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Writing a Book

As I noted, communities of practice gave a language, a name for so much of what I do. In 2004 Etienne came to John Smith and I and asked if we’d help him update a little report he wrote in 2001 on technologies for CoPs. We said sure. What started as a report revision grew slowly (and sometimes painfully) into what is now Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities which will come out this month. The book was written by the three of us primarily at a distance. Without Skype, email, Google docs, Flickr, and publishing on demand, this book would not have been born.  We had only three face to face sessions.



• Social media provides an amazing research, testing and writing environment.

The approach has made significant contributions to public communications in other parts of the country. In Barnet LBC, outlets such as the council’s whereilive.org site and the blog written by leader Mike Freer (Con), have helped identify factors that contribute to the fear of crime.

They have also enabled it to find ways to improve this, such as visible policing, better street lighting and activities for young people.

At Medway Council, head of marketing Simon Wakeman says that in 2006 podcasts allowed young people to talk to the council about the public services they used in ways they enjoyed and felt comfortable with.

For six months, podcasts were created for and by young people under the editorial control of the communications team. There were about 400 downloads for each podcast. The method was successful because it was appropriate for the target community.

“We chose podcasts because a high proportion of young people have MP3 players,” Wakeman says. “While newspapers look to reach thousands, young people tend to respond to smaller outreach methods.”

At Plymouth City Council, for example, Labour group leader Tudor Evans posted an offensive tweet about a member of the British National Party. Council chief executive Barry Keel reacted by banning access to social media through council computers, despite Cllr Evans’ apologies.

“I was using Twitter to reach out to people who would not normally engage with politics and to communicate my personality,” Cllr Evans says. “The council banned staff from using social media, but councillors have different dialogues and different roles to staff members.”

Cllr Evans believes the opportunity is being missed for council staff to use social media for public communications. “Only press office staff can now access Twitter — and they’re using it to post jobs,” he says. “The library has an award-winning Twitter feed, which cannot continue. The LGA cited YouTube use as excellent practice; in Plymouth
this is banned.”

Forrester admits that "increased adoption of mobile data packages
and of connected, dedicated portable media players like the iPod Touch
are ... giving consumers on-the-go access to previously PC-tethered
streaming experiences. In this context, ownership becomes less
important if the songs you want are available on demand and on the go."

However, its report concludes that portable on-demand streaming
services will not substitute for music ownership — and cannot do so, if they're going to get along with the labels.

Network effects should be extremely important to most of you.

Marketers know all about stickiness, but how many of you measure network density? You purchase all sorts of data from Nielsen and comScore that tells you about uniques, but do you know anything about the cluster dynamics of the users? Are you able to see when the network graph is reaching a sustainable point or, more importantly, when things are starting to fracture?