Author Archives: Suw Charman-Anderson

01.29.10
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Are you T-shaped?

I recently discovered Keith Sawyer’s blog, Creativity & Innovation. Keith is a professor of psychology, an expert on creativity and well worth a read. In his post about cross understanding in teams he discusses the observation that teams including people with the ability to understand another’s perspective do better than teams that don’t:

[…] cross understanding can help us to explain several apparently contradictory findings in group collaboration research:

1. Diversity often has a negative impact on team performance, and this is sometimes explained by the “social categorization bias” that people have towards similar people. But in some groups, diversity does not result in reduced performance; the authors argue that this will happen when cross understanding is high.

2. In some groups, strong sub-groups can interfere with effective collaboration. But if cross understanding is high, this problem can be reduced.

Related to this is the idea of ‘T-shaped people’ who have one particular area of deep expertise which makes up the shaft of the T, but then also have knowledge and skills in other areas (the crossbar).

It strikes me that most of the social media and tech people that I admire look T-shaped to me: Leisa Reichelt, Stephanie Booth, Stephanie Troeth, David Weinberger, Euan Semple, Lloyd Davis… the list goes on. I wonder if being empathic, able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, curious about the world around it and other people’s experiences, and able to recognise patterns across disciplines is really what marks out a social media natural.

Some people really do just ‘get it’, almost without trying, whereas others just can’t wrap their heads around even basic concepts no matter how often or how clearly they are explained. I have never been able to spot a correlation between age, online experience, social media experience, activity in communities and that ability to comprehend what makes social media different to other forms of communications. Hm, that could be an interesting area of research!

01.28.10
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The iPad – a social computer?

I’ve been ignoring all the build-up to this year’s Apple produce announcement, mainly because I just didn’t want to get my hopes up. But it turns out that I’m actually quite excited about the iPad, Apple’s tablet computer.

I had a very spirited discussion with my husband on the train last night as we were catching up on the announcements made whilst we were in a plane. My thought is that there will be two reactions to the iPad: the spec-geeks who will pour over the physical specification and find it wanting in comparison to their own laptop or desktop. People who look at the iPad the same way they looked at the Air, as a smaller version of their existing laptop will be disappointed, as many of them were with the Air, because the iPad is not as powerful or as fast as a laptop.

Then there’ll be people who come at it having used an iPhone or iPod Touch. For them, the iPad is a different proposition. It will give them a bigger and better browsing experience. Reading ebooks will be easier, videos will be bigger, email more readable. For people who want a better sofa experience, who want to be entertained and kept busy on a long journey, or who want a less conspicuous machine to take meeting notes, it looks like a goer. It’s not going to be a MacBook replacement, but a machine to sit between the iPhone/iPod Touch and the MacBook.

Obviously I see sociability in everything, so I think the iPad is going to be great for social media. I find the iPhone too small to write a blog post on, yet I have most of my blog post ideas whilst I’m out and about. Would an iPad encourage me to write more?

Because the iPad taps into the existing App Store and is able to run apps either at iPhone definition or x2, without any interventions necessary, it comes ready to rock and roll. There’s already a WordPress iPhone App along with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and many others. Your social web is there, ready and waiting. App writers can, if they want, upgrade their apps to take advantage of the bigger screen, which means potentially more functionality and a richer experience.

And because of the form factor, might we see more people using an iPad in scenarios where you wouldn’t get a laptop out? I have long felt that opening a laptop, e.g. in a meeting, is a bad thing from a psychological point of view: Flipping up the screen puts up a barrier between you and the person you’re talking to, something I greatly dislike. Would an iPad be better in meetings or at social gatherings? Would they make the iPad user able to socialise both in person and online simultaneously without the people present feeling blocked out?

For my money, though, Apple has some changes to make to ensure the iPad’s success: Stop inhibiting innovation by placing strictures on what sort of apps are allowed in the App Store. By all means, have a QA process to ensure that malicious apps aren’t developed, but their current rules about not developing apps that conflict with Apple-provided apps is stupid and counter-productive. If I want to run a different browser than Safari, for example, a browser that integrates with Instapaper, Delicious, Twitter and other social tools, then I should be able to do so.

