Author: Christopher Carfi

• 
  DestinationCRM: Study Points to Enterprise 2.0 Perplexity – "Despite steady growth forecasted for Enterprise 2.0, recent research by
  content management association AIIM demonstrates that organizations are
  unclear of exactly how to make the best of the Enterprise 2.0 market."
• Doc Searls: VRM, The Personal Platform – A video and presentation given by Doc at Mobile Monday in Amsterdam

Just spoke with Clay Shirky, who hinted at a few of the things he’s going to be discussing at Supernova.  The highlights…

• Here Comes Everybody could be summed up in five words, "group action just got easier."  Now it’s time to think about what happens when group action actually occurs.

• We talked quite a bit about the types of things that could "happen" when people start working together.  Interestingly, one can think about a couple of different ways that individuals can work together when they interact with a larger organization. 

• The first way (and perhaps the "default" way) is that individuals could work together to "stop" something that an organization is doing.  In other words, many grassroots collaboration efforts can be broadly grouped together under the heading of "protest" movements. 

• What might be more interesting is to examine what happens when groups form to perform a "start" activity.  That is, let’s start to think about the case when individuals begin to collaborate to create something new, and to start a novel set of activities, as opposed to banding together to "stop" something that is already extant.

This is going to be a fun conference.  More here.

photo credit: joi ito

BJ Fogg is a professor who (along with others including Dave McClure) led the "Creating Engaging Facebook Apps" course at Stanford.  In 10 weeks, the students in the course created Facebook apps that were installed over 16 million times that were being used over 1 million times a day.

I caught up with him last week via a phone call, and was able to both gain a better understanding the of impact of the Facebook course, as well as get a glimpse of what’s coming next. 

CFC: What surprised you most about what your class learned?

BJF: The students did this amazing thing, with NO budget.  Nobody could have predicted the success.  Nobody.

CFC: You’ve stated that "mobile phones will be the #1 platform for
persuasion soon."  What makes mobile so compelling, in your opinion?

BJF:   Mobile is so compelling for three reasons.

1) Mobile devices are always there with us and we love them
2) Mobile devices are very
personal and private
3) Mobile devices are powerful and have these amazing capabilities
(ed. – BJ noted that just before we got on the phone, traffic was snarled in front of him and he would have been irretrievably stuck, but his phone allowed him to access a map, look at the current traffic patterns and find the only path that wasn’t tied up.  He then added that "had the phone
been a little smarter, it would have warned me earlier.")

CFC:  What is "persuasive technology?"

BJF: People are persuading people all the time.  What’s changed is that we
now have modes of interaction that are designed in software.  There’s a
bias in that system, based on the software.  The paths, the chutes and
tunnels will be set up in favor of whoever builds the system.

Facebook is all about getting you to upload your picture, go back, invite
your friends, etc.,  The only way that users have done things is to set
up groups.  Users don’t have any specific channels [to exert persuasion]; they have to
improvise.  When designing a system, "who are you going to give the power and influence to?" is the inherent question.

Everybody who is succeeding is successful at "persuading" people.  Right now, Facebook is the leader.

CFC: What else do you think should be on the radar of the folks attending Supernova?

BJF: Peace.stanford.edu
should be on their radar.  We’re doing a "peace intervention"….with the
new internet tools, you can systematically and scientifically do things
that will result in world peace.  We’re doing quantitative studies that
show that Web 2.0 tools can create the antecedents to peace.  We’re
trying to develop a process that lets people use new technologies and
are measuring the outcomes of trials. 

I think it’s a much more critical issue than global warming.
Climate change has been marketed as an issue, and is developing a
series of business models.  Peace ends up being a not-sexy
topic, but we’ll keep doing it, and hopefully the people at Supernova
will step back from the biases that cause people not to care about
peace. 

BJ Fogg will be moderating a panel entitled "People: What we know, and what it means" at Supernova 2008, which runs June 16-18 in San Francisco.  More Supernova agenda information here.

This year, the Supernova conference is collaborating with Cerado to create a custom Ventana^tm that will serve as a mobile-friendly Official Pocket Guide and connect the event with its attendees in real time.  (Scroll down to see screenshots of the guide.)

There are four versions of the Supernova Pocket Guide available:

• For Mobile (including the Nokia N95 and BlackBerry)
• For iPhone
• Supernova widget for websites
• Supernova widget for your blog

The guide offers quick access to…

The Buzz – The latest blog posts, Twitter comments, and announcements are the first things you see when you open the Guide

The People – The Network page lets other attendees quickly jump to your blog or website. (By the way, you can add yourself to the guide with one click, and link people to your Facebook profile, LinkedIn presence, Twitter stream, or any other online resource.)

The Answers – We’ve included a helpful FAQ to help you keep track of everything that’s going on.

The Plan – The Agenda page will be updated in real time whenever the conference agenda shifts.

