I have posted notes from the keynote panel and a couple of presentations at my personal blog. More photos to come...

Overall I've had positive feedback on the Open Space that we held earlier.  People spotted some of the ways that it could have been improved, if we'd had more time.  Johnnie shared an insight with me which is that it's often good to resist the impulse to help people out based on our own perception of their problem.   We very quickly had a wide range of  conversations hosted and ready to go including: learning and education with wikis; moderation; using a combination of tools to support communities of practice; guerrilla marketing; engaging with large groups of consumers;  making money with blogs and many others that sprang up in the gaps between.  Most gratifying for me was seeing people in suits sitting cross legged on a conference room floor...

JP Rangaswami: "I don't know why you'd hire a human being and then expect them to do what you tell them to."

I'm putting images from the conferences up on flickr with the tag bsmf0506 - I encourage you to do the same - and to use this tag on any blogposts that you might create.

Here's Euan Semple, today's chair, being interviewed in the least noisy cafe we could find in Blackfriars.  This is one of the joys I find in blogging and social media, show up and do what you need to do, and never mind the "quality" feel the width!

Download the podcast from here

This is stretching 'pre-conference' a bit - it's posted from "speakers corner" at in the registration room at the London Hilton Metropole....

Picture by Peter Kaminski

I spoke with Adriana Cronin-Lukas this morning to hear how she first got involved in helping to create the conference and what sorts of issues she's dealing with when working with social media in a corporate context. 

Download the podcast here

Adriana offers some fascinating insights into the differences between how social media affects organisations both at a macro, strategic level as well as at an operational level.

I met up with Lee Bryant at Headshift HQ to chat about what he's bringing to the forum on Wednesday and also to find out what he's expecting to take away.

Download the podcast from here

Lee mentions a couple of the public sites that Headshift has been involved in:

1001 Inventions
Patient Opinion
Culture Online (DCMS)

Look out for Lee on the day (the picture here is of Lee at Our Social World last year)

Journalist David Tebbutt links from his blog to an article he wrote for Information World Review entitled Genie in a Bottle. In it, he explores the deep fear that some companies have about introducing social computing into their operations. As Al Tepper, head of online development at Caspian Publishing points out in the piece, some companies have quite valid reasons to be scared - and they should be. In his words, "if you’ve got something to hide, you’ve got something to fear." As Tebbutt concludes:

This is bad news indeed for those who maintain their position through manipulation, hoarding information or playing politics.

In which case, you have bigger, more fundamental issues to worry about than social media.

I had a great conversation today with Michael Nutley, editor of New Media Age. We met up at the Soho Hotel - not for the first time, though this time we skipped the bar and sat in the drawing room. Much nicer.

Mike and I talked a bit about podcasting, and I admitted that there is no podcast I listen to regularly. (There are a few reasons for this, but primary amongst them is that I rarely hook my mp3 player up to my PC to change the line-up. I'm waiting for wireless transfer, I guess.) I do try to listen to the election podcast that my partner, Antoine Clarke, does with Brian Micklethwait every Tuesday night, but the truth is that I have access to Antoine's election insight whenever I want it, and hear a lot of that stuff on a day-to-day basis anyway. Plus, I'm not an election enthusiast.

One of the dilemmas that Brian and Antoine seem to have is how long or short the podcast should be. (Here's Brian blogging about that very topic today.) When Brian was round for dinner the other week, he said something about how, when he opens up a podcast and sees that the whole file runs at something like 32 minutes or whatever, his heart sinks. I can relate. But the point is that a podcast is just a recording of a conversation, and you shouldn't rush the conversation if it's interesting to you. Better to provide detailed show notes so that people can choose to zip right to the parts that interest them. Michael Vanderdonk summed this up quite well in a comment on the blog for Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz's For Immediate Release podcast:

The real anoying part for me is that ‘time’ is the measuring stick. If you are baking a double chocolate mud cake, the cake is ready when the cake it ready. Speeding up the cooking time to have it ready ruins the cake. Taking the cake out half baked (pun intended) ruins the cake. Skipping ingredients or preparation steps, ruins the cake. Accept the fact, Neville and Shel, that FIR takes over an hour to ‘bake’. Let the listeners decide how they want to slice it…

Second verse, same as the first: Control what you can, not what you wish you could. Let people have a choice. Do your thing and then get out of the damn way.

For some sterling examples of great business blogs, check out the Pajama Market. Every day, a different business blog is featured. If you're seeking inspiration for how your own company might use blogging, start clicking and reading.

NB Stormhoek CEO Jason Korman, who will be speaking at our event on May 17th, has even been interviewed by the Pajama Market.

For anyone who thinks that customers having online voices is a passing fad or something that can be fought with bare teeth or lawsuits, you might want to heed the tale of the ad agency that sued a blogger for badmouthing a client - and found themselves on the receiving end of an avalanche of bad PR and hostility. Individuals and communities are online and are here to stay. Some of those individuals - and perhaps entire communities - may have negative things to say about your company. You are going to need a better strategy for dealing with that than Shut them down.

