February 26th, 2008 by mhjones

Ah, the sweet irony. After recording the latest episode of The Scoop - titled “The end of social networking?” - I decided it was worth updating the tag at the end of the show which includes a reference to our facebook group.

In case you’ve been under a digital rock, it’s now become fashionable to talk about how you’re either deleting your facebook account, moving to another platform, or declaring you never thought it would take off anyway. Personally, I think it’s a case of back to the future with email, as I’ve argued before.

So given that I’ve planted my flag in the ground on this subject, it will be really interesting to see what happens at ad:tech Sydney. I’m moderating a panel on social media and we’re discussing if a value proposition has emerged? I’m really looking forward to the conversation. Check out the panel’s lineup:

• Rebekah Horne,Vice President Australia & New Zealand, Fox Interactive Media
• Adrian Toy, Regional Director Digital, Universal McCann
• Francisco Cordero, General Manager, Bebo
• Mike Murphy, VP, Media Sales, Facebook

Update: Jon Udell (the bloke who first introduced me to blogging), points to a second generation of social networking…

“…social networks that you have to explicitly join are artificial and ungraphable. But we agreed that these first-generation online social networks are fostering a culture of self-disclosure, and that they may lead to a second generation of more naturalistic systems: bottom-up, ad-hoc, peer-to-peer.”

Tagged: Social media, The Scoop
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February 20th, 2008 by mhjones

What is Enterprise 2.0? To paraphrase Harvard Business School’s Andrew McAfee at yesterday’s Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum, it’s a term that describes the use of social software by companies. Think Web 2.0 for the suits.

(Cartoon source: Geek and Poke)

So that’s the definition, but what about real world applications? Forum host Ross Dawson assembled some interesting local case studies, and you can listen to their presentations and the Q&A session on The Scoop. (Btw, it’s the first time I’ve done a live recording of a panel using my Zoom H4. The feed out of the desk was a little hot for some of the speakers, but with a bit of digital spit and polish I’m largely satisfied with the result.)

There’s plenty of blog coverage out there from the event, including posts from Brad, Trevor, Mick (plus more from him at Phil Morle on Tangler), and of course Ross’ own reflections.

As for me, it’s been interesting to reflect on the expectations that we bring to this discussion. If you’re a digital marketer, you want to know how social media effectiveness can be measured in terms of ROI and sales leads. If you’re in business, there’s a sense that Enterprise 2.0 should add significant business value. Andrew McAfee’s assessment was that we expect any new collaboration tool to be at least 10x better than the incumbent technology - email.

Expressed in more simple terms, we’re impatient for success. Enterprise 2.0 is part of a broader, very significant shift in the way we communicate and collaborate. We’re still experimenting, and those on the bleeding edge like those in featured in my podcast are blazing the trail. It strikes me that to simply sit back and demand instant success does not reflect the spirit of what’s happening here. It’s the different between participation and consumption. Consumers say “gimme!”, while those in social software are prepared to take a risk and get their hands dirty.

We got a chance to flesh out some of these issues during roundtable sessions at the event. I attended one hosted by Capgemini’s CTO Peter Evans-Greenwood called “Effective implementation of Enterprise 2.0.” Here’s the notes I typed into my dopod 838: Read the rest of this entry »

Tagged: MISaustralia.com, New media, Podcasting, Social media, The Scoop, Weblogs
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February 13th, 2008 by mhjones

Hey, are you one of the thousands of people who download The Scoop each month?  How are we doing? What topics would you like us to discuss? Want to come on the show?

Join The Scoop’s Facebook group and let us know.

Tagged: New media, Social media, The Scoop
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February 13th, 2008 by mhjones

There are moments in life when the actions of a leader instantly connect with, and shift the mindset of an entire population.

Australia’s PM Kevin Rudd defined that moment today. In the first instance he made good on an election promise. But more than that, he went beyond saying “sorry” and pushed for partisan, practical strategies to address the cultural divide between indigenous Australians and the rest of us who came later.

Today’s speech was, in my opinion, deeply profound. Yes, he’s deeply buried the Howard legacy (a man who was conspicuous in his absence). But more importantly I believe that when a spirit of reconciliation is embedded into the culture from the top down, real change can, and will actually begin.

A few things I will remember about today:

• Explaining to my inquisitive 4 year old daughter why we are saying sorry on behalf of other people
• Realising that Rudd has the makings of a statesman (it’s about time we had one in Australia)
• Watching the spontaneous standing ovation after Rudd’s speech
• Wondering what on earth possessed opposition leader Brendan Nelson to imply there were cases when it was appropriate to take Aboriginal children from their parents. News Ltd report: “Our generation does not own these actions nor should it feel guilt for what was done in many, but certainly not all cases, with the best of intentions,” [Nelson] said. No wonder the crowds outside parliament turned their backs.

SMH report here, and video and text of the speech over at the ABC here.

Tagged: Government, Random musings
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February 6th, 2008 by mhjones

There’s a new social networking revolution brewing. Let me tie together a few threads.

There’s a growing chorus of people who rightly observe that social networking sites will begin morphing into something even greater this year. A reporter from The Economist eloquently argues over on Chris Saad’s blog that stand-alone social networks will dissolve. It’s not just an opinion. MySpace’s growth seems to have stalled, according to Creative Capital’s coverage of ComScore numbers.

Then it’s interesting to read between the lines of what Google’s Marissa Myer told VentureBeat:

I think there is the possibility of taking a social network and combining some element of annotations and searches done. For example, if I have 400 friends on Facebook, and I knew 10 of them all searched for one topic today, that might interest me. So aggregate statistics might work. In truth, there are a bunch of things you could try.

Marissa talks about “social search” because that points to Google’s machine-oriented mindset. Patterns and relationships among social networks can be automated and analysed by Google’s server farms. It’s a perfect science project for Google’s hoard of engineers.

But there’s a deeper agenda at work here, and it’s connected with our desire to congregate around discreet destinations on the web. In the early days we had public web portals like Netscape and Yahoo! Then we moved to media portals and an interconnected web of corporate sites and third parties. Somewhere in here many of us discovered RSS-powered newsreaders helped us sort through the chaff (I still rely on Bloglines, for example), so they becames something of portal to the web. Next up was the social bookmarking wave with del.icio.us and StumbleUpon notable examples.

In the background, search technology continued to tie the social web together despite the fact social networks like Facebook and MySpace rose to dominate the Internet agenda with grand (back to the future) portal plans. They were building discreet, proprietary social destinations. Walled gardens that hark back to AOL days.

Now it seems Google is creating a new paradigm. As VentureBeat writes of Marissa (in the article linked above): “She hints Gmail may be used to identify your friends, using their search history to influence search results for you and those in your social network.”

The stark reality is that social networking sites come and go. Email, on the other hand, is the great constant. Google, Yahoo! and MSN’s greatest assets are their free email accounts. Email might be out of fashion with some young people, particularly in South Korea, but for the vast majority of people it’s still where we store our contacts, keep valuable documents, and communicate with people.

Put in economic terms, free email providers still “own” (or at least faciliate) much of the baseline social networking and business conversations on the web. Even social networking sites rely on automated email services to notify users of changes to their profiles and sites.

To further illustrate the point, here’s a slide from a presentation that I give to corporates on social media, which shows why small and medium sized companies get broadband connections:

The short answer? Email.

Social networking, search, bookmarks, e-commerce, marketing, and venture capital are colliding to give us Email 3.0. The question is whether anyone can beat Google to the finish line.

Tagged: Online, Social media
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