Category Archives: Computer Weekly: The Social Enterprise

02.19.10
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ATA: What makes a good case study?

Every now and again I find myself searching for social media case studies, and whenever this happens it’s always a monumental pain in the proverbials. People aren’t great at interpreting a case study from outside of their own context, so I like to find something that they can immediately relate to. But it can be really hard to find something relevant on short notice so I often wind up going back to my old favourites and then having to tell the client “Well, this may not sound exactly like you, but trust me, it’s more relevant than it looks.”

Although there are loads of social case studies on the web, they aren’t particularly well organised. There are various lists kicking about, but many of them are poorly organised and it takes ages to plough through them. So I’m considering a quick and dirty solution in the form of a Google spreadsheet and form so that we can gather more detailed information together. What kind of information would be useful to you? Here are some possible ideas:

  • Name of the company
  • Whether the project was internal or external
  • Date of case study
  • Tools used
  • Is this good practice or bad practice
  • Overview
  • Link to full write-up
  • Name of person writing is up
  • Style of case study (blog post, formal case study etc)

What else would you like to see? I’ll use your comments to create the spreadsheet and will post the form here when it’s ready.

02.18.10
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What does “content strategy” mean for social media?

I stumbled across a blog post yesterday by Kristina Halvorsen about content strategy. The post looked at the difference between strategy and planning and was very interesting. But there was one small section that worried me:

But for a mid-sized or large organization, if social media content is conceived and created in a silo (or siloes) apart from the organization’s other content channels, it opens the door for inconsistent messaging, irrelevant content for current target audiences, and so on. So it’s important to understand that a blog, like all social media, is (among other things) a channel through which to distribute branded content.

This is an issue that needs untangling because, misinterpreted, it could result in a poor social media strategy.

The silo’d nature of many businesses is a significant problem and I entirely agree that a fragmented social media strategy, or content strategy, will result in a mess. A wise strategist will look at the business’ aims, understand its market, and will create a strategy that will help the business meet its goals within the context of its market.

But blogs and social media are not “a channel through which to distribute branded content”, they are a way for people within the company to form relationships with both other people outside the company and their own colleagues. These relationships create greater trust in the business, as potential customers feel that they have an ‘in’: access to a real person to whom they can take their troubles if they experience any. As trust increases, so does the likelihood that a transaction will occur between those trusted parties.

Branded content is inappropriate for social media because it’s impersonal, it’s not from the heart of the blogger (or Twitterer etc.) and so does not build trust because the recipient can see right through it. Indeed, one of the most common problems I am asked to fix is underperforming Twitter accounts, and they uniformly underperform because they are streams of branded content without a hint of humanity in sight. In fact, this comes up so often I may start offering Twitter Rehabilitation as a specific service to clients.

This doesn’t mean, however, that social media should not have a content strategy, but it needs a very different approach to the sort of strategy one would apply to traditional communications. Rather than focusing specifically on the content, one has to focus on the people who are active in social media and the communities that they are active in. My process would be this:

  1. Examine your markets and understand what topics your customers are interested in
  2. Find people in your business who are passionate about those same topics
  3. Pick people from that group who are happy using social tools
  4. Agree with the bloggers/Twitterers/etc. which topics they are going to cover
  5. Let them get on with it
  6. Review regularly to make sure that the bloggers/Twitterer/etc. feel happy with what they are doing and that everything’s going in the right direction

When we look at successful business bloggers, we don’t see branded content, we see personality, transparency, authenticity, honesty. Those keywords haven’t changed in over a decade and they aren’t going to change now because these are the attributes that people respond most positively to.

Social media comes from the heart and needs very light touch management. More than that, it needs passion, freedom and trust in order to truly work.

02.17.10
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Social isn’t just online

The British Psychological Society’s Research Digest Blog carries a post about how much better we feel when we get absorbed in a social task than if we do the same task on our own. You’ve probably heard of ‘flow’, the feeling of being so absorbed in something that time stands still. Flow “is highly rewarding and usually provokes feelings of joy afterwards”, but Charles Walker has discovered that “social flow is associated with more joy than solitary flow – ‘that doing it together is better than doing it alone’.”

The ‘social enterprise’ isn’t just about using social media to make connections between people via technology, it’s also about using that technology to bolster face-to-face relationships. Wouldn’t it be great if we could provide people with opportunities to experience social flow on a regular basis as a part of getting their job done!

02.16.10
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Data security vs agility and cost

Third party social media tools really are a two-edged sword. On the one hand, they allow you to get up and running almost instantaneously for little or no money, but on the other hand you have no data security or guarantee of uptime.

I’m reminded of this dichotomy by the recent closure of a number of music blogs by Google’s Blogger service. Despite the fact that these blogs were all operating legitimately and within the law, Google removed their content from Blogger without either a warning or an opportunity to back up. This appears to be bad behaviour from Google, but they are not alone. Yahoo! has a track record of closing down Cinderella services without much of a by-your-leave, resulting in confused and unhappy users whose data has been lost forever. And, of course, there was the catastrophic server meltdown at Ma.gnolia, a Delicious.com rival, which resulted in their entire bookmark repository being lost.

Whether it’s a company targeting a few users, closing down underachieving services, or suffering massive data loss, there is just no guarantee that the information you put online is still going to be there in the morning.

So does this mean that corporate information should never be entrusted to third party sites? Not at all. Firstly, it’s not always possible to run your own internal version of a third party tool, and often it’s not even desirable. You could never replicate the networked nature of a third party social network, for example.

Sometimes you can install software, such as WordPress, on your own servers, but if your IT department is maxed out or uncooperative, you may be forced on to WordPress.com instead. There could be a significant cost to the business if you have to wait months for your own installation to be set up and for your project to get started, in which case the hosted option becomes the most viable option.

