Who Can You Trust? Who Do You Trust (Read Time 1:41)

Who do you trust? Who can you trust? With happenings in Auckland, New Zealand mayoral politics recently, the NSA spying, and other revelations, we find ourselves in interesting times. With the invasive growth of social media we live in a world of increasing transparency. Corporates and Governments which have thrived on sharing only what they think people need to know are losing that battle.

I’ve been reading article in The Futurist by Rolf Jensen, Chief Imagination Officer (I like that title!) of Dream Company in Denmark who compares today’s society to the first Renaissance. Gutenberg’s Press accelerated the spread of new ideas, and the golden age sprung out of the middle ages where much of the world was controlled by a religious hierarchy.

We have a similar break-up to political hierarchy’s now, particularly in but not limited to the Middle East and Europe, and like the Gutenberg Press, Social Media is now making important information available to the masses, most significantly in real time. This means that it isn’t possible for governments and corporations to use smoke and mirrors quite so much. With trending information, we can see right past the kaleidoscopic obfuscation to what is really going on.

Here are some interesting statistics that Rolf shared in his article in The Futurist:

• From Pew Research: In the 1960’s 75% of the US public trusted their Government. In 2010 the result was 25%!
• The European barometer polled UK voters in 2005 and found a trust level of only 34%. In 2012 that was down to 21%.
• CEO’s of large corporations are trusted by 45% of the US population (almost double the number that trust their politicians, that’s positive isn’t it?)
• Gallop says that teachers are trusted by 84%. That’s great news isn’t it. What a shame they get one of the smallest parts of the budget!

Back to social media though, what we are doing is finding groups of people that we do trust and building a new society. We’re sharing knowledge and information in countless ways that have immediacy.

As an example, in my new eBook, Buying a House – Using Real Estate Apps, Maps and Location Based Services, I speak a lot about using social media to research where to live. I cover questions like where to find people who are like you, or people who can tell you about a suburb or area, who have nothing to gain by sharing that information. Who can you trust to give you honest information?

I feel very grateful to live in such exciting times where the power is gong back to the people. Of course ‘the people’ do have to take the power and whilst everyone subsequently had an opinion on Mayor Len Brown’s indiscretions, only 33% turned up to vote in the Auckland local Government elections. I do like the saying ‘You get the Government you deserve’.

So who do you trust? Who do you go to for advice? How are you going to use the information now available to you, to help build the world you want for yourself and your children? How will you contribute?

Comments welcomed.

What is a Blog and How do I Get One?

Everyone is talking about writing blogs. In the world of IT and in large companies, people are writing online. It might be newsletters, articles, pages on websites and of course social media. That’s all very well for people that like writing and can do it well, but what about busy people working in their SME business? What about people who are good at what they do but are not good at writing?

I’m not going to tell you in detail what a blog is. The web is full of explanations, Wikipedia, defines it as well as anyone here. A blog is effectively an easy tool to allow you to share your passion and message with the world. It’s a way to attract new clients, to share your knowledge, to engage with people with a common interest, a way to share stories.

A blog can contain photos, video, music, polls and much more. You can allow people to comment, you can create categories of information, add keywords to help people find your information when they are looking for what you have and much more. It is also chronological and that is very important. If you are going to blog, you need to be doing it regularly so that people know there will be new information coming. They can subscribe to it and get involved with you and your brand.

Here are a few thoughts:

