Category Archives: Business

03.31.09
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Community Conference 2009: Jake McKee, How to build a community that’s crazy about your product

Jake McKee begins by talking about ‘success by a thousand paper cuts’, which is thinking about the smallest thing possible you can do without approval to get you closer to your goals. He also said that we’ve talked a lot about community, but what we’re really talking about is ‘social engagement’. Just because it’s new doesn’t mean it’s difficult.

Rather than talking about building a community that’s crazy about you or your product, he talks about how to throw a great party. We already build relationships with people in our lives. Parties connect, excite and engage. He lists ingredients to create a great party:

  1. Your party needs a reason to be. What is this thing? Is your party a 12-year-old’s birthday party or a cocktail party with friends.
  2. What’s the higher calling? What are we here to connect about? What is the need we are addressing? What problem are we trying to solve?
  3. Your party needs good planning. Every good social effort starts with good strategy. Prep for scale. Make it simple and flexible so you can constantly evolve. Keep in mind the 1-9-90 principle.
  4. Your party needs a host. We need leaders in social groups. It gives direction to where we’re going in this social group. It gives accountability and direction, and it builds the culture.
  5. Your party needs a few introductions. It doesn’t happen often enough. In the early days of Flickr, every new user was introduced by one of the staff. Every single person who signed up and posted a picture was introduced to others with similar interests. That might not be possible when you’ve got 200 sign-ups an hour, but Flickr had established the culture.
    Not enough communities have mentors, volunteers who welcome people and help them find their way around.
  6. Your party needs an invitation. The site needs functionality and tools that make it easy for members to invite other people. Make it portable such as the share this buttons for Facebook or Twitter. Be explicit with the invitation.
  7. You need social norms. Guidelines and rule are important. Guidelines are guiding principles. How do we translate guidelines into something that people will pay attention to? He points to Flickr’s community guidelines: “Don’t be creepy. You know the guy. Don’t be that guy.”
    It is about building culture, not blocking content.
    It creates collaborative ownership. It’s clear and fun. In online environments
  8. Your party needs a bouncer. “Be nice until it’s time to not be nice.”
  9. Power in n00bs and nerds. It’s so easy in a social group to get caught up in the history and the legacy.
  10. You need your attendees to pitch in. People want to be heard, but they also need a something to do.
  11. Your party needs you. These things don’t get outsourced.
  12. Everybody goes home happy. This is what it all boils down to.

He was asked what it takes to be a good community manager. He says it’s all down communication skills.

03.31.09
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Community Conference 2009: Tommy Sollen, social media manager Visit Sweden

As I said, the Community Conference 2009 in Copenhagen is a mix of business, media,

Tommy Sollen talked about how he set up a community for Visit Sweden. While he did this, he set up a WordPress blog to talk about the development of the community and the site. He was working in the open. Tourism organisations across Europe and in Canada, which helped in the development. They developed Community of Sweden.com. It focuses photos and stories. The main goal is to help the members of community to inspire each other. It’s built on the EPiServer content management system.

They have tags on all the content including geo-tags and activities. One of the things I liked is that they also have a tag for the seasons. He talked about how they encourage people to tag photos because the titles provided too little information to properly index. Photo sharing has surpassed their expectations, and they now have more than 12,000 photos (the site was launched in late 2007). He highlighted some of the photos and said that they could easily create an online magazine just with user-generated photos. If they use a photo in their print magazine, they give full photo credits to who uploaded the photos and offer to buy the photo.

One of the users, from Italy, had taken a photo that their print magazine editor thought was perfect for an article. They contacted him and offered to pay him for the photo, but he refused to accept payment.

They do no marketing for the site, but they now have 6,300 registered members, 12,000 photos and more than a thousand travel stories. They have a community and the development blog, but they wanted to know what came next so they integrated Community of Sweden.com more tightly with the Visit Sweden website.

They have also created Sweden pages on Facebook and a Sweden channel on YouTube. “It’s about placing ourselves in the social media sphere,” he said. They also have created widgets that allow people to add these to their blogs, sites or social networks.

He was asked about the issue of people on Facebook saying that they would come to an event but didn’t. The person asking the question asked if they had tried to offer a coupon to encourage them to turn out. Tommy said that he wanted events but hadn’t got the budget yet for it, but he believes that events would help support the community.

He was asked about how 6000 users was seen as a success. He said that people have spent not just minutes, not just hours but days on the site and had ‘created ambassadors for Sweden’.

03.31.09
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Community Conference 2009: Lois Kelly, Communities and business

I’m at the Community Conference 2009 in Copenhagen. The audience is a mix of media, government, NGOs and business folks.

Lois Kelly of Beeline Labs talks about how she got into the field. In 1992, she became involved in the AOL miscarriage community. “This is what the internet is about. It is about creating ways to connect people.”

In 1998, she launched her own consultancy. She found Alan’s Forums, a community for consultants to help each other with tip on how to market each other and build your business. People were all over the world. People helping people.

In 2001, she and her neighbours joined together to save a local landmark, an old bridge. People wouldn’t show up for meetings or sign petitions. People would go online at night and voice what they wanted.

In 2005, Ning makes communities free. It’s so inexpensive and easy to use that almost anyone could start playing comunities, 900,000 communities in February 2009. There are 4000 new communities a day with almost 40% outside of the US.

