“Putting the customer in the centre of all we do is why we have been successful” says Carol Johnson, COO of Sensis Yellow Pages. And success is indeed the case. Telstra has just announced 8.4% growth for Sensis, Australia’s Yellow and White Pages. While the paper product has lost value in other parts of the world the Sensis team has increased organic print revenue by 3.3% (which is especially impressive given the first half is when they close the big Metro books). The Yellow Pages Metro campaigns have seen the highest first half revenue growth in four years. White Pages exceeded double digit growth again! And there was triple digit growth (21%) achieved for Sensis’ online advertising for Real Estate, Auto and IT sites in China.

While this is exciting news it has created a bit of a dilemma for our management team. On Friday we called an emergency management meeting to determine whether it would be better working as an “Island Caretaker” on the Great Barrier Reef or putting our occasional online promotional efforts behind Sensis? We went through an analysis to come to our conclusion.

The job (as posted on the Internet) as “Island Caretaker” on the Great Barrier Reef involves some serious tasks and there have been 34,000 applicants from over 200 different countries. This indicates some pretty fierce competition for the job. As “Island Caretaker” we would be required to feed the fish, (Prasad, our CIO, has first dibbs on this since he has memorized every variety of marine life and their preferred choice of cuisine), clean the pool, (John, our VP of Sales, claims to have expert experience in this area having worked as a pool boy during his early education years), and report to Tourism Queensland and the world, (it would be my role to blog and tweet about the virtues and bliss of island life in the hopes of generating some visitor traffic to the island). Now compensation seems to be guaranteed in the form of warm weather, (at -35 Celsius in Winnipeg, Canada this has been a strong motivating factor in our job application), blue skies, crystal water and pure sand. While we will need our lawyer to review the contract carefully, in essence this opportunity is being touted as “The Best Job in the World”. We have agreed that our best strategy is a “leap of faith” under these unique circumstances.

Now, regarding Sensis, we feel there is a rather natural fit here. The duties are not specified other than to share the truth, and it appears only if we are inclined to do so. It is hard not to be inclined to do so when you look at the extraordinary story behind Sensis’ success. It is one of a group of very talented women who turned around an industry through extraordinary leadership, vision, and collaboration. Their mantra of “I think I can win” is an energy and spirit that permeates the whole cross-functional team. The employees I have had the opportunity to exchange communications with are excited to be a part of “their” company’s success. The company cares and they in turn care for the company. Part of the reengineering included reversing the management model putting employees and customers first. This is central to the foundation and to the awesome results of year after year growth in usage, revenue, and shareholder value.

Great leaders know how to touch hearts and make a positive difference in the lives of everyone they encounter. They are not arrogant or proud, boastful or self-centered. They embrace differences and motivate through simple acts of kindness. When faced with difficulty you know them through their actions. They can heal with a smile, a touch, or a wise word. Great leaders have followers who want to be around them. Gandhi, Churchill, and Mother Teresa all had an enormous number of followers. There is a grass roots momentum at Sensis that has been evidenced for a couple of years now that leads one to conclude that there is exceptional leadership talent at work and play there.

Could the Sensis leadership team have an impact in the North American marketplace? Could their inspirational story and leadership attract a whole new breed of leaders that in turn would be like Sensis, care about their directory and agency customers, make time to meet for feedback, input and to solve issues, be committed through their actions to growing strong relationships and celebrating the successes in the mutual promotion of the industry sector? Carol Johnson will be a Key Note presenter at the upcoming YPA Convention in April. I guess time will tell. In the meantime, we can dream.

So, while the “Island Caretaker” position looks very enticing our team has agreed that we will chose to continue to support and applaud Sensis from our whole heart in return for Kiwis. (i.e. John has asked that I clarify that I am referring to “the fruit”).  Our address is: 201,701 Pembina Hwy, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada R3M 2L7 (sometimes mail sent to the geographic centre of North America or the coldest place on earth, gets through).

Meeting adjourned.

Are North American students being left behind? It is amazing to read articles in our daily newspapers on how mobile phones are being banned from American and Canadian classrooms while in other countries such as Japan, the Philippines, and Germany the mobile phone has been embraced as a strategic, technological tool for delivering enhanced learning in language, science and in math.

With more computing power than an average computer of the 1990s today’s mobile phone is the most powerful integrated technological device of our era. 3.5 billion people have a cell phone of the 5 billion on the planet. We need to embrace this technology, and set the example for our children on acceptable use to educate respectful future citizens. Running from the technology is the not the answer.

