I had been waiting in anticipation for the show since I booked it a month ago. Silly pun and unintended there, as the booked show I'm referring to was an event "The future of the Book" held as part of the Melbourne writers festival this week. Straight off the bat I'll let you know that I'm mildly dyslexic and even though I have always had a massive respect for books I'm not the type to plunder my way through a glorious stack of books in a weekend. My mother used to take me by the hand around the library with a basket which she piled high with her weeks reading so it wasn't for lack of being shown the way that I didn't do the same. I am an Audio book person and Audible.com is my friend. Friend in the way it points out what other books I would probably like if I enjoyed the one I just listened to and friend in the way that it takes me to reviews by other people who share my interests. I know you're all probably laughing, yes at me and not with me, thinking you probably have no real friends. We'll get to that in another Blog post when we discuss what a friend really means to us but here's a little insight by Cameron Marlow about Online Social Media and friends in Facebook http://tinyurl.com/aapjq2

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Social Media is nothing we can hide behind. It exposes us in areas we didn't know we even had areas. I wanted to introduce you to what I call the "coffee shop syndrome" of Online Social Media:

Remember those times we skived off from school pretending to be sick so we could have a day off. Remember then how your parents would tell you "well if you're too sick to go to school you're defiantly too sick to go to the shops." You tended to agree only because if someone from school saw you out and about they would wonder why you were not in class. Well the coffee shop syndrome relates to this concept but I just wanted to set the scene offline first.

"The Coffee Shop Syndrome" relates to our level of Emotional Intelligence and how we act upon these skills in the world of Online Social Media. Remember that Emotional Intelligence refers to how often we demonstrate certain behaviours.  It's a set of skills that define how effectively we perceive, understand, reason with and manage our own and others' feelings.  It's all very well believing we demonstrate a high level of EI but if we don't have an outward display of this behaviour then others may have a different opinion!!

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I felt compelled to write this post in light of the recent Twitter crazed support of the most popular reality show in the history of Australian TV, MasterChef. Something fundamental was uncovered for me and it relates to a change which we are all going to have to face up to. Twitter is crossing boundaries and these are quite serious ones indeed which Media companies such as Channel 10 are going to have to face up to.

The MasterChef final went to air on the East coast of Australia at 7:30pm last night. It was only to be aired two hours later on the west coast of Australia when it would be 7:30pm there, due to the time zone difference. MasterChef, during the series, gained a massive following on Twitter. If you don't believe me do a search in Twitter on #masterchef and see for yourself. The series for many who use Twitter was made that much more special when shared with new and old friends alike on the Twitter Social Media platform. The advertisement breaks for once became useful as Tweets spun between the lounge rooms of viewers. This is entertainment and we will see this concept grow and grow.

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With regards to authenticity in the Tweetspace: Earlier this year on the 5^th of March there was an earth quake in the Melbourne region which shook everyone a little as it's not a common occurrence. Tweets started to steam out about the occurrence and our local vetted ABC radio/TV channel which has a Twitter account @774melbourne followed it furiously trying to get the "right" story and doing a good job of it. The size of the tremor was being reported as 5+ on many accounts and this was starting to become official. A month earlier there had been a quake a few thousand km away in the pacific and people who were Googling "earthquake Australia" were in their haste seeing the size of a quake as 5.7 . Chinese whispers took this into the Tweepspace and I heard people talking about it in town the following day giving this statistic. There had been an Earthquake on the 14^th of February near Fiji which measured 5.7 and from what I can gather the two occurrences were being linked. The actual size of the quake in Melbourne was 4.6

Following on from this another story: On the 18^th of march @Wolfcat from the The ABC (Australia) was asked to present how Twitter had been used during the devastating Australian Victoria bushfires to locate lost loved ones and deliver critical information to those under threat. @Wolfcat had established and oversaw the Twitter channel for this part of the ABC. He was not given long to present and asked the audience to please understand that he could not give it its due in the short time he had allocated to him. Instead he would present on the Earthquake which occurred on the 5^th of March and how the ABC had operated in order to feed the relevant information out to the Tweetspace. It was really interesting as he explained how he had developed a method of establishing the Epicentre of this seismic event based on his mapping of the regions the relevant Tweets were coming in from.

As is happening more and more during seminar sessions there was a Twitter Tag #v21 which the audience were including in their Tweet threads out to their followers to keep on topic. I was sitting in the audience and started to feel the room shake while @Wolfcat was explaining all this. I immediately blamed it on a strong black coffee I had had during the break and having missed lunch earlier. Low and behold the streams of Tweets from outside the room started to come back in on the #v21 that there had just been another Earthquake. More and more tweets came streaming in and the session room started to buzz with this massive coincidence. http://tinyurl.com/n7nsx5  .

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These days there is a lot of talk around this thing we call “Emotional Intelligence’ but what is it really and what does that mean in the context of Social Media?

According to Mehrabian, the actual words we say only account for 7% of our communication, tone of voice is 38% and body language is 55%.  For effective and meaningful communication, these three parts of the message need to support each other – in other words they have to be congruent.