The answer? Your social media tools should, where possible, be regularly backed up just as with your own servers. Recovery of your social media presence should be at the top of your disaster recovery plan, if only because if something serious happens to your company or any of your other data, your blog could be a key communications channel. (This is also a good reason not to host your own blog on the same servers as your main website, by the way! If everything else goes down, you need to have some way to communicate with the outside world.)

02.15.10
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Perceived barriers to wiki adoption

Alan Porter writes a great blog post – one I wish I’d written! – over on Ars Technica examining some of the perceived barriers to wiki adoption that he has come across. He says:

As I continue to research and write my upcoming book on wikis, I keep hearing one word over and over again. That word is “BUT” (complete with all-caps), as in, “I would like to use a wiki, BUT…” or “We tried using a wiki, BUT…”

What follows is usually an excuse for why the speaker feels that a wiki isn’t a worthwhile tool for collaboration in his or her environment. I use the word “excuse” deliberately, because rarely does anyone articulate an actual business reason, such as a lack of need. When I ask deeper questions, I invariably find that the objection isn’t to the wiki technology itself, but instead to the concept of collaborative authoring and a perceived loss of control over the content.

Porter’s post is an excellent view into the cultural and technical barriers people erect in order to isolate themselves from change. Cultural excuses include:

  • We tried one once and no one used it
  • The cost/benefit ratio is too high
  • I’m too busy doing actual work to try anything new
  • It’s overwhelming, and I don’t know where to start
  • If my management doesn’t care, why should I?
  • It won’t be accurate
  • I prefer meetings

Technical excuses include:

  • I need to learn a mark-up language
  • Search doesn’t work
  • It’s a black hole
  • It isn’t like (name your favorite application here)
  • It’s a security nightmare

Porter debunks each myth with great care, and then poses a set of questions that everyone should ask themselves before they embark on a wiki project.

The whole post reminds me of the Why Don’t You/Yes, But… Game from Transactional Analysis where one person offers the other help, but that help is rejected every time with an excuse. I have certainly observed managers (even quite senior ones) playing Why Don’t You/Yes, But… around social technology, particularly wikis and blogs. Let me write you a sample script:

Manager: We need to improve collaboration and capture knowledge.

Consultant: Why don’t you use a wiki?

M: Yes, but it’ll take us 18 months to get it through IT.

C: Why don’t you use a hosted wiki?

M: Yes, but then our data won’t be secure.

C: Why don’t you create a regular back-up schedule?

M: Yes, but that’s too difficult.

C: Why don’t you go with a vendor that backs up for you?

M: Yes, but that’s too expensive.

C: Why don’t you install open source software on an under-the-desk server, Trojan Mouse style?

M: Yes, but if IT ever find out, they’ll kill me.

As Wikipedia says, “”Why Don’t You, Yes But” can proceed indefinitely, with any number of players in the [Manager] role, until [the Consultant’s] imagination is exhausted, and she can think of no other solutions. At this point, [the Manager] “wins” by having stumped [the Consultant].”

Every time I have found myself embroiled in this game, the project has stalled, often before anything has happened. It’s so easy to think of reasons why something won’t work and much harder to think of ways to make sure it does. And when I say Manager in the above example, I don’t just mean middle managers; I have played this game with CxOs, people you would think could just say, “Make it so”, people who are supposed to be the ones setting their company’s technology agenda.

We have to recognise that many companies behave like dysfunctional mega-personalities, with each member of the collective reinforcing each other’s bad behaviour. We can’t always use logic and evidence to deal with people playing these games, but instead must draw from other sources of inspiration such as psychology in order to understand how to move things forward. And that’s easier said than done!

02.12.10
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CSWE Roundup – 12 Feb 10

Oops, forgot to do my Computer Weekly: The Social Enterprise round-up last week, so here are two week’s worth of links for you.

Asymmetry: The problem with social networks
Shoot the alpha males
Does your personality influence how you use the web?
Listening – Connecting – Publishing
IntraTeam 2010
How important is Twitter to your blog’s traffic stats?
Report: Pew’s Social Media and Young Adults
Report: Edelman’s Trust Barometer 2010
Everything you need to know about comments
Google Buzz: A user testing fail?

Enjoy!

02.12.10
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Google Buzz: A user testing fail?

Yesterday i wrote a long piece about Google Buzz over on my own blog, Strange Attractor. The long and the short of it is that Google has released a Twitter-clone that is embedded in Gmail. Various privacy concerns rapidly came to light which resulted in quite a few concerned blog posts from various quarters.

Once alerted to these concerns, Google immediately addressed some of them, although not everyone is convinced that it has gone far enough to correct the problems. Jessica Dolcourt has written a detailed set of instructions for how to fully disable Buzz for those unhappy with its intrusion into their inbox.

On the one hand, I’m not at all surprised that Google could mess this up so badly. Whilst a brilliant company from an engineering standpoint, it has a history of not really understanding people particularly well. When it does attempt social applications, it tends to do them clumsily.

Most of the stuff that was (and is) wrong with Google Buzz is obvious right from the get-go. A small user test with a handful of people would have picked it up. I wonder if Google did any user testing at all with Buzz, or whether they did it with people who work at Google and therefore, dare I say it, probably don’t think the way we do. Had they reached out to wider user community I think they would have rapidly discovered that Buzz made people feel squicky and that privacy was a serious concern.

We do know that Google does testing. They famously “couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better.” The question is, do they do user testing, and do they do it right? The mistakes made by Google Buzz would indicate that good user testing is not used uniformly across the business.

02.10.10
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Report: Edelman’s Trust Barometer 2010

Edelman’s yearly