I keep thinking about the increasing influence of the Infographic. Part of me continues to marvel at the human brain’s capacity to deconstruct complex data and disseminate it in an attractive, playful, visual format that my child could understand. The other part of me worries about the increasing difficulty we have in finding time to analyse complex material ourselves, and our increasing reliance on ‘data as visual entertainment’.

In the same way we are increasingly uncertain on what happens with the data we entrust to Google and Facebook, I just wonder whether the immediate future is going to be all about eye candy and ten seconds to absorb complex issues in between a sandwich break in front of whatever screen happens to be in front of us.

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Most of us don’t read the fine print and rely on others to ‘mediate’ what the recent privacy changes mean. The video below is Google trying to explain what Google is up to. At face value, it’s a consolidation and updating exercise – because Google is not what it first set out to be. Now, its our vital ‘lifelong’ communication / learning / utility / entertainment / data repository channel. It used to be just about search once. Then again, Facebook once was about spotty students eyeing up each other’s profiles.

Times change. And we all have to become better at reading the fine print.

These days, the conversation is as follows.  A marketing executive has commissioned a professionally-designed Facebook campaign page at the behest of the web agency (newly reinvented as a ‘social media consultancy’) or simply ‘because everyone is doing it, it’s free and I’m told it’s great for SEO.’  The executive has been waiting a couple of weeks for nearly one thousand ‘likes’ on the page to transform into ‘a minimum of 300 incremental sales’ to meet her targets.  She’s worried that although the iPad competition went well, she’s not sure the people who submitted their pictures and email addresses will become new loyal customers, after all – in fact, some of them may be fakes.

She’s wondering also whether she should quickly go and put money back into print advertising or an online advert on the newspaper’s site, because ‘that works instantly in a small place like this’ – and it’s almost the cost of an iPad anyway.  Perhaps, the executive should take a picture with the winner of the iPad and send it in a press release to all the media.  The web agency pitches to develop an iPhone app for a reasonable price.  The trouble is the CEO doesn’t really see how this social media stuff fits in the business, although his son managed to get some of his Facebook friends to like the company page anyway.

It seems as if the gold rush is over before it even started.  We know social media has become all pervasive in our lives and how user-access media itself is ever-changing to accommodate the demand for social applications:  eMarketer estimates that by 2013, the combined installed base of smart phones and browser-equipped enhanced phones will exceed 1.82 billion units, eclipsing the total of 1.78 billion PCs.  The customer is increasingly mobile and informed.  One of the largest areas of disruptions is in retail; shoppers are packing smart phones and tablets with retailer apps and using them to hunt for bargains, product information, and to find almost everything on their shopping list.

Yet, for many companies who invested in social media engagement, the outlay has not met expectations of instant returns.  Most corporates have no idea what metrics to use to measure success.  We are in this moment of stasis – where smaller companies dive into the media without a strategy, and where larger corporates are developing sustainable change programmes to socialise their brands and inculcate social business in their core processes. The additional challenge is that trust in institutions is in freefall. The 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer featuring results from 25 countries shows an overall decline in trust in institutions globally, with steep declines in the levels of trust in government and business. Significantly, trust and transparency are now just as important to corporate reputation as the quality of products and services. For the fifth year in a row, NGOs are the most trusted institutions: media, heavily influenced by citizen journalism, was the only institution to see an increase in trust over the past year.

One thing hasn’t changed.  Rather than obsessing about the tools, corporates need to first focus on how the customer’s behaviour is changing because of the tools.  Only once the implications of this change on core business have been understood can you start to plan on how to socialise your business.

The following set of pointers is based on current best practices in corporates approaching social businesses in a strategic manner:

Prepare to break down the silos.  The media has changed but your business is probably still organised the old way, with departments like marketing, sales, PR, customer service and product development operating in traditional silos that do not necessarily focus directly on customer needs.  Social business planning looks at multiple operations across the organisation and identifies opportunities for networking and integration to facilitate doing business in a more social and responsive manner.  Many social media initiatives fail because of a lack of internal communication, co-ordination, integration and buy-in – often symptoms of a closed business culture.

Get into learning mode.  Use the social technologies to listen to and learn from customers who are already speaking – and then from your competitors and their customers.  Social business involves harnessing both external forces (the social brand – which lives in the voice of customers) and internal ones (the social enterprise).

Use what you’re learning to develop your social business plan.  This is the blueprint for the transformation of your organisation.  It focuses on social technologies to bridge the gap between external and internal stakeholders and create shared value, identifying strategies and programmes for a more connected way of doing business.  It is an essential input into the overall company business plan.

