Recently in Social networks Category

Melcrum recently released a report on How to use social media to solve critical communication issues, with as usual some great case studies and many practical insights. Go to the report website for a full overview and executive summary.

I was asked to write the closing section in the report, on The Future of Social Media and Internal Communications. Below is my article in full. If you're interested in the topic also see my recent Thoughts on the future of workplace communications.

The Future of Social Media and Internal Communications

Organisations achieve their objectives by bringing together the talent and energy of many people. As such, the raft of emerging communications platforms today have the potential to literally transform how organizations work. From the 1990s, email fundamentally changed how most jobs were done. Now a wealth of new communication tools are being used to create sometimes dramatically different ways of working.

Based on the rapid emergence of social media and other new communication platforms, there are seven key aspects to how organisational communication will change.

Flipboard and Paper.li are two of the hottest properties in media today. Over the last six weeks they have taken social news curation to a new level. This will undoubtedly soon spawn hordes of competitors, while these leaders in the field continue to evolve their offerings. The result will be that we all have far better access to the news that we want from world of infinite information.

Flipboard was launched on July 21, at the time announcing that they had received $10.5 million in funding. For several weeks it was ranked one of the top few free iPad apps in the News category in US, UK, and Australia, attracting massive interest for what it calls a “social magazine”.

Paper.li has been around a bit longer, but has just taken off properly in the last few weeks, as the chart below illustrates.

Earlier today I spoke on a live webcast on the Future of Workplace Communication as part of Viocorp’s Future Forum series.

I took notes during the panel session and posted these live on my blog right after the event. I took notes while the other panellists were speaking: Nicky Wakefield, head of human capital at Deloitte, Philip Cronin, general manager of Intel Australia, and Oscar Trimboli, head of the information workers group at Microsoft.

I wasn’t able to take notes while I was speaking myself, so having had a look at the panel discussion which is now archived and can be viewed at the Viocorp site (requires registration), I’ve written out some of what I said during the discussion.

10:50 – 14:00
Workplace is not a good term to refer to the future – people will be working from anywhere so workplaces will have less impact than they have today. In the bigger context we also have to question whether organizations as we know them today will exist. Transaction costs are going down, meaning that moving forward, organizations will have to justify why they exist. There will be many business models bringing together loosely coupled talent and processes.

It is sometimes difficult to describe what my companies do. That is now a little bit easier, as we have created a flyer describing the key services of Advanced Human Technologies, focused on clients in the technology and media sector. The flyer does not mention our publishing and ventures activities, but covers the kind of consulting we do for vendors. Our Enterprise 2.0 flyer describes our work for corporate clients on implementing Enterprise 2.0.

Thought Leadership in Technology - Advanced Human Technologies

I hope it's useful for those that want to know more about what we do (or may even want to engage us!).

I will later share some snapshots of what Future Exploration Network and The Insight Exchange are up to, to give a better picture of the group and how it fits together.

I just caught up with my neighbor and fellow futurist Mark Pesce, who over a coffee at our local briefed me on his new project Plexus, which he publicly announced at his recent keynote at Pycon Australia, for Python developers. His excellent speech, titled How Not to be Seen, is below, and the transcript on Mark’s blog.

In his presentation Mark starts with his long relationship with programming and finally moves on to describe his project Plexus, which will provide a new platform for social networks.

I have just been requested permission by London School of Economics to use my Web 2.0 Framework in their Management and Innovation of eBusiness program for the next four years. The first part of the framework is below, and the industry landscape further down the page.

Click on the image for the original description and full pdf

I’m delighted that the framework is still seen as relevant and useful over 3 years after it was created in May 2007. Certainly the original post continues to get plenty of traffic, not least because an image from the framework still appears on the front page of a Google search for ‘Web 2.0’. The phrase ‘Web 2.0’ has been largely replaced with ‘social media’, 'cloud' and similar terms, but the underlying concepts remain valid in understanding what is going on today.

I thought it would be worth reviewing the framework today to see what is still current and what I would change.

We all know that processing power has for many years increased exponentially and continues to do so. This essentially means that any processing-intensive task you can imagine will eventually be possible.

Facial recognition happens to be a task that humans are hard-wired to be exceptionally good at. While computers struggled at this for a long time, it is now an entirely viable technology in controlled conditions, as when people are walking through turnstiles or gates.

The facial recognition used at the 2001 Super Bowl was successful enough to apparently nab 19 people with pending arrest warrants, while facial recognition is now commonly used in border security.

It becomes a lot harder when people's faces are not viewed from the front, however to a large degree that's where the increased processing power comes in handy.

Mark Cuban says that he has just invested in a company that uses video to identify how many people are in a given area, which can be useful for safety, security, and traffic control.

