Slides from my talk at Startup Saturday Mumbai today.

Just discovered Tricia Wang’s really super blog, Cultural Bytes, thanks to Experientia‘s blogpost on Ethnography’s contribution to values in technology design and use. She’s blogging her way through her research on the socio-cultural contexts of technology usage in low-income communities and migrant communities in Mexico and China. Lots to learn!!

A couple of months ago former Nokia ethnographer Tricia Wang gave a talk at the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, CA, and she just posted the slideshow and the abstract on her blog.

“My talk today is about how I came into my research at Nokia wanting to answer the question: how can ethnographers contribute to the product design process of a mobile device? Ethnographically grounded research for technology use is a method that aims to reveal users’ values, beliefs, and ideas. Nokia was one of the first mobile companies to concertedly hire ethnographers as part of its design process, In the mid to late nineties, Nokia changed the mobile industry forever by creating affordable, user friendly phones. More than a decade later, the hardware mobile phone market is nearing saturation. With Nokia transitioning from a company that produces hardware to software, how can ethnographically driven research provide strategic insights for this shift?”

Here’s her slideshow:

I was asked this question at the Anthrodesign group, in the context of a conversation around getting into the swing of a project and developing some working momentum . I shared there, how I often find myself turning to my blog and twitter communities for helping me with my thinking on qualitative and ethnographic research projects. I was then asked these questions: Could you elaborate a bit more on how you tap into your twitter community? with the limited character set, do you drive them to answer in more detail on your blog? How effective have you found twitter in generating meaningful conversations and resources?

Sharing my response here with a few modifications – there are many many ways I use Twitter, apart from keeping in touch with people, the world, and sharing warm fuzzy feelings or rants. I’ll try and describe some of these:

• If I’m looking for advice (from a community I trust) on say which phone to buy next, or where to find macbook chargers, or how to solve a particular problem I find I can really rely on my twitter community.  During the Mumbai 26/11 terror attacks Twitter was what kept many of us feeling ‘safe’ (in the way of experiencing it together) and connected to the outside world, as we were stuck in our homes. We also used it to try and reach out to people who were affected – eg. sourced and published lists of victims from hospitals (and directed people to those lists via links on twitter). I’ve often also used Twitter to help mobilize action around immediate causes like someone needing blood of a certain group in a specific hospital. But these are all very specific short term needs being addressed by quick responses.

• I often use Twitter (and my blog – they’re linked BTW) to have meaningful conversations, tease out some areas, ask for help on resources, opinions, suss out experts, or participants for studies. Obviously, with no mention of the actual client or specific subject of research. A recent example – a client is looking to understand Durability as a driver for purchase in her category, and I  broadened the issue and asked a question on Twitter  - the thought to actually blog this series started off with this tweet – and responses to it - looking for evidence that ‘durability’ as a brand proposition isn’t a big purchase driver for youth today. egs, links anecdotes welcome!”.  Sometimes its linked back to my blog, or to something someone else has published and I’m always amazed at both the depth and width in the sharing of perspectives that it evokes.

• And I use it increasingly to share links around what I’m reading or find interesting. The way I do it, is bookmark the link on Delicious and I’ve automated it to show both at my blog, and on Twitter. Often, these are starting points for meaningful conversations among several tweeters who share similar interests. And as importantly, if not more, I get to see all their marvelous links too!

• Or to live-tweet an event I’m at, as I did with TEDIndia last year and then just aggregated my tweets at my blog, and TedXMumbai more recently. The interesting thing about such tweets is you actually have people responding back in real-time, you feel your community is ‘present’ too, and often their questions and comments are shared back at the conferences. These could be conferences around my areas of work too.

• To amplify interesting thoughts, ideas, requirements, needs of others I follow on twitter thru RTs.

• Every post I make on my blog, every bookmark I link to at Delicious – is tweeted. As a result, it helps me broadcast my thoughts, and encourages people to come in and add to the conversation. It really doesn’t bother me where they do this – as today it’s possible to weave much of this into a lifestream of sorts. (I know this might be annoying to those who follow my blog, my twitter profile, and facebook as there can be much repetition – I need to find a way to sort this one out!)

So to answer the question more directly … I find I’m using Twitter increasingly both as a quick-byte sort of space – in and out, and as a gateway or pipe through which information and conversations flow!

Would love to hear your views – How do you use twitter or your blog in generating meaningful conversations and resources around what you do?

