iPlot

Coup d'Etat on Twitter

Matt Webb just pointed out in his LIFT presentation that humans “take pleasure in watching things unfold.” True – even if the events are a quasi-authentic account of something that has already happened.

Coincidentally, the Spanish site Per Soitu reports about a fascinating example of “fake authenticity” and the emerging trend of using Twitter for storytelling. On February 23, 2009, exactly 28 years after about 200 soldiers and paramilitary members of the Spanish Civil Guard toppled remnants of General Franco's dictatorship, a group of Spanish Twitterers revived minute by minute the historical coup d'etat that occurred on February 23, 1981. During Franco's fascist government all cultural activities were subject to censorship, and many were plainly forbidden on various grounds (political or moral).

We’ll see more of this "instant" rewriting and reliving of history. Twitter is perfectly suited to translate historical narratives into the realm of social real-time presence. The new Hollywood?

“Where Did the Future Go?” – LIFT09 Conference in Geneva

LIFT is an annual interdisciplinary gathering for creative doers and thinkers in Geneva exploring the social consequences of new technologies over cheese fondue. LIFT09 (February 25-28) will look back to look ahead, exploring topics like change, solidarity, love, or design, during three days of intense networking and inspiration themed around a simple question: “Where did the future go?”

frog attended in the past few years, and this year, our Milan-based creative director Fabio Sergio will participate in a panel on “design thinking” (where did the hype go?). Other speakers include Vint Cerf (Google), the “Father of the Internet;” Baba Wamé, a researcher who studied the impact of dating websites on African society; Patrick Gyger, director of the science-fiction museum La Maison d'Ailleurs; Juliana Rotich, author, editor, and digital activist with Global Voices Online and Ushahidi; Carlo Ratti, director of the SENSEable City Laboratory at MIT; Clive van Heerden, creative director at Philips; and James Gillies, CERN spokesperson and historian of the invention of the World Wide Web.

Off to the reception now!

http://liftconference.com/

Status Updates 02/24/09: Surgery Twittering, Vertical Twittering, Moderated Twittering, Visual Twittering, Re-Tweeting

Not only because a surgery conducted via Twitter made headlines the other day, Twitter is all the buzz (again), and it seem as if almost three years after its now legendary debut at SXSW Interactive, the popular micro-blogging service has reached the second (or third) hype cycle, entering the business and media mainstream as the ultimate narrow- AND broadcast network. Joel Comm, CEO of InfoMedia Inc. and author of Twitter Power, points out: “It's like the old saying: ‘People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.' People who use Twitter as only a broadcast system are missing out on 95% of its benefits.” And further: “It's about staying top of mind. If a brand was to run an ad campaign and it only reached 1,000 people, it wouldn't be doing so well, but a brand can do very well with 1,000 followers on Twitter because of who they are and how conversions can reverberate within the community and outsside the community.”

Consequently, everyone’s writing about Twitter again (on and off Twitter), but the conversation has shifted from a “What is it?” to a “How to” – a sure sign that it will not experience the same slow decline as Second Life.

A new Pew study on “Twitter and Status Updating” discovers that Twitter users tend to be younger and more mobile than the general Internet population. They also consume more news through the Internet and tend to engage in social activities online differently than everyone else. The report further says that the average Twitter user is "overwhelmingly young," although the average age of a Twitter user is slightly higher than most other social networking services. (Twitter's median age is 31, while Facebook's is 26 and MySpace's is 27.) Nearly one in five (19%) online adults ages 18 and 24 have ever used Twitter and its ilk, as have 20% of online adults 25 to 34. Use of these services drops off steadily after age 35 with 10% of 35 to 44 year olds and 5% of 45 to 54 year olds using Twitter. The decline is even starker among older internet users: 4% of 55-64 year olds and 2% of those 65 and older use Twitter.

