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I'm Loic Le Meur and I’ll be moderating this plenary session.
And I’ve been asked to wait another two minutes? We can go?
Okay let’s go then. So welcome everyone.
I'm going to have the pleasure to be your moderator today
and we have an amazing group,
social software leaders so if I may ask from Peter who is here.
We have Gina Bianchini from Ning right there,
Gina; George Colony from Forrester Research,
George; Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn; who is the Chairman of the Board
of Trustees of the…; we have Mousa Musa here,
a Global Changemaker from the British Council
and Global Changemaker from Iraq…; Owen Van Natta from MySpace right here;
and Don Tapscott who is the Chairman of nGenera. Welcome.
And so I'm the founder of a company
that’s called Seesmic which covers
most of all the social networks.
So here’s the format of the session.
We will hand every we’ll have the social software leaders
introduce in a few minutes what they think of the three questions
and mostly how are social networks changing society,
so that’s what we’re talking about today.
And we would like to have you all share a few thoughts,
a few minutes, first room-wide
and then we will break into table conversations
so every table will analyze those three questions
so let me give you three questions.
How are social networks changing in society?
First question.
We have a standing up table here.
Yeah, you're a – so if there is another table which is a virtual standing table.
We have to tweet each other.
You can tweet, absolutely.
What are the most important implications and risks of society?
So we also talk about the negative aspects, that’s the second question.
Again what are the most important implications and risks for society?
And the third question is what should individuals
and institutions, what should we do,
to leverage our social networks in the future?
So now is it changing society, what are the most important implications
and the risks and what should we all do,
including institutions, to make sure that we leverage that power to change
and improve the world rather than run the risks that come?
And so we will do that until 9:50, that’s plenty of time,
that’s actually two hours in total, and at 9:50 I will ask every table,
including the standing table too, to report on your conversations.
It can be the discussion leader or you can get anyone at the table,
it doesn’t have to be you read, it can be anyone.
And we will also… with social software session,
we also have plenty of questions on the internet so we have a… computer
which is Davos social and we can see the tweets here,
we’ll have a look at them,…
That’s interesting software you have around here.
Thank you very much.
It’s out of date…
and we will also have Davos questions from YouTube so Steve,
where is Steve, Steve is right there,
he’s going to give us so that we have a video going
running on YouTube which will where we ask people to have questions
and participate also so we’ll have that and probably run… as well.
It can be from any social software post as well.
So that’s the plan for today, first hour on the table,
second on the – on room-wide conversation with people in the internet.
So with that I would like to ask George Colony
if you want to start sharing with us what Forrester has
for us in terms of social software.
I should use the mike, Loic?
Oh by the way, I should have simply said yes,
we are – so we’re live also on the internet so everything is on record,
it’s coming from that little computer here.
Software quality is not the best but it’s live,…
Just to let you know that there are no secrets here for two hours,
everything is live.
What’s the address to tweet?
It’s – I’ll give it to you right now, just go to /Davos…
But we should use a mike, right?
Yes please.
So I'm George Colony, I'm the CEO of Forrester Research.
How’s that? Hear me?
Yeah. Great.
So I'm George Colony, I'm the CEO of Forrester
and I’ve got the boring job of giving you some data
on the social networking world to get it started.
Of the 15 most trafficked sites in the world 7 of them are social sites
and if you wonder why Apple is announcing the iPad…
call it today we now spend between five and six hours per day on media, that is,
the second biggest human activity after sleeping.
So we are – we all understand that we’re very social.
Of the major social sites, these is a measure
of unique visitors: Twitter’s got 25 million
and that’s been flat for about the last six months
so that Twitter came up to a really fast curve
and has been flat; Facebook has 130 million users,
unique visitors per day is again flat
for the last six months; MySpace is 50 to 60 unique visitors per day
and that is down considerably in the last six months;
LinkedIn about 15 million and that is up;
and Ning about six million, that’s down in the last six months.
And that’s all… right?
Yeah, those are not Forrester numbers.
Yeah and actually the… as our two hours progress.
The social networking is far from ubiquitous,
if you look at the United States, the visit to social networking sites,
at least daily, is only 70% of online users,
so 70% of online users will consult a social site per day
and that’s a sample of about 5000 US online adults.
And a very, very – this is of course very different per age group
so if you look at 18- to 24-year-olds, 27% of them will consult
a social site everyday; 25- to 34-year-olds 24%;
and then 35- to 44-year-olds 18%; 45- to 54-year-olds 12%;
55- to 64-year-olds 9%; and 65 or older is 6%, so a very fast drop off.
We are unable to do surveys on individuals younger
than 18 but we believe that in fact that number is almost doubled
for the young adult under 18. Yeah, Mike?
Does that include mobile for no?
I’ll repeat the question, does that include mobile or not?
It does. and then my last bit of data which is Europeans reading blogs,
this is online Europeans, 54% will frequently consult a blog in Europe;
46% no, and at least daily is only 12% in Europe,
so the number is smaller than the US.
And my last, last bit data is this is customer interaction
with retailers via social blogs, we’re talking about Best Buy,
the number of online consumers consulting a corporate blog is only 1%,
the trust level for the blogs is actually quite low.
However the number of online consumers becoming a fan
or following is approximately 8%.
So a lot more followers of corporate
than there are individuals consulting the blogs of corporations.
So that’s my data to get it started, I will say one thing before I sit down
and that is that we believe that one of the most important aspects of social,
when it comes to corporations, Forrester is in the business
of primarily studying how large corporations
are affected by these trends, we believe that a major trend
will be called social stigma, so you all know what’s social stigma,
which is the idea of the corporations
will use social primarily to improve their products.
Sick stigma is the gradual improvement or process to improve products.
We believe that social will be used by corporations to get feedback
from their customers to improve the price, we call that social stigma.
So that’s will get it started.
Very good. -Any questions?
Any criticism? - I don’t want any of that.
Okay, that’s it. - Okay, thank you.
All right. Thank you very much George.
We’re glad to have those numbers.
Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn,
will now share with us his thoughts about the social networks
and changing society.
I think the principal goal here is to set up few…
in the conversation we’re having per table and then to the room
and so as opposed to data, I actually will be kind of closing
some kind of framework pertaining to this
and since you never know what the different level of expertise is,
some of you might… but my apologies.
So part of what's going on in terms of the whole – the social networking
phenomena as part of what is frequently referred to as the Web 2.0 trend.
The weird thing about Web 2.0 is what happens when every person
has an identity online and is a participant either in terms
of sharing or publishing and what are the applications that come out of that.
There's a variety of applications, at least three different areas,
that are particularly interesting, kind of social, media, and professional.
Social is things like when they're all sharing photographs
or other things with a small group of people, usually friends, family,
some kind of trust group; media is publishing
to the world where essentially every one is
for instance everyone’s a journalist, everyone’s a magazine
and those sorts of things as a way of establishing kind of a global channel;
and then professional is finding expertise
and information to solve professional tasks.
And what the themes are that the folks generally
in social sites talk about is how do you get kind of robust connections
between people, how do you get transparency of information
and the people in order to be able to solve these kinds of applications,
whether it’s sharing or gaming or finding channels of expertise,
and then how do you facilitate that in a way that essentially causes
the entire system to do much more informationally efficient.
And it’s the ability for everyone to be expressing identity
and to be publishing that allows for a very robust
and rich information source to be generated.
And what you use on these friends’ lists or following lists or other kinds
of things is a way of configuring your own particular
part of the space because obviously when you have millions
or hundreds of millions of people participating in publishing,
even if you wanted to try to read everything,
you wouldn’t manage to do it.
And so when you think about these questions in terms
of whether the implications I’ll say a few things
they’ve been saying over the years
because I think it might be particularly useful for this audience,
I actually don’t think there's much in the way of risks.
One of the things I said a couple of years ago in a magazine conference
was that all the concerns about privacy,
this is my guess, she asked me about this a couple of weeks ago,
all these concerns about privacy tend to be all people issues.
If you actually look at most young people using Facebook, etc,
they put their cellphones on the profile, and it may be a little less these days,
but really where that more substantially is a question of the value
of being connected and transparent is so high
that the road bumps of kind of privacy issues
are much lower in actual experience than people see it
and that’s the reason why it kind of trends that way.
And so when we consider these questions, the thing we should think about
is how do you use the fact that everyone’s present information
and transparency and how do you get a lot of benefit out of that
with essentially diminished risk, I think that would be a good frame
and with that I’ll sit down and pass the mike.
All right. Thank you, Reid.
And so you can see also a few cameras on the tables, these are not to be taken,
these are to be used later on so that we can record your thoughts
on the second part of the session and then tweet them
and upload them on YouTube.
