Category: Four pillars

The diagram above is from an article headlined “The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits — to You” which appeared in Wired about a year ago. Go read the original, the diagram is interactive and instructive.

Why instructive? After all, doesn’t everyone in the blogosphere know about ping servers, search engines, aggregators, ad servers, data miners, ad servers and text scrapers? What’s so instructive about spam blogs? And surely everybody knows about social bookmarking, about linking, and about making comments?

The instructiveness for me comes in the word I left out. Corporations. Enterprises.

In the 21st Century, the web is two-way; as Doc Searls often says, it’s writeable. So, if we take these ideas into the enterprise, build enterprise applications around the web, what are the analogies? Should there be any analogies? Should enterprises be using exactly the same tools as their customers? Why not?

These are the things I’ve been thinking about for a while. Why it makes sense to have a Facebook for the Enterprise without actually competing with Facebook, in fact actually collaborating with them. Why a form of Twitter should be used in the enterprise. What the enterprise equivalent of YouTube is, what the enterprise equivalent of Flickr is. Why all this matters.

You see, I no longer think the diagram (or the article, for that matter) is about blogs. It’s about information. As a result of the writeable web, information has become more liquid, it flows better. Static information required snapshots, and that’s what we’ve been doing for 30 years (or maybe more). Learning about snapshots.

The snapshot analogy led to a plethora of sins, to the way we designed databases, to the way we “inserted”, “amended” and “deleted” data. As we tried to force the snapshots to move around between systems, we hit DRM version 1. Enterprise Application Integration. Otherwise known as paying to bury our data, paying to dig it out again, and then, just in case we haven’t had enough, paying to move it around. And we could do so many wonderfully silly things as a result. Hire armies of people to write code to synchronise things, then hire more armies of people to write code to reconcile the data. Sometimes we missed out the “writing code” bit and just hired the reconcilers direct.

And the platform vendors prospered. And the database guys prospered. The storage guys prospered. The EAI guys prospered. The code writers prospered. The reconcilers prospered. Everyone prospered.

Except the customer.

The writeable web changes all that. Now, very time a knowledge worker does something, we can classify it as search, syndication, fulfilment or conversation. We’re going to look deeply into all this, and we’re going to find……find what? That knowledge workers spend most of their time in conversation. They use search and syndication to augment the conversations, they use fulfilment to execute every now and then, but they spend most of their time in conversation. Within the enterprise, and beyond the enterprise. With their colleagues. With their trading partners. With their customers. With everyone.

Markets are conversations. [Yes, it’s Cluetrain all over again, not just Four Pillars.]

So we’re going to see some things change in the enterprise. Conversation is going to be captured and archived and retrieved and enhanced and allowed to flow. We’re going to use blogs and wikis and twitter and IM and audio and video, we may even have tiny pockets of e-mail and fax and (dare I mention it) telex. Every conversational action will hit an enterprise ping server, populate search engines, aggregators, data miners and online media and even text scrapers. [An aside: The single biggest creator of spam is the corporation.] Every conversational action will have the capability to be bookmarked, linked to, commented upon, ranked, rated, added to, enhanced.

I can even visualise a time when Microsoft and Google and Amazon will have to pay corporations for the right to “serve ads” to their staff and customers. Every time I fire up a Microsoft program they are advertising to me. In the enterprise. At the enterprise’s expense. So maybe we’re going to see brand-free applications in the enterprise, or large sums of money paid to corporations for the right to advertise on the desktop. This could be one of the unintended consequences of consumerisation.

The boundary of the enterprise will continue to grow more and more porous, as enterprises work out that bringing customers into the enterprise is a GOOD THING. Suddenly, we will start seeing these ping servers and search engines and aggregators and data miners shared in communities, shared between participants in the community. The extended enterprise will grow and morph until it becomes a market.

And we’re going to have to ask ourselves what a firewall means in all this, what privacy and confidentiality mean in all this. Because they’re changing. As the enterprise boundary shifts, the “perimeter” concept also shifts, and starts becoming “personal”. It’s already happening.

Just musing. More later. What do you think?

