Month: May 2009

Categories
Passion

Power to the people

Maria Sipka is on cloud nine. And it doesn’t look like she’s coming down any time soon. Last month her new venture, Linqia, secured a second round of funding. And yesterday she heard that Plug and Play – the high powered US incubator – will seed Linqia’s expansion in the States.

But the thing that’s really got her buzzing was an event organised by Procter and Gamble on Wednesday night: in the last 36 hours Maria’s team has raised £7,265 to help vaccinate newborn babies against Tetanus – all as the result of a social media campaign that they set up in minutes.

“This event was held in Geneva last Wednesday and 200 employees from all over Europe attended, plus 50 people from social media – Google, MySpace etc. Over a few hours, they created this amazing experience.

“You can’t get 200 people in a room and motivate them without having a story to tell: social media is all about story-telling. P&G have this initiative with UNICEF, fronted by Salma Hayek, funding Tetanus vaccinations – the idea was to raise money for the cause.

“The event lasted around two hours. The way it was set up is that there were five different rooms with about 50 people in each room. We all walked into our assigned rooms and had to get started. I didn’t know what was going on, no-one knew what was going on. Everyone was like a herd of sheep.

“It was collaboration on a massive scale. At the start, it was the simple act of just sharing information: ‘What’s going on here?’. Then we had about ten minutes to define our strategy. And the leader (each room had a designated leader) asked ‘Shall we all work on the same thing or should each table do something different?’.

“We said ‘Let’s each do something different’ – so we had one table deciding key influencers, another table looking at SEO, one generating content, another identifying ‘big fish’ – super wealthy people – and another covering media buyers.

“And then it was like ‘Bang – go!’. And on the fly we had to define strategies. So I was sitting there telling people what Twitter was, for example. I had to identify ten followers who had a lot of followers: Mike Butcher, Robert Scoble etc. As a result of that initiative I had exposure to 100,000 people.

“Every time something important happened it flashed up on a big screen. And we could also see the results [of the fundraising] in real time. Someone called Salma Hayek and got her to donate. Someone else said ‘Hey who are the 100 most followed on Twitter? And got on the phone to Ashton Kutcher. Every time there was a success we celebrated it. We raised £12,000 in two hours, we were trending on Twitter. People’s heads were spinning.

“Overall more than £30K has been raised since Wednesday night. And that’s all as the result of a campaign which we invented on the spot – the great thing is that we got quick tangible results. That’s the sort of uplifting experience that says to anyone ‘You can do it!’”

The experience has created a Eureka moment for Maria:

“One of the biggest issues is getting people internally to evangelise. There’s no better way to indoctronate than to get people involved in an activity…This type of format works really well in convincing the cynics. It could be used anywhere.”

If engaging people and inciting their passion is the best way to get them to learn, it looks like Procter and Gamble have found a great way to crack it.

Categories
Passion

Your space or mine?

Steve Lawson’s mum is on Twitter and she loves it.

“I showed her my Twitter page. I showed her people we knew who were already on Twitter. I said you can now see what I’m up to and make funny comments about it and I’ll know what you’re up to. She said that’s fantastic, what a great little tool!'”

Steve’s a musician based in London; his mum is retired and lives in a tiny village in Scotland, so social media is a great way to keep in touch.

“She gets it because she curates the space. It’s not branded. She decides who she wants to follow. She can block people. She feels in control. One of the reasons she got into it was that I didn’t use the language of social media to explain it to her: I used the language of conversation and of letter writing.”

Steve’s a true social media champion. His blog gives regular updates on his very “2.0” approach to doing business:

“My entire career has been created online. I had a hunch early on that record labels weren’t the way to go. I set up my first website in 1997/8 and put out my first record beginning of 2000. I put a load of my first gig up online, and there were people who wanted to buy my CDs. The process of my ‘art’ happening in dialogue with my audience was already there.”

Steve joined MySpace in 2004 and now has 949 friends there, compared to 2,097 followers on Twitter, so it’s not hard to guess which network he prefers.

As Steve points out, MySpace is alienating to anyone over 30:

“They’ve used this pop culture language. People who are 50 look at it and think ‘Why the f*** would I want to be on MySpace? What a complete waste of time’! When they log onto the MySpace front page and see Lily Allen or Eminem and they’re barely literate, they think ‘Why do I want to be part of all that?’…[The message is] ‘It’s our space, and you’re invited to be in it, on our terms’.

All this wouldn’t be so bad if MySpace wasn’t one of social media’s flagbearers.

So, for anyone needing reassurance about taking the online networking plunge, apart from getting stuck into Twitter, what else does Steve recommend?