1. Why blog? If you don’t know the answer to that, skip the rest of this. If you have a bit of an idea, then start focusing on it. What is your end game? Do you want customers to buy your goods or services? Do you want to add value and inform people about things you are excited about? Do you want to raise your profile? Do you want new customers, or to keep existing ones? if you don’t have a goal, you’re going to have a pointless blog.
2. Why would people read your blog? You don’t want to be preaching to the converted. You don’t want to be telling people what they already know, which a lot of blog writers do. If you are in business, what sort of questions do customers often ask you? Why do they come to you, I frequently hear people say their customers go to them because they have product knowledge. I would put it to you that if you have product knowledge, you have passion. People will read your blog for the same reason they do business with you, you have a common interest, you have helpful information and you care.
3. How often should you blog? At least a couple of times a week or people will forget about you. Search engines will pick up on your blog is they see there is regular content and you will rise higher up the rankings and more people will find you. That might sound a lot, but they don’t have to be long. In fact any longer than this and people may well stop reading.
4. What sort of writing style should you use? It needs to be easy to read, almost like having a conversation, but leave out the slang and the industry jargon. It also needs excellent spelling and grammar. This is a professional conversation.
5. What should you write about? Keep it relevant to your goals and your target audience. When I was studying songwriting a common thread was write about what you know. As above, what do you know that will be useful to your reader?
6. I want to write but I don’t have time. Then contact someone like me. You can email me at luigi@solomoconsulting.co.nz  I can get you started with your online writing and help you start the conversation.

Blogging is of course only one form of online content writing. There are newsletters, white papers, online magazines, websites and much more. What is great about a blog is that there are easy to use and often free tools. It is all kept in one place, but keeps growing. You can go back and add to stories, you can edit them if you want to. You also get analytics which means you can find out how many people are reading your blog and even what part of the world they come from. Once you get started it’s a lot of fun. Want to get started?

Here are a few blogs that I write. SoLoMo Consulting is all about Location Based Services. The Future Diaries is fiction of sorts with my futurist hat on. I pretend to be some years in the future talking about things that might be coming, mostly about technology. Imersia NZ is one I collaborate on with my colleagues at Imersia. I have more, but these will give you a bit of a mix, showing different ways of presenting information for different reasons. Of course you have already found this one, which comprises everything from technology to soapbox rants.

If there is one final rule I would add, it would be have fun. So we have some empty chairs sitting there waiting to be filled by people who are interested in what you have to say. Let’s start the conversation:)

Michael Q Todd is a Social Media Expert

The world is full of self proclaimed social media experts, many of them legends in their own minds. Every once in a while you come across someone who not only really does understand how it all works, but one that practices what they preach. 

Presenting at his Auckland Seminar

One such person is Michael Q Todd. I had the pleasure last week of meeting him in person in Auckland and attending one of his seminars which was a pre-launch of his upcoming book The 7 Pillars of Your Online Success. Michael is an ex-pat Kiwi who lives in Japan with his lovely wife Dr Yoriko Todd.

The mix of attendees ranged from total beginners to very experienced people including Sean Mitchell of Techday, Jason Kemp of Dialog Ventures, Mark Thomas of 2Review and Roger Bennett, one of New Zealand’s serial networkers and connectors, all people who are very passionate about what they do. You have to be, to go to a 3 hour seminar on a weekday evening. There was a quality of debate, illustrating that one size doesn’t fit all and Michael managed the proceedings like the pro that he is.

I’m not going to tell you about everything he covered, it was an introduction to the new book and one that I am very much looking to receive an advanced copy on. I’ve read a couple of pre-released chapters and they are winners. You may be very good with one application or aspects of an application, but be missing out on others. Another is that this is a changing environment. Social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are constantly adding and modifying features, you need to keep abreast of these. New services like Vine, Empire Ave (one of my current favorites, you’ll find my account here)  and Posse  are popping up all the time. Some of these will be valuable to you. Never assume you are up to date, because you will be wrong. If you don’t keep up to date, you could end up like this moth (not for the squeemish) I captured on my second Vine attempt, being devoured by a praying mantis.

This is one of the reasons I really like

Following are a 3 key takeouts for me:

1. It’s about selling. Anything you do is social media has to have a purpose, an end game. It is usually to sell something. It could be the products or services you provide to customers, it could be selling your consultancy, or perhaps promoting your sporting activity, music or hobbies. Start with the end game in mind.

