Global Neighbourhoods

Restarting SM Global Report

While there is still some work to do on Twitterville, the heavy lifting is over on my part as the publisher's efforts swing into full gear. Interviews about 125 people for the book and nearly 100 of them will be cited, to varying degrees in the book when it comes out Sept. 3. About that number are also acknowledged in the book for having contributed useful ideas or content.

It seems the core of my work since 2005, has been to talk with people about how social media is changing their work, culture and life in general. I have now interviewed more than 400 people in 41 countries for my two books and for my Social Media Global Report which has appeared on this blog off-and-on for three the last three years.

I put on hold last November when I started working fulltime on Twitterville. In better times, the SM Global Report had been sponsored by SAP, and Intel. I'd love a sponsor, but even without one, I will do the report as a labor of love. If you happen to think your brand would benefit by being associated with this ongoing project, I would of course like to talk with you.

But more than that, I would like your help in finding stories of how social media is changing work, culture and lives. My stories are about people. They can be business stories, but if you cannot personalize or humanize the story, I'm not the right guy to write it up. If you have a story idea, please contact me.

I have a particular interest these days in hearing stories about social media and health. I want to learn and report about people who use social media tools to learn, collaborate and share ideas about health conditions of all kinds. I am aware of the rising number of healthcare institutions joining the conversation, but for now, my focus is on people who have found support, encouragement, inspiration and-- most of all--choices.

I have been talking for a while with a friend about doing a book on the topic of social media's growing role in health and healthcare and I'm curious to see what is happening in this area and what sort of difference it is making.

But please, do not confine any story ideas you have for me to just health. Send me anything you believe would be interesting or useful to my readers.

SM Global Report: Lebanon MP Jawad S. Boulos

Using Facebook to Serve Constituents & Stay Alive

                  

                  [ Jawad S. Boulos. MP Lebanon. Public photo file]

In a couple of days, here in the US, we will elect a new president. Many people think both sides played hardball in the two campaigns. We have no idea. In Lebanon, where Jawad S. Boulos, was elected in 2005 to a four-year term in Parliament, opponents are assassinating members of his party in order to trim the voting majority and he is clearly a target.

For this reason, Jawad, a Sorbonne-educated lawyer, his wife and their three children live much of their lives either in hiding, or behind a formidable wall of security. This is not easy for a politician who wants to see and mix with constituents.

To talk to his constituents and to exchange ideas as well as receive epitaphs and insults from those who disagree with his freedom-loving views, Jawad uses Facebook--at least when Facebook's watchdog employees aren't shutting him down as a suspected spammer.

This is the 112th interview in this series and Lebanon is the 34th country we have visited. Although, Jawad speaks in a calm and level-headed voice, this is among the most dramatic and inspirational stories I've reported on so far.

[Special thanks to Stan Magniant for connecting me to Jawad and making this interview possible]

 

1. As a Member of the Lebanese Parliament (MP), you sometimes have to take extreme precautions to ensure your safety. Why? And can you tell me more about this?

I was first elected in June 2005, a few months after the horrific assassination of Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and then Minister of Economy and MP Bassel Fleihan. These followed a previous attempt on the life of former Minister and MP Marwan Hamadeh.

All three had been active in attempting to free Lebanon from Syrian control. These events were the straw that broke the camel’s back and brought the Lebanese people into the streets. During a full month of demonstrations culminating in a massive rally on March 14, 2005 more than 1.5 million Lebanese took to the streets in what became known as the Cedar Revolution.

They demanded the departure of Syrian troops and the end of Syrian hegemony and control over the country. This massive turnout of nearly one half of the Lebanese resident population (an equivalent rally in the US would require the participation of more than 150 million Americans) finally convinced the international community, which had been complacently blind to the occupation, to put pressure on the Syrian government to pull their troops out of Lebanon.
 
Hariri's assassination led to international outrage an an international investigation into the assassination to unmask the responsible party. The investigation has been ongoing for three years now in utmost secrecy while, in parallel, the legal, financial and operational requirements for setting up an international tribunal to judge those responsible for the assassinations proceeds apace with the investigation.

The elections that were held right after the Syrian pullout gave the independent faction, known as the 14 March Alliance, a majority of seats in Parliament and therefore control over the apparatus of government. This control was not complete because of the presence of Hezbollah, an armed organization operating outside of the scope of the state. Hezbollah constituted the nucleus around which the pro-Syrian opposition, strengthened by 30 years of occupation, coalesced.

Despite the international investigation, assassinations continued at a pace targeting majority MPs, journalists and leaders of opinion as well as officers in the army and police force. The common thread was the political affiliation of the victims to the “Sovereignist “coalition.

In less than a year, four Sovereignist MPs were murdered, whittling down the independent majority in Parliament at a time when holding by-elections was becoming more and more problematic in the face of mounting security threats and the influence of a heavily armed Hezbollah. As a consequence, surviving MPs were advised to take extreme security measures to protect themselves against assassinations with a view towards destroying the parliamentary majority.

During certain periods, the security threats were so prevalent that MPs had to regroup in severely fortified and protected premises away from their homes and families but also to completely curtail our movements. Though the security threat has decreased somewhat as security services, which were previously subservient to Syrian whim are rebuilt and acquire better capabilities to thwart threats but also after the UN Security Council voted a resolution to create the international tribunal for Lebanon rendering ratification by Parliament unnecessary.



2. Why do you continue? Why do you not just decide to step out of Parliament and perhaps move to another country where it is safer for you and your family?

I do it because I believe in Lebanese exceptionalism. Besides, there is no place like home. Let me expand:

Lebanon has always been the odd player in this region.

We have managed to create a parliamentary democracy that is open and tolerant with constitutional protection of individual and community rights and equality for all citizens. This is unique to the Middle East.

In Lebanon, there is no state religion and religion is not a source of legislation as in all other Middle East countries. It is a system where the military is subservient to the civilian authorities unlike Turkey, for example, where legislation does not discriminate according to religious affiliation (such as the law of return in Israel) and where power proceeds from the people (unlike Iran which is a theocracy). It is also a democracy unlike the Monarchies of the Gulf and the authoritarian states of the Levant and North Africa.

Lebanon has a market economy, a liberal bent, an open society-- and we worship our freedoms. Unfortunately, our openness as well as our geographical location between two states that have territorial designs over our country, coupled with the presence of a very large Palestinian refugee community, have negatively affected our stability since our country gained independence from France in 1943.

The very openness of our system has rendered us vulnerable to shocks resulting from the conflicts that rage in the Middle East. Despite all this, the Lebanese people have been unanimous in defending their system and their country and have consistently refused to succumb to totalitarianism or to theocratic tendencies. Ours is a country worth defending and worth sacrificing for.


3. Tell me about technology in your country. How many people have computers? How many people use mobile communications devices?

Figures are a bit sketchy but there is a relatively high penetration of the Internet and computer literacy is broad. Mobile telephony was a hit since it was introduced. Indeed most people prefer their mobiles to fixed lines and most people own mobiles, which are a must in country with a high level of social interaction and where most business is conducted over the phone. Lebanese software companies, while small, have radiated in the region and the Lebanese are pioneers in the use of communication devices and software in marketing and advertising in the Arab world. Access to computers is widely available in schools, businesses and private homes. However, our infrastructure is not up to par. We sorely need investment in our telecommunications infrastructure.


4. Why did you decide to start using Facebook?

As I mentioned, security considerations had forced me to curtail my movements and draconian security measures made it difficult for me to meet with my constituents--or even friends and family. I had to find a way to communicate with people and connect. This was early in 2007 and Facebook and other social utilities had started to really take off in Lebanon.

It was “cool” to be on Facebook and fun too. I first connected just to see what the excitement was about. But I soon discovered the potential of the tool to communicate with a very large constituency of socially diverse and geographically dispersed population. The Lebanese are like the Irish. They tend to emigrate in large numbers in search of better opportunities. But they remain connected and keenly interested in developments at home. It is a common occurrence for me to be informed about something happening literally next door to me from a constituent who has emigrated to Australia 10 or 20 years ago. The constituent from abroad would call to inquire about an event that I wouldn’t know had occurred in my neighborhood or in my circle.

Quite soon, I started using Facebook as a tool to reach out and exchange views with constituents. That’s when the facebook service started disconnecting me. After the 30th or 50th message, Facebook would interpret my activities as spamming and shut me down. After the third disconnect, the Facebook Help Desk warned me that I would not be reconnected next time. So I had to learn to manage the tool in a less expansive way.


5.  How many of your constituents use Facebook? What sort of conversations do you have with them?

I really don’t know how many of them do, but I am surprised by their numbers. I currently have about 1100 friends most of whom are constituents.

But I receive a huge number of messages from people who don’t solicit an “add.” They just want to ask a question or inquire about an issue or clarify a position. I get some hate mail, of course, from people who sometimes later become friends as we talk about issues.

But mostly, it is people with legitimate concerns or who are just curious or who, for one reason or another, simply do not want to appear on my profile.

I often use my friends as sounding boards for positions I wish to take publicly in order to obtain their feedback and fine tune the message. I also take note of complaints and requests from citizens who require services or who are sometimes blocked by the bureaucracy and who require my assistance. So it is a mixed bag really.


6. Who else do you speak with on Facebook? You seem to encounter some people there who are bitterly opposed to your views. Do you feel these conversations can be constructive?

They are. Facebook is an excellent means to customize a message and explain issues. Modern media favor the sound bite over a more nuanced delivery of a political position.

People are very often confused by issues and need to be walked through the details. I often discover that there is a lot of common ground with people who come across as intransigent or radical in the first exchange.

This is not to say that Facebook outreach is a miracle mind changer. We often agree to disagree but keep up the contact. This is very important in a small constituency where people like to vote for candidates they happen to know personally or have access to. This may be a sufficient incentive for them to vote across the political divide. But is it certainly enriching--and time-consuming though I certainly don’t mind receiving hundreds of birthday good wishes.