The mobile phone is a powerful educational tool and has proven to have positive impact on the learning experience. A test in North Carolina showed that math students given specially integrated cell phones to assist with algebra studies found students performed 25% better on exams. A New York school that defied the cell phone ban, received free Samsung flip-phones where students could earn prepaid minutes for high test scores and good behavior, discovered they had more empowered students and better classroom control. Teachers developed better communications through text messaging and the school was able to monitor the student phone use and reprimand for any abuse.

Schools spend hundreds of millions of dollars on computers at an average cost of $1,000 per year per child. From a cost efficiency basis there is a good argument for cell phone use as part of the daily classroom. From an educational perspective here are just a few of the benefits:

* Math – cell phones have a calculator function

* Schedule and calendar functions are available

   Notebook for taking notes

* Stopwatch for timing assignments or presentations

* SMS – for voting, polling or short quizzes

* Internet browser – 3G provides fast connection for research online

* Camera – you can photograph that growing plant from seed

* Video – science experiments that only happen once you can record

* Google Maps for history assignments

* Microphone – for music class and memorizing a song

* Bluetooth technology provides reporting back to home base

* GPS – cool scavenger hunts anyone?

* Applications and software – an exploding area with programs like m-explore, vlingo, and m-learning

The mobile phone is getting smaller and more powerful every day. Soon educators around the world will be handing our the equivalent of credit card size cell phones in every classroom with preloaded software and details on class contacts and assignments. Are North American children going to be left behind? I hope not. Text mania is as strong here as anywhere. Children send on average 400 texts a month. They take their cell phone with them wherever they go, even to bed. We need to be apart of their world, to engage them and to provide leadership and education on the appropriate social use of this technology.

Hey, honey those racey photos you just posted on my Facebook wall, well you are in big trouble, Facebook owns them, in “perpentuity”. Now that means “forever”. Too late to reach for the little sock to cover up as their new contract says: “You hereby grant Facebook irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license. If you remove the content, the license granted automatically expires, however you acknowledge that the company may retain archived copies of your user content”. Forget your dream of a political career – unless you remembered your Facebook privacy settings. Did you? If so, you just have me and my vast social network of mashup-crazed girlfriends to worry about.

According to compete.com Facebook is the worlds most popular social networking site boasting over 1.2 billion visits this January. My Space fell to second spot with 810 million and micro-blogging Twitter rose to third spot from 22nd with 54.2 million visits. Flixster, LinkedIn and Tagged each gained in popularity in the past month. So, you can imagine with over 64 million users how big the uproar was when Facebook made changes to its user contract allowing them to do whatever they want with your uploaded content.

Users say they were not notified and demand ”full control” anywhere, anytime, over “their” created content on Facebook. But didn’t they read the clause that says Facebook has the right “without notice” to make changes to its user agreement? Also, continued use of Facebook creates the offer, acceptance, and consideration needed to form a contract.

Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, claims their decision was in the best interests of the user but has failed to communicate clearly how this is the case. This is not the first run-in Facebook has had with its users over privacy concerns. The controversial Beacon service that automatically placed ads in members profiles based on their activities was met with petitions and harsh criticizm. Facebook apologized and pulled the service but did face a couple of class-action lawsuits.

There are certain hazards to sharing over social networks. The internet is a highly viral environment and in the very connected world we live in comments, photos, videos, and the like, live and breathe much longer than often originally intended. As such picking the sites where you are comfortable is important. User contracts should always be reviewed. For example if you are concerned about sharing photos over Facebook you might consider posting on Google’s Picassa. Their user contract sets forth in section 11 that “it has no right, title or interest to your intellectual property unless you agree in writing with Google”.

“Words, words, beautiful words masking a heart that’s breaking, breaking….” Can we really build computer intelligence through tagging, data mining, and dissecting words into stems, senses, and syntaxes of senses to make the semantic web a reality? I suppose the process is not dissimilar to trying to make sense of archaic Elizabethan language for a modern day audience.

“Have you the heart? When your head did but ache, I knit my hankercher about your brow, the best I had…”

Arthur was the heir to the throne but his uncle, King John usurped the throne sending young Arthur to the Tower and to have his eyes burned out by his keeper and best friend Hubert. One of the darkest of Shakespeare’s scenes in “King John” involved Arthur negotiating for his eyes to be spared. Playing this role was a challenge. Much of the language was difficult. By skipping on a rope and reciting the lines I discovered that reason was found in the off beat of the rhyme and in the haunting repetition of the letter “h”. The brilliance of the horrific imagery needed only to be placed not played. Shakespeare was brilliant in providing everything an actor needed to bring his work to life. The meaning was there in the rhythm of the language, the syntax, and stem. 