Align social media objectives to business objectives.  Prepare and align internal roles, policies, processes and education with their specific business objectives.  Social business is a profound change that impacts most departments in the organisation.

Make social central.  Empower the champion(s) of any initiative at the outset. Social business is not an afterthought and cuts across the organisation.  There are different models for organising social from centralised and hub and spoke to totally decentralised.  It all depends on the specific business culture and size of corporate.

Commit to investing in content.  That’s not rolling out PR or corporate content, or some ‘clever’ link-baiting, but the development of your own material and curation of relevant third-party content add value to your community of interest and influencers and differentiate you from the competition.  Yes, it will cost you time and money.

It’s still about People, Process, Product.  Think about social media as a connective tissue between these.  In the old system, you had gatekeepers controlling flows of information. Social media can revolutionise old paradigms.  Walmart recently announced that 90% of service refinement comes from feedback from Twitter.  It requires not just an investment in HR and response teams – but also a willingness to change old practices.

Avoid the classic mistake of buying a tool before addressing the issue of effective monitoring and response.  If you still think that social media is only interesting for ‘marketing’ as opposed to customer engagement, it’s best to realise that social media is slow-burn marketing.

Count what matters.  If you’re using social media tools for customer service, focus on support KPIs such as response times, resolution rates, and satisfaction scores.  Use different metrics for different people within the organisation.  You can measure social media success but if you have aligned your programmes with business objectives, you should focus on measuring the latter, not the technologies.

Resist the temptation to obsess about influence.  Tools like Klout, based on algorithms are pretty meaningless in micro-markets like Malta.  We rely on SEO as some yardstick of success but Google is changing its search algorithm all the time.  The online clamour is increasing and our chance to get attention is getting increasingly smaller.  Making “attention” a synonym for “influence” is nonsense:  sentiment analysis is equally nonsensical.

Make social work in concert with your other initiatives.  Putting all your focus on a Facebook campaign and abandoning other channels is just plain daft.  Conversely, when budgets are limited, you have to ensure that you are not over-stretched.

Acknowledge the need for digital literacies.  New literacies, together with our basic literacies of reading and writing, are required to help us cope with information overload, navigate our way through the social web and teach our children skills we wrongly assume they are now born with.  Projects like CodeYear are part of a growing movement to introduce programming as a cornerstone of primary education and co-learning.  Howard Rheingold’s latest research is a great point of departure on the subject.

In conclusion

Everything points towards a more human, personalised way of conducting business.  It may be a way of beating your competition and opening new markets.  Most probably, it means re-thinking the way you do business.  It’s not going to be to everyone’s liking.  And yet, it’s likely to be inevitable, as the new generations of Smartphone-toting consumers with Point-Know-Buy technologies can find out about (if not buy) almost anything they encounter in the real world, anytime.  The disruption of our technologies of life is irreversible and relentless

It was via Brain Pickings that I came across the video I have embedded in this blog.

In the old days, I would have bookmarked the link, using Diigo, perhaps. But I wanted to store it somewhere I could find it. Think about why it had touched a chord. Share it. Apply my own layer of thought around it. Curate it.

Curation is increasingly easier. The coolest social media collateral right now is Pinterest.  Curation made simple – it levers on the immediacy of the visual, the low-attention span of our  distracted generation, and one-click collection and storage. Download the ‘Pin It’ icon, embed it in your browser, and you’re suddenly collecting images and organising them. If you want to do something similar with texts, you can do worse than use Scoop It. Or Storify.

Of course, as we collect, we leave more valuable clues – about our social graph, what makes us tick, the stuff we like, the brands we admire, the culture we can relate to, the tribes we aspire to belong to.  The clues we leave are the trigger for another start-up, another adjustment in some search algorithm, the future promise of monetisation because of the mass user-generated content.

Except of course, it’s not content we’re creating as much as extending the life and reach of content curated by others. Right now, we’re primarily doing it for amusement: if you are to believe the social media marketers, brands are benefiting from our efforts. The truth, as usual, is probably somewhere in between amusing ourselves to death and navigating our digital lives to another level of curiosity.

Now if we can find some way of using the curation tools to help us add value to others and manage infotention in the process, then we may really be on to something.

What is Curation? from Percolate on Vimeo.

Say Everything is one of my favourite books.  Not just because it covers the history of blogging, which is at the core of my doctoral research – but also because it encapsulates the empowerment we associate with the read/write web:  freedom from intermediaries, access to the modern equivalent of a private printing press, the right to raise our voice above mediated and official channels.  I wrote a review of the book for a journal and continue to find new nuggets of pleasure within my mangled copy of Rosenberg’s opus.

