Confessions of a digital narcissist….

Posted on March 6, 2012 by Ari

I am a digital narcissist. There, I admitted it.  Perhaps, we all have a little bit of narcissism in us.  Not the bad kind, where ego and attention are a character flaw involving vanity, selfishness, arrogance, entitlement, etc.  I’m talking more about the healthier sort of narcissism where we crave some amount of recognition for our work, our contribution to society, or even our ability to entertain our social circles.  In a sense, it is the opposite of insecurity.  You can trust me on this one. You are reading about a guy who dealt with insecurity issues his entire life.  So, it feels good to have your post commented on, see your quote and name in a story, get an “atta boy” or “atta girl” for something you did that added value, whatever it might be.  To be recognized by your peers as a knowledge leader is a means for you to shoo away those insecure feelings at least for the time being.

Andy Warhol coined the phrase that in the future, we will all be world famous for 15 minutes, which was later truncated to indicate that everyone gets 15 minutes of fame, but what does “fame” mean.  Is it constrained to your social circle, group or team, organization, neighborhood association or is it something larger like a society, a region, perhaps the entire world?  Many of us will never attain the latter, books will not be written about us nor movies depicting our life.  However, recognition is still critical.  In fact, it factors into Maslow’s hierarchy of needs where the 4th tier deals with self-esteem.  As my colleague, Jesse Schell described in his lecture on “The Pleasure Principle” one of the reasons why games work focuses on Self Determination Theory (SDT).  SDT argues that Autonomy, Competence and Relatedness are required to foster high quality motivation and engagement for activities.  OK, so you have self-esteem and competence as 2 critical needs for motivated healthy individuals.

Unfortunately, this does not translate well into the enterprise.  We often see silos of data, closely guarded information, and collaboration relegated to channels like e-mail not over open platforms.  Why?  Knowledge, especially at the ideation stage, is hard to operationalize and measure.  From an employee perspective, it’s viewed as putting yourself out there especially for reproach.  In addition, sometime the payback is not in line with the risk.  One reason for this might be that it’s hard to track the flow of knowledge and the contributions within an organization.  Knowledge management systems are phasing out and being replace with more socially oriented software.  However in order for these tools to be effective we need to take a look at the culture of sharing within the organization and identify the motivational factors and incentive structure.  If your incentive structure is not aligned with your employee’s expectations than knowledge sharing breaks down.

So how can you “attribute” value creation back to the multitude of folks that worked on a project or even all the way back to the person(s) who first voiced the idea?  What should their incentives look like?  Recognition, monetary incentive, promotion, name on a plaque, new significant title?  I think some smart folks should develop a system that tracks knowledge across an organization real-time, in a visual fashion so that anyone can quickly understand it.  It would attribute value back to the source(s) and weigh contribution accordingly.  It would also show how knowledge evolves and morphs associated with connection points and different skillsets.  Users view their particular dashboard to understand where their idea/contribution lies in the innovation funnel and allows them the potential to jump back into the discussion.  I think this would be a powerful motivator to accelerate sharing and advance collaboration within the enterprise.  Now if only I could find some smart students to help me build it, hmmmm???

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Step up, sign in, move on….

Posted on February 24, 2012 by Ari

A few weeks ago in Measuring Social class, we discussed the idea of social advocacy.  Specifically, what are the ramifications associated with the spread of messaging and the increasing ease of gathering supporters around a cause using social channels.  Of course, there are the large-scale movements like the Arab Spring or #Occupywallstreet, but we chose some more recent events.  We looked at the recent uproar over SOPA/PIPA and how it was presented online and the use of change.org to draw attention to unfair labor practices when Target had it’s employees begin work at 11 PM thanksgiving day last year to get ready for Black Friday.  SOPA/PIPA has been debated to death, at this point, and in my mind it was just bad legislation and represented big media using their lobbying power to deliver a set of controls that were simply untenable.  Their thinking was rooted back in an antiquated means of media distribution and monetization rooted in an analog world and had little comprehension of how users become aware of, consume and share digital media.  The net denizens revolted in a large semi-organized fashion but the class was not entirely sure if everyone was aware of the issues.  There was a great piece by Stacey Higginbotham on this topic in GigaOm.  Piracy and digital media rights were overshadowed by heavy-handed practices that threatened to have the right to shut down several cherished sites that rely on user-generated content.  When banners were placed on sites to get folks to understand the issues, there was little action but when sites went dark that’s when the preverbal “you know what” hit the fan and people came out en mass.  Personally, I’m glad the proposed legislation was turned down but the debate still lives on and we will see many different manifestations of similar regulations as big media attempts to implement controls.  If you’re interested, Yochai Benkler from the Harvard’s Berkman Center had a phenomenal post on this subject

