The Bucket Brigade is going to Chicago for the weekend! While we are down there we are enjoying DrupalCampCHI2010. Andrew, Ashe, Kevin, and Matt are heading down for a fun filled weekend of Drupal, DruPAL, DRUAPL!
I have made my agenda and am ready for a brain exploding experience.
If anyone else is going down from Milwaukee (I know of at least 10) we'll see you there.
Expect many brain dump blogs (no video of brain dump, I promise) in the future, maybe some live blogging, and for sure some tweets.
The decision to bring a new technology into your company isn't easy. What is it? How do you tell people about it? How can it help? In this series, we interview a few key cloud applications we like a lot. What would Wordpress say if you could talk to it?
What is your mission?
My mission is to make it a snap for you to speak to the world.
How do you make my life easier?
I make it easy to quickly and easily create a small site without having to think about the mechanics underneath. My strength is that I can let you start sharing writing, images, and video quickly and with little training. I do have the power to be transformed (with a little help) into a more powerful website with customization and flexibility.
Do you save my company money or time?
If your aim is to be able to easily create a website mostly focused on media (blogs, photos, and video) using default themes than you can create and maintain your own the content and save money.
Are there other similar tools I could use?
You can create similar websites using Google, Yahoo, or PMWiki. While I have thousands of siblings, I am quite popular. There are more powerful tools such as two of my open source siblings: Drupal and Joomla. Drupal is great at giving you a lot of flexibility and handles things like e-Commerce and community-building features far better than I do. Joomla is our middle sister and unfortunately for her I am learning to do most of what she can do with less complexity, while my brother Drupal is becoming ever easier to use.
What makes you so awesome?
I am awesome because everybody loves me. I am great in the places where there is little desire for commerce, community or customization, but lots of need for fresh content. I rock as a small but talkative business tool that allows a single person, or a group to communicate out and share feedback on their communication with the world.
How does the Bucket Brigade use you?
They don't use me much either internally or for clients, because they are fans of my more powerful, scalable brother Drupal. But a few of them, for instance Oleg, have used me regularly to quickly create blogs about business and the world. He has set me up a number of times. He loves that I make it easy for him to have a fresh, small website with very little work.
In 140 characters or less tell me why I should use you.
I make it simple for you to share your thoughts with the world, one blog post at a time.
It was an interesting ride while it lasted, but today I'm deactivating my Facebook account. I know it is a trendy thing to do, but I've got some good reasons.
1. OpenGraph - There is a slide from the Facebook developers conference, f8, which sums why the name OpenGraph is crap, it has all websites and identity go to and from Facebook. This kind of setup is not open, federated or decentralized, and makes the Vint Cerf and Pete Prodoehl in me very suspicious. It is as though it is now going to be expected to use the social web you need to have a facebook account
2. You must have a Facebook account - What? In order to play with other people and interact and annotate I can only use one social network? This is again not open, and worse, captive by nature. I don't see a login with twitter button when I want to sign into Facebook, and twitter is where I feel my real digital identity lives and breathes every day. Facebook's history with using this social meta data, which they own and control, has not great either, see beacon.
3. Yet another non-open standard - Why is OpenGraph needed? Data describing data, we have RDF. Friend of a friend, we have FOAF and XFN. Federated login, OAuth. This "new format" is not needed and intended to create a standard that Facebook controls. Ask anyone that writes Facebook applications, the API is always changing without notice and one of the worst to develop for. Also when times get tough over at Facebook, how much of your meta data are they going to be willing to sell with a simple Terms of Service modification?
4. Kevin, Google has more of your information than Facebook! - Yes they do, but there are two main differentiations between them, utility and portability. Google provides my life with enormous utility, free email, calendar, docs, IM, all with nice interconnections with my phone and the services themselves. Not withstanding Google Buzz, which I just turned off from the start, Google has made it clear that these tools are at your control. There focus on open API's, protocols, and portability give me the piece of mind that I can move my data whenever I want, I have the exact opposite feeling with Facebook.
5. Facebook is now a waste of time - Even before facebook, my micro messaging/status updates are on twitter, open richly geo/text/fav/person tagged photos are on flickr, and IM indexed and searchable through Gmail. Facebook for me has not changed any of this over the years. I've gotten work offers through twitter and linkedin, never fb. From the early application spammers, to people that invite me to every stupid fun run, I get more spam then ever before. And don't get anyone started on Farmville's sins of the father.
6. Default Privacy - Without overstating it, Facebook tricked its users last year with the mandatory pop-up privacy changer. It defaulted all of your settings to "everyone" thereby opening your info to the web and more clicks on Facebook. They called the program a "success" with 1/3 of the people changing the settings, however this means 2/3 clicked "everyone" and opened up their profile to the world. This kind of move shows malicious use of your Social Graph purely for the good of Facebook Inc.
It is really all a combination of diminishing utility, real privacy concerns, and bad internet citizenship. I'll still be plugged into the internet, I just won't be able to like things. Until OpenLike takes off ;)
All I will really miss is 200 people wishing me a happy birthday. I'm still human.
Follow me on twitter @KeVroN
UPDATE: Check out this amazing infographic about default privacy settings
UPDATE2: My post has been made into a cartoon! Thanks for the great viz @bengillin
A good description of unconferences and what they are. Between the RWW pitch, there is a good description of an unconference in there.
