Passing the threshold of blogging

Which in itself comes to the nub of the experience of blogging, all the thresholds you have to cross to actually start and finish a blog post. What is compelling enough to say that you take the time to write it? How long or polished should pieces be? If I get started writing a post, how much time is it going to take to say what it is I want to say? When do I cut off a blog post and save the rest for the next post?

In a way, the more you have to say, the harder it is to say it, because a book is a more appropriate format than a blog post. Any blog post risks becoming a book. Any topic you choose to blog about, however narrow, deserves deeper inspection.

For the last few years the majority of my blog posts have shared thoughts from my keynotes and media coverage. The preparation for each of my keynotes develops my thinking further each time, and I want to do a blog post to share just a little of what I covered.

However since I have barely blogged for over a year, I have a backlog of 50 or more keynotes from which I want to share thoughts, and other streams of content I am developing. In short despite developing a great deal of content, this has been the year I’ve produced the least content for many years. It is time to get back to sharing.

Finding your blogging voice and behaviours

The standard advice to anyone starting a blog is that you need to find your voice, and the only way to find your voice is to blog. As you write, you find what works for you.

For ages I have wanted to try to catch fragments of thoughts as they happening, capturing them as a brief snapshot, quickly written. I have a tendency to want to keep on going when I write a blog post, and almost every post refers to other posts I intend to write that will go into more detail, that almost invariably I never get around to writing.

I was always trying to change my blogging habits, to tend to capture these very brief ideas rather than feel I had to go into detail. So now I am relaunching my blog, this is an opportunity to change my behaviours, to try to blog more.

However one reason that I have blogged less over the last years is that I am simply so busy, I take on a crazy amount and blogging is never top of the priority list when you have client deadlines and many projects being launched. But I just need to prioritise blogging, as a way of letting my thoughts flow more, be more visible rather than it only coming out in more structured work such as frameworks. I am launching an ambitious new set of ventures (more on that later) so the pace is not letting up, but I want some kind of content to consistently spin off what I do.

The rise and retreat of blogging

As I write this post I realise it has been 14 years since I launched my blog. Since then I have written 1,793 blog posts. Those were fairly early days in blogging, well before any significant social media platforms had emerged. While it took a few years before I really got going with it, for quite a few years my blog was central to my identity and visibility, core to building my global work.

I resisted Twitter until mid-2008, believing that it would take away time from my blogging, but as soon as I started I realised how complementary blogging and Twitter are. However over the last few years Twitter has become by far my dominant social channel.

A number of years ago my New Year’s resolution was to spend more time on Facebook. Over the last year or two I finally am doing that. However Twitter is certainly my primary home, with still all my tweets being funneled through into my Facebook stream, just adding an occasional post directly on Facebook.

Of course other blogging channels have arisen, notably LinkedIn and Medium. There is a strong case to just blog on those channels than your own blog, as there is the potential for far wider distribution. But other than reposting a few posts on LinkedIn, I haven’t used those channels yet, I prefer posting on my own blog.

With the rise of a multiplicity of other social and content-sharing channels including Instagam, Snapchat, YouTube and many others, it seems far fewer people are blogging than back in blogging’s heyday. But a blog still has power today.

back to blogging?

I have been able to easily write this blog post as a stream of consciousness (section headers added later) as I sit in the airport lounge, seizing the opportunity of fractional space in my schedule. I hope that I will get my blog going properly again, sharing in new and easy ways, seizing the opportunity of relaunching my blog to reframe how I use it, what new blogging behaviors I can take on. Among other things, I want to try to make it more conversational, as in this post.

I wouldn’t hold your breath given my record over the last few years, but perhaps I will find my blogging voice again. :-)

Image: Jacqui 1686

City of Melbourne’s over-arching vision for the annual Melbourne Spring Fashion Week is to position Melbourne as Australia’s premier fashion destination, and have a real economic impact by driving increased sales for retailers in the city.

In partnering with IBM for the second year the intention was to extend the impact of the event beyond the week and to drive ticket sales and in turn sales by tapping the social currency of influencers.

Melbourne Spring Fashion Week is unusual in fashion shows in that everything on the runways can be bought at stores in the city. This contrasts to the traditional role of fashion shows as breaking new fashion, which may not be available for many months after it is launched.

Melbourne Spring Fashion Week used IBM Social Media Analytics on Twitter and Instagram to uncover the top 50 relevant fashion influencers, used Watson Personality Insights to work out how best to approach them, and invited them to be MSFW “insiders”, asking them what content would be most useful to them.

Ticket sales have been considerably higher than last year, with 4 of the events sold out.

The initiative is particularly interesting in showing how social analytics and engagement can help drive shoppers into shopping centers and physical stores.

While individual stores can do a great deal to merge their digital, social and physical engagement, the real power comes in bringing people to a shopping center or area, or even an entire city center.

