Category Archives: Computer Weekly: The Social Enterprise

04.16.10
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How does the Digital Economy Act affect your business?

As a social media consultant and an occasional digital rights activist, I paid a lot of attention to the Digital Economy Bill as it was frogmarched through Parliament. Like many, I was disgusted by the ill-informed nature of the debate about key problems with the bill and frustrated at how the politicians seemed to have been entirely captured by the music industry lobbyists, particularly the BPI.

The Bill is now an Act and whilst there are many aspects which are appalling, such as the threats to disconnect accused copyright infringers without any recourse to a proper hearing, I am very concerned about the chilling effect that this legislation is going to have in industry. Not just the internet industry, but all industries that use the internet. If you have a marketing campaign that solicits contributions from your community, if your business model includes any kind of aggregation, if you provide a wifi connection free of charge to visitors or guests, you could be affected by the Act.

Indeed, I’ve already noticed the chilling effect on my own thoughts about social media. What would I advise a client to do to ensure they are as safe as they can be of the unintended consequences of this bill? Is that even possible? What role will encryption now play in day-to-day interactions with the internet? Should I be advising clients against using third party tools that could potentially get taken down because they might possibly be used by others for infringing acts?

I’d very much like to hear your thoughts about how you think the Digital Economy Act might affect your business. Please do leave a comment.

04.15.10
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Journalism’s loss might be an opportunity for other sectors

It’s no secret that media companies are shedding jobs left, right and centre and it’s unlikely that those jobs will ever be replaced, even once the recession is over. Conservative estimates say that the number of journalists employed by the industry will decrease by 40% – 50% compared to before the crash. Less conservative estimates put that figure at 80%. Journalism schools, on the other hand, are producing more graduates than ever before. So what is going to happen to all these journalists?

The obvious path would be for them to go into PR and certainly many ex-journalists do. But this is an amazing opportunity for businesses in every sector, as Adam Tinworth and David Meerman Scott point out. David says:

[M]any organizations — corporations, nonprofits, government agencies, and educational institutions — finally understand the value of what I call “brand journalism,” creating interesting information online that serves to educate and inform consumers. People in companies now realize web marketing success comes from creating content-rich web sites, videos, podcasts, photos, charts, ebooks, white papers and other valuable content.

However, many of the companies I speak with are trying to figure out who will create the content that they need for their online initiatives. Marketers, executives, and entrepreneurs say things like: “David, I need help. If I knew how to create great content, I’d already be doing it.”

At every speech I deliver I say to corporations one of the best ways to create great Web content is to actually hire a journalist, either full- or part-time, to create it. Journalists, both print and broadcast, are great at understanding an audience and creating content that buyers want to consume–it’s the bread and butter of their skill set.

The rise of social media as a community engagement tool – and blogging in particular as a tool for companies to get their own, unedited story out – means that there is an increasing need for talented storytellers and communicators. Writing full time is not as easy as it looks and the skills that journalists bring to the table are valuable and hard to acquire.

Businesses who want to really bump up their social media presence should seriously consider hiring dedicated writers in addition to any evangelist program. Of course, you still have to take care that you’re hiring someone with the right sort of social media nouse (or at least, the right attitude and a willingness to learn about social media), which is not something all journalists have. But nevertheless, there’s a huge pool of talent searching for work right now and businesses would be daft to ignore it.

04.14.10
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Leopards don’t change their spots

Angela Connor points out that, just because you’ve built a lovely new community doesn’t mean that people will change their habits and visit yours over their existing networks:

Your new community, no matter how great will not change habits. What I mean by this is you will not be able to stop potential members from posting on Facebook or twitter or their favorite Ning community. If you are assuming that your new community will become the new gathering place for those belonging to the niche, I think you will be disappointed.

Whatever your community is, whether it’s a brand community or an internal social network, people will only create a new habit around your offering if it consistently gives them something really valuable. Communities take an awful long time to build. Like everything else in social media, there’s just no ‘quick win’.

04.13.10
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Collecting behaviours

Christian Crumlish write a too-brief post on tags as collecting behaviour and says:

Tagging and other forms of collecting are also an example of social design patterns that mimic game dynamics. Collecting objects is a core “easy fun” activity in many games, and similarly these extremely lightweight social interactions around gathering or tagging objects enable a form of self-interested behavior that creates aggregate value and potentially richer forms of engagement.

Tagging is one of those incredibly flexible ideas that can be implemented in a multitude of ways and contexts. What innovative uses of tagging and collecting behavoiurs in enterprise are you witnessing?

04.12.10
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Why I’m a fan of small talk in business

Derek Sivers reminds us that on the other end of our keyboard there lies a real person, someone who has real feelings, who will have real reactions to what we say.

