[amplified individuals // amplified leicester]

Sue Thomas is leading a project - Amplified Leicester - a city-wide experiment in social media, and there'll be an opportunity to participate on the 11th of September:

We're looking for people who are open-minded, enthusiastic and curious.

Amplified Leicester is a city-wide experiment to
- explore diversity and innovation
- build a network across diverse communities
- create, share and develop new ideas
- use social media like Facebook and Twitter as an amplifier

This is an opportunity to work with people you might otherwise never meet and learn how to:
- benefit from Leicester's huge diversity of people and cultures
- generate lots of new ideas quickly
- think like a futurist and see the bigger picture
- organise and collaborate better
- be persuasive in different social situations
- share and develop creative ideas
- manage the stream of information which bombards us every day
- choose the best people to collaborate with
- make the most of different kinds of resources - social, economic, creative

Participation is free of charge but places are limited. Deadline for applications Friday 11th September 2009.

Find out more and download an application form from http://www.facebook.com/l/;http://www.amplifiedleicester.com

For an informal chat, please contact Sue Thomas or Thilo Boeck:
Sue Thomas t: 0116 207 8266 e: sue.thomas@dmu.ac.uk
Thilo Boeck t: 0116 2577879 e: tgboeck@dmu.ac.uk

Amplified Leicester is managed by the Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University in partnership with the DMU Centre for Social Action and Phoenix Square Digital Media Centre. The project is commissioned and supported by NESTA, an independent body with a mission to make the UK more innovative.

“A group that thinks in diverse ways will address a problem from many angles.” Charles Leadbeater, The Difference Dividend

Note: Also of interest, a talk by Andrea Saveri on amplified individuals or this presentation which Andrea did for last year's NLab Social Networks conference.

[better business blogging: twitter tips]

I'm all for blogging and I think twitter is extremely useful (for some people). I've had some very helpful feedback thanks to tweets I've put out asking for feedback, recommendations, suggestions and advice.

However, my use of twitter is a little more organic; it fluctuates with my current research or projects rather than a long term strategic goal that you'd have if you are going to try to harness it (and other social media applications) for *purely* business use.

Suaad Sait over at The B2B Lead Blog has some tips garnered from Rich Karpinski's B-to-b followers flock to Twitter article.

Business Tips for Twitter Use:

1. In your Twitter bio, clearly spell out what business you are in, who is posting to the account and even what you hope to get out of it. That creates transparency and the underpinnings of trust.
2. Find people to follow. They’ll likely follow you back, broadening and enriching your conversation.
3. To start, sit back and watch conversations unfold. As your comfort level grows, be proactive by participating in and starting conversations related to your business.
4. Be generous: Offer more than you get back and always try to be responsive to peers and customers.

A caveat as Jon Miller notes, "Tweets don’t yet show up in Google search results, and links can’t influence your SEO rankings.”

[nlab social networks conference - panel discussion]

Panel Discussion Rounding up the issues of the day with Steve Clayton, Roland Harwood, Chris Meade, Vijay Riyait, Andrea Saveri.

"All our relationships are built on favours...ultimately that's how you make money." (RH)

Distinguishing between the social media platform and the activities, sometimes these issues are conflated (AS)

Emergence of new infrastructure for businesses and on top of that the ways we support client development etc...(AS)

Questions:
How to bridge the gap between all the technical skills and the person/client/community. How do you bring the benefits of social netowkring to more people more of the time?

It is clear that these tools have benefits. It is time to get a little more political (CM) - it's about sharing information and succeeding globally.

Vijay notes that there aren't really many of these kinds of conferences engaging small businesses particularly out of London. We need to get out there and connect with business groups etc... Creative Coffee Club then fits in really well with this idea.

Question:
Caroline from PCM Creative - If you could only keep two social media platforms what would they be and why?

Twitter because it's fascinating and Facebook. Niche social networking is important but the grander interactions with people you don't know are it (RH)

Chris thinks it's a good idea to have only one that can do all sorts of things. That could be more exciting rather than another thing appearing and another thing we need to learn.

For Andrea it's delicious and news aggregator that tracks all the blogs so that she can stay in touch with a whole community of people.

Facebook allows Vijay to connect with colleagues and clients which as a small business helps develop a social relationship which helps build trust.

Question from Karl Craig West: He explains that his clients should use social networking but they come back saying "so." Why should small businesses get into social networking, where's the business incentive.

