I have been reading a great book by Daniel Pink called A Whole New Mind. The argument being put forward is that in today’s society, which Pink calls the Conceptual Age, a person is required to be more right-minded and therefore more inventive, empathetic, and meaningful - as opposed to a left-minded person who is by definition more analytical such as doctors, accountants etc.

Much of the discussion put forward by Pink mirrors a lot of the ideas we hold today about the ‘new’ Internet. Firstly, Pink says that society has transformed through stages of agriculture (farmers), industrial (factory workers), information (knowledge workers) to the conceptual age (creators and empathisers) - which is the period we are embarking on now. The movement from information to conceptual on the Internet is certainly the case.

The ‘new’ Internet - Web 2.0 - is a distinct shift from the simple publishing of one-dimensional information to a dynamic environment of creation, editing, contributing, recreation and definitely empathy for each others opinions, creations and contributions. Within each person’s Facebook profile we find a healthy dose of right brain conceptualisation.

Pink argues that the growth in influence of right-brain thinkers in this modern age is the result of a number of factors shaping our everyday society. Inter alia the growth of low cost knowledge economies in Asia and India has led to the outsourcing of so much work such as software development, accounting, and even medical by Western countries that it is making these left brain skills in the developed countries largely redundant. In their place is the demand for more designers, inventors, entrepreneurial types who can see the big picture - bring all the pieces together and so on. Similarly, improvements in technology that master many of the knowledge workers functions including the creation of software code, linear decision-making for medical diagnosis, number crunching for accounting and the bringing together of skills from every corner of the globe further exasperates the redundancies on these left brain services. It is easier today, according to Pink, for right brain dreamers to get their ideas realised with cheaper access to analytical and knowledge services.

This definitely is the case in the new Internet where we see a massive growth in start-up businesses that tap into both our creative and empathetic values; sites where we promote ourselves through building up our profiles for others to admire through friend networks and inter-link relationships, such as Facebook, Twitter, Friend Feed, and even the common blog. The growth in ‘platforms’ such as Ning or Yahoo Pipes further allow us to produce our own creations almost on the fly.

Obviously a society of purely right brained designers and creators doesn’t sound like an economic mecca and Pink spends the second half of his excellent book discussing ‘a whole new mind’, one that takes advantage of both the left and right minds. However, so far this book has been a great read and it is interesting for me to see the reality of psychology in things we do everyday in our business.

FB is cool, but I just don’t get it. Perhaps it’s because I am 30+ - a Gen - Xer with no role models and therefore no need to show off the number of friends I have accumulated (hic).

Seriously though I do actually believe that the likes of FB and MySpace are doomed, because they offer little more than a vain effort to accumulate social currency. There are often referred to terms as ego-oriented versus object-oriented social networks. Ego-oriented are all about the person (or profile). Object-oriented is all about the items (object). For example, You Tube and Flickr are often cited as object-oriented, the video and image sharing are more important than the person doing the sharing. These sites have something tangible to hang your hat on and therefore will well outlast the social ego-centric networks such as FB and MySpace.

The thing about the social network sites is that it is so easy to change sites. You have not stored anything on Facebook apart from your profile. In fact, it is easy just to setup a new social site elsewhere and import those same friends again using your address books. Hence the migration from My Space to FB occurred almost overnight while us oldies slept. With object-oriented sites the actual moving of the data is much harder and in most cases not practical. Take Del.icio.us as an example; if you have built up a stream of your bookmarks going to the effort to move these is almost unimaginable and leaving them behind equally insane.

So, FB is dead, what’s next? Clearly it is about the data (the object) - the web as an application, collecting data and making it more useful for the user. Moreover, the user has the power to collect the data they want from anywhere and manipulate it in their own ways. As most know we are well underway getting the Travel Generation project live and are currently in private alpha testing. An important part of this development is this ethos - giving the user the power to collect travel data that is pertinent to them and build rich itinerary and mapping outputs that are meaningful to them. I will keep you posted when we migrate to beta release soon.