Owen from MySpace, Owen Van Natta,
maybe – I think you have a few idas to share with us especially
under MySpace perspective.
Sure. Thank you.
I generally agree with a lot of the way that Reid
has framed up what's happening in the social web
and my viewpoint is that the web is increasingly becoming social,
meaning that we’re going to experience all the things
that we do on the internet with other people,
this is very much like what exists in the real world today,
we want to go and experience communications,
media, content with other people.
The impact of this is essentially having on society
and then trying to frame this up for discussion,
if you think about how the social web has evolved
and of the elements that Reid talked about in terms of identity
and ability for people to publish and communicate
and have that all be part of the fabric of your web experience
as opposed to an experience where you're consuming content
and doing communications in two separate actions.
Really what I think what that is doing is causing us
to more efficiently be able to consume media through other people
as opposed to just through a limited number of sources,
whether it’s portals or other new sources.
I think the impact that this is starting to have on media
and you think about some of the metrics
that George shared with us is that we’re finding increasingly
that distribution of content is happening much more
through people as opposed to through these destinations or portals.
And the implication on society is interesting in that I'm now able
to engage in my media consumption, in my content consumption
with other people that I never was able to before,
much like the internet connected me to people that I was never connected
to in the real world before the internet was available
and email was so prevalent.
And the way that we are thinking about this at MySpace
and how it is that we’re looking to serve the users
of MySpace in regard to this is we see a huge amount of activity
around key areas of content consumption like music, entertainment, film and TV,
games, all of these areas are starting to explode in terms of usage
and growth because you can have such a richer experience
when you're able to experience these things with other people
than you were before the social web started to evolve
and it was much less of a social experience.
We think it really maps directly to the way the real world works
which is I go to rock concerts and I want to experience
that with other people who have similar tastes in that type of music,
in that band.
I go to theaters to experience that content,
to consume that media with other people.
And I think that the social web is finally evolving
to the point where I'm able to do that in a massive way online
and do it like we can with the internet
without the geographic barriers that exist in the real world.
And I think that’s going to continue
and if you look at just the growth of the social web overall,
I think it will permeate every single area of what we do on the internet
and even unlock new areas as well.
And I also to echo Reid’s thoughts in terms of impact on society,
I think it has a very positive impact on society
and I don’t think there's a huge amount of downside
and it’s always going to be things that need to be managed
in terms of controls in privacy and security
and how it is that we think about that and giving people controls.
But the beautiful thing about technology
and the internet is that we can build those things
and we can extend them to people very easily
and maybe even more importantly we can continually evolve those things
in a way that evolve with the needs of society, with the needs of people
and enable this movement to continue at.
So those are my thoughts and I think this is going to be a very,
very interesting conversation.
Thank you very much Owen.
In the meantime since we started talking I have the pleasure
to announce that we have Randi Zuckerberg of Facebook right here
with us who just arrived so Randi will share a few thoughts
with us a little later and just sit yourself.
I just wanted to introduce you.
And also for everyone watching us on the internet,
quite a few people tagged Davos social will be used to gather
what the virtual room is saying.
And with that I would like to have Gina Bianchini of Ning
to share a few thoughts with us.
Hi, my name is Gina Bianchini and I run a company called Ning
which is a social platform that gives people the opportunity
to create unique social experiences for specific topics,
interests, and passions.
I think the most amazing thing about 2009 is that outside of Silicon Valley
social technologies went mainstream and they went mainstream
in the sense that we have all heard of them if we’re
not actually using them in our daily lives.
And specifically I think it’s not Forrester numbers
but I think the number is something like from the beginning of 2009
to the end people spent three times the amount of time
and energy in social technologies
and on social platforms than they had in the prior year.
So where does it go from here?
The exciting thing from my perspective
is that there actually is an analogy for this.
When you look at 1994, 1995 as people came online for the first time,
in many cases they weren’t coming online to the web, they came online to AOL,
to CompuServe, to Prodigy, they got comfortable
with services that actually provided a pretty narrow
and simple user experience for people to get up and running
and really understanding that particular example
and in that particular case what email was like, what chat meant,
and what the concept of a page was.
What the web actually provided was a way once people got sophisticated
to be able to dive into all the different things that they wanted to on the web,
both from the creative perspective, in terms of people creating things
as well as people consuming things in entirely new ways.
And what we found was that the web-needed behavior of people using the internet
was connecting to other people and we’re seeing this
now 15 to 16 years later fully realized in social technologies.
But I think you can use that map to see where people go,
namely there is no analogue for the type of growth that Facebook
and even Twitter has seen this year and yet it’s sending people into richer,
more immersive experiences and specifically richer
and more immersive social experiences around the things that they care about.
So I think that that is absolutely something
that we’ll see emerge from here.
People now understand “Well I can get and have the kinds of relationships
that I have in the real world with strong ties with people that I already know
in the context of Facebook and I can discover new people
and new ideas on Twitter and this stream of compelling information
and then I can also dive into deeper immersive social experiences
around the things that I care about.”
And I think what's so exciting about this from my perspective
is it’s really one of the first times where technology
is not defining how people act but it’s actually reflecting
how do we actually live our lives in the real world,
where we actually fluidly move between the people that we meet at conferences
and the people that we know from growing up
and the people that we admire from a… or editorial perspective.
And what I think is so cool is that all of these different
social technologies are working together
in the same fluid way that we live our lives
and I think that the end result is going to be richer online
and offline lives for all of us around the world.
Do I think are there inherent implications that –
and certainly risks associated with this?
Well I think that it’s really about the internet amplifying the best
and worst of people and I think that we’ve seen
actually more cases where the good is winning out over the bad
and I think the last 14 days or however long it’s been
in terms of just the immediate impact that the earthquake
in Haiti has had around the world especially from a fundraising perspective,
there is no analogue for that, there is no analogue
for the kind of ways in which people today can have
an impact on something sitting on their couch
in their pajamas halfway around the world.
And I think that that’s only going to make us globally much more interesting
and hopefully, not to sound too much like a hippy,
but the world a better and certainly more interesting place.
Thank you, Gina. Don, are you ready, since the mike is over there?
Sure.
To share a few thoughts with us? Don Tapscott from nGenera.
In case you don’t know who I am, I'm a researcher.
I’ve written a bunch of books going back to 1981 about the internet and society.
I wrote the book “Wikinomics.”
Okay, two points; where’s this going and big risks
and where is it going from the perspective of business and the enterprise.
I think we’re at a deflection point where social networking is changing
and becoming a new mode of production, it’s becoming social production.
And social networks within the enterprise
are becoming the new operating system of a business.
Now I can speak to this quite a bit and hopefully… will add later
on in the conversation of what I'm saying.
Best Buy is a company has a social network involving tens of thousands of people
and this changes the way Best Buy operates its business.
It has a link to that, part of a broader collaborative platform
and electronic water pool with 70,000 people
that comes up with all kinds of fantastic ideas.
It uses prediction markets to better understand
what's really happening with the company.
This is changing the way you run a business.
It’s no longer about hooking up online or creating a gardening community.
But the more important opportunity has to do with using these
new collaborative platforms built around social networks
to change the deep structure and the architecture of corporations
and how they orchestrate capability to innovate and to create value.
So I use LinkedIn, for example, to run a contest
for a book I’ve read recently called “Grown Up Digital”
where I ask kids around the world “Give me a two-minute video
that says what’s wrong with the education system and how you’d fix it?”
I had half a person working on this for two weeks.
I got hundreds of videos from dozens of countries
and it changed the way that I as a company could relate with the rest of the world.
InoCentive is basically built on a social network.
I'm Procter & Gamble, I'm trying to find a molecule
that will take red wine out of a shirt, I’ve got 9000 people inside
but there are 200,000 outside on the InoCentive network
that sure enough there's a retired chemist in Taipei or a grad student
in London that comes up with a molecule,
I’d pay him a couple of hundred thousand dollars
and I have a product that ends up being a billion dollar product.
Goldscorp, gold mining company, the CEO there was very frustrated
that his geologist couldn’t tell him where to go into production,
where the gold was, so he held a contest based essentially on a social network
and collaborative platform “$500,000 in prices for anybody
who can tell me do I have any gold in this company and if so, where is it?”
He got 77 submissions from all around the world,
they used techniques that he’d never heard of,
and for half a million dollars in price money he found $3.4 billion
worth of gold and the market value of his company went
from $19 million to $10 billion.
He’s actually my neighbor.
He lives across the street from me and I can tell you, he’s a happy camper.
So this is changing the way that we innovate,
it’s called open innovation, the way we get capability.
Government, another example, I'm working with some heads of state
and men at the governor level in the US to do digital brainstorms
that are essentially on a social network platform where the issue,
the President of Portugal for example, is going to come online
and say “For the next three days, we’re going to have a conversation
in our country where everyone can participate.”
