Anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with social media will know that using it as a backchannel is not an option you switch on or off. It is, inherently, at least 50% backchannel. Social media’s most salient characteristic, in fact, is its interactivity. So much so that one has trouble disentangling message ‘push’ from what you almost immediately get back. Post to a LinkedIn group, say, and people reply. And they expect a reply in return. You might have been trying to do a bit of PR, but what you get drawn into is a conversation.
This diminution of lag between messaging and response – coupled with the transparency of that response to the whole community (be it positive or negative) is what makes social media so hard to fit into traditional models of business communications.
Continue reading Social media: dangers in the backchannel?
Anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with social media will know that using it as a backchannel is not an option you switch on or off. It is, inherently, at least 50% backchannel. Social media’s most salient characteristic, in fact, is its interactivity. So much so that one has trouble disentangling message ‘push’ from what you almost immediately get back. Post to a LinkedIn group, say, and people reply. And they expect a reply in return. You might have been trying to do a bit of PR, but what you get drawn into is a conversation.
This diminution of lag between messaging and response – coupled with the transparency of that response to the whole community (be it positive or negative) is what makes social media so hard to fit into traditional models of business communications.
Continue reading 
being interviewed at the 2010 Tools of Change for Publishing conference in Frankfurt. He spoke at the conference about mobile platforms from the perspective of publishers faced with multiple delivery models including apps and the web.
Have a listen and let us know what you think.
When I was preparing a couple of articles on social media for this blog earlier in the year, I had a quick scoot around Google to see if I could find a taxonomy of social media. I hadn’t realised it would be such a big ask.
It seemed, to me at least, a fairly reasonable request. Standard research procedure. You’re surveying a particular knowledge area and you want a map of the terrain and boundaries; some kind of idea of what the thing you’re researching might contain and how these contents can be broken down into logical categories. I wasn’t asking for a precise ontology, just a usable classification scheme.
Aside from the unsatisfactory nature of what I turned up, (follow the links in this post by all means and judge for yourself whether I’m being too harsh), the question soon loomed of why on earth I would expect such a thing to be available.