Recently a group of interested parties met up in a Bier Café in Bradford to discuss how we re-boot the Bradford Social Media Surgery. Yes, there were some cold beverages taken but the main topic of discussion of how we make the BDSMS more relevant and tailored to the people of the district. The concept of Social Media Surgeries was based on an idea by @podnosh and they have spread like wildfire ever since, with surgeries taking place as far afield as Amsterdam and Tokyo. Basically it’s all about people giving up their time to answer questions from voluntary, community and third sector organisations about the web and social media. I myself have been along to other surgeries in York, Leeds and Huddersfield and these all had a very distinct, very local flavour of their own.

Nick also came up with a very handy site which acted as a toolkit for people wanting to run their own surgeries and the infrastructure provided by www.socialmediasurgery.com has been invaluable. Check it out for further info.

Success?

The Bradford Social Media Surgery kicked off in early 2010 having been cooked up by Kevin Campbell-Wright and I in the last knockings of 2009. Since it started we have held six events, taking place on a very roughly quarterly basis and with varying degrees of success. It’s been pretty common knowledge that we’ve been experimenting with the format for about the last nine months having held some private, themed and invite only and events. Assuming that the main barometer of success is attendance then it’s been almost impossible to chart. The people turning up have ranged from an unsustainable thirty right down to an equally unsustainable, but rather more worrying, four. More importantly though, we’d helped some fantastic people and great organisations do some really good stuff and helped people connect a little bit more. At a time when budgets in the sector are being squeezed we’ve noticed a real interest in people and organisations communicating more directly and more cheaply over the web.

We’re really committed to the idea of the surgeries but we’re equally, not to mention painfully, aware that they’ve not perhaps been the success they have in other places. We’re also all really proud of, and committed to, making Bradford a better place and central to that is the idea of helping people communicate and organise themselves better.

A Solution?

For the last six months or so I’ve been talking to people involved and taking soundings from them about what we can do better, what success looks like for us and how we can achieve it. The main sticking point seems to be one of regularity, everybody pretty much agreed that we need to do it more regularly. Some said quarterly, some bi-monthly and some said monthly but everyone seems pretty sure that regularity is the key. Personally I feel monthly is a bit hopeful and it’s also a lot to ask of the host venues. This leads us nicely on to the next item…

Location. The venue of the surgeries to date has essentially been The Gumption Centre (Check them out, they are great and have given a lot to this) and failing that it’s been held at the Central Library’s Learning Zone. The Gumption guys have been great, never charged us a penny and been a superb venue but to make it more accessible to more people we need to move it about a bit. We’d like to take the event out around Bradford district, not just the city centre but to Keighley, to Bingley, to anywhere willing to have us really.

The last discussion point has infrastructure. As I mentioned above, socialmediasurgeryplus has provided a fantastic bit of infrastructure to people looking for an out of the box toolkit type solution for setting up a Social Media Surgery. But for our one to work better, and with the increase in regularity and venues, I think we need to develop our own place for people to find out about the next event, ask questions, get answers and to have an open, honest and peer-to-peer discussion away from the event and to ask for help on specific topics. With this in mind we’ll be putting together a dedicated site, most probably using Buddypress, which does all of these things and, most probably, a few things more too.

What can you do to help?

Well firstly we need you to volunteer in whatever way you can. If you’d like to help people use the web better then we’d love to have you involved. If your organisation can do anything to help then we’d love to have you involved. If you can offer a venue with wi-fi then we would love to have you involved. If you have some spare laptops or desktops you could bring along we’d love to have you involved. If you want to offer tea, coffee, cakes, samosas or pakorahs at a surgery we would love to have you involved. If there’s anything you think you can do to help, even if it’s just advice or ideas, then we would, surprisingly enough, love to have you involved. Leave a comment below and we’ll be sure to be in touch.

Also, we’d love your opinions on the discussion points above. How regular do you think the surgeries should be held? Where would you like to see them? Should those who can afford to make a ‘thank you’ payment to the venue? How do we spread the message better? What do you think would be useful to have on the site? Should it still just be for non-profit organisations? Should we even call it a Social Media Surgery any more?

We’re aiming to kick off the new events in September so we need your input right now. Please leave comment below, or if you are shy you can drop me an email. If you want to be contacted when things are live then just leave a comment with the word ‘contact’ in the box.

Steve Jobs shortly after the last time he said sorry

The past year has been a bit of a strange one in the tech world. In many ways this should have been the year that web technology “broke”, this was true in more than one sense with Facebook becoming the subject of a Hollywood blockbuster and Apple – generally thought of as invincibly slick – managing to bodge the launch of iPhone4 so badly that #antenna trended for weeks on end. The crisis pitch got to such an incessant whine that Steve Jobs, a man not known for any prior acquaintance with penitence, was forced to offer people spending hundreds on Apple’s faulty product a quite frankly derisory phone case as compensation.

