A new service provided by giffgaff (Meaning “Mutual giving”), is due to be launched on the 25th November, claiming to be “The mobile model of the future” where the more you do, the cheaper your calls become. They won’t be advertising but using Word-of-mouth to get their message out.

They don’t provide mobile phones, just a giffgaff SIM card using the O2 network that goes into any unlocked mobile, providing members with free or very cheap phone calls when they top-up.

“The way we’re run is different. Our members get involved in lots of ways. The more they put in, the more we reward them. Give and take, that’s what we’re about.

People powered means that the giffgaff community can get involved. For example by answering each other’s questions, or recruiting new members. This helps us keep our costs low, and our prices low. If you don’t want to get involved, you don’t have to. But if you do want to muck in, you’ll earn points toward a rebate – which could be as much as 100% of your top-ups.”

A number of ‘Tools’ that are free-to-hire, will be available for members to use to spread the ‘giffgaff’ word, they need to create a video of themselves using it and post it up to YouTube to earn free texts, data or cash.

The opening paragraph from Cluetrain (Which for some reason, because it’s been universally spoken about has lost it’s cool, which is utter rubbish. Good words live forever in the mind) “Markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.”

Please stop using high scoring words in scrabble to make presentations on social media / business design language nonsense

A recent post by Jeanne C Meister and Karie Willyerd in Harvard Business discussed how few socially connected organisations there are, indicating this will need to be redressed if companies are to be attractive to a future workforce that judges a potential employer by the social media freedom they allow their employees.

The social networking juice that powers a generation across sprawling vibrant communities has its feed forcibly cut off when the majority of company staff walk into work. All the potential of networked company communities, the opportunity for people to collaborate and and share knowledge is left at home and lost to the company.

Is it fear of lost productivity to idle chatter, tighter budgets and a weakening of central control that drives businesses to produce restrictive policies on social media use at work? These are long held arguments against developing a social media strategy, and simply don’t hold water. Devolving central control works. Flat organisational structures dissolves barriers between teams, ideas are generated with the customer and new products and services can be brought online quicker than through the traditional gate process. Vibrant social communities support this open structure and in todays rapidly changing economy, knowledge and innovation that drives the market can be at the heart of a company’s social community. Businesses have to let go of centralised control.

People who keep close to their customers by empowering their staff to engage directly with them across their internal and external comms channels, to solve problems and find solutions know what the market’s needs are and can respond faster to changes. In flat organisations, decisions are pushed through faster because the ideas are fed directly into decision makers without having to go through limiting chains of command. It also means the creativity of staff is released, and ideas and innovation blossoms.

Companies who are slow to release the energy of their own staff could have serious repercussions for them when the next generation of employees, the tuned in Millennials, who increasingly spend more of their time online being entertained, learning, researching, listening and talking to friends enter the workplace.

Think of the posibilities of a socially networked business. The ability to nurture new ways of thinking and innovating together is already proving sustainable (Look at the human genome project) and businesses who are tuning onto the opportunity are setting the standard for a new social business model that puts customers inside their products / service development process. These businesses tap into the human processor at the core of it’s workforce and free peoples minds to dream and create better products and services.

The winners and losers in business is borne out by Don tapscott and Anthony D. Williams who suggest in their seminal book ‘Wikinomics’, when web properties are compared, the difference is the losers build websites, and the winners build vibrant communities. I.e wiki beat britannica, blogger beat CNN, craigslist beat monster and googlemaps beat MapQuest. The losers build walled gardens the winners public squares.

Millennials will form over half the available workforce by 2014, and it is they who will set the bar for their employers.

Held at The Great North Museum, and the room in question was without doubt the coldest room I’d sat in for a long time. 30f is pretty cold and we were wondering why so? Half way through the event we were informed we were sharing a room with Lindow Man, a 2000 year old guy found preserved in a peat bog in 1984. He had to be kept at a constant temperature to stop him from melting! Well any feelings of upset quickly disappeared as you’d imagine. If a guys been around that long he’s got the call on how he wants to be kept.

Anyway here’s the presentation. I make no apology for the title, I like quirky nonsense!