The original blog was on the book website, but a couple of years later I moved it to this domain, rossdawsonblog.com. At the time I put quite a lot of consideration into whether that was a good name, given that ‘blog’ was a neologism that might fade or be replaced.

The concept of a blog is now firmly mainstream, with not just tens of millions of people and many companies blogging, but a significant chunk of mainstream media having shifted to blog-like formats.

I still spot many articles about how to get attention to your new blog, and many people still seem to be setting up blogs (though of course many are also abandoning them after having tried for a while).

So what are some of the things I have learned from 12 years of blogging?

It is massively worthwhile (for me).
There is no question that my blog has been central to my visibility and in turn the success of my work over the years. Many client engagements come from people who read or discover my blog, and a significant proportion of the people who know of my work know of it through my blog.

Blogging refines knowledge and expertise.
The process of putting into words your views about industry developments, technology, the future, or anything else requires you to structure your thoughts. If you are going to share your ideasin public, you want to make sure you have your facts right, forcing you to research and find the relevant references and examples. Good blogging is often about engaging in online discussions with well-informed people who can hone your perspectives. If you have an opinions about something, write a blog post about it, and you will definitely know more and have better structured thoughts about it after you’ve written it.

Blogging is best complemented by other channels.
My first tweet, on June 21, 2008, read: “ok I know I’m the last one on the planet to dive in, but I’m now in twitterland – hi all!” As it turned I wasn’t the last person on the planet to join Twitter, but in my blog post about my arrival on Twitter I reported how I thought Twitter would take away from the limited time I was able to carve out for bloggging, which was my top priority. I have long spent more time on Twitter than I do blogging, however they are marvellous complements. Twitter information exposure leads to blog posts, and blog posts can be shared on Twitter. However the development of what I call “mini-blogging” – formats such as Tumblr and Google+ that are between blogs and micro-blogs – are also a vital part of the mix of discovering what is interesting, and contributing to the global brain.

Blogging is a commitment.
The real value of blogging comes from (reasonably) consistent effort over an extended period. If you stop for a while you lose momentum and it is harder to pick up again. However it is very hard to find time to blog; there is always something more urgent and important to do, and over the last couple of years in particular I have had extremely intense work periods when I have had to concentrate on client priorities. Yet I am committed to blogging, because the value far exceeds the effort. It is part of my life. While the word ‘blog’ may eventually be superseded, I expect to blog in some form or another for the rest of my life.

This is my 1,689th blog post (compared to 19,365 tweets so far). Here’s to many more.

At the time we did want to translate it into Arabic, however this proved difficult as it requires the Middle East version of Illustrator; most versions of Adobe CS do not support Arabic text. Fortunately we were recently approached with an offer to do a translation into Arabic, supported by the NGO Internews.

When I recently did the keynote at Arab Media World in Dubai on Creating the Future of Arab Media I noted that one of the defining aspects of Arab media is the exceptional uptake of social media in a number of Arab countries, by some measures the highest in the world.

As such the social media familiarity gap between users on the one hand and companies and governments on the other is extremely high. Hopefully this framework will prove useful. As always feel free to pass on the framework to those who might find it useful.

Click on the framework image to see the full pdf.

These well-publicized studies have led people to believe that Wikipedia is always a reliable source of information. However the problem is that both of these studies compared articles of substance on academic topics. There are more than 23 million articles on Wikipedia, and around 130,000 on Encyclopedia Brittanica. There is no way to assess on a comparative basis the accuracy of the close to 23 million Wikipedia articles on topics that aren’t substantively covered elsewhere.

This is a broad and important issue, as people are very often placing too much reliance on long-tail Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia’s credibility for articles that attract multiple contributors and editors is pretty good. But when there are fewer contributors to an article, that credence is not always merited.

I have to say I have a personal interest in this. Because people trust Wikipedia, when they want to find out about me they go to the Wikipedia article about me rather than my websites. The Wikipedia article is also syndicated so that, for example, it is referenced on the first page of Google results when you search for my name.

When I am introduced for media appearances or keynotes, I am surprised how often people quote the Wikipedia article.

Notably, the Wikipedia article describes me as a “former stockbroker”. That’s certainly correct, though I’m not sure why the editor highlighted that aspect of my diverse career. Now through one person’s choice of words I find am consistently referred to as a former stockbroker wherever I go.

Since I am at the somewhat well-known rather than famous end of the spectrum, it took a little while until someone felt it was worth writing a Wikipedia article about me. Someone eventually created an article stub, and since then just a few minor edits have been made.