The change.org movement was fascinating in that they managed to achieve significant uptake for their protest in a short amount of time.  With close to 200K people signing a protest against Target’s policy, that represents significant leverage a company simply cannot ignore.  I recall canvassing door to door in my impressionable youth for some public interest group around conservation and the sheer futility of it.  The amount of energy and time expended to achieve a few signatures has been replaced by digital mechanisms to create awareness for a cause, share it your social circle, accelerate it across networks and hopefully manage to scale it in an efficient and timely manner.  The problem that the class brought up was around social advocacy fatigue.  There is simply too much to become aware of, understand the issues and lend support.  Now that the means are apparent and easy, causes to lend support to are coming from everywhere so you need to be diligent associated with what you are going to lend your time and effort to.  But it would be good to understand levels of commitment.  I tried finding some framework for identifying this (i.e. did some quick web searches) put came up short.  So I thought I would see if I could try and devise something:

  1. Awareness – understanding that an issue/cause exists
  2. Communicate – telling others in your social circle either virtually or IRL (in real life) that this is an issue to know about.
  3. Sign up – lending your name to a cause says something about your level of commitment
  4. Encourage – reaching out and letting your friends know that you have lent your name to a cause begins the generation of message spread.  Of course this is easier to do now in the age of social connections than it was back when I was going door-to-door
  5. Donate – put your money where your mouth is, this is important step, to use another over-used euphemism – now you have skin in the game
  6. Create – spending time to develop a protest gives you a new role- organizer there are multiple levels depending on whether it’s a virtual protest using a channel like change.org or a real world protest using social channels as a communication mechanism.  This might be short term, localized effort or could involve a large level of commitment if the cause becomes global.  Case in point is the One Million Voices against FARC that David Kirkpatrick chronicled in “The Facebook Effect”
  7. Lobby – getting a politician to understand the issues, the communities point of view and representing them to enact change take time, energy and leverage
  8. Protest – This is also relative to how you might protest but the we took a look at the folks from Occupywallstreet that weighed the opportunity cost and decided that the cause was important to them.  We discussed folks that potentially risk incarceration, harm even death to come out in support of their beliefs
  9. All in – We defined this as the point where it becomes all-consuming until there is some sort of amicable resolution but the battle wages on and on.  You just need to look to folks like Bill McKibbon from 350.org to understand how protesting an issue like climate change can turn into an all-consuming passion.  And more power to him, this dedication to a belief system is incredibly impressive

What are you’re thoughts, did I miss anything?  The big question in my mind is what happens after change occurs – legislation get passed or dropped; money gets raised; situations get rectified, etc.  Do people continue to monitor the situation? When another opportunity presents itself, are they more or less likely to get engaged and at what level?  I would be interested in measuring commitment from average social users after frequent exposure.  If and when another legislation or action begins, will there be increased levels of social advocacy or will awareness need to be “regenerated”?  Is attention span diminishing due to a continuous barrage of campaigns using social channels? As social advocacy presents itself at an increasing rate, will citizens become immune to attempts to persuade them to get involved?  Or perhaps worse yet will they simply sign up not knowing the issues but doing something as a routine practice?  Sounds like some potentially interesting research….

 

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How did this crowd get in my office?

