A paen to the social web

A great post from Euan Semple which resists partial quotation, so here it is in full (presented under the terms of a Creative Commons license!):

A recent client engagement combined with reading Nick Carr's review of Everything Is Miscellaneous have yet again made me question whether those of us who drank The Cluetrain kool-aid seven years ago are mad or simply facing the growing pains of a new world as it emerges from the old.

Sometimes it seems that the naysayers are right. There is nothing fundamently different about the web and human nature stays the same no matter what technologies we have to hand. Having read John Gray's Straw Dogs I am aware that ideas of progress are pretty relative and while that at one level technology has enabled us to save more people through medicine it has also enabled us to kill more people more efficiently. Did the printing press make the world a better place or did it just allow ideas to circulate faster and wider?

The apparent simplicity of what we are talking about also presents challenges. In a world where real work takes effort and things worth doing are hard the apparent promise of the transformative effect of "getting it" appears, and sometimes feels, naive. Helping people to "get it" appears a soft option in contrast to doing or building.

And yet, and yet ....

I am only half way through David's book but I have to say I am loving it just as much as I loved The Cluetrain and Small Pieces Loosely Joined. What has happened to me since embracing the web has felt transformational and enabled connections and relationships that would never have happened otherwise. And these are not just appealing because they enable cozy conversations between like minded people. They enable exchange of ideas at a frequency and a quality that I never experienced before. I have also seen at first hand the effect this capability can have on an organisation. Being able to get quick, quality answers to questions, get collective heads around major cultural issues, and fostering connections that spark innovation are all non-trivial things that all organisations aspire to but which are notoriously difficult without web approaches.

It is good to catch ourselves sometimes and question the things we take for granted - whatever our views. But I am glad to report that I still get excited about the ways that the web is making the world different as described so well by David and others and I feel lucky that I get to pass on that excitement to the people I work with.

Ironically, given that Nick Carr makes much of the fact that he didn't get past page 9 of David's book I gave up on his tedius, rather self-indulgent post after the first couple of paragraphs.

Euan, you really put your finger on the issue here. The naysayers are too busy seeing the fragments of the evoving web to see either the mysterious and majestic evolution of the whole or the incremental increases in intelligence enjoyed by each one of us who engages authentically within conversations with others who we just wouldn't have been able to dialogue with pre-web.

I know that I am a more effective thinker and communicator than I used to be thanks to my blogging (although I also know there's still infinite room for improvement—which, of course, is a great motivator to continue the process), and I see you and all the other bloggers I read becoming better thinkers and communicators each post, week, month and year that goes by.

What a blessing!

Virtual relationships—eroding authenticity?

Kermit Snelson laments the erosion of authenticity in a world of virtual relationships:

Even if the old question "Who are you?" has increasingly lost its meaning as we all become Google-able, another old question should probably remain: "Have we met?"

I'm sure that's very true. You just can't beat a good old face to face natter—which is why I'm excited to about the great new venue for London OpenCoffee, the tech entrepreneur and investor meetup event on Thursday mornings!

Innocent family: not so innocent?

Innocent, purveyors of the eponymous smoothies, are playing happy families:

Hello.

We were wondering if you'd like to join the innocent family. Don't worry - it's not some weird cult. It's just our way of staying in touch with the people who drink our drinks i.e. you. Every week we'll email you our news and give you the chance to win lots of drinks. We'll also invite you to nice events like Fruitstock (our free festival) and maybe send you the odd present if you're lucky. Finally, we'll very occasionally ask you what you reckon we should do next, as we sometimes get confused.

All the practical aspects of this—engaging with customers, giving them perks, asking their opinions—are clearly great ideas, but I can't help finding the "join our smoothie-kissed happy family" thing rather creepy.

Families are groups of people bonded for life by shared bloodlines, and may be happy and harmonious, unhappy and discordant or (in very many cases) a rich mixture of both. A company, by contrast, provides products and services to customers, once or over a certain period of time, in exchange for money. Relationship exists in each case, but of a very mutually-different kind.

Innocent make great smoothies—so why don't they concentrate their marketing activities on conveying their passion for doing just that, rather than spinning us with some delusional fantasy of intimacy?

Soulful brands

YoSushi! founder Simon Woodroffe, talking to entreprenologist Steve Parkes on the Flying Startups Podcast:

"The brands that people will trust in the future are the brands that haven't been designed by advertising agencies; where the soul of the people who are behind them actually come out in that brand."

Indeed. As customers, we are more and more looking for the identities of the people behind the brand to shine through the identity of the brand itself.

It's called authenticity.