Category Archives: Computer Weekly: The Social Enterprise

12.31.09
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The importance of voice

Does a more personal voice make information more credible? Carrie Brown-Smith writes that, in the news industry, there is some evidence that “a hint of personality” leads to “higher credibility”. She goes on to say:

A recent study by my former Mizzou colleagues Jeremy Littau, Liz Gardner, and Esther Thorson, presented at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication conference in Boston last August, found that news with more opinion, voice, and analysis could be key in attracting younger readers. […]

They also tested the impact of voice on what is known in the academy as “political efficacy,” or the belief that you are able to act upon your knowledge.

What they found is that voice increases efficacy, in part because, unlike a dry, authoritative, institutional voice, it better engages your brain. It gets you thinking, actively processing the information, which in turn makes it more likely that you will not only remember this information, but feel empowered to act on it, too.

Understanding what encourages trust is very important indeed. Edelman’s Trust Barometer survey showed that across the board, trust in official channels of communication is declining:

Mirroring the erosion of trust in business this year, trust in every type of source of information about companies and of every type of spokesperson is down in most markets around the world. These lower levels of credibility suggest that business must engage with its audiences through multiple voices on multiple channels, especially since informed publics say they need to hear information several times before they will believe it.

If a more personal voice is key to reversing this decline in trust, then social media is an obvious way to do it. Now this might all seem like stating the obvious, but it’s worth going over this familiar ground. A lot of businesses have yet to shake off their fear of having actual, real humans speaking on their behalf. If they don’t, they’re going to find that a trust divide has opened up underneath their feet, with people trusting companies who are open, transparent and personable and not trusting those who use only corporate managed communications channels.

12.31.09
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Social semantics

Andrew McAfee asks if the word “social” has so many negative connotations that it’s a potentially harmful word to use when trying to persuade managers that web 2.0 tools are worth investigating:

“It’s technically accurate… [but] I have rarely come across a word that has more negative connotations to busy, pragmatic line managers inside organizations. The best thing it is is neutral… the worst thing it is is a sign that we’re going to use these tools to waste time, to goof off, to plan happy hour, to do all these social activities. The impression I get from people who make decisions… is ‘I’m not running a social club. I’m trying to run a business here.’ ” (I accompanied this monologue with a picture intended to convey what flashes through an executive’s mind when he hears the word ‘social.’)

I discussed the baggage that comes with “social” last year:

Is ‘social’ the problem with social software? Certainly in the UK, ‘social’ has some rather negative connotations: Social workers are often despised and derided as interfering, and often incompetent, busybodies. Social housing is where you put people at the bottom of the socioeconomic heap. Social sciences are the humanities trying to sound important by putting on sciency airs. Social climbers are people who know how to suck their way up the ladder. Social engineering is getting your way deviously, by using people’s weaknesses against them. Social security is money you give people who can’t be bother work for themselves. Socialism is an inherently flawed system that is prone to corruption. Social disease is venereal.

Whether or not you agree with all of those descriptions – and for the record, I don’t – you have to admit that the word ‘social’ does have a bit of a bad rap. I wonder how much that influences people – in business and elsewhere – to dismiss ‘social media’, ‘social networks’ and ‘social tools’ before they have even found out what they are and what they’re good for.

I still think that the word “social” is a problem. But I’m not sure that it either can or should be replaced. If a company balks at the word “social” before even looking at how social tools can be used to help their people get stuff done, then they have deeper problems than those that social tools can help with.

12.30.09
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Why we should care about information overload

Tom Davenport writes that no one cares about information overload anymore. His main thesis appears to be that because no one turns off their phone in meetings, tunes their email filters or turns off their email alerts, that means that information overload is now unimportant. He then tries to conflate that with the aspects of information flow that make turning these things off difficult, i.e. our addiction to the receipt of new and exciting bits of information.

Tom has basically got everything the wrong way round. Information overload still matters, and that few people do something about it should be cause for concern and not a reason to stick our heads in the sand and pretend that everything is ok.

The problem is one of those nasty wicked problems that change shape as you try to solve them. There is a complex interplay between the tools we use to communicate online, our physiological responses to incoming data, our expectations of other people’s expectations of our response to incoming communications, and cultural pressures that cause us to create and disseminate information in specific ways.

This is difficult territory. You can’t just tell people to turn off their email alerts and expect that to do the trick – although I certainly do recommend that as one action to take. Beating the physiological responses to incoming information is going to take a lot of thought and experimentation, but it’s the culture that’s going to be hardest to figure out. How do we change the way that people relate informationally to one another so that we have a healther information landscape?

