Although the rolling passage of time makes a changing year somewhat irrelevant in the greater scheme of things, the turn of a decade is a useful milestone for reflection and looking forward. My biggest learning points from the last 10 years are…
The web has exposed what we really are…
Animals. There is no better illustration of this than the herd behaviour it has facilitated on a global level, which has been a repeated pattern of the last decade – from the dotcom boom and bust to the financial bubbles to Twitter. The latter is an appropriate name for something that induces ‘flocking’ or ‘swarming’. You can almost visualise this happening as a leading influencer changes direction or swoops down on something new.
So – is this a good or bad thing? I guess it depends whether, on balance, it has done more harm than good. It’s driven growth, that’s for sure – but has it been the right sort of growth? There would appear to be an even greater gap between rich and poor and it is becoming ever clearer that we have raped and pillaged our planet more in the last ten years than at any time before. The consequences of that could well be catastrophic if you believe the growing consensus of scientific opinion.
Bill Gates is right…
Well about one thing anyway. His soundbite from The Road Ahead about people “overestimating what will happen in the next two years but underestimating what will happen in the next 10” keeps playing out. Slightly ironic I guess that the biggest example from the last decade is the mobile market. When I worked on projects at the beginning of the decade to visualise the types of services 3G technology would bring to phone users I must admit that none of them looked much like a Microsoft approach. However, I had an underlying sense that the proprietary monolith would come to dominate the mobile world, as it had the desktop.
The big lesson here is that applying thinking and approaches from one environment to a fundamentally different one – is deeply flawed. Fresh thinking is needed. And Apple demonstrated that so well with the iPhone. Design a device and applications specifically for the context in which they are used rather than trying to get a phone to behave like a desktop PC. Lessons from my time at NTL in the 90s suggest exactly the same is applicable to the web and interactivity ‘on TV’ – in a communal, lean back environment, the context and approach must be relevant and compelling. Also lessons from spending half of the last decade in IT/software development roles also suggest that continuing to apply desktop thinking to an inter-connected always-on online world is also ultimately flawed.
Tony Blair was wrong…
Well, not about everything – but certainly in ‘his’ decision to commit the UK to an ill-conceived war and extremely badly planned peace in Iraq. Although I’ve highlighted the dangers of herd behaviour in the first point, there are times when ‘the wisdom of crowds’ is right – the challenge of course is to read the situation correctly. The largest demonstration ever on the streets of London and in other capitals around the world suggested that the majority of people felt uncomfortable with the reasons for going to war – even if they didn’t physically take to the streets. I’m sure that I and many others are having our own thoughts back in 2003 confirmed as the latest enquiries expose the degree to which we were misled. It is particularly galling to remember our prime minister telling us that we didn’t see what he saw in terms of intelligence reports and therefore he had to make the decision on our behalf. There was a collective sense, more than anything I have experienced in my life, that this was wrong – I feel we had an innate understanding that we were being lied to but were ultimately powerless to stop the political machinery taking us to war. This matters deeply and it’s made me question everything I ever understood about ‘democracy’. If social media had been more prominent in the early part of the decade I’m wondering if things would still have happened in the way they did and if many hundred of thousands of innocent lives could have been saved?
There is hope…
If we can harness herd behaviour effectively in the next 5 years to help fix some of the damage we have done to our environment and promote more sustainable ways of living – then the web driven booms and busts of the Noughties will provide some consolation. But, and it’s a big but, we need to be convinced that those influencing the herd or causing the flock to change direction have thought about what they are doing and the effect such mass changed behaviour will have in the longer term.
If we can be brave enough to slow down, take a step back and look at things differently then the next decade could be full of exciting innovations that really would have the potential to change the world for the better. The challenge here is having the courage and vision to turn away from the herd and head for new pastures. I encountered the Blue Ocean Strategy a while back which, although it really is a post-justification reasoning, it does illustrate the thinking that has created some of the iconic gadgets of the last decade such as the Wii and iPhone. Perhaps a more appropriate title for this approach in the next decade would be Clean Ocean Strategy given the damage we are doing to the remaining Blue Ocean. In this, we would be looking to create new opportunities that didn’t add to the plastic, chemical and CO2 pollution that is turning our seas to an acid bath but also captured people’s imagination in the way that communications and entertainment have done in more recent years.