Posted on November 23, 2011 by Ari

A few weeks ago in our Measuring Social class, we had a panel exploring issues around crowdsourcing.  This was just a terrific panel.  It had a lot to do with the panelists who participated which included:

Crowdsouring or drawing on the wisdom from a dispersed community has been around for a long time, it’s just no one thought to put a nice wrapper around it until Jeff Howe coined the term.  I use a quote from the famed economist Friedrich Hayek in one of my lectures. He said the following in 1945, (yes 1945!):

“The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is … a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality”

Pretty astonishing the clarity of insight into what companies are now just beginning to discover.  There are plenty of examples to see how this was used in practice, for example the Chicago Tribune building (did not know that one).  One of the panelists, Peter, provides some great examples of these “crowdsourced” initiatives in his blog post “Crowdsourcing isn’t new only the word is”

The general sense from the panelists was that crowdsouring is similar to where ecommerce was back in the late 1990s; everyone knew it was going to be important but most are struggling with how to harness collective wisdom and implement successful initiatives. From my point of view, I find it fascinating that this practice is not limited to a niche market with narrowly defined interests, but rather there are a plethora of examples of both large and small companies/organizations/communities in different industries attempting to harness crowds for a wide variety of uses.

crowdSPRING and Quirky are great examples of small companies that have taped into a need to work with creative folks around design and product development.  P&G is a well known company with 24 brands that have over a billion in net annual sales.  They have successfully leveraged crowds to help in the co-creation of new products through their open connect initiative.  I always find it interesting that a large company like P&G can latch onto this concept early, create top down leverage, aggregate a large motivated community and especially work out all the IP hurdles.   But they are not the only large company focused on harnessing collective wisdom; examples are plentiful from Starbucks “MyIdea” to IBM’s “IdeaJam” to Intuit’s “Brainstorm”.  Even Government agencies such as NASA and DARPA are experimenting with crowdsourcing initiatives.  During the panel, we discussed some interesting trends around crowdsourcing including:

  • Vetting the crowd or leaving it open
  • Commoditized (repetitive) tasks vs. creative tasks
  • Price erosion for similar services
  • Greater prevalence of crowdsourcing platforms, such as Mturk and associated implications
  • Gamification, Monetization and/or Peer Recognition as a motivator to participate
  • Subjective vs objective tasks
  •  Ability to scale platforms/initiatives effectively
  • Limits on what can or should be “crowdsourced”

Each of these issues would be interesting to explore in their own right (perhaps a source of future posts…) but if I piqued your interest, catch the replay of the panel online.

Posted in Crowdsourcing, Social Media Class | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Drowning in social data, better find a statistician….

Posted on July 7, 2011 by Ari

Two weeks ago, I had an opportunity to co-host a virtual roundtable with The Center for CIO Leadership founded by IBM.  The topic focused on social data and the challenges/ opportunities for CIOs.  To prepare for the roundtable, we put together a laundry list of issues from enabling enterprise 2.0 initiatives to security around storage/transferring data.  Since we only had one hour, we decided to focus on key issues involving data driven decision-making, success metrics and resource needs.  We began with a discussion of the challenge this new data source presents and how CIOs can leverage it for insight across the organization.  We also spent some time on the demands put on the CIO and staff to incorporate social data into existing processes from business intelligence to customer segmentation. One of the takeaways was that the different characteristics of this data (i.e. unstructured, voluminous, readily available) as well as how its generated, collected, stored and integrated will require new skillsets and perhaps even a different orientation to the traditional IT role.  So, what might be important skillsets for this next generation of data analyst?  I thought I would take a crack and put together some ideas….

Curiosity – The adage “you don’t know what you don’t know” is very appropriate when mining, analyzing and integrating social data. When I was a graduate student developing my thesis, experimentation was essential to develop unique findings.  This needs to be enabled and even encouraged within a corporate setting to find how this data can add value to different strategic initiatives.

Comprehensive mentality – Collect everything (within reason) since you never know what might be important for a future campaign or initiative.  However, keeping track of what data is collected, where it is stored and how to access it is key.  Data does have a finite shelf life and data sitting unused in a silo adds no value.