Equally, they need to rethink their age warnings. It is utterly absurd to see an age-related warning when you install a dictionary or an RSS reader just because it’s possible to see some naughty words in those sorts of applications. Apple needs to understand that it can’t expect to promulgate the values of conservative America (as opposed to the rest of America, which is much more sensible) around the world in a techno-cultural hegemony.

Apple are already coming under fire for being shills for DRM, and rightly so. Nate Anderson of Ars Technica wrote:

Members of the Free Software Foundation staged a small protest outside today’s Apple event in San Francisco, making the case against Apple’s use of DRM. The group’s four-foot signs were headed with the message “Entering Apple Restriction Zone” and laid out the tablet’s detriments:

* No free software

* No installing apps from the Web

* No sharing music or books

* We can remotely disable your apps & media

Much as I love the look of the iPad, Apple needs to deal with these issues and as a community we should bring to bear as much pressure as we can. This is the one thing that dulls my enthusiasm for the iPad. I was vehemently against Microsoft’s Vista and all the DRM and ‘phone home’ controls that it supported. Anyone who felt that Vista was an invasion of their privacy must apply the same logic to the iPad. We can’t just let Apple off the hook because their device and OS are prettier.

I’m confident, however, that people will take steps to route around the barriers that get in their way. It didn’t take long for someone to jailbreak the iPhone and we can expect the iPad to come under much more scrutiny. I never felt comfortable jailbreaking my primary communications device, but I’d be much happier to fiddle with an iPad in order to install the software that I want to use. And I’m sure I’m not alone in that.

I’ll leave you now with the iPad keynote for your delectation and delight:

01.27.10
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Embrace your daydreams

Psychology Today has an article by Amy Fries on how daydreamers are also more intelligent:

Researchers using brain scanning technology found that the “default network,” the relatively new buzzword for the daydreaming state, was significantly more active in the “superior intelligence group” than the “average intelligence group.” According to the study, this suggests that the stronger connections displayed in the “functional integration of the default network might be related to individual intelligent performance.”

My nonscientific translation of this: while daydreaming, your thoughts are gliding and ricocheting all over the place–past, present, future–accessing all your stored knowledge, memories, experiences, etc. What the study seems to be saying is that these connections–the ricocheting thoughts if you will–appear to be stronger in smarter people. Maybe that’s why they can get more out of their daydreaming states of mind. They can dig deeper. This seems to fit nicely with other studies that say that people who can go deeper into daydreaming states are more likely to come away with worthwhile insights.

I’ve spoken before about daydreaming and it’s importance to my writing life. I also think that daydreaming is important in business, particularly if you’re in a creative or innovative role. Yet daydreaming is verboten in a professional context. We’re supposed to be heads-down, focused on our work all day every day. That’s not physically possible, of course, so people fake concentration by doing low-energy tasks, like cleaning out their inbox, to give their brains some time to spin freely.

When it comes to social media, I see this need to freewheel as even more important. I can type at over 90 words per minute, but it can still take me an hour to write even a short blog post because for much of that time I’m reading and mulling (a more acceptable word for daydreaming, perhaps). Blogging is, at its best, about people synthesising new ideas from the works of others. That sort of thought, where you’re taking in different strands of information and forming novel links between them, requires time, not to mention a good night’s sleep.

This is why bloggers need managerial support to be effective. Blogging at work can put serious pressure on the blogger, who may want to spend a day figuring a post out, but who feels that they are supposed to be banging out something quick. Acceptance from colleagues that blogging is a legitimate way for them to be spending their time is also important – there’s nothing like negative peer pressure to kill off a blogger’s enthusiasm. Without that support the blogger can wind up abandoning their writing or not fulfiling their potential, and everyone loses out.

The long and the short of it is that if you want your staff to be creative, innovative, thoughtful and to benefit fully from their intelligence, give them the time and space to cogitate, mull, consider and daydream.

01.26.10
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In praise of messiness and noise

Excellent talk from Euan at last year’s Lift Conference, talking about some of the daft attitudes prevalent in management and IT and how they get in the way of knowledge sharing, innovation and, in some cases the basic act of getting on with our jobs.

I love Euan’s comment in the discussion on his blog post too:

People are so much better able to cope with apparent messiness than we have been led to believe. And as you say helping them cope with messiness is better than tidying up.

How are you helping people cope with messiness?

01.25.10
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What can a dating site teach enterprise?