Vijay: How many people run a small business (half the delegates). How do you get your business (networking). Vijay says social networking can only help. The value in getting to people.

Chris reminds us what Jim said, that online social networking lets you do more for less. What about the tailor who went from "zero to hero" (RH) and Jim Benson solving a problem within 25 minutes after asking the twitterverse. That's got to be important to a business.

There are ways to expand markets, to get that kind of reach with social networking. Also where you need expert knowledge. Using social media to participate in channels where you can get that kind of information (AS).

David Terrar: it doesn't matter what the business is, there are always tangible benefits. Dell using the platform to talk to customers etc... There isn't a killer feature other than collaboration.

Michael: consensus that social networking is worth investing in but isn't it a bit oversaturated and actually aren't consumers way more savvy? Consumers know there's an agenda behind it.

Chris Meade says this is why it's important to pick one kind of platform and stick with it. It's better that people have a focus and know what they are after. Vijay reminds us that there are companies who began a blog under the pretense that it was written but a real, unaffiliated person. We need rules on transparency.

Toby Moores: One question we haven't yet addressed is the dramatic shift in landscape, the fact that India and China are producing more grads than we are producing children. So doing the innovative bit of business is going to shift so the value of social media is amplifying that process. How much do you believe that social media will be adpoted and support this shift in landscape?

Andrea thinks it will. It is a collaborative, open, social platform. It supports emergent swarm activity. But right now China has the greatest number of bloggers around so she wouldn't underestimate their involvement in the creative side of business.

Could we live without the web? RH says we assume it'll be there forever in the shape it is now.

Vijay says the whole thing about social networking is allowing people to be creative, letting go of some of that control. We know big businesses will adopt it but will smaller businesses?

Question from Andrew (?): what is really different with social networking? Moved from relationship marketing to meeting needs of the customer but today, social networking enhances that relationship, makes that conversation much better. Forces traditional thinking businesses into rexaming the way they do business if they have come from a "command and control position." But the younger businesses will do things very very differently. Suggestion from Andrew to FSB and BusinessLink to do some case studies to move this into the real world and out of academia (note: this isn't an academic conference!). Note from Sue: Shani has been working with Creative Coffee Club to do exactly that.

just found social cash - a way to magically monetize?

[nlab social networks conference - jim benson]

Social Networking Beyond The Dogma: Let's Make Some Money

The application of social networking and social media technologies ultimately should help your business work better. How do you set goals, create campaigns, and execute cost effectively?

NOTE: if you join a social network - twitter, facebook etc...you must give back to the community, answer other questions, participate otherwise you're just a leech.

Which social media networks should we be on? Well, can't say but Jim does tell us what we shouldn't be on...Facebook! At least if we're thinking about time vs content...it takes too much time whereas twitter etc...can offer benefit/value much quicker.

Social networking reduces costs of: lead acquisition, product improvement, individual sales, expert information and opportunities

Social networks are like cities by fostering growth, coordination, affinity, voice, realisation

[nlab social networks conference - ken thompson]

Bioteams: what can we learn from nature's social networks?

Ken's current job grew out of his investigation of "nature's best teams." Have a look at www.bioteams.com.

Nature’s teams, such as bees, geese, ants and dolphins, are based on a small number of fundamentally different principles than human teams. Interestingly these “bioteams” seem to bear a much closer resemblance to today’s virtual/ mobile social networks than the traditional organisation teams we all know and love. Ken will explore whether an awareness of these principles can help us get much more value out of both social software and social networks.

Ken Thompson: "Bioteams - What Can We Learn from Nature's Social Networks"

Prizes?! Ken says we're going to be interacting and we get prizes!

Most networks are networks of convenience.

Check out Ken's most recent book The Networked Enterprise.

Three principles of swarms: ask the network, all nodes, network invention

www.swarm-pro.com/private/messageboard.aspx - the name of the swarm is NL owned by ken.thompson. to join, text "JOIN NL username to 07786203958

After we've registered Ken asks us a variety of questions to which we respond via sms to this swarm team. We can all see the (often quite funny!) responses to the questions by browsing to the url. Ken is going to add this to his site later.

Apparently we're a collective brain. If there was one question we wanted to ask the room, what would it be?

How any of those constantly twittering get any work done? Ken rephrases: "Does Twitter distract from work?"

Are current group structures natural?
Bioteams share 4 common behaviours:
any group leader can take the lead - nature's groups are never led exclusively by one member. Collective leadership is...the right leader for the right task at the right time. Single leader teams are no longer appropriate.

