Author Archives: Suw Charman-Anderson

01.19.10
by

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.

01.18.10
by

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%?

01.14.10
by

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.

01.14.10
by

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.

01.13.10
by

Experimenting with Kachingle

In April last year I wrote about a start-up called Kachingle for The Guardian. I explained Kachingle thusly:

After registering with Kachingle, users decide on a maximum monthly donation, currently set at $5 (£3.50). When they see something they like, they simply click on the Kachingle “medallion” to initiate a donation. Kachingle tracks their reading habits, tots up how many times they visit each favoured site and divvies up the money proportionally at the end of the month.

It’s equally simple for site owners, who just need a PayPal account and a snippet of code to display the Kachingle medallion. The revenue split gives content providers 80% of the donations, with the rest covering Kachingle’s costs and PayPal fees.

I’ve been quietly keeping an eye on Kachingle to see when they would launch and was excited to get an email from Bill Lazar, Kachingle’s Marketing Engineer, last week saying that they were ready for beta testers to come on board. They will be launching properly in early February.

I think Kachingle is a really interesting idea, and I’m very excited to have the opportunity to test it out. That’s the medallion, up there in the top of the right-hand sidebar. All you need to sign up with Kachingle is a PayPal account and a spare $5 a month (although you can spend more if you want to). That works out at £3.07 per month, which even in a recession I think I can spare!

Kachingle sits very nicely with my recent decision to buy as many hand-crafted present for Christmas as I could. In an economic downturn it is more important than ever to support small businesses and I really like the fact that the vast majority of the money I spend on sites like Folksy go to the person who made the item I’ve bought.

But Kachingle is not just a way that I might earn a little spare change, it also gives me a way to support others. I’m hoping that over the course of the next few months, bloggers I enjoy will be able to join up and let me show them my appreciation.

If you want to sign up as a Kachingler or as a Site Owner, get in touch with Kachingle’s beta programme. And, of course, let me know what you think in the comments!

01.13.10
by

Giving ourselves space to create

There are lots of reasons why letting people blog behind (or in front of) the firewall is a good idea, but one of the key benefits to blogging is how easy it makes thoughtfulness and creativity.

In his blog post Stress, creativity and confabulation, Johnnie Moore shares some of the insights he’s gleaned from Keith Sawyer’s book, Group Genius:

Keith’s work also emphasises how we deceive ourselves about leaps of insight, assigning credit for apparently sudden bursts of insight to a variety of causes. Closer examination shows that our minds actually build towards ideas in a process of slow, often unconscious, accretion.

Blogging is one of those ways that we can accrete the little thoughts we need to help us come up with the crucial ideas we need to do our jobs better. It also allows us to share our ideas with our peers who can add their own extensions and refinements, growing our kernel into something bigger and better. Blogging makes explicit the natural idea formation process and through that makes the process itself as valuable as the end product.

It’s not true that we are more creative under pressure, or that big ideas come from flashes of insight, or that the lone genius is only one capable of great invention. Just as its a myth that art requires madness, so it is a myth that creativity needs pinpoint moments of brilliance. Better to provide people with the space and time to participate in an ongoing process of creativity than try to coral it in a brainstorming session.

01.12.10
by

Two thoughts

Couple of thoughts from Euan Semple that are really worth considering in the context of social media behind the firewall. Firstly:

Social media relies on people having the temerity to say what they think and others having the decency to listen.

And secondly:

With a blog you have more reason to think. Having an outlet for your ideas makes you take them more seriously. Even if you never publish the posts, taking your ideas seriously and thinking harder about them is a good thing.

If you write a half decent blog post you will make someone else think. You may make them think you are wrong or you may make them think you are right but you will make them think.

These thoughts trigger two key questions:

  • Can your people say what they think?
  • Do they have the time and space to do that thinking?

Just a thought.

01.11.10
by

Scrobbling business

Via Roo Reynolds I just came across Dale Lane’s TV scrobbling project. For those of you who don’t use the social music site Last.FM, ‘scrobbling‘ is the act of gathering attention data for analysis. Last.FM pioneered the scrobbling of listening data from people’s computers, allowing them to see at a glance what they listened to, what their friends listened to, and discover people with similar taste in music.

Dale has taken this idea a step further and has whipped up a scrobbler for his TV data. This wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t for the fact that Dale’s TV is also his computer. This gives him access to data that would otherwise be stuck inside a set-top box:

Tv Scrobbling

Similar software exists to track your attention during day-to-day work on your computer. I have RescueTime installed on my laptop. That gives me access to information about which applications I use and how much time I spend using them, and allows me to decide if an app is productive or not. It then scores my overall productivity accordingly. Sometimes the results can be surprising, for example, I spend a lot less time in email than I had thought, often less than half an hour a day, and I never look at email on the weekends. RescueTime also illustrates changing preferences for software. Here’s me experimenting with Google’s Chrome browser (olive green = Firefox; teal green = Chrome):

Rescuetime All Activities By Day

The aim of RescueTime, if you put the effort in to set it up properly, (e.g. choose which applications and websites you find distracting, neutral or productive), is to reveal where you can make productivity gains. If, for example, you discover that you spend a lot of time on Twitter and you find it to be very distracting then you can use RescueTime to track your progress in resisting its lure.

Of course, attention data can just become infoporn, producing endless pretty graphs that don’t help alter behaviour, so scrobbling isn’t a solution by itself. It could, however, form the basis of behavioural analysis and change projects that would not otherwise be possible. Productivity is the holy grail of the knowledge worker, but it’s hard to know how productive one is being as we’re not built to accurately track our actions as we carry them out. My guess for amount of time spent in Twitter, for example, was wildly higher than reality – I generally use it for less than an hour a day, which is not bad given my line of work.

Attention data scrobbling could also, with a clever bit of functionality design, help do away with timesheets, which I loathe to the core of my being. The key there, as with RescueTime, is understanding what constitutes ‘productivity’. Splitting behaviours out by application, or even by website, doesn’t necessarily tell you if you’re being productive. Time in instant messenger, for example, could be productive or it could be a distraction, depending on who you’re talking to and what you’re talking about. Scrobbling won’t solve that bit of the puzzle, but it would make a good starting point.

There is an obvious dark side to attention data scrobbling in business, though: such data could easily be misused by management as a stick to beat employees with. Care would need to be taken as to who could access what data, perhaps with data anonymised when accessed by management to prevent victimisation. There would also need to be an educational component to any scrobbling project to ensure that people knew what the data meant and how to act on it.

There’s such great opportunity here for both knowledge workers and the businesses who employ them. I’d love to hear from anyone using or interested in collecting and using attention data in this way.