Box of old photos

There is a lot of talk about big data and the social media data that we leave behind us online. In this talk of tools and processes, examples and opportunities, it can be easy to forget what we are dealing with. Social media data is the memories of the people who wrote that post, or took that photo. And memories mean something very specific to us as human beings.

In an era where we are talking about a legal right to be forgotten, it’s worth remembering how we usually interpret memories and the value they have for us. I presented at a Forward3D event in May about this, talking about how we think about memories, what this means for what we share online, and what this means for brands’ big data ambitions.

See video here.

Taking a photo of Christmas tree (Photo credit: Takashi(aes256))

For today’s young adults (those aged 18-30), access to technology is, alongside education, seen as a critical component of progress and opportunity. A recent survey of 12,000 young adults across 27 countries for Telefónica found that this group believed that not only are they at the cutting edge of technology, but that this gives them a competitive edge.

For all brands it is increasingly important to understand how this group of connected consumers behaves, and how to engage them. Here is our summary of four key themes brands should learn from this research:

1. You need to design for smartphone

Globally, 76% of young adults say that they own a smartphone with the highest penetration in Asia (83%). In all markets, this is higher than desktop or tablet ownership; it is higher than laptop penetration in all markets but the US and Central & Eastern Europe. Brands need to be designing smartphone-first experiences for smartphone-first audiences.

2. Technology removes language barriers

Just as the spread of literature, music, film and TV helped to remove (or lower) cultural barriers, technology removes language barriers. In each market studied, over 84% of young adults think that technology has removed language barriers to communication and meeting people – in Central & Eastern Europe this is as high as 94%. In an increasingly connected world information and ideas can flow more easily between people, and brands need to consider these lower linguistic barriers to any communication.

3. They want to understand technology even more

Whilst their use of technology is strong, these young adults want to understand even more about technology and see that as a key to their own success. In each market, it was seen as the most important area of study (ahead of economics or foreign languages). This reflects an understanding that technology is not about understanding current devices and how they can help us, but the process of technology and the role it plays. For brands this will challenge their own relationships with new employees, who will enter the job market with an increasing understanding of and need to adopt new technologies in their work.

4. Technology has created a new ‘excluded’

Finally, these young adults believe that technology has widened the gap between rich and poor, with only those in Latin America thinking that it has made the gap smaller. Technology – education and devices – is seen as critical to success and so a lack of access to these is seen as a hindrance. Brands need be aware that whilst for many (if not most) of young adults there is an increasing role for and reliance on technology, there will continue to be an excluded group that they need to engage with too.

But the rise of Snapchat is much more interesting than that; it presents a real innovation in communication tools.

Social media tools typically allow communication (in text or visually) that is then stored forever. You can get lost in a sea of your own memories and in the messages and updates for others. This can be confusing in itself – the nature of memories tends to eschew this kind of cataloguing of detail. But also it reflects more the nature of written communications - things that are logged and recorded; filed and searchable. And this is at odds with the nature of much of the things that we communicate on social media.

Much of what we want to say to contacts in social media is ‘of the moment’ – it is a greeting or a friendly hello, a piece of information or advice. It is not content that the recipient will need after they have read it, and it is certainly not content that needs to be stored, catalogued and searchable. It reflects more much of our spoken communication – passing a message on in the now. And to date social media tools have been poor at meeting this need.

What Snapchat offers is a tool for communication as ephemera – content and messaging that has a shelf-life and doesn’t need to live on after that.

So much of the way we interact as human beings is like this that I would expect to see a real rise in tools that operate in a similar way to Snapchat; tools that don’t require everything we say in social media to be forever.

Of course, there is much that is wrong with Snapchat – the concerns of bullying, sexting and whether those photos are really deleted are all real. But the essence of the app – the ephemeral nature of communication is also very real. And it has the opportunity to develop and to change the way we communicate through digital devices, and the way brands communicate with us. What would you say if you could pass on a message that genuinely lived just in the now?

1. What do we mean by leadership?

Professor Jean Hartley took everyone through the 5 Ps:

1. Person – personal characteristics and leadership style(s).
2. Position – e.g. a position of authority often creates access to resource pools, but equally there are many leaders who don’t hold positions of formal authority.
3. Process – i.e. between a set of stakeholders, and energising and organising others.
4. Performance – achievements and skills.
5. Projection – both in terms of the qualities the leader projects to others, and which others project onto the leader.

The advice was to consider all 5 Ps as opposed to focusing on just one area.

2. What type of leadership is best?

It depends on the context, and the type of problem the leader is encountering, e.g. Rittel and Webber’s:

• Tame problems – which although complicated are still resolvable because we’ve come across them before and know how to fix them. In these cases leadership is more about applying tried and tested approaches capably.
• Wicked problems – which we’ve never encountered before, and are typically interlinked with so many other factors and issues as to make them incredibly complex and multi-faceted. In these cases leadership is about asking the right questions, and knowing who the right stakeholders are to be involved, and how they should be managed.