Given the race to grab early market share has hotted up to such an extent that companies are releasing products onto the market that clearly aren’t ready to go it does begin to call into question the advantage of being “bleeding edge”. Sure you look…..um…grrrrreat in the unboxing videos and all of your friends are jealous that you have the latest bit of tech fetish kit but spending all night queuing up has never been anything other then the behaviour of  a fanatic – meant in the worst sense of the word – and the subsequent days spent in the stygian hinterlands of teething problem tech support are hardly worth the time spent. It’s never been truer than now that the only way to receive tech hot off the press is as a tech journalist, nothing incentivises good support like the possibility of a negative review.

In many ways 2010 should’ve been Apple’s year and with April’s release of the iPad it looked like it was going to be. There’s no getting past the fact that the iPad is an incredible little bit of kit and more than “just a big iPhone” as some people rather uncharitably called it on release. From my point of view the really interesting thing about it is the fact that it opens up a whole new market for games and apps that simply wasn’t there before.

Not "Just a big iPhone"...apparently

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Apple’s new baby is the love affair between it and publishing, time will tell whether it’s entirely mutual or whether it’s more of an unrequited thing but the initial blossoming of the relationship certainly looks promising for both parties. The Times launched their paywall at more or less the same time as the Times iPad app was launched and the Guardian’s excellent iPhone app was also scaled up for the new technology. Time will tell whether this is an unlikely revival for the flagging newspaper industry but with developments like Murdoch announcing an “iPad only” newspaper it certainly looks more positive than it had before. If I had to make a call though I’d imagine that this new dawn is more of an opportunity for more niche publishers like Marvel, their excellent iPad app has brought many a lapsed nerd back to the comic book fold.

Sadly what should’ve been a stellar year for Apple was sullied by the launch of the iPhone4, which clearly wasn’t ready for market at the time of launch and was beset by all sorts of antenna and signal problems. It also didn’t help that the phone appeared to many to be uglier and more delicate than it’s predecessors. What could’ve been just a momentary slip from Apple was made all the more serious by the presence for the first time of high quality alternatives like HTC’s Desire and Google’s Nexus. And, with that, Apple’s domination of the “Smartphone” market was over.

Check in here, please check in here

Twenty Ten was also a bit of a big year for Facebook who are fast rivalling Google as the company looking to take over Microsoft’s trophy as the web’s bad guy, not only did they burst through the five and six hundred million user marks but they also launched Facebook Places, their take on location, in June. The take up of this has by all accounts been rather slow – especially given Facebook’s massive captive audience – leading some commentators to rethink their previous proclamations that “geo is the future”. My thoughts are that the whole geolocation issue is that it’s still a very nascent space with occasional early adopters continuing to check in via foursquare and gowalla.  The mass market, perhaps a little worried about privacy given the amount of info attached to their Facebook account; have yet to really embrace the feature. One feature that Facebook did introduce that seems to be working is “Groups”. Not to be confused with the Fan Pages groups, though of course it will be in the nomenclature challenged world of Facebook, these allow you to manage and segment your friends down into contextual bunches. Very useful and, for those lucky people with enough friends, an important development I’m sure.

After a few stellar years of growth this was also the year Twitter’s trajectory began to slow. Although, for my money at least, still the best community on the net, we really started to see Twitter grow up with the introduction of lists at the back end of 2009. In this post I talked about the possibility that lists were the first strike against clients and throughout 2010 this started to look more and more likely. September finally saw the launch of “New Twitter”, as announced by their CEO Evan Williams, predictably in a tweet. New Twitter, coupled with the increasingly severe API throttling, did finally spell the death knell for the Twitter Client Eco-system which is a shame of quite epic proportions as, whilst clients are still out there providing a great user experience, the need to use them will tail off in favour of the web experience. Twenty ten also saw the introduction of the rather tawdry “Promoted Tweet” which looks like a good frontrunner for the Most Annoying Thing on the Web in 2011 Award. You cant, or at least shouldn’t, blame Twitter for this though. They need to start, just like Facebook has, identifying and safeguarding the revenue streams that are going to keep the company afloat when the next hot, new social thing comes along. I think it was Warren Buffett that said it best when he said “It’s not until the tide goes out that you know who is swimming without trunks” and, much like Fred Savage in The Wonder Years, child stars are more often than not much less cute when they grow up.

Perhaps one of the strangest stories from the web in 2010 was the demise of huge chunks of Yahoo who had previously employed a google-esque strategy of buying up every web property who took their fancy. Apart from the decidedly old school, almost portal like homepage and email service, Yahoo’s stars are undoubtedly the web’s premier photography site Flickr and their social bookmarking service, Delicious. For the moment at least it looks like the self-sufficient Flickr is staying within the Yahoo stable but Delicious looks to not have been as lucky and will possibly be either sold or cut-adrift completely despite their protestations to the contrary. To help save Delicious click here and if you haven’t already tried it please give it a whirl, I’m a big fan and it’d be a shame to see it go.

