The Social Organization

Community 2.0 Recap

Just got back from Las Vegas and the Community 2.0 conference.  It was one of my favorite types of conferences - big enough to get exposed to new people and ideas but small enough to get to know people, have great conversations, and not get totally overwhelmed.

I had a few agendas; One - to meet some people in person that I had gotten to know either in Twitterville or the Blogosphere. Two - to recruit some people who were willing to give me their community ramp stats so that I can build a model that can be used to simulate community growth based on the effort, content, etc. that is injected...but I need real data to make sure my model has the right assumptions in it.  Three - I wanted to hear more stories from companies who were in the middle of the storm.  On all fronts - I got more than I expected out of the event.

I got to meet Shel Israel who told some wonderful stories about his global neighbourhoods work with SAP. I met Jake McKee who told the Lego Mindstorm story from his perspective as the community manager. I had a great chat with Sean O'Driscoll who is having a lot of fun helping companies figure out their own community strategies.  I had a very interesting dinner with Greg Schneider and John Kembel from HiveLive - John has a product design/IDEO background and great perspective on the space. Got to have a great conversation over lunch with Dan Neely from Networked Insights.  Last night, Mike Walsh from Leverage Software, Dawn Lacallade from Dell, and Rawn Shah from IBM had a great dinner and discussion. In between all of that I talked to some community managers from WebEx, United Airlines, Zappos, Kawanis Club, RSA Conference, SAP, GlobalSpec, Wells Fargo, Verisgn, and Reed Elsevier.

Highlights for me:

• The people that are in this space right now are incredibly interesting, passionate, and fun.  Many people commented that they hope this aspect doesn't change as the market grows.
• While there is a lot of chatter, like my recent forecast confirmed, enterprise communities are happening in all kinds of organizations to address a number of different challenges.
• Perhaps the most revealing moment of the conference was when two different Microsoft people stood up, one to say how community focused his group was while another to say how not community focused her group was but how much she wanted to get there.
• Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh gave a keynote about community and values as Zappos and how that is their brand and they use it to guide all of their decisions.  For me, the vision that he is executing on is part of the reason I am so passionate about this space.  I don't believe we need to compromise and resign ourselves to corporations who treat their employees and customers like widgets with the excuse of expense or distraction.  Tony is showing that you can do the right thing (and some would call it the obvious thing) and build an incredibly successful business doing it.
• Listening to Tony Hsieh and Shel Israel reinforced something I have been thinking for a while which is that storytelling is the most effective way to transfer knowledge - regardless of the topic or context.  Stats, theories, and details are important backup but it is the stories that people remember and it is stories that inspire. 

While those are the highlights there were also many other wonderful presentations and I caught up with many friends - well worth the long flight and dry desert air (I swear I don't ever remember being so dehydrated) More post-conference content is posted at the Community 2.0 Blog

Modeling the Hockey Stick

Social media nirvana usually includes some kind of expectation around getting to a 'hockey stick' adoption curve.  For online services in general it is immensely hard to predict if and when that curve will happen.  But communities are slightly different - especially enterprise communities. Here's why:

- There is a known addressable audience
- It is easier to gauge where there are passionate, engaged individuals
- There is strong existing affinities - even if unevenly distributed
- The topic and scope of discussion is more obvious

Which leads to the question - are there standard models for growth (i.e. slow, moderate, aggressive) given how much content and marketing is injected into the community over time?  I think that there are....I'm just not sure exactly how to build them yet.

Some factors that I believe affect community velocity:

• Size of the total potential user audience
• Jump starting connections by analyzing email and IM transactions and, based on that, recommending 'friends' to new users
• Jump starting profile pages by pulling directory, location, and reporting/team structures from existing enterprise information
• Allowing individuals to customize their profile with their pictures, links to external accounts (Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Upcoming, etc.), and other media
• Profiling users for contributing content - Social Media Today does this very well. Replicate this offline or in other venues as well
• Providing online recognition for volume or quality of entries (who doesn't want to be a grand puba?)
• Providing a few compelling ways to  'converse' initially rather than overwhelming users with too much functionality
• Seeding plenty of content so people always get something new
• Provide some structured ways to participate with specific fields/questions so to make people comfortable with expectations - i.e. an idea form with specific questions.
• Email alerts
• Marketing and awareness campaigns
• Make it fun - be tongue and cheek, include some games, ask odd profile questions...