Being able to say everything means that meaningful discourse has to compete for our attention with whatever else comes out of people’s keyboards, mobiles, iPads and other devices.  Tumblr is a great example of the coexistence of say, politics and activism with trivia and banality.  The social web simply reflects and magnifies what goes on in our private lives – with the significant difference that we don’t know who is listening, or indeed how our private data is being used by the owners of the social platforms that we choose to use  for our daily fix of interaction or personal broadcast.  That is the bargain we are currently in, for using a set of tools for free:  we don’t quite know (and perhaps don’t quite care) how user-generated content is being monetised by the companies that own the networks we trust.

The disconnect between our expectations of the social web, and what it appears to deliver, is increasingly a topic of interest for marketers, academics and parents.  I summarised some of these disconnects in a TEDx talk  and how an awareness of the need for digital literacies may be one way of narrowing the gulf that currently exists in how to navigate social media, and particularly in corporates and classrooms.  Howard Rheingold’s new book Net Smart will, no doubt, enable us to peep round the corners.

In the meantime, being able to say everything online will continue to disrupt our view of how traditional power systems are supposed to operate.  CEOs commission social media strategies while monitoring staff ‘wasting time’ on social media; parents look for clues on what their children think about them from their Facebook pages; teachers are met by shields of laptops and laconic fiddling with mobile devices ; 12 year-olds build apps for the iPhone; Marxists lock horns with Internet utopians on the basic notions of what really constitutes democracy and online participation; and aspiring politicians continue to mistake the medium for the old broadcast and get regularly lampooned by people who until recently would have feared retribution.

Never as much as today is McLuhan relevant.  Or Postman, for the matter.  Business, political and education models are being disrupted as more people and more social systems come on stream.  And of course, it’s  not all good – in fact, the social landscape is plain messy and difficult to navigate and has been like that for a while.  There are serious concerns about the potential for citizen surveillance and many are tempted to disconnect altogether. In 2008, the academic Terri Senft, in her book ‘CamGirls’ wrote:

Offline, we are protected from ourselves by the passage of time. Even when others recall our most embarrassing moments, they are filtered through the gauze of memory. Online, the words and images with which we associate ourselves persist indefinitely, retaining their exact original form long after the context of their creation has been lost and the self who created them has been discarded. Most of us who started online in the 1980’s or 1990’s can readily summon up a list of cringe-worthy documents of our past selves, long deleted but still locatable through search engines like the Wayback Machine (Senft, 2008. Pg.8).

We appear to be stuck in the transit lounge – from saying everything and possibly amusing ourselves to death to figuring out how we can say something at the right time, on the right platform, to the right people and make our discourse and actions meaningful.  And yet, there’s never been as interesting a time as now to observe the fissures being created, by often accidental discourse on social media, to the foundations of power systems that until recently we would never have questioned or dare challenge.

Jobs changed our relationship with technology. He took it out of the domain of the geeks and specialists and made it an indispensable tool for our lives. Jobs will forever be associated with an ‘era’ and social change. From the way we interact with others via screens, to the way we readily use visuals, theatre and story-telling when we have to stand up and present to others – and in a short time, find a way of connecting, sharing and inspiring.

Just in case you are one of a handful of people who has never seen the Jobs Stanford address in 2005 – watch the clip below. And perhaps, the other seminal clip, when Jobs came back to reclaim the company he had built and this round up from the BBC Click team.

Jobs will will continue to inspire generations of misfits, trouble-makers, creatives, frustrated blue-collar workers, parents and dreamers.

This is the mix of tools I am currently using to stay on top of the daily wave of data that I need to manage quickly for my work and academic research.

DETECTING

NetVibes is my preferred RSS tool to track a wide range of blogs. The trick is to organise multiple pages within the system, set up tabs in a coherent manner and to remember to go back to your pages on a regular basis. It’s very easy to forget that you are curating some great (even if obscure) material. I live in the hope that RSS is never killed off!

I use Twitter when I’m searching for more immediate material – news-breaking stuff, or material that people I follow have just discovered. I find the LISTS feature on Twitter particularly useful, as I have organised people I follow regularly in a handful of lists (academics, media types, people who understand social strategy etc). I have specific search tabs permanently open on my Twitter management tool (Hootsuite) to stay in touch with subjects I am interested in and monitor what specific people are saying (for instance, Howard Rheingold is on my academics list).

I’ve joined a few Facebook pages and groups, so I also get alerts from there.  As a closed ecosystem, Facebook is a good way of finding what your peers are up to; not so great at discovering new knowledge outside your immediate networks.

