Global Neighbourhoods

A Jew's View of Christmas

[Chrismas lover Paula Israel with Brewster & very old friend. Photo by Shel]

KD Paine just did a wonderful piece about a little girl and the meaning of Christmas. It motivated me to dust off one of my two annual reruns. This one is about a little Jewish boy and the meaning of Christmas.  I originally posted this in December 2003, my second month of blogging. I've changed a few numbers to make my personal stats current.

"I grew up in the 1950s in New Bedford, Mass., a second-tier East Coast city. Christmas was the biggest day of the year. School was closed. Parents had rare paid days off. There was usually snow on the ground and the abundant churches would chime carols from bell towers all day long.

Even if you were a Jewish kid and you knew this day was not designed for you, you couldn’t help but share in the excitement. My parents, who were born in Europe at a time when it was unfortunate to be both European and Jewish, were unable to conceal their own ambivalence. Our small family would drive to Christian neighborhoods admiring decorations. We once ventured all the way to Boston--in those days a two-hour drive-- where we saw live reindeer fenced in on Boston Commons beside a large illuminated plastic nativity scene.

More than once, my mother cooked a turkey on Christmas day and family would come for the day—but we never, ever admitted that the celebration had any relationship to Christmas. There were no stockings hung by our chimney with care, no bulbous piles of loot, no sweet smell of pine trees in our living room.

Christmas was a source of huge confusion for me as a boy and teenager. Perhaps it still is.

As a Jewish kid, we had Hanukkah. But the Festival of Lights, as it is called, seemed pale in the shadow of all that Christmas glitter of tinsel and bright blinking bulbs. Christmas was everywhere in the windows of homes and stores, on lawns in parks and even on rooftops. Yes, it was in the schools and no one even thought of objecting at that time. I still wouldn't.

While he was still alive, my grandfather, a white-haired kindly old man gave me Hanukkah “gelt,” in the form of a silver dollar. A dollar was big-time money back then, but how could my grandfather ever compete with the other white-haired guy, the one in the red suit with the elves, the flying sleigh and all his well-disguised doubles in department stores?

I liked getting a gift each of the eight days of Hanukkah, even if over-half was only socks and clothing that I would have gotten anyway. But while my Christian friends had only a single day, theirs seemed to be the Perfecta Jackpot, dwarfing our quantity of days with their quality.

In January. when we went back to Betsy B. Winslow School, I’d hear glee-filled reports of how these Christian kids had awakened Dec. 25 to entire living rooms filled with Schwinn bikes, Lionel Trains, American Flyer Wagons and Junior Builder Erector Sets. The only price they had to pay was to leave out some faith-based milk and cookies the night before.

Christmas loot was bad enough, but then there were the miracles. Theirs was the birth of God’s son on a night when animals talked. Ours was that a temple light burned for a long time. Big deal. Our most popular Hanukkah song was, “Dreydle, Dreydle, Dreydle,” which has the same melodic merit as “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Not quite on par with “Silent Night,” “First Noel” or even, for that matter, “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Our Holiday food featured potato latkas, still a personal, cholesterol-soaked favorite, but we had no Mormon Tabernacle Choir, no TV special with Perry Como crooning “Ave Maria.“ We never dashed through the snow, laughing even part of the way.

But Hanukkah had one special part for a Jewish kid in that era-- latent machismo. The holiday story was about how Judah Maccabee had led a successful guerrilla war against the previously undefeated Roman Legions, making himself the central figure in the whole Hanukkah tale. Maccabee had kicked some serious Roman butt back when the Romans were the undefeated champs. It made me proud. He was our Rocky, our Joltin' Joe DiMaggio, Jackie Robinson. He wasn't no wimp as Jewish kids were often considered to be in the 50s.

I started remembering all this yesterday, while driving through the sad city of East Palo Alto (EPA). A few years back, EPA had the highest murder rate in the country--outdoing Detroit, New York City and Oakland. [They say it’s a lot better now that they’ve brought in a Home Depot, Ikea and Sun Microsystems campus]. But as I sat at a traffic light watching a packaged goods deal between a dude in a long coat and a kid on a bike, I saw a sign that reminded me about what I envied most about Christmas. It hung in huge, slightly lopsided, letters across University Avenue.

It said: “Peace on Earth.”

Tomorrow will be my 64th Christmas. It was a great many Christmases ago when I first heard the words, and fewer Christmas ago when I came to understand the bigness of the concept and the power of the thought. Peace on Earth is much, much bigger than Maccabee kicking Roman butt.

Not too many years ago, I met Paula who is now my wife. She loved Christmas like the kids in the old TV programs sponsored by Hallmark cards. She loved the planning, and decorating; the gifting and wrapping and opening and putting ribbons on her head; she loved the cooking and filling the house with unlikely assortments of people who somehow enjoyed each other. Her zeal put me at odds with my own deep and ambiguous feelings about the holiday. I’ve never been able to explain them to her in any way that makes sense and perhaps that’s what I’m trying to do in this particular blog.

There are now two things special about Christmas for me. The first is the big thought, dream or illusion of peace on earth and goodwill between its many inhabitants--Christians Jews, Muslims, Hindus, atheists and even Republicans. I don’t pray, but I do hope. If you do pray for these issues, I hope they come through and I will be grateful to you.

The second is smaller and more personal. It’s about Paula and how she catches the season’s joy as if it were something contagious. Whatever the germ, I’ve caught it as I find myself looking forward to the planning, and decorating; the gifting, wrapping and opening--albeit without ribbons on my head. Christmas Day, our home will be filled with unlikely assortments of people and I already know it will work out just fine.

Happy holidays, whichever you choose to observe, and may the New Year bring all of us closer to peace on Earth."

[Originally published December 24, 2003.

Even if you were a Jewish kid and you knew this day was not designed for you, you couldn’t help but share in the excitement. My parents, who were born in Europe at a time when it was unfortunate to be both European and Jewish, were unable to conceal their own ambivalence. Our small family would drive to Christian neighborhoods admiring decorations. We once ventured all the way to Boston--in those days a two-hour drive-- where we saw live reindeer fenced in on Boston Commons beside a large illuminated plastic nativity scene.

More than once, my mother cooked a turkey on Christmas day and family would come for the day—but we never, ever admitted that the celebration had any relationship to Christmas. There were no stockings hung by our chimney with care, no bulbous piles of loot, no sweet smell of pine trees in our living room.

Christmas was a source of huge confusion for me as a boy and teenager. Perhaps it still is.

As a Jewish kid, we had Hanukkah. But the Festival of Lights, as it is called, seemed pale in the shadow of all that Christmas glitter of tinsel and bright blinking bulbs. Christmas was everywhere in the windows of homes and stores, on lawns in parks and even on rooftops. Yes, it was in the schools and no one even thought of objecting at that time. I still wouldn't.

While he was still alive, my grandfather, a white-haired kindly old man gave me Hanukkah “gelt,” in the form of a silver dollar. A dollar was big-time money back then, but how could my grandfather ever compete with the other white-haired guy, the one in the red suit with the elves, the flying sleigh and all his well-disguised doubles in department stores?

I liked getting a gift each of the eight days of Hanukkah, even if over-half was only socks and clothing that I would have gotten anyway. But while my Christian friends had only a single day, theirs seemed to be the Perfecta Jackpot, dwarfing our quantity of days with their quality.

In January. when we went back to Betsy B. Winslow School, I’d hear glee-filled reports of how these Christian kids had awakened Dec. 25 to entire living rooms filled with Schwinn bikes, Lionel Trains, American Flyer Wagons and Junior Builder Erector Sets. The only price they had to pay was to leave out some faith-based milk and cookies the night before.

Christmas loot was bad enough, but then there were the miracles. Theirs was the birth of God’s son on a night when animals talked. Ours was that a temple light burned for a long time. Big deal. Our most popular Hanukkah song was, “Dreydle, Dreydle, Dreydle,” which has the same melodic merit as “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Not quite on par with “Silent Night,” “First Noel” or even, for that matter, “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Our Holiday food featured potato latkas, still a personal, cholesterol-soaked favorite, but we had no Mormon Tabernacle Choir, no TV special with Perry Como crooning “Ave Maria.“ We never dashed through the snow, laughing even part of the way.

But Hanukkah had one special part for a Jewish kid in that era-- latent machismo. The holiday story was about how Judah Maccabee had led a successful guerrilla war against the previously undefeated Roman Legions, making himself the central figure in the whole Hanukkah tale. Maccabee had kicked some serious Roman butt back when the Romans were the undefeated champs. It made me proud. He was our Rocky, our Joltin' Joe DiMaggio, Jackie Robinson. He wasn't no wimp as Jewish kids were often considered to be in the 50s.

I started remembering all this yesterday, while driving through the sad city of East Palo Alto (EPA). A few years back, EPA had the highest murder rate in the country--outdoing Detroit, New York City and Oakland. [They say it’s a lot better now that they’ve brought in a Home Depot, Ikea and Sun Microsystems campus]. But as I sat at a traffic light watching a packaged goods deal between a dude in a long coat and a kid on a bike, I saw a sign that reminded me about what I envied most about Christmas. It hung in huge, slightly lopsided, letters across University Avenue.

It said: “Peace on Earth.”

Tomorrow will be my 64th Christmas. It was a great many Christmases ago when I first heard the words, and fewer Christmas ago when I came to understand the bigness of the concept and the power of the thought. Peace on Earth is much, much bigger than Maccabee kicking Roman butt.

Not too many years ago, I met Paula who is now my wife. She loved Christmas like the kids in the old TV programs sponsored by Hallmark cards. She loved the planning, and decorating; the gifting and wrapping and opening and putting ribbons on her head; she loved the cooking and filling the house with unlikely assortments of people who somehow enjoyed each other. Her zeal put me at odds with my own deep and ambiguous feelings about the holiday. I’ve never been able to explain them to her in any way that makes sense and perhaps that’s what I’m trying to do in this particular blog.

There are now two things special about Christmas for me. The first is the big thought, dream or illusion of peace on earth and goodwill between its many inhabitants--Christians Jews, Muslims, Hindus, atheists and even Republicans. I don’t pray, but I do hope. If you do pray for these issues, I hope they come through and I will be grateful to you.

The second is smaller and more personal. It’s about Paula and how she catches the season’s joy as if it were something contagious. Whatever the germ, I’ve caught it as I find myself looking forward to the planning, and decorating; the gifting, wrapping and opening--albeit without ribbons on my head. Christmas Day, our home will be filled with unlikely assortments of people and I already know it will work out just fine.

Happy holidays, whichever you choose to observe, and may the New Year bring all of us closer to peace on Earth."

[Originally published December 24, 2003.

