Category: Collaboration

Naked on the Fourth Plinth

In London’s famous Trafalgar Square there are a set of plinths with sculptures on them, there is also another plinth – known as the fourth plinth – which doesn’t have anything permanent on it.

Jimmy and Granddad visit Alnwick GardensThis fourth plinth has, in recent years, been used to host all sorts of art projects and installations.

The installation that gained, probably, the most public interest was Anthony Gormley’s One & Other.

In this project people were invited to apply for a sixty minute slot on the fourth plinth. The intention was to “create a collective portrait of humanity”, this translated into people doing all sorts of things for their sixty minutes of fame. Many people chose to carry plaques with a message on them others performed an activity, all of them were videoed.

The people who gained the most fame were, not surprisingly, the people who chose to spend some, or all, of their time naked.

I sometimes ask myself the question when I’m posting something to Twitter or Facebook or even this blog:

If I were stood naked on the fourth plinth and the whole of London were watching would I still be comfortable saying this?

There are a lot of people who could do with a similar checkpoint before they write and post.

(The reality of posting to Twitter or Facebook (or any other ‘social’ site) is actually a whole lot scarier than standing on the fourth plinth with a plaque but for some reason the scariness doesn’t translate into caution)

Telling Stories

I’ve often thought that schools should spend much more time teaching people to tell stories.

Universities should, in my opinion, have story telling as a basic requirement for all courses.

I sit in so many meetings where someone stands up and talks through a set of slides. I use the word ‘set’ to describe a random collection of information.

The slides themselves aren’t coherent, the order of slides isn’t coherent, in short there is no story.

People connect with story, stories travel and live on beyond the event itself. Tell a story and you’ll be memorable.

One of the best lecturers I ever had at university was my ‘Stress’ tutor. He regularly started lectures with a broken component. He’d then tell the story of how this component got broken. This story would always be told with glint in the eye and an air of mystery.

Our job was to solve the mystery in order to complete the story. He’d then tell us the real end of the story. I still remember one of the stories about a tow bar component that had actually led to someone’s death – that’s nearly 25 years ago.

Micro-celebrity

The other day I wrote about Social Currency and some of the ways that we could potentially be measured for our online presence.

BorrowdaleOne of the things that I’ve been pondering while playing with these different tools has been the social impact of these changes.

This kind of change always has extremes and today I’ve been reading about some of those through an article by Danah Boyd (apophenia) called “Publicity and the Culture of Celebritization“.

This article comments on an article in Rolling Stone about a 14-year-old teen in Florida who has created an online persona called Kiki Kannibal.

You’ve probably never heard of Kiki Kannibal but she’s created quite a stir in her sphere of influence, but it’s not all been good.

In many ways she’s created a level of online celebrity without any of the protection that wider celebrities often receive and the internet can be a very unforgiving place.

Danah makes some really interesting observations about the growing “attention economy” and our ability to deal with “micro-celebrity” and in particular the social and cultural capabilities available to us:

Widespread celebritization is the flipside of the “attention economy” coin and I think that we have a lot of deep thinking to do about the implications of both of these. Both are already rattling society in unexpected ways and I’m not convinced that we have the social, psychological, or cultural infrastructure to manage what will unfold. Some people will become famous or rich. Others will commit suicide or drown attempting to swim in these rocky waves. This doesn’t mean that we should blockade the technologies that are emerging, but it’s high time that we start reflecting on the societal values that are getting magnified by them.

I agree.

We have a long way to go before we understand what we are doing to ourselves in an online world and how we deal with it.

(Charlie pointed out Klout as another way of measuring your social connectedness. It’s interesting to see the score of people I connect to)

Social Currency

I’ve been playing with a couple of tools recently, both of them focussed on assessing someone’s social value.

Williamson ParkThe first one is Empire Avenue which is an online market game where you can buy and sell shares in other people’s social media presence.

My share value is currently running around 25 eaves up from a starting price of around 17 eaves. Not a bad profit Smile.

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Your value is influenced by a number of things but primarily by your online social interactions.

I’ve now got 8 share holders too who’ve made some good eaves out of my share price rise. My portfolio is doing quite well too.

The other tool is My Web Career which seeks to measure your online presence in terms of a ‘Career Score’:

A Career Score is an indication of the strength of an individuals career brand, professional accomplishments, and relationships.

Here’s my current score:

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It would appear from this that I’m not doing too badly at creating an online presence Smile.

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There’s also some really interesting visualisations of my connections which have been quite interesting to nosey around. Who knew that they were connected to them?

Both of these tools raise some interesting questions about the value and the perils of the read-write web and social media.

We all need to remember that our online presence is available around the world and to millions of eyes.

