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Kevin: Caterina Fake, one of the co-founder's of Flickr writes a loving defence of participatory culture. It's a great post in which she points out that "people do things for reasons other than bolstering their egos and making money". It's a wonderful explanation of why people create things for non-economic motivations.
Monthly Archives: January 2010
Melcrum survey reveals widespread use of social media behind the firewall
According to Melcrum, an internal comms training business:
Internal communicators are increasingly turning to Web 2.0 tools, such as employee and executive blogs, online video, and internal Twitter-style forums, to deliver key strategic messages, stimulate collaboration and knowledge sharing and boost productivity.
In a recent Melcrum member survey, 40% of respondents said the business case for social media within internal communication was clear and that there is visible return on investment, while 53% of the 2,212 senior communicators who responded said they were planning to increase investment in their organization’s intranet in 2010.
When asked about channels used for internal communication, online video and webcasts were cited as of increasing importance, with the intranet ranked as the most effective channel by 73% of senior communicators worldwide.
The business benefits of investment in social media highlighted included improved levels of employee engagement (21%), better communication with remote workers (16%), knowledge management and collaboration (25%), improving employee feedback (20%) and making business leaders more visible and accessible (14%).
This is very encouraging indeed! If you’re a social media consultant working on internal projects, have you noticed an uptick in interest?
links for 2010-01-19
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Kevin: Mark Briggs explain how to use the power of open-source CMS Drupal to aggregate content. He also explains some of the ethics behind aggregation, saying: "It’s always best when users submit this content voluntarily, rather than if you as a site admin just go out and scrape it." I really like the example of a Drupal administrator in Dalian China on how he aggregated photos tagged with the name of his site. He also describes how bloggers using WordPress can use Drupal to easily cross-post. Powerful stuff.
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Kevin: "Readbility is a simple tool that makes reading on the web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you are reading." The site gives you the choice of styles, font size and margin. It's an interesting experiment.
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Kevin: Fascinating piece by Peter Kirwan about internal thinking at News Corp about paid content options. The real interesting bits are estimates for the "premium" online display ad market in the UK by the Guardian Media Group. A few other things to flag up.
Les Hinton, the former executive chairman of News International and now the chief executive of Dow Jones, was widely quoted saying beware of geeks bearing gifts and rattling off a list of dot.com era mantras such as "clicks and cash". He says that he's learned a lot since then. Well, most of us learned back in 2000 that dot.com business mantras were bullshit. Quoting these mantras to heap scorn on current digital business thinking is pretty feeble. It reflects how News Corp has failed to develop credible digital businesses, not that digital businesses are without merit.
Kirwan raises some good points. Sadly, it's probably too late for many news orgs.
Privacy is not dead
Back in December, Facebook changed the default settings for all 350 million users to ‘encourage’ them to share more content publicly. The reality of the situation was that many people were confused by the new settings and that a lot more content is now public than before.
Earlier this month, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg said that the age of privacy is over, and that we should all get used to it. Michael Zimmer has an excellent post on the subject:
Even if we accept that there has been some changes in how people share information online, Zuckerberg claims that Facebook is merely following these supposedly shifting norms. Such a sentiment clearly ignores the role Facebook itself is playing in creating — no, forcing — these shifts. Facebook regularly thrusts new “features” on its millions of users: forcing our status updates into news feeds, injecting our actions into advertisements on Beacon, suddenly making certain personal information permanently “publicly available” without any ability for users to limit or control access. These actions force people to share information in new ways, and when 300 million Facebook users are suddenly forced to share their friends list with the word, perhaps it does look like social norms are changing. But, in reality, it is Zuckerberg pushing the buttons.
As does danah boyd:
No one makes money off of creating private communities in an era of “free.” It’s in Facebook’s economic interest to force people into being public, even if a few people break up with Facebook in the process. Of course, it’s in Facebook’s interest to maintain some semblance of trust, some appearance of being a trustworthy enterprise. I mean, if they were total bastards, they would’ve just turned everyone’s content public automatically without asking. Instead, they asked in a way that no one would ever figure out what’s going on and voila, lots of folks are producing content that is more public than they even realize. Maybe then they’ll get used to it and accept it, right? Worked with the newsfeed, right? Of course, some legal folks got in the way and now they can’t be that forceful about making people public but, guess what, I can see a lot of people’s content out there who I’m pretty certain don’t think that I can.