7. How do you feel Facebook has changed your role in Parliament How has it changed you as an individual?

I don’t think Facebook is an issue as far as my parliamentary duties are concerned. So there is not much of a plus there though I sometimes wish I could connect during a particularly boring session in commissions.

On the individual level, it has allowed me to connect with friends and family spread across the globe. I have been able to stay in touch with friends I haven’t seen in years. It is very rewarding to be able to share in the lives of people who have touched your own life at one moment or another. Though I am a private person, which is pretty unusual for a Lebanese politician, I enjoy being part of a worldwide network of friends, family, supporters or just ordinary people who want to reach out.

8. What is your vision for the future of Lebanon? How can social media play a role in that future?

I definitely want my children to grow up in a free country where stability does not come at the price of liberty. I want a country that is ruled by laws and where rights are preserved and defended. I want a sovereign country where the right of the state to exercise it’s sovereignty over it’s institutions and territory is not in question as it is today, where citizens are unarmed and where the courts are free and equitable. I want a country that has good schools and respected universities.

This may sound like pretty basic stuff to many of your readers but not in my country. We are still struggling with existential issues. How to secure our borders, how to defend our skies and waters from daily Israeli encroachments, how to sterilize Syrian influence born from 30 years of hegemony, how to avoid paying the price of regional conflicts in which we are intimately embroiled without denying our basic values, how to conduct a dialog between religious communities in a region where religious convictions are an important part of identity and where fundamentalism is on the rise. How do we stabilize and rebuild for the umpteenth time after the latest war?

I do not think that social media can replace broadcast media or come close to the impact these media have. But I am sure that, as far as politics are concerned, that social media can have niche roles such as the one that is the subject of your questions.

I think it really depends on the personality of the individual who wishes to harness its use. It doesn’t make sense to delegate when using a media such as Facebook. You can’t ask a staffer to do the job because the whole point of it is that people want to talk to the person they are trying to connect with. So one has to be able to allocate the time it needs and therefore design a unique role for it in his or her outreach strategy.


9. Is there something that the global social media community can do to help Lebanon's plight?

One of the problems we face is that Lebanon is a very complex society with unusual problems. Our issues do not lend themselves to over-simplification yet they are extremely important.

Had the world community heeded the lessons of our historical experience, many of the issues that are being debated now in crisis mode could have been addressed earlier and solutions found. I would cite the example of the role of Islam in politics for example or the protection of the rights of religious minorities in societies where a complete separation of church and state is impossible.

Had the US made better use of the experience of the Lebanese, it may have avoided many of the mistakes it has made in Iraq. It is not by design that Pope John Paul II described Lebanon as “much more than a country, it is a message”.  We are sometimes amazed by the misrepresentations and superficiality of reporting on Lebanese issues that far exceed the small size of our country in their importance. We would like to see more serious, thoughtful and unprejudiced reporting on Lebanon

10. Any additional comments?

If you are a politician and you are not using social media, you had better start learning fast.

[Interested in sponsoring the SM Global Report? Email me for details.

SM Global Report: Home Depot's Nick Ayres

The Return on Hurricane Tweeting

    

                        [Home Depot's Nick Ayres. Photo by his wife]

When hurricanes hit, The Home Depot, world's largest home improvement retailer, understands there's a lot of business and reputation at stake.

Such emergency preparedness items as home generators and gas cans must be stocked up in advance. That might be simple enough, except that hurricanes are moving targets. They zig and zag on short notice to endanger communities that can be hundreds of miles apart. Stocking the right stores before disaster hits can be a supply chain nightmare. Trucks, loaded with goods that can bring comfort and safety to a community sometimes need to be rerouted fast. Cold meals for thousands of employees who may work all night to prepare for emergency disasters need to be ordered before other places shut down and sent to the right stores.

Home Depot is an old hand at this stuff, however.  It has a system in place, a tight act that has been  refined over a good many years. As this year's  parade of hurricanes meandered up the Caribbean toward the US Gulf Coast,often varying abruptly in direction and magnitude, Home Depot's Atlanta-based corporate headquarters activated it's four-room Hurricane Command Center. Its veteran crew took their places amid walls covered with maps and monitors, where they could watch an array of news channels as well as "Pulse," Home Depot's own proprietary monitoring software. This War Room could watch and respond to supply chain issues fast. As sophiccated as this all was, it was all on the supply side. The Hurricane Command Center had no direct contact with customers.

Until this year, when the company integrated it's relatively new Twitter account into the system to help customers repare and to earn what was happening to people has the storms encroached their lives.

 

Social media has long been active in disaster news sharing. Evelyn Rodriguez blogged her experiences when a tsunami hit Phuket in 2004. Brian Oberkirch, helped people in his small hometown of Slidell, La, find loved one's when Katrina flooded it in 2005.  Emergency service organizations such as the Los Angeles Fire Department and the American Red Cross have already used Twitter to provide realtime information during natural disasters. And the Wells Fargo Bank Guided by History blog has served communities during emergencies, particularly fires. Traditional media, almost always short staffed have turned to social media to provide feet-on-the-street first person reporting in disasters.

But The Home Depot is the first commercial enterprise to use Twitter in an emergency to support customers--and increase sales--during a natural disaster. The company could have taken a mercenary approach, but it was extremely careful to not exploit the situation, but rather to serve communities in need.

The Home Deport is an unlikely social media pioneer. Until Spring 2008, its only social social media program was a YouTube channel where it posted do-it-yourself instructional videos--useful, but not ground-breaking stuff. The company had also tried polling and online contests as well as The Home Depot Garden Club , which the cimpany considers to be an online community, but essentially they were laggards in terms of breaking new ground in social media, at least from my perspective.

Nick Ayres, Home Depot's interactive marketing manager told me. "We kept looking at social media, but we just couldn't quite figure out what would make sense for us. Ayres said he remained unconvinced when he decided to check out the Blog Council, an organization comprised of some of the world's largest companies such as Coke, GM, Dell Computer, SAP all of whom were struggling with many of the same issues related to social media. Formed in December 2007, the Blog Council received a chilly reception in the social media community. But the Council is not intended for SM enthusiasts but to provide a safe and private way for members, who extoll its virtues.

John Pope, a Dell communications officer told me, "Members have been quite willing to share what works and what doesn't, and I believe that peer-to-peer openess has been a catalyst for some large companies to seriously engage in social media."

"In Florida, I engaged in several conversations that convinced me it was time to give social media a try," Ayres said. "We picked Twitter because it seemed like a low-cost, low-risk entry point."

The Home Depot assigned Sarah Molinari, a corporate communications manager to start @TheHomeDepot spend a part of her time playing with Twitter and talking with customers about local stores and hometown events. Early on, Sarah showed an ability to join conversations rather than just hype corporate policy and available goods. She showed candor and humor and started building a modest following in Twitterville.

When Gustav started rolling toward the Gulf Coast, the company started wondering if Twitter might serve a communications role. According to Ayres, the thought was that Twitter could help the company "reach further and faster. Twitter was an obvious tool for us to use to  offer meaningful advice and help. To be honest,  we weren't sure how the approach was going to go over or how effective it would be." The company decided on four facets to incorporate into a Twitter strategy: timeliness, relevance, accuracy and most important, appropriateness. "This was not going to be a hard-sell situation. We were not going to post: 'We still have generators, and you can buy them for $xx.'"

As Gustav approached, Sarah put her other PR activities aside and moved into the Hurricane Control Center. She posted almost continuously and was present to report when decisions were made. For example, when company officers decided to keep 12 stores open all night, Sarah tweeted the news in near realtime so customers knew what stores had which supplies.

"Before Twitter, we simply had no way to get the information out this quickly and this accurately," Ayres told me.

The more she posted, the ore it was noticed in Twitterville. The number of @TheHomeDepot followers spiked, reaching just north of 1000. News media turned to The Home Depot as a primary source of information. Home Depot management attention went to the Twitter account as well.

I asked Ayres about this and he conceded, "We didn't plan it this way. But the fact is that people greatly appreciated what we did. If gives me some pleasure to think that the next time someone needs home improvement goods in one of these communities, he or she is likely to drive right past Lowe's [Home Depot's leading competitor] to get to one of out stores." Lowe's has no social media programs.

According to Marketing Profs' Michael Rubin, @TheHomeDepot's emergency reporting/preparedness worked because Sarah used clear, direct and personal language. It never tried to hard sell to people in an emergency situation and the Twitter site became an invaluable source for spreading timely valuable information as a community participant.

Ayres added that a few additional benefit that go beyond disaster preparedness. Engaging the community during an emotionally charged time "is a great way to learn from others in real-time. Engaging the Twitter  community has become a great way for me to not only learn from others in  the social media industry in a real-time fashion. More important, it taught me the value of just listening to what our customers are saying  during emotionally charged situations."

This carries over, Ayres thinks, into more general situations. Home improvement projects are intensely personal and emotionally charged. Through social media, we can tap into that emotion."

Still another benefit is letting customers help each other. Often Sarah steps back at Twitter and lets her followers advise each other.

Then there's the issue of competitive advantage. Neither press, nor customers could turn to Lowe's for tips and timely information. Their competitor did not embed itself into the community like Home Depot. By lagging further behind, Lowe's can only be a follower in this particular area. As a result, Ayres added, "I have to admit that I get a good deal of pleasure realizing that because of what we've done, some people will drive right past Lowe's [Home Depot's largest competitor, inactive in social media] to get to one of our stores.

This is an example of what I recently called "lethal generosity." In social media, the companies who are the most generous to their communities will be the most influential and those who are the most influential will prevail, particularly during tough economic times that most businesses are now facing.

The Home Depot is still digesting what it has learned by this first truly interactive foray into social media. It is looking at what role it can play in other types of disasters. It is also thinking hard about how it can benefit plumbers and other mainstay customers through online conversations.