AOL, which famously tried to build a walled garden which it thought could usurp the rest of the internet ("We have content, but the web doesnt,” they thought. It wasn’t so long ago, either.), has launched their own network of financial blogs.

For the initiative, AOL and Weblogs, Inc. collected a staff of journalists, industry experts, and independent investors to author single-stock-focused blogs. “Individual investors are the most passionate about individual stocks, and the further you get away from individual companies, the more the passion gets diluted,” Moe said. “What we want to do is become the place for any holder of these stocks--the place where they go there every day and know they’re going to get something they’re not going to get anywhere else."

AOL has identified a community - and it’s quite a broad one - that they’d like to influence. Whether the value they provide to readers is enough to bring great benefits has yet to be decided - and it will be decided, not by AOL, but by that community.

Link via Adriana Cronin-Lukas

Terry Heaton is a media specialist whose background is in television, but who is entirely up to speed with social media and its implications. He writes of the case of YouTube, the user-contributed videos website that very quickly grew to six million daily users, and which now serves more than 35,000 videos per day:

[T]hose numbers have caught the attention of the mainstream, and we're about to see clone after clone being created. Why? It's the numbers. It's like mass media scouts are scanning the horizon and shouting back to the tribe, "There! There's the audience we've been losing." Meanwhile, there are reports that youTube is raising as much as $25 million in venture money. Why? It's the numbers. Is youTube the new Amazon, the new eBay, or the new mySpace? This is a VERY tricky question, because with money comes old school rules, and if there ever was an anti-establishment site, it's youTube. Remember that this site was built for user-contributed videos. The deep pockets that are drooling over it could give a rat's ass about such. They want those numbers to present their OWN videos, and that's a problem. The same users who made youTube "successful" could just as easily turn their allegiance elsewhere.

Terry laments the fact that so many companies are desperate to purchase communities developed by other entities, yet want nothing to do with exploration and experimentation of their own. Our quotation here earlier of Jeff Jarvis's contention that you can't own the community; the community owns the community is one that such companies would do well to heed. In a time where individuals online have not only asserted control but wield it with a growing certainty that it is their right (and it is), it is easier than ever to be faced with millions of turned backs. And no receipt can get you your money back on that kind of loss.

Cross-posted from What MySpace Means

As social media goes, MySpace is one of the hottest topics going. (So much so that I and my non-profit, the Engagement Alliance, are holding an event entitled What MySpace MeansLessons for Every Brand next month.)

Last night I attended an event in London called Mashup, where MySpace‘s senior vice president of marketing and content, Jamie Kantrowitz, gave what she called “[MySpace’s] side of our story”. Some interesting figures from Jamie’s presentation:

MySpace has the second largest amount of traffic of any internet site

MySpace has the single largest concentration of young people on the web (Jamie said “on the internet,” but I would be surprised if more young people are on MySpace than are on, say, AOL instant messenger. If anyone has stats about this, please feel free to share.)

99% of MySpace’s content is created by its members (aka ’user-generated content‘)

MySpace has 72 million+ users worldwide, 2.3 million in the UK, with 15,000 new UK users registering daily

MySpace’s sex split is 51% male, 49% female

The average MySpace user logs into their account seven times per month, with an average user session of 21 minutes

And in case you’re wondering how many people it takes to run a monolith like MySpace, the company has 300 employees, 75% of which are technical specialists.

Stats over, what struck me is that whatever success MySpace is enjoying has come from two very simple principles that any company can adopt right this minute:

1) An emphasis for users (that is, customers) on discovery and exploration, not on bombarding them with your own agenda.

2) Providing genuine value to customers - that is, features and services they find valuable (such as the ability to connect easily with others), not that you wish they’d find valuable (like, say, your latest TV ad as a download).

If those are the ‘secrets’ to the MySpace success, here’s hoping that they don’t stay secrets for very long.

I had a meeting today with the Managing Director of a hugely successful UK media company. When the conversation turned to blogs, the MD said: "Every company should have a blog strategy." My thoughts? "Yes, exactly." Then it turned out that the kind of strategy he was thinking of was a reactive one, all about shutting down disgruntled customers' blogs and other forums.

I was relieved that this guy wasn't actually advocating that kind of iron-fisted, backwards approach to conversing with customers - it was merely what came to his head when he thought of 'blog strategy'. The proactive, positive approach of using social media to talk with the people who matter - customers, employees, industry influencers, or even potential investors - is far from the minds of upper management in most companies when subjects like blogging enter their awareness.

Their take is, of course, one based on fear. Not only fear of what they do not know, but fear of what they cannot control. The simple fact is that this stuff can be learned, and that certain things can be controlled. Control what you can, not what you wish you could, as many wise women and men have said. But the process starts with learning and exploring, when a lot of upper management types really just want answers and numbers to cross their desks.

