Posts Tagged ‘social media’

Institutions as Mobilising Networks

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

The book I’m reading at the moment is “The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age“. The book links to a number of themes I’m interested in, particularly developing knowledge content and user generated content (and also a number of the drivers indentified in the recent NCVO future of membership report).

The book looks at how new technology such as social networks and virtual environments will change how people learn. And although the book is aimed mainly at higher education, there is plenty of read across into the membership organisations as many are knowledge-based and/or educational.

I’ve just finished the chapter titled “Institutions as Mobilising Networks” which contrasts how institutions are often viewed - as rule-driven, centralised, old fashioned and slow moving - with how they could be - trend setting, dynamic, agile and innovative.

The key opportunity (or challenge, depending on how you look at it) is: to use social media and learning environments to aggregate, coordinate and disseminate knowledge and facilitate learning - to mobilise the network of members and other potential participants.

Taking up this challenge could dramatically improve engagement and knowledge development in an institution’s area of interest.

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Clay Shirky - Cognitive Surplus

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010

Clay Shirky launched his new book “Cognitive Surplus” at the LSE yesterday evening (also available: podcast and video). The “Cognitive Surplus” comes from a combination of the increase in free time since the mid 1900s and the recently developed medium for coordinated action.

This follows “Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens when People Come Together” which is one of the seminal texts for the impact of social media on society.

As well as presenting some excellent material from his book, I found him a very engaging speaker. His main theme (amongst a fair few) was that digital communications and social media is providing opportunities for previously unmet social/psychological needs. So, it has provided opportunities for example, to counter attacks on Indian women considered by right-wing activists to be behaving inappropriately.

He suggested categories of opportunities:

  • Communal - there are numerous examples of communities of people with common interests sharing photos, jokes, etc.
  • Public, such as Wikipedia.
  • Civic - where there could be significant impact on our culture, such as political opposition and moves to much more openness in medical records.

    • Among his examples, conclusions and suggestions were:

  • It has taken 100 million hours of effort so far to create Wikipedia. This may seem large, but the US population consumes more hours of TV commercials than this in a weekend.
  • The power of brands will decline significantly.
  • Marketing and communications professionals need to switch from their current approach of either being in broadcast mode (advertising) or receiving mode (research), to a far more conversational approach.
  • In the third world, mobile is far more important than PCs, so incorporating SMS into solutions needs serious consideration.

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    Ready for real-time relationships?

    Saturday, January 23rd, 2010

    I was at an interesting event on Wednesday, hosted by not-for-profit (NFP) supplier Iris, debating the latest technology trends (as relate to the NFP sector).

    The format was to write out your top prediction at the start. These were then all collated and debated, ending up with a vote. I was sat next to Social Media expert Steve Bridger and our contributions had a significant overlap - his was the rise of real-time computing; mine was on the increasing demands for personalisation, of content, and ultimately, of relationship.

    The common ground here is real-time relationships - that in the world of Facebook, LinkedIn and especially Twitter, charity supporters and association members expect a personal conversation that is (near) real time and not constrained to office hours.

    This type of relationship is a real challenge for NFP organisations, certainly for their software, but more importantly organisationally:

  • The best person to contribute to your side of the conversation is unlikely to be in marketing; they are much more likely to be “knowledge workers” in the research or professional development group
  • The working pattern (and HR) implications of the timing of the conversations

    • On the software side, the phrase “social CRM” has been coined in the last year or so and a number of the software vendors such as Oracle are responding. Its important to realise here though that this actually represents a huge mindset change for CRM - from “segment and conquer” to the personal conversation. This is likely to be much more manpower intensive. It is also much more about data assimilation and less about automated marketing.

    We are running a seminar related to this posting in March: Power to Your People: The Death and Rebirth of CRM, hosted by Stephen Bubb, the Chief Executive of AVECO.

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    Getting Value from Twitter

    Thursday, August 13th, 2009

    One of the social media tools that is getting a lot of press attention is Twitter, partly because of its use by the likes of Stephen Fry. So the inevitable question for charities and membership organisations is “should we be using Twitter to communicate with our members/supporters?”