What do you think affects the velocity of community ramp? 

Collaborating? Communing? Conversing? Twittering?

What the heck is it that we do with social media?  In my mind there are a number of things that apply:

- Talking
- Conversing
- Publishing
- Collaborating
- Planning
- Exchanging
- Referencing
- Promoting
- Befriending

I started thinking about collaboration because a colleague - who I had recently shared a story about why Twitter was so powerful - came up to me later and was quite insistent that social media is simply a continuation of where 'Collaborative' technologies leave off.  On one hand I agree - they often are used to further the same goals: link people, disseminate information faster, encourage collaboration (little c).  On the other hand, there are some significant gaps and differences between email and team rooms and social media.

I asked my Twitter friends how collaborating and social media were different and here's what I got in response:

mukund   @rhappe they r all buzzwords :)
TalentSynch   @rhappe Collaboration can happen without social networking/computing but don't think GOOD social networking can thrive w/out collaboration
SamLawrence   @rhappe People think email is collaborating. Social software connotes an open-dialog-driven collaboration.
SamLawrence   @rhappe It's more than nomenclature as you know. :)
tomhumbarger   @rhappe - to me, it feels like collaboration is more of an internal company 'thing' and...
tomhumbarger   @rhappe - ...and that social computing is more of an external, outside the firewall phenomena...they are moving together, but not yet...         
tomhumbarger   @rhappe - maybe I feel collaboration is an internal feature as that is one of the value props that we use at iRise, but it's sharing of work 
jstorerj   @rhappe imho, social computing is just one type of collaboration, limited by the fact that it's confined to occur with a "computing" context
jstorerj   @rhappe agree that collaboration occurs across many different constituencies & existing mental models dictate types of collab that work
stoweboyd   @rhappe I disagree about collaboration as umbrella: it's so rooted in 90s thinking that its best to consider social tools as a new paradigm
vanhoosear   @rhappe on your earlier question, I see collaboration as a subset of social computing
rsims   @rhappe different things. Collaboration doesn't even require a computer and e.g. Twitter is social computing but not collaboration
mibdepot   @rhappe I started saying that social computing must be a subset of Collaboration then wondered which came first the chicken or the egg

It is clearly not very clear what the relationship is between collaboration and social computing.  As buzzwords, Collaboration has connotations that are quite a bit more structured than what people typically mean when they use social media or social computing lingo.  As a word collaboration is simply working with someone else on an initiative...which can be quite small and discrete...and offline. And Social media can simply connote a tool used for dialog/conversation - without collaboration happening at all.

One of the things that I think differentiates the two most dramatically is this: you cannot create a team workspace if a) you don't have a team and b) you don't have an agenda/goal. So much of work is about having an idea (not a project or a goal), discussing its feasibility, prioritizing, and figuring out who should be on the team or how to execute it.  Often you want to pull in people within the organization that you don't actually know personally.  And these ideas can be customer requests, new product ideas, new approaches to a problem, new ways to present your product or service, new people your company should know, and on and on - they touch every department and team in the company.  Where do those conversations happen?  It has to be on an open network that everyone has access to...with information filtering tools to help individuals find relevant conversations, content, and people.

Once ideas become more than a glimmer and have an interested group of people, a goal, and some initial feasibility...well then they can use - either inside the social network or not - a team workspace.

I think I'm with @TalentSynch on this one - collaboration can certainly happen without social media but good enterprise social media efforts cannot thrive without collaboration.

What do you think?

 

Social Media Forgiveness and Repentance

Now that so many of us are blogging, commenting, Twittering, and generally leaving breadcrumbs everywhere we go online there is a semi-permanent record of our behavior.  Add to that the fact that many of us have the same name as other people (apparently there is a 15-year-old in Minnesota with my name...check out www.rachelhappe.com) and the general public can get a rich collection of information by which to make judgments about who you are; some of which may be accurate, some my be outdated, and some may not even be applicable.

