broadstuff

Twitter has released the ability to make lists of people, ie group 'em in convenient monotypes:

We’re putting the finishing touches on our new Lists feature and we're really excited about the folks who have already taken a lot of time creating awesome lists. From the @time list of funny people to your own list of people who make you laugh—it's easy to see how this feature increases discovery and adds value in lots of ways.

Lists also make it easier to curate tweets into meaningful real-time experiences on your own sites via the Lists API. Media companies are already taking advantage: for example, check out @huffingtonpost's use of the Lists API in their World Series coverage.

@Bettydraper/rolodex: A collection of fan-created Mad Men characters
@NYTimes/staff: The colorful people behind The Gray Lady
@BBC/radio1-1xtra: Turns out BBC radio hosts are a chatty bunch
@Joesebok/poker: A list of professional poker players by a professional poker player
@jayrosen/mindcasters: A list of the some of the best new media thinkers by an NYU professor
@Stocktwits/suggested: A list of traders for stock market fanatics

We’ve been taking our time rolling out the lists feature to make sure things go smoothly and developers have a chance to begin experimenting with our Lists API. For example, TLISTS will provide tools to efficiently build, measure and distribute Lists, while Listorious hosts a directory of 'awesome lists' on Twitter.

The really, really interesting thing is that you can have Public lists. Anyone can curate and publish these lists, and put anyone else on it. So if you have an idea for one, just click "New list" in the sidebar of your Twitter account and you're on your way. However. the above options don't go far enough - I see the opportunity not just for extending one's egosystem, but for more radical waggish fun and mayhem - so the suggestions below probably go too far :

@Hotornot/Twittergals - the jolly grouping of all those Ladies (or men, we ain't sexist here) and the opportunity to decide who are not a perfect "10"
@Bastardswhof*ckedmeover - just as it says on the tin. Build your own antisocial network, hours of entertainment for the whole extended digifamily
@Jerkswhotalkaboutlunch - for people who like talking about what they had for lunch on Twitter.
@CoffeeteableTwitterList - Your List of People you Should Be Following so other people think you are UberCool
@PeopleI'msuckingupto - Would be even better if you could auto-retweet them all
@Peoplewhoowememoney - put your debtor list online (hat tip Steve Lawson)
@Iwouldn'tfollowthesewankersifmylifedependedonit - "unlists" (hat tip JP Rangaswami)

Blimey, that was quick.......

Now, apparently you can exeunt yourself from being on these sorts of lists by blocking them yourself, but that seems time consuming for the poor listee, so no doubt some more sophisticated controls will have to emerge.

Ah - I see the List Facility is also on my account.......... I may be gone some time, I have some listbots to write

There is a post on the marvellously satirical blog Stuff White People Like, on White (White in the sense of US slang for the Lefty Liberal Intelligentsia) people's view of people who Know About Technology

When white people go away to college, they tend to study what are knowns as the Arts. This includes actual Art, English, History, Classics, and Philosophy. These can of course be broken down further into Film, Womyn’s Studies (yes the spelling is correct), Communications, Gender Studies, and so forth. It is important to note that a high percentage of white people also get degrees in Political Science, which is pretty much like arts, and only seems to have the word “science” in it to make white people feel better about themselves.

........

But what about the white people who study Science, Engineering or Business? Unless they become doctors, they essentially lose white person status (and can only be regained by working at a non-profit).

Now, I was reminded of this over the last few days because I was listening to the debates on the C&binet Forum Conference sessions over the Internet whilst working. This was an invite only session, and it became increasingly clear to me over the 2 days I was listening in, that this discussion about the future of digital media was being essentially run by White people, talking to White people, for the benefit White people. I doubt there was the merest smattering of a Tech Major present. (OK, I exaggerate - but just look at the forum's blogroll - nary a techie blogger in the whole roll, its MSM tech journos all except for TechCrunch - who, of course, were not actually invited to the event, being, well, Tech Crunchies )

One can argue that this is fine, after all heaven forbid the critical Affairs of State be decided by people who are not White! (I mean, if we had a Real democracy we'd be doing weird things like not invading random Mid-Asian countries, for example - imagine that!) The big problem with technology is that, by and large, mainstream Meedja, Journos and Politicians - the "White" people mainly invited to these sorts of bashes - actually don't by and large know how all this stuff actually works (Sorry good people, but being on Twitter and/or Facebook and even having an instapundit blog on Wordpress doesn't quite qualify). This means that when the Dark People who run theEvil Corporations appear and talk smoothly about how the Digital Landscape works, then the White people get totally bamboozled and either lap it up (if its a "Good" Evil Corporation - Google Neutrality anyone?) or tend to run around jousting at various largely irrelevant windmills, muddying the Ether nets.