I wrote earlier this month about the importance of faces in profile photos. Today I stumbled across a fascinating post about profile pictures from dating site OKCupid, via Adam Tinworth’s blog.

Christian from OKCupid gathered data from their site, analysing photos and looking at the messages that people received and sent to see if different photo styles affected how successful people were in attracting both incoming messages and replies to their outgoing messages. The results are fascinating, turning upside down some assumptions about what sort of photos would be best. Women, for example, should probably put a ‘flirty face’ on, whereas if you’re a bloke with good abs you should show them off and if your photo doesn’t show your face, make sure that it’s interesting in some other way.

Now, I’m not trying to imply that professional women should put on their flirty face when posing for their business headshot or that men should be getting their abs out for their team photo. (And I’m sure I”m not the only one to heave a sigh of relief about that.) But this study does throw up an interesting question: What do we know about the impact of different types of profile pictures in a professional setting?

I’m sure that some will say that in a professional context, photos shouldn’t matter, that we judge each other based on their abilities and actions, not on what they look like. If that were true, the world would be a much better place, but if we’re honest we’ll admit that how someone looks does affect the way we think of them. Such reactions are hardwired into our brains, and they’re not necessarily a bad thing, particularly if you have good instincts.

I’m also sure that we’ve all seen corporate directly photos that are deeply unflattering. Generally speaking, when you get your company photocard done, the person taking the photo probably isn’t thinking very hard about how to make you look your best. And in some cases, the results are worse than a passport photo. Unfortunately, regardless of quality, those photos then get put onto the internal directory, whether we like it or not.

I don’t know of anyone who has studied the responses provoked by different photos in, say, LinkedIn, but I think it would make a fascinating topic of research. Are there particular types of photos – looking the camera or not, smiling or not, naturalistic or posed, for example – that make people more predisposed to think positively of the subject? And how might this affect the way we interact with people professionally?

There is no doubt that very subtle things can affect the way we think of others. In one experiment, subjects were asked to hold either a warm of cold drink for a brief time. They were then asked their opinions about the woman who gave them the drink to hold. Those who held a warm drink thought more kindly of her than those who got the cold drink. (Lesson: Never give your boss anything cold to hold!)

So, are we doing ourselves no favours by allowing poor photos of ourselves to be used in social networks and internal directories? Should businesses pay more attention to the way that they photograph and present photos of staff? Should we be allowed to provide our own? If so, what guidelines should we follow?

I know one things for sure: I need a better avatar photo because apparently “with an animal” scores worse than any other typo of photo if you’re a woman. If you’re a bloke, however, you should go and get yourself a kitten right now, because even getting your abs out is less popular than a guy with an animal. It’s probably more socially acceptable too!

01.22.10
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Customer outreach doesn’t trump genuine change

Sucking up to disgruntled (and well-connected) customers that you’ve found on Twitter is by now a fairly well established social media CRM strategy. Trouble is, your well-connected disgruntled customer doesn’t necessarily want to be mollified. She might want to see real, tangible change, not just for her benefit but for all your other customers. Says Tara Hunt:

I don’t take bribes (#12) even when they don’t look like one. I want change. I don’t want to see change for me, I want to see change for everyone. I want banks to stop experimenting with how far they can push us before we cry ‘uncle’ on their policies and start thinking about how they can help us achieve our dreams with customer-empowering policies. I want business to invest in technology that streamlines and helps the customer experience, not technology that spies on us.

Social media marketing and word of mouth isn’t just about finding new ways to gloss over cracks and quieten down the loudest critical voices, it’s an opportunity to learn about what really doesn’t work in your business and then figure out how to fix it. Permanently. Anything less is a whitewash.

01.21.10
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Making the case for internal community managers

i was reading a great post on Fresh Networks about the key mistakes community managers make when it struck me: Most people are sold on the need to hire community managers for public facing communities, but how many businesses hire community managers for their own internal social networks?

Most communities rely on a small number of individuals who glue the group together socially. It’s a role that I have been discussing with many people, especially Kevin Marks, over the years. Kevin and I first met on IRC (Internet Relay Chat), in a channel where one person in particular played a key role in keeping things moving smoothly. She wasn’t chosen by the community, nor did she put herself forward to fulfil the role: it just sorta happened.