Tribal behaviour has been here forever. We want to connect with each other. The biggest challenges are how to attract people and get them engaged. Only 40% of the communities set up on Ning are active.

What makes communities successful:

  • Communities need a purpose. They need a clear purpose
  • The community needs deeply felt or widely felt issue
  • Help and get help. Trust.

People do not trust businesses or governments. They do not want to be marketed to. A Nielsen study found Denmark had low levels of trust in advertising, only 28%.

What drives people’s use of communities

  • Ability to help people
  • Ability to connect with like-minded issue
  • Community focused on hot topic issue

The value of communities to businesses and non-profits is for market insights or research. She gave the example of an ’employee community’ that saved $5m a year through insights gained in the community. They were little ideas not huge complicated ones.

The unexpected value of communities from a case study:

  • Insights and Ideas. The case study company said the community had become ‘an unlimited source of R&D’.
  • Sales. They had higher average sales per community member ($1200) compared to a typical customer ($500)
  • Customers are creating their own marketing in the community.
  • They could cut down their PR or even get rid of their PR.

She suggested the people ask 5 simple questions that businesses need to ask before creating a community:

  1. Why are we doing this?
  2. How will people (not the company) benefit?
  3. Do people care enough?
  4. What do we expect to get? (There needs to be business value, which is tied to the first question.)
  5. How do we measure?

She suggested the businesses creating communities need to be customer-centric versus product-centric. Focus on ‘behavioural tribes versus demographic segments’. She pointed to how a scissors company had created a community not based on scissors but rather based on how people used scissors, in this case scrapbooking. She also said that companies need to foucs on ‘networks versus channels’. IBM created an internal community called beehive. Employees were able to connect with each other. Employees with really good ideas started promoting their projects. Instead of going through usual channels, employees were going through this network to promote their ideas. People also thought they could get ahead faster – ‘climbing’. She had interviewed a 27-year-old employee who said she was able to advance more quickly because she used the intranet to show off her skills. “Before this, she would have been anonymous,” Lois said.

It allows great talent to network and share.

She found that many companies do not have internal networks but will create their own through Facebook (or LinkedIn, I would say).

She said that businesses with communities need to measure against business goals. New product ideas? Earn customer confidence? Reduce customer service costs? Awareness in category? Reduce training, education costs? Change perceptions? Get votes, get sales? That will help drive design.

Communities are a lot of work. If you want a successful community, you have to put the resources in.

She also said that some companies need to be more ‘social’ but don’t necessarily need a community. She showed how Panasonic.com had created customer reviews and recommendations. She compared a number of social strategies – badges, tagging, Twitter and communities. Communities take investment and resources to be successful, but there might be simpler social strategies to achieve your goals rather than creating a community.

There was an interesting question about Facebook. They need to pay for the service but communities are resistant to advertising or marketing messages.

Lois: In the US, a lot of us think that Facebook is over and we’ve all moved to Twitter. We’re nomadic tribes. Last year, it was Facebook. This year is Twitter. I don’t know what it will be next year. Value needs to be there for a payment value. (She talked about some of the features that Twitter is considering as a business model including adding a service for business ala Yammer.) Advertising model still has value.

03.27.09
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Yo Vodafone! 15MB per day is not an ‘unlimited data’ plan

I don’t usually write about commercial products or services here on Strange Attractor, unless they are really, really good or really, really bad. This would be a case of the latter, at least in terms of honesty regarding terms and conditions.

I’ve been a Vodafone pay-as-you-go customer since I moved to the UK four years ago, mostly because when I came here, Voda was the only company I could find with international roaming on PAYG. I also didn’t know how long I would be in the UK and so I didn’t want to get locked into an 18- to 24-month contract. Besides, I don’t really use my phone to make calls much. In the UK, unlike in the US, you only pay for calls you make so if people called me, I don’t have to pay for those minutes. Instead, I text people, and I could get 70 texts a month for about £5 plus all the calls I ever made for £10 a month all in. Up until recently (although their website says different things on the tarriffs), Vodafone also would sell PAYG customers 15MB of data a day for a £1, which was generally reasonable for the amount of data I was using. It made economic sense, and it fit with the way I used my phone.

However, since I’m relatively settled here in the UK and have an Nokia N82 with a lot of data services, I decided to look into their new SIM-only plans. I don’t need a new phone. I also noticed that my PAYG credit was disappearing surprisingly quickly, even though I wasn’t making more calls. I spent a goodly amount of time clicking around on my account on the Vodafone site trying to determine where my credit was going, but Voda doesn’t actually seem to let me in on the secret of how I’m spending my PAYG credit. It might be buried in the website somewhere, but there isn’t anything in My Account that says, ‘See your latest bill’ or latest usage. I was none the wiser. I can only guess that I must have been going over the 15MB limit so a £2 per megabyte charge kicks in. Ouch.

Still, I was paying about £15 a month for text, calls and data, and with a new £7.50 monthly data plan for pay pay monthly customers, it looked like I could get ‘unlimited data’. Of course with any of these things, there is the fine print. ‘Unlimited data’ actually doesn’t mean unlimited in any traditional definition of the term, which isn’t surprising. In the UK, most of the broadband plans are capped at 5 to 8 GB a month. Like many others, the Voda ‘unlimited’ data plan has a ‘fair use limit’. But what exactly is this ‘fair use’ limit?

