This post is copied from my wordpress blog - I'll shortly be transitioning back to that as posterous doesn't seem to be maing things any easier for bloggers, just for sharing random pix etc I find. Feel free to check ouw www.deliriantistiromani.wordpress.com in future!

THE POST:

I wear a yin yang ring on my right hand just about every day of the week. Not because of any spiritual significance, and not because I have Chinese roots somewhere in there (among other things). The Ying Yang symbolises perfect balance – the recognition that every action has a reaction, that every great idea must be tempered with pragmatic, rational thinking. It is that very counterbalance of thought that allows us to understand other cultures and religions, to understand the strengthsand weaknesses of any given plan – that counterbalance in turn makes us better, more effective. We learn.

So it is this imperative that in the business world – and this doesn’t just apply to my social media colleagues out there, but in fact all facets of business and community -  that is essential to being more effective in what we do.

I’m no self-help writer either, mind you. But take a look at your own business career and you’ll see what I mean.

In my own career, I’ve worked in big companies where critical thinking was so institutionalised, nothing ever got done and no one ever wanted to speak up with a good idea. In such organisations, you can see and feel the frustration of those who simply want to be more effective, to do a better job, and in most cases, to do the right thing. These situations are often shouting out for an injection of something fresh – a new idea, a new way of thinking, a removal of layers of bureaucracy – anything to break the cycle of repetition. And you know the definition of insanity, right? Doing the same thing over and over again the same way, but expecting a different result. Unfortunately in bigger organisations we don’t see this fresh injection or counterbalance to the institutionalised culture until change is made at the top.

I’ve also worked with startup and smaller organisations that are led by entrepreneurial, forward thinking people. Always fresh, always on the move, always heading to bigger and better things. I hope we’ve all had the opportunity to work at such organisations. But even Richard Branson in his prime entrepreneurial days admitted that once he initiated an organization, the longer he personally ran it, the more doomed to failure it was. And why? Each Virgin business that Branson started simply needed something or someone to counterbalance the entrepreneurial thinking – when is it time to put the brakes on nomadic, forward thinking and when is it time to start laying foundations for a solid business and brand? When do you call in the accountants and consultants to set things up and when does the entrepreneur have to start delegating their idea to others?

So if we’re talking about balance here – which we are – I’d like to think I have the ability to switch between the two modes – forward ‘big idea’ thinking and rational thinking. It’s important for those of us trying to get new ideas and opportunities off the ground, to recognise when it’s time to let others bring the idea to life. When you’re a manager of people, balance is about knowing when to let things slide with your people, and when to intervene. In personal relationships, it’s very much the same. Often, it’s even about finding the right balance between when to be serious and professional, and when to relax and be yourself.

When I first started this blog a long time ago, I put forward the principle of Deliriant isti Romani – an old latin term which simply reminds us to challenge the status quo.

In 2011, in our line of work – media, technology, social media – whatever you like to call it – the status quo is to push forward with new ideas relentlessly (just check your twitter feed if you don’t believe me) – but at some point we need question that, and to balance that with action, rational thinking, and planning. We should apply the same to our personal lives in order to be more effective at everything we do, and on a more philosophical note – to be better people full stop.

That’s my two cents for a Tuesday morning!

 

Tony Chilvers put this question out earlier and it’s a good one – and seeing as I have a few minutes spare I thought I’d throw some thoughts onto the screen. 

The question was: “If a brand approached you to collaborate, do you expect payment? Should brands pay bloggers to review products or create content?”

Let’s tackle that in two parts, purely off the top of my head:

Do I expect payment?

Generally speaking, no. Why? Well, if a brand with which I was familiar and supported passionately approached me and said: “we love the support you give my brand, we’d like you to participate in a certain campaign”, I’d be open to that as an amateur blogger who genuinely supports the brand / cause / product. If the request however was to blatantly rebrand my blog and sell their product, then I would certainly be expecting a few extra ‘000s in my bank balance before taking it on.

 So the variables here are the nature of the request and the extent to which the brand expects to control what I saying about their product.

The prime example here is the Coca-Cola Facebook page. From memory, this was set up by a couple of fans who loved the product and lived the values – the brand approached them and said: “keep doing what you’re doing, we’ll provide you with some resource to support you, but please just follow a few basic guidelines”, and hey presto – a fan based community was born.

Should a brand pay bloggers to review products?

Well, there’s no reason why not, but what we know about effective use of social media is the principle of authenticity. Anyone using social media publishing of any form who provides non-authentic views of the world quickly lose following and reputation and therefore their effectiveness in the social space.

 The new world order is the understanding that people are having all sorts of conversations about your brand and products and always have been. Just like the old PR saying goes: Any publicity is good publicity.

 At the end of the day, brands shouldn’t have to pay bloggers to do this though: If you can make sure your product is good enough to withstand the scrutiny of the people you are trying to sell it to – then the rest will take care of itself.

