Google has introduced a standard for the development of social networking applications, its called OpenSocial. Standards had names like SOAP, BPEL, WSDL and UDDI up to now. The challenge with Web services is not developing the technology but in agreeing on the business semantics.
Did the term ‘Item Shipped’ mean the same thing to every company?
Google’s strategy with OpenSocial is to take the emphasis away from Facebook (which people are getting bored of, by the way) in the same way that Web services where about taking the emphasis away from Microsoft.
The ’semantics’ have converged with naming conventions in the case of OpenSocial. But surely, the effect of OpenSocial – if successful - will be to muddy the waters when it comes to social networking.
Then again, perhaps OpenSocial will allow small communities to exist in their personalised community while mixing with the rest of the world if they want. Make your own mind up, this article from Computerworld is a starting point.
It gives rise to the question is social media a solution in search of a problem? It will only sustain us when we are all sat behind computers all day or they are wired into our brains.
Australia tends to follow the rest of the world and this is the case with social media. The adoption of social media by corporates in Australia is nascent. The country is in market maker mode - a time when influencers should come together to help develop and educate, which makes it hard for me to understand the thinking behind the scheduling of two relevant events in Sydney.
ACE’s Online Social Networking and Business Collaboration and IIR’s Enterprise 2.0 will take place in Sydney on the same dates 3, 4, 5 December.
Now that’s a fine example of collaboration….this country!
I’v already opted to go for the ACE event (I am a bit worred that they felt the need to use the word ‘Online’ in the title of this event, by the way) but the Enterprise 2.0 line-up looks really good.
There is lot of talk about the abscence of professional tools and applications in the latest social networking sites. I have been thinking about applying the concept of ’social’ in the context of ’social media’ to the work place. This may have been discussed or it may be being discussed. It stemmed from a conference call in which I took actions and circulated them to the participants. Well actually, I sent them to my team mate to review and then asked her to circulate them. Now, if instead of circulating them she posted them to the Web and sent us a feed. We would then accept and they would go into a centralised To Do List, which collects the actions from all of your calls and meetings. Everyone can view everyone else’s actions. When one action is the first step before another, as many are, the team member that completed the first step would automatically initiate the action as ready in the To Do List of his colleague. With the same application, you would have a Twitter like application for teams to exchange pleasantries or share ideas and thoughts. And a status bar would broadcast a descriptive of your current project (if it is of significane and/or lengthy enough to require a status bar update). Imagine a team member is called into an urgent/unplanned meeting and unable to complete a must do task in his to do list before its deadline. This task would pop up on the screens of the team mates with an option for them to accept, delay or reject. If the action is rejected then an automatic chat room pops up for the team to discuss the resolution. Does anyone think there is something in this at least in distributed teams.
I featured in a Marketing Magazine article today on the topic of BLOGGING. It was written by Duncan Riley and dealt with the relationship between communications (specifically blogging) and company image.
Here are my comments in full:
Blogging is about developing a conversation and building relationships over time.By establishing credibility, authenticity and transparency, organisations can build trust with target audience groups.Strategy for corporate blogging needs to be aligned with broader communications goals and business objectives.There are, however, two fundamentals for a corporate blog.First, a blog is not an additional sales and marketing channel.A blog that espouses corporate messages will fail.That’s the role of the website. Second, the blog should represent a single identifiable voice or group of voices within an organisation and should be written by that individual.External consultants can provide advice on style and topics but ultimately the content and insights needs to come from the author.Blogs need to provide a human face to an organisation, be consistent and interactive (i.e. responsive to feedback) to build credibility. Organisations need to think long and hard about resourcing.The voice of the CEO sounds great in practice but will he or she have the time or the inclination in reality? Organisations need to consider the target audience, their interests and the most suitable spokesperson, as they would during the planning stages of any communications program.Clients also need to consider style, content, objectives and protocols.Included in the latter are issues relating to legalities and corporate disclosure. There are good examples from overseas of large corporations that have used blogging to engage their stakeholders and target audiences.GM and Boeing have opened up its product development processes via a blog and received a lot of participation and involvement from readers and interested parties that revel in the transparency that GM is providing.Blogs are a great tool for internal communications, replacing (or supporting) the company newsletter and providing a mechanism for interaction and conversations between employees.Many organisations begin with an internally focused blog to gain confidence and credibility before rolling this out externally.This can be a great strategy as an external blog that starts enthusiastically but gradually goes dormant is more damaging to a company reputation than no blog at all.
There may be readers out there that disagree with the idea of corporations blogging. The whole topic gives rise to some interesting issues, which I will endeavour to explore in the coming weeks.
I just watched a Liberal party broadcast fronted by John Howard. He basically said that everything is a mess but we shouldn’t change the government because the future is uncertain. I’d argue that its due to the certainty of John Howard and people like him that we are in this mess. Watch it and make your own mind up?
I couldn’t find the Uncertain Times Commercial on YouTube but I did find this:
It’s been a while since my last post. Need to re-focus on the blog. I’ve been busy winning soccer championships with my Sunday league side Lokomotiv Cove (affiliated with the Sydney FC A-League team) and trying to get healthy.
