Category Archives: Computer Weekly: The Social Enterprise

12.04.09
by

Why does a blog look like a blog?

Smashing Magazine has an article titled The Death of the Blog Post, wherein UX designer Paddy Donnelly examines a trend amongst web designers to play with their blog’s design and layout in what he calls a “blogazine” – a blog with a magazine-style layout. Donnelly’s main point seems to be that he, and other designers, find traditional blog designs boring, and feel that that each post deserves to have its own design to service its own needs, rather than have to fit in with a single blog-wide design.

I can understand why this is deeply attractive to designers. The creative freedom to tailor a page’s design perfectly to fit the text must be something designers often crave. And the examples he gives, particularly those from Dustin Curtis, look lovely. But the idea of designing each post afresh is only going to work for a very tiny minority of bloggers with the time and skills. For the vast majority of bloggers, this is just not an option.

But more than that, conflating blog and magazine is a really bad idea.

In unpicking why, we have an opportunity for some important lessons for enterprise. The first is that your blog design really, really matters. There is no excuse for you not to have a beautifully, professionally designed blog that is readable, accessible, and flexible enough to be read on different monitors or devices. If your blog is just slapped onto your corporate website with the same navigation, styling and layout as the rest of the site you should get it redesigned right now. No excuses.

The next lesson is relevant not just to enterprise, but also to web designers shifting from site design to blog design: Blog design patterns matter.

When you look at a well-designed blog you will see a number of features that I call “blog furniture”. There are many pieces of blog furniture to choose from, and not all blogs use all pieces, but most use a combination of:

  • Calendar
  • Search
  • Categories
  • Archives
  • Recent posts
  • Recent comments
  • Meta information (e.g. the admin sign-in link, RSS feed link)
  • RSS feeds from other sources, e.g. Delicious, Twitter, or news headlines
  • Badges from third party sites, e.g. Flickr badges
  • About the Author text, photo or link
  • Blogroll or list of external links
  • Tag lists or tag clouds

These are really important not just because they are useful, but because they provide the visual cues that tell visitors they are somewhere different from the rest of the site, somewhere more personal, more conversational, more informal. Take those cues away, and you risk confusing your readers, even if only momentarily.

If I pitch up on a page that looks just like the rest of the site – or, indeed, nothing like any other page on the site – then it’s going to take me a while to understand what it is and what it’s for. When we arrive on a new site, we give it less than a second to impress us. If the visuals conflict with the content, for example, we are expecting to see a blog but we are presented with something that looks like a magazine, we are less likely to hang around. The fact that it looks pretty isn’t going to make up for that moment of disconnection. (In this precise case, designers may be the exception, but that also means they are profoundly unable to judge whether or not a page causes a conflict of expectations.)

Thirdly, RSS matters. A cornerstone of the blogging world, RSS strips out all design and present, very simply, passages of text interspersed with any graphics. Donnelly’s post looks awful in RSS. Compare and contrast:

From the website

The Death Of The Blog Post - Smashing Magazine

From the RSS feed

NetNewsWire (1536 unread)

A blog post that reads in a disjointed way, with too many graphics, in your RSS reader is going to be a post you don’t bother to finish. Beautiful layouts that rely on the juxtaposition of text and image to make their point are likely to fail horribly in RSS.

I would say that if you’re creating a site with lots of bespoke pages, no blog furniture, which loses its coherence in an RSS reader, you’re not actually writing a blog at all: you’re using blogging software as the backend of a website. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that and I’m glad that such talented designers are flexing their online creative muscles. But let’s not confuse our spades and our shovels.

Over the last ten years blogs have evolved conventions because those conventions are useful. There is no reason why those conventions should hamper design, but you throw them out at your peril.

12.03.09
by

The other Two Cultures

What are the implications of reducing bureaucracy? Bill Vlasic of the New York Times asked that question in his piece about how General Motors is trying to get rid of needless form-filling and shed its “hidebound, command-and-control corporate culture”. GM is trying to shift from a company where dissent was marginalised to a culture of openness and honesty.

