iTunes 10 goes Ping (and makes good use of social media concepts)

Apple launched the new version of iTunes yesterday – version 10. Besides a host of small improvements, including a long overdue change in the icon (dropping the CD image!), the big news is that Apple have understood that social media concepts can be integrated into any software and shopping platform. It’s obvious, and we have talked about this at length on this blog (see especially this blog entry on going beyond the “obvious” with social media in businesses), but so many companies just haven’t got their heads into this space. It’s good to see Apple taking their first steps here with the introduction of Ping as part of iTunes 10.

Unfortunately, they’re only first steps. There’s a long way to go still before it is really impressive.

Ping is a social media platform that sits inside iTunes (that’s part of the problem, as it crawls along at even slower speeds than the snail paced iTunes store). Ping allows you to follow artists and friends and have them follow you – basically a music-based social network. It also promises to be quite clever about learning your music preferences (from your iTunes library, purchases and likes). It displays a customized Top 10 chart that is based upon your followers (although when you start, it’s a bog standard list that includes Lady Gaga, U2 and Linkin Park). The friends feature allows privacy controls so you can choose who to share your music preferences with.

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Is Google becoming a former supermodel?

In the rapidly changing world of the Internet, Google has become one of its superstars. Within little more than a decade Google has risen to be a giant in the industry with almost 20,000 employees, revenue of $23.6 billion and profits of $6.5 billion. Growth though is slowing and competition is on the up. Most companies would be envious with long-term growth rates of 17% that Google is expected to achieve, but for a company that has been used to growing at between 30-40% a year such growth seems almost pedestrian. Analysts think so, and while Apple has become the most valuable company in tech, Google stocks have hit the wall in the past 12 months and under performed the broader market.

So has Google run out of runway, can it compete in this Brave New World? Is this supermodel now destined only to make cameo appearances on Hollywood movies, or in MBA terms, has Google moved from being a Star and become a Cash Cow?
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A bit of fun: 10 Incredible Politician Technology Gaffs

FastCompany magazine recently were a bit taken aback by a very unscientific survey that rated the “Digital IQ” of the United States Senators. It was a completely nonsense survey, but it did allow the magazine the opportunity to poke fun at some top politicians who clearly have not fully come to terms with technology.

You can read an extract below. If you’d like to see some of the pictures, and links to videos of the actual events, then read the original at the FastCompany website.

Top 10 Politico Tech Blunders, From the Internets to the Google

BY AUSTIN CARR
Aug 20, 2010, FastCompany

… Politicians are notorious for their blunders and ignorance of all things tech-related, and this study–while not exactly using the most scientific metrics to determine tech-savviness–may just be a blunder in itself. Here we present our top 10 politico gaffes that show just how low our elected officials’ Digital IQs actually are.

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Mind Games – games where thinking REALLY counts

Got sent a link from Faaiez (twitter username : )

Very short article from The Los Angeles Times profiling some new games that require you to really engage your mind in order to play them. Engage as in, in order to move things you have to think them into action.

Charlatans and con artists have laid claim to its power for centuries. In science fiction, Jedi knights call it “the Force,” and the mind-bending X-Men (and Women) are old hats at it.

Telekinesis. Harnessing the mind to control your surroundings. It is the stuff of fantasy.

Now, that fantasy is crystallizing into reality.

Of course this technology is destined for greater things. Our cars, houses, planes, artificial limbs, wheelchairs, etc, etc will one day be controlled by simply thinking.

I often wonder how this will all be so? Let’s be honest, most of us battle to think about the stuff we have to deal with now. And based on millions of years of human history, we don’t think that well. Imagine when our minds are needed to control more than just ourselves? What damage will we be capable of then?

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How much Klout do you have on Twitter?

I mainly use two online apps to run the Twitter accounts I run. And I use these two because they do very different things. There are some things I need to do from time to time where the one trumps the other, and visa versa for other things. So there’s no getting rid of either of them.

• CoTweet (I do wish Co-Tweet had an iPhone app)
• HootSuite

Anyway, a possibly meaningless introduction to Klout. It’s integrated into CoTweet, but you can get there without CoTweet (click here).

The Klout Score is the measurement of your overall online influence. The scores range from 0 to 100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence. Klout uses over 25 variables to measure True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score. The size of the sphere is calculated by measuring True Reach (engaged followers and friends vs. spam bots, dead accounts, etc.). Amplification Probability is the likelihood that messages will generate retweets or spark a conversation. If the user’s engaged followers are highly influential, they’ll have a high Network Score.

