Inside the Cubicle

Employees talk, Google listens, Chaos ensues

Exciting news from Google today that they are going to allow reader comments to be posted on stories in Google News - but only from individuals and organizations involved in the stories.

Ohhhh...I am just giddy with the possibilities.

Someone writes a story on McDonald's and all of the sudden every restaurant manager and fry cook across the globe can submit a comment.

It is the idea of distributed public relations come to life, where employees at every level have a relatively unfiltered avenue to reach the public and shape opinion - in a much broader way than at the water cooler or dinner table.

This means mass hysteria for Corporate Communicators everywhere. Sure, you can spend hours working with your PR agency to craft a thorough response to a criticism, but it appears Google is going to give that the same weight and prominence of a note e-mailed from an administrative assistant.

• Will Google accept comments from sources they can verify, but do not want to publicly identify themselves?
• What will happen when the comment becomes fodder for an additional story, that is then indexed by Google, that then allows comments? (man, my head is spinning)
• Google has to exercise some type of editorial control. Will preference be given to any particular type of individual? (CEO, academic)

More reactions on Google's news from:

• Stowe Boyd (and others)
• Steve Rubel (with a nice pic)
• Andy Beal

An optimist would say this this is a great way for an organization and its representatives to get their story out in an unfiltered way. However, I suspect most organizations are not comfortable with what their employees might say when given the chance to speak.

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Technorati Tags: Google, employee

Google creating the lightweight Enterprise

Last month all the talk at the Enterprise 2.0 conference (which I sadly missed) was on the moves by IBM (Lotus), Intel (SuiteTwo) and Microsoft (Sharepoint 2007) to showcase their integrated suite of social media applications.

For Fortune 1000 businesses, these companies have a clear edge because they offer proven, secure solutions that can implemented behind the firewall (making the IT people happy)

But for small to mid-size businesses the answer for applications may be the same we have seen for advertising: GOOGLE.

Let's take a look at some of Google's recent acquisitions
Postini - security
Grand Central - VOIP
JotSpot - Wikis
Feedburner - RSS Management

Throw in Gmail, GChat, Google Docs (formerly Writely) , and you have a powerful version of Google Apps. Google Apps has quickly become a legitimate externally hosted solution for companies.

With an external hosted solution based around collaborative tools organizations can:
- Accommodate geographically dispersed employees
- Save money on IT hosting and maintenance
- Facilitate knowledge management and social networking in your organization

This last point is a big one. An externally hosted system forces information into a space where the organization can access it in a number of ways. Stephen Baker at Blogspotting notes the Orwellian uses this could have. I suppose I am naive, but I think the benefits of more effective compliance, ease of social networking and improved workflow will be more prevalent than snooping bosses.

Anyway, I am curious to see if any big company switches over to Google in the next year - then look for the dominoes to fall.

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Technorati Tags: Google, Enterprise2.0, Applications, Postini

BW gives executives guide to technology

BusinessWeek online has compiled a slew of the publication's articles on new media issues organizations face, calling the collection CEO Guide to Technology.

The page includes a section of articles on wikis, including this article last month mentioning work by the likes of Intel, Sony, Disney, Xerox and Microsoft. The piece included this gem from Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAffee: "If you did a comprehensive survey of Fortune 1,000 companies, you would probably find some sort of wiki in all of them."

Well...a couple of less-than rigorous studies (here and here) disagree with the esteemed professor - but I definitely get his point. If we were to look deeply enough into companies - project teams and small employee groups, not just corporate corporations departments - we would likely find far more wikis than companies report.

Wiki platforms are the most flexible and versatile of the mainstream social media tools and will probably have the highest rate of adoption among companies in 2007.

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Technorati Tags: wiki, CEO, McAfee

Freudian Post

By now, everyone knows that, according to Time,  we are the people of the year (although based on the pronoun use and syntax I am inclined to believe maybe they are just talking about me).

However, check out this teaser for the article:
 

Look at where they chose to cut of the text. If you look really quickly it appears to say, "the history of the world is but the blog."

Coincidence????????? I think not!

Facilitating Communities Can Pay Big

Last month (yes, I am that far behind in posting) Harvard Business Review had a brief report discussing a study on the potential of customer communities (paid subscription required).