Yet these numbers are likely to change, as Ars Technica predicts: “Given another few years, it won't be surprising to see widespread Twitter use spread to older and more general Internet users in the same way text messaging has spread to parents and families. In fact, Twitter often only involves sending an SMS in the first place – maybe some of those parents can keep the momentum going after texting their kids and start sending updates to Twitter while they're at it.”  The Pew study indicates that there will not only be opportunities for vertical twittering geared towards professionals (Yammer) but also for services tailored to certain age groups: Think of a Twitter for seniors to stay in touch with their children and grandchildren as the next killer app. 

And then there is what you could call Moderated Twittering, in other words: attempts to tame the conversation monster for the sake of attracting advertisers. Glam Media monetized its Oscars feed by offering marketers the chance to sponsor a filtered or edited version of the message stream during the awards ceremony. As VentureBeat notes, the ad network’s editors chose which tweets showed up in the stream and purged those that were inappropriate or off-topic, making it safer for brand advertisers. Aveeno sponsored the OscarsTwitter widget; Glam Media says it plans to expand the service, dubbed gWire, to include FriendFeed and Facebook streams for future events.

Other innovative ways of Twittering can be found in the realm of visualization. Elizabeth Baranik, for example, points out how the ASAE Great Ideas Conference used Twitterfountain for a visually richer feed. 

The medium is new, the challenge is old: It’s all about being different. Attention is the currency of any online (and offline) social interaction, and on Twitter, being re-tweeted is “the sincerest form of flattery,” as AlwaysOn puts it (while also provididing some suggestions as to how to achieve that). In the fast new Twitter ergo sum world, the formula goes: The more popular your status updates, the higher your social status.

The Power of the Crowd, Revisited

Almost three years after Jeff Howe coined the term in his seminal article "The Rise of Crowdsourcing," and, ironically, in the very week 1,300 handpicked scientists, entrepreneurs, artists, and other thinkers, movers, and shakers assembled at the TED conference in Long Beach, the term "crowdsourcing" yielded more than one million search results on Google.

That's quite an accomplishment. Crowdsourcing is no longer an exclusive noun for a few in the know, it has become a verb for the crowd. Mom-and pop shops, SME's, and large corporations, receptionists, interns, middle managers, and CEOs – everyone's crowdsourcing these days and calling it so (even if they just ask a few friends to particpate in a mini-survey...).

Here's a little piece of nostalgia, THE crowdsourcing primer starring Jeff Howe:

Interestingly, the power of the crowd has not translated yet into the one realm whose decisions have arguably the biggest power to impact the crowd: politics. Since Obama's masterful use of social media helped restore trust in the American ideal of democracy, and his emphatic election fomented expectations of all-inclusive "power-to-the-people" digital governance, most of the attempts to establish an effective crowdsourced model of policy-making have fallen flat, at least so far. While the new US president has issued several executive orders introducing a new level of transparency to governance (on this topic, for a divergent opinion, it is worth reading Noah Feldman's "In Defense of Secrecy" essay in the NY Times Magazine), the mechanisms of collaborative political decision-making have yet to find a proper forum on the social web.

Sure, there are dozens of open forums that aggregate input and funnel it to the decision-makers – from Public Agenda to the rather light-hearted advertising riff "Dear Mr. President" (Pepsi). And on change.gov, there were Obama's invitation during the transition to submit input for his political agenda ("share your vision") as well as Tom Daschle's video responses to people's suggestions on healthcare ("citizen briefing book"). Perhaps the most ambitious project so far, however, was MySpace and Change.org's "Ideas for America" initiative. The site yielded 7,875 ideas by way of crowdsourcing and then distilled them down (through 675,943 votes) to ten ideas presented to the administration. Yet even though a blog is tracking the progress, it is somewhat unclear if and when the top ten ideas are actually becoming action items incorporated into national policy.

