The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in the small municipality of Davos (pop. 11,289) with its picturesque, snow-capped chalets and its world-class ski-resort has always been one of those events, which outsiders have considered an opportunity for the powerful and the super-rich to hob-nob and plan how to create opportunities to make more millions.

Items on the agenda usually have to do with agriculture and food security, economic growth and financial systems so when they start this year’s list of subjects for discussion with topics such as “Is capitalism working? Will we grow again? Is the Western model still working?”, you know that there is a fundamental shift taking place in the tectonic plates of global power. A shift that’s been caused by a change in society on a global scale, itself [supported by] by social media.

For the heads of state and the financial elite meeting [in Davos] the concern is that the world has now entered what they readily acknowledge to be: …the “age of damage”, where “social media create a world of radical transparency”.

“Whether you are the head of an Arab country, the boss of BP, a misbehaving fashion designer or a footballer,” he says, “basically what we are seeing every single day is the power of people to make leaders behave the way they want them to be.”

The view espoused by the founder of the summit, Prof Klaus Schwab (see this BBC article), sounds like slogans we’ve heard in the Occupy Wall Street movement since the end of last summer: “Capitalism in its current form no longer fits the world around us,” which in itself shows the depth of change which social media has brought to our world.

Can We Remake Our World?

Inherent in the answer is the belief that, somehow, we matter. Up until the moment corporate conglomerates like Unilever and PayPal started to feel the sting of social media and entrenched tech companies like Blackberry in this Youtube video, began to fail, many of us thought that if we did matter, it was difficult to make our voice heard.

Social media is the ingredient that transforms everything.

The ability to suddenly find others like us and join them in making our voice heard is beginning to have an effect upon the world which stretches from politics to science and which, inevitably, encompasses business.

Companies love the fact that suddenly they deal with engaged, interested customers who can potentially offer two of the most fabled of customer traits: loyalty and word-of-mouth publicity by becoming enthusiastic brand ambassadors. The flip side of the coin is that companies also need to drop the marketing BS, stop treating customers like idiots, and respond to each one of them as a breathing, thinking human being who has an overriding concern that needs to be addressed.

This means that the adoption of social media and social media practices is only going to grow and this will continue to have a significant effect in the way we relate not just to the companies which we buy goods and services from but also every other company, institution and organisation which depends upon our custom or acceptance to function.

Now We Are All Responsible

Imagine the chaos that must have been the Athenian Democratic Forum where every citizen could hold forth with his views on how one of the most vibrant cities in the ancient world should be governed. Social media is revolutionary because it puts us in charge. As the recent SOPA debacle so clearly illustrated, we have the ability to sway companies, governments and individuals with the sheer weight of our voice. 

This is the moment when we realise that “With great power, comes great responsibility”.

We are, largely, united in our view that the world we live in, a world which, in many ways has been a digital extension of the 20th century, is not really working terribly well. Our governments and institutions are in serious need of overhaul and our guiding philosophies, like Capitalism, are in a state of degeneration. 

If we are looking for someone to blame here, we should look upon ourselves.

As Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm told Newsnight’s Jeremy Paxman that capitalism was concerned only with growth and making profit, not responsibility (You can see his interview here). This is another one of those moments when we realise that Capitalism, left unchecked, functions as it should, to our detriment.

The time is ripe for human intervention.

For the first time in history, everywhere, we have more connectivity than before, the ability to make our voice heard and knowledge at our fingertips. As David Amerland, author of “Social Media Mind” points out, we are learning anew, how to engage with one another en masse. It may be messy but I suggest the signs are, we’re learning quickly – exciting times indeed.

Why has this experiment been so successful?

A key advantage of trading through a Facebook tool, must surely be that “it’s where the people are”. If you’re a Facebook user with a reasonable number of friends, then you’ve probably adapted to a daily routine that includes at least one check of Facebook each day for news and updates. So to click the Group’s tab and check-in on what’s being traded or exchanged is easy.