When we yell at our car or coffee machine, it’s fine because they’re just mechanical appliances.

So when we yell at a website or company, using our computer or phone appliance, we forget it’s not an appliance, but a person that’s affected.

It’s dehumanizing to have thousands of people passing through our computer screens, so we do things we’d never do if they were sitting next to us.

He’s right. I’ve recently had an experience with someone suffering a total empathy failure, who didn’t seem able to put himself in my shoes and ask himself, “So, how would I feel about this situation?” It wasn’t very pleasant. This chap seemed to have entirely forgotten that their was another human being, with real feelings, who was being directly affected by his poor behaviour.

But I think we can do something about the dehumanising aspect of device-mediated interactions, and that something is to use more social media, particularly the tools that encourage small talk and phatic communication. In 2004, David Weinberger said in his JOHO newsletter:

[…] Art expresses something big in something small. (If it expresses something small in something big, you leave during the intermission.) Likewise, in small talk, we express ourselves in the details of what we talk about, the words we use, the ones we don’t, how far we lean forward, how tentatively or aggressively we probe for shared ground. Because all of this is implicitly presented, it tends to give a more accurate picture of who we are and what we care about than big, explicit conversations.

[…] I’m more of a constructivist than an archaeologist when it comes to social relationships. My aim isn’t to expose my buried self to you. It’s to build a conversation and then a relationship that eventually is so deep that we can’t disentangle the roots. For that, we need lots and lots of ambiguity.

He is still spot on. I responded to him in a post on Headshift’s blog, where I was writing at the time, and said:

What are the best aspects of conferences? The bits inbetween the panels and Q&A sessions where we get to chat with our peers. What is the best bit of the working day? Those watercooler conversations or lunch down the pub. Why do smokers have an advantage in the workplace? Because they take regular smoke breaks where they get the opportunities to chat and exchange scraps of information that become important later on.

Small talk is part of the ‘social grooming’ that is required to create and maintain social bonds. Through small talk, people reveal contextual information that they couldn’t otherwise share, particularly in a business setting. It’s around the coffee machine that you’re most likely to find out that your colleague was up all night with their sick child, which is why they looked like they were nodding off in a meeting. This extra nugget of information allows you to sympathise with them instead of getting annoyed – the context turns a negative reaction into a positive one, and helps keep the team working together instead of fostering mistrust and other destructive emotions.

Yet small talk is often despised, particularly in a work environment where one ‘should’ be concentrating on the task in hand, not chatting. But without small talk, without those bonds and the trust that they engender, teams fragment and become inefficient. The strong work ethic that has become prevalent since the industrial revolution has lessened tolerance for the social grooming activities upon which a sense of community depends, yet some companies spend a lot of money on team-building exercises which are really nothing more than formalised (and therefore often ineffective) opportunities for small talk.

The demise of the communal teabreak in offices has probably done more harm that good. The habit in many offices is that people work through their breaks, including lunch, and the idea of taking a short break mid-morning and mid-afternoon is very much frowned upon. People also have a tendency not to take breaks communally anymore except for the odd lunch or drinks after work. These trends decrease the opportunity for face-to-face small talk in the workplace.

Instead, people use email, instant messaging programme or external blogs or bulletin boards in order to get their fix of chitchat. The social requirement for small talk hasn’t gone away, it’s just moved online.

At the Social Tools for Enterprise Symposium, Euan Semple talked about his experiences implementing social software internally at the BBC. He found that a significant fraction of posts on the bulletin boards were not overtly to do with work, but either passing on experiences gained outside of work or the sort of small talk that glues communities together. But, as Euan says, “People get to trust each other through small talk, and I actively defend it against those who say it is not work related.”

It’s as true now as it was then.

04.09.10
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Bookmarking your Twitter links in Delicious

When it comes to sharing links, I will confess that I tend to do so on Twitter these days, rather than Delicious. But Packrati.us now lets me do both at once. By hooking up my Twitter account to my Delicious account, I can now send a link to Twitter and have it automatically saved to Delicious. Settings let me control which links are saved, so I can specify a hashtag which will tell Packrati.us which of my links to save. Packrati.us can also convert other hashtags to tags for the bookmark saved or exclude Tweets with specified hashtags. Further settings allow relatively fine-grained control of what gets saved and how.

I’ve long since felt that Delicious is being a bit left behind. Although it’s a really useful tool that I recommend to many of my clients, it lacks the vibrant ecosystem that, say, Twitter enjoys. I’m not going to say that the development of Packrati.us will single-handedly change all that, but it is nice to see someone thinking about how Delicious can be worked into their day-to-day social media life.

04.08.10
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Find yourself giving advice?

