt digger")

For some in serious, proper corporate communications - the kind where you frown a lot and drop your voice an octave to explain things of super-important, biz news agenda setting graveness - it is kind of annoying when a lay person sets them in context with celebrity PR, blithely bracketing their profession with the likes of *gasp* Max Clifford.

Outsiders are rarely aware of the nuances of PR, publicist, press officer and corporate affairs specialist.

Depending on the context the work-a-day flack might let the implied affiliation with the Heat-seeker variety of PR go unchallenged (at a party meeting someone new who seems impressed by celeb-ism, for instance), or deploy some grade-A gravitas and explain why and how what they do is so very, very different (meeting a prospective father-in-law, for instance).

But there's something fascinating, raw and compelling about the fame game, and even though I've never been a player, now I don't have to defend my serious PR credentials, I'll openly admit to enjoying arch-publicist and general showman Mark Borkowski's analysis of fame in an excerpt from his forthcoming book (out next week) The Fame Formula: How Hollywood's Fixers, Fakers and Star Makers Created the Celebrity Industry published into today's Media Guardian.

I'm allergic to celebrity news in a way which many red carpet-hugging PRs are probably allergic to my technology and media obsessions. I know I'd never have been able to commit to that particular game - but the game itself is utterly fascinating.

I'm spoiling nothing by revealing that Borkowski's formula is:

F(T) = B+P(1/10T+1/2T2)

where:

F is the level of fame;

T is time, measured in three-monthly intervals. So T=1 is after three months, T=2 is after six months, etc. Fame is at its peak when T=0. (Putting T=0 into the equation gives an infinite fame peak, not mathematically accurate, perhaps, but the concept of the level of fame being off the radar is apposite.);

B is a base level of fame that we identified and quantified by analysing the average level of fame in the year before peak. For George Clooney, B would be a large number, but for a fabulous nobody, like a new Big Brother contestant, B is zero;

P is the increment of fame above the base level, that establishes the individual firmly at the front of public consciousness.

The conceit of a formula works as an analysis framework for looking at how some celebs play the keepy-uppy game of bouncing their name in and out of the headlines.

If, as I did, you got a vicarious kick (and some new lessons in how the media works) out of Piers Morgan's The Insider The Fame Formula could make for a very good read indeed...

media, PR, fame, celebrity, publicists, markborkowski, borkowski

China's blistering growth in internet use

2008-07-25T09:02:19+01:00

Image: Sun and Moon Pagodas, by judepics

Since December has increased its online population by 43 million since December, almost the equivalent of everyone in Spain coming online just half a year.

The lastest CNNIC (Chinese Internet Network Information Centre) report puts the total number of people at 252 million, making it of course the country with the most people online in the world.

Kaiser Kuo on the Ogilvy China blog has done us all a favour by filleting the report and presenting the most important data points in a post called CNNIC 22nd Report: Some Excerpts & Observations.

Naturally China's size means that proportionately it trails other countries, but as Kaiser Kuo points out, at current growth rates it is catching up very quickly indeed:

The penetration rate of 19.1%, (which assumes a total population of about 1.325 billion) compares with penetration rates of 71.2% in South Korea and 68.4% in Japan, which rank among the highest in the world. Chinese Internet penetration is marginally lower than developmentally comparable Russia, which stands at 20.8%. Iceland is highest at 85.4%, the U.S. has 71.9%, India only 5.3%. Total global Internet penetration is higher than China’s still, at 21.1%. But at current growth rates China should be at or above the world average by year’s end.

Via @johnkerrnz on Twitter.

stats, web, china, internet

Farewell sweet 3 dongle

2008-07-24T07:58:33+01:00

It's time for my 3 broadband dongle I've been trying courtesy of the blogger testing programme to go back.

I gave it a pretty rigorous road test a while back and while my opinion's not changed since then (Voda better for train use, 3 has the edge on price / contract stuff) there's a couple of things I'd like to add on the subject of les dongles, more generally.

From a hardware point of view there's just one final hurdle - can you just make it plug and play? I mean do I have to activate the application, Ok the connection, enter my password and *then* click connect on the phone icon in my toolbar (this on a Mac).