They found that eBay users in Germany who joined a customer community (they were provide prizes for doing so) provided far more activity and revenue than a control group that did not join a community:

"The differences were astonishing. Lurkers and community enthusiasts bid twice as often as members of the control group, won up to 25% more auctions, paid final prices that were as much as 24% higher, and spent up to 54% more money (in total). Enthusiasts listed up to four times as many items on eBay and earned up to six times as much in monthly sales revenues as the control users. The findings on first-time sellers were even more impressive: Compared with the controls, almost ten times as many lurkers (56.1%) and enthusiasts (54.1%) started selling on eBay after they joined and participated in customer communities." 

These numbers translated into several million dollars in profit from the increased activity, a good ROI on the $5,000 or so they spent on the incentives.

The big question - At the end of the article, the authors speculate that this principle of community building could apply to offline businesses as well. While I think this is certainly true (Think about Saturn, or Lego, or Harley Davidson) it seems to me that the benefits of community building online are vast:

• Inexpensive
• Greater reach
• Not bound by time or space
• Long-lasting and searchable
• Provides greater data

Companies often gain a majority of profit from heavy users and repeat purchasers. Building a community makes it easier for individuals to:

• Develop a relationship with the company/brand/employees
• Share information and reduce the marketing or support burden on the organization
• Create customer evangelists

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Technorati Tags: eBay, community

Because we don't get enough PowerPoint...

Several other people (Ross, Niall, Shel - big thanks to Niall for the invite) have already posted about a great new Web 2.0 offering called SlideShare.

SlideShare can be simply described as YouTube for PowerPoint presentations (or other slide formats). They offer a bunch of cool features that will allow for better searching and display of information in slides.

This will be a spectacular tool for sharing presentations - think of how much easier it will be to aggregate and host conference presentations through SlideShare, instead of dealing with bulky files.

Here is my first SlideShare contribution, a deck our team prepared to accompany a speech on how the rise of the global economy has brought about a paradigm shift in employee communications. Remember, there is supposed to be a speech to go along with this.

I have 10 SlideShare invites to give away, so send me an e-mail or leave a comment if you are interested.

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Technorati Tags: SlideShare, PowerPoint

How many friends do you have?

According to USA Today, Brittnie Sarnes has more than 5,000 friends.....on MySpace that is.

I had a party a few weeks ago where 20 people showed up and I thought I was pretty popular. Then again, I invited everyone through primitive means - calling them or talking to them in person. Maybe I should have posted the party of Craigslist, sent around an Evite, or left messages on people's profile pages.

There is no denying that the Internet is a powerful tool to connect individuals, and social networking platforms (MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Orkut, LinkedIn, etc.) facilitate this better than anything else. As soon as you sign in and establish a profile you are instantly connected to tens of thousands of individuals who share your music tastes, school affiliation, and occupation. With the click of the mouse, you are linked to more people than Kevin Bacon could dream of.

The question is, are these connections in and of themselves meaningful? At what point does a connection turn into a relationship? When does an online link or a shared membership in a community become the basis for action, a reason to share, the trigger to form an opinion?

On the surface, it would seem that these connections formed through online social networks constitute what sociologists refer to as "weak ties" - relationships that are formed through loose connections (acquaintances, distant friends, etc.) and whose members do not put a lot weight on the opinions of the others. The stereotype is that this online activity, because it lacks the tactile aspects of face-to-face communication, is inherently less significant.

However, this is not the case.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project published a significant report this January, "The Strength of Internet Ties" that concluded:

1. Internet users have larger social networks than non-users
2. People are turning to the Internet to make major life decisions like what cars to buy, where to live, where to work, etc.

The fact is that for many people (a number that will only increase in coming generations) the relationships formed online matter...bigtime. Just look at how elaborate the online world Second Life has become.

What does this mean?
With physical boundaries irrelevant, relevancy reigns supreme - Think about what you did as a kid - kicked the soccer ball around, played Dungeons & Dragons, sat around and listened to records. You were limited to joining up with the neighborhood kids. Activities were based on what those kids liked or what toys they had to play with.

Now, you have the whole world as your neighbor and whatever your interests are, you can find a community that supports that (for better or worse). All that matters is that community give the individual a place to connect and participate.

