Doc-Searls

First published to the generative identity website . No two people can share an exact understanding of anything deep and meaningful simply because we each have different contexts. Conversation relies upon and can never wholly substitute for context. Nevertheless, we can work to grow a shared understanding through conversation, and the relationship between conversationalists evolves in the process. The relationship is immanent in such informational exchange[1]. On one level, the opening paragraph here pertains to this being a blog post about conversations I’ve valued in recent months. But there’s another level given that ‘digital identity’ is our subject. Identity, in what you might call the natural and non-bureaucratic sense, is reciprocally defining and co-constitutive with relationships and information exchange[2]. Identities are immanent in the relationships immanent in information exchange. ...

This morning, my colleague Hector Arthur pointed me to a new report from Ovum’s Mark Little knowing I’d have a few comments to make. In the corresponding blog post – “Big Trust is Big Data’s missing DNA ” – Mark kicks off with: In the rush to monetize customer data, companies risk diminishing the trust people have in services and brands. Sustaining and growing people’s trust in services is not just about “doing the right thing,” but also makes commercial sense. As I like to say in other words, big data is worth more when wielded with customers rather than at them. Ovum calls this approach Big Trust. Big Trust strategies are designed to build “trust equity” with customers as a basis for making core services stickier, for selling new services, and for brokering personal data to commerce under a new set of trust principles. Public relations The outlook is informed, directly or indirectly I know not, by the excellence theory of public relations presented by James E Grunig more than twenty years ago, which champions the two-way symmetrical PR model. This model uses communication to negotiate with the public, resolve conflict and promote mutual understanding and respect between the organization and its stakeholders. My Six Influence Flows model from 2011 extends this work for the digital / social / big data age, and you can find out more about PR models in my post here if it’s your thing. Of course, this is not how the majority of practitioners practice PR, deferring instead to publicity and ‘spin’, which may be associated more closely with distrust than trust. But excellent practice is championed if, as a shrewd procurer, you know where to look. ...

“Data is the new oil." So said Clive Humby back in 2006. “Data is the new soil” said David McCandless in 2010. In between, in 2009, Meglena Kuneva , European Consumer Commissioner, said: “Personal data is the new oil of the internet and the new currency of the digital world.” I’ve long been excited about the advent of big data, and started posting about visualising the stuff back in 2008. If anything distinguishes the modern professional – in marketing, PR, HR, R&D, operations, etc. – from her predecessors, it’s the facility to work with data. ...