This is changing the nature of democracy
and the way the citizens engage with their state. I could go on, I won't.
I know.
Can I say one thing about problem?
I think there are two really big problems.
One is privacy and I did a research project where I interviewed 11,000 young people,
young people are giving away their personal information, too much,
and this year there will be thousands of young people who don’t get
that dream job because their employer
did a reference check on Facebook and there are things that you say
or do or wear when you're 19 that are not really who you are.
This is a massive historic problem to me.
The other big problem has to do with moving to this new paradigm
and I think there's a crisis in leadership in companies
and enterprises typified by this popular habit of banning Facebook
and banning social networks within the enterprise.
I was talking to the CIO of a state where the governor had banned Facebook
and I said “Why did you do that?”
and he says “Well the governor felt young people were wasting their time on the job,”
to which I replied “Well if young people are wasting their time,
is that a technology problem?
You fix that by banning a technology?”
They just got to do some of the workload, job design, and performance evaluation.
I said “What was the effect of banning Facebook?”
He said “Everybody went to MySpace.”
Another, good news there, another youngster, 27 years old, I asked him,
he works for the Federal Agency “What's the effect of banning Facebook?”
He had a different answer.
He said “It was the single most Demoralizing
thing management has ever done.
It said to us we don’t get collaboration, we don’t get your tools,
we don’t understand your generation, and we don’t trust you.”
So there's a crisis of leadership emerging.
Very good. Thank you very much Don.
I will ask now Evan Williams, Co-Founder and CEO of Twitter
Well I agree with a lot of what's been said
and there's tons of interesting stuff to talk about already
so I won't add too much more.
One thing I noticed though is there's a lot of conflation of ideas
when we talked about social in the social web
and I'm wondering why that is and what that means
because I think most of everything we’re talking about is just
it’s about the internet and it’s about taking media
and making it two-way and giving everybody the ability to publish
and participate with each other.
So when we talk about social networks or social – there are infinite varieties
of what that means and I think it more or less just means the internet
and people have been publishing in the internet.
The big original promise of the internet, at least one of them
was about the democratization of information and it took us,
in the trend of social networks and Twitter which we don’t really even
consider a social network and all these other tools,
are about lowering the bar and really realizing that that ability
for everybody to publish and participate very, very easily.
And the effects of that, I totally agree with Gina
and the other folks that said they pretty much affect everything,
they affect society in every way, they affect,
not only what media we consume but how we – basically
at Twitter we look at doing three things for people:
helping then find the information they want and when they want it
and so it’s basically a filtering and discovery engine;
two is creation of content which is expressing
and having influence over others so not everybody in the world
is going to be writing articles or creating videos
and what not but almost everybody may say to their friend now
and then or whoever is listening to him “Hey check this out.
And that’s a form of influence and that has profound effects right there
because that directs people more and more to what media they consume;
and third is about building relationships and obviously this is the heart
of a lot of social networks that are out there about communicating
but they're also about relationships of all types, with businesses,
some of the stuff that we’re excited about Twitter is where an individual
will follow a local business, their coffee shop
and get their special of the day and that’s a two-way channel
so businesses can hear back from customers who’ve always been more or less anonymous
and so with all these mechanisms we now have a way to keep in touch
with a person or a business or any entity that we care to keep in touch
with so when you have a meeting instead of just
you can now have a link back to them.
So there's not much that that won't influence in the society,
I think the underlying idea to just consider about what this affects
is that people who use these technologies and use the internet
to do what people have always done and that’s about building relationships,
communicating with each other, expressing themselves,
and this is just a continuation of what's been happening
for the last 15 years or so since the commercialization of the internet.
Thank you, Evan. Randi?
Here’s the mike for you. So Randi Zuckerberg from Facebook
Thanks for giving me some time to stall. Hi everyone.
I'm pinch-hitting for my brother who unfortunately couldn’t make it this year.
I just want to say that it’s really fantastic to be here
and this time last year I was here speaking about
an incredible event that happened for social media
and that was the inauguration of Barack Obama
and what we saw online with people all over the world
coming together in this incredible global conversation
and the fact that content was really democratized like never before,
I think that was just a really amazing time and I remember coming here
and really seeing the attention that was given to social media
at that time among business and global leaders.
Since then there have been a lot of events in the world this year.
There have been elections all over, the Iranian election
and we’ve seen the current situation in Haiti especially.
Collectively in this room when you look around we have hundreds
of millions of people that are using all of these sites
and I think that gives us incredible responsibility to come together
to find ways to make sure that people are getting access to accurate information,
to real time information, and to information online
in a social way that’s really going to help make a difference.
Very good. And Randi will you have feedback from Facebook as well?
Sure. Yeah.
So one of the things that we experimented with last year at the forum,
we actually granted some real time in-site polls over some of the sessions
where world leaders were talking about issues,.
We actually were instantaneously
polling people on Facebook to get the public opinion.
It’s not enough to see just what six global leaders have to say,
let’s bring 350 million people into the conversation too.
So we’re going to be taking questions from any of you guys
that want to ask what people online are thinking about social –
So why don’t you ask them the three same questions
and see what we get from Facebook?
Sure.
Great. I’ll make sure I’ll give you the questions again.
Sounds good. Thanks guys.
Are you done? Very good. Thank you, Randi.
We will move into – Mousa Musa, we’ll see,
I guess you could report for your table maybe?
And what should individuals and institutions do to leverage our power?
Those were out three questions.
Can someone take this table because I’ll be moving around?
You want to – I found a casualty here. Maybe you want to run the conversation?
Okay
It’s just about like having a conversation and then we continue.
So anyone can report – if will be good if you – I’ll be right back,
I'm just making sure everything is fine. Do you have the three questions?
How is it changing society?
What are the risks –
Implications and risks. And what should we do to leverage it.
Exactly.
So how is it changing society?
I have – you changed my life, I have three boys and who spend everyday,
I hope not a lot, and actually they are travelling
and now they have friends all around the world.
One of them is in Latin America and the only way he communicates
is on Facebook, so that’s one impact.
Except that your children won't need to meet their friends on Facebook.
…do that primarily is around media and constant interests, right?
And what we talk about is the discovery which they discover a lot of content
in the media through other people and then the sharing
and show casing of the information. And I think each of those
provides a different filter, the people I'm connected to
in the real world are one filter for me Twitter
is another one where I can go up and take a topic
and find out what the general populace is thinking about it.
I think that’s interesting.
When I was thinking about was what John was just saying
about sort of thinking that this is more than
an evolution rather than a revolution so from letter writing
to phone to email to Twitter, that’s a way of looking
at communication but what I think is interesting here is conflating
or is the joining of communication with the ability to broadcast
and I think that’s kind of what we’re seeing,
it’s like it’s not just that I can now communicate with you through
a different channel but I'm also at the same time communicating
and broadcasting and like at YouTube you think about
that as now anybody can have his platform for the ability
to broadcast yourself which was limited to a very,
very small group of people and now you're both communicating
and broadcasting at the same time which I think,
based on my experience watching how my friends act
and watching how people younger than me are interacting
with these technologies is that it is changing how people behave.
I'm less of a believer that this is just a reflection of how society is
and more I think of a campus thing but it is kind
of changing how we conduct ourselves because you watch the way
that young people… on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace,
there's much more of this like self-conscious
“How am I presenting myself? Is this information that I'm sharing,
how is this going to reflect on how I'm perceived socially?”
It is an interesting question the way that you're talking about it.
Is this just an ongoing evolution?
When you think about newspapers as an example,
to try to get your perspective on this Arthur, you know,
newspapers were about news and then they start to be about
increasingly you have opinion and analysis
and then up at where you're drawing people into the conversation,
not necessarily these people…
How do you see this in terms of –
I'm here to learn.
Going to be increasingly smelt out and actually vilified.
It will bite them bad because they’ll talk to the camera
and it will be a totally different jargon than the guy online
and suddenly the fraud is exposed.
You're going to be naked so you better be rough.
Can I pick up on this point?
Like the whole theme of Davos this year is that the world is busted
and we need to rethink, redesign, rebuild our institutions
and we have – the current model is nation states come together to fix things.
The model we’re exploring at Davos is that we could have
new multi-stakeholders to solve problems.
So the world leaders are stalled in Copenhagen
trying to get a climate change deal, I estimate between 8
and 10 million people that they're organizing using the web,
social networks and other stuff, around this issue.
So this is the first time in human history that we’re all on the same side basically
and so to me this presents a new opportunity that fundamentally
changed the way that we collaborated with the world,
the way that we solved problems.
Yeah, my company is Mobile Video.
