social-media-tools

After attending Africa Gathering this weekend, the central key words and phrases I gained were:

Relevance
Solution based approach
Context
Understanding your stakeholders.
Sustainable (All four cornerstones)

In the West, particularly the US, the most publicised and most visible business model for the development of collaborative and people-connecting technologies have been the social network models.

There is a perception (right or wrong) that the model to replicate is the one that is built on ‘the great idea that takes off’.

Have a great idea
Obtain funding
Build it using smart technology
Gain user buy in and critical mass
Figure out the business models later
New, unexpected business models will appear as you go along.

What these models have proved to us is that there is power in connecting people, in collaboration and allowing people to add value and perspectives. Some amazing technologies have resulted from this and new ways of looking at how we can use these tools have been unexpected by products. There is no denying that these have changed the way we do things, and have a huge capacity to ensure the way we do business changes for the better.

These models came about in a time of comparative wealth and excess. As resources become increasingly scarce, people are looking towards business models based upon relevance and context.

It has always been the case within Africa that development resources have been scarce. One thing the people of Africa understand is how to make the most of their limited resources. AfriGadget, a blog that explores the way in which the people of Africa solve everyday problems with ingenuity illustrates this very well.

In the West there is a tendency to try and replicated what is out there. There is a preoccupation on talking about the various ways in which existing platforms or networks can be best “leveraged”. Hands up those who have not written or read numerous blogs on how to get the most out of twitter?

Technology solutions coming out of Africa are built with purpose, against objectives and within the boundaries of their resources. It is a solutions based approach. It is also a stripped down approach where only the relevant resources and tools are used. Simple works because less can go wrong and if it does go wrong, simple is easier to fix. There is a shift in the way tools and technologies are looked at.

A good example of this is what Ushahidi did in Kenya. Ushahidi is an opensource platform that crowdsources crisis information. They took a widely used and available piece of technology, texting on mobile phones and applied it to a Google Maps mashup. This was built in Kenya using local knowledge and technologists in response to post election violence. This provided a real time map of violence hotspots with an understanding of the types of violence in those areas. The interesting part is they quickly recognised that citizen reporting leads to an overload of incoming information. Using social media tools most people take for granted, or seldom consider outside the context of specific social networks, they are creating a crowdsource filter. Using tools such as rating, both content and people and word, language and phrase filters, for example, sense can be made out of this overload. Considering profiles to have a deeper significance than a means to tell people who you are, real value can be added to content. Check out Erik Hersman’s TED talk here.

As the West, and the developed world continue to struggle against scarcity of resources, they can learn from Africa’s approach. Shifting the way resources are looked at and challenging old business models are essential. Context and relevance are no longer just buzz words.

I have just found these links to blogs on Africa Gathering thanks to Juergen Eichholz

Social Media

Social Media has everybody talking, but are they all talking about the same thing? Social Media is such a vast subject, with many different nuances, disciplines, approaches and reference points.

What do we use social media for? I asked a sample of people, male and female between the ages of 16 and 40. Here are some of the answers.

To share pictures, videos, links and posts with friends.
To connect to friends and family.
To find out stuff.
To keep in touch.
For entertainment. Etc.

Perhaps the most interesting answer came from a 16-year-old female. (I will call her Emma)

“I don’t use social media for anything specific. It is not like I set out to use social media, it just exists. It is a part of my life. This is a dumb question. You don’t ask people what they use a telephone for. I could list a thousand instances where I would use a telephone, but really everyone knows that a telephone allows you to talk to people over distances. Well social networking allows you to do this better. It is a fuller experience.”

Emma’s answer makes sense to me. Social media allows us to communicate with people in ways we never thought imaginable. It provides us with easy to use, intuitive tools that cross over multiple learning styles, allowing us to be a part of that communication. We don’t think about how this happens, we just accept it. Providers of these tools think for us. We want to run with these tools from the offset. We accept that it can exist in real time, that we can mix sound with visuals, with text and participate in multiple dialogues. We do not only accept it, we now expect it.

Right? Well, these are our expectation. These expectations are what a handful of social media sites have engrained in us. But this is not always the case. So many social media providers don’t think for their users, they don’t even talk to them. They get fixated in the technology. This is pretty dismal for a discipline that is all about people and communicating. The how is important I agree. There is a need to have world-class technology in order to supply a world-class service, but that technology needs to be applied correctly, with understanding and after dialogue.

When we think social media, we need to think people and connections. If we understand our audience, I mean really understand the audience and then marry that understanding with our objectives, the right technology, applications and tools will follow.

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