I worry, now that our casual commentary is generally available, that many of my off the cuff musings could be wildly misinterpreted or taken out of context in a way I never intended. I'm not the type of person who ever means to be disrespectful, dismissive, or offensive.  But I do have a dry, sometimes teasing, sense of humor...the type of humor that often does not come across well in text. I realize this and try very hard to not share those types of comments in email and text, particularly with business colleagues and others who may not know me that well.  The problem?!? The more conversational and dynamic the social media tool - Twitter for example - the more likely I am to treat it conversationally and I do occasionally slip. I can only hope that the recipient 'gets' it. 

Which gets me to forgiveness.  I occasionally need other people's forgiveness. I have faults like anyone else; I can be impatient, I can be 'funny' when it is not appreciated, I can forget to follow-up with people, and I can say things that come out differently than I mean them to. In this age of overload - of information, of tools, of 'best practices' - it is pretty easy to take a mis-step.  But now it is stored for as long as those Google datacenters last. So we need to be more forgiving and I don't think as a society we are there yet.  We blame our sleep deprived political candidates all the time for saying the wrong thing.  We often take words out of context and use them to demonstrate our points. We get angry because people don't ask our opinion or don't listen to us. We fight over who is right or who owns an idea or a project. Working with other people is hard because we can't just pick out the ones with whom we have a mind meld.

Because social media can now store all of this complexity in working with one another it is extremely easy to point to one thing someone did or said online and judge them harshly for it. Here is my pledge to try and repent and be more forgiving. Social media will force us all to come to terms with accepting both the strengths and the weaknesses in others - I hope we are all collectively up for it.

Information Arbitrage and the Window of Opportunity

Ross Mayfield, riffing on a blog by JP Rangaswami on the value of information - or more precisely the corruption of the value of information - added some great perspective to the discussion of why information should not be so tightly controlled within enterprises.  And  Ross makes the suggestion that "Perhaps there is an opportunity for security systems to be more effective as a whole system when it focuses on what people do with information instead of controlling its flow".

This is a similar point to what I was attempting to make in my Content = Community post in that until people *do* something with information, it might as well not exist in terms of value. The more people add to information - whether by tagging it, sending it around, riffing off of it (as Ross did to JP's post) - the more valuable it becomes.

Earlier in my career I worked at a management consulting firm and we helped large companies with new product development processes.  It was the mid-90s and the whole world seemed to be talking about supply chain management software, processes, and structures.  Now that the management consultants and SAP have been working on those operational processes for a couple of decades, there is less and less efficiency to ring out of that business flow. 

The experience of helping companies reduce time to market got me thinking about the real value of social media. I think its real value is in reducing the time between the spark of an idea and the point at which someone initiates execution on that idea (assuming it is a good idea).   The problem is that 'process' can't really be applied to ideas and you can't apply a workflow to make them more inspirational - they either are appealing or not to their audience.  What social media does is to capture conversation and then make in persistent and transparent.  It also allows ideas to be exposed to others through trusted connections - which matters when it comes to exposure.  No offense to J.Blow but I'm more likely to read Ross Mayfield's or JP Rangaswami's blogs.  So in an unstructured way, it enables faster exposure to ideas and gives the viewer a way to contribute, riff, and pass the idea along - giving it more value and creating a higher likelihood that the idea will be acted upon.  Doing that across an enterprise and its ecosystem creates huge potential.

Companies that see the potential of that openness will find that they can get more idea 'sparks', a lot more exposure to ideas, the contributions that makes the ideas more valuable, and ultimately the ability to execute on the well vetted ideas much more rapidly.  They get the opportunity to arbitrage information and gain competitive advantage.

The Power of Raw Transparency

Raw emotion and transparency are very powerful things - and they cause humans to have searing memories of information.  On my way in to work this morning, I was listening to NPR as I often do and they had on their typical Friday StoryCorps piece.  This week it was a young son,  Rahsheed McKenstry, interviewing his mother Rhonetta.  It was probably only 1-2 minutes long but it was a very powerful couple of minutes.  Why?  Both Rahsheed and Rhonetta gave us the gift of raw transparency.  And it had a very strong impact.

Part of the power of social media is that it encourages this transparency by allowing for conversations, story telling, and personal perspectives. And those are the very things that make data, content, entertainment, and information memorable.