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I found the following snippets so interesting I had to republish them. You can find more on the http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/ site. It all points towards the uptake in the Relationship Economy and the future of the New Web with its Interactive technology. 

1. Web 2.0 technology takes center stage at Gartner CRM Summit: According to expert Paul Greenberg, the customer experience is now the key differentiator in the business ecosystem. Web 2.0 technologies like blogs, wikis and social networking sites are changing the way companies interact with their customers and putting the customer experience center stage. Gartner recommends companies looking to improve the customer experience get started with Web 2.0 as soon as possible.

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[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Je5gnqkE_AE 400x400]

Physical conference events are becoming more and more sophisticated and I remember realizing this when I attended one situated in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles which was impressive for a start. I had intended during the first coffee break of the day to meet with the information manager of Pfizer Europe. As I exited into the break rooms of which there were many I was greeted by a representative in a black suite who was part of the conference coordination team. He asked me who I would like to meet. He had a headset on and as I let him know, he was immediately relayed information as to which table the Information Manager of Pfizer  was taking a biscuit off at that precise moment and took me across and introduced me to him. This to me was the height of coordination and service.

Now let's step into the virtual world for a little while should we. I was privileged enough to attend a evening seminar (Knowledge Management Leadership Forum in Melbourne) this week where the speaker (Helen Mitchell from CPA Australia) had Project Managed the development of and coordinated a conference session on Second Life. Now for those of you who are new to the virtual world, Second Life is a whole "other world, " which exists in Cyberspace. It's a world portrayed much like our own where you are represented as an Avatar which can walk and talk(though your headset) and interacts with other avatars, who are real people sitting at computers, pulling the strings with their keyboards. A seminar in Second Life has chairs and stage along with all the wonderful other things we take for granted when we attend such an event, all taken care of by the Event Coordinator and a vast behind the scenes team. These things we take for granted are plants, seating setup the colour of the carpet and the room, backdrop and much much more. In Second Life this all has to be built from scratch after you hire the land to build it on or you could hire the venue at a lesser cost. There is a massive amount of detail to consider if you were to build it yourself so once again there are software development companies who do it for you on specification.

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 Having spent the last six years running a few business's in a regional part of Australia I felt compelled to tell you this little story.

How do Australians, Americans, Brits and the rest of the world perceive AUSTRALIA? Think about this for a minute and form an opinion before reading on.

OK now that you have done that little exercise is your Australia more than the sum of the parts of Sydney and Melbourne. I hope so. It's massive, it's dispersed and it's diverse in nature and culture.

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With all the current talk about job losses and redundancies I'm reminded of a situation I was in back in 1996. I had recently moved to the UK at the time and had a great job working for a modern international software company. The position was that of a support specialist in a particular niche database technology. The company was right (or wrong) sizing and they had decided to relocate their International support operation to the HQ in the States and disband the UK international support group. When I had joined the company only 6 months prior I had been introduced to the HR company lawyer in my induction with the words, "if you ever get called into a meeting with your boss and this man happens to be also sitting there, then it is probably your last day in the company."

It was 10am and I was called into a meeting only to find that yes, you know who was there. I was given four weeks notice and I felt very alone until I walked out into the open plan office and found that all 9 others in the international group had also had the same meeting. It was little consolation as I had not been expecting to lose my job at all. Now that I've set the scene I'll focus on the point I want to get across. There was only one other expert in the UK who supported the same database I supported and he was one of the 9 who was let go along with me. We had a thriving local (UK) operation that needed technical support on this product and the only two experts on the product had been let go within the same hour. At 5pm I was reluctantly called back into my boss's office and offered my job back supporting the same product. The managers had not thought about the Intellectual capital which they were losing until they had lost it. In actual fact it really was too late as I had already been on the phone that afternoon to the States and had arranged an interview asking to relocate to HQ on the International team once again. The other expert who had been let go lived in a city in the north of the country. His office was being closed entirely and he didn't want to relocate to London, which is where I had been. I turned down the offer to take my job back. The London (UK) office was now stuck with the situation of desperately needing to employ and train from scratch to support their local client base, which was a costly affair. There is definitely a lesson in effective planning to be learned here.

I did end up immigrating to the US and my career was escalated through the opportunity offered to me as a result of being made redundant. Each cloud has a silver lining.

For those of you who may not be up on the jargon: A mashup is a Web Application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool (Wikipedia). A good example is the integration of Google maps into a Real-estate Website. Two distinct applications mashedup to create an enhanced solution to your property hunting needs.

The paradigm shift of the players like Google, Amazon and the likes of Salesforce.com are to create platforms with which you can Mashup. The game being that the more applications that incorporate these larger players' technologies the more imbedded the player and the more reliant we are on them going forward. The best example of this kind of reliance of course is the Microsoft operating system with which so many computers are shipped each day. Companies in this space must create this reliance in order to survive the long term.

The smaller technology companies are given a chance to make the most of these platforms for development by being allowed to bolt their own applications and data into the platform to create a new product as such. I'll give another example just to make it a little clearer. In a local tourism website you could have an imbedded map which when clicked on reveals Flickr photo's of sites to go and see, where you click your mouse. This will of course help you plan a trip more effectively and let you have more fun planning it.

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