We believe that influence is the ability to drive people to action — “action” might be defined as a reply, a retweet or clicking on a link. We perform significant testing to ensure that the average click-through rate on links shared is highly correlated with a person’s Klout Score. The 25+ variables used to generate scores for each of these categories are normalized across the whole data set and run through our analytics engine. After the first pass of analytics, we apply a specific weight to each data point. We then run the factors through our machine-learning analysis and calculate the final Klout Score. The final Klout Score is a representation of how successful a person is at engaging their audience and how big of an impact their messages have on people.

I’ve enjoyed engaging with their system of measurement, simply because it goes beyond the usual measure of ‘how many followers’ I have? A friend, for example, who has three times as many followers on Twitter than I do, but our Klout Scores suggest I behave in a very different way to how he does, and because of that, according to Klout, I get a higher score.

Sometimes I smile when I look at what Klout feedbacks to me, because it sounds a little like a personality assessment based on my Twitter behaviour. Very flattering and all mushy and gooey. Who knows, perhaps this will even be a significant measure of who we are in  the future. Can it be any less accurate or definitive than some of the measures we use today? Maybe even an extra layer to be applied to the Talent Matrix being implemented inside of companies the world over? At least the feedback is objective, instant, and I know exactly what’s expected of me to move it  : ) But this is a conversation for another day…

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Cell C may need more than (Trevor) Noah’s Ark to get them out of this one?

I’m sure it started out as a great idea at CellC Marketing HQ? The mobile phone industry has a mostly terrible name when it comes to customer service. Lines drop all the time, prices cripple you, data crawls regularly and call centers frustrate whatever life you still have, right out of you.

So it was a no-brainer to come up with a bold PR/Marketing angle of honesty, integrity and openness aimed at the bruised and beaten South African consumer. You know the story if you’ve been in South Africa these last 2 weeks. But in case you need an overview, care of The Daily Maverick and Mandy De Waal:

On Wednesday 28 July a mysterious Internet user going by the moniker of SABobbyT posted a video clip on YouTube of popular local comedian Trevor Noah going ape about mobile networks in general and Cell C in particular. In just four days Cell C found the offending link, watched it, decided to respond publicly, briefed its big agency (Ogilvy) to swiftly book media space in the Sunday Times and Rapport and to develop an advert apologising to Noah. The ad was created, approved and placed in record time before the advertising print deadlines for the two weeklies closed.

So what exactly did the ‘then nearing Super-Hero status’ Cell C CEO do? More from Mandy De Waal and The Daily Maverick:

Two “mea culpa”’ full-page adverts signed by Cell C’s CEO Lars P. Reichelt later, and the Twitterverse was abuzz with chat about social media hero Trevor Noah, how he had stood up for the small guy and what swell people Cell C were for coming clean. The story was getting airtime and was reported on by no less than Bloomberg while other media pundits were calling the effort a marketing “master-stroke”.

However, what started as a ‘master-stroke’ is fast turning into a sinking ship (in some circles anyway – search cellc on Twitter and scroll through). You can read other’s views on why they think this has been a ‘master-sink’, here, here and here, but I’d like to comment on simply this:

What Cell C and Trevor ‘I need a lifeboat’ Noah missed in all of this, is that they picked a social media space to execute their very clever campaign. They used a new world platform with old world marketing antics. They just don’t go together easily.

The Social Media space has, at some levels, become a sacred space created away from the power, smoke and mirrors of traditional media. There’s a new set of rules that governs, towards the promise of more authentic and honest dialogue. It’s a space that belongs to everyone, equally. No matter your status, your money, your power. In the world of Social Media we can all stand together as equals. You may be able to shout further than I can, because of the size of your network, but you can’t shout any louder. Your view is as important as my view.

So when Cell C (powerful and wealthy) steps into ‘our space’ and sends communication to apparently ‘one of our own’, who can shout quite far with his ‘friend base’ of over 120 000 on FaceBook, and thereby invites us to accept their communication as honest, transparent and full of integrity, and then confesses to this being simply a marketing campaign, you can understand why people are responding the way they are.

My prediction is that Cell C and Trevor Noah will lose credibility through this event. It’s a classic case of two parties not understanding the shifts that have taken place in this new-way-of-connecting-world. Of course they wont lose on every front. Some people out there (see Twitter again) love that they’ve been pranked (or should that be Arked? Or even Noah’d?). But this will remain, for a long time, as a case study of how you don’t do social media.

