OPEN

I’m obviously in a reflective mood. Blame it on the blogging hiatus, blame it on the sunshine, blame it on the hospital-issue painkillers – whatever…

I presented at the Social Media Influence conference today on innovation and social media. More about that in a moment, but the conference itself feels like a milestone for me, a kind of social media Christmas – all the family gathered together once again, revisiting the same ground, except that everything has changed has moved on.

You see I was on stage for panel discussions at the last two versions of the conference that Matthew Yeomans and Bernhard Warner put together – previously known as Blogging4Business.

The first time I was just about to make the jump from PR to digital. A year later I was on a panel again, and so much had changed, in terms of what was happening in social media and the work I was doing with clients.

The pace of change and evolution continues – it’s important to take into account the rate of change, I think…

So for fun, I included a slide called the Social Media Influence OMG Index, pointing out some key things that made us all stand back in amazement when we found out about them. Here’s what I included…

• 2005: I started with the iPod Nano communications crisis. Comms professionals were blown away at the time by just how quickly people created a PR crisis for Apple around problems with the first iPod Nano’s propensity to scratch easily.
• 2006: I chose MoneySavingExpert’s forums. These had been for a good while, but it was only about this time that I realised their massive influence in creating momentum behind issues which set the UK business and news agendas, not least around the issue of bank charges being possibly illegal.
• 2007: Zopa. A year ago or so we were talking about Zopa – describing it as “an eBay for loans” – and people in the finance sector shook their heads in disbelief (some still do). A year on and we have Virgin Money adopting the concept in the US, a whole crowd of me-toos, and Gartner predicting 10% of loans will be issued via community models in just two years’ time.
• 2008: What’s making us say OMG right now? Well, a lot of things, but the most dazzlig of them all is the boldness of the idea and the sheer potential for radical change in how companies communicate with individuals that is Project VRM. When people own more of their own data and share it with companies on terms they find agreeable all sorts of amazing disruption will occur.

There’s more reflection going on at BusinessWeek I see.

According to Jeff Jarvis the magazine is revisiting its cover story on blogs from 2005 (this one I think):

Three years ago, blogs were still a curiosity to a business audience, new enough to warrant a cover story, strange enough to require explaining. But now, blogs and social media are not only better understood and accepted but they are coming to be seen as a necessity in media and more and more in business. I’ve written three stories in the magazine about business using social media to rebuild relationships with customers — Dell blogging and collaborating with customers and Starbucks opening a platform for customers’ ideas.

I remember that edition of the magazine – it was much discussed in my office at the time, and not without a little scepticism from some of my colleagues. It’s all a fad, one said.

Some fad.

NB: Mac fans among you will be delighted to hear that I made my first presentation in Keynote (it’s amazingly good, BTW) this week after a decade plus of Powerpointism .