Diversity of communities is powerful -Closed networks are productive, but not innovative. Surround yourself with like minded people and you will be get things done. But you will never be able to see beyond what is right around you. You will not be exposed to new things, people will not question the status quo, growth will be steady at best, but never exponential. In short, the big idea will never come.

The most innovative and expansive knowledge comes from diverse networks of weak ties, a theory put forth by sociologist Mark Granovetter and furthered by Ronald Burt among others. The people who, as Burt says, "sit at the edges of social networks." are the ones that posses the greatest and most useful forms of social capital.

What does this mean for organizations?
Create communities (and make them inclusive) - Organizations are incredibly inefficient in terms of applying roles and responsibilities. Employees are bound by a job description and prescriptive responsibilities. Managers are reluctant to share resources (i.e., staff, funding) and so you are stuck "going to war with the army ya got." Organizations would be better off viewing people as able to offer more than their position and title imply. Do you know what your employee's interests are, their hobbies, their additional skill sets? Do you give individuals the chance to pursue interests beyond their team, their office, even their cubicle?

The payoff of employee engagement is discretionary effort, when employees go beyond what is required of them and give additional value. Is your organization set up to even allow this to happen? Don't be bound be time and space. Don't think employees have to work 9-5 with the people right around them. Open things up, create communities based on skills and interests, not titles and quotas.

Find people with tons of friends - A decade ago it was the size of your Rolodex, three years ago it was the number of Outlook contacts, now it is the number of MySpace friends, or your Technorati rank that matter. You want people on the A-list. Why? Because like it or not, people will at the least hear them, and likely listen to them as well. They will know people in organizations you want to work with, have friends who are prospective clients, put you in touch with someone who knows someone who can get that thing that you need. The world is not flat, it is a series of webs of interconnectivity, and as an organization you want the people who at the middle of multiple webs.

Brittnie Sarnes has more than 5,000 friends....That is 5,000 people she can turn to for information, her own personal library of knowledge and resources. Maybe one of them will help her get a job, get into school, get that hot new pair of jeans.

Brittnie Sarnes is taking advantage of the benefits of social networking, are you? Is your organization?

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Technorati Tags: Myspace, networking, community

CTC - "Enterprise 2.0"

This talk was given by Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee, who popularized the term Enterprise 2.0 . The topic has generated tremendous reaction and discussion on his blog, as it did at the conference as well.

Emergent Platforms:

1. Structure is not imposed up front
- roles and identities are of little importance
- any form of data or information is acceptable
- Busisness process is not rigid, workflow is flexible
- Optionality - these technologies are not mandated

2. Structure emerges over time (just because we don't state with a structure, doesn't mean one doesn't develop over time).

He makes the point that almost everyone has an easier time finding information on the free Internet, than they do on their supposedly structured intranet.

Google works because the link structure of the Internet gives us a great structure for the Internet. The same type of principle works with tag clouds on flickr, del.icio.us and technorati. It gives structure to something that had no structure at the start.

The Current State of Enterprise 2.0:

• We are in the early days of this - Business executives at Harvard Business School get either a deer in a headlights looks or are utterly overwhelmed. Many executives feel that creating a blog takes to much work. Awareness of tools, ease of use and accessibility is very low.
• Encouraging examples: wikis, blogs, prediction markets, tagging
  • prediction markets - an internal stock exchange that allows people to buy or sell on the success of certain events (based on Iowa Electronic Markets
• Tech companies are early adopters - need to move slowly in other business areas where they are not tech savvy

Which is easier - Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0?
Web advantages
    - Long Tail - only need a small set of passionate users
    - Can dial up or down the level of anonymity

Enterprise Advantages
    - Incentives - can provide direct motivation for participation
    - Culture - the collegial atmosphere and caring is not sufficient and caring
    - Management? - not users or IT staff - what is going to make this work in a company is whether management really wants this to work or not

Vibrant Communities and Ghost Towns
When Enterprise 2.0 works
    - Interdependance - what makes a team is the level of interdependance, you need some level of shared fate
    - Goals/deadlines/output - need something tangible that you are working to
    - Nudge from leaders - not mandate
    - No powerful holdouts

When Enterprise 2.0 doesn't work
    - Independence
    - No goals, deadlines
    - "If we build it, they will come
    - Wrong user demographics - younger and tech friendly your workforce is, the  more success you will have

Question was raised as to whether it makes sense to go with blogs or wikis within an enterprise. There was the issue of the need for attribution.
Two issues:
- It is only logical that these tools (blogs and wikis) will begin to merge together
- There is still a documented trail on a wiki

The issue of relevancy - A blog is more like a lecture, from one trusted source, where a wiki is more like a discussion. Difference between opinion and subject matter expert.