Since then, we – and many others – have been trying to find the right word for that sort of role. Whether you want to call them tummlers, geishas, animateurs or Chief Conversation Officers, these people are essential to the smooth running of a community. Kevin said in 2008 (read the whole post, it’s well worth it):

The key to [successful communities] is finding people who play the role of conversational catalyst within a group, to welcome newcomers, rein in old hands and set the tone of the conversation so that it can become a community. […]

The communities that fail, whether dying out from apathy or being overwhelmed by noise, are the ones that don’t have someone there cherishing the conversation, setting the tone, creating a space to speak, and rapidly segregating those intent on damage. The big problem with have is that we don’t have a English name for this role; they get called ‘Moderators’ (as Tom Coates thoroughly described) or ‘Community Managers’, and because when they’re doing it right you see everyone’s conversation, not their carefully crafted atmosphere, their role is often ignored.

These people are as essential in internal communities as they are in public ones, yet somehow we expect internal communities to just run themselves. It’s no wonder that so many social media projects wither on the vine: they are not getting the right social conditions to flourish.

Instead, I suspect that the tummler role is rather frowned upon in business contexts. That person who makes sure that they talk to the new users, who spends time tidying up the wiki and talking to people about how things work, who reads all the internal blogs and highlights favourite posts, is probably also the person whose jobs review says, “Spends too much time on the intranet”. The expectation is that everyone will take a share of the tummler role, that everyone is responsible for making the community work and so therefore it will. “Because we’re all professionals round here, and that’s just what professionals do.”

That is, I’m afraid, deluded bullshit. We need tummlers internally just as much as we need them in external communities. Certainly they’ll have to be much more capable diplomats and skilled in recognising and smoothing out internal political shenanigans. They’ll also have to be good coaches, helping people understand how to use the tools and why they should bother.

The payback from employing a tummler could be huge as they would be the people who’d help drive tool adoption across the business. I’m sure some will read this and think, “But this is what evangelists/champions do. We don’t need tummlers too.” I think tummlers and evangelists are very different indeed. Evangelists tend to be people who are superusers who are massively enthusiastic about the tools they are using. They often manage to persuade the people around them to use the tools too, but they don’t always have the social skills required to achieve even that. I have certainly come across “evangelists” that were so obsessive about their new favourite toy that they put people right off. They also, of course, have their own job to do. They can’t spend all their time helping others get to grips with social software.

A tummler, on the other hand, would be hired for their social skills, their ability to communicate, teach and explain, and their knowledge of the different tools and how they work. In a way, a good social media consultant acts as a tummler-by-proxy, encouraging their clients to adopt more sociable thinking patterns, but they can only do so much. A full-time tummler who only needs to focus on nurturing internal communities could achieve so much more.

I guess we’re back once again to the 20:80 rule: 20% of social media is tech, 80% is people, so focus on your people!

01.20.10
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Christian Crumlish on Social Design Patterns

Last night I went to a great talk by Christian Crumlish about the Yahoo! Pattern Library and social design patterns. Christian has a book, co-authored by Erin Malone, out at the moment on O’Reilly, Designing Social Interfaces, from which part of this talk was drawn.

Brief history of patterns
Design patterns – concept of a pattern language originated in architecture in the 70s. Christopher Alexander wrote two books: A Pattern Language and A Timeless Way of Building. He posited that you could do architecture and could plan towns and buildings and rooms and even construction through recognising a series of patterns that were replicated the world over. Once you had discovered them you could apply them to problems. Trying to demystify architecture by recognising that there’s a syntax. Not one single pattern language, just that they had derived a particular one.

Idea didn’t take off in architecture. Alexander isn’t that well respected, but it’s taken root in other fields. CompSci picked up on idea of patterns in 80s, Design Patterns is famous book, pushed idea into dev world. Concept of wikis and design patterns in software and architecture are siblings. Ward Cunningham built Portland Pattern Repository, pattern libraries and collections often maintained in wikis, and the ideas co-evolved.

Jenifer Tidwell, proposed idea of HCI or User Interaction design patterns. Wanted to apply idea to software that involves human begins. She put together a book, Designing Interfaces, and inspired a number of UI people to think in terms of patterns, which influenced the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library, launched in 2005. Internal Yahoo! library. In 2006, decided to make it available in the public at least in part.