Its the (smoothly) bland leading the blind. (By the way, JP Rangaswami has written a great fiskpost on Dark Lord Mandelson's nefarious scheme over here......)

Which is why, of course, the UK is in the Digital Shi....Situation it is in. 'Nuff said........

I had written the above last night and was going to spike it under the "This Would Seem Like Sour Grapes Because You Weren't Invited* " heading (that, and this article probably is as close to a perfect 10 on the Paul Carr Scale of How to Lose Friends and Piss People Off that I've ever come) , but then I read about an Unconference that was held at the above Cabinet Forum by some of the attendees, and was run for roughly the same reasons that I raised as issues above. It is written up here on the Pervasive Media Blog. Here is a synopsis of the conclusions.

University is broken. Education is way behind industry. Our education system needs to change - places like RCA, ITP, University of South California are brilliant at fostering creative entrepreneurialism by getting artists, writers, programmers etc to work together on one project. We need to teach teamwork and interdisciplinary, entrepreneurial skills through an embedded cross-cutting logic.

There is a need for more computer scientists coming into the creative industries in order to create innovative products, but this often causes a disjunct in language and understanding.

We need a new generation of producers with more diverse skills and an overview of the industry - 'super-producers'

We need to support the brokers, the people who bring together the creatives with businesses, brands, finance etc. At present there is no core support for this kind of role, though there is general acknowledgment it has financial, cultural and social impact. We need to invest time in our own businesses to make connections.

Collaboration isn't just about money its about making things happen and learning from each other.

May I emphasize "There is a need for more computer scientists coming into the creative industries in order to create innovative products" and "We need a new generation of producers with more diverse skills and an overview of the industry"

They are right of course, but lets just go down another level on the implications:

- Firstly, it is fascinating that in 2009 the "Creative Industries" by and large still do not, it would appear, automatically include Digital Media at their heart - you cannot apparently, you see, be Creative if you are not White and are a Geek.

- Secondly, there is technology all over and under the Creative Industries already - its just that, because the Real Geeks are not White, the IT is Crowded in basements, Morlock-like and kept from sight (and under-utilised).

Once upon a time, the White people of the Media-Political complex were called the "Chattering Classes" and had Dinner Parties in Islington, but now some are paddling in the shallower waters of technology and thus label themselves as Geeks, or even "Digerati". This is of course inaccurate, the correct term is Chatterati, obviously. Digerati by and large know how this stuff actually works, and work in - or even run real businesses in - the space. Unfortunately, many Digerati are inarticulate, wear unfashionable glasses and look like the IT Crowd, so they are best left Unseen and Unheard. (This of course is what Quangos are for - Quangos allow White people to draw large salaries for performing the unpleasant job of managing Real Geeks, so that other White People don't have to see them at conferences like this...... )

So, next C&binet Forum, I would like to see some of the people there who do actually know how this sh*t all works rebutting some of the claims made. Some positive discrimination for people who actually did some Maths in their university degrees, for example, would be helpful. People with unfashionable glasses and haircuts. Maybe even people who studied IT. (OK, OK, thats probably going too far.....)

Oh, and as for the the Blogroll....c'mon guys, you need to read a bit wider than that. You could even read this 'ere Broadstuff blog, after all, we've been shortlisted for the BIMAS so we must be some cop......

*The tongue is , I hope, firmly in the cheek - and what cheek - They did, after all, streamcast the sessions and put it all up on Twitter for comment. I'm thus now awaiting the Grapes of Wrath

(Update - In the interests of journalistic balance, there is a far more sanguine post by Anthony Mayfield, on TechCrunch EU oddly enough . Anthony imho doesn't go far enough on the Tech lack - this post, on the other hand, goes too far )

(Update 2 - To explain a bit of my frustration here - we do a lot of work in this space, and I will shortly post up some research we have done on the pace of innovation over the last 100 years or so that I presented at the "Internet: Next 40 Years" session last night. In essence, the changes that are coming to the media have been predictable - and have been predicted - for at least 15 years to my certain knowledge and have happened more than once before over the last 100 years, and are not quick - its a 20 - 30 year repetitive cycle, from novel technology driving economic shift to screams for industry protection to social takeup to regulatory shift to it all happening again. (see here for some of our previous analysis on the situation). It just makes me very frustrated that, because the answers aren't "under the Creative Media lampost" as it were, they are deemed not to exist, or at least don't get airtime.)