On the digital front, I joined the PRIA’s social media committee, which should be interesting and booked myself in to attend Online Social Networking and Business Collaboration World in early December. I joined a Social Media & Public Relations group in Facebook.
I’ve been working on a Search Engine Optimisation project for a client (which is really interesting) and also a blogger relations program. I have digital proposals to work on this afternoon for clients. It’s all go.
I attended the PRIA NSW State Excellence award presentation last night, with some teamies! We picked up a couple of awards in health related fields. The event was OK but over-priced.
I also improved my Windows Movie Maker skills (creating a couple of vides, one for a colleague who is leaving the agency after ten years), purchased a guitar and a how to play book and booked my flights back to the UK over Christmas.
I saw Daniel Kitson at the Opera House last week in his one-man stage performance, C-90. The story focuses on a guy called Henry who works at a storage ‘facility’ for unwanted compilation audio cassettes. It’s Henry’s last day in the job after more than 20 years and he – for the first time – receives and listens to a tape that has been sent to him. The remainder of the tale focuses on Henry’s detective skills as he tries to work out who sent the tape and three or four other local personalities. It was very much like this. Very funny, touching, insightful and clever. Daniel Kitson is pictured, he also does stand up (I saw him in Newtown last year and he was brilliant).
I attended a panel discussion last night at the Sydney Museum. The theme for the ‘debate’ was: blogging is as useful as talkback radio. No one could decide if talkback radio was useful – the inference was that it wasn’t useful at all. So we were drawing comparisons against a benchmark that didn’t exist.
Most of the panellists were a little bit disparaging about talkback radio, as am I. It rarely leads to a high brow debate, at least not while I’ve be listening. The same could be said of comment boards on mainstream media. For this very reason, Fairfax has to moderate its ‘blogs’ for fear of being found liable for the views of its readers.
The panel treated journalist blogs and independent blogs as one and the same, which isn’t helpful. The Internet provides a means by which the mainstream media can interact with their audiences who are associated by a publisher’s masthead but its the blog that places power in the hands of the individual to build a community that is brought together by a common geography, interest, experience, orientation or point of view. Journalist blogs have to be commercially viable, they have to add something to the brand, they need to attract readers.
The panel talked about the low levels of blogging in Australia – a genuine point of debate. Very few corporations blog and various reasons where put forward for this. I didn’t agree with one panel member who said that CEOs should get their flunkies to write on their behalf - I think he misses the point.
There was a nice moment, when the panel were asked to name their favourites blogs. Chris Gilbey chose a blog and the blogger happened to be in the audience.
It was telling that Fairfax representative who spoke the most about the commercialisation of blogs couldn’t – when asked – name a blog that didn’t belong to Fairfax. One wondered if she is active in the blogosphere at all, perhaps it doesn’t matter or maybe she just isn’t a big fan of user generated media…
In the latest For Immediate Releasepodcast Neville Hobson talks at length about the launch of A-space by the US Community Intelligence Service. A-space is an application modeled on Facebook. The FT covered the story and you can read more here. The idea is to ‘break down stove pipes’ between agencies, enable collaboration and make it possible to efficiently process information. A-space will launch in December, which means that while the CIS has worked out aspects of the application it is yet to deliver any benefit whatsoever.
I agree with Hobson that other organisations might have something to learn here but I don’t agree with him when he says that the ‘benefits (of social networks within corporations) are apparent’ for everyone. This ‘me too’ attitude is likely to damage the prospects for social networking and Web 2.0 type applications. Organisations get burnt when they invest money and resources in technology just to follow suit or stay current.
Organisations that are considering an implementation of a social network or any other tool for employee collaboration need to think long and hard about how it can or will work for them. They need to think about usage guidelines; and privacy and access controls need to be considered. They need to be specific about the objective of the network and identify the anticipated benefits? They need to include strategies and tools for measuring the impact of the service and figure out how it will integrate with their existing knowledge spaces and Intranet. The list goes on.
Implementing technology for technology’s sake is not a good idea.
It has recently come to my attention that religious groups are interested in the power of social media. The 7th Day Adventists keep popping up. I guess this group and others like it are banking on the theory that the average online-Joe is ripe for a spiritual awakening. Are there figures on the success rate for the door stepping tactic, I wonder…is man’s relationship with God the original - and most enduring – virtual friendship?
I just started listening to ‘Linked: How everything is connected to everything else and what it means’ in audiobook format. The book is by Albert Laszlo-Barabasi. I got this through Audible.com, which is a great service except for the fact that the free book offer from TWIT is only available to US listeners. Boo!
Check out this site for the top 1,000 Web 2.o websites, according to Leah. I will take some time to visit these sites. This relates to Steve Rubel’s concept of the attention crash. Rubel recently blogged about the issue of consolidation, he says that Google, Microsoft and others have been successful in acquiring many of the established or well trafficed Web 2.0 sites but that the zero barriers to entry will ensure that the Web stays vibrant and organic. History tells us that consolidation is inevitable.
