Futurity Media

My apprehensions about the #Likeminds social media event was that it would be a love-in among insincere folk selling sincerity services. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Nearly all of the people I met over the course of two days in Exeter were genuine, enthusiastic and passionate about social media.

And I learned a lot from the sessions – about Chris Brogan’s jealous Followers that need regular loving, to Olivier Blanchard’s discovery of disconnected organisations that are listening to social media but unable to channel listening into doing; and debates about the future of journalism, paywalls, bloggers and brand advocates.

And the networking and discourse (a true Socratic symopsium?) at an event like this was far more informative and vibrant than any of the hundreds of technology conferences I have attended in my working life.

But the lasting thoughts that I left with is that of noise and the inability to filter it out. Every moment of the Likeminds event was caught on iphone camera, on Kodak Zi8 and of course the ubiquitous Twitter tap tap tapping. A multiverse of content was generated on this most sociable of days. Ok, as a consumer of this data (rather than producer) I can dip in an out.

But how much juicy content am I missing? Fear of this, and a desperate desire to taste everything, as it happens, means that I am monitoring social media streams 24/7.

It has to stop. The noise has to be filtered out somehow.

The future of publishing, of blogging, of social media, will depend on some way to filter.

I’m thinking about how I can do this with my own work – Futurity produces up to 1000 articles are year, with ideas inspired from a vast array of sources. I need to organise and filter this, and in doing so, capture underlying trends.

When I trained in Futurology (a dumb term, I know), we learned how to think slowly, see real changes behind the vapid. But it’s getting harder to do this since the advent of the social media. So how can we learn to filter?

Your thoughts please?

#stewartbaines

Tonight – my first experience of #Likeminds – and I’ve got more questions than answers. I came to this social media event, which was highly recommended as one of the best on the social media calendar, hoping to learn about the positive impact social media has had on companies. I find that the problem with events like this is that a load of consultants and small agencies are essentially pitching to each other, and there are very few leads. Scattered around though, are some very bright, very persuasive people who have far more experience than I do in engaging enterprise acolytes.

Nonetheless, I did learn something tonight – you can’t fake sincerity. If you want brands – whether B2B or B2C – to engage with social media, particularly blogging and Twitter, you need to find interesting, enthusiastic contributors  that enjoy what they are doing. You can cajole, poke, threaten or bribe consultants and other knowledge workers in enterprises to participate in knowledge sharing, you can persuade them of the need to build their own social capital, but you can’t convince them to be sincere.  So what does it take to convince people to be sincere? Tomorrow I hope to learn that . In the meantime, how do you think we can encourage corporate  bloggers to be sincere?

#stewartbaines

A new report from the UN warns that the environmental dangers of e-waste is set to explode with the increasing use of PCs, mobile phones and consumer gadgetry worldwide. It says that unless countries  take action to collect and recycle e-waste, many developing countries will be left with (even bigger) mountains of hazardous toxic e-waste. The report predicts that e-waste from discarded mobile phones will be seven times higher in 2020 compared to 2007, and 18 times higher in India. Two to four times as many computers will be dumped in South Africa and China, and five times as many in India. China already produces 2.3 million tonnes of e-waste domestically and remains a major dumping ground for developed countries despite having banned e-waste imports. How to deal with this waste is a growing problem, and the report acknowledges that simply transferring existing recycling methods from more developed countries is unlikely to work.

Existing controls for e-waste recycling are already weak, as demonstrated by a Greenpeace investigation that followed a TV from the UK to Nigeria where it is dumped or the materials recycled using less than safe methods. With the poorest being involved in trying to extract materials such as lead, cadmium and mercury e-waste, Greenpeace say its up to the manufacturers of this equipment to stop using toxic chemicals in its manufacture.

Normally, we like to post finished articles, but in this instance, I’m going to post my request-for-information.

I’m writing article for the good people at Silicon.com on the pains and barriers of deploying social media in the enterprise. I have a number of issues that I am struggling to deal with. So, in collaborative writing kind of way, have you got any answers?

