Topic: The 10 Criteria of Social Business Maturity. ON SLIDESHARE:http://slidesha.re/social_business_maturity
Nathaniel Hansen, CEO of The Socializers, giving closing remarks at 3rd InnoFORUM AIT, Athens, Greece. March 18, 2011.
Athens Information Technology (AIT), an internationally-renowned non profit education and research center in the fields of information technology, telecommunications, and innovation management, was founded in 2002 by the INTRACOM group of companies. In creating AIT, INTRACOM’s purpose was to build on the track record of excellence set by Greek scientists and engineers both in Greece and abroad, and to enable Greece to play a significant future role in these fields. (http://www.ait.gr/ait_web_site/Ait_at_a_glance.jsp)
The blurring of author + audience: Whose story is it?
LIVING STORIES: Living stories are upon us. Imagine a cinema or films full of viewers/participants guiding a film’s course. Imagine a celebrity submitting to his/her fan’s socially communicated desires and vice versa. Imagine the fan-guided star, the film packed with alternate directions that viewers can guide via a mobile app. We are in the age of choose your own adventure sensibility and the tech to support it is here.
How is this trotted out in hard cold steps? How can I apply the possibility above NOW?
c. Aggregate key influencers related to that name, that concept. Use Listorious to do this. Follow ALL of these influencers and study who they follow. Use Research.ly to gain insight into what is trending and other useful information from your focused Interest Graph.
d. Create a FB account for this name. Populate the account with images, video, text and links derived from the focused Twitter account.
f. Now go into Quora and ask questions that arise for you related to this identity. Source tweets, blog posts, image searches, video creation, music selection and other content from answers to these questions.
g. Now go into YouTube via a Gmail account set up for a specific identity and create a branded account. Create channels of content full of favorited videos. Create videos of your own where you narrate stories related to a series of images or a live journey you take (POV).
h. Now go to Flickr via Yahoo and create a series of Sets or Galleries full of images associated with this identity.
i. If you are wanting to really expand, go to KnowEm and populate hundreds of properties with various types of content.
4. CURATION: By this time, you have curated a body of resources and individuals/groups around these identities. And you have produced your own content based upon your observation and initial participation in those blended graphs of Interest and Social connection. The content is all source material for your choose your own adventure social media/socialTV project. More on curation.
A NEW LIFE: A movie IS a community waiting live that story. In the past, one would go to a movie, watch it and walk out with something within. But now when we walk into a cinema, we have the potential to walk into a completely new life…into something that is done vs. watched. Movies can now be an active experience for the user and the community. And truly life-changing.
CASTING OFF FLESH: Consider what Ibn Sina Avicenna, a Persian philosopher-scientist who lived between 980 and 1037 A.D, wrote:
“These bodily members are, as it were, no more than garments; which, because they have been attached to us for a long time, we think are us, or parts of us [and] the cause of this is the long period of adherence: we are accustomed to remove clothes and to throw them down, which we are entirely unaccustomed to do with our bodily members.”
Consider that through social networks, apps, PCs and mobile devices, we are casting off our bodily limbs, and beginning to wear our spirits.
How To Run a Successful Self-Funded Creative Project
The age of the Creative has fully arrived. We are in times when Creatives have the real possibility of identifying an audience for their work and getting funding from that audience.
Using a combination of creative software, free intelligence solutions and free crowd-funding solutions (here and here), Creatives globally can be up an running within 1-2 months on the creative project of their dreams.
THE VALUE OF COMBINING A TARGETED INTEREST GRAPH WITH A CROWD-FUNDING TOOL: When you identify Key Influencers who are passionate about YOUR niche AND their followers, you will have discovered a fertile field in which to plant your crowdfunding campaign. Why? Because these are YOUR people, the ones who LOVE what you love! When you place a Kickstarter or Indegogo project WITHIN a targeted social footprint chock-full of Passionates, funding and momentum occur that much faster. Your Facebook page is GREAT for family and friends to participate BUT you also need to get this project in front of its tribe!
Following is a simple process for getting going:
1. LEARN: Visit KickStarter and Indegogo. Study the projects that have been funded successfully, read the FAQs and blogs and learn how these easy-to-use crowd-funding solutions work.
2. GATHER: your materials: video, photo, music, text.
3. CREATE a promotional video (this one of the MOST important aspects of successfully funding a crowd-funded project).
4. IDENTIFY YOUR AUDIENCE/FUNDING SOURCE: Once all of your materials are together and are tightly written, edited and scored, it is time to create the interest graph around your offering. An Interest Graph is a term used to describe the tribe of people who are passionate about the content in YOUR creative offering. While the initial funds for any creative project often come from family and friends, it is a great idea to do a little “intelligence gathering” on your potential audience and funders.
a. THE AUDIENCE WITH AN AUDIENCE: Go to wefollow.com , Research.ly and listorious.com. Type in keywords related to your niche. In both of these free solutions, lists of key influencers will emerge. Those influencers and their followers are YOUR tribe. They are the ones who will be interested in what you have to offer.
c. AGGREGATE THE INFLUENCERS: Create a Twitter account and brand it. This Twitter account should be around YOUR niche interest. Do NOT title it the name of your movie or album. Title it more generically and then follow ALL of the key influencers you discovered in wefollow.com and listorious.com. Their content and their audiences will be a very valuable resource for you in the following ways:
i. – As an idea of what is trending
ii.- As a virtual tribe to “drop” your Kickstarter or Indegogo project into. Once you create your project in one of these two funding solutions, you can announce it into the fabric of this niche social footprint. The way to do this is simply to tweet the video you created with a link to the Kickstarter project.
iii.- Feedback on your offering. You can direct members of this niche tribe to your video and get valuable feedback. Remember, the best part about critics is how they refine a creative offering. The best Critics are actually lovers of Creativity and offer constructive feedback. Even blistering Critics are valuable since these individuals shave away the fluff and help one identify potency. Never fear a Critic. Seek out a Critic and seduce him or her through your offering.