If we can use the technology to empower those who are repressed and discriminated against to gain a voice and learn for themselves that there are alternative ways to think and live, fundamentalism in all nations can be shown for what it is – a destructive, pseudo reality. For instance, if women had been in a stronger position in places such Afghanistan and Iraq, and likewise in the leading administrations of the Western world earlier this decade I doubt these complicated, entrenched and drawn-out wars would ever have started. Social media in its broadest sense offers the opportunities to make things more transparent expose hypocrisy and lies and amplify wisdom. Conversely, it could be manipulated unhealthily to amplify destructive forces and promote damaging herd behaviour. We have it in our power though to use it for good, rather than evil.
Let hopes rather than fears prevail in the next ten years
2020 here we come…
I remember first attending the Information Management/Online Information Show, or a variation of it, at London’s Olympia back in the 90s. I haven’t attended for a few years but enjoyed my visit last week for some very selfish reasons. For a start, it was very quiet – a welcome surprise for a deafie like me – and lack of footfall in the aisles meant I had some useful conversations and demos with a number of interesting exhibitors. The seminar theatres were quite small so I was thankful for good acoustics and being able to chat with some of the presenters easily.
I have a soft-spot for this show and I like the way it attempts to bring together age-old disciplines of information management with the latest online buzz – usually with some intelligent and well reasoned views of the latter. I’m sure there are some wise and seasoned information practitioners who look on with despair at the hype cycles that have passed by over the last 10 years or so and soldier on regardless until some common sense returns to the proceedings.
Unsurprisingly, social media was on the agenda in a number of the seminar theatres. I very much enjoyed a ‘pitfalls’ presentation by Sam Marshall from Clearbox Consulting a guy who has clearly ‘been there and done it’ in his roles with Unilever. You can see Sam’s presentations here and his list of very useful and common sense ‘pitfalls’ are…
1. Be ready to give up control
2. The price of entry is nearly zero for everyone
3. Be ready to follow up
4. If there’s a backlash, join the conversation
5. Keep looking out for a groundswell
6. Don’t feel you have to own the community
7. Be authentic
8. Match the approach to the channel
9. Don’t use social media to duck legislation
10. Tidy up
His examples from Dove illustrated very well that people hate hypocrisy and ’social media’ is a great way of the people letting hypocritical companies know. The examples are also great lessons for brand managers in that very worthy comments about the downsides of the beauty industry look highly hypocritical from a massive FMCG organisation who benefits greatly from such an industry and who also has some responsibilities for heavy damage to the environment.
I also enjoyed Theresa Regli’s common sense keynote presentation about ‘Findability in the Web 2.0 World’ and her tour along the Red line of CMS Watch’s Content Technology Vendor Map 2010
With its focus on knowledge management from a librarian’s perspective and the challenges of legal, technical and medical publishing, IMS has a solidity about it. I’ve noticed many vendors in the Online Information side of things coming and going over the last 10 years (probably in direct correlation to the hype cycle) so it remains a useful barometer of the broader information management space and will probably be a lot busier next year when the social media hype dies down 
November began with a virtual attendance at JBoye 09 and some remote involvement in the #fixwcm debate started at the event and continued online by Jon Marks. Crossing from West to East last week for a visit to China gave ample opportunity to think about #futurewcm and the upcoming debates on this being triggered by the Gilbane event in Boston.
So, in my blog round-up for November, I’m going to summarise some WCM client side views for this discussion and debate and hope that this provides a catalyst for other client views as these debates have a tendency to be dominated by vendors, analysts and commentators.
Getting back to basics…
In my first post of the month that coincided with the #fixwcm debate I looked at the CMS Watch definition of Web Content Management and in some further thoughts traveled even further back to how the father of the web Sir Tim Berners-Lee described his original invention and how he describes its transition into something greater – the Giant Global Graph (GGG).
So, ten years from now, will Web Content Management still be “A system that lets you apply management principles to content.” ? and to what extent will WCM have evolved so that it can be distilled down into the simplistic description of the GGG – ‘content plus pointers plus relationships plus descriptions’?
