Community Mobilization

Social Collaboraton in Enterprise

I was lucky enough to be interviewed for this project a number of moths ago and am very excited to read the pre-release of the book. David Coleman did an exceptional job surveying and engaging collaborators within enterprise to see how social tools can drive collaboration.

I was very excited to hear David mention Basecamp and PB Wiki (tools I love to use) as cornerstones of his new book writing process. David's new book 42 Rules for Successful collaboration is an amalgam of input form those who use these systems and tools on a daily basis.

FinNode Studies Successful Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration Strategies from Mark Addison on Vimeo.

The interview is interesting and give a lot of insight into the inital findings but also highlights some of the key challenges with enterprise level collaboration systems. Many years ago I helped ferret out an internal portal and found that AirProducts and Chemicals Co. in Allentown, PA had an exceptional tool. Collaboration tools and systems are not just about effeciency and communication, but also about getting th emost out of hiden tallents in your employees. I look forward to reading the file and think about internal social networks and relationship structures as an overlay on systems.

Using Technology to Teach

Technology at every level has an opportunity to help mediate educational curricula and learning. It can serve as a powerful in helping students understand complex theories and easily render models of vast systems. However, technology is only as good as the content it displays and that is I bypassed all of the Baby Einstein videos and DVDs after watching the first one.

Technology at every level has an opportunity to help mediate educational curricula and learning. It can serve as a powerful in helping students understand complex theories and easily render models of vast systems. However, technology is only as good as the content it displays and that is I bypassed all of the Baby Einstein videos and DVDs after watching the first one.

The first video I watched was a baby gift, and  I was very curious how the dvd would engage a child's mind and supercharge it, propelling them to the levels of MENSA. Within the first few minutes I realized it was hogwash. Lacking fundamental concepts such as alphabets, reading, math, numbers, shapes and all of the other foundational learning all children should have  I saw the dvd as what it was - a rudimentary puppet music video. There was nothing there to teach my child and nothing I could engage them on.

We did purchase another video program that my daughter loves. It presents vocabulary, and engenders reading and pronunciation skills. The repetition reinforces certain basic words and her vocabulary clearly is influenced by it. I can sit and work with her on the words and the images and I feel the hallmark of a good tool is something that gets parents engaged in helping the child learn.

The first video I watched was a baby gift, and  I was very curious how the dvd would engage a child's mind and supercharge it, propelling them to the levels of MENSA. Within the first few minutes I realized it was hogwash. Lacking fundamental concepts such as alphabets, reading, math, numbers, shapes and all of the other foundational learning all children should have  I saw the dvd as what it was - a rudimentary puppet music video. There was nothing there to teach my child and nothing I could engage them on.

We did purchase another video program that my daughter loves. It presents vocabulary, and engenders reading and pronunciation skills. The repetition reinforces certain basic words and her vocabulary clearly is influenced by it. I can sit and work with her on the words and the images and I feel the hallmark of a good tool is something that gets parents engaged in helping the child learn.

The End of GeoCities

It is easy to deconstruct Geocities as we look back at it. The semantic organization, the way it was broken into semi-relevant interest / industry groups, its California centric lingo. Yes we can knit-pick but what we should really do is marvel at the audacity of the idea to build and establish such a wide reaching community of web sites so early on.

1994 seems a long way back. I was in the middle of high school and we were learning rudimentary online computer skills. We slung e-mail via AOL or prodigy mail, but that was pretty much it. That and BBS role playing games.

The consideration point that makes me gasp in awe at GeoCities is the way that it was able to flex and meld with its population in order to accomodate as many of its 'homesteaders' as it could. The space was always evolving and web hosting was new, exciting, and frankly dificult unles you were a re comp-sci pro. It was one of the first mass website arenas and for those who used it, it was a great place to go, explore and creat. I hope Yahoo got thier $3.5 Billion dollars of stock's worth. They drove the comunity out of the community space and recently realized all they have left is ... an empty space. Yahoo closed Geocities today. I feel for those who lost their digital home.

Being Unprepared for Popularity

One thing that I always run into during project management and program development is that we tend to think short term, about current projected needs and usage, and fail to prepare for popularity. Brough Turner has a very lengthy (and technical) blog post about the current service issues with AT&T's wireless network and devices.