I was chatting with a friend today who’s not a Twitter user, and trying to explain why I like it, and why so many people do too. I found myself turning to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and his Theory of Human Motivations to try and explain this. I discovered this blog post titled The Hierarchy of Tweets at the Innovation Diaries, with this clever diagram based on Maslow’s model. The author makes an interesting connection between what motivates people and how these needs are expressed in 140 characters:

Click to Enlarge

I also discovered this neat little blog post by students of new media at the University of Amsterdam, where the question discussed is whether Twitter is in fact a tool that nourishes our social needs or is it in fact, increasing our needs to keep track of our friends every minute of the day? Here’s a clip:

Humans are social beings with social needs. We need each other to grow as well. Rom Harré describes in his book ‘Social Being’ that we exist as persons for ourselves and other people. We exist solely by the virtue of networks of relations in which we stand to other human beings of our kind. We are partially created by other people and our actions and interactions are jointed actions [3]. Twitter in this case would be a platform on which network of relations are enhanced. Networks are created and the followers you have and you follow are people you have shared interest with; they are ‘humans beings of our kind.’ Aristotle on the other hand speaks of how achieving the good life. We all have social needs and to have a good, successful and happy life we need to socialize with others. And because humans are by nature social beings it is good to live in a society in which the social life is mostly based on a community. Social life in a community is a necessity for a human’s complete flourishing as a human being. Another aspect that Aristotle addresses is friendship. This mutual admiration between two human beings is a necessity. This moral admiration for one and another is essential in friendships and taking advantage of these friendships can make a person fully human. [4]. The Maslow’s hierarchy of needs also addresses this fact. After physical and safety needs we all have our social needs. According to Maslow these social needs involve emotionally based relationships such as friendship and intimacy.

And how can one forget this piece – Understanding the Psychology of Twitter – at Moses Ma’s The Tao of Innovation Blog, written in March 2009.

All this research took me back to 2007, when I had talked about Social Media Strategies – Let’s Remember Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. I had then said:

Click to Enlarge - Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

Web 2.0 companies have shown the way – their products are in perpetual beta, their architecture and marketing is decentralized, they encourage communities of users to self-organize around them. Recently, in an email to Rob, I wrote …. I think one of the most difficult things for people to do is give up control and relinquish ‘power’ to the many unless they see tangible ‘cost-per-click’ sort of gains. It’s the single largest barrier to accepting and adopting a process that is different to one we have been so conditioned to. Sadly, what few realise the act of giving up that power itself can be so empowering for them – why is WordPress gaining popularity – why is Flickr so popular – why are del.icio.us and Skype and so many others gaining traction today? They weren’t built in a day and pushed onto us as a final product or service – they are being built by and around the community that breathes them. The folks behind them had the guts and vision to say – let’s see how our customers ‘play’ – how they self-organize into networks (developers for instance) – embrace the criticisms with the accolades – and build around what they build. Chaos ….. and creativity. So powerful.

and

I’m not one of those academics who is framework-crazy or model-crazy, still it is good to pause sometimes, and reflect on their relevance and application, especially those that deepen our understanding of basic human motivations , which directly affect how we work, play and even ‘consume’. Triggered by the link I discovered today, I’m amazed at how relevant some of these models are, in our understanding and appreciation of the work we are doing in the social media strategy space. So much of our own social media usage that goes to form what Ton refers to as our distributed self, is driven by these needs – del.icio.us, furl, facebook, blogging, flickr, youtube, twitter, plazes, skype, last.fm – the list is never-ending! As I think about each, I see each one fulfilling a different need, and yet coming together to form a lifestream that is driven by the ‘gestalt’, often sub-conscious, of my own needs.

Moreover, the ability for brands and organisations to be in beta, and to listen and engage in Social Media – those that can take that leap, will be fulfilling some of the higher-order needs in the classic pyramid model, and in Jennifer’s circle, forming and providing ecosytems to their customers that enable the fulfillment of these needs. Ultimately, good marketing and PR is always one that delivers on meeting customer needs.

Something marketers, consultants, techies and geeks, and PR folks who are working in the area of Blogger Relations, Social Media and Web 2.0 should well keep in mind when they design their projects, processes, products or services and strategies!

