NESTA hosted a lovely panel discussion yesterday with Stephen Fry, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, who discussed Twitter as a force for good - see a video of the event here.
Biz talked about the way Twitter was developed, like so many other interesting services, as a side-project, which then quickly evolved into something remarkable thanks to its sheer simplicity and malleability. He said that early reactions from potential investors suggested they couldn't see past this simplicity, and this was echoed by Reid Hoffman, who was told by VCs in 2003 that social networking would be a feature of dating sites, recruiting sites and other existing destination web sites, but not a meaningful service in its own right. Talking about future social networking services, Reid said "You ain't seen nothing yet," and suggested we have only just begun to explore the power of people, connected. How we connect with other people gives us meaning in life, and he thinks there are many more ways in which we will explore this notion with future products and services - with the next wave of web innovation being about what we do with the massive amounts of data and ... read more >>
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The European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA) has published its Internet Barometer Report (via Marketing Charts), which shows that 83% of European marketers plan to up their online ad spend in 2010. One in three (33%) organisations are now including mobile in their strategies confirming the increasing importance of the mobile Internet. But at the same time,one of the key drivers for marketers, in addition to changing consumer habits, is the perception that you get more bang for your buck online, with 31% citing cost efficiencies as a factor behind their decision. There’s of course a very important health warning with that, namely the on-going debate about click through rates in online advertising.  In fact, in the Summer Double Click (via Indolent) published research about engagement with Internet advertising and found that the UK performed worst with a 0.08% click through rate compared to the US (0.1%), France (0.12%) and Germany (0.13%) .
However, at the same time Comscore has results out showing that when combined with a social engagement, people are more than twice as likely to search for brands online. In that sense maybe on and offline ... read more >>
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This is another in a series of notes from the 2009 KM World. It is titled: Is Semantic Technology Real? It is moderated by Rob Gonzalez, Platform Product Manager, Endeca Technologies and include: Michael J. Cataldo, CEO, Cambridge Semantics, Daniela Barbosa, Business Development Manager, Dow Jones Client Solutions, Dow Jones & Company, Lorenzo Thione, Founder / Principal Program Manager, Powerset / Bing Microsoft, Inc. Here is the session description. “Semantic technology is all the rage, sometimes even dubbed “Web 3.0.” However, many people—especially those making technology decisions for enterprises—wonder whether semantic technology has meaningful applications in the enterprise. Based on hands-on experience working with semantic tools, this panel of experts will establish the boundaries between reality and hype and help you understand what enterprises can gain from semantic technology in the here and now.” Cambridge Semantics provides semantic development tools. Dow Jones Client Solutions helps clients with taxonomy solutions, as well as other information needs. Powerset was acquired by Microsoft. It is Web semantic search tool. Rob ...
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by B. L. Ochman
While thousands of companies have either experimental or well-established presence on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social media sites, those communities remain invisible on all but a tiny fraction of company homepages. Why do companies hide their social media efforts from visitors? My guess is that their reasons include
o fear that they'll lose control of their brand if too many people know they can have a say;
o lack of cooperation between marketing and IT;
o and perhaps pressure from lawyers who are nervous about new-fangled new media. It's hard to find a company website whose homepage easily and clearly allows visitors to see all of the its social media initiatives. You'd have to be Nancy Drew to find the company blog on most websites, or its Facebook page, or all of its YouTube videos.  Starbucks new homepage, recently re-designed, stands head and shoulders above the rest for clarity, ease of use and organization. Clean and clear, it has a community heading above the fold, and clearly lists Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, among other links.
A few companies try to curate their content effectively, including:
o Dell ... read more >>
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Metaphors and stories are powerful things - far better than numbers at showing how powerful human interactions can be and how much they impact the world at large - or sometimes in the small. When it comes to Social CRM, one thing that we've been saying over and over is that Gen Y drove the changes but they aren't exclusive to their effects or use. In fact, the generation that follows Gen Y is even more savvy than the echo boomers themselves. They are multitaskers who didn't know a day without the Internet or a computer - not a single day. So, due to an extraordinary circumstance and Facebook, I'm going to let one of these younger-than-Yers tell you a story about something he did. This is Rio Bowerman, folks. Rio is the son of Elissa Amoroso Bowerman who was a neighbor of mine when we grew up as kids in East Meadow NY. Due to Facebook and fortuitous circumstance, I had the opportunity to meet with Elissa and hang out with her for awhile when I was at the Gartner Summit in Scottsdale a few months ago. In the course of this lovely hour or so, I got the chance to meet her son Rio who has quite a history already though he's only 18. He was Chef Rio and on national TV from the ages of ...
