Bruce MacVarish Notes

Social by Design: Design Thinking & Business

I came across another insightful presentation from David Armano (@armano) ... this time on Design Thinking & Business.

My favorite line:

"Design Thinking gets us thinking holistically and differently".

Social by Design: Design Thinking & Business

View more presentations from David Armano

Google Unlocks Voice Data

Google announced that starting today, you can download a copy of all your Google Voice and other communications data.  

This is a huge move by Google that unlocks new value for end users, for application vendors and advertisers by enabling new ways to benefit from our communications and conversation data.

The value of voice communications is no longer found in the connecting of conversations but rather in the data, analytics and relevance derived from the conversation content.

 

 

 

The Value of Average Influencers

Liz Gannes interviews Duncan Watts about a number of topics included in his new book "Everything is Obvious".

I found his perspective on the challenges, reality and research focused on "Influencers" very interesting (about 3:17).  

He suggests it is very difficult to identify the very few people that have strong influence in the network... and the results are often disappointing.

Instead, Watts sees research on influence moving toward finding the very many people that have "some" level of influence in the network.  

It would seem that Watts sees more value in finding the "average many" influencers instead of the "vital few".

 

 

Human Behavior as the start of Social Design

Jenn Webb interviewed Paul Adams in prep for Web 2.0 Expo scheduled for later this month.  

The interview is well worth a read. You should also keep an eye out for Paul's forth coming book titled "Social Circles" (I've already pre-ordered).   

One of many interesting quotes from Paul's interview includes: 

"Our (mobile) phone, or whatever we carry around with us, will probably be our primary source and producer of social media data, so it's important that when we use it, we're not burdened by its place in the ecosystem — for example, by seeing constant privacy controls or too many invasive alerts."

Paul Adams, Global Brand Experience Manager, Facebook

For me, it is interesting to think about his reference to "whatever we carry around with us will probably be our primary source of social media data".  

What about you?

 

Not all Graphs are the same

Chris Dixon, CEO of Hunch, recently presented at a GoogleTechTalk at the Google New York office.

Chris talked about the value of Graphs ... as in social, communications, intention, taste graphs ... the evolution toward Graph Wars ... and strategic choices important to developing graphs.

 

I was particularly interested in his question:

"How are Communication Graphs related to Social or Taste Graphs?"  

While there may be some overlap in "nodes" that appear across all 3 graphs, there are many "nodes" that are distinct.  As a result, we should expect to see the use of each graph as the source for distinctly different services for users.

Because not all Graphs are the same, the value of network analysis and new graph based services will continue to grow.

Dare to Share in the Enterprise

From the Socialcast Blog:

 

Games @ Work

I wanted to refresh my thinking on the Guiding Principles of Game Design @ Work from my earlier post. 

 

The Guiding Principles for Games @ Work were focused on making it easy for collaboration leaders and business users to:

1. Define clear boundaries, shared problem(s) and a community of collaborative business users

 

2. Assign satisfying tasks or roles that enable business users to excel and be part of something "Bigger"

 

3. Build nonmonetary incentives into a game economy to strongly motivate individuals to accomplish group aims.

 

4. Deliver hyper- transparency of information about users' skills and teams’ real-time performance 

 

5. Create a virtual economic marketplace for information and collaboration

 

6. Open multiple real-time sources of information and communication upon which to make decisions

 

7. Structure as a project-oriented organization that can easily be disbanded and reformed based on tasks and skills

 

8. Recognize individual, group and company achievements in a clear, specific way

 

9. Open visibility into all skills / project / social networks of communication across an organization

 

10. Adapt multiple, purpose-specific communications mediums to improve speed and efficiency of collaboration. 

 

With a little vision, strategy and design, it is not hard to see how game design principles will be shaping the future of communication and collaboration applications.

 

Trust Deficits in Social Networks

"Social networks have something of a trust deficit, which will either limit or make “more expensive” its ability to offer new services.  The product teams at social networks have proven their ability to offer compelling services in exchange for personal information, but our research shows that people place a relatively low value on their social information. 

For social networks to offer products in exchange for higher value information such as health records, physical location, or email/IM history, they will need to offer even more compelling products, services and outcomes to consumers."

Timothy Morey,

Frog Design,

Who do we trust with our personal data

Evolution of the Enterprise Applications Industry

John Mancini, the President of AIIM International, provides his perspective on the evolution of enterprise IT in one slide:

Personally, I like the way John describes the shift from managing "a web page" to managing "a conversation" as we see systems of engagement emerge in the enterprise... but...

While the balance of the slide is specific to Enterprise IT and the companies that define the era include traditional enterprise players like IBM, Digital and Microsoft, it isn't clear to me that Google and Facebook have had the same level of ENTERPRISE impact (yet?).

If you dig a little at this line of thinking, you clearly see that each era was/is defined by a number of different sources of value and competitive advantage.  

With a hat-tip to insights gained from the work of Geoffrey Moore, Umair Haque, John Hagel, Valdis Krebs and others, I like to describe the transition we're seeing in the enterprise applications industry this way:

 

Combining the two models, we have a hint at the opportunity for enterprise application vendors moving forward.   Helping users manage conversations, relationships and transactions with and across the enterprise is a significant source of new value and growth.

A couple of questions to consider as the enterprise application industry evolves to a "network of information nodes":

1. Will Google or Facebook be "the best known" enterprise vendor as outlined by John in the Social and Cloud era?

2. What comes after the Social and Cloud era?

LoSoPhoMo and Mobile Enterprise Pure-Plays

Steve Rubel believes the next media disruptors are Mobile Pure-Plays.  I agree.  

From Steve's post:

"Now a new era is under way.

The next wave of media disruptors are laser focused on being tailored, rather than retrofitted, for mobile devices. They start out sometimes just as apps, creating a strong beachhead in your pocket. Then they use these platforms to springboard into other ancillary media ventures. This means they're cut from a different cloth than older stalwarts that often need to retrofit themselves for mobile.

With Internet consumption on mobile devices set to surpass the same on PCs next year, according to Morgan Stanley, and US smart phone penetration to hit 50%, Nielsen says, mobile is no longer the tail on the media dog. For the next wave of media upstarts, it's the dog and the rest is the tail.

We're at the very beginning of a new era in media; one where mobile is the primary distribution platform. What's more, we have a perfect storm of technologies coming together that combine local, social, photo and mobile (what we call "LoSoPhoMo") and this is sure to spur even more media companies that are pure-plays at least at the start."

Steve is focused on the next wave of media.  For me, the question is what does a disruptive mobile pure-play strategy look like for the enterprise when it takes advantage of the very same LoSoPhoMo - local, social, photo and mobile technologies Steve identifies as drivers for media disruption.

In many ways, the emergence and evolution of consumer focused Web 2.0 applications and strategy served as a proxy for key elements of Enterprise 2.0.  

So, it is not too far of a stretch that the emergence of Mobile Pure-Plays and their evolution along a new transmedia arc may provide insight into the evolution of the mobile enterprise.

For example, one strategy could be starting as a Mobile Enterprise Pure-Play and evolving to a --->

    - Mobile Enterprise Web App ---> 

    - Mobile Enterprise Cloud --->

    - Mobile Enterprise Device --->

    - Mobile Enterprise ?