But a much bigger gap exists, often unnoticed by companies: The amount of money contact centers and support organizations spend on social media is nominal compared to the percentage of customers’ queries that hit these emerging channels. This is the “support gap.”

Social media has become a new service and support channel that customers employ to raise concerns about products and services, describe their experiences, seek help from others, post new product insights, and consult for advice on features and functions. For companies, this is not trivial. It means that conversations about your products that would traditionally have occurred in your customer contact center are now occurring in public places. The Consortium for Service Innovation estimates that fully 90% of customer conversations about a company never touch the organization. What’s more, a mere 1% of all customer conversations are assimilated as organizational knowledge.

nGenera’s own Customer Interaction Management solution recently added social media support for its contact center product, but many companies have yet to consider this option. In most cases, if a social media strategy is being implemented by the support organization, it’s on an ad hoc basis with a few employees manually monitoring Twitter and branded Web spaces and responding to customers where appropriate. These interactions, though helpful, are not strategic in that they are not integrated with enterprise systems or contact center processes. Building processes and accountability around these activities is the first step that companies can take today—connecting to CRM systems in a robust and meaningful way will be the next horizon.

The plight of marketing and the plight of the support organization are linked and the two organizations need to work together, using shared information, on a common platform. Traditionally, marketing has been about communicating brand messaging, while the customer service department deals with problems and complaints. But a customer that you’ve engaged through social media for marketing purposes doesn’t see the separation – and customer service is becoming a key aspect of managing customer relationships online (I’ve talked before about how “customer service is the new marketing“). This is not trivial. It means matching the tremendous amount of time and energy spent on other official support channels such as e-mail and phone in order to meet customer expectations for social media and deliver a consistent and authentic customer experience. Those companies that think social media is just a cost-effective way to get the message out are in for a surprise. By marketing on social media you inadvertently open a new support channel as well—get ready!

Noted: danah boyd, in her address to open SXSW this month, related the following story: “I met a teen whose abusive father was recently released from jail. Recognizing that a restraining order would not be enough protection, the teen and her mother moved thousands of miles away. As the teen began making friends in her new school, she begged for a Facebook account. Her mother caved and both the daughter and mother worked to make the account as private as possible; neither of them wanted to face the consequences of being found. In December, when Facebook changed its [default] privacy settings [to Everyone], this teen and her mother didn’t realize what the change in privacy settings meant until someone else pointed them out after the fact. Is putting her at-risk an acceptable bi-product of Facebook’s changes?” Facebook has 400 million-plus apparently satisfied users; it would be devastating to two of them if, unintentionally, the impact of the change in privacy policy had not been communicated to them.

Noted: Although this is, I imagine, precisely what Facebook is intended to do, I recently heard from someone in one of my classes when I was a middle school teacher some 39 years ago. (Gasps are acceptable.) We connected by phone and during a two-hour conversation, we caught each other up on our lives since then and on families and I heard a bit about some other people in the class. This example probably does not really belong under the title On Unintended Consequences, but I include it because it certainly was unintended from my perspective – but thoroughly enjoyable.

I only bring these unrelated examples up for one reason, and that’s to remind myself and perhaps you that for all the intentionally positive consequences of technology such as social networking, online banking, and blogging, etc., there are also unforeseen, unpredictable impacts. Online banking, for example, means I never have to enter the bank for anything, which also means I am a virtual customer as far as the bank is concerned. I live in a very small town so I do know the current bank official, but I see her no more than once a year and most often to replace a lost ATM card. If I wanted to borrow money, I might have a much harder time because, frankly, they do not know me. My wife knows all the people in her bank because she is a regular, physically present customer.

We recently refinanced our house, and, until closing, I never met or saw anyone I dealt with. Nearly everything was handled by email or cell phone or landline. But I really enjoyed the closing because a very nice, personable, and knowledgeable woman came to our home and walked us through it. She put a face on the transaction.

I think the one thing people really want in an online relationship, whether they are friends, friends of friends, one-time customers, or long-term customers is trust, and that is very hard to build virtually and very easily and quickly lost. One mistake – such as a misspelled name or inaccurate transaction – can diminish or terminate the relationship. For all the convenience, choice, and selection that online buying and selling create, the magic is that trust occurs at all. That it does – far more often than not – says something about people’s openness and about companies’ diligence and cleverness at establishing virtual relationships that matter.

Many see mobility as simply another communication channel or another medium. Others mistakenly view mobility as simply another information technology, much like those that preceded it. They do not see how a mobile device combined with a business platform (elsewhere I have discussed the characteristics and success factors of business platforms) can lead to new business models, entirely new businesses, and new growth options.

Here are five critical elements executives must understand about mobility. Mobility creates:

1. Micro-tasking. How small can a meaningful piece of work be? Is not the right one-word answer immeasurably productive at the right time? What about a single word of encouragement at the right moment. Rehearsing a new set of phrases for a new language as an adult or reviewing multiplication tables during a couple of available minutes as a child can be remarkably effective and efficient. This is the power of micro-tasking and mobile platforms enable this behavior in ways and times not possible before. Multiply this by the millions or perhaps billion moments per day and you have new levels of potential human productivity and significantly revised time budgets. And there are examples: The Extraordinaries harnesses voluntary micro-tasking to help those in need and see Denis Hancock’s post, “The iPhone, growing up digital, and my daughter’s education,” on the way micro-tasking changes the way pre-schoolers learn.
2. New Creativity. Humans are fundamentally asynchronous and associative. We require props to operate on schedule. Most of the time our ideas, inspirations, and breakthroughs seem random or triggered by some event, association with another idea, or situational experience. Because our devices are always with us and allow us immediate access to tools that were formerly attached to a desk or office, mobile platforms enable us to work in a more natural way – asynchronously and associatively. When did you have your last creative idea? Being connected to a global infrastructure, able to access capabilities at a whim, or simply using an appropriate app at the appropriate time enables new levels of creativity.
3. The Growing World of Sensors. Mobile devices loaded with sensors will revolutionize health, safety and security. Sensor technology is growing in its ability to sense the world that is visible to humans as well as the world that is not. When you integrate sensor technology (biosensors, temperature, radiation, personal sonar/radar etc) into mobile devices married to platform infrastructures, every human being becomes a sensing station that can measure environmental pollutions, noise pollution, unhealthy emissions, or dangerous hazards. The implications for health, safety and personal care surpass any in a non-mobile, non-sensor based world.
4. Enhanced experience or augmented reality. Much like the headphones issued at some public museums enhance the one’s understanding of museum artifacts, all facets of daily life can be enhanced by location, context and proximal awareness. Location data can enhance the experience of the local opera, theatrical performance, or visit to a museum. Commercial enterprises, whether serving B2C or B2B marketplaces, have the ability to augment the entire procurement process through mobile platforms. Employees can be augmented with relevant information and tools when serving customers and providing contracted services.
5. Digital Identity and the Rich Digital Self. As remarkable as the human capacity to remember is, it remains limited in many ways. The same is not true of devices that sense and store, activities that mobile platforms do in unique and often helpful ways. If my rich digital self is only based on what I can recall, it is limited. On the other hand, a rich digital self enhanced by streams of unbounded data collected through my mobile platform can create personal value and protect my privacy.

Are these areas where the greatest opportunity awaits? Are there others that I have missed? Are there companies and institutions that seem to really recognize—and leverage accordingly—the power of mobile platforms? Is there a role of for mobile business platforms to meet the special needs of your marketplace? Or will you stand by and let others, competitors and new entrants till the fields of mobility?

allow guests to receive exclusive offers directly on their mobile phones. Coupons are redeemed by scanning a barcode on the phone at checkout.

Customers are able to opt-in to the program three ways: via PC at Target.com/mobile, on their phone at m.target.com or by texting COUPONS to 827438. The coupons are for one use only and expire on the date listed, similar to paper coupons.

The technology to make offers and bar codes available on a phone is not the issue, it’s the infrastructure required in each store to be able to scan and record the data. This is where the major investment is, and why things like mobile coupons have not been introduced sooner. In other parts of the World people can use their “mobile wallets” to get food from a vending machine or to scan and gain entry to a public transit system. North America still has a lot of infrastructure to put in place in order for this level of mobile use to be more widely available.