I agree wholeheartedly with Johnnie Moore, when he says:

My feeling is that what appears to be happening at GM needs to happen in a lot more places. It often seems to me that everytime we experience a crisis, the solution is to write more rules. […]

The intention is good, but the practical effect is to engulf people in explicit, complicated systems and reduce their freedom – based on an unconscious assumption that everyone is not to be trusted. We give ascendancy to people who are really great at theory and effectively degrade practice. I think its rooted in the idea that one person or a group of people can effectively oversee a system and control how it works with written instructions.

In order to get things done people have to find elaborate work arounds for the rules, often with anxiety. The result: it’s actually harder to create real trust the human way, using our judgement and instincts.

This reminds me of theories of management that I stumbled once on Wikipedia, Theory X and Theory Y, which were proposed by Douglas McGregor in the 60s. In Theory X, management assume that employees are “inherently lazy and will avoid work if they can”. In Theory Y, managers assume that employes “may be ambitious and self-motivated” and enjoy their work.

Whilst reality tends not to fall into two neatly opposing mindsets, the framework is still useful, especially when think about how social media fits into a corporate culture. One could extend the theories thus:

Theory X companies are inimical to social tools, because they simply do not trust staff. Concern that people will ‘abuse’ the tools in some way leads to attempts to control employees’ access to them. The company’s public blog winds up with an editorial committee, only approved managers are allowed an internal blog, and access to sites like Wikipedia or services like Twitter are curtailed. Social media projects generally fail in these cultures, if they are ever started in the first place.

Theory Y companies, on the other hand, are ready to trust their staff to do the right thing. Social software is made available to all, small talk and social uses of the tools are allowed (sometimes even encouraged), and people build stronger relationships with colleagues which increases trust and ability to collaborate. Departmental silos are broken down, communication across time zones and locations improves, duplication of effort is reduced. Social media projects generally succeed in these cultures.

Of course, in reality, corporate cultures are not homogeneous. One department may have a much more open, collaborative and sharing culture than another. The question is whether Theory Y cultures are nurtured and growing within a wider Theory X company, or are they seen as aliens to be disposed of?

(The other Two Cultures, in case you’re wondering, are CP Snow’s.)

12.02.09
by

ATA: Who are your favourite social media bloggers?

So I reckon it’s time for a bit of audience participation here on The Social Enterprise, so I’ve decided to create a new “Ask The Audience” category. I shall, unsurprisingly enough, periodically and at random ask you a question about your thoughts on social media. Simples!

Today’s question:

Who are your favourite social media bloggers?

Who are the trusted old voices whose opinions you value? Who are the up-and-comers that provide you with insight? Which social media blogs can you simply not live without?

Let me know in the comments!

12.01.09
by

CWSE Roundup – 27 Nov 09

To make sure that you don’t miss out on the blogging that I’m doing over on my new Computer Weekly blog, The Social Enterprise, I’m going to do weekly round-up posts so you can see if anything takes your fancy. Obviously I’m a bit late for last week, but I’m sure I’ll hit a rhythm soon.

Monday: Joining the Social Enterprise
Tuesday: CoTweet: Twitter tools get collaborative
Wednesday: Is tendering right for social software projects?
Thursday: The role of dopamine in social media
Friday: Merlin Mann’s Time & Attention talk

Please do pop over to The Social Enterprise, take a look around, and let me know what you think.

12.01.09
by

When provided a choice, do people choose?

Social software is a strange beast in terms of corporate software. The best social tools are developed by small software houses or ad hoc groups of open source developers. Often they are much more usable than traditional corporate tools, more lightweight and more flexible. Comparing WordPress, which is basically a content management system, with some of the CMSes I used back when I was a web designer/developer, the difference is stunning. WordPress is just so much simpler to use and easier to manage.

But for me, the key difference between traditional enterprise software and social software is that in almost all cases, social software is elective. If your business decides to change its email client or accounts package, for example, there’s nothing users can do but get on with it. Social tools, on the other hand, frequently replace existing tools/processes such as email and meetings and are almost always optional. Users often opt not to bother.

The successful implementation of social software doesn’t stop with a technically successful roll-out. In fact, that’s when the process begins because that’s when your adoption strategy should kick in.

