Gilbey, Rodrigues and Marshall

Today’s conference was much more productive than yesterday, I thought.

As Steven Noble said,  what we want from events like this are insights. And that is what we did get today!

Some things that I found interesting:

Laurel Papworth touched on the idea of social networks having the potential to be accretive to productivity - particularly with the advent of social finance sites such as iGrin and Peermint.

Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum talked about the idea of ’semantic serendipity’ and how important it is to enable and allow the community to create their own taxonomies. I interpreted this as follows: When communities create a taxonomy they tend to see things in a more literal way than the ‘insiders’ sometimes do. So what happens is that the literal becomes a lateral idea…I thought that was a good insight.

David Hawking from Funnelback and CSIRO talked about the context of search and how important it is to profile the person searching in order to provide more informed and valuable results. He also talked about how valuable it can be to take the lessons learned in the wide world of web and to apply those within the organization. I tend to think that this then should lead to the commons on the outside needing to understand this as it will no doubt be used against them to sell them more unless they understand this….

One other thing that I am interested to explore - as the matter of taxation was raised by Nick Abrahams from Deacons. What is the potential for local bartering to develop using a social networking platform?

I attended the first day of the conference on Social Networking yesterday - in Sydney.

There were a couple of interesting things that came out of it. Unfortunately some of the presenters essentially did sales pitches for their organizations without providing any useful insights into the what and why of their businesses. Maybe they just don’t know?

Patrick Crane, VP Marketing at Linked In, talked about the “access to activatable intelligence” that is provided by Linked In. Later at lunch a recruiter sat near me and was telling some colleagues about how he was now in the Top 30 connected people in Linked In. This was pretty interesting stuff. His whole raison d’etre was about promoting himself to the point where he had reached a tipping point. At the time that he had been listed as a power user, he found that people wanting to be in his first degree of separation contacts took off.

So clearly for those who really focus on building ‘friends’ in Linked In can win big time, just like those bands who built massive networks in MySpace in order to build visibility with record labels.

The presentation from Mark Charkin from Bebo was certainly interesting. I wasn’t aware of the importance of Bebo before yesterday. It appears that it is the #1 social networking player in the UK, and also in NZ.

The MySpace presentation was just about how much ad inventory they have and how good it would be if people bought it. Nothing particularly useful there, and no reference to the opening up of the platform, which was disappointing.

There was a Google presentation about the value of YouTube as an advertising platform which was singularly uninformative.

Then came the presentation from Nielsen/Net Ratings. The presentation from Allan Dib, who is MD of the company for the Pacific region, was metrics rich as you would expect. The one big idea from this wa that there are some emergent Big Trends.. They key one of these is that trust is eroding. And with that comes the need for defensive branding.

This is of course one of the key areas of interest for Karl, Bruce and myself at GRMP. The key to the growth of brand attacks is the ease with which people can shoot video or still photos with their phones and post that material to the web. Companies are starting to watch for occurrences of negative comments online and are moving to respond rapidly in some cases - but normally only when that same material goes mainstream, and hits regular media.

So the growing risk for corporations is to reputation/brand risk. And it can come from just one video that happens to hit the right spot.