5. CREATE THE CAMPAIGN: After creating the Interest Graph (the GENERIC “social footprint” around a microsite based on that genre), it is time to create the Kickstarter or Indegogo project. Both sites have EXCELLENT instructions and are very easy to use.
6. MARKET THE PROJECT through your interest graph, to family and friends, and on all of your social networks. Let people know about your project with short punchy tweet-length messaging that contains bit.ly or ow.ly links leading back to the video on YouTube and to the crowd-funding solution.
Insight-driven action in a data-flooded age must be heart-centered. The most important segment of the customer-experience cycle is post-conversion (something was bought), pre-evangelization (the customer tells his/her friends). In that sweet spot, brands must engage the user in dialogue, be open to education BY the customer and take action based on opportunity occurring in the present.
A core list of key influencers drops one very quickly into mine-able territory for content, business connections, tools, and relationship. Useable social intelligence delivers punchy actions with targeted influencer graphs in which to carry out those actions. Chris Ramsey, EVP BizDev, Radian6, writes, “Social media is a two-way communication platform, not a broadcast platform, and it’s all about engagement and relationships.” Amber Naslund, Director of Strategy for Radian6 writes, “Social media marketing is contextually appropriate, just-in-time marketing where you find a chance to engage authentically, and you take it.”
Companies ought to consider the benefit of having in-house curators and/or relationships with 3rd party curators of vertical-specific content. In this way, they will own verticals and niches and be seen as authorities in both the internal development AND in listening to the customer of this niche. Those brands who rule niches through curation will be seen as thought-leaders. And the only way to be a true thought-leader is to spend plenty of time listening. We derive powerful insights and even more powerful action by listening.
Klout CEO and co-founder Joe Fernandez writes, “…target the few key influencers who have authority around a given topic and allow them to tell the story. The message is then amplified up through the network to reach a large engaged audience that trusts the message sender. We’ve basically flipped the funnel upside down.” The weaving of reflection AND action within such an approach is masterful and demonstrates the ideal ethos of actionable intelligence. Creativity around one conversation, one circle of influencers, one city can lead to immense opportunities. Product-centric thinkers are second to customer-centric action-agents. It is simply more practical to be relational vs. transactional in today’s business climate.
We live in times when independent operatives, moving swift and fast, have become more successful than giant entities, moving like cruise ships. Such operatives have an idea, angel-fund the idea and balloon the idea into a global community. Or such operatives provide specialized deliverables like comprehensive social intelligence reports (Business Intelligence), Community Manager training/supervision and Social-Action tools training.
Educational systems in America need to be replaced by personalized education using social tech with a variety of physical meetup-style groups in which kids mix with other “specialists” AND “the Other”. Every educator needs to read Margaret Mead, Franz Boas and Marshall Rosenberg for innovative ideas in overcoming the detrimental effects of passe social mores. Cultural Relativism is eclipsing Ethnocentrism in a multi-cultural, pluralistic, transmodern, socially-networked world.
The education system of the 20th century is built around institutions: schools, colleges, academies and universities. Naturally, many companies are aiming to recreate a degree-issuing institution. In this scenario, a startup has the highest level of control and the highest earnings per student. Online-based institutions have started from several niches (education for children with disabilities, advanced placement programs, test preparation) and are approaching mainstream education.
We’ve now seen the first online high schools (Keystone School), colleges (University of Phoenix, Kaplan University, The Open University, University of the People), certification programs (Alison.com), enterprise training programs (GlobalEnglish.com), art schools (AudioVisualAcademy.com) and test preparation programs (Top Test Prep, GrockIt, Knewton, RevolutionPrep, TutorJam, BrightStorm).
At the same time, brick-and-mortar institutions launch experimental online programs. iQAcademy helps high-schools to offer online classes, and 2tor and Altius Education do that for universities. Finally, there are innovative offline programs like YCombinator, Singularity University and Tetuan Valley.
Although there’s been much talk that the future of education will be online, the Florida Virtual School (FLVS), the country’s first state-wide Internet-based public high school, is actually over a decade old. So for the 97,000 students who took classes via FLVS during the past school year, that future of online education is here now.
FLVS doesn’t grant any degrees or diplomas, but it does offer more than 125 accredited courses, including the core subjects, honors classes, world languages, electives, and 14 Advanced Placement courses. There are no textbooks; all the material is online, and the instruction happens via the Web, email and phone.
Self-interest fundamentalism was the economic religion of the 20th Century. We are now in the midst of an economic reformation on par with the Enlightenment as we enter the new millennium.
