Remember those days when we still lived in caves? When we used to go out hunting or berry picking with our tight knit little community of cavemen. Those were the days. Did you ever wonder how many people these groups consisted of? We did. Why? Because we like to talk about communities. That’s why we looked in to the so called Dunbar Number, a number that predicts group sizes for primates named after Robin Dunbar, anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist. Dunbar was able to determine the maximum size of a group in which any individual can sustain stable relations with all other individuals in that group by looking at cognitive capacity. The bigger the brain, the bigger the group can be without becoming unstable. Read more and discuss… »

Recently two potential clients gave the exact same reason (or was it an excuse?) for delaying the start of a social business project: “We need to sort out our brand first.”

So was it a simple coincidence or not? In any case it got me thinking.

What makes organizations believe that they need to “sort out their brand” before engaging in a conversation with the outside world?
Having worked for over ten years in the traditional branding industry myself, I understand, and in fact respect their hesitance and the need to address the (potential) brand issues. Back then I also used to earn a living on preaching about consistency, produced endless brand bibles and insisted that the brand police abided by every single rule in the book. Structure, coherency and apply rules & regulations to everything you do – did I mention I am German by the way?

So I used to be old school. Very branding 1.0. and now?

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Earlier this month I presented on the interaction possibilities of the Ipad. It still ceases to amaze me how big an impact the tablet has on user experience and use. Bearing no startup time and fitted in a decent size, there is an abundance of possibilities. It’s no surprise unique stories of unforeseen Ipad uses are emerging everywhere. As it seems the Ipad is starting to replace the newspaper as the number one object to bring to the toilet. Nice to imagine what will next.

One of our taglines at Favela Fabric is “We help organizations harness their social capital”. Many definitions exist for social capital, so what do we harness exactly? One of the characteristics of social capital is that it refers to something intangible. Another could be that it refers to human (social) relationships. To me, we’re talking about the value of networks, in an dynamic environment where these relationships can change all the time.

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Decision making comes in many forms. One can easily see the difference between a decision that you make yourself, and a decision that must be made by a group. In the latter example, many people are not quite happy with the outcome, some even not at all, and only a few are getting the outcome that they wanted in the first place. Everyone can have an opinion on the issue, which can all vary on many factors. So what’s the best outcome?

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Before you answer this question, we should ask ourselves what status ‘Twittering’ really is. I’d like to call it a tool to update your status. Twitter or Facebook starts with updating your status. The basic idea of a status update is to share others what you are doing, what you are thinking of, or any other thing you would like to share. Some say that status updates is the same as microblogging. Whatever you would like to call it, it’s a means for one-to-many communication (or broadcasting). The question remains, why should you update your status?

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Most people have joined one or more social networks nowadays. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter: many people have found a way to use them to their advantage. They know how to create value out of it by participating, or even just by observation. People feel comfortable by doing that. Participating and joining discussions with their peers, known or unknown, can lead to unexpected leads, build knowledge that you were or weren’t looking for, and can keep you updated in many ways.

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Power, creativity and controversy: these are three keywords for yielding more results from innovation communities. However, it is not just simply more power, more creativity and more controversy that a community needs… Or is it?

Some time ago I was researching an employee-driven innovation community (EDI). The community was developed for the purpose of optimizing and innovating business processes, procedures and products by starting a dialogue between staff members and other employees. Main mechanism was sharing ideas and thoughts, followed by discussion to shave away the edginess to eventually result in a useful concept for that particular organization. Read more and discuss… »