Global mindset while acting locally – Social data can be used to target market segments but there are always gaps in defining a complete understanding of customers (habits, trends, history).  Accessing data from individual campaigns, communities of interest, social platforms is useful; but only if implemented strategically. What is important, how do you build a holistic view, what are the ethical implication, how do you ensure proper adherence to security? These all need to be included in the mix…

Bridge builder – Increasingly, social data is used throughout the enterprise.  However, is it focused on brand awareness, internal collaboration and innovation, engagement with active online communities etc.?  These are all markedly different strategies, impacting various departments and warranting their own set of success metrics.

Statistical orientation – This attribute fits in with experimentation.  There are many different analysis tools for the social space, however sometimes you need to resort to good old fashioned sampling of data to find out whether there is statistically significant correlation.  We use several applications in my class at Carnegie Mellon but often need to resort to collecting data and doing analysis using primary research methods.

Rapid iteration mindset – Sometimes ideas need to be “thrown over the wall” to see what resonates, pulled back in, optimized and redelivered.  This is common in the consumer social space as new platforms try to find a balance between value, member concerns, resource limitations and speed to market.  How can this be fostered but tempered for a corporate setting?  Perhaps using an internal community as a test bed?

Investigative reporting – Think about what a good reporter needs to do – retell a story, verify facts, corroborate sources, etc.  The same thing hold true for social analysts.  Data is simply qualitative or quantitative variables.  It is up to the person analyzing it to be able to explain what is important within the data orally and visually.

Right brain orientation – I think tapping into creative thinking is also important.  All this information is ineffective unless it can be communicated.  In my class, I bring in Dan Byorski who is faculty at the school of design @ CMU to discuss communicating  data form and function as well as meaning visually. Dealing with complex data is difficult.  Communicating its importance to different groups is equally challenging.

Community instead of process driven – Don’t get me wrong, processes are important but unlike other data stores that fit nicely into processes, social data is continuously evolving.  Imagine an ERP system that relies on a common database, which has been defined and clearly articulated.  Now think about a campaign around social listening where variables can change readily based on new external inputs.  Think of it as a shift from taxonomy (process) to folksonomy (dynamic and largely derived from the community.)  You have to adjust your analysis accordingly.

What are your thoughts?  Are there other characteristics that need to be included in the mix?  Will we see the development of a competency center across the enterprise focusing on social data?

Posted in Social Data | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Stop asking the same bleeping questions…

Posted on April 27, 2011 by Ari

Recently, I had some service done on my Prius, BTW: if there was ever a car company and model embracing the social space, it has to be the Toyota Prius.  Their new campaign is designed around crowdsourcing innovation using components from the car.  Basically teams are breaking down the car and using various components (solar sun roof, brake system, hybrid synergy drive, etc.) to re-configure them around unique innovations.  I think this is brilliant and has interesting implication as you can see with our local ambassadors of innovation, DeepLocal - (but more about that later).

I had a fairly standard service completed.  Lost my smartkey, so they had to order and reprogram a new one.  Apparently, this is more involved than it seems.  You cannot just order one from eBay, jailbreak it and program it yourself, much to my dismay.  Well, I’m sure there are ways mere consumers can do it but that’s beyond my limited capacities.  You need to order it from Toyota and have your dealership program it with specialized equipment.  It went smoothly enough after I made this realization and then I was confronted with the after service survey.  Not by one or even two but by three different groups.  Yes, the dealership wanted to know about my experience but so did Toyota Finance (I’m leasing the car) as well as Toyota Parts.  In fact one of them kept calling almost every night right around the time I was putting my kids to bed.  Finally, I answered the call and it was the same bleeping questions as the other surveys.  In fact they were all pretty much similar i.e. how satisfied were you with the service and if not, what could we have done differently.  Some were more involved and drawn out asking round about questions that basically wanted the same fundamental information.

This annoyed me to no end but I understand the justification.  In our hyper connected, real time, socially engaged world, organizations more than ever want to reconnect with consumers to assess customer experience, collect data and improve satisfaction ratios.  But this was not the way to do it.  One of the aspects we discuss continually in my social analysis class is sharing of data, collaboration across geographies, departments, skill sets, demographics, etc.  This seems simple enough.  Why couldn’t these three groups collaborate on a simple survey?  Why can’t my survey answers be available somewhere in the cloud where I can grant access for other to view them – sort of like profile portability which is still not available despite lots of work in this area (yet, another blog post).