(Update 3 - a friend pointed me to this 2006 post from Tom Coates saying much the same as I said above. I love the analogy of the Old Order wailing for assistance because it can't run away from the snail)

(Update 4 - in response to some comments below, and several emails and DM's from people. I was not so much shooting at the people in the room or Arts majors per se, as I wrote in the Comments:

"I was more aiming at the weird - and unique to UK thing I think - of the wide separation of Arts and Tech in the culture, so the governing class (the media-political and to an extent financial set) by and large have a very small amount of tech in their "DNA". And in a world that is increasingly driven by its technology, this to my mind opens 2 major risks:

(i) Misunderstanding - of how the technology works, which leaves the policymakers - and media overall - very vulnerable to misconceptions, bamboozlement and snake oil salesmen.

(ii) Missed opportunities - not understanding what is going on , and even worse being misled by the vested interests, leads to a lot of wasted time, resource and effort.

I feel extremely strongly about this (as the above post shows, methinks) - we are a small niche strategy consultancy in this space, we study the UK vis a vis other countries, we study this technology age vs previous ones and do future projections - and the things that stare out at you when you do are:

(i) This era of change is not unique - for those that can be bothered to do so, there are plenty of lessons from previous technology waves that can be instructive. And the Old Order always reaches for the protectionist lever.

(ii) Britain as a country is losing out competitively by a failure to optimise its takeup of these industries. It has actually done well despite the best efforts of its vested interests and many policy decisions, a testament to the creativity of its arts and technology establishments, but things are accelerating and there needs to be a co-ordinated approach if it is to carry on batting at its weight, never mind above it

So it is frustrating to see the (smoothly) bland leading the blind in 2009. There is no need, and little excuse for it. That the "Stuff White people like" blog is written in the USA proves they have the same ideological issues, but the fact they also have held the technology lead since the 1950's shows they are able to overcome it too.

Peter Mandelson today said that the UK will get a "3 strikes and you're off the Internet" rule by April 2010. The BBC notes that:

Lord Mandelson emphasised that cutting off internet connections would be a "last resort".

"I have no expectation of mass suspensions. People will receive two notifications and if it reaches the point [of cutting them off] they will have the opportunity to appeal," Lord Mandelson told the audience at the C&binet Forum, a talking shop set up by government to debate the issues facing the creative industries (of which more, later). The pay-off for tough penalties against persistent file-sharers would be a more relaxed copyright regime, Lord Mandelson said. The details of it would need to be hammered out at European level but it would take account of the use of copyright material "at home and between friends", he said.

It would mean that, for example, someone who has bought a CD would be able to copy it to their iPod or share it with family members without acting unlawfully.

Well, that's akin to giving people what they already have with one hand while extracting something with the other hand - I don't know anyone who has ever been prosecuted for taping their own CD's or loading music onto their spouse's iPod. Still, there are some delicious turns of phrase:

....he emphasised that "legislation and enforcement can only ever be part of the solution".

The long-term answer was for the industry to educate users and to offer new and cheaper ways to download content, he said. In addition, new copyright laws were needed to lift restrictions on how people moved content on to the various different devices that they owned.

(Italics are mine.) There's a subtle knife twist in there, around those words "cheaper", "lift" and "restrictions". Its the music rightsholders that are behind this, they are trying to get the ISP's to police it - and bear some of the costs. They are not going to like those 3 words. The ISP's have also hit back where it hurts - in the wallet:

The Internet Service Providers' Association thinks rightsholders should shoulder the burden for all costs, including the reimbursement of ISPs.

"This approach is consistent with the principle of beneficiary pays and would serve to incentivise rightsholders to develop new business models and ensure an effective and efficient use of notifications and targeted legal action," read a statement from ISPA.

Which is a sound principle in most sensible legal systems. Another sound principle is that any law that criminalises the majority of its citizens will be made an ass of. The issue, of course, is the one the industry doesn't really want to adress - ie overcharging, What no-one who looks at this "gets" is why this industry feels the Apple model - decent quality at reasonable prices - isn't acceptable.

Now Lord Mandelson, of all people, knows all this. He also knows the Labour party has near zero chance of getting this law through before the next election anyway. Plus there are far bigger fish to fry, so why cause a storm in a teacup full of bloggers, music fans, open rights activists etc who like nothing better than a nice righteous campaign to get off on?

Part of the answer is the size of the industry, c £16bn annually, which the Government needs to ensure (i) keeps its revenue going and people employed and (ii) that they can tax, especially now the City's golden egg is broken.

Another part, suggested by some scurrilous wags, is that some of that £16bn turnover is used to fund lobbying activity, and....well, what with all the other parliamentary expenses being curtailed these days.........but frankly, thats too obvious a ploy, and if you need petty cash go float a bank or two.

