This is a set of two mood maps for South Africa based on the moods set on the Grid yesterday (12 Oct 2009). You will notice that we are now rendering these based on aggregated data matched to suburban shapes rather than dots like my previous post.
We have been busy bees over at the The Grid and the new version of the mobile Java app went live last week with a couple of useful new features.
Standard Bank has just posted a response on their blog to the name-squatting situation and have come out clearly committed to participating in the social media space. The tone of the release is firm:
“it goes without question that by making ourselves more available to our customers with social media we are also opening ourselves up for very public, and sometimes very loud, criticisms. However, in the spirit of ensuring improved accessibility and transparency, we knew that the online space was one that we had to embrace”
This is how you deal with this sort of problem. You don’t back down, you stand firm and you deal with the problem with integrity. And then you provide real-time communication about what you are doing. I’m pretty sure that this is going to be a case study for a while and so far Standard Bank are setting a great example for how to deal with this kind of situation.
I think the observation that “We fully support and understand consumers’ rights to freedom of expression, but we don’t have the same liberty as a corporate” is particularly profound. In a sense here liberty is the freedom to act on one’s freedom and often corporate blandness is perceived as a lack of caring rather than an inability to speak with the passions of a single individual.
Another thing that makes all this work is that there is a human (Bellinda Carreira) out there responding to people on blogs and making the occasional chirp. She points out on my previous post that Standard Bank has been on Twitter longer than a few commentators referring to them as newcomers. Sometimes you need a little sting in your tail.
I have sat in endless conferences where the relative merits of brand immersion in social media is discussed. Occasionally someone points out the dangers and brings a healthy edge of sobriety to the conversation but usually its just blue-sky projections about how many happy customers will become your friend on Facebook or follow you on Twitter.
I have occasionally had melt-downs where I suggested that some brands should not enter social media, or that perhaps the risks outweigh the benefits. This really makes the conference crowd twitch. In my opinion the biggest danger exists for big brands that provide services, banks, insurance, telcos, broadcasters, airlines.
This risk only becomes real once a social media product shifts from being an early-adopter platform to a mass-audience one. Twitter has just shifted from the one profile to another and what comes with that shift is a severe change in the brand threat level. Culturally the early-adopters tend to be an elite that are predominantly driven by rational causes and tend to be aware of the consequences of their actions in the broader political and legal framework that they are operating in. When the rest of the population embrace something like Twitter then the rules change. One can no longer rely on the circumspection of users when it comes to trying to kamikaze a brand for personal and often unpredictable reasons.
You can see this change in danger density immediately if you compare the tone and nature of comments on blogs on the web to comments and discussions that happen in the mobile internet environment, as an example. The mobile internet is a mass-audience environment and people tend to be less cognizant of the legal implications of what they say and do, of the fact that other’s can see what they are saying, that they can be traced and held accountable or that their boss or someone significant in their lives may well come across their trail and see what they are doing. In a way it seems that the more people use a system the less conscious they seem to appear about the transparency of the system. On a level it must be the same instinct that gives us a sense of safety in numbers but it is certainly a false sense of security.
And so this brings me to my point – someone, most probably a disgruntled account holder, is trying to embarrass Standard Bank by squatting on a few Twitter accounts and posting stuff like “friends don’t let friends bank at Standard Bank !” and other kinds of malarkey. So what, I guess, its just Twitter.
Except that this little incident is probably wasting the time of a whole team of people who are trying to get to the bottom of it, stop it and help the rest of the audience understand its not real. If its not managed properly at Standard Bank its probably going to put them back 3 years in terms of management buy-in for social media campaigns and presence. Its also going to send every other big corporate social media team into a flat-spin (as it should) and in general its going to make a few more people nod in conferences when someone points out the odd chance that some psycho might jack your brand and burn you on the ether.
Like it or hate it, this is what we signed up for when the technologists decided everyone needs the maximum publishing power.
In June Nic Haralambous will join my team to head up the development of a very exciting project currently hatching in the Vodacom social networking portfolio. So far Nic’s career has been fast and furious, which is what I like about him. He started at the Financial Mail Campus edition, moved on to FM proper, then to the Mail & Guardian as head of mobile there and then as the Guateng GM of Zoopy. He also runs the popular blog SARocks
Nic and I share a crazy passion for social networking and doing insane-sounding stuff at short notice. On his first day at the Mail and Guardian I have him a database of 100 000 people names and asked him to read through it and remove duplicates and fix the spelling. While I was LOLing in the bg, he got stuck in and did it in 2 days. While he can be motivated by beer and pizza, he normally doesn’t need any extra motivation.
So that’s the commitment he brings to my team and that’s why I have been wanting to work with him again since I left the M&G last year.
Last night I did a presentation at the Gordon Institute for Business Science as part of forum titled The Business of Social Networking, along with Matthew Buckland, Mark Buwalda, Andy Hadfield and Kate Elphick.
You can download my presentation in two forms:
Once you have downloaded it, unzip the file and run it. In fullscreen mode you need to use the arrow keys to move forward, there are only 4 slides and on the main slide, click the tabs and drag them into the main window. Sounds comlicated but it isn’t.
