Ecademy - A way of living

The Changing Face of Advertising

(or How we are learning to love personalisation)

At a recent conference Mark Zuckerberg, the 23 year old boss of Facebook was talking to 250 or so “middle aged” advertising executives about the news ways that Facebook envisaged advertising developing. His thoughts are indeed interesting. “For the last 100 years media has been pushed out to people, but now marketers are going to be part of the conversation”.

 

That phrase - 'Part of the conversation’ caught my eye. What does it mean to you?

What are the limits of Freedom of Speech in Social Networking

In Social Networks (like Ecademy) members are often demanding their right to speak feely - to "say it as I find it" - on matters. Often those demand are defended on the grounds of Freedom of Speech.

In this globally connected internet world we need to take notice of local laws and traditions as well as cultural diversity. More than that, we also keep aware of them as the restrictions on Freedom of Speech change for reasons of political expediency and social necessity.
When we write in some forums there are also local rules and codes to keep in mind and some take a narrow and some a wide view. But how can we know, as our content is distributed around the world via search engines and mirror sites, what should we aim for? What is better?  - a narrow freedom or a wide one?

Using an on-line medium.... Update

Communication styles in an online network are pretty vital

About 18 months ago I wrote this article : Using an on-line medium for discussion – New game – New rules….. on Ecademy and some debates on Ecademy made me look at it again.

These thoughts fit in well with the thinking about readership styles discussed in this posting and these discussion issues affect both reading and writing styles.

The rules I discussed 18 months ago are as true now as they were then, the key rules I determined were...

Where is your attention?

I read Stowe Boyd's comments about attention profiling with interest. The idea of a markup language that allows us to define what has our attention and helps organisations to use that to push the right data to us is fascinating and although I can see it has big upsides I can also see big downsides.

There is no doubt though that in today's world grabbing our attention and keeping it is really important. So what might happen if we get this right?

What's your reading style?

There are two aspects to any written debate which I think need to be considered in any discussion about readership styles.

Firstly, written debate is is relatively permanent, so what we say has a habit of being read and re-read - and quoted back to us after our position has changed through debate!

Secondly the audience is invisible.

Let us transport ourselves to a university debating chamber, where someone might say 'What's the problem with that idea then pal?", said with a smile and an arm round the shoulder it's seen as a quizzical search for more information, if the "Pal" is spat out when standing square on shoulder to shoulder with faces inches away from each other and red cheeks, we see a different image and a different intention.

Whose first in your social network?

I read tonight this post on Seth Godin's excellent blog and got to thinking about how true this is for our Social Networks too.

When people join your social network are they going to wade through all your previous posts or are the going to start from now. When a new person joins an individuals social network to them it is new - Your first message to them is THE first message they have had. You are judged on what they see and not what others have seen over time.

I think this is why sometimes we meet people for whom our experience seems at odds with other people. We need to be aware of 'newness' in relationships built through on-line social networks and recognise the need to adapt our messages and not assume that people know about what we have done before. Now that is an interesting thought......

Participation

My previous article highlighted the impact of aparent non participation on the conclusions that others might draw from a discussion, particularly around the level of support for an idea or issue.

Russ Mayfield's excellent blog discusses a power law of participation which goes a long way to describing why so few people actully engage in the discussions that take place and yet how much they might actually be doing with the consequences of that discussion.

That article is helpng me to chrystalise my thinking on some issues - and I'll be back here when I've reached a conclusion!

Judging the mood

One of the issues with any forum, be that a blog or some other means of collaborative writing is how to interpret apparent disengagement.

Ecademy is a social networking site that maintains a number of clubs each with their own forum and also some general blogs and advertising opportunities through Marketplace.

I lead a number of clubs on Ecademy, including Blackstar, the life members club. In all of these clubs only 1 in 10 members participate, but the research shows that this is typical. One issue that arises is when there are polarised discussions. Often a lone voice arguing against a few vocal people appears to be in a significant minority when the reality is far harder to judge.

Silent people are not truly silent, because they leave trails of data behind them when they view a page. If you capture this data then you know the page has been viewed and if you capture arrival time and leaving time you could even surmise if it has been read.

Is silence agreement? - does the failure to post mean that you agree with the previous post? - of course not.

The problem most forums and discussion groups face is that the views of a few vocal people may not be representative and silence, absence of a dissenting point of view, can be seen as agreement. On important issues it's therefore important to validate that what is being said is truly representative.

So, to be able to truly judge the mood you need to be contacting a representive sample of the membership and not relying on the responses of the vocal few. The next question has to be how to find that representative sample?

Kobyashi

Ecademy is a social network which operates with a mission to connect business people. One of the key features of the site is the ability to put in 50 words about yourself. These 50 words allow people to find other people like them based on similarities in the list.

One of my 50 words is Kobyashi, and for the first time I met someone else who recognised the root of this word straight away. Stowe Boyd solved it in one - An episode from Star Trek where Kirk decided the rules of a simulation were unfair, and that made it fair to change the rules. That's something I have always taught teams in business.

Well done Stowe - It was good to meet and chat about many things but this was great.