Accidentally on Purpose Blog

I know this is about two weeks old now but, I have to say how impressed I am with David Weinberger’s post about how he accidentally got bumped from the Le Web 3 program.  It’s worth reproducing in its entirety:

“It was my fault. I missed (somehow) the email that said to check in by the left of the stage half an hour before my talk. I therefore went by the printed schedule and thought I was just supposed to climb onto the stage when it was my turn. But the printed schedule was wrong, and so they were pretty surprised when I climbed onto the stage at what was no longer my appointed time, and when they had thought I was a no-show. (In fact I was in the hall all afternoon, and standing by the wrong side of the stage, which makes the whole thing more frustrating.) My fault.

Loic offered to put me on after the UN folks were finished, but I thought it was right that the conference end with the UN Web project to educate nine million child refugees. I still think that was the right decision, but, in any case, it was my decision, not Loic’s.

Still, I’m pretty bummed. I worked hard on this talk. But it was an excellent conference with some great hallway networking and sessions” 

David sounds more embarrassed than annoyed — a true sign of humility.  I won’t pretend to know David very well but at a recent Technorati & The Conversation Group social in NYC some weeks back, I had the opportunity to sit and speak with David for about 30 minutes.  Just pleasant conversation nothing about social media, nothing about business — we just spoke about everyday things.  

David – you’re a real gentleman.  Thanks for the chat!

Jeremiah Owyang at Forrester has an interesting primer on how to pitch social media projects to clients and execs.  He outlines a hierarchy of approaches ranging from pitches that focus on technology (weakest) to business value (strongest).

“Instead of focusing on terms like “Web 2.0″ or “Ajax” focus on terms like customers, trust, community, and connections.”

I couldn’t agree more.  Just speaking from my own experience, the folks who are now doing social media at (or for) SAP all pitched the business value.  And with that business value clearly stated, we also know how to measure the effort.

Robert Scoble celebrated his seventh year as a blogger this weekend, and I’d like to light a virtual candle for the guy — not for his fame and reputation as one of world’s best-known bloggers, but more specifically for his work in helping businesses understand the positive impact of social media. 

Seven years is a long time to put it all out there on a blog.  The things I remember best were from his time at Microsoft — MSFT’s Channel 9 was ground breaking work — it inspired (and is still inspiring) many other new corporate videocasters to give it a go.   That’s not to take away from what he’s doing now, its just that the what, how, why, where and when he did it showed everyone else that it could be done!

Happy “B”-day Robert!

The BBC reports on a global survey that shows 40% of respondents ”said it was more important to maintain social harmony and peace, even if it meant curbing the press’s freedom to report news truthfully.”  That number is shocking to many folks in the West, which overwhelmingly favored press freedom over safety.  Roughly 70% of respondents from North America and Western Europe “put freedom first.” 

Reminds me of one of Shel Israel’s key observations in the SAP Global Survey: 

In cultures where society is emerging from monolithic governments, such as Russia, China, the former Soviet satellites, and Singapore, citizen journalism is on a rapid rise. In societies where a free press is entrenched, it is emerging more slowly. 

Yet, according to the BBC survey, the citizens of these countries put “safety first.”  What may be happening, in fact, is that citizen journalism is playing the role of civic-educator in countries where freedom — as Westerners define it — is a relatively new thing. In any case, citizen-generated news is generally trusted more in those countries and better positioned to win readers, whether they fear for their safety or cherish their freedoms.

Every now and then I check in on Technorati’s top 100-blog list, rarely are there any real surprises.  But this time I was surprised – I’m referring to the success of the blog di Beppe Grillo (now number 8), the outrageous and comic Italian blog that has ”tackled financial scandals and political corruption.” How does Beppe do it?  I’m not sure, but it can’t hurt that the blog appears in Italian, English, and Japanese.

Hat tip to colleague and consultant Giovanni Rodriguez, who tells me he’s now proud again of his Italian heritage.  But, he’s still wondering about the other half – ”where are all the Puerto Rican bloggers?”

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PCWorld has an article about Jeff Mann’s take on the business value of social software.  Mann, a Gartner analyst, is not just a proponent of social software.  He’s elevating the category above others.

Shrinking returns from business automation and the impact of Web 2.0 are conspiring to revolutionize the workplace and change the way we do business forever, according to Jeff Mann, research vice-president at Gartner.

Mann said that social interaction is the way most value is delivered in the modern work environment and predicted that by 2012, the primary role of business networks will be to support social interactions, not routine business transactions.

It’s refreshing to see social software getting this kind of side-by-side comparison with other business technology.  But my guess is that social software will be embedded in the fabric of everything we do, rather than dueling for a better position in the “software stack.”  It’s about the socialization of the enterprise, which will always rely on the automation of processes but also always depend on the autonomy of its people.