I don’t have answers to that. But I do know that pretending information overload is an insignificant problem is not a constructive way to deal with it.

12.29.09
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What makes a website successful?

Paul Boag has written a great blog post about what makes websites successful, and many of his conclusions are directly applicable to social media projects too. Paul says,

Before we can address issues of aesthetics, usability and code, we need to tackle business objectives, calls to action and user tasks. Without dealing with these fundamental principles our clients’ website will fail.

I could very easily rewrite that to refer to social media, without having to change much:

Before we can address issues of social tool choice, metrics and community building, we need to tackle business objectives, calls to action and user tasks. Without dealing with these fundamental principles our clients’ social media project will fail.

Well worth a read, both for businesses considering a website redesign and those considering a social media project, internal or external.

12.29.09
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Newsflash! RSS still not dead: Story at 11.

I’ve lost count of the number of times over the years various people have declared RSS to be dead, dying, moribund, comatose or laid low with a dose of swine flu. The latest is a piece by Read Write Web’s Richard MacManus who says, RSS Reader Market in Disarray, Continues to Decline.

RSS is a bit of a weird duck, really. It is infrastructure more than it is a service and there’s a distinct lack of clarity outside the tech community about what it is and what it does. That’s not helped by the fact that there are competing standards, not to mention competing terms: RSS (and all its version numbers), RDF, Atom, web feeds, news feeds, syndication, syndication feeds, even just plain ‘feeds’.

In short, RSS confuses people. It’s not until I explain how easily RSS can save time that people start to become interested. In a business context, RSS is invaluable. So many information publishers now produce RSS feeds of one stripe or another that it has become possible to draw together huge numbers of sources in one place very easily indeed. Anyone in market or competitive intelligence, marketing, PR, research, and any other department that relies on aggregating information should be all over RSS like a rash. But they aren’t. Why?

This is where RWW’s piece becomes relevant. At best there is stagnation in the RSS reader market, at worst there is a genuine decline. RWW reports:

[…] Feedburner no longer publishes any useful data about RSS Readers. The product has been infrequently updated since Google acquired it in June 2007 and it no longer even has a proper blog (a Google blog called Adsense For Feeds was the closest I could find).

Pheedo also has gone quiet from a blogging perspective – its last blog post was January 2009.

[…] There’s little sign of life on Bloglines’ blog either and its Compete.com traffic numbers show a decline since June 2009.

Netvibes, FriendFeed, Newsgator and PostRank are the only other english language competitors showing in our Feedburner numbers. The others are either browser (Firefox) or operating system readers.

Also note that Newsgator shut down its online RSS Reader at the end of July this year.

We are not seeing the kind of innovation that we need in the RSS market. I suspect that part of this has been because businesses have been very slow to realise the usefulness of RSS and so hoped-for licensing income hasn’t been forthcoming for aggregation vendors. Partly this is down to the fact that getting new software assessed, accepted and rolled out through business is a long, tedious process in most companies – long enough to kill off relationships with cashflow sensitive start-ups.

A friend of mine once told me that it took his company 18 months to code-check new software. Doing that with social tools is IT suicide – most tools have iterated half a dozen times in that period. At least. It’s no wonder that most of the companies I talk to have not implemented any RSS readers internally. By the time they’ve got the software approved, it’s out of date.

This means that people are stuck using web-based applications. Whilst Netvibes and Google Reader are very good at what they do, they are also a little limited. Google Reader is a very introspective tool – you can share stuff with other people within Google Reader, but there are no tools for sharing on Twitter, Delicious, Instapaper etc. Netvibes does a bit more, in that you can share on Twitter or Facebook, but again it doesn’t embed itself in the wider content-reading ecosystem.

RSS still has huge potential, but the landscape it sits within is complicated, comprising of RSS sources, RSS readers, IT department policy makers, and those social media community members who are actually still communicating to business that this is a really useful tool.

That’s a lot of ducks to get in a row, but I am pretty sure (or rather, I hope!) that at some point, it’s going to happen. I wouldn’t call time of death on RSS just yet.

12.24.09
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Metrics, Part 4: Subjective measurements

(If you haven’t already read them, you might like to take a look at Part 1: The webstats legacy, Metrics, Part 2: Are we measuring the right things?) and Metrics, Part 3: What are your success criteria?)

