Making Connections

Jonathan AkwueAn Outsiders View of Social Media

Who am I? Confession I’m not a social media guru

Illustration

Graphic Design

Youth Engagement

Social Marketing

Service Design

Management Consultancy

Communications strategy

I’m a Director of a Management Consultancy - but I didn’t get here straight from Harvard or MIT - the back drop to my life has been urban culture, youth engagement, and working in many parts of the creative and communications industries

Digital thinking and innovation

Digital Public is part of Engine, the largest independently owned communications company in the UK

This is an outsiders view. I want to start by talking more broadly than social media to think about the impact of Digital technology on society more generally

Digital technology doesn’t always make

things betterImage courtesy of http:/ www.officemuseum.com

I’m sure when this photo was taken at the Computing Division, Veterans Bureau, Washington DC, 1929 they thought it was state of the art, and things would only get better..

80 years on, what’s changed?

...but 80 years on, what’s really changed?

A better banking system?We used to queue inside banks, now we queue outside

“Press 1 for more options...”

Improved call handling systems? How long does it take to find the help you need?

Digital solutions don’t always benefit the

customer Does anyone actually find these self-service tills easier to use? If not, who gets the benefit?

We are willing to make compromises to save money...

We can live with no frills if we receive the benefits

The Google generation is fighting back, using digital against corporations. As we will see, this presents a key challenge

We use the things that make

our life easier

91% of iPhone users would recommend the device to others. This creates the potential for a massive channel shift.

Myspace was right...

...it’s their space, not yours

Key characteristic of Social Media is its ability to connect people together

Urban Mashup

I was lucky enough to grow up during one of the biggest cultural movements to emerge in the 20th Century

It started on August 11th in 1973 at a High School event in New York, DJ Kool Herc did something that gave birth to a global movement... he started mixing

What the web can learn from Hip-Hop

This lead to a new cultural form called Hip-Hop. But what can its development teach us?

Hip-Hop culture: B-boys, DeeJays, MC’s (Rappers), Writers (Graffiti Artists).

Most of us know that in 1977, the Apple II was among the first successful personal computers and was responsible for changing the way we use computers

However you may not be aware that a year later the Technics SL-1200MK2 changed the way we interact with music. The base model is still in production 30 years later

The Akai S900 (1986) was the first truly affordable digital sampler. Hip-Hop producers were so grateful, one of them named a song after it.

The idea of taking some one else’s music, sampling it, remixing it, and republishing it was considered theft. But among the community it operated like a creative commons license. Music industry Lawyers found a way to make the Hip-Hop producers pay, and arguably stifled innovation in the process

Rap music gave a voice to a generation...

When MC’s emerged as the dominant voice of disenfranchised African-Americans, Rap music really took off

...but what they had to say shocked the

mainstream

The same thing is happening with Social Media

Social Media draws together Like Minds...

...but some Like Minds are more dangerous than

others

There are darker uses for social media that create new challenges

Some unlikely winners emergeSocial Media and Hip-Hop have also created some unlikely winners. Granted, a kid from Harvard always had a better chance of making it than a kid from a poor housing project in New York. But who would have guessed that MarK Zuckerberg would become the youngest ever billionaire, and Jay-Z would have the most number 1 albums by a solo artist on the BillBoard 200 in history?

However, by 2006 the Rap artist Nas declared what others were already saying privately. Hip-Hop was dead. What happened?

“Hip-Hop is Corporate America’s QVC”

Crass selling out by artists to corporate America meant that Hip-Hop was losing touch with its key audience.

This is a key lesson for Social Media to learn from, try to hard to make money by infringing on people’s spaces and your users will punish you. Ironically, it seems Myspace didn’t learn this lesson. It’s one Twitter will need to

One of the important cultural shifts that Hip-Hop helped to foster was the idea of an Open Source culture where people are free to take what other people have made, and build on it. This has created what Lawrence Lessig calls “Remix culture”

But with all this remixing going on - how does anyone make money? This is what Matt Mason calls The Pirate’s Dilemma. What do you do if people expect everything on the web to be free, and they don’t want advertising either?

“At the end of the day, the police, the social services, the

government, they can all f**k off

because in this society we are the government. They

don’t do nothing for us.”

There’s another problem. Some young people are becoming increasingly disconnected (Nick Barham).

How do you connect to people that don’t want to know you?

This is a key challenge for corporations, but even more so for public services - because no body really wants to talk to government unless they’ve got a complaint

Provide services in their space, not yours

Digital Public’s Service Innovation model - Systems thinking to solve complex problems

Preventing Teenage Pregnancies using Social Media

Is it possible? Absolutely.

More detail on the Service Innovation approach

Over a two-month period, more than 46,000 users engaged in webchats with

health information advisors

This was not a banner ad campaign. We built a virtual sexual health clinic, and put the front door in Bebo. The average webchat lasted 12 minutes, and users reported making changes to their behaviour based on the conversations.

Engaging families

We have also used social media to help provide support for families. Working with the Department for Children, Schools and Families to develop a set of new services for parents

• They do not want advice on parenting from the government • Support at times that suits their needs and lifestyles

Parents want and need support but:

Started life as Parent Know How - now Family Information Direct

Funded a whole bunch of services

Supporting parents on the

edge using Social Media

One organisation in particular demonstrated how you can use social media to reach parents on the edge of a breakdown

This isn’t using social media to tell people what you had for lunch. Netmums created a virtual drop in clinic that has actually saved lives. It wasn’t even our idea - it was theirs. We just created the opportunity for them to expand it.

What does the future

hold for Social

Media?

Massive Opportunities

We’re just beginning to scratch at the surface of what is possible. The opportunities to connect people to people to transform services is something that we are still getting our heads around. It has massive implications for business, government and the Third Sector

I’m just glad to be a part of it - aren’t you?