Children born between 1982 and 1998 are now beginning to enter the workforce; while they’ve been called many things, I continue to use the term Generation M. [And that’s not because of any personal pride in coming up with the term; rather, the characteristics that define this generation seem to have a lot of “M” about them — mobile, multimedia, multitasking, multichannel and so on.

The Netxplorateur Forum invited me to speak to them about Generation M a few days ago; as part of my preparation, I trawled through my bookmarked items to see what had changed since mid-December, the last time I’d spoken about the subject (also in Paris, as it turned out, at Le Web 3). Which meant I had an excuse to re-read the excellent Pew Internet report on Teens and Social Media, published just before Christmas last year.

Read it if you get the chance, it’s worth it.

Four things stand out for me in the report:

Generation M is faced with a vast array of choices when it comes down to communications. They really use this vast array. [We never had this choice, so we should not judge them. Things are different, and we have to live with the differences.]
A segment of Generation M, termed super communicators, use the array more extensively than others. And they defy their critics by meeting their friends in person far more often than other teens. [Putting paid to the myth that these kids spend all their time online and have no “life”]
Those that belong to social network sites are the most active content creators, the most active contributors of social objects, the most active participants in the conversations around the social objects. [These are the people that marketers would do well to understand, because they are the new marketers, the viral recommenders who are adept at creating and using social objects.]
While all this is happening, the landline continues to be important. [This is probably a self-fulfilling prophecy, restricted to the developed world, and will prove completely false in India, China, Africa and maybe even Russia and South America. Nevertheless it is of interest to me, and not just because of where I work!]

The relevant charts from the report are given below for your convenience.

Ever since Hugh first explained to me precisely what he meant by the term “social object”, I’ve been fascinated by the concept. More recently, he’s been writing more about social objects, building on his original thoughts.

I thought he was really on to something, and I told him so. But that was quite some time ago. Now, having passed up the opportunity to repent at leisure, it’s time to share why.

If markets are conversations, then marketing is about the things that conversations are about. Not about placing those things or promoting those things, but about the things themselves.

In the past, as Hugh explains so well, things entered the conversation space via mass media. Centralised. Broadcast. Controlled. Any colour you like as long as it’s black.

Now things are different. To understand how they are different, I’ve been playing with some ideas. See what you think about them, and let me know what you think.

You can have a conversation without a social object. You cannot have a social object without a conversation. It is the conversation that makes the object “social”.

Conversations grow around social objects, much like pearls grow around microscopic dust. Social objects are about growth, they are “live”.

If you try and “inject” a social object into a conversation, then what you get, at best, is a cultured pearl. That’s what mass media did. Mass media tried to farm conversations. And created cultured pearls. Social objects are natural, not artificial.

The Cluetrain guys got this, and were amongst the earliest to understand that the web represented an incredible opportunity. An opportunity to get back to natural conversations, to the mollusks that matter, rather than to farmed or cultured conversations. And the Hughtrain understood Cluetrain. Social objects are about renaissance, about our rediscovering something we used to have before.

A successful social object is one that has layer upon layer of conversation created around it; as the number of participants increases, social objects enjoy network effects. Social objects are about participation and participants.

Conversations, like molluscs, can be closed. In which case there’s no social object, no microscopic dust. And no pearls. Social objects are open.

As with pearls, conversations behave differently in fresh water and salt water, in rough seas and in protected lagoons. The colour and lustre and shape of conversations is influenced by the environment, the participants, the openness, the ability to grow. Well-rounded conversations are rare, as are the social objects that help achieve this rounding. Good social objects are rare.

Unlike the microscopic dust in natural pearls, social objects are not necessarily irritants. But they can be. Social objects can be irritants.

Similar to the microscopic dust in natural pearls, social objects are unique. Not cookie-cutter. Not assembly-line. Social objects are about long-tail, about diversity.

My thanks to wikipedia for the pearl illustration.

I don’t know whether it’s driven by innate curiosity, or whether I’m just wired that way: I learn best by watching someone do something. And, because of that bias, I believe in using examples wherever possible, stories, analogies, screenshots, whatever. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a picture with a few supporting words could be worth ten thousand.