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Flattr Update – How paying for content is shifting and changing

A while back I wrote about new models for paying for content online. One of the new developments I wrote about was Flattr. It’s a ‘closed system’ that allows you to pay people for the content they produce, as long as they’re part of the Flattr system. I like the ethos behind their model, and I think it has great potential to begin to shift our mind-set around paying for content.

I signed up for Flattr at the beginning of July. To be a part of Flattr will cost you a minimum of a 2 Euros per month. It’s an investment in other people’s content, and not a payment to Flattr.

At the end of July I had been allocated 6.31 Euros, and a total of 7 of my blog posts had been Flattr’d 14 times. I’m chuffed with the results, and assuming Flattr is able to sustain the growth of their database, it can only be a good thing.

If you produce content (blog, podcast, vidcast, etc) I’d encourage you to look them up and apply for an invitation to get into their system.

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Do we Twitter because we’re human, and are we human because we Twitter?

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Are Most Big Corporates Really Psychopaths?

RANT ALERT. Most times I try to be a dispassionate researcher of the new world of work. But sometimes I just can’t take it anymore. Today is one of those days…

Almost every day I pick up a story on the Net of someone being fired by their company for some indiscretion related to social media or digital communications. I suppose people get fired every day for breaching company policies, but when you dig into most of these stories, you really get a feeling that the people in charge just have no freaking clue and are acting like reactionary, idiotic psychopaths.

A psychopath is “a person afflicted with a personality disorder characterized by a tendency to commit antisocial, perverted, criminal, amoral and sometimes violent acts and a failure to feel guilt for such acts.” (dictionary.com)

It may be a bit over the top to call the reflex firing of a person a psychopathic act, but it certainly is not the act of a rational, emotional stable or intelligent entity either. And when it is clear that someone has been fired largely because their employer just does not understand how social media or digital communications work, then I think you can label it antisocial, perverted, criminal and amoral. And normally there is no apology later. That’s a psychopath then!

Is your company a psychopath? You’d be surprised who else is…

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Nine key workforce trends for the next decade

Download a copy of this article in PDF format – right click here. The contents of this article can be presented as a keynote or a workshop for your team. Contact our UK or South African offices to find out how.

My company, TomorrowToday, researches the new world of work, and focuses especially on helping our clients to understand the disruptive forces that will change the world in the next decade. We use a variety of constructs or frameworks to help people understand and respond to these issues. One of my favourites is our “TIDES of Change” framework (read an extended article on it here).

I was recently asked to simply list some of the key workforce trends of the next decade. It was an interesting exercise. So, without much explanation or detail (search this blog site for more details on each of these trends), here is a list of the most important issues we’ll be facing in the next few years in relation to our employees, leaders and teams. There are obviously some variations in different world regions, but these are fairly general trends for the next decade:

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Ebooks outsell hardbooks on Amazon – another marker of signficant change

For the first time in history (I seem to using that phrase a lot at the moment), ebooks now outsell hardcover books on Amazon (read the report here).

You can also listen to an excellent speech by Seth Godin to a publisher, in which he talks about the glorious past and the frightening future of the publishing industry. Click here for the MP3 file link.

The publishing industry provides a superb example of what is happening in almost every industry. Almost every aspect of business is being impacted by changes in technology, industry structures, demographics, environmental issues and shifting social values. This will require companies to change dramatically, or risk becoming irrelevant. The music industry is well down this path of irrelevance already. The book publishing industry is following closely behind them. And the hardcover book is probably the best example of a remnant of the old days (and the “how do we make more money by screwing over our customers” style of business).

The times, they are a-changing.

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Cheaper desalination – water for the world

I wrote recently about potential water wars. One reader got into conversation with me, and questioned my assertion that desalination was expensive and therefore not yet a viable solution to the world’s water scarcity problem. Well, I did a bit of digging and found an article in The Economist that not only provides some details, but also suggests that some scientists have come up with a potential solution.

So, the bad news is that I was right, and we have real water issues. The good news is that there are solutions being developed. You can read the article in The Economist here, or an extract below.

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I’d like to Flattr you by paying for your content

Last week I posted an article around the much needed innovation and creative thinking in the pay-for-content space. One of the new additions in this space that I profiled was Flattr.