FILTERING & ORGANISING

I find Diigo excellent for social bookmarking, and it works pretty well with Chrome and FireFox, if you’ve downloaded the relevant extensions to insert in your browser toolbar. One click, and you’ve bookmarked, tagged, highlighted text, created a sticky note, taken a snapshot of a page with the Awesome screenshot extension, stored it somewhere on a drive if you need to revisit and remix the content that you’ve just discovered. The search function on ‘my library’ combined with a decent attempt at tagging means that I can normally find material I have stored a while ago.

Diigo also enables me to follow other people and groups. I’m part of Rheingold’s Mind Amplifiers group, and I am alerted regularly whenever someone within the group finds something of interest and tags it as ‘MindAmp‘ on Diigo.  Diigo can become a fundamental curating tool in the future.  Like others, I migrated my Delicious bookmarks earlier this year, and continue to back everything up on Google bookmarks. Again, we live in a time when we have to hope that some of these tools have longevity.

I’m starting the third year of my PhD and have been using RefWorks to keep track of literature. It’s a decent system, but it’s a closed subscription model. I wish I had used Zotero when I started, but I am too far down the line to re-engineer my brain on that one, right now.  Mendeley also holds promise for academic researchers.

SHARING

Nothing quite beats Twitter for instant sharing. Using Hootsuite or Seesmic as my primary management tools, I can disseminate what I find quickly. The downside is that Twitter remains the curation tool for ‘now’ – it can never compete with a wiki.

I think more can be done with Twitter hashtags – Tweetchat is an excellent, if asynchronous, way of holding a group chat.

When something is really interesting, or it’s a video link, I embed that in one of my blogs, and write around that. It’s a way of personal branding, I guess – but I also, to date, have found no substitute for the ease of use and flexibility of the blog for essay-type, more reflective writing. Scott Rosenberg nailed it: with a blog you can say everything. And it also functions as an archive of sorts; and if you’re using WordPress it’s also likely to have longevity as a technology.

And now Google+

It’s early days, but Google+ is either going to be a game-changer or another Wave damp squib. I like a lot of what I have seen though my discomfort about large companies like Google and Facebook helping me ‘curate’ MY information still makes me uncomfortable. To date, I’ve really enjoyed using Hangout, been incredibly underwhelmed by Sparks, and generally I am not sure Google+ is going to be a social network – but it may yet become a powerful sharing tool because of the integration with all the other Google applications we all use – from Gmail to Google documents.  As others have pointed out, Microsoft stands more to lose from Google+ than Facebook, at this juncture.

I’m curious about how receptive bankers are to the notion of disruptive technologies and empowered clients. In the past two years, banking has had more than its fair share of bad press – mention ‘banking’ and you get mutterings of greed, fat cat bonuses, corruption and government bailouts. Ask anyone in academia in the UK about why they are having to work with decimated budgets and raise student fees, and they point the finger at the financial sector.

In my country, the impact of the financial meltdown has been somewhat cushioned – to the extent that some local bankers are surprised by the barricade mentality of their counterparts across the water. And yet, the bubble that burst has still impacted the local way of doing business, as all major banks have been forced to increase checks and balances and tighten up internal control procedures to make sure there is no repeat of the 2010 crash.

In this new ‘cautious’ brave new world, you can understand why some banks have been reluctant to explore using social media channels. Yes, there are blogs aplenty on financial issues, Deutsche Bank and American Express are doing some interesting things, but most of the ‘social’ in banking happens at an individual basis – or in the way some banks continue to engage with their customers – developing personal relationships, going the extra mile for clients who are known and trusted.

The corollary is that banks have had an online presence for many years – and yet, clients’ only interface with the bank’s website is to complete a basic transaction within as short a timeframe as possible: checking a balance, making a payment, viewing an electronic bank statement. I have serious doubts on how many people use the more ‘social’ functions of these sites – such as requesting a meeting, asking for information about a new set of financial instruments, engaging in the type of interaction that has to happen on a ‘face to face’ basis.

When I tweeted that I was running a workshop for bankers a couple of days ago, the instant reaction from the Twitterati went from ‘They seriously need to be receptive, Alex’ to ‘Yeah.. about time they got disrupted.’ A day or two later, a lovely lady from my local (village) branch called me on my mobile to ‘remind’ me that I had promised to meet her and a colleague to review a new set of financial instruments.

Somewhere, there is an opportunity to migrate the personal touch of the village bank online. Whether there is an interest in doing this, in the age of austerity and procedure will unravel.