Added rich interaction patterns. Idea is you can drop stuff into a page and get it working. Should be able to find the code for each pattern in the Yahoo code library. Not all those links exists, but they try. Crumlish now caretaker for the library and is interested in adding social patterns to it. Yahoo! makes own products and buys companies and a number of the most popular social sites, specially early ones, which are now Yahoo! did similar things in different ways. Flickr and Delicious popularised tagging as a way of letting users add metadata that’s not topdown or hierarchical, but their interfaces are different: comment or space delimiter, compound words or not. Talking a look at that aspects of user interface, compound interface elements that make a social experience. Looking for a language. Also found out you can’t solve the tag problem.

Reason why we have a pattern library is a post from Fast Company, One Company, 100 Designs. Yahoo is essentially one site, but it all looks different. It isn’t just one giant website, but there are numerous examples where things were inconsistent for no good reason, so the pattern library is trying to provide common basis for a starting point so people innovate on top of that.

Social designs, in the early days of social interface, it’s got awkwardness built in because of unfamiliarity, lack of mores, customs and habits that show people how to behave.

Saw the problem with telephones: didn’t now how to use them, didn’t think they needed them, didn’t have a model of speaking to people a big distance away from you and the uses weren’t clear. Network effect is also important – one telephone isn’t useful, you need a network of people to communicate with. Early days of blogging, joke was how do you do business with blogs? Well, how do you do it with telephones. And that’s what these social interfaces are about. You don’t teach them. [I disagree that you don’t teach people how to do business with blogs!]

We figured out how to use a telephone, and the model back in the old days is that you were calling a place and asking for a person. Idea now is that a telephone is attached to a person, so you’re always calling the person with the mobile It’s not that one model is better that the other, but it’s inherently different, which means there are habits which need to be changed. If you can be reached at any time, you need to either let that happen or set boundaries, e.g turn your phone off or not answer late at night. But these things are still being negotiated and not everything has been figured out. E.g. people shouting down the phone, being loud, and it may be that they grew up with a different type of phone, and don’t know how to use a mobile yet.

Users are entering new and unfamiliar situations and they don’t know how to act, or how to behave. So they are going to be awkward, but can try to mitigate that, try to teach people, make it harder to spam people, things like that.

Social patterns informed by the whole web, to inform Yahoo! and if they work, they release them out to teach others. Asked a lot at Barcamps, talked to people, wrote an O’Reilly book. Found overarching principles that should inform this kind of work.

Five principles
Pave the cowpaths. Look at the behaviour that’s already happening and facilitate that, rather than forcing people into behaviour you think is better. Brute force attempts to make people behave in a way that doesn’t make sense will fail. Eg Dogster. When we’re online we’re performing, the computer is between us and everyone else in the network, so we get to chose an identity and perform in a certain way. Dog owners, that’s what they are doing. They are talking about their pets, pretending to be their pets, talking mainly about themselves at one remove in a childlike and innocent voice, and people like it. But interesting thing about Dogster is that when it started it was just a photo sharing site, and one thing they noticed early on was that users were uploading photos of animals, and when you have a social component and let people add the value, it’s easy to decide that people aren’t doing what you want, but what Dogster saw was that people like putting up pictures of pets, and created site that supported that behaviour, then supported other behaviours that people like to do. If they had turned away pet lovers, they would have killed off what turned out to be a profitable business.

Talk like a person
On a social site there you’re trying to create a climate of sociability, it’s all the more important that your web copy is conversational, is human, is about how people really talk. There’s a range here, cases where you want to be more formal, or less. But don’t hide from your users the fact that there are human beings behind the site as well as in the network on the site. Set a humanistic tone. Flickr famous for having a human tone, not a faceless corporation.

How to talk like a person:
* Conversational voice
* Self-deprecating error messages (take the blame, don’t put it on the user or cryptic messages, say that you’re going to try to fix it.)
* Ask questions (creates conversational dialogue with the user, e.g. Twitter “What are you doing?”. It’s just a prompt that establishes a dialogue.)
* Your vs My (If you use Your you create a dialogue. ‘My Yahoo!’ is an asocial thing. If it’s only me, it’s like looking in my filing cabinet, it’s me and my stuff. But something that’s Your, it’s ‘who is the person saying you?’. The way your mind works is that it creates a feeling that you’re not the only person there.)
* No joking around (Tempting, when you want to be conversational, to be jokey. But it doesn’t always translate, as you know from sarcasm doesn’t always work.)