Must admit I'm stumped on this at the moment.

On Monday I attended the Media 140 Conference. Owing to a confluence of adverse railway related issues, I arrived late (Am reconsidering my opposition to fascism, I think Focussed Fascism - on the trains - would be a Good Thing) so missed the first morning session (but Adam Tinworth has blogged the whole day starting here). The aim of the day was to explore how microblog systems (ie Twitter) work in a more commercial arena for brands, ie "Everything a brand needs to know about twitter & real-time social media". This meant, on the day, focus was mainly on sales, marketing, PR and the occasional dive into customer service rather than any more operational uses.

At any rate, these are the notes I took on the day.:


Quirk's Nic Ray and Unilever's Noam Buchalter on Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is not new, but new technology helps - cheaper, more people, faster, do more things. It attacks the traditional Ad agency model's economics as:

- there are more creatives outside
- it is lower cost and risk plus faster turnaround
- potentially gives better consumer insight, and often earlier
- drives better consumer exposure
- has high PR exposure at moment (buzz)

However, its not without its challenges:

- sifting ideas takes up a lot of time and effort
- manage the contributing community expectation so they remain "customers" (and prevent backlash etc if they feel they are ignored)
- these, and other production issues still need paying of skilled people
- IP issues with 3rd party ideas
- old agency sour grapes - got a lot of negative press from people who have access to presses

Also, Crowdsourcing is not appropriate for everything, works best with:

-fairly well defined brand
-something the target market would have a view on

They went through a case study for Peperami, who changed to this model, in essence because:

- wanted new ideas from new sources as brand was getting old
- economics of outsourcing to (less expensive) users were very attractive

After the users generated the ideas, they were sifted and scored by:

- fitted client brief
- was actionable
- "wow" factor
-was produceable

What was fairly radical apparently was that the client was fully involved in the process (I must say, coming from the consulting/design side of the service industries that point amazed me - seems like there area few other issues "Olde Advertising" has to deal with still).

There was then a Panel I missed owing to Real Work Issues, but Adam Tinworth has it covered (All panellists are listed in the Media140 link above in Para 1).


Ciaran Norris of Mindshare on Listening skills....

Ciaran addressed the economics of "Social media" marketing - he noted that points not often grasped up front are that:

- Listening is very labour intensive
- Shirky - transaction cost and the creator effort is much lower - but this means there is a lot more stuff, much of which is dross (my words)
- Search is the biggest social tool still
- Buzz metric tools are not cheap - search, viral tracking etc - once you scale up.

Also today one needs to track video not just text, and there is a proliferation of listening posts

- Delicious is a good listening tool, has RSS feeds
- Tweetdeck good for listening too
-Tweetfunnel - allows multiple people to manage Twitter
-Tweetmeme tracks links spread around Twitter (Ciaran hypothesis 90% of content shared on Twitted is professional, not amateur)
-Twitterfall searches a hashtag
-Trendistic etc etc - all seem to be point tools

He also made the point that the brand may have its online personality hijacked - For example, Weight Watchers on Twitter is not expressing it's personality, its just a recipe feed - so "Tweet what you eat" has hijacked the brand personality on Twitter by being far more about peopel commnicating to lose weight

Lunch and another Real Work Break so I missed Mr Red Bull, John Beasley, and then we had.....

The Great Twitterwall Hijack

There was then quite a useful panel with real experience - or at least it could have been except for The Twitterwall. As far as I can see, the dynamic went something like this:

- Panelists stop talking when Twitterwall goes up and start reading Twitterwall and responding to it
- This encourages twitterwalling audience to become more strident in their twts, trying to be seen by panellists
- Result is random, diverted panel with not a lot of useful stuff.

That at least was my view, I'm coming to the conclusion that Twitterwalls should be shut off (or at least curated) while panels are talking and only switched on at question time, or there is little point in having the panellists. Anyway, Adam Tinworth covered this panel well (and disagrees with me re Twitterwalls....).

The Last Panel of the Day

This was quite useful as (i) it had a real user - Virgin Trains and (ii) it had Will McInness and Drew Benvie on, who I think know their stuff (as in fact did the others, I just didn't know them).

Richard Baker from Virgin Train made some interesting observations (see his blog post over here)

- brand is in hands of the people in the company. Some customers want a conversation, others just want info/answers
- to start up: no strategy, started on Twitter, just listening. People very positive - but after a while it's not enough - the service actually needs to work
- issue with the instant gratification of real time media - why should a brand respond instantly? There is a penalty if you don't, but its lousy economics sometimes
- but people are ruder to Virgin trains than to his own persona

By the way, the Grauniad's Mercedes Bunz (yes, really) covered this panel over here.

