Trapped girls call for help on Facebook

Interesting news item from yesterday – two girls from Adelaide who were trapped in a drain called for help by updating their status on Facebook using a mobile phone. Some say this one comes in the category “you could not make this up”‘. Others – like Don Tapscott – would probable say this comes under “digital natives think differently”.

Now, as I understand, the two girls (aged 10 & 12) opted to seek out help from their social network instead of going straight to the authorities (eg. phoning ‘000′) because they wanted to avoid getting into trouble with their parents. Still, there are some important messages here, this one from Laurel Papworth:

“Incredibly important today is understanding how social networking protects our children. There is stuff they can’t tell a parent or a teacher or the police but they can’t bottle up any more. So they tell their friends, they tell people they play online games with, they write anonymously on websites full of emo-angst and they tell forum moderators and game GMs, who understand and ‘get them’. Expect to see lots more “we should’ve seen it coming” from adults waking up to teens pushing out warnings on online communities. It keeps them safe in the absence of an understanding adult”.

From my perspective – and drawing on Don Tapscott’s knowledge of these things – the girls had trust in their social network, more trust than in dealing with authority figures. Seems to me like another indicator of the central role that social network services play in the lives of digital natives.

Looking at this from anther perspective, Facebook, MySpace and Bebo all have age restrictions that limit access to those aged 13 or 14 and above. Such policies no doubt reflect the concerns that many have about social network site risks. Thing is, the reality is different. According to a UK study reported in August 2008, age restrictions do not stop many children from participating. A spokesperson for the UK research outfit said that “Children are at the vanguard of the social networking phenomenon, using sites such as Facebook and Bebo in the same way other generations used the telephone”.  True for Australia too. The ACMA’s Click and connect: Young Australians’ use of online social media 02:Quantitative research report found that:

• the internet is a regular part of everyday lives of children and young people aged eight to 17 years
• both frequency and length of use increase with age
• young people of high school age (12 to 17) years used the internet on average 6.3 days per week for an average of 2.9 hours per day
• the use of social networking services increases dramatically between the ages of eight to 17.

Plenty of room for thought here, not only about what digital natives do now that is so different, but what implications lie ahead for institutions and social interaction.

Twitter is not about text messaging, it is much more than that

A couple of recent developments prompted this posting. One was this New York Times piece on why teens are not attracted to Twitter. The other was to share with you another positive Telstra experience on Twitter that I had last week, and to share some other observations about Twitter.

I’ll start with my own experience, with a little background first. I have some history now, having signed up on Twitter as @conem just over a year ago now. In that time Twitter has grown about 10 fold from an early adopter crowd to almost being a mainstream social media service. As of this morning I am following 767 tweeple and 772 are following me.

Readers of this blog may recall I had a positive experience with @BigPondTeam some time ago. I was treated to a similar experience last week. I found an odd item on my latest Telstra bill, a charge of $2.28 for “Dial-up Internet Calls Telstra”. The thing is, we have broadband, not dial-up…I was left scratching my head. It just did not stack-up. While it was not much money, I decided not to let the matter lie. So I tweeted about it. About one hour later (6.37 pm) I had a response from @BigPondTeam agreeing with me that the charge looked odd and asking if they could help out. They surely did.

@BigPondTeam managed to find out the calls were to subscription TV operator Foxtel number to order Box Office movies. Eight calls were made between 4 am and 5 pm over the same day. In my response to @BigPondTeam I said that it was weird on two counts – we have never ordered a Box Office movie from Foxtel, and there was no one awake or at home when the calls were made! Anyway, @BigPondTeam said that was all they could do. We would need to contact Foxtel to resolve the matter they said. Still, got to be impressed with @BigPondTeam!

I tried @Foxtel but while they had some followers they had not posted any Tweets. I thought, why be on Twitter and not tweet? So I rejected that move. Then I shuddered. The next step was to make a phone call and go through the hassle of computerised directions in the hope that I could find a human to talk to. Actually, as it turned out I managed to speak to a human at Foxtel without any drama and got the matter resolved quickly. The problem with the dial-up calls put down to a software problem. A refund will be made the man said. Still, I wonder how much dosh Telstra has made overall from software-glitch dial-up calls for Foxtel movies?