It appears one of the biggest barriers to the development of the Semantic Web is the degree to which information can be deliberately manipulated. Could ’social network’ frameworks such as Twitter provide a human driven semantic process that machines can actually make sense of? Or will the same issues of deceit and manipulation render such information as increasingly unreliable?
How far have we come in the last ten years?
As my #futureWCM post here emphasised, we’ve got the costs of WCM down considerably during this decade. A sub $50K mid market proprietary solution will pretty much do what an upper tier one did 10 years ago and Free/Open Source solutions will do as much if not a lot more of what the mid market solutions offered in the early to mid noughties.
However, the average organisation still struggles to make content management integral to its employee’s roles and CMS providers across all tiers are still struggling to make the content management process as intuitive and user-friendly as it needs to be. I’ve started a wish list at the end of my previous post for capabilities I’d love to have at my fingertips in my current role.
My personal belief is that CMS developers across all tiers and types tend to be focused far too much on the next big thing rather than understanding how the basic elements in the system need continual focus and development to make sure tasks can be achieved in as productive a way as possible. Let’s make the next ten years the ‘age of user experience’ and revolutionise the processes of creating and managing content online with some fresh thinking rather than too much herd behaviour.
The bigger picture
From my ramblings over the last month, you’ll probably have gathered that I feel Microsoft has hindered the progress of information management during the last decade through its efforts to protect its desktop dominance. Although I have been a big user and, at times, advocate of SharePoint the heritage of that product will always pull it back to the past rather than looking to the future. It is my personal belief that information management as a whole will benefit from Google making further progress into the average medium to large organisation.
Beyond the big software ideology battles that will doubtless continue to influence WCM development considerably over the next ten years, I think we will see new regional influence. The US led the way in the 90s, Europe has dominated the 00s and I believe that the East will come to dominate the 10s. Why? because in the same way the US has never really understood Europe, neither Europe or the US really understand the East.
When will the social media bubble burst?
As I’ve mentioned in posts during this month, alarm bells are ringing for me on ‘Social Media’. It’s another bubble for sure as I’m hearing the same levels of irrational comments and exuberance I’ve experienced many times now over the last 15 years or so.
Personally, I think organisations would do well to not get unhealthily distracted by the hype and really focus on what it is they do well. After-all, if the products and services they provide live up to their promise, they will be talked about with positive sentiment and the brand advocates will naturally do their part to drown out the negatives. Conversely, if social media becomes one big game of manipulation, trust will be undermined to such an extent that nobody will take any notice anyway and return to the long-standing beacons of trustworthy information – more than often the historical media properties whose people have been trained well to sniff out the truth. Citizen journalism is here to stay, as is ‘the cult of the amateur’ - the last few years of this decade have shown the benefits of this, but also the downsides and I am looking forward to a return to common sense during the next decade that brings some balance to some of the more ridiculous social media hype around today and lets us recognise reality from pseudo-reality.
A 2020 vision…
Ten years from now I’d like to see Microsoft Office (as we know it today) consigned to history and for people to be having nostalgic conversations about the days when they used to spend most of their working days creating Word documents or PowerPoint presentations and describing how ridiculous it was compared to how they work today. I’d like to imagine us all working in ubiquitous ‘context aware’ and ‘adaptive’ tools that help create and manage content assets in universally standardised ways and for that to become a basic commodity that nobody really feels the need to talk about anymore. In 2020 I’d like us all to be ‘web’ masters and not for web publishing to still be seen as a technical domain divorced from the rest of the operation.
I absolutely don’t want to be feeling that we are locked into a particular vendor or implementor or that in order to benefit from new ways of managing information for the web that we are going to need to start almost from the beginning again. I’d like to be sure that when we say we are making iterative improvements we are actually improving rather than just approaching the same issues from a different direction or adding a superficial veneer of improvement but not fixing the basics.
In an ideal world I’d love for us to be able to ‘engage’ with our web users on a ‘one-to-one’ basis. Firstly though, they’ve got to really want to do that in the first place. Secondly we need to be so good at managing the information flow throughout our organisation that we can engage with an individual customer in a meaningful and useful way, beyond how it’s always been done. Right now I don’t think the average organisation is remotely close to achieving this. Maybe the next ten years will finally make ‘one-to-one’ web ‘engagement’ a reality – but only if it really makes sense in the real world.
