The olympic games communications team have rightly been being criticised for imposing constraints on the use of social media by volunteers for the duration of the games. This is naïve on so many levels.

It is a missed opportunity. Allowing volunteers to be part of communication about the event could have generated so much genuine involvement and enthusiasm. Any official use of the tools is likely to be stilted and ineffective in comparison. Trying to control use of the social web in this way in this day and age is impractical. It makes the organisers look stupid.

They are not alone. Most people running our institutions don’t understand what is happening and don’t know what to do about it. They pay agencies to do it for them and the agencies themselves don’t understand what is going on, or find it challenging and try to retain their own form of control.

It doesn’t have to be this way. This is not rocket science.

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I just tweeted about the odd feeling of cramming ideas into my head as fast as I can when eventually my head will no longer exist. This wasn’t necessarily as gloomy a thought as some may have assumed.

I have often thought that writing a blog post is like lobbing a pebble into a pond. You are not sure where the ripples will end up but you aspire to getting better at lobbing them and making bigger ripples.

A while back I was chatting with a friend about recent discoveries in neuroscience and got on to the way significant or repeated thoughts have a physical and persistent effect on our synapses. We reckoned that one way to achieve physical immortality would be to make sufficiently significant and replicable dents in enough people’s heads – literally!

As we parted he said that my pebbles were rippling in his pond. I reckon this is as much as we can hope for …

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“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” ~ Mark Twain

There are advantages to being an outsider. Being outside allows you to look in. You can retain an independence from the mainstream and have the privilege of noticing things hidden from those closer to the action.

In business it is easy to get locked into things being the way they are. To be too much in the flow. To become too mainstream and feel stuck. It is easy to think that things are inevitable and that change is too difficult to even consider.

Blogging inside a business has the potential to alter this. Writing a blog helps you step outside. It helps you to observe what is happening around you in a more detached way. It enables you to interpret and comment. Being even slightly outside the mainstream helps you to see the way forward, to see things as less inevitable. To see clearly how things are now and to imagine how they might be otherwise.

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The best way to control people is to encourage them to be mischievous. Then
they will be in control in its wider sense. To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow is the way to control him. So it
is with people: first let them do what they want, and watch them. This is the best policy. To ignore them is not good; that is
the worst policy. The second worst is trying to control them. The best one is to watch them, just to watch them, without
trying to control them.
- Shunryu Suzuki in Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind

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I know there will be a lot written about Steve Jobs resigning over the next few days – way too much. But it would have been odd not to make a comment about this apparently minor event of a CEO resignation here on my blog.

I am sure PC users will be bewildered at the wailing and gnashing of teeth that will emerge from the Mac community – but then they never did really understand what we were so passionate about. It’s just a computer isn’t it? Well yes and no.

Job’s once said he was building  ”a bicycle for the mind” and that is what has had such a huge impact on my life. I have always had this feeling of potential and possibility from my computing, that it was an enabler rather than an end in itself. Whether it is me writing my book, or my daughter editing amazing films, it is the joy of making something that Macs have, for me, been uniquely great at, that I dread losing.

I have always had a very strong sense that Jobs cared what my computing felt like. That there was passion built into the devices I have had so much pleasure using. This quote from him reveals the focus behind that feeling:

“We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.

When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”

I know he is not dead, and that Tim Cook will hopefully keep the huge ship that is now Apple on course, but I am not ashamed to admit shedding a tear this morning at the coming to an end of an era that has had had such a significant impact on my life.

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Thought you might enjoy this paragraph from the chapter in my book exhorting people to resist tidying up their information:

Finding the good stuff is one of the functions of bloggers. Information rag and bone men who curate the weak signal and the long tail. Seeing patterns in the small, the marginal, the messy. This is where those with nerdy curiosity and a good eye can find real value in what others have discarded or not noticed. Boosting these weak signals so that they last long enough to travel long distances takes effort and care. Finding it, recording it and nurturing it are important skills. Separating it in a dynamic way from the noise. Curation is becoming one of the most valued skills on the internet. Pulling together the good stuff. Separating the signal from the noise and boosting it. We will all have to develop these skills. Recycling has become a way of life for many of us. Why not apply this to information and knowledge? Keep your knowledge equivalent of potato peelings and use them to generate compost. Pile more rubbish on the bits of the garden you want to grow and employ gardeners who tend and care for your baby shoots rather than disinfecting your information spaces.