Now, back to the teenager thing. There are teenagers on Twitter. Some follow me. But there is a rule of thumb when it comes to teenager communication preferences – literally. As the NYT’s piece noted, “Kristen Nagy, an 18-year-old from Sparta, N.J., sends and receives 500 text messages a day. But she never uses Twitter”.  At 500 texts a day, who would have the time to do anything else? I’ve managed 1684 tweets in 14 months and I am one of the power users.

It is common to have text-like experiences on Twitter – conversations flicking back and forth. They are often good fun. The relationship side is important. Some personal, some professional, some that are weak ties. One-to-one communication is available through a direct messaging option. But the main benefit for me in using Twitter is tapping into and contributing to the rich information stream (mostly about communications and media trends). Oh, and getting my Telstra problems sorted out. I put up comments and links about seminars I’m attending or blog posts or news items online I have read or viewed, or photos or videos just taken or viewed and so on. The thing is, so do many others that I connect to on Twitter. I can track particular topics or events by hash tags that are used (eg. #gov2au for the Government 2.0 Taskforce). The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Question and Answer show uses #qanda for real-time Twitter interaction. Nothing beats Twitter for real-time information.

I use a third party application called TweetDeck to categorise my Twitter stream into everyone I follow, mentions of me, most interesting or core groups and favourite hashtags. I have TweetDeck on my PC and on my iPhone. I have columns for links to status updates of my friends on Facebook. My tweets show up in my Facebook and FriendFeed streams, as do others I’m connected with.

Bit.ly is a service that lets you shorten, share and track your links on Twitter.  I can track how many tweeps (people with a mutual following) have clicked in the links I put up.

There are third party applications that measure Twitter influence. As Ross Dawson has said, influence on Twitter is not just a matter of how many tweeple are following you. Influence is measured by the frequency that you tweet and retweet others postings, the replies and direct messages that you send, and your use of hash tags to help others track stuff.  Influence is about your reach – how many people is it possible for you to reach, say if you take all of the connections with others you are connected to into account. Check out your Twitter influence on Twinfluence.

Here is a link to a good article in the New York Times by David Pogue  about tools for Twitter that a colleague passed on to me.

In short, I can understand why teenagers prefer text messaging. They mainly just want to interact with their mates. Whereas Twitter is about being in the information stream…and for getting excellent customer service.

Government 2.0: no change without culture shift

Australian Government 2.0 Taskforce member Martin Stewart-Weeks has put up a really good posting on the culture shift necessary to thrive in the Web 2.0 world. Martin’s posting revealed a deep knowledge of the societal issues involved in online engagement, issues that are far more challenging than designing or selecting Web 2.0 tools.

The challenges and opportunities outlined in Martin’s posting are challenges and opportunities for citizens and lobbyists as well as for public servants and policy makers. Here is a taste of what he had to say:

“As governments and the public sector start to do the same [get value from Web 2.0], they will encounter the same challenge as others have, which is that these new tools don’t just change structures and processes, they change behaviour as well. In order to thrive in this kind of world – connected, contingent, collaborative – you have to adopt a certain set of behaviours that are similarly open, interactive and engaged. The obvious conclusion is simple, but demanding – no change without culture shift.

This is the big challenge underlying the ability for governments to make the most of this new way of working and these new tools for democratic conversation. If they want to use them to improve the design of public services, to empower citizens to use information to create new services themselves or to harness more powerful combinations of knowledge and expertise for better policy, then they have to embrace the consequent shift of culture and behaviour too.

As it turns out, this is much harder than it sounds in the public sector, although it’s true that it’s turned out to be much harder in the corporate sector too (even though they might not always admit it). As the Issues Paper points out, we’ve spent quite some time defining what it is that constitutes the requisite behaviour from a public servant, including things like impartiality, balance, fairness and the absence of partisan political advocacy.

The problem, though, is that these definitions were shaped in a world fundamentally different to the one which ‘government 2.0’ is ushering in, including especially the speed with which issues emerge and change, the level of transparency about government thinking and activity and the complexity of the ideas and inputs now clamouring not just to be heard but to be influential.

Somehow we have to find a way for public servants to be able to engage with this world on terms that are both satisfying and safe. Assuming that the twin extremes of prohibition and unfettered licence are unlikely to work, we have to set about finding some new territory somewhere along that spectrum that is fit for purpose.