Just to add some context to the next post…
For the first few years of this decade I was immersed in an Enterprise Content Management project for a global products company. For the last couple of years of this decade I have also been immersed in web/enterprise content management for global products companies.
click image for book link
Therefore, as we come to the end of another decade and the first of the 21st century my thoughts are turning to the progress that’s been made over the last ten years and if I was writing this blog in 2020 (as from its title you may guess I intend to) what would I be saying about the next ten years of progress?
Ten years ago, the company I was working for was spending in the region of $25 million to consolidate its many external and internal websites onto one consistent platform and empower the subject matter experts around the organisation to create and manage content for themselves. There were great ambitions to be able to deliver highly personalised content and use the web as a dynamic multi-channel publishing tool that would create PDF documents on the fly based on the web visitors specified preferences.
The consolidation worked well and came at a crucial time as technology markets started to collapse and the dotcom boom turned to bust. The ambitious and complex personalisation efforts were abandoned completely and as far as I can see today were never resurrected.
Fast forward to the end of the decade, the global projects I have been working on are a fraction of the budget (around $1-2 million) but have been achieving the same types of results in terms of website consolidation and functionality. However, I am experiencing some of the same issues I did 10 years ago that call into question how far we’ve actually come in that time.
When you are responsible for managing websites, global or otherwise, the degree to which you can empower others around the organisation to create and manage content is the top concern because all other aspects of web management and marketing are ultimately dependent on this. Consider for a moment all of the debate and hype currently being generated around ‘social media’. The best way for a product manufacturer to achieve positive sentiment on the social web is to focus on producing products and associated services that deliver on their promise of performance and reliability and will be talked about for those reasons and not any negative aspects. Getting the information management right both inside and outside the organisation is crucial to this.
So, ten years on, is this getting any easier? Well, yes and no. In general the tools have become more non-technically focused and generation shifts mean that the younger employees are more web savvy. However, I still think that the deep dependence on Microsoft’s largely disconnected desktop environment that is so ingrained in many organisations is hindering rather than helping progress in content management. Too often, the web is still seen as an activity that ‘someone else does’, that it is too technically complex for everyday business folks to get involved with and that responsibilities for it come in addition to people’s day jobs. Web Content Management in particular sits in too much of a separate domain which still leads to considerable duplication of content and effort.
Over the next ten years I’d really like to see organisations really focusing on breaking their Microsoft Office dependence and beginning more of their content creation and management processes online rather than having to go through lengthy re-purposing exercises to make that content useful on the web. There is undoubtedly a place for ‘social web’ style publishing processes within organisations once the downsides of such approaches have been fully exposed on the wider web but these will entail major IT and cultural change programmes that will typically take years not months to push through
The CMS providers who successfully address the concerns of the IT department for secure, reliable, robust and supportable solutions with the non-technical ease of use exhibited by the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube are poised to win and deep down I’m really hoping this isn’t Microsoft SharePoint, simply because I think SharePoint continues to be a counterproductive information management approach that is designed to safeguard Microsoft’s desktop application monopoly.
In 15 years of content management projects from enterprise to medium to small companies I can’t remember ever initiating or participating in a content related workflow. Now that it’s become commonplace to publish anything and everything to the web through social media tools it seems unlikely that I ever will.
However, thinking ahead, this is an area that could well turn on its head during the next 10 years as we climb the slope of enlightenment. The more I get under the covers of social media, the more I think that organisations need to play a very cautious game here. This may well be contrary to the hyped-up view of greater transparency and openness that’s currently pervasive but then after so many years of hype exposure I’m more inclined to turn against the herd view these days.
