In collaboration with NYnet and Manchester Digital Development Agency
Sponsored by Fujitsu Telecom and the Nominet Trust
24th November 2011 Royal York Hotel, Station Parade, York, YO24 1AA
Category Archives: Digital Britain
“Social Networks for Business Advantage”
I spoke at the Communications Managers’ Association conference “Communications – the Key UK Growth Accelerator” on March 9th; I had a 10 minute plenary slot. The CMA is a trade association whose members are responsible for about £15bn of spending on IT/Comms. I’ve written up the notes I used for the talk and they follow.
I said I was ‘the light relief before coffee’ – talking about ‘Social Networking for Business Advantage’. Two global brands and an ex Ofcom senior person spoke before I did.
I started by saying – of course, this audience will probably regard Social Networking as “all that fluffy stuff your marketing and PR people may be waffling on about” – the audience’s body language said as much! “Oh and a few geeks might be going on about it as well.” You can just make them all go away; but it’s coming to something when the marketing and PR people and your geeks are on the same side! Might be worth thinking about a bit.
The question is, can we gain Business Advantage from Social Networking? My approach was to talk about three things which make it important for me, and which might be useful in thinking further; it’s about
- Being entrepreneurial; and taking a bit of risk in a new area
- Avoiding being caught in the hype – but don’t let your predjudices (people Tweeting about what they had for breakfast for example) drive your behaviours
- Being prepared to have a go at it – for yourself; to see how it might work (or not!)
Being Entrepreneurial
I was described as “Entrepreneur” in the programme and I joked that the conference organisers had looked at my bio and thought “No idea what he does – just put Entrepreneur – he won’t mind”. You’ll also note that that they didn’t put “wildly successful and influential” in front of “Entrepreneur”. Nor did they put “failed”. I’m working on the former – and have had a bit of the latter (but not too much).
I set up on my own in late 2002 – and I now do lots of things. Consulting with Complexity Partners where I work with Thias Martin and Neil Gregory and a network of other business partners. I’m on the Board of CBN (a Coop) and Aquafuel Research Limited (a venture capital backed technology business). I work closely with Amplified Networks (a not for profit) at the cutting edge of the use of social media and collaborative working.
I use Social Networks to sustain meaningful conversations with customers, stakeholders and business partners. I’m actively using technology to generate realtime and near-realtime content using widely available technology; mostly for C4CC and Amplified.
Over the past 6 years or so, Social Networks have become an integral part of the way I do business.
One of Complexity Partners’ major projects is the Centre for Creative Collaboration (“C4CC”). C4CC is a joint venture between the University of London, Goldsmiths, Central School of Speech and Drama and Complexity. C4CC exists to support collaborations that can deliver both economic impact and public value.
The hypothesis is that by focusing the development of Creative Industry businesses – most of them SMEs (as one of the key outcomes of the work at C4CC), we can make rapid and meaningful economic impacts. These businesses can grow faster (and fail faster!) and offer the potential for employment growth over and above that of “traditional” STEM based businesses.
As part of this, the management of the Social and other networks around C4CC is an integral part of the design. We actively manage the Physical, Virtual and Social ‘spaces’. We have a Social Artist in Residence. We host London’s Leading Social Media Cafe (aka the “Tuttle Club”) and a number of other business, cultural and artistic and performance networks. And we do this for reasons of ‘Business Advantage’.
The power of the approach I describe is that it brings the kind of people we want to work with into the space. And we invite them in on their terms – not ours. And it’s working.
Avoiding the hype
I warned earlier about not being caught in the hype; a collection of anecdotes (sometimes called ‘”case studies”) does not deliver actionable data. However in using Social Networks we can both set sensible metrics and track them. So, in the case of C4CC what are the data for our first 12 months of operation?:
- Collaborative projects; target set 20; actually achieved 80
- People involved in projects and events; target set 200; actually achieved 2,100
And we were told “There’s no demand” for this kind of neutral collaboration space combined with high quality support and facilitation services. We also have 4 start-up businesses (2 emerging from projects at C4CC and 2 we have brought in from outside).