So how do computational linguistics decipher modern day language and web search to create valid meaning in our lives?

The semantic web, where web content is presented not as documents but as items of data linked by both meaning and relationship was envisioned nearly 15 years ago by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web. Since 2000, 23 billion data relationships have been coded using a protocol called RDF or resource description framework. RDF enables a definition of relationship of each data item to others, not just within a document but wherever that data may be on the web. The semantic web attempts to deliver search results from thousands of documents into one convenient collection and it does so in a personalized way. Think of the full functionality of Linked-In or Facebook using the RDF approach and you can imagine where we are headed.

BooRah a semantic and natural language processing aggregator based in Mountainview, California is attempting to extract user reviews, and blogs to summarize and rate local businesses. They score and analyze the content and package it in a usable form. For example a search for “hotels” in San Diego can return results that are more category specific such as delivering on qualifiers like type of service, facilities, etc.. that are more personalized for the searcher. They use location qualifiers to provide more razor sharp search result delivery to searchers looking for the: “best calamari in Chicago”. 

There is no question that computational linguistic professionals can have a huge impact on our lives. In fact these changes in search will impact every search engine, online retailer, media publisher and most web sites.

But how fast will the semantic web be here? Well, just as every line of Shakespearian text is not decipherable, neither do I believe semantic technologies can be diffinitive in understanding human language and all its nuances. Its going to take time. Such a broad availability of metadata, annotation data and relationship data is required in order for computers to learn and there are huge numbers of people required to dedicate the intelligence and judgement for building and maintaining it.

Social networking tools such as weblogs, wikis, forums and popular networking sites like Facebook, You Tube, Linkedin and Twitter are changing how we relate with each other in our business, personal and community lives. The societal changes that we are going through are profound and should not be ignored or dismissed as being frivilous or short-lived.

Social marketing or social networking can be compared to attending simultaneous cocktail parties where you don’t need to worry about what to wear, about burning yourself with a curling iron, or about driving home via the backlanes. The benefits of attendance are often quite immediate. For example here is one of my recent experiences of interaction:

• I share an opinion on a forum
• a new contact reads my comment and visits my company website
• the new contact sends me a request to join me on linkedin which I accept
• a personal email enshews where the new contact shares their resume
• I introduce the new contact to another contact of mine whom I have met in a group conversation on another social networking site
• my previous contact, contacts the new contact (I hope a job enshews for this chap!)

The cool thing about social conversation marketing is that the fear that is often present when attending an in-person cocktail party is removed. I am certain that anyone reading this post knows what I mean. I am talking about those moments where a guy (thinking he is a geek musters the courage to start a conversation) and you also interested in speaking to him feel so self conscious when he approaches that you start talking about the weather while pouring your drink unconsciously into your right shoe. (This actually happened to me. I had to fly on a business trip following the event and people at the airport starred at me as I squished through the security line up. Then when I had to deposit my shoes on the security belt I left a trail for the security officers through security. Oh dear). Well, a great benefit to online cocktail parties is the lessening of these types of embarrassing moments and the opportunity to share more meaningful conversations and ideas.

Social networking sites have taken off around the world as more empowered consumers navigate the new frontier. This movement has certainly caught the attention of the top 100 retailers as 59% of them now have fan pages on Facebook. This is living proof that the business community recognizes the changes afoot and that social media sites are an important source of community connection, where they can reap the benefits of rapid exposure to new demographic groups; such as the millenials or gen xers. They also are recognizing that understanding and giving back to these communities is important and that touting company dogma is dismissed. A fan page is about empowering the consumer, putting them in control and making sure it is part of your overall integrated online marketing strategy to build customer loyalty and deepen relationships.

In the new world of social media marketing the old world metrics to measure success do not work because it is not about generating leads but rather about engagement. Measurement is different but simple. Success in this realm is about spreading an idea and going viral. It is about creating something, then sharing it, and then letting is go to take on a life of its own. The realm is routed in the universal law of nature if you will, that is that what goes around, comes around. You pay it forward.

Social media and social networking is not a trend or a fad in a moment of history it is a profound societal change in consciousness that is changing human communication, challenging old hierarchies, and redefining the DNA of human society. Understanding, participating and exploring this new space will open your consiousness to the unlimitless opportunities that abound.

P.S. I have stopped travelling with an extra pair of shoes in my brief case