Social Business Revolution

Social Business (R)evolution

by Martijn Linssen

(sample)

The current world is abuzz about Social. Social networks, social media, Social Business: all things social. People, Twitterati and even a small number of companies embrace the diverse ideas and notions of Social, trying to sell and implement them

That movement is a natural counter reaction to the events that have occurred over the last centuries: industrialisation and automation has allowed industries, companies and societies to grow beyond belief

Influencers? You mean under the Influence?

Thanks to Zoli Erdos for the last bit to the title

I've gotten worked up a bit about the Influence game in general and Klout in particular, resulting in a few posts of which "Klout. Nail. Coffin. Who cares?" was the last one. This post is a bit about Klout, but not really (wouldn't want to break that promise, however tempting every now and then)

With Klout marketing themselves as the standard for influence, determining which people are Influencers, these socalled Influencers become nothing more than puppets in Klout's hands. The real Influencer? Klout itself of course

Twitter delegates the monetisation strain to its developers

On the Twitter Development Google Group, Twitter announced today that they'll stop whitelisting. Whitelisting basically lifts an application developer's limitation of 150 Twitter requests per hour, that mere mortals suffer from

Beginning today, Twitter will no longer grant whitelisting requests.
We will continue to allow whitelisting privileges for previously
approved applications; however any unanswered requests recently
submitted to Twitter will not be granted whitelist access

Unfortunately, my TwUniverse will be one of the latter - filed a request twice in the past months now, and never got a response

Gamification - yet another one-size-fits-all?

[Image courtesy of Johnny Mr Ninja]

I got into discussions today about gamification:

Gamification is the use of game play mechanics for non-game applications (also known as "funware"), particularly consumer-oriented web and mobile sites, in order to encourage people to adopt the applications. It also strives to encourage users to engage in desired behaviors in connection with the applications. Gamification works by making technology more engaging, and by encouraging desired behaviors, taking advantage of humans' psychological predisposition to engage in gaming. The technique can encourage people to perform chores that they ordinarily consider boring, such as completing surveys, shopping, or reading web sites

While making some pun statements about feeding dogs biscuits to make them obey, and rewarding them for doing a trick, along with some serious ones, Alan Berkson made a great statement:

The Social CRM Oxymoron

The temptation was great of course, a few years back, to invent Social CRM. There was a lot of buzz about Social, social people, social companies, social employees and social customers. It wasn't a great step from that last one to Social Customer Relationship Management.
Last year I piled all that up on the Social Sh*tpile, urging for an architectural overview over all these different movements bound to end up in yet another few dozen disconnected silos

I firmly believe in a Social movement. I also think we're getting pretty social, with three quarters of a billion people on Facebook, Twitter and Orkut - even if only half of those are active, and only a a quarter of that engaging in daily conversations - that is a nice marketplace to consider.
But business-wise, Social isn't much of a market - it's more of a channel

The simple secret to knowledge curation

Of all the Social Tools out there, most if not all of it is free text to the power of three. Notwithstanding the huge progress made - getting conversations in writing and saving them for eternity - it gets increasingly harder to make heads or tails of them.
Why favour conversation or thread A over B? You tell me; you won't be able to unless you've gone through both

The extra dimension of groups or communities, next to people, has added some value but not much. John Hagel's Push versus Pull has still not resonated clearly enough: predictability is out of the window. Deciding to participate in a bonding engagement with people and "interests" and then wait what happens, isn't very 21st century

Social Enterprise Magic Quadrant

Debate and savviness seems to be flying across the Twitter verse these days, Stowe Boyd wrote a post about that
One quote there:

And Dennis has been making his displeasure about the use of the term ‘social business’ known, but not by arguing about the principles involved. Instead, Howlett has adopted a ‘savviness’ cant: he isn’t arguing, he uses his savviness instead of arguing

I agree with both Stowe and Dennis. Not because I want to suck up, just because I'm used to stand in the middle.

Open means bidirectional - please stop abusing the word

A tweet by Dion Hinchcliffe got me going:

Yes, I agree @fabella, API is an older technical term that confuses non-techs. I'm now using "open supply chains" to be more self-evident.

My answer to that?

@dhinchcliffe @fabella, API confuses non-techs. I'm now using "open supply chains" < may I suggest "application interaction agreement"?

The better phrase would have been "application interaction description", as an agreement is something agreed upon by mutual parties. A description is just something that is created uni-laterally.
I'm a big advocate of mutual. Not so much of uni-lateral. And I'm starting to develop a trauma over the continued abuse of the word "open"

Free Chatter: all your data are belong to us?

A pun on an Internet meme that I first saw as a hack to World of Warcraft, this is the first thing that crossed my mind when I read the Terms of Service (TOS) of the now free Chatter, released January 31st

First, I briefly used Chatter and it looks like an old version of Yammer. Access via one single email domain, and People, Groups, Files: been there done that. Maybe I should play around a bit more but I'm being a bit careful - after reading this post, you'll understand why

I have a few posts on Chatter, but suffices to say the price per user was aimed at $50 a month before and during development, and lowered to $15 at introduction. A little while later, Chatter became free for existing salesforce.com users, and now it's free for everyone in the world.
Clever move, desperate move, anything in between? I can only guesstimate the motive(s)

A few quotes from the TOS:

"Your Data" means all electronic data or information submitted by You to the Chatter.com Service.

That doesn't leave out anything, agreed? ALL you submit, is referred to by "Your Data"

Tibbr - the revolution starts right here

Today I attended the launch of Tibco's tibbr in London. A perfectly short and great event of a few hours with excellent food, drinks, very interesting speakers and some great panel remarks - not in that order

Ram Menon, Executive Vice President of Worldwide Marketing presented a very clear overview emphasizing the punch-line: when information is available, it comes to you

There were several speakers, among which Sriram Chakravarthy, Head of Cloud Services and Strategy (Tibco) and Jon Scarpelli, VP of Technology for CIBER. The panel existed of Dennis Howlett, Enterprise Buyer Advocate, Jem Eskenazi, Chief Information Officer of Groupama Insurances, and Ray Wang, Industry Analyst, and was moderated by Euan Semple, Consultant and Writer on The Social Web for Business

Those are the facts. Here are my findings: