Announcing DigitalNow 2009 Speaker Charlene Li

The DigitalNow team is pleased to announce an exciting addition to the 2009 speaker line-up: Charlene Li.

Charlene is co-author of the influential book on Web 2.0 titled, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies.

Groundswell explores how social media -- blogs, wikis, Facebook -- has impacted the way customers interact with brands. These elements of a social phenomenon -- the groundswell -- has created a permanent, long-lasting shift in the way the world works. Most organizations see it as a threat but it is also an opportunity.

According to an article by Groundswell co-authors Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, "... groundswell technologies are exploding. They're cheap and easy to create and improve, they tap easily into the Internet advertising economy, and they connect people who naturally want to connect.

The net result of all this accelerating activity is that the groundswell is about to get embedded within every activity, not just on computers, but on mobile devices and in the real world. This is the ubiquitous groundswell."

As an award-winning Forrester analyst on social technologies, Charlene has developed a unique "ladder of engagement" methodology known as Social Technographics™ that places the groundswell into a practical framework. Social Technographics™ classifies people according to how they use social technologies. Classifcations include:

• Creators


• Critics


• Collectors


• Joiners


• Spectators
  
  
• Inactives

At DigitalNow 2009, Charlene will discuss how associations can take advantage of the groundswell, and utilize Social Technographics™ to develop a strategy that speaks directly to the unique make-up of their constituency.

In addition to discussing her work and its application to associations, Charlene will be providing a summary of DigitalNow highlights and helping associations create a plan of action.

Groundswell is available at Amazon.com.

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LinkedIn Moves into Mainstream

More than 30 million people have joined the business social network LinkedIn.The first public study of users' demographics and psychographics has just been completed and reveals why people join and how they use the site.

Anderson Analytics, LinkedIn, and text mining company SPSS conducted a study of 70,000 LinkedIn users and have identified four main categories of users:

• Senior Executives


• Those Exploring Options


• Savvy Networkers


• Late Adopters

"(The study) showed us that LinkedIn has really become a tool for all information workers," said Dan Shapero, LinkedIn director-business services. "Some people believe that LinkedIn is a place for job hunters, some believe it's a place for serious networkers and others think it's a way to keep in touch with old colleagues. This study shows those are all true."

Read the article at Advertising Age.

What's next for LinkedIn? Join us at DigitalNow and hear LinkedIn Vice President Ellen Levy speak about what's on the horizon.

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What's the point?

The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft a-gley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain
For promis'd joy.

~Robert Burns, the "Bard of Ayrshire"

Cause-related organizations build a business on asking people to take action - from writing a letter to donating money. As anyone who has ever worked on such a campaign can attest, they don't always produce results that make the effort worth the expenditure. So what makes one campaign successful while another equally viable one flops?

When a campaign doesn't produce it's not necessarily the plan that's the problem. It's the execution of it. ThePoint.com is a site dedicated to helping organizations achieve success with their fundraising, awareness, and other community-based campaigns. At ThePoint, "All campaigns have a “tipping point” — people pledge to give money or do something, but no one does a thing until the conditions are met to make contributions worthwhile."

According to www.Thepoint.com, when members of a community are not clear on how their participation is going to translate into results, they are less likely to make a commitment. When ThePoint manages a campaign, "people pledge to give money or do something, but no one does a thing until the conditions are met to make contributions worthwhile." In other words, everyone agrees to tip, but no one moves until everyone is sure that there is enough strength behind the effort to reach the intended result.

This model minimizes the guesswork for success by investing most of the resources into the planning of a campaign. Visit www.thepoint.com to read more about the methodology and explore how you can leverage it in your organization.

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How valuable are your intangibles?

If you had to add an "intangibles" line item to your balance sheet, what monetary value would you assign to your brand? How much is the creativity of your staff actually worth?

According to author Denise Caruso, "... intangible assets now make up between 60 and 80 percent of global corporate worth. The monetary value represented by those percentages is staggering. Leonard Nakamura of the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank declared in 2001 that the value of gross investments in such intangibles as alliances and networks, human capital, and leadership was greater than $1 trillion annually for the United States alone. Reports from both the Federal Reserve and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) calculated that as much as $800 billion of intangible investment was excluded from published data on U.S. gross domestic product in 2003. The exclusion translated to more than $3 trillion of intangible corporate value."

Caruso adds, "When the authors of the NBER working paper ­ Carol Corrado, Charles Hulten, and Daniel Sichel ­ added intangible assets to the sources-of-growth framework used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they saw 'a significant difference in the observed patterns of U.S. economic growth' that drive investment, corporate strategy, and government market interventions.

"If the absence of effective accounting for intangibles is significantly skewing official statistics, that means the daily decisions being made by investors, managers, and regulators are actually based on financial data that has only a marginal connection with economic reality ­ and does not even acknowledge the existence of the most important drivers of value in the global economy."

What are the implications for these un- and under-accounted for assets, and whose responsibility is it to support markets and promote investment in intangibles? Read the entire article here.

Denise Caruso is the executive director and chair of the Hybrid Vigor Institute, which supports cross-disciplinary inquiry and collaboration on science, technology, and social issues. She is the author of Intervention: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet

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It's not information overload: It's broken filters

DigitalNow 2009 Keynote speaker Clay Shirky spoke earlier this year at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City. Web writer Mitch Wagner offers a thorough and insightful review of Clay's presentation. Highlights include:

• "Information overload" started in the 1500s, with the invention of the printing press; that was the first time in history that there were more books than one person could read.


• This overload made it necessary for someone to identify what was worth reading and what was not; this role naturally fell to the publishers.


• The internet broke the "publisher as filter" model because it removed the barriers to publishing, giving anyone with a keyboard the opportunity to produce and distribute content.


• Our information overload situation has been escalated from a problem to a fact, and wherever overload is, so will we find broken filters.

Join us at DigitalNow 2009 to hear Clay Shirky speak about how the Internet affects associations and the role they play in our society. Clay is the author of the book, Here Comes Everbody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.

Registration now open!

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The internet and the election

According to a Pew/Internet Report, a record-breaking 46% of Americans have used the internet, email or cell phone text messaging to get news about the 2008 campaign, share their views and mobilize others.

Other findings include:

• 39% of online Americans have used the internet to access "unfiltered" campaign materials, which includes video of candidate debates, speeches and announcements, as well as position papers and speech transcripts.


• 12% of online 18-29 year-olds have posted their own political commentary or writing to an online newsgroup, website or blog.


• 10% say they have used social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace to gather information or become involved.

Read the entire report at www.pewinternet.org

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DigitalNow 2009: Registration now open! April 15 - 18 at Disney's Yacht and Beach Club Resorts.

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Contribute to the DigitalNow blog. Suggest a blog topic, or reference an article or other item you think would be of interest to the DigitalNow community. Drop us a line at DigitalNow@fusionproductions.com