Another reason for why it’s worked for us, has to do with the relative isolation of this island community. When members of the Waiheke community are exploring what new things are on offer, or find something through the ‘Search this Group’ function, they know they won’t have to hassle with shipping and transport. We all live within a few minutes of each other so we’ll be able to drop around to look at it, and if it’s suitable, finalise the trade and take it home, or arrange for a larger vehicle to collect it.

The fact that there’s a good chance you know the person you’re negotiating with can be a bonus. But if you don’t know them, it’s highly probable that a friend of yours is a friend of theirs, so the level of trust in this online community is extraordinarily high. This makes for a wonderfully open and generous environment to be trading in. It’s not unusual to see people posting things for free. If something sells but there’s more than one expression of interest in it, someone else might offer a similar item to meet the need of the other person wanting it.

It’s an incredibly social space, with a recent thread making plans for a summer Barbecue on the beach, and a poll being offered to decide the location. We’ve even had some tiffs, just as you might have in an open air local market. Some people have been quite vocal in expressing opposing points of view, but then their friends gently suggested we should stick to trading. We’ve even started a second Facebook group now, called “Waiheke Community Notice Board” for all the things that don’t belong in the Waiheke Trading group.

These are some of the social reasons this seems to be working, but then there’s the functionality of the Facebook group itself. While it’s not perfect, and if we ever had the chance to have discussions with Facebook’s coders we could offer suggestions for functionality we’d like to see. However, it could well be the lack of options which make it so easy to use for this purpose. Trademe on the other hand, which is our very popular New Zealand online trading service, has ooodles of options and you can’t engage in open discussion or share contact details.

Offering a new item to the 660 people (and counting), is as simple as loading a photo to the group, which can be done by uploading one from your computer to the group, or by taking a snapshot with your smartphone camera and adding it to the group with a suitable description via the free Facebook app.

As new items get added or older ones receive new comments, the content re-arranges itself to keep the current ones near the top and the ones that have either come to an end because the item is sold, or because no one is interested, slide slowly further down the list. The good thing is that even these ones that seem to drop off the bottoming can be found easily via the ‘Search this Group’ function in the upper right.

Where to from here? Who knows, but this is sufficient fun for now.

If you live on Waiheke and want to trade with your community, visit the group and ask to join, or find someone in the group to add you to it.

I’m a connector of people who can support one another co-create the emerging world. Our world is undergoing massive transformations, and the expanding network of neural connections across the Gaian brain is just one expression of it. I’m excited to be playing my part in helping others connect to the right people and information, both within their organisations and externally – to their clients, customers and partners.

Most of what I’ve done over the last 7 years, has been done online, and now I have a chance to bring some of the connections to life.

I’ll be leaving summer Waiheke’s beaches, and traveling across the globe to the wintery side of this spaceship we call home. I have a family engagement in California, which ends Jan 1st, and after that anything is possible.

I’m planning to meet up with the Yammer crew in San Fransisco. Then, by taking the long way home, meetup with various clusters of The Natural Step network, who I’ve been connecting with through their new Yammer network. It would be a chance to share some tips for how to get the most out of this and other social tools, and strengthen the connections with the people and organisations I’d like to work with more in 2012 and beyond.

Leave a comment here, drop me an email or a message on Facebook, or call me on Skype – let’s talk soon.

A Community Manager is a role and a function which, if established with clearly defined outcomes and implemented strategically to meet them, can have a measurable and positive return on investment for an organization. Rich Millington’s keynote address at Swarm Sydney, was a thorough overview of the job of a competent and skilled community manager, and enlightened me to several different aspects of this newly emerging role. It’s a role that has grown out the substantial growth in social media and is a response to a need for increased professionalism in this field.

I’m grateful to Alison Michalk (Director @Quiip) and Venessa Paech (Lead Community Manager @communityengine) and others who committed considerable energy to creating an event and attracting a wide range of excellent speakers who collectively touched on and brought insights to all the important aspects of this work.

From an organisation-centric perspective, online communities fall into one of two camps. There’s the outwards focused communities, where the community manager’s role is to grow an engaged community, focussed around an issue, a brand or a cause. These will often take advantage of commonly known and widely used tools, such as Facebook and Twitter and one of the many tried and true forum platforms.