A Global Web Managers Wish List…
- The cost-effective globalisation capabilities of EPiServer (with a touch more object orientation and shared content support but maintaining the traditional site tree mental model)
- The image management and manipulation capabilities of Flickr, expanded to support the video capacity and capability of YouTube
- Non-technical creation and management of rich media illustrated by 10CMS
- Article creation and management with the simplicity of WordPress and document capabilities of Google Docs
- A microsite creation capability with the simplicity of WordPress but within the globalised framework of EPiServer
- Module/application development and integration with the breadth of Joomla and simplicity of Facebook
- Collaborative site building with the breadth of SharePoint but the simplicity of Google Apps and WCM connectivity of Alterian
- Community site building breadth of Drupal with simplicity of Community Server
- A content repository that works with the speed and accuracy of Gmail that could auto-categorise and make related content recommendations on the fly
- Google Analytics expanded to incorporate social media monitoring – as I want to keep all analytics in context
- An internal relationship building and knowledge sharing capability illustrated by Twitter
Microsoft and Google featured strongly in my last post because in thinking about how web content management may develop over the next decade, the big battle for hearts and minds these organisations are engaged in will continue to shape WCM because they touch so many aspects of the content process. A personal view I’ve held for a number of years now is that Microsoft’s understandable efforts to protect the desktop worldview that it earns the bulk of its revenue from has been doing WCM a disservice and products such as SharePoint continue to distract us from smarter ways of doing things. Conversely, Google appears to be accelerating its pace of development in exciting and innovative ways. Its services are superb for small to medium businesses and I welcome its ongoing efforts to usurp Microsoft’s desktop dominance in larger organisations.
Many WCM and ECM developments of the last 15 years have been skewed towards Microsoft’s desktop PC view of the world and, for the sake of ubiquity, we have complied with this worldview and happily made WCM products that look like Microsoft’s desktop apps (because that’s what most people are familiar with using), connected to them or integrated them while being at its mercy with sometimes flaky support for broader standards such as WebDAV or having to get to grips with it’s particular way of doing things such as extensive use of CAML in SharePoint.
Google has been making steady progress in pushing the humble web browser forward to accomplish ever more sophisticated computing application tasks. Recent developments have highlighted progress in these areas. Google Wave and a new range of Google Apps site templates illustrate the company’s play for Microsoft’s stronghold of business collaboration. Reading Don Dodge’s recent blog post following his departure from Microsoft to Google and looking beyond the slightly acrimonious tone of some of it, the words he chose to describe the development of Google docs hit at the heart of Microsoft’s perceived weaknesses and Google’s strengths.
Personally I welcome these developments and have felt frustrated at the time it’s taking to shift from an information management approach that has clearly had it’s day and to a web first one that makes so much sense in an always on, always connected world.
For a number of years now I’ve been emphasising the importance of context in the content management process and while in a Product Management and Strategy role a few years ago, was focused for a time on visualising just the kind of connected and collaborative process now being illustrated by Google Wave. At the time we were looking at how web based application developers such as Zoho were innovating word processing in a browser based environment, recognising that new thinking should be applied rather than replicating old thinking on a new delivery platform.
1st generation web content management was driven by the US and the desire for the dominant global organisations of the 90’s to embrace the commercial opportunities offered by the web
2nd generation web content management was driven to a large extent by Europe and Scandinavia, who have needed to deal with many more language and cultural challenges across all types and tiers of organisations
3rd generation web content management is being driven by web users themselves who have discovered the power of open source community development, online content creation and socially driven communications
4th generation web content management will be driven by the East – simply because the West doesn’t understand the East well enough. An excellent recent TED presentation here by Devdutt Pattanaik emphasises some aspects of this lack of understanding
I’m not making this observation because I am currently writing this blog in China. My experiences in working for European brands with strong Asian presence in recent years has given me an insight into how business is done in the East at a grass routes level, how and where this is influencing information management requirements and how this is likely to impact web content management.
For product manufacturers, particularly those with some heritage, the web can be a double-edged sword. On one hand it has helped them create effective global sales operations. On the other, it erodes margins and polarises markets – with mass market low-cost products at one end and premium products at the other. The middle ground is not a comfortable place to be in today’s wired economy.
Sitting in meetings here in Hong Kong I have been struck by the contrast of presentations by the marketing folks. The European contingent’s slides are often peppered with the phrase ‘no internet’ – referring to efforts to prevent high-end, premium products being subjected to a price-led web war. So the unease in the room was apparent when the Chinese marketing folks presented. In contrast, their presentations were almost entirely about the web and it’s hard to forget that almost every single product being discussed, including competitive ones, is manufactured in China.