Digital Strangelove …. the Intention Economy … or WTF Social Media?  David Gillespie,  Account Director at Maclaren McCann, Toronto shares a great presentation (263 slides). There’s a lot that speaks to the fact that all media is social, it is about people not technology, paid vs free, attention vs intention, the need to listen and not just ‘speak’ etc etc – things we’ve been hearing about for years.  I particularly like how he frames it as a new age requiring new stories and new storytellers, where digital is not a ‘thing’ anymore! Take that in a brand context or a journalism context and having observed how social media is being used, I can’t help feeling WTF – this presentation only reinforces the feeling that practitioners of and experts in traditional media are in fact novices in this space, if they are trying to control user-generated content, as many do!  Love this quote he uses from Ralph Waldo Emerson too:

“As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.”

Description form the author – “This is a collection of thoughts around where we are right now in the history of the Internet. I believe we’re getting ahead of ourselves, confusing the growth of the Internet with it growing up, but I also believe we’re doing some amazing things, and can draw a few lines in the sand, making some solid guesses on where we are going.I hope you enjoy”

I’ve spent the morning playing with Taglets – which is very cool and has the potential to be quite revolutionary as it’s offering up an open platform and API for developers. It seems like reverse Twitter in some ways – I create or follow tags that are really keywords of interest to me, and I get comments/discussion streams flowing into my email or as twitter messages to me. I like that it embraces the concept of information flows. I like that comments and followers are anonymous – although there may be a time when I would want to know who adds what. I like that it does not ask me for any password. I like the interface – it’s simple easy to navigate/understand and use. It has a very Web 3.0 feel to it – I like that Mark and David are asking folks to explore it and figure out ways of using it themselves!

What I’d like to see added, fully appreciating this is early days :

• comment streams available on the site
• more characters permissible in the creation of tags
• option to get only one email per day with all comments on tags I have subscribed to (I use Gmail as my email client so it’s not really a worry as it gets strung into one stream – those who use Outlook and other Clients may find it too much)
• capability to snip URLs in the comments

Taglet links:

Introducing Taglets

Taglets-are-it – an early review

Detailed Overview

About/API/FAQ’s here

Gaurav Mishra says he’s “the marketer who hates the social media hustle”. And yet he finds himself hustling, as he believes much of what we do in social media is hustle:

But social media is all about the hustle, it’s all about working the room, and, indeed, working your social networks, doing anything you need to do to increase your influence and build your brand.

My response to him:

Gaurav, I hate hustling too. I don’t buy that Social Media is all about hustling. That’s doing injustice to users of social media and your readers by implying they can and will be ‘hustled’!!!

We all hustle once in a while. If the ‘hustling’ leads to meaningful dialogue/conversation/action that is visible to those who are recipients of your “hustle” then it makes sense. If it’s only about how great I am, and how great I am perceived by my community and the rest of the world, it just won’t work.

A lot of the people you mention use their social media ‘whuffie’ for causes outside themselves – is that hustling?

Building your influence and brand really comes from the relationships you are able to build with a wide audience based on solid and credible work, thought, intent, experience, energy, imagination. Not just hustling

To hustle … or not???

Been meaning to post this video – it was fun talking to Rajiv Dingra and Navneet from the WATShow on Phweet and the Social Media scene in India.

Dina Mehta On Phweet – A Tool That Enables Voice Conversation On Twitter (Via WATShow)

I look forward to Part 2 where I have demo’d how Phweet works.

This morning, I set up an Open Phweet around the Future of Social Computing, triggered by Jan Chipchase’s paper called Future Social, and my subsequent feeling of reinforcement and validation around a study we recently did around the future of Mobile Social Computing.  It’s been an interesting day, talking to a few people who joined my Phweet Cafe on this!  Am going to keep it open for a few days more!

@whitelight007 on Twitter then asked me – what’s my take on the future of social networking.  Had to keep the words to the bare minimum given Twitter’s 140 character limit so here’s what I said in two tweets and edited down here to:

“Networks based on & layered around location, access, presence & context. Those that enhance real-world interactions. Enabling choice, privacy and control”

Do you believe this is in the zone? Makes sense? What’s missing?  Would you like to share your shot at describing your perception of the future of social networking in say 140 characters?

Come and discuss it! All you need is your Twitter ID and password to enter the conversation.

