Sponsored Tweets opens up the world of monetizing influence

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Sponsored Tweets has just launched, providing a sophisticated pay per tweet system. Mashable has a detailed review of Sponsored Tweets, including how disclosure is handled.

The Sponsored Tweets platform works by giving advertisers the ability to create campaigns and select, invite, and approve Twitterers of their choosing to participate in their sponsored campaigns. On the flip side, Twitterers can set their pay rate and find opportunities to tweet on behalf of advertisers and get paid per tweet and/or click.

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Of course, IZEA’s attempting to cover the disclosure and ethics and portion with their Disclosure Engine software that automatically detects whether or not the appropriate hashtag or text is included. According to IZEA’s CEO, Ted Murphy, “disclosure is systematically enforced” and adheres to FTC and WOMMA guidelines.

This is the first substantive platform in what will undoubtedly become a crowded space. How prominent twitterers and their followers will respond to this is an unknown.

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Dialogue with Dave Snowden at KM Australia on success in a world of infinite information

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Knowledge and complexity guru Dave Snowden (@snowded) recently tweeted me to ask if I would like to have an on-stage conversation with him to close the KM Australia conference. Apparently the session as originally planned didn’t pan out, so I’m the last-minute back-up plan.

In a brief Twitter exchange we decided on a discussion topic of :

“How to build organisations that succeed in a world of infinite information”.

I think the idea is we’ll walk on stage and have a conversation. I think it’s fair to say that Dave is forthright in his opinions, so it should be fun. :-)

It will be quite a while since I’ve been to a knowledge management conference.

Working out who influences the influencers

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Travis Murdock has a nice blog post: Who influences the influencers? (which, tellingly, I found from @louisgray on Twitter).

Travis offers five tips:

1. Check who they are following on FriendFeed

2. Follow Influencer RSS reader feeds

3. Research Facebook events

4. Research ReTweets and @replies on Twitter

5. Follow the social brick road

There are a variety of other manual and automated ways to identify who key influencers are listening to and drawing on to shape their opinions.

What is critical about the idea of ‘who influences the influencers’ is that this intrinsically describes influence networks. Far too much influencer marketing is about finding the influence hubs and then trying to reach them.

The reality is far more subtle than that, in many ways. Influence flows through networks, and effectively working with influence can only be done by understanding influence networks, not the ‘hub and spoke’ model that many PR and marketing firms seem to base their thinking about influence on.

Far more on where influence is going at Future of Influence Summit in San Francisco and Sydney, coming up soon!

The World in 2030: Four scenarios for long-term planning and strategy

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This morning I did the opening keynote to the top executive team of a major organization.at their strategy offsite. It’s not appropriate to share the full presentation, however I can share the rough scenarios I presented for the world to 2030. The scenarios were presented after having examined the driving forces and critical uncertainties for the company. (See also my post on The best visuals to explain the Singularity to senior executives)

As always, a strong disclaimer comes with any generic set of scenarios like these – scenarios really must be created by the users themselves for specific decisions and in context (for the full disclaimer as well as a brief background on using scenarios in the strategy process see my scenarios for the future of financial services).

SCENARIO FRAMEWORK FOR THE WORLD IN 2030

A traditional scenario process identifies two dimensions to uncertainty, that when combined produce a matrix of four scenarios. Once the framework is created, the full richness of trends and uncertainties uncovered in the research process are integrated into the scenarios. Here the two dimensions selected are:

RESOURCES AVAILABILITY: Resource Poverty TO Resource Affluence

Availability and real cost of key resources including energy, food, water, and environmental stability.

COHESION: Cohesion TO Fragmentation

Cohesion of society, government, nations, and institutions.

Together these dimensions yield:

SCENARIOS FOR THE WORLD IN 2030

World2030_frame.gif

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The best visuals to explain the Singularity to senior executives

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Tomorrow morning I’m doing a presentation to the top executive team of a very large organization on the next 20 years. Most of what I will cover will be general societal, business and technological drivers as well as specific strategic issues driving their business. However as part of stretching their thinking I’ll also speak a about the Singularity.