Until this Report, I've posted mostly about leaders and pioneers. The Home Depot neither claims nor does it aspire to be either. Like most companies, it's really looking for better ways to interact with customer efficiently. It seems to me that the Twitter hurricane blog has lessons for a great number of companies trying to figure out how to get closer with customer precisely when traditional marketing budgets are being reduced.

[NOTE: Interested in sponsoring SM Global Report? Contact me for information.

SM Global Report: China's Kaiser Kuo

Straddling 2 Worlds with Balance & Understanding

             

             [Photo by Guenevere, Kaiser Kuo's daughter, 4&1/2]

I leave for my first visit to China in just 18 days, so this interview is particularly timely for me. For the 55 percent of my readers based in the US, I believe it is also timely for you. It seems to me that China is America's most important relationship. It is also among the most complex with apparent misconceptions on both sides of a very large ocean.

That is why Kaiser Kuo, Ogilvy China Group Director for Digital Strategy, is an ideal subject of this 112th SM Global Report. Both charismatic and articulate, Kaiser seems to straddle the two worlds more comfortably than anyone else. 

Born in upstate New York and raised in Arizona with degrees from both UC Berkeley and the University of Arizona, Kaiser has lived full-time in Beijing since the early 1990s and his passion and understanding of his adopted country comes through clearly in this interview.

Kaiser has had what one might call a quixotic career. It includes a good deal of professional writing including a stint as Red Herring magazine Asia bureau chief, where he covered the tech business in China and East Asia and as Editor-in-Chief for the now defunct  ChinaNow.com multi-city online guide. He chronicles his life in Beijing in the popular back page column of English-language magazine  The Beijinger—a column called "Ich Bin Ein Beijinger, which is also the name of his former personal blog." A collection of those columns will soon be published as a book.

He also served previously in a couple of Internet companies, Mobile Internet Games and Linktone, where he created successful mobile game concepts and currently advises seven additional start ups.

But before that, Kaiser was really a rock star and I mean that literally. Co-founder of China's first and most successful Heavy Metal band, Tang Dynasty, Kaiser remains active in the music scene, performing and recording with his band Chunqiu. [YouTube], which goes on tour the day after I meet up with him in China.


1. When and why did you decide to move to China? What is the single biggest change in your life because of that move?

On trips to China with my family in the 1980s, it had become clear to me that the genie was out of the bottle, and that once unleashed, there wasn't any turning back. It was pretty obvious to anyone paying attention that the entrepreneurial talents of China's enormous population, once unleashed, were going to bring on changes of historic proportion.

I realized that as someone with some facility in the language I'd be in an excellent position to watch how things transpired from up close, and perhaps hitch my wagon to any number of opportunities that would come up. I first intended to settle in China in 1988, right after finishing my undergrad studies at Cal Berkeley. I came to Beijing as planned, and very interesting things started happening for me--particularly in the world of rock music, in which I quickly became involved.

But the political upheaval of the Spring of '89 cut my plans short and I wound up high-tailing it back to the States and enrolling in a graduate program in East Asian Studies at Arizona. I spent much of my time there trying to make sense of what I'd seen happen in Beijing. Once I realized that when the smoke cleared, the reform and the opening-up of the country was proceeding apace, I started coming back during summers. After my MA, I dropped out of a Ph.D. program and returned to Beijing in 1996, more or less for good. Initially the lure remained primarily music, but the nascent dynamism--social, economic, cultural--was a huge draw for me too.

If I had to identify one single biggest change in my life, it's that by having spent so much time on both sides of the Pacific I've become something of a credible bridge individual: someone to whom many Americans looked to have China "explained" to them, and conversely, someone to whom Chinese looked to have certain aspects of the West demystified. I'm lucky that I've been able to serve in that capacity both as a rock musician and as an Internet commentator. I've learned, I hope, to see how each side views the other, and to empathize with the perspectives of both.

2. You have spoken and written--perhaps more than anyone else--about the misconceptions the US and Chinese social community members have about each other. You've described what's happening online as "when Worlds Collide." Can you give a quick summary of what we in the West misunderstand the most?

First off, I want to make clear that there are many, many Westerners, whether academics, journalists, bloggers or pundits, who "get" China--who get it as well as anyone can, anyway. On balance I believe the media--especially journalists who live here in China and have taken the time to learn the language and cultivate excellent networks of contacts--do a laudable job reporting China. (I'm referring to Anglo-American media outlets; I don't read other Western languages). That said, their excellent work still can't overcome some deeply-rooted misconceptions. The sad truth about people is that they'll come away from the most balanced of news stories with their own misconceptions reinforced. Social media community members are no exception. Social media lets us choose our own communities and we tend to move in even more like-minded circles than we might in our offline lives. So the same misconceptions persist, are often amplified and continue to color and inform the western sides of citizen-to-citizen dialogs that happen between denizens of the Anglo and Chinese online worlds. Here are a few that I see crop up a lot:

• The monolithic myth. The assumption that Chinese political authority speaks with a single voice. China is a continent-sized country, and its enormous, parallel hierarchies of Party and state are not the perfect transmission lines that run from Beijing down to every village that some people imagine. There's a lot that goes on at the sub-provincial level that has little or nothing to do with the Party line from on high. Even within the Party there are a wide range of viewpoints on the burning questions of the day, to include issues of personal freedoms. But there's this persistent notion that any time someone's rights are violated in a small town thousands of kilometers from Beijing, the order must have somehow come down from Hu Jintao himself.

• The myth of continuity. When someone like Jack Cafferty on CNN calls the Chinese leadership "the same goons and thugs they were 50 years ago," he's simply wrong. China underwent a momentous, revolutionary change 30 years ago when Deng Xiaoping inaugurated his reforms deliberately reshaping the leadership to create one of the most thoroughly technocratic regimes the world has ever seen. Jiang Zemin, his successor, continued to change the very nature of the leadership by embracing capitalists and entrepreneurs--the "most advanced forces of production"--who had had been excluded previously. And now the leadership under President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao have shifted emphasis and are addressing many of the excesses of earlier freewheeling market-led development.

They're genuinely focused on issues like sustainability, energy and the environment, and the terrible unevenness of development between the countryside and the cities and between the coastal provinces and the hinterland. Civil society and the public sphere have made major advances--the latter especially on the Internet--and while there have been lamentable setbacks at times, the general trend toward a more open society increasingly tolerant of criticism is undeniable.

• Historicism. There's a tendency by some westerners to discount or even dismiss China's claims that history still has a strong hold on China's political culture. You see this crop up in discussions online between Chinese and Westerners constantly. China's position is that long-entrenched habits of mind aren't so easily discarded and that leaping, for instance, to a more pluralistic, open society would be dangerous and destabilizing--that it could well reverse the gains in quality of life that 30 years of gradualist reform have built, that it would be bad for the world in ways Western critics of the Communist Party's monopoly on power haven't thought through. China's leadership, as well as private citizens, both play this card so often that I can see why Westerners might have gotten sick of hearing it, but among Chinese this notion that China's historical realities circumscribe the possible rate of change is widely--indeed, nearly universally--held. Americans in particular, are relatively free (blessedly so, some would say) of historic baggage, and there's a prevalent sentiment that change can happen overnight through collective will, a faith that things can turn on a dime.

3. And what do the Chinese most misunderstand about the West, in particular our social media community?

As to Chinese misconceptions about the West's social media community, I think it's unfortunate but fair to say that the number of Chinese who've even bothered forming impressions of it are few and far between.
The vast majority simply pay it no mind, just as the vast majority of western Internet users pay little mind to the Chinese social media community, except to convey pity for the oppressive yoke they assume it lives under.

Those Chinese who do pay attention--generally, more tech-savvy, cosmopolitan urbanites who read English and may have spent some time abroad--are uniformly impressed with the ingenuity that social media entrepreneurs continue to display, impressed with the enthusiasm with which social media apps are adopted, and with the level of thought that and reflection one sees in the West about the impact of social media on everything from marketing to politics.

But in the last year, especially after the riots in Tibet, the disruption of the Olympic Torch relay, the controversy over the Olympic Games and China's human rights record, many have been jolted into an awareness that China's image, even among the tech-savvy Americans they so admire, isn't a good one. From their online encounters this year, many--even among China's most Westernized young people--have come away with the impression that Americans and other Westerners are woefully ignorant of China. That's not, of course, uniformly true--and ignorance of the West among Chinese is also widespread and lamentable.

4. You've published a list of Forbidden cliches Western journalists should avoid saying about Beijing. I get there in 15 days. What advice do you have for me about what I should look at when I'm there? What stories should I go after that other Western journalists have missed?

In terms of Internet stories, I don't think enough gets written about the specific ways in which the emerging Chinese Internet culture really differs from digital culture in the West, or Japan, or other developed markets. So many writers on this sector get all breathless with the huge numbers (and I'm still not invulnerable to that) that they miss the human dimension to ICT stories.

Articles (and books) that address innovation here are too polemical: either China's doomed to copy Valley business models for eternity, or it's going to upend the whole world with some super-disruptive Next Big Thing. I'd love to see more stories that explore in a more nuanced way the balance of forces holding China back and propelling it ahead.

Also, not enough gets written about the culture of tech entrepreneurship here--about this fascinating ecosystem that involves nerdy Tsinghua engineers with big ideas, worldly returnees with their Valley experience and their Harvard MBAs, silver-tongued lawyers and placement agents, and all those VCs--from the parachutist who comes to China and expects to be buried in business plans as soon as he lands, to the jaded, world-weary China veteran who's seen it all and knows every trick.

I don't think anyone's written the definitive story--not one that's well-reported and addressed from all the right angles--about how China's tech industry is going to be impacted by the meltdown of the global financial system. That's what's really on my mind these days. So many moving parts--it's really a fascinating story.

5. One of the elephants in the room for Western journalists is the issue of censorship. Help me to understand why Western perceptions may be overblown? Is there no "Great Firewall of China?"