Ethan Bodnar, 17, Lands Book Contract

Ethan Bodnar is the youngest person I have interviewed for the SAP Global Survey so far. He's 17, lives in Connecticut and aspires to study design in an art college next year. I  immensely enjoyed meeting him for the first time for a few minutes last week in Boston. I often discuss him in my public talks on the SAP Survey because he's the one who made it clear how reluctant many members of the emerging generation are to work for an employer who will not trust them to blog.

http://www.grabbagbook.com/

Ethan has just announced he has received a publisher's proposal to publish Grab Bag his project-turned-book.  According to Ethan, it will feature 100 artists, be around 200 pages long, and will come out in Spring 2009. Each artists will have two images in the book(one of the creative task and one from there current field of work), a biography, and a short paragraph detailing their experience with the
creative task.

I have a lot of friends who are writing books. Ethan is the youngest, however, and I think it is a great idea that shows the collaborative disposition that also comes out so well in his fine blog.

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Reposting Survey Part 3: Social Media by Region

A couple of people have complained that they cannot access my SAP Global Report Part 3, posted on Dec. 3. I am not certain I understand how or why, but I am reposting this now. It is identical to the earlier post.

[This is the third of four parts I am publishing of the SAP Global Report on Culture, Business & Social Media.  It compares and contrasts what is happening by geographic region. You can see Part One here, which tells you the story of how the report was researched and Part Two here, listing my seven key findings.]

The Americas
.
•    The US continues to drive most social media innovation with most new products and social media products originating in traditional tech clusters. Silicon Valley remains home to the world’s three most popular blogging platforms; to four of the world’s five most popular social networks Facebook. It is a hotbed for micro-blogging and online video.
•    The time spread from geek to everyday people in the United States, as mentioned above, is widespread and accelerating.  Social media strategists talk about marketing between the coasts.”  Mainstream US enterprise shunned blogging just two years ago, they are now scurrying to embrace it. 
•    Other gaps are shortening as well. Young people, raised on internet communications are embracing social media innovations nearly in tandem to technology insiders. Likewise, geography lags are getting shorter as well. Tech adoption between Palo Alto, California and say Dubai or the Czech Republics have shortened from years to months.

•    Nascent social media projects have also begun to pervade government and educational bodies. Conferences for government workers, librarians, vertical publishers are being held for the first time and are well attended.

•    With few exceptions, Canada emulates adoption patterns in the US.  However, business blogging remains much rarer in Canada. Canadians latched on to Facebook faster than did Americans and today about one in 10 Canadians is a Facebook user. But, they use it differently than their American neighbors. Instead of finding new friends, they just talk to people they already know in the tangible world.
•    Brazil has Latin America's largest online population, with about 16 million monthly unique visitors or about 10% of total population. Nearly a third has broadband access.  It the Western Hemisphere’s leader in e-government. Last election, about 120 million of them voted electronically. Over 90% of its taxpayers files online. The country also has an advanced e-banking system and most people can access some of their medical records online. There are a surprisingly high number of CEO bloggers and it is not uncommon for businesses to experiment in the social media. Brazil, has a disproportionately young which may explain the very high popularity of social networks and other sharing sites. Orkut is the overwhelming social network of choice. Fotolog, Flogao and Flickr ,three photo sharing sites are among the most popular, as are Google and YouTube. Facebook does not rank in the top 100 sites. perhaps because its navigation is more text-intensive than Orkut and its applications are all in English.
•    Chile claims to be the most technologically developed country in Latin America. According to ISI 2007, in the first quarter of 2007, Chileans spent an average of $532 USD per person in information technology. There is no doubt that young  people are taking great strides in adopting social media. Internet's primary users are children and teenagers from 6 to 17, followed by young men age 18 to 29, mainly from the higher half of the country’s socioeconomic sectors. In the poorest neighborhoods, computer cafés are jammed with young men playing games online. Government has started allowing RSS subscription to websites and a couple of ministries post informational videos on YouTube.  But business remains slow to adopt, and when it does, the project is often internal.
•    Argentina, has been slower to adopt social media, partly because half the country’s population remains below the poverty line. The country’s emerging middle class is slowed by a home broadband connection cost of $100 monthly. This has lead to the high popularity of computer cafes, prevalent in most cities. People pay for connection by the hour. Igooh is a independent citizen journalism arm of La Nacion, Argentina’s national newspaper and online site. Igooh’s adoption is steep and La Nacion’s is flat.  People use Igooh to socialize and publish examples of personal creativity more than to consume news.  Igooh’s founder Ignacio Escribano believes social media is the most revolutionary innovation since the Gutenberg Press. “But Revolutions take time,” he observed. “Perhaps decades.”

Western Europe

•    Western Europe’s culture is diverse. This is a factor in a very uneven social media development. A second contributing factor is the equally diverse fluctuations of broadband adoption and cost from one country to the next.

•    Some European strategists believe in playing follow-the-leader with the US, allowing America to get wet at the “bleeding edge,” adopting only after technology is refined and stabilized. This “fashion following” frustrates Europe’s most innovative social media practitioners, two of whom have moved to the US during the course of this survey.

•    Social media has begun to disrupt “master-servant” business models in France and Spain.  Less so, in Germany and hardly at all in Italy, where broadband access lags.

•    Small countries see the advantage of social media. Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands are among the most blogging countries per population in EU. Irish entrepreneurs have used blogs effectively to establish US market presence.

•    Many European companies value social media as the most efficient way to reach American markets.

•    In Italy, one of the EU’s slowest broadband adopters, there are only 7.5 million visits to social networks in a month. 80% of them are under age 30.

•    Germany has been the slowest advanced country to embrace blogging.  But it does not lag in social networking, where, according to Comscore, 45 percent of Germans who go online use social networks. While MySpace remains the most popular site among Germans, StudiVZ, a German-language social network targeted to students received 3.1 million visitors in July 2007.  Facebook, which has grown this year across Europe at a rate exceeding 400%,  has not yet caught on in Germany. The reluctance of German businesses to permit blogging is often attributed to a love for privacy. A closer look would indicate it is more because German executives want to see a tangible ROI on any activity in which time is invested. In the rare occasions when German companies elect to use social media, they often outsource it to consultants, with the result being an ineffective product that is not integrated with the company culture.

•    Scotland is a world leader in using social media in education. Educators are using virtual reality as well as other innovations to engage students in innovative ways. A public school educator encourages students to work with teachers via social media to determine what they will be taught. Children of parents who have rarely left the UK are encouraged to interact with people all over the world. Behind it all is a strategy to help the next generation to leapfrog into the global marketplace. Facebook has gone from near zero in Ireland to over 130,000 users in six months. At its current rate it will overtake Bebo, which started in Ireland.

Eastern Europe & Russia

•    Countries that were under Soviet control until approximately 1990, started with fresh slates and have relatively high internet involvement. Several eastern countries are well-beyond their Western neighbors in terms of Internet and social media adoption. Citizen journalism flourishes in many of these countries.

•    Estonia is the most connected European country with free, virtually ubiquitous WiFi access provided by the government. It has a highly active e-government, and has a strong pan-European role in e-transactions including banking, purchasing and gambling. Over 90% of Estonian speaking people under age 25 use rate.ee, the localized social network. It’s dependence on internet-related activities for its national operations and economy made it vulnerable to cyber attacks alleged to have stemmed from Russia.

•    From 25-to-30% of Russia’s142 million use the Internet from home or work. About 30% of families have PCs, but not all are Internet enabled. Around 65% own cell phones, but not more than 20% of them use them to go online. There are at least one million bloggers on LiveJournal. Bloggers discuss more politics than business. There is a lot of localized information sharing.  Russians watch a good deal of US-uploaded YouTube clips and there are expressions of surprise of how much in common the people of both countries share. Nearly all traditional media in Russia reflects only the government’s viewpoint. This has given birth to citizen journalism, the first of which is Realno.com, has a network of 320 journalists.  Relatively new, it is receiving about1000 unique visitors daily, but appears to be growing.

•    The lack of business and technology legacy makes Eastern Europe a hotbed for rapid social media emergence. An example is Bulgaria, which fancies itself, “the Silicon Valley of Eastern Europe,” and boasts a low-cost, high-talent development community. One-fourth of Bulgarian households have computers. 75% have cellphones and a great many Bulgarians use them to get online. Internet penetration in Sofia, Bulgaria's capitol, is 50%, although the rest of the country is only 25%.  While older generations studied Russian, the younger is required to study English.

•    From 2000 to 2006, Polish internet users increased by over 307%.  With a population of 38 million, there are 25 million cell phones and 10-15 million PCs, with an estimated 13 million people or 34% using the internet, but adoption is growing fast and it is estimated 50% of the population will be online in three years. Broadband access, however is small--about 1.75 million. The number of home Internet users is increasing, while the number using it at work is declining. Citizen journalism, blogging and social networking are flourishing. Many young Poles see the Internet as a short route to career stardom. Bands have started there and flourished. Bloggers have risen quickly to points of significant national influence. . . Wiadomości24.pl is a citizen journalism network of 760 writers where multiple viewpoints are shared.

•    With the exception of Denmark, Scandinavian countries, Baltic countries and Germany have not glommed onto blogging.  But they are zealous users of Wikipedia and localized social networks do well. Wikis are relatively  popular inside the enterprise.

•    In Ukraine, a nation of46 million people, businesses universally provide internet access to employees. About 38% of it is broadband.  Despite, sometimes dangerous friction with it’s Russian neighbor, Ukrainians argue that it is one of the world’s most promising markets for technology in general and social media in particular.

•    In the Baltic nations, about 90% of young people are using social networks.

•    In the Czech Republic, there are 10 million people and 12.5 millions cell phones, 25% more phones than users. Among18-40 year-old men, having the latest mobile device is a status symbol. The country is wild for SMS. During Christmas 2006, Czechs sent about 60 million text messages. However, only about 500,000 people, or 5% of the population use mobile internet connection. About 35% of Czech households have PCs, purchased mostly for children. Their parents access the Internet at work—often for personal purposes. About 2/3s of all computers are Internet connected.  Older Czechs speak Russian, but their children speak English because the latter language has replaced the former in education programs. Social media has not yet really taken off because there are few Czech localized versions.  As more young Czechs become English-proficient, adoption is likely to escalate and the business and cultural changes are likely to be significant.

Asia

•    In China, social media is used more effectively as an instrument of social change than as a business tool. Business users, mostly blog to advertise or to create direct sales catalogs. Growth in social media is enormous. In two years, the number of bloggers has risen from 1.2 million to over 20 million. Bloggers range in age from 10 to above 70.  The Chinese are wild about Twitter and social networks. There are thousands of Chinese speaking English in Facebook Groups. Several prominent Chinese blog in English as well as there native language. The rapid growth has made the Chinese government demonstrably nervous. The burgeoning growth of China bloggers makes attempts to control who blogs and what they say, increasingly difficult because understanding the internet and how it works is giving social media users an increased advantage. They are adept at bypassing, what they commonly call, “the Great China Firewall.” Despite the well-document rapid rise of an enormous middle class, the cost of starting a tech-related business in China remains quite low and investment dollars are growing.  The start up community, still in its formative stages, uses social media to reach foreign markets. They greatly prefer the direct conversational opportunities of social media to going through official government channels.