But niggles aside, no one should be without a dongle in this day and age - especially in the UK.

I shared my spare dongle with a colleague, who jokingly compared it - as I wrested it from his hands - to an extremely addictive substance. Without really noticing it, he'd very quickly got used to being able to hook up his laptop to the web wherever he was - and get a good broadband connection while he was at it.

There was a moment when we talked about him giving it back and we were about to get off the train when I realised he still had the thing.

Felt a bit like that moment in Lord of the Rings when Gandalf has to get all stern with Bilbo about giving the ring back. I swear my soon-to-be-3G-cold-turkey colleague was a beat away from calling it his "precious"...

Dongles are so cheap and so fast, while WiFi is so erratically free in this country that, for most people who carry a laptop I would recommend a dongle right now...

3 , mobile, reviews, broadband

Twitter's sketchpad origins

2008-07-23T08:39:58+01:00

If you ever sketched out an idea on the back of fag packet or on a notepad and got just a little bit excited about the possibilities captured in that rabbled scribbling, you may get a kick out of these sketchbook doodlings posted on Flickr by the founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey.

There's a really intriguing explanation of the thinking that led to Twitter. It began, apparently, in 2000 when Jack signed up for the venerable blogging service, LiveJournal:

One night in July of that year I had an idea to make a more "live" LiveJournal. Real-time, up-to-date, from the road. Akin to updating your AIM status from wherever you are, and sharing it. For the next 5 years, I thought about this concept and tried to silently introduce it into my various projects. It slipped into my dispatch work. It slipped into my networks of medical devices. It slipped into an idea for a frictionless service market. It was everywhere I looked: a wonderful abstraction which was easy to implement and understand.

The photo was posted in July 2006, not long after Twitter got under way, so there's a touching conclusion to the commentary for the pic:

I'm happy this idea has taken root; I hope it thrives.

Yep - it's thriving. At an estimated two million users now, according to a ComScore estimate in a USA Today article telling the short history of the Twitter service.

So get thinking, get doodling, and get out there - and a couple of years from now we can coo over the genesis of your idea... Boldness, magic, etc... eh?

Via PSFK

twitter, ideas, innovation

Blogging from my iPod

2008-07-20T10:55:56+01:00

Testing out the Typepad app on me iPod Touch. Works....

Critics: the frogs in our media ecology

2008-07-13T08:27:32+01:00

Image: Thumbs down by desi.italy

Watch the frogs, some ecologists say, when they start dying we're all in trouble. Frogs are the most sensitive to climate change because of the way the. Think of of them as the canary in the coal mine of their ecosystem.

I pay close attention to what is happening to newspapers and journalists because they are on the sharp end of the media revolution that the web is bringing about. And critics, be they film, theatre or literature specialists, may be the mot sensitive of all to change.

Food critic Jay Rayner has a considered piece about bloggers and critics in today's Observer.

He starts off with a personal tale of when he went to lunch to review a restaurant and took Simon Majumdar a foodie blogger along with him:

Within two hours of getting back to my desk, Simon's review was online.... The problem was that his readers would be opinion formers: not just chefs, restaurateurs and food journalists but other hardcore restaurant goers. And when my review was printed almost three weeks later they would all assume I was the one who had taken my lead from Simon rather than the other way round; that the real finds were being made by the amateurs.

Luckily for Rayner his blogger friend agreed to take down his post on this occasion, but it prompted some serious reflection on the part of the professional critic.

The article takes in interviews with a good number of critics and bloggers alike. Very much worth a look - and there's some healthy debate (naturally) on the Guardian's blog's comment section.

Keep an eye on what happens to paid media critics. How they morph, adapt survive or otherwise may tell us a lot about where the rest of the media ecosytem is headed.

media, newspapers, reviews, critics, journalism, food, theatre, arts

Adam Tinworth: "Community is not a place. Community is an approach to publishing."

2008-06-29T12:34:05+01:00

Image: Community: Just because you build a place for it, doesn't mean it will come...

There are a few people working in the media that I follow closely when they blog or speak. The reason is that they are at the absolute edge when it comes to discovery of the new role, or new roles, of media organisations in the time of the social web.