Issue of incentives - Depends if you are incentivized for participation or goal acheivement. In a competitive environment, you may want personal recognition (i.e, every individual is rewarded for their talents)

What is needed from technologists?
- Better search
- Integration and consolidation - the danger of not doing this is having a bunch of individual walled gardens
- Simple, intuitive UI
- Features? - do we keep these completely free-form. That may be a little naive for the Enterprise
- Workflow - Are we ever going to need to build in a little bit of assigned procedures


Decision: Which is it?

Do leaders really believe "People are our most important asset...we believe in transparency...we want to encourage collaboration and cross-functional cooperation..."

or do they really think...

"Every bureaucracy seeks to increase the superiority of the professionally informed by keeping their knowledge and intentions secret..." - Max Weber

CTC - "Running Your Business on Web 2.0: Simple, Lightweight Apps"

This session, "Running Your Business on Web 2.0: Simple, Lightweight Apps," was run by Rod Boothby, author of the great Innovation Creators blog. Rod goes through about a dozen slides a minute, and a lot of visuals, so I suspect my notes will miss a lot.

His is a consultant - he works with knowledge workers.

He started a blog, found it was a good communication tool and asked why he couldn't use it in his work.

The key question to ask: Are you on the grid? (Can Google find you?)

The case for Web 2.0 in the enterprise is the case for hyper-linked information

(It is significant that more people are willing to read something via html than download a pdf.)

Everything in business comes down to greed and fear.

Greed

• Constant Innovation In order to acheive a constant stream of profits is to constantly innovate. You constantly innovate by leveraging the people around you.
• Improve efficiency
• Happier/ more engaged employees are more productive

Knowledge workers create ad-hoc things. They invent stuff and solve problems.

Fear

• Sarbanes-Oxley
• Global Communication

We rarely need to make life-and-death real-time decisions. It is more important to build relationships and communication

We rarely need to collaborate in real time. We can build off each other in a continuum.

Knowledge workers = Innovation Creators

We don't need knowledge management, we need better communication tools

Business case for blogs
- Empower employees - as a manager you need to be able to take people with small or big ideas and give them the ability to make that a success.

Example: In his organization, everyone is getting a People Pages and Project Pages (blogs by another name).
This will create:

• A searchable database of everyone (130,000 globally) and what they are working on
• Make a personal benefit by having by-lined articles that show readership and ranking
• Will have client blogs
• Focus pages that will talk on a particular topic

The point is to create blogs with a obvious business purposes. A way people can construct and link information that makes sense.

Simple tools:
37 Signals
Google
Joyent
Wordpress
MovableType
SocialText
Traction
Zoho

These things are agile

The key is:

• Individuals and interactions over process and tools

• Working software over comprehensive documentation

It is important of encouraging a cottage-industry of internal  user-developed-application (UDA). This allows others to do work and increases

Who gets it?: Blogtronix, Automattic, Socialtext, iUpload (others I didn't get down)

Problem is IT's first job is to not get fired and second job is to protect the information.

IT is slow to adpot SOA because it is not linear, it is messy.

Suggestion of Enterprise Web 2.0 Gateway

What Should Go Behind the Firewall:
Authentication, Access Control, Encryption, Audit Trail

Already sort of happening with Sxip

We are going to have to consider the laws of identity.

Conclusion:

• To profit you must innovate

• To innovate you need to empower innovator creators

• Innovation creators need the tools (blogs, wikis)

In the end the business case comes in terms of innovation. These things are all just tools that will facilitate innovation, people still have to use these tools. In the end it comes down to defining what you need in terms of tools in the business. This will different in each business. Give people the tools to make their own application.

