Five Must-Read Posts from Last Week

We often read about the death of blogging, or publishing, or the plateauing of Facebook – but most of these announcements don’t actually engage with the underlying issues. They don’t address our sense of digital belonging or the reasons why social network find and then lose favour. The five must-read posts from last week provide some important thinking on this particular subject:

  1. John Hagel and John Seely Brown discuss dynamic ecosystems and suggest that orchestration creates performance multipliers whereas static ecosystems (such as crowdsourcing) are still zero-sum. Take a few minutes to learn why more companies need to break their antisocial tendencies
  2. For a more academic angle, Jan Lorenz, Jeoko Rauhut, Frank Schweitzer and Dirk Helbing have written a paper entitled How social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect. They show how this impacts large scale issues – from the global financial crisis through to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Fascinating stuff!
  3. We are increasingly seeing online connection result in a “real world” meeting. David Hood was the instigator of Gathering ‘11 and Beth Worrall captured the enthusiasm and energy in her recap post
  4. Niall Harbison explains that social media and connectiveness is not just about linking or clicking. Asking Is Google +1 Another Social Flop?, he identifies the disconnect between the idea and its execution
  5. You know that adage about “fishing where the fish are” when it comes social media and channel engagement? Well Francois Gossieaux debunks a couple of these myths and reminds us that it’s important to put the effort in to find your tribes – and find ways to support them.