Sounds like a glamorous job, no? And when they reflect on their careers in a few years time it will most likely seem like the most wonderful time of innovation, experimentation and achievement.

But that's memory for you: smoothes out the narrative for you, let's you tell yourself a story that makes sense and hopefully seems like it was all for the best in the end.

Different living though it, though eh? Hard graft.

Their accounts of what they've been up to, new ideas and perspectives are naturally very useful to me in challenging my own ideas and giving me glimpses of what the near future might hold for brands, for marketing communications etc.

And then every now and again one of them blows - geyser like - with a rush of insight, often powered by frustrations, but no less interesting for that.

Here's one now: Adam Tinworth's leading the charge for Reed Business Information, publishers of a slew of trade titles like Estates Gazette, Computer Weekly and Flight International.

Adam's been fighting his way through a major upgrade of the company's blogging platform (Movable Type, since you ask). Possibly the upgrade of his organisation's view of how the web works is the greater challenge though.

Witness his blog post this week Why Media Gets Community Wrong which is presented self-deprecatingly as an alternative to banging his head against his desk in despair (good choice, Adam).

It's a long blog post which is most definitely worth spending some time with, mulling over for a while and then returning to it for another read.

...last Friday that I had an epiphany: most media people don't realise that blogging is a community strategy. They think of it as a publishing process and, perhaps, as articles published with a particular tone of voice. They certainly don't think of it as a conversation.

blogging is all about personal voices interacting with one another, not about personal voices lecturing. And that's something that the media usually misses.

Here's the heart of it:

You either care about your readers, or you don't. Creating forums, and then making that your only point of community interaction with your readers is roughly like inviting some guests round - and then not letting them out of the guest bedroom. It shows that you've heard of the idea of hospitality, but aren't really all that keen on the idea of, y'know, socialising.

*Care* about your reader. Care.

Because caring is human. And in the human networks of the social web you need human behaviours, human emotions earn the right to even be there.

....to really, genuinely engage with your readers you have to embed [community] in everything you publish to some degree.

It's all too easy for people from a traditional media background to see community as a place - something off to the side where the readers go, while the journalists sit over here in the real part of the site.

I had that perspective once. I remember with MoneySavingExpert, a site I'd seen many times and knew well and thought about its most significant parts as being its advice sections and the weekly email from Martin Lewis. There was a link on the home page to the forums, but I didn't think about them much. Now I think of the 340,00+ (I'm sure it was only 25,000 back then - ha!: *only*) strong forums as the powerhouse of that incredible site, which is more influential and agenda setting than any of the personal finance sections of our national newspaper brand.

I was wrong. I was prejudiced by channelthink, by a mental models and assumptions about media made by having lived for so long in a world where the editorial was the most important thing, the voice from on high was what everyone wanted most.

socialmedia

Virgin America's social media fight to exist

2008-06-22T14:46:10+01:00

Virgin America an internal airline in the US, owes its existence in part to the power of stirring up customer demand via social media (disclosure: my company iCrossing works with some Virgin brands in the UK).

In short, it would seem, there was a great deal of resistance to Virgin's attempt to set up a US domestic service, with a lot of the lobbying by rivals focussing on the fact that the company is, well, foreign.

Ian Delaney does us all a service by recounting a presentation from Alex Hunter, Virgin’s Head of Group Online Marketing, from a conference called Fuel last week...

Legal fencing, defencing, shilly-shallying and fence-sitting ensued, for months. Finally, on December 26 2006, the DoT delivered its verdict: Virgin America would not be allowed to fly. This was a black day for Alex and the company. To that date, the Department had never reversed its decision on such a matter.

So Virgin decided to take the fight to the (metaphorical) streets.

They submitted a time-lapse video of one of the planes being painted to YouTube. Over the weekend, it garnered 200,000 views and found its way to the front page of digg. It wasn’t an especially remarkable film from a technical perspective, though at that time, there was nothing like it (all their rivals have since copied the idea, apparently).