Beyond the technical, this is failure in planning. One of the key points that I saw in the post was that the buffering was set for zero packet loss (superior data integrity). In choosing that AT&T inadvertently created an over demand for their network and in turn delivered a lousy user experience. In trying to maximize data transfer they overloaded their circuits.

My understanding is that if there were fewer people o nthe network cuncurrently that it would function at zero packet loss, but the iPhuone sold so well that the popularity of the device is its downfall (and thier mobile 3G laptop antenna).

Additional Metrics to Judge By

As the web matures, new systems emerge that provide us with data about just about anything we can imagine. Enter Tuggl, s site and program designed to promote local cause marketing relationships between merchants and their local philanthropic activity.

Tuggl connects you with local businesses committed to making the world a better place. Now you can find the local products or services you need and support causes that speak to your heart.

As I see it tuggl is looking to create a vertical directory of localy engaged businesses. As our society fully embraces the ethos of 'green' , I think the enxt metric that matters is going to be the local engagement factor. When I was young local businesses used to sponsor T-ball and soccer teams. I think there is going to be a resurgence of this kind of community engagement on a wider and more public scale in the comming years.

Write Your Own Video

I recently saw a fantastic 'Beware Social Media Expert Video' on AdBroad that used Xtranormal as the creation engine. I loved it - not just for the witty and irreverent content, but also because of how user friendly xtranormal is.

Literally if you can write a story then you can make a movie. The technology is fascinating and  ihave just begun to explore it. In short order I think that animation products like this will enable people to make entertaining and meaningful presentations in a supremely protracted time frame. The value of a system like this will be determnie largely on the quality and focus of the content that drive the animation. I am eager to see the system's capacity for capturing a wider reel of interpersonal interactions grow and how others leverage it.

Social Media and H1N1

Over the last 15 years (Rushkoff Media Virus - 1994) we have heard the buzz term viral marketing and aside from sounding ominous, we as professionals continue to wax and wane about value tracking, conversion rates, efficacy, impressions and so forth. What is clear is that we are looking at systems and campaign design more closely than ever because we want to better understand our ROI.

Enter H1N1. One of the key things I hear is that there is a test todetermine if an individual has been exposed to H1N1. If you get the illness your body reacts to it and you can be tested for its presence even after you  recover. So the challenge is how can we tell if someone has been exposed to our viral campaign.

For to long we have relied on impression metrics, individual activities, and engagement measures to gauge ROI. We need new tools like trackable urls and other other non-invasive (tracking cookies = privacy concerns), and new aproaches beyond the typical canonic validation interaction.

Digital marekting has advantages over traditional media channels, but there are still opportunities yet to be realized. Total awareness of impact could be the defining metric defines digtial ROI. The creative mind that come up with how to pull that off should be celebrated accordingly.

Digital Branding Transparency - Brands in Public

I spent some time this morning looking over a site called Brands in Public. Brands in Public is a collection of interesting, accessible, public-facing dashboards for your favorite brands - displaying what is being said about the brand around the web. They aggregate data from Twitter, Quant Cast, Google Trends, Yahoo! News, and Black Type to provide a holistic view of the digital conversations around a brand.

The value in this broad view is that it not only brings in up to the moment conversations and juxtaposes them against historical data that provides a marketer a lot of information to gauge their position. As important as web analytics are, this kind off page commentary collection is a more genuine way to collect unsolicited and honest feedback about digital branding experiences.

Above and beyond understanding customer interaction with campaigns, you can also follow blog posts and forum discussions about a brand, segmented out by positive and negative sentiments. The one thing that I dislike is that as great as Brands in Public is at bringing in relevent data, it also bring in lots of irellevent data.

The site is only as good as its components, and in the case of Home Depot's page , there is a lot of chaff. Some of the searches are bringing in posts with only the word 'Home', or 'Depot' in them and that is generating a lot of extraneous material. Off topic posts and tweets cloud the overal view. I like the system of a single view to see all of the various aggregators. I hope as the individual parts improve so will Brands in Public.