For £1 a day you get unlimited data access in the UK only, subject to a fair use limit of 15MB per day (100s of emails and web pages). If you use over 15MB a day then we may ask you to moderate your usage. If after we have asked you to moderate your usage, you fail to do so, we reserve the right to charge you for the excessive element of your usage at your price plan’s standard rate or to suspend or terminate your service in accordance with your airtime and/or price plan terms and conditions.

‘Unlimited’, to Voda, equals 450MB in a 30-day month. The chap in the Vodafone shop up the road assured me that “no one ever goes over the limit” and besides, “all of the data is compressed [using their Novarra internet service] anyway”.

What a lovely bit of thinking from 2006. Memo to Voda: People use the data plans on their phones for so much more than surfing the mobile web though your portal. My phone has a Flickr uploader. If I want to upload 15 pics from the N82’s very capable 5-megapixel camera on the road using the phones built-in uploader, I’m getting pretty close to 15 MB right there. I use Google Maps all of the time, and the N82’s GPS uses network servers to speed location-locking. Using Vodafone’s own data calculator, they reckon I’d use 1GB of data a month if I only spent 1 hour browsing the internet a day, sent and received 10 emails each day, (what planet do they live on?), download or upload 5 documents a day, downloaded 10 music tracks a month, uploaded 55 pics a month and downloaded 1 software program or system update a month.

Also, chaps, why do you call it ‘unlimited’ subject to a ‘fair use limit’ when you tell 3G data dongle users exactly how much data they get with your laptop plans: £20 for 1GB and £25 for 3GB. Why not just do that with your so-called ‘unlimited’ plan for phones? It’s not unlimited even with the ‘fair-use’ fig leaf.

This is much more than taking liberties with the English language. For the annual award for Greatest Abuse Done to the English Language in Pursuit of Profits, Voda’s lawyers seem intent on challenging the marketing departments in the landline ‘fraud-band’ industry that routinely quote speeds you would never get unless the switch was in your bathroom. Deceptive marketing practices really piss me off, and this is deceptive, which is why right after this post, I’m headed to the Advertising Standards Authority website (or the Trading Standards folks). Let’s file this one under lies, damn lies and terms & conditions.

03.17.09
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Businesses will live to regret their social media ignorance

There’s been a lot of discussion recently about how social media sites are now the more popular than, and even replacing, email. Earlier in March, a Nielsen survey found that 67% of people going online spent time on social networks and blogs. Now a presentation at South by SouthWest has posited how social tools such as Facebook, Yammer, Twitter and Friendfeed are replacing email.

I have no doubt that both reports are true and the wide media coverage of both should be a warning shot across the bows of business and, in particular, their IT departments. If CxOs don’t start to get a grip on the use of social media internally for communication and collaboration they are going to regret it.

Just think about what is actually going on here: Fed up with rubbish corporate email software and wanting to communicate quickly and effectively with their colleagues, people are turning to the tools that suit them the most. Or to put it another way,

People see email as damage and route around it.

This means that corporate communications are being had all over the place. And that means that your communications archives, which you might have to one day rely on in court, are scattered who knows where across the internet. This is something you really do not want to happen.

What’s the answer? Well, you can put your kneejerks away. The answer is not to summarily shut off access to Twitter and Facebook and the like. Remember that bit about routing round damage? People find ways to circumvent stupid IT policies, and you won’t find out until it’s too late. Using Ubuntu on a USB stick to circumvent idiotic IT decisions that prevent people from doing their job effectively and efficiently may be a minority sport at the moment, but it’s going to become a lot more common as it becomes easier and information on how to do it starts to circulate beyond the geek community.

If you want to stop your staff using Twitter to discuss hiring decisions and ensure that your corporate communications information is safe on your own server, where it can be archived and searched, you need to install Web 2.0 services yourself. Now. This is not a time for the Great Race to be Second, this is a time to look very seriously at the ramifications of not enabling your staff to work the way that they want to.

At the very minimum, you need to give your staff these tools:

  • Wiki
  • Instant messanger
  • Twitter-esque microconversation
  • RSS readers

And you need to make sure you know how communications using these tools are going to be logged, archived, and made searchable. Mostly, archiving (or logging) is built in, so it shouldn’t be that difficult. Cross-archive search might be a little bit more interesting, but it’s worth your while because more time is wasted in re-finding information than in finding it in the first place.

You also need to understand how these tools can be used to best effect, what their strengths and weaknesses are, how to communicate about them to your staff, and how to encourage adoption. How do they fit together as a suite? How can you encourage people to use them instead of the publicly available tools? What are the benefits? What do you do if someone, despite everything, does something silly publicly? Don’t guess at this stuff – do it properly. You’ve probably got expertise internally, somewhere. If not, hire it in. Carefully.

This discussion is no longer about things like return on investment, improving efficiency and productivity or encouraging corporate culture change. Whilst those are still important, I think we’ve crossed a threshold where installing social tools is actually the risk averse action to take, the safer route, the thing that helps prevent monumentally stupid communications fuck-ups.

