Notes from the Blogs & Social Media Forum

I just got my notes on Wednesday’s VNU Blogs & Social Media Forum back (thanks, Adriana!). They’re not comprehensive, because there were points when I just wanted to listen and not write. Where no quotation marks are used or I am not obviously relating a point made by a specific person, the words are reflective of my own thoughts, not necessarily the words of the speakers.

(I also only took down notes for a few presentations. Sue me.)

Opening keynote panel

Euan Semple jokes that, now that he’s not the BBC’s Head of Knowledge Management anymore, he’s not lumbered with such a ridiculous title (as if one can manage knowledge). I’m not sure the KM people in the crowd get the joke, which says more about them than it does Euan. As he’s billed as the ex-Head of Knowledge Management, BBC, for this event, it must be annoying still to be defined, in such a headline way, by that former title. (He’s a very able moderator for the day, btw.)

Ray Jordan, corporate vice president of Johnson & Johnson, describes his ‘wine moment’: Many years ago (1995?), popping the cork on a bottle of Rutherford Hill, he noticed the company’s URL etched into the cork. He was impressed by the committment this showed to the technology on their part. (Whether or not Rutherford Hill was committed to the technology or the network, kudos to them.)

Someone (I didn’t note who) quotes Hugh MacLeod saying that no company should get into social media if they don’t actually welcome disruption.

Chris Barger, IBM’s “blogger-in-chief,” says that getting into social media is a necessity for IBM as they will very soon be recruiting employees from the MySpace generation - a generation of people who expect the dynamic of online social media and games in what they do.

Jordan says that the other interesting angle for J&J is using social media as a way to circumvent traditional media and get their side of any story out to the network (blogosphere, people using the network, etc). The usual approach to the media is to use print and broadcast as an intermediary between the company and the public, banking on the balance they hope to find in the resulting article or piece. Social media would be an incredibly direct way of reaching the public with their own media.

One upshot of all this is that increasingly, more attention is being paid to transparency - a focus on what your company is supposed to be doing (making widgets, performing nose jobs, whatever), not on what you’re saying ("public relations”...which rarely relates to the public anyway). This is naturally scary for many troubled or downright sucky businesses.

Big point I keep trying to make to people: The world in which businesses and individuals operate on the presumption of transparency is a much better one. (If “character is who you are when nobody’s looking,” who will you be when everyone’s looking?) Barger says the expectations of transparency are obviously now greater than in recent history.

Adriana Cronin-Lukas relates her start in blogging, with Samizdata, back in 2001. When Perry de Havilland started that blog (which Adriana soon joined as co-editor), they had no idea who was reading them, and were downright puzzled by who the 100 people per day (gasp!) could possibly be (current traffic is at 20,000+ uniques per day). So despite the fact that the first rule of communications is “Know your audience,” they had no clue who their audience was and were still able to create something hugely successful and valuable to those people (and for themselves). The same story is true for most highly trafficked bloggers.

Semple says that, at the BBC, the people who didn’t participate in internal blogging became conspicuous by their absence. He also relates that Richard Sambrook, director of BBC Global News, says that in the last ten months of keeping his internal blog, he’s had more interesting conversations with more interesting people than in the last ten years.

Loic LeMeur says that Six Apart doesn’t have a PR agency, and hasn’t for two years. Hmm, what about Guillaume du Gardier (who’s moved on from his own PR biz to a large PR company, but who very publicly handled PR for Six Apart as recently as last year)? While not having a PR company isn’t odd (in most cases, it’s smart), I found this comment puzzling.

JP Rangaswami, who’s clearly a rockstar in a CIO’s body, talks to us about the experience of DrKW (his investment bank) using social media internally.

“The real wisdom of crowds comes from figuring out when it’s wisdom and when it’s madness.”

DrKW was in a war for time and war for talent. It was astounding how difficult IT made collaboration. This was because all of the systems and programs were designed from the point of view that all information is closed - which then forces you to find and tunnel your own openings.

Cluetrain-y bits: Forget the Middle Eastern conversational markets of ancient times - as recently as the 18th century, the entire insurance industry was being created over conversations in London tea shops. Technology is just allowing us to bring back what we already had, but somehow (tragically) lost along the way. The conversation used to come first, then the transaction. We’ve moved to a transaction-first mindset, which is why so many of our business dealings are in terms of contractual relationships instead of covenants.

DrKW tried not to be prescriptive in how people should use internal social media. “The best way to ensure nothing happens is to mandate that it does.” And: “Why would you hire good people and then tell them what to do?”

(I wish I had been able to transcribe all of JP’s presentation, because it was just great. Anyone who’s in the mood to have their mind blown should spend five minutes talking to him. I told him he should go into other big companies and give their boards this kind of talk, but as soon as I said it, I realised it was like telling Mozart that he should go around to peoples’ houses and play some tunes for them.)

Later, during other conversations, JP says that the implementation of social media internally almost has to be a guerilla operation. He says that social media is brought into companies by those with “some level of benevolent desperation” - things are so screwed that they’re going to do the company the favour of improving them, but without loads of to-do with projects and so on. Of all the companies he knows of which have successfully implemented social media internally, JP says, “I don’t know one that had a project. If you have a project, you don’t have collaboration.”

Sun’s Alec Muffet gave a hilarious and spot-on presentation that captivated the entire audience, so I expect he’ll be getting more invites to speak at events from now on. What a smart, funny, lovely guy. Ben Hammersley was, as expected, great fun. And Chris Shaw from Factiva had more sensible things to say than I would have expected from someone on the sponsor-dominated panel.

The other quotation of the day that I loved was when Jaap Favier from Forrester Research said that, when asked on live radio what the ultimate result of social media would be, he said that he didn’t know the full answer but that it would mean that “no one will have to be lonely anymore”. As someone who went from thinking I was the only one who held certain beliefs, to discovering through blogging that there were active, large communities of people who did indeed share these with me, I can only hope that is right. (I expect that he is.)

All in all, a conference with more sense per pound than any other blogging-related event I have attended (apart from the one I organsied back in October for Latitude). 

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