As such I’ve been trying to find one good image to introduce my explanation, however I haven’t been able to find one which is quite right for the purpose.

Ray Kurzweil’s Six Epochs diagram below is great and the one I’ll probably end up using, however it is a bit too over-the-top for most senior executives. The Universe becoming conscious is beyond the ambit of most strategy sessions.

Source: Ray Kurzweil, Applied Abstractions

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Online media and independents drive business software buying

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SAP4SME, a diversified social media initiative from SAP to reach the SME market, is generating a variety of interesting content.

At 2pm US Eastern time today SAP is running a webinar: “The Stimulus Package: What Does it Mean for Your Business?” which examines how small to medium enterprise can best tap the US federal stimulus package (see also my earlier note on this).

On the SAP4SME LinkedIn group site there is a survey asking:

“Who do you trust most when making a business software purchasing decision?”

The results are very interesting, with 400-odd respondents, though it may not be a fully representative sample.

SAPsurvey_2907.jpg

The stand-out most influential sources are the online technology media such as ZDNet, and independent bloggers and analysts, considerably ahead of the major analyst firms.

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Chris Anderson on the social filtering of news and media

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Chris Anderson, currently most well-known for his provocative book Free, today put forward his views in yet another interview, this time with a cranky reporter from Spiegel, published under the catchy title of ‘Maybe Media Will Be a Hobby Rather than a Job’.

I’m most interested in what he says about how he gets his news, which is precisely the How Influence Drives Content and Publishing theme of the upcoming Future of Influence Summit. It is good to hear this said in someone else’s words, from an information consumers’ perspective. Here is an excerpt from the interview…

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“Influence is the future of media”

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After three extremely successful years running the Future of Media Summit, held simultaneously in San Francisco Bay Area and Sydney, it is time to move on. This year the event, run by The Insight Exchange, will be titled Future of Influence Summit. This is because:

INFLUENCE IS THE FUTURE OF MEDIA

We have already begun to discover this through the now-dominant concept of “social media”. In the Future of Media Strategic Framework that was launched for our Future of Media Summit 2006 we described the (symbiotic) relationship between Mainstream Media and Social Media.

Social media is all about human relationships, about how we shape our view of the world based on our peer communication. The extraordinary breadth of information and opinion that we are exposed to today, combined with the ability to converse, means our own opinions are often driven more by peers than traditional sources.

In fact this shift to the social means that media is becoming far more about peer influence than information and reporting.

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Implementing Enterprise 2.0: Free Chapter 11: Social Networks In The Enterprise

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Continuing our series of free chapters from Implementing Enterprise 2.0, here is Chapter 11 on Social Networks in the Enterprise. For full details on the report and all the sample chapters go to the Implementing Enterprise 2.0 website.

Section 4 of Implementing Enterprise 2.0 is Creating Business Value From Enterprise 2.0 Tools. It includes chapters on implementing Wikis, Blogs, Social Networks, RSS and syndication, Social Bookmarking, and Microblogging in the enterprise.

Chapter 11 on Social Networks in the Enterprise contains:

* Visual representation of social networks in the enterprise (see also the visualizations for RSS in the enterprise, wikis in the enteprise and social bookmarking in the enterprise)

* Background to social networks and adoption in the enterprise

* Six key domains in which social networks can create business value inside organizations

* Required functionality of social networks for enterprise use

* Issues with implementation, including for internal social network and external social networks

* Two brief case studies of enterprise implementation of social networks

IE2 Sample Chapter 11

You can also just download the pdf of Chapter 11.

Last.FM needs a “serendipity factor” dial

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I’ve been listening to Last.FM (and writing about it) since it was launched in 2002. I love it, to the extent of forking out when they finally asked me to start paying a few months ago.

However one of the features I most miss is a “serendipity factor” dial.

A basic concept in information filtering is the degree of serendipity of content selection. Do you want a highly predictable stream, or do you want to be very surprised sometimes?

I vary in how much I want the serendipity dial cranked up.

It would be totally awesome if Last.FM were to introduce a serendipity factor dial.

How about it guys?