The Real Time Web & Show me money - Bernard Desarnauts, Glam Media

The Real Time Web and how to make money - two topics dear to my heart! Here is the Problem:

-Fragmenting content
- fragmenting audience long and mid tail
- fragmenting traffic
- classic web less important (I love the idea of the Classic Web)
- brand engagement higher in distributed media

The Solution - analysis tools, in this case Tinker, a sort of Real Time Walled Garden which allows brands to see in real time stuff but gives them a safe place. The main issue though is the same as with any Real Time system, ie stopping clutter. The solution - blending algorithm and curator via real time categorisation of type of source, aggregation and filter plus metadata curation eg of hashtags.

Other things coming down the road in Real Time are:

- Event ads and real time ads
- Integrate real time web data - for example real time location targeting
- Where was the money and how does it flow? Provided metrics will be key in future
- Data send to user on various sites eg Twitter depending on what they are on, will see integration to Twitter, Friendfeed, YouTube.

Why will these approaches work? Money. Early indications are that it works 5x better than other Ad systems

- 17 vs 2.7 % interaction rate
- 15 vs 2 seconds engagement times
- 28 average tweets into Ad unit

As to how they are filtering, for eg how do you screen and remove noisy inanity - you can't yet, so they are scrubbing repetition

Dave McCandless - InformationIsBeautiful

Dave's view is that information visualization was "a new trend" (consternation in the back row as we all tried to work out if it was 10 or 15 years ago that it was a hot new trend). Anyway, Dave's view is that to to sell on social media, you need to give something - and "interestingness" is great currency (if you are not a sleb, that is?). At any rate, Dave provided some brilliant graphs and data visualizations, one of which I've put up. (By the way, the brevity of this precis is more than made up by the graphics he showed. You can get (more here)- a picture, as they say, is worth a 1,000 words)

Utku Can Akyuz - MintDigital

Utku put up the Hemlock Open Source middleware applications, which seems mainly optimised for making game type environments. Applicatios mentioned were:

- Games: Real time open source tools for eg bamzooki as game
- Filtering and graphics
- 2 Screen behaviour TV plus Lsptop integration - made as game
- Data from the ads to interact with, or for eg pulling data from shows for Ad placement next to TV

Mark Rock - AudioBoo

As the last speaker, Mark did the sensible thing and made his talk short and sharp. Key points were:

- Twitter made SMS social, trying to do same with audio at audioboo (and video in future maybe?)
- Podcasting was too complex, turned people off
- AudioBoo cannot be edited, deliberately trying to keep it fresh and simple

So what's with the headline - a sale of two Twitters - I hear you ask?. Well, the interesting stuff is often what is said in the discussion at lunch etc, and there were two strands of polarisation I picked up - firstly, the view that not a lot new was being said, but what was being said was to new people (In this respect I thought that it varied, the individual speakers were quite perceptive but sometimes the panels struggled to get insights out, as it were).

The second polarisation was a philosophical difference about how Twitter is used by Brands, 2 "tribes" in this space as it were. These tribes are:

(i) The "Sell, Sell, Sell" fraternity - the view is that some people see this as just another channel to flog stuff on, and stuff the other users' experience. The channel has a higher response rate still, so make hay while the sun shines and the devil takes the hindmost. (The "Tragedy of the Commoners" approach)

(ii) The "Social Sell" fraternity who believe that you do actually have to act differently on this medium, be part of a conversation (ie the "Its a Sewer" fraternity - what you get out of it depends on what you put into it)

There was also a feeling that the "newbies" are predominantly of the former persuasion, the old hands of the latter.

Thoughts of Which Twitter will win out?

(Update - as always, kudos to the organisers, I know how much work is involved in things like this)

It would appear Broadstuff has been shortlisted for the BIMAS (British Interactive Media Association's) "Best Blog of 2009" Award.

Now those sceptics among you (and readers of this blog are probably mainly sceptics) will no doubt assume someone was bribed to put us up for it, but I promise you it came as a complete surprise to me too. Investigation of the Broadstuff PR budget shows it is unspent (the 2p piece and half a tin of freebie peppermints from TED remain intact in the shoebox) so the only conclusion we can come to is that.... someone actually likes what is done here!

To say one is therefore pleased is an understatement .

Anyway, at this point it is customary to yell "Vote For Me"!, so here, in order not to disappoint you, is that instruction. To ameliorate the cringe factor, I offer the video above, from M. Python esq, on elections and voting.