We’re in about 60 countries, including a lot of developing markets
and what really struck me, and it’s similar to what you're saying,
is applications we had never thought of in remote villages in Africa
and Southeast Asia, they're doing telemedicine,
they're having access to medical care through these networks
and so they don’t have to walk a day and a half to get that.
They can get that through something that’s formal or less formal.
For me it’s about bringing information to people that one way wouldn’t…
and then the other side is you bring in people in to the dialogue
that didn’t have a voice before and now they have a voice,
that’s something I'm truly struck us a lot in the last 18 months.
And so just another thing, the bottom line of what I was saying that I didn’t say,
this morning at 7:30 I was at a meeting hosted by Nike
and the CEOs of some other companies and they launched something
called the “Green Exchange.”
And this is a historic thing to me where companies are going
to contribute their intellectual property and put it in the platform in the commons
and using social networking to do this basically.
Nike’s giving away its 440 patents and placing them in the commons
and the idea, not just that a rising tide lifts all boats
and that we have a big problem in the world regarding the environment,
but also on the idea that this is part of a new thinking about open innovation
and competitive strategies, you don’t need to own all your intellectual property,
I mean now through social networking and all this other stuff we have a platform
that radically drops collaboration costs and enables us to innovate differently
and to think differently about the nature of IP.
And, man, this is a big change, I mean back in the music industry,
the internet was the best thing that ever happened to it
and at least rather embracing internet radically changed
the whole industry and turned music from a product to a service
and the record industry ends up suing children
and is hated by its customers in this –
I think that’s true. I do think there’s an interesting question
though that becomes “So what is the new IP?
What is the new internet?” because, I mean,
I agree with you but you how many even tens of hundreds
of years in the development of what does competitive advantage,
differentiation, and IP need and --
Where people are and I think that that application right now
is being used in the human rights community but as people age
who are online users, right now there's a big issue,
if you're 85, you're alone, and you don’t have children
who aren’t tracking you there isn’t the kind of minute-to-minute
or day-to-day accountability to where you are and how you're doing
and what your state is which I think social networks
could actually provide, where people… and that would be a function
of users aging and incorporating this kind of technology.
Two more great… so now people are using real names like…
The second thing is that you can really reach second degree of connections.
It was never possible and this is like a treasure to know.
I'm not asking the internet, I'm asking the friends of my friends.
And that’s vitally true for a wide range of acts,
everything from restaurant conversations to who is a good person
understanding city problems and can you create diversities, ecologies,
that sort of thing because the second degree,
it’s very easy to ascertain trust and authenticity in the administration.
There's other ways of doing that too but second degree’s easy,
its like “Oh Jeff knows this guy?
Jeff what do you think of him? Good? Bad?”
There’s a new Facebook program called, I think,… that is a dating service only
for people who your friends know.
That’s always been a communication gateway,
the information from my friend is more important
but what's the implication for your media, or the old establishment media,
or the big media that everyone went to for information
because now you don’t know who those people are, right?
That’s the opportunity… about the need for algorithmic authority
and what he’s saying is there's a business
opportunity here to find definitions of trust,
it’s no longer one size fits all, we all trust this brand,
the New York Times, some people trust…, some don’t. I do, very clear.
But that’s an individual decision, always has been…
But then it’s really disruptive to the different kind of
who we go to trust in terms of these guys.
I don’t know who he is.
Well I don’t know but I know I can get all my friends
to get to all the places I want to go.
Actually there are 10,000…,it’s a lot, you can find almost anything.
You have instant friends, someone wants to know about whiskey,
you make new friends who know about whiskey, like that and --
Are there any questions we haven’t addressed…
At this time I can't talk about all of them but one of them
we talked about Haiti and we talked about Iran.
In our case we kept the story about Iran going for many,
many days after most of the big newspapers had been kicked out of the country
and we’re depending on Reuters or BAP.
By then we had developed a network of people inside of Iran
who were kind of checking and balancing each other
so we were getting information that was kind of checked
by the crowd of Iran and we were able to tell a really accurate story.
I'm not sure if it was pretty accurate but in our case
we felt that accurate enough given the point of the story was good enough.
In the case of Haiti, we s well as CNN, as well as everybody else jumped
on to the story much faster than any other natural disaster.
The last one was the one of the tsunami was the beginning
of social networking where you could see pictures of the tsunami being uploaded.
In this particular case of Haiti social networking
is much more evolved and you saw the reaction,
the reaction was spontaneous, quite gigantic,
and the biggest worry about natural disasters is what the story could live on
and what people could do to pay attention.
We believe that in this case, yes.
The biggest risk is that governments which are not involved
in social networking except very much… do not understand the phenomenon
and will – as the velocity of social networks make current events
go even faster, they're going to be left behind,
and that one might have implications where there's a complete disconnect,
and I don’t want to make any predictions but I think we’re starting
to see that disconnect happening whereby just a year after a very popular president
gets elected he walked into a brick wall and a lot of it has to do with the fact
that people have moved on and his administration has stayed behind.
My name is Marie…
and we will start with Mousa Musa reporting from his table
so perhaps someone…
I'm sure you all can see me.
So I think what we were talking about in our table
social networks are instruments of social change
and we’ve had different opinions, of course,
but I think we’ve said that social networks can change
a community because we’re more communicated
and we’re more in touch with each other.
And actually what we said was we deprive people,
people who are in poor countries they could get their message
out through these social networks.
And also we’ve talked about how social networks can actually influence
people to more objective towards their goals and to help people,
such as Iran and Haiti.
As the risks go, kind of – the value of education is kind of a lesson
because we don’t have very much value, we don’t concentrate on education,
people spend more time on social networks than they do obviously reading books.
And so goes with checks and balances,
we said we can't check on the accuracy of information
and we’re also – when we put all these people together
we’re given the risk of exclusion, we’re excluding some people
out of even though it’s an exclusion utensil we’re excluding
some people out of it and that’s really unfair.
Also, as leveraging the power, I think most of us agree
that we should use that power instead of leveraging it
and actually using the power of the people to put
a check on the corporations and kind of on the information going on.
Thank you.
So in between I would like to YouTube’s Steve Grove that is also a social network.
Explain what you’ve learned here and I’ll take one question
from YouTube that someone here can answer and we fall back also to the internet.
Excellent. I'm Steve Grove from YouTube
and three or four days ago when we… this video on our homepage,
asking people to submit questions and vote on their favorites
on YouTube.com/Davos, and let me click over to the platform now,
so there is a whole range of questions that have been submitted here
and one of the top voted ones and ones that we thought might be
relevant is grouped to discuss --
How many answers and questions did you get?
We got 114 questions.
Wow.
So we should inform the YouTube users that we won't be able to answer 114
questions but we’ll take one right now.
Exactly. The question comes from a user who calls themselves –
Before you read the question, someone in the room,
one of the leaders or anyone else, if you want to answer…
So can you read it?
Yes, so the question is, you can't see it in the board,
that what was supposed to free us but with the world becoming increasingly
influenced by hype, popular news is over imported along
with the decline of journalism and efficiency, internet short hands
and lack of grammar online.
Is society deteriorating?
With the hype. Okay who wants to take this one?
All right I will.
All right,… He needs a microphone.
There should be one over here. Can you pass it to him?
How do I put this gently.
You could always find people who would be worried about this hype
but the trick is the opportunity here.
Is journalism declining?
I think journalism is growing in a couple of new ways,
like Larry who is in journalism right here and making money doing it.
Is there a hype in media?
Yeah, blame the media but are we all idiots enough that we all follow it?
No. Is society deteriorating?
I think to the contrary, I think we have new tools for that, I'm…
Mike Butcher from TechCrunch.
One thing, and Jeff you're just the perfect guy to talk to this about,
what I don’t get is there's this view about before the internet
that journalism was this sort of pure and innocent priesthood of truth
and if I didn’t realize exactly how journalism was really
sausage making until I became one and just how ugly it is behind the scenes
and how it’s a constant battle to even find the truth, let alone report it,
how did they pull that off? So here’s my question:
over the last 800 years how did the press as a whole manage to convince the world
that they somehow stand for truth as opposed to whatever
it is they do from your standpoint?
Control, one word, control.
And what the internet does is it breaks down control.
It breaks it down, not only media but in every industry there is,
it will do so in government in ways that may scare people,
those who had control but if you had some inherent faith in the people,
which is to say society, which this question does not, I know,
there's no asking it, but that’s become a comfort blanket
but I think when others of us gain control thanks to what the internet
allows then that breaks down old structures,
that scares the old structures, the old structures go to
constantly complain like this, but if you have faith in your fellow men,
good things will happen.
Anyone else on that topic?
About why is society getting better with…
No? All right.