A couple questions about the mobile coupons:
1. How will Target deal with stores that have “dead spots.” If your web-browser isn’t working how can you access the coupons for checkout? Can you download and save the coupons/barcodes on your phone directly or is a connection required?
2. Why isn’t anyone talking about the green benefits here? This option should cut down on paper use and if other stores transition coupons and things like loyalty cards to a mobile platform there could be a huge cost savings for them as well as a great environmental benefit for the rest of us.
3. Will people use them? I would think that having them more easily accessible on your phone would mean that more coupons get redeemed. I am curious to see if there is an uptick in use or any research that suggests better sales from this program.
4. What do you think? Do you currently use mobile coupons? Would you use mobile coupons? I just signed up and look forward to testing it out.

A blues or jazz band—or any ‘jam band’ for that matter—operates using many of the design principles we’d like to see from a collaborative enterprise. Unlike an orchestra, a band is much more fluid in their interpretation of the music. They are able to improvise on the spot, blend sounds, and often play to the mood of the audience. In other words, they innovate, create mash-ups, and are responsive to users.

I’m not the first person to use the band analogy. Barry Rabkin of the Market Insight Group asks whether technology analyst firms are more like a jazz band or symphony orchestra. He alludes to the fact that the jazz band style is more agile and responsive to customer demands—another important outcome of collaboration:

“Another area where jazz musicians differ from their symphonic counterparts is that jazz musicians, sensing their audience, can and do take liberties with new selections not identified during their rehearsals. They can do this because they have a broad library of music and musical explorations in their knowledge set and, as importantly, they know how to blend their sounds together to get the best outcome possible for their audience.”

What’s more, in a symphony orchestra the conductor alone is responsible for guiding the entire team, whereas with a distributed, ad-libbing crew, anyone can start pushing with a new riff or mood and the others will follow suit. In this way, the benefit of each player’s perspective and expertise is baked into the model.

One of the factors that allows a band to operate in this manner is the existence of very well defined roles (i.e. guitarist, vocalist, drummer, base, keyboards, etc.) and somewhat open tasks (i.e. what songs to play, when to riff, what chords to use, etc.). This is another important learning for the enterprise. As Lynda Gratton and Tammy Erickson note in the HBR article Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams:

“Cooperation increases when the roles of individual team members are sharply defined yet the team is given latitude on how to achieve the task. [...]Assign distinct roles so team members can do their work independently. They’ll spend less time negotiating responsibilities or protecting turf. But leave the path to achieving the team’s goal somewhat ambiguous. Lacking well-defined tasks, members are more likely to invest time and energy collaborating.”

In addition to looking at how bands are structured, we might also consider how band members collect largely unstructured customer experience ‘metrics’ in real time and use the feedback to adjust their approach. These metrics provide a useful analogy for the type of approaches leading companies should take when developing customer strategies, including:

• The applause of the crowd: What kind of noise are customers and prospects making online and in social media channels? Using sentiment analysis companies can find out if it is positive (cheers) or negative (boos) and change their tune accordingly.
• Number of people dancing: How engaged is your audience? Metrics might be based on active participation on forums, comments online, rating of content, and re-broadcasting of brand messages, or more passive (i.e. head bobbing) activities such as subscribing to feeds, friending, and following.
• Song requests: What kinds of requests are coming into your contact center and support organization? In many organizations, the contact center is an untapped wealth of customer feedback, largely ignored by groups like marketing and product development. Listening to this channel and other prosumer input can lead to dramatically improved customer experience.
• Duration of stay in the bar: How long do customers hang out in your online properties? Using Web analytics, companies can now obtain this information, as well as data about how people got there, what path they take along the way, and how influential various ‘promoters’ are at bringing in prospects.
• CD and merchandise sales: How are Web interactions translating into sales? The performance is about creating an experience, but ultimately, in order to be profitable, you need people to buy your stuff.

As companies continue to seek best practices and metrics for collaboration, I firmly believe that some of the more innovative solutions will come from non-traditional fields that have deep roots in collaboration, but that have eluded formal study and analysis. (If I’ve managed to spark an interest in enterprise lessons in collaboration from other disciplines, also see my previous post on Measuring collaboration: Lessons from Shane Battier and the NBA and the related Collaboration box score.)

There is more to the game than a comprehensive tutorial, there’s also a sharp story, and perhaps more significantly, a robust content delivery and data-mining platform that Valve uses to update and monitor the usage of their products. Valve’s content distribution platform, Steam, allows the company to apply bug-fixes and updates to games, as well as learn about how users go about playing through the games, including but not limited to the furthest level of completion, and whereabouts in the game players are most likely to meet their end.

While the ability to glean insights about how their customers use their products must be invaluable as feedback data for making better and more engaging games, it is the ability to update content seamlessly on users’ computers that was a move to watch this past week.

To prepare for the upcoming release of Portal 2, Valve quietly and unceremoniously released an update to 2007’s portal that changed the end of the game. The practice, known as retconning, or enforcing “retroactive continuity” is usually met with nerd-rage, but seems to have been well-received by the gaming community in this case. Thanks to their content distribution and monitoring platform, Valve has been able to take a product already in the hands of consumers, and modify it so that when their forthcoming product hits the shelves, the continuity between the first and second installments of the game’s story is cohesive and correct. Not something that could be done with the game of Life or Clue.

Steam isn’t the only content distribution platform that has the ability to update and change the user experience after the sale is made, Amazon’s kindle had an unfortunate time with what is more or less the same story, and I’m sure that there is plenty of legal language and technical infrastructure in the iPod/Phone/Pad terms of service that allows Steve Jobs to legally annex users’ first born children.

As an increasing amount of products are imbued with connectivity and access to a platform, the way that companies think about the experience they deliver to users will need to change in kind. Companies will need to find ways to cleverly leverage these platforms to make their brand experience really resonate with customers–all the while avoiding pitfalls where they may alienate users and lose their trust.

When we developed our 2010 research agenda a few months ago we could not ignore the fact that now more than ever, enterprises are being forced to manage huge amounts of data from many different and often completely new channels. The term unbounded sums up the situation perfectly as it immediately suggests infinite. Enterprises generate more data, collect more data, and can consider more data than ever before. But an increasing amount of data is generated outside the enterprise, by sources that you don’t control.

Prodigious quantities of data present opportunity, complexity, and distraction. Separating signal from noise requires advanced analytics and thoughtful strategies. Many businesses can and will reap the benefits of more detailed information on every part of the ecosystem (customers, prospects, competitors, partners, and employees) if it can be harnessed. Data-driven insight will enhance intuition and expand the purview of decision makers inside and outside the enterprise in ad hoc and deliberative processes.

As we began the research into this topic we decided that it would be help set a benchmark and get a better understanding of where professionals and their companies are with regards to their readiness and ability to deal with data. Last week we launched a survey to measure how data is being used both from a functional level and across enterprises. The survey is open to all levels and functions—if you are reading this we would love to hear from you! It only takes about 15 minutes. As a thank you for your time we will provide you with a summary of the findings.

The survey is designed to gather information to help answer these questions: Are decision-makers able to get the information they need? Are enterprise processes and IT departments keeping pace with technology advancements? What new types of data are being gleaned from social media and how are these being used? What data-related issues are preventing enterprises from measuring, managing, analyzing, sharing, and collaborating more effectively?

To participate, please click on one of the links above or simply click here.

Thank you in advance for your participation, we look forward to sharing results with you.

nGenera is a major, national sponsor of CoSN. If you have followed the work of Don and frequent collaborator Anthony Williams, you recognize this as consistent with their coverage of education as a key topic of their writing and nGenera’s research. And while I agree with Don and Anthony, that the tools and (in many cases) the conditions are in place for dramatic improvement to take place in the public education system for many a country, my personal opinion for the U.S. is gloomier, in that I think we are in for a decade of frustration.

Maybe I’m a little tired from a week of 18-20 hour days and running my Starbucks card through too many Venti bold cups of coffee. But, the state of public education in our country seems to be awash in contradictions, opposites, and (as the cliché goes) “left hands not knowing what the right hands are doing.”

For instance, on the one hand, it seems that most people understand the transformative potential for IT in learning. We are witness to it literally before our eyes on a daily basis, as my colleague Denis Hancock made the case so well in his post Wednesday, on the subject of the impact of iPhone apps on his daughter’s learning. Yet, on the other hand, few school districts include the CTO at the cabinet level (in other words, as a member of the senior executive team directly reporting to the superintendent) in the district’s leadership.

Part of the issue, which CoSN is working to change, is that the CTOs themselves are not well prepared to be effective at that senior leadership position. Many lack the business vision and strategic leadership skills to operate as effective change agents and equal partners in the running of the district with the other leaders. Thus, an important objective for CoSN’s members and staff is to promote the adoption of an Essential Skills Framework for CTOs, advocating that there is the profession itself can do a better job to equip its members, preparing them to be more effective leaders.