All shopping is becoming social. Retail strategies for merging physical and digital are best envisaged and implemented on a large scale, tapping collaboration and activating buyers.

Image credit: Eva Rinaldi

There are and have been many influence ranking systems around. This one focuses on a particular group – keynote speakers – for whom online influence is particularly important, and brings together three measures: Klout, website traffic, and Twitter followers.

It is of course very easy to criticise any influence rankings mechanism, and we do not pretend this is by any means ‘accurate’, it is intended to be indicative and interesting. We have provided complete transparency by publishing the algorithm we use. The intention is to tweak and develop the algorithm over time. Let us know if you have suggestions on how to improve it!

At the time of writing this post I am in 23rd position, which I think is pretty decent given my illustrious peers. I suspect I will move down the list over time, as we have no doubt missed people who should be on the list. Please suggest additional speakers if you or anyone else are not on the list and you believe should be included. To be included people need to work primarily as a keynote speaker.

Let me know your thoughts!

]]> https://rossdawson.com/launch-keynote-speaker-influence-ranking-tracker/feed/ 0 https://rossdawson.com/lessons-learned-12-years-blogging/ https://rossdawson.com/lessons-learned-12-years-blogging/#comments Thu, 30 Oct 2014 12:00:53 +0000 https://rossdawson.com/?p=7243 It is 12 years since I started this Trends in the Living Networks blog to accompany the launch of my book Living Networks. It is interesting to look at my posts from October 2002, in which I reflected on some of the earlier signs of the networks coming to life.

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.

I have applied the tools and approaches of network analysis to a wide variety of domains, including organizational analysis, industry analysis, client relationship analysis, influence networks, sales and innovation networks, high-performance personal networks, and far more.

Much of my work today is helping organizations and senior executives to think effectively about the future, so as to set and implement effective strategies for success. However network analysis is an invaluable complement to that work, applying it as a tool to help improve performance.

In a networked world, we must understand the networks in which we are embedded.

On RossDawson.com I have just published a brief piece Futurists on Twitter: An analysis of network centrality and authority.

The chart showing the network analysis is shown below, uncovering authority and centrality among futurists on Twitter. Zoom in by clicking on the image.

Read the article for full details on the analysis.

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 full transcript of the lecture provides rich stories from the history of journalism in Australia, and an incisive view of the present.

On the topic of crowdsourcing, Mark says:

Mark also discusses the automation of news content, a topic I’ve written about several times on this blog.

The overall tone of Mark’s comments is pessimistic, pointing in detail to the financial travails of all but a handful of news outlets in the world today. He rightly concludes:

Certainly the story that Mark tells – one well familiar to those in the frontline of the news industry today – is on the face of it not a happy one. Yet we need to look at the possibilities of the landscape today.

Just over a week ago I ran a workshop in New York on Crowdsourcing for Media, which included an overview of 12 elements of news that can be crowdsourced in different ways. I’ll expand on that analysis soon.

Mark takes a positive view of crowdsourcing in his comments. Indeed, in almost all cases the crowdsourcing of news combines amateur contribution with professional insight and experience, creating better combined capabilities.

We could look at the automation of news content as a negative. Yet if some kinds of news can be reported adequately by machines, why have skilled humans do that? There are ample domains in journalism where we can be confident that machines will not be rivalling human capabilities for probably decades, which is considerably longer than it will be for many other professions.

Automation and crowdsourcing of news, combined with professional journalistic skills, undoubtedly provide a richer landscape of news reporting than we have had before.

As I write in the Second Edition of Getting Results From Crowds:

Of course the piece of the puzzle that is far from resolved is the financial models that will pay for the professional journalists in this picture. I do believe that those news organizations that truly explore the emerging sources of value in news will find those models, possibly including crowdfunding of some initiatives.

Let’s do what we can to create that richer world of news, enabled by automation, crowdsourcing, and the blossoming of social media.

Some of the interesting insights from the study include:

* There is a massive amount of communication about major companies, with each company mentioned in an average of over 55,000 tweets and 19,000 blog posts each month

* Corporate participation in social media is high though not yet pervasive, with 82% of the companies on Twitter (compared to 65% in 2010), 74% on Facebook (up from 54%), and 79% on YouTube (up from 50%)

* The average Fortune 100 company has almost 15,000 followers on their Twitter account, almost 3x a year earlier, and over 150,000 likes on Facebook

* There has been a rapid shift to multiple social media accounts, with the average company having over 10 Twitter accounts and 10 Facebook pages, across segments, geographies, and purposes

* 25% of the companies have Pinterest accounts, showing they are on top of trends

Overall, the data points to a high and increasing level of engagement with social media by large corporations. However by 2012 it is still rather surprising that there are still major companies that are not yet engaged on social media. Undoubtedly under the headline data there are many companies that are engaging on social media, but with little depth or enthusiasm.

