It's a conference day today, at the Dell B2B Social Media Huddle. Not sure how much I'll be liveblogging - it depends how the fancy takes me. But keep an eye out for an important post (to me) not long after 2pm...
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The end of the year always seems to end up as conference season for me - which is no bad thing. A good conference sends you away full of ideas and enthusiasm for the coming months, and hopefully the current crop will see me intellectually kitted up for the challenges of 2012.
I can't quite believe that this will be the sixth Le Web I've attended. I know many people who attended the predecessor conferences Les Blogs find that it has grown out of the range they feel comfortable with, but I think I enjoyed the 2010 Le Web at least as much as any other. I'll be heading to Paris in December as an official blogger once more.
And I'm delighted to say I've been invited to be an official blogger for two forthcoming conferences.
Like Minds
The last few Like Minds events have been some of my most enjoyable and useful times at conferences in the last few years. The Exeter conference, which kicks off next week, has expanded to three days. Scott Gould has invited me to join the conference as an official blogger - I'll be liveblogging sessions on the Like Minds site - so I'll be there for all three days.
If you can conceivably get to Exeter for those three days (19 to 21st October), I really recommend that you do.
Le Web
I can't quite believe that this will be the sixth Le Web I've attended. I know many people who attended the predecessor conferences Les Blogs find that it has grown out of the range they feel comfortable with, but I think I enjoyed the 2010 Le Web at least as much as any other. I'll be heading to Paris in December as an official blogger once more.I don't think there's any other event where the European and US tech scene meet and mingle quite so much, and I'm really interested to see how the extension of the conference to three days will change how it feels. Let's hope it's not bedevilled by snow like it was last year, though...
In the computer-scarce past, the institution purchased and owned the computer. The institution managed the computer and the institution controlled what happened on that computer.
In the computer-rich present and the even-richer future, I think that Apple’s looking towards a different model. The user of the device “owns” it. Whether they really purchase it themselves is somewhat beside the point. The idea is that the person who spends their days working with that device has control of it, and the institution can overlay certain policies on top to meet their requirements.
An interesting inversion of the way things often work now.
Those who know me are aware that, on the whole, I prefer the arrive late/ leave late approach to work. I skip the worst of the commuting, get more done befoe I leave home, and generally feel better about life. In my world, the early bird might catch the worm, but it gets grumpy and doesn't eat it because he feels a little sick.
But some things are worth getting up early for. I'm a big fan of the Like Minds events, and the idea of a business book club from them could just be tailor-made for me. And so, I dragged myself out of bed early enough to join them at The Hospital Club this morning to hear Scott Belsky talk about his book Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality
After a rather scrummy bacon buttie and some pain au chocolat (which are pretty much worth getting out bed for, frankly), we settled down to hear him explain how the hell to get creative people to actually buckle down and deliver.
Most ideas never happen, suggested Belsky. He wishes for an idea meritocracy, where only the best survive... Don't we all? And he, like the rest of us has become convinced that ideas don't happen because they're great. That takes away the romantic notion that a great idea will come to fruition.. Most ideas never happen because of the double-edged sword of creativity. When an idea strikes, energy and excitement is high. But it subsides as you get into execution, eroded by the drudgery of project management. How do you escape the drudgery and return to the excitement? To many of us just come up with a new idea and get excited by that instead, so things never get completed.
One shouldn't understimate the gravitational force of operations, suggested Belsky. The demands of the grind take over, and the ideas never get executed. A strategic offsite gets overwhelmed by daily life. Creative people tend to be disorganised. So, getting ideas in all about defying the odds. Some teams are able to do that again and agaimn - how?
Organise/Prioritise
You have to overcome reactionary workflow, the endless stream of communication that can blight our lives. We're in the era of reactionary workflow, pecking away at the inboxes of our lives and trying to stay afloat. Belsky gives the example of a friend who commuted by car, and found himself a deep thinking/sacred space while driving. Then he got a new car with iPhone linkage. Goodbye non-stimulation time. Creating windows of non-stimulation where you ignore social media and e-mail inputs and focus down on the things you want to achieve can be incredibly helpful.
And you should spend time on organisation. The equation:
Creativity x Organisation = Impact
It doesn't matter how much creativity you have, if you don't invest time in organisation, you will have zero impact. For the last three years Apple, a company reknowned for creativity, has won an award for the best supply chain management. Many have speculated that COO Tim Cook is as important to the company as CEO Steve Jobs.
