Category Archives: Computer Weekly: The Social Enterprise

12.18.09
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Let’s just not build teams

Robert Brook writes an impassioned post about his distaste for artificial games and the overuse of competition as a motivator. I’ll write more on that later, but I wanted to pick up on one thing that Robert says at the bottom of his post:

Lindsay Marshall, of Bifurcated Rivets fame – I’m a long-time reader – reminds me of another grim manifestation: team building. Real teams come together organically, or emerge – they are rarely, if ever, built. That false application and bonhomie is dreadfully thin stuff, especially in comparison to emergent groups.

This reminds me of a story a friend of mine once told me about how he was chastised by his boss for not being a ‘team player’ because he didn’t join in office conversations about football.

Team building is not about creating groupthink. The kind of mutual respect and understanding that underpins the best teams is something that can’t be forced.

So here’s a thought: How about we use social media to build internal communities from which teams emerge spontaneously? How about providing people with the means and opportunity to get to know each other, understand each others’ skills and ways of working, and then let teams coalesce around projects? Turn Google’s 20% Time on its head: Instead of giving staff one day a week to work on whatever project they want, give them four days to work on projects that they get to choose from a list of things that the business needs doing (which they also get to contribute to), and one day where everyone has to do unavoidable unpopular tasks. If you share the good, you have to share the bad, after all!

What kind of company might that create? I would hazard a guess that it would be highly creative, innovative, productive and successful. It would be a company that retained its best staff because they are happier there than they could ever be in a traditional management structure. And if you only have one day to do chores, then the needless administrivia that gets created out of nowhere and which serves no purpose other than to feed the bureaucracy will just die off.

Who’s going to give it a go, then?

12.17.09
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Metrics, Part 2: Are we measuring the right things?

(If you haven’t already read it, you might like to take a look at Part 1: The Webstats Legacy.)

Anand Giridharadas asks in the New York Times, Are metrics blinding our perception?. Giridharadas begins by talking about the Trixie Telemetry company which takes data about a baby’s naps, nappy changes and feed times and turns it into charts, graphs and analyses to “help parents make data-based decisions”. He then goes on to say:

Self-quantification of the Trixie Telemetry kind is everywhere now. Bedposted.com quantifies your sexual encounters. Kibotzer.com quantifies your progress toward goals like losing weight. Withings, a French firm, makes a Wi-Fi-enabled weighing scale that sends readings to your computer to be graphed. There are tools to measure and analyze the steps you take in a day; the abundance and ideological orientation of your friends; the influence of your Twitter utterances; what you eat; the words you most use; your happiness; your success in spurning cigarettes.

Welcome to the Age of Metrics — or to the End of Instinct. Metrics are everywhere. It is increasingly with them that we decide what to read, what stocks to buy, which poor people to feed, which athletes to recruit, which films and restaurants to try. World Metrics Day was declared for the first time this year.

But measure the wrong thing and you end up doing the wrong thing:

Will metrics encourage charities to work toward the metric (acres reforested), not the underlying goal (sustainability)? […] Trees are killed because the sales from paper are countable, while a forest’s worth is not.

The same is true in social media. Count the wrong thing and you’ll do the wrong thing. As Stephanie Booth says, in the second video in this post:

As soon as you start converting behaviours into numbers then people adapt their behaviour to have good numbers.

She goes on to say that some of her clients believe that the number of comments they have on a blog post is a measure of success, but because of this they become obsessed with getting people to comment:

So you’re going to write posts which make people react or you’re going to encourage people to have chatty conversations in your comments. That’s really great, you get lots of comments, but does it mean that what you’re providing is really more valuable? […] I don’t believe that more is always better, that more conversation is always better. It’s “Is it relevant?” And that’s something that we do not know how to measure in numbers.

If the key metric for assessing success is a simplistic one like ‘page views’ or ‘unique users’ or ‘comments’, the emphasis in your web 2.0 strategy will be on creating something populist instead of something that meets a business need.