We want these two from the table, Reid,
and then we’ll take one more from YouTube, one more
So we talked both about a little bit about upsides
and somewhat more about risks.
There was a general discussion on the privacy topic.
Most folks at the table, many points of view,
had the view that the privacy sector is frequently overblown
as taken partially from journalists having something dramatic to write about.
Now the interesting theme about privacy is not so much what you publish
about yourselves but many of us feel that’s there's a kind
of new normal coming off of that
but a question of what do other people publish you
and that the more interesting questions about having millions publish
as there is are everything from slander
or other kinds of things where issues over brand is happening.
There was a bunch of discussions about digital divide issues,
the question of if there is there's a general view
that having the world much more connected
and efficient in terms of information distribution
and finding people either for kind of finding former colleagues
or classmates that we’re connecting or finding experts
to help you with a business problem.
With all that is there a digital divide problem
and how do you make sure that there isn’t kind
of an accelerating difference between kind
of already rich connected markets and emerging markets
and how do you solve the problem now?
You know one of the wag comments I made there was well go on
to professional sites like LinkedIn… and find the people to help with that.
And so that was kind of the things – and then also
we talked some about the question of how do you approach these
things as an individual person?
What’s your strategy?
Because part of essentially what you get out is what you put in,
most people tend to feel like I show up
and something like this happens, but actually these things
are now actually part of our lives and you should think about
what is the way that I use these tools like I use the BlackBerry
or anything else as a way of navigating how you navigate
your own personal life.
Thank you very much, Reid.
I was looking at so for all of you watching online
I was looking at the Davos social sites, lots of feedback on Twitter
so hopefully we’ll take one of those, keep going.
One more, Steve, from YouTube before we go to George’s table.
So this one just came in, it’s really good.
A little bit to what Reid was saying, not on broadband-accessed
but on accessed information, it’s about censorship.
This comes from Rashna at the Dubai School
of Government who asks how involved should corporations such as Facebook,
Twitter, YouTube, etc be on the internet censorship laws
that compromise access to their content and don’t they owe
it to their users to try and ensure their equal access worldwide?
Especially with China… Anyone who wants to take this one?
There has to be one of you. All right I’ll pick a casualty.
Read it again Steve while we find a –
All right. It’s essentially a question about censorship
and corporations have overall in defining
internet censorship laws around the world.
So Randi has been proposing to answer
this question from Facebook’s perspective.
Thank you very much, Randi.
The world wants to hear what Facebook has to say about that.
We’re not friends right now.
I think it’s interesting.
This is something that I was really involved with Facebook
since its response to the elections in Iran and what was going on there.
We saw Facebook users in the country decline by
about 78% during that and it was really interesting,
that was the really first experience that we had with a global situation
when it was more critical than ever to get messaging in
and out of the country and to not have reliable access.
It was very disappointing to us.
In China has a very different situation because Facebook is completely
blocked in China so there's no access and no way to access the site
at all there but looking at the outcry on Facebook that we’ve seen
is speaking as the voice of the users people seem supportive
of those decisions.
Anyone else on censorship?
Just a question.
You’ve already said at DLD that censorship was taking basically
what was available…
Pardon?
Can you repeat that for me?
I said I was at another session at the same time,
I missed – I'm done with the mike, this is the mike of trouble
I apologize, Randi, I apologize.
I hope it’s only on Facebook but we’re still friends.
All right, anyone else on censorship?
No. George?
Can I have the mike?
…of the social networking companies who won't stand up
against censorship in the room.
They won't do it?
Reid.
The short hand is – so LinkedIn doesn’t directly counter
these things because very rarely did questions of the professional CV
and expertise would encounter any of these censorship issues.
The only particular thing that you actually end up getting
to navigate is things like “If I put in my profile I was so
and so’s consulting firms… which is rarely that.
Generally speaking I’d say that all the Silicon Valley folks
are very pro – technology folks are very pro- transparency,
very pro-publication and information
and is generally very positive.
On the other hand you try to pulse about what is cultural sensitivity,
what are the government’s ability to make laws regarding their particular things?
And it’s not just, for example, China which tends to get harped
on a lot here, but you knew there's questions around,
for example, laws regarding hate groups in Germany
and France and other kinds of things all pertain to this
and how do you balance the general good of transparency
and individual freedom against certain kinds of social rules.
And I think one of the most corporate folks tend to say
“Well I just kind of want to just help the thing
and make as much as the transparencies available
and not take on public conflicts” is for that reason.
Now I don’t know what the right answer is here
but that’s the shape of it in terms of how I look at it.
Did your role change the game?
The question was did your role change the game.
TVD, obviously I think there was a lot of support for saying
“Hey it’s important” that we defend people’s belief
in private accounts and all those kinds of things
and I think that’s a very good move.
Usually it’s a bad interfaith point with the Chinese government
to try to take into a public debate but I think it’s good,
very good for the general world discussion that brought it up
and I think that a lot of things as important is how in general
I think the right place to go in the global society
is how do we add more transparency because more or less
if the thing can't be published openly, what is it?
Not that I think they can be published openly,
like I’d prefer the DNA code for Ebola to not be easily accessible
but generally speaking how do we get there?
I think the most productive way to fight that is not like trying
to engage the Chinese government or these other governments who
the very being is against what we are all about
but I am hopeful that the way around some of these is the technological
ways around some of these barriers.
And we have seen that we have seem some very interesting
…to get to Twitter from Iran and other places
where it’s not accessible in normal ways.
Like the API for example?
Through the API but even clever one of the advantages of Twitter
is this is not a website which is part of why George’s…
numbers aren’t totally relevant.
Twitter is a network that just has access to thousands
of different applications and from mobile networks
and from other websites including Facebook in other ways.
So we think that’s an advantage when it comes to censorship
and with their… that I don’t want to talk about widely
to get around the normal blog.
So we will do all we can to enable people to access to Twitter,
that’s kind of our whole deal, we’re not going to move into countries.
I'm very proud that… that same Google’s taking there.
We are not in a position as 100%... to take that kind of
taking that kind of influence, we don’t even
I can't even start that, but we will do all we can
to hopefully enable to work around it eventually.
Thank you, Evan. Anyone else on censorship?
Anyone else? Gina? No?
All right, so we’ll move one.
Hi I'm Eric…
So as a journalistic organization it’s easy to be against censorship
but I think we should give Hilary Clinton
a lot of credit for the speech that she gave the other day
calling for an open internet which is for transparency
and openness and really taking on China to do to a large degree
on behalf of Google and others.
We’re completely blocked in countries like Iran for these reasons
and China, for whatever reason, blocks us on and off.
And I don’t think that any of us can stand
and for a world where censorship exists,
we wouldn’t have the society that we have today
and the freedoms that we have with censorship.
Having said that, it’s just a question of time,
you can't put the genie back in the bottle,
you can't put the genie back in the bottle the same way
that you can't get the news back in the bottle,
you can't put the genie back in the bottle
and so just a question of time, people in Iran, people in China,
wherever they are that there might be censored,
are finding as we speak ways around, as Ed was mentioning…
and the best thing we could do is we continue to do best
and to try to tell real stories about what's going on in the world.
All right, I will take one from Twitter,
so if someone wants to take this one, this is from… from Twitter
and it’s very simple, it’s easy, so the Davos social tag,
does social media make us more honest?
Anyone? Yeah.
The mike is there.
Does social media make us more honest?
Go ahead.
Well I think there are two ways going about the question.
Of course there's no check on the very occlusive information
coming out there.
It does not make us more honest but we would be more honest.
I mean, I'm 17 and I'm trying to get my message out about social --
What’s your message?
About – I school for the visually impaired
and I actually help get equipment to these schools
and I’ve seen the real need for equipment in Iraq
for these schools so I try to get them
the equipment that they need and we’ve actually been
covered by CNN and we try to do it as much as possible.
That doesn’t make us honest, nothing kind of makes
you honest but you want to be honest
on these things because you want to make change.
I want to effect change so I want it to be honest.
So that’s the reason that it’s more honest because you want to be.
Thank you. Randi if you have someone helping you,
like just show the page on Facebook so that we can put it up there
and we’ll take a question from Facebook.
Do you want to say something? Okay.
I think we are underestimating the power of social networks
in making people honest because it’s like almost orchestrated gossip.
There is a way that when you know people are going to comment
on what you do, when you know people can see what you do,
the risk that you can get away with things.
You know the question about how journalists actually get away
with this thesis that everything was pristine and perfect before.
Well there wasn’t any way of the feedback wasn’t there
to say what we were talking is crap.
Here we have voting mechanisms, we have open criticism capabilities
and we’ve always felt that any open source movement
because of the Linus’ law, given enough eyeballs,
all bugs are shallow, there is an equivalent
of shallow people being exposed more easily
when they use a social network
because they don’t have any of the traditional protection.