•    In Japan 13.8 % of businesses now have blogs, including the country’s largest bank.  They use them to communicate with existing customers and market to new ones. In the last two years, these blogs have become more open, allowing comments where they once did not. No major Japanese company launches a new product without a blogger relations component. Companies host blogger conferences to tell their story. About 17% of small Japanese companies have blogs and “social networking services (SNS),” as they call it, are widely used by individuals and businesses.  Mixi, the leading SNS, attracts more than ten million users. Like Germans and Canadians, the Japanese do not use social networks to meet new people, but to talk with existing friends. For many Japanese, speaking or writing in English remains. Japanese corporations are starting to use social networks internally to improve innovation through collaborative efforts.

•    Singapore is ahead of the remaining South Asian Countries in social media. The upper echelons of government use social media in their efforts to slowly, steadily open up and previously closed society. But government is not in control.  Recent efforts to silence bloggers during a national election, completely failed. An instructor as a class of 40 college students recently asked how many ofhisstudents blogged.  39 hands went up.

Africa

•    About 4 million South Africans have Internet access, or less than 10% of the population. 25% of the users have broadband. Mobile is what matters in this country.  Young people use MXIT , a mobile chat and text message service is exploding as is Facebook.
•   During a lunch interview, an American NGO worker described Internet surfing in a Kenya Computer Café.  African children politely swarmed around her, fascinated by her visits to Yahoo, Google, blogs and email. “They don’t have the money to be part of it yet,” she told me. “But they know it’s there and they want in.”

•    Senegal may have the highest percentage of Internet users in Africa. The country is highly stable with a good economy and education rate. During the years of South African boycotts, global enterprises set up headquarters there and a generation of knowledge workers as evolved, with a new level of awareness of access benefits.

One More Addition to my FaceBook Wish List

When someone sends me a message in Facebook,  I then get notified in my real  email client.  Please let me answer from  my client.  I would be much more efficient and it would let me use the full functionality of a real email client. By dragging me back into Facebook to respond,  you may not be creating a walled garden, but it is a fenced garden and it is not in the user's interest.

If Facebook wants to force us users back in, then at a minimum, it needs to give it's de facto email a great deal more functionality. I am probably going to move conversations started in Facebook over to my GMail Account, where it is easier and faster for me to manage and respond/

Another Creative YouTube Ad

My British friend Adrian Moss of Focus Business has once again sent me an amazing YouTube video this time using a computer simulation to make it appear this gorilla is backing up Phil Collins in the interest of selling Cadbury Chocolate Bars.

This is not exactly a scoop.  The clip is not exactly a scoop.  It has already been view 1.5 million times.  But it is a good follow up to my recent piece on Stephen Voltz, co-producer of the EepyBird Coke Mentos YouTube Clips.

The Cadbury clip is the work of a group called Ass-and-a-Half Productions. I imagine they were as recently obscure as EepyBird. On YouTube you can also see some interesting remixes of the clip, as well as a spoof of a teddy bear hand puppet serving as the drummer, with a poorly masked hand popping out from behind a pillow. There's also a video showing the drummer who is simulated by technology to make it appear the drummer is a gorilla.

I point to these clips for three reasons:

(1) Like the early days of traditional TV, the ads can be really creative. When they are, people feel good about the products. If history repeats itself, these one-of-a-kind pearls of brilliance will eventually suffer from an avalanche of imitators who will suck the edge out of the originals.

(2) They show the potential for online video.  Most business, political and technology video clips feature no more than a talking head, usually for a brief period of time. Theseads show what the medium can do.  They demonstrate  what can be done in original, low-budget, small screen environments.

(3)  You can just watch them and enjoy them without ever  sipping a Coke, eating a mint or chawing on a chocolate bar. They're fun. And fun is a good thing.

Is press freedom a cultural thing?

Accidentally on Purpose Blog » BBC Survey: Would You Rather Be Safe Than Free?

My client Mike Prosceno picked up on my post about a BBC global survey that showed 40% of the respondents preferred social harmony to free press. He drilled a little deeper than I did and found that in the Western world, 70% of respondents preferred free press.

He then noted that the survey re-enforced a key finding in my SAP Global Survey, which was contracted by him, and that is that Citizen Journalism was flourishing in places unaccustomed to free press.

It's a good point.  But I'm still a bit disturbed that nearly one-third of Americans prefer harmony to free press. I wonder what other freedoms they would give up for the sake of said harmony.





Technorati Tags: SAP Global Survey, SAP Global Report, Mike Prosceno

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Blog Council & State of the Revolution

Todd Defren on PR Squared has a good piece that argues what is happening today is an evolution of tools and not a revolution. I happen to respectfully disagree. You can follow wars through history and see an evolutionary progression from rocks in slings to nuclear, but that is not the point. The point is that some wars actually changed the course of history, actually moved the power and control from one group to another.

And the effect of that power transfer from the Czars to the Bolsheviks or from the British to the Colonists has been revolutionary. Social Media is transferring power from large centralized organizations into the hands of the constituencies they are supposed to serve and the impact of that on governments, educators, media, libraries, health providers and, of course, commercial enterprises of all sizes is becoming revolutionary.

The social media revolution may be bloodless, but it is as disruptive as Hell.

On a bold day, I like to think of myself as a forward observer in that revolution. Because I had the good fortune to write a book with a famous corporate blogger at the right point in history, I have helped to spread the world to a multitude of villages and farms across several continents.

Like most revolutions, this one did not start in the centers of population, but off in the hills. Fomented by pissed-off and laid-off developers who can be likened to the peasants of yore, they had an idea.  Unlike them, they also had a new tool in blogging. As the idea spread the tools would develop at an awesome rate and in diverse directions.

This revolution has spread slower than I had hoped and faster than I had reason to imagine. I cn state all the incredible numbers--Nearly 100 million bloggers, 125 YouTube downloads for every paper version of the NY Times sold, etc.

The revolution has now gain in strength and momentum.  There are relatively few institutions that do not feel discomfort from the power-demanding masses behind social media. It is now at the very gates of corporate power.

Which brings me to--of all things--the Blog Council. The Council is being heavily criticized by a good number of my revolutionary friends including the co-author of my book. Some of the criticism hits an accurate mark.  The selected name is pretty lame. Issuing a press release rather than blogging it would have made sense.  Listening before declaring would have made them a wiser body from the start. Stating flatly that this would be a closed body did not represent the brightest light on the ceiling of inspiration.

The Blog Council would be wise to state--via a participant's blog the magic words: "You're right.  We screwed up. This is how we're going to try to do better."

But let's get back to us revolutionaries for a minute, shall we. I for one find that I have spent too much time chanting by torchlight at the castle gates. I have clever answers to the really tough and complex questions being asked behind the Firewalls of power. "How do you measure?" "What's a best practice?" "What happens to your brand when you have 2000 bloggers free to say whatever they please. "How easy will i be to be sued if we do say, 'sorry, we screwed up?'

I know a few members of this council.  I have financial dealings with one of them. I see the members that I know as soldiers in this revolution. They are the forward observers, who have slipped through the bars on the gate, who believe as I do that the corporations will actually prosper greatly by yielding control to the masses.

They are also the ones who can best work out the answers to the sticky questions that I can only answer glibly. When I'm asked, what the ROI is on a blog, I ask what the ROI is on a press release.  it's clever and well-supported by folk n my side of the debate, but it gains no ground for the revolution.

That ground needs to be taken by people inside, people like the blog council. They need to address complex and tedious issues such as the rewriting of employee guidelines, redefinition of proprietary; decentralization of message, and ones I don't even know about. They need to have some of these discussions, some of the time behind closed doors.

This is very similar to my own behavior. When I have a big problem, I rarely come here and tll all of you about it. Instead, I talk to a small handful of friends, friends who perhaps are facing similar problems. This is our personal nature.  I am a huge proponent of greater transparency in the corporation, but it is foolishness to argue for total transparency.  Robert Scoble is the most transparent blogger I know, and even he keeps some secrets, which he shares with a small circle of friends.

So, I can see why the Blog Council is off to--let us say--an inauspicious start. But I hope it gets its chance.  I think they have the potential to bring the revolution to places that revolution has not yet reached.

Marc Orchant Memorial Site & Service

In Memoriam Marc Orchant : December 2007

Marjolein Hoekstra (CleverClogs)

Dutch blogger Marjolein Hoekstra has collected the farewells to Marc in the Blogosphere. It is most touching.

Oliver Starr has announced Memorial Services for Marc

Services for Marc Orchant will be held at 11AM on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 in the Congregation Albert, 3800 Louisiana Ave. NE, Albuquerque, NM. I regret I will not be able to attend. My personal experience has taught me that the immediate family is impacted by the number of attendees.

I won't be able to make it happen, but I am hopeful, someone in the SF Bay Area sets upa Memorial Service for Marc. It would also be useful if someone who is attending could livestream the service so those of us who are not there can share.

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SAP Global Report, Part 6: SAP, Tools & the Killer App

[This is the 6th and final post on the SAP Global Report on Culture, Business & Social media. It covers perceptions, of SAP, social media tools and my take on the true killer app for social media.
Tomorrow, I will begin sending out questions to people all over the world to see how social media is impacting their neighborhoods. Here are the links for the prior posts: Part 1, Overview; Part 2, 7 Key Findings;  Part 3 Findings by World Region; Part 4, Business Analysis; and Part 5,  Communications and Culture. ]

Perceptions of SAP

A good deal of input was received by people with suggestions on what SAP should do regarding social media. The people who were the most knowledgeable about SAP current efforts were the most favorable.  But what also became clear was that SAP’s most successful programs were not generally well known.

A few random comments, are reported here. They do not necessarily represent recommended actions.

SAP should:

“Build ERP around social media and not the reverse.”

“Have a Facebook strategy.”

“Use social media to make SAP feel smaller, more nimble and responsive, rather than big, remote and stodgy.”

“Navigate a careful course to ensure it can deliver on customer needs without cannibalizing.”

“The reliance on 30-year-old technologies at premium prices isn’t going to cut it for SAP, Oracle, IBM and others.”

“[My customers] perceive Microsoft Sharepoint as easier to use and collaborate on than SAP Enterprise Portal. “

“Build social media into planning and strategy applications so that people inside the company, but outside of the department, can make suggestions .”

“SAP, like most ERP vendors forgets it is the user experience which matters most..”

“Most of the SAP [social media] efforts have been internal. They haven't told their story.”

“I would like SAP to deliver my services directly to SAP’s client desks. I’m sure, SAP clients would like it as well because their staff would have the information they need delivered [on demand]. The companies advertising their products and services to B2B would like it.” 

Tools, Trends & Global Neighborhoods

Just two years ago, there were merely two social media tools, blogs and wikis. Both were text-based. Now there is an entire warehouse of tools, all of which are used in tandem with each other, are remixed or are otherwise customized. Blogs are now filled with images, and film clips.  Some tools are not actually tools at all.  Social networks, for example, are meeting places. Mobile has more to do with hardware capability than software.