Then there are the inward focused enterprise social networks, implemented when an organization perceives potential benefit from building connections and increasing the sharing of information more openly within the walls of its organisation. This second thread will make use of tools like Yammer which has the capacity, if implemented strategically, to build an active and engaged community, and increase and enhance collaboration and innovation.

Other distinctions which were less explicit in the speakers presentations, refer to the character and purposes of the organisations themselves. This distinction might be summarized as being either self-serving – in the case of an organisation who’s primary intention is to grow profits for its shareholders, or as society-serving – in the case of organisations who have a clear intent to be a beneficial presence in and for their local or global communities.

I’ve recently had the pleasure of assuming a community management role for The Natural Step international which has been building an inward focused online community using Yammer. This worldwide network of practitioners has a clear intent and desire to affect the most positive change and lead the transition to a sustainable world.

Swarm Sydney clarified that it is this sort of organization I want to be working with. I look forward to bringing my skills and experience to help build the capacity of organisations who are clearly leading the way and building a positive and bright future.

Over the past week or so, I’ve been having conversations with many different people, most of whom are well aware of the scale of the change, we are just now beginning to experience. It is my belief that we are now in the process of a massive reorganization of our institutions. The economic growth which has allowed corporations, governments and SME’s to thrive in recent years, is no longer, and some of them are embracing the change. The organisations that have moved beyond the comforting but unfounded assumption that growth will continue forever, are finding new ways to increase efficiencies, and thrive in a resource-constrained world.

I see us moving from being a carbon society, dependent on fossil fuels, towards a society where collaboration and innovation is the new energy source – supported by the free flow of information. How do we enhance the ability for members of an organization to collaborate and innovate. Creative sparks come when serendipitous links are made, as the same challenge is seen through different lenses.

The TED talk (above) by David Bolinsky offers a glimpse into the world of human biology and the complexity of the cells which make up these living breathing, walking, talking collectives we call our bodies. As I come to understand complexity at a cellular level, the more I sense that our equally complex organisations are also beginning to tap into the wisdom-of-the-crowd through the use of social networking tools like Yammer, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and more. I believe we’ll discover that facilitating positive change is mostly about facilitating the open flow of information and helping people to filter it in order to find the relevant information needed to ensure their work is part of the solution.

The impulse is a good one, that has correctly identified the inherent limits of the silo’d organisation. Though segmenting into departments has a logic, and may have been necessary in an on-the-ground world – in order to maintain focus and prevent information overload – such divisions are less important in a highly connected, digital online world.

The social networking tools have evolved to enable us to efficiently process increasing volumes of data without becoming overwhelmed. Through intuitive options and preferences, users can take control of which data gets ‘pushed’ into their “feed”, without being shut out of the rest, but when looking for something or someone in particular, a user still has access to it.

In an online world, we act as filters for one another (screening the information and focussing on particular segments of the vastly expanding volumes of it. With good tools we can choose who to follow, and what topics or projects to follow. We can change direction on a whim, and decide level of engagement that currently suits us – recognising we are all different characters, with different needs, at different times.

Assuming the role of online community manager, utilising these enterprise social networking tools, is a natural addition to the work I’ve been doing for the past 5 years.

In 2006 I was invited to cocreate a corporate team building event. It was a short deadline event, and the team was scattered across the city, so I found and introduced the team to Basecamp, an online project management tool, with some strong social communication tools. The event was a huge success and led to many more projects, with this group and others, including supporting the establishment of a self-organising network of Transition Town’ers in New Zealand.

Yammer

For the past few months I’ve had the pleasure of being part of several Yammer networks, and seen how they benefit communication and collaboration within these organisations.

Yammer is not the first or the only enterprise social networking tool on the market, and it certainly wont be the last, but it may presently be the most used – and not without good reason. It has a design logic that is focussed on usability and function. It is easy on the eye, it has a good balance between features that make it useful, without so many that it’s overwhelming for the new user, and its similarity with the Facebook way of working combine to make it a powerful tool that’s easy to start using and gain benefit from.