In the meantime, Jeremiah Owyang et al continue to evangelise on the need to turn the corporate website social. Banks could do worse than start from this: how can they use their functional, utilitarian websites to help them operate more as village banks, and less as ‘suits’ hiding behind procedure?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Secrets of Engagement: Leverage Social to Unlock User Value on Your Site from Janrain on Vimeo.

Altimeter Group, a US research firm, says that 2011 is the year of social integration for US business. Yet views on business and social media remain polarised. Some are exploring how social media can increase productivity, cut costs and facilitate new ways of engaging with customers and prospects. Many remain sceptical – especially those with recent investments in websites, SEO and pay-per-click campaigns as a sure-fire way of ‘getting e-business’ and who now find themselves having to go back to the drawing board.

Here are some common social media myths that need to be debunked if businesses in Malta are to start incorporating social media in their business model:

Myth#1: Social media is free.
Fact: As a bare minimum, engagement requires content, interaction with users, technology-savviness, channel management, SEO and more. Real people cost real money.

Myth#2: Social media is easy
Fact: The barriers to entry may be low: setting up a blog, or an account on Facebook or Twitter requires little technical skill. Using social media to increase sales, reduce costs, develop a brand and engage with customers and prospects requires strategic content, technical expertise and commitment.

Myth #3: Social media’s a fad.
Fact: The participatory read/write web has been around for over 10 years. Rather than about technology, it’s about a paradigm shift in social engagement: a new sphere of working, networking, communicating, living, and organising. It has become intertwined in our daily lives.

Myth #4: Social media is all about branding and PR.
Fact: Social media is not about broadcasting, but about a personal, more open way of engagement. It’s as fraught with risk as it is rich in opportunity. It flies against many business cultures. The brand lives in the voices of your online community. Use social media to be personable and build trust relationships instead of broadcasting corporate spin.

Myth #5: Social media will lead to a loss of control
Fact: The technologies are disruptive, not least because customers and prospects have access to instant publishing tools. The real myth is that a business never had control over what people were saying.

Myth #6: Success is about content going viral.
Fact: It is more important that the right people view targeted content. Content rarely goes viral.

Myth #7: Participation requires the engagement of a “social media agency” or “guru.”
Fact: You will probably need help with strategy and technology. Always ask for case studies to back up social media credentials. But the champion of change has always got to be found within.

Myth #8: Focus on increasing online visitors, not making money.
Fact: Unless you’ve got VC backing, what you have is a hobby, not a business. Even Twitter now needs to monetise. Conversely, the most popular business model on line is the freemium model, where a very small proportion of online users pay for premium services and online advertising.

Myth #9: Social media is not measurable.
Fact: Social media monitoring tools can provide an array of qualitative and quantitative metrics. From blog comments, media mentions and real-time Facebook advertising outcomes to click-throughs to your website. Conversely: what’s the ROI on your print campaigns, your trade show, on that phone call you just made?

Myth #10: Build it and they will come
Fact: Social media needs to be actively managed. Facebook and Twitter are littered with a graveyard of inactive ‘business’ pages and profiles that potentially damage an existing brand.

Myth #11: User-generated content will lead to money-making opportunities.
Fact: Social media can provide valuable inbound marketing links and bring more prospects to your e-business platform. It is not a guarantee that click-throughs will convert into sales. It’s easier to make money if you have an existing product or service that can be sold online than if you are building one from the ground up on a social media platform.

Myth #12: User-generated content is better than branded content.
Fact. Content is expensive to produce. People do not normally enjoy watching branded content as it’s associated with one-way marketing. Most user-generated content will bring your business zero value. Compelling content is rarely about you.

Myth #13: You can do it all in-house.
Fact: The likelihood is that someone within the organisation has used social media tools. The challenge is convincing internal stakeholders that social media should be considered alongside orthodox marketing, CRM, PR and HR channels. Sometimes, it’s easier to do that with the help of an external change agent with hands-on experience with new media.

Myth #14: Social media is for kids.
Fact: In the US, the 55-64 age group on Facebook is almost the size of the 13-17 group. Older demographics are now joining social media than younger ones.

Myth #15: A business needs to have a presence on all major social media.
Fact: First think of where your clients and prospects are likely to be interacting, then think of the media.

Finally: Get your website social media ready. Incorporate Facebook, YouTube and Twitter alongside orthodox marketing and customer relationship channels. Approach bloggers and other online influencers about your products and services, ask for feedback and engage. Develop a sound social media strategy before you dive in. If you do not wish to engage immediately, just listen to your customers and your competitors. Manage your expectations.

Article syndicated by the Times of Malta