The Social Organization

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rich collection of information by which to make judgments about who you are; some of which may be accurate, some my be outdated, and some may not even be applicable.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.    

Books on my social networking To Read list

There are so many great books out there and not enough time to read them all.  People recommend books to me quite often and others I find through my own searches. I have 4 or 5 stacked up at home but also have the following books on my To Read list in no particular order:

Storytelling in Organizations: Why Storytelling Is Transforming 21st Century Organizations and Management

Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications

Social Networks and the Semantic Web

Network Flows: Theory, Algorithms, and Applications

Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing

Stone Age Present: How Evolution Has Shaped Modern Life -- From Sex, Violence and Language to Emotions, Morals and Communities

Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness

Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty

Sensemaking in Organizations

Information Foraging Theory: Adaptive Interaction with Information

Organization and Environment: Managing Differentiation and Integration

What is on your social media reading list?  Any recommendations or suggestions from this or other lists? 
  

Content = Community

Content has no value without an audience.  That audience is a community that is interested in the topic of the content.  The content is only valuable to the extent that it promotes shared experiences, reaction, or activity.  Those shared experiences around content help individuals understand each other better.  On the personal end of the spectrum, if I go out on a first date with someone and see a movie and we both have wildly disparate reactions to it, I may decide that a second date is not in our future.  The sharing of content consumption allows us to evaluate our compatibility and develop connections (or not) with other people.  On the business front, content is primarily used to illicit activity - whether that is a decision or a fix to a product or to inform a choice.  The content increases in value with its relevance which is often determined by who developed the content,  who promoted it to others, and who contributes more content on the same topic. 

Now it is a stretch to say that an individual piece of content has a community - but a collection of content around the same topic definitely does (i.e. one episode of Lost is an audience but the Lost series has a community).  The other interesting thing is that the content, as a stand alone element, represents the smallest percentage of potential value that the content actually has.  The interaction and response to the content, the commentary that is added to the content by individuals, and the action that might result from the content has enormous value on top of just the initial 'eyeballs' that saw the content. In the online world this suggests that if you produce content....and don't proactively provide the infrastructure for the community to congregate...there is an enormous opportunity lost.  While a product example (and this does apply to many products too), www.tivocommunity.com gets participation from an estimated 10% of the Tivo owners...but Tivo doesn't get that value because they don't run the community.  What a loss.

Big media and publishing companies understand this inconsistently.  They are used to getting community for 'free' because of massive broadcast channels that assured a large percentage of the population consumed the same thing.  No one needed to create a community around I Love Lucy or the local paper because everyone could chat about it the next day at the water cooler. We all know that those days are gone and online, consumption of content is so fragmented that unless there is an online community, content can lose its value very quickly because there is no opportunity to interact around it.

Social Media's Dark Side

Now I am clearly an enthusiast of social media but there are a lot of skeptics and detractors - particularly in the enterprise social media space. Some skeptics simply don't think social networking is applicable for business or it wastes peoples' time.  Others point to some legitimate examples of real harm being done in the consumer social networking world:

• The 13-year-old who committed suicide, allegedly because of comments made on MySpace
• The riot/party that was broken up by East Lansing, MI police who are claiming it was fueled by comments left on Facebook

And even the promoters of this brave new world speak often of its possibility to enable user revolutions and collective action.  But what happens when mob mentality rules?  Not all revolts are constructive, useful, or warranted. 

In the corporate world, there are a lot more controls than on the consumer web but even things like conference attendees using social media to rebel against a speaker make some people cringe at that potential possibilities of social media going awry. And part of that fear is completely valid - no one wants to sponsor an event where the participants will create a hostile environment.

The point?!?  I think all of us who see the potential in social media need to make sure we acknowledge the dark side of social technologies.  To be philosophical - you cannot have positive without negative or good without bad.

Build social media war gaming scenarios. They will help think through the good - and the not so good - consequences of social media and get everyone on the same page with regards to governance, content boundaries, and  disaster recovery.

What are your war game scenarios?