In the last instalment of this series I mentioned that sometimes there just aren’t objective metrics that we can use to help us understand the repercussions of our actions. Yet much of what we try to achieve with social media projects is exactly this sort of unmeasurable thing.

No amount of understanding of page views, for example, is going to tell us how the people who have viewed that page feel about it. Did they come because they were interested? Or because they were outraged? Is your comment community a healthy one or a pit of raging hatred? Are your staff better able to collaborate now you have a wiki or are they finding it difficult to keep another datastore up to date?

There are two ways round this:

  • Surveys
  • Subjective measurement scales

Surveys are sometimes the only way you can get a sense for how well a social media project is going. All the metrics in the world won’t tell you if your staff are finding their internal blogs useful or burdensome. Random anecdotes are liable to mislead as you’ll end up relying on either the vocal evangelists who will give you an overly rosy picture, or the vocal naysayers who will give you an overly pessimistic picture. The truth is likely to be in the middle somewhere, and the only way that you can find out where is to ask people.

Survey questions need to be very carefully constructed, however, to ensure that they are not leading people to answer a certain way. At the very least, make sure that questions are worded in a neutral way and that you cover all bases for the answer options you give. Test and retest surveys as it’s so easy to get something crucial wrong!

The second way to try and measure subjective metrics is to create a scale and regularly assess activity against that scale. If you were assessing the comments in your customer-facing community, for example, you might consider a scale like this:

?????…..Lively discussion, readers are replying to each other, tone is polite, constructive information is shared

????………Moderate amount of discussion, readers replying to each other, tone is polite, some useful information shared

???………….Little discussion, readers reply only to author, tone is mainly polite, not much information shared

??……………..Discussion is moribund OR Tone of discussion negative, tone is impolite, no information shared

?…………………Abusive discussion OR Discussion is just a torrent of “me too” comments

?…………………No discussion

The idea here isn’t to create an enormous cognitive load but to try and have a consistent understanding of what we mean when we rate something 3 out of 5. This means keeping scales clear and simple, and avoiding any ambiguity such as language which could be misunderstood or which has an inherent value judgement that could sway an assessment.

I would also suggest that valuable data would be compiled by having a varied group of people rating on a regular basis and then averaging scores. That would hopefully smooth out any variation in interpretation of the scale or personal opinion.

Again, I’m going to stress that both these methods need to be put in place and measurement started before a project begins. Thinking ahead is just so worth the effort.

In all honesty, I’ve never had a client do either surveys or subjective scales. Mainly because none of them have ever really given enough thought to metrics before they start a project. It’s a shame because with services like Survey Monkey, it’s really not hard to do.

12.23.09
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Developing etiquette

Technological change is outpacing our ability as a society to negotiate and agree upon acceptable behaviour sets for each new tool type. The mobile is a great example of this: Some of us think that it’s rude to sit in a cinema yapping away on your mobile, whilst others feel that it’s not only acceptable but also their right.

Where social media steals a march on mobile phones is that we can use the very tools we are discussing to negotiate what acceptable behaviour means. What is rude on a social network? What is expected on a wiki? And what is good etiquette for comments?

Justine Larbalestier has a great post outlining what people engaging in comment threads should do before plunging in, including:

  • Read the entire post before commenting. Nothing is more annoying to a blogger than to have someone say “But why did you not mention French beanbags?” when you have just spent six paragraphs doing exactly that.

And:

  • Do not explode on to a comment thread in a whirl of fire and outrage. Particularly don’t do this if all the discourse up to that point has been calm and measured.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been online for so long, but it does seem to me that most of these are no-brainers, yet they still appear to be news to some! Will the day ever come where online etiquette is pervasive or are manners a thing of the past?

12.22.09
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The power of ecosystems

It used to be that I judged a new social tool, service or application purely on intrinsic qualities such as functionality, usability, design or utility. In an increasingly competitive social media landscape, where even niches are getting crowded, what is it that makes one tool stand out above the others?

Ecosystem. Plain and simple. What kind of API does the tool provide? How vibrant is the developer community? What other tools and services are building up around it?

Twitter, for example, has a really vibrant ecosystem, full of tools that allow you to post pictures, track compressed links, analyse statistics, manage your accounts, send Tweets longer than 140 characters. The ecosystem is so vibrant that a service devoted just to cataloguing it has sprung up: OneForty.com.

Wordpress is another tool with a fabulous ecosystem, not just in terms of plug-ins and themes, but also in terms of developers. I’ve never had a problem finding WP developers to help me out when I need a hand wrangling the finer points of WP admin.