On Twitter, the social media crowd talks a lot of shop.  But they also talk about their kids, their other interests, and sometimes their illnesses. And the crowd rallies around. I have Twitter friends that I have never met but they are unforgettable because of their humanness and the gift to us of transparency.  Examples are @susanreynolds,  @stevemann,  @Pistachio, @chrisbrogan, @astrout, @jstorerj, @DougH, and @SamLawrence...I could go on and on.

HR experts will talk and talk about finding 'passionate' employees.  Most companies miss the boat on this because they ask their employees to contribute one part of themselves to the organization and leave the other stuff out.  But as people we are so much more than what we 'do' at work and encouraging people to express that fully,  giving them the space to do so, and celebrating that with them is what ultimately creates passionate employees - and it will lead to serendipitous opportunities that cannot even be imagined.

And the implications of not embracing your employees is clear to me.  Part of the reason I did not stay with a previous employer (the job there was an amazing experience) is because when my father was dying, not only did I not get a reprieve from weekly travel, I did not receive a card or condolences from my manager...even though I missed the biggest corporate event of the year because of his ultimate death.  I really enjoyed that job and they made clear that they wanted me to stay.  A $100 bouquet of flowers might have changed how I felt about the company dramatically. I wanted to work somewhere that was flexible enough to adapt to my needs when my life got a little messy - for reasons beyond my control - and so I decided to leave because the corporate environment did not support me as a person.

Life is messy - social media can expose that but it can also create a support structure to navigate that messiness.  For embracing that, you may just win over some employees.

Oh...and I know he is only 10...but someone should hire Rahsheed because he is an amazing  story teller. 

The Struggle to Measure Social Media Effectiveness

Social media is at its core a communications and discovery solution.  Both of those things, communications and discovery, are very hard to measure and more often than not measurements tend to be negative.  For example, Sue Feldman my colleague at IDC, did some very popular research a few years ago called "The High Cost of Not Finding Information".  The values we need to measure to understand what social media provides are the following:

- What is the value of having a better conversation?
- What is the value of meeting someone?
- What is the value of getting more accurate information faster?
- What is the value of being able to drive consensus around an idea faster?
- What is the value of building trust?
- What is the opportunity cost of not innovating?

All thorny things to measure but all at the heart of being a successful business and about as hard to measure as extrapolating the value of a baby by measuring its head. Chuck Hollis wrote an excellent post on the state of social media efforts at EMC and mulls over some of the measurement challenges there. The things he can measure easily (activity) are not the things that provide insight into the real value to the organization.

Laura Fitton (aka @Pistachio) got me thinking with her post about giving Twitter homework to students.  I can pretty effectively - at an individual level - measure how many new people I've met, how many conversations I've had, how many people I've now met in person, and how many collaborative efforts have come out of my engagement there - and how all of those things have changed over time.  Abstracting that to a whole community becomes challenging because it is hard to track what conversations were work-related (it may not matter), how many people have collaborated based on a conversation, and how many business initiatives got started that would not have otherwise.  But, you can start by asking your members some of these things and it might be instructive.  I've added some of these metrics to my blog page that lists social media metrics.

How would you approach this issue?  What do you measure?

140 Characters is Bliss

I love that Twitter has 140 characters. Love, love, love it. Why? 

People abuse emails in so many ways:

• Going on and on and on. Unless it is something I am directly responsible for, taking 15 minutes to read an email is not something I am going to prioritize. What can be communicated in 2 minutes over the phone takes me 300% longer to read and I may mis-understand the email after all of that.
• Everyone gets cc'd - this means I really won't pay attention to the tome.
• The action needed is typically buried somewhere in the middle of the email
• Email is used for conversations that should really be had in person - it encourages dysfunctional passivity and political maneuvering that usually only obfuscates the issue.

I've had a couple of interesting conversations recently with multiple people over multiple channels (some are Twitterers, some are not).  The non-Twitter conversation is much more involved and I suppose some of that context is useful - but it sure isn't quick.  The Twitter side of my conversation - short and to the point.

In an era of information overload, I appreciate the ability to zero in to the heart of the matter. As my example here shows, you can actually get a lot of information in - and link to anything that is supporting information.

My suggestion: Even if you don't Twitter - try limiting your emails to 140 characters for a week.  If it is longer than that, pick up the phone, stop by someone's office, or provide back up information via a link.

Short is definitely sweet.