Both posts are worth reading. And the issue is an important one for Enterprise 2.0. Not only do individuals within Facebook need to make sure that their privacy settings are correct, but businesses need to make sure that they don’t end up invading staff’s privacy, accidentally, unintentionally, or on purpose. As I wrote in CIO Magazine (also here) in August 08:
But when companies do use tools that are usually associated with personal social interactions for business interactions, the lines between personal and professional can become uncomfortably blurred. Often this is because personal use has bled over into the workplace in an ad hoc manner, without consideration of the business use case and without providing users with good-practice guidelines.
One woman, who preferred to remain anonymous, talked about her experience in a large media company.
“When I started to use Facebook it was because of work pressure,” she said. “Everybody in the office was using it, and it became difficult not to be there, because everybody was swapping photos, arranging work nights out, and even swapping shifts on Facebook. I held out for as long as I could, but eventually I signed up.” At that point, she didn’t understand how Facebook worked and didn’t realise that as soon as she put her work email address in, it would sign her up to her company network.
“The minute I did that, I got lots of people requesting me as a friend,” she said, “Several members of management, six or seven layers above my head, requested me as a friend. I would never have requested them, but you can’t say no because if you reject them they can tell, and so you end up being stuck with these people.
“One of the worst moments was when my boss messaged me at 11 o’clock on a Friday night and said, ‘Why are you still online? Aren’t you working tomorrow?’ I was sitting at home with a glass of wine in my hand and I thought, ‘That’s too weird’.”
Facebook isn’t just about personal lives anymore. We need to think very carefully about what role it plays in business, officially or unofficially, and what impact these privacy settings changes may have.
Journalists: Belittling digital staff is not acceptable
Patrick Smith, recently of paidcontent.co.uk, has a post about the economics of regional newspapers in the UK and he makes the case (again) that the challenges facing British regional newspapers come down quite simply to economics.
This is not about the quality of journalism – this is about economics: The web is simply more effective for advertisers – Google ads are more effective and have less wastage than an ad in the Oxdown Gazette, no matter how good the editorial quality of the paper is.
In the post, he quotes “Blunt, the pseudonymous author of the Playing the Game: Real Adventures in Journalism blog” who defines a “Web Manager” as:
An expert in cut and paste. Probably a journalist but not necessary.
My issue isn’t with Blunt. Let’s be honest with ourselves, this is a sadly typical comment in the industry regarding digital staff. It’s not even new. I’ve heard comments like this for most of my 16-year career. During this Great Recession, I can understand psychologically and emotionally where they come from: It’s an anxious time for journalists, all journalists, regardless of medium or platform.
The digitally focused staff are working just as hard to preserve professional journalism as those staff still focused on print. I have spent most of my career developing unique digital skills while producing content for broadcast and print. I have often felt that I had to work harder than traditional journalists to prove that I’m not just an ‘expert in cut and paste’. I work very hard to know my beats, work across platforms and produce high quality journalism that meets or exceeds the industry standards of print, broadcast and web journalism. I am not the only digital journalist who puts this sort of effort in. Yet the industry is still rife with the same anti-digital prejudice I witnessed ten years ago.
It’s long past time for senior figures in journalism to publicly state that demeaning digital staff is not acceptable. Here are a few basic facts about digital journalism:
- I use a computer for much of my work. That doesn’t mean I’m a member of the IT staff.
- I know about technology. That doesn’t mean that I’m incapable of writing.
- My primary platform is digital. That doesn’t mean my professional standards are lower.
Prejudice towards digital journalists needs to stop. It sends a message to digital journalists that they are unwanted at a time when their skills are desperately needed by newspapers. Digital staff should not be the convenient whipping women and men for those angry and upset about economic uncertainty in the industry.
There is nothing totemic about print and paper that makes the journalism instantly better or more credible. Quality broadsheets are printed on paper just as sensationalist tabloids are. Let’s measure journalists not by the platform but by their output.
