Social Strategy & Design by @KarlLong

I just signed up for another location based micro-blogging/micro-media/social-media site at 11870.com (similar to britekite.com) and quickly discovered they have a very unique error page. (click on img for full size)

Wow!

I think many of us intuitively know how important Creative Commons is in supporting the co-creativity, like mashups and many kinds of consumer generated content. Now we don’t have to rely on our intuition and Creative Commons have created a database of case studies of it’s use around the world.

If you want to know more about Creative Commons check out this video here:

| View | Upload your own

Your mileage may vary but some of the themes in this slideshow “happiness as your business model” resonate so deeply with me it literally brought tears to my eyes. In the deck Tara (author of HorsePigCow and founder of Citizen Agency) connects so succinctly Maslows hierarchy of needs and the concepts of autonomy and relatedness it just blew me away. Funny because i’ve been trying to connect the same things for the last five or six years with limited success, so you would imagine it would make me feel quite inept seeing how well Tara has done it here, but that’s not the case at all, i feel like it’s a huge confirmation and an opportunity for me to go back and see how I can build on it.

I wrote an article way back in 2003 where I tried to connect a concept called the “hierarchy of customer experience” to loyalty, which was heavily inspired by Maslow’s hierarchy and Hertzbergs two factor theory of motivation which included “Trust > Competence > Autonomy > Creativity/Relatedness”

Here’s another look at an earlier attempt:

I’m quite convinced that a model like this is the secret behind the real success (and real failure) of web 2.0/social media type companies. Increasingly it will be the secret behind the real success (and real failure) of all companies and organizations.

Nadav Savio, now a user experience designer at Google (GOOG), and mobile usage expert Jared Braiterman, founder of Jared Research, wrote in a 2007 paper.
From the Business Week article “Moving to the Mobile Web”.

Word!

They do mention a few design/UX agencies in the Business Week article including Punchcut (who I only heard about last week as a good friend of mine just left Frog design to join them, also follow them on twitter), and of course the good people at Adaptive Path who have always focused on the people and not the technology.

I know most of us with significant web experience have been hearing for years how the mobile web was going to take off, but it really does feel like the current environment has got some very disruptive forces and new entrants that are going to heat up the competitive environment.

Highly recomend reading GigaOm’s post this morning titled Symbian, iPhone and the new mobile reality

Kluster.com is an interesting collaborative crowdsourcing decision making platform. They seem to position themselves as a sort of collaborative ideation/innovation platform. It seems that their main marketing strategy is to launch interesting services on it’s platform and the most recent one is called Name This, the main idea being that for $99 companies/entrepreneurs can post products and services to have the community come up with names for. As a demo they are running an initiative to rename Wolf Blitzer, a newsman who is famously on CNN more than any other person.

I particularly like these suggestions:
Garrison Sontag
Stonewall Blitzer
Slartibartfast

Other things they are attempting to rename in this demo are:
Chevy Nova
Zune!
Verizon’s G’zOne

As with all social tools like this I like to look at the rewards and recognition part of the culture, why would people participate in this in meaningful ways. In the case of Name This the primary reward seems to be cash money. Essentially they distribute $80 of the $99 fee to the top 3 names and the invluencecers:

Personally i think cash is a pretty weak motivator, especially when so few are going to benefit, and they need to do a better job of showcasing the top participants and have some non-cash community points for participation.

Via Mashable and my friend the Mad Finn

Another recent branding related crowdsourcing application is of course the runaway success BrandTags.com by Noah Brier

Well that is Bill Hicks ripping marketing a new one, heard about this via Johnnie Moore’s weblog where he also mention he’s starting a new collaborative blog. The the new blog is called Marketing 2.0 in which some very respectable marketing bloggers are getting together to post on how marketing is changing.

I rather like Johnnie’s inaugural post where he even questions the validity of marketing 2.0, I mean, doesn’t marketing just go away if it’s built into the DNA of products and experiences?