Let’s say you’re in eCommerce and you sell pet supplies. Your business goal is not ‘get more people onto our website’, it is ‘get more people buying pet supplies from our website’. The two are very different indeed. A company that believes that they need to just lots and lots of people through the virtual door will focus on anything that might get them more attention and traffic. A company that understands they need to attract the right people will focus on communicating with passionate pet lovers who arrive at the site primed to buy.

This is why niche blogs can command higher advertising rates than general news sites. Advertisers can see that more of the people who click their ads will actually buy their products and are willing to pay more for these higher quality visitors.

Equally, let’s say you want to ‘improve collaboration’ internally and to that end you start a wiki. You start measuring activity on the wiki and focus on ‘edits per user’ as a key metric. You encourage people to edit more, but the quality and amount of collaboration doesn’t increase as you expected. Why? Because people learnt that changing a single typo boosts their ‘edits per user’ count and took a lot less effort than creating a new page, engaging with a co-worker or making a substantive change. Focusing on the wrong numbers changes the wrong behaviour.

In order to think about metrics, you need to know exactly what you’re using social media for. Figure that out and you’re halfway there.

12.16.09
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Saatchi and Saatchi get it horribly wrong for Toyota

Tim Burrowes explains just how wrong Saatchi and Saatchi got Toyota’s Australian social media campaign. There are key lessons here not just for social media marketing, but for social media use across business.

  1. Do not assume that the agencies you work with, whether they are marketing, internal communications or PR, understand social media. The chances are high that they haven’t got a clue.
  2. Do not assume that your internal departments, whether they are marketing, internal communications, PR or any other department, understand social media. The chances are that they haven’t got a clue either.
  3. If your clue-free marketing/internal comms/PR department is working with a clue-free agency on a social media project, all your warning lights should be going off and your klaxons blaring. Danger, Will Robinson! Danger, Will Robinson!
  4. Social media is easier to mess up than to get right. And it’s easier to think you know what you’re doing when you don’t than it is to recognise when you don’t know what you’re doing. All that known unknowns and unknown unknowns, y’know?

The commonest excuse I hear about why companies aren’t going to bother learning about social media themselves is that they ‘don’t have time’ or ‘want results now’. Which is a bit like opening an office in a foreign country, without anyone on staff who can speak the language, and then demanding ‘results now’ whilst expecting nothing to go wrong.

With attitudes like that so prevalent, I expect that social media cock-ups will continue to entertain us throughout the foreseeable future. Maybe I need to start the social media version of FailBlog or ClientsFromHell.

12.15.09
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Instapaper: Managing your ‘To Read’ list

I have this dreadfully bad habit of leaving lots of tabs open in my browser. Since the day Firefox introduced tabs, they have been my default way of “managing” large numbers of articles that I want to read. Whether someone has sent me a link by email or IM, or I spot something on Twitter, I’d open it up in a tab, glance at the headline and think, “Oh, I’ll read that later.” Then it would sit in my browser for weeks, sometimes months, whilst I did other stuff.

When Firefox grows to 60+ open tabs it becomes a bit of a resources pig and more often than not would crash horribly, maybe taking down the rest of the OS with it. I’d be forced to restart my Mac and when Firefox reopened I would feel compelled to reopen the 60 tabs that had caused it to crash in the first place. Sometimes I copy all URLs into a separate document and start afresh with an empty browser. I almost never go back to this list of URLs (which now goes back to 10th August 2006!).

I recently discovered Instapaper and now my workflow has totally changed. Instead of leaving tabs open, I open the article I want to read, save it to Instapaper, and close the tab. I can then read it either later on, in my browser, or I can read it on the Instapaper iPhone app. Once I’m done, I can archive the link, or I can share it on Tumbler, Twitter, Feedly, Google Reader, Facebook or via email. Instapaper also plays very nicely with Tweetie on the iPhone, so I can save links direct from my phone without having to star the Tweet and open it on my Mac later. The only thing I miss at the moment is that I can’t save links to Delicious, which is my current link storage facility.