To take a different issue, on the one hand, there was a nearly universal cry for the need for standard approaches to web 2.0 content production, assessment, and platform deployment. Yet, on the other hand, in a panel that closed the morning portion of an international symposium day at the CoSN conference, it was ironic (to me anyhow) that the five speakers – from ePals, Taking IT Global, IEARN-USA, NASA’s GLOBE program, and European Schoolnet – presented their web 2.0 platforms for about 10 minutes each, in succession, but yet by my hearing completely missed the opportunity to address how they were working together.

In every case, each one seemed to be busily building communities of millions of users, thousands of pieces of content, with hundreds of schools and or regions involved. However, except in the case of the European Schoolnet, which is a partnership of multiple European education ministries, there was practically no mention of how any of the presenters were striving towards cross-promotion, standardization, or (god forbid) merger of operations and mission from two into one, or three into two, etc.

On the one hand, you have the President and Secretary of Education setting ambitious and merit-worthy goals of achieving an increase to a college graduation rate of 60% by the year 2020, from our present level of approximately 40%. This means, from the federal perspective, a real focus needs to be on what we can do to impact the success of kids at the 4^th grade level and above, starting now. Yet, on the other hand, data from regional groups like the E3 Alliance in Texas and others shows that frequently the point of greatest leverage is young children and getting them “school ready” by the time they get to kindergarten.

Lastly, the final day of the CoSN conference was billed as an advocacy day, where we spent the morning hearing about the legislative funding priorities for Education, from CoSN and three other education-related partners: ISTE, SETDA, and SIIA. On the one hand, the associations had the data and talking points clearly showing how critical education is to the success of the nation and how important some of the funding streams are to national goals.

Yet, on the other hand, the panel of congressional staffers who spoke to the audience of 100 or so software and CTO/CIO leaders convened to advocate to their various state delegations of senators and congressmen and women were extremely bearish on the chances of the education priorities getting much attention in 2010, due to other pressing U.S. national priorities such as healthcare reform, job creation, and of course, inflexible military and social entitlement program commitments.

It’s like the comment that a senior federal technology official from an agency (not the Department of Education) made to me, on my last day in the city this week, about the especially challenging position for a change agent in the government. He used the example of the military and recounted that it was about 100 years ago that the U.S. Navy determined they would no longer build ships out of wood…that all future vessels must be built using metal.

Without that specific and irreversible requirement – which had an impact, no doubt, of enormous consequences to supply chains, inventories, jobs, and countless other transition costs – one can just imagine that 50, 60, 70 years later, we might still have been building and launching new ships made of wood. The problem, he said, is that in some domains – and I would venture that education is one of them – it’s very hard to recognize the wooden ships.

What do we do in the meantime, given that the status quo isn’t an acceptable option?  That’s where I think the government is at least trying to apply the principles of social entrepreneurship and innovation, with the reauthorization of “No Child Left Behind,” now more benignly named the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (or ESEA), and the “Race to the Top” program.  It’s also where I think we must see more public/private partnerships emerge.  Experimentation must be encouraged and real consequences have got to be at stake for communities, ultimately producing quantifiable, economic value like we describe in the Nexus Economics theme in nGenera’s 2010 research agenda.

So, if you’ve got a “wooden ship” that you want to sink and, more specifically, an education innovation that you want to promote, then tell us about it.  Or better yet, tell us AND tell the Department of Education, through its new Innovation website.  Let’s prevent a decade of frustration in public education.

Given the questions I’ve received about it, that I’ve worked with Don Tapscott et al on a number of things around “growing up digital”, and just general parental concern, I’ve spent a lot of time watching (and helping) my daughter use  it, and thinking about how it might impact how she learns. In general, I think it’s an extremely positive thing – and while much of the stuff I mention below might seem rather simple and obvious (particularly to other iPhone users), I believe they are worthy of discussion – and might point towards how education itself should change in the future.

Obviously, part of the story is that she is going to grow up in a digital world – and being comfortable with technology is going to help in that regard. But that’s not the first thing I focus on. What I tend to hear from skeptics is that they don’t want their kids “playing virtual games” – they’d rather have them building their skills and imagination with real world stuff- building blocks, puzzles, etc. My response is that obviously I want my daughter doing that too – but I find that the touch-screen interface on the iPhone actually helps her in this regard.

The most obvious example of this is what she’s chosen as her favorite app – ShapeBuilder. When I downloaded it however many months ago, she was at a point where she was good at basic puzzles (i.e. put the circle in the circle, etc.), but was having trouble with the harder ones (i.e. trying to get six contoured pieces into place to create something). And of course, since each puzzle costs a fair bit of money, she had relatively limited selection. Shapebuilder has many puzzles, and cost a buck or two – but that is only part of the story here.

She took to Shapebuilder like a duck to water. On the right hand side of the screen, there is an outline of an image, “broken” up into the many pieces that compose it. On the left are the pieces. Importantly, none of them rotate – they just need to be slid into place- which makes it a tad easier than real-world equivalents. And it doesn’t appear she has to get them in exactly the right place – get them close, and they “pop” in (and stay there – also important). When all the pieces get in their proper places, the outline instantly transforms into a “real” picture of something (say, a cow), and the word for it appears (and is said). She can then go onto the next one – and there are many of them.

In turn, I see it as a middle step between the basic “real” puzzles, and the slightly harder ones – she learns important parts of puzzle building I can now see her apply to real ones, in a game she finds very entertaining, with tons of variety, that cost me next to nothing, and doesn’t require clean-up (score!).

That’s just one example, but I think it’s an important one. Here’s her other favorite “games” (and if anyone would like to recommend some new ones, I’m all ears):

First Words Deluxe. Shares some similar properties with ShapeBuilder, but for words. She picks a category, and at the top there is a word, with boxes for each letter (with the actual letter shaded in behind). The letters to make the word – i.e. ” p p y u p” for puppy are below. Each time she touches one, the game says the letter, and when she slides it close to the right spot it stays there. Once the word is formed, the game spells out the word, then says it, an there’s a bit of animation around an image associated with it. In my mind, that has to help her learn words – and to spell. Think it was $1.99, which I’m considering a good investment.

The Toddler Teasers series. I’ve just downloaded a few more of these, but she’s been playing the “shapes” one for awhile. A bunch of shapes appear on the screen, the game says (and has written down) something like “touch the star”. If she touches the wrong one, it vanishes. When she gets it right, the game cheers, the shape flies around, and you go onto the next one. Every 4 or so, she earns a “sticker”, she can put on her sticker page. Again, I think it’s fair to say this helps her learn shapes and words in a fun way (though I didn’t think so at first. After a while, she was always getting them wrong. But then I realized it wasn’t random – she was always picking the right one last. Then one day I noticed when she picks which color to use for play-doh, she does it through a process of elimination – i.e. “not blue! not green! not pink! YELLLLLOWWWW! – and she does the same on the game). $0.99 each I think.

Memory Pro (free). Very simple – classic game of memory. 12 tiles (in the small version), 6 animals, match them up. Again, hard to see how playing this many times can’t help with improving memory and matching skills – and it’s a clear case of where not having the “set-up” time helps (she’ll play this more than the equivalent using “real” matching tiles, which she’s also getting much better at… because of the game, in my opinion).

Five monkeys. One of her favorite songs (I’ve probably sang it to her 500 times by now), but on the iPhone. I find this cool because it has three variations of the song (country, rock, and pop) to help show different musical styles; she has control of it (the monkeys only fall off the bed when she touches them); and there are a variety of other ways she can interact with it (stop/ go button, making the cat run out of the room, etc.). Again, it doesn’t mean I don’t sing it to her anymore – but it seems like a nice addition to that.

Sneezies Light. So it actually took her awhile to learn to stick to her own page, and I’d downloaded this to test and she “stole it”. Less obvious educational value, but I do think there’s some there. The basic idea is there’s a bunch of little critters on the screen. Touch one, it sneezes and blows up – and if the sneeze touches another critter, it does the same, etc. Goal is to make as many disappear as possible. She loves it – and the cause and effect, coupled with learning some patience around waiting for them to get close together, seems useful.

There are more, but I’ll end it there today. In short, I’m amazed when I watch my daughter use the iPhone, and really think it’s helping her learn many important things – particularly as the touch screen interface lies somewhere between the real and “traditional” virtual worlds. In total, I think I’ve invested about $10 in all the apps for her combined – or less than almost any single toy out there. And as she grows, I see so much more potential – such as downloading stories to be read in a language I can’t personally speak, but we want her to learn. Every time I look at that device, I think of different ways it could improve her education in a variety of ways.