So I think that probably social networks are definitely forces
of being able to make people act more honestly.
Thank you JP. Owen? MySpace.
I don’t know that social networks make us more honest but social networks
and social media and the social web creates a level of transparency
that makes us a lot more accountable.
And it exposes a lot more those things that the general public perceives
as incorrect or inaccurate.
I think that’s an important distinction because I think honestly
there's a much different definition than to accountability
and accountability is one of the big benefits
that we get from the transparency of the social web.
So Don, if you could pass the mike to Don at the other table?
Okay, very good.
And Don will you report for your table as well?
Very good.
I think to answer the question
you need to differentiate between individuals and institutions.
An individual, I think it’s a tough issue,
but in the sense that honesty is a foundation of trust,
if you as an individual wants to have trusting relationships
with other people you need to be honest
so that would argue that over time people’s behavior
will change to be more truthful unless
in order to have any kind of reputation brand.
I think it’s much clearer when it comes to institutions
and the key thing is transparency.
That because of social networks and the web as a whole,
institutions are becoming naked.
Transparency is a new force that’s causing companies to be,
I believe and I’ve done a lot of research on this,
to be more open and to be more truthful and honest.
We don’t always see it but that’s the general trend.
Basically companies are going to be naked,
and if you're going to be naked fitness is no longer optional,
if you're going to be naked you better be buff.
And so companies that are on this can use transparency as a friend,
they can sort of undress success, if you like,
and build relationships with others.
This is a new force, sunlight is the best disinfectant basically,
and I think on the question of institutions,
it’s unquestionable that there are very good things happening.
Okay, in terms of our group, briefly –
Yeah, especially in places on your table,
knowing you as what you discussed with Reid.
You know what? We never got into that.
That’s very good, I'm surprised.
It’s more interesting that you started a discussion about social networks
and all of a sudden you're into a discussion
about human behavior; about newspapers TV,
democracy, innovation, intellectual property,
the nature of corporations, competition, competitive advantage,
relationship capital is a new source of competitive advantage,
and just the fact that we had that conversation is kind of interesting.
Gina made a very good point.
I should – why don’t you make it about art and artists
and how the music industry is causing some change.
So the thing that is really interesting from my perspective
is we’re now going through yet another shift in terms
of what makes a successful either artist or organizer.
Today, in a social world, and the analogy that I think
is appropriate is actually when we moved from silent movies talkies.
And the fact of the matter is silent movie start
didn’t necessarily make that transition.
In the same way, the characteristics
and the things that are going to make whether it’s an artist
or an organizer or just the creator of social experience is successful in 2010
and beyond given this new technology and these new social platforms
is actually the days of a shy artist who has all of these handlers
that they basically can be shy and brooding in the corner
just making their art, they actually may not make it
because the distribution channels and the ways that art
is discovered actually on some level requires being outgoing and being social.
So I think that it’s going to be one of these very interesting
transitions just as we’ve seen in the past with different technologies
actually rewarding and being very appropriate for some kinds
of personalities and some types of ways of organizing and not others.
Thank you Gina.
Just one quick example.
I want to do this because we’re on the web
and there's this view that at Davos people talk about stuff
but nothing ever happens.
This morning I attended a breakfast hosted by Mark Parker,
the CEO of Nike and it launched something I think is historic,
the Green Exchange and it’s basically using social network
so that companies will contribute their intellectual property,
anything processed, best practice, software ideas that have to do
with improving the environment, cutting carbon, and so on.
They're going to place it in the comments on the idea
not just a rising tide lifts all boats and the other big problem
in the world, but as part of a new thinking about open innovation
and competitive strategy and this is something
that’s really important, in any companies that are watching,
I’d encourage them to join in and participate.
And it makes a point about social networks, it’s not just about –
They make companies more honest.
Yeah, making friends.
It also enables companies to think differently
about intellectual property, to innovate differently,
and to solve some big social problems, so that’s very important.
Thank you, Don.
Now I'm going to ask the inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee,
to give us some thoughts.
Do you want to talk about –
I think, let me say about social networks generally that to ask a question
like that I think is wrong to treat them all the same
because it depends on how you design them
and little changes I think, for example Facebook
found just little changes in how you treat privacy
can dramatically affect the way the social network works,
the fact that eBay works isn’t because they handle money very well,
they protect their products really well, it’s because threw
in their reputation-based system for where you can trust the other person
and it happened to be a reputation-based system that worked.
Other sites that, I won't mention, but secure ones,
other sites in which people tweet about or give information
about what they typically think about what just happened where there is
a reputation-based system where people can push the messages up and down,
they don’t work and it’s still generally… when you go there you find
as much garbage…
It turns out that really small changes in the way
you design the interaction system, where you design this social machinery…
voting systems out there, well we’ve had voting systems…
on a social networks which breaks across countries and…
and actually can't we think of something better than voting,
I think we’d be using democracy because there would be nothing better.
Winston Churchill said for years and years and years.
On social networks, every single social network
we get a chance to redesign the way we actually make decisions together,
the way we collectively design towards the truth,
and I hope we’re really at the beginning of that path
in each of the social networks because at the moment, the experiments
and I hope we find some really effective ways
so that the problem would become very much more reliable
so that I can put much more trust in it.
So Tim you created the web, so how do you feel about this preferred –
I invented it, one person this guy sent me an email
and I called him back because he was really mad
and I said “I did not, I created the web,”
and he said “How can you say you created the web and...?”
So what do you think about the third question then?
What do you think we should do in institutions to make social networks
to make sure that they improve the world better?
Well actually I think we have to study, for example we’re subjecting
the people to study the web as a scientific discipline
because nobody is studying it and so we need people studying
social networks who combine some psychology and some anthropology
and the computer science… fancy new system.
So we need to study web science and look at what we’ve got
and really analyze how a need spreads, I think it’s fascinating how
a need spreads because of Twitter.
We need to do it because we need to build other systems
but also we need to analyze it because we need to figure out
whether the social network that we built now is actually unstable
and somebody thought of a really good conspiracy theory
which said don’t believe all the people of the world…,
don’t believe everything that you see, everything you hear on the news,
and don’t believe any of these bloggers but do go
and do something that’s very disruptive on the frontier.
Then how do we know?
Have we got any – we don’t know how the system works,
we don’t have to analyze how those so maybe the whole thing
could be like an unstable stock exchange,
or an unstable… exchange out there unless we think about it
just like we have to analyze the stock exchange.
Very interesting. Thank you, Tim.
George? And then Facebook?
You can switch to Facebook whenever you like in your computer.
So here a series of ideas which are probably unconnected
as they came out of their table, I think they were interesting.
Before I go there, this question about honesty,
my view has been for 10 years that it should be good
because in the future everyone will know everything about you
and although a famous golfer in the United States, Tiger Woods,
thought he could cover up for many years
and he found out he could not
and ultimately it will all come out whatever you do.
That’s scary. Thank you.
Yeah. He had to be mentioned this morning.
So changing society, a couple of points here.
I think it was made by our friend from Best Buy,
he said that one of the biggest impacts will be how social will change leadership.
I think it was Don who talked about Don talked about how some CEOs
were shutting down social sites and so there's going to have to be
some reformational leadership so that it’s a challenge to all leadership,
even CEOs, even Presidents, etc, number one.
And the second point of changing society is this is creating an obligation to listen,
not to talk but to listen, we all will have to listen.
So here are the risks.
A lash back by institutions, some people on the table thought
that there will be a lash back coming.
Institutions will shut it down and will stop it, it will censor it,
even in democracies.
Who said open was good? We all claim open is good.
Why did we claim that?
Three of the most secretive companies in the world: Apple, Google,
and Amazon are very secretive.
They love us to all be open but they don’t want to be open.
So who claims that open is good?
I'm hoping Steve Jobs who’s claiming that open was good.
And last thought here on the risks is that we,
and going back to Mr. Tapscott’s example about these videos
he got on education, you might assume
that that’s the general belief of the world but maybe it’s not,
maybe that’s a small slice, maybe we are taking these small samples
considering them to be the mass opinion, they may not be the mass opinion.
And last one on how we leverage this, you want to tell your story for Best Buy?
About harnessing young people?
Can you introduce yourself?
…with Best Buy.
I just wanted to – something we did with Twitter
which is just a practical thing that I think
back to Evan’s point where you’ve got to find businesses using it
and people ought to find use out of it.
We had an employee that came up with an idea
how the connection used Twitter to help customers with the problems
they might have with their computers, any computers or devices
that they're having problems with.
And how do you use Twitter?
We have a big work force, a young workforce,
probably the biggest, largest, organized young workforce
in America probably outside the Army and you have to engage this population
and you can't just kind of employ them in a contractual basis,
you have to inspire them, they come and go, they don’t have to work for you.