But, on perusing the list, I see some blogs from people I know and like, so in the finest tradition of netpotism, I would also say (if you don't like Broadstuff ) how about voting for Kerry, or Robin & crew.

Or, you could vote Silly Party.....

Last week I attended the IAB Europe's Research Showcase on Social Media (hat tip Andrew Gerrard). Speakers were:

- Tom Smith Managing Director of Trendstream
- Bradley Little Director Industry Solutions Online, Nielsen
- Pawel Petkowicz, from Poland’s largest social networking site, Nasza Klasa.
- Charlie Osmond, Managing Director of FreshNetworks

Here are my snapshot views from quite a thought provoking day:

Tom Smith - European Social Media Trends

Tom put up a "Hype Timeline" from blogs to twitter, Facebook is so last year, MySpace falls off the groovy scale. Reality of course is different, as usage is opposite to hype - and Internet forums on Google and Yahoo are still most active still, despite Geocities demise.

He also put up some market research charts on Usage Motivation (you can get them here) including the above one showing - guess what - that Usage is mainly driven by "Staying in touch", "sharing views" (which is of course why the popularity of simple connection tools - email, sms, twitter) confound verey generation of tech pundits. Also very popular usage is market research to buy stuff. He notes the Rise of Iphone, and the most popular apps are around getting access to social media.

This balance shifts by country - Russians and emerging mkts are more social whereas UK, Germany most purchase research based. I saked why re Russia et al, Tom's hypothesis is that these countries have more rigid social structures, so fewer alternatives for good old open comms. I also wonder if its harder to buy online....

On Social Networks, the online ones are bigger than F2F (due to lower transaction costs in my opinion - does this impact the Dunbar number?) but not so many online friends are "have a beer with" friends - also noted different social nets have different "mean distance of relationships" vs. F2F and each other

On research to buy, he notes Twitter is becoming more heavily used to promote something, and Trusted recommendation are moving to online social network from geographic/professional recommendation sites.

A few other nuggets:

- All content will be somewhat social eg the Social Electronic Program Guide (EPG)
- We will all have one identity across all media (I Disagree)
- Augmented reality will be driven by social, not commercial metadata (much to the disappointment of those hoping to cash in on Advertising)

Marketing implications are:

- social in path to purchase
- it's good to talk
- make purpose clear
- social media impacts all the voice of the customer stuff and HR, Recruitment
- so trend monitoring (eg Www.trendstream.net) will be key

Brad Little - State of the Debate

Key points were:

- metrics still emergent
- Pepsi pro facebook page 250k Coke homebuilt by fams 2.5m friends
- social media is like a big focus group

The Industry is still in learning curve mode, basically trying to use push metrics on pull media. PR and Marketing are "early in" to being reshaped by the new technologies, and he sees big future market in:

- Customer service - as Big companies make it into a profit centre
- Insight and research
- Product development based on the above

How to unlock value? Some thoughts are:

- understand all data is not equal.
- Corollary issue is too much data - needs filtering, explaining
- use dashboards, and use "zero bse" metrics to see progress
- combine research approach
- derive testable insights (and test them)
- Interaction - just listening leads to insight, then try to understand, then interact

He gave the Snuggies "Outstanding Success" Example (Snuggies are blankets with knitted arm tubes)

- The Standard media view was that Snuggies was a functional product, had good ads and well defined benefits = market win
- The "Real story" - people mocked it on social media, and so it went viral online and was bought by many.

If you stuck with the Standard story you would make the wrong investments in media, marketing and possibly product development.


Next up - Andrew Gerrard chairing a panel Talking ROI

This featured some of the afternoon’s presenters, plus Facebook's Trevor Johnson, Head of Planning & Stratgy EMEA. Issues are:

- Getting organisations used to new metrics & blending it with other media
- People are asking a lot more of it than Older Media because of data available, but its still in its infancy so less able to answer
- Not everything that can be measured is worth it and vice versa

Other useful comments I noted were:

- All new mediums have struggled with ROI in early days - also need to differentiate between direct, indirect and added value ROI
- The "you have no option" argument - lots of "social media e-forces" today
- Good start is using it for cost cutting areas eg customer service to build experiences
- Social networks massively dominated by women and their values (this is something we have banged on about tima and again)
- Many types of social media means lots of different ROI,
- Social Media goes across boundaries also structurally hard to do in Silo companies
- Don't worry about detailed metrics do monitor the big things
- Story key for internal sell - how to link to CRM etc

I had to miss most of Pawel's Sony case study due to real work related tasks, but picked up that they found the "Recommend to a friend" is best way of promotion