Modern agencies are leaping on the social bandwagon. Even traditional agencies are rapidly acquiring small collaborative development groups who lack a real sales organization and structure, to bolster the 'interactive side of the business,' which their clients are now asking them to provide in earnest.
What's driving this change? Clients are seeing the growth, because the numbers are visible like never before. Not with traditional print ads, and not with email blasts, and not with billboard campaigns can you simply Google the numbers that measure Twitter's benefit to brands.
As more and more firms get more sophisticated technology for measuring and reacting to social conversations, and as the mediums themselves specialize into social and relational search engines, there will be a wave of winners who are able to capitalize on their mathematical genius for customer relationships. That's why agencies are up-tooling. Their clients are demanding the math.
Of course, savvy consumers--the kind who can create a new market for a business with a single tweet--will wise up, and the price escalation bubble between people with followers and brands with messages will expand exponentially, only to burst when the real value of a person's audience stock is visible and measurable to everyone.
When the new social bubble bursts, what will be left? What will we get, as a society, from the splash? Collaboration is the upside. Social tools within businesses are already proving their mettle. Hierarchies are flattening, firms are giving away more critical knowledge in free communities, and customers are being invited to the back office. These are all side effects of social, caused by the external pressure exerted on the individuals at work.
Yes--the people. Remember them? When people go home to Facebook, they wonder why they can't bring it to work. Not for their family, or games, or friends--for their job. People have never been as informed as they are about their friends and loved ones. Surely they're concerned about their co-workers as well? The social conversation at work has a different core topic, but it's still social--and businesses who create social communities for their employees at work, for work, are winning.
Even after social conversation realizes a defense for the analytical engine of the brand lab and the economy pops, the environment of transparency and collaboration within organizations will remain, and be stronger. That's what makes collaboration the long play: it's the ultimate insulation from economic transitions.
Whenever we are asked to present on social media to an audience--sometimes an industry group, sometimes teachers, sometimes in private forums--the invitation is usually focused around Twitter and Facebook.
"We've organized a group of industry leaders. Can you come talk about Twitter, Facebook? Help them understand what this is all about."
I love presenting and engaging a group in discussion. So do other members of the Brigade, like Kevin and Jenn. We always accept the invitation. And then, we try not to talk about Twitter and Facebook.
Instead, we talk about collaboration, and language, and sharing information. I know it's sneaky--people want us to talk about Twitter and Facebook. But these tools are just expressions or techniques of deeper ideas, and most organizations will only be ready to use them when they have learned how to listen to the conversations happening within their four walls.
I like to open the conversation about social media by starting with the alphabet.
The alphabet is incredibly high technology, compared to Twitter. it's social media--it's chunkable, it's replicable, it's portable, you can use it in all kinds of mediums--and it's thousands of years old. What a stable platform! The use of language in an organization is the foundation of its communication, and therefore, its collaborative potential.
I like this analogy because it keeps things simple--the hype around social business and social media is as confusing as health care reform, and even more daunting to the unfamiliar. What's worse is that the relationship between social media and collaboration isn't clear. Most people think the big win comes from using social media for marketing and branding, which is why they ask us to talk about Twitter and Facebook. That's what the hype is saying. But the first win has to come from collaboration.
The business leaders I talk to are concerned about collaboration. They understand the value it can bring. They know their top talent wants to collaborate--and that by doing so, the team will create more top talent. They know that power can't stay in the silos. Right now, these leaders are trying to innovate as fast as they can, and their intuition is telling them a story about social media.
"I don't know what the value is, but I can tell there's something!"
The first place to look for that "something" is within the walls of a company, and in the eyes of its people. Whatever a leader wants to do with a brand in the world of Twitter and Facebook, that leader will do better with a team that is engaged in the world of meeting room and water cooler.
Bolting a social tool into your organization is just like getting another phone line, and plugging it into another call center, and setting up another CRM system to track your newest customer issue queue. Progressive business leaders know this is not the way forward, but see the activity and buzz and can't quite tell if it's real, useful, valuable.
That's why talking about collaboration is much easier than talking about Twitter. These leaders aren't sure what Twitter is good for, yet. Twitter might be an enabler, and there are plenty of ways to use Twitter to foster collaboration--but as Evan Rosen recently wrote in BusinessWeek,
"When tools fail to create value, it's usually because decision-makers adopt tools before the company's culture and processes are collaboration-ready."
I don't want these business leaders to give up on Twitter because they tried an experiment and failed. I want them to get a new tool and have a culture that is ready to use it.
When I describe what collaboration is like for me, using stories from my own daily work life, in an organization rooted in collaborative practice, eyes light up. Most business leaders dream of working in an environment where
just about every day. That's what collaboration is like, and kick-starting it means using more 'alphabet' and less 'social media' at the start. Asking people questions, and giving them all an equal place to share their answers can be a simple start.
Once things are rolling, using Twitter and Facebook will seem as natural as riding a bike to most of the people in an organization--after all, they're already doing it personally. Get the practice established in the safe, policy-controlled walls of the company before you try it with the millions on Facebook. You will know you are ready.