Organizations need to understand that consumers are not a point in time, an incident that occurred or a piece of data that needs to be recorded.  Along with the trend toward consumerism, there needs to be a holistic view of customers, which in this rudimentary example includes the fact that I have already answered the survey and willingly provided the necessary information.  I spoke about this in one of my first blog posts entitled “Little Help Over Here” Unfortunately this will only occur when companies realize that there is value in sharing data much like all of us who are involved with and get value from online social communities.  However, with legacy systems and policies around data collection and distribution as well as security and privacy concerns, I don’t think this will change quickly.  But I would love to see one day a company ask me after conducting a survey would you mind if we shared your responses with X, Y and Z?

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South by So What….

Posted on March 23, 2011 by Ari

I had a great opportunity to finally get down to Austin for SXSW.  I only spent a day and a half down there but immediately figure out that this was a much different sort of conference than I have attended in the past.  SXSW is a multi-industry conference-taking place every March in Austin and covering Interactive, Music and Film.  It sort of struck me when I was sitting in a lobby waiting for a meeting and saw both Rainn Wilson (Dwight from the Office) and Reid Hoffman within a the same ½ hour, you know you’re not in Kansas anymore…

It was interesting to watch the ennui from the faithful on how commercial the conference has gotten.  It seems like it is in some ways suffering from its own success.  In fact, it’s compounded by the fact that they stretch across three major industries.  NPR did an interesting story on the music side and whether it’s even worthwhile for bands to make the trek.  Both sides were represented.

Now some of the backlash has been down right hysterical, a perfect example is Hitler weighing in on SXSW. Others provided a humorous and satirical look at segmenting out the typical types you will find at the conference.  It also encapsulates one of my favorite quotes “ We’re Twitter meets Zynga with an API that transforms the social graph” – Nice job from the folks at Software Advice.

I have no context as this was my first trip down but I have gone through many different conference evolutions as they have tried to serve a wider audience and weather the storm through recessions and over-exuberance.  I used to be heavily involved in the telecom space and saw the changes from Supercom to Globalcom to Nextcom.  I also recall the changes in CTIA from a conference predominantly catering to wireless carriers and equipment manufacturers to opening up the stage to media professionals and eventually brand marketers.  I stuck to the interactive side, but to me there was a vibe/feel that I was hoping for – smart people passionate about technology and looking to make a difference.

In terms of interactive there is one other archetype which will keep me, coming back and that’s the social innovator.  These are the folks that understand the power of the medium and are using it to affect change either in their community, industry, region etc.  I saw Social Innovation alive and thriving at SXSW even taking up a greater percentage of time and mindshare of entrepreneurs focusing on social platforms, technologies and communities.  Even though there was no Twitter or Foursquare that consumed everyone’s attention, there was an undercurrent of how do we leverage these initiatives for good.  I attended a few sessions (especially crowdsourcing) where the discussion was focused on

  • People – not just disadvantaged communities but peers trying to break into new careers or get projects funded/started
  • Place – sustainable business practices, innovation in the workplace and how the environment is affecting livelihood of people across the globe
  • Policy – how can social be used as a change agent for bringing to light unjust regimes/policies, transparency into open gov, fixing serious infrastructure issues (e.g. transportation)

Winston Churchill once said “The Price of Greatness is Responsibility” or for you comic book fans Uncle Ben from Spider Man said “With great power there must come great responsibility”.  I like that there were attendees from companies, organizations, universities and the like that resonated with this theme.  Being able to harness and extrapolate insight from collective human knowledge is a very powerful thing but careful attention needs to be placed on how we wield it.

So I’ll be back at SXSW next year that’s for sure.  Would I say no to grabbing a beer with Rainn Wilson, no way, but I’ll be just as happy to sit and chat with several entrepreneurs, students and technologists who want to address social technologies, societal issues and affect change …

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Posted on February 23, 2011 by Ari

I’m actually not a DR, I just play one online….