Social media and productivity
I’ve been thinking this morning about why people who are interested in social media are often interested in productivity as well. Adam created a productivity category here on The Social Enterprise long before I turned up and many of my other blogger friends regularly write about productivity. Stephanie Booth writes some especially good stuff on productivity, often mirroring my own thoughts.
In part, I think it’s because a lot of social tools are seen as ways to help us improve our productivity. Blogs and wikis behind the firewall are often set up as a way to make us more effective. We want to communicate more effectively, collaborate more easily, take less time to do tasks that used to be tedious with the old tools.
People who are goal-oriented, who want to achieve their ends by the most economical means possible, seem to be the ones drawn to social tools as a way to remake the patterns of their working lives. People who are task-oriented and are much more interested in executing the process that they have learnt (or have been told to do) than in achieving the goal are, I suspect, more likely to resist changes whether that’s new tools or new procedures.
Being a regular social media user also begs productivity questions around the way that it fits into our lives: How do I make sure that Twitter doesn’t become a time sink? How can I persuade myself to blog regularly? When do I fit checking out my essential wiki pages into my day? How can I become better at managing my time with all this information and stuff going on?
That latter question is an interesting and circular one. Many social tools, such as blogs, wikis and social bookmarking sites, were created to better manage information-and-stuff, but as you use more of them, they become the very sources of information-and-stuff that you need to better manage… And so the study of productivity hacks becomes a de facto item of interest for the committed social media user.
A lot of productivity thinking done by social media people is focused on how people who are driven to improve their own working experience can best deal with, say, email or procrastination. Like giving up smoking or losing weight, these sorts of tips and tricks require the individual to be committed to changing the way that they behave and react. Sites like 6Changes are excellent resources for people who want to create new good habits for themselves.
But how do we encourage good habits in the people we introduce to social tools? Are we spending enough time working with new social media users so that they can fit the tools into their day? So that they can understand how to make positive behavioural changes? So that they can support each other when changing working processes that were previously so embedded in their day that they barely realised it was a process at all?
I always say that social media is only 20% technology and 80% people. Are we really spending enough time and money looking after the 80%?
Still think social media is a fad?
From Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics (via Cyberjournalist):
CWSE Roundup – 15 Jan 10
This week’s activity over on The Social Enterprise for your delight and delectation:
Scrobbling business
Two thoughts
Giving ourselves space to create
David Carr on Twitter
Still think social media is a fad?
CWSE Roundup – 8 Jan 10
Things got a bit mental before Christmas, as they are wont to do, so I didn’t have the time to do my planned weekly round up of posts over on The Social Enterprise. I blogged throughout the Christmas period – magickally, it would seem, given I was in Lanzarote for a week! So here’s a belated overview of what I’ve been banging on about since, er, 27th November:
The decline of empire
When provided a choice, do people choose?
ATA: Who are your favourite social media bloggers?
The other Two Cultures
Why does a blog look like a blog?
Notes of caution and notes of hope
Google’s real-time search ups the misTweet ante
Incentives in social media
danah boyd and digital anthropology
Professionalism
Metrics, Part 1: The webstats legacy
Instapaper: Managing your ‘To Read’ list
Saatchi and Saatchi get it horribly wrong for Toyota
Metrics, Part 2: Are we measuring the right things?
Let’s just not build teams
Metrics, Part 3: What are your success criteria?
The power of ecosystems
Developing etiquette
Metrics, Part 4: Subjective measurements
How fanboys see operating systems
Newsflash! RSS still not dead: Story at 11.
What makes a website successful?
Why we should care about information overload
Social semantics
The importance of voice
Twitter announces bylines
ATA: What’s a good framework for innovation?
The cost of IT failure
Avatars, faces and the socialisation of enterprise software
How to ruin your community
Which both explains why I’ve been a little bit quiet here and gives you something that hopefully makes up for that quiet.
David Carr on Twitter
There’s a lot of stuff written about Twitter and most of it rubbish, but every now and again I read something that really sums Twitter up nicely. This piece by David Carr in the New York Times is one of those great articles that talks very clearly about why Twitter is both useful and important, but without flipping out in gushing hyperbole. It’s the sort of thing that I’ll keep in my arsenal of articles to show people who want to understand social media.