What is of much greater importance is what is done with any tool.  A hammer for example, can be used to build or bludgeon.  It is mostly the user’s choice. Now there are a great number of users.  Social media tools are like any other tools. They are adapted to accommodate existing needs. Small countries like Ireland, Singapore and Estonia use social media to reach larger markets. Scotland uses it in education to help its children leapfrog ahead of where their parents got. Oppressed countries use social media to enable free speech. Tools get remixed, recalibrated and redistributed in new ways at a very frequent pace.

As the focus has moved from tool to application, some tools are simply taken for granted.  In our 48 interviews, only one person mentioned RSS or tagging, two of social media’s most ubiquitous tools. Whether you use Typepad or Wordpress for a blog platform has become as relevant as whether you ship packages via UPS or FedEx.

Just one year ago the site and the number of visitors was considered extremely important.  There was much talk of the number of visitors at MySpace or YouTube. The general consensus is that such numbers are now less important than had been thought.  Social Media sites are rarely spaces for mass consumption. Instead people tend to bop from site to site seeing the same friends and colleagues at each, whether they are sharing photos, reading blogs, watching videos or sharing the virtual community benefits of a social network.

These personal networks are arranged around shared topical interests.  The most influential members of these networks are very often the most frequent to contribute valuable or interesting information to it.  I call them “Global Neighborhoods.”

Global Neighborhoods have become more important than sites.  Most of them are small; usually each has less than 500 members and often, fewer than 50.  The influence inside them is overwhelmingly peer-to-peer.

This poses an enormous challenge to traditional marketers accustomed to mass communications.  Instead of having mass markets where millions of people can be reached, the world is restructuring into millions of online micro markets where the only way to influence is to join in and through generosity, gain credibility.

The result of the myriad social media tools is a highly decentralized universe where marketing has lost its controls to the market itself.

Youth is the killer app

If one wants to understand what is likely to happen in the next 5, 20 or 50 years, the best way may be to study the habits of children and young adults. They are the Online Generation. They are as comfortable with social media as their parents were with television. YouTube today is better known and more often used than was Big Bird and Sesame Street.

Sites like Webkinz & Club Penguin are starting children into social networking early and possibly changing how they collaborate and connect with people through their lifetimes. Social media becomes a habit that is likely to stay with them through their 50 years or so in the marketplace.

The new professional employee is going to know where he wants to work because of social media, is going to use social media to do his job more effectively than did his or her predecessor and doing so will be as normal a process as using the telephone or email is to older employees of today.

As Ethan Bodnar, a High School student in Connecticut said, 

"I want to work at a place that has an office culture that accepted and used social media for work and play. "

He seems to be representative of his generation.

[This concludes the portion of the Survey which I will be posting.  The remainder consists entirely of specific recommendations I made to SAP.]

 

PRSA Wants to Overcome us Bullies

KDPaine's PR Measurement Blog

KD has an almost unbelievable post about PRSA offering a teleseminar called: "Overcoming the bullies, bloggers, bloviators and bellyachers in this new media." This is lamer than a crateful of frogs after dinner in a French restaurant. Speaking of which, there is probably a future in the restaurant service industry for the PRSA person who came up with this unique idea.

Gotta go.  I have a date to push some little guy into a mud puddle if he doesn't give me lunch money.

BTW--KD has also posted a picture of her with her new book book, looking pretty proud.  I know that feeling. Net best thing to having a baby, or so I would guess.


Technorati Tags: KD Paine, PRSA

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SAP Global Report, Part 5: Communications & Culture

[NOTE--This is the next chunk of the analysis portion of the SAP Global Report on Culture, Business and Technology. It continues with the analysis of critical areas.  If you missed early portions of this report, based on 48 interviews with people in 25 countries, please check these out: PPart 1, Overview; Part 2, 7 Key Findings;  Part 3 Findings by World Region. and Part 4 Business Analysis.]

Communications & Culture

I define social media as any online space where people can have conversations via text, video, photos or audio.  Although, VOIP, email and forums are somewhat conversational, they were not included in my investigation. While others define the term differently, the important point is to understand that social media may be used by marketing departments, it is not merely a tool of marketing. I am among those who would argue that it is in fact a great disruption to the way marketing has been traditionally practiced for the past 5-6 decades.

I see social media as a communications toolset. As such, its use in the enterprise is much broader. I have called social media a revolution.  It is important that this not a marketing revolution, but a conversational revolution. The revolution moves the corporation from one-way monologue to two-way dialog. Now, a corporation can listen and respond to what people who matter have to say and the implications to efficiency are quite vast.

Social Media allows news, information and rumors to travel from peer-to-peer-to-peer at amazing speed. If something inaccurate or malicious is said about a company or person, it can be responded to immediately. One person with a smart phone on a street corner, in a London Tube, or a plummeting plane can be heard or watched worldwide in minutes after an occurrence.  And anyone who cares can respond.

A company can no longer effectively manage and control relevant conversations regarding its business, products or services. Its traditional use of “communications channels” via traditional analysts and media is eroded and in some cases, has hit a point of near disintegration.

Demand-side revolution

Social media is creating a revolution in demand as well as supply” as industry guru Doc Searls said in his Survey interview. This may be the underpinning of a fundamental shift of control from large, centralized organizations out to communities of customers, prospects, partners and affiliates. Social media is driving a decentralization of power that has fundamental implications.

In fact, one of the phenomena that needs to be examined is the issue of decision-making powers. Evidence is overwhelming that power is moving from the center of the enterprise to the edge where an increasing number of decisions are being made. Social media is said to be a cult of generosity and the evidence would argue that the most influential people in social media are indeed the most generous. In short, generosity is good for business, and in fact, can be used as a competitive edge.

Culture & Language

My research shows more than a little ambiguity regarding language and culture.  There is some evidence that language is emerging as the language of Internet commerce and there are obvious benefits to the world speaking just one language.  While we may be closer today than at any point in this post-Babel Era, we are not significantly closer.

Most of China’s 1.3 billion people would disagree with any claims for English dominance, if they could read these words. While many Japanese business people read English; they are uncomfortable writing in it.  In Poland, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, the Czech Republic, Estonia and a great many other countries, English is taught to children and elite members of the business community speak English.

But regional markets speak local languages and this is unlikely to change for a very long time. A business wishing to use social media to conduct conversations in these markets needs to participate in local language conversations as well as those conducted in English.

Social Networks

While three of the world’s largest social networks, MySpace, Facebook and Bebo are mostly English speaking, Orkut and Hi5 seem to be strong because of their adaptability to multiple languages. Add to that, popular localized social networks in a great many countries, it is clear that a majority of social network users prefer local languages.

The wisest course for a multinational company of any size is to develop and maintain a two-pronged approach.

Culture shapes more than just the language. It also shapes who uses social networks and how they use them. Canadians and the British, for example, have embraced Facebook, but they use it differently than many Americans. While the Americans often use social networks to make new acquaintances, the British and Canadians tend to use it to just speak with people they already know in the tangible world. This behavior is reinforced by the fact that neither the British, nor the Canadians, or the Germans for that matter, blog in great numbers, perhaps because blogging can be viewed by strangers as well as friends.

Citizen Journalism

In cultures where society is emerging from monolithic governments, such as Russia, China, the former Soviet satellites and Singapore, citizen journalism is on a rapid rise.  In societies where a free press is entrenched it is emerging more slowly. Companies choosing to conduct business in these emerging countries should consider citizen journalism as part of their communications strategy that will increase in time.

German culture

Of the developed nations, Germany appears to be the slowest to embrace social media. While some say German business cultures stress privacy, there is greater evidence that German business is more concerned with ROI.  Like England, Canada, and for that matter Estonia, young Germans eschew blogs but embrace social networking.

[Next: Respondent perceptions of SAP.]

SNCR Symposium & the EepyBird Guy

I was impressed with a great many presenters and attendees at the recent SNCR Symposium, a panel featuring Ricardo Guerrero,Dell's Twitter Guy and Christopher Barger of GM showed me how far the enterprise has progressed since Scoble and I wrote the book.  Back then, bloggers were just revolutionaries up in the hills to be disdained and ignored. SNCR showed me that social media is now swimming in the swift warm waters of the mainstream.

I missed the opening keynote address by Dr. Nora Barnes, of Umass Dartmouth, who's report on the amazing use of social media by nonprofits generated favorable buzz throughout the conference. Next time I won't miss her for the world.

But I have to admit, the guy who blew me away the most was Stephen Voltz, the soft spoken, transparent and creative partner of EepyBird. If you are not among the 40 million people who have viewed at least one of the incredible collection of the Coke Mentos videos, then watch this one. If you do not laugh, or at least smile at length, then I would be surprised.

Stephen Voltz, the larger of the two mad professors was at Symposium to receive an Award for Excellence and to speak on a few panels. He's a large Teddy Bear of a guy, who's EepyBird is a creative company of two employees, producing brilliance in a town in Maine that nobody ever heard of.

Coke's first response to the YouTube ad was to crush these Eepybird guys like an empty can headed to the recycler. But in the end they embraced them.  It is unclear just how the monetization works, but my sense is what began as a labor of creative love has become a nice gold pot for Stephen and his partner.

I am going to interview him again for the now-restarting SAP Global Survey, but here's what's important about the Eepybird work, for those of us who own stock in neither Coke nor the Mentos mint company. They are the poster child for answering the question of how big brands can use social media to advertise in a way that is not only inoffensive, but is highly effective. Once you watch it, you will probably think twice about what you swallow with your Diet Cokes, but you may feel just a bit better about the brand.

Major brands and their advertisers, should study these video clips.  They should be taught to marketing and communications students. What they might learn is that in the social media transparency, creativity and humor work extremely well.  So does originality.  Come to think of it, all those things worked in traditional advertising, until everything started homogeneously blinded into drivel.

But there may be a way for brands to get something equally as good. EepyBird is an independent operation. You should start lining up at the EepyDoor for the chance to work with these two true originals.

40% of world prefer social harmony to free press

The BBC reports that it conducted a survey in which only 56% of those polled though a free press was important to society.  A full 40% thought restricting press for the sake of social harmony was preferable.  I wonder how they would vote on incarcerating social dissenters or perhaps waterboarding activists.

Marc Orchant is dead at 42

Marc Orchant, a husband, father and talented writer is died a short while ago, Oliver Starr has announced. He was loved by those close to him and respected and enjoyed by just about everyone who had the pleasure of knowing him. It is hard to believe this has actually happened and I wish there was something wise I could say but there is not.

This is very sad, very sad indeed.

SAP Global Survey: Part 4 Business Analysis

[I have been publishing the results of my three months global research on state of culture, business and technology as an assignment from SAP.  This 4th Chunk is the Business Analysis section.  If you missed previous Sections, please click on Part 1, Overview; Part 2, 7 Key Findings; and Part 3 Findings by World Region.

The survey itself will continue as an ongoing project. If you think you have something to contribute to this conversation, please ping me at ShelIsrael1@gmail.com.]

4.    Analysis

The following are my subjective observations in various key areas, based on my SAP Global Survey findings as well as the additional conversations, mentioned earlier.