Adoption is ultimately about behaviour change: persuading people that, for example,

instead of sending an email to everyone with a new version of a document they are working on, they should put it on a wiki where it’s easier to collaborate. This might seem like a small step – and for a few people it is – but for the majority that’s a fundamental change to the way that they have learnt to work on documents.

When we are faced with these sorts of changes we tend to resist. I’d hazard a guess that neophobia is much more common than neophilia (which is why you can spot us neophiliacs a mile off!), and the assumption that people will resist should be front and centre in social media project roll-out plans.

In short, the implementation of social software is not a technical project, it’s a behavioural change project.

11.30.09
by

The decline of empire

Oh, I love a bit of infoporn and this is a truly glorious visualisation of the decline of the British, Spanish, French and Portuguese maritime empires by Pedro Cruz. (For a bigger version, pop along to Vimeo.)

Cruz explains:

The data refers to the evolution of the top 4 maritime empires of the XIX and XX centuries by extent. I chose the maritime empires because of their more abrupt and obtuse evolution as the visual emphasis is on their decline. The first idea to represent a territory independence was a mitosis like split — it’s harder to implement than it looks. Each shape tends to retain an area that’s directly proportional to the extent of the occupied territory on a specific year. The datasource is mostly our beloved wikipedia. The split of a territory is often the result of an extent process and it had to be visualized on a specific year. So I chose to pick the dates where it was perceived a de facto independence (e.g. the most of independence declarations prior to the new state’s recognition). Dominions of an empire, were considered part of that empire and thus not independent.

The wonderful thing about these sorts of projects is that they turn otherwise dry information into fascinating social objects.

Via David Weinberger.

11.27.09
by

Merlin Mann’s Time & Attention talk

I love Merlin Mann’s way of thinking about productivity, the way that we work and our relationship with our working life. This is a great talk that he gave last year about, yes, Time & Attention. Merlin talks about our relationship to email, the usefulness of re-negotiation, and our need to recognise that our time and attention are scarce resources that we should prize more highly.

Well worth a watch.

11.26.09
by

The role of dopamine in social media

What is it that makes our inbox such an enticing place that we spend hours there every day? It’s a question that fascinates me, mainly because I have such an uncomfortable relationship with email. I get lots of it, am often slow to respond and frequently end up feeling guilty because my email has got the best of me.

Psychologist Susan Weinschenk puts the blame for our obsession on dopamine:

[T]he latest research shows that dopamine causes seeking behavior. Dopamine causes us to want, desire, seek out, and search.

[…]

It’s not just about physical needs such as food, or sex, but also about abstract concepts. Dopamine makes us curious about ideas and fuels our searching for information. The latest research shows that it is the opoid system (separate from dopamine) that makes us feel pleasure.

Wanting vs. liking – According to Kent Berridge, these two systems, the “wanting” (dopamine) and the “liking” (opoid) are complementary. The wanting system propels us to action and the liking system makes us feel satisfied and therefore pause our seeking. If our seeking isn’t turned off at least for a little while, then we start to run in an endless loop. The latest research shows that the dopamine system is stronger than the opoid system. We seek more than we are satisfied (back to evolution… seeking is more likely to keep us alive than sitting around in a satisfied stupor).

A dopamine induced loop – With the internet, twitter, and texting we now have almost instant gratification of our desire to seek. Want to talk to someone right away? Send a text and they respond in a few seconds. Want to look up some information? Just type it into google. What to see what your friends are up to? Go to twitter or facebook. We get into a dopamine induced loop… dopamine starts us seeking, then we get rewarded for the seeking which makes us seek more. It becomes harder and harder to stop looking at email, stop texting, stop checking our cell phones to see if we have a message or a new text.

This sheds much needed light on why we spend so much time checking for new email only to then not deal with it when it has arrived, but there is more to the email problem than dopamine.

There are cultural problems around the use of email as a proxy for productivity; huge email loads being worn as a badge of honour by people who like to equate their inbox martyrdom with a commitment to work; and defensive emailing by people who feel so scared or insecure that they CC everyone. These issues around the sending of mail need to be tackled, probably before we try to tackle our dopamine-fueled inbox obsession.