Other ideas:
- Organise with a bias to action
- Go into creativity workshops and focus on the action steps
- If meetings lead to nothing actionable - replace them with an e-mail? A stand-up?
- Culture of capturing action steps.
- Surround yourself with evidence of progress
Communal forces
Three base types of people:
- Dreamer - something new all the time. Goes to bed happy when there are new things in the pepline
- Doer - says "no", extinguishes ideas. Goes to bed happy with nothing new in the pipeline
- Incrementalist - rotates between the two. They create too much and never scale them.
Value the team's immune system. Doers can extinguish distractions. Dreamers bring new things. Empower different people at different times based on which of these three groups they fall into.
Share your ideas liberally and allow others to comment on them. Those which garner the most reaction are probably the ones you should focus on. Chris Anderson just pushes all his ideas on his blog (both internal and external.) Is there a risk of premature sharing, and your ideas being nicked? The benefits outweigh the costs.
Fights force people to explore each other's opinion. However don't let these fights push people into apathy. When you stop exploring opinions, you stop performing.
Other ideas:
- Don't be burdened by consensus.
- Overcome the stigma of self-marketing
- Curate because it attracts attention, and then people will listen when you have something new to say.
And he finshed on a note that I found particularly compelling: gain confidence from doubt.
"If 99% of people think you're crazy, you're either crazy or onto something. We shun people before we celebrate them. Status quo is the grease on the wheels of society."
But sometimes, status quo is another word for terminal decline...
It was a good talk, and I'm now throughly lookiong forward to diving into the book. Scott Gould has already reviewed it, and comments from the other book clubbers should start flowing over the week. Ve Interactive blogged the event, too.
For the next two days I'm in Berlin, liveblogging those parts of the NEXT 11 conference that catch my eye. Today, I'll be largely following the media track, for reasons that should be self-evident to anyone who reads this blog... ;-)
WiFi holding up so far, power available, and coffee accessible (despite the queues for it). All systems are go...
Jeremiah Owyang is presenting some data about social business this year and next. Highlights:
What happened in 2010 in social business?
Most corporate social strategies are only two years old - 2010 was the year of formation. The decision maker tends to be in marketing or corporate comms. That's where the money is now - it will move into support and product teams over time.
Models:
- Decentralised - everyone can do it - looks authentic, but is disorganised
- Centralised: Consistency and control, doesn't look authentic.
- Hub and Spoke: small central group works with each division - Majority
- Multiple Hub and Spoke
- Holistic or "honeycomb": everyone does it in a consistent way
What's gonna happen in 2011?
Year of integration. The struggle is to measure social media. Most cases, they're using engagement data (which is not helpful). Most people looking to embed social in their sites. Brand monitoring is most popular area, but all areas of social are seeing big investment in social.
In dollar value? Jobs. $278,000 People are looking for social media staff.
As companies get more mature in their social media strategy, they move from tarditional agencies to the boutique social media agencies.
Six recommendations for corporations:
- Hire correctly - don't hire "social media gurus/ninjas" - hire business process managers.
- Integrate social media - be pragmatic. Don't just put a "follow me on..." button on your site. Integrate feature into your site.
- Use advertising that leverages social graph: use advertising that triggers word of mouth
- Develop an unpaid army of advocates: Microsoft's MVP's aren't paid, but they get access and trips. That's scalable. One on one dialogue doesn't scale.
- Invest in scalable systems like SCRM and SMMS - help you manage hundreds of accounts across the globe.
- Learn to measure right. Right metrics for the right people.
The full presentation is on his blog already.
After years of listening to Leo Laporte's TWIT network, I'm now seeing him live… He's lost one of his panelists to the snow, so Dennis Crowley has stepped in, joining Brent Hoberman of mydeco and Loïc.
And we're talking about entrepreneurship in Europe. Should people just copy US ideas? No, but it's a qualified no. Hoberman explains that his original startup (lastminute.com) could only expand into France, for example, by acquiring a local firm that helped them deal with all the legal restrictions in each country. So there's a value in building our parallel sites in countries that have different legal systems.
That said, Loic moved from being an European entrepreneur to being an US one, because being in the US gives him direct access to the management of the big web companies that matter - like Google for example. It's more difficult in Europe, Loic suggests, citing Daily Motion which started before YouTube but never got teh funding to scale in the same way.
Crowley started Foursquare in New York, simply because that was where he lived. He thinks the urban density of the city helped them create a better product, and they're now part of a whole thriving community of startups in the city.
