SXSW image by benjamin ellis

This week I’m going to be reporting from the South by South West Interactive (SXSWi) festival in Austin Texas. SXSW is World’s largest digital and interactive festival/trade-show/conference/party/event/get-together. Around 20,000 people will be joining me in Austin to uncover the latest thinking in digital and, I suspect,  to network like nutters.

I’ve been looking for an excuse to make it to SXSW for years. A few months ago my prayers were answered and FreshNetworks was picked by UK Trade & Investment (UKTI) to be one of 40 companies chosen to represent the UK at the festival. The grandly titled Digital Mission aims to help UK digital companies expand internationally and develop overseas business relationships.

The list of events is monsterous. It’s taken me a few hours to get my itinerary in order. I suspect I have fallen into classic SXSW-newbie mistake of trying to plan out a perfect route between each session to ensure a schedule that optimises my time here. I’ll probably find the plan goes in the bin half-way through day1 one.

Some frantic session planning on the plane

Here are just three of the sessions I am looking forward to:

• Time + Social + Location. What’s next in mobile experiences – Foursquare and Gowalla are hot properties inn the social media world at the moment. This session includes Naveen from Foursquare.
• Can the Real Time Web be Realised – a panel debate featuring some great speakers – Scott Raymond, co-founder of Gowalla, Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb and Bret Slatkin from Google who created PubSubHubBub which you will hear a lot about in 2010.
• Banking 2.0 – financial services driven by people and emerging technologies – as a social media agency, FreshNetworks has always done a lot in the financial services sector, so I am keen to test some ideas we’ve been discussing back at base.

And finally, one of the delights of coming to SXSW as part of the Digital Mission is the opportunity to spend lots of time with other UK entrepreneurs. I have always found that spending time with peers not only gives me new ideas, but also (because I’m rather competitive) it tends to raise the level of my personal ambition.

There are a few companies that I am especially interested in learning more about:

• Silence Media – cost per engagement ad network for video banner ads
• Slicethepie – crowdsourced band/music funding

Let me know if you want me to bring you anything back from Texas.

Read all our posts from SXSW

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that everybody makes predictions at the end of a year about ‘the big thing for next year’. Sometimes they’re right and sometimes they’re wrong. And sometimes you only really start to notice trends and change when you are in them. In social media it is becoming clearer and clearer that the big thing for 2010 is location-based tools.

We’ve posted before about how businesses can use Foursquare and only yesterday about Fourwhere, the Foursquare and Google Maps mashup. Foursquare is a great tool that lets you share where you are and add tips and reviews of cafes, shops, restaurants, bars, theatres. Anywhere really. From a business perspective it can offer invaluable insight into who visits your business, how often, what they think about it and where else they go. All good stuff. Of course, there is a serious downside to location-based tools (as we saw with Please Rob Me) and people should be aware of and sensible about any information they share in social media.

Why are location-based social media tools growing?

Location based social media tools are possible because more and more people own mobile phones that are GPS enabled. Phones that can tell you where you are and plot this information on a map. This is then data that can be shared with others or used in conjunction with discussions, reviews and other information to build a resource and community that is location-dependent.

There are many instances where location can add significant value to an online community:

• People reviewing cafes and bars in a certain area and recommending places people might like to visit
• People sharing tips of good and safe running routes
• Groups of local activists looking to organise themselves
• Parents wanting to find other parents near them to help organise safe walking to school
• People wantingto identify and report on things that need mending in their neighbourhood
• Friends wanting to share their location and tell others where they are

The utility of location in social media is huge and there are many cases where tying location to reviews, discussions and other content will really help, either for those generating the content or those looking for and benefiting from it. Adding in location could also save us from updates that say “Iam at…” with that information instead being tagged as in the tweet above. You can use the update to say something that has real semantic value rather than just indicating where you are.

What’s happening and what’s coming

Location-based tools are not new but they are growing and new developments are happening all the time as people use them more and in different ways. Some important developments recently discussed are as follows.