In our social media analysis class at Carnegie Mellon, we have been putting a lot of thought into the evolution of the social space and what our project sponsors should consider when making major investments in this area.  It is always interesting to see where we have come from.  I have spent some time evaluating the mechanics and social interactions of discussion boards and forums especially as it relates to privacy.  In the past, anonymity was an important item so individuals could not target community members directly.  Yahoo had several groups geared toward different discussions and of course folks could sign up, mis-represent themselves and game the conversation.  In fact, there was nothing preventing folks from creating several identities and monopolizing a conversation.  With stronger community policies and self-policing capabilities, this was reduced but still continues.  You might recall when the CEO of Whole Foods wrote anonymously on Internet financial forums that a smaller rival Wild Oats Market was overpriced prior to Whole food buying the company for $565 M in 2/2007.  You might also remember the Steve Job’s heart attack hoax when a teenager posted a false report on ireport.com causing Apple’s stock price to plummet 5% over the course of a day.  Several organizations, including the SEC, started investigating how they can prevent this practice in the future

With the advent of modern social networks, identity became critical.   Friendster, Myspace, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. rely on members to provide their actual name.  This puts an extra onus on users to provide factual information and not mis-represent themselves especially when it relates to their credentials.  Its one thing to be incur a low ranking from the community, it’s another thing to be called out by connections especially business networks.  In addition, I don’t need to read “coolguy 101”’s content or follow them over a period of time to connect.  Rather, I can simply get a friend request from Jane Doe who I went to High School with or worked with at a previous company to feel comfortable in connecting with her.   This allows for acceleration of connections.  It also provides greater self-identification of information.  If I want to get noticed by other members of the community, I will place in additional information regarding my works history, education, preferences, demographic information, etc.  This provides greater possible ways for folks to connect and shows stronger correlation between community members.  Stronger correlations possibly allow for tighter bonds, which ensure staying power.  Weaker links create fragmentation and dissociation (IMHO).  In fact, it is my theory that these stronger correlations ensure a comfort level that ensures the delivery of content, which is the lifeblood of any social network.  Without the generation of content, status updates, microblog entries, photos, videos, links etc. that keep people coming back over and over again to see what’s new and interesting.  In David Kirkpatrick’s book, The Facebook Effect, (BTW, Highly Recommended) he writes that transparency of information and identity of community members was an essential part of Facebook’s game plan and was a key contributor to their success even to the point where personal and business identities are combined.  Privacy controls are in place for the user to decide what they wish to share with which community.  My personal belief is that transparency will continue to increase as companies disclose more information about targeted advertising, collaboration becomes a mandate around innovation within the enterprise and the social norms change around full disclosure online.  As I keep telling clients, students and anyone else that bother to listen to me, it’s about education in terms of what you want to disclose, what value you reap from disclosure and what are the potential pitfalls with all this information availability….

Posted in Social Media Class | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Welcome, now please fill out the following 10 items…

Posted on February 9, 2011 by Ari

Wow, has it really been since Oct. that I have posted anything.  Nothing like a gently reminder from my 9 yr old to get my act in motion.  Hopefully, I can sustain this…

Recently, BusinessWeek published a chart on how not to embarrass yourself while doing business in Germany.  Here is a link to the graphic.  There were several common sense items but some struck me as somewhat excessive.  Now I understand that there are cultural differences and social norms that vary from one culture to another but it got me thinking about social communities.  Specifically, how formalities can manifest themselves into barriers to adoption and engagement.  My thinking was that when you have a highly formal country with particular etiquette required to conduct business, does that translate to online barriers/hurdles leading to diminished use of social networks, potentially even community collaboration?

I used to do quite a bit of consulting in the telecomm space and the general rule was that the more steps a user needs to go through to get value from an application the less likely they will be to use it.  This is exacerbated by the fact that mobile users have a limited attention span due to small form factor for viewing, connectivity issues and in most cases they need information quickly.  By placing hurdles between the user and accessing information you diminish value.  These steps might be placed in due to bad UI design or they might be put in as part of a formal process to extract information prior to delivering value.  Either way they lead to lower utilization.