Care of Wikipedia:

Flattr is a project started by Peter Sunde and Linus Olsson. Users will be able to pay a small monthly amount and then click buttons on sites to share out the money they paid in among those sites, sort of like an Internet tip jar. The minimum users will have to pay is 2 euros per month. Sunde said, “the money you pay each month will be spread evenly among the buttons you click in a month. We want to encourage people to share money as well as content.”

I then applied for a Flattr account (invitation only) during beta phase, and this week received an invite. I’m all signed up and have Flattr’d my first person. It’s a great step, in my opinion, in the right direction. Take a look at the video below to see how it works. Get enough people to change their thinking around paying for content, and then signing up to services like Flattr, and we’re moving forward nicely.

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Three simple information technology tools that you can use to dramatically enhance your business

Technology advances have dominated the world of work for almost the entire lifetime of anyone reading this article.  Yet, until recently, communication technology has failed to deliver on the promises that were made.  Computers were meant to connect us, to make our lives easier and to take work away from us.  Yet, most of us have experienced the opposite.  We may be able to communicate more, but it feels as if we’re connecting less.  Buried under an avalanche of emails, voicemails and instant messages, we do not have the luxury of time to prepare considered responses.  Our hastily composed messages are often misunderstood, misinterpreted or just ignored.  Our advertising and promotional communication is equally often ignored.

It seems that information technology has made our offices (and lives) more efficient, more productive and more frenetic.  But also more sterile.  We’ve had to adjust how we want to work in order to accommodate the computer and its preferences.  This is immortalized in a running series of jokes in the UK comedy series, Little Britain: “The computer says ‘No’”, which was the answer of customer services to almost any reasonable customer request.  This is not what we had in mind when we embraced the computer’s arrival just a few decades ago.

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Digital spectators, fans and customers

Recently, I was chatting to an author who taught me a neat trick about getting your book to be listed as an “Amazon bestseller”. It’s not about writing a good book, it’s all about manipulating the system (you get all your friends and family to buy your book on one day, and choose a nice niche category, and by the end of the day your book is in the top five best sellers on Amazon in that category. Take a screenshot, and voila – an “Amazon bestseller” forever). I was a little horrified… but then I got over myself. All bestseller charts (for books, music, anything) are manipulated. So, good for him and his team in working that out.

I also recently was chatting to a group of people who were swapping notes on how to grow the number of digital contacts they had (different advice for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn). The danger here was that the loudest voice was from a woman who has over 40,000 Twitter followers. She follows nearly 50,000 people, but has sent less than 100 Tweets. In other words, for her, it is about the quantity of connections, not their quality or utility. My instant reaction was: “so what?”. Big deal.

And, then today Seth Godin’s daily thought cemented my thinking. The key is not to generate more digital spectators. You need to work hard to turn spectators into participants. Participants can become fans – and then you’re talking!

Read Seth’s blog, or an extract below. The last line is the most important!

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Freelancers, eLancers and Cloud workers

We have long been predicting that a significant employment trend in the years ahead will be online freelancers. We have used analogies of the movie industry to prove that it can work. We’ve done book reviews of authors who lay out manifestos of how organisations can be put together in this type of world (the most recent book is Malone’s, “The Future Arrived Yesterday”). And we ourselves try to incorporate some of this thinking in how we run our own company.

So, it’s no surprise to find that temporary freelance work is being ramped up by technology and by the recession. The Economist had a piece about this recently, which is worth reading (find it here, or an extract below).

I recently met an insurance salesman in London who was a star for his company. He sold nearly double what anyone else in his sales team was able to do. His sales manager kept trying to get him to tell the team his secret, but since his bonus was partly dependent on how much better than everyone else he was he declined to divulge his methods.

Is your company ready for freelancing?

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An online store that sells one different thing each day – Now that’s Woot!

Woot! – I came accross them by accident. Clicked on a video link, not knowing what I was in for, and ta da – Woot.com

They sell one thing each day. And each day it’s a different thing. Once they sell out on a day, they stop selling, and wait for the next day to begin.

The short answer: we offer a new item every single day. The details: a new product is released every morning at 12am central time, seven days a week. (If you’re not a morning person, this can be described as every night at midnight. Better?) If a product sells out during its run, a new item will not appear until the next release time. You will know if a product is sold out, because the main page says “SOLD OUT” instead of “I want one”. (Clever, eh?)