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We wrote here about LinkedIn’s groups, and how to network through them. An associate of mine told me that it didn’t work for him. When I asked him why, I understood his that he came in too strong by putting a link immediately after joining. This was considered spamming, and he paid the price. Here’s a lesson for all of us. 
Spam- by David, on Flickr. Joining a LinkedIn group gives you the opportunity to communicate with other members of the group and also to post your content there. My associate was thrilled to find another place to put links to his site. While this can indeed be a nice platform for receiving quality traffic, from a well targeted group of professionals, this approach doesn’t always satisfy the group administrators. The big mistake that he did was not to read the rules. The group rules strictly stated no links! I believe that if you’re a veteran member of such a group, and you make such a sin as leaving a link in the discussion board, you’ll probably be forgiven. Well, my associate was not only hasty not to read the rules, but posted the link within hours of joining the group. This behavior was considered spammy by the group’s administrator, that used the ... read more >>
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 Amidst a surging global economy, rising environmental challenges,poverty and food crisis ,corruption continues to pervade most human societies.This is revealed in the annual global corruption and country indices report prepared by Transparency international. The 2009 Transparency international Corruption Index released on Tuesday in Berlin,Germany indicates " that no region of the world is immune to the perils of corruption". As usual this blog has always taken an interest in the corruption index and makes it a point to discuss the report on annual basis. In this years Corruption Index Kenya has improved with a point from 2008 where its corruption perception index was placed at 2.1 to 2.2 in 2009.Indicating that there has been some relative improvement. The Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) is used in measuring the perceived level of public-sector corruption in 180 countries and territories around the world. The CPI is a "survey of surveys", based on 13 different expert and business surveys.The survey involved a random sampling of 3500 households between April and May 2009. It is good to note that among public institutions that have drastically improved include ... read more >>
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I've seen a bunch of posts bubble up over the past few days that are really sparking my curiousity about what is really going on with Twitter, so I need to do a little brain dump. Bear with me.Insight #1An article by Rosabeth Moss Kanter was just published today on the Harvard Business Review website, titled On Twitter and in the Workplace, It's Power to the Connectors. In it, she highlights the fact that there is an organizational trend moving away from the hierarchical networks of the 20th century, and towards complex, distributed, non-hierarchical structures of business organization and leadership.She also points out that success today is based on a person's ability to leverage power and influence within their social networks, to act as "connectors" between people and information, and in turn build social capital.She leaves the evaluation of the significance of Twitter open-ended, but she lays out a few characteristics of Twitter that I found most interesting:In the World According to Twitter, giving away access to information rewards the giver by building followers. The more followers, the more information comes to the giver to distribute, which in turn builds more followers. ... read more >>
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There is a quaint notion surrounding social media that ‘everyone is special and every voice matters’. This viewpoint is a powerful one: that every voice has an equal footing and every one deserves an equal audience. Every blog post, every tweet, every Scribd and Digg and Delicious item on the net needs a watch. Needs to be thought over. Responded to. Engaged with. “Whether you have a million readers or just a dozen,” goes the refrain, “your voice is just as important.” That’s a very nice, warm and comfortable notion. But it’s wrong. The plain truth of it all when it comes to social media for your organization; some people matter, some people don’t. Okay. Now that we’ve broken the taboo and put that out there, let me see if I can speak over the din and wailing and gnashing of teeth in order to clarify. Communications and Marketing do not have unlimited funds and one-on-one relationships can scale only so far. You want to leverage the network of the people you build relationships with to act as an amplifier for your message and to serve as a qualified filter for information flowing back into the organization. Don’t get me wrong, if ... read more >>
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I am thrilled to share key findings from research that Don Bulmer and I conducted called The New Symbiosis of Professional Networks. The research was conducted as part of our 2009 fellowship with the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR). Don and I began this research this summer in efforts to explore a greatly overlooked area in social media - how decision-makers are using social media in their work. A great deal of attention and research has been devoted over the last few years to evangelizing social media as a new form of customer-centric relationship building. Build a network or use social media to deepen customer intimacy has become the mantra of today. However, what is often overlooked is the impact of social media to change behaviors, and the potential to use social media to impact a professional’s decision-making processes. While everyone is endeavoring to capture the mindshare of the buyer, few understand what success truly looks like. In an effort to better understand the impact of social media on business, we conducted research (as a first step) to examine the role that social media has on decision-making ... read more >>
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