Being prepared to have a go
Over the past 12 months or so, interest in Social Networks from businesses has grown and seems to have accelerated over the past 6 months. Much of the action has so far been in the B2C area with ‘Big Brands’ using Social Networks to promote themselves and communicate.
And there is massive potential in B2B and also in internal communications; Enterprise versions of Social Media tools for example. But to capture the value in this, it’s necessary to ‘have a go’ and not leave it to the PRs and the geeks.
Recently I was at a Round Table discussion of the use of Social Networks by business; a scattering of Fortune 500 companies, technology companies; a mixture of operational people, public affairs people and consultants. All discussing the impact of Social Networks on business; and one of the participants, a very senior corporate public affairs person said “The Genie is out of the bottle – it’s just that the “C-Suite” hasn’t accepted it yet”.
So the best thing to do – is have a go. And remember, this is what we wanted – pervasive, ubiquitous, accessible IT/Comms technology. Deeply embedded in our lives and businesses. So we have to deal with it by getting involved.
Designing the city: What role for design in London’s future
In this STIR Lecture (Simulator Teaching Innovation Research) at Imperial College, the role of design in London’s future was to be ‘debated’; except there was no debate. Mighty good stuff though.
Sir George Cox plugging away; telling anecdotes (mostly about the previous administration) and giving really good examples of how design skills and process can contribute value to product and service design.
Matt Hunter, head of the Design Council – using the ‘hokey cokey’ approach to rhetoric (you put London in, you take London out . . . .) and speaking passionately about the need to ’embed design in policy-making’ (bless)
| Dan Phillips Group Director of Sustainability of Buro Happold got off to a bit of a slow start but got into his stride, talking about the need for a big change in attitude from both the designers and providers of goods and services; “There’s a sense that the utilities want to sell us power and gas – but they ought to be selling ‘warmth’ and ‘light’.”
More about the speakers here: |
And why was there no debate? Because all the speakers agreed with each other (and themselves) that Design was central to the changes we need to make in our economy and society – but is anyone listening?
Localism and the Media – team up the geeks and journos
Setting out the ground
I heard the Jeremy Hunt MP, the new Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport deliver his first keynote on Media and Technology on 8 June 2010.
Jeremy Hunt spoke with the confidence and assurance of someone new in a job he’s wanted to do for ages and an awareness, I felt, that this bit is the easy bit. He also mentioned his happiness at having a new baby recently. If he has a 100 day plan (which I suspect he has – look at the 15th July date mentioned in his speech), then the first 30 are going well. He set out with clarity the areas he will focus on; three main strategic objectives:
- Rapid roll-out of superfast broadband
- Access to infrastructure
- A new vision for local media
The real strategic goal is, of course, the new vision for local media. It plays strongly into the New Localism agenda and potentially opens up a way of unlocking the over dominance of Big Media. By relaxing (perhaps abolishing) the cross-media ownership rules he may stimulate local developments that will rescue some of the sub-scale regional media groups. Forcing the Telcos to share infrastructure through access to ducts and poles also opens up interesting possibilities for new entrants.
In all probability, we won’t be able to realise the new vision for local media without the rapid roll-out of (carefully undefined) ‘superfast broadband’ and that will require shared infrastructure. Hence why we have the 3 areas he will stand and fight on.
I say ‘stand and fight’ because the existing mainstream media and telco players with Significant Market Power will, while smiling, fight him every step of the way. The broadcast media industry hasn’t spent the last 20 years consolidating just to give it all up to a ‘New Vision for Local Media’. And there will be lots of reasons why access to infrastructure will be ‘problematic’ – some valid; many specious (remember all the shenanigans at the beginning of the unbundling of exchanges!).
Zero-basing the media
The existing models can’t deliver local TV/radio news, the IFNC idea was never going to work and the public service regional news broadcast model has over-centralised – look at the BBC and ITV. I live in Kent and my ‘local’ news often features things happening in Oxfordshire; well over 100 miles away.
We need a radical rethink of how local news is generated, managed and delivered. And that means teaming up communities, bloggers, journalists and coders. It means finding ways for local advertisers to support local news stations (I think you can make local advertising ‘cool’ on the web) and it needs to be done over broadband.
I think if you start from a zero-base and team up geeks and journos – you just might get somewhere.