They can turn up in your building but they don’t have to work for you.
So one of the things that we did was this… you'll see it on Twitter.
So if you have a computer problem you can do it now,
you can just say “Hey my BlackBerry is not working.
I’ve got this, this, and this”…, and we have a voluntary army of employees,
now voluntary in the sense that they’ve all got jobs inside Best Buy,
they might be working in the store, they might be working in a call center,
they might be a corporate employee, could be just an employee
and they basically say “Hey we will sign up to solve problems”
and they just do this between things that they’ve got to do,
usually most of the time their boss is really happy with it
because it’s helping customers at Best Buy.
Do you pay them?
But they're employed by Best Buy.
But there's no extra pay for this?
No, no.
I mean it’s volunteer, they decide to do it.
What's interesting is that if they're in the store they're actually helping
the same customers that they're helping either coming
into the store so they're just meeting people where they are.
So that’s a useful little wave, about 3000 people have signed up for it
and it’s just a useful, helpful tool that came out of using Twitter
and so I just – that’s what it was.
And our last point was it’s more valuable listening to them than talking to them.
Thank you, George. Are we ready to end?
Owen, do you have anything from MySpace?
We’ll do some feedback from Facebook? Randi you want to?
Sure. So we threw out the same question to people on Facebook as we were discussing
and in about two minutes we had 6000 responses come in and overwhelmingly,
people are saying making people more connected with their friends,
I was secretly breathing a sigh of relief
that playing games online more was a –
That’s a sample of 6000 replying online in the last 15minutes?
Two minutes.
Okay.
And then what was interesting is there was a
some interesting age differences so we see people who are 35+
are more interested in the games and gaming section
and it was also interesting to see how being aware
of current events also ranged pretty important to people,
especially young people, we’re seeing 10%,
pretty significantly larger than game playing as being aware of the news
and what's going on in the world.
It’s just interesting I think to bring that many people
to the conversation also.
Yes, thank you. Very good.
So next table, you want to report for that table or is there anyone...
I'm David…
First of all my mother is addicted to Farm Ville
so keep your mothers away from the games.
She drives to the house and then she opens the computer
and like – to feed the cow before she’ll talk to me.
It’s dangerous this Farm Ville thing.
But I think the game part’s new.
Speaking of the games, I'm just going to try
and find some of the things from our table that I haven’t heard yet.
I think there was a good discussion about whether social networks
waste time or add time and I think the consensus from most
of the people at the table is that social networks
have improved value that they're saving both time and money.
There were companies that had cut their marketing budgets by 8%
because social networks were a more effective way to get the word out
and their employees were doing it.
People were having meetings for work reasons
and saving time because they just knew a lot more
and were finding faster answers.
So I think the general view was the impact on society
was to increase its value by saving time and money.
In terms of the risk, and I weigh it
because I think we had a slightly different view about the honesty issue.
I think we have a real concern about trust
and a real concern about truth not because people are inherently
not truthful but because there isn’t enough literacy to know what is truth
and what is not.
And we had profound stories that social networks
gave wrong information about companies which killed their stock prices
and then people made it back so there's no regulation on this,
the regulations haven’t caught up with it.
We think there's a real risk of the fact that there
is a generational knowledge being passed,
that people are using more education and... than teachers,
they always prefer to do that but now it’s becoming easier,
their reputations can move quite quickly and there's a real thinking
and I think we were hearing that earlier that people are moving fast.
So we do see a real risk to having literacy, education,
teaching catch up with this phenomenon.
Then lastly, in terms of what to do many things,
one is addressing the literacy issue, the other is we feel very strongly
about the digital divide.
There are 4 billion people
whose access to the internet is through their mobile phones.
They really use SMS, they need vaccinations,
they need to care for their children, they need news.
The economics and the technology are moving to more advanced things
but we can't forget these people because if they don’t come along
with us we’re creating two societies, not one
and that won't be good for society or its economics.
Very good. Thank you, David.
So this table, who reports? Owen?
So if anyone wants to intervene we have a little bit more than 10 minutes left
so let me know and at the end I will ask all the discussion leaders
to wrap up the session and talk to us about what they learned during
the session again so we have 10 minutes. Owen.
Great. First of all to the person that brought me the water, thank you.
I think I’ve never been so happy to receive a bottle of water before.
I can speak again.
We had a pretty broad ranging discussion that went a number of different areas.
The three themes that I think came out of it
were what impact can we have now that social networking is where it is
and I think the information that you shut down
one social network inside of a company or inside a community
and another social network just simply spurts up and takes off,
people move their social networking to another platform,
I think the general consensus around the table was that the genie
is out of the bottle, this digital disruption has occurred
and so we then try to direct the conversation towards
“Okay, how does that impact society?
What do we want to do? What should we do?”
One great point that was made by Jeremy was that there really is a difference
and that we should separate the issues of privacy
and regulation of data.
And this notion that data lives on forever and that there is a potential role
for regulation in terms of how it is that we should protect society
in terms of how we manage the data both in how companies use it towards business
and monetization strategies as well as how it is available
and certainly the role of government and the term “big brother”
was certainly brought up in availability of that data far into the future.
And then the last thing that came up at our table
and unfortunately we weren’t able to go into but I thought was interesting,
I think there was general interest in our table is our social networks
truly bringing together global communities like we oftentimes
think or hear that they are or are they really just bringing together
the communities that exist… to extend them maybe country by country
and one of the examples that was brought up was there
are social networks in certain countries that are much,
much larger – that are the dominant social networks
that aren’t MySpace or Facebook or Twitter
which I think we often perceive as the dominant social networks
that the entire globe is using.
We weren’t able get into the discussion but I thought the risk
was an interesting one so that was what our table discussed.
Okay, thank you very much.
I was trying to go to see what people were saying on Twitter
but there looks like we have a so let’s hear this one out.
Are people in social networks moving too fast,
sacrificing truth and reputation?
Lots of areas like hundreds and hundreds of pieces of feedback here.
Has anyone have any question or remark before we ask for discussion
leaders to wrap up the session?
Okay so let’s have a look at I was trying to find a question in there.
That’s one of the filtering issues here which you can see
is that filtering the questions from the rest is not the best.
All right, so I'm going to ask the discussion leaders to
Reid do you want to wrap up the session?
I'm sure you can share with us what you’ve learned
and where you see this is going.
I'm going to try and pass you the mike, very far away.
So this is something – I won't take this as what do I learn
because these are things I live and breathe on a daily basis.
What I will say is some of the things that I think have emerged
as means or ideas I think that some of the key questions
here are from hopefully mostly for good or majorly for good.
There is an inevitable tidal wave of what's happening in terms
of everyone being present with these technologies.
And while the maybe potential institutional back lash,
there maybe some question about is open inherently good although
I think many people will defend transparency
and openness is inherently good and maybe some companies
should be a little more open.
I think that the question is really given the fact
that that ship has sailed and we do live in an environment
where we are living in a network world, the question then becomes
how do you do that effectively, how do you minimize risk issues,
and how do you maximize the benefits that you can get from this.
And for example in terms of Facebook polls,
staying connected is extremely important not just socially
but also professionally in terms of what's going on in your industry.
Industries are in the process of I think a lot of transition.
You can just ask any journalist about what's going on
and you'll get a very good insight into how much these technologies
are actually changing the landscape in which we live.
And so both individually I think it should be good to have
a kind of what is your personal social media strategy
but also in terms of the organizations and what you're trying to accomplish.
I think thematically in terms of the fact that when you have this
openness what kinds of things can you accomplish?
Can you find talent and expertise two degrees away from you?
Can you publicize what your mission is or find people in the world
to participate in discussion that will help you with those things?
And I think that as you identify the issues I don’t think
you can hold back the future, I think you can just try to still the car
a little bit because the ship is left port. Thank you.
Thank you, Reid. So Gina maybe? Don and then Evan.
Gina are you ready? Don do you want to start?
Randi I'm sorry Mark is not here because I wanted to say to him
please don’t send out an email to 350 million people
because one of the unintended consequences of that was
for people who are Mark’s friends, all of a sudden the whole world
wanting to get closer to Mark sent friend requests to people like me.
I wondered what’s going on, I was getting hundreds
of friend requests coming in here every hour
and it’s like I must have done something really amazing.
Okay, I’ll just make one observation,
I’d like to go back into this thing about the issue about journalists
and that Michael talked about this world where we all thought that journalists
and the traditional newspapers with the source of all truth
and somebody said why is that the case.