• Twitter: Twitter has for some time allowed users to tag their updates with their location details – this has mainly been done through third-party apps, such as Tweetdeck, and to date locations have not been shown on Twitter’s own website. Briefly this week they started showing location on Tweets on their site – with maps overlaying tweets on both the individual tweet page and on the main stream. This update was quickly disabled but adding this back in would certainly add significant value to the Twitter site and pave the way for search for people and issues that are trending ‘near me’ – based on where people are when they share their information and not where they say they are in their location.
• Foursquare:

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I’ve just been playing with FourWhere. It’s a mashup of Foursquare location data and the Google Maps API. It has been built using the Sysomos social media monitoring tool

It is neither as fun as PleaseRobMe nor as useful as Wikitude, but it is mildly interesting to see what is being said at venues near me. And more features are promised in the future.

Most of all, this mashup reminds me of why I have been impressed with Sysomos recently. Sysomos is behind this mashup and they are  one of many Social Media Monitoring tools that we use. Over the past month they have really cranked up their PR efforts and seem to be emailing me with news every week. For examples see their analysis of Oscars buzz and their look at how people use YouTube.

In the next month we’ll be releasing a study of buzz tracking tools (subscribe to the blog to ensure you get to see it) and Sysomos have scored highly with many of our team. Their tool is very easy to use – especially good if you are likley to have multiple people from your company accessing your social media monitoring dashboard. They also allow for post-search filtering of results; essential for international or multi-segmented buzz tracking projects. And they also offer a simple influencer search.

There are drawbacks – for example,  I would treat the sentiment analysis with care. One test we ran on blog sentiment showed a 40% innacuracy in sentiment analysis (once you strip out neutral comments). But overall, it’s a good tool if put to proper use. They are definitely one of the market leaders and we look forward to telling you how they compare to Radian6, Neilsen Buzz Metrics, Alterian and many more over the next few weeks.

Should people be allowed to leave anonymous comments in online communities and forums? It’s a question that has been debated many times and people have different perspectives on it. Some say that “No, if people don’t say who they are then its easy for discussions to get out of hand”, whereas others say “Yes, if you want people to be honest you need to allow them to be anonymous”.

The issue of anonymity when commenting in online communities is actually more complicated than some arguments would suggest. And the answer is both yes and no.

What do we mean by anonymity?

When talking about anonymous comments we need to consider two types of anonymity:

1. If the commenter should be anonymous to other members of the community
2. If the commenter should be anonymous to the site owner and community manager

These two aspects of anonymity are often confused. As a general principle of online community management, anybody wanting to add to the discussions and debates in the community should share at least a minimum of information with the site owner and community manager about who they are. This is not just so that they can capture the data, but because the social exchange of an online community works on the basis of openness, transparency and honesty.

This of course works both ways – in a successful online community neither party should be anonymous to each other. The brand, organisation or people behind an online community should be honest about who they are and why they are sponsoring or running the site. And people who want to comment on or add to the discussions on the site should be open and honest about who they are. At least privately to the people running the site. You will also find that asking for a minimum of information about people before they add their thoughts or comments will make them more likely to consider what they are saying. Even if other community members don’t know who they are, the site owner and community managers will and will be able to contact them.

So in this respect, no comments should be allowed from members who are anonymous to the online community manager or site owner.

Should people be allowed to be anonymous to other community members?

So, even if we say that users should not be allowed to add to the discussions in our online community without telling us who they are, should they be able to remain anonymous from other community members?

This question has always intrigued me as there is a whole spectrum of ways in which community members can identify themselves depending on the community and on what the individual member chooses to share. And they offer varying degrees of anonymity that could be offered to me as a user

• I could have a generic username, ‘Anonymous’ and no further information about myself – this is perhaps the most anonymous I can be to any other user of the online community
• I could choose a username that reveals nothing about me, ‘Grey2834′ – by allowing users to choose their own username there is an increased risk that they will share information that will allow us to identify them. Perhaps I use the same username on other communities and forums and this will let you understand more about who I might be.
• I could choose a username and have other information on my profile, perhaps by city (London) and age range (30-39). The more information I share the greater the chance people will start to identify me.
• I could use my first name (Matt) and some other information – the more I share the less anonymous I become
• I could share my full name, date of birth, address, email address

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I thought that the movie provided a feast of metaphorical food for thought. First, please consider this light spoiler alert. I’m not intentionally revealing secret plot elements, but if you want to see it with completely fresh eyes, you should probably save reading this blog until after you’ve seen the movie.