Many IT departments, taking their network security responsibilities seriously, have secured their networks so tightly that they are no longer functional for the very people who need to use them. And those people now have options – they can go elsewhere, and they are going elsewhere. Let me put it another way:

People see IT restrictions as damage and route around them.

Routing around damage is getting easier and easier, so easy it will soon be mainstream. You cannot ignore this anymore. You can’t bury your head in the sand and say that Web 2.0 is for other people. You can’t blindly carry on using bloated corporate tools that drive your users to madness. Your users are smarter than that now, and they have been enabled. You either get to grips with the tools that people actually want to use to communicate, you provide them with what they need to do their jobs, you transform your IT department into an enabling force for good, or…

Can you actually afford to risk finding out what “or” might mean? Peter Horrocks accidentally Tweeted BBC promotions. What if it had been firings? What if his entire direct message archive was accidentally made public by a third party tool? What if one of the external tools your staff are using suddenly changes the way that it works, thus revealing things that were assumed to be hidden?

Trust me on this, if nothing else. You aren’t going to like “or” very much at all, and you’ll be much better off if you take social software seriously.

02.06.09
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How to tell if your social media consultant is a lemon

Dave Fleet has a great blog post about how to pick a social media marketing consultant, after a blog post by Ike Pigott calling into question the knowledge of the new flock of “social media consultants” who seem to have crawled out of the woodwork over the last six months.

[W]e have a glut of people selling their expertise on how you should handle “the Twitter community” who have zero experience using the service the way most people do. They hopped on board the Consultancy Express, went straight to the head of the line, and now want to tell you how to talk to people at all of the stops they skipped.

Like Dave and Ike, I have reservations about the way that it seems to have suddenly become fashionable to be a “social media consultant”. As Dave says:

I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of seeing people sign up for Twitter, follow ten thousand people (many of whom follow back) to build a substantial following, then start spouting advice as though followers equals expertise. Some of them are experts, for sure. Others, however, seem to have little beyond a big mouth to back their words up.

Almost as annoying, but just as dangerous, are the hordes of traditional practitioners that have realized they need to include social media in their pitches nowadays, but have no experience whatsoever using those tools.

I have been wanting to write a post like this for months now, but had been holding off because I was a bit worried that I’d end up sounding as If I was criticising people simply for being new. We all have to start somewhere, after all, but social media is experiential, which means if you haven’t experienced it then you really don’t know what you’re talking about.

That said, I lost a job to a guy who had giant red flashing text on his blog, and that was two or three years ago. (Funnily, not only did they tell me “he’s a blog expert recommended by one of our directors, they also told me “we’ll get back to you if we ever need any help with social media.” D’oh.) So experience alone doesn’t guarantee that you’re going to get good advice, because there are some people around who have been successfully spouting crap for years.

Dave offers up these questions to help you winnow out the wheat from the chaff when looking for a social media marketing consultant:

1. Can you give me an example of social media work you’ve completed for a client recently?
2. How do you go about pitching bloggers?
3. How do you monitor what people are saying about you?
4. Where can I find you online?
5. Can you (ghost) write my blog for me?
6. How do you measure results?
7. How would you define social media?
8. Can you just pretend to be me online?

Now, some of these work just as well if you’re looking for an expert to help with internal communications and collaboration, but I’d like to offer up my own list.

So, what do you ask a social media business consultant?

How long have you been using social tools? A good consultant will have been using social tools for quite a while, probably a year or two longer than they’ve actually been a consultant. If someone has only been doing this blogging for six months or a year, you might want to look much more closely at their experience, and make a decision as to whether you want to take a risk on them. They may be a natural, but they’re probably winging it.

Equally, do not believe anyone who says they’ve been doing it blogging forever. Blogs themselves are only ten years old. When I started consulting five years ago, I had only a handful of peers, and they are all very well known now. Any unknown who says they’ve been doing it consulting for more than six years is probably fibbing.

[Update: It’s been pointed out that this section was a bit fuzzy, so I’ve clarified what I mean by “doing it”! And yes, I know hand-coded blog-like websites have been around longer than ten years, but what makes blogging different from a website is the lightweight CMS that underpins it, and both LiveJournal and Blogger started in ’99.]

What was the first social tool you used? Most consultants who’ve been doing this for any length of time probably started off with a personal blog, because that was all that was around in those days. If they started off on Facebook, run away very quickly. If they started on Twitter, carefully examine their other experience.

What tools do you use on a regular basis? They should have at least one blog, a Twitter (or similar) account, and some sort of social network account. If they list every damn thing under the sun, it means that either they have no clients and therefore a lot of time to kill, or they are playing buzzword bingo with you. Realistically, it’s hard to go deep on more than three tools and a lot of the really important stuff is learnt only through focused engagement.

What sort of clients do you have? Expect a broad range of clients in many different sectors, and expect company sizes to range from tiny to multinational. Ask what type of engagements they were, and you should get similarly broad descriptions, from one hour presentations on upwards. Any consultant worth their salt has done a lot of work with very unsure clients who don’t want to spend too much money, because that’s just how the market has been (and still is).