They launched a blog called Let VA Fly (now defunct), unveiling all the sophisticated new features on their planes. At this point, they felt they had nothing to lose, so they might as well. They included an online petition, and forms which would create and send a correctly worded and legally valid complaint to individual users’ representatives, senators and the Department of Transport. Technically, it was a fairly simple site, based on open source Wordpress software. But it did the job.

Image: the Let VA Fly blog (now de-commissioned - from Twopointouch

A simple blog then, and a lot of action around the Digg community, tapping into geek-love for some of the features of the new airline and the ambient antipathy of US consumers to many of their dreary carriers (see Buzzmachine passim and my own smouldering sense of indignation and rage brought about by 18 months of intermittent bouncing around North America on planes).

Some "ROI" on their blogging and sundry social efforts (besides the fact the airline now exists):

Front page of Digg 8 times.
75,000 letters supporting them sent to the authorities.
30,000 signatures on a petition supporting them.

Not bad at all...

brands, business, socialmedia, campaigns, issues, virgin, virginamerica, airlines

A shot of Haque: the next industrial revolution

2008-06-22T06:42:49+01:00

Mr Haque has published the speech he would have given at this year's Supernova.

One of the gems takes Google's "organize the world's inormation" mission and applied it to other things that networks would be able to sort out better than firms and governments:

The next industrial revolution begins here. What happens when we think of using new DNA to reorganize structurally inefficient industries? A blueprint for the next industrial revolution emerges. Here’s what it looks like.

Organize the world's hunger.

Organize the world’s energy.

Organize the world’s thirst.

Organize the world's health.

Organize the world's freedom.

Organize the world's finance.

Organize the world's education.

Hope he gets to give that speech sometime - hope i get to hear it. Meantime, read the article and think about what you might want to take part in organising. In a final call to arms, Umair says:

If you're a startup, and your elevator pitch isn’t shaped by this blueprint; if you're an investor, and your portfolio isn't full of companies like this; if you’re a corporate boardroom, and you're not refocusing and restructuring to meet these new challenges – here’s the bottom line: the next industrial revolution has your name written all over it.

business, google, networks, thinking

Google trends for websites

2008-06-22T06:21:18+01:00

Google Trends has for some been giving us a glimpse of trends around what people are looking for on the world's favourite search engine., now it is letting you do the same for website traffic or "insights into the traffic and geographic visitation patterns", as the Google explanation of how it works would have it.

All good fun, but I wonder if it has any more accuracy than the notoriously erratic Alexa?

The Goog's account of where it gets the numbers from is plausible but vague:

Trends for Websites combines information from a variety of sources, such as aggregated Google search data, aggregated opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. The data is aggregated over millions of users, powered by computer algorithms, and doesn't contain personally identifiable information. Additionally, Google Trends for Websites only shows results for sites that receive a significant amount of traffic, and enforces minimum thresholds for inclusion in the tool.

Anyway, let's have a look at some graphs...

Typepad.com vs. Wordpress.com, showing the latter blog platform's steady success... (BTW this blog will be migrating to avouWordpress soon).

And in the case of the home pages for the top three online newspapers in the UK, Google Trends thinks the Guardian is still in the lead:

And it's no wonder they all like to have a pop at the BBC...

analytics, google, web

Measurement when the web is all around us

2008-06-20T04:49:42+01:00

Image: Shadows...

I have a thought that I would like to share with you. It requires a bit of pre-amble from me and attention on your part, so it disobeys quite a few of Nielsen's rules for McNugget size info-morsel web writing.

But this is my notebook, not my newspaper, so I'll go right ahead...

Jeff Jarvis often mentions the idea of your Google shadow, the impression on the Google indexed web that you leave by talking about things and by people talking about you. I think that the shadows we as individuals and as membrs of networks, communities of interest are going to grow in all sorts of interesting and useful ways.

To my mind, there are basically three ways that people add to the network that is the web, the social web, the Web 2.0 operating system, however you like to think of it. Three kinds of data that people create that is useful to others in the network:

Creations: What we classically think of as "content". Images, videos, blog posts, Tweets etc. Stuff we make and upload to the web.
Conversations: The comments, the ratings, the activities Forrester ascribes to the "Critic" class of user behaviour in social media in their emminently useful Technographics profiling. [LINK]
Behaviour: Everything we do on the web leaves a trail that affects the way that the web works, what it knows, in a way. When we search and click on things it improves the way Google works, when we read a blog post or a news article we notch another point up on the analytics measuring that.