I also made an Audioboo with other thoughts:
Jeremy Hunt MP – Media and Technology
I was invited to hear his first keynote on Media and Technology – and here is the liveblog of the event.
At the bottom of this post you can see the liveblog I made at the time; while Jeremy Hunt was speaking. Using Scribblelive, I also added in content from those making comments on Twitter. I streamed live from the event using Ustream Broadcaster on the iPhone but just some of the questions. There’s no point trying to stream the speech – Ministers rarely depart from their prepared texts and in any event the transcript is usually available immediately. Questions are different however.
I’m embedding the stream archive here. The person in shot on the immediate left is Mark Thompson DG of the BBC – check out the body language.
The People’s Republic of Computer
A liveblog from Thinking Digital 2010
Bridging Thinking Digital
The Future of Broadband event in Gateshead
The Future of Broadband in the NE and the world
In a busy, buzzy and engaging event, over 100 of the NE’s leading business people and entrepreneurs discussed the Future of Broadband – looking at the prospects for the NE in the new wave of broadband services, often called “Next Generation Access” or “NGA” some of which are being developed here in the region.
The scale of the opportunity
The event was sponsored by NorthernNet represented by Mercedes Clark Smith and Sunderland Software City represented by Fred Pernet of Codeworks.
In their opening remarks, Fred and Mercedes mentioned the importance to the NE’s businesses of getting to grips with the coming services as broadband develops; this is especially important given that the region is increasingly looking to create new jobs in the digital and creative sectors; such as games, animation and software. Mercedes described how NorthenNet offers types of technology and broadband speeds to smaller companies previously only available to the very largest and on a much more flexible basis. She argued that “It’s not about the technology; it’s about the people” and that the benefits of creative and technical people working together are beginning to be realised.
The move from Copper to Fibre
To provide a basis for the conversation, Adrian Wooster, Chief Technology Officer of the Community Broadband Network, talked about “From Copper to Fibre” and covered the types of new services based on optical fibre technology and their impact on business. He mentioned that it’s important to remember that it’s not all about download speed. Increasingly the speed at which you can upload files and other content is becoming more critical to businesses. He said “New technologies are coming, some of them already being implemented in Gateshead, that offer the potential for new services. You can get closer and closer to customers.” He stressed the business relevance and innovation potential of new services.
G-ti – “Getting it done” in Gateshead
Liz Reed from Gateshead Council (pictured above) focused on G-ti (which stands for Gateshead Technology Innovation) a ground-breaking project bringing ultra high speed service to the Baltic Business Quarter. “Our job is to make sure we get businesses and jobs; jobs for local people.” That G-ti is an example of collaboration between the private and public sectors, is a very open and competitive network and that it demonstrates what Gateshead needs to be competitive. That it’s important for local authorities to demonstrate leadership. She spoke passionately about the “need to unite creative and technical people in using this new stuff”. Liz said that Gateshead was “About getting things done.” At the end of LIz’s presentation, Brian Condon a director of CBN and an independent consultant on technology and business, did a ‘straw poll’; asking the audience to vote on whether this project was a good use of public funds – admittedly an unrepresentative audience – but they voted in favour (with not a single hand raised against).
Caring for the “Not Got Anythings”
Other local projects featured highly in the session – Cybermoor Limited whose Operations Director, Kevin Wood, said that in his area of Weardale ‘NGA’ stands for “Not Got Anything”. Cybermoor are working with local communities to install optical fibre and improve access to services and innovations such as high capacity ‘Telehealth’. He agreed with Liz that it was about “Getting things done”. He said he wasn’t afraid of the “Community” word. He was open about some of the issues of small scale projects; and that a lack of depth of resources could give problems. He concluded that “It’s about making things happen when no one else cares.”
