mind this - by Lars Plougmann

Adoption of new communications technology in the financial sector - an anecdote from 1911

Concerning adoption of new communication technology, there are often parallels between what we are experiencing today and what has happened with previous waves of transformative technology. The adoption of social business often gets compared to take-up of email a couple of decades ago but it gets more interesting when we see similarities that span a century.

From Herbert Newton Casson's The History of the Telephone (A.C. McClurg & Co, Chicago 1911):

'Next to public officials, bankers were perhaps the last to accept the facilities of the telephone.'

Casson goes on to describe an early adopter at JP Morgan:

'At the present time, the banker who works closest to his telephone is probably George W. Perkins of the J.P. Morgan group of bankers. "He is the only man," says Morgan, "who can raise twenty millions in twenty minutes."

and:

'Recently one of the other members of the Morgan bank proposed to enlarge its telephone equipment. "What will we gain by more wires?" asked the operator. "If we were to put in a six-hundred pair cable, Mr. Perkins would keep it busy." '

Who is the George Perkins of social business in the financial sector today?

The Stone Age didn't end for lack of stone

News broke this month of a slowdown in Facebook's growth in the US.

The usual doubts arise in the wake of such an announcement. Are we past the peak? Are we getting tired of social networking? Was it all a fad?

Facebook is so prominent that news about the social network has a ripple effect. The news affect community building initiatives on Facebook itself but also elsewhere. Facebook has become the poster child for the power of social networking, so much so that all kinds of initiatives, even projects to introduce social business design into companies' internal processes, suffer when Facebook experiences a hiccup.

We have been here before: In 2007, doubts about social business initiatives flared up when Facebook experienced a drop in traffic. Growth swiftly resumed to propel the social network to more than 50 million users before the end of 2007. Today, the worldwide number of users is approaching 700 million.

As Facebook grows larger, continued growth is harder to attain and we may see the service settle into a steady state which could still be profitable. The possibility also exists that Facebook's popularity may be eclipsed by another service, just like MySpace before it.

We would do well to recall that "The Stone Age didn't end for lack of stone". Social Business is a far larger sea change than any single service no matter how popular and we will continue to see innovative new applications of social business principles leading to profound new ways of working and engaging with customers.

To be sure, Social Business as a term will start to decline one day, just as Enterprise 2.0 has probably peaked and is being subsumed into the former. But the principles and the dynamics will continue to develop and deliver personal and business value.

Five years of flickr

Today, it is five years ago that I started using flickr, the photo sharing service. Flickr has brought about a resurgence in my interest in photography, the site has provided a way to stay in touch with friends and family, it has allowed my photos to be seen around the world and used for purposes I would otherwise never have learned about. 

When I heard about flickr (launched in 2004), I was wondering why anybody would want to make their photos public. At the time, I was using Ofoto and other sites that allowed me to make albums available to people on an invitation-only basis. As people in my social network joined flickr in increasing numbers I decided to try it out. And I got hooked.

The user interface was simple and elegant. Tags were central to the way the site worked. The tone of voice playful and personal. The site stored photos without increasing compression to silly levels. Above all, the way it allowed people to interact and connect was meaningful. Simple but effective controls allayed privacy concerns. I soon discovered photo streams from which I could draw inspiration. People would leave helpful comments on my photos. This sparked a desire to become a better photographer, a journey I am still enjoying. 

A huge milestone was when flickr incorporated support for Creative Commons licenses. Realising that I am not going to make money off my photography, I decided to apply a liberal license (CC BY-SA) to my photographs. That has resulted in more than one hundred of my photos being used on other websites, in magazines and books, in Wikipedia, in print calendars even as an album cover. This kind of reach is something I could never have achieved as an amateur photographer without an agent. I use the tag ccpublished to track which photos have been used elsewhere. (I have actually sold one photo, it was discovered on flickr by an image agency; their client wanted to use it without attribution so they couldn't use it within the terms of the Creative Commons license.)

With more than 10,000 photos on flickr and a network of connections I am not going elsewhere for photo sharing anytime soon. I wish flickr made it easy to export statistics and comments for my photographs - in case Yahoo decided to call a stop to flickr. I am also concerned about falling foul of flickr's moderation policies which have reportedly resulted in people having their account cancelled with no prior warning. But most of all, I would like to sign up for an account that doesn't expire, even when I die. My father left behind a collection of wonderful photos; our generation has the ability to do the same, all neatly tagged and categorised and available on the web so that our children don't have to store it all in the attic.

From connection to transaction

The other evening I observed the following sequence of events.