First, I don't think Western journalists have been at all shy about the elephant, about covering the issue of censorship. It's actually rare for me to speak to someone who doesn't bring the topic up in some capacity. And I wouldn't by any means say that Western perceptions of censorship are uniformly overblown. I've seen some absolutely spot-on reporting by American mainstream media reporters, most notably James Fallows of The Atlantic.

For me the most persistent problem, and one that creates real misunderstandings between the Chinese technorati and their counterparts in the West, is this myth of a blinkered netizenry. There's often an assumption by Westerners that China's Internet is much more closely regulated and tightly fettered than it in fact is.

The Internet is censored, yes: Of that there's no doubt. But the parameters within which online discussion is allowed to take place is surprisingly large, and circumscribing walls are stretched daily. Not a day goes by when Internet forums aren't abuzz with some instance of official malfeasance, and criticisms are directed at anyone from the lowliest county cadres to the loftiest politburo members.

The image that many westerners have of a benighted netizenry cowering behind a Great Firewall is a terribly misleading caricature, and one that causes fierce resentment among those Chinese aware of it.
There's another problem with the west's understanding of censorship in China. They tend--and I think this is sadly western-centric--to think of Chinese Internet censorship mainly in terms of the blocking of external sites:

The BBC, or Wikipedia, or CNN (none of which are currently blocked, by the way). The truth is, most Chinese aren't interested in looking at sites hosted outside of China, and by far the more significant form of censorship is that demanded of operating companies within China--the blog hosting companies, the Internet forums, the news portals and so on. That impacts on the lives of Chinese Internet users far, far more than say Typepad or Wordpress blogs outside of China being blocked. Besides, most tech-savvy Chinese interested in accessing that content easily find ways around the so-called Great Firewall, through VPNs, tools like Tor, or numerous proxy servers.

6. Do you think social media will help increase understanding between the two cultures over time, or do we just keep inscrutably bumping? How and why or why not?

I think 2008 has been an unlucky year for cross-cultural misunderstandings in cyberspace: the pace and timing of events never allowed things to cool off, never allowed a respite for emotions to subside. I'm optimistic, though, because I see a growing number of people who've spent time on both sides of the divide stepping up and, out of purely unselfish motives, trying to bridge the chasm and help each side to better understand why the other side behaves the way it does.

Social media communities to which I belong--Twitter, and various social networks like Facebook--are heavily populated with both Chinese and Anglos. I do believe that these two dominant cultures in cyberspace--the Anglophone Internet culture and the Sinophone Internet culture--ultimately have a lot in common. Just as the Chinese-American relationship will be the most important bilateral relationship in coming decades in a purely geopolitical or geo-strategic sense, so too will the relationship between the respective netizens of the two dominant nations. With ever-improving translation tools, talking to one another is going to get easier. I'm confident that a more civil conversation will eventually emerge.

7. Just what does the top social media guy at Ogilvy do?

I'm an evangelist and what you might call an "intelligence officer."

Externally, I try to raise Ogilvy China's profile as the best digital shop among agencies in China through frequent public speaking, writing, and blogging. Internally, I organize workshops and seminars with leading entrepreneurs and innovators, as well as put internal training materials together to help Ogilvy people better understand the fast-transforming media landscape, to keep up with what's new in digital technology, and how to talk about it and sell it to clients.

By "intelligence officer," I mean that anyone within the company--whether from our interactive agency, from our traditional above-the-line agency O&M, from PR, or from our activation practice, can come to me with their questions about what vendors they should work with to get advice on what channels they might be pitching to clients for a particular campaign, to bounce ideas off me for digital components of campaigns they're working on, or just to bone up on some aspect of digital they don't quite get. Another part of my job involves identifying tech companies in China that we (either Ogilvy or our parent company, WPP) might want to make strategic investments in. I love that part of it because it puts me on the ground with a lot of start-ups and I can get a sense for where things are moving.
   

8. Can you give me a brief picture of how Chinese business is using social media?

Chinese companies--and multinationals operating in China--frankly haven't been as quick to embrace social media as their counterparts in the West have been, but that's changing. Companies and their brands are aware, at least, that they need to be monitoring social media. It's not the blogs that they worry about so much: It's really the BBS.

You've probably read stats on how widespread BBS use is in China. More than a third of Internet users post to BBSs regularly. 80% of China's 1.5 million Internet sites have BBSs attached to them. Tens of millions of posts go up a day. It's on BBSs where most of the big controversies, the scandals, the crises all break these days. It's where people are really talking about your brand. A raft of companies has popped up to try to help manage a brand's digital reputation. Most focus, correctly, on BBS. Some of them are quite reputable while others behave with almost comically grotesque lack of ethics, using the most egregious astroturfing techniques you've ever seen.

In social networks, brands are taking cautious first steps to enlist brand ambassadors and corral fans but the social networks themselves have been cautious about user experience and haven't opened the floodgates to targeted advertising just yet. The Internet video sites, which must also count as social media, are making a big push to engage Chinese businesses. Seed ads, either professionally produced or user-generated, are commonplace now on sites like Youku , Tudou, and Ku6 .

9. Do you see some disruptive technologies emerging in China that will impact US business and/or social media?

I've seen some very nifty things developed in China that may very will impact the global social media landscape. Just last Friday I was at lunch with a new crew of entrepreneurs who are building a hybrid SNS/virtual world. And that's the second one I've seen in China. Doubtless, similar efforts are already underway in Silicon Valley or Tel Aviv or in Scandinavia. I have a couple of friends who've developed a terrific Firefox plug-in--a smart, learning discovery engine with a strong social component--which I believe will radically change the way people use their browsers.

At present, these sorts of things are the exceptions. For the most part, Chinese Internet companies still copy business models they've seen in the West so that there's a Chinese counterpart for just about every well-known social media platform or app that's come out of North America or Europe. But I believe that's changing. Valley VCs were apt to fund companies whose business models were easily intelligible to them--to pick the low-hanging fruit. But that fruit's largely been picked clean and as venture starts reaching into higher branches, entrepreneurs will start bearing fruit in those higher branches.

A guy I know at Intellectual Ventures once pointed out that over time, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea all moved from being net IP importers to enjoying a relative balance of payments in royalties and licensing fees and did so at increasingly steep trajectories. China's been no slouch about learning from what its neighbors have done to stimulate innovation. It has some real advantages in innovating--a huge domestic market, like the U.S. had after the Second World War, massive manufacturing capabilities and leadership committed to creating a more innovation-friendly business environment. China's business leaders, educators and increasingly its political leadership are on the same page when it comes to their understanding of the obstacles: China's traditional pedagogy, the lack of credit available to private sector start-ups and so forth.

10. There are more than 100 million "regular" bloggers in China according to Isaac Mao. Yet very few, I am told use social media for business purposes. Is business use increasing? What are some of the main subjects of conversation in the Chinese blogosphere?

Isaac is right that there aren't a lot of businesses using social media, unless you count Instant Messaging (IM) as a social medium. IM is a commonplace business tool not only within an enterprise but for communicating between companies. It's quite routine, for instance, for a sales staffer to have lunch with a potential client, exchange IM account names or numbers and IM each other when they get back to their respective offices to keep in touch.

As I mentioned, BBS, arguably a very primitive form of social media, still trumps blogging in China. Part of that seems to be because of the relative anonymity of BBS compared to blogs whose hosting companies, in theory at least, are supposed to insist on real-name registration.

There may be, as Isaac suggests, a huge number of "regular" bloggers in China but we have a strange phenomena here whereby there aren't really any "celebrity bloggers" like we have in the U.S. -- the Glenn Reynolds, the Drudges, the Perez Hiltons -- but there are rather a lot of "blogging celebrities" -- actors and actresses, well-known writers, and traditional media personalities who write some of China's most popular blogs.

My purely unscientific, anecdotal surmise as to the main subjects of conversation in China: Basically, your pedestrian comings-and-goings blogs: "my kitty got sick and I had to take her to the vet," or "I'm so depressed that my girlfriend dumped me," entertainment (boy bands, Korean soaps, Jay Chou and other pop stars or the latest Hollywood blockbusters. Cars are a big topic--it's like the 50s in the U.S., where young people are car-crazy and of course there's technology, online games and that sort of thing. There is a surprising number devoted to literature. Political blogs are rare.

11. What are the most popular social media tools in China?

In terms of sheer user numbers, Shenzhen-based Tencent, which operates China's most popular IM, QQ [Google Translate] has a suite of social media tools that have to rank up there among the most popular.

Tencent cleverly weaves together a complementary offering including their ubiquitous IM (340 million active accounts, when there are only 253 million Internet users in China!), a traditional portal , a LiveJournal-like mini-blog-cum-social network called QZone and casual and MMO game offerings and keeps it sticky and low-churning by unifying it with a virtual currency.

Social networks are all the rage right now and you basically have three who've carved out strong niches themselves in three separate demographics: Xiaonei.com is the dominant campus-based SNS, relative newcomer Kaixin001.com has come to dominate among first-tier city white collar workers and professionals, and 51.com rules the hinterland and the secondary/tertiary cities of the coastal provinces.
Most bloggers in China blog either through a service provided by one of the leading Internet portals, Sina.com or Sohu.com, or through one of the major blog service providers like Blogcn.com, Bokee.com, or Blogbus.com. A great many also use mini-blog services like MSN Spaces or Tencent's above-mentioned QZone.

Social bookmarking tools haven't really caught on with the mainstream Internet user in China yet, so the Digg or Del.icio.us clones haven't really taken off. But consumer rating sites--one particularly popular one is Douban.com [Link is Google translated], where books, movies, TV shows and music are rated and discussed--are quite popular.