The MD I spoke was much more sensible and, well, clever than most. He today wondered if PR agencies were on to the blog thing yet. I told him that a lot of them know they need to be on top of it, and a few actually have the right idea. But another simple fact is that even 'new media' PRs come from a channel world, which is what they know best. The networked world - the world of conversation, not one-way broadcast - is foreign to them, too.

If you ever want to see a high level executive panic, tell him that not only do his people not know what to do, but his PR agency doesn't have a clue, either. (It is less fun to play this game, I imagine, if you are one of the people who really should know what's going on.)

You know, one blog post isn't enough to cover all the ways in which that title is true. But for now:

Certain people seemed to be very concerned with blogging and social media being 'overhyped'. I think the only problem is inappropriate hype ("Blogging will bring our politicians into touch with the People!").

I don't think people have actually grasped the extent to which social media is changing, and will continue to change, humanity.

The most basic way that social media has changed the way that I (and many people I know) interact is that we are growing used to being able to meet individuals' minds before we meet them physically. In such circles, if you're going to an event, you check out the list of attendees and see whose blogs look interesting. When you get accustomed to this, you grow a bit frustrated with not being able to do this with others. It's a much more efficient way to interact - avoid those whose online presence reveals them to be not your cup of tea, seek out those who have interesting things to say, and speed up the process of getting from "Hi, nice to meet you," to "Tell me more about your take on X." I also think of my friend Robert Avrech, whose family I have stayed with in Los Angeles, whose daughter's wedding I attended out there (the same daughter I played host to when she and her friends were stranded in London on short notice). I actually met Robert's daughter in person before I had met him; I found him through mutual blogger friends, on his blog, where he was writing of his grief over the death of his beloved son Ariel. Where else but the blogosphere would an introverted, 50-something Orthodox Jewish screenwriter in LA become friends for life with a 20-something Ohio girl living in London? And, as Doc Searls says today:

Lately I've been suspecting that the blogosphere is a home improvement job on the humansphere.

He points to one of the blogs I never, ever neglect to read, Dear Elena, started by Dan Steinberg the day after his six-year-old daughter died. Doc also points to Remembering Allie, a blog post from Terry Heaton which I read last night and which made me feel even more deeply grateful for the health of my partner and family. I read the news of the death of Terry's wife via Jeff Jarvis the other day, and actually typed up a link to it from my personal blog, but didn't publish it. I figured, "Well, I don't know the guy. It might seem creepy to say he's in my thoughts." Terry writes:

The sense of loss that I felt that morning was overwhelmed by a fear so profound that I can't even begin to describe it. My whole world was torn out from beneath me, and I was scared to death. The only -- and I mean only -- place I felt safe while I was awaiting the arrival of family and friends was right here at my keyboard. If I moved even a few steps away, I began to feel suffocated and would race back. I wrote the post and I sent an e-mail, and what happened after that kept me going. Hundreds upon hundreds of people responded, and I can't tell you how important that was to me.

That's the last time I talk myself out of extending compassion to another human being. Terry hits the nail on the head with this:

I believe -- as Doug Rushkoff wrote in his book "Get Back in the Box" -- that the internet isn't a media phenomenon or a technical phenomenon as much as it is a social phenomenon. In this sense, he wrote, it will change everything. In our increasingly postmodern culture, the greatest social connection we have beyond family is our tribe, a concept both practical and esoteric. We choose our tribe, whereas we don't choose our family.

And on the morning of Allie's death, this is what it meant to Terry, and this is what it means for all of us:

People I didn't know (I'm apparently a member of many other tribes) shared their thoughts, poems, condolences and experiences, and that was enormously helpful to one so adrift in fear and the unknown. This is profound in its implications for the future of humankind, and I hope you all can see that. We are not alone. None of us. We need each other, and we have the shared knowledge and capacity for compassion that will save the world. I mean that with all my heart. Our institutions have failed, but we will not.

Individuals are the basic unit not just of any business, but of this world, and those who think the blogosphere is some kind of blessed embrace of collectivism or Marxism are wrong for precisely this reason: It is the ease with which individuals can connect with one another across this network which brings about the spectacular effects that it does. There is no top-down imposition on these individuals. There is no governing body deciding what each individual's 'needs' and 'abilities' are, or how frivolous or worthy those might be. These are millions of individuals deciding for themselves what is in it for them, and getting from it what they want. Sometimes that's a recipe or a video of someone singing a stupid song, and sometimes it's comfort after the death of a child or loved one. If you think that's not going to continue to have hugely positive implications for us and this planet, think again.

My previous post touched on the Southwest Airlines blog, which many have found disappointing. Here's an example of the network in action: Brian Oberkirch has created five sample blogs for Southwest, showing them how much better it could be done.

Disappointingly, especially from one who is trying to sell his services as a social media consultant, Brian hasn't categorised these on his blog, which makes linking to them a pain. Ease of linking is hugely important if you want to spread information across the network. Here they are, anyway:

Sample 1
Sample 2
Sample 3
Sample 4
Sample 5

Link via Shel Israel