My wife was using Facebook to introduce two people to each other. One of the people had in his timeline some messages from Shaun White of whom he is a fan. Having only heard about Shaun White because of the Wii game that carries his name I encouraged her to click through to Shaun White's facebook profile. Once there, we watched an impressive video with amazing slo-mo snowboarding stunts. The last ten seconds of the video featured a different song on the soundtrack than the rest of the video. Leilani thought she knew the song but couldn't quite place it. I got out my iPhone and we Shazam'ed the piece to learn that it was an 80s song, Pop goes the world by Men without hats. We looked up Men Without Hats on iTunes and learned that some of their songs were featured on an 80s compilation album: 60 songs for £4.49.

And she bought it.

Probably a pretty normal story, trivial really. From connection to transaction. After all, most of our purchases are the result of some influence or other. But the dynamics of the story are compelling in two ways:

• The chain of events traverses social networking, video streaming, a smartphone app and an online music store. Multimedia in the original sense of the phrase with all the big players represented: Facebook, Google and Apple.
• The underlying mechanics are large scale and complex in order to deliver a relatively simple experience: Server farms, pattern matching, payment processing, multi-party legal agreements.

Wikipedia as inspiration for enterprises

It has always been useful inside organisations to refer to Wikipedia as a successful example of a self-policed open community with an ex-post moderation policy. The proposed change to the Wikipedia moderation model is akin to allowing 'trusted' editors to continue with the ex-post moderation model while imposing stricter control for people who are not signed in or just created their account. (How, and if, Wikipedia may implement flagged revisions is still being discussed.)

In an organisation employees are, by default, trusted. They have been approved as part of their recruitment, they are given access to buildings and logins to systems, they are trusted to do work and make decisions, handle confidential information etc. Many are trusted to advise the clients of the organisation. In light of this, the proposed changes for the Wikipedia moderation policy have no impact on the parallels we like to draw.

Another angle that may enter the discussion when debating the openness of social tools inside organisations and the trustworthiness of information is that of transparency. If a false statement is made in an email, the process of correcting the error is more convoluted than in the wiki world where the "many eyes" effect is put to work. (The controversy resulting in the review of Wikipedia's moderation policy is about a false statement that was corrected a few minutes later.)

The current discussion does not detract from the usefulness of using wikis for process support or project collaboration inside organisations. But perhaps a bit of the magic surrounding Wikipedia as the flagship example will have worn off.

Tags: Wikipedia moderation trust

Local area World Wide Web

New York's 311 non-emergency hotline service struck me as a brilliant idea when I first heard about it. Imagine that on your way to work you spot a bollard that has been knocked over. Who do you call? The cost to the individual of researching where to direct the information is high and expectations of the call being handled efficiently are probably low. 311 introduces a single hotline where reports like the bollard example can be logged right away and routed to the proper authority.

An obvious expansion of the service, given that phones with GPS and cameras are becoming more widespread, would be sending a geotagged photo of, say, a nasty pothole or a broken swing at a playground to a 311-style email address. Often no explanation would be required, the picture would reveal the nature of the problem being reported.

While waiting for that service to become available in London it was a delight to learn about FixMyStreet. The site allows you to describe a local problem, which once it is logged on the site will get forwarded to the appropriate authority.

Looking at what had been reported in our local area of London I found this report detailing a problem that I had noticed but never really considered doing anything about:

The mix of mobile phone cameras, geotagging, easy reporting via the web and many eyes roaming the streets is promising.

Tags: FixMyStreet 311 geotagging

When social network fatigue sets in

Buzz and bandwagons usually lead to an oversaturation of a market before the bubble bursts and activity levels out at a sensible equilibrium. What happens when everything becomes a social network?

I have been getting frequent pings from Plaxo over the last six months or so, a service I stopped using a year or more ago. Looks like they are up to something new. Should I re-join before my invitations expire?

Tags: Plaxo social networks

All join in

In December, I had a delightful conversation with the BBC's Peter Day and his producer Rosamund Jones at the Headshift office in front of a microphone. The In Business programme about social networking aired on Radio 4 this week.