Video sites are extraordinarily popular. In a study last year by MTV and Microsoft, 33% of Chinese answered "always" or "most of the time" when asked how frequently they visit Internet video sites when they go online. That was more than in any other geography surveyed. The dominant Internet video sites in China, Youku.com [Goog Transl.] and Tudou.com [Trans] actually have quite large ratios of professionally-produced content, and so calling them "video sharing sites" isn't quite accurate.

Youku, a company I consult, is, for instance, ranked between the 5th and 7th most popular site on the Chinese Internet in terms of time spent on site. In China, more searches are done per day on Youku than on Google.
   

12. Can you give me any statistics regarding the number of Chinese bloggers who understand and read English blogs?

I don't believe I've ever seen any such statistics, but I reckon the numbers to be very, very low. Some level of English reading ability is common, as it's compulsory in schools, but the outward-facing fringe of the blogging community is still small.

SM Global Report: Fr. Roderick, The Podcasting Priest

A Daily Breakfast of Fun & the Human Condition

         

 

I seem to have a lot in common with Father Roderick, the Dutch podcasting priest. We both have a fascination with technology, yet we both are more interested in how to use technology for story telling than for love of source code and silicon. We also both love to write about our travel experiences and the people we meet and we both find ourselves more than a little concerned with the human condition. Sometimes, we use humor, to lightened our subject matter.

There are two essential differences in us. First, from my perspective, his collar is juxtaposed and my in is not.He's also more prone to wearing black than I am. Second, he is an extremely good podcaster, while I have learned to stick with text. Father Roderick is in my opinion, is among the best there is in mass audience podcasting, and trust me, you need not be Catholic or religious to enjoy his highly entertaining Daily Breakfast shows.

My point of these comparisons is to point out something, that he reveals almost daily. People everywhere are pretty much alike, even if our diverse cultures sometimes make that hard to see. The technology we both use, however, lets more people understand the similarities of each other.

This guy is entertaining, conversational, observant and every morning talks with a diverse group of people on current events ranging from travel, to the causes of the sinking American economy. I have been an irregular listener to the most recent of his more than 550 Daily Breakfasts and have almost always walked away in a good mood with a new interesting or useful insight.

Father Roderick has been active in podcasting since the pre-historic year of AD 2001. He is founder of the impressive and effective SQPN, Catholic podcasting network and 100s of thousands of people tune in to him every morning. I suggest you go listen to a few of his Daily Breakfast episodes, now. then come back to hear his

1. Where were you born and raised? When and why did you decide to become a priest? What was your assignment prior to starting SQPN?

I was born in Leidschendam, not far from The Hague in the Netherlands and was raised in Bleiswijk, a town in the middle of a region dominated by polders, windmills and greenhouses. I went to school in the fast-growing, modern city of Zoetermeer, and contemplated various careers: comic-book artist, writer, movie director, computer game programmer, lawyer and even army officer. 

The idea of the priesthood never even entered my mind: although I was brought up in a Catholic family, I always thought of priests as old men, out of touch with modern culture, leading a life that couldn't be further away from my ambitions and dreams. As an altar boy, my thoughts during Mass often drifted to galaxies far, far away, where I would fight evil as a Jedi knight instead of paying attention to what was said by the priest.

All that changed around the age of 17, when I was challenged by my classmates and teachers to explain why I still went to Church, and I started to read and study what this Catholic Church was all about. My curiosity quickly evolved into fascination: beyond the appearances of an old, dusty institution I discovered a living, active, worldwide community with an incredibly rich tradition and a balanced view on life and on modern issues. An international youth gathering in the French place of pilgrimage Lourdes triggered the idea of getting involved in this Church as a priest. 

I thought this vocation would mean a definitive farewell to my fascination with computers, movies and media. Little did I know that all this would be an important part of my work as a priest today.

2. Tell me how and when SQPN got started. What came first the Daily Breakfast or the network? Can you give me some sense of how big the SQPN and the overall Catholic media network is? How many shows, listeners, countries--any numbers you feel free to share.

In 2001, my bishop sent me to Rome, where I studied social communications at the Gregorian University, one of the oldest universities in the world. Although the university was old, their media formation was very modern. While studying mass communications, journalism, radio and television production and marketing, I realized that this was exactly what I needed to do: help the Catholic Church use modern media to communicate its message to the world. While speaking at a communications conference in the Vatican, news broke that Pope John Paul II had been hospitalized. Switching on my portable recorder, I ran to Saint Peter's square to find out what had happened, jumped in a cab to the hospital and recorded a report on the situation. The world had just been introduced to the medium of podcasting, and I decided to upload the file to the internet and create a series called the 'Catholic Insider'.

Encouraged by hundreds of reactions from all over the world, I returned to Rome to report on the final days of John Paul II, his funeral and the election process of Pope Benedict XVI. As a priest, I had access to areas and people that were out of reach for regular journalists. The success of these audio documentaries, with over 15,000 listeners per episode and lots of media attention from CNN to BusinessWeek inspired me to set up a network for Catholic media producers, the Star Quest Production Network (SQPN).

undefined soon offered more than 25 audio and video programs, reaching around 250,000 people each month. About 60% of the audience is from North America, 25% from Europe, and 15% from South America, Asia and Oceania.

Half our audience is not Catholic. Our listeners and viewers range from convinced atheists to Protestants to people with Jewish, Buddhist or even Muslim backgrounds. I now host two daily shows: The Daily Breakfast in English and Katholiek Leven in Dutch and I produce a number of other audio and video shows when I have time.

3. The SQPN website says your focus is to build, "bridges between the dominant popular culture of the Western world and the religious culture and tradition of the Catholic Church in order to reach an audience that has little or no relationship with that Church." Why?

The Catholic Church has always reached out to the culture in which it existed, often integrating its language and symbols and transforming the culture from within. Saint Paul's advise to "examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good" has given the Catholic tradition a consistent openness to the world outside its Church walls.

Social Communications studies show that in order to establish successful communications, you first need to have a common language. The problem of the Catholic Church today, is that that common language seems to have disappeared. There is a wide gap between the age-old culture of the Church and the popular culture in our western world. With SQPN, we try to bridge that gap by engaging popular culture with the same openness that the apostle Paul encouraged. Many popular movies and books contain symbols, events and themes that are inspired by the Christian tradition.

That is why we have a show like The Secrets of Harry Potter, or The Secrets of the Lord of the Rings. By explaining the deeper layers of these popular imaginary worlds, we try to show how a better understanding of the Christian inspiration in these books adds new value and enjoyment of these stories.

4. In a recent video episode, you are strolling atop the frozen Winnipeg River, joking about walking on water. In another, you are disappointed that a chapel on a cliff in Southern Portugal has a locked door, keeping tourists out. Do any of your quips get you in trouble with your superiors? How does the Vatican regard SQPN? What obstacles in the Church did you have to overcome to get The Daily Breakfast show going?

I have always enjoyed a lot of support and encouragement from the official Church. My bishop allows me to dedicate 70% of my work to Catholic media and Vatican Radio even started podcasting after I introduced them to the medium. The Vatican strongly encourages the use of the internet and modern communications to build community and to enter a dialog with society.

The only difficult aspect of our work is to find funding. Podcasting, internet video, blogging and social networking are very new phenomena, whereas many potential sponsors are still completely focused on the 'old', traditional media. It would be much easier to raise money for a magazine or a radio show than for the kind of productions that we make at SQPN.

5. You get an amazing array of live call-ins. Are they mostly American? Are they mostly Catholic? Are they screened before they come on air?  What makes you decide to give your listeners 30 seconds of croaking frogs in a storm-flooded backyard?

One thing that sets podcasting apart from more traditional media is the strong, interactive and personal relationship between the host and the audience.

Listeners to the Daily Breakfast are very involved with the show and quickly respond to any question or topic that I launch on the program. The majority of callers are from the US, but I also receive voice feedback from Canada, Europe and Australia on a regular basis.

I always listen to the feedback before I play it, so that I can respond in an adequate way to their questions or remarks. Two types of feedback are very popular: the bit at the start of the Daily Breakfast where listeners can share what is going on in their part of the world, and the Q&A segment about the 'Peculiar Bunch': the Catholics.

It is again, a matter of creating a common language. The more you know your audience and the situation in which they live, the better you will communicate. And the more my listeners get to know each other, the easier it will be to form an online community around the show.

I think that religion is a natural part of our daily lives, and not something that should be confined to specific days or places of worship. The Daily Breakfast is about everything that makes life interesting - from croaking frogs in a storm-flooded backyard to praying monks in a silent monastery.

6. What have you learned from your audiences? How has it changed you? How do you think it may change the Church?

Producing these audio and video programs has had a huge impact on my own communications as a priest.

Getting to know my audience, whether they are listeners in China or my own parishioners in Amersfoort, is of capital importance. Only when I know what people need and are searching for can I hope to contribute something meaningful to their lives.

Communication begins with listening. The same is true for prayer, by the way. I hope that our work at SQPN will lead the way in Catholic new media--that it will show the Church that there are more ways to reach out to the world than ever before.

New media creates new community. The social networking revolution reflects something that the Church has been doing for 2000 years--bringing people together around a common inspiration. Catholics have always used a wide range of communication tools to create these communities, from Bibles to newspapers to radio and television. Why not use the new digital tools as well? When pope Benedict XVI visited Vatican Radio some time ago, they gave him an iPod full of Catholic podcasts. If the Pope uses new media, hopefully the rest of the Church will follow soon.

7.  Do you see a lesson in this social media experience that may be applicable to business or other institutions such as government?

There are a lot of similarities between an old institution like the Church and other business or governmental institutions. The world is embracing new media at a very fast pace. It expects institutions and businesses to do the same. Interactivity, personalized media and social networking, international branding, flexibility, niche marketing and the ability and willingness to involve customers or target audiences in the process are of vital importance for the survival and the success of modern organizations. Any company or organization that doesn't embrace these changes in communication risks losing its audience. 