All right, then…

A lot of people have written about the fairly obvious, low-hanging and perhaps heavy-handed ecological messages in the film (”And so the aliens [that’s us] went back to their dying world…”). The story from the film has created a ton of discussion and conflict on the Internet, with accusations that it is racist (the dump blue-skinned savages), it is naïve (um, this is Hollywood), and it is colonialist (see two points above).

My take on it is a little different. I’ve decided to really emphasize the ethnography part of the move. And to analyze a bit of the ethnographic alliance-shifting that is a central part of its plot.

The movie concerns a future military-industrial enterprise’s use of a biological remote-control system to undertake human participant-observation of the Pandora planet’s intelligent tribal inhabitants.

Along with all the other engaging metaphors that it weaves together, I find Avatar to also be an extended meditation not only on colonialism but also on the anthropological practice of ethnography in a capitalist military-industrial culture.

As my friend, Diego Rinallo from Milan’s Bocconi University noted to me after the movie was over “Avatar is all about ethnography.” And so it is.

Among the many other things that it is, Avatar is a science fictional concretization of the anthropologist’s journey. There is an alien–in this case, a literally alien– culture that needs examination. There is a scientific observer, the accidental anthropologist and paraplegic Jake Sully, who must learn the language, rituals, and ways of a new culture. In this case, instead of Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski joining the Trobriand Islanders, it is Sully joining the blue-skinned, animist, and very Native American-seeming Na’vi.

The movie is about identity, interests, loyalties, and change. A major concern is the classic anthropological dilemma of “Going Native.”

This was the same theme, sort of, as Dance with Wolves, and Gorillas in the Mist. There it is, happening again, on the big screen. Amazingly, Sigourney Weaver plays the head ethnographers in both Gorillas and Avatar. She’s our anthropological role model!

The ethnographer is, himself or herself, an avatar of types. This is a theme I explore in a recent poem I submitted to the Journal of Business Research as an extended meditation on introspection and ethnography, a poem that explores this avatar topic of possessing multiple identities and feeling identity conflict.

So this movie inspired some thinking in me about what we do as anthropologists-for-hire.

Why are we doing what we do as corporate ethnographers? Would we work for Exxon? Would we work for a company that wanted to mine the Amazon rain forest? Would we work for banks in poor countries where people might not be able to afford the interest rates?

The film reveals the dark side of the scientific-academic enterprise, and the dark secret that, although knowledge is power, academics sell out their power to the military-industrial system. In this case, science is anthropology, and anthropology offer understanding in order to manipulate and destroy. The Company in this film wanted to learning the cultural ways of the Na’Vi people in order to manipulate them. Does this sound like cultural marketing and applied anthropology to anyone else?

Of course, in the movie, understanding wasn’t geared towards selling the natives things. Apparently the blue Na’Vi had no need of Coca Cola and blue jeans, they were an anti-consumerist culture. The movie was classic colonialism—get them off of their land, and take it and its r

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Drupal, Drupal, Drupal. Ever since I organised the “Drupal for Doughnuts” gathering during social media week back in January, all I seem to hear about is Drupal.

At our nfp and membership breakfast seminar a few weeks ago, Bertie Bosredon from Breast Cancer Care was talking about the benefits of Drupal as a content management system. And while some of the US government’s various administrative bodies have been using Drupal as their CMS system for some time now, the big news for Drupal in the UK was when Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt unveiled Data.gov.uk, a new government website allowing access to public sector data for mere mortals like myself. The Data.gov.uk website uses Drupal web technologies to encourage people to create and manipulate data in clear, imaginative ways – a great validation for Drupal’s adoption of the semantic web.