Charlie Osmond Fresh Minds - building online research communities

Having aon Online Research Community Allows better innovation to customer led organisation eg Dell Ideastorm as response to MyDellHell. Some thoughts on how to make them work are:

- Use their language, so if thy use txt 2 spk u hve 2 follo suit
- Using social media for insight risky as 90% are only readers, you will never see their views
- Need to be able to get the more detailed info from follow on questions

Some other points made

- Social network is about me, online Community is about us
- You need a social community hub (a blog, website etc)
- Control is a dirty word but some is needed - (nudge?)
- Need to differentiate between buzz and sustained impact (buzz is by definition ephemeral)

How to build an online community:

1. Listen
- ongoing monitoring
- snapshot audit

2. Planning
- website is 20% of work
- community recruit takes time
- plan demographic
- need to get org online, how do you deal with umpleasants

3. Platform

Different channels for different reqmnts - hub idea
Tools key to reduce labour

4. Community Management

Not just about moderation, more like being a host at a party, creating conversation, external outreach

Eg Starbucks wound up 20 people heavier due to poor design of community, tools etc

5. Measuring results

As per discussions above

All in all an interesting day, the analytics alone made attendance worthwhile.

There is a brilliant, gently satirical website about the rich world's liberal, educated intelligentsia called "Stuff White People Like" by Christian Lander. "White" here is taken from US slang, and is actually more about class distinction (and maintaining it):

It’s partially about race, but it’s fundamentally about class. It’s about a generation and class that values authenticity and credibility more than monetary wealth.

Update: Here is a part of the requisite section about Being Offended:

It is also valuable to know that white people spend a significant portion of their time preparing for the moment when they will be offended. They read magazines, books, and watch documentaries all in hopes that one day they will encounter a person who will say something offensive. When this happens, they can leap into action with quotes, statistics, and historical examples. Once they have finished lecturing another white person about how it’s wrong to use the term “black” instead of “African-American,” they can sit back and relax in the knowledge that they have made a difference.

White people also get excited at the opportunity to be offended at things that are sexist and/or homophobic. Both cases offering ample opportunities for lectures, complaints, graduate classes, lengthy discussions and workshops. All of which do an excellent job of raising awareness among white people who hope to change their status from “not racist” to “super not racist.”

Another thing worth noting is that the threshold for being offended is a very important tool for judging and ranking white people. Missing an opportunity to be outraged is like missing a reference to Derrida-it’s social death.

He also has a book out. But there is something he is unlikely to publish, as it will raise ire in the potential buyer. Last week showed me something very dark that these "white" people don't like, and that is Freedom of Speech (of people you disagree with). Once upon a time (The Age of Reason) it was the height of "white" (as in liberal intellectual) thinking to say:

“I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

(Voltaire, ftw...)

Now, however, it seems we are in the Age of Unreason. Two examples last week showed this - Jan Moir and Nick Griffin. Both are the "wrong" sort of White people, both were hounded on "24 hour Outrage* " flashmobs on Twitter and other social media. And the net result is quite a lot of people looked at the hounding and wondered just who the bigots were (see the response to the Nick Griffin episode on the BBC feedback website, its mostly full of people quite upset at the online and on-air mugging) - the reverse (albeit predictable) effect of what was intended.

Yesterday at Media140 (of which more, later) this "feature" of social media was alluded to every so often but only twice this downside was explicitly mentioned, and the corollary - that we will have to design social media decision architectures to "nudge" people into better behaviour patterns was only lightly brushed over.

I am in agreement with this - at the moment, on social media, populist misbehaviour is too widely rewarded. For social capital systems to work well, they need to be able to reign in the "increasing returns" benefits of low cost supporting, (twibbons, retweeting, turning your avatar a different colour on Twitter etc) of whatever populist fad is sweeping through. In game theory its called a "weak tell" and in real life we are quite good at distinguishing between these and real commitment, but online (it would seem, anyway) we are less so.

The hard thing will be to design systems so they are also capable of maintaining vigilance and hounding real wrongdoing, as also happened recently in the Trafigura case.

And as for being able to generate World Peace, I go to Kerry Gaffney's point in the comments below - Social Media can potentially function more as an echo chamber amplifier than a diversifier without some form of "nudge" to the serendipitous. (As opposed to a "nudge towards reduced privacy" which seems to be the main aim behind the Facebook gambit)

For the record, I follow Voltaire's nostrum up to the point of inflammatory incitement to violence (which makes me Millsian).

*To use a term coined in Media140 yesterday.

