Creating a consistent online voice and identity

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I have recently been running a series of social media workshops for retailers in a franchise chain.

The workshop starts with a big picture view and then runs through detailed guidance on establishing a presence, building engagement, and driving success, interspersed with group exercises to set objectives, think through stratgies, and set action plans.

One of the exercises I take the participants through in the workshops is thinking through their online voice and identity.
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Scenarios for the downfall of Facebook and a new landscape for social networks

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Today I gave the keynote on Social Media and the Future at Marcus Evans’ CIO Summit.

In question time after my keynote I was asked whether Facebook will still be the dominant social network in 5 years.

I think the degree of uncertainty on this front is too high to make a firm prediction. However given the current market landscape and trends over the last couple of years, the most likely outcome is that Facebook will still dominate.

In structured futures studies, one of the most powerful tools is trying to build plausible scenarios for how alternative outcomes to what is expected could come to pass.

In this case, we need to tell a credible story on how Facebook loses its predominant position in social networks.
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Social Media and the Future: Keynote slides at CIO Summit

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This afternoon I am giving a keynote on Social Media and the Future at the Australian CIO Summit in the Gold Coast.

Here are the slides from my presentation. As always, my keynote slides are shared with the proviso that they are designed to accompany my presentation and are NOT intended to be useful on their own. However you might find them of interest.

To provide just a little context on the flow of my keynote:
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Rich insights into the state of social media today

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Here is a very good compilation of statistics, perspectives, and news on social media as at the middle of 2012:

2H12: The State of Social Media & Social Media Marketing in the Second Half of 2012

A few things in particular that I thought worth noting from these stats, apart from the usual Social Media is BIG and GROWING FAST!
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The rise of micro mavens: Building business empires around personal brands

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Trevor Young, aka PR Warrior, is launching a new site Micro Domination which covers the “Global Microbrand Revolution”.

The site already includes an excellent free e-book The Micro Maven Revolution. You can download it from here or by clicking on the cover below.

Trevor opens the book by practising what he preaches, highlighting his capabilities and brand in a low-key way in front of excellent content. He then describes the core idea:
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Zynga’s new game The Ville takes virtual sex to the masses

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This article was originally posted in Future of Sex magazine.

Social gaming giant Zynga, purveyor of Facebook games such as CityVille and FarmVille, is making things a little racier with its latest product The Ville, launched today.

As the video shows, users can build the “home of your dreams” and invite their Facebook friends over to have fun there. The fun can start with talking, cooking, and dancing, and then go a little further.
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Why do you curate? The 3 intents of curation and how they create value

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I was recently in Rome for 24 hours to run a workshop for the senior technology executives of a global Fortune 50 company. While I was in town I was keen to try to catch up with collaboration and new media expert Robin Good, who I have known online for many years but never met, so I got in touch to see if we could catch up.

Fortunately he was available, and he took the opportunity to do a video interview with me. He has excerpted part of the interview in a great post Curation – A View from The Future: Ross Dawson, which includes 4 brief videos of me sharing my thoughts on curation.

Here is the fourth video in which I talk about the 3 intents of curation.

Here are the 3 intents, presented in reverse order from the video.
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MIT global study on social business: Executives increasingly understand the value and success drivers

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MIT Sloan Management Review together with Deloitte have just launched 2012 Social Business Global Executive Study and Research Project, drawing out some very interesting insights from a survey of almost 3,500 executives from 115 countries.

Below the slides of the report I have selected several of the interesting slides with brief commentary.

Social Business: What Are Companies Really Doing? – Survey Questions and Answers

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Creating emergent, adaptive systems in organizations

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In my keynotes and executive sessions I often use the analogy of ant colonies, in which the collective intelligence of the colony is far greater than that of its individuals.

Since the collective intelligence of many – or even most – human organizations is significantly less than the intelligence of many of its participants, there are no doubt lessons we can learn.

In my book Living Networks I included a small section on Creating adaptive systems in Chapter 6 on Network Presence. The company I mention, CompanyWay, was subsequently acquired by AskMe and in turn by HiveMine, by name at least keeping to the spirit of the initial concept.

The underlying concepts described in the passage below are now being implemented into some of the most interesting crowdsourcing platforms of today, building the mechanisms whereby we can create value – and hopefully intelligence – from many.
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Video of TheNextWeb keynote on The Future of Crowds

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TheNextWeb produced a good quality video of my keynote at TheNextWeb Conference 2012, shown below.

It doesn’t show all of my full motion graphics presentation, though it frequently cuts to show segments of the visuals through my keynote. I will create and share a full video of my motion graphics presentation along with the audio of me speaking, however as I’m travelling it may take a little while to complete.

Here is a brief overview of the structure of the presentation:
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