But as Weinschenk points out, tools like Twitter are just as likely to “send our dopamine system raging”.

So if social media is as addictive as email, isn’t it pointless to try to replace one with the other? I don’t think so, no, because there’s more to it than trying to reduce inbox faffing, as important as that is. It’s also about improving sharing, findability, archiving, collaboration, conversation, staff relationships, morale and efficiency. These benefits, in my opinion, outweigh the potential flaws in the new tools.

We do need to be aware that social media isn’t without its problems, but understanding the fundamental biological and psychological processes that shape the way we interact with technology will help us to solve those problems. I look forward to watching and maybe even participating in the emerging field of technopsychology.

11.25.09
by

Is tendering right for social software projects?

One of the most important stages in building a relationship with a new client is, in my opinion, requirements gathering. Partly this happens even before a deal is struck, because consultants need to know top level requirements before they can put together a proposal.

Once work begins there’s usually a more formal and detailed requirements gathering phase during which one learns about the client as much through observation as direct questioning. This period of learning is crucial. To do the job well, one must understand how one’s client thinks, how they work, what they are expecting, what they know, not to mention figuring out what the client thinks they want and what they actually need.

This is at odds with the common procurement procedure of having multiple companies/consultants tendering to fulfil an already detailed brief. I came across one of these briefs just the other day and it was a stark reminder of how the tender process fails horribly when the client doesn’t understand what it is they are asking for.

The tender in question was very detailed: seven pages of background, contract objectives and deliverables, specifications, timetables and milestones, selection criteria and more. But whilst it’s great to see that they’d put so much thought into it, their basic premise was so deeply flawed that I can only imagine two types of people who would tender for the job as described: a naïf with no real understanding of social media, or someone with flexible ethics.

The tender process is setting the project up to fail. A responsible consultant would respond to the tender with a counterproposal, suggesting alternative avenues of exploration that would be more fruitful and constructive. I fear, however, that once a project is at tender stage, so much work has gone into it and so many colours nailed to its mast that it becomes politically difficult to turn the ship around.

The sad thing is, when the project fails it will be social media that is blamed, not the project’s central concept. And had the organisation in question spent a little bit of money up front working with someone who knows their onions, they could have saved a lot of money in the long run. Penny wise, pound foolish.

11.24.09
by

CoTweet: Twitter tools get collaborative

Searching for the perfect Twitter tool is a bit like searching for Shangri-La: You know it’s out there somewhere and you can find it if you just search hard enough.

I was a Twhirl addict for a long time, but recently switched to Tweetie as Twhirl was hammering my Mac’s processors a bit too much. Tweetie is more compact and has a better user interface, but there are things that it doesn’t do that Twhirl did.

Such is the way of Twitter clients. If you pooled all the features of all Twitter clients, you’d have all you need to create a spec for the perfect client, but no single client fits that bill yet.

When it comes to managing Twitter accounts in a business context, Tweetdeck is many people’s favourite, if only because it lets you save keyword searches. If you’re monitoring Twitter for mentions of your company, that’s invaluable functionality. But still has its drawbacks, including awful design and excessive demands on screen real estate.

CoTweet is a newcomer to the market, but already has an impressive feature set. Because it’s a web app rather than a local client, multiple people can manage multiple accounts. It also allows you to assign Tweets to a colleagues for follow-up action, with automatic email assignment notifications, and to make notes on individual Tweeters. That should help companies monitoring Twitter for customer care purposes make sure Tweets don’t fall between the cracks.

Other cute features include scheduled tweets and inline access to Bit.ly’s shortened URL stats so you can see how many people have clicked on a any given Bit.ly link.

CoTweet does need a bit of love and attention where usability is concerned, though. The interface is a bit confusing and, just like every other Twitter client, there are things that it could be doing but isn’t. I particularly like Tweetie’s conversation view, where when you click on a Tweet it will show you all the previous Tweets in that exchange, and I can imagine that might be useful for CoTweet users too.

Overall, though, CoTweet shows promise and provides a very different view of Twitter than most other clients. Definitely one to watch.