Amplified ’08

There are a few reasons why I was interested in attending Amplified’08: one, I believe the UK has a very healthy system of interest-based groups, and this event aimed to bring them all together. Two, it was organised by NESTA (the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts), the body that serves as the front for innovation in the country and I was interested in seeing what they had to contribute, and three, I’m a part of a couple of the individual groups that were being represented atAmplified’08. 

The aim of the event was to create a ‘Network of Networks’, leading up to a huge TED-style event in 2010. A lofty ambition, but not entirely impossible, if it is planned properly. I can say that they have a long way to go yet. 

The event was organised unconference-style, with NESTA merely providing a venue. I didn’t see them getting more involved than that, but to be fair the event was put together in 2 months and it is likely that they will have greater involvement going forward. Largely, what was discussed was around the issue of social media – how social media can help businesses, musicians, education and so on. There were multiple discussions occurring simultaneously, as is usual with unconferences. The first one I was part of was a discussion on how companies can use social media to generate new business. Some of the issues that were brought out were that many clients today are still not convinced about social media, and that no matter what we say, the proportion of people like “us” – advanced users of social media – is still very little (someone who worked as a Microsoft evangelist said that of the large number of business people she spoke to, very few were actual users of Facebook or Twitter, for example). Another important point was that when brands have a presence on Twitter, they have to be very careful about not just sending out links arbitrarily into the Tweetsphere in a unidirectional fashion. They need to actively engage their consumers in dialogue if they are to get any benefit out of it. Related social media examples that were quoted were Samsung’s social media project with the Photographic Adventures of Nick Turpin, where the photos clicked by Nick Turpin (who is a real person living in East Dulwich, if you were wondering!) would determine his next subject based on the photo that got the highest number of public votes, IBM’s Diggable Resources Center which was created following the revelation that a lot of useful white papers produced by IBM were being buried under the sheer volume of them, and Carphone Warehouse’s sheer lack of response to the number of grievances aired over their inept handling of the release of the new iPhone 3G. The presence of companies on Twitter was a topic that generated some interest – is it better to have multiple ID’s representing a client (as Zappos and Dell do) or a single Twitter feed representing the company as a whole? If it is the latter, what happens when multiple people take over the feed is that it leaves consumers feeling a lack of a personal relationship – which is what the Twitter ID was supposed to enhance in the first place. 

Another discussion I was part of focussed on the issue of multiple authors writing a book via a wiki (apparently this is an idea that a lady who works with Deloitte plans to put into action in the next few months for a client, and she was testing the waters). Very simply, it was agreed that there needs to be some direction provided at the outset with an outline of available chapters/sections and a call for experts to declare their interest, with issues such as multiple tones of voice and editing needing to be kept in mind. Nothing particularly groundbreaking there.

The best one for me was the one headed by Johnnie Moore on Less Talk More Play, where we got together in a group and played a couple of games: SoundBall (click the link to see what it’s about), and drawing a face with a partner, where pairs of us took turns to draw one feature of a face till we thought it was complete. From the first game we took back these thoughts: that people who play a game usually tinker with it to keep it interesting, that not everyone has to purse the same activity in order to be efficient, and that multi-tasking could actually be a fallacy – computers perform one calculation a time, for example, so it isn’t necessary that humans should be able to (this with reference to multiple ID’s and activities that we get used to doing in social media, almost as if we are a failure if we can’t manage them all). From the second game, I took this back: that an activity that seems inconsequential is actually consequential, because as with social media, relationships matter. 

As much as I enjoyed parts of it – the last segment I described, particularly – I was left with a feeling that if, as with the proposed wiki-book, there was some more direction, it would have been more fruitful. One session in fact didn’t even have a moderator – and we wound up with a large group of people in a room looking at each other, not knowing what to do. It was a great first-time effort by all involved – I’m not taking that away from them – but moving forward (Amplified ’09 has already been scheduled for February, which is just a couple of months away), I hope there will be much more structure to the event. That’s the only way they can hope to achieve TED-status by 2010.