He’s a great fan of [fellow musician] Pat Kane’s book, The Play Ethic:

“I really like Pat Kane’s take on all this. He says: “It’s a big playground, a space to mess around in, not everything’s of massive significance. There are all these people who feel they need to ‘get’ it or they’re a failure but when you frame it as just a conversation removed from the limitations of proximity…just like walking into a bar…that makes it all seem much more accessible.”

Categories
Sharing

Planet Rock

It’s nearly a month since the launch of Audioboo and Mark Rock is quietly pleased with progress.

This morning the social audio network was name-checked by Chris Moyles on his Radio One show. Tony Blackburn, Stephen Fry and the BBC’s Technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones are all fans.

Corporate clients include The BBC, ITV and The British Library.

Audioboo enables people to record and upload audio from anywhere using an i-phone. The technology will soon be available via other mobile phone networks.

Audioboo is not only easy to use – it’s completely free.

When Mark’s company, Best Before Media, launched Audioboo in partnership with Channel 4’s 4IP fund, they decided to make it a “Freemium” service.

This means that the majority of users can access the software for free; a small proportion (currently around 5 per cent) pay a monthly subscription of £2.95 for additional features (eg: easier uploading, larger photo allowance) while a tiny number of corporate clients pay around £500 a month for customised versions.

There are three reasons for launching Audioboo like this, says Mark:

1. It’s a social network so it doesn’t work without content
2. The costs of adding each extra user are minimal
3. It’s an innovative product – a relatively new idea

Podcasters love Audioboo: earlier this year, Christian Payne (aka Documentally) audiobooed the birth of his son. And news journalists are also finding it useful: when BBC reporter Matthew Weaver forgot his digital recorder at the G20 protests in London in March, he used Audioboo instead.

Mark is keen to build on this initial enthusiasm: he has ambitions for his new baby to be “the audio version of Twitter or Flickr”.

So he’s been thinking a lot about “sound ecology” (our aural environment) and speaking to people called “acousticians. Like all true innovators, Mark is carving out a market for something that we don’t know we needed – until now. Mark sells it winningly:

“When my three years old is 15, imagine how great it will be to have an audio record of her life!”

Every profile and tag on Audioboo has an RSS feed. And users can create audio maps featuring any type of sound they like. Soon, Best Before will publish an API that’ll enable people to build applications that expand Audioboo’s functionality. It’s very much a work in progress.

“It’s an agile model. The customer is more important than the business plan. You iterate. It’s all about trying stuff. Because a product isn’t fully developed, it means you launch as free.”

It’s early days and the product has yet to become profitable, but Mark is optimistic for the future. He cites networks such as Flickr, Vimeo, Last.FM and Spotify as examples of other networks apparently succeeding with the Freemium model.

There are competitors in this space: Twitmic and Evernote – but Mark’s social focus may just give him the edge.

Part of the challenge is thinking laterally. Among other plans, Audioboo hopes to tie in with The Guardian Hay Festival later this year. Watch the the Best Before blog for further updates!

Categories
Context

Us Now: fave quotes

“Any system that tries to apply rules to human behavior leaves itself open to being gamed. It’s scarey. Not everyone can cope with it. But I think if you show trust, then what tends to happen is that you reduce the incentive to game the system substantially, so just by being open and showing trust you can actually protect yourself.”
– Lee Bryant, Headshift

“It’s just the beginning of this fantastic phenomenon. It’s really a very powerful force for good – the potential for people to connect in this way.”
– MT Rainey, Horse’s Mouth

“There are lots of challenges in doing something like this. There’ll be sabouters, there’ll be some people who won’t have access to the web, there’s the whole complexity of millions of ideas and how these can aggregate together and the good ones come to the core. But these are all in the category of implementation challenges, they’re not in the category of reasons not to do it.”
– Don Tapscott

Categories
Context

Us Now launches online

Us Now from Banyak Films on Vimeo.

Ivo Gormley’s new (ish) film, backed by The RSA and ThinkPublic, is a timely look at how social media is impacting on political power. For anyone who couldn’t make or didn’t get to know about last year’s London premier, it’s great news that the entire film is (as of yesterday) available to view online – thanks to some hard coding work from Chris Thorpe at Jaggeree.

Case studies include travellers’ accommodation swap network Couch Surfing, peer to peer telephone exchange The People Speak, people’s bank Zopa, music financing engine Slice The Pie and fan-owned football team, Ebbsfleet United.

I love the score (originally composed by Orlando Robertson), the time-lapse photography (courtesy of Guy Gormley) and the overall optimistic message: I like the way the music gets scarey and the tone becomes dark as back-packer Eric looks up his couch-surfing host in a dimly-lit back street – only to be confronted by a smiley bloke cooking pasta.