We've been doing a lot of work on the measurement side of things at iCrossing. Although there's a lot to measure out there and a lot of ways to measure it, we sense that people have yet to grasp the full potential for themselves and their businesses of being aware of what they can learn from data.

Through what we've been calling the engagement framework and active listening, we've developed a kind an ethos of "numbers and stories" that can distill, elicit, divine meaning from the mass of website analytics and data that you can pull together by listening carefully to your networks. Stories carry the meaning, the numbers show they're true, would be the way it makes sense to me.

We think you can see all sorts of things. The ways that people behave on online, the things they talk about reflect an impact throughout their lives.

But more of that another time. The thought I wanted to share was that as the web becomes ubiquitous in our lives, the conversations, creations and behaviours we leave there are interesting not just in their own right but as echoes of what we are thinking, doing and saying in the rest of our lives.

socialmedia, web, measurement, analytics, listening

Governments should throw data not money at issues

2008-06-19T20:01:55+01:00

One more thing from the CLT thing today...

The session was under Chatham House rules, so I won't go into details of who said what, but one other point that was made eloquently was that Government tends to define its role in terms of addressing deficits. In networks it may be as useful or more useful in addressing assets. The example given was identifying under-used public spaces, and helping people find them.

Someone else talked about how Government often felt its role was to throw money at things but that this wasn't necessarily going to be the only thing it could do in networks. I quipped that instead it should be throwing data at problems.

Thinking about those two points in parallel there's something every local authority could do to be useful. Share data about spaces that are available at low or no cost for community groups. To make the data useful it would need to be portable, so that you could take the data into Facebook, Google Calendar, Upcoming and Meetup to help organise... whatever.

(If anyone wants to own up to their brilliant insights in the comments section I'll credit them, natch.)

UK, g, web24gov, government

Understanding your networks is a full-time job

2008-06-19T19:54:31+01:00

Spent some time with an interesting crowd divided between "geeks and government" at t Communities and Local Government (CLG) today discussing how Government will need to adapt in the age of networks.

One of the themes that emerged strongly for me was around the "understand your networks" imperative that I've discussed here before.

Government organisations need to spend time understanding their networks and their place in them in almost exactly the same way that brands and media owners do.

Understanding and listening to networks should be part of the the planning process for any Government project, consultation etc. And it should be part of the day to day business of the

I recall the Home Office has several people listening (monitoring) social media full time. Hopefuly their role is not just to support the communications department, i.e. supporting PR, but to bring insights to everyone they work with, from policy makers to people who design the customer journey to get a passport.

I see a lot more talk these days of social media roles arising in agencies and other organisations. Hopefully listening, understanding and sharing knowledge about what the networks are will be the major part of hat they do.

socialmedia, UK, government, monitoring, social, communities

, webgov24

See your music listening history from Last.fm

2008-06-15T07:00:35+01:00

Ahem... this post went up without either the words or pictures meant to go with it. No idea why...

About a year ago I wrote about a data visualisation by Lee Byron of his music listening history on Last.fm. Oh how I wished I could see my own.

Well, now everyone can at a site called LastGraph created by Andrew Goodwin and supported by raw 'puter power from State51.

If you listen to Last.FM you've got to give this a go. If you are particularly proud of your rich seams of aural adventuring - and many people are - you can get a poster showing the evidence of your immaculately tasteful and eclectic online listening. Or upgrade to LastGraph premium for:

In return for a small (annual) fee, we'll enable hotlinking for your graphs (so you can include them on your own website), and give you access to some small dynamic signature images you can use for forums or other similar things. You also get the priceless feeling of warm fuzziness for helping us out.

My own Last.FM listening data is patchy for one reason and another but I did manage to get a decent graph up. I was delighted that it didn't include some of the kids tunes I'd been downloading recently for my four-year-old's birthday party, however it does show my recent guilty pleasure of revisiting the REM back catalogue...