The BPS blog provides us with an overview of research which seems to show that people prefer information, not just opinion, when they are receiving advice. Obviously one mustn’t over-generalise, but this does seem to say that we should be careful when we find ourselves giving advice:

Individuals who are advising decision-makers should at the very least be careful to provide information along with their recommendations.

Blogging in particular encourages us to share our opinions and to explore ideas. Sometimes this teeters over into advice-giving, so if we want to truly be helpful we need to remember that information is the key!

04.07.10
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Event: Radical Real-Time

The Radical Real-Time annual virtual unconference is scheduled for June 5 this year, with the theme of “Making the Most of Collaborative Worlds: Physical, Virtual and Blended Collaboration”.

This Radical Real-time unconference will take place in different virtual platforms that offer possibilities to meet both asynchronously and synchronously. The synchronous part of our conference will be an array of meetings during four hours on June 5, 2010 starting at 2.00PM GMT. You are already participating in the asynchronous part of the conference by being on this Ning site. Right now, we are collaboratively putting together the conference program.

For more info, check out their Q&A page.

04.06.10
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Blogging is a journey, not a destination

Seth Godin emphasises something that I think it’s very, very easy to forget: Blogging is not just about the finished blog post, but the process of thinking things through and having a conversation around ideas.

It doesn’t matter what context we are blogging in: business or personal, inside the firewall or publicly, anonymously or as oursevles. We are all writing ourselves into existence, and the important thing to remember is that this is a journey, not a destination.

04.06.10
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Useless artificial divisions

I’m increasingly of the belief that trying to split social media into ‘internal’ and ‘external’ uses is a totally pointless waste of time. Equally I hear people talking about B2B and B2C social media case studies as if they are somehow different, but they really aren’t. These are shallow, superficial divisions that have no basis in reality.

Social media is about people forming relationships with each other. The tools they use are irrelevant. The context is irrelevant. This is about people, whether they are colleagues, customers, clients or vendors. It’s not the what, it’s the who.

Creating these social media silos of marketing and internal communications and B2B and B2C just seem to me to be doing the very thing that social media is often used to combat: putting up walls between different groups of people who are doing very similar things and who could do with talking to each other once in a while. Frankly, I think a lot of the really focused social media types, who zoom in on one tiny application of social tools, could do with getting out a bit more. And the people who focus on using social media for marketing, rejecting the idea that they might actually gain something from using the tools between themselves, are idiots.

We don’t need social media to turn into just another branch of marketing, or just another thing done by internal comms teams, or something that customer-facing companies do but B2B companies don’t. Start thinking like that and we’ll end up with the very sort of blinkered stupidity we’re already struggling to combat. Letting social media become what we’re trying to replace would be, to put it mildly, dumb.

Instead, why don’t we just accept that social media is rather like a hammer: you can use a hammer to build a garden shed or the Taj Mahal, but at the end of the day you’re still using it to hit a nail. Social media can be used to build a garden shed or the Taj Mahal, but at the end of the day you’re still using it to build relationships with people. I’d rather see businesses set up a separate Social Media Department populated by people steeped in social media culture who then helped everyone else in the company, regardless of who they are or where they sit, get the best out of social tools than see it eaten up by marketeers or managers who want to turn it into something safe, comfortable, familiar and vapid.

Let’s face it, most companies need to be shaken up a bit. Internal business cultures often suck, based on command-and-control and he-who-shouts-loudest-wins. A lot of marketing is just brainless drivel based on an out-of-date assumption that we’re all passive consumers just waiting to absorb your ‘message’. Social media can humanise all aspects of business, empowering any and all individuals touched by the company, whether employees or customers or just idle bystanders. But not if we let ourselves get caught up in these artificial divisions, cutting ourselves off from the wide variety of ideas that could so easily inspire our thinking.

I know this blog is called The Social Enterprise, but it is in fact this name which has lead me to writing this post. I sometimes worry that what I’m writing isn’t ‘enterprisey’ enough, but I’m not even sure that ‘enterprise’ has a meaning relevant in the context of social media. Does it matter if you’re a multinational or an SME when you’re trying to improve collaboration? No. What matters is that you understand how collaboration works, how people function, how social tools fit into that landscape. The underlying concepts and constructs are the same in both contexts. How people work is the same in all contexts.

I suspect that this splintering of social media comes less from intrinsic differences and more from the way that existing powermongers re-interpret social media through their own lenses, attempting to remake it in their own image so that they can control – i.e. defang and declaw – and own the change, whilst not really caring whether the change is genuine or meaningful. Social media therefore becomes a tool in the constant game of empire-building, either as a prize to be squabbled over or a stick to beat others with.

So I’m calling time on these pointless divisions. It’s all about social media and people. Fin.