Conversationware

With young children you sometimes worry about education. 

Well, beyond just the paying for it, you also wonder if ‘the powers that be’ can possibly keep up.

For instance I heard on the radio the other day that the establishment is worried about plagiarism by students from the internet. It reminds me of how worried they were when calculators came out (in my time), but eventually they worked out that machines weren’t going away and stopped worrying about basic math being practiced by older children with calculators.

Older children moved on to more advanced subjects.

I think we’re going to have to stop worrying about information - facts? - available on the internet, when discovered by older students. Why bother learning things by heart when the facts are available on wikipedia.

….arguable perhaps?

Meantime, I hope there are classes being planned on blogs, wiki’s, RSS feeds, linking, tagging.

Scott Karp talks here about why he, historically a very literate person, doesn’t read books anymore. He finds Networked thought much more powerful.

Me too.

Blogging and linking are a kind of thoughtful shorthand for ideas. If I don’t understand the squiggle - I click through, read the linked material - and then click back to continue the reading. Multiple people’s thoughts are then combined and blended and leveraged.

It’s just like you, as the single pupil in the class, having dozens of lecturers in front of you all building on each other’s ideas. No wonder that’s more powerful than a single linear, non-interactive ’broadcast’ by a single professor to 150 students. 

This video is worth another airing - it’s been watched 1.5 Million times so far.

I kept hearing about Twitter, but to be frank, things are busy enough without learning anything new. But, I suppose there is nothing new about having to learn something else in web software land.

So, here I am

https://twitter.com/mattlambert

I follow only one person so far (1 hour and counting), and that’s because they linked to this blog with a twitter post, so I knew where to find them.

Ok, I admit, being in a conversation on your own is no fun for me - so if you’re reading, why not sign up? It’s free, takes about 10 minutes to discover the long and short of it all.

The premise is that you can keep up to date with people’s stuff, but only as and when its convenient for you, not for them.

It’s like IM but shorter and not so interruptive. This is a very important point for us Brits who, even if you’re ‘friended’ via instant messaging, won’t presume to interrupt even if your presence status is ‘green’ unless you’re very best of buddies.

I can see it would be a better form of ‘presence’ - much more contextual.

Ultimately, the fact I work remotely (no word reversal jokes huh), made the decision, as Twitter can apparently resemble being in an office by letting you pick up on ambient information without having to join in.

It even interfaces through your gtalk client and ping you to remind you to add a sentence and to make things easier.

Perhaps you can tell me if you’ve already had a go, or if you can add to the ‘business case’? I may have to update my Communications Mindmap

Could society could be stupid enough to label completely different disciplines with the same moniker?

I used to wonder.

Communications meant both “telephone technology” and a “job title within some PR function”

Back in the day though, telephones seemed completely different to the ‘other sort’ of communications, which seemed to be about getting your message published in a newspaper.

Well, doesn’t this single word make more sense this year? (Happy 2008)

Today, you can draw a theoretical line between real time voice communications, through other one to one technologies, to messaging, and on to other asynchronous group based communications like blogs, wikis and social software.

So my theme is that;

• Marketing is talking - originally to a very wide audience, but now steadily being segmented (segmented, segmented) into smaller and smaller targeted audiences.
• Real time communications is talking - originally one to one, but now steadily being increased from one to one conversation into larger and larger targeted audiences.
• Communications has finally lived up to it’s original promise.
• Cisco bought a Web Conference company last year. That tells you the same thing - communications is communications, and wherever the technology falls between the two endpoints, it is all interelated.

So: communications were unified enough already. Therefore, doesn’t the phrase ’Unified Communications’ lack definition, ambition and a sense of purpose?

Get a telephone, and surround it with lots of other technology like IM, everyone seems to say. Perhaps the better approach is to define a business process, and then telephone enable if needs be.

Voice is used to persuade, to seal the deal. But the fact is, written communications are just as useful as voice communications and sometimes a great deal more.

I suppose I could have just rung you all to tell you, but this seemed like a better way.

PBX based companies had better think this through.

I didn’t know that

The BBC pointed it out in this article.

Apparently there are 1.5M posts on blogs per day.

I wonder what the next ten years will bring, as things tend to speed up don’t they?

It’s too grand a title, and too big a conversation. But things ARE changing on the Interweb.

Blogging, multimedia presentation, Google Adwords, RSS - this is the web marketing future. This company called Pepperjam does several things that most other companies don’t find natural.

They walk the talk.

The founders video on the front page tell you so much more than just the content - its the passion, the attitude and its the dogs doo-dahs.

Yes it’s a little in your face, and Brits might find this a little unsettling but even they’ll (we’ll) get the hang of it sooner or later.

 The web isn’t new, but Pence Per Click Management is.

PepperJam’s growth rate of over 450% last year, and 550% this year shows that.