He makes it clear that all of these conversation are INTERNAL. External conversations need a lot more control. Think about going slowly.

The distribution of blogging policy actual resulted in increase in usage. You need a senior person to communicate this stuff (preferrably in person). Then get that senior person to recognize participation.

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Technorati Tags: ctc2006, CTCBoston, CTC, collaborative+technologies+conference, Boothby, Innovation, Innovation+Creators, blogs

CTC - "Making Sense of Web 2.0: Impact on the Enterprise"

The afternoon breakouts began with Dion Hinchcliffe, editor-in-chief of Web 2.0 Journal, talking about "Making Sense of Web 2.0: Impact on the Enterprise" (He zoomed through the presentation pretty quickly and had a lot of diagrams, so I will try to post the presentation later)

A reductionist view of Web 2.0 - A Read-Write Web + Lots of People Using It = Collective Intelligence

Network Effects - A good or service that has value based on other people having it (e-mail, wikis, etc.)

There are a lot of definitions of Web 2.0s and they are all true in some way.

Aspects of Web 2.0
Stratgic positioning
    - web as a platform
User Positioning
    - you control your own data
Core Compenticies
    - Services, not packaged software
    - Harnessing collective intelligence

Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of the platforms. Going beyond the page to the idea of applications

7 tenets of Web 2.0

1. Web as platform - open, reusable Web services, permalinks, syndication
2. Harnessing Collective Intelligence - services that get better, the more people use them
3. Information as the Core Capability, Not Software - Google Maps, "Blogosphere"
4. End of Discrete Software Releases - continous improvement becomes the norm
5. Lightwieght programming models - users can be their own programers
6. Fundamentally federated software systems - examples: iTunes, blogosphere
7. Rich User Experiences - Results found in software are as good as can be found anywhere else

Core competencies of Web 2.0

• Online services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability

• Maintaining control over unique, hard to re-create information that gets better with more users

• Trusting your users as co-developers

• Harnessing collective intelligence

• Leveraging The Long Tail

• Lightwieght user interfaces, development models

The most pressing issue facing the enterprise over the next year is the conflict/overlap/reconciliation between SOA and Web 2.0

The simplicity of use and ability to exploit network effects has resulted in enormous online communities.

Now users have extended beyond early adopters and techies. It now has global adoption and blogosphere doubles every six months

Will this happen in the enterprise?
Two pre-requisites to acquiring  knowledge

• Motivation - People will discover that they can help themselves to solve problems and get information
• Context - Understanding concepts and reasons for them. As people become more familiar with benefits it will become more widespread

We should strive for less transactional interactions and more tacit interactions. Tacit interactions provide the largest productivity gains.

Technologies allow us to allocate activities more effieciently between tacit interaction and transactional employees.

Technology to boost the quality, speed and scalability of the decisions employees make.

Applying Web 2.0 to the enterprise
- Low barrier, available anywhere
- Allow users to structure business information (folksonomies over taxonomies)
- Continous bottom-up management by end-users
- Business processes exposed as Web services (or at least a feed)
- Easy inclusion of external Web services (outside-in)
- Based on portable, recognized standards
- Web 2.0 style collaboration (Wikis, Visible Path, etc.)

Adding enterprise "context" to blogs - Question is whether this stuff eliminates benefits of blogging
- Enterprise Integrated Secruity
- Approval Process for Posts and New Users
- Content Auditing (preferably automated)
- Open Services - Both usage and consumption
- High-Quality Enterprise Federated Search (huge problem)
- Flexible Hosting Options

Governance is a key issue in that when you open yourself up to other departments and users, you bring up

Examples:
IBM and QEDwiki
ProgrammableWeb.com
MashupFeed.com

Government agency creates an internal wiki. They wanted to get workers to contrinute high value information, but they couldn't get contributions from workers because it wasn't in their self-interest.

The result of long-term Web 2.0: Social Computing

• moving from top-down to bottom-up model

• moving from ownership to experience

• Power is moving from institutions to communities

Major Trends for Enterprise 2.0

• Enterprise Mashups
• Ad-hoc yet integrated
• Consistent Foundations

Reccommendations
Small Pieces, Loosely Joined
Reuse first, build structure
Provide minimum structure and let users build from there