3. What skills should a leader possess?

According to Professor Hartley:

• Strategic direction & scanning – what you need to do, and when, and the tenacity to stick to it. The leader really has to believe in it if it’s going to be a success.
• Building alignment & alliances – i.e.  the leader as a “connector”, and crucially demonstrating political astuteness – a skill which people accepted was important in Hartley’s research, despite the stigma and “dark arts” reputation of organisational power and politics.
• Reading people & situations – e.g. alertness to different agendas and power pockets.
• Interpersonal skills – a mixture of hard and soft skills, and crucially listening to people and properly communicating with them, as well as understanding different situations and perspectives.
• Personal skills – self-awareness and self-control, being genuinely curious about others, and taking the time to be self-reflective and learn from mistakes and feedback.

How do people learn these skills though? According to Hartley’s research, people tend to learn most through making mistakes, and the inference was that more could be done to enhance training and development activities and programmes.

4. What’s an example of these leadership skills in practice?

The FT’s Caspar de Bono gave a particularly interesting talk which highlighted the importance of strategic direction and planning through his concept of leadership as action that is purposeful, but also creative (changing the paradigm), and courageous (i.e. you are out front, leading the way). In the FT’s case it was about listening to what customers wanted, and sticking to their business knitting while still innovating (i.e. operating broadly the same business model, but through improved digital channels and technology). The key was always to keep a clear idea of the WHAT while allowing the HOW to be more emergent, and informed by stakeholder involvement and analysis.

5. What’s the best leadership style to have?

In short: a mixture, and adapted to the particular business context in question (e.g. its size, stage of development, etc. etc.). Hay Group’s Lubna Haq identified 6 leadership styles, and asserted that the most effective leaders tend to have a minimum of 3 or more dominant / preferred ones:

1. Directive – based more on control and coercion, often more prevalent during downturns.
2. Visionary – opposite of directive and is primarily about building and selling a compelling vision.
3. Affiliative – creating harmony.
4. Participative – involving others.
5. Pace-setting – accomplishing tasks to a very high standard of excellence.
6. Coaching – focusing on the long-term professional development of others.

6. What are the key things to know about leadership?

• A leader should live the cultural values of their organisation, and be visible and approachable.
• Focus on achievements and also the long-term. Keep short-term issues in context.
• You can’t please everyone – confront issues head on and make those tough decisions if necessary.
• Think consciously about your style – is it right for the context you’re in? Is your style transformative or transactional?
• Political astuteness is important – forget about its negative press.
• Optimism is key – particularly during these current difficult economic and political times.

Old Trafford, Manchester (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)

At 09:20 this morning Sir Alex Ferguson retired after 26 years in charge of Manchester United. The club, and the manager, are respected and supported far from the city of Manchester, and reaction was quick to spread on Twitter. In many analyses of event and how Twitter reacts to them, the focus is on volume – just how many people are talking about an issue. But more interesting than this is what people are saying.

There is a hypothesis that when there is ‘breaking news’ (at least on Twitter), most of the discussions convey the same information – people either retweeting the original message or people conveying the same information to their followers that lots of others are doing at the same time. So in this case immediately after the announcement, whilst they may use different words, we would expect people to be conveying the simple message: Sir Alex Ferguson has retired.

But is this true – what did people actually discuss on Twitter in the first hour after his retirement was announced?

What we did

We captured every Tweet that clearly discussed Sir Alex Ferguson during the first hour after his retirement was announced shortly before 09:20 this morning. Using Datasift, we captured all Tweets that included the terms “Alex Ferguson” or “#fergie’ or ‘#mufc’.

In total we captured 95,312 Tweets in the first hour of discussion on Twitter – or about 26 Tweets every second.

What we found

First some basic stats about the discussions on Twitter in the first hour after the announcement:

• 68% of people discussing the retirement were male (16% were female and the remaining 16% had genders that could not be determined from Twitter)
• With 4.3% of all discussions, the news was actually discussed most in Manchester; London came second (3.8%). The global impact of the club is reflected with Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and South Africa being in the top 10 locations for discussions
• 22% of Tweets were people retweeting other people’s content; the remaining 78% were original Tweets
• The most retweeted account was the club themselves. This was followed by a number of accounts in Indonesia (UtdIndonesia and detiksport). The most mentioned UK news provider during the first hour was SkySportsNews.

With only 22% of Tweets as clear retweets, there was a lot of original Twitter content being produced. So what were people actually discussing:

• Just over one third of Tweets (34%) were simple statements that Sir Alex Ferguson had retired
• The next largest group (26% of Tweets) were reflecting on their own experiences or thoughts – memories of the club and what Sir Alex’s time there meant for them
• A further 14% of Tweets were thanking Sir Alex for what he had done for the club or indeed for their own experiences (a trend started by the club themselves in their announcement)

Some topics were less popular but noteworthy:

• 360 people (0.7% of all Tweets) were wishing Sir Alex luck in or sending their best wishes for his future
• 53 people (0.01%) were worried that Sir Alex might have died

So the first hour on Twitter was an interesting place, and the discussions were more varied than just retweeting or repeating the simple fact of Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement. In fact a significant proportion of Tweets were reflecting on what his role as manager had meant to them and the memories they had of his time with the club. This kind of reflection and content is altogether more interesting than mere retweets and statements of fact and shows Twitter at its best – connecting personal experiences and opinions to larger events.