The Supernova
conference is on its seventh year of catalyzing the visionary
conversations about the development of new technology. In collaboration
with Wharton, one of the world’s foremost business schools, Supernova
embraces the changes sweeping our world and the tools that often make
the "audience" better connected and informed than the experts.

   

Supernova 2008 will take place June 16-18 in San Francisco. To reserve your place in the conversation, register now, and get the Guide.

You can learn more about Cerado Ventana at http://ventana.cerado.com.

   

Jeremiah is up at Cluetrain @ 10. 

POST methodology

• People – Assess your customers’ ‘Social Technographics’ profile
• Objectives – Decide what you want to accomplish
• Strategy – Plan for how relationships with customer will change
• Technology – Decide which social technologies to use

Full background on POST here.

NOTE:  "It’s POST, not ‘TSOP’ … it doesn’t start with technology"

—

How to deal with detractors?

Best practice … have a crisis strategy in place.  More on how to deal with detractors here.

Five types of detractors:

• Legitimate complainer
• Competitor
• Engaged critic
• Flamer
• Troublemaker

—

Adoption models

• "The Tower" – Purely centralized adoption of social media tools
• "The Tire" – Uncoordinated adoption at the edge of the organization
• "Hub & Spoke" – Central resource, but people can be flexible at the edge

—

Jeremiah’s Recommendations

• Act like a host at a part, rather than a cop
• Power is in the hands of the community
• Put the needs of the members first, followed by marketing objectives

Deb Schultz is up at Cluetrain at 10.  Just make a number of great points on how to engage in a highly connected world.  Deb’s thoughts:

1. Be Real
2. Participate
3. Find your communities
4. Be a catalyst
5. Engage online
6. Engage offline
7. Know when to "let it go"
8. The love you give is equal to the love you get
9. Be multi demensional
10. Be consistent
11. Focus on people not tech
12. Listen.  Rinse.  Repeat.

Am in Palo Alto this morning at the Cluetrain at 10 event in Palo Alto (details on the event here).   Hope to see you here!  Doc, Debs, and a lot of other great folks here.  Will be updating this post throughout the day.

Highlights from Doc’s talk:

"Open source is a lot like the construction industry.  We don’t think about the construction industry as a ‘gift culture’ — it’s just a culture where good ideas get
spread around."  Example: Augustus Taylor and frame construction

—

NEA:
Nobody owns it
Everybody can use it.
Anybody can improve it.

—

We should be able to express global (and logical) preferences outside of anyone’s silo.  Example:   "IF I am calling for tech support THEN I don’t want to hear a commercial message AND I am willing to pay X to reach a human in < 60 seconds"

—

Joyce Searls: "Why can’t I take my shopping cart from one site to another?"

—

VRM: A new business model.  Project #1 is for free media (that isn’t advertising). 

—

RelButton = "I want to pay..what I want, I want to relate on my terms…"

Three states:

1) Intention to relate and pay

2) Intention to sell, but also to relate on your (the buyer’s terms) as well as mine

3) Existing relationship

Can capture intentions, transaction records, preferences, memberships, social graphs, shopping lists, existing agreements, etc.

—

Summary thoughts:

– The customer is the new platform

– Markets are relationships

– Relating is the new frontier

– The "intention economy" will grow around what we actually want

– Our work has barely started

The rumors on the new iPhone state that it’ll have a second camera for "video conferencing."  But think about it…if it’s on the faster 3G network, and it has that second camera, it’s not really "video conferencing," which conjures images of staid meetings and boardrooms and such.

If the camera is there, and the network is fast enough, and the UI is right, this is that individual, person-to-person videophone that has been envisioned for the last 50 years.

Thoughts?

(And yes, for the record, I still want my flying car.)

"In every successful viral campaign there’s at least an ounce or two of
luck, but let’s dismiss that and focus on everything else. What we are
seeing now in online communities is a shift toward humanness. It’s no
longer acceptable to the Internet savvy individuals to interface with a
faceless corporation. Social tools like blogs, messaging services and
community sites have broken down barriers between individuals and also
between brands and consumers." – Jackie Peters

In particular, Jackie was talking about the success of Blendtec, which now has a marketing department that is a profit center, based on the success of their marketing videos on Revver.  (Yes, you read that correctly.)

So…will it blend?

Clay Shirky will be a speaker at Supernova 2008.  Some great insight from a keynote earlier this year:

“I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way
back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the
critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution,
was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and
so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to
drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era
are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the
streets of London.

And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender
that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we
associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public
libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children,
elected leaders–a lot of things we like–didn’t happen until having all
of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started
seeming like an asset.

It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic
surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we
started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century,
the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off
the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the
Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per
capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and,
critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work
weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of
its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to
manage before–free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched
Gilligan’s Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate
Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of
cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have
built up and caused society to overheat.”

Go check out the whole discussion here, or the video here.