To be frank I don’t have too much to complain about in the article.

There is one overt inaccuracy: it says “his ‘Future of Media Reports’ have a readership in the tens of thousands”. That number is entirely made up, I have no idea where it came from. The original Future of Media Report 2006 alone was downloaded over 400,000 times, however that figure is from my server logs; I don’t have a third party reference for that.

The article says I’m best known for my book Living Networks and how it anticipated social networks. That may be true, though I’m probably more broadly known for my Newspaper Extinction Timeline, which has appeared in many more than 70 major publications around the world.

I’m not going to edit my own Wikipedia article. If anyone wants to edit or flesh out my Wikipedia article they are very welcome!

In terms of sources, there is verifiable information on my RossDawson.com website, including from a variety of media appearances. Longer media profiles of me that are generally available include those in ITWire and Inside Knowledge magazines. I understand some other profiles of me will be published soon.

Hopefully over time not just my Wikipedia entry but many others in the long tail will improve in quality. In the meantime, don’t believe everything you read on Wikipedia!

On June 3-7 Crowdsourcing Week will be held in Singapore, bringing the Crowdsourcing Week team’s vision to fruition.

The term crowdsourcing was coined in just 2006, crystallizing and communicating the already well-established ideas of creating value from diverse distributed talent.

In today’s connected world we can tap the power, talent, and energy of crowds as never before. That is in the process of transforming many aspects of business, society, and government.

However, while the many manifestations of crowdsourcing, notably crowdfunding, are among the most visible trends today, the extent of the potential is still far from being recognized and understood.

As such the real value I see in Crowdsourcing Week is in bringing to both existing and new audiences the potential and possibilities of tapping crowds. Singapore is a fantastic venue for a global conference of this nature, not least in drawing greater attention to these important ideas in the Asia Pacific.

I will be doing the keynote on the second day of the conference, on Connecting the Crowd: The Future of Creativity and Innovation.

I am very pleased to be on the board of advisors for Crowdsourcing Week, participating in an event which will push forward the value of crowdsourcing across industries, governments, countries, and regions.

You can register for Crowdsourcing week here. I hope to see you there!

My keynote will be on the Future of the CIO. I have recently pulled together my thinking on the topic, drawing in particular on a series of CIO workshops I ran across Europe last year.

Below is the Future of the CIO Framework that I will be sharing at the events. It is now up on my complete list of visual frameworks on RossDawson.com.

Click on the image for the full-size pdf

As I did for many of my keynotes based on my Transformation of Business framework, I will use Prezi to run through the framework and offer insights into each of the elements of the landscape. I will shortly share the Prezi on my blog.

The launch of this framework is the kickoff point for what will be considerably more content from us on the future of the CIO and IT function. Stand by for more detailed explanations of some of the facets of the landscape, as well as different perspectives on the topic.

Air New Zealand ran its first Social Media Breakfast in July last year with Randi Zuckerberg as key speaker, with the exceptional success of the event leading the airline to continue the series with the second breakfast next week. While Air New Zealand is the 36th largest airline in the world, it ranks 6th in its social media presence.

In preparing for the event I have been looking at data on New Zealand’s usage of social media. I was surprised to find that there is a fair chance that New Zealand has the highest rate of social network usage in the world.

The chart above shows a summary of data from Nielsen on the time spent per month on social networks in a variety of countries around the world.

The differing dates for the data and what that means requires some explanation.

In January 2010 I reported on Nielsen’s first public study on global social network usage, which showed Australia as #1 in the world in time spent on social networks. Subsequent data from April 2010 showed increased usage and the same relative position of the countries.

Since then there has been no global comparative data released by Nielsen that I am aware of. However in its Social Media Q3 2011 Report Nielsen stated that Australia was still #1 in social media usage across the countries it covered, with an average usage of 7 hours 17 minutes per month. This figure was in fact 2 minutes DOWN from the statistics from over one year earlier.

Recently Nielsen released social media usage statistics for the US for July 2012, showing average time on social networks of 6 hours 28 minutes. This was also 7 minutes DOWN from the figures from April 2010.

In short, it is pretty clear that in countries where social media usage penetration is high such as US and Australia, time spent on social networks is not increasing and may be decreasing.

This is not highly surprising, as there are of course limits to how much time we can spend on social media, and it looks like we may have reached them. However the breadth of social media penetration is continuing to increase even in developed countries.