But I’m betting this growth isn’t just the service they give their clients, but that they live their dream in public.

Wordpress open source software used to be just for building blogs, but now its more than good enough to have your website built with.

You should.

For all my friends in small businesses, here’s my reasons.

1. Wordpress can be used to create a website from scratch with no coding (with a little reading)
2. Anyone can add pages, and this means more content, and more updates (no charge)
3. Search engines care very much about content levels and how often a site is updated.
4. Content is preserved, even when changing the look of the site (Thats what this Wordpress Content Management System actually does)
5. Change the look, and all pages are updated, there’s no hard-coding. A website can live and breathe.
6. Thousands of developers are working to simplify all sorts of advanced capability - e.g. Search Engine friendly stuff, statistics management! audio and video embedding, database and e-commerce functions.
7. If you get stuck, any Wordpress contractor can pick up where you left off - easily
8. It is a major bonus for a website to support RSS and blogs, for marketing, and with Wordpress, such rich functionality is built in of course.
9. Websites are tons better when interactive - positive customer comments build trust and credibility and will increase conversions from visits to contact.
10. It’s free to use

Forget the word Blog - just think of this as a way to replace that old website that looks like a brochure and to start a conversation in your marketplace, and hit those search engines.

It has been on my mind for a while that communications professionals aren’t communicating very well. How many Communications people and companies in the UK are using RSS, and may heaven forbid Blogs - or am I not looking hard enough?

Appropriate notification is a serious communications issue, as is information overload. RSS is relevant to people and companies. So, can you be interested, and work in, communications without considering new technology? Are your clients wondering how committed you are to keeping their business at the forefront.

I picked up on this, being reminded by the linked post, that communications technology companies aren’t using communications technology. It’s not just me then.

Times are changing, and it looks like its a variable as to how quickly people and companies are trying to keep up.

I suppose it is a question of critical mass adoption, as when Text Messaging only really took off in the UK once networks linked to each other. It meant that you could be confident that whoever you sent the message to would receive it.

Presumably when RSS readers outnumber non-readers we’ll see the adoption speeding up. Is there a tipping point, and when might that be?

Most technologists know the Rogers adoption curve, but it doesn’t show the pace vs overall penetration of technology. I’d expect the adoption to creep along a horizontal time path very low, and then a steep increase towards the right.

Where are we on the adoption curve I wonder, still in the early adopters stage?

‘Online Marketing’ as it is quaintly called, is probably the least expensive communication on a ‘one to many basis’ available.

So, does your business really need more of a shopfront, or perhaps a press marketing campaign with a freephone number and a new callcentre, or maybe ’Online Marketing’ is a better place to put your budget. It could be the best return for your money…

Matt Ambrose tells it best, as usual, around a classic tale of a global micro-brand

It seems that if you tell your company story well enough, people could literally buy into it, and help make the story even better, joining the club.

What’s a better conversation over the evening meal?

a. I popped into town to buy a shirt today from Marks and Spencers - or,

b. I bought my shirt from a chap in England. He flys all over the world once a quarter to measure us up and the delivery is within a week or two. It’s great service, and now he keeps my measurements, it saves so much time when I need a new one. Yes of course, you can find him on.. http://englishcut.com/ There’s loads of pictures of the tailoring process and what he’s up to, quite interesting really.

You could never get that word of mouth from a telesales campaign could you, especially as they always seem to interrupt your dinner.

Being in business is fast becoming a celebrity shoot out.

Isn’t buying an iPod very similar to calling a number and voting for our favourite singer, dancer, aspiring business person, whatever? ….It’s a contract, we buy, and Steve Jobs promises to come back next week to entertain and delight us with his designs and deliver us a unique experience.

I’m tempted to compare the iPhone purchase to a tactical vote - because ’the public’ likes the look of the current vote leaders even less. Looking at it like that, then it’s no suprise people will pay more ($550) to keep their favourite in the game. It’s just the equivalent to phoning in twice.

On some mass level, the public longs to buy into and be a part of the corporate celebrity story, if only to give it more legs (cue a kate moss clothing joke), and give us the next chapter in the soap that is corporate stardom.

(more…)

Someone I was speaking to recently said that companies don’t need blogs if they’re using message boards - and it wasn’t the first time I’d heard that.

Instinctively though, I felt there was a difference in terms of how companies could engage (have conversations) with a wide audience - with current blog technology in the early stages at least.

Having a scout around my favourite ‘principles of blogging’ sites, I found Tom Chandler doing his usual excellent job of articulating just why blogs are better, with other links around the subject.

It’s interesting that companies worry about blogging, and yet allow a ‘free for all’ within their message boards. Perhaps its just that anything new = automatically bad until proven otherwise.

Another favourite blogging (copywriting) site The Copywriters Crucible pointed out this youtube video, with poor sound, but very ‘new-media’ funny.