A.   Business

Over the past two years the business community has moved through the phases of denial, dismissal, contempt and hostility regarding social media. Now they are beginning to embrace them.  In some parts of the world, this is still occurring at a snail’s pace. In certain pockets of the US, there is an emerging sense of urgency being demonstrated. I believe this is a wise course that will gain momentum elsewhere in the world over the next few years.

The Pain Point

Many of the barriers toward business acceptance have diminished, but one remains. It is one that needs to be addressed on a strategic level and it’s focal point is middle management. While at the c-level and junior levels, there appears to be increasing enthusiasm for social media, middle managers are often more resistant. They often occupy the corporate seat where change causes the greatest pain. On one hand, middle managers are being prodded to creatively initiate new programs. On the other; they are held responsible for continued profitability and efficiency of existing ones. To them, social media can feel like a time-sucking distraction from their primary responsibility.

The Entry Point 

With this in mind, a good number of otherwise diverse companies have found it a wise course to determine a social media low-pain point of entry, one where disruption is minimal, risk factors few and deadline pressures soft. Internal wikis requiring large numbers of employee collaboration work well.  A Massachusetts company’s first project was a wiki to organize a sports team two years ago. They now have several public blogs and are integrating online video with them.

Like the Massachusetts company, a great many enterprise efforts start internally.

What to Measure?

A second set of  barriers involves revolves around the insatiable enterprise hunger for statistical evaluations .  How do we measure the success of a social media program.  How do we compare it to traditional marketing efforts? What’s the ROI on a blog? What are the industry standards?  Point me to a few Best practice efforts.

Social media is, in fact, in a dynamic stage and so are the quantification efforts.  There are some such as Google Analytics. More sophisticated programs are being pioneered by companies such as BuzzLogic. But they have not yet achieved any great level of sophisticated measurement.

Why is measurement so vexing to so many?

For one thing, the issue of what should be measured remains a challenge. While a traditional media relations campaign may look at newspaper article impressions, blogs work differently. The newspaper is a one-directional publisher. A blogger is part of a network, one containing 75 million or so nodes. A blogger can have very few readers and be extremely influential. Take for example a political blogger with only three readers. Measurement tools would determine this blogger to be irrelevant. But what of those three readers were the presidents of the US and Russia as well as the Chinese Prime Minister?

ROI is even more difficult to measure. Social media has to do with conversations, about getting closer to customers. It is no easier to measure the ROI of a blog or an online video clip, than the value of a good business conversation.  For that matter, how do you measure the value of a CEO spending four days traveling to and from and attending a conference, where he speaks on a panel for 15 minutes?

Social Media is just starting. In general business, it’s adoption is just now starting. There has not yet been sufficient time for Best Practices.  There are only good ideas, some of which will be refined and evolve into Best Practices.  Likewise, standards usually come in to play once a technology matures. Social media is currently moving too dynamically to be standardized.

A Hilly World

This Survey made clear that the world is not so flat as Thomas Friedman’s book implied. But it is getting hillier.  The Internet has made geography less relevant that the seller is in Chennai and the buyer is in San Francisco. But social media cannot replace the face-to-face experience. While the culture of business transaction is becoming globalized, local cultures remain diverse. Language remains an enormous barrier, which I will discuss in a few paragraphs.

A second factor of Global Hilliness is that the decisions are rolling downhill, from headquarters to the front lines. One Survey respondent noted that the same phenomenon has made armies more efficient because decisions are made fastest where the action occurs.

This, obviously, restructures the corporation in function, if not organization. Authority and influence are becoming decentralized and the implications to a global enterprise are significant.

Internal & recruiting benefits

The SAP Global Survey also showed the most immediate and universal benefit of social media in the enterprise often happens internally, not externally. Even employees who do not use social media themselves seem to enjoy the fact that management trusts them sufficiently to have the option. There is also evidence that allowing social media is likely to attract the best and brightest of the next generation. One high schooler told me, “I just won’t join a company that will not let me blog.

Corporate credibility

The SAP Global Survey confirmed what has often been reported. People trust what is communicated by everyday people online more than they trust authorities being quoted in traditional media.   As one interviewee put it, “I trust companies that are open and honest with me. I will pay more for their products and services because I can talk with and about them on the Internet.

[Next: Analysis of communications issues]

Techcrunch post detects whole stockpile of smoking guns in Sam Sethi saga

This is getting ridiculous.

Michael Arrington weighs in with a mysteriously received dubiously dated Blognation term sheet for a half million pounds from Secora, and ailing British Venture firm. The post is the tip of the dirtpile. Read the comments and watch the story unravel.

Marc Orchant, in 8th day of coma, remains unpaid by Sethi

[Marc Orchant at DEMO 07. Photo by Shel]

My friend Marc Orchant suffered a massive cardiac infarction on Dec. 2 and remains in a coma. Marc was the first editor for Naked Conversations, during that first month when Robert and I could not get it together and nothing got written. Marc decided he was not suited to counseling the Odd Couple and stepped out of the project.  That jarred Robert  & me into learning how to work together.

Marc has a wonderful wife, Sue, and a kid. The general wisdom on comas--I know very little about them--is that the longer your in one, the less optimistic the prognosis. So the news with Marc is really becoming quite bad.

Like everyone else, I wish there was something I could do and say.  Marc is decent and geerous and bright and much too young to have been so horribly stricken and it makes me sad.

The family updates are being posted on a section of Starr Trek, Oliver Starr's new blog. Oliver and Marc are best friends. I have often seen them together at industry gatherings and they have always felt sort of like a matched set. Oliver, as regular readers here already know, has been embroiled in a scathing divorce from Sam Sethi's Blognation, accusing his former employer fraudulent behavior and nonpayment of wages. This is also where Marc worked until last week.

After a 4 am phone call from Sam to Oliver a couple of days ago, Oliver agreed to stop publicly calling out Sam--if Sam would simply pay Marc's back salary to Sue Orchant. Sam, Oliver reports, did what he always does. He promised to send the check that day, and forward evidence of payment to Oliver.

Then he did nothing.

Earlier, this week Sam accused me of getting my facts wrong in reviewing his record. Yet all week long, smoking guns have been piling up on the side of the path he has taken. 

2nd Reporter quits Blognation; Claims Sethi lied

About mobilejones the blog and background of mobile jones

I did not realize that Debi Jones had quit BlogNation at the same time as Oliver Starr until just a few minutes ago.  But she has and she has posted that Sam Sethi lied on at least one of his key points left on this blog.

No one can really say for sure.  There are a few voices on one side of this and then there is Sam's. I am sure there will be more twists in this road before the story fully unfolds.

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The Kindness of Strangers

I kvetched on Twitter that I had forgotten a coat on my trip to Boston. Several people expressed sympathy and a few commented on my abject stupidity. But then I met Michael Kringsman. You may know him from his ZDNet blog on project failures. He's also CEO of Asuret, a Brookline-based IT consultancy. Michael had tagged along with  James Governor, who set up a meeting with me.  James and I have connected through blogs for years, but had never met.

I invited Michael to come watch SAP's Mike Prosceno and me speak at the SNCR Symposium the next day as my guest. When he returned, he showed up with this beautiful Marmot down-filled blue coat. I asked for an address so I could mail it back and he told me to keep it. He shrugged, saying it was an old coat and was almost gone anyway. The coat is in fine condition as far as I can tell. Since I will probably wear it only for tris from California to the Northeast in Winter, it is likely to last longer than I will.

Every time I wear it, I'll remember Michael's kindness and generosity. I am moved by it.

Lionel at Dell weighs in on the Blog Council

Lionel Menchaca, the primary author of Direct2Dell has weighed in on the instantly controversial Blog Council. Of course, he is optimistic about the Council's future, a cynic might say. His employer, after all, is among the Council's founding members.  But is you make that assumption, you don't know Lionel.

I too, sang praise for the Council launch and cynics might note that I work with SAP, another founding member.  But then, if you think that, you probably don't know me either.

Will the council change anything? Who knows?  Predicting outcomes is always dangerous, and the graveyards are filled with the heavily hyped councils and consortia of yore. Eached launched with bravado that turned out to be much bigger than their actual accomplishments.

There was no news conference for the council. No big party with free champagne and designer bling. No PR Agency took any media trained spokesperson on tour. No trees died for a glossy covered press it. Instead the Council put out a simple, adjective deprived press release over the wire and emailed a heads up--not to the NY Times--but to a small handfull of bloggers.

And in some circles, people I know, like and respect, competed to tell you how it will suck. Maybe it will, but then maybe, this council will move the social media needle in many of the world's largest companies.

It happens that I know a few of the players involved and they are not your corporate traditional marketing suits. They've been the forward observers taking the enterprise hill. They've taken inches of enterprise terrain, then defended and expanded on it. And after a couple years effort, they represent companies who have come to see the value of social media. They are also a highly qualified group for addressing issues that befuddle us all, issues of governance, measurement and the release of outmoded and ineffective attempts to control message and customer.

Yeah, the Council could fall flat on its face, but I hope not.

That brings me back to Lionel at Dell. When it comes to having a cynical start for a large corporation, he has been there and done that. We should look at what happened when and after Dell started blogging.

Has blogging saved Dell? Of course not. It takes much more thn some cool blogging and Twittering to do that.  It takes better product and a whole lot more. But social media has taught Dell that it is good business to listen to customers and that's a big slice of the success pie chart.

I think the Blog Council opens the door a crack for more companies who behave the way Dell used to behave to use social media to become more like Dell is.






Technorati Tags: lionel menchaca, blog council, direct2dell

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Live Tweeting SNCR Symposium

Instead of live blogging SNCR Symposium, I am live tweeting it. You can follow me at shelisrael. I will post a longer piece about it after the conference is over.

Sam Sethi Replies

Sam Sethi, publisher of Blognation takes strong issue on my report of Oliver Starr's angry departure.  He left it as a comment, but I thought it deserved the same level of visibility as the original report received. He closes by taking a swipe at "friends of Mike Arrington" spreading untuths that Sam characterizes as "Naked Conversations."

To clarify a point, I know and like Mike who was been very kind and generous to me when Naked Conversations was published. But if I have a friend in this situation, it is Oliver Starr, who chose to leave TechCrunch to join Blognation. In any case, my loyalty is to my readers, not my friends.

I don't know Sam and we are now in a his-word-vs-the-other-guy's word situation. I would be surprised if what Oliver wrote proves to be untrue.

Sam has one legitimate gripe with me I think. I was covering news and I did not try to gain the balance of pursuing a comment from Sam before publishing. I wish blogging worked the way newspapers do, but that is not the case. The best I can do is draw your attention to what he has to say.