Have you ever had a project that didn’t work out the way you anticipated? If the answer to this is not “Yes”, be suspicious. Good consultants have had to experiment because there isn’t a definitive guide to running social software projects. We know a lot more about what sort of things work now than we used to, but every new client has a new culture, and every new culture throws up new and sometimes surprising problems. Rarely do things go as planned, and you want someone who can think on their feet and adapt to changing circumstances.

What presentations have you given? This is a slightly nuanced question to ask, because not all knowledgeable people speak at conferences, but the more experienced someone is, the more likely they are to have done some speaking. Maybe it will be at conferences of their peers, or maybe it will be at small specialist meetings, or maybe it’s even a lunchtime talk for a business. I’m not really sure that barcamps count – they’re a great place for learning how to present, but they don’t necessarily indicate anything other than a desire to stand up in front of people and speak.

How do you measure success and recognise failure? The correct answer isn’t a stream of jargon about statistics and metrics, but instead should cover understanding the situation as it is before the new software is installed, having clear project goals, and critically examining what can be measured and what it might mean. There is no simple answer to this question, and if they suggest complicated metrics like “edits per page view per person”, then they’re not really thinking things through enough.

Of course, you should thoroughly Google any consultant before you contact them. You should easily be able to find:

  • A professional site or LinkedIn/Xing (etc.) profile
  • A blog, professional or personal
  • A Twitter or other micro-conversation account
  • Articles and blog posts that quote them
  • Their name on conference speaker rosters
  • Audio and/or video of talks they’ve given

Take the time to read through what other people say about them. Do they seem to be respected by their peers? Are they personable online? Can you build a sense of how much experience they have? What do they reveal about themselves as a person?

I wouldn’t worry about the age-old “Have they done work similar to the project I have in mind?” question, because to be honest, every project is a little bit different and what works perfectly for one company might not work in another, for cultural reasons.

Equally, don’t worry if they haven’t worked in your sector – social tools are cross-sector, and good consultants can work successful in any industry. I hate to say it, but your industry is unlikely to be so different that it genuinely takes specialist knowledge to work in. After all, we’re talking mainly about human qualities, such as openness, trust, or transparency, and these exist everywhere. (Also, anyone who tries to flog you sector-specific tools is probably talking out of their arse.)

Red flags
There are some thing that should make you immediately wary, however they are couched.

Promising the earth. Social media projects are neither fast nor easy, because they are centred not around technology but around behavioural change, and that takes time. Any consultant who promises a ‘quick win’ is promising something they can’t deliver.

‘Facebookitis’. Consultants whose only focus is Facebook are to be avoided. Facebook is great at what it does, which is help people organise their social lives and throw virtual sheep at each other. Internal business social networks are most useful tools only when they are designed to fulfil the needs of the user, which are likely to be different to those of the average Facebook user.

Too much focus on technology. Having the right tools is important, but it’s only 20% of the solution. The rest is about understanding and communicating with people about how these tools will make genuine improvements to their work life. If all the consultant talks about is tech, they’re not right for you.

Too much focus on launch. We are (or should be) long past the idea that all the hard work is done prior to a project launch, but this is especially true with social media projects. Getting things up and running is only the beginning – the hard work comes when you start focusing on adoption and long-term usage.

Hard questions to ask yourself
Before you start looking for help, there are some questions you should be asking yourself. If you can’t say “Yes” to these questions, perhaps you’re not ready to get a consultant of any sort in yet.

Are you in it for the long haul? As I’ve said, social media projects take time, and there’s no such thing as a quick win. If you’re not really interested in ongoing change, don’t run the project.

Are you capable of accepting hard truths? A good consultant won’t shy away from hard truths. They may have to tell you that your wonderful idea won’t work. Are you ready to hear that?

Are you willing to spend money on your people? I’ll say it again. Tech is only 20% of the problem – the rest is people. If you’re not willing to spend significant time and money working on understanding your people’s individual needs and helping them learn how these tools will help, don’t go ahead with the project. You can’t just throw mud against the wall and see what sticks – we know that doesn’t work, so don’t pretend it will.

Are you willing to eat your own dogfood? You want to get other people to use these tools, but do you?

It’s turned into a bit of a long post, and I hope that it’s been useful. Personally, I relish the idea that maybe one day I’ll turn up to a first meeting with a client, and they’ll have printed this post out and proceed to ask me what I’m proposing you ask your consultant. Am I willing to eat my own dogfood? Oh yes!!

11.17.08
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Disrupt or be disrupted

more about “ Why do people listen to Michael Ros…“, posted with vodpod

Andy Dickinson has a post asking the question: Why do people listen to Michael Rosenblum? Andy thinks that Michael is worth listening to but that his approach doesn’t “work across the board”. At conferences, many in the room may be hearing Michael’s message for the first time, but Andy says:

As suprising as it may be to them, there are people in their organisations who are as knowledgable and passionate about video as he is. They may have more experience of the particular problems in their company and more direct suggestions to help solve them.

They may not give as good a show but they may give as good advice.

Suw sees the same thing in business. She is often called in as a consultant by people who agree with her, often passionately, but don’t have the political capital in their organisation to shake it from its inertia. They need a comrade in arms but have to buy one in.