Most readers of this blog are by now well aware of Google Maps, of mashups, of Twitter, maybe even of Twittervision, some less than others. No matter. As long as you’re curious about what these terms mean, and, more importantly, what they can mean for you. How you can derive value from them, as a person, as an enterprise.

Well, thanks to Super Tuesday, here’s your chance. Go here and see what’s happening; if your timezone permits you, and if you’re interested, watch the activity from 8pm EST, as the polls close and the results start pouring in. It will give you an idea of three things:

The power of combination, of “mashing”: how “static” data (like a map) can be overlaid with “volatile” data (like conversations)
The power of context, of “enrichment” : how it is possible to take a “firehose” of information and break it down to capillary size, just by using tools that embed the information in context
The power of collaboration, of “many”: how individuals operating with modern tools can provide us with detailed information as it happens

Here’s a screenshot of what’s happening now, but to get the real value, take a look at the site after 8pm EST. An aside. Some people hold the opinion that CNN made its bones on Desert Storm. It may well be that Twitter makes its bones on this election. The tool could not have been timed better.

Now that the Super Bowl‘s over and done with, attention switches back to the 2008 Presidential election, particularly the caucuses and primaries due to be held tomorrow, on what is termed Super Tuesday.

After reading Seven Days in May when I was around 12, I decided to read everything that Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey had ever written. Which included a book called Convention, reading which spurred me to follow the US Presidential election quite closely ever since. I have no idea why, I guess there’s something about the byzantine process that makes me feel at home; somehow, it manages to leave the bureaucracy of the Empire, Raj and even Writers’ Building quaking in its wake.

[Incidentally, I love the Knebel quote in Wikipedia: “Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics“.]

In conversation a few days ago, someone asked me to explain what Super Tuesday was, and for that matter how the US President was elected. I wasn’t happy with my explanation, and decided I’d blog it; that way I learn by putting myself through the discipline of writing it down, I learn from my mistakes, I learn from your comments. And maybe some of you will learn something as well.

So here goes:

Elected by electoral college, not by popular vote 

The President of the United States of America is actually elected indirectly, via an electoral college, on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December. [Technically, if the electoral college does not produce a majority winner, with at least 270 votes, then the process passes to the House of Representatives who then vote to elect the President, but this is an arcane amendment].

As a result, what we know as Election Day, the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, is not actually the day on which the President is voted for. It is actually the day when the electoral college is elected. The votes of the electoral college, however, are normally already pledged by then, state by state, party by party, through a process of caucus and primary and national convention. [Again technically, the electors have no legal requirement to vote as directed in the caucus or primary. But they do].

It is therefore possible for a candidate to win “the popular vote” in the November election (where the presidential candidate names do appear on the ballot) while still losing the election proper (which is based on the pre-pledged voting intentions of the candidates gaining election to the college of electors). This has happened, even as recently as 2000, when Al Gore won the popular vote, yet failed to get majority in the electoral college. John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B Hayes and Benjamin Harrison, like George W Bush, all became President while losing the popular vote.

Delegates selected for national convention by caucus or primary

The actual selection of the presidential candidate by a party takes place at that party’s national convention, usually held in the August preceding a presidential election. Caucuses are local meetings which select delegates to district meetings which select delegates to regional meetings which select delegates to state meetings which select delegates to the national convention. Primaries compress all this and select delegates to the national convention.

Both caucuses as well as primaries can be closed (only available to registered party members) or open to all. Both caucuses as well as primaries can pledge delegate votes on a proportional basis or on a winner-take-all basis. There is also a concept of a semi-closed primary, open but requiring prior registration.

National convention selects presidential candidates as well as party platform

The party’s candidates for the electoral college are already known by the time the national convention comes along, so the objective of the convention is simple: nominate candidates for president and vice-president, sort out the party platform, do the necessary rah-rah to unify the party: remember that the convention follows maybe 18 months of bitter fighting within the party, as candidates battle against each other.

So. Razzmatazz. Caucus or Primary. National Convention. Election of Electors. Election of President. And that’s it.

Please do tell me what I got wrong, so that I can understand the process better.