And of course, partially since I can’t yet be 100% confident that she won’t “accidently” hit the phone button and call some of daddy’s colleagues, I’m close to her – watching, helping, talking about what she’s doing – the entire time, which most parents would agree is what matters the most.

As I’m sure you already know, there are many companies doing things like creating collaborative workplaces for their employees, partners and/or customers, but finding those that are actually measuring the results AND have some interesting outcomes are very hard to find. All in all I ended up highlighting a little over a dozen examples in a paper last November. They range from companies using social media tools and developing collaborative relationships to drive a marketing campaign, to companies using a webspace to innovate new product and service ideas.

Later this month, March 23rd, my colleague Tim Bevins and I will be sharing some of these findings in a webinar called Real Collaboration – Real World Examples for Successful ROI. We will discuss some of the collaborative activities companies are undertaking and how they are being measured, lessons learned from leading-edge companies, recommendations and next steps for developing successful collaborative initiatives and what ROI top companies are recognizing from collaborative initiatives. Click on the link above or  register here. I look forward to an interesting discussion and hope you are able to join us.

When we study prosumers, one of the reoccurring themes is how to create incentives to get people to contribute their valuable time to an initiative. Increasingly, consumers are challenging the notion that the Internet is recruiting ground for free labor that will willingly engage with your brand, contribute ideas, and co-innovate with you—consumers want some sort of value in exchange for their time. Contrary to what is being proclaimed in popular social media echo chambers, most consumers actually don’t want to co-create with companies; the vast majority of Internet users are happy to be passive consumers and observers, with only a small fraction opting for prosumerism.

This brings be to the main point of this blog post, which is the notion of playbor. I first came across the term—a combination of ‘play’ and ‘labor’—on the Web site for a conference on digital labor hosted by The New School in New York. The Internet as Playground and Factory notes that, “Today, communication is a mode of social production facilitated by new capitalist imperatives and it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between play, consumption and production, life and work, labor and non-labor.” The simple idea driving the playbor discussion: What happens when we collapse the often conflicting interests of work, personal ambitions, and entertainment into a single activity?

We already see examples of this happening on the Web. Consider Google’s Image Labeler, which creates a game out of the legitimate task of tagging and creating metadata for Web images. A less contentious example is Free Rice, which hosts a word game and has sponsors donate 10 grains of rice to the World Food Programme for every right answer submitted by players.

Recently, my colleague Jeff DeChambeau wrote a case study about the dating site OKCupid. Unlike eHarmony and other dating sites where the company determines the question set used for matching couples, OKCupid relies on questions submitted by its users. The notion that the users know best about what characteristics make a suitable mate makes sense. Why this is novel from a playbor perspective is that users, through actions that are apparently self-serving, are also contributing to the growth of the site and the effectiveness of its proprietary matching algorithms. What’s more, the actions of users create value for the company in the form of new data and analytic possibilities (for fun examples, see how OKCupid number crunchers use member data to determine what makes a good profile picture, or why dating an older woman might make sense).

For enterprises, these examples raise the question: How can we make work more interesting, more curious, and more playful so that users willingly play to create value? How can we align incentives in a way that lets us harness free labor? What is the appropriate division of labor across a diverse and fluid ecosystem that includes customers, prospects, partners, and competitors?

There are troubling consequences as well. How can consumers be sure of the authenticity of their experiences? Child labor is a discouraged practice, but what about video games that could be designed so that game-play elements actually contribute to the production of a commercial product like a new chip, program, or piece of software? As our environments become highly-instrumented with and capture data from our activities, how are users compensated for, or even made aware of the commercial value of their data? What does it mean for the broader economy when waged and unwaged labor collapse and are often indistinguishable? What does it mean for society when we debase the notion of pure, innocent play? The Internet as Playground and Factory has a great Vimeo page with clips from leading thinkers that are considering and debating these and other issues that arise from playbor. It’s a lot to digest, but this is a great starting point for people interested in the topic form a social studies perspective.

If only there were tools to find out which employees are susceptible to phishing and other scams that masquerade as legitimate email?

There are such tools including at least one product that lets IT send fake phishing emails to employees to test their awareness of and adherence to IT policies. Such products enable IT to find out who the security weak links are among employees.

Security breaches of the humongous kind get very bad press and agitate people and government regulators, but many smaller and unpublicized potential intrusions are foiled everyday; criminals and others test the security of companies, governments, and individuals all the time.

So what is my point? Call me incredibly naïve, but the effects of outing the weak security links among employees may not all be positive. For IT, testing individual employees for security awareness can help close holes in security. For the employees who fail and even those who do not, the fact of testing can remind all employees of IT policies and of the consequences of opening email from unknown sources or clicking on links. It will make them more skeptical, which is probably a good thing when it comes to corporate network security.

It also may have other effects. It may make them resentful of IT for duping them, may harm morale and affect engagement, and may, in particular, turn off younger employees, who may well post their disaffection on social network sites, or Twitter or even via text messaging, which can make it very hard for the company to find out. Recent research by Accenture among Millennials – the Gen Ys in your workforce – reveals that 45% of employed Millennials use social networking sites at work and about half say they have accessed “online collaborative tools, online applications, and open source technologies” from free public sites at work when the tools provided by the employer are either inadequate or missing. Furthermore, 66% of Millennial employees say they do not abide by corporate IT policies, some because they are unaware of those policies, some because they claim the policies are either not published or too complex. They clearly have a very different attitude towards security than other employees.

I am not advocating that IT tune its policies to the wants and desires of Millennials, or that it stop testing for security holes, but rather that it be aware of the consequences of surreptitiously checking up on specific employees. Testing security all the time is important; testing individual employees for compliance may be counterproductive, especially among the youngest employees.

What’s your view?

Groupon.com – a web 2.0 version of collective buying power, where local merchants offer up special deals so long as enough people sign up for them- wasn’t what the founders originally envisioned. They launched a site called “The Point”, where groups of people could form around specific causes and drive social change. Many of the people that came to the site seemed more interested in getting group discounts on products and services. Seeing the opportunity, Groupon was launched, and from a dead start in August the company now has a top-2000 rating on Alexa, is expanding rapidly, and reports to already be profitable. In short, the future is bright.

City Streets was a online version of the classic Monopoly game that Hasbro developed as a marketing tool. It absolutely exploded in popularity – 1.5 million registered players by November 2009, and 1.5 billion page views, made it the 12th most popular massively multi player online game on the web. Amazingly, it did so without incurring any direct marketing costs, and benefited from – among other things – some very engaged prosumers helping them co-create value. However, the future here isn’t so bright – Hasbro shut it down.You can read why, from their perspective, on the site.

Now obviously the two stories come from very different starting points – notably, one company was launching an entirely new business, while the other had a legacy business model to consider. But it’s fair to say that, we believe, this difference is not enough to explain a way the different responses. In both cases, a surprising new business opportunity emerged that the company didn’t originally envision, as the customers led the company towards the type of experience they wanted. In both cases, signs were everywhere that a lot of money could be made (in Hasbro’s case, the multi-billion dollar online game business is kind of flashing in the background here). But in only one case did something good come from it.

That’s a shame. Without getting into all the reasons why, it’s important to remember that when you ask your customers to dance, let them lead – because they might just teach you an interesting new routine that many of their friends enjoying doing as well.

The Rally Fighter was built for racing in the desert, and after checking out a few other designs I quickly realized that each car was built for specific geographic preferences. Other designs include the The Miami Roadster, The Green Apple (for The Big Apple) and my favorite The Boston Bullet, described below:

For “a city that gives innovation in a spirit of tradition.” The Bullet is Boston’s car, designed for narrow streets and a smooth ride while managing to capture the city’s cultural and ideological heritage.

Local Motors is challenging how new cars are created, holding design contests for each piece of the car from overall design, to the electrical systems, to the interior, to the name. The community prioritizes the ideas and develops those designs that have the most support. My favorite part is that once a full car design is complete, people order them online and the actual manufacturing is done by the new owner. Did you hear that? The new owner builds their own car! With help from the Local Motors team, owners learn how and then actually build an engine, put in windows, craft a brake system, everything! So not only is Local Motors offering designers a great way to collaborate around an exciting concept, they are offering their customers a very personalized experience. Taking the prosumer concept to the next level is no doubt creating a loyal following and a significant group of lifelong customers.