Sounds like a crazy idea! Right? Except they just got bought by Amazon (which is what the video is about – see below). So it can’t be that crazy. Right? Unless Amazon has more money lying around than they know what to do with?

The thing that’s got me most puzzled / intrigued is who thought this up? And even if they were high on something, who on earth thought it would work once they came down off of the high? I do love it. Not necessarily the store, but the story. The guts. The courage. The ‘big set of balls’ required (I imagine) to give it a go. And then the team that made it work. Work so well they get acquired by Amazon.

I haven’t spent much time looking around, but I love their attitude. Maybe they’re still high? I don’t know but I’m loving it : ) From their faq page:

I see some kind of weird-looking pope hat on the main page. What’s that about?

A Pope hat? Oh, that. It’s supposed to be a rocket ship. In any case, that’s our LAUNCH EVENT indicator! And boy, are you a lucky cuss. Spying the LAUNCH EVENT indicator is like catching sight of a leprechaun, or the elusive white whale. When you see it next to a Woot item, that item is available on Woot and nowhere else! Woot is the first and only place you can get such a doo-dad!

I’m certain they break a bunch of retail rules? I’m not enough of an expert, but because it’s so different to what I’ve seen before, I figure they must be doing something an expert consultant would have told them never to do : )

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Barack Obama rants against technology and releases Apps at the same time

Just a few weeks ago, America’s President ranted against technology. This surprised me because he is the first President to keep his mobile phone (it’s a Blackberry), made extensive use of the Internet (including social media) in his election campaign, and seems to be quite savvy about how to use new media to get his message across.

Then, last week, the White House launched an entire series of Apps (I have an iPhone, so know that the Apps work on that, but they seem to be for many different devices). All of this points to a government willing to embrace new technology.

Yet, the President had a good old go at technology in May. Was he just tired of how some of his detractors use the technology? If so, then why shoot the messenger? That is the title of a great little piece in The Economist from May 2010. I didn’t blog on it then because it was just a minor story. But given the release of these Apps by the Whitehouse, the irony of the story called out to me. So, read The Economist’s view from May here, or an extract below.

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Reaching the Tipping Point in the shift from books to e-readers

Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The  Tipping Point, explores the idea that products, ideas, values, etc can be tipped, or do tip when certain criteria are ‘activated’. Wikipedia describes a Tipping Point (sociologically) as:

In sociology, a tipping point or angle of repose is the event of a previously rare phenomenon becoming rapidly and dramatically more common. The phrase was coined in its sociological use by Morton Grodzins, by analogy with the fact in physics that adding a small amount of weight to a balanced object can cause it to suddenly and completely topple.

Applied to the world of books and e-readers, a tipping point will be reached when more digital books (e-books) are sold than traditional paper books. Of course there are many who believe this will never happen, but these predictions have history stacked against them. Think music, video, radio, TV, theatre, etc, etc.

I wondered what the signs of an emerging Tipping Point would look like, and this morning smiled a little because of an event in my house.

I’m writing this post in the hope that other’s with similar stories might add to the post (comment below) to build a list of criteria.

My event happened while looking for our recently acquired Kindle. I couldn’t find it in any of the ‘usual spots’. Gave up looking and went for a shower. As I walked into the bathroom I spotted it on the floor next to the toilet : ) Had me laughing for a little while and realised this may be a sure sign that books are out and Kindle’s are in. In my house anyway.

If you have any anecdotes that point to a Tipping Point, please share them in the comment box below.

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Where do you find your music? There’s a game for that!

We all know that the music industry is in huge trouble. Their fight against the music “pirates” is only going to end in tears – they need to work on new strategies. Luckily, some of the players in the industry are starting to do just that.

One clever idea that caught my eye is a new game that is all about finding new music. It is the Music Pets app for Facebook, and the goal is to entertain a virtual pet by training it to like the music you like, then using points to send the pet out to find more music to add to your collection. The app has had just short of a million users sign up since launching in March 2010.

The idea is to replicate how we actually choose new music in the “real world”. We hear something we like, we listen to our friend’s music, we ask for recommendations. Then we try it out ourselves, build a collection, and finally start sharing it with our friends.

Read more about it in the Wired magazine here. Music is meant to be fun. It’s meant to be shared and enjoyed. Maybe the virtual world is how this can best be done in the future.

Now if we can just get some of the world’s governments to start understanding this, and the music industry to wake up, maybe they’d unban the app in the UK!

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