Hoberman jumps in with mention of east London and the silicon roundabout area, that's becoming the hub for the UK startup scene. And he thinks any entrepreneur that can make it in Europe has great management skills, because it's so much harder to scale over the language and legal barriers than it is in the more monocultural US.
Lots of discussion about funding, which seems to be a perennial topic here. Hoberman pointed out that venture capital is a terrible investment class right now, which doesn't help. And there's not the volume or the structure that exists in the US. Most tellingly, Loic revealed that he had several companies turn down his "how to be acquired" panel tomorrow simply because it's Europe and they're not interested.
Loic is replying to a question from one of the questioners, talking about the infamous "political hijack" of Le Web 3 in 2006 (my first Le Web). His mistake wasn't so much inviting the politicians, he suggests, but in springing it on the room. If he'd informed people, it would have gone better. And he spent a long time afterwards reading every bit of criticism and responding, and using that to inform future events.
Nice challenge from Leo: is it necessary to always build big companies? Can't you be happy with a local, niche service? The reply, between Hoberman and Crowley, is that you don't get a platform that way. And if it's working, why wouldn't you want to scale it?
George Brock, head of journalism department, City University London
He speech celebrated chaos, the idea that we're in a process of massive change, and that the "spaghetti throwers", those actively promoting and exploring change, is vital. We're throwing spaghetti at the walls and seeing what sticks...
Many of our past assumptions are false. Traditional, established professional journalism is not as old, traditional or established as we think it is.
And I love some of his ideas - journalism taught on the "teaching hospital" model. Brilliant. Great agenda setting.
Kevin Marsh, BBC College of Journalism
Three key ideas while facing the practical challenges of education journalists:
One.
Journalists were suddenly expected to take on new roles and new skills that didn't exist within the BBC before. We were putting at the centre of the news offer not the bulletins but "live and continuous". The internal news agency became the flywheel of the whole operation. Blogging and podcasting became much freer.
Our landscape is shifting - it's changing faster than we can understand it, it's changing faster than we can handle in any formal way. If you think you have the answer, you didn't understand the question.
Large organisations are changing from within - in a way that can look like chaos - but only in the way that any living organism looks chaotic.
Two.
Two core skills: Finding checking, assessing facts and telling those facts. That duality was at the heart of his infamous e-mails about Andrew Gilligan and the Hutton enquiry. Multimedia skills do not supplant traditional journalistic skills - making contacts, findings stories, pursuing investigations, etc.
However, he sees an anxiety amongst journalists about how much they are expected to do. A newsroom does not need to be populated exclusively by pan-media people. You need people with higher than average skills, but not everyone needs to have them all. He's making the comparison with one man media machines like Ben Hammersley.
Look at what attracts you. Look at what you do well. Evaluate new skills and media - what do they add to what you do? Is it working for you? Is it delivering? If not, drop it. When you find the skills that work for you, keep innovating. Once you stop innovating, the chances are you should be moving on and looking at something else.
Blogging has done more than anything else to transform how journalists work. Nick Robinson and Robert Peston are cited as examples. Robinson has destroyed the notion that a story isn't a story until it appears on the 10 O'Clock bulletin using his blog. It puts expertise to the front - both knowledge and authenticity.
Three
Any skills you have are a means to an end, not an end in itself. We spend too much time talking about the applications and not about what they can do. Stay outside that bubble.
I've just left today's Tuttle Club (or should that be Social Media Café?) Breakfast, held at the rather lovely One Alfred Place.
As always at events organised by Lloyd, it was a bit of a brain-stuffer. Lots of chance to chat with people from a wide variety of fields all of whom have an interest in social media.
In no particular order, the ideas I took away from the session which I'll probably blog about more later are:
- How you might facilitate real-time metrics for journalists
- How to maintain passion as a medium endures, and what we can learn from the mistakes made as business magazines matured
- How job titles can be the biggest barrier to organisational change
- Is routine the enemy of passion?
- What can we learn about physical working spaces from online social media spaces?
As you can see, it was a very trivial, light-weight discussion...
One of my colleagues (in the most broad sense of "works for the same employer in a distant sub-division of the business") has started blogging about the RBI Divestment as it happens.
He's actually using it as much as a springboard for discussions about company acquisitions and changes as about this actual divestment itself (as "not much to report yet" gets pretty old, pretty quickly..) but it an interesting wee read.
He's actually using it as much as a springboard for discussions about company acquisitions and changes as about this actual divestment itself (as "not much to report yet" gets pretty old, pretty quickly..) but it an interesting wee read.
I'll be attending…
