Accidentally on Purpose Blog

Clay Shirky is one of my favorite thinkers & presenters and his recent Web 2.0 presentation on the cognitive surplus has helped me immensely.   Lately I’ve been struggling to keep all that’s in front of me in focus –  a cognitive bender if you will.  

I don’t watch a lot of TV and I don’t read a lot (at least not for pleasure.)   The latter being more of an occupational hazard as a result of my day job — my feed reader is in a perpetual mode of edit as I try to parse my ever growing lists of feeds.  As for the former, I’m not much interested in most of what the broadcasting community has to offer.  Its been ~47 years since Newton Minnow, delivered his famous “wasteland” speech to the National Association of Broadcasters — IMO, not much has changed.

Shirky’s presentation made me think about my current situation and after a long hard look I realized I was falling prey to dogma. I found myself floundering against what was expected of me from various points of view (family, friends, colleagues, etc.) not that all of these things were bad mind you, its just that for the most part, I was feeling “trapped” by other people’s thinking and that isn’t always the friendliest of places.  

My cognitive surplus was actually a deficit.  Shirky presented the challenge in a way that allowed me to think of my predicament in a new way.  It was the inspiration I needed to think through my situation and devise a plan to divest myself of what was burdening me and focus my new found time on the opportunities that would keep me motivated and productive.  Where you find the time is a personal endeavor — I hope Shirky’s insights inspire you in a way that helps you find the time.

Part 1

Part 2

Jerry Bowles  posted a great interview with IBM’s Luis Suarez.  From his most interesting perch on the Canary Islands, he is perhaps one of the best examples of the social media evangelist trend so many big companies are employing with respect to challenging the status quo.

“I had been playing a very interesting role of evangelist all along, creating lots and lots of demos and tutorials on how to make use of social media in a business environment, including proving its business value and what the corporation gets, as well as what the employees get from all of it,” he says.

Social Media champions inside the enterprise are important agents for change.  The savviest practitioners understand this and take great care to build social sense into their programs.  For example: 

1. Ensuring that people with social skills are chosen – or at least allowed to emerge – to lead the projects
2. Appealing to both the group and individual needs of the participants
3. Where it makes sense, building communities around particular services as a way to scale the population of users. 

Forrester’s Charlene Li touched on this subject last week with her presentation at SxSW.  You can view her slides via slideshare here.  

Tomorrow, The Conversation Group is holding an event in NYC at SAP’s Office at 95 Morton St — 2nd floor from 1-7pm.

Basically, its an examination of the ten years post Cluetrain:  What have we learned?,  What was right and wrong?,  What was left out that should have been discussed?  and What should we be thinking about for the next ten years?

If your interested please register here.  Speakers for the event include:

• Doc Searls, co-author of “The Cluetrain Manifesto” and fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Institute
• Peter Hirshberg, Chairman of the Executive Committee of Technorati and Chairman and Partner at The Conversation Group
• Ted Shelton, partner at The Conversation Group
• Josh Bernoff, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
• Thor Muller, CEO of Get Satisfaction
• Jake McKee, Principal at Ant’s Eye View, and past Global Community Relations Specialist for the LEGO Company

I hope to see you there.

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.