8.  How do you think SQPN will evolve in coming years? Describe what the network will look like five years from now?

I think that SQPN will continue to raise the bar in terms of quality and reach. Five years from now, I hope SQPN will have a collection of audio and video productions that can rival the best secular programs on radio and TV.

We will also work hard to get some of our best shows syndicated on existing radio and television channels. With about a billion Catholics on this planet, and an even larger potential audience, I am confident that we will be able to reach several million people on a regular basis. Most importantly, I hope that SQPN will continue to produce shows that will surprise people, challenge them to explore, to be curious, to get involved in a community, online or off line. When I look back at what we have been able to achieve in only two years, I have high hopes for the future.

The sky is the limit, or, in our case, heaven is :) .

NOTE: Special thanks to Bryan Person for pointing me to Fr. Roderick

SM Global Report: IBM's George Faulkner

How SM brings a team of 380,000 closer together

             

                             [IBM's George Faulkner]

In my interview earlier this year with Firestoker's Jevon MacDonald, I speculated there was probably more happening in social media behind the firewall than in front of it. In this talk with IBM's George Faulkner, I would speculate that there is more happening behind IBM's firewall than at any other company.

Faulkner, a 14-year veteran of IBM has played a key role in IBM internal social media, particularly podcasting since 2004, the first the audio social media tool was introduced. He is currently editor in chief of the prolific IBM Media Library, which curates more than seven million employee contributions.

I found the extent of internal social media activity to be far greater than I had expected. This is a company of nearly 400,000 employees residing in over 200 countries. One-third of them telecommute and social media has made it closer, more efficient and more agile. I found parts of what George told me to be remarkable, and as a social media evangelist, some of it was to me downright inspirational.

1. Can you walk me through what IBM is doing behind the firewall with social media? Can you tell me what is going on both with employees as well as with your partners and your ecosystem?

Before turning IBM's 380,000 employees loose to self publish, we felt strongly that social computing could only exist and thrive if founded on some guiding principles and heightened cultural awareness. Like most large organizations, IBM staff  already adhered to Business Conduct Guidelines (BCG) covering responsible practices. With those BCGs, in mind, we initiated, socially drafted, and published a set of company values - created through a three-day, intranet IBM Jam, which is an open forum. From that, we established three cultural principles that we set in place immediately:

(1) Dedication to every client's success

(2) Innovation that matters - for our company and the world

(3) Trust and personal responsibility in all relationships

We view, this third one--trust and personal responsibility in all relationships--as a foundation for all open social computing activities at IBM.

The Jam resulted in us socially drafting the IBM Blogging Guidelines which help IBMers to engage, utilize and represent themselves in all social spaces.

With these foundational elements in place, IBM began to launch internal publishing spaces enabling blogging, podcasting, file sharing, wikis, social networking etc. Most of these spaces support social tagging, comment functions, networking/personal connection abilities, private/public sharing, and have transformed the way in which we find experts, answers, information, and how we connect globally and culturally with one another.

These platforms are guided by the IBM community and are not policed. Intranet editorial calendars do not dictate use and employees may publish as they see fit. The often referenced yet mythological scenario of the "Wild West" that many large organizations fear when considering this sort of mass open publishing has manifested itself as the complete opposite. When IBMers publish their expert opinions or share insight into their work, we all win. When they share opinions - no matter how hard-hitting - it inspires productive conversation. We feel these conversations influence and help shape executive opinion and add tremendous value in supporting the talent, skills and character of our employees.

We are involved socially beyond the IBM intranet - both in external social media and community platforms - with clients and business partners, and find that where conversation and community building are involved, great progress can be achieved.

2. Which of these programs works best in your opinion? What works the least well? Why?

Our most successful social platform by far is Wiki Central. Between publishing, editing, and visitors, IBM wikis achieve over 1 million hits per day. This speaks volumes in regard to what IBMers want and need in collaborative publishing and knowledge-sharing.

Our second most popular platform is the IBM Media Library which supports subscription-based audio, video, presentation and document publishing along with html-friendly page building and much more. The Library has achieved over 7 million file downloads to-date and is home to over 28k files created by IBMers worldwide. Our blogging platform is active as is our file-sharing platform. Our social networking site is quite popular as well. What makes all of these platforms most interesting, when viewed holistically, is how they are all tied together through our Enterprise Tagging Service, which enables extremely valuable discovery/search for IBMers through a variety of aggregation tools.

3. How do you measure or judge the success of your social media programs?

We measure success very simply in all social media publishing efforts on our platforms. The primary measurement is based on the conversations that the content inspires and what we all learn from these conversations. There is deep value in this open dialog. It inspires us to think, to collaborate, to work through puzzles and share our vast expertise. We finally get to be the experts we were hired to be on an extremely broad scale. We have moved from mass communications to masses of communicators.

4. How do you think internal social media is changing IBM as a business? What about corporate culture?

For me, I am more connected than I have ever been in my 14 years at IBM. Vast amounts of information are now available to me, specific to virtually any topic I seek, with just a few clicks. I not only get information, but can access vast opinions, find subject matter experts and even launch broad-scale community initiatives if I so desire. My reach is much wider, my effectiveness multiplied, my profile and reputation enhanced. I understand more of the vast undertakings of IBM in new ways which makes me a more valuable asset to the company, and I am more culturally aware of who my peers are and what my company stands for.

This is a huge change - a massive flip of traditional big business information control that has placed trust into the hands of the employee and enriched our business and our culture, allowing us to be responsible adults who feel empowered, not followers waiting for the next strategic missive with no ability to participate in the conversation.

5. What have been the biggest barriers to getting social media going at IBM? How did you overcome them?

Biggest barriers were fear of the unknown prior to launch. Worries that there could be IBMers with difficult concerns and issues looking for discussion and finding nobody there. Worried some employees may be discourteous or irresponsible for some reason, even in light of our deep values. This never happened.

“The  Wisdom of Crowds,” is not a catch-phrase. It is real. Given the opportunity to publish, IBMers immediately embraced it and have been working together through thick and thin ever since. The fear was overcome in light of our very first Jam - the Values Jam.

During that three-day open forum, we saw how IBMers would react and interact in such a situation. Although it was a controlled experiment with a set length, it was tremendous. The blog platform followed shortly and the rest of the platforms came after that. In any instance - and there have been but a few - where an IBMer gets somewhere close to crossing the line of what our guidelines and values frame, the extended IBM community steps up and speaks up. It is inspiring to see and to be a part of. The community, at large, oversees these situations and always acts to effectively work through these bumps in the road with respect, thus effecting change and progress.

6. I've talked to several global enterprises in the last couple of years and there’s  a similar scenario. There is a small band of social media evangelists and a sea of other employees. In your case, you are part of a 5-member communications team serving 380,000 employees. How do you expect to succeed?

Setting guidelines, launching education materials, creating content that would be inspirational to those sitting on the fence, and evangelizing around all of this was difficult for the first few years. Our social media evangelists are a very widespread and enthusiastic bunch, but not the key here.

The key proved to be simple enablement and guidance built on deep trust. The evangelists were the early adopters, for sure, but as the years roll by, and although it is not as rapid as I had anticipated, these platforms offer such a remarkable opportunity for all IBMers that it is inevitable that most will use one or more at some point, or they will be left behind in our new knowledge-sharing community ecosystem.

Adoption at first for the general population was often done with skepticism. Now they are eager and wide-eyed. It just took some time. I should note that we never announced the launch of any of these platforms in our intranet homepage news spaces. They were all rolled out in a viral manner. This stemmed what I would guess could have been a mass of confusion and/or ambivalence and, in turn, created a slow and steady interest.

7. How do social media programs scale at IBM? When small, pilot programs succeed and require significant budget and oversight, how does it --or will it--occur? Who does social media report to?

All of our social computing platforms come from within the CIO's office, IBM Software and IBM Research.

8. What percentage of IBM's marketing or communications budget is dedicated to social media?

Many of these internal IBM social platforms were built for a variety of reasons by a variety of sources as mentioned above. Over the last six years, IBM Communications has simply played the role of leading IBMers to understand how to use these spaces and take advantage of the opportunities they present.

Our mantra is in teaching IBMers to understand why and how to use them, how to create low-cost content with existing tools and how to focus more on quality of message and creativity (and follow-through) than expensive, slick and sleek productions.

I dare not speak for IBM content creators worldwide - we are a massive group of self-publishers without an editorial board - but investments have surely been made by some to aid in content creation. We feel strongly that low-cost options should always be considered because, when done well, they can be extremely effective and are very often going to prove to be more genuine at heart, thus generating a larger audience and inspiring deeper conversations.

Content created by 'people like me' - non-professional media producers - is compelling and is often devoid of traditional marketing hallmarks and people react very well to that. From my humble cubicle, I've spent the last four years conceptualizing, recording, editing, publishing, promoting and nurturing a large volume of podcast content on a total $1,500 investment in audio equipment and software. My internal podcasts have generated over 266,000 downloads, and I feel IBM has enjoyed a healthy return on that investment.

9. How do internal social media programs impact the lives of IBM's significant number of employee telecommuters?

Some of these IBMers have never met their managers face-to-face. Social media has enabled many of these folks to hear the voices of their peers and to feel and experience our culture and brand in new ways. It's important to realize that globally, fewer than half of all IBMers work in traditional offices. The remainder work remotely from customer sites, from home, are mobile with no fixed office.

IBM employees are bombarded with more content than ever before from more sources than ever before via multiple devices. As a result, they’re consuming large amounts of bite-size content, and later deciding where to more fully invest their time. And they’re exercising unprecedented control over assembling and customizing their content — thanks to wikis, RSS feeds, and meta-tagging. Today’s young opinion elites have a different way of gathering and validating information about companies. Unlike older influencers, they graze for information constantly, trust a multitude of sources, and prefer first-person testimonials to statements by traditional business authority figures.

IBMers are more likely to trust company information coming from regular employees than that being issued from the C suite. And in places like Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the U.S., “a person like me” (i.e., one with shared values and interests) is considered the most credible source of information about our company.