Top tip - try out creating posters in different colours and in high resolution and you can zoom in close to what look like the sedimentary layers of listening... nice. The LastGraph guys should be linking this through to a Threadless concession. Seriously.

data visualisation, last.fm, music

I see tags. Everywhere...

2008-06-14T16:32:45+01:00

Everyone's been very excited by a site called Brandtags lately. Keeping the concept beautifully simple, Brandtags asks people to submit words and phrases that come into their heads when confronted with a series of logos.

It then creates a tag-cloud (you know the drill - the more often a word's mentioned, the larger it is) that gives you a snapshot of what people say.

As you can see from the tip of the BBC's tag-cloud, the sample may be biased to the US slightly with "accents" and "awesome" being two key words that have been associated with the corporation.

Some people describe it wrongly and think it is pulling tags in from blogs and forums etc. Watch out for that... this is very interesting and a great eye-opener, a tease that begs people to ask what people are saying elsewhere out there on the social web.

Anyhow, here's a site I've come across that is doing a similar thing but visualising - I think - the most common tags associated with a word when people tag a photo on Flickr as planets orbiting

It's called Tag Galaxy. Here's the tag planetary system for Xbox. No surprises there, but a neat visualisation of how important Halo is as a title.

And Brighton....

Yep - nor are there surprises there really... People are taking shots of the sky, the seaside, the pier. Nice.

It's a bit of fun really - but I do like the interface. We quite often use nodes from network maps at iCrossing to visusalise / illustrate the scale of, for instance, attention, between different web-pages or brands. The similarity to planets is a metaphor we often use ("If the NYT is Jupiter, we're a about the size of Sputnik on this topic...").

I say a bit of fun, it's actually a diploma thesis project by Steven Wood at the Georg-Simon-Ohm University of Applied Sciences Nuremberg. Hope it works out for you, Steven...

* * Update: Thanks to Brand Tags creator Noah Brier for popping by in the comments to let us know there's a UK version of Brand Tags. I think it will be hard to divide the two out (I've input 50 or so tags on the US version before I heard of the UK edition)... but could be interesting nonetheless.

brands, tags, visualisation, visualization

World of World of Warcraft

2008-06-14T15:58:21+01:00

So I've been confined to quarters for a while and not allowed to work. Boo!

How to pass the time when one is allergic to daytime TV?

Well there's always video games. There's always World of Warcraft...

As I declare another attempt at normal service and uninstall the thing from my machine - I cannot play it in the course of normal life or there will be no normal life - let me mark the moment with this inspired news item from The Onion...

'Warcraft' Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing 'Warcraft'

Via All About Face...

worldofwarcraft, theonion

Restarting (myself) in safe mode

2008-06-12T15:41:53+01:00

Yep - still not back to my old self.

Hoping for normal service to resume over the weekend, or early next week. 'Til then I'm mostly not on the grid...

Put a penny in the hat for the old micro-blogging platform: Twitterfund

2008-06-07T05:14:05+01:00

Incroyable! Twitterfund!

People who use Twitter like nothing more it seems than to talk about the problems with Twitter. The service rarely lets them down by going for a considerable period of time without breaking in some way.

I recall Tom Coates defining Twitter as "a way to access error messages on the web".

Now there's nothing so dreary as people moaning about the same thing day in day out without trying to change it.

The utterly charming thing about the social media-istas who use Twitter is that some of them have actually tried to do something to help Twitter out.

I spotted a Tweet from Chris Reed talking about Twitterfund, which he has set up to raise money from users of the service to give to Twitter to help them improve the reliability of the service.

So, if you're a Twitter fan, drop a couple of quid (or $5, 3.5 Euros) in at Twitterfund. If you have PayPal it is super-easy. If you don't have PayPal, go and get an account - it really does make online life a lot easier.

twitter

Terror laws and fly-tippers

2008-06-07T05:04:05+01:00

Don't worry - I'm not drifting into becoming a political blogger myself, but I was struck yesterday by a pair of stories...

First off John Major speaking out against the 42-day detention period for terror suspects. When the grey man is coming out of semi-retirement and looks like a hero for freedom, sit feels like something has gone very wrong.

