Chris Brogan recently wrote an excellent post about why community really matters. And then Valeria Maltoni waded in that ‘being helpful’ should be ‘the new black’. If you’re in Melbourne on the 22nd and 23rd September, you can catch my friend Stephen Johnson and social media luminaries such as Darren Rowse and David Armano over 2 days of conferences and workshops – and it won’t cost you a dime other than a donation to your favourite charity.
Wherever you look, the traditional networking and underlying business models are being turned on their head. Free is in vogue – many of us are also using the downturn to take a new hard look of how we, and our clients, are operating and trying to think sideways.
I came across this post from Rheingold, today: ’When social media grew from a playground and laboratory for a small group of enthusiasts into a worldwide platform for commerce, politics, sociality, I became convinced that knowing how to use and think about social media could influence the final shape of the emerging infosphere. What you know and do today matters because it will be part of setting the rules for who can use these media, how they can use them, who will profit, and who will control tomorrow’s media’.
Even on my island, a bunch of people tool the plunge and are launching Mobile Monday on the 14th September in the hope that they can start a small movement. The planning for this event has been approximately 5 weeks. I’m happy to be involved in this one.
And speaking of helpful – and how sharing and ‘free’ is what I believe will undpin the next wave of innovation (and hopefully, my research), here’s a great deck of slides on post digital marketing. I love Slideshare.
It’s been on my mind for a while. Like the past 15 years.
One of the things about getting older and moving to a small place, is that you gradually become the peer group. And that’s when you can do one of two things. Cruise into your comfort zone. Or look at the warning signs on the dashboard of your life, and do something new.
A chance reconnection on Twitter has ended up with me registering on the PhD program at the School of Arts and New Media at Scarborough. The provisional research area is the ‘free’ model that underpins most social media applications. But like most people who have gone down this journey before, I know what I’m going in with – I guess I’ll find out more during the research process.
I’d like to continue doing change management work – as a strategist, it’s where I can really make a difference. And in Malta InsideOut, we’ve got a side project which takes a lot of time and commitment to sustain.
But I’m also going to make time to explore new connections and challenge what I think I know.
Yesterday, together with my friend Gege Gatt, I gave a talk to a COMNET-IT workshop meeting in Malta. It was interesting to see public servants start to scramble for their 3G phones and laptops at the end.
I was first attracted to this book by both the title, and the fact that it was co-written by Marcus Buckingham, a proponent of the ’strengths’ philosophy that I have embraced in the work place.
This is a deck of slides I have compiled for the Alt-MBA group that has spun out of Seth Godin’s Triiibes.
UPDATE: Slideshare selected this as a featured presentation. Nice to know it resonated with some.
Sometimes, it’s easy to forget that what we now take for granted is very young. Here, Kevin Kelly outlines his vision for Web 3.0 and other things wonderful. Kevin’s blog is always a source of inspiration.
I’ve spent the past 2 days immersed in the IFA Press Conference in Malta. I first heard the Conference was coming to Malta when I picked up a tweet from Steven Leon from ShowStoppers on my ‘Malta’ search column on TweetDeck. We exchanged a couple of 140-character tweets with links to our blogs and before you know it we were immersed in a conversation on logistics, technology and local interest. Who says social media and Twitter in particular is not useful for making real life connections?
Steven introduced me to Tim Bajarin, President of Creative Strategies. I spent a fascinating 20 minutes listening to Tim’s unique insights on personal computers and the next wave of computer technology developments. ”I’ve been through seven recessions since I joined the company in 1981,” said Tim. ”Every time there’s a recession, technology companies always emerge stronger. Sure, there is correction and weaker companies fall by the wayside. But I expect the same thing to happen again at the end of this recessionary cycle”.
Tim’s closing remarks at the IFA Press Conference are in the video below. It’s worth your three minutes.
I’ve recently took on an engagement to be the founding editor of a monthly technology supplement for the Sunday Times of Malta, the leading newspaper in my country. The first edition of Technology Sunday is out tomorrow. I’m passionate about content and all things digital and the Times is a good brand to be associated with.
