[VIDEO] The flow of Twitter around the world

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Twitter has created a nice video showing how much and when the unique moment of 11:11 on 11.11.11 was mentioned around the world last Friday, as below. They describe it:

This clip is a visualization of all the Tweets mentioning 11:11 on 11.11.11. Each “1” is a location that moves with the conversation on Twitter. Their scale varies depending on the volume of Tweets posted from the location they represent. You can see the main wave move from right to left, and then a second one that occurred at 11 p.m. around the world.


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Latest data: Retailers shift to social media and online

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I am at a media briefiing by cloud-based ERP provider NetSuite at the very nice Quay restaurant in Sydney.

In addition to the interesting presentation by CEO Zach Nelson on the state of NetSuite, we have been given no less than 7 press releases, so a big news day for the company. One of these was the key findings from Frost & Sullivan of Australian retailers, conducted in October 2011. This includes a survey of the use of social media by retailers, showing:
– 34% monitor conversations on social media
– 29% use social media to promote their store
– 20% advertise on Facebook
– 17% use social media to publicize special offers or discounts
– 16% provide services to customers on social media
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The secrets of BigCommerce’s success

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In the Kochie’s Business Builders program that I hosted on Sunday, I interviewed Matt Barrie of Freelancer.com, and Eddie Machaalani and Mitch Harper of BigCommerce, both fantastic Australian online business success stories.

Following the excellent Freelancer.com interview, below is the interview with BigCommerce’s founders. They recently raised US$15 million from US VC firm General Catalyst Partners in their first external funding round since they were founded.

The interview brings out the reasons for their success: great products and an intense focus on marketing. Their story offers great lessons for any online business.

Here are a few of the insights they shared in the interview:
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KBB: Interview on the essentials of online business

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Kochie’s Business Builders program on Channel 7, which focuses on helping growing businesses improve their performance, has just started its fifth series. This series they have dedicated a complete program to an “online bootcamp”.

The program starts with an interview with me, after which I go on to interview two of Australia’s top online businesses: Freelancer.com and BigCommerce on their secrets of success.

The program has been excerpted in online videos. The kickoff interview is below. I will post videos from the other interviews shortly.

Here are some snapshots of what I cover in the interview:
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Six thoughts on the Klout scoring changes

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Today influence ratings service Klout significantly changed its rankings. Last week Klout CEO Joe Fernandez announced there would be changes, saying “a majority of users will see their scores stay the same or go up but some users will see a drop”. It seems that was not correct, and rankings levels have been revised such that most people’s scores go down. The results appears to be plenty of unhappy people.

Before I offer a few thoughts on this, it’s worth addressing those who say they couldn’t care less about their Klout score. It is absolutely fine, and quite possibly the most appropriate response, not to care a jot what number a service happens to attribute to your influence.

I’ve written extensively on this blog about influence and influence networks over the last six years, and in fact our Future of Influence Summit 2009 had Klout CEO Joe Fernandez and other luminaries of the emerging influence space speak on the business models for influence and reputation panel.

The reason is that, like it or not, the measurement of influence and reputation is one of the most important changes we are seeing in society. We see the ‘reputation economy’ as one of the ExaTrends of the decade.

In a world in which influence has become completely democratized, having measures of influence and reputation will drive many facets of society. Of course, the validity of the influence measures we use is a different matter, but an increasingly important one.

Here are a few quick thoughts on the changes:
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The global state of the mobile industry

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Mary Meeker, formerly of Morgan Stanley and now of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, continues to do her annual presentation at Web 2.0 Summit, providing an unparalleled compilation of research about the global internet industry.

There is a lot to digest in the 65 slides of the presentation, so I thought it was worth pulling out some of the more interesting ones on mobile. Below is the full presentation, plus six charts giving insights into the state of the global mobile industry.

KPCB Internet Trends (2011)
Here are the 7 selected charts with brief commentary:
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The latest on the future of journalism: where value creation means jobs

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As part of News Limited’s launch of its digital subscription plans that I wrote about earlier this week, News has just launched the site Future of Journalism, (subtitle: A Discussion Hosted by News Limited).

It includes videos, infographics (very clearly taking a cue from social media here!), and articles. The site says “We have gathered thoughts from some of the leading personnel at News Limited, and engaged a range of industry leading commentators to share their opinions,” so while they are hosting the discussion they are trying to make it far broader.

I suppose the implicit point of the site and discussion it is intended to engender is that for journalism to have a future, it needs to be paid for, so you should pay for their subscription plan.

I was asked to contribute to the site at short notice, so given my schedule I thought it made sense to share my NewsScape visual on where value resides in news today (and thus what you can get people to pay for), and managed to find time on an airplane flight to write a few notes on how this was relevant to journalism.

You can see my article on the Future of Journalism site, or here it is in below in full.

The Future of Journalism

The NewsScape
Click on the image to see large version

Journalism has a rich future. In some ways it will be very similar to its rich and illustrious past. In others it will be very different, reflecting the current fragmentation and restructuring of the world of news. Among other shifts, journalism will encompass not just words, but also images, data, video, visualisations and more.
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Breaking: Details of News Limited’s digital subscription plans

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I am at what would not long ago have been unimaginable for News Limited: a briefing by senior executives for bloggers and social media. What is even more surprising is that social media are getting the scoop on mainstream media in being briefed first.

The executives present include Richard Freudenstein, CEO of The Australian and News Digital Media, Ed Smith, Chief Marketing Officer of New Ltd, and Clive Mathieson, editor of The Australian. Many of the most visible people in social media in Australia are here, including @servantofchaos, @silkcharm, @GaryPHayes, @mediahunter, @tiphereth, and @katydaniells, with @bhowarth and @mumbrella crossing the chasm as both social and mainstream media protagonists.

Here are some notes live at the briefing.
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Using social media to track and drive organizational success metrics

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This week I was MC for the AHRI HR Technology conference, and ran one of the workshops on the following day, on Creating Results Using Social Media.

A real highlight of the conference was the Social Media: Risks and Rewards panel, which I chaired, with the participation of a fantastic cast of Peter Williams of Deloitte, Steve Barham of LinkedIn, Laurel Papworth of The Community Crew, and Sam Mutimer of ThinkTank Media.

It was a fabulous discussion, and we covered a lot of territory in the conversation.

One of the many topics discussed was the use of social media to track metrics and correlate these with organizational success metrics.
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Workshop content: Creating results using social media – the HR perspective

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Tomorrow is the Australian Human Resources Institute HR Technology conference. I will be MC for the conference day, and will also run a half-day workshop on Creating Results Using Social Media on the following day.

I thought I would share the visual content we will be using during the workshop. As usual, the slides are not intended to be useful by themselves, but to provide supporting content for the activities and discussions of the session.

Workshop: Creating Results With Social Media in HR

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