Here are my notes for the presentation:
Intro (drag down the tab called “the shape” at the top right)
The spiral shape represents the exponential expansion of social networks known as the Viral Expansion Loop. Read the Fast Company article for analysis of the concept using Ning as a case study.
The same pattern occurs in nature, in art (the Divine Proportion), etc and is somehow connected to the structure of material reality. If you stretch it out and invert it, it will look like a Pareto graph (the Long Tail).
CONTENT
Content, either in the form of commercial, professional or user-generated, is the core building block for community. It is the lifeblood of the system and must be nurtured and cared for. It must not be allowed to become diseased by spam, abuse or neglect.
Curatorship is very important, especially in mature social networks, to avoid decay.
In these systems identity is compressed into a two-dimensional presentation of content, strategically selected, to communicate the effect of the self. The I in social networks is reduced to a content element.
CONTEXT
Rich meta-data is the primary means of providing contextually relevant content to users. This data may come in the form of location, keywords, semantic tagging and folksonomies or hierarchical categorisation.
COMMUNITY
The relationships between users are fundamental in terms of establishing circles of trust and generating the viral expansion loop. Users must be able to establish their own communities based on common interest, family or friendship within a system and feel safe that their community is not vulnerable to negative external influence.
COLLABORATION
Users must be able to work on or around content in a collaborative manner and the history of the collaboration must be sensibly recorded and displayed. This could take the form of conversations that start with a piece of content and then expand into the creation of other types of content like comments or real-time chat.
Content, context and community are required to enable collaboration and when the conditions are correct for collaboration then the system is ripe for a series of sustained viral expansion loops. This will probably take place as the curve of the reverse Pareto graph starts to steepen.
COMMERCE
As communities of interest develop and content consumption becomes frequent there will be the need to generate revenue from the content through advertising or sales and the users will gradually want to generate their own income by using the system as a marketplace for their own content.
JOHANNESBURG – Media and Information Technology (IT) workers across the country are demostrating outside several large technology corporations today to protest a recent 45 percent wage decrease by employers.
More than seven thousand workers in the technology field have been camped outside the corporate head-offices of several major companies in a country-wide strike with placards saying “One bullet, One IT admin” and “Free our faces”.
The strikes follow a decision by several large corporates to reassses worker productivity and adjust pay packages accordingly. When auditors discovered that workers generally spent more that half their time browsing social networking sites like blogger.com, Amatomu and Facebook, most organisations issued warnings and then followed up with massive pay decreases six months later.
Labor Union spokesperson, Santie Van Der Merwe, said in a press conference yesterday that the mass action would not cease until the old pay rates were restored and social networking sites were allowed through corporate firewalls.
“This is an incredibly hostile move by employers and violates several constitutional rights,” said vd Merwe.
It has been estimated that business in South Africa loses over R3.2 million per day as staff only use three hours daily on productive work and use the remainder to post comments on Facebook walls or update their MySpace templates.
An anonymous source at one of the three auditors tasked with calculating the total loss across more than two hundred companies said that the real figures were “much higher” and that the reality is “not believeable”.
“Ultimately,” he said, “employment contracts are being violated to such a degree that it became necessary to remunerate employees for an accurate amount of time they were comittng to their jobs.”
WARNING [added later]: This post was intended as satire and does not describe actual events
Anyone remember First Tuesday, the business and technology networking events? Well they are back and the first one to be held in Johannesburg has a web 2.0 focus. I will be talking about the basics of Web 2.0, Mike Stopforth will be talking about leveraging the technologies for business gain and Heather Ford will be talking about when to open up intellectual property and how to go about doing it. I have also heard rumors that Vinny Lingham will be joining our panel for questions, which is great for me because I haven’t met Vinny in person and have wanted to do so for a long time.
I haven’t been to one of these events before but I have heard good things in the past. Given the massive success of the 27 Dinners from a networking perspective, I am glad this event is going to happen regularly again.
The event takes place on 3 April at the Wanderers Club.
This morning I got in early, so I spent some time doing low priority things like replying to email from people I don’t like and visiting the links people have sent me during the last few days. On my travels I saw two cool things:
The favicon thing is old news but I never really cared about them until now.
A restless night….
I spent a lot of my night thinking what it would look like if one was to represent the way users move from page to page as a type of cell-chain or living organism. I guess I have become preoccupied with visualisation these days but I do think real-time social metrics are the key to emergent content hierarchies. Gone are the days when an editor decides what goes at the top.
I also read recently that Microsoft are fighting their way back in with a Digg-like app called MSN Reporter. What this is pointing to is the level of permanence we can now associate with social news, and the level of threat it poses to a) journalists and b) notions of balanced rationality in news selection.
I have uploaded my two Powerpoint presentations for my workshops this afternoon here. The target audience is newspaper journalists and editors, so the Web 2.0 discussion is introductory and the blogging discussion is about the way forward.
He has worked in the online media industry since 1996, has presented papers at many international conferences and specializes in profitable innovation in emerging markets.
RSS for this blog
Learn more about syndication, feeds, and feedburning.