By providing IBMers with self-publishing abilities, tied together through subscription and social tagging, telecommuters participating in this are now more integrated and culturally connected than remote workers have ever been before. At the most basic level, we have found that IBMers react extremely positively to media embedded in traditional intranet news articles, due to the personal nature of most of our social media content and the trust they have in the information. But we also find that telecommuters truly appreciate the aural and visual window into other IBM work locations and the community spirit they encounter in the comment spaces as a result. I telecommute sporadically, and can speak from experience that it feels a lot more like being at IBM than it used to.


10. Any additional comments?

I have been stunned and overjoyed at what has occurred here at IBM in this social media space. IBMers publish a wide range of content, some worthwhile to only a few, some that connects on a widespread basis. Some have 'blogged their way into a new job,' some have prompted procedural change as a result. I'm not joking when I say it has transformed my personal work-life and how it has enhanced my productivity. Such widespread self-publishing enablement is unique to IBM as far as I know, but I see it as the inevitable future for many large organizations.

SM Global Report: Homeland Security's Charles Brownstein

Using Social Media in Disasters

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                [Charles Brownstein, HSI. from his file.]

It seems to me that social media is at its best during times of life-threatening crises. Robert Scoble was the first person in the US to report the devastating China Earthquake earlier this year. Not only did he find out about it through Twitter, he used social media to report it about 45 minutes sooner than did the US Geologic Service. There are other stories about social media being used in disasters. Back in the days of Katrina, Ernie the Attorney was blogging about the shortage of human services in New Orleans long before mainstream media gave it a mention. The Los Angeles Fire Department has several social media accounts. it seems that whenever there is a natural or human-started emergency, new social media stories emerge.

So when my friend Jeremiah Owyang mentioned he had represented Forrester at a day-long seminar put on by the Homeland Security Institute(HSI), I was more than a little curious to find out more about what is going on. First, I learned that HSI, is an entirely different entity than the Homeland Security Department (HSD). The former group is a think tank, formed in 2002 and operating since 2004 to provide research all matters of homeland security. It reports to the Homeland Security secretary, but also conducts projects work with the US Departments of Defense, Education, Interior, Intelligence and even the Smithsonian Institute.

Jeremiah connected me to HSI Fellow Charles Brownstein who ran the workshop. A 20--year veteran of the National Academies,Brownstein joined HSI in 2005, where he serves as a Fellow. In his role there, he leads projects involving information sharing, innovation and collaboration, personal identification systems, national and regional small vessel security, and cyber security R&D planning, among others.

Rather than using SM tools in their own operations, HSI is more focused on empowering on-the-scene orgranizations where the tools can be used to help people at ground zero of an emergency.

1. Before we get to social media, can you give me an example or two of the kind of thinking developed at HSI that has impacted domestic security in the US?

HSI is tasked to undertake a broad array of studies and analyses for DHS,  but to remain independent in its approach and implementation.  Our work has ranged from doing fundamental work on a national response plan to integrating Federal agencies as they respond to various kinds of emergencies, to specific technical assessments on the adequacy of the testing for the Advanced Spectrographic Portal [which scans US ports for nuclear devices]. In the first instance, we helped the government get its act together; in the second we helped to avoid moving too fast with technology not ready for deployment.

2. What sort of social media programs are you using? Are these used for internal collaborative purposes or are they public?

HSI does not use social media programs, if what you have in mind is Twitter, Facebook and the like. We support our internal operations as a matrix organization with shared drives and operational procedures that don't permit stovepipes. We use wikis on a project-by-project basis where the staff finds them useful. 
My particular interest in social media is part of a project that I manage to look at innovation and how to make use of it for Homeland Security applications of DHS. 

Folks at DHS who try to look to the future asked us to do that.

3. My sense of Homeland Security is that it is very top down in it's approach. Social media, conversely, works best when it is bottom up. Are you concerned that social media could wrest control from those currently in charge?

I personally have no such concerns and the folks at DHS who asked me to look into it have no such concerns. The application that we are exploring for DHS is the ad hoc incremental use of social media by end users for self assistance in response to emergencies.

DHS asked us to explore how it has been used, its efficacy for self assistance, how to promote its use for efficacious purposes, and then to see how the sort of formal response institutions (police, fire, emergency response, FEMA, etc)  might take advantage of what the public does and can be expected to do, to improve their own operations.

4. In an earlier conversation, you told me, "HSI got some people together to explore" social media's possibilities." Can you tell me more about that session?

We put on a one-day workshop that brought together a diverse group of officials from the DHS Policy Office, including Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Stewart Baker, state and local emergency responders from the local FEMA Region, and the California Office of Homeland Security, representatives of national fire and emergency responder professional groups, large and small companies and university researchers. Among private sector and non-government participants were representatives from Google, Cisco, Apple, Forrester Research, Microsoft, UConn, UC San Diego, University of Colorado,  Stanford University and representatives from emergency preparedness organizations.

5. Lets talk about disasters. As you've noted, during Katrina, 9/11,during forest fires and earthquakes, Americans have become very active in social media. How can that be braided into HSI & DHS activities?

Again, we are not exploring how to weave social networking into HSI or DHS- but rather doing research into how national, state and local authorities can use social networking in THEIR operations, and advising
DHS on how it can promote such uses. There seems to me to be a number of ways.

First, emergency responders, especially the younger ones, use all of the same social media tools that you use. So they are tuned into how Facebook was used at Virginia Tech by school authorities and students to gain a more accurate picture of events on the ground than the police, the mass media and the public had. So their bosses want to know how to factor their own workers uses into official operations. Police in the Phoenix area, the LA Fire Department and New York City are weaving Twitter into daily operations.
So, from that point of view, we want to make sure that DHS does nothing to stop this from happening more- or better yet, makes it legitimate for local authorities to spend block grant funds to find their own uses.

Second, DHS can look at what information is readily made available by end users of social networking technology, and figure out how to incorporate that information into FEMA and other agency emergency response operations at command centers, such as common operating picture and logistics support systems. To some extent, this means getting local authorities to figure out what works for them, doing some training, or at some point when its well-understood, offering assistance and promoting standards.
Or, perhaps, it means designing and operation "back end" information processing systems dedicated to effectively using the bits that individuals generate for their own purposes.

Third, DHS can look at how the underlying common use infrastructure for social networking, such as application servers, terrestrial or mobile access links and data processing facilities, can be made or kept sufficient resilient, and reliable to be trustworthy in emergency situations.

6. Can you walk me through an example? How would a social media tool, such as Twitter,  be helpful to your purposes?

There’s a Twitter client for the iPhone that has an "emergency" button . It has a pre-typed message asking for help and it sends the geo-location and a picture if the user desires, to whomever is following that user. In an ideal world, authorities could have individuals configure their device to send such tweets to the authorities where a back-end system parses the messages and resends it and the rest of the bits from it to the appropriate response agency (fire, police, etc etc.),and they, in turn, use that information to do triage and issue orders or "trouble tickets" to responders, or set up direct communications to the sender or whatever is appropriate. So imagine an event like an earthquake, and contemplate the utility of such a system if it were available.

7. How transparent can HSI and HSD be in telling the public what they are up to related to social media? What would you say to people who are apprehensive about Homeland Security watching what people say and do in online conversations?

I believe that this stuff will be useful at scale only if authorities are100% transparent and if authorities are very careful in official ways to be appropriate about privacy and about use. The critical variable for citizens and authorities is TRUST. Without that, I believe the use of the technology by all parties will be marginal  and unimportant.

8. Do you see a point in the future when you will be able to say that social media made America a safer place? How far into the future might that be?

Yes.

It has been going on for some time. It started the first time emergency responders started using available tech like instant messenger unofficially years ago, picked up steam with deployments of 802.11 around events like Katrina and California wildfires, and began picking up steam with cities supporting Twitter and other applications. I think it’s not "social media" that is important- its mobile social media applications and the entire infrastructure that supports it.

It is still in its infancy, but I think it will grow as rapidly as mobile technology innovations that look and operate like the iPhone are diffused and become more ubiquitous. That will include many non-Apple products and operating systems. To the extent that the many applications that support Homeland Security find a place in this space, we will be safer or at least better able to respond.

9. What technical improvements could be made to social media, making it more useful to Homeland Security?

I think that the key things needed are to keep the infrastructure inexpensive and make it more reliable, and to do the many things needed make the information for any particular application trustworthy.

SM Global Report: The Current TV-Twitter Deal

Putting Twitterville Closer to Candidates

[Current TV's Mario Anima. Photo by Laughing Squid.]

I have always been extremely optimistic about social media's potential for bringing people and politicians closer to each other. After all, the guys running are supposed to serve the rest of us, aren't they. Four years ago many people got excited when Howard Dean appeared to have started a blog and was answering comments. But then it turned out that Dean was using Joe Trippi to handle the blog while he remained adamantly clueless about them.

This year, most candidates have been very active in SM, setting up Twitter, Facebook and other accounts. Unfortunately, it has seemed to me, the tools have been used to get messages out and campaign contributions in.

No candidate has really tried using social media to actually listen to the people, which I believe is the killer app for government, politicians and constituencies. For the first time, there is technology that allows significant numbers of voter voices to be heard in venues larger than their own living rooms.

So, I was instantly elated when an announcement came a couple of days ago about a deal that will let Current TV and Twitter combine efforts to let people stream comments while during the four upcoming presidential debates, starting in Sept. 26 in symbolic Oxford, Mississippi.

Essentially, this is a massive mashup called Hack the Debate. Current TV was co-founded by Al Gore and former TV pop lawyer Joel Hyatt. There have been previous attempts to add online video and commentary to political events, particularly by uStream. But to my knowledge, there has never been anything like Hack the Debate. While this first effort, may be pock-marked with tech issues and Neanderthals who may slip by screeners to write nastiness, I believe it is a major step in the right direction for the future of democracy.