Tony - hope this helps the conversation! Thus ends my two cents.

 

 

 

Amazing that with more than 100 million total users, LinkedIn only has 18% (see below) that have actively joined a group - never mind the number of people that are active in those groups, which I suspect is a lot less.

It's enough to make me question the effectiveness of the platform (or any platform, for that matter) in really engaging its audiences. Has LinkedIn really moved beyond a place to post your resume online? Is it really a professional networking tool? And how limited is its audience?

eMarketer published a piece today http://bit.ly/kqoFd8 outlining 'what's next' for LinkedIn which is also a good read (and where I borrowed the image from). But here's a couple of quick thoughts from me:

 

LinkedIn is not suited to all working professionals:

Yes, anyone can create a profile on LinkedIn, but how effective is it at helping the career of the everyday laborer, waiter / waitress, driver, or nurse? Blue collar workers are still the backbone of our society (If you don't believe me, watch me try and fix my car, nail something into a wall, or fetch my own cup of coffee at McDonald's), yet the only decent professional networking platform out there seems to be fundamentally lacking in inclusion for this. 

So, there's an opportunity out there for budding social network entrepreneurs. I wonder if LinkedIn will get involved, either by launching a second platform, or perhaps finding a way to shift the orientation of their current site to include the kinds of kudos that actually benefit blue collar workers. You know, the people we talk to on the phone when we complain about things, the people we order food from at restaurants and cafes, the people who come to fix our broken whatever in the house, and the people that fix our cars. We all express our happiness or distaste at their service, and an open environment where good customer service and support is rewarded with kudos and feedback can only bring further benefit to business and society.

LinkedIn (and other platforms) do not support the communities they have created:

When was the last time you heard about Facebook, LinkedIn, or any other key platform for that matter actually cultivating the communities they have created? Truth is, it was probably when something went horribly wrong and got to the media, wasn't it? 

I'm an advocate of the phrase 'With great power comes great responsibility', and the cultivation and management of communities created by your technology is important not only in helping ensure it is used properly and to greatest effect, but also in really understanding market needs, demands, and opportunities. Unfortunately most of the current social media platforms we are all familiar with rely on the old school 'build it and they will come' principle that failed so many of the early web publishers, including the media publishers such as News Limited and Fairfax who are only now beginning to truly understand what they're up against in terms of seeding their content into a world gone social.

They are just a couple of thoughts I had while on the treadmill this morning - happy for you to disagree. What are yor thoughts?

 

 

I’m still amazed to hear of businesses and government organisations who believe that social media is a temporary phase. Good to be reminded of the perspective every now and then however. My friend Ryan was attending a conference over the last couple of days and posted something on the tweetfeed that I noticed saying:

 And throughout the day, this also came up:

Which sent all sorts of alarm bells ringing, just as it was with my friend Ryan (hence the tweets). I’m an advocate of asking the hard questions (‘Deliriant Isti Romani’ is one of my favoured expressions for questioning the status quo), but it’s scary all the same to hear of technology professionals who are developing technologies that do not reflect or understand the fundamental shifts in society that digital and social web technologies bring.

Then, on the second day, this resistance to change was further confirmed:

I’m no expert in records management to be sure, but I also understand that business process must be agile in order to adapt to change at the rate the world has been changing for the last 15 years – basically, since the Internet became mainstream (or thereabouts).

In fact, in my own technology experience I have become an advocate of the agile methodology– a methodology project management methodology that actually recognizes that project requirements will evolve over the duration of the project – so why try and build a ‘start to finish product’?

Instead, technology development in a time of constant change is about iterative and frequent updates, with the adaptability and responsiveness to change.  That way, the end product is never finished – but it is always getting better and adapting to the changing needs and circumstances in which it lies.

So it’s disappointing to hear of people at conferences like this saying that if a c-level exec doesn’t ask for a strategy, then you simply don’t need it. Those are in fact the same people that still don’t know what the social web is – who don’t understand that the agent of change in places like Syria, Libya, Tunisia and Egypt was not time, weapons, or the power of one – it was the power of many, expressed via social media to mobilise the masses.

The very fact that Ryan was using social media to post opinion and commentary on this conference while it was happening has enabled anyone – in this case myself - to share the learnings and add ‘my two cents’ to the conversation.

In this case, I’ll leave you on this note: If your C-level exec hasn’t asked you for a social media strategy by now, then either they won’t be around for long – or your business won’t.

Deliriant Isti Romani – These Romans are Crazy!

Having just wrecked my home PC this morning when some virus decided to let itself in, I am reminded of the paradoxical shift in human communication via social media.

Cast your mind back to the original The Matrix movie, when Hugo Weaving, as Agent Smith, tells us that humans are a virus – because they exist in one place until all the resources are dried up, and then they can only continue to exist unless they move on to another place.

