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Kevin: “Features, I’ve recently come to realize, can be obstacles. Problems. … Determine a basic need -> Create a service that satisfies it in the simplest way possible -> Open it up.”
Monthly Archives: June 2008
links for 2008-06-27
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In the manner of Facebook and Digg, the social-news application lets people see which stories their friends are commenting on and recommending. Read this blog post by Caroline McCarthy on The Social.
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Kevin: Thoughtful post about the New Yorks Times’ Times People social media tool. He likes the focused nature of the tool as opposed to baking in social networking features into the site.
links for 2008-06-26
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Kevin: Interesting post and stats about ad spend and trends in the US and India. Mukund Mohan says that advertisers may go straight from print to mobile.
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Could the BBC be funded by a tax on web and mobile? In France President Sarkozy has just announced such a plan.
links for 2008-06-25
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Kevin: Adam Tinworth writes a must bookmark post on why media gets community wrong. To quote one of the comments, ‘brilliant clarity’. Goes to the heart of why mass media doesn’t take advantage of social media.
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Kevin: My colleague Roy Greenslade has a great post on the benefits that journalists can realise by learning the values of the blogging revolution.
links for 2008-06-24
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Suw: To paraphrase: Social media has to be 9x better than the technologies it replaces in order to be accepted by users. Wonder how a proper adoption strategy changes that equation
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Suw: Joel Spolsky on how hard it is to reach a state of flow, and now an interruption of merely a few seconds can result in a 15 minute loss of productivity for the person who has been interrupted.
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Kevin: Jeff Jarvis from an internal conference at the Guardian about the Future of Journalism. Lots to think about. I like in helping find quality or interesting content, “it becomes an editorial job and knowing who people are and creating “circles of tru
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Kevin: Is Fred Wilson getting bored with Web 2.0? Yes and no. He is just curious about having a more positive social and political impact, which is why he’s travelling to Europe.
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Kevin: Ari Melber says: “Web entrepreneur Arianna Huffington slammed old media at a political conference in New York today, assailing reporters for abandoning the pursuit of truth in favor of a “fake neutrality” and quailing in the face of government inti
links for 2008-06-23
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Kevin: USA Today’s Chuck Raasch wonders if journalists are painting a grimmer economic picture than actually exists because of the woes of the newspaper industry
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The Personal Democracy Forum collects essays from lots of big thinkers including Esther Dyson, Yochai Benkler, Jeff Jarvis, Micah Sifry and many more on how to re-energise, reorganise and reorient US democracy for the internet age.
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Suw: Amazon use their power to bully small publishers by removing one click buy buttons from the titles of those publishers who are not submitting to Amazon’s demands. Disgraceful.
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Kevin: Craig draws lessons from Iain Dale’s advertising model and makes some suggestions on why Google AdSense didn’t work for him. Craig suggests improvements on ad placement and the value of an ‘online presence’.
Three days left to sign up
Just a reminder that there are a couple of days left to sign up for my seminar, Making Social Tools Ubiquitous, on Friday 27 June. Ticket sales close on Wednesday 25 June at 9am.
And due to a booking snafu, Lloyd Davis’s seminar, Mastering Social Media, is now on Wednesday July 16th.
links for 2008-06-20
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Kevin: Robin Hamman makes it official. He’s leaving the BBC to join Headshift and head up a team of social media consultants. Congrats and good luck Robin.
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Kevin: Adam Tinworth collects a couple of sage points of community wisdom: Must enjoy technology and Participate. Good conversation in the comments.
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Kevin: Very rich map mashup of donations and other campaign contributions on Huffington Post. Excellent use of data but also great presentation.
Why isn’t social software spreading like wildfire through business?
Andrew McAfee asked a deceptively simple question to a panel at Enterprise 2.0 last week, “If Enterprise 2.0 tools and approaches really are so beneficial and powerful, why haven’t they spread like wildfire?” He was surprised that no one fingered management as the culprits.
In their initial responses all of them identified users, not bad managers or inadequate technologies, as the biggest barriers to faster and deeper adoption of Enterprise 2.0. Entrenched practices and mindsets, some degree of technophobia, busyness, and the 9X Problem of email as an incumbent technology combine, they said, to limit the pace of adoption. These factors slow the migration from channels to platforms and necessitate continued patience, evangelism, and training and coaching.
