Use your imagination! The potential of Annotated Tweets

By

Aside from the announcement of Promoted Tweets, Twitter’s advertising platform, the most important thing coming out of Twitter’s Chirp developer’s conference was a hazy pre-announcement of Annotated Tweets.

In a nutshell, developer’s will be able to let users to attach up to (probably) 512bytes of structured metadata to a tweet (plans are to increase this to 2KB), which can be used in one or many ‘annotations’ with additional data. This can only be added at the time of the tweet, or it if is retweeted.

To put this in context, a character can be represented in a byte, so you can add over 3 times as much data as the 140 characters of a tweet, in whatever format you want.

It is very early yet, with estimates of being launch in two months, and many things to be ironed out, not least how people can untangle the plethora of annotation formats that are likely to be launched.

It is completely open what can be done with this. In its note to developers Twitter says: Think big. Blow our minds.

Ideas for what annotations could be used for, adapted from Twitter, Venture Beat, Scobleizer, plus quite a few of our own, include:

Read more →

Location-based dating is FINALLY hot, Hot, HOT!

By

Some ideas take a while to come to reality. Urban Signals is a New York-based company whose iPhone app notifies you when compatible singles are nearby and would like to meet. The iPhone app is free to download but requires a monthly subscription after the first month.

While some suggest that this was only a matter of time, this has in fact been happening for at least eight years.

Back in 2002 I wrote about proximity dating in my book Living Networks.

Read more →

A few thoughts on Twitter’s ‘Promoted Tweets’

By

Just over 4 years since the first Tweet was sent, Twitter has announced its plan to sell advertising on Twitter, by the name of ‘Promoted Tweets’.

A good interview of Twitter COO Dick Costolo on CNBC gives quite a bit of detail on the plan:

Read more →

There will be two types of people: content creators and non-content creators

By

In the future there will be two types of people.

Either you will create content to share with the world, or you will not.

Many of us have already made the choice to share content with the world at large. We will be joined by many more.

The advantages of having a visible presence in a world awash with information will create a substantial economic and social difference between content creators and the rest.

Yet some people will not to want to share. Some won’t want to share anything about themselves beyond family and close friends. Others will be concerned about the privacy implications. They will not share of themselves to the world.

However if you choose to be a content-creator, it’s a slippery slope. Once you are sharing your voice online, be it through blogging, Twitter, social networks, videos, or other channels, the demands are intense just to keep it going. It’s fun, it’s rewarding, but it’s a commitment.

When your reputation and personal potential are driven by sharing, you do more. So as I just wrote, there can be spiralling demands from content creation.

If you choose to create content, content creation will be your life.

Managing the spiralling demands of blogging

By

It’s all about content. That’s the heart of the universe today. Which is why I blog – to have presence in the universe.

But writing a blog is a continuous commitment. You’re always trying to carve out time from seemingly intractably busy-ness, just to keep the blog alive. Blogging is a priority, but it’s always easy to postpone writing down an idea when it arises, and then it never gets done.

Of course, if you’re a professional blogger/ writer, then the demands are truly intense. Columbia Journalism Review writes how Michael Calderone, just leaving Politico to the Yahoo! News Project, wrote over 4,000 posts while at Politico (averaging over 4 posts for every single day of his 2 ½ years there).

Read more →

The power of Juicystar07 demonstrates two key trends in influence

By

While we were working on the Future of Influence Summit last year I encapsulated the essence of what I was seeing in the space in Five key trends in how influence is transforming society, complementing our Influence Landscape.

If you’ve managed to avoid Juicystar07 and Allthatglitters21 so far, your time is up. They provide a fantastic example of two of the key trends in influence. Blair Fowler (Juicystar07) and Elle Fowler (Allthatglitters21) are sisters who review beauty and fashion products on their YouTube channels, with a total of 50 million and 31 million video views respectively. The video below is a “haul” review of a sponsor’s products which was also being filmed by Good Morning America.

Read more →

New ventures in political crowdsourcing

By

yourbudgetresponse.jpg

User-contributed content is often far more up-to-date than other sources. I just stumbled across some interesting current news while browsing through Wikipedia’s List of crowdsourcing projects.

The UK Conservative Party has launched Your Budget Response 2010, a website that is intended to allow anyone to identify problems, oversights and issues in the government’s budget, to fuel the Conservative Party’s response to the budget.

Read more →

6 Steps in Enterprise 2.0 Governance Projects

By

I believe that governance is at the heart of effective Enterprise 2.0 implementation. While many shy away at the term, mainly because governance is usually focused on risk and limitations, I see it differently. True governance is just as much about ensuring that opportunities are taken as it is as about containing risk. Governance, done well, is an enabler of innovation, providing parameters, guidelines and policies that address risks, and allow the greatest possible scope for experimentation and value creation.

As such most of my client work on Enterprise 2.0 is helping executives to frame governance and develop effective strategies. Advanced Human Technologies doesn’t do implementation; we work with partners for the nitty-gritty of larger projects. We believe that the greatest value creation is getting the frame right. Everything else flows from that.

The chapter on governance in my book Implementing Enterprise 2.0 is available for free download from the book website. However I thought it was also worth excerpting the chapter, as below. This section describes a typical Enterprise 2.0 governance process. Of course projects must be always tailored to the situation, addressing issues including organizational culture and existing processes.

SIX STEPS IN A TYPICAL GOVERNANCE PROCESS

1. Nominate a project leader and project sponsor

Creating a governance framework is a significant initiative that requires access to key stakeholders. A senior executive project sponsor should be named who will facilitate access to resources and people where required. The project leader can be either an internal manager with the appropriate skills and understanding of the organization, or an external consultant who has the benefit of independence from organizational politics.

Read more →

Social CRM and disrupting analyst business models

By

I recently had a chat with R “Ray” Wang of Altimeter Group about what we’re up to and our respective business models. Among other things, Ray said that Altimeter wants to work in new spaces that others aren’t covering. ERP is boring. But Social CRM, for example, is on the leading edge of where value is being created, but traditional analyst firms are not working.

As a recent entrant to the market (the firm was founded in July 2008 by Charlene Li and now has 7 partners), Altimeter has the flexibility to use different approaches to the existing large firms. In this case, instead of charging in the thousands of dollars for a cutting-edge analyst report, it has launched Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management for free, enabling anyone to embed it on their own site, as I have below.

Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management

View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang.

Read more →

Key management trend: Reputation management

By

I was recently interviewed for a report created by the executive forum Vistage, titled 12 Trends That Will Define Business in the “New Normal”.

One of the key trends covered in the report in which they drew on my thoughts is reputation management, excerpted below.

Trend 7: Reputation Management

Read more →