Jan 24, 2011 | Collaboration, Communication, Social Media
Linux started with a promise, one that formed the basis of what has become a major player in the server operating system market, with a current share somewhere around 45%.
Linus Torvalds back in 1991 posted the following message on a discussion board inhabited by systems engineers “I am doing a free operating system (just a hobby) and I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won’t promise to implement them”
Torvalds, knowingly or otherwise, tapped a vein that has proven on many occasions (Wikipedia.org & Meetup.com being just two), that a community has the chance to form when several conditions are met:
- The community is driven by a need, or interest, rather than profit for the initiator
- Participation is welcome, and encouraged, but a transparent “peer review” process dictates if the contribution will be used
- Recognition is offered to all participants.
The promise is that these conditions will be met, and when they are not, the community fails, as did the first iteration of Wikipedia. Does yours measure up?
Dec 30, 2010 | Communication, Marketing, Social Media
On the eve of a new decade, it is perhaps useful to consider the changes that have occurred, recognise that the pace of change is still accelerating. For myself, and I suspect most of my readers, to even try and anticipate the changes to come in the next decade, on top of absorbing the impact of the last decade, just hurts the old brain.
However, where there is change, there is opportunity, and the opportunities that emerge will all require that the individual and the group is “connected” and using the communication and collaboration tools of the new decade. Part of the challenge here is throwing off the pre-conceptions of a disconnected world, the one we have all lived in to date, and to see the world through a different lens.
Chance favors the connected mind, so in 2011, get connected!
Dec 28, 2010 | Communication, Personal Rant, Social Media
Around a BBQ over the Christmas break, a bunch of us were chatting about what we would ban as a New Years resolution, as you do. Some innovative solutions to intractable problems emerged, peace in the middle east, an end to nuclear Iran/Korea/Pakistan, a clean coal technology, and so on. Light refreshments were involved.
One that struck me was when someone suggested we ban “Spin Doctors” particularly political ones that set out to persuade us that black is white, that what happened was not as it seemed, that somebody else was to blame, people had not contributed to climate change, and any number of other “Goebbelesque” distortions.
It occurred to me that the problem here was ours, as consumers of information and the media by which it is communicated, we accept the interpretation of data by those with a point of view, and often no knowledge just an outcome in mind. We allow those in positions of influence to distort data to their own purposes, when the opportunity is available to us to consider the data ourselves, and process it into information we are comfortable with.
Data is not information, it is just data to be interpreted to become information, and when used properly, usually with further processing, knowledge.
In this age of data availability and transparency, we only have ourselves to blame when we accept as the truth some dodgy interpretation of data by a dill with an agenda.
Dec 7, 2010 | Communication, Marketing, Social Media
It is amazing how many sites I visit claim least one of a few hyperbolic options:
We have a “unique” solution,
We are the “industry leader”,
We have an “innovative approach”
We offer the “best value”
These claims mean little, after all, there is only one industry leader, innovative approach is meaningless, value often just means price, and a unique solution remains unique usually only in the minds of the site owner.
Surely a better way is to be memorable by being different, be disturbing, be extremely focused, and the sales pitch needs to be about the outcomes of applying your solutions to their problems, not about how great your solutions are.
Dec 1, 2010 | Communication, Marketing
Presentations of any type are a sales pitch, not always a product, perhaps a point of view, capability of an organisation, seeking engagement with an objective or vision, or an idea.
Irrespective, the objective of selling cannot be met unless the audience is first engaged in the process, so the core question a presenter should ask is “how do I engage my audience into the process?” There are many common tools, know the audience, speak to them each “personally”, do not read, get out from behind the lectern, deliver with passion, and so on.
One that appears to be missed is the cadence, the combination of high points, the set-ups questions and desirable answer, observations about the “how it is” followed by the “how it could be” and always finished by a call to take action to move towards a visionary goal . When you think about it, all the great speeches have elements of all these cadence tools. Winston Churchill was a master, Martin Luther King’s I have a dream speech is possibly the best known, JFK seemed to do it effortlessly, and there are many, many others, which the web is making available to us to learn from.
Next time you do a presentation, consider the cadence it has, as it can have a huge impact on the effectiveness of the effort.
Nov 26, 2010 | Change, Collaboration, Communication, Social Media, Strategy
I am indebted to Alan Rustbridger, editor of the Guardian newspaper whose recent Andrew Olle lecture articulated many of the challenges facing traditional media owners as the new social media destroys their business model.
Among the gems in this lecture is a list of 15 uses of Twitter, as Alan says, it is far more than useless information on what Twits are having for breakfast, and should be considered for what it can do that has value, rather than just the nonsense accumulating in some places of its ecosystem, it is a disruption of the first order.
Here is an edited version of the list, with a few bits of my own thrown in, it is a fascinating view of a tool many over 50’s see as just a piece of nonsense our kids play with.
- It is an entirely new form of distribution, it may be 140 characters, but the power is in the linkages it can create
- It happens first. Then contributors to twitter, millions of them, have the power to be in the right place at the right time. News of the London bombings a few years back came in first from social media, predominantly twitter.
- It is a search engine, one that uses the algorithms of Google, and adds human curiosity, ingenuity, on top of the maths
- It is an aggregator of information. Set your tweet deck to a subject, and it will assemble the “wisdom of the crowd” to your device
- It is a reporting tool, that can find and communicate and co-ordinate knowledge, insight, and news, almost instantaneously
- It is a marketing tool of great power. Anyone can put a link to their website, alerting the community of followers, and others looking for info on a subject to the post, or information, and then encourage linkages. It is a tool that both drives traffic to a site, and can engage at the same time, the slam dunk of marketing.
- It is a series of parallel conversations, real conversations where you can agree, disagree, bring more information to the table, express ideas, and have views shaped, and it all happens in almost real time.
- It is a place where diverse voices can be heard, a place where the views of those who previously had no hope of being heard have the potential to find an audience
- It has changed the way the written word works. No longer are we as serious as we were in the days of “proper journalism” now we know much better the impact of pictures, humor, and diversity in the way we write
- It is a level playing field, anyone can be heard, no longer do you have to own a printing press or a TV station to get your message out there
- It has redefined what is and what is not news. No longer do we rely on a few editors curating what we see and hear, there are now thousands, millions out there putting stuff out into the ecosystem, and we can pick and choose which bits we pick up
- Twitter has a long attention span, much longer than a newspaper, whose headline today is wrapping paper tomorrow. Twitter can build, and build as more people become engaged, and bring information to the table for consideration, and as an argument evolves, move in directions and into spaces a 24 hour news cycle would never consider.
- It creates communities around thoughts, ideas, and causes.
- It changes our notion of authority, everyone is equal to start off, and it is the value of an idea or view that attracts authority, not the role played in an organisation that gives authority
- It is an agent of change, harnessing the power of collaboration, at potentially lightening speed.
Pretty good for a tool whose only redeeming feature was that is allowed us to find out what some wannabe celeb was doing right now!!