So, what about the major auto manufacturers? Is Local Motors planning to compete with them? How would that work? While the concept is most likely too specialized to ever take off in the mass market, Local Motors is hoping to work with major automakers. They see an opportunity to fill a niche that the major players just can’t fill as it is too cost prohibitive. I anticipate seeing some type of partnership, but given the innovative nature of this company it will most likely be structured like nothing we’ve seen before.

I can’t wait to see what new product development concepts and of course really cool cars come out of this company. As you can imagine the Local Motor’s website is central to its business model, and it is built to keep you interested. Everything from the live shop camera to the design wall to the community and forums are designed to get you thinking, wanting to learn more and maybe even participate. The newest contest launched January 27 and closed February 9 was for a Texas hunting truck described as

a vehicle for Texas that could easily meet the demands of hunters and could adapt depending on the requirements of the different types of game — white tail deer, quail, dove, and javalina to name a few. Essentially, design a base vehicle that could have various modules easily attached to it depending on the needs of the user.

Did you happen to notice how fast this contest is? 2 weeks from launch to close…not bad turnaround time for innovating new ideas. That efficiency is what the collaborative enterprise is all about.

So…what aspects of this model could your company use to improve innovation? What new products or services could be developed in this rapid, community-driven approach? Who among us will jump in and become the next cool car designer? One thing is clear, it will be really fun to watch!

While the site shows where people are now, not where their homes are, clever criminals could scan for location-updating users and filter their results by context. “Drinking wine by the fireplace” is likely something said at home, as is “at my home office doing some work.” With a base-collection of tweets like those tied to geotagged locations, a criminal could easily create a database that maps who is away from home right now, how far away they are, and in the case of fervent tweeters, what speed and direction they’re traveling in. By putting all of this information on a map, and filtering to see only people who are on vacation, enterprising burglars could plot an optimized route through a neighborhood going after only the houses that are currently empty. Pretty great risk-mitigation strategy for criminals!

At the footer of each page on the PleaseRobMe site is the friendly explanation that “[its] intention is not, and never has been, to have people burglarized.” I believe them completely, but their point is well made. Technologies like geolocation and status updates might appear simple, but they’re part of a complex and elaborately tracked ecosystem of technology, one that’s not easily understood or teased apart into core pieces. Hopefully PleaseRobMe catches some attention and brings to light that showing whether or not you’re a candidate for burglary or not is a possible consequence of not carefully using modern social technology. I wish the PleaseRobMe team luck, as the lesson is much better learned here and now than later when even more sensitive information is accidentally or carelessly shared, and the stakes rise further.

A recent article by Nate Anderson in Ars Technica highlights professor Mayer-Schönberger book, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. The message: “Technology has now made ‘remembering’ the default approach to information, and in doing so, threatens to make ‘forgetfulness’ obsolete.” This is not only a profound change from 20 years ago, it can also be detrimental to our ability to think and analyze information. The article goes on to say: “Selective forgetfulness is a boon to humanity; it keeps us from drowning in our own recorded data. It allows us to sift and sort, then to think at a higher level of abstraction instead of wallowing in detail.”

But, this may all soon change.  Perhaps, computers can learn to forget too.

Researchers led by doctoral candidate Roxana Geambasu, at the University of Washington in Seattle are working on project called Vanish. The idea is to encapsulate data such as e-mails, selected text in messages, or documents that are sent over the Internet. The system would create corresponding keys for decapsulation that are widely available online, but that would deteriorate over time so that the data in readable form would only be available for a certain period of time. The overview page of the Vanish project states, “We strongly believe that realizing Vanish’s vision would represent a significant step toward achieving privacy in today’s unforgetful age.” Mayer-Schönberger suggests a similar solution that uses metadata to tag data objects with expiration dates and cites the work of Lawrence Lessig who has proposed a broader approach to combine policy and software to force privacy compliance.

nGenera’s research project Leading in an Age of Unbounded Data is looking at new sources of data available to the enterprise and how these will lead to new insights, opportunities, and challenges, as well as change enterprise processes and decision-making. One of the assumptions we make is that data will continue to grow and companies, through analytics, will develop a type of ’sixth sense’ or situational awareness about the organization thanks to information captured from across the business ecosystem. We have already found that the growth of personal information and digital identity data will lead to rich digital profiles containing social graph information. These rich profiles present opportunities to better engage with customers and employees, improve customization, and facilitate knowledge management by anticipating user needs and connecting them to relevant people and information.

Projects like Vanish force us to think about data, not as an asset with an indefinite lifespan, but rather as something that depreciates over time, just like physical assets do. This would effectively reduce the amount of data that we need to manage and improve signal-to-noise ratio as more important facts and information would be retained while less significant information would be deleted. By eliminating the perfect memory of computers, we might also feel less pressure to maintain digital facades and manicure our online profiles. Additionally, the idea of adding expiration dates and metadata to data could accelerate the shift in power away from marketer towards consumer as it would allow individuals to dictate what personal data is used, who has access, for how long, and for what purpose.

But, self-destructing data would also diminish the value of many of the ‘big data’ opportunities that we talk about such as using large data sets to infer the truth about various situations, and using sentiment analysis to mine online customer comments and status updates for market research and product insights. It would confound companies and marketers that store petabytes of information to generate longitudinal trends and rely on usage data to drive Web analytics and build reputation and ratings, as well as improve information management through technologies such as collaborative filtering (e.g. the technology used by Amazon to recommend books to you based on the activity of people with similar behaviors). By collectively deleting our less-than-favorable digital trails, would we also be doing a disservice to future generations of anthropologists that could benefit from a complete digital history and behavior map—both good, bad, and questionable actions—of their ancestors?

The idea that all data should live on forever is a relatively new concept that many people have already taken for granted. In general, I think enterprises, governments, and individuals would benefit from more discussion on the topic instead of seeing it as a foregone conclusion. The idea of having an information lifecycle for all data is a powerful one. Personally, I would welcome more initiatives such as those by the Vanish team and professor Mayer-Schönberger that broach the topic and reintroduce a little forgetfulness into our digital lives.

Someone in the group mentioned how it would be great to be able to filter information from individuals, so that you only received from any person what you found most helpful or useful from that person. Makes sense to just use each person’s skill or knowledge strength to enhance your own. So, if you had Facebook-like connections with lots of people, you could selectively receive information about trends in mobile marketing from someone whose focus is mobile marketing. I see this as a kind of best of the best relationship approach: You get your colleagues’ best and they get yours.

But, when I thought about this approach, it struck me that it was actually anti-collaborative. A few byproducts of this approach came to mind, none of which I liked. Deciding who you want to listen to about specific topics – essentially, getting only insights and information that you think this person is best at – means you never hear from anyone else, never hear anything but what you want to hear, and you only hear one person’s views on a given topic. Taken to an extreme, I see this as exclusionary, not collaborative.

When I interviewed Randy Adkins, former Director of The Center of Excellence for Knowledge Management at the United States Department of Defense, he told me that the idea for a people search feature in the Air Force’s highly regarded knowledge management platform, Knowledge Now, originated in what he described as an unlikely place: the Air Force Audit Agency, the unit that senior leaders in the Air Force rely on to understand problems and develop solutions. The Audit Agency was having trouble locating the best people to dig deep into a specific problem and prepare solutions. With 900 auditors, knowing exactly who knew what or who was most knowledgeable about a specific weapon system or organizational process was almost impossible. Each auditor’s previous experience was invisible to the Auditor General (AG), which meant problem-solving was more complex than it needed to be. Taking advantage of the wealth of experience in the division was a high priority for the AG. “If you need to audit an F-16 supply support issue, is there anybody else out there that has had F-16 experience or supply support experience that we can put on that audit?” Adkins commented. “It benefits everybody because you have a more informed auditor, so when you are being audited, the chances of getting a more insightful person to help solve that problem is increased dramatically with People Search.”

So, yes, a collaborative platform should have a feature that exposes everyone’s strengths and skills to everyone else. But what I am getting at is this: Even with an expertise identification system, such as one based on people tagging, you never know where great ideas are going to come from. Filtering is great but if it closes off the possibilities of surprise and even creative thinking, it’s going to result in more isolation than sharing. The possibility of insights and ideas from unlikely places, it seems to me, would be minimalized if people filtered their connections to the extent that they saw individuals in a narrow way, as having useful information on just one topic. If collaboration platform software does anything well, it has to expose lots of people to lots of other people across the enterprise. It should increase the opportunity for surprise, not narrow it.

I’ve written a couple of posts about the GreenXchange and a related sustainability workshop, in the run-up to Davos. What I haven’t talked about is an interesting behind-the-scenes aspect of the GreenXchange technology platform.