 

Fun: Keeping the Social in Social Media

Social media tools are incredibly valuable for enabling better communications within the enterprise context but they are tools that will always be adopted by the users themselves.  And people used social tools in a purely social context first - whether that was blogging or MySpace or Twitter - because they were fun.

It is fun to connect with others that share the same hobbies, sense of humor, perspectives, friends, etc. The Internet now enables us to connect with even more of those people who add another level of richness to a shared interests. And then you can throw a stapler at them or 'gift' them a jar of Fluff or play a game with them.  That's kind of fun - how else could I play a game with all of my cousins that live in 7 different states?  And playing games connects us in ways emailing can't...because it is hard to have an ongoing, regular conversation with distant friends but fairly easy - and a lot more fun - to play a game with them.

A few of my favorite examples:

• Microsoft Office Poke in Facebook.  Shred documents with your friends, throw a stapler at them, grab coffee together, or 'Leverage Cross-Team Synergies' if you must.  One of the funniest engineers I know built this and it's just fun.
• New York Times Quiz in Facebook. Pit your knowledge of current events against your friends or Facebook members in general.
• Picture of the Day blogs: examples at New York Daily Photo and Budapst Daily Photo
• Microsoft Children's Book: The Stay at Home Server
• Almost anything Ze Frank does.
• The Seesmic guys - I particularly thought this video was funny.

I could go on and on...and the things I find interesting and funny are not the things that will appeal to a lot of other people.  But, if you notice, many of the things that are on my list further a business goal by exposing an idea, provoking a response, or engaging the user.

My point with all of this is that we shouldn't forget the fun when we think about deploying social media applications in the enterprise.  Things to think about:

• Give your effort a strong personality - everyone may not love it but it will provoke engagement
• Surprise people with unexpected content or features
• People like competition and it drives engagement
• People like recognition, giving them recognition will inspire enthusiasts
• People like to personalize their corner of the universe, give them tools to do that

I like to smile and I like when people use humor to make a business point.  This makes me feel better about my work and enjoy the people I work with more.  If I have a positive emotion associated with my work, I will have a sharper recollection of that work and I am more apt to be an active supporter.  Isn't that what we all want in our jobs and in our companies?  People who are happy doing their work?  I would even go so far to say that it is far more productive.  The less resistant people are to new ideas  or initiatives (because it was introduced in an appealing/disarming way), the less work is needed to get everyone going in the same direction.

Customer Dissatisfaction Surveys

My #1 requirement for starting an enterprise community (whether that is using a discussion board, blog, wiki, social network or other tool) is: Constituents Who Care

If you are thinking about using social media tools it is essential that you start with a set of people who care about the topic at hand.  Realistically you also need not only a wide range of people that care but a handful that care deeply.  It's the only way to get activity. Without activity none of the other requirements, benefits, or risks matter.

Now there is one major caveat. The constituents - whether they be customers, partners, employees, or the general public - can be passionate in their dislike as well as passionate in their likes.  If you are thinking "well, we are pretty average" this is not good enough. Online, a vocal minority sometimes can become the majority voice making average a risky position from which to start a community.

The problem: your customer/employee satisfaction scores are average.  How do you determine whether every constituent is only sort of happy, whether you have a bi-modal distribution of very passionate responses, or whether responses are all over the place and only moderately felt.  It's pretty hard to tell from the typical customer satisfaction score how big and passionate your 'dissatisfied' constituents are.  Layer on that the human impulse to want to please and you confuse matters even more.

Which brings me to dissatisfaction.  What if we forgot about satisfaction - it's really just a feel good measurement for ourselves anyway - and measure customer/employee dissatisfaction.  Maybe it would go something like this:

- How unhappy are you about x?
- How frustrated are you with: the product/service/content/company?
- Given the expectations you had, how disappointed were you with the product/job/service?
- What are your top 5 complaints/frustrations/disappointments?
- Is there anything that confuses you?

I don't necessarily recommend sending out that set of questions in a complete vacuum with no explanation but I do think it might actually be more instructive than asking "How satisfied are you?"  Asking this question would also allow you to effectively gauge your audience and what kind of issues might emerge in a community and the percentage of constituents who are dissatisfied. If you have high dissatisfaction scores for more than 15-20% of your constituents I would recommend holding off on launching a community - there are bigger issues to deal with.