I didn’t expect the panelists to say that the Enterprise 2.0 tooklit is so incomplete as to hinder adoption, but I was a bit surprised that none of them identified management as a real impediment in their first round of comments. So I pressed the point by saying something like “I didn’t hear any of you point the finger at the managers in your organizations. Were you just being polite, or are they really not getting in the way of Enterprise 2.0? The new social software platforms are a bureaucrat’s worst nightmare because they remove his ability to filter information, or control its flow. I’d expect, then, that each of you would have some examples of managers overtly or covertly trying to stop the spread and use of these tools. Are you telling me this hasn’t happened?”
That is in fact what they were telling me, and I didn’t get the impression that they were just being diplomatic. They said that managers were just another category of users that needed to migrate over to new ways of working, and not anything more. In other words, the panelists hadn’t seen managers in their organizations actively trying to impede Enterprise 2.0.
I think the issue is far more complex than a simple “Is it the management?”. The IT department, for example, has become a common source of no, and issues around legal and compliance can scare people off. But management exert a strong and inescapable influence on how well social media is adopted in business.
Firstly, I have indeed come across managers who have refused point blank to use social software, who have actively campaigned against its use and have told their teams that they are not to use it. Whilst managers that vocal are rare, they do exist.
I have also seen managers who have damned the tools with faint praise, ostensibly supporting their use, but undermining them by planting seeds of doubt about things like how safe the data is or how long the tools will be around. These people talk up the tools in meetings, but never actually use them, so they give off mixed messages to their teams who then feel uncertain about what they should and shouldn’t do. If someone feels uncertain about a new tool, the chances are that they will avoid it or will interact with it only half-heartedly. This damages adoption just a surely as open hostility and is much more common.
More insidious – and much more common – are the indifferent managers. They are not vocal, and maybe not even all that negative about social media; they just aren’t interested in it. They may show up for coaching sessions, but they won’t bother using the tools, and they won’t encourage any of their team to use them either. They won’t complain, they’ll just ignore what they don’t want to engage with.
Now, in some ways these people are just “users” who need to be persuaded of value of using social tools, but to describe them that simply is to miss the point – managers have a subtle (and sometimes, not so subtle) power to either encourage or discourage their teams to behave in a certain way. They set the culture in their team, and the adoption of social media is about culture and behaviours rather than technology.
Managers who show disinterest are broadcasting a message to their team that new tools are of no value, and so they will dampen interest amongst people who actually are keen to learn and use new software, even to the point of stopping that person going to a training session or using the tool for their own work. This kills off grassroots adoption in a very quiet, subtle, almost unnoticeable way. You won’t here these people complaining. You won’t hear them talk about social software at all, but they can have a powerful effect on the success of a new tool.
But the main way that managers hobble the adoption of social tools is through simply not thinking it through, not considering what they are doing and why. They don’t provide the right sort of coaching or support, and then they wonder why people aren’t using the tools. They chuck up some blogs or wikis and hope that ‘nature will take its course’ and that people will just see the light and start using them. That, of course, doesn’t happen because not everyone has the time or the inclination to investigate new tools.
Once the early adopters – the people who are naturally curious and experimental – have discovered and started using social software, growth slows because just as in tech product marketing, there is a chasm between early adopters and the mainstream user than needs to be deliberately bridged. Businesses who have not thought about how to bridge this gap will find that adoption slows, stops, and then sometimes starts to contract. (Particularly if your key evangelists leave.)
Why doesn’t social media spread like wildfire in business? Because few people provide the tinder for a spark to ignite. Disinterested managers act like firebreaks, hostile managers act like rain, and managers giving off mixed messages act like firefighters pouring water on otherwise susceptible land. If you want a wildfire, the conditions have to be right for it to burn, which means thinking harder about what you’re doing.
Suw is holding a seminar on the adoption of social tools in business on June 27 2008. Deadline to sign up is June 25.
links for 2008-06-19
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Kevin: Journalist and programmer Adrian Holovaty talks about how reporters can make better use of data from his recent talk at the Guardian internal Future of Journalism conference.