The Delicious ecosystem, on the other hand, appears to be moribund. The Firefox add-on that I used to rely on, Delicious Complete, is now defunct (does not function in FF3) and I can’t find an alternative that allows me to manage multiple accounts. There are a handful of dedicated add-ons for Firefox, but beyond that the wider developer community is either invisible or just doesn’t exist. New tools, like Instapaper, that could tie in with Delicious don’t. That’s a real shame because Delicious is one of my favourite tools, but it simply isn’t that easy to embed it in my working processes.

I know that there may be some very good reasons why some tools have better ecosystems than others, but as I’m not a developer and have never looked at the barriers to entry for working with these different tools, I can’t speak to that side of the debate.

But ecosystem is very important to users not just in deciding which tools to use, but whether to be loyal. The cost of switching from Twitter or WordPress to a competitor is quite high. It’s not just a matter of swapping one service for another, but of having to start again with the community, whether that’s moving your own social network over or finding new people to worth with on the new platform. The cost of moving from Delicious, however, would be relatively low. If someone offered a better service with better tools and even a small ecosystem that showed promise, I wouldn’t hesitate to migrate my data.

12.21.09
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Metrics, Part 3: What are your success criteria?

(If you haven’t already read them, you might like to take a look at Part 1: The webstats legacy and Metrics, Part 2: Are we measuring the right things?)

It’s never been more true to say that just because we can measure something it doesn’t mean we should. The temptation to amass as many stats as possible about our social media projects, in the hope that somewhere in the numbers lies enlightenment, is almost irresistible. Instead, we need to do the opposite: Measure only the things that can tell us something useful. And some of those measurements may not actually come from social media at all.

To know what to measure, we first need to understand the strategic goals of the project. This is the 60,000 ft view, the “We want increased profitability” or “We want to be more productive” view. These aren’t easily measured directly. Profitability, for example, may be improved by a whole host of actions taken by the company as well as by market forces, so teasing out which bit is down to a specific social media project could be very difficult.

Instead, strategic goals provide us with a context for tactical goals. Increased productivity, for example, may mean decreasing email use, decreasing hours spent in meetings, improving collaboration, improving communication, decreasing duplicated projects, and improving employee engagement.

Of these tactical goals, some are easier to measure than others. Leisa Reichelt has written a great post on the importance of measurement and criteria for success in which she says:

Some success criteria are immediately apparent and easy to measure, for example return visitors, increased membership, activity or sales. Ideally you want to put some numbers around what you’d consider would define this project as ‘successful’, but even just identifying the metrics that you will use to judge the success of the project is a good start.

Some success criteria are less easy to ‘measure’ but don’t let that discourage you. Often for these kinds of criteria I’ll use a round of research to determine whether or not we’ve been successful – those things that are difficult to quantify are often quite easy to examine using qualitative research. I find myself more and more using a last round of research to ‘check off’ the less quantifiable success criteria for projects.

I think of these two types of success criteria as objective and subjective:

  • Objective criteria map fairly cleanly to something you can measure. For example, you can measure how many emails are sent and received and so can see if your social media project is reducing email flow.
  • Subjective criteria do not map cleanly to any metric. For example, it’s hard to define, let alone measure, collaboration.

Sometimes one can get creative around subjective criteria and create a new metric that can shed light on matters, but often there isn’t much more than gut feeling to go on. In that case, it is worth asking our gut how it feels on a regular basis so that we can at least look back dispassionately rather than trying to remember how things felt six months ago. (More on this in a later post.)

For all measures, it’s important to understand what the numbers are really telling you and to discard any measurements that could be in any way misleading (cf Part 2).

A good workflow for this whole process might be:

  • Set out strategic and tactical goals
  • List objective and subjective criteria for success
  • Map criteria to measurable metrics
  • Discard misleading metrics
  • Discard unimportant metrics
  • Identify desired trends
  • Start measuring

One word of warning: Beware numerical targets. It’s often not possible to know how big of a change you need to create in order to meet your goals. And in many cases, social tools scale best when they scale slowly. Rapid change can even destroy the very thing you’re trying to create (especially when you’re looking at community building). Numerical targets are often nothing better than fairytales that may or may not one day resemble reality.

The final thing to remember is to start taking measurements before the project launches. It might seem like a no-brainer, but in my experience it’s common for companies to forget that without information on starting conditions, there’ll be nothing to compare to.