Marshall Kirkpatrick over at ReadWriteWeb shares, with some optimism and a lot of caution, the Reality Mining project, being conducted by the Human Dynamics Group at the MIT Media Lab. They are processing more than 350,000 hours of data collected from peoples’ cell phones. More than just who calls who, Pentland is also studying proximity, location and activity data using information like interactions recorded between Bluetooth devices. [images in this post from the Reality Mining website]

More details on the project at Nicholas Carr’s blog:

In a paper entitled “Inferring Social Network Structure Using Mobile Phone Data,” Pentland and two coauthors explain that one of the great benefits of the cell phone as a data mining tool is that it provides raw, unfiltered information, which ends up being more reliable than information “self-reported” by people. People’s reports on their own behavior are subject to a great deal of distortion due to memory lapses, cognitive biases, embarrassment, and other factors. Cell-phone reality mining, by contrast, provides “a new method for precise measurements of large-scale human behavior.” Our cell phone know us better than we know ourselves.

To illustrate the power of the technique, the authors conducted a reality mining experiment that involved “ninety-four subjects using mobile phones pre-installed with several pieces of software that record and send the researcher data on call logs, Bluetooth devices in proximity, cell tower IDs, application usage, and phone status. These subjects were observed via mobile phones over the course of nine months, representing over 330,000 person-hours of data (about 35 years worth of observations).” The data provided a remarkably intimate view of the subjects’ lives. The researchers were, for instance, able to “identify characteristic behavioral signatures of relationships that allowed us to accurately predict 95% of the reciprocated friendships in the study. Using these behavioral signatures we can predict, in turn, individual-level outcomes such as job satisfaction.”

In an interview with Kate Greene of Technology Review, Professor Alex (Sandy) Pentland, the senior faculty on this project, claims that reality mining can help solve social problems, big and small:

TR: What could be some benefits to all this measurement?

SP: You can really see things in a way that you never could before–a God’s-eye view. One of the examples I’ve been stuck on recently relates to how transformative Google Earth has been. Imagine having something where you can see all the people moving around on a map. Think about SARS in Hong Kong. What if in a particular apartment building, nobody left for work that day? You could identify a major health problem in 12 hours instead of two weeks. Another example is the social health of communities. It’s known that social integration, or how well people mix, correlates with whether or not a community is thriving. With reality mining, you can actually see social integration, as it happens or doesn’t happen. Once everyone can see it, then you can start to have transparent political discussions. Why isn’t the mayor putting more sidewalks and crosswalks in this area? Could more community events make the area more livable?

I’m not so sure how this will work.

As a researcher working in a commercial marketplace, however, my eyes light up at the potential mining and processing this data would have in several areas: segmentation and user-behaviour modelling and prediction studies on all sorts of parameters based on an observation of actual behaviour- demographic, contextual and social interaction, motivational, community, relational, efficiency, mapping – the possibilities are endless when you have such masses of ‘real’ raw data. With many commercial implications and potential – to feed into explorations and fine-tuning of market positioning opportunities, UI and design experiments, social networking and community building (which may or maynot be exploited commercially), mobile marketing and value-added services.

But, as a user of a mobile phone, I am quite worried by it. I want to control my information, and I want to be able to decide who has access to it. I don’t want my mobile phone to reveal more of me, than I want it to. I want less intrusions, interruptions and invasions – they’re one of my biggest cribs already – I fear that there will only be more. I want an opt-in/opt-out option for sure.
Surveillance or research? Invasive or transformative? Benefit to community or commerce?

Lets see what shape this takes!

I first saw a demo of Flock at Pop!Tech in 2005 – I remember feeling it was cool because it brought together so many tools into one space. And I’m re-visiting Flock today, withe the launch of Flock 1.0 beta.

What I like:

I’m liking it – it is like integrating my desktop-browsing-bookmarking-tagging-publishing-social networking all in one. More specifically:

• It just looks so much more appealing than most other browsers – brighter and more vibrant somehow
• The sidebar is really pretty cool – i like the People sidebar a lot – it lets me login to my Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube accounts and it displays pictures and latest updates from my friends and community. That’s quite special – because it’s all coming into my space now, without my having to go to my Flickr or Facebook homepages, or use IM or Twitterific to tweet. And all this without actually having to download toolbars and extensions. It also lets me send updates, load pictures etc so easily. That’s a big wow to have all of this in one place.
• I like the Media bar too .. its lovely to actually just have pictures up there .. makes work so much more fun! And the drag-and-drop features.
• And the Clipboard is cool too – I could clip an image I wanted into it and Blog it from there.
• The blog editor misses some things, but I like the idea of having one editor that lets you publish to several blogs across blogging platforms like Blogger and WordPress (which I use) right from your browser, without having to go to each blog.
• I found I could post links to and tag in del.icio.us in a similar manner as I do from Firefox – that’s good.
• I got myself the screenshot extension – it’s cool – just click that star on top! Am waiting for more plug-ins and extensions to be developed around Flock.