I am so sorry that there has been no posts for some time - since we put the Bootstrap video up with have been inundating with enquiries and feedback. We are finalising the demo site and expect it any day now! Plus, I have only just graduated from the couch to the kitchen table with this broken ankle.

In the meantime, I have some cool news to report. We have been so busy here at Xebidy developing all our new stuff (Breathe website, Backpacking Queensland website, new functionality for Base Backpacker, and Wayward Bus and The Park websites getting close to going live) that we simply did not have time to do the designs for the new Oz Experience website. Anyway, a local company here in Queenstown called Fluid Designs was commissioned to do the designs - and they have come back with three awesome options. So much so in fact that we can’t decide which direction to go in next.

The solution: Bruce Thurlow at Oz Experience has asked the Oz Experience groups in Facebook for their opinion. I think this is awesome - after all these are the same customers that use and enjoy the product - they know the product better then the company themselves. Lets’ hope we get some constructive feedback.

Whats’ more, by empowering the customers he has created a bit of an aire of anticipation too. Once we get the feedback the plan is to report to the group and keep them in the loop, announce new functionality and generally spread he word. This sort of social marketing really gets me excited!!

I am really enjoying working on the Oz Experience project at present as everyday so many things come up that just reinforce what I am preaching about selling on the Internet and Web 2.0. The latest involves bad press.

I have talked about this before, particularly in our March article which discusses Creating a Relationship with your Customers; there exists a real risk in the greater social Internet of bad press blowing up in your face. In the case of Oz Experience a customer who travelled earlier this year has created an anti-Oz Experience page in Facebook. After I have read the guys complaint I immediately spotted one inconsistency - he had heard of problems and therefore decided to travel an alternative method. he had not actually experienced any problems. Although I only consult to Oz Experience I was well aware that during the time this guy is talking about they did everything possible to put on more buses and alleviate any backloads. Those customers that were well organised experienced very little problems.

It is interesting to see that there is already a comment to this regard by a customer on this Facebook page. From my point of view it is important that the company address the complaint immediately. I believe that Oz Experience should consider commenting on this guys page saying “hey did you personally experience any problems? and hey, we did have a few overloads due to people changing their minds at the last minute etc - but this is how we have reorganised our routes and bus management to avoid it happening again in the future”.

The important point for the rest of us, however, is that it is vital that you have someone monitoring the social Internet for these types of PR nightmares. Given the positive feedback of customers to this Facebook page it is unlikely that this will manifest itself much further and by monitoring the situation Oz Experience is more than well placed to deal with it quickly, efficiently and turn it into a positive. Can you say this of your business? Are you aware of what people are saying about your business on the Internet?

Just a plug - for those that are interested, Xebidy offers a monthly subscriber service to our Xefeed product which monitors the greater Internet, blogoshphere and media sharing sites for information continually about our clients, manually checking the information and then feeding the good news in an RSS format that can be reused as marketing material on your own site, and feeding bad news directly to you for dealing with quickly.

I have promoted heavily in the past the possibilities of using sites such as My Space and Bebo for promoting your company to the target market. I now have an amazing example of this working in practice. I am referring to two excellent groups that have been formed on the Facebook website for Oz Experience (one group is for both Oz Experience and Kiwi Experience).

As I have said before is that these types of social media inevitably lead to the growing of a like-minded community of users who are actively promoting the virtues of your company. The below quote is taken from an email sent to Oz Experience from one of the users of the Oz Experience group.

I’ve seen many a topic on here describing peoples bad experiences on the Oz or Kiwi Experience, which I must admit worried me slightly as I’m doing both, due to fly out in July.

I looked elsewhere to see what other peoples opinions were and found some groups on facebook that are dedicated to the Oz/Kiwi experiences, and each has nothing but praise for them both.

I think you need to be a member of facebook, but here’s the links…

1. Oz/Kiwi Experience
2. Oz Experience
3. Kiwi Experience

After reading these I feel a lot more positive about my trip than when I read this topic.

No matter how much you spend on marketing - you will never achieve as good leverage at this. The Oz Experience site has 401 members alone and over 190 images posted! Seriously, social media works!

You will need to register to Facebook to see the sites - which is easy, and does not hammer you with spam or anything.