George’s “Stories from the Coalface” from ITPS and Virgin
George Galloway, MD of ITPS brought what he called “Stories from the coalface” of real business in the region. ITPS is a successful and growing privately owned IT services business with over £10m of turnover. George, who was on stage with Chris Walsham from Virgin Media, provided examples of how ITPS operates. They were the first Service Provider to offer services on the G-ti network (there are now 5 competing providers) and they partner with a range of companies including Virgin Media. Chris stressed the importance of partnership working and the need to collaborate. He said that their strategic relationship with ITPS was a good example as it shows that both large (and Virgin Media has a £15bn network) and smaller players can benefit. George gave the example of a successful project where a move from Copper to Fibre (of one of the types described by Adrian earlier) had delivered operating cost savings of 30% while simultaneously provding a 10-fold performance increase. Chris added that these new technologies can help companies reduce their carbon footprint; reducing the need to travel and saving time.
Partnership working to ‘bridge the gap’
Simon Roberson who is the NE Regional Manager for BT Group gave a different perspective from a very big player in the market. He talked about BT’s plans to deploy “Superfast Broadband” to 66% of the UK population by 2015. He said it was a very big project and that it would be difficult to reach those people described as being in the “Final Third”. He said “We have to remember that the ‘Final Third’ is one third of the population; not 1/3 of the country.” and that there are still very big distances to cover outside the dense urban areas.
Simon gave an example of partnership working in Northern Ireland as a way for the public and private sectors to work together. He argued that, despite what some other speakers had said, what will pay for the investments will be premium services such as HD and 3D TV which need more bandwidth than existing services. He said to businesses in the meeting “For you guys it’s a tremendous opportunity.”
Stand by me . .
In a charismatic multimedia keynote presentation, Houston Spencer (above, left) Vice President of Alcatel Europe (the private sector partner in G-ti) used the Ben E. King song “Stand by me” coupled with images from the 50s and 60s to show how much the world has changed and how much more change there is to go still. He showed a video called “Stand by me; playing for change” which was made in multiple locations by multiple players and brought together to form a single performance. He told us that the original record had been played over 7 million times on the radio since its original release 50 years ago but that this video, released only 2 years ago had already been watched over 12 million times on YouTube.
Houston talked about the changes that are coming; and that big organisations came about because of the ‘need to aggregate capital’ because everything was expensive. The IP/Broadband world changes all that – and that it’s now much easier to create and distribute new forms of content and products using the internet. Houston asserted that many people mistake the intent of new forms of social media such as Facebook and Twitter; they are not about “broadcast mode”; “It’s not about self promotion, it’s about making connections with people, building relationships and forming an ‘ecosystem’ of people connected together”. Houston concluded that there was a risk that the big players might destroy the ecosystems they are creating by too many rules or changing the conditions that brought them about. He finished with an optimistic picture of how relationships sustained by the internet can result in an explosion of global collaboration and connectivity.
Photo credit: Simon Williams, Crest Photography
Transformational Digital Infrastructure (“TDI”)
Last week, Shaun Fensom and I went to Birmingham for CBN to talk to Digital Birmingham about NGA strategy and developments in the wider City Region. We realised during a sequence of discussions with regeneration specialists and others that there’s been ‘language capture’ going on. The telecoms industry, in it’s usual way, has used the ‘naming of things’ to confuse the picture. So ‘First Generation Broadband’ aka ADSL was never really ‘broad’, and Next Generation Access is undefined, largely. But we’ve got ‘Superfast Broadband’ now; well, some of us have. So that’s all right then.
There’s an overfocus on speed. And a lack of visibility of connection quality, the need for symmetry, levels of contention, latency and jitter. In the past, in Regeneration and Planning ‘connectivity’ meant roads, airports and rail. The good news is that there is increasing realisation on a regional and City-regional basis that Digital Connectivity is increasingly important and needs to be planned in; and not left to the industry to not-deliver it.
So we need a new term. and Shaun and I agreed we would blog about it. So here it is. We need “Transformational Digital Infrastructure” – it’s not just about the technology. And it’s not some false polarisation of the “Pipes and/or Poetry” mafia.
It’s a much richer picture of the human and technical networks needed to bring about Digital Britain.
Tweeting the politics – party conferences 2009
This year Twitter made its impact felt on the Party Conference circuit. I went to NESTA Fringe meetings in Brighton last week and in Manchester this week. I came up with the idea of seeing whether the Tweetstreams might tell us something about the relative states of those two parties. The results are, I think, intriguing.