Reminds me very much of victor papanek’s sentement from his seminal book from the 70’s called Design for the Real World

Now, both me and Johnnie do have one other thing in common and that is we are from England, which I think gives us a somewhat different view of marketing, because to be quite honest America is a nation that has been marketing better than any other nation in history. What we often refer to with slight disdain as that American razzmatazz is in fact the American marketing machine revving up into high gear.

That being said advertising is becoming less effective, customers are becoming more aware of the impact of their consumption, are holding companies to higher standards, and are seeking more meaning out of the products and services they buy. As post war marketing theory, segments, demographics, focus groups, monolithic ad networks and the mass market are becoming increasingly irrelevant companies have to look for new ways to engage.

So one of the things I genuinely love and couldn’t live without now on my N95 is the podcasting application (it’s actually a podcatcher, but lets not go there). What I love is that it aggregates the podcasts i like and can update them over wifi, this means I always have the latest episodes and always have something new and interesting to listed to on my phone. Now one of the biggest challenges I have is getting the podcast RSS feed in my phone, once you’ve manually typed out one RSS feed url like http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=13 you will be desperate for another way to get podcasts on your phone. Well here’s my workflow (this is dependent on you having the very useful google toolbar installed on your browser).

first get the podcasting application www.nokia.co.uk/podcasting

1. Click on “send to” on the google tool bar choose SMS



2. Copy and paste the rss url in the pop up window



3. On your phone now open the text message and choose forward
4. Choosing forward gives you a editable version of the message, now hold down the edit key* (the pencil icon) and use the joystick to highlight the url, and use the soft key to choose “copy”
5. Switch to the podcasting application, choose add podcast, which will bring up a text field, now hold the the edit key again and choose the soft key “Paste”

Sound arduous but it’s really fast with some practice and certainly quicker than trying to type out an RSS url

Some things I’d love to see in future podcasting applications:

• The ability to record and post audio to a podcast/website
• The ability to have it detect what wifi zone i’m in and choose the best one (right now you have to set it manually
• some way to use my web browser to manage my podcasts and have that show up on my phone
• some rules for how long to keep podcasts, like 5 most recent, or delete after x amount of time (with the ability to override for certain episodes

These are the podcasts on my phone right now:

• The daily source code of course
• the radio 4 show In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg (this show will simultaniously make you feel smart and stupid at the same time
• Fresh Air with Terry Gross
• This American Life
• American Copywriter
• You Look Nice Today
• the RCRD Label podcasts

Oh, another feature for the podcasting app, the ability to publish my podcast list to the web, or email it to myself

What are you listening to?

Oh and if you didn’t know I do work for Nokia, but that’s not why I wrote this and I have no association with the group responsible for the Podcasting Application.

Here’s the location of the Edit key that unlocks the copy and paste function, but i’m sure you knew that

Just heard of this new service called Plurk which is a similar “microblogging” service rather like Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku etc. According to Venture Beat it launched in January this year and seems to be targeting a more teenage demographic.

bub.blicio.us asks the question “is Plurk another Twitter?” and in many ways it is, it’s a lifestreaming/microblogging platform with friends and fans etc. The one major difference that I see in Plurk is it’s “Karma” measure, and that is one of the only reasons why I think it will be interesting to watch what happens. Karma is essentially a measure of your level of participation in the Plurk system, and it’s the kind of explicit feedback that I think can fuel the growth of social systems. One of the reasons that Yelp is so successful is it has multiple feedback mechanisms that reward and recognize the right activity in the social network, and therefore encourages more of that activity. If you reward the right “value creating” activities on your social network you set up very powerful virtuous cycles.

Mind you, as bub.blicio.us also pointed out there is no apparent business model or revenue model, agreed, but what else is new.

Oh, you can find me on Plurk here

UPDATE: Looks like Plurk is the new twitter… it’s down