Pheromone-style Short messaging. Nature's groups use short instant message. Instantly broadcast and received in situ. Short and simple...all species have a message instinct.

Small is Beautiful and Big is powerful

Crowds - everyone does the same thing at the same time...Scale or the Wisdom of Crowds.
Sall groups...everyone can do different things at different times

Read the many through the few. Nature's networks are clustered. Some group members have many more connections than the average. These members have extreme connectivity.

Humberto Maturana on Autopoieses: "a living system is one whose only products are itself." (more on Maturana here: http://www.oikos.org/maten.htm)

Boundary, processes, nervous system, external communications = living network

Check out swarm tribes: http://www.swarmtribes.com/Public/getswarming.aspx?sname=jd4

*The most successful teams on the planet are not human teams.*

[nlab social networks conference - andrea saveri]

Andrea Saveri on The Future of Work: Amplified Individuals, Jobs & Organizations

Institute for the Future - founded in 1968

How to forecast the future, applied to business, government and non-profits

Think about the future though aware of the present

Amplified individual uses twitter to get information out. Thinking of global events and tweets becoming quick and powerful ways to sort, filter and disseminate information.

Amplified individuals are also highly collaborate - work with others to collectively solve problems, tap into an contribute to the intelligence of crowds. Re: businesses this might expand staff without necessarily hiring new staff. Through social media can actually attract people to you to provide people to you without hiring somebody.

Wikis - a great example with wikis on just about everything. Imagine being a small business, putting up a wiki page about a new process, technique or technology you're inviting other people to contribute to that knowledge base. Identify your own need (HR: you get other people to scratch your itch).

Prediction Markets - imagine what it would take for small businesses to do their own market forcasting, accessing intelligence from a broad community about a focused question. See: http://us.newsfutures.com/home/home.html

Another way to use sociology and collective action might be to bring in ludic concepts. Gaming allows different kinds of associations and people get interested in solving puzzles etc...

Amplified Individuals are highly improvisational. Andrea tells us about a group of work-from-home people who band together to work in a real space and share infrastructure and resources.

Amplified Individuals are also highly augmented. They employ systems, tools, and hacks to enhacne cognitive abilities and coordination skills. This is particuarly important for small businesses as they are likely to fill many hats, the kinds of techniques and practises to enhance memory, attention etc...is important.

See chumby - way to control information. Have a look at the chumby website. Totally into social media, they have a section where the audience (are they really called customers?) can upload (via flickr) their own photos or videos (via youtube)
of a chumby: http://www.chumby.com/pages/showoff.

Key Characteristics:

moddable, influency, ping quotient (measure of your responsiveness to other people's requests for engagment, your propensity and ability to participate), protovation (fearless innovation in rapid, iterative cycles), open authorship (creating content for public consumption and modification), multi-capitalism (fluency in working with different capitals, eg. natural, intellectual, social and financial), longbroading (thinking in terms of higher level systems, cycles, the bigger picture, can you rise above and look at the higher-level system), signal/noise management, cooperation radar (ability to sense, almost intuitively, who would make the best collaborators on a particular task)

Why Important for Small Biz?

This really does amplify scope for info. Individuals have the motivation and know-how to create new strucutres and processes that bypass traditional constraints

Key Ways:

Economies of sociality

Asymmetric power

Responsive resilience

New market niches

***Questions

How to monetize the individual? Go to that multi-capitalisation skill. Understanding of the relationship between building social captial and reputation might be a way to convert that into monetising. What do you give away and what do you charge for? This is a real area of fluidity right now. We shouldn't think about monetisation alone...we should think about other kinds of capital.

If you're talking about micro-businesses and the amount of time that should be spent on this kind of social networking/web. Andrea: it's not just a chunk of time...what is it that they're doing on the web. Are they participating in a discussion related to their job...that would be related to their work. The question is why are you going out there? You need a good reason for using that kind of technology, a way to enhance the staff that actually makes them more productive.

[nlab social networks conference - roland harwood]

Roland Harwood: "Are Online Social Networks the New Cities?"

social networks are starting to fulfill some of the interactions upon which cities are traditionally based

two books that have inspired Roland:
The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs and Emergence by Steven Johnson

Manchester - first formed as a settlement in 76 and 1301 there was a town charter and in 1700-1850 because of industrial revolution it grew ten-fold though not formally recognised as a city until 1853.