Either leave a comment at the bottom of the post, or send me a tweet (#stewartbaines) or email (stewartbaines at futuritymedia dot com)

1. Can enterprises truly engage in social media then they are “anti-social” organisations (argues Benjamin Ellis). Is this true? Is the profit motive inconsistent with sharing (which is intangible)?
2. Should enterprise social media stay under the radar (with small projects) until you have an ROI and then roll-out extensively?
3. How do you identify social media champions in an organisation, how do you motivate them (without financial rewards)
4. How do you get those with the most knowledge to share their knowledge when they are increasingly working to time sheets with minimum no. of billable hours? Surely those with “knowledge capital” are disinclined to convert this into “social capital”
5. If you can’t demonstrate ROI, will participating in social media ever be written into a job description
6. What happens to social networks in the enterprise, when you remove the champions (e.g. they move jobs) – do the networks collapse? (I’ve seen some evidence to suggest this does happen with immature networks.)
7. How do you measure the value of enterprise social media in terms of marketing/PR terms, particulalry in B2B space? My point is that traditional B2B marketing was all about segmentation based on job title, location etc. Social media is so scattergun, and your audience typically doesn’t fit the segmented target audience (i.e you can hire an agency like Futurity to be your social media mouthpiece but what are you getting back for that, in terms of increased sales, or raised profile in your target audience.

Your thoughts, comments, corrections or criticism very welcomed.

UPDATE: I am going to be at Like Minds social media conference in Exeter on Friday 26 February. If you, or a client, is going to be there and has something interesting to say, I’m happy to meet up.

#stewartbaines

My Futurity colleague Steve Costello points our that for some public sector CIOs the need for power (i.e. being a big spender) is more important than looking after the public purse. Here’s a post he wrote….

An interesting paradox was reported in the UK IT press recently, when one of the UK government’s Chief Information Officers revealed that if he cut his IT spending by too great a sum, he would be excluded from an informal “club” of top purchasers which has a significant influence on informing cross-departmental policies and procedures.

In addition to writing text at Futurity Media, we’re also doing video and audio. This is an example of a recent podcast that we did with Orange Business Services in Herndon Virginia. We were talking to Current Analysis analyst Amy Larsen DeCarlo about cloud computing from an enterprise viewpoint. Where is the technology heading? What applications are suited to it? How are early adopters using it?

As well as all of the wonderful corporate blogs and customer publications that we manage for industry leaders  like Orange Business Services, Alcatel-Lucent, Juniper Networks,  Airwave, TelecityGroup and Vodafone, we also still like to get our hands dirty with the nitty gritty of the technology businesses. Writing white papers is never easy but does give us an opportunity to really get our teeth into some pretty cool technology. In the last couple of months, we’ve written reports on M2M telemedicine, M2M applications, Cloud Computing and enterprise perimter security. The latest is a report on femto cells (or small cells) for Alcatel-Lucent. Bell Labs performed an extensive five country consumer survey (and I mean extensive) on attitudes to small cells and mobile broadband. So while pundits may argue mobile operators should be paying the costs for network in-fill, a surprising number of people are prepared to buy their own femto cell if it provides an significantly improved mobile broadband experience. I know I would.

If you’re interested in what people would do with a femto cell at home, check out this white paper that we wrote for Alcatel-Lucent: Alcatel-Lucent small cells whitepaper

This will probably come back to bite me….

I love my iPhone, it’s indispensible. I run with it (tracking my distance and speed), i’ve used it when i’ve been lost in the mountains, i’ve checked train times, used maps, watched TV episodes when I’m on the treadmill in the gym, search recipes in the supermarket, found recommended cocktails when wandering around the West End, and listen to audio books on the Tube. I’ve even used it to have multi-way, international Skype conferences while I’m stuck in a service station on the M1. It’s properly integrated with out MS Exchange, so i have pretty seamless communications.

