One of the primary benefits the social media cognoscenti put forward for the value of Twitter is the human-curated news stream. On Twitter you follow people you trust, know or who interest you for some reason. As they come across news, blog posts, YouTube videos or other items on the web that interest them they will tweet about them. If these are people you have chosen to follow, it is highly likely that the items they share will be of interest to you as well based on some shared interest or personal connection that led you to follow these people.

My own experience is that the human curated news feed I capture from the people I follow on Twitter is extremely valuable. This is probably the most consistent value I have captured from Twitter. A number of interesting and highly relevant items have come to my attention solely because somebody in my Twitter stream chose to share those news item.

There is another Internet tool that I find extremely valuable: Google Reader. I use Google Reader to track hundreds (yes hundreds) of RSS feeds for blogs, publications, search alerts from Google, Bing and activity on RSS-enabled social networks (sadly Facebook is not among them). I scan through well over 1,000 news items on a daily basis in a series of relatively painless quick sessions of 15 – 20 minutes max. So in under 1 hour each day I am exposed to over 1,000 unique news items in the domains of general news, telecommunications, strategy, competitive intelligence… the list goes on.

Several months ago the people at Google Reader added a “Share” function that allows people to share items of interest with their Google Reader social network. Your Google social network generally defaults to your fellow Gmail users you have added to your Google Chat contact list. Recently the Google Reader team have added tools that enable you to find fellow Google Reader users with shared interests and subscribe to their shared items.

I am a promiscuous sharer on Google Reader. How I structure my marathon review sessions to get through the large volume of news items that are in my Google Reader at any one time is that if there is an item that I find interesting I actually share it so that I will come back to it when I have more time to read it. My thinking is that if I find the item of interest it’s likely that the few dozen people following my shared items on Google Reader might also find it interesting.

My default cognitive model is to share (my own version of “publish, then filter”). If you are interested in the latest news about strategy, competitive intelligence, marketing, social media and knowledge management this is a well-curated stream of information. Not all of it may be of deep interest to you, but the odds are high that a large proportion of the material will be worth at least a momentary glance. I’ve featured the most recent shared items on the right-hand side of this blog page for some time now below my Twitter stream and above my Delicious bookmarks.

If you are a person that needs to cast a wide information net I highly recommend you consider creating your own Google Reader account. You don’t need to be quite the addict that I am, though I am confident you’ll find value from Google Reader. If you share an interest in the topics that I’ve mentioned in this blog entry (you’re reading this blog, so that is probably a “Yes”) you should follow me on Google Reader (I also want to follow you back). If you are using another RSS reader you can subscribe to the RSS feed of my shared items. If you are kicking it old school and still not ready to step up to RSS you can see the web page of my shared items from Google Reader.

One of the projects that I’ve been working on is an article on Web 2.0 and CI that I needed to get out the door and kept me up until 2 AM Thursday night. The article is probably going to be in the March/April issue of Competitive Intelligence magazine.  Some of the main points that I try to convey in this article are the basics of Web 2.0 and the consequences of network effects, transparency and open platforms on established business models.

I also try to make the point in this article that Web 2.0 platforms increase the need and importance of active, real-time reputation monitoring.  This is a difficult tight-rope to walk, because one of the dynamics I am trying to convey related to corporate policies related to employee use of Web 2.0 platforms (both inside and outside the enterprise) is that heavy-handed strategies won’t work.  My challenge is creating an appropriate sense of urgency around active reputation monitoring and management with the knee-jerk reflex to “lock it down” that one observes in command-and-control oriented corporate structures.  

The downside to the command and control approach is that it comes with a hard-to-measure cost in employee efficiency, satisfaction and retention.  Ham-handed anti-web 2.0 policies are signals to the market (and employment is still a market even if it’s more of a buyer’s market these days) of the value in which the corporation holds individual employees.  The best and the brightest want to go where they are going to be recognized as individuals, allowed to innovate, allowed to pursue individual initiative and rewarded for their efforts.  Heavy-fisted policies about participation and social networks tell these stellar employees that this will not happen here.  It also sends a message to market watchers that a corporate structure lacks the ability to take advantage of bottom-up innovation.  When the recovery does happen I would like to think investors will see these qualities as indicators of staying power and the ability of a firm to generate growth and higher returns on investments.

On January 28, 2009 we will be holding “New Ways of Knowing 2.0″ and highlighting application of Web 2.0 and social media to primary research, secondary research, analysis and communications of competitive intelligence.  Keep your eyes on the SCIP Greater Washington Chapter blog for updates on the event as they become available.

• Make certain videos free from the get-go.  Just one or two to keep the buzz of the conference going.
• Make all videos free to SCIP members behind the SCIP firewall,
  similar to what they do with magazine articles.  Perhaps there’s a 3-6
  month delay in doing this so that there’s still a premium for attending
  the conference.  It’s always a good idea to have more membership
  benefits.
• If you’re going to charge for the video then forget what I said about lower quality being better than no video at all.
• Sell sponsorships of each presentation, and by extension the video.

Sadly, Jon was not able to post his suggestions in a comment to my own blog.  Previous run-ins with crazy volumes of SPAM led me to be perhaps a little overzealous in limiting readers’ ability to comment.  I have made some changes to the blog srttings and hopefully have fixed this as an issue.  Just know that any offers for herbal Viagra you see posted in the comments of this blog do not come with my endorsement.