People who study urban growth talk about the role of technology (field rotation etc...) on the development of cities. "I think the internet is going to have as profound effect on cities but we're only at the beginning."

See Richard Florida Flight of the Creative Class.

Jane Jacobs talks about the essence of cities, especially cites in which you can walk. In a car you are isolated but on foot you overhead conversations, have encounters and even change your behaviour based on those encounters. The characteristics of good cities:

random encounters, information storage and exchange, communities, space to play, economies of scale, trade/sharing, organised complexity, anonymity.

Diversity drives innovation. We need to create more space to cross-fertilise our ideas (this can feed into my IOCT research on transdisciplinarity).

Roland's just mentioned a really interesting idea of "bothies": random shelters that people can use for free?! See here for more info: http://www.mountainbothies.org.uk/

[social media in lay terms]

Over at common craft there's a handy video explaining social media in "plain English." Useful for anyone new to social media and in tune with our upcoming (this Thursday!) NLab Social Networks conference in Leicester.

Warning: the video might make you hungry for ice cream:

[social networks & identity]

This article by Scott Monty on his social networks and what it means for his identity fits well with the upcoming NLab Social Networks conference.

"I've been getting a lot of requests for friends on various social networks lately. You probably have been too - there seems to be an explosion of interest lately, particularly on Twitter.

I'm generally encouraged by this, as it means that the space is continuing to grow, rather than to wane like some short-lived fad. But at the same time, it can make life a little more complex or cluttered if you're not ready to deal with it.

But social networks are inherently different from each other. How you use one may not reflect how you use another, nor will contacts be consistent across every one of them. I thought it might be instructive to share how I think about my social networks - particularly focusing on how I consider friend requests in each. I've linked to my profiles, if you'd care to connect with me on them.

Facebook
Ah, Facebook. One of the most visible and recognized brands in the social networking space, where "friend" is a verb. For me, Facebook is a combination of business and social contacts.

I'll immediately accept a friendship request if I know you or follow you on another network. But that's not to say I'm exclusive in my friending. If we don't know each other, just introduce yourself and - most importantly - give me some context as to how you know me.

LinkedIn
I use LinkedIn as my professional social network. Like the old three-ring binders of business cards that I kept, LinkedIn is my real-time virtual collection of business cards.

As you can imagine, my requirements for LinkedIn are a bit more stringent. If you'd like to connect with me on LinkedIn, we should have met or at least have had some meaningful interaction. I'll also accept introductions via people I know.

Twitter
Twitter is probably the loosest of all of my networks. I generally like connecting with more people there because I enjoy the exchange of ideas, links and quick personal interaction that it allows."

From Marketing Profs Daily Fix.

[business+social networking]

Thinking about our current plan for NLab (tracking social networking in business) this video seems to give a good background on what businesses need and how social networking can help:

(of course there's ecademy linked in - with 11 million members and the more recent jump up etc...)

[ad clicks]

An interesting post on the logistics of ad-clicking from Zeila Rich Enterprises.

"The pie chart shown above gives you all the different types of clicks there are to Adsense Advertisements, be it on the Search or Content Networks. We cannot disclose our methods of collection of such data, as it is our proprietary technology, and we might plan to do something about it some day. There are several categories of clicks.

We have the Fact-Finding Clicks (FFC). These clicks are just for visitors to find out more about a particular offer or just receive information, perhaps comparing offers from one advertiser to another. It is not surprising that it makes up over 60% of all clicks in our research.

What is shocking most is that out of 4 clicks, at least one of them is what we term the Curious Click (CUC). Over 25% of all clicks are as a result of curiosity. People are clicking just to find out “what’s going on”, without the intention to buy anything. That has serious implication to pay per click advertisers, but that is beyond the scope of this book.

There are also the Competitive Clicks (COC). Luckily, it is only 1% of total clicks. These are ads which are clicked by competitors of the advertisers. These competitors have no intention whatsoever to do business with the advertisers, other than to inflate the advertising costs of their competitors. Sad, but true about the existence of such clicks!


The 3% Converted Clicks (CNC) are in line with data collected by major advertising firms. These conversions only include direct sales (and exclude leads such as subscription to a mailing list, request for information, etc). What this means is that 3 out of 100 people actually buy something the first time they click on an ad. Remember we talked about Click Flipping in Chapter 4? Can you imagine making money from referral commissions from just 3% of your ad clicks (not to mention an even infinitesimal portion of your total web visitors)?"

For more see here.