I have no idea where that point on the spectrum is. My inclination is to be more permissive than not. But perhaps more useful than any single attempt to pick the new sweet spot is to encourage a process of active and energetic experimentation that will get us closer to that outcome, and more quickly, than simply sitting around talking about it.”

Martin went on to say that “For the public sector too, the rising demand for innovation in policy development, program design and delivery and organisational practice is enabled, and sometimes accelerated, by the new tools themselves. In that sense, the rapid spread of use and influence by social networking technologies, and the habits of mind and culture that they reflect and reinforce, is becoming an inescapable feature of public innovation in its own right.”

I found Martin’s description of Web 2.0 to be a good supplement the Issues Paper released by the Taskforce earlier this month. Although the paper provided a good overview of the aim and benefits of Government 2.0, there was one sticking point for me. To say that “The central theme of Web 2.0 is moving away from point to point communications and towards many to many communication and collaboration” just does not sit right with me. For a start the term ‘point to point’ is a technical one and not explained in the paper. Point to point communication is defined by some as direct communication between two end points not using the internet (such as a two-way telephone call). And by others it is used in a broadcasting sense, say like radio communication between two fixed stations. As for me, the central theme of Web 2.0 is participation & interaction. Pure and simple.

Largest increase in expressing capability in history

Clay Shirky’s latest presentation is inspirational.

How cellphones, Twitter, Facebook can make history

What is changing is that the people formally known as the audience (in broadcasting terms) or the user (in telecommunications terms) can connect to one-another to talk and ‘do media’. It’s these networks of inter-personal connections that is the driver of change.

The ‘Telecommunications Age’ was one of one-to-one communication. The ‘Broadcasting Age’ was one of ‘one-to-many’ content distribution. The ‘Networks of Inter-Personal Connections Age is ‘many-to-many’.

Those institutions that were in control are no longer. They can convene groups of networked people but cannot control them. Adapting to that change involves a mature realisation of that social phenomenon.

Identifying New Influencers

As time goes by there is more research published on social media and social networking use. Here are some examples on identifying and measuring influence.

Research firm Sysomos has released some interesting data on Twitter use. In round numbers,10% of Twitter users make up 90% of the activity and 1% of Twitter users update more than 10 times per day. Approximately 90% of Twitter users post less than one update per day. Only 1% of Twitter users follow more than 1,000 people. About 90% of twitter users follow less than 100 people. Now this is all consistent with Dr Jacob Nielsen’s 90.9.1 rule:  “In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a littel, and 1% of users account for almost all the action”. As I’ve mentioned before, the 90.9.1 rule is a well-established pattern in social groups.

There are a couple of observations here. One is that the term “hyperconnectivity” needs to be taken in the context of how much attention is paid to “followers” or “friends” on social networks. Facebook’s own analysis shows that, while the average Facebook user has 120 friends, people maintain regular contact with only about five or six those. The rest are “weak ties” as it were. Those people who are highly active tend to have more connections (eg.1% of Twitter users are most active & 1% follow more than 1,000 people). The two may not be the same set, but based on my own use of Twitter I would say that they are the same. Sysomos data backs this up too: once someone has 1,000 followers the number of tweets/day rises from three to six.

Here is another piece about Twitter, this time as a leading source of real-time information. Time and again Twitter has demonstrated its strength as a source or real-time eyewitness news, heading off  the big media brands, this time in Iran. But there is a downside. To quote Inquisitr “When recognizing Twitter as the best outlet for the latest on the ground, you can’t ignore that the data coming from Twitter is raw, unfiltered, and at times difficult to follow”.  This is where adding value comes in through channelling attention to particular content. According to the Inquisitr article, that is exactly what the Huffington Post (an online newspaper) did to good effect in using data on post-election Iran that had been distributed over Twitter.

Nielsen has reported that time spent on Facebook in the US increased from 1.7 billion minutes in April 2008 to 13.9 billion minutes by April 2009, a growth rate of 700%.Time spent on the top 10 social network and social media sites increased by 212% over the year to April 2009. Interestingly, time spent on MySpace was down 31%. Some previously popular sites (such as Friendster) are no longer in the top 10. The assumption is that users find it easy to migrate from one site to another. I’m not so sure that it’s as simple as that. Facebook now has the largest number of photos of any site and there is no easy way for people to take their data with them right now.