Sam's Comment in full:

A number of facts need to be corrected in your post. Much of what you wrote is blogsphere fiction and gossip. 1.I resigned - Mike never fired me on matter of principal. 2.I never stole any money and Arrington knows that as he claimed it from the sponsors. In fact Mike never paid me and still owes me expenses. 3. All the editors knew coming in that the project was seeking funding and would only be paid once we got the funding. That has taken 6 weeks longer than we planned. They will all be paid in full and we will funds in place to trade through to profitability so I guess this short term gain will disappear very soon. 4. I never stole the blognation.com domain. Odd given the owner Tristan is part of the blognation management team. So please could you correct this post because apart from this is ugly there is little or no actual fact. And yet I am truly sorry that the editors have had to endure this longer period of fund raising causing them to not being paid as expected. I had the same experience with Arrington and never intended to replicate that but it has happened and all of the remaining editors who were not fired from blognation know directly from the VC's when they expect to be paid and it is before xmas and imminent. I wish that this dirty laundry never came out publically, it is hard enough building a global startup from scratch in less than 6 months with out Arrington and his friends trying to take you down but I guess that is the naked conversation.

Huge Companies form Blog Council

The Blog Council

I learned earlier tonight of a very significant announcement tomorrow. A new group called The Blog Council has been formed.  What makes it newsworthy is that the members include
AccuQuote, Cisco Systems, The Coca-Cola Company, Dell Computer, Gemstar-TV
Guide, General Motors, Kaiser Permanente, Microsoft, Nokia, SAP (my client),
Starwood Hotels & Resorts and Wells Fargo.

If anyone still doubts that blogging and social media are going mainstream, here is smoking gun evidence. Each of these companies has active social media programs.

In a release slated to go out tomorrow morning, the council says it will:

• How do global brands manage blogs in more than one language?
  
• What do you do when 2000 employees have personal blogs?
  
• What is the role of the corporate brand in a media landscape increasingly geared toward consumer-generated media?
  
• What is the correct way to engage and respond to bloggers who write about your company?

These are complex questions, ones that are bewst resolved through collaborative thinking. In fact, what I like and respect about this announcement is it's collaborative nature. It feels true to the social media approach and hearing it from such formidable voices gives some vindication to some of us who have sometimes felt we were hollering in a hurricane.


Technorati Tags: SAP, The Blog Council, Accuquote, Cisco, Cocacola, general motors, Microsoft, starwood, wells fargo

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Slides Up for SNCR Symposium. Early Report on SNCR Forum

I have posted my slides for tomorrow's Symposium talk with SAP's Mike Prosceno on the results of my Global Survey on Culture, Business and Social Media. The slides are not entirely different than the ones I posted for Spain. The big difference will be in having Mike share the dais with me. Why SAP would want to hire the likes of me is an interesting piece of the story. Why SAP thinks this research work is important is even more interesting.

I spent three hours in a  SNCR Advisory Board meeting.  I talked too much since I've been drinking coffee pretty steadily since about 5 this morning. But I am impressed with the team Jennifer has assembled.  The board's credentials and expertise span academia, corporate communications, and just about all aspects of social media. They are moving forward on initiatives in publishing, research and academia to name some.

There was a good deal of talk on the 4th annual Spring SNCR Forum.  Personally I think it is will be the best ever. We have taken over an entire vineyard.  It is going to focus on mastering the conversation.  It's not about teaching basic skills or arguing the case for why company or organizations or universities should or should not blog. Instead it will be for the professionals who want to address the complex issues, such as measurement, governance, and cultural transformation. Plus there will be more social opportunities than we have previously had.

Zuckerberg Posts on Beacon SNAFU

Facebook | The Facebook Blog

Mark Zuckerberg has posted "Thoughts on Beacon" on the Facebook blog. A key statement:

"We've made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we've made even
more with how we've handled them. We simply did a bad job with this
release, and I apologize for it."

In a carefully worded, but credible statement, he talks about trying to help users find their friends stuff wherever it resides on the Internet and of establishing a balance between functionality and simplicity.

As he knows, Beacon did not come out that way. But perhaps it is salvagable. The goal of Beacon inches toward my thematice Global Neighborhoods, in which no site is relevant.  What is relevant is your circle of friends, existing by topic, not URL.

I think Mark, skated Facebook onto thin ice before recuing it on this one. In the future, he might use the Facebook blog to tell his users what his compay is trying to do.  He might also start a Facebook Group that can become a focal point for valuable user input. He also should consider engaging in blog discussion a bit faster.

It will be interesting to see hw Facebook adjusts course on this one.






Technorati Tags: mark zuckerberg, facebook

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Note to Zuckerberg: Look at what Mena Trott did.

Robert and I never collaborate on blog topics, but w seem to have both posted questions on Facebook at about he same time. Robert more directly addresses the Beacon controversy, which I decided to leave out.

But he asks the key question: Where's Zuckerberg?  In 2004, Six Apart was the blogosphere darling that FaceBook is today. That was until the surprised users by starting to charge for a new version of MovableType. What saved the company's credibility was that co-founder Mena Trott used her blog to make it right with users and to say those three magic words "We screwed up."

Now both Robert and I have been champions of Facebook. I for one, will allow them to try new ways to make revenue.  The first one has so very clearly failed. That is easily solved. But the bigger problem, and the one that could bring this sprinting star banging intto the hurdles is to not demonstrate it is listening to it's users, not responding to what they want, not showing it realizes that it is the users who are in power, not them.

To Scoble I say. Yeah, where's Zuckerberg?

Connie's Mother's Blog

Connie Reece, the Austin lady with a boa informed me that her 83-year-old mother has started a blog, and it's darned good. It reveals where both Connie and her sister get their spunk. At the risk of sounding competitive, I do a video blog with my 87-year-old mother-in-law Jean Berman. You can find them mixed in here.

I think senior citizen blogging is more than just cute. People who have lived 80 years have seen a lot, and have a certain wisdom that people my age have not yet acquired. Now, social media let's them share what they've learned; let's them tell nuggets of the stories that have been their lives for either their families or the whole world to see.

Thank's Connie's Mom. Keep them coming.

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Oliver Starr leaves blognation; Says Sethi never paid him

blognation USA » Blog Archive » An Open Letter to Sam Sethi

Oliver Starr writes an Open Letter in Blognation to Sam Sethi, owner of Blognation, accusing Sam of not paying him or any other of the network of talented blogger-journalists that have joined Sam. You may recall that less than a year ago, Techcrunch's Mike Arrington fired Sam during the post-Les Web 3 firestorm in which Mike accused Sam of keeping funds that belonged to TechCrunch.

Oliver subsequently left TechCrunch and joined Blognation. Between these two controversies, Sam also got accused of having also stolen the Blognation name.

This is an ugly story. It is hard enough for a serious blogger to get any compensation, as I well know.  But to have worked for it and not received what you've earned that really sucks. Sam has not yet replied. It will be interesting to see how he explains this one.


Technorati Tags: oliver starr, sam sethi, mike arrington, blognation, techcrunch

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Boston Blogger Dinner this Thursday

David Parmet is organizing a blogging dinner in Boston for the night after tomorrow in conjunction with the SNCR Symposium. If you are around, please join David, SNCR founder Jen McClure and me. Go to his blog because he needs the links.  That will send you to his wiki where you can sign up.  The password is "Home" which was not the obvious to me.

David has told me that he is treating the first 50 people to sign up for this shindig.

Note to Communicators: Join, don't pitch

Lately, I have been hit by a bevy of bad PR pitches.  They have about the same effect n me as eating bad clams. I am a recovering publicist, so I try to be gentle and encouraging to PR folk, even though I rarely write about a pitched company or topic. But this week, I know I got grumpy. Enough is enough.

So many of my favorite bloggers are PR folk. There are probably too many to mention. But Phil Gomes, Mike Manuel, Kami Huyse, Joe Thornley, Shel Holtz, David Parmet, Josh Hallett, and Chris Heuer are the first to come to mind.  There are others, but I'm feeling link-lazy.

Many started blogging before or at about the same time as I did and, as far as I can tell, few of them reached prominence in their field before they became so immersed in blogging and social media. They figured out that the fundamentals of PR had shifted. Instead of pitching influencers, they could be influencers.  They realized that while a hit in the times or at Scobleizer was nice, a hit in their own posts could have its impact as well.

Each of these players gave me hope that enough PR practitioners would understand and embrace the fundamental change in the PR practice.  That their was greater PR impact in talking with client customers than sending them messages through traditional tactics.

But the taper off seems to be sharpening.  My experience is that an increasing number of PR folk are trying to treat bloggers as media. They want to find the 3-5 highest ranked topical bloggers and get hits that can be converted to clips.

They've learned smarmy little tricks like telling bloggers that they consider the blogger influential.  It takes little time for a blogger to realize the pitcher has never read the blog they are pitching.

Here's the real trick. Don't pitch the conversational network.  Join it.  start your own blog. Get into the social networks like Facebook. Send your own tweets.  Be part of the conversation so that we bloggers can see who you are and what yo do and what you have to say.

Then when you say something that is useful or interesting to my readers, chances are I will link to you. If I write something, and you can add value to the conversation--new insight, new data, a different perspective, I will scurry to your blog and read you for a while. Kami Huyse did this to me a while back and I became a fan of her blog and recommend it to all sorts of people. When Kami & Josh launched Sea World's Roller Coaster blog, they didn't have to pitch me. I saw they had news that was relevant and I wrote about it because my audience would be interested. Any of the other bloggers listed above also have sufficient transparency and authenticity. If they wrote about a client, I would not need a pitch from them to be motivated to find a post that would be relevant to my readers.

In the end, that is where my loyalty rests.  I write for the people who come here. 

My point is this. PR fiolk have a huge new opportunity.  They can now have actual relationships with the public.  They can bring back what they learn i conversations to clients. That's the real value in blogger relations.  The conversation means a great deal, the blogger rankings, in most cases, means very little.

DC Report: There really is a government here...

I just completed my kickoff keynote at the ALI Social Media in Government conference. Attendance was better by 50% than it was last year. I don't think that had much to do with my participation so much as it has to do with the relentless advance of social media itself.

The room was filled with about 125 people, mid-level professionals in government.  Like people I meet in enterprise environments, they are working the problem of social media, people trying to figure out how to convince decision-makers that relinquishing control to your constituencies is a good thing, that listening to irate comments will diminish them.

These were real people doing real jobs, some of them with a fair amount of passion.

Now, I pack and head to SNCR's Symposium in Boston, where I address an entirely different audience with Mike Prosceno of SAP. We will be discussing the SAP Survey, which I have been publishing here. The Symposium is primarily about research, and how the SAP research was conducted will hopefully be of interest.

EU Broadband Access rate is soaring

My friend Adrian Moss at Focus  pointed me to this new Eurostat Report on EU Internet usage. Broadband jumped from 2006 to 2007 by nearly 50% to 42%.  Two countries I follow pretty closely really boomed. Ireland broadband adoption went from a mere 13% in 2006 to 31% in 2007 and Italy jumped from 16% to 25%.

In my talks, I often say that the largest barrier to social media in Europe is broadband access.  Pretty soon, I'll need to update that observation and I will be happy to do it.


Technorati Tags: eurostat, adrian moss, focus

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Edelman points out a new spin on astroturfing

Richard Edelman - 6 A.M.: License to Operate Online.