Not surprisingly, Clay Shirky dominates the talking heads (the film opens and closes with his quotes) but there’s a rich seam of interviewees ranging from Shirky and Don Tapscott through our own home-grown experts Lee Bryant and MT Rainey to the less familiar faces of “ethical hacker” Shane Kelly and Mumsnet user Lorayn Brown. But it’s a shame JP Rangaswami didn’t make the final cut: he would have been a welcome non-white voice in an otherwise monotone selection.

Overall, a great film. There’s only one thing I’d disagree with: the claim (by Alan Cox) that some programmers had used Linux to hack their car speedometres to play Ride of the Valkyries as “a reminder to slow down” when they’d gone over the speed limit. Yeah, right.

Categories
Passion

Who do you think you are?

The first time I meet Chris Thorpe aka Jaggeree it’s at the tail end of a pre-Christmas drinking session in a pub round the back of King’s Cross. Maybe it’s only fair that today he’s plumped for rather more sophisticated surroundings just up the road: the foyer of the spanking new Kings Place concert hall.

The light, airy atrium dotted with Terence Coventry sculptures would probably exude serenity if it weren’t for the lunch-time hoardes, serial tannoy announcements and one cute but kamikaze toddler.

But we’re talking social, so I guess this is all okay.

Chris is the Developer Platform Evangelist for MySpace; this means he spends his time liaising between developers, users and brands, and thinking about what these people/entities actually want from each other. Primarily, he’s interested in why and how people use social networks.

“Your engagement with social media is very much to do with your intent: and your intent on LinkedIn is very different from your intent on MySpace. MySpace’s audience is very engaged with media. The ties between friends are slightly weaker than, say, on Facebook, but weak ties are strengthened by a common shared interest in content – music, film and games.”

“There’s no such thing as a prototypical social network. Facebook is pretty much a Salesforce for friends. MySpace is more of a friend discovery network – in the same way as Twitter: it’s all about finding new friendships.”

As the world’s most popular social network, Facebook’s appeal seems to be ever broader: older people joining to view photos of their grandchildren while teens sign up as they outgrow other networks and want to see what all the fuss is about.

Just 12 months ago, MySpace’s user base was more or less level with Facebook. But recent figures show that Facebook’s reach is now double that of MySpace: MySpace reported just 124 million monthly unique visitors in February compared to Facebook’s 276 million.

MySpace may be consolidating its user base but the seam it mines is a rich one: it is still the ‘must have’ network for bands and musicians. Nonetheless, whereas on Facebook or LinkedIn, your “friends” or “contacts” lists might be sacrosanct, on MySpace the switching costs (ie: the expense of moving to another profile or network) are possibly slightly lower:

“It’s not necessarily the cost of losing friendships, more about the cost of building up another identity. On MySpace people are happy to shed identities: they’ll close down one profile and build up a new one. MySpace is about trying new things on: bands, crazes, even politics. It’s about discovery of things – and of yourself.”

“If it’s all about building a persona then that’s only authentic for a certain period. Authenticity is time-based. I used to be a research scientist – now I work in social software. [Furthermore] if you think about how you are in real life, you expose different facets to different people: we fine tune what we say depending on who we’re talking to.”

One thing’s for sure, your funky, expressive MySpace profile (and certainly the one you may have flouted when you were 16) is probably not the one you’d like your future boss or current business colleagues to have access to.

This is the one area in particular that Chris sees as ripe for exploitation:

“When I ask people what makes them uncomfortable about social media the issue that always comes up is the one of being friends with colleagues…okay, so the gap between work and life is disappearing, but this just shows the massive need for more work social intranets.”

Indeed, if your boss is desperate to be your friend, let him/her hang out with you during work hours – don’t impinge on my downtime, dude!

Categories
Listening

Five tips for corporate Twitterers

Today is the deadline for her Twitter book, but Danish entrepreneur Natasha Saxberg is impressively un-flustered. The manuscript is more or less ready, and she’s time for a quick chat about what makes Twitter work so well as a business tool.

“The border between the internal and external operations of an organisation is melting away…the big potential here is for a company to get out there with product development and talk to the customer before it launches a product, listen to what the customer has to say and learn and innovate from that.”

These are Natasha’s tips for connecting with customers via Twitter:

1. People relate to people not organisations so make your profile as natural as possible.

2. Be confident. Remember the format for Twitter is simple: everyone has something to contribute.

3. Be completely aware of your reasons for using Twitter: is it to listen? To learn?

4. Find role models. Seek out people who share your interests and follow them. Ask yourself what is it about their updates that makes them interesting.

5. Choose some subjects that really interest you, that you really ‘burn’ for, and focus on these – that way you’ll sound more passionate and others will connect with you more.

Natasha’s book on Twitter is due out soon; unfortunately it’s in Danish, but if you’d like to find out more about her work (in English), you can follow her on Twitter and/ or visit her blog.