Yup, Sir Tim Berners-Lee has joined Twitter., moniker timberners_lee. There must be some form of recursivity there somewhere

Apparently he finds the interface confusing - no doubt next he will start tinkering, and who knows where that might lead.....look what happened last time

(Update - a friend tells me he is not actually microblogging on Twitter per se. He has linked his indenti.ca account to Twitter and uses identi.ca to microblog..... no wonder he finds the interface confusing :-0 )

Last night, amidst massive protests, the leader of the British National Party*, Nick Griffin was allowed onto one of the BBC's premier political programmes, Question Time. This is a debate style program, typically 5 people - 3 politicians of the main parties, 2 people from other walks of life (or minor parties) and is very high risk for politicians as the audience can ask some difficult questions and their sharp comments can undo the best prepared polemic.

But to me the really interesting thing about Question Time (and other TV programs) is that the British Twitterati have got into the habit of chatting and commenting on the programme using the hashtag #bbcqt, and that to me is the really interesting bit, for 2 reasons:

- The dream of people interacting around TV programming via social networks, a key plank of Joost's original pitch, has been shown to be valid - its just that people are using a microblogging service on standard terrestrial TV rather than herding sheeplike into the Web TV players' own social networks

- Why Twitter - I hypothesize that its because:

(i) Its a mass-chat based system and easy to apply in this sort of live-comment usage

(ii) Assymetric follow - I can see the opinions of people I don't usually follow - adds richness

(iii) 140 Characters - what killed debate in the earlier email based UseNet were people writing massive polemic essays and swamping the textwaves. 140 characters means a light touch of easily digestible views

There is also fascinating implication here - the same internetworks that are breaking up the media are also capable of re-combining audiences in the social media systems. I can't imagine how you would use Facebook to do this (too cumbersome) or IM (too small an audience reach).

Update - two good points/clarifications:

- Richard Beddard notes in the comments below that on of the issues now facing something like #bbcqt is the sheer volume (it was hitting 1,000 twts a minute at one stage) these hashtag based comment aggregators can get, and the need for better filtering

- Matt Locke noted (on Twitter) that the #bbcqt did not unify all opinion, and interestingly the opinion on the BBC "Have Your say" website was very different in flavour. The thought I was airing above is that Twitter was more an aggregator of many off-the-BBC-site comment subnetworks that would otherwise not have been seen in one place.

Incidentally, in my personal view the audience collectively came out as the most sensible attendee in the Question Time debate - which is fascinating in itself too. The other panel members (Liberal Democrat excepted more of the time) succumbed to the temptation of pillorying Griffin, whereas - in my view anyway - if they had STFU he would have hanged himself on his own petard, without getting any sympathy. Trust in Free Speech .....

(*For the uninitiated, the BNP is a classic "far right" party - their policies are almost designed to make the liberal left splutter into their FairTrade lattes. The fascinating problem is that the BNP now have similar sort of elected political support in the UK to the Greens, Welsh Nationalists etc (primarily due to the Government totally botching up massive immigration over the last 10 years) and thus - in a free speech country - deserve access to these national TV platforms. This has led to the fascinating spectacle of the liberal/left leaning politicos all dying to deny free speech, rather than support it as one would expect...... )

Fascinating study from IPO Dashboard showing the extreme unlikelihood of the "5 year dash to $50m turnover from startup" hockey stick business plan so beloved ov VC focussed business cases. The study was based on the top 100 publically traded (US) software companies, inflation adjusted. Some conclusions:

Most successful technology companies aren’t rocket ships.

Only 28% of the nation’s most successful public software empires were rocketships. I’ve defined a rocket ship as a company that reached $50 million in annual sales in 6 years or less (this is the type of growth that typically appears in VC-funded business plans). A hot shot reaches $50m in 7 to 12 years. A slow burner takes 13 years or more. Interestingly, 50% of these companies took 9 or more years to reach $50m in revenue. The fastest rocket ship of today’s software industry was Novell.

Novell (NASD: NOVL) was one impressive company. It took only three years to reach $50 million after it was founded in 1983. In 2008 it still pulled in almost $1 billion in revenue. You’ll recognize the names of a few of the other genuine rocket ships from various decades: Adobe, Autodesk, Electronic Arts, Interwoven, McAfee, Salesforce, Sybase, Synopsys, and Verisign.

Microsoft and Oracle weren’t rocket ships.

Who would have thought? They are two of the most valuable companies ever founded, in any industry, in any country. Microsoft took 8 years to reach $50 million in sales; Oracle took 10.

As IPO Dashboard notes, is it wise to prepare a business plan featuring steep hockey stick sales projections?

(Hat Tip Robin Klein)