This *is* the droid you are looking for

So who was the big winner in the web in 2010? You might expect that, given the stellar success of the iPad it’d be Apple or, with a 600m strong user base, it’d be Facebook but for me the real winner from this year is Android. It wasn’t just the iPhone4 antenna debacle which let them in to win it, just like Android wasn’t the only technology that could’ve prospered from it but this was the year that Android really came alive as a viable mass-market platform for Smartphones. Those with longer memories will have already recognised that this situation has more than a few parallels with the Mac vs. PC battle of the 80s where Apple made the technological early running before being overtaken by the cheaper and more generic PCs running a common OS most people would recognise is a poor relation to the original. Apple’s proprietary approach to their hardware and, in this case more importantly their apps, has again created a market gap for an entity which Android has ably filled and the lines in the Smartphone wars have been largely drawn along the lines of Apple vs. Everyone else.

I love Apple products but I don’t see it being a battle they can win and in 2010 it looks like Android has landed the first blow.

One of my most popular ‘off the peg’ group sessions is around defining the boundaries between you, that is “you” the person, and the professional you. I use the “These views are my own” line as an example of how one may choose to successfully negotiate this boundary friction but, if I’m really honest, I’m not altogether too sure it does.

I guess the nub of the matter here isn’t the people whose profiles contain this disclaimer text but rather the companies that they work for and just how risk averse they are. I’m not entirely clear who would misconstrue a Tweet from somebody’s clearly personal account but, as the legal world moves at a snail’s pace, one could probably make a fairly decent case that it could constitute an official statement if your lawyers really tried. The ‘views are my own’ clause seems to protect the company more than the individual though. In the advent of a controversial status update, the company would still be able to reprimand their employee whether they had applied the disclaimer or not, and perhaps you might say rightly so too.

So what’s to gain from including this statement in a profile? My feeling is not much really, gestural insulation aside it’s still the same person associated with the same company. My own personal rule of thumb is that if you mention your employers on your profile you are signing up to the attendant risks and benefits of doing so, with or without a disclaimer you are creating that association for good or ill. If you want to be free to tweet, update or blog what you want then keep your profile brand neutral and if you want to be associated with your company then you are signing up to their code of conduct, no matter how different it is to yours. No matter how well or poorly defined your company social media strategy may be it is down to you to negotiate the risks of your actions and ultimately, as with anything else in life, it’s about taking responsibility for your own course of action.

As ever, I would love to hear your thoughts.

Since last year’s change to the privacy terms and conditions, a move which in itself attracted enough bad press to sink a government with a decent sized majority, Facebook has endured what some might say was a difficult adolescence. Their difficult teenage years started to intensify even more recently with movements springing up to boycott Facebook by deleting accounts from the service. Anybody who has tried to do this recently will know just how complex and painful a task doing this actually is. There are several layers to get through before you even get the chance to deactivate your account and it takes an even greater effort to actually get them to remove you from the system itself.

The central hub of the objection that the Boycott Facebook campaigners seem to have to the site is that the information they hold about you is being misused to the point of abuse by the service. Whilst I really can sympathise with them on this it does have to be stated that these people are displaying a quite stunning level of naivety in their outrage over the issue.

I’ve been in and around the web for a long time and, whilst I’m loathe to get into the clichéd terms of “The Free Web”, “Web 1.0”, “Web 2.0” etc., it’s pretty clear that the days of the web as a force for good and a haven of free speech/content was over long before we all rushed like crazed sheep to start poking each other and turning our ‘friends’ into zombies and pirates. Facebook, like most of the web’s most successful social brands, started out without any kind of business model or viral strategy. Like any business that starts without a goal, as soon as the product started gaining any traction so did the need to “monetize” (I know, I know. Sorry) it. You can’t expect them to provide the service for free can you?

Facebook has one primary asset that it can use as a saleable product. That asset is you, the demographic data assigned to each user account. Advertisers identify the people most likely to buy their product, they then identify the best vehicles to do that with. For instance and in the most traditional sense, if Boots are looking to promote their sale they are likely to, say, buy some ad space in the commercial break on Desperate Housewives. Likewise, if Carlsberg want to sell their Lager they will run ads in the break of the World Cup. It’s called targeting and companies will pay a certain premium to reach their target market. Facebook holds an infinitely more precise set of demographic information about you than just which TV program you are likely to be watching, everything from your age, your sexuality, what type of area you live in and what products you assign your brand loyalties to. To believe that the information Facebook holds about you, especially given the value of that information, will not be used as some sort of saleable asset marks you out as either terribly naive or some sort of anachronistic idealist. There is a transaction that takes place for you signing up to their “free” service. For some that might not be explicit enough but to believe that it isn’t implicit is just bananas.

That Facebook use your (or their, if you really think about it) data doesn’t make them an evil corporation bent on world domination, what it does make them is a company with a revenue stream. Maybe in a Web 2.0 world that isn’t seen as cool or bleeding edge enough to some but it is a necessity. So, they are neither Snow White or the Big Bad Wolf, as with most things the truth is a far more nuanced grey area. Expect Twitter to be next up in the race to “monetize the user base”, it’s already started with their ad-Tweets, and what’s more I’ll wager they wont make half as good a job of it as Facebook has.

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