#cpc09 beats #lab09 hands down
I’ve looked at the main hashtags being used at both the Labour and Conservative Party conferences over a comparable period in each case (beginning on Sunday and ending on Thursday). The total volume of Tweets with the #lab09 tag was 10,379 compared with 12,733 with the cpc09 tag. The numbers are derived from time series data kindly provided by What The Hashtag?! and I acknowledge the help of Mark Bockenstedt for his advice in understanding how to use the API.
Naturally, all I’m doing is looking at Tweets tagged with those particular hastags – I don’t know at this stage what the contents or stance of the Tweets might be; whether positive or negative.
Time series data . . . hmmmm
We can also examine the flow of Tweets over time (and looking at the structure of flow is always instructive).
This picture shows the daily volume of Tweets with the #lab09 tag, beginning on the Sunday (Day 1) and running until Thursday (Day 5). When I saw this picture, I wasn’t particularly surprised – it shows a build-up of activity each day with a ‘peak’ on Tuesday; the day when Gordon Brown did his ‘big speech’ to conference. Looks like activity diminished somewhat on Wednesday and Thursday – and indeed, recalling the news coverage at the time there was talk of the conference ‘going a bit flat’.
Looking at the daily volume of Tweets tagged #cpc09 is a bit more surprising. Day 2 (Monday) was the day Boris Johnson ‘did his thing’ and William Hague gave a keynote. Day 3 was George Osbourne’s Gloomy Day. Day 5 (yesterday) was David Cameron’s ‘big speech’.
Now examine the two charts together
Look at the volumes; only once did the #lab09 tag reach over 3,000 per day; and that was when Gordon Brown spoke. And the daily volumes were consistently larger for #cpc09. Activity levels higher across the piece. And it seems to me, by observation, there seems to be more ‘momentum’ in the #cpc09 hashtag. Certainly, I noted (and Audioboo’d about) the generally less cheerful and relatively more cheerful feels of the Labour conference people I observed versus the Conservative conference people. Note I was just in each city (actually on the Tuesday) and at Fringe events outside the ‘security zone’.
It’s just an observation – and you may have some thoughts
What does it mean? I should add that I’ve looked at hashtag activity extending both sides of the Labour conference and for the run up to the Conservative one. There are no glaringly obvious patterns and, in any event I have produced comparable stats on the same chart scales for each conference.
I’m still thinking about what, if anything, this analysis tells us. It could be that the volume of #cpc09 tweets reflects relatively more negative traffic (ie Labour supporters using the hashtag to criticise the Tory conference) than is in the #lab09 Tweetstream. It could just be that the disquiet of the Labour supporters is reflected in their lower use of the #lab09 hashtag – staying quiet rather than Tweeting negative thoughts. Please feel free to comment if you have further thoughts.
Why no #ldc09?
Well, I can’t get back in time as far as the Liberal Democrat conference – Twittersearch says “No older Tweets available” and they’re not there on WTHashtag?! either. Which brings me to a further thought – Tweets are ephemera. they vanish into the ether after about 10 days or so as I understand it. However their nature Which, will, I think, become an issue if Twitter starts to have an impact on the political process . . .
Because it should have been #ldconf
Thanks to Tory Bear for pointing out my error, and also, see his comment below. My reading (such as it is) of the Tweetstream from #cpc09 does tally with his view.
So here we have the Tweets from the Liberal Democrat conference alongside the Labour and Tory ones (it’s not quite midnight oil burning yet . . ).
The choice of hashtag is a bit odd, I think – not including the year does not follow ‘best emerging practice’ such as it is. I wonder, to what extent, the choice of this hashtag was really planned?
Now for the timeseries data, shown on the same scale as #lab09 and cpc09 above. At this scale, the detail is not apparent – and when I look at the numbers, the daily volumes vary from about 700 Tweets per day (Shall I define a new unit – Tpd?) to 900 Tpd. So the idea tha the Lib Dems are somehow more sociable and chatty does not seem to be borne out by the evidence.
Endnote: You can find my other material on the conference fringe events on the Amplified09 website:
Amplifying Nesta at the Labour Party Conference
Amplifying NESTA at the Conservative Party Conference – Getting Creative