Play well with others
Embrace open standards, technologies, OS etc. What you make will plug into other people’s stuff easily, you won’t create barriers to people building on and extending your stuff. Use standards that are established. Allow the data that’s in the site to be taken off the site and displayed elsewhere, mashed up, etc. There’s almost no way to stop that, as people will scrape, so use XML, Json, microformats, so people can create value around what you’ve done. Have ways to bring data into the system. allow for portability, allow for interoperability. There are exceptions, these are just trends, things you should consider.

Learn from games
One issue is that up and coming generations of users are learning on games more often, on video games. they have high expectations for how rich, responsive and sophisticated interfaces should be. You can’t change enterprise software into a game, but there are elements of game dynamics that help people get into a flow state, and you can get into those things.

E.g. if you gave people a way to collect favourite pages, then you can let them express the collectible behaviour people like.

When you design a game, you’e not designing an end-state, you’re designing a set of rules, boundaries, tokens, a space to play in. Every time you play, it plays out a different way. Social design is more like that, less like creating a device. This is a space where people will meet and interact. People are going to finish the experience themselves. You might build the house, but they’ll decorate it. Give up control, design something that has variables that the users can control.

Game Neverending, by Ludicorp. Very much like a MUD, but had chat element, small graphics, and Ludicorp went ton to make Flickr. It was not a game, literally, but it feels like a game, you discover elements, e.g. hovering over a name to provide a drop-down. Playfulness and discovery. People make up their own games in Flickr, they make badges and award them to each other. Early users fostered game-like behaviour.

Respect the ethical dimensions
Ethics are complicated, you have to balance different goods against one another. There are ethical ramifications behind your choices. You are at least putting together people who might not be put together. You’re playing with people lives, affecting people’s lives. You have to think through the consequences of your choices.

Counter-example: Tagged.com. Once you’ve signed up, they ask for your email address, and if you give them that and your password and say ok, then they spam your address book with a marketing message as if it’s from you. Was clear they were designing it so that users were accidentally “agreeing” to this. Plaxo did the same once. This is ethically questionable behaviour.

96 Patterns
[Nice diagram.] Patterns come in three categories, revolving around ‘social spaces’.
Self >> Activities >> Community

Three stake holders: the owner/designer, the user, the community at large. The community starts to behave like an organism.

Give people a way to represent themselves, and give them a way to customise it, claim their work, identify themselves when commenting, etc. Need to distinguish users from each other, so people can differentiate themselves from someone with same name, for e.g. Colour scheme, avatar, name – all self expression.

Self
Four groups of patterns:

Engagement: e.g. sign-up. to be social you need people and thus they need to join.
Identity: Once they’ve joined they can create an identity.
Presence: who else is here? who else has been here? What have they done?
Reputation: your score, ranking, category, help strangers encountering you for first time understand who you are and what you do

(created flash cards based on the patterns)

User cards, mini-profile, gives basics around the person.

Social objects
Things people have a common interest in, want to discuss or find interesting. things they rally around. Early social networks didn’t have that concept, e.g. Friendster. So there was a ‘so what’ moment. You’d join, find friends “traversing the graph”, you’d add them, and then you’d collect everyone. And at some point you’d go “Ok. Now what? What do I do now?”, and there was noting to do. You could talk to them, but you could do that anyway.

Friendster wanted to have ability to gather round common interests. They created Fakester, e.g. a person like Santa, or an inanimate thing like skiing, and through that connection had created symbolic way to form identity around an object or activity. Friendster didn’t like Fakester. Not necessarily a bad thing, making people use real names has a benefit to some extent (me: not always), but they violated the Pave the Cowpaths principle, and they deleted all the Fakester accounts all at once. Massacre. Friendster had a big scaling problem in their architecture but he big decline was when they kill the Fakester off. So you need not just people but also objects, e.g. photos, or freeform objects/topics people can decide for themselves.

Actions
Give people something to do.

Collecting: which is least social, most passive or individualistic thing you can do, but it’s a starting point. E.g. favourites, bookmarks, adding to a page. Small social element there, if i collect something you made. IF i display that collection it says something about me.

Sharing: bread and butter of social network. Giving stuff to each other.

Broadcasting and publishing: sharing on a megascale. Facebook is bad at distinction between broadcast/individually targeted behaviours. Blogging seen as 1-to-many, which is why blogs don’t always foster communication and conversation.