What's lacking is transparency when it matters. If all the crowdsourced ideas remain in a sand box without visible, actionable outcome, the enthusiasm to engage in politics (that was so salient during the presidential campaign) will slowly fade. Yet the missing link between input and outcome is not an easy task given the many legal and bureaucratic restrictions the administration is facing. For the time being, it is the experts who govern. The crowd will have to wait before its ideas will make a real difference in setting the national agenda.

At the Kanzleramt

I was invited to participate in a half-day expert workshop hosted by the German Federal Chancellery, dedicated to the theme "Next Generation Germany – Welfare and Quality of Living. Possible Trends in the Next Two Decades," on Thursday in Berlin. The workshop was part of a series of expert hearings designed to pursue an interdisciplinary dialogue between different sectors in society.

More soon.

Skinny Love

This is all about listening and watching people listen. I love the guy by the window who is completely carried away.

Obama's Elf

Generation G: Wired to Care, Wired to Share

“You make a living by what you get. You make a life by what you give.” ~ Winston Churchill

Trendwatching gets it right (again): “Giving is the New Taking, and Sharing is the New Giving.” That’s the key assertion in this month’s trend briefing which describes the characteristics of Generation G (= Generosity) and offers eight ways for brands to join: from Tryvertising to Brand Butlers to Random Acts of Kindness (RAK).

One can object to the catchy neologisms used in Trendwatching’s reports and accuse the authors of over-simplifying complex phenomena into easy-to-digest, convenient “snacks of meaning” that are then recycled and cited at every single business conference in the next twelve months without ever really being more profoundly examined. But that skepticism is not entirely fair. Trend researchers are like marketers: they are by definition simplifiers, “sensemakers,” or in other words: storytellers. And like all great storytellers they have to tweak the truth if needed. Trend reports are in-the-moment cultural observations, overarching narratives rather than scientifically backed studies.

And so the Generation G report strikes a chord – in tune with the calls for rebooting capitalism, the notion of “Chief Meaning Officers” (marketing’s new role as arbiters of social value), and also the kind of Activism 2.0 espoused by start-ups like Virgance: “As consumers are disgusted with greed and its current dire consequences for the economy – and while that same upheaval has them longing more than ever for institutions that care – the need for more generosity beautifully coincides with the ongoing (and pre-recession) emergence of an online-fueled culture of individuals who share, give, engage, create and collaborate in large numbers.”

The driving forces behind Generation G are powerful indeed: “Challenging times see people craving care, empathy, sympathy and generosity. Now, with a full-blown recession having set in, expect to hear even more about caring, as that’s what consumers and citizens will demand from governments and organizations: someone to take care of their jobs, their savings, their fellow citizens. This need becomes extra poignant in societies where individualism is the new religion, and thus every person, young and old, rich and poor, has been told by society that he or she matters as an individual.”

Generation G not only demands new concepts of quality of life vs. concepts of material wealth, safety, status, and comfort – it also wants to have a say in developing them. Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs has become a "Human Tower" (see picture above; also called Castells in the Catalan tradition), offering an endless array of configurations of "balance" that are only possible through continued focus, experimentation, and cooperation. For Generation G, the value of sharing trumps shareholder value. While the boundaries between work and life are dissipating, Lifeholder Value is gaining traction as the penultimate return on investment.

In this vein, Umair Haque, in his “Smart Growth Manifesto,” makes the case for “outcomes, not income”: "Dumb growth is about incomes – are we richer today than we were yesterday? Smart growth is about people, and how much better or worse off they are – not merely how much junk an economy can churn out. Smart growth measures people's outcomes – not just their incomes. Are people healthier, fitter, smarter, happier? Economics that measure financial numbers, we've learned the hard way, often fail to be meaningful, except to the quants among us. It is tangible human outcomes that are the arbiters of authentic value creation.”

For corporations seeking to engage Generation G two things are key. One is empathy or as Jump Associates’s Dev Patnaik posits in a recent book: Today’s corporations need to be “Wired to Care.” Empathy must not be confused with sympathy: Sympathy is literally "feeling with" – compassion for or commiseration with another person. Empathy, by contrast, is literally "feeling into" – the ability to project one’s personality into another person and more fully understand that person. You feel sympathy when you haven’t been there; empathy is when you have.

