Green Tea Ice Cream

One of the biggest problem I have with evangelising the Live Web or Web 2.0 or Biz 3.0 or whatever it is this week is finding the sweet spot of user focus that will actually turn my colleagues from nervous observers to participants. This has its difficulties.

Take Twitter which is a proposition of genius for anyone who’s either been born attached to a phone (like our three year old) or who’s found texting to be the core communications medium of their life to date (”On average, over 3 million messages are sent every hour in Britain. ” And that was in 2005). Still, it’s the most meaningless prospect imaginable for many of us (full disclosure!), especially most of my colleagues. Or even my partner.

Technorati’s numbers would suggest that most of the planet is blogging but the fact that the management team where I work (demographic largely 35 to 50) have collectively never so much as accidentally stumbled upon a blog suggests otherwise, however anecdotally. (And aside from that, the Technorati definition of post is, I suspect, rather loose one given the number of options available for re-publishing your content on other platforms such as Tumblr or Rss2twitter. Do re-postings of nano-blog items, Flickr streams, home-syndication of posts from one location to another etc etc all count as seperate posts?) With Technorati’s numbers showing blog postings per second only growing (only!) from 15 to 17 one might even speculate that qualitative blog activity is slowing down as new arrivals in the ‘live web’ start off with other forms (MySpace, Facebook) or existing users migrate? Anyway…)

Speaking of Facebook, the demographic there is legendarily concentrated. Emily Yoffe has written of her Facebook journey as a fifty-something on Slate last week and published a follow-up today. Between then and now, she gained 725 friends. Twelve of them were in their fifties. Pretty much all of the rest of them were under 24 (she cited a poignant message from a twenty four year old – too young for LinkedIn, too old for the first wave of Facebookers. You can probably guess the reaction of most of my colleagues.

Suggest that they get their industry news through Netvibes? Huh? Pageflakes?  Del.icio.us?  Not a Flickr of interest (though a certain amount of edging away from the fanatic in the front row).  How do I reach these people?

But hang on, there’s good news. Two cracks in the dam have appeared lately. The first is the marvellous Library Thing which has seized the imaginations of every librarian in the division. We’ve bought them CueCats and they’ve gone crazy for it. Another breakthrough was deploying the free usage level of Campfire which is arguably nothing more than an amazingly businesslike and user-friendly chat room but is as Web 2.0 as they come in terms of usability and immediacy. My boss has started using it for remote meetings with the members of her team scattered eight offices and is absolutely enthralled. The next killer app for the information team is likely to be tagging. That’ll be next month.

So what exactly am I saying here? That the life of an evangelist is frequently made more difficult than it needs to be purely by the flowery byways our own enthusiasms tend to lead us down. If you want to change the working habits of your organisation, if you want to bring in positively disruptive technological influences to bear, you have to address the needs and enthusiasms of your your users on their terms. Not on your terms, not in terms of the fab thing that will utterly change their lives – but in terms of what’s useful for them right now. And hopefully the rest will follow.

Social value is an incremental thing. It happens one small step at a time in the space immediately around you. Or it all too frequently doesn’t happen at all.