It also translates into the online community space. I worked for a financial services firm developing an online community for investors.  We wanted to drive adoption but the legal team wanted to make sure that perspective members were aware of the user terms of service.  In most cases, users simply check off a box and they are in which has probably precipitated much of the angst around privacy – Read the agreement and really understand what social networks can access and eventually monetize, but that’s another blog post.  At the client, after much consternation we appeased legal and actually displaying the agreement in front of users.  By looking at conversion ratios, we saw a significant drop off in registrations based on displaying the agreement.  This formality created a barrier to adoption.

So, getting back to my original theory that a society with a more formal structure to conducting business results in lower adoption of social communities, there is some anecdotal evidence.  RWW (one of my favorite sources for all things web/social) did a piece on how Germany is behind the rest of the world in terms of online social adoption. Link here.  It’s an interesting read regarding the German blogosphere, absence of social news and the lackluster social start-up scene. There are some bright spots, of course, but StudiVZ which was once hailed as a potential German version of Facebook is not achieving the growth patterns seen in other social communities that are country specific.

In the corporate world, German companies are blocking access to social sites citing security concerns, as well as lack of productivity. Link Here.  There are of course several examples to the contrary.  I have worked with a few German based companies who are embracing online social communities and viewing it as a way to accelerate collaboration and innovation both externally and internally.  Whichever way you might be leaning on this issue, I do think that there is merit in research examining a correlation between formalities in society and diminished utilization of social networking even evaluating community-based collaboration.  I guess the proof will be in the data, smells like an interesting research project to me…

Posted in Social Media Utilization | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Mine, Mine, Mine….

Posted on October 15, 2010 by Ari

We had an interesting class last week on Enterprise 2.0 and the adoption of social oriented tools for companies and organizations.  It was interesting to do some research on the transition from focusing on technologies, platforms and workflows to enabling innovation, collaboration and processes centered around people.  This adoption, of course, is being accelerated by the widespread use of consumer focused social technologies.  The new work force is not asking for the adoption of these tools and humbly waiting for their incorporation, they are demanding them and if they are not available, well, there is always options like your competition.  New technologies are being built from the ground up around collaboration (sort of a social DNA).  This is driving the legacy vendors focusing on document and content management to become more social.  The space is getting increasingly fragmented and confusing with IBM’s Lotus Connections and Microsoft Sharepoint layering on collaboration and social networking features, the social platforms like Telligent and Jive offering a suite of tools and sophisticated analysis around collaboration and content while the more point  oriented solutions like SocialText and Yammer are deepening and extending their offerings.  There is even a whole slew of pundits focusing on development in this space. Dion Hinchcliffe now at the Dachis Group is doing some pivotal work in getting enterprises ready for the wave of new collaborative tools and work processes.

With all this momentum around application enabling innovation and collaboration, a majority of companies are adopting these technologies at glacial speed.  One answer could be the relative maturity of the industry. A continuously changing landscape does not make for rapid decision-making and deployment.  Another answer might be in the metrics.  We know this very well from our social media analysis class at CMU.  Companies are trying to understand how to effectively measure consumer focused social media campaigns to provide the necessary justification to allocate required budgets and resources.  The metrics and timeline for evaluation differs significantly from previous campaigns so there is a paradigm shift happening.  Within the enterprise, the metrics to evaluate success (innovation, process improvement, resource reduction, etc) are also being re-evaluated associated with a more collaborative organization.