The other interesting data point is that in December Nielsen released data showing that online New Zealanders average 7 hours 43 minutes per month on social networks, far ahead of the US and considerably ahead of what was previously the world leader, Australia, where social media usage appears to be flat.

I am just looking at the publicly available data, so it is not clear whether Nielsen started covering New Zealand more recently or it came from behind to overtake Australia as having the highest usage of social media. Just as Australia caught up from a very slow start in uptake of social media, I suspect that the same has happened in New Zealand.

From before the popular rise of social media I was saying that geographically isolated countries such as Australia must have a mentality of connection. For New Zealand, even smaller and more isolated, that applies even more.

It is fantastic that New Zealanders clearly understand and embrace connectivity and the rise of the living networks. It augurs well for the country’s social and economic prosperity in years to come.

The roundtable was also written up in the Australian Financial Review, which provides a good summary of the discussion in a piece titled Conversation killers: managers who can’t talk the talk.

Interestingly, what the journalist drew out from my contributions was about the rise of microblogging:

Dawson said micro-blogging had soared with employers including Deloitte, the NSW Department of Education and NSW Department of Premier and cabinet using microblogs for internal communication with staff. “Of all the social media platforms microblogging is the most akin to conversation,” he said. “Email is not going to die, but it is reducing,” he said.

The rise of microblogging
I have been reflecting on the quite extraordinary rise of microblogging over the last few years. When I wrote Implementing Enterprise 2.0 in January 2009, I included in the “Tools” section Wikis, Blogs, Social Networks, RSS and Syndication, Social Bookmarking, and Microblogging.

Those were fairly early days and obviously today we would have quite a different frame, not least since the social software platforms originally available in each space have converged to each offer broad, integrated social suites.

However if we consider the individual social tools, there is no question that microblogging has risen the fastest, and is the aspect of social software most on the lips of CEOs who wonder whether they should emulate their peers who have found value in using microblogs.

The major microblogging players
The most prominent players are Yammer, now part of Microsoft, and Salesforce.com’s Chatter, and each have built out from that core to wider functionality. However there are many other participants. Tibco’s Tibbr kicked off the strong shift to “activity streams”, which includes corporate and project activities as well as people’s notes; I wrote about this at Tibbr’s launch.

IBM’s broad-based social platform Connections and platforms that began with specific tools such as wikis and blogs and have now shifted to broader social suites, such as SocialText, Jive, Telligent all include microblogging, while Cisco has introduced Jabber.

Intriguingly, I am hearing that some companies are using Twitter as a free enterprise microblogging platform, using protected accounts.

Why microblogging has flourished
If I had to pick out a single reason as to why microblogging has moved to the heart of enterprise social initiatives, it would be reflected in the quote the AFR used: microblogging is the closest we have to human conversation, which is at the center of organizational value in the knowledge economy.

In a related way, it provides the greatest value for the lowest effort. Most employees initially view social software as additional effort on top of heavy workloads, so have no interest in activities such as blogging that they think will be time-consuming. Contributing to a microblog takes minimal time so is an easy starting point, yet people can quickly see the benefits.

One of my most consistent messages is that high-performance organizations are increasingly driven by the quality of their networks. Microblogs, through their ease of participation and the breadth of their visibility, are excellent facilitators of organizational networks. Staff can easily get a better sense of activities, capabilities, and personalities across the firm. After 15 years of ‘expertise location’ being on the agenda, microblogs are proving to be one of the simplest and best ways to find the relevant expertise in the organization to address a problem or opportunity.

Success and failure
It is instructive how different the success of microblogging initiatives is across companies. In some cases they immediately flourish, providing value that is evident at all levels of the organization. In other situations microblogs fail to take off, fizzle, or simply flatline. Sometimes microblogs get traction in a part of the organization but fail to take root in others.

There are now a fairly well-developed set of organizational capabilities, that I will write about more in another post, on making microblogging work effectively. While some of it is about cultural initiatives, more is about design, in finding the right starting points for microblogging to grow.

Building a fire
Implementing microblogs is like building a fire; you begin with the kindling that moves to twigs and branches and eventually spreads to the central logs of the structure.

Microblogging has been clearly demonstrated to be a central element to building valuable conversations and networks in organizations. It needs to be a central element to building successful social business.

The Möbius strip is a simple strip of paper folded once and pasted so that it has only one side. A Klein bottle is its (hypothetical) three-dimensional equivalent, where the outside and inside of the bottle are the one and the same.

This is a powerful and highly relevant metaphor for the successful organizations of today and tomorrow.

Organizations are networks, and the high-performance organizations of today are those that are the better networked in swiftly connecting resources with opportunities.

Some companies have been very effective at using social media and other tools of connection to engage external communities including their customers.

Others have used social software and the tools of Enterprise 2.0 internally to build rich conversations and fruitful collaboration.

A small minority of organizations have proved to be good at both internal and external connection. These are the ones that will lead their industries in the years to come.

The challenge – and the opportunity – is to apply internal network capabilities to the outside world of customers, suppliers, and partners, and use experience in external engagement in building better connectivity inside.

For the successful organizations of the future, the inside and outside will be indistinguishable. Employees and crowdsourced external talent will connect through the same networks. Internal and external customers will be engaged in the same mechanisms of value creation.

Marketing and HR functions will mirror and learn from each others’ experience and capabilities, because they are doing the same job. Perhaps in more sophisticated organizations Marketing and HR will eventually merge into a single integrated function.

If you can clearly discern the distinction between the internal and external focus of a company, it will face major challenges ahead. The most successful organizations will be those where the inside and the outside are the one and the same.

Thanks to Dominique Turcq‘s The Fractal Nature of Enterprise 2.0 for the Möbius strip and Klein bottle metaphor.

This blog was launched to accompany the publication of my book Living Networks, which opened with a description of corporate blogging, and went on to look at how social networks would arise and impact business.

The title of the blog, “Trends in the Living Networks”, was pointing to the ongoing nature of a blog, picking up on what is current, in counterpoint to the static nature of a book. Of course the blog is now simply my primary vehicle for sharing content and ideas on a day-to-day basis.

There is much to reflect on from those 10 years of blogging.

Blogging has long become mainstream, and in fact in its original form largely supplanted by micro-blogging – largely in the form of Twitter – and social networks such as Facebook, which are largely derived from the format of blogging. However for many of us who were blogging since before social networks emerged, blogging is still a core activity, complemented by other media and formats.

When I registered the domain rossdawsonblog.com I actually thought the word ‘blog’ might not have real longevity, however it has proven to last fairly well.

As I predicted, the boundaries between mainstream media and social media have blurred beyond recognition, with traditional media companies using blog formats in earnest, and many platforms that began as blogs now rivaling long-established media.

My experience for a long time now is of feeling frustrated that I am not able to share more on my blog. Blogging is a core part of my work, however client work and working on ventures have to take precedence.

I will increasingly work with other people in creating content, however I feel my blog is still my own personal space, so I need to carve out the time to write on it as I can.

Perhaps my blog style and format is too established. I use it primarily to provide quick insights from work I am doing, with some other perspectives and content thrown in. It would be nice to do some longer-form pieces, however I tend to put the deeper-dive content into books or reports. I will try to experiment a bit more.

Blogging has been central to my life for much of the last decade. It is an ongoing commitment, which undoubtedly adds to the stress and pressure of a busy life. However its value has been immense to me.

My ability to reach people with my ideas and to be found is significantly founded on the visibility of my blog. A significant proportion of my client work over many years has come about directly through my blog.

At least as importantly, blogging consistently has helped me to research well and frame my thinking. I continually get asked about what you need to do to be a futurist. Many of the disciplines are the same as those of blogging: scanning for interesting insights, thinking them through and giving them structure, and communicating them usefully to others.

Unquestionably, blogging is an invaluable path to making sense of a complex world.

Will I blog for another decade? Undoubtedly.

I will no doubt use a variety of platforms new and old for sharing ideas and content. But right now it looks like the word ‘blogging’ has at last another 10 years of currency, and I expect to be regularly adding for many years to come to the 1,520 blog posts I have written so far.

To be frank, I think ROI calculations for social initiatives are in most cases a waste of time, because so many of the benefits and costs are unknowable before the initiative. A leap of faith is required, after which calculations using real data can be done to help refine strategies.

However if the organization requires a financial case, then those seeing the opportunity need to do what they can to create the case.

Chapter 16 of my report Implementing Enterprise 2.0 is on Building a Business Case. One of the resources I provide in the chapter is a table to help make ROI calculations. All that is required is to put numbers against each of the value and cost items in the table below, where appropriate using a back-of-the-envelope calculation to support them. Not all of the items will be relevant, and you may find other items that are applicable, but it provides a good starting point to generating numbers that can be used in an ROI.

I hope you find it useful! If so, also have a look at the free chapters from Implementing Enterprise 2.0 on issues including risks and benefits, and how these flow into effective governance.

Return on Investment for Enterprise 2.0 and social media