We each need to decide what kind of presence we want to have online.

We also need to realise that our online presence is a differentiator in the workplace with both our customers, employers and potential future employers. It’s a social currency.

(If the truth be known – I thought twice before I wrote this post because I wasn’t sure that it was a good thing to write)

Old Dogs and New Tricks

One of the challenges I find as I get older is how I continue to be open to new ways of doing things.

Surveying the landThe world of work is consistently changing and in order to stay valuable we need to change with it. An example of this has recently become evident to me. I used to do a job that was very valuable within the business, I can now see a situation where the business no longer requires people with that role. It’s not just that the role is being diminished – it’s no longer needed at all.

If I’d stayed doing what I was doing I would now be feeling very sensitive about my position going forward.

Here are the things that I do to stay open to change:

  • Experiment – try new things out it’s a great way finding something out.
  • Read and watch widely – I try to get a broad view on as many things as I can.
  • Converse – other people’s points of view influence my point of view and it’s always better to converse with someone who has a different opinion to you.
  • Listen – conversing involves listening but it’s worth highlighting that it’s the listening part that is the most important.
  • Help – in helping others work through things I get to understand a different perspective
  • Be Open – I try to stay open to someone else having a better idea about something than I do
  • Lay down – I try to stop doing things that are no longer important. This is probably the thing I struggle with the most.
  • Respect – people are rarely the stereotype that they might look like so I try not to prejudge what someone might have to offer.

The Merging of the Lines

I’m sitting here with a device that can plug me straight into the list of activities that await me for my working time.

But I’m not working, this is definitely not the time to be thinking about those activities.

I can take that device with me wherever I go, whenever I go.

The lines in my life become more blurred every day.

Facebook – Reducing the Noise and Losing the Interest

As part of my return to online life after my decontamination over the holidays I went through my Facebook wall and marked anything and everyone I wasn’t really interested in and clicked: “Hide all posts by…”

This had the effect of significantly reducing the number of updates on my wall. It also had a more significant impact – it removed much of the interest too.

I’m not talking about real interest.

I’m talking about the interest I give to all of those times I’ve found myself looking at photos of someone I vaguely know with their dog, cat, budgie, etc.

I’m talking about the interest I give to all of those petty conversations between people who should really be excluded from using a keyboard by virtue of the way in which they waste everyone else’s time.

I’m talking about all of the interest I show to status update messages from the applications that people are using because they don’t have anything better to do.

In short – I lost interest because I significantly reduced the “variable interval reinforcement schedule” of Facebook.

Try it someday you might actually enjoy it.

Crafting Slides

I’ve spent a good deal of my time over the last few days ‘crafting slides’.

This particular activity hasn’t changed a great deal in the last 15 years.

All sorts of progress and development in the collaboration arena has taken place over that time.

So why no change?

Why do we still need to transact over a set of information in a meeting?

Feel the Width

We are all educated in an environment that requires quantity – “In 2000 words explain the complexities of the inside of a golf ball”

Business culture requires brevity.

Somewhere between the two states people get lost.

Rich Pictures – Showing The Peoples Perspective

I’m really enjoying the way that Rich Pictures have entered into the consciousness of the place where I work.

Tarn HowesActually, it’s gone even further than that, I was recently at a customer presentation, with a customer I didn’t know, and they displayed a Rich Picture in the format I’ve been using.

The use for these pictures that I see repeatedly is to display a people perspective for a problem and/or a solution.

The use of people icons and speech bubbles abound – “I need a….”, “Why is this…”

This is a huge result, not because it’s people using Rich Pictures, but because it’s people taking the time to consider the perspective of the people in the middle of the problem, or the solution.

Monopoly: Social Media Edition

Loving the thought of a Social media Edition of Monopoly, particularly like the idea that Jail has become The Real World.

Monopoly: Social Media Edition
Flowtown – Social Media Marketing Application

Not sure about Blogger being higher up than WordPress? Surely not.

How different would this have looked 5 years ago?

How different will it look in 5 years time?

The Conversation Prism V3

An update to the Conversation Prism Infograph.

Chatworth with the FamilyThe prism shows 28 different categories of technologies that support the current complex set of conversations that we all have, everything from Wiki to Streams and Social Commerce to sCRM.

As someone who works within the corporate IT world there are a number of very prominent organisations we barely feature , or don’t feature at all: Microsoft, Oracle, HP, SAP. The high levels of choice also shows that we are a long way from many of these capabilities becoming universal, and for some even mainstream.

I’m also sure that we’ll see some of these capabilities collapse into other capabilities. There’s also a massive difference between wide adoption and deep adoption. Anyone who assumes that just because they are using Facebook for 2 hours a day means that everyone else is – is mistaken.