The technology platform itself is currently a working beta version, proving the GreenXchange concept, developed by Salesforce.com (with help from a Force.com partner), 2Degrees, and nGenera. You can view the “public facing” part of the GreenXchange at http://greenxchange.force.com.

What you won’t see on the website is a sophisticated “listener” capability that the GreenXchange platform provides to its founding members, through nGenera’s collaboration server.

Listening isn’t a new concept. Among its simplest forms is a stored search that gets “pushed” to you via e-mail or other messaging. Think Google Alerts, as an example. But, for modern brand managers, communications professionals, and marketing executives, listeners have become increasingly important applications, because of the ability for reputation to be shaped by parties external to your company, from your customers to your competitors.

In fact, listeners have become part of what is recognized as a “missing layer” of social media and collaborative application infrastructure. This layer of collaborative infrastructure fills the gaps left uncovered between the traditional IT systems management products, from vendors like IBM and HP, and the point solutions vendors of collaboration platforms, as shown in the figure.

In the case of the GreenXchange launch at Davos, we employed listeners primarily for the purpose of an external monitoring activity, to track, rate, and analyze the sentiment of the articles, posts, and other communications that were being generated by the announcement.

Specifically, we wanted to analyze the spike in activity found on the web pre-Davos and post-Davos. So, a listener was created to listen for the combination of “GreenXchange” AND any of the following words or phrases: World Economic Forum, WEF, Davos, or Annual Meeting.

The listener was first run on 1/22/2010; however, we exclude results from the first run because it pulls results from very early time periods and typically finds a very large number of web clips. We ignore the first run and measure velocity on the second run forward, so that it will provide meaningful metrics.

The next screen shot demonstrates the distribution of keywords based on the listener criteria. It is showing that GreenXchange and Davos have the highest key word matches.

This figure also shows that we had a total of 900 unique web clips that had been found since we ran the listener on Jan 25^th that matched our criteria. It also shows that we had a total of 995 occurrences, meaning that there was some duplication of web clips across various channels.

The next screenshot, in the figure below, shows us the velocity between runs. What is interesting is that 34 unique web clips were found on or before Jan 26^th prior to the launch and over 935 new web clips were found since the launch on Jan 27^th, as of Feb 2nd.

This screenshot also shows the top scoring or most popular content (articles), including articles posted on websites like businessweek.com and eqentia.com

The next screenshot, in the figure below, shows an example of the web clips that were retrieved from various channels, such as Yahoo, GoogleNews, and Bing. The score indicates our confidence that this article matches the search criteria and that this content is relevant.

The sentiment shows our confidence that this web clip is either positive or negative in sentiment. All but one in the example, appear to be positive with varying degrees of confidence. This sentiment can be corrected, with the sentiment engine adapting and becoming more accurate over time.

The web channel, publish date, domain, and keyword match are also listed. And we assign a status so that you can easily filter on new content that was discovered on the most recent listener run.

The next figure simply demonstrates how convenient it is to click through the listeners results, directly to the source content. In this example, one of the articles that came up as popular content was from businessgreen.com entitled “Just share it – top brands usher in era of green co-opetition.”

The next figure further shows this click through feature, invoked by clicking on the magnifying glass to the right of the article link and view the content within the listener.

After previewing the web clips, you can decide to add them as content to your collaboration platform and request that others inside your organization, or who have been granted secure access to it from outside your organization, can comment or collaborate on the content. This action is taken by clicking the “Add” link next to the magnifying glass.

Lastly, the figure below shows an activity history. For the GreenXchange listener illustrated, the first run occurred on Jan 22^nd, with 141 web clips returned to build the baseline. But as mentioned earlier, we ignored that result set, for velocity tracking and trending going forward.

For the first several days after the GreenXchange launch, we found over 100 new, unique web clips during the daily runs, on average, with some tapering off in recent runs.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, social media listening is just one component of the “missing layer” of collaborative infrastructure. Other capabilities built into nGenera’s collaboration server include:

• Policy management – Use listening technology to detect non-compliant email (port 25) and web interaction (port 80), either on the Internet or internally, and set policy rules to allow, quarantine or block this traffic
• Social metadata aggregation – continuously build rich profiles from multiple sources (Active Directory, SharePoint, HRIS, social networks, esp. Facebook, user-provided), continuously track relationship strength between profiles, and continuously aggregate log-level activities from a variety of integrated services
• Federated search – Provide ranked search results across all elements of the collaborative environment (internal and external)
• Basic collaborative metrics – Aggregated statistics of tightly and loosely coupled services

These capabilities and others – like powerful analytics engines and more sophisticated reporting – are clearly meeting a demand that large enterprises are more aware than ever that they need. In addition to nGenera’s collaboration server, vendors like Radian6, Socialware, and a number of others are helping to build this sector of software that is bound to be very lively for some time.

But, when you consider the near-term cost and potential long-term damage to one’s brand – like what we’ve been seeing with the auto recall struggles of Toyota – it’s easy to understand why “learning to listen” in new ways using these tools has become an imperative for doing business.

The first clue that something is off comes from the chart they provided. True, when asked whom do you trust as a credible source of information about a company, friends / peers dropped from 45% to 25% (from 2008 to 2010). However, trust in other sources – TV news, radio news, and newspapers – dropped by almost the exact same proportion, from almost the exact same base (i.e. newspapers appear to have dropped from 46% to 26%, for example). The article gets around to mentioning this, but not until the main message they are trying to send has been established.

This indicates two things to me. One, the article deliberately chose to focus on the one part of the story that seemed most provocative – always suspicious. Two, that the question being used does not appear particularly good at distinguishing trust levels between different channels, in terms of marketing. Setting the 2010 data to the side, there is a lot of data out there indicating that tells a very different story than the 2008 baseline (and interpretation) presented. Commenter Kevin pointed towards one such study, from Nielsen, that showed 90% of online customers either completely or somewhat trusted recommendations from people they know. The importance of “recommend to a friend” has been well established, and validated, for many years. But I’ll come back to that in a minute.

A second clue was the interpretation of the quote provided by Richard Edelman himself – that “the lesson for marketers is consumers have to see and hear things in five different places before they believe it.” That type of message could be viewed as great news for people in the advertising business, who can tell clients they need to spend money everywhere to get a message through (cha-ching!). I don’t buy it. My main interpretation of the chart is that it’s very, very likely that many, many customers indicated they didn’t trust any source, in relation to the given question. Hitting these people with messages from many sources they deem uncredible, and expecting that to turn into a message that they trust, is a bit of a stretch.

A third clue is that the chart provided is primarily focused on news sources (i.e. it’s “radio news”, not “radio”), while the discussion is primarily marketing focused. I think there’s a major disconnect there, which ties into some of the discussion above.

I then thought a bit about how I would respond to the given question – and I realized I’d probably fall in the “not trusting any source” camp. But it’s not because I don’t trust opinions and recommendations from friends and peers – it’s because the question is too generic, and notably I don’t really associate it with marketing and purchasing decisions. The reason is simple – while I may know a fair number of people, most of them are fairly busy. If I want “information on a company”  – a very generic request – that I pick out of thin air, I can’t exactly expect them to have it. It’s also likely that what they know, or could find, would come from the company itself (directly or indirectly). In my opinion, the link between this question, and what marketers should be thinking about, is relatively weak.

This led me to a couple more thoughts that I think need to be taken into account here – from a marketing perspective.

First, let’s start from a different question – Who knows you the best? - and provide the same list of options. I would bet my retirement fund on friends / peers winning this contest, and that if someone chose “radio” it’s unlikely you’d let them in your house. I’d also be willing to assert, with a high degree of confidence, that there are many situations where people trust messages, and recommendations, from this group of people over ads on TV, radio, and newspapers – even though this article would have you think differently. I know that seems like a very simple and obvious point, but it seems like it needs to be made here.

Second, take a context specific approach – and think about a question that more closely ties to influence in relation to marketing, or a specific purchasing decision. For example, “who do you trust to help pick a movie?”, or “who do you trust to help you find new fashions?”. It’s very likely that for any question that ties to personal taste, style, etc., the influence of peer recommendations is important. In other words, I many not trust them as a source of information “on a company” , but I will trust them as a source of information for a specific product or service, in a specific context, in relation to me.

Third, such questions need to account for different platforms that are emerging to influence purchasing decisions – particularly the ones that consolidate numerous different opinions (think Flikster, Yelp, etc.). I might not trust any single individual on there (and thus claim not to trust them in response to a generic question), but I may trust their collective opinion if the sample size is large enough, or even a specific individual’s opinion if (say) their reputation score is high enough. Very hard to tease out of a survey – but very important.