The other critical ability for engaging Generation G is “sharing.” In a digital economy where most of the transactions are for free (or expected to be free), value is mainly created through the act of sharing. This means replacing outdated concepts of ownership, control, and coordination with concepts of open source, open IP, and open innovation. It also means open conversations in the spirit of what Clive Thompson labeled “Radical Transparency.” As they are increasingly replacing traditional media companies, brands’ foremost task is to share information. The message for Generation G is loud and clear: As much as transparency can underscore that you have nothing to hide, it can also highlight that you have a lot to give.

Kindle? Here Comes the Talking Book!

Everyone's talking about the new Kindle, but here's a product that may present an even more radical innovation in the e-book sector: The Talking Book, created and distributed by the non-profit Literacy Bridge, is a low cost audio player/recorder with special features for Knowledge Sharing and Literacy Learning. It was developed entirely by volunteers and costs less than $10. The device involves an ecosystem to produce and share locally relevant audio content, allowing users to record their own messages and distribute them within local networks through a device-to-device copying capability. Other features include slow play for reading practice and some interactive features (for educational lessons and games).

The man behind Literacy Bridge is former Microsoft program manager Cliff Schmidt, who studied artificial intelligence and spent much of his time thinking about how literacy can play a role in moving people out of poverty. Schmidt believes that in a country like Ghana having spoken information at hand will help people avoid lengthy trips to visit clinics or other offices. As a next step, he envisions using the Talking Books to reach women in Afghanistan (90% of whom are illiterate), but ideally the device could of course be used anywhere in the world.

While it may not have the media hype of the One Laptop per Child project (yet), the Talking Book may indeed yield greater impact. The thinking behind the device is compelling, and the opportunities that come with using commodity components to create a rich service are fascinating.

Top Social Brands 2008

The question which brands are the best at “socializing” with their audiences is often asked, but rarely answered. Now Vitrue, a social media advertising solutions company, has attempted to capture a snapshot by releasing a Top Social Brands of 2008 list. The ranking is based on the Social Media Index (SMI), a measurement system the company launched to help track brands' share of voice on the social web. The Top 100, which range from the iPhone, CNN, and Disney at the top of the list, to Jet Blue, Puma, and Sears at the bottom of the list, were drawn from Vitrue's daily analysis of online conversations about more than 2,000 popular brands in blogs, social networks, microblogging services, and photo and video-sharing sites.

Strikingly missing is the Obama brand, arguably the most social brand in 2008, and there are other shortcomings. Vitrue’s press release states that some powerhouse technology brands were omitted from the list “as they provide the backbone of many social networks. While Google, Facebook and others are top brands, The Vitrue 100 is measuring companies that are using social technology, not those who are the technology.” You could argue, of course, that this distinction is rather arbitrary as the lines between technology and content are somewhat blurry and will continue to dissolve. Just take the iPhone as an example – it provides social technology, per Vitrue’s definition, but also uses it to socialize its own brand. The same applies to Amazon, CNN, the New York Times, and all other brands that constitute either latent or manifest social networks online.

Another pitfall is the narrow focus on volume and the lack of analysis as to what makes brands score higher. A high score may not always be attributed to an effective social web strategy. Brands may simply top the list because their sales have been successful and they are therefore much talked about (or, conversely, everyone’s talking about them because their sales are tanking). There is no metric for measuring if the conversations were largely positive, negative, or highly contested. As one commenter on Vitrue's blog poignantly remarks: “Looking at brands as something capturing share of voice online, without understanding the drivers of said volume, is kind of like looking at shadows on the cave wall and mistaking them for the truth?”

In any case, Vitrue’s list has started an interesting conversation and helped socialize its own brand.

Press Release: Announcing The Vitrue 100

Advertising Age: The Most Social Brands of 2008