Well obviously it has to do with the character of the old media
versus the news buff and they were able to establish that view
because they in fact ran the press and we had the traditional media
that was one, that it was centralized
and you can control the message so what we’re talking about today
is there's a new medium that’s highly distributed,
it’s decentralized, it’s one-to-one, it’s many of the many,
and freedom of the press was a great idea especially
if you're one of the press.
Well now we kind of all do.
So we have this thing that sort of has this awesome neutrality
and will it be good, will it be bad,
will it make us more open or not or whatever.
To me this is a reflection of everything that’s good
and bad in society and it will be what we want it to be
which is why issues like censorship, to make sure that they really
have privacy controls and so what are really key issue
but it’s not just for them, it’s for all of us in terms
of the way they use this technology
to ensure that it’s used for the public good
and for the good of all of us basically.
Thank you Don. Gina?
So let me maybe just summarize some of what I think are the interesting
contrarian views that I actually think came out in this conversation
that I thought was really cool
and also something we should continue to talk about.
One is secrecy and some of the most powerful companies
today in terms of driving growth and change
and real revenue are much more secretive than if you take corporations as a whole,
I think we need to look at that.
I think there are some sort of standard ways we talk about privacy
or transparency or trust at sort of a macro level,
I think we have to start from here and leaving this conversation
getting more and more granular in that conversation.
In some cases privacy matters and privacy is paramount
and I think in other situations we are going to be more transparent
and comfortable and I think from here I would encourage all of us to sort of
take it down the level in terms of granularity.
And I think the last point that was made here is that that it’s worth spending
more time on is the fact that small changes do make a big difference
and it is so easy whether you're creating services as some of us in this room are
and evolving them dynamically that small decisions
in the product actually have in some cases intending consequences
and in other cases unintended consequences that need to be looked at
and everybody is moving so fast and you're talking about this volume
of people using these social technologies in different ways,
our CTO describes it as three-dimensional chess,
and I think that that is very accurate here.
So I think there are so many things
that have been great that we’ve covered this morning
and I think the conversations and really the places
where there is tension and where there are contrarian views
are really the places to go from this.
Gina before we pass it to George, since the mike is here, just one question.
You have a collection of how many social networks on Ning?
There have been over two million Ning networks created
with 5000 new ones created every day.
So I just wanted some of your views on –
Some of those are domain-mapped so Camscore doesn’t actually – just as insight.
So some people are saying that a huge – Facebook, Twitter,
and MySpace will like take it all and I just wanted your views on that.
Are we going to have more millions of social networks
or is it going to consolidate into five or ten?
I don’t think it’s going to consolidate, I mean,
whenever you see technology trends you do see dominant players
in specific things, whether it’s LinkedIn professional identity,
whether it’s Facebook to connect you to the people that you know in your life
and you went to school with and others or whether it’s about
meeting new people around your interests and passions,
I actually think that all of these work so well together
that it’s not as though it’s some game and I think that when you actually look
at how technologies generally evolve they tend to go from their own
fixed experiences into platform experiences that have a lot of different ways
for people to interact with them and there's a place for both.
Thank you, Gina.
So real quick, we have a few minutes left, George.
Just a few quick thoughts on trust.
Forrester has done a number of surveys on trusted media
and blogs are one of the least trusted media
in the United States below magazines, newspapers, TV,
one of the least trusted media are blogs.
My feeling after two hours here is that this all feels very immature.
It feels like we’re sitting here on campfires
and why it’s like we’re just chewing on bones,
it just feels like we’re just getting going here.
That being said the door will not close, the door will open even wider.
And if you look at our data on the Y-generation,
that’s 18 to 28 versus the X-generation which is 29 to 40,
you see incredible velocity towards all these media.
So it is coming.
And I have a friend who’s my age who said none of the cool stuff
will happen until we’re all dead,
so we all could die before all the cool stuff could happen.
It feels immature but we’re going there.
Thank you very much. Evan Williams.
I agree with the notion that it’s very, very early and I think
of all the changes we’ve talked about probably we’re underestimating
where the changes will happen and how much they will happen
to these technologies.
Then on a positive note one thing I don’t think I’ve talked about enough
and really changes society is where the dramatic things happen
in society is that we don’t have freedom of expression or we’re undergoing crisis
and this is something that I think these technologies
do in a powerful way that didn’t happen before.
Basically if you give people a way to form groups
and to find that there’s someone else out there who shares
a notion to do something, the likelihood of doing something dramatically skyrockets
and this is something that we’ve seen on Twitter many times
they get excited with simple things like in a story we heard
a couple of years ago when someone tweeted something in Toronto
and it was around Christmas and it was really cold outside
and they got the notion to go outside and do a spontaneous sort of effort
to go help the homeless people and give them clothes and food.
And it was a person sitting alone in their apartment
and because they were able to connect with others online they formed a group
who just went out to the streets and did that right then
and it became something that they did regularly.
And then you see the huge movements to help people out in Haiti currently
on all the social networks.
And I just tweeted and I learned a new term from Oreo here,
slaptivism, it’s about people feeling like they did something by putting
a ribbon on or tweeting that you should donate money,
perhaps if they haven’t donated money themselves,
and feeling good about that, that is definitely happening
but I think it also is a fact that more people are doing stuff
because they're motivated by others around them
and they're connected to instead of sitting in their apartment
and that’s very promising to me. Thank you.
Thank you, Evan. Mousa Musa.
Yeah I think we’ve learned something really big here.
As the statistic on Facebook is that young people
are more aware of current events, they're more interested in current events, right?
And with the terms that people are backing social causes
on social media I don’t see a reason why we shouldn’t make them more social,
while we shouldn’t have a branch dedicated to social causes
because it’s not just about social causes, there's also business in it as well,
you're attracting teenagers.
And as Forrester, the statistic is people under 18
are double so there will be more double people interested in your current events
so if you just put more interest into social activity more people will join.
Thank you. Can you pass the mike
to Randi Zuckerberg while he hear Owen Van Natta, closing remarks?
It’s interesting, we came together
to talk about how social network is changing society
and I think there are a lot of really great ways that social networking
is having a super, big, positive impact on society
and some of them have been mentioned here.
We bring together this group of people who are obviously interested
in discussing this issue and one of the things
that I take away from it is we’re all very concerned about privacy,
we’re all very concerned about how youth is operating within these social networks
and how they may not understand the future implications of what it is that they do today
and one of the things I take away from this is that somebody
who is part of one of these social networks, we have a responsibility
to make sure that we are transparent and that we don’t confuse people,
that they understand what it is that they're doing.
We may not be able to educate them as to exactly what the repercussions
will be if they put pictures up of themselves in college
that they ultimately 10 years later are not going to want digitized
and available on the web, that s something that society
and social norms are going to have to, I think,
ultimately impact but what we can do is we can make sure
that we don’t obscure things and we don’t confuse users
and it’s something that I can tell you, as we take a much more user-centered
approach to how it is that we’re building out MySpace,
we’re committed to making sure that users at least understand exactly
what privacy settings are, what is being shared in what places
and how does that information flow, so those are my thoughts.
Thank you, Owen. Randi, closing remarks.
Thanks. So at our table we discussed identity quite a bit,
I think that’s going to be the huge trend of 2010 that we discussed
how to take your identity and carry it with you wherever you are online.
I also thought there was an interesting point too about current events
and looking at people aged 13 to 17, how interested they were.
One of the questions I get asked a lot is old media versus media which I hate but,
are they cannibalizing each other.
I think that there's incredible opportunity for every one to work better together.
I think you need that social filter of what your friends are saying
but you also really need that expert content
and that’s more important to us than ever right now.
I also still agree that we’re still at the beginning of unlocking the potential.
We’ve certainly come a long way from a few years ago
when people said “We’re just going to hire some college
interns to manage our social media presence,”
and a long way from a year or two ago when politicians were saying
“I don’t know, should I get on these sites?”
and connect with people.
But at the same time when I look at how it still excited the media,
it gets about like “Oh my God, this situation happened in Haiti
and people respond on Facebook and Twitter,”
I mean, of course they respond there because that’s where people are
and that’s where 350 million or 500 million people around the world
are and I hope that we get to a time when that’s not exciting to media
any more because it just fully integrated that people understand
that that’s where people are taking online.
And then the last thing, someone made a really interesting point
about – that we need to do a little more research,
we need to work with data a little more in the academics.
I think that we really are in a position of responsibility
that we need to understand the impacts this is making on the world,
how people are forming connections in unlikely areas of the world
and how that can impact for social responsibility.
Thank you, Randi, and all the discussion leaders
and all the thousand people or so who watched us live on this…
So those feed cameras are here if you want to leave a thought about the session,
just one and Steve will load them to YouTube as well.
They are not to be taken away, please,
but you can do that you can be on the Davos channel
and I want to thank you very much and have a great World Economic Forum.