The more I listened, the more I got a sense of déjà vu. There was a lot of comment about sites like Taobao and Team Buy . Although terms like social networking were being used liberally, the concepts they were talking about, such as ‘team buying’ sounded awfully familiar to web seminars I attended back in the late 90s where start-ups like letsbuyit.com were regular presenters. During the peak of the dotcom boom, their concept of people coming together to push down the price of an item made regular appearances on TV in the form of their ‘ant’ logo.
Letsbuyit.com was a high profile victim of the dotcom bust but it is making a comeback – this time as a membership orientated price comparison site
Given that the great firewall of China is blocking access to some of the familiar names of the ‘social media’ world, it appears there are no shortage of online ‘conversations’ happening amongst the countries many, many millions of web users. It looks like China is continuing to through it’s own dotcom boom within its firewall, with the types of irrational exuberance that continues to be a feature of the western world’s web usage, fueling a boom in online communications and shopping. Regardless of whether this bubble bursts any time soon, I think these developments are significant to the future of the web and web content management in the coming years.
At present, open-source software is not big in China – mainly because extensive pirating means that proprietary software is mainly free too. I imagine that Microsoft, in particular, is quite happy about this as it has helped indoctrinate the world’s largest population into the belief that the only way to operate a computer, deal with content and communicate online is via its software.
From what I’ve heard over here, China has big ambitions in software. Perhaps the recent resignation of Kai-Fu Lee from Google China (who originally headed Microsoft’s Chinese Research operation) indicates things are gathering pace as one imagines he would have the background knowledge and insight to jump into the Chinese tech venture capital space at the right time. If China is to make an impact beyond its firewall, then it needs to look beyond what Google is doing to usurp Microsoft’s desktop computing dominance. The netbook market development driven to a large extent by Taiwan’s ASUS innovations has often been described as a threat to Microsoft’s dominance because it has demonstrated that there is an alternative. ASUS and it’s fellow Taiwanese manufacturer Acer’s enthusiasm for netbooks is clear and I understand it shook Microsoft that these innovations were more popular in the western world than it believed they would be.
So, with Chinese companies innovating in hardware, it follows that they’ll be innovating in software, in the first instance to deal with the obvious differences in language and culture close to home and secondly to help create a new world order.
…Not much specific Chinese WCM input yet but I’m expecting some over the next few days. The following is just a few initial thoughts from the flight over and being wide awake when I need to be asleep 
As another decade is coming to a close and we begin heading towards 2020, there is increasing commentary about the future of Web Content Management and what the next year, 5 years and 10 years might bring forth.
Quite often, looking back and learning lessons from history helps in the process of anticipating what the future might hold. While we can be sure there will be unpredictable developments, we can also be sure that history will repeat itself in one form or another. After-all, the ‘noughties’ has been a decade full of ‘history repeating itself’ – from the Dotcom ( read South Seas) bubble, to long drawn out ‘religious’ wars in ancient lands to another great economic disaster. This last decade would seem to haved showed more than many that the more technologically sophisticated we get and the more electronically connected we become, the faster and more frequently we repeat our historical mistakes.
So, a good place to look back, before looking forward, is to the birth of the ‘Web’ part of Web Content Management and the great works of Tim Berners-Lee.
Aside from Sir Berners-Lee’s association with Dorset UK (where the very best of ‘noughties’ WCM came from of course ;) ) and his more recent time at Southampton University working on the Semantic Web (I’m trying to put my home town on the map for something other than the Titanic ) I believe the simplistic essence of his original idea hits at the heart of what Web Content Management, to date, has been all about .
The essence of the WWW is ‘content plus pointers’ and you can pretty much distil the majority of our WCM efforts over the last 10-15 years down to that simple description. Content (documents, text, data, images, video) plus pointers (taxonomy, site navigation, search engines, blogs (chronological pointing), wikis (pointing simplified) )
Through his work on the semantic web, Berners-Lee has described the WWW transitioning into the GGG (Giant Global Graph). Spookily enough, when you read more about graph theory, one word stands out – the ‘Matrix’.