It’s not often that an app revolutionises my reading in this way. RSS did it, years back. (If you’re curious, I use NetNewsWire which syncs to Google Reader and thence with Reeder on the iPhone – a fab combination.) But nothing has come close to changing how I consume non-RSS content until now.

The great thing is that I don’t feel the need to read everything that passes into view, but have a much more streamlined way of saving the link and assessing it later. And because Instapaper on the iPhone works offline, I can use some of that wasted time spent sitting on underground trains to flip through my articles. Win!

12.14.09
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Metrics, Part 1: The webstats legacy

Probably the hardest part of any social media project, whether it’s internal or external, is figuring out whether or not the project has been a success. In the early days of social media, I worked with a lot of clients who were more interested in experimenting than in quantifying the results of their projects. That’s incredibly freeing in one sense, but we are (or should be) moving beyond the ‘flinging mud at the walls to see what sticks’ stage into the ‘knowing how much sticks’ stage.

Social media metrics, though, are a bit of a disaster zone. Anyone can come up with a set of statistics, create impressive-sounding jargon for them and pull a meaningless analysis out of their arse to ‘explain’ the numbers. Particularly in marketing, there’s a lot of hogwash spoken about ‘social media metrics’.

This is the legacy of the dot.com era in a couple of ways. Firstly, the boom days of the dot.com era attracted a lot of snakeoil salesmen. After the crash, businesses, now sceptical about the internet, demanded proof that a site really was doing well. They wanted cold, hard numbers.

Sysadmins were able to pull together statistics direct from the webserver and the age of ‘hits’ was born. For a time, back there in the bubble, people talked about getting millions of hits on their website as if it was something impressive. Those of us who paid attention to how these stats were gathered knew that ‘hits’ meant ‘files downloaded by the browser’, and that stuffing your website full of transparent gifs would artificially bump up your hits. Any fool could get a million hits – you just needed a web page with a million transparent gifs on it and one page load.

This led to the second legacy: an obsession with really big numbers. You see it everywhere, from news sites talking about how many ‘unique users’ they get in comparison to their competitors to internal projects measuring success by how many people visit their wiki or blogs. It’s understandable, this cultural obsession with telephone-number-length stats, but it’s often pointless. You may have tens of thousands of people coming to your product blog, but if they all think it’s crap you haven’t actually made any progress. You may have 60% of your staff visiting your internal wiki, but if they’re not participating they aren’t going to benefit from it.

Web stats have become more sophisticated since the 90s, but not by much. Google Analytics now provides bounce rates and absolute unique visitors and all sorts of stats for the numerically obsessed. Deep down, we all know these are the same sorts of stats that we were looking at ten years ago but with prettier graphs.

And just like then, different statistics packages give you different numbers. Server logs, for example, have always provided numbers that were orders of magnitude higher than a service like StatCounter which relies on you pasting some Javascript code into your web pages or blog. Even amongst external analytics services there can be wild variation. A comparison of Statcounter and Google Analytics shows that numbers for the same site can be radically different.

Who, exactly, is right? Is Google undercounting? StatCounter overcounting? Your web server overcounting by a factor of 10? Do you even know what they are counting? Most people do not know how their statistics are gathered. Javascript counters, for example, can undercount because they rely on the visitor enabling Javascript in their browser. Many mobile browsers, for example, will not show up because they are not able to run Javascript. (I note that the iPhone, iTouch and Android do show up, but I doubt that they represent the majority of mobile browsers.)