In reality my concept is more nuanced than simply giving away content.  The conference will be held next April, and I am advocating that we make audio recordings of the sessions that will be presented (pending presenter’s agreement, of course).  Paying attendees will be given access to the recorded content for no cost following the conference.  Those who did not register for the conference will be able to purchase the content as a price well under the cost of conference registration (I’m playing with price points between 1/10 and 1/5 of the cnference registration cost).  Three to four months before the next year’s conference (set for April 2010) we would make some (probably not all) of the recorded content available for free.

Today a great example of using free content to broaden the appeal of a brand was brought to my attention: Tom Friedman is giving away audio recordings of the third edition of The World is Flat for free.  The audio book is being made available with an audio preview of Friedman’s next book, and is likely part of a strategy to build anticipation and promote sales of the new book.

We’ve seen in the past years that diverse customer segments will pay varying prices for what is ostensibly the same product.  Almost every one of us have paid for a bottle of water often enough when tap water is generally conveniently available for free.  When the 9/11 Commission Report was published it became one of the best-selling tomes of 2004 despite the fact that the contents were freely available on-line.  Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have both demonstrated the benefits of giving away content or letting customers name their own price for music downloads.

With these and other examples in mind I’m not as concerned that freely-available content will cannibalize paying attendees.  I’ve been watching presentations from the TED conference for several years, and would still be thrilled to attend the event in person if I got the chance.  The real value of most conferences is in the face-to-face exchange of ideas, and you really do need to pony up the bucks to get the full benefit of a conference.  Hearing the quality of the material from last year’s conference would, I am convinced, raise the interest of those who might not otherwise attend.

I’m very interested to hear what others think about this.  Help me make the case to a skeptical audience.  If you’re skeptical, lay it on me so I can refine or revise this concept.  If you’re sufficiently convincing you might get me to change my mind.  If you agree with the general concept of giving away content to spur interest among non-consumers then give me your take on this to help me make the case.

Twiter reminds me very much of Facebook.  It’s a web site that, once you see the value potential of the site, you begin to see great potential.  Once the hockey stick of rapid adoption hits the site, though, the infrastructure is completely unable to keep pace.  Because web 2.0 platforms like social networks (Friendster) and micro-blogging sites (Twitter) rely on both the number of users and number of social transactions they can enable.  As the number of these transactions is capped, users begin to look elsewhere.  For Friendster adoption brought extremely slow performance and database errors.  For Twitter some convenient methods for sending and receiving messages (particularly IM) become unavailable on a regular basis and for extended periods of time.  The first-to-market innovators show others how to duplicate the promised user value and highlight some of the tecnical pitfalls to avoid.  Friendster users went to MySpace and Facebook.  If Twitter cannot get their act together where will the Twitter users go?  Jaiku?  FriendFeed?

The program is entitled “New Ways of Knowing” and is focused on the application of new Internet platforms and tools to the practice of intelligence collection, creation and distribution in commercial and government environments.  I’ll be functioning as the moderator, and our distinguish panel consists of:

Don Burke, Intellipedia Doyen, CIA

Sean Dennehy, Chief of Intellipedia, CIA

Eric Garland, President, Competitive Futures, Inc. and author of “Future, Inc.”

To give you an idea of the caliber of the program I am expecting, I want to share an excerpt from an interview Sean Dennehy recently gave to the Washington business forum ExecutiveBiz.  It’s the most eloquent and concise definition of “Web 2.0″ that I have seen, and goes far beyond the notional buzzword bingo that most pundits throw at you when they talk about the concept:

ExecutiveBiz: Web 2.0 means different things to different people, how would you define the web 2.0 tools as it relates to the intelligence community?

Sean Dennehy: Tim O’Reilly coined the term, web 2.0–it’s basically using the internet or web as a platform in which applications improve the more people use them due to network effects. I often relate to our students a story about  when I first joined Facebook (Facebook is a good example because it’s an obvious web 2.0 application). When I first started using Facebook it had very little value to me until other colleagues and friends started using it, then it became a much richer source of information for me. So how does this relate to the IC? Well it’s about user participation. The more people that start participating and using the tools, the more we can work collaboratively to build knowledge across the IC.

Prior to Intellipedia, blogs and TagConnect (the social bookmarking software in the IC), you had to go through a webmaster to get anything posted to the web. I remember sending out “blast” emails to everyone in the IC that you knew worked an issue, but emails fall into what we call a channel and can only be seen by those people on the distribution list, when there might be others outside that list that might have something to contribute. By using blogs, Intellipedia, and TagConnect, you can move the analytic “conversation” previously trapped in a channel out onto a  platform where more people can see it and participate. That’s actually one of the recommendations from the Iraq WMD Commission—to make the IC’s analysis more transparent. I believe that these tools can help us become more transparent.

So join us for what’s definitely going to be a great interactive panel.

January 24, 2008
12 Noon – 4:00 PM

Embassy Suites
4300 Military Road
Washington, DC

Register here at the SCIP web site: http://members.scip.org/scriptcontent/BeWeb/events/eventdetail.cfm?