However, prophetic film making aside, the simple description of the GGG is ‘content plus pointers plus relationships plus descriptions’
Twitter, for example, distils down nicely into this description. 140 characters can provide surprisingly valuable content – it is the best content ‘pointing’ tool yet devised (because of the following 2 points) – relationships between content and pointers are visible and can be analysed – and the content, it’s context and relevancy, is often described well – by humans rather than metadata.
But, like any first mover in the technology space, Twitter is gaining critical mass but also generating considerable hype. I think that looking beyond this hype and the mechanics that Twitter is illustrating is key to the future of WCM. In part two of this post, I’ll give the reasons for this thought…
Since arriving at my current organisation and seemingly the only person in the place with the word ‘web’ in their job title I have become a magnet for a whole bunch of folks, from Marketing and beyond, interested in embarking into the brave new world of Social Media. In fact the CEO himself has said he wants to do more in Web 2.0. When I hear observations that we shouldn’t bother with our current WCM efforts and just use Facebook and Twitter I start to worry. Am I missing something here? Is social media really reaching a level and maturity where we should be concentrating all our information and communication management efforts on it?
Over the last couple of months I’ve learned some interesting things about ‘appliance manufacturing’. The first is that it is a surprisingly cut-throat business, with one manufacturer not hesitating to take another to court over the size and shapes of their knobs (you know what I mean and I kid you not). It’s also not without its fair share of accidents. Each year brings at least a few suitable nominees for the Darwin Awards and I have heard tales of how people have managed to embed all manner of attachments in themselves while trying to clean appliances while they’ve been running and then trying to sue the manufacturer. Some of our customer service people have to use two names because they have received unreasonable and abusive approaches from aggrieved customers. Naturally, email and the web have become prime tools for unhappy customers and ’social media’ is clearly another potential weapon in the aggrieved’s armory.
So it is in this context that I have been getting ‘hands on’ in social media and trying to understand some of the mechanics from the ground up. If you’ve read much comment on my blog you’ll know that I’ve been exposed to a lot of hype over the last 20 years and, to my shame, been responsible for creating a fair bit too. And let’s not beat about the bush here – there is a hell of a lot of hype around ’social media’ at the moment – equivalent I think to the ‘one-to-one relationship marketing’ and ‘personalisation’ idealism that helped fuel the original dotcom bubble.
A great example of this is a comment I saw associated with the recent Monitoring Social Media event earlier in the week. “Twitter Doesn’t Create Influence, it Reveals it.” Now, if you read my previous post you’ll see I’ve been conducting an experiment in Twitter influence and trying to understand to what degree it is valid and to what degree it can be manipulated. On last look, I raised my Klout score by 15 points in just over a week. Looking at other influence monitoring tools like TweetLevel I even discovered I had an influence level equivalent to the founder of CMS Watch – an organisation I have admired for years for its incitefulness and ability to get beyond hype in a crowded and complicated industry. A subsequent communication revealed that said founder and I are agreed that Twitter, although providing professional value, is pseudo-reality. My concern is that the more hype is generated around things like Twitter influence, the more the professional usefulness of the tool will be undermined and it will become a haven for the ‘dark side’.
In another communication I received the observation that perhaps these experiments show that “social media expert” is just another word for ‘douchebag’ and interestingly enough a bit of hunting around revealed an excellent resource on all aspects of social media psychology and ‘douchebaggery’. This has led to me questioning that if the ‘dark side’ of social media and Twitter, in particular, is well-known amongst those who are practised in its use, is this sufficient sanction to prevent these mediums descending into the typical expletive ridden slanging matches of a typical YouTube comment stream? Will the age-old adage from the long-standing newsgroup and debate forums of the last decade of “Don’t feed the trolls” work successfully in these newer online communications environments as they reach mass market appeal?
Personally, my recent experiments have revealed to myself that I don’t like being a social media jerk and that fulfilling the guidance offered on some of the sites I’ve read recently is the right way to go. My only hope is that as these environments grow in their popularity and usage that others become similarly enlightened…
It’s been a rapid learning exercise but I think I can now offer some wiser counsel to those yet to experiment or really understand these newer social media environments and, once again, to those I may have upset in the process, I am sorry. Once again I seem to be fulfilling a repeated purpose in my life “to serve as a warning to others”
If there are two things modern comms technologies have taught us, it is the power and danger of herd behaviour and that if something can be manipulated, it will be manipulated.