2. Three things that brand you. People get confused when you tell them you do lots of different things. Define the 3 most important things, based  on (1) above. Give this some serious thought. If you have too much going on, narrow your focus or you will confuse people and won’t sell much of anything. For me, I am

• an entrepreneur, late founding member of Imersia, involved in location based services and Augmented Reality
• a Futurist consultant, blogger and public speaker, owner of SoLoMo Consulting
• a Songwriter, although I haven’t been able to dedicate a lot of time to that lately

3. Plug the gaps. One for me is Lists. I used to have a very successful newsletter many years ago which I sold as part of my consultancy and training school, the New Zealand Smartphone and PDA Academy. It had a large following and I really enjoyed the feedback from readers. Lately I thought that social media had replaced email newsletters, but now realize that they add another dimension. What are your gaps?

Once in a rare while you meet someone who will make a profound and positive difference in your life if you let them. I have had a few of those over my years and I believe that Michael Q Todd is going to be one of those. Whatever business you are in, or want to be in, whatever role you currently play in life, you are a brand and Michael can help teach you how to focus and market that brand and to reach the results you desire. You can find out more about him on his website.

I’ll leave the last word to Michael from one of his many YouTube Videos

More on Location Based Applications and Privacy

In an article at LBS Zone, LeClairRyan attorney Kevin D. Pomfret says businesses should step forward to educate Congress and executive agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) about the breadth and scope of location-based technologies, as well as the industry’s enormous potential.

This is something I have been saying for some time in past blogs. If we get Location Based Services applications right, they can enrich our lives in so many aspects. For example:

• B2C Marketing. I would welcome personal location based marketing, based on my location, time and interests. Tell me if there is a hot deal on a new guitar pedal or music software as I drive past a music store on a Saturday. My girls would love to be told there is a 2 for 1 coupon on the latest summer fashion as they walk past a shop and their colors and sizes are in stock.
• Health and safety. If one of my relatives is ill and needs medical help while on vacation, a blind or disabled person becomes disoriented, a diabetic travels and forgets their insulin, a car’s airbags deploy on a remote country road. These are all instances where consumers can be aided by LBS apps and help directed to them with ease.
• Entertainment. Rugby World Cup year starts in less than 24 hours in New Zealand. Wouldn’t it be great if people can sign up to services that know where in the country they are, what they are interested in and can guide them to other activities based on time of day, interest and location? It could be golf, a cultural performance, Happy Hour, a concert or music festival, you could opt in before hand with your interests so if you are a ballet fan, you don’t get guided to a Christian Death Metal Grunge Fest.
• The Road Trip. An application that provides car navigation, access to traffic information, entertainment, allows you to connect to your social networks, upload photos and blog, find ‘friends’ close to you and more.

We’ll see more of these in 2011, along with apps from Facebook, Google, Apple, Foursquare, Groupon, Twitter and hundreds of others. But what about the risks?

When you sign up for these applications, do you know who you are giving access to? Do you know whether you can opt out? Do you know of the service has the ability to delete your information if you decide to opt out. Often the services themselves don’t have that ability because Google and other services have cached it and even if they delete it, it still exists in other places.

It is a well know fact that criminal elements already use sites such as Facebook to identify people they want to commit crimes against. It might be that they want your car, your jewellery, your 65″ 3D TV, all the Christmas presents you displayed on your profile, or just to ransack your house. It may be nothing to do with you, as they say in the movies “Nothing Personal, this is business”.

You could follow this thread and think, this guy is anti LBS. Wrong, its how I make my living. I love it for what it can do for me and you. I just worry about how it can be used and believe it is incumbent on the developers to make the applications as safe as possible, to provide privacy controls and make sure people know how to use them. They might also want to consider liability insurance. I’ve heard of insurance claims by people who drove their cars into rivers because their nav told them to turn right. It won’t be long before there are claims from people saying that it is the fault of the social media location application, which indirectly told a car ring that their expensive sports car would be parked at the airport for 2 weeks.

The article that set me off on today’s blog was about educating politicians, something that needs to happen all over the world, because these applications go international very quickly. It is also necessary to educate the developers because they are focussed on what they want people to be able to do with their apps, not the inherent risks of uses they hadn’t considered. I often want my ‘friends’ to know where I am, but I don’t want people who are not my ‘friends’ to know where I am or where I am not.