I believe one of the primary reasons these enterprise tools are not getting adopted rapidly is not based on the availability of tools, integration timeline into current platforms or collaboration/social processes but the shift in focus around individual effort and achievement.  Let me explain.  In many companies, tacit knowledge is viewed as an asset, tightly controlled by individual employees since it provides accolades, control and staying power.  “We can’t fire Bob because he is the only one who knows how to successfully run the work process”: hence Bob has job security.   Also, Bob gets rewarded based on his accomplishments to a large extent so there is little motivation for Bob to share his knowledge and a disincentive for Bob to spend a great deal of time on collaboration.  This type of thinking (culture of I, greed is good, whats mine is mine, whatever) needs to change to a culture of sharing for collaboration to firmly gain ground and it all starts with compensation.  Whether we like it or not, this is the biggest motivator.  You can want employees to “do good” for altruistic reasons till the cows come home but ultimately it won’t be put into practice until it directly impacts compensation.  What this means is a change in placing collaboration activities into an employee’s job reqs and reviewing an individual not on how they finished a project on time and under budget but how they used the community to achieve it.  Social oriented compensation schemes need to reflect a person’s contribution to their immediate groups/teams.  Perhaps the next generation of social software will directly spit out reports that managers can review reflecting a person’s collective contribution and then this will be used for assessment.  Once this gets put into lace we will see more widespread adoption of these practices and collaborative tools…

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Oh no, here come the haters…

Posted on September 30, 2010 by Ari

On a recent project, I saw an unusual anomaly through social media.  It was very much akin to a good old fashioned smear campaign with the ultimate goal to embed a negative image of the company.  Unlike targeted messages, these mentions were broadcast to anyone available to try and achieve the greatest reach possible.  The same messages and themes were delivered routinely and they were sent out anywhere usually from 6-72 hours after either a public announcement from the company or a mention of the company (positive and negative) by traditional media.  The interesting thing was that a) the same folks kept issuing out identical or slightly altered messages and b) they would double up their efforts after any positive mention about the company or its activities.

It became fairly clear that here was a market segment that was in no way interested in engaging in a dialogue with the company on a level playing field.  As opposed to others who were interested in what the company was doing to mitigate any negative impacts on the environment and society, this group viewed the company as evil (not even a necessary evil) and wanted nothing less than to see them out of business (conjecture on my part).  Hence, we termed them the “haters”.  Trying to take down a company is a daunting challenge especially when you are faced with a multibillion dollar global conglomerate.  What they were attempting was to try and erode consumer confidence and shape public sentiment in a piecemeal fashion.  This may not be a concern in a traditional (non-digital) campaign but we live in a hyper connected real time society where the internet has infinite memory and old messages become new once again when different communities discover them and disseminate them to their followers/friends/fans etc.  In addition, you have the ease of aggregation in a globally connected always online society.  That means that a group in Asia who might never know about similar concerns/issues/tactics of another group in the US can find and connect with them through SEM, social media analysis or any number of ways groups connect online and with the rush to translate content they can now collaborate, aggregate negative views and provide a unified front.  So what was before a singular volley or campaign directed at a company now becomes a global coordinated campaign.  This can become a difficult thing to get past no matter how much the organization is trying to impart positive change.  In our social media class, we take a look at the Greenpeace/Nestle case study, where Greenpeace launched a campaign to affect policy at Nestle around responsible sourcing of materials.  This was a global well orchestrated campaign that in a short amount of time rallied a community to implement new policies and procedures at one of the largest CPG companies in the world.

So what’s a company to do about the haters?  Well, you can’t ignore them and you can’t marginalize them and you can try, but it probably won’t be successful, to engage them.  You can spend a great deal of time, energy and cost to try and get them to understand your role and the societal benefit of your actions but it will most likely fall on deaf ears.  The opportunity cost associated with these actions can become huge.  The haters are ‘dug in” and they have sent a good chunk of their time and effort propagating negative messages.  They are not going to suddenly give up and come over to your corner with some well crafted messaging.  So, focus on the markets that want to have a discourse making sure that you do it on a level playing field not trying to cram down top down messaging.  Develop advocates with a deep understanding of your industry and the associated challenges realizing that some will resonate with your messaging be it around good corporate citizenship, health and welfare of society, sustainability and resource conservation, etc.  Others will be continuous skeptics and influenced by the haters.  Build your community of stakeholders, both with you and on the fence, by engaging with them on topics that are relevant in an online fashion where they aggregate to discuss.  Understand their vernacular and social norms so that you don’t come across as the 800 lb elephant that just entered the room.  Yes the haters will come out on mass but the only way to counteract negative sentiment is by building your voice and community awareness around the positive.

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