What I miss/don’t like in Flock 1.0:

• My biggest grouse is that the blogging editor is very basic. Am not sure I will really be able to blog from there – no picture uploads, not much WYSIWYG formatting possible. For this post, I had to get the logo from someone else’s blog, and use their bandwidth to be able to display it here. Still, I found a way to insert the image without having to upload it to Facebook or Flickr – I got into image view at the post where the image was located, and dragged the image into the inbuilt Clipboard in Flock. Once there it gave me three option – view, blog and delete. So I clicked ‘blog’ and it opened up in the blog editor. That’s fine for images that are already on the web, but what’s really required is for it to allow me to bring in my own images saved on my computer, or even better, straight off my camera or mobile phone into the Clipboard! Also, it doesn’t allow you to post to multiple categories.
• My second grouse is that although I have changed my default search engine in Preferences to Google, I am always taken to the Yahoo search page. That’s not good.
• Teeny third grouse – when I use livesearch on the top right corner of the browser, it opens up on the same tab I am on – I want it to open the page in a new tab

Other random thoughts and my watchlist around Flock:

• Is all this activity in the side bar going to burn huge holes in my pocket – here in India, we pay a lot for half-decent broadband and there are limits on your usage (I pay approx. Rs.1700 ($42) every month for bundled usage of 7.5 MB – anything over that is charged to me at Rs. 0.90 ($2.25 per 100 mb’s).
• Am wondering too whether it’s going to eat up my memory, and slow down other applications.
• The other thought I had was with a browser that’s so intuitive, and one that can become a real dashboard for your own footprints on the web and for your community of friends, am wondering what happens to measurements and web metrics like time spent on site, page views, unique visitors, click rate etc. RSS and Newsreaders are already redefining how we search and navigate the web and forcing people to redefine how they measure popularity and ‘success’.

Am posting this from the Flock editor now .. let’s see how it works!

UPDATE:  that was easy .. and was quick too to show up at my blog.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: flock1.0, browser, flock1.0review,

  Olivier at Headshift has a good post titled “Enterprise 2.0″ Performance:  Exploitation or Exploration?” Reminds me of a post I had done way back in 2004 called Revisiting Knowledge Management – Presence, Communication, Collaboration = FLOW. And that was pre-Twitter, pre-Facebook, pre-so-many-new-web-2.0-tools. How amazing it would be if we could turn random ideas, thoughts and our life experiences into organizational assets. And to be able to use freely all available social media to allow information to flow seamlessly from one employee to another. These are enabled today by social media tools like blogs, wikis, VoIP, IM, social networks, twitter, bookmarking, newsreaders etc.

Some excerpts from Olivier’s piece today:

“The key focus should be people and information flow. So the first thing we have to consider is that communication and HR are not two elements one has to put on the backburner. Trick is that it is a lasting tradition in many organisations. For instance, IT people still put communication processes on the backburner and favour operational processes. They don’t understand that knowledge work cannot be limited to processes, that it is multi-faceted communication flows around processed tasks that make things work. Meetings, e-mails, phone, IM, blogs, wikis, information aggregators and filtering devices wrap defined task oriented programmes up. The former help employees use the later, more efficiently.”

He goes on to make the points that for real innovation, you need and open mind and an appetite for exploration. And today, IT departments are creating artificial scarcity by imposing upon and restricting employees to a set of tools, when they are really in the know on what tools are most relevant for them. “Instead, it might be clever to take advantage of employees who enjoy web 2.0 at home, for years now.”

Here’s how:

“If we live in an economy where innovation is a key factor of performance and competitiveness, we have to accept exploration and reprimand exploitation. We have to unleash the innovation that lies dormant within the firewall. We have to favour pilots, contextual applications, open-source, information and application mashups. The corporate information world needs no more systematic enterprise-wide stuff. Reductionism does not create relevance, it creates scarcity and underperformance. Relevance is created by situational applications, social software, interaction design, user-centricity and some basic features like APIs and personalized pages as Intranets (see Portaneo Enterprise). The corporate world needs no more old routines hidden behind new tools. Stop confusing documents and information. Stop forcing people using only emails and Enterprise Content Management. ECM reduces workflow to permission and conversation to versioning. Emails create confusion in conversations. This replicates ageless routines. Replication does not create performance in a world of innovation.”