Returning to Andy’s post, I think another, possibly more important question is: Why do people nod in agreement at conferences and then completely ignore Michael Rosenblum or other digital advocates, especially those in their own organisations? Frankly, Michael, Jeff Jarvis and many of us have been saying the same thing for years now. Digital technology will disrupt the business of journalism, and it presents a clear choice of either adopting and adapting the technology or watching your business crumble. However, we shouldn’t mistake the collapse of some businesses as evidence of lightning fast change. This has been a slow motion train wreck. This is the predictable outcome of the economics of disruptive digital technologies, which is why I’m mystified people continue to ignore this fact, carry on with business as usual and then feign surprise as their businesses implode.

We’ve had decades to watch the digital revolution play out. As Tom Coates wrote in debunking the attack of the snails argument:

So here’s the argument – that perhaps broadcast won’t last forever and that technology is changing faster than ever before. So fast, apparently, that it’s almost dazzlingly confusing for people.

I’m afraid I think this is certifiable bullshit. There’s nothing rapid about this transition at all. It’s been happening in the background for fifteen years. So let me rephrase it in ways that I understand. Shock revelation! A new set of technologies has started to displace older technologies and will continue to do so at a fairly slow rate over the next ten to thirty years!

Tom wrote his post two and a half years ago, and yet journalism and media organisations continue to bemoan the rapid pace of change. In fact, this change is just the logical conclusion of decades-long trends that have been clear to anyone who was actually paying attention.

In some ways, it’s understandable. If you have a wonderfully lucrative business model like television or the de facto monopolies of big metro daily newspapers in the US, the first reaction is to protect the existing business model rather than adapt to meet the challenge of digital insurgents. It’s a perfectly reasonable response.

In other ways, it’s a complete failure of management replicated almost identically across several sectors of the media industry. Newspapers have been suffering declining readership for decades. Television has been facing fragmenting audiences for years under the threat of cable and satellite. This is the failure of vision by media management: They have focused on digital consumption patterns without adopting digital production methods and undercutting their own costs. And as the erosion of audience has accelerated, they have mainly cut costs by cutting staff instead of by adopting digital production and distribution technology.

At this late hour for many media companies the critical question is, when are you going to stop nodding your heads at conferences and get on with it? Not many of us in media will be able to go hat in hand like Northern Rock or General Motors and ask for billions to bail us out. I think that Mindy McAdams raises an important issue in the comments on Andy’s post:

News organizations seem particularly susceptible to “a prophet is without honor in his own land” — people inside the organization who spread Michael’s same message might be completely ignored, but management will hire Michael to come in and do his excellent presentation, and THEN they will ooo and ahh about it, acting as if it is brand-new.

A few things to realise in the age of digital disruption:

  1. Higher costs of production do not necessarily result in higher quality of products.
  2. Quality and brand do not equal media success.
  3. Broadcast=wedding. Anytime you put broadcast near technology in the same sentence, it’s like saying you want something for a wedding. Just triple the cost.
  4. Disrupt or be disrupted. Actively look for ways to disrupt your own business model with digital technologies before someone else does.
11.06.08
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The nature of work – visible, invisible, and that doesn’t look like work

As I mentioned in my last post, Proxies for productivity, and why no one trusts teleworkers, I think one of the big problems facing business right now is the fact that they do not understand what work is, and what it isn’t. I outlined the four most common proxies for productivity that I’ve noticed at play in the businesses I have observed:

  • Number of emails received
  • Amount of time spent in meetings
  • Length of the work day
  • Distance travelled and jetlag suffered

Now this is not to say that email, meetings, long days and travel aren’t sometimes needed, or don’t form an important part of what work is in the knowledge economy. A small number of emails are important; meetings can occasionally be very productive, not just from the point of view of making decisions but also for the high-value relationship building that can only be done face-to-face; sometimes long days can be not just necessary but also productive; and every now and again you really do need to get on that plane.

I’m keen not to throw the baby out with the bath water, but to make the point that whilst sometimes these activities are genuinely important, mostly they are not. When they have become goals in and of themselves, instead of a means to achieve a goal, they have shifted from being useful tools to proxies for productivity.

Think about the playground marbles champion, who holds his position primarily because he’s managed to win, buy, steal or otherwise acquire a very large collection of marbles, rather than because he’s actually good at playing the game. People who believe that they are working hard because they get lots of email, do lots of meetings, always work long hours and travel a lot have done nothing more than fill a very large bag full of marbles.

So if all of this activity, this busy-ness, is only rarely actual work, what is work? For a couple of years now, I’ve been in the habit of thinking of work as falling into two categories, one easy to define, the other a lot less so.

Visible Work
This is all of the stuff that other people can see you doing. Obviously, the proxy activities fall into this category – if they weren’t very clearly visible to your peers and your managers, they would be no use as proxies. Document writing, coding, designing, phone calls, conferences, presentations… the list is almost infinitely extensible.

These are things that easily answer the question, “What is Alice doing?” They are the knowledge economy equivalents of manufacturing industry work: behaviours that result in something, whether tangible or digital, that is easily described.

Invisible Work
One of the big problems with working in a knowledge job is that much of your work is done in your head. There is no way to embody what goes on in your brain, no matter how important it is in helping you to attain your goals. Indeed, a lot of what knowledge workers do is very creative, and creativity needs to be fed. That means knowledge workers can often end up doing things that, to the uninitiated, look like anything except work. Talking to colleagues around the water cooler, gazing off into the middle distance, getting up from your desk to go sit somewhere quiet… thinking.