I could go on, but I’ll stop there. Overall, I think there are quite a few issues with what this article presents, and how it is interpreted. Did I miss any big ones – or do you think I’m wrong?

Some time ago internet memes were confined mostly to the periphery of the Internet, but some made it into the mainstream–think LOLCats and RickRolling. These two and their fore-bearers originally spread on message boards, forums, and irc channels; parts of the internet that weren’t especially welcoming to casual users. But the face of the internet has changed: it’s now easier to use and more people are on it. And it’s more social. Lots has been written about how it’s easier for messages to go viral on social networking sites like facebook because people have a built-in friends list, and their peers are likely to be more receptive to a message that comes from a friend.

Lately on facebook these mainstream internet memes really seem to be taking off. A few weeks ago women everywhere were posting status updates that were only one word long: a color that corresponded to that of their bra. This was allegedly to raise awareness about breast cancer, though it’s equally plausible that the idea was simply to “confuse boys.” Shortly thereafter, “doppelganger week” began, and people started changing their facebook pictures to photos of celebrities that they vaguely (or wishfully) resembled. Next was the “post the urbandictionary definition of your name. Finally, and most recently, has been a political meme going around seeing if an onion ring can amass more facebook fans than Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper (and boy can it ever).

These four memes have taken over my facebook newsfeed, and likely those of just about everyone else who shares more than a few friends with me. Viral marketers would love to get this kind of reach, but doing so largely remains a dream. So why not change the rules of the game a bit?

Urbandictionary is clearly benefiting a great deal from being the center of attention in this way, but what’s to stop other companies from joining-in on the trend and showing that they “get it”? Various breast cancer societies could have easily hopped on the bra-color bandwagon. New York Fries or Pizza Pizza (the only places I can think of off the top of my head that serve onion rings) could roll out a “Prime Minister Onion Meal,” and any number of celebrity gossip magazines could use the doppelganger meme to great effect.

After all, if these trends simply “happen,” then there’s no intellectual property concerns to worry about, the message already exists and is popular (making it a proven commodity), and it shows people who already feel like they’re a part of something that the marketer/company is also in the know. Macy’s tried this by hiring Rick Astley to sing “Never gonna give you up” in 2008’s Macy’s day parade, but I think the best has yet to come in terms of marketers latching on to, and reflecting back, the spontaneous culture of the internet.

For fifteen years, we’ve been arguing that the digital revolution will challenge many fundamental aspects of the university. We have not been alone. In 1997, none other than Peter Drucker predicted that big university campuses would be “relics” within thirty years.

Universities are losing their grip on higher learning as the Internet is, inexorably, becoming the dominant infrastructure for knowledge — both as a container and as a global platform for knowledge exchange between people — and as a new generation of students requires a very different model of higher education. The transformation of the university is not just a good idea; It is an imperative, and evidence is mounting that the consequences of further delay may be dire.

Read the full essay here.

6. The world needs better governments.

Some governments in Central America and Africa are just holding on and many are dysfunctional.  But governability is becoming an issue for G20 countries as well.  One leader said the US is on the brink of being “ungovernable.”  One Chinese executive responded thusly when asked to defend his country’s lack of democracy:  “So we should adopt the American system where lobbyists run everything and nothing happens?”

Democracy was still seen as an unstoppable force but in many regions of the world it is becoming stalled, and in some cases losing ground.  Basic democratic institutions are at risk and in danger of failing part due to the economic crisis in poor countries.  The best predictor of democratic survival is per capita income.  In some countries portions of the government have been captured by interest groups. Other non-democratic countries are proving competitively stable and economically healthy.  And the current economic crisis shows that national governments and domestic regulation are inadequate to deal with the challenges of the global economy.   There is also danger of protectionism and isolationism.

7. It turns out the internet DOES change everything

The much-discredited phrase from the dotcom period is not just geek speak.  The Internet and Social Networks were central to many of the discussions here.  The digital age seems to be coming of age.  I participated with CEOs of most of the important social networks in a session called The Power of Social Networks. It got a lot of buzz at Davos.  A few minutes into it the session we solicited questions from Facebook.  6,000 questions appeared in first 2 minutes.

The growing consensus is that new business models are emerging in every industry and throughout society.  I’ve argued that social networking is becoming social production and that a new mode of production is emerging – changing not only how we make software or encyclopedias but physical goods like motorcycles.

Most leaders love that a web company – Google –  is taking on China. The circumstantial evidence that the China-based hacking of Google was conducted by authorities looking for information about activists was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  Talking to Google execs I’m convinced they not going to back down.

8. Girls, women and gender. A sea change is underway.

There was lots of buzz about women’s emerging purchasing power, known as the Power of the Purse.  The expected worldwide increase of women’s income by 2013 is $5.1 trillion, which is greater than China’s expected growth of $3 trillion for the same period.

Deep interest in the so-called Girl Effect, i.e., investing in girls offers the biggest ROI in the developing world.  In African countries female illiteracy is almost a third higher than that of men.  But every year of schooling increases a girl’s future earnings by 20 percent.  And by earning more and influencing how dollars are spent, women would acquire a stronger voice in all aspects of their lives.

Although women are becoming stronger financially, they are still very weak politically.  Countries should be more aggressive in finding female candidates for public office, and look outside the regular channels. But increased financial and political power brings responsibility. Woman could be key in refocusing our political and economic efforts away from consumerism.

9.  We need new measures of progress

There is growing agreement that GDPs and GNPs are flawed tools for measuring the health of country, and we should instead emphasize the idea of Gross National Well-Being or something similar.  Just as some companies have moved to “triple-bottom line” reporting for their impact on society, many economists argue that GDPs and GNPs measure activities that are detrimental to society and ignore activities that are beneficial.

A pandemic will increase drug sales and visits to doctors, thereby driving up GNP.  Volunteer work or work in the home is not recognized as contributing to GNP.

There is no lack of research and creativity on this issue, as some governments and academics have developed a wide array of yardsticks to more accurately capture how well and healthily a country is growing.  The key now is to have these new tools recognized as legitimate and encourage their widespread adoption.

10. A new big idea.  The Global Commons.

Like a park in a village we need new global parks in the global village. Some of the global commons areas are well-recognized, such as our atmosphere, oceans and space, but there are less obvious areas that exist, or should be created, such as know-how concerning sustainability

Conventional wisdom says you should control and protect proprietary resources and innovations – especially intellectual property – through patents, copyright and trademarks. If someone infringes your IP, summon the lawyers out to do battle.  That’s often the wrong approach.  Contributing to “the commons” is not altruism; it’s the best way to build vibrant business ecosystems that harness a shared foundation of technology and knowledge to accelerate growth and innovation.

A good private sector example is when more than a dozen pharmaceutical firms abandoned their proprietary R&D projects to support open collaborations such as the SNP (single nucleotide polymorphisms) Consortium and the Alliance for Cellular Signaling.  Both projects aggregate genetic information culled from biomedical research in publicly accessible databases. They also use their shared infrastructures to harness resources and insights from the for-profit and not-for-profit research worlds. These efforts are speeding the industry toward fundamental breakthroughs in molecular biology – breakthroughs that promise an era of personalized medicine and treatments for intractable disorders. Nobody gives up their potential patent rights over new end products, and by sharing some basic intellectual property the companies bring products to market more quickly.

One overarching theme at the conference is the confidence that young people have such great potential. Obviously we have a lot of work ahead of us if we don’t want to pass on a deeply damaged planet to our children.  At the final session at Davos, we heard from six inspiring young people on stage on their hopes and ambitions.  There were more than a few tears in the audience.

1. The state of the world is not good.

The theme of Davos was Rethink, Redesign, Rebuild, which may sound a bit grandiose to some people. I doubt many attendees think this now. The world clearly needs fixing.

Figures cited at the Forum show we’re a long way from being out of the woods on the global recession. Jobs are and will continue to be a huge issue. It is estimated the unemployment in the word jumped by 50 million during the recession, and the working poor increased by 200 million.

But the financial meltdown and recession are arguably symptoms of a bigger systemic crises and deep institutional failures. There is growing recognition that many of the organizations and institutions that have served us well for decades, even centuries, are no longer able. Many of the pillars of economic and social life have come to the end of their life cycle. In 2009, the American auto industry — the epitome of the industrial economy — collapsed. The upheaval is now spreading to other sectors — from the universities and science, to entertainment and media, to government and democracy. The continuing collapse of many newspapers in the United States is a storm warning.