My wife Victoria Buckley just received a message from Facebook asking her to change the profile image on the Victoria Buckley Jewellery Facebook page, threatening to close the page as it did not conform to its 'terms and conditions'.

Presumably the were referring to condition3. 7. You will not post content that...contains nudity.... referring to the profile image of a beautiful doll touching one of Victoria's rings.

Above is the offensive image. If you go to the Victoria Buckley Jewellery Facebook page you will now see a censored image so she doesn't get banned, along with her close to 1,000 fans. (Though if you click through to the Photos page and the Ophelia Enchanted Doll collection you can see more stunning images of the doll).

Micro-messaging processing company Semiocast has just released research showing that Asia has overtaken North America as the biggest user of Twitter, with 37% of total tweets.

Source: Semiocast

In June 2009 the US still accounted for 55% of tweets, in February 2010 statistics showed that half of tweets were in languages other than English, and by April 2010 US tweets accounted for 37% of tweets. The rise of "international" (as Americans describe the planet excluding USA) and corresponding decline of the US share is shown in the chart below. Today's study shows that US tweets have in the three months since then fallen to just 25% of the total. This is not because the US is slowing, it is because the rest of the world and particularly Asia is taking up Twitter at an enormous pace.

A just got an email from Tiffany Schlain, who had just seen my post on how hyper-connectivity is literally bringing the networks to life. I know of Tiffany as the Founder of the very influential Webby Awards. What I didn't know is that she is also a filmmaker. Tiffany pointed me to the film she's currently working on: Connected: A Declaration of Interdependence. The awesome trailer is below - well worth watching. It simply poses the question we are all facing.

In January I looked at the just-released Nielsen data on global social media usage, and wrote Australians are #1 globally in usage of social media: Why?.

New data from Nielsen shows an updated picture from April 2010, including the proportion of people online in each country who are using social networks.

Click on image for large version

A little while ago I gave a keynote at the Gartner Symposium. Gartner looks to its analysts to share their deep research at their events. It also invites a handful of external speakers to bring a lighter and more entertaining – though still pragmatic – approach and style.

I suggested the topic of Driving Business Results Through Personal Network, which can readily be made fun and interesting, but is also extremely practical for senior technology executives. It was a broad-ranging keynote, ranging across topics including why we need to understand the Bacon number, why boundary spanners are so critical for organizations, the long tail of sexual activity, how to enhance serendipity, and steps to being an energizing leader.

Inset into the presentation were two sets of recommendations, on building personal online networks and on enhancing organizational networks. At the risk of taking them out of the supporting context, here they are:

On Saturday I spoke at Creative Sydney’s Crowds + Collaboration event. I had just been invited to on Thursday to fill in for a speaker who couldn’t make it, but it was pretty easy to do given last week we launched our Crowdsourcing Landscape and I gave two keynotes largely about crowdsourcing (to Cisco and at a regional futures conference in WA). As such I addressed the topic The Future is Crowdsourcing, largely supported by the Crowdsourcing Landscape, as you can see at the bottom of this post.

The other speakers were excellent. In particular the story of Detours and Destinations was extremely inspiring. Highly disadvanted youth were given the opportunity to spend time at the Sydney Opera House creating their own performance. One of their many creations is below.

Creative Sydney is one of the best things going on in Sydney - this annual festival really does bring out and support the best of what's happening here. Particularly as the creative and technology spaces merge, I am very excited about what I see happening in Sydney, far more than at any other time in the 14 years I've been back here.

Creative Sydney has just launched its 10x10 Project. The website says:

Personal recommendation speaks volumes: so who do Sydney's creative leaders turn to for inspiration?

10 creative leaders each nominate 10 creative businesses or practitioners, introducing us to the local creatives who inspire them.

I am honored to be one of the 10 creative catalysts selected. Our task was to nominate who we think is doing fantastic work in Sydney. It's a very special group - you can see their profiles on the front page of the 10x10 Project website. There is also a brief review of the 10 creative leaders by Campaign Brief.

Crowdfunding is one of the more interesting (and important) neologisms of the last few years. It takes the idea of crowdsourcing (getting services delivered by crowds) and applies it to raising money.

In a later post I will write about the implications of the rise of crowdfunding for venture capital and other early stage funding sources. Here I will just cover some examples of crowdfunding, many of them in creative domains.

Kickstarter is a well developed creative crowdfunding platform, covering films, music, games, theatre, technology and far more. It uses the common all-or-nothing model, so projects are only funded if they raise their target funds in a defined period. It does not offer equity in the ventures, but project creators can provide specific rewards for funders. Kickstarter gained attention when the new open source competitor to Facebook, Diaspora*, sought $10,000 and has already raised over $180,000 before the funding period is over.