Now use that analogy and apply it to a conversation – a simple, everyday conversation. It starts with something that people are interested in chatting about. Then, when they have exhausted the topic (or get bored), the conversation moves on to new topics – or it fizzes out and you have an awkward silence.

Just check out trendsmap.com or whatever other tool you use to monitor Twitter trends to see what I mean. You can literally watch hot conversation topics fade away as new ones jump up to replace it.

In the last couple of weeks via my usual social channels I have been keeping an eye on conversations around:

• The Royal Wedding
• Assassination of Osama Bin Laden
• Closure of the Sydney Harbour Bridge (which shut down the city for a whole morning)
• Planking (including #plankmovies, just for fun)
• Eurovision
• The NBA Playoffs and the eventual (but inevitable) demise of my beloved Los Angeles Lakers

And so on. With the exception of #planking, which is continuing as we speak, each conversation has depleted itself of new fodder and therefore I as one of the masses of engaged – have become bored with it (call it a Gen Y trait if you like), and moved on.

In your own social universe, think of the trending conversations you have been following yourself over that period. Do you think anyone’s really still talking about the royal wedding? Of course not (to the same extent) – that conversation has moved on to the honeymoon, and so on. Maybe you’ve been tracking the Canadian election or latest business reviews on yelp (which is trending in Northern California at the moment for some reason).

Now as a business or brand, whether global or existing purely within a microcosm of a community, perhaps you can begin to understand why acting like a virus is important. It sounds a bit odd I know, but a basic anthropological understanding – ie knowing how and why people behave, can help you as a marketing, social media, communications or just a general business manager understand why in a world gone social you need to coexist with the conversation. That is to say, you are no longer in control of the conversation, but simply able to participate just like everyone else. The opportunities lie in being involved at the right time, to be able to inject value when required, and to create a spark in the conversation when it starts to fade – either by adding more value to the same topic, or by changing the topic entirely to find fresh new pastures of engagement.

At any rate, Agent Smith’s ‘virus’ analogy was quite apt – not only for my poor broken machine at home (which I get to spend all night trying to fix), but for those of us trying to learn some practical, real-world things to apply and understand for everyday business in the world of the social web. It’s not so artificial as it seems (just like The Matrix!), and in many ways social technology is not about creating new patterns of communication – it’s about mimicking  the true human condition and behaviours around communication. It’s something we should therefore all know already…so why is it so hard?

Deliriant Isti Romani – These Romans are crazy!

 

 

I was reading a post on the Startup Smart site recently about how small business has a higher propensity and in fact a better fit to use social media than big business.

It’s an interesting perspective and some key points were made:

1) small business owners have possibly even less time to prioritise business networking in their schedule and therefore social media provides them with an avenue to connect with similar business professionals on their own time (ie after hours etc) 

  2) Smaller businesses are more agile and therefore have greater opportunity to capitalize on micro-initiatives and conversations as they please.  Having talked social business with a number of mid to large size Australian organisations with heavy and slow approval mechanisms – I can tell you, this is an enormous advantage over bigger players.

 Ultimately the social web enables business communication to transition between hyper-local, real-time content to broader national and international issues quickly – as quickly as a conversation can change.  Being ‘on the ground’ locally means that local business owners are in tune with community sentiment and opportunities more than anyone else and therefore have the opportunity to innovate and capture the crowd – ‘ad captandum’ to use the latin speak.

While I often see and hear small business having to defend themselves against bigger players shutting them out of the market, it would be silly for those business owners to underestimate the power of agility in tackling the problem.

 David had nothing but a rock when he went up against Goliath; In this day and age, social media technology is about to empower small business to strike where it hurts big business most – giving consumers what they want, contextually, in their local area. It’s the slingshot David really needed in order to do something with that rock.

 There’s still big things to come in 2011 around how small business can connect with it’s hyper-local customer base. Stay tuned!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you're in Sydney next Wednesday morning and you have an interest in how Australian businesses use social media, come and check out a presentation by Community Engine and Nielsen, with the inaugural Social Media Business Index. The session will be held at the Hilton Hotel Sydney from 7.30am next Wednesday  the 18th May. 

While this is of course a bit of a plug for a function by my own people at CE, the session will be of great value to anyone working in the social media space who is wanting to get a better understanding of what's going on in the market, and how Aussies are currently using social web technology to improve and enhance their online community engagement.

You can find the official info on the Community Engine blog here: http://bit.ly/mCyNHz, and if you are interested in attending, send an email including your name, company name and role to Alex Mileham, Marketing Manager by clicking will try and get you on the list! Seats are limited so book quickly.

During the session, Mark Higginson (@mark_higginson)  and Melanie Ingrey (@melanie_ingrey) from Nielsen will be presenting some of their findings, along with Stephen Johnson (@huxley) , Director of Social from Community Engine and one of Australia's leading social enterprise evangelists.

If you're watching from afar, the Twitter hastag will be #b2bsocialstudy. Stay tuned and join in the conversation!

JP