Despite the enormity of the dotcom boom and bust and the even greater enormity of the credit crunch, both of which were driven by technology fueled herd behaviour, we continue to rush headlong into the ‘next big thing’ – until it comes crashing down around our ears again.
Likewise, the massive growth of Google over the last decade has led to the equally massive growth of an industry whose sole purpose is to manipulate Google results.
On social media, the alarm bells are starting to ring for me and I’m getting a sense of ‘unrealness’ that I got working in the midst of the web and telecoms industry at the turn of the century and in watching the ‘financial services’ bubbles growing ever larger in more recent years.
Two experiences in the last week have added to that sense of unrealness. The first is playing about with Klout and the second is looking deeper at emerging areas of ’sentiment’ monitoring. Twitter influence and social media sentiment are on my radar in terms of web strategy but, as always, I’m keen to get beyond the assumption and hype often associated with such things and not waste either my time or my employer’s time and money unnecessarily.
So, if automated tools such as Klout are to be believed, I managed to raise my ‘influence’ score by 8 points in less than a week. How? well essentially by using the same triggers that have always been used in these type of environments, since the early newsgroup days .
1. Controversy
2. Audaciousness (nice word – thanks Simon )
3. Flaming
Maybe it was a little more subtle than the average troll, maybe not, but in essence it was these 3 approaches that gained the ‘@’ and RT responses that Klout is clearly using as a primary measure of influence in its algorithms. Is Twitter a more mature environment impervious to techniques employed for years in other online social environments? – I think not. Do I genuinely feel I’ve gained any influence during the last week – errr no – but Klout thinks so.
If, however, the consensus is that something like Klout is an accurate representation of influence on Twitter then this raises another key question – how representative is Twitter of offline influence and is there a danger of getting fixated with something which in the bigger, wider world currently has very little influence?
Beyond Twitter, I think I’m seeing the rise of a new SEO – Sentiment Engineering & Optimisation – that, like bees to a honeypot, is already attracting the naive evangelists, ’snake oil’ salespeople, confusion marketers and cowboy operators.
Anyone who has spent any real time in web analytics and has had responsibility for reporting results knows how easy it is to misinterpret data and how taking numbers on face value can be a dangerous thing, without trying to understand the deeper background to that data.
If it’s easy to misinterpret and misrepresent structured data, I’m thinking it’s even easier to misinterpret and misrepresent ’unstructured’ information.
There was a tweet from one attendee at the recent Alterian customer day that I felt was fundamental to this “ It’s hard for a computer to comprehend sarcasm and irony.” Like it or loath it, our brave new social media environment is loaded with sarcasm and irony and as this article illustrates, it is a complex form of communication. Has ‘natural language processing’ advanced to a point where it can interpret a comment correctly that actually has the opposite meaning? If it has then I suggest we are much closer to achieving artificial intelligence than perhaps I thought. Add into this, the ‘ugly side’ of social media, very well described by Econsultancy here, and there is a whole potent mix of manipulated, distorted and amplified information that potentially has to be dealt with here.
With its immense programming capability, Google has a continual struggle to prevent its search results being manipulated (I’m guessing a lot more than 200 signals now) and judging by the numbers of individuals and organisations jumping onto the current SEO bandwagon there is still clearly money to made in trying to do it. So, realistically, how close are we to even beginning to monitor and understand the infinitely more complex realm of social media sentiment in a useful and accurate way? And do solutions such as Klout indicate that a whole new Sentiment Engineering & Optimisation (SEO) industry is about to explode? Sadly, I think they do
It seems ‘humility’ is the latest management/leadership buzzword. After twenty plus years of working life and studying how organisations and people behave, I agree that it is a very important attribute in leaders.
I recommend, however, that if individuals and organisations want to embrace such philosophies they need to at least do the following…
- Eradicate any use of the word ‘Superior’ with regard to all HR processes (bottom line – nobody is ‘superior’ to anybody else)
- Make sure references to humility refer to the top, not the bottom. No point a leader talking about humility in others if they are not prepared to be humble themselves.