To understand exactly what is going on and what we can expect, I turned Mario Anima, director of online community for Current [tweet: @manima) to get some of the details that the initial stories seem to have skirted over.

1. Mario, is this a wide open project. Who can comment through Hack the Debate and how do others find our comments?

The  debate page is 100% open to submissions on relevant topics. Anyone interested in clipping stories can tag their submissions with “Hack the Debate” and they will appear on that page. It’s sort of like a pre-debate mash-up of related information.

Also, we’ll be keeping an eye on the broader discussions taking place around the Twittersphere, but we’ll be focusing on tweets that include the #current hashtag. We’ll try to monitor all comments, but it makes sense to focus on anyone who’s choosing to participate in the discussion via the hashtag.

2. Is Al Gore actually involved in Current or is this a case of him co-founding, adding the credibility of his name and moving on?

Al Gore is definitely involved. He weighs in on what we cook up in-house, and he’s very supportive in regards to this sort of thing.

3. Why was Current TV selected to participate in the debates rather than say uStream? What will you be doing that is different than what other live streamers may do?

We purchased the rights to air the debates because we know our audience is engaged in this election. The main differentiator between CurrentTV and uStream is the finished output — we have a cable TV network to utilize, so one of our focus points on the Current.com side of things is figuring out how to make a two-screen experience (from online to television) a reality. It’s a tough problem to solve, because it requires sewing together two vastly different ways of doing things.

4. Why did CurrentTV decide to partner with Twitter on this project?

When you look at microblogging, as a form of back channeling during major events, its obvious that Twitter is at the hub of this type of thing. Since I arrived at Current in February, it’s become clear that we need to get out there and let others know a little bit more about what we’re up to, what we’re open to try, and some of the things that interest us in regards to experimenting in both online and broadcast arenas. Melding the online and broadcast experience is really at the center of this Twitter/Current debate initiative, and it’s sort of a Phase I for what we refer to as building out a set of APIs for online content and communities in regards to television.

5. How challenging is the technology involved?

It’s a pretty hefty undertaking. We’re working steadily to get our platforms in place to help facilitate more of these types of ventures more often, so while we’re confident with where we’re at for the debates, we're trying to make the process more robust yet streamlined for the future.

6. How challenging will the logistics be? What happens if 100,000 tweeters all wish to tweet at once?

We’d love to automate everything, but there’s going to be some manual activity. The tweets will all be rendered in flash in an overlay stream during the broadcast. We’re also cognizant of the broadcast restrictions that are out there, so we’ll be filtering out inappropriate tweets from the rest of the bunch. Our goal is to show as much of the Twitter conversation on-air as we can, while still maintaining a good viewing experience. Bottom line, we’re trying to make this as flexible as possible so we can adjust as needed.

7. How do you think the Current-Twitter participation will change the world.

I hope it has an impact. Reading through the tweets during the primaries, DNC, and RNC, there was a lot of really intelligent discussion taking place. Sure, there was noise too, but people have insights that are worth getting out there. I have a group of friends who have been partaking in a non-stop debate via email since before the primaries. They are all extremely intelligent people who hold high positions in their respective fields, but all of this knowledge and discussion is buried in the inboxes of 30 or so recipients. If our little effort does anything, I hope it gives people like them the opportunity to weigh in on the issues discussed in a very visible way. Ultimately it would be nice if this was a small step towards moving traditional broadcast television away from the voices of the few to a conversation of the many.

I'm Looking for a few Good Social Media Stories

I am starting my 16th month of writing my Social Media Global Reports. To date, I have interviewed 108 people in 34 countries. They are a diverse lot, ranging from Michael Dell, founder of the world's second largest computer company to Wael Abbas who uploads hidden camera videos of police brutality in Egypt. The point of these stories is to investigate social media's impact on culture and business.

This project, sponsored and encouraged by Intel, is among my core activities. I have a great deal of passion about it. To date I have posted over 150,000 words on this subject, just about double the number of words in Naked Conversations. Some day, the stories I have gathered may be condensed into a book.

I am saying all this, because I am constantly looking for stories of people--prominent and obscure--who show the wide range of events that are changing business, education, government, communications and just about everything else. From time to time I post on Twitter that I am looking for new stories and I get flooded. While this method has landed me a few gems, I also get lots of stories that just won't fly. In fact, I end up covering about one in 14 ideas that get presented to me. This frustrates me and I'm sure it frustrates all those people who took the time to pitch me only to get rejected.

First let me clear up some stories that I simply do and do not cover:

• I almost never cover a start up on a first launch. I am looking for technologies that are changing business and life. There's a guy named Scoble who just LOVES tech stories. Pitch him at scobleizer@gmail.com. Tell him I urged you to go there.
• I am not really focused on technology per se, but on business and people. If you do represent a tech vendor, please send me the customer who has the most remarkable story.
• I am interested in human elements and how remarkably social media has impacted real people, such as the Kenya orphans who blog to raise money for running shoes, or the Erik Hersman who helped Kenyans by creating a mobile wiki so they could see where violence erupted and avoided it or Laurel Papworth who went to Saudi Arabia to help Muslim women set up a social network, or Isaac Mao, China's first blogger who is now investing in disruptive startups in China.
• The interview that I most covet would be with Queen Rania of Jordan who posts videos on YouTube that educate me about Islamic culture and inspire me in many ways. Perhaps this link will catch her attention more than my email pitches have so far.
• I am interested in behind the firewall stories, such as Peter Reiser, who architected SunSpace, where 15,000 engineers share what they know in a Facebook-type environment and who figured out the ROI is in shared knowledge. I just loved the story I posted earlier this week about Francois Gossieaux interview this week, where he showed how tribalism is a key factor in understand business social networks. I loved Ethan Bodnar's story last year when he was a high school student that he would never work for a company that would not let him blog or Pawel Nowacki of Poland who told me how citizen journalism in his country has greater impact than traditional newpapers.

And so on.

I am looking for stories that will help professionals understand how to use social media to move the needle inside their organizations and will help people to move mountains in their culture. I'm looking for stories that will inspire other people to use social media in ways that most of us have not yet even dreamed about.

In fact, if you do want to pitch me for a story, I strongly suggest you push the SM Global Survey button to your right as you read this page and take the time to read a few. That will get you to understand that if you are pitching a Twitter for the enterprise, there are venues that will treat you with much greater veneration than I will.

I'm looking for diamonds in a coal mine. I will be very grateful if you have one to share with my readers.

Oh yes. One other thing. Most pitches I hear are American-based. I am really eager to hear more from other parts of the world. After all, the name of this space is Global Neighbourhoods.

OnLine Tribalism & the Future of Social Media

A couple of weeks back, I wrote a piece on the future of social media. It was not my best-received post. It is one of the few times that I have ever been criticized for brevity. But the issue was that I had a thought that has not fully developed, one that has been coming out in drips and drabs for several years.

The key thought is that while tools keep changing people don't. We behave, for the most part, the same way we did when we were cave dwellers. The online tools we use today have allowed us to scale out conversations and eliminate many barriers such as geography, allowing us to build global neighborhoods whose members sometimes reside thousands of miles apart. The relevance of social media is that it allows us to interact in the world increasingly more like we behave in our own physical neighborhoods.

Yesterday, I was pleased that my SM Global Report on Francois Gossieaux's study of Online Tribalism was so much better received. It is among my favorites in the series of more than 100 interviews I have done in the past 15 months. By providing data gathered through conversations with online community managers at 140 organizations, Francois has added numerous valuable insights into how people behave in online communities.

His key point fall right in the crosshairs of what I have been trying to say. Humans are tribal by nature. It is in our DNA. It has to do with why we are passionate about sports team and rock bands. It has to do with those whose roots are in heartlands or the burrows of New York City, or the barrios of Mexico. It has to do with why most people want to marry people of their own race or religion and it has to do with the unfortunate human tendency to mistrust or downright dislike people of apparently different tribes.

Let's go back for a moment to a time before social media or the internet, before electricities or the cave; before the development of synthetic music and genocidal bombs. Let's go back to the caves and how we lived and communicated.

We collaborated for food, in the same ways that we now collaborate in global workgroups. We self-organized to achieve a common goal. Before we could perform the magic of binary languages, we grunted and gestured. And the result was that we and the ones we loved back in the cave ate and were clothed. We signaled to our tribes the success or failure of the hunt, by banging rocks on hollow logs in certain rhythms, inadvertently inventing music. Back in the cave, after we feasted, we told our stories by drawing lines in the dirt with fingers and sticks, and we narrated with increasingly refined grunts. Eventually, we illustrated our stories by using blood and berries to draw pictures on the cave walls.

hen we were out foraging, we sometimes encountered "others," people from tribes we did not know, people who may have looked differently than we look, who used different series of grunts and rhythms and gestures. Sometimes we ended up trading with them and perhaps sharing food.. At other times, perhaps because a gesture was misunderstood, we bashed each others heads in.

The refinements continued in a near-linear direction over millennia. We evolved relentlessly from stone to iron to steel to silicon to something we have not yet dreamed of. Our communications and our tools allowed us to travel further, to leave our neighborhoods for other places, some at the bottom of the ocean and some into the first inches of the space beyond our planet.

Yesterday and this morning I watched the response to Francois' perceptive comments about online communities. I saw thoughtful professionals take his contribution and begin to work the problem. They will take the information he has gathered and shared and apply it in varying ways to a great many online communities. He has moved the needle on the body of knowledge that will be used to extend and refine the online community.

From my perspective, Francois has shown that people behave online as we do offline. We behave a certain way in small communities that is different from large communities. He has shown that what is needed is more tools and greater focus on letting people behave online as they do in real life and he has given ample evidence that communities online are about people, not technology as much as communities in the real word are about people not bricks, mortars and machines.

I am glad to have played some role in amplifying his findings and I can't wait to see what happens next.