Equally, server logs tend to overcount not just because they’ll count every damn thing, whether it’s a bot, a spider or a hit from a browser, but also they’ll count everything on the server, not just the pages with Javascript code on. To some extent, different sorts of traffic will be distinguished by the analytics software that is processing the logs, but there’s no way round the fact that you’re getting stats for every page, not just the ones you’re interested in. Comparing my server stats to my StatCounter shows the former is 7 times the latter. (In the past, I’ve had sites where it’s been more than a factor of ten.)

So, you have lots of big numbers and pretty graphs but no idea what is being counted and no real clue what the numbers mean. How on earth, then, can you judge a project a success if all you have to go on are numbers? Just because you could dial a phone with your total visitor count for the month and reach an obscure island in the Pacific doesn’t mean that you have hit the jackpot. It could equally mean that lots of people swung past to point and laugh at your awful site.

And that’s just web stats. Socal media stats are even worse, riddled with the very snakeoil that web stats were trying to mitigate against. But more on that another day.

12.11.09
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Professionalism

First we caused the twin evils of poor communication and inability to learn from each other through our systematisation and bureaucratisation of the world of work. We devalued relationships and trust as twin pillars of human endeavour. Then we made it worse by sticking plaster on the wound, adding layers of “professional” intervention on top in the form of “internal communicators” and “knowledge managers” in our attempts to make things better. We buried the people trying to do things under increasingly collusive layers of “grown ups” pretending that this is the way things have to be.

And then… (Euan is a great read – if you’re not already subscribed, he’s well worth it.)

Professionalism is, at best, a veneer of objectivity. At worst is a false persona that distances us from our colleagues, complicates collaboration and erodes trust. Social media turns all this on its head – instead of being “professional” we can be ourselves, we can have genuine relationships with colleagues that promote trust and understanding. We can finally acknowledge that we are real people with real emotions and that those emotions matter.

12.10.09
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danah boyd and digital anthropology

There’s a great interview with digital anthropologist danah boyd in The Guardian. I love danah’s work. We so desperately need more people like danah who take a calm and evidence-based view of the way the internet and social tools are changing society (or not, in some cases). She proved to be an essential source for my work on digital natives earlier this year, and her work should be essential reading for everyone in recruitment and HR.

The article says:

Lately, [boyd’s] work has been about explaining new ways of interpreting the behaviour we see online, and understanding that the context of online activity is often more subtle – and more familiar – than we first imagine.

Last week she outlined some examples at the Supernova conference in San Francisco, including the case of a young man from one of the poorest districts of Los Angeles who was applying to a prestigious American college. The applicant said he wanted to escape the influence of gangs and violence, but the admissions officer was appalled when he discovered that the boy’s MySpace page was plastered with precisely the violent language and gang imagery he claimed to abhor. Why was he lying about his motivations, asked the university? He wasn’t, says Boyd: in his world, showing the right images online was a key part of surviving daily life.

This is possibly an extreme case, but an important illustration. There are so many examples of people who have been fired or had job/univiersity offers withdrawn because of their behaviour on social tools. As a society we need to be really careful about how we handle the occasional mismatch between what we see and what we want to see. Sometimes it’s just more complicated than it seems and people deserve to have that complexity examined before people leap to a conclusion.

Social tools bring into the light behaviours that were previously hidden and we risk making very poor HR decisions if we don’t examine the nuance of each scenario individually. Is it right that employers expect a potential hire’s Facebook page to reflect the employers’ values rather than the reality of the new hire’s life? How long do youthful transgressions linger? After all, how many managers making hiring decisions have an entirely unblemished past? The fact that their mistakes are buried in the mists of pre-technological history doesn’t mean that they didn’t make the same ones that we witness young people making online now.

12.09.09
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Incentives in social media

I found myself explaining to a client the other day why incentives don’t work very well for encouraging people to get involved in social media. Indeed, incentives can have the very opposite effect so must be handled with extreme caution.

This excellent video from Dan Pink explains very succinctly why incentives do not work for anything other than simple mechanical tasks, and goes on to examine the importance of autonomy.