Second, when these "anti-terror laws" are enacted are they used well? Can we trust the authorities with these new powers?

Apparently very much so - South Kesteven District Council has been using laws allowing surveillance that were designed for anti-terrorism to... wait for it...

...prosecute people for fly-tipping.

The shame.

I'm definitely not going to get started on the racketeering by local authorities (parking's the usual scam), suffice to say it is scary that councils can behave in this way.

Watch out for your rights.

politics, anti-terror, councils

Blog beatings and the Tory MEP expenses scandal

2008-06-07T04:47:11+01:00

There's an interesting tale doing the rounds of influencers on the right of UK politics giving their own a bit of a pre-emptive kicking. It seems to show political bloggers here jockeying for position for what seems like a likely regime change when Gordon Brown and the decaying New Labour project shuffle out of power in a year or two.

Tory bloggers (and Tory friends - Guido Fawkes is *not* a Tory, he emphasises) have looked a lot more lively on the social media side of things over the last couple of years. Reasons for this - they were hungrier for debate and reinvention, they are and perhaps just more open to new ideas at this time.

Control and channel media, as we know, go hand in hand and New Labour's success was defined in many ways by its mastery of mainstream media manipulation. It's hard to let go of a winning formula, even when it's not winning anymore.

Anyhow, Mark Hanson picks up the grubby threads:

Westminster circles were buzzing yesterday because ConservativeHome and Guido Fawkes had joined forces (swapping research, swapping sources, referencing each other) to uncover the expenses sleaze of a succession of Tory MEPs and the mobilise as a block to force David Cameron to kick them out of the Party.

Bloggers calling for blood is nothing new but ConHome and Guido have relied on Tory HQ briefings to give them so much information, access and help with sleaze investigations into the government, which has built their profile and muscle. Was this their way of demonstrating that they are in no way in Cameron’s pocket? That they are attack dogs who will turn on the powerful whichever Party flag they fly?

A charitable view would be that it is nice to see right-wing bloggers cleaning their own house. But I'm sure there's more to this than that...

blogs , politics, UK, influence

Damn your eyes email, I'm not mailing any more: I shall attend to correspondence

2008-06-07T04:31:26+01:00

Image: Dreaming of worlds before and beyond email...

Hands up who likes email?

No one? Oh. One at the back.

Listen to me: You're an idiot.

Take that opening salvo by way of short-hand about the inefficiencies and multiple friendly-spam abuses of email.

It wasn't built as a file-transfer system, a conversation-space or anything like that and there are plenty of tools now that let us do things with email better. So I'm not doing it anymore.

It's good for short messages and memos. Thassit. Enough.

I am not even going to mention the word anymore. Nor am I going to twitch and fuss and watch my browser, my phone or my Outlook for new messages. I shall go to my inbox a couple of times a day and "deal with my correspondence".

That's right, my correspondence. I'll imagine myself a Victorian gentleman in my library in a comfortable chair next to a bureau with a silver coffee service on it, primed and ready to go, wearing a smoking jacket and opening mail with an ornate letter opener.

That should put me in the right frame of mind.

I've no problem with being always on. Just not always on for any distraction that happens to know my email address.

writing , email

Beyond Blogs

2008-06-05T09:37:51+01:00

So here's the new BusinessWeek cover story that I was talking about yesterday.

It's called Beyond Blogs and there are an interesting collection of stories on wikis, social networking and generally how businesses are working with blogs.

There's a nice little video overview of the subject from one of the journalists who led this, Stephen Baker at the top of the page.

Couple of interesting points from it that jumped out at me:

"One of the big opportunties for social media in the coming years to help us deal with this deluge of information..." Absolutely. Even on a personal level, services like FriendFeed don't seem up to the job of helping me filter my social networks' information just yet.

"There is a bubble... but it doesn't matter..." I'm looking forward to reading more and finding out about the social media bubble. But he's right again of course that an industry / start-up bubble won't matter much unless you an investor or a businessperson who gets caught up in it. The rest of the world just has to let the good things of social media come their way.

socialmedia, blog