Feedback: comments, rating, voting, favourites (again). Asking for feedback. Feedback is where you get more viral and exponential behaviour.

Communicating Comes later, after collecting, sharing etc.

Collaboration: managing, voting, editing, wikis.

Social media: Following filtering, recommendations, helping people find stuff and sort out what’s good, recent, etc.

Community
Last three are all community. Let community elevate people and content they value. Allow people to moderate itself, within reason. Selfish reason for self-moderation – third party mod doesn’t scale, can never hire enough moderators. Have to make community responsible for quality of the content. Has to police itself, set its own rules within boundaries. Not totally hands off, have to establish clear norms, important in early days to model good behaviour, participate in the community to show people what the community should look like .But want to create mechanisms by which people can manage it for you.

Connections: Relationships, finding people, friends. Declaring a connection between people, what types of relationships you want to support, do they have to be reciprocal or can they be one way, or only one way? Can people find people or do they have to traverse the graph manually. Do you have implicit and explicit relationships. Can you algorithmically determine if people are in same groups? Can you use that info to create implicit relationships. Fans and fame, one to many relationships. What permissions and authorisations are implied by connections? Should they be announced in an activity stream? But do you announce when people stop being friends?

Community management: Rules, establish norms, manifest in your own site and show people how you expect them to behave, give people way to decide what should happen, e.g. Craigslist. Asked the community to discuss what they should charge for to make it tenable. Give people ways to collaboratively filter information. People need to be able to report abuse.

Place, Geo, Location: mapping, face-to-face meetings, calendaring, geo-behaviours. Just scratching the surface of all this. This is a growth area.

Circles of connections – pre-defined or user-defined groups for permissioning purposes.
Public conversation – e.g. Facebook walls. Curious and interesting thing, as people talk to each other who don’t know each other talking on a third person’s wall. Twitter is all public conversation.
Enable a bridge to real life events. Let people do stuff in person too.

Anti-patterns
Noticed there are certain behaviours used repeatedly that are anti-patterns. Something that seems like a good idea, but has negative consequences. Appears to solve a problem or is a shortcut, but has an aftermath.

Cargo Cult: During WWII in Pacific, US would set up landing strips to supply the troops. In natural course of things, western goods would appear on the island, and the more primitive people on the island liked these goods, but when the war ended the US left. So religious cargo cults sprang up, so war uniforms, making effigies of airplanes and towers, did what air traffic guys did, to try to draw new cargo.

In social media, good e.g. is that after Flickr, Zooomr tried to do the same thing, nicked a lot of copy, and decided the lack of an E was the big thing. Just copying without understanding why. May get the right things but may not know why, or ever understand what bring success.

Don’t break email: Lots of email notifications, but the problem is when it’s used as a one-way medium, e.g. if you have noreply@facebookmail.com, and you may not even get a bounce message back. Trying to make people go back to the website to look at an ad, but it’s still not good to break email. Basecamp let you reply, above the line, and it’s added as a comment to the thread. You don’t have to break email. Build on existing infrastructure – work with it not against it.Don’t break users’ existing habits.

Password anti-pattern: Asking for people’s email and password so you can spam their mailbox, or even just help you get your friends list out of the email contacts list into the new social graph. But it encourages risky behaviour as you shouldn’t be giving your password away

Ex-boyfriend bug: Dodgeball discovered this, when “The ‘people you should know’ list on Facebook is actually a list of people you hate.” – Rex Sorgatz. Algorithms show people you should connect with, even though there’s a reason you may not. Algorithm doesn’t need to know who is your ex, but needs to allow you to block someone and say ‘never show me this person or tell them about me’.

Potemkin Village. Settlements in Russia, Potemkin told Catherine that settlements in Crimea were going really well, but it wasn’t, so when she insisted on visiting, he created a series of facades and shipped peasants town to town to create the lie. Don’t create forums and discussion areas and map them out. In first early days of alpha, there’s no one there, and so if there’s a lot of fora, you won’t find people so creates a barrier early on. Cure: start with very limited number of fora, even just one or two. Put everyone in the same room. Odds are your initial community is small, and they will tell you when they want more space.

[There was a short Q&A afterwards. I didn’t capture it, but Jeff Van Campen’s notes did.]

01.20.10
by

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?