Many other serious problems loom. Lack of access to fresh water is a catastrophe for humanity, as 2.8 billion (or 44%) of the world’s population already live in high water stress areas, increasing to 3.9 billion by 2030. In a world of growing capacity, global poverty is getting worse. Ten children die of hunger every minute and a third of the world’s population fester in slums. Almost everyone, especially the scientists at Davos is deeply troubled by climate change. We need to reinvent out energy grids, transportation systems and reindustrialize the planet. And we’re running out of time.

As Bill Clinton said to a few of us at a cocktail party, “The world is too unequal, unstable, and unsustainable.”

2. Everywhere there are new collaborative models emerging to solve global problems

Our systems of global cooperation are not rising to the many challenges we face. The global warming conference in Copenhagen has become a metaphor for failure.

I believe the Forum itself is an example of the global multi-stakeholder cooperation that is picking up where nation states and formal institutions left off.

The global humanitarian response to the Haitian earthquake is showing us what is possible. The 7.0 magnitude earthquake not being just a Caribbean island crisis, but a world crisis. Millions of people and thousands of institutions have responded in non-traditional ways. They are donating their time, money, goods and services. Charitable organizations such as the Red Cross received donation of tens of millions of dollars within days by using new technologies such as texting, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Social media has become the pre-eminent tool to connect people around the world, and help empower people become active participants in relief efforts.

There are 100 million people on Facebook Causes – the biggest application on Facebook. These are not just people talking to each other. They are now organizing activities in the physical world. I heard of dozens of examples at Davos.

3. There is a profound rethinking of the financial services industry and its role in society.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy put it well: “The banker’s job is not to speculate, it is to analyse credit risk, assess the capacity of borrowers to repay their loans and finance growth of the economy. If financial capitalism went so wrong, it was, first and foremost, because many banks were no longer doing their job. Why take the risk of lending to entrepreneurs when it is so easy to earn money by speculating on the markets? Why lend only to those who can repay the loan when it is so easy to shift the risks off the balance sheet?”

The mood at Davos was widespread: Banks need to be reined in, the sooner the better. US banking executives used to be the stars of Davos. Now they are a low-key, humble and dour looking group. Last year at Davos everyone was in a degree of shock. This year, a better term would be “fed up.” Fed up with banks that are “too big to fail,” with government bailouts, with the human costs of this crisis and with an industry that basically got out of control. For some CEOs the crisis warrants a critical re-evaluation of market capitalism.

4. Executive pay, especially for bankers, needs fixing.

There was a very strong sentiment that the issue of exorbitant executive compensation needs to be corrected. The biggest targets of discussions were bankers and other architects of the financial crisis. Many heavily damaged their own firms, some to the point of bankruptcy, paralyzed the commercial credit market for tens of thousands of companies, and today are not able or willing to loan money to entrepreneurs. To set aside $billions for bonuses just after they had been bailed out by the government was viewed by almost everyone as unconscionable. Even those banks that didn’t need a bailout cannot justify 8 digit compensation packages.

5. Sustainability is an idea whose time has come. Business is moving from talk to action.

As one executive put it: “It’s no longer about the Green Economy; it’s about the Economy.” Sustainability is the central issue many businesses face.

A few short years ago, sustainability was buried in a company’s PR department and it was primarily a matter of spin. But then governments began forcing certain reporting and behaviors, and the corporate issue became compliance. Then sustainability became a matter of competitiveness and cost reduction, by capturing efficiencies such as reducing waste and energy use. CEOs everywhere at Davos said we’ve now arrived at the point where sustainability must be integrated into the business strategy — what is a business, and how it does it operate and relate to the rest of the world.

We’ll see if they walk the talk.

I’ll post themes 6 – 10 tomorrow.

When I originally started looking State of the Union addresses, I simply found transcripts online and did a manual count of words in text documents. This was laborious, but provided some interesting findings (note sites like Speech Wars can now automate this process). Last January I highlighted Wordle and used tag clouds to create a visualization of State of the Union addresses from notable past Presidents. This year, I’ve been spending a fair bit of time researching sentiment analysis, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that vendor Crimson Hexagon and CNN had teamed up to analyze public sentiment towards the 2010 State of the Union in real-time. Check out the video after the jump.

The impact of the new technology was not lost on the news media. The Huffington Post picked up the story and reported that, “The moment that ends up being most pivotal in changing the way the media covers big, live events may well have happened on CNN, where John King used the ‘Magic Wall’ to analyze almost 150,000 Twitter responses to President Obama’s speech.” In the article, CNN’s Senior Vice President and Washington Bureau Chief, David Bohrman is quoted as saying, “Twitter is all noise, but to be able to harness it and group it and actually intelligently cluster it and derive moods and opinions from it is very interesting.”

Whatever you might think of Twitter (Jon Stewart used the Magic Wall as an opportunity to make fun of both CNN and Twitter), this is exactly the type of technology companies are starting to think about for managing their brands, conduct market research, and pre-emptively deal with customer issues. The next level of granularity that sentiment analysis vendors are starting to offer is the ability to go beyond positive and negative sentiment to look at why sentiment is the way it is. Why are people pro-Obama? What types of issues are most often related to “Obama is too liberal?” This type of analysis is available, and I’ve seen demos from some vendors that offer fairly sophisticated drill-downs. However, some people remain sceptical about the general accuracy of this capability, as well as the limitations of most systems to crunch this type of data in real-time. Maybe we’ll see this for next year’s State of the Union—I’m hoping so.

The group’s approach starts with facilitating partnerships and maintaining “a network of technology volunteers to respond to specific needs.” Included in its professionals’ network are developers, specialists, communicators, first responders, and project managers, but also “people who just want to help.” Everyone who volunteers usually gets to work on projects that align with their specific talents and interests, but, when dozens of people gathered in Boston on January 23 for a CrisisCamp event for Haiti, a group who intended to create software to identify Twitter messages sent from Haitian refugees did not have all the right programming tools and dived in to work on a non-technical task.

At CrisisCamps, people brainstorm and develop ideas. Special camps tend to address an individual event or create problem-specific tools. CrisisCamps often happen in several locations at once; camps for Haiti, for example, happened on January 30 in New York, Chicago, Montreal, Washington, DC, London, Toronto, and Mountain View, CA, and are scheduled for February 6 in Ottowa, Calgary, London, Pittsburgh, and Kansas City.

Because the next crisis is around the corner, at so-called Hack-a-Thon events, Crisis Commons volunteers prepare for future critical needs by developing new tools. The group’s web site explains: “We’re about responding to specific requests and needs. But we’re also about supporting just good ideas. Before a CrisisCamp, organizers reach out to responder organizations – governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and others – seeking requests for technological supports. We organize into teams to support those requests. But we also develop around things that are just good ideas.” All tools are open-source.

The group has a blog for updates on camp activities and outcomes and uses a wiki (http://wiki.Crisis Commons.org/wiki/Main_Page) for project and volunteer coordination. Anyone who wants to organize a CrisisCamp starts by by filling out a form with basic personal information, background information about skills and interests, and the purpose of the camp. Crisis Commons sets a limit of just one camp per city per day to ensure all local resources are located in one place for maximum impact.

Some of the projects already completed include:

• GPS maps of Haiti, along with instructions for downloading the maps into a Garmin navigators. The maps are available at OpenStreetMap.org. Haiti Crisis Map (http://haiticrisismap.org/) includes multiple overlays that show, for example, destroyed buildings and refugee camps and satellite images from multiple sources that is used for tracing in Open Street Map.
• A Haitian Creole-to-English translator for the iPhone
• An alpha version of We Have We Need Exchange (http://wehaveweneed.org), a site for relief organizations to post immediate needs so donors can respond quickly. Categories of need include food, fuel, medical, shelter, telecom, transport, volunteers, and other.

The impact of Crisis Commons’ CrisisCamp events on participants can be profound. Co-founder of Crisis Commons, Noel Dickover described the work he’s doing in the Haiti camps as “more important than anything I’ve ever done in my life.” Thom Goodsell, a software developer at Humedica Inc. in Boston, who participated in the Boston CrisisCamp on January 23, explains the value of Crisis Commons this way: “No one here is going to save a life directly. What we are going to do is build infrastructure to help them do their jobs better.”

Crisis Commons benefits from the desire of people to help in concrete ways in events where they cannot participate on the ground. Social network technology makes it possible to assemble people with and without technical skills to make real differences in virtual ways. Crisis Commons is an example of the potential for good that’s often overlooked or invisible on a day-to-day basis when people think about social media and the Internet, which are often derided as trivial and time-wasters.