When his agency is not enmeshed in it's own controversies, Richard Edelman has a good eye for the ethically challenged practices of marketers and is quick to point them out. In this case, he points to a recent TechCrunch post in which, Dan Ackerman Greenberg of The Comotion Group,
suggests that his firm creates controversy in the comments section
below the video. “We get a few people in our office to log in
throughout the day and post heated comments back and forth…we aren't
afraid to delete comments if someone is saying our video sucks…"

Astroturfing is a practice that started in the slimier corners of the Richard Nixon White House. Charles Colson, who woud later serve time for his contributions to Watergate, set up a system where a network of pseudo "irate citizens" would call and write editors to protest any article that was perceived to be negative to Nixon.

It was called "astroturfing" because it appeared to be grassroots. But there were no roots. Just something artificial that could deceive you, if you didn't look closely enough.

My thanks to Dan Ackerman for being so transparent in his sleaziness. I will remember to avoid anything related to you.

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Scientists Say Global Warming is expanding the Tropics

The BBC has a story covering a research report from the UN Climate Summit in Bali, saying that the width of the area we call the Tropics has expanded by nearly five degrees of latitude. I can see some short-sighted opportunitists gleefully planning new destination resorts in untapped areas.

But those untapped areas are underdeveloped nations and their problems are that weather changes will cause draught and famine and the inevitable related human and wildlife suffering.

There are some things in the news that I find more depressing than FaceBook Beacon and lame advertising concepts.


Technorati Tags: global warmng, tropics widen

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EBE07 & Government slides posted online

I have posted my presentation slides from Evento Blog Espana from last week as my keynote slides for ALI's Social Media in Government  at Slideshare. Use them in any way you find useful, including wrapping virtual fish in them.

SAP Global Report. Part 3: Social Media by Region

[This is the third of four parts I am publishing of the SAP Global Report on Culture, Business & Social Media.  It compares and contrasts what is happening by geographic region. You can see Part One here, which tells you the story of how the report was researched and Part Two here, listing my seven key findings]

The Americas
.
•    The US continues to drive most social media innovation with most new products and social media products originating in traditional tech clusters. Silicon Valley remains home to the world’s three most popular blogging platforms; to four of the world’s five most popular social networks Facebook. It is a hotbed for microblogging and online video.
•    The time spread from geek to everyday people in the United States, as mentioned above, is widespread and accelerating.  Social media strategists talk about marketing between the coasts.”  Mainstream US enterprise shunned blogging just two years ago, they are now scurrying to embrace it. 
•    Other gaps are shortening as well. Young people, raised on internet communications are embracing social media innovations nearly in tandem to technology insiders. Likewise, geography lags are getting shorter as well. Tech adoption between Palo Alto, California and say Dubai or the Czech Republics have shortened from years to months.

•    Nascent social media projects have also begun to pervade government and educational bodies. Conferences for government workers, librarians, vertical publishers are being held for the first time and are well attended.

•    With few exceptions, Canada emulates adoption patterns in the US.  However, business blogging remains much rarer in Canada. Canadians latched on to Facebook faster than did Americans and today about one in 10 Canadians is a Facebook user. But, they use it differently than their American neighbors. Instead of finding new friends, they just talk to people they already know in the tangible world.
•     Brazil has Latin America's largest online population, with about 16 million monthly unique visitors or about 10% of total population. Nearly a third has broadband access.  It the Western Hemisphere’s leader in e-government. Last election, about 120 million of them voted electronically. Over 90% of its taxpayers files online. The country also has an advanced e-banking system and most people can access some of their medical records online. There are a surprisingly high number of CEO bloggers and it is not uncommon for businesses to experiment in the social media. Brazil, has a disproportionately young which may explain the very high popularity of social networks and other sharing sites. Orkut is the overwhelming social network of choice. Fotolog, Flogao and Flickr ,three photo sharing sites are among the most popular, as are Google and YouTube. Facebook does not rank in the top 100 sites. perhaps because its navigation is more text-intensive than Orkut and its applications are all in English.
•    Chile claims to be the most technologically developed country in Latin America. According to ISI 2007, in the first quarter of 2007, Chileans spent an average of $532 USD per person in information technology. There is no doubt that young  people are taking great strides in adopting social media. Internet's primary users are children and teenagers from 6 to 17, followed by young men age 18 to 29, mainly from the higher half of the country’s socioeconomic sectors. In the poorest neighborhoods, computer cafés are jammed with young men playing games online. Government has started allowing RSS subscription to websites and a couple of ministries post informational videos on YouTube.  But business remains slow to adopt, and when it does, the project is often internal.
•    Argentina, has been slower to adopt social media, partly because half the country’s population remains below the poverty line. The country’s emerging middle class is slowed by a home broadband connection cost of $100 monthly. This has lead to the high popularity of computer cafes, prevalent in most cities. People pay for connection by the hour. Igooh is a independent citizen journalism arm of La Nacion, Argentina’s national newspaper and online site. Igooh’s adoption is steep and La Nacion’s is flat.  People use Igooh to socialize and publish examples of personal creativity more than to consume news.  Igooh’s founder Ignacio Escribano believes social media is the most revolutionary innovation since the Gutenberg Press. “But Revolutions take time,” he observed. “Perhaps decades.”

Western Europe

•    Western Europe’s culture is diverse. This is a factor in a very uneven social media development. A second contributing factor is the equally diverse fluctuations of broadband adoption and cost from one country to the next.

•    Some European strategists believe in playing follow-the-leader with the US, allowing America to get wet at the “bleeding edge,” adopting only after technology is refined and stabilized. This “fashion following” frustrates Europe’s most innovative social media practitioners, two of whom have moved to the US during the course of this survey.

•    Social media has begun to disrupt “master-servant” business models in France and Spain.  Less so, in Germany and hardly at all in Italy, where broadband access lags.

•    Small countries see the advantage of social media. Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands are among the most blogging countries per population in EU. Irish entrepreneurs have used blogs effectively to establish US market presence.

•    Many European companies value social media as the most efficient way to reach American markets.

•    In Italy, one of the EU’s slowest broadband adopters, there are only 7.5 million visits to social networks in a month. 80% of them are under age 30.

•    Germany has been the slowest advanced country to embrace blogging.  But it does not lag in social networking, where, according to Comscore, 45 percent of Germans who go online use social networks. While MySpace remains the most popular site among Germans, StudiVZ, a German-language social network targeted to students received 3.1 million visitors in July 2007.  Facebook, which has grown this year across Europe at a rate exceeding 400%,  has not yet caught on in Germany. The reluctance of German businesses to permit blogging is often attributed to a love for privacy. A closer look would indicate it is more because German executives want to see a tangible ROI on any activity in which time is invested. In the rare occasions when German companies elect to use social media, they often outsource it to consultants, with the result being an ineffective product that is not integrated with the company culture.

•    Scotland is a world leader in using social media in education. Educators are using virtual reality as well as other innovations to engage students in innovative ways. A public school educator encourages students to work with teachers via social media to determine what they will be taught. Children of parents who have rarely left the UK are encouraged to interact with people all over the world. Behind it all is a strategy to help the next generation to leapfrog into the global marketplace. Facebook has gone from near zero in Ireland to over 130,000 users in six months. At its current rate it will overtake Bebo, which started in Ireland.

Eastern Europe & Russia

•    Countries that were under Soviet control until approximately 1990, started with fresh slates and have relatively high internet involvement. Several eastern countries are well-beyond their Western neighbors in terms of Internet and social media adoption. Citizen journalism flourishes in many of these countries.

•    Estonia is the most connected European country with free, virtually ubiquitous WiFi access provided by the government. It has a highly active e-government, and has a strong pan-European role in e-transactions including banking, purchasing and gambling. Over 90% of Estonian speaking people under age 25 use rate.ee, the localized social network. It’s dependence on internet-related activities for its national operations and economy made it vulnerable to cyber attacks alleged to have stemmed from Russia.

•    From 25-to-30% of Russia’s142 million use the Internet from home or work. About 30% of families have PCs, but not all are Internet enabled. Around 65% own cell phones, but not more than 20% of them use them to go online. There are at least one million bloggers on LiveJournal. Bloggers discuss more politics than business. There is a lot of localized information sharing.  Russians watch a good deal of US-uploaded YouTube clips and there are expressions of surprise of how much in common the people of both countries share. Nearly all traditional media in Russia reflects only the government’s viewpoint. This has given birth to citizen journalism, the first of which is Realno.com, has a network of 320 journalists.  Relatively new, it is receiving about1000 unique visitors daily, but appears to be growing.

•    The lack of business and technology legacy makes Eastern Europe a hotbed for rapid social media emergence. An example is Bulgaria, which fancies itself, “the Silicon Valley of Eastern Europe,” and boasts a low-cost, high-talent development community. One-fourth of Bulgarian households have computers. 75% have cellphones and a great many Bulgarians use them to get online. Internet penetration in Sofia, Bulgaria's capitol, is 50%, although the rest of the country is only 25%.  While older generations studied Russian, the younger is required to study English.

•    From 2000 to 2006, Polish internet users increased by over 307%.  With a population of 38 million, there are 25 million cell phones and 10-15 million PCs, with an estimated 13 million people or 34% using the internet, but adoption is growing fast and it is estimated 50% of the population will be online in three years. Broadband access, however is small--about 1.75 million. The number of home Internet users is increasing, while the number using it at work is declining. Citizen journalism, blogging and social networking are flourishing. Many young Poles see the Internet as a short route to career stardom. Bands have started there and flourished. Bloggers have risen quickly to points of significant national influence. . . Wiadomości24.pl is a citizen journalism network of 760 writers where multiple viewpoints are shared.

•    With the exception of Denmark, Scandinavian countries, Baltic countries and Germany have not glommed onto blogging.  But they are zealous users of Wikipedia and localized social networks do well. Wikis are relatively  popular inside the enterprise.

•    In Ukraine, a nation of46 million people, businesses universally provide internet access to employees. About 38% of it is broadband.  Despite, sometimes dangerous friction with it’s Russian neighbor, Ukrainians argue that it is one of the world’s most promising markets for technology in general and social media in particular.

•    In the Baltic nations, about 90% of young people are using social networks.

•    In the Czech Republic, there are 10 million people and 12.5 millions cell phones, 25% more phones than users. Among18-40 year-old men, having the latest mobile device is a status symbol. The country is wild for SMS. During Christmas 2006, Czechs sent about 60 million text messages. However, only about 500,000 people, or 5% of the population use mobile internet connection. About 35% of Czech households have PCs, purchased mostly for children. Their parents access the Internet at work—often for personal purposes. About 2/3s of all computers are Internet connected.  Older Czechs speak Russian, but their children speak English because the latter language has replaced the former in education programs. Social media has not yet really taken off because there are few Czech localized versions.  As more young Czechs become English-proficient, adoption is likely to escalate and the business and cultural changes are likely to be significant.