For me, its the personal and portable nature of the iPhone which has become indispensable – and i think augmented reality apps (when mature) will entrench the addiction even further.

So what of the iPad? Its seems to me predominately a device for using at home – although yes it would make a great accompanyment to a long haul flight if the 10 hour battery life for video playback is a genuine.

So what would I use the iPad? Which of the dozens of location and office productivity tools that i have on my iPhone will be useful on a tablet that spends most of its time in the living room?

I’m sure that the enduringly innovative app developer community will prove me wrong, and before you know it there will be a plethora of compelling and addictive iPad apps – but it seems to me that the most likely use of the iPad in my home will be the web and possibly TV series. I already purchase TV through the iPhone and connect to my giant plasma screen using an AV out cable so that’s not nessarily a new feature. The iPad doesn’t have HDMI either. Or USB. And its 4:3, so not great for most of today’s video content.

And so to the Web – the Web that requires so many plugins and updates that allow you to view the broad spectrum of file formats. Like Flash – the iPad does not offer in-browser Flash. Kind of dumb in my humble opinion.

Apple in its rather closed, limited environment, would rather that you were a viewer or consumer of the Web rather than a contributor to it, they would rather you purchase your leisure time through iTunes than finding you pleasure spread throughout the four corners on obscure site. I cannot believe that the iPad will offer me a sufficiently flexible and rewarding experience as my £500 laptop, with which i can download all manner of content and plugins. My cheapo Dell Vostro is light enough, with a long enough battery life, to support most of the living room browsing I need. A Windows tablet would probably do the trick if i really wanted a tablet. Or maybe the new Chrome OS ultra-mobile PCs.

So for me, the iPad is just a little bit too much. Just like the Touch, and the Apple TV. A profitable niche perhaps, but unless you are a Mac lover (I’m not), the tablet in my living room will need to be a lot more open than an iPad.

There are some more objections here: http://technologizer.com/2010/01/27/my-first-25-questions-about-apples-ipad/ and this wonderful sanitary towel courtesy of failblog.

@stewartbaines

So how did social media fare in 2009, and what can we look forward to in 2010? If Facebook could be considered a bell-weather for social media, then 2009 was an important year, because it broke through 300 million users and became cash-flow positive for the first time. Although this of course doesn’t mean that it is profitable – yet.

Analyst Gartner reckons that Facebook will actually strengthen its position in the future, because it will help different social networks operate with mechanisms such as Facebook Connect. In fact, Gartner believes that interoperability will be the most important trend in social networks over the next two years.

All business sectors embraced social media in 2009. Look at newspapers; criticised by Gartner in early 2009, the vast majority of newspaper sites now have social media widgets to help their readers share information. The Telegraph, for example, has a ‘retweet’ button, which handily counts the number of times readers have retweeted its articles.

Away from the mainstream, social media turned up in all sorts of places. It aimed to stop the spread of swine flu, got jurors into trouble in court and even saw an innocent man hauled down the police station to be questioned about terrorism offenses.

So what for next year? Well Forrester’s Josh Bernoff believes that 2010 is the year when marketers will focus less on fuzzy social media metrics and look for proper measureable marketing metrics. Getting followers and friends is all very well, but if businesses don’t use these networks or connections for any obvious end, then the money is wasted. In fact it can be counterproductive if the connections get bored or disillusioned with the enterprise’s business.

What do you think?

After years of gnashing teeth about the brain drain of innovators out of the UK, it appears that the tide may be turning. A recent article in Reuters claims that international technology entrepreneurs are in fact choosing the UK, with London and Cambridge proving particularly popular. It quotes someone from the OECD saying that the “UK is now well placed in Europe on a number of indexes measuring factors like taxes, red tape, the dynamics of internal markets and how they are connected on the world stage, and the ability to access a qualified workforce.” The article also points to a review by the Legatum Institute, that places the UK 2nd in the world in “Entrepreneurship and Innovation”. Good news indeed, particularly with our esteemed bankers all threatening to take their expense accounts to Geneva.