    The answer is - it depends … on:

  • What the demographics are of your target audience? Around 10% the online population are Twitter users, but retention rates have not been as good as some other social media sites such as Facebook. Of these, nearly half of Twitter users are young adults, very few children use it and a reasonable number of older adults (20% according to one survey).
  • Take into account how people use Twitter - see for example the recent report on BBC news site. Twitter generally has a low content level, so make sure your content stands out from the crowd.
  • What would you want to communicate to them, or what discussions would you want to have using Twitter? A number of organisations, such as the RSA, have Twitter feeds for informing/reminding people of their events.
  • If the communication is to be two way, this will need to be supported by resources - people expect Twitter to be very responsive and it will probably need an expert level person.

    • The likely conclusion for many NFP organisations, unless there are specific reasons, is to use Twitter in a “push-only” mode for announcements. The take up and effectiveness should be monitored to see how useful a contribution to your online presence it is making.

    If this type of announcement feed is unlikely to be valuable in your situation, wait and review again in a year.

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    Social Media Seminar

    Friday, June 12th, 2009

    Had some excellent feedback from a very enjoyable seminar at the RSA yesterday, despite the tube strike that resulted in a number of people having to drop out.

    Matthew Taylor gave some fascinating reflections on the journey the RSA have gone through since he became their Chief Executive in 2006, with regards to the RSA fellowship and their use of social media. Matthew also had some interesting thoughts on the future of membership, questioning its role in modern society. He was candid in acknowledging that past attempts at social media by the RSA had not been successful.

    They are now working hard to reap the potential through delivering a content proposition, engaging with and supporting their membership, and providing appropriate tools.

    The AAT in contrast, has a very different membership community than the RSA, and consequently, very different needs from their social media, which are in a sense easier to understand and “sell” to their membership. Their Chief Executive, Jane Scott Paul, gave an insightful historical view of how they achieved their success, starting with a clear business strategy and then developing incrementally.

    I came across some interesting examples in putting the IndigoBlue presentation together:

  • Looking behind the obvious success of LinkedIn in contrast to ContactDetails (no currently available website) who had a similar website offering. The key difference was that LinkedIn had a clear business strategy and used an incremental approach, whereas ContactDetails took much more of a technology-led, waterfall approach.
  • netmums is an excellent online community with over 500,000 signed up members, which provides immediate access to advice including nutrition, recipes, local events and local groups. It’s interesting to contrast this with the NCT site, which is very attractively laid out and does have a different audience, but has more of a corporate feel to it.
  • And finally, when looking for an example Facebook page, came across Vladimir Putin’s info page and thought would share as an example of effective use of social media (compare with Gordon Brown’s!)

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    Imagining Knowledge Technology of the Future

    Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

    I went to an interesting evening event at the British Computer Society yesterday - a Gurteen Knowledge Café. The format of the evening was a series of discussions with small groups of attendees based round the topic “How do you imagine the Knowledge Technologies of the Future”, with the groups mixing up at intervals.

    Overall, the discussions were fairly philosophical, with some of them moving too far into the future to have any practical impact.

    However, there were some interesting points for this blog, mostly around the information and knowledge made available to users of websites and other digital media.

    The fundamental question is - what are the underlying needs of your audience that you are trying to fulfil? There would seem to be two parts to the answer to this:

  • It is about providing the information and knowledge they want  (or need, which is subtly different)
  • It is also about enabling members of your audience to engage in the conversations they value, and even facilitating those conversations

    • I’m using the term “audience” here to mean the members of your organisation, or supporters of your charity and even going wider to include people who might be visiting your website for the first time … which poses the further question - have you assessed the needs of wider stakeholders?

    There were also some interesting comments on the way that Facebook is driving user behaviour:

  • Listing the number of friends someone has drives people to want to acquire more
  • The question mark Facebook had for people without a photo drove people to add a photo
  • There is a trend for particularly younger Facebook users to be much more open and less concerned with privacy

    • We are hosting a seminar with the RSA - “Engaging the Community - the challenges and opportunities for the third sector” on 11th June 2009 where these issues will be discussed in more detail.

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    Obama appoints CIO

    Monday, March 9th, 2009

    I was interested to see the announcement that US President Barack Obama has named Vivek Kundra as his Chief Information Officer (CIO). Kundra was previously Chief Technology Office for Washington DC, where he introduced the widespread use of social media including blogs, Twitter and Facebook, as well as many Google Apps. There’s a good overview of how they use Google docs, spreadsheets and earth in Washington.

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