Theme: Where S the Working in Social Networking?

PRESENTATION NOTES

BUDD UK NETWORKING EVENT

6 DECEMBER 200 CENTRAL LONDON

Theme: “Where’s the ‘working’ in social networking?’

Q: “What’s the most powerful force in the Universe?”

A: (Appears when I click) The need to connect.

Bowling Alone. Disintegration of social connections. Back cover.

Social networking in all its forms (I’m including multi-player roleplayer games here) on the web is rebuilding this social cohesion.

It’s not gone. It’s just moved to The Web.

Working in a cupboard in a village in North Oxfordshire. US, Singapore, Russia, Kenya, Australia. at least partly through a collaboration platform based on social networking principles – The Leadership Hub.

My IP lawyer for The Leadership Hub is based in Sydney. I’ve never met him face to face. We met in a blog comment exchange in Tom Peters’ website. Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan. Now he’s working with me on The Leadership Hub as my IP lawyer. Where’s the ‘working’ in social networking’? D’uhhhhh…as my son would say.

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SLIDE

“For most people, the human drive to connect and share is stronger than the duty to spend every possible moment being productive.”

This is a great point. But, at the same time, it misses the even bigger point. The two are not opposites. They are not mutually exclusive. I’d go further: It’s PART AND PARCEL of being productive.

‘Markets are conversations’. Two stories and a fact

1. Water cooler exchanges

Xerox

Engineer’s rest room around a drinks machine.

Remove the drinks machine?

2. Marine insurance company (ten years ago)

Gossip database

Big claim for ruined cargo of rice

Rang a bell in the claim handler’s mind

Found in the db a log of a conversation in a bar in Singapore between a local shipping agent and one of the crew, who said he had warned the captain that some of the rice bags were damaged and they shouldn’t accept the cargo.

Prior knowledge invalidated the claim.

3. 70% of our information exchange and learning is informal. It’s gossip, stories, anecdotes – Aidan Halligan

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Q: “What’s the other most powerful force in the Universe?”

(Appears when I click) A: The need to be in control

Hence the rise of co-creation.

For the first time, Web 2.0 puts the controls of the web in everyone’s hands.

It’s the ‘read-write’ web.

Used to be most websites published TO the site user.

Producer/consumer split.

Now it’s a whole new ballgame.

What is Web 2.0 technology?

Blogging, wikis, instant messaging, gaming technology – avatars that interact

Moving from monologue to conversation. (Markets are conversations).

Millions of fragmented markets of one – that’s what Davenport is missing.

The ‘CCS’ Content Creation System – is put at least partly in the hands of the users.

(The ‘CMS’ – Content Management System – is an established acronym. ‘CCS’ isn’t so familiar, which says something about how acronyms tell last year’s story).

* * *

- screenshot of home page, please

An example of co-creation and the slow death of the supplier/consumer relationship as it morphs into the c0-creator/co-creator relationship

-Upload your picture and it becomes the picture on the label on your soda (same tool/principle as uploading your picture to The Leadership Hub or to Facebook)

-Upload a paragraph – anything you want to say – and it becomes the wording on the label on the back of the bottle (like uploading a paragraph about yourself to create a profile on a social networking site)

-Pay them $30 and a few days later a carry case of a dozen bottles of your own co-created soda is delivered to your door

According to Peter Fisk, MyJones is now the second soft drinks company in Canada after Coke. It’s beating Pepsi.

2. The pigeon that blogs

(pic of a pigeon, too?)

Roland Piquepaille technology blog.

The point is….

It used to be said REAL networking is face to face. You can’t network properly over the web.

That’s crap

b. Another false polarity. The two are not opposites. The pigeon is not behind a screen. Yet the data it is transmitting is. As the pigeon moves in the real world, the data changes in the virtual world. RF goods tracking etc. We exist outside and inside the Net at the same time. The barriers are down. The virtual world is the real world is the virtual world.

THE SINGULARITY

Ray Kurzweil. Futurist.

Cyborg people and machine merge. Chips in arms etc.

Neuron in a global brain

It’s happening now and it’s not about cyborg 6 Million dollar woman stuff.

It’s happening with social networking, with Web 2.0, with Blackberries, with ‘always on’ web in your pocket.

BUT, again it’s not an opposite. We are individuals first – markets of one – and neurons in a global brain or in different social communities, as and when we want to be

It’s a question of IDENTITY. We now have multiple identities. And we borrow from one to feed others. Our social identity feeds and overlaps with our work identity.

EBay is a social network – ANDREW ZOLLI – Large company analysed job applications. Seven in the previous month had said in their job application form, as evidence they could be trusted, that they had 100% positive feedback on eBay.

IHG press release about its new meeting rooms. They don’t exist in the real world. They exist in Second Life. And people pay real money to use them.

Companies are all over Second Life.

3. The Paradox It’s not about Facebook

OR It’s all about Facebook

Budd in Facebook. Groups in Facebook

Largest growing group is 40-something men who think the party is going on. (Bound to kill its cool).

Facebook is setting out to be the operating system of the web

Opened its code – so you can use the API to write your own programs – little widgets and gizmos – for Facebook.

Google has set up its Open Social API, which it hopes all social networking sites will buy into. Because you don’t want to create your profile again and again.

Google is setting out to be the operating system of the Web, just as Windows is the Operating System of the desktop.

Linked-In is a £240 million company.

CONCLUSION: THE ONE WORD YOU NEED TO KNOW

In The Graduate, the young Dustin Hoffman character, Benjamin, is given one word of advice for his career. He’s told this is the one word he needs to focus on to understand the way the world is going and to profit from it. And that word, he is told, is……PLASTICS.

Johnnie Moore, in his weblog , has come up with the one word that tells us where all this Web 2.0 and social networking and business networking and online learning and collaboration using Web 2.0 tools is going.

And that word, says Johnnie; the one word you need to hold in your head, is….VELCRO.

The ties that bind today are manifold, strong and weak*, but at the same time can be peeled away individually, with new ones taking their place, as we choose.

*Google ‘weak ties’ for the principle behind ‘weak’ forces that connect people in social networks and the paradox that some of those will become the strong forces that bind a community together.

ENDS PRESENTATION NOTES