The interview touched on a host of subjects, but featured in the programme are:

• Negative feedback about a company's products and services on social network sites: Market signals are weak insofar that if demand dries up you don't necessarily know why. By listening to the discussions happening on blogs and groups on social networks you can get useful information about how your products and services are perceived and what aspects matter to your customers (I made the same point in August when I appeared on BBC News 24... well, I hope I did, it was aired live).
• The rise of the consumer-advertiser: A recommendation from people you know and trust is the most effective route to transaction. Social networks offer a powerful transmission mechanism for recommendations. It happens by itself but advertisers and social network providers are keen to monetise it.
• Declarative commerce: When you search for something on Google you are met with advertising linked to keywords because searching is one of the closest proxies to declared intention. But what if you could unequivocally declare your intention to buy a certain type of product or service? Imagine what companies would be willing to pay to offer you theirs. (The inspiration for this point is from Doc Searls and his thoughts on VRM and from John Battelle with his coining of the database of intentions.)
• Collaborating on ideas: Organisations can boost their innovative capability by sharing their ideas and inviting contributions from a wider group. This can happen internally as well as externally.
• Twitter in the enterprise: While a fair bit of traffic on Twitter could be considered mundane, I believe the use of ultra-short from-any-device-to-any-device no-action-required messaging inside the organisation has enormous potential to tie people together and spark relevant conversations. Let the stream of information flow by and engage when relevant. Low cost attention-wise. (Since the interview was recorded I have had the pleasure of reading similar thoughts much better phrased by JP Rangaswami.)

The programme also features Kara Swisher of All Things Digital, Peter Cunningham of Viadeo, Stephen Millard of Clearswift, Penny Davis of T-Mobile, Dan Black of Ernst & Young and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffmann. You can download an mp3 of the half hour broadcast from the BBC website.

Tags: BBC social networks consumer-advertiser declarative commerce twitter Peter Day podcast radio mp3

"It will never catch on"

With a few quotes about technology predictions to help get the audience in the right state of mind, Peter Day of the BBC and David Richards of The Stationers' Company opened this city livery company's summer forum.

The full title is The Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers; it dates back to 1403. The Stationers' Hall is a beautiful building near St Paul's Cathedral in central London. During a brief tour I learned about Caxton (who introduced the printing press to England) and it was explained to me that books would sometimes be burned in the courtyard (in previous centuries of course, alternating between books of protestant and catholic observation - depending on the persuasion of the regent).

This year's summer forum looked beyond the printed word representing a departure from earlier forums that rarely strayed far from the 'ink-on-paper' history. "It will never catch on" was chosen as the tongue-in-cheek title of the forum. With speakers from The Daily Telegraph, Orange and Apple, the discussion touched on the digital newsroom, mobile services based on IMS and podcasting in education.

I was asked to speak about the changes that use of the internet is bringing about and the implications for existing means of communication and sources of information. "It should all be done without slides or overheads, merely an eloquent and persuasive address", I was briefed. Presenting without using slides as a crutch was something I hadn't done before, but compared to being asked to share my thoughts on ideas barely a decade old with an organisation of 600 years' standing that part of the challenge faded in significance.

Using what I see as the main trends today (open, free, social, simple, mobile) I described how technology and an ever more connected world is leading to decreasing barriers to entry and increasing choice. Those tools that prove themselves on the open internet get adopted by organisations allowing them to tap into the benefits brought about by decreasing transaction costs; not just cost of mechanical or financial transactions but complex ones involving people connected to each other in formal and informal social networks. The cost of experimenting with technology is also coming down and as such it is easier to test if something is likely to ever catch on.

Assisted serendipity and the digital side of travelling

Twelve years ago, on a trip to San Francisco, two friends of mine passed by a one-hour photo shop and stopped to marvel at the photo printer in the window. The printer was spitting out freshly printed photos in plain view and that is how Rodney recognised his uncle in a series of photos, posing in front of famous San Francisco landmarks. Rodney did not know that his uncle was in San Francisco but after the discovery they managed to meet up. Small world.

What is the probability of somebody you know being in the same city as you at the same time? What is the Bayesian of finding out about it or actually meeting up?

The familiar anecdotes about the world being small are about to go out of fashion if a new fusion of social networks and the geographic web takes of.

Dopplr is a web based tool that allows you to publish your travel plans to people you trust. Log in, and the main page will show you who will be at any of the future destinations you are planning to travel to.

For years, Plazes has enabled you to find out who is close to your current position. In the new version launched this week, you can also input your future travel plans and see friends' future locations.

Whether boosting serendipity or just lending a helping hand with the logistics of a meeting, services like this would come in handy both for social purposes and business (of course, business is a social activity too).

The same way sharing a physical location ties people together, assisted serendipity makes sense in other dimensions as well. Adoption of social tools within organisations would, say, help a team in Finland find the people in China with an idea that solves a problem they are grappling with, and identify the influencer in Turkey who will sponsor the project to apply the idea. Without any of them ever having heard of the others before. Big companies like a smaller world too.

Tags: Dopplr Plazes serendipity geographic+web social+tools