MySpace seems to be more popular with teens, and more popular for viewing online video. Nielsen reported that: “In April 2009, visitors aged 25 to 34 and 35 to 49 were the highest indexing age groups on Facebook, being 27% and 23% more likely to visit the site than the average user, respectively. In contrast, the highest indexing demographics on Myspace.com was people aged 18 to 24 and 12 to 17″.

Identifying social media influence looks like it will be no trouble: focus on the top 1% of users (by activity and number of friends or followers).

The hard part is in measuring influence. According to the Sysomos sample, ‘Twitterfluence’ (as I call it) adds up to about 120,000 people. Time spent on sites is another measure of influence, a more straightforward task. Demographic analysis is another way of measuring influence. For example, tracking teenager social activity would involve more analysis of MySpace relative to Facebook. Tracking the use of social networks like Twitter by other media brands and by individual bloggers of note would also be another measure of influence.

Participation Divide

I gave a presentation on the social web to a professional services firm yesterday. My two key messages to them were about:

• the fast pace of change; and that
• massive networking changes everything

On the first point I looked back to the early 1990’s – before the public internet and in the days where the few people that had mobile phones carried around what looked like bricks.  Today, there are over 1.6 billion people connected to the Internet and over 4 billion mobile phone users. And we are on the threshold of fundamental change in how people communicate, work and how organisations operate. With the “Participative Web” (Web 2.0) now mature we are moving toward the “Personalised Web” (Web 3.0) where context rather than content is more likely to be king.

The mobile internet space is growing rapidly. Take iPhone for example, with over 1 billion applications downloaded in the last nine months. As I recall, the Skype app is the most popular, helping to spur the Skype user base past 400 million. Such is the ubiquity and potential utility of smart phones, some expect that 80% of Internet connectivity will be through mobile devices.

There are now over 5 million Australians using Facebook at least once a month, half of them using Facebook everyday. Internationally there are over 200 million people on Facebook with 500,000 people joining every week. Then there is MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, Goofy2 and many other social networks and bulletin boards around the world. Part of my presentation yesterday was The Conversation by Brian Solis that shows how many apps there are and their diverse use, all based around that very human activity of conversations. Twitter growth has been just amazing over the last quarter. FriendFeed appears to be on a winner with the introduction of real-time multiple person conversations. During my presentation I spoke about the benefits of the social web to productivity. I spoke about a re-balancing of power between institutions and distributed groups of people.

Now, I had a mixed reception to my presentation. Most of the younger people present were nodding their heads. Some of the older people just shook their heads. They have choosen not to participate, perhaps just regarding the social web as a fad, preferring to assume it will not make much difference to them. Perhaps they just don’t realise that having conversations – that very real and powerful human activity – is happening online as well as offline. It is better to integrate the two, far better, than to assume online conversations are not hear to stay.

Now that is a serious issue. This participaton gap may well be looked upon as a productivity gap, and sooner rather than later.

Openness, participation and scale: Web 2.0 rules of thumb

A large part of my horizon scanning research last year was on emerging communications and media business models. I needed to explain the main underlying trends likely to shape emerging value-chains and business models, so I came up with these three over-arching trends for ease of ‘conveying the message’ and to help retain the message:

Openness – socially, commercially and technically (standards and code) driving a culture of collaboration

Participation- the people formally known as the audience creating and co-creating, forming new connections and augmenting existing connections via social media and social networks online; and service providers facilitating interaction with their customer and the public

Scale - where location and size are no longer barriers to offering services or content online, challenging the scale advantages of mass media and telecommunications

Those three forces are driving growth and innovation in communications and media. My conclusion was that any communications & media business model that lacked those three drivers had a limited shelf-life.

Why am I posting this now? It was Vodafone’s move to “embrace open source with open arms”. I think this is biggie. Vodafone is a global mobile operator and from a sector that has strived to maintain control over what goes over their networks – such as Skype.  The EU is now on to that.

All well and good – my analysis is standing the test of time. But of course “it’s the economy stupid” applies as well. The global economic meltdown occurred afer I completed by research above and that factor has obviously caused Vodafone to re-think its strategy. No longer in a position to grow by acquisition, the company now accepts that “the only way to create a fertile environment for innovation is to have open platforms and leverage them”.