Here at FreshNetworks we have always believed in the power of Drupal, which is why we’ve chosen to use it as our social media software platform.

Now I’ve heard, time and again, from our Tech team about why Drupal is the best choice for developing online communities, but being a layman and not a Drupaler (I work in Marketing), I thought it might be beneficial to explain, in simple terms, my top 5 reasons for using Drupal as a social media platform:

1. Drupal supports the tools and modules needed to develop a successful online community

In order to engage your community and get them talking to each other you need to provide them with an online arena to interact. With a bit of techie know-how, Drupal can be used to build the various tools that are proven to encourage online conversation, including:

• Blogs: a person or multiple people can publish posts and comment on posts on a regular basis.
• Forums: an area for a structured group discussion about an idea, theme or topic.
• Profiles: people can publish information about themselves to help engage users and make the experience more “real”.
• Wikis: several people can jointly edit a document or group of documents to encourage collaboration and teamwork.

In fact, we’ve used Drupal to develop a variety of different tools and modules so that we can alter the function of the community depending on the needs of our clients.

2. Drupal is open source

Drupal is an open source platform. This is a fancy way of saying that the source code for the software is published and made available to the general public so that everyone can access it.

To me, the benefit of an open source platform is that it is supported by a large developer community. This means that if you use Drupal as a social media platform it’ll be improving all the time – vital in the fast-moving era of social media marketing. And as Drupal is quite a mature platform, it has been through several different version releases so it’s an extremely secure system.

3. Drupal is highly scalable when coupled with a good hosting platform

In a nutshell, Drupal has history of running big websites with lots of content. So you are free to add videos, articles, newsletters and downloads to your online community platform without fear of it crashing.  It also means you can keep on increasing the size of your community and its members.

4. Drupal has great SEO

You don’t have to do much to Drupal for it to be SEO friendly – it has good SEO straight out of t

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At FreshNetworks, we aim to bring you the best posts in social media, online communities and customer engagement online. In case you missed them, find below our top five posts in February.

1.The Economist on Social Networking

At the end of January, the Economist published a special report on on social networking.Their special report on A World of Connections, provided an excellent overview of the current state of social media for those still trying to get to grips with it. You can download a free pdf of the report here. Or check out our summary of key highlights in this post.

2. Vodafone, Twitter and the challenges of managing your brand in social medial

An interesting afternoon at Vodafone in the UK saw a tweet on their official @VodafoneUK account that was clearly not the kind of message the brand intended to share with its customers. You can read about what was actually said elsewhere. But, in addition to some rather questionable grammar, the message was offensive and not appropriate for a brand’s Twitter stream at all. It was clearly the work of either a hack, a case of very bad judgement, a disgruntled employee or an inappropriate sharing of passwords.

Putting aside any short-term issues and negative publicity, there are a couple of things we can learn from what happened to Vodafone. First in how you should manage your use of social media as a brand, and second in how you should respond when things go very wrong.

3. Facebook’s redesign shows how important search is for social networks

In February, Facebook rolled-out a redesigned homepage and navigation to its users. There four main areas where the site had changed: improved use of space n the main panel, made messaging easier, put notifications together in one place, and moved the search box. It is the last of these improvements that is, perhaps, the most significant. Facebook did more than just move the search box, they increased its importance on the site and showed the importance of search for Facebook, and indeed all social networks and online communities.

Facebook is huge, but to many of us feels very small. We mainly access content through feeds, messages and notifications. Training us as users to make search an integral part of our Facebook experience will make it a much bigger and more useful tool for us all.

4. The Matthew Effect – linking and how things become viral in social media

The Matthew Effect dates from the 1960s. It is the theory, first expressed by sociologist Robert K. Merton, that those who possess power and economic or social capital can leverage those resources to gain more power or capital. Put simply: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. In this post we

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I’m a podcast fanatic. I listen in the shower, on my cycle to work (sorry mum, I know that’s not safe) and when swimming (using the excellent Speedo Aquabeat). I have tried hundreds of different podcasts to find some that are consistently good. I thought you might like to know my favourites I’d love to hear about yours.