When I worked as a web designer for PwC, back before the Great Crash, the head of our studio and our lead designer both recognised the importance of invisible work (although I doubt they conceptualised it like that). We were encouraged to spend time fiddling about with new ideas, we were taken on days out to the Science Museum for inspiration, we could talk to each other and do whatever we needed in order be creative.

But despite the fact that thinking is an essential part of knowledge work (it wouldn’t be knowledge work if it didn’t involve thinking, it’d just be… information work or data work) we give people very little time to pause, reflect, and consider their actions. It’s all go go go, all about the visible work. Because consideration looks far too much like inaction from the outside: the real work is going on inside your skull, and short of hooking everyone up to brain scanners, there’s no real external sign that anything at all happening in there.

So the knowledge worker either has to find a way to feign work in order to get a moment to think, or has to do it on their own time, mulling things over on the commute to work or under the shower. The deep, intense conversations that spark a revelation have to happen at lunch, or down the pub, or not at all, because “chatting” is skiving. (Unless, of course, it’s scheduled in the diary in which case it could be a meeting… but then your brain falls into meeting mode and, after years and years of bad experiences in meeting rooms, your creativity slinks off to a corner and quietly dies.)

Now, after a couple of years of thinking about this and watching what goes on around me, I want to add a new category to the list:

Work That Doesn’t Look Like Work
The internet has had a very bad rap over the last ten years. One person I know tells the story of how he used to do research for his job using internet tools, primarily a browser and Skype, but started to notice a chill in the work atmosphere. When he asked a colleague what was going on, she replied “Well, we see you using a browser, and… well… we only use the internet for booking holidays and buying stuff on eBay, so we assume you’re doing the same thing.”

People – peers and managers alike – too often equate the browser with skiving, an accusation which as never been fair. When I was a music journalist back in the late 90s, I could not have done my job without using the internet for research. It was an invaluable tool then and it’s an even more invaluable tool now. I cannot imagine how I could do my job without having the internet to provide not just information, but inspiration. Indeed, I would not want a job that cut me off from the web. It would be like undergoing a lobotomy.

Of course, businesses have had intranets – accessible only through a browser – for years, but many of them were under-utilised and so awfully designed that they provided clear visual clues that, whatever it was that you were doing on that site, it wasn’t going to be fun. (And, therefore, had to be work… oh, what a sad indictment of our attitudes.)

But now it’s hard to tell at a glance whether the blog or wiki or social bookmarking site that someone is using is business-related or not. (Even the definition of “business-related” is getting very loose and floppy, with information and insight coming from all sorts of strange places.) And given that many businesses are now using these tools internally anyway, the browser is no longer the sad second cousin of “real” office tools, but rapidly becoming The Daddy.

The question is, will attitudes keep up? Truth is, they can’t afford not to.

If companies want to survive the current economic crisis, they are going to have to start getting a handle on what “work” really is, and in particular, address some of the old misconceptions that are still prevalent about the nature of work. They need change the way that they judge how hard someone is working and re-evaluate their concepts of productivity. Because right now, they are engaging in strategies that are actively damaging their ability to function and, indeed, to survive in these straitened times.

11.04.08
by

Proxies for productivity, and why no one trusts teleworkers

One of the biggest challenges facing business today is understanding the cultural changes that are required to truly put our manufacturing past behind us and face up to the new knowledge economy that we find ourselves in, like it or not. Over the years I’ve had a peak inside a wide variety of companies, everything from the five person start up to the multinational corporation and it’s blindingly obvious that we haven’t yet moved on from Taylorism, where managers are focused on create efficient processes and eradicating the opportunity for error. (The wrongness of a focus on process could be a whole series of posts on it’s own, but I’ll let it be for now.)

Most businesses are still treating work and workers as if they were producing physical objects like spanners and the fact that they are not actually producing anything tangible causes a serious problem when attempting to understand, let alone measure, productivity. What does it mean to be productive in a knowledge economy job? From a company perspective, there’s always the profit margin to give an overview of how well the business is doing, but on an individual basis, that doesn’t help us at all. How can we tell whether Alice’s work contributed to the bottom line? How do we know if Bob is working to the best of his capabilities or slacking off? How do we compare Carol to her co-workers, when she does something completely different to Alice and Bob?

Nature abhors a vacuum, and in the the absence of any genuine measures of productivity, we create our own ways of trying to understand how well we are doing compared to our colleagues. We are social creatures for whom status is important, so when we compare our own behaviours to those around us, we look for obvious measures of success and, thence, status. Those measures are like a sort of conceptual creole, the melding of the ideas of Taylorism and the realities of the modern job to create a set of proxies for productivity that are almost universally agreed upon, despite the fact that no one knows how or when that agreement occurred.

It’s important to note that all of these proxies come with a martyrdom complex – people boast about their sacrifices, expecting to elicit both sympathy and awe from colleagues. The bigger the sacrifice, the more sympathy and awe they get, and they get caught in a self-reinforcing cycle: the bigger martyr they are, the higher status they have, so the more motivation there is for sacrificing yet more.

The Email Proxy
More emails received indicates higher status.

This is probably one of the most common and damaging proxies for productivity and it almost seems to feed off a fame-like mechanism. We all know that being famous sucks, yet celebrity is still a big draw and many people who say they would eschew a chance to be famous would really, deep down, jump at the chance if it came along. We all know that getting hundreds of emails a day sucks, yet when our inbox gets that busy we feel proud of it, as if we are making a sacrifice for the sake of our increased status.

The Meeting Proxy
More time spent in meetings indicates higher status.

People simultaneously boast about their seven hour meeting marathon to colleagues, whilst also attempting to elicit sympathy about what a horrible day they’ve just had. Yet there is rarely any serious attempt to reduce the time spent in meetings or to avoid going to unnecessary ones. Indeed, in many cases, even people who are aware of how pointless some of their meetings are feel pressured to go anyway because they fear that their bosses will interpret their absence as “slacking off”, or because they don’t want to be excluded from any decisions that may get made in their absence. (They know that this is a proxy, but they also know that their bosses may not see it like that.)

The Time-At-Desk Proxy
A longer work day indicates higher status.

Not only do some people take a perverse pride in how long they end up staying at work, but they look down on those who do not spend (or seem to spend) an equal amount of time at their desk. Part-timers are viewed very negatively, and, indeed, the term ‘part-timer’ becomes an insult thrown at anyone who perhaps leaves early one day, or gets in late.

The Travel Proxy
More miles travelled to meetings, or more jetlag incurred, indicates higher status.

This proxy only really applies to a subsection of the workforce who have to travel for their job, but when it’s in place it’s just as powerful as any of the other proxies. Sometimes the travel is about commute time, or time spent on trains, but for some it’s really about how long you had to spend at the airport and how jetlagged you are. There’s a degree of machismo involved too, as people travel daft distances for short meetings through which they are barely awake due to the effects of exhaustion and jetlag. These experiences are perceived as demonstrating toughness and commitment, rather than the excesses they really are.

Firmly embedded
These proxies for productivity are so firmly embedded in business culture that I suspect they are used, whether consciously or not, as ways to gauge how well someone is doing and who deserves reward. Goals may be set at an annual review to help provide some sort of objective measure of how well you are doing, but can you really imagine someone who hardly ever used email, didn’t go to meetings, spent little time at their desk and rarely travelled, yet who met or exceeded all their goals, actually being popular with their boss? Anyone who behaved like that, no matter how effective they actually were, would be perceived as a slacker. And as we all know, perception is much more important than reality. That’s how real slackers get away with it – they look busy all the time, even though they achieve very little.

The irony about these proxies is that, of course, they are focused on the least productive ways you can spend your time. Email is a time sink, meetings are a waste, excessively long days decrease your productivity, and well, who really gets all that much done on a long journey? By allowing these proxies to stand, businesses are not only encouraging their staff to make false judgements upon their own and others’ productivity, they are also encouraging the very sort of behaviours that they should be working to minimise.
This is pretty bad news for social media, which disintermediates these proxies by reducing email, reducing the length and frequency of meetings, allowing people to be seen to be working even when not at their desk (and potentially reducing the amount of time they need to work to get the same amount of stuff done), and reducing the need to travel. Whilst these proxies are fixed firmly in people’s minds as a measure of their own effectiveness, then we’re going to have a very difficult time persuading people that it’s in their interests to adopt different and more effective ways of working.

A bigger problem, of course, is that most business leaders are in denial that there could be a problem with the culture of their organisation. One of the most dysfunctional companies I have ever come across, where decisions are arrived at seemingly at random, no one takes responsibility for those decisions, and the main mode of communication is shouting, also thinks it is the most egalitarian company out there. It’s not in the business leaders’ interests for them to examine or address the dysfunction of their business, because it’s that dysfunction that got them where they are, and keeps them there. If they suddenly had to become competent, well, that would be problematic.
Why no one trusts teleworkers
The great dream of teleworking hasn’t come true. We are not seeing companies rush to let their staff work from home, even though internet access and a phone is pretty much all that a lot of people need to do their job. I think the reason we haven’t seen a sea change in the way that we work is not because of the technology – I work from home most of the time, and even the basic tech I have on my Mac is enough for me to do my job perfectly well – It is because no one trusts the teleworker.

Three of the four proxies for productivity are removed in the case of the teleworker. The whole point of working from home is that you are not at your desk in the office, are not in meetings, and are not travelling. That leaves just email as a proxy, but for most managers that’s just not enough. They have never really sat down and thought about what their team actually does on a day to day basis, never considered how that might be measured, and what those measurements might mean (if anything). Instead, the forcible removal of three proxies simply leaves an uncomfortable hole in their subconscious reckoning of how hard someone is working, which allows in the fear that they are in fact not working at all, which then makes them reluctant to allow anyone that opportunity.

Social media can do a lot to help the teleworker connect with his or her colleagues, particularly applications that support declarative working (like declarative living, but, well, at work), helping make explicit the previously implicit acts of work that make up each working day. But again, the cultural barriers are high and it will take a determined and brave leader to change their business culture enough to allow teleworkers’ managers and co-workers to fully understand and trust them.