This is not my first blog motivated by Pomfret. In September I wrote about Location Based Apps and Trust, prior to that Proximity Based Marketing and Trust, and a whole series of blogs around Who’s Looking at You on Facebook. In one of them I thought up a name at random, searched for someone with that name and found out a huge amount of information about the person. I found it to be very scary, what I could find out about that person. Add location to that mix now and it could become downright dangerous.

Of course the tables can be turned on crims as well as law enforcement agencies can use the same apps to find out what they are up to and where.

The Future of TV

I was watching a TED Video recently. Unfortunately I can’t remember who was talking, but a couple of statistics resonated. The speaker said that by the time an American student (in most western countries probably the same) gets to university they will have spent 20,000 hours watching TV and another 10,000 hours playing video games.

What’s really amazing about that is generally (especially this time of year) how crappy TV coverage is. I have written in blogs previously that I believe IP TV is going to change things massively, but of course that will spell the demise of TV as we know it unless broadcasters get on the bandwagon. If they don’t, they will be singing the same song and laying off loads of staff in the same way as the music and newspaper industries are.

One thing that will make a difference is interactivity and in NZ we are way behind on that score, although I did note during the T20 Cricket match between Pakistan and New Zealand on Boxing Day on Sky TV, you could vote for your man of the match via your remote control. Normally you have to text and pay a premium, so that’s a start, but NZ is way behind the 8-ball when it comes to TV interaction.

In the December issue of The Futurist John M Smart of Acceleration Future Studies came up with some insightful comments on where TV will go, which should be compulsory reading to broadcasters.

Interactivity was one of those concepts. Two areas he covered were collaborative rating social viewing. Both of these happen independent of TV already, but are not embraced by the broadcasters. For example, kids send each other SMS messages via their mobiles all the time when they watch TV. This has been happening for years. The only way the media has taken advantage of that is for competitions and voting on programs like American Idol, which recorded 178 million votes this year. It’s hard to find out what revenue they got from that because it depended on how you voted and who your carrier was, but you can be certain that signifiucant revenue was made, but I digress.

I was talking about social interactivity. So kids text message each other all the time while they watch TV and with new media such as Twitter, the same thing crosses the age barriers. For example whenever there is a major sporting event on anywhere in the world, people are tweeting in real time and sharing their opinions and passion. I believe this will be huge during the Rugby World Cup in New Zealand in 2011. It will be happening concurrently around the world via mobile and internet. That would be a great opportunity for Sky TV in New Zealand, NBC, and others to get involved, but I doubt they have the foresight.

Another topic that John Smart covered was ratings. I don’t know how accurate the current TV ratings systems are, but if TV really wants to compete with the Internet, why not give all viewers the ability to rate what they are watching on TV and at the same time  what they are viewing by way of IP broadcast media.

A great thing about the Internet is that it can cater for every taste. I have around 60 channels on my TV, but I have access to so much more media online. Family overseas have access to hundreds of channels, but most of it is reruns of old TV series.

I regularly watch TED videos on my TV via my iPod connected to my home theater, but the interface is ugly and its a pain to connect my notebook to my TV. I don’t have an iPad as yet, but I can certainly see myself getting some sort of IP TV connectivity, whether it is a home media hub (so I can get internet radio as well as YouTube and other products around the house).

Today, according to Smart there are 20,000+ streaming Internet TV Channels including YouTube, Vimeo, Metacafe and Viddler. Boxee is an example of a Set Top Box that started off with an open source media software package. Unfortunately many of their services such as Pandora are not available in New Zealand. I’m going to give it a try and see if I can make it work downunder.

I’ll stop here and will come back to this topic as I am just grazing the surface. Leave your comments and bookmark this page if this is of interest to you. This is a very exciting and rapidly changing environment and it will be interesting to see who the winners and losers are in the next 5 years.

Boxee review suggests it has potential, but isn’t quite ready?