I see tools like Yammer, facilitating the process of coming together as the singular humanity that we are – helping us celebrate the diversity within the unity. Like cells in any organism, we are finding we can build communities of interest and connect with others who can support our projects while helping others with theirs.

In the following video (at 8m34s) Matt Kuperholz talks about the power of good tools to connect people, who may not otherwise find each other.

Following on from this video, an excellent article on how Deloittes is embracing Yammer and even building additional tools to leverage off it, is this one on Yammer’s website.

This post is a follow on from “The Spring of Enterprise Social Networks“

Communications

Trends in the digital world, which include digitised information, and the ability to share it, is on the rise at a pace hinted at in the one minute video from this August post. Concurrent with this seems to be a growing desire for collaboration. The abundance of tools that are available today, to facilitate connections online, had not even been conceived of 15 years ago. Consider for a moment and picture where you were in 1996 – what communications tools you were using?

Now some of the people who are building tools to connect us online, have turned their attention to the needs of organisations. A growing desire to be a beneficial presence in the world, combined with tools that enable us to connect more easily feel like perfect ingredients for an evolutionary leap into significantly greater collaboration and that sometimes mysterious process of innovation, where almost miraculous discoveries can be made.

Building connections

I have had the pleasure of working with a diverse range of networks over the last six years, with a focus on finding better ways to collaborate online. I’ve observed that the people in these networks share many of the same world views. These organisations are engaged in business and actions that express respectful relationship to all forms of life, wherever it arises – in a city, in a pond, in a tribal community, in a jungle. They share the idea that the structures of business can be used to heal and create a present, that is not only sustainable, but where human actions are even regenerative in relation to the world’s life-support systems.

So what’s trending in the technology space?

Enterprise social networks

We are social beings. We exchange with one another for the clothes on our back, the food on our plate, and we collaborate to make the music we share. It’s logical then, that if you offer new ways for people to easily connect with one another, that they will embrace the opportunity.

We’ve seen this with the meteoric rise of Facebook, from serving a few students in a single college campus (from a computer in a dorm), to being host to conversations and the sharing of information between over half a billion people. Now that’s a big conversation!

The first thing we notice in the world of digital sharing, is that we can’t be part of every conversation. So how do we find the conversations we want to be part of and leave the rest, always being attentive to expanding our perspectives through wise and conscious use of the tools available.

A good place to start is inside the organisation you are choosing to work with.

Is it performing at its best, is the flow and sharing of information being done in a way that allows relevant information to pop up quite naturally to your attention – without overwhelming you with unwanted data? Is your organisation utilising available and context relevant tools to facilitate the best conversations, on the most important topics, at the right time?

Learning new tools and the appropriate work flow habits that they require can be challenge. But, like Spring, it’s full of promise, and if we plant the right seeds at the right time, we’ll be sure to enjoy an abundant harvest.

James

1. It is only accesible by the members of the company or organisation, and carefully chosen guests
2. It respects the information is a key value and therefore it goes to great lengths to make it easy to find, collate, curate and share.

One Minute One Slide – Take Seven by jmsinnz

New Zealand had one hour of the 24 hour project, which was presented live from the Auckland Museum on Thursday night. Most of the hour was taken up with a 45 minute slide show, and then a few people including myself, were given 60 seconds and a single slide each to bring a message of the work they are involved in.

The message on my single slide was:

“Transition Towns - busting the myth that climate change is too big for anyone to do anything about.”

Keeping pace with the evolution of social media over the past 25 years has given me valuable insights into where we are going and what’s possible. We’ve been moving at a rapid rate from the old one-to-many broadcast models of TV and print media, to the interactive and peer to peer models of social media.

Social media is about having better relationships.

• Better relationships with your customers/clients.
• Better relationships with employees or colleagues.
• Better relationships with prospective customers/clients.
• Better relationships with stakeholders.
• Better relationships with potential talent.

If you choose to attend one of my workshops you’ll understand:

• It’s more than a bunch of kids on Facebook
• Where you can start
• How you can measure the effectiveness of social media investment
• Key elements to an effective social media strategy