Asia

•    In China, social media is used more effectively as an instrument of social change than as a business tool. Business users, mostly blog to advertise or to create direct sales catalogs. Growth in social media is enormous. In two years, the number of bloggers has risen from 1.2 million to over 20 million. Bloggers range in age from 10 to above 70.  The Chinese are wild about Twitter and social networks. There are thousands of Chinese speaking English in Facebook Groups. Several prominent Chinese blog in English as well as there native language. The rapid growth has made the Chinese government demonstrably nervous. The burgeoning growth of China bloggers makes attempts to control who blogs and what they say, increasingly difficult because understanding the internet and how it works is giving social media users an increased advantage. They are adept at bypassing, what they commonly call, “the Great China Firewall.” Despite the well-document rapid rise of an enormous middle class, the cost of starting a tech-related business in China remains quite low and investment dollars are growing.  The start up community, still in its formative stages, uses social media to reach foreign markets. They greatly prefer the direct conversational opportunities of social media to going through official government channels.

•    In Japan 13.8 % of businesses now have blogs, including the country’s largest bank.  They use them to communicate with existing customers and market to new ones. In the last two years, these blogs have become more open, allowing comments where they once did not. No major Japanese company launches a new product without a blogger relations component. Companies host blogger conferences to tell their story. About 17% of small Japanese companies have blogs and “social networking services (SNS),” as they call it, are widely used by individuals and businesses.  Mixi, the leading SNS, attracts more than ten million users. Like Germans and Canadians, the Japanese do not use social networks to meet new people, but to talk with existing friends. For many Japanese, speaking or writing in English remains. Japanese corporations are starting to use social networks internally to improve innovation through collaborative efforts.

•    Singapore is ahead of the remaining South Asian Countries in social media. The upper echelons of government use social media in their efforts to slowly, steadily open up and previously closed society. But government is not in control.  Recent efforts to silence bloggers during a national election, completely failed. An instructor as a class of 40 college students recently asked how many ofhisstudents blogged.  39 hands went up.

Africa

•    About 4 million South Africans have Internet access, or less than 10% of the population. 25% of the users have broadband. Mobile is what matters in this country.  Young people use MXIT , a mobile chat and text message service is exploding as is Facebook.
•    During a lunch interview, an American NGO worker described Internet surfing in a Kenya Computer Café.  African children politely swarmed around her, fascinated by her visits to Yahoo, Google, blogs and email. “They don’t have the money to be part of it yet,” she told me. “But they know it’s there and they want in.”

•    Senegal may have the highest percentage of Internet users in Africa. The country is highly stable with a good economy and education rate. During the years of South African boycotts, global enterprises set up headquarters there and a generation of knowledge workers as evolved, with a new level of awareness of access benefits.

Six Apart Reportedly Selling Live Journal to Russian-based SUP

Michael Arrington reports that San Francisco-based Six Apart has sold it's LiveJournal blog authoring service to SUP, a Russian-based social media company. LiveJournal, first published in 1999, is the only one of four Six Apart platforms that was not internally developed.

While Arrington reports LiveJournal sales in the past year have been stagnant, I do not think that is true in Russia.  While researching the SAP Global Report, I was told that LiveJournal is growing at a brisk rate in Russia to well over a million users, mostly adult. Russians have figured out that it is very difficult for the government to monitor what they say. That may be, in art, because the servers are currently located in the US.


Technorati Tags: techcrunch, six apart, live journal

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SAP Global Report Part Two: 7 Key Findings

[ This is Part 2 of--I don't know how many parts of the--SAP Global Survey Report on Culture, Business and Social Media. This summarizes the key points of what I learned while working on this report.}

2.   Seven Key Findings

A great deal of anecdotal information was garnered from these interviews. Braided into the survey were excerpts from 30 additional conversations I have conducted in Europe and the US as research for a book project. Additionally, nuggets have been gleaned from current news items. Finally, are observations I have from the many conversations I have held at conferences in Europe and the US and in Internet conversations with people all over the world.

In addition to this somewhat lengthy report, I will be submitting in the new few weeks an Appendix containing bulleted summaries of the interviews conducted specifically for this SAP Global Report. 

My greatest challenge for this report has been to boil down these entire finding to just a few easily digestible points.  The following section is my best effort.  While, they may appear a bit obvious, they are the result of a good deal of listening and thinking.  Each has significant strategic implications for a global enterprise, or so it seems to me.

1.    While it is proceeding at an uneven pace, Social Media is fomenting change in all developed and developing countries. The pace of that change is accelerating. The results will be fundamental and long-lasting changes to most large and centralized institutions including media, government, education and most certainly businesses of all sizes.

2.    The inevitably of this social media revolution rests in the fact that it is being driven by young people—under the age of 30 down to elementary school age. The revolution began, not with social media, but with the Internet. Most freshmen who entered universities last month were born after the introduction of the Web. Communicating and purchasing online is as natural for them as using the telephone is to their parents. As it enters the workplace and markets, this Online Generation is not influenced by traditional marketing, but by peers. They are unlikely to be recruited for employment by a Help wanted ad and they are unlikely to join an enterprise that does not allow them to use the social media tools of their choice. Online conversations will have great influence on what this Online generation buys, view, listens to, where its members travel to and where they stay beginning shortly and remaining for at least the next 50 years.

3.    While a mere two years ago, text blogs were the only power tool of social media, today there is an eve expanding social media toolshed. Blogs themselves have transformed into multimedia things that include video, audio and images. Micro-blogging, where people blog in tiny clips is now in nascent stages but is already wildly popular and demonstrates hw social media will go mobile.

4.    Of all the social media tools, the social network is far away the most popular. FaceBook is the most popular and fastest growing of them among the growing number of people who use English to communicate on the Internet. But people still prefer to use their native languages as is evidenced by the fact that Hi5, a seldom mention, San Francisco-based social network, that focuses on international languages, is among the world’s five most popular social media sites.

5.    Because geography is so much less of a barrier to peer-to-peer communications   than was true a decade ago, cultural differences may be lessening. There is evidence of a global cultural blending in the long term.  However, in the immediate future, language and culture remain highly important and need to be factored into any goal strategies. Someday one size may fit all, but that day will not come in the next five years.

6.     The “geek-to-suit gap is narrowing.” The time from technology enthusiast embracing something new to its adoption in the mainstream enterprise is growing shorter.  It took 12 years for the enterprise to address PCs in a programmatic fashion, after the first of them were smuggled in through the back doors of large companies. It has taken about two years from blogs to be the craze of the technically sophisticated to the current level of enterprise interest.  According to Blogworld, 89% of US businesses believe  blogs are becoming more important for their businesses, up from a Polaris Study estimate of 2% in 2005.

7.    Currently, few enterprises are paying much attention to either social networks  or online video. It is likely that the speed of which this changes will exceed the two years it took blogs to bridge the geek-to-enterprise gap.

Is Facebook starting to fade?

Let me begin by saying I am a Facebook fan.  I have no business connections with the company and to be honest I regret that.

But in the last few weeks I've noticed that:

• The number of blogger complaints about Facebook is on the rise
• The amount of spammy groups, notifications and messages coming my way is on the rise
• The number of new groups that interest me is on the decline
• The number of times I hear "Facebook" in conversations is on the decline, while the number of  Twitter mentions continues to rise. This matters.  All sites compete for the exhaustible research of attention.

Is this a trend.  I have not a clue.  But it is an early warning sign.  Every time something experiences phenomenal adoption, whether it be Facebook of today or Hula Hoops of yesterday, it takes time to sort out whether or not the phenomeon is a trend or a fad. Personally, I think Facebook is a trend, but it needs to pay attention.

First, Facebook needs to keep refining itself, and there has been very little change in the site since I joined it several months ago, Second, it needs to respond to very real user concerns on privacy and ownership as Risto Linturi has expressed. Facebook, like any other company, will find it's reputation can rise or fall quite quickly if t fails to listen and respond to legitimate criticism.

Personally, I think Facebook remains in the most promising position of any new company I know. Social Networks is the killer app of social media and Facebook is the most enjoyable place I have yet seen to meet people with whom I share common interests. But change is in an accelerated mode these days, and if Facebook does not pay attention, it could very easily find it's position more vulnerable than it appears to be today.

The SAP Global Report--Part One

[For those of you new to this blog, I have been working on the SAP Global Report on Culture, Business & Social Media since June. It has been a massive, revealing and entirely enjoyable project for me, which will be continued before year end.

I submitted a lengthy report on my findings so far, earlier this month. I am working also on an Appendix summarizing what the participants told me.

The report has been favorably received by SAP who has given me permission to publish the report, minus my specific recommendations to them. Upon completion, I will also publish the Appendix.

I will be publishing the report here in chunks over the next several days. This is the first part.]

1.   Overview

My assignment was at once simple and monumental. Investigate and report on the state of social media in the world. Do it in three months and report to SAP on what I found.

I would approach the assignment, not as a traditional researcher, which I am not; but as a social media champion who has co-authored a book on business blogging transparently on my blog.

Instead of asking the same series of checkbox questions to a large number of people then compiling numbers onto a spreadsheet, I talked to just 48 people, residing in 25 countries, posting 53,000 words of interview results on my blog.  The interviewees were a diverse group, ranging from celebrity bloggers to high schoolers; from South African ERP consultants to Ukrainian citizen journalists, from Cambodian NGO workers and Kenyan orphans to China’s most famous serial entrepreneur.

In giving me this assignment through The Conversation Group, SAP’s Mike Prosceno told me a primary goal was to help SAP become a social media thought leader. That’s a daunting goal but the survey in itself became a significant step down the path required toward achieving it. The transparent approach we took made thousands of people aware of SAP’s interest. By sharing our findings, SAP has already demonstrated it understands that to be a social media leader, one needs to be generous.  By doing our work publicly, the public wants to know more. To date, I’ve received six requests to speak on the SAP survey. Mike has so far been asked to speak with me twice.

The process further demonstrates yet another important lesson of social media. Not only must a company be both generous and transparent, it must also understand that control is slipping from its clutches of organizations into the hands of its constituencies. When, I began the SAP Global Survey, as it has come to be called, I thought I was in control, when in fact I was not.

My very first survey respondent, Hugh MacLeod, author of the wildly popular Gaping Void and a Microsoft consultant, posted his answers on his blog rather than mine. Then Tom Raftery, an Irish IT blogger who was not on my list at all, copied Hugh’s questions, then answered them on his own blog. This was followed by Ken Camp, a Microsoft consultant,  whom I had never talked with who posted to his own site. However, he apparently didn’t like one of my questions, so he replaced it with one of his own, answering it. A little while later, Joe Thornley, a Canadian PR executive would answer my emailed questions with a video post which appeared on Facebook. This was followed by a couple of people taking it upon themselves to ask questions from the survey on both Facebook and LinkedIn. More than 100 people served up answers.

I had obviously lost control, and the SAP Survey benefited greatly by that loss. It demonstrated two central assumptions of social media and why it is so powerful. People are wired to collaborate and most people perform better when you don’t attempt to impose excessive controls over the process.

Of course, the results of these findings are what is of the greatest value, not just to SAP, but to the general public with whom we will share them.  As a social media professional, I will admit that the findings provide very few surprises to me. However, the survey adds hundreds of data points to the general body of knowledge. These confirm arguments that have been previously based merely on guesswork.

[NEXT: Seven Key Findings.]