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I recently completed a chapter in a book on social media to be published next year (no not mine – another one) and I called it “Your staff are your best advocates”. Hugh McLeod just re-blogged this post from 2005 on the same topic, and Steve Bridger just said in a Twitter conversation that he got a good response to saying “ loyalty to charity brands is now shifting towards affinity to individuals working within charities” in a keynote yesterday.

We are gradually groping our way towards the Cluetrain idea of markets being conversations but it is still a long way off and “brand” still mostly means orchestrated bollocks.

I am a mentor at The School of Communication Arts, run by Marc Lewis, which aims to develop new talent for the marketing business. I have done a few mentoring sessions and really enjoyed meeting and getting to know the students. However I have been feeling increasingly uncomfortable about being involved, even marginally, with an activity that I find increasingly annoying.

When I called Marc to share these feelings we had a pretty robust exchange of views on marketing and its place in the modern world. We then had round two of this argument in a session in front of the students at the school last week. I said that I had no problem with advertising as such. I am happy being helped to make decisions about buying stuff. I will always buy stuff and ways of making better decisions about what to buy are always welcome. But this is a million miles away from being shouted at about crap I don’t want when I am trying to do something else – no matter how entertainingly it is done. There were one or two students nodding as I made my case but most were pretty full on that we “need” marketing to fund content, entertain us in magazines, and smarten up Times Square!

Roll on the day when marketing retires into the background and I can have real conversations, with real people, in real businesses, who are doing stuff that makes my life better.

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The highlight of my speaking gig this week on board the cruise ship Aurora was getting to meet and spend time with the author Maria Nemeth. I realised half way through our first conversation that I had read her book The Energy Of Money a few years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. In fact as we talked I downloaded her other book Mastering Life’s Energies on the Kindle app and am reading it now.

Maria is one of those wonderfully intense Californian women who take themselves and you very seriously because they have spent a long time thinking very hard about the sort of stuff most of us gloss over or take for granted. She is also a very close listener and it is disconcerting to have someone listen to you as hard as she does. It is so unusual.

During the course of our first conversation I came out with my usual one liner about not feeling Scottish any more. She responded by saying “Of course you are Scottish. What is wrong with being Scottish? Why are you resisting that part of you? What are you hiding from?” I did my best to make light of it during the rest of our conversation – we bantered about my “inner Scot” who I imagined as a grumpy wee troll with red hair and a tartan tam o’ shanter – but she had really got to me. Not so much about the Scottish bit but the way I can define myself by my resistance to things and why this is so. Whether it is religion or IT, those who read this blog will have seen me shape myself by the strength of my reaction to these two groups, and some of you will no doubt have winced to watch me do so.

Given that I was on the boat to talk to The IT Directors’ Forum and to write my book I went back to my cabin in an existential funk struggling to think clearly about what I was trying to say, to whom, and why. This was a good thing. Thanks Maria!

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It just dawned on me that my big problem with “follow Jesus” is the “follow” bit. Same goes for Buddha or Mohammed. Why do so many people cloud the potential, that everyone has, to take themselves to a whole different level of existence by tying themselves to the way someone else did it – and thousands of years ago at that!

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I am often struck by the way people circle around social media in business. They read case studies, write strategies, spend loads of money on tools – but when you ask them if they blog you get a blank look.

Part of me knows you don’t have to have done something yourself to manage it. I took on the management of fifty film and VT editors many moons ago having come from radio and don’t believe I was the worst manager they had ever had. I also have clients who are helping their organisations adopt social tools very successfully but ….. part of me still has a nagging doubt about why people don’t get their hands dirty and use the tools themselves.

I recently tweeted “Social Media 101 – put your own hands on the bloody keyboard and write something!” and I reckon until you have done so you can’t fully grasp the magic of what these tools make possible.

What do you think?

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