There is another twist as well. While reflecting on the Vodafone development, it occurred to me that the three over-arching drivers are applicable to individual netizens (consumers) and to instititutions generally as well as business.  To make the most out of the web, embrace the 3 x Web2.0 rule: openness, participation and scale. Of course there are major challenges to people and organisations taking up that challenge: the modus operandi for the 20th century has been one of control and acting independently.  Now we are in a century of co-dependence and collaboration – at least that is where innovation and growth is coming from. Perhaps a more apt phrase is “it’s the culture, stupid”.

Web enabled politics and stakeholder engagement

This posting is for those interested in new ways to engage with stakeholders and citizen-engagement in rules-making – in other words, those of you thinking about ways to improve stakeholder engagement in consultation processes and rules development. One of the contributing factors to a fall-off in political engagement over the last few decades is due to individual perceptions of a lack of influence or control. Much of what goes on in democratic processes between elections is led by sectoral interests who achieve power through organising institutionally (the organised few) in contrast to the influence of citizens (the dis-organised many). Well, although it is early days yet – the Obama administration for example is experimenting with different platforms – the web has the potential to change that.

Earlier today I listened to a Radio Berkman podcast on web-enabled political system. Gene Koo, a Berkman Fellow, was interviewed on how the Obama Administration could build on what they have done to bring about a web-savvy democracy based on values of transparency and engagement. One of the advantages of the web is that participation can scale at no marginal cost. Achieving citizen engagement in rules-making sessions would overturn the institutionalised power of a few. Koo talked about the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules-making process and the power of lobbyists to influence how the law gets enforced, and the potential for citizen engagement to participate, in effect contributing the ‘wisdom-of the-crowd’ to EPA rules. I feel there is potential for similar citizen-engagement in Australian rules-making processes…or at least to draw in a wider contribution from those who would not otherwise have the time or the money to participate in institutionalised processes.
 
Last Monday I went to a presentation in Melbourne on engaging stakeholders using Web 2.0 hosted by Futureye and BangtheTable(who claim to be an independent space for discussing public policy). The presenter, Crispin Butteriss, made some useful points about online consultative processes including that they:

•  are accessed by people from work between the hours of 8.00 am – 6.00 pm
• unearth real issues, not necessarily those identified by politicians or bureaucrats
• can shatter myths about what people really think about particular issues or public services
• make it easier for small-sized community groups to participate as well as individuals
• can use a range of tools, although some are better for particular uses (wikis are good for communities of interest; web forums are better for exchanging views, blogs are a useful public relations tool and to record the history of decision-making, mapping tools are good to cluster regional interaction)

Crispin had some hints about managing risks from online participation, such as:

• promoting the site widely so that the process is not hijacked by special-interest groups
• moderate post-comment as people find pre-comment moderation annoying
• once you make the call to start the online conversation, stay with it

People-centric media

I agree with Sean Howard, this presentation byJessica Clark rocks!

View the full presentation here: Public Media

There is also a great quote from Doc Searls, “The customer is the new platform”.

Main take-aways for me are that:

• Organisations and institutions are still important, but are not central to public media
• Public media is networked, not centralised

Transparency, participation and collaboration in Government

On 21 January President Obama issued a memo to the US federal heads of departments and agencies on the subject of transparency and open government. I know this direction is confined to the USA, but the principles have applicability in all democracies.

The aim of the initiative is to strengthen democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government through transparency, participation and collaboration. The memo acknowledges that knowledge is widely dispersed in society and that public officials benefit from having access to dispersed knowledge (as well as better access to information and knowledge held by other departments and agencies).

In summary, the consequences for departments and agencies are to:

• disclose information rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use
• offer increased opportunities for the public to participate in policy-making
• use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperate among themselves, across all levels of Government, and with nonprofit organisations, businesses, and individuals in the private sector.

An Open Government Directive to implement these measures will be developed over the next four months. You can view the memo here.

As well as improving the quality of information and analysis to support evidence-based decision-making, I can’t help but feel this initiative by President Obama has the potential to transform government processes and restore public confidence in democratic processes. The Participative Web has arrived in Washington DC.

I have not seen this memo mentioned in mainstream media, but the blogosphere has latched onto it. Interesting in itself. Maybe that is a sign that the watchdog role of the media is now going social?

In any case, President Obama’s initiative is bound to support and foster social networking and social media. As to the establishment: here comes everybody!