How well companies engage in social media is likely to be an increasingly accurate indicator of their ability to deal with accelerating change in the business environment.

Klout today unveiled a major change to its algorithm and scores. Here are some thoughts on the changes.

* It is valid to regularly change algorithms.
Many people feel that if Klout keeps on changing its scoring mechanism (the last major change was in October 2011) it makes it hard to believe that they have any validity at all. It’s a fair response, however we are still early in developing reputation measures, so the more important task is to keep trying to improve the algorithm rather than being consistent with something that can be improved. It disrupts its clients who are running campaigns, but that is a low cost to driving a better score.

* Increasing people’s scores is a good thing.
The biggest complaint people had with Klout’s last algorithm change is that most people’s scores went down. As I explained in my analysis of that change, it was an avoidable and unnecessary move. It looks like today’s change will increase most people’s scores. Before today, I would guess that a Klout score in the low 50s would put you in the top 1% of people, giving almost 50 points to distinguish between the top 1%. When you are scoring against a scale of 0-100, it is more useful to allocate scores more evenly. A side benefit is that people are happy that their scores have increased, even it doesn’t change their relative ranking. Another interesting aspect is that Klout together with its main competitors, PeerIndex and Kred, calibrate their scores against each other, simply because people prefer seeing higher scores. Klout and PeerIndex score on a 1-100 scale while Kred scores on a 1-1000 scale. Kred tends to give higher scores on the scale than the others. Now that Klout has readjusted its scoring scale, PeerIndex tends to rank people lowest on the scale.

* The algorithm now extends beyond social media.
Klout says that it is making its “first steps towards including real-world influence” by including an array of new measures listed here. Still the vast majority are on social media, but it now includes measures such as LinkedIn (so call yourself as Director or CEO) and PageRank on the person’s Wikipedia page. These are indeed first steps however presage other moves. Our stealth startup Repyoot intends to focus on real influence not social media influence, reflecting the reality you don’t need to be on social media to be influential (though it increasingly helps).

* Using +K as a measure encourages gaming.
One of the most prominent activities on Klout is giving people “+K” on particular topics to indicate influence. Most people do not realize it, but until today that has not influenced score at all, only the topics that people are said to be prominent in. Now that +K influences score, there is no doubt that there will be many requests for +K, exchanges of +K, and other attempts to get more, as it is one of the only readily gameable elements in the Klout score. Klout can fairly easily uncover and discount these gaming efforts, however people will still do it.

* There will be a trend to greater transparency in scoring.
Klout says that it is introducing more transparency with a “brand new feature called “moments” that showcases your most influential social media activity—the times when your ideas most impacted and touched the people in your world.” That’s more transparency? Not really, though the announcement alludes to more details being provided. In any case let’s hope that it is an early sign of more indication of how scores are set. Klout is undoubtedly responding to Kred, which provides details of how every social media event impacts scores.

I should also add a comment from my post on Klout last year:

There is no such thing as an accurate reputation measure
We know that Twitter followers is not a very good indication of influence. When you start to account for other factors such as amplification and engagement, there is no ‘correct’ result. Human judgment on what is more important shapes the algorithm.

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

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

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

In this case, we need to tell a credible story on how Facebook loses its predominant position in social networks.

So if you’d like to stretch your brain or have an interesting conversation with your friends, then build a scenario of how Facebook will fail.

I won’t go into a detailed analysis here, but will just suggest some of the elements that are may be part of that story:

* Facebook overreaches and pushes many of its users to look for an alternative. This would almost certainly be related to privacy, driven by over-commercialization by the newly public company.

* There is a viable alternative. If we are looking at a 5 year time frame, then it would almost certainly have to be Google+, which gets its act together and draws in far broader participation. It seems very unlikely that Twitter will seek to become a broad-based social network. Microsoft, which has a powerful platform to build engagement, has only just launched Socl, and Apple today has no real foundation for a social network. If we look much beyond 5 years then a yet-to-be launched social network could rise to become dominant. It is less than 6 years now since Facebook became open to the public.

* Not essential, but a possible element in the story is a dramatic shift to open social networks, potentially a distributed non-commercial social network. Open social network Diaspora* has not yet launched to the public however is now in a Y-Combinator program and is expected to launch in the next few months. Privacy or other breaches of trust could support a shift to open platforms.

* A massive shift of social networking activity to mobile platforms creates an opening for one or more of the major mobile players to leverage their position.

On the face of it, while there are plausible scenarios for Facebook to stumble and be supplanted containing some of these elements, they are not likely to play out within the next 5 years.

Facebook’s extraordinary global dominance in social networks today will take some serious shaking to erode. But much beyond 5 years there are many ways they could be supplanted.

How do you see this playing out?