By Martin
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December 10, 2009
The UK government seems particularly keen to encourage consumer empowerment. We’ve already had the GP patient survey – an opportunity for patients to rate the performance of GPs – and now we have OnePlace – designed by the Audit Commission to highlight and compare the performance of local councils, hospitals and police, across a range of measures, such as traffic accidents, child protection, teenage pregnancy and Co2 emissions.
Predictably, the ratings system used on the OnePlace site has been criticised by many local authorities as inaccurate, unfair and expensive. But it reflects the prevailing political view that providing easy access to information is the best way to encourage all of us to become more active and demanding citizens, which will, in turn, drive up standards within the public sector.
By Martin
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December 8, 2009
We devoted a whole chapter in the book to Dell’s transition from bloggers’ pariah to Crowd Surfing hero. Some of the statistics we quoted are inevitably out of date, so here’s the latest numbers, courtesy of Gordon Macmillan at Brand Republic:
- 3.5 million consumer contacts through social media, including 1.5 million followers on Twitter
- $6.5m in sales directly attributable to Twitter, supported by a team of over 200 Dell Twitterers
- 60,000 members of the IdeaStorm crowdsourcing community, contributing 12,743 ideas, of which 385 have been implemented.
Not bad for a business, run by a self confessed control freak, that was almost brought to its knees four years ago by Jeff Jarvis’ Dell Hell rants.
By Martin
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December 4, 2009
General Motors’ champion of openness, Fritz Henderson, has been fired, so it seems perfectly appropriate that his daughter publicly criticised the decision on the company’s own Facebook page. Her offending comments (including rude words and poor spelling) were quickly removed, although not before they had been picked up by sharp-eyed bloggers.
Predictably, many commentators have suggested that this highlights the dangers for corporations of using social media, although GM must be one hell of a weak company if the comments of an angry daughter are enough to give it sleepless nights. If anything, the young Henderson’s comments add a degree of authenticity to the often bland and over-polished outpourings from GM HQ.
By Martin
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November 25, 2009
Google has been forced to defend its refusal to filter inappropriate or offensive material that appears in its search results. It is apparently responding to criticism following the appearance of a racist depiction of Michelle Obama towards the top of its search rankings.
Google argues that it is simply refecting the range of opinion that appears online and cannot be held accountable if that opinion includes racist or offensive comments. This is the same Google that is quite happy to compromise its principles of free speech when it comes to operating in China.
By Martin
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November 20, 2009
Clay Shirky is always good for a soundbite. One of his more sage-like comments is that “Tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.” Facebook is now officially boring and all the better for it. This means that initiatives – such as Marks & Spencer’s use of Facebook to organise a live web chat with customers - are no longer seen as leading edge experiments but as sensible models of customer engagement.
By Martin
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November 19, 2009
Social media is often credited with reviving the democratic process, heralding a world of instant access to our political masters and open and honest debate. Unfortunately, as Daniel Finkelstein pointed out in his Times Opinion piece yesterday, the public (by and large) “are serenely indifferent” to the world of politics. It is not that the crowd is too stupid to understand political issues … it simply has better things to do with its time. As a consequence, in the words of Finkelstein: “the gulf between the amount of attention politicians and pundits believe voters are paying and the amount they are actually paying is vast.”
You can apply the same reality check to the commercial world. By and large, companies delude themselves that their customers are interested in everything that they do. In reality, for every activist scrutinising corporate behaviour, there are tens of thousands of people wh0 simply don’t care, unless that behaviour directly impacts their own lives. This doesn’t mean that corporate behaviour is unimportant, but that interesting and engaging a distracted and indifferent crowd is not that easy.
By Martin
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November 12, 2009
We may have struggled to sell the film rights to Crowd Surfing, but at least we now have a map of the book, courtesy of Pete Shannon. Looks like he has found a clever way to capture the key points from business books and help the rest of us avoid having to read the books in the first place … just don’t tell our publishers.
By Martin
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November 12, 2009
It may have started with the strange outpouring of collective grief that followed the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, but the British have become a nation of public mourners. Whether lining the streets of Wootton Bassett – as yet another coffin makes its way back from Afghanistan – or marking the death of a celebrity, we want to show solidarity with the suffering of others and demonstrate a shared sense of grief. As Ben Macintyre wrote in The Times today: “Today’s mourners are …. brought up in an atmosphere of emotional honesty and openness to collective grief.”
It is this collective self expression that so captures the spirit of the times in which we live. We have the desire and the means to express and share our feelings or inner-most thoughts – whether weeping in public or producing a video confessional on YouTube – and also want to feel part of a shared experience. The social media evangelists often see this trend as a biproduct of their new media technologies, but we are dealing with something far more profound than Twitter.
By Martin
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November 11, 2009
It takes a brave person to challenge the social media hyperbole, so hats off to those brave people at Lightspeed Research, who have just published a research study suggesting that we don’t necessarily trust the information we are given via social media. They may be entertaining, they may provide us with new ideas, they may be a great way to form new social connections with like-minded individuals … but according to the research, “only 33% of consumers trust social networking sites to provide the detailed independent information they need to make purchasing decisions.” That said, this still makes social media more trusted than traditional advertising, which struggles to achieve trust scores in the double figures.
By Martin
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November 2, 2009
Two very interesting articles were published over the weekend, analysing the implications of the recent Twitter-based protests against Jan Moir’s criticism of Stephen Gately’s lifestyle; Andrew Neil’s allegedly racist insult of Diane Abbot (when he described her as a chocolate hobnob, in an extended riff on people as biscuits); a typically close-to-the bone gag by Jimmy Carr and AA Gill’s tales of killing a baboon. In each case, in the words of Jon Henley in The Guardian, “a liberal rent a mob (were) hell bent on hanging out to dry those who express an opinion that differs from their own.” This theme was echoed by Nick Cohen in yesterday’s Observer, who described how “A mob fighting a good cause is still a mob.”
Twitter is an undeniably powerful tool for whipping-up instant storms of protest, but the Twitterati are far from being a representative sample of the population – in fact Twitter is in danger of becoming a mouthpiece for the type of pseudo-liberal intollerance that only grants free speech to those who’s opinions concur with the Twitter herd. Just because something starts trending on Twitter, it doesn’t automatically make a particular cause either right or important. As we have repeated on countless occasions in our book and in subsequent blogs, the crowd (in whatever form – mob with pitchforks, hashtag-wielding Twitter group) is not always wise.