My immediate challenge was to quickly find people who could a) write well b) quickly c) with authority d) with insider local knowledge on e) a range of issues – from telecoms to gadgets to social media to the intersection of life and anything deemed digital and f) for no money!
I decided to rely exclusively on social media to search for like-minded people. I also wanted to find people who were not professional media journalists. Unconsciously, I was starting to look for members of a new tribe, who wanted to engage and collaborate on a project on the basis of trust and a common objective.
These are some observations I made as I assembled my writing team:
Start with Facebook. If like me you do not have thousands of ‘friends’, it is fairly easy to filter down on the handful of potential writers. Look at the way they engage online. It’s fairly easy to sort out who can write and who can’t.
Continue with LinkedIn. You can now home in on specific skills sets. Look at how active people are in groups; see if they answer questions and help others. LinkedIn is adding plenty of new features and groups are really getting a lot of traction.
Use Twitter’s own advanced features. This post is very useful if you want a web-based application. In my case, I used TweetDeck to monitor who was active in my space, and spent some time looking at blogs. I also tweeted a question, asking if people were interested in joining the quest. I started to get followers.
You could also use some customised applications. This tool, called the UGC finder, for instance, is targeted at journalists.
I leave the obvious till last – use Google. I guess the fact that this is last is indicative of how search is becoming more specialised, perhaps more human – where word of mouth is as important as an algorithm. Or a reflection of how we are constantly looking for short-cuts in our time-poor lives.
I met people in my office or in cafe’s, and held many an online conversation with writers I had never heard of. I guess the acid test is tomorrow. But the process has already paid off, as far as I’m concerned. I have met some great people, learned how to generate specialist content quickly and cost-effectively and applied social media tools for a specific task.
And perhaps that is where the lesson lies – that if you are very focused on your objectives before you start to apply social media, you can get relatively quick results. Like most things in life, it helps having a clear strategy before you dive into trying to get something done. And that applies as much to a business, as to a 24-page technology supplement.
I’m finalising my slides for a presentation on social media for SMEs next Friday. As I try and wade through the ’social media’ column on my TweetDeck to pick up the latest conversations on the subject, there seems to be a number of common threads:
1. Early adopters of social media tools are up in arms on new entrants claiming to be ’social media marketers.’ The consensus seems to be that unless you update a blog regularly (for yourself and others), manage a Facebook group, and twitter regularly (for yourself and others) and (here’s the US hook) have advised some Fortune 100 company on social media marketing, you’re not really cut to be a social media marketer. (I find this particularly amusing, as I believe social media is essential for SMEs to reach way beyond their physical and economic budgeting / marketing / logistical restrictions to connect with entirely new customer segments).
2. Then again, large companies also apparently get it wrong. Watch this.
5. In the meantime, more sign of the times: some hope social media will get them a job. Others are still in Obama mode and are focusing on how social media can create change.
As I write this, Gmail has been down for over five hours. I’m still looking at a ‘502 server error’ message’ in Malta, though some people are saying the service is slowly coming back to life. It’s something quite unprecedented. The news broke early on Twitter, as the eager, connected social media types tried to access email, and drew a blank.
In 140-character speak, there are already some great nuggets as we get to terms with cloud computing failing:
@jackschofield: Cost of outage: 100 million users x $50 per hour x 5 hours = $25 billion. Make your own guesses
@helenawaldron: Thank heavens for little twitterers who explain why my gmail isn’t working – fingers crossed it’s back soon!
@twoon: using google to find an alternative login for gmail ; the irony almost kills me
@TechCrunch: Trouble In The Clouds: Gmail Turns Into Gfail
@Cocco00: Microsoft must really be enjoying this gmail fiasco
@noplay: Give Gmail a break and enjoy the silence
It’s actually been quite fun reading these tweets! I just wonder whether with time, this will be deemed to be an isolated, 9/11 type incident or the shape of things to come: when cloud computing started to go pear-shaped.