You should also read Johnnie Moore’s blog post Incentives, innovation, community which adds yet more flavour and context, including lots of quotes from and links to studies in the same area. And you might also like my post on incentives from earlier this year.

It’s unsurprising that these flaws ‘business operating systems’ affect the way that social media projects are rolled out, as companies try to remake social media in their own image. But it’s also interesting to (sometimes) see how the more autonomous processes of social media can rub off on business culture. Might social media even be a powerful enough force to change the default settings under which business operates? I hope so.

12.08.09
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Google’s real-time search ups the misTweet ante

Google has announced that it is going to be indexing the web in real time:

Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before.

[…] You can also filter your results to see only “Updates” from micro-blogs like Twitter, FriendFeed, Jaiku and others.

[…] Our real-time search features are based on more than a dozen new search technologies that enable us to monitor more than a billion documents and process hundreds of millions of real-time changes each day. Of course, none of this would be possible without the support of our new partners that we’re announcing today: Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca — along with Twitter, which we announced a few weeks ago.

This announcement should make people with twitchy Twitter fingers pause. There was once a time when a mis-posted Tweet could be deleted in time to ensure it never made it into Google’s cache (although never fast enough ensure no one saw it in their timeline). Google hasn’t explained how they will now deal with deleted updates, but my own experiment this morning showed that deleted Tweets are not deleted from Google in a timely fashion (if at all).

This is good and bad news. On the one hand, Google Cache has allowed me to do a bit of forensic Twitter searching to piece together deleted conversations. There will be times when it will be an important tool for holding public figures accountable for what they say in public. On the other hand, everyone makes mistakes. Shouldn’t we be able to delete and forget them?

However Google ultimately decides to deal with deleted content, it’s a timely reminder not to update in haste.

12.07.09
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Notes of caution and notes of hope

Stephen Baker writes an interesting piece over on Business Week sounding a note of caution about social media snake oil (and publishes some paragraphs that didn’t make the final cut on his own blog). The comments take Baker to task about the case studies he selects, but I think the point he makes still stands: It’s very easy to become a well-known name in social media regardless of your actual knowledge and experience, and quite a different thing to achieve results.

The problem of social media carpetbaggers is something I’ve mentioned before, but it’s a topic worth revisiting regularly because it’s not one that’s going away. People can be suspicious of consultants at the best of times and now that the job title “social media consultant” draws the same reaction as “estate agent” or “used car salesman”, it’s clear that the carpetbaggers are having a strong and negative impact on the perception of social media.

Therein lies the problem. Social tools can be incredibly powerful, but they have to be used well to stand even the slightest chance of success. If you have a crappy email client, you just have to learn to live with it. A crappy social media project is not only something that people can reject out of hand, it’s also likely that when it fails it is social media that is blamed, not the implementation.

Baker suggests that there is “danger of a backlash”. I’d say that the backlash is already happening – I see it already in the scorn some people heap on not just consultants but the tools themselves.

We saw exactly the same thing happen after the Dot Com Crash. Companies that had invested in expensive web projects, many of which were doomed from the outset due to being patently stupid ideas, failed to look at their own poor decisions and instead wrote off the web as a bad idea. “Internet” became a four letter word. (If you tried raising biz dev money in autumn 2002, you’ll know that!) The baby was thrown out with the bath water.

Seven years later, companies that had been quick to throw their digital talent under the bus have found themselves way behind competitors who reacted more sensibly to the end of the boom. Those who invested wisely in the web and ensured they had good digital people on board have flourished. The nay sayers are still running to catch up.

So here are two basic truths about social media:

* Social media is not a panacea. It cannot perform miracles. It cannot turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse. It can go horribly wrong horribly easily.

* Social media is not a waste of time. It can be transformational. It can empower your staff and your customers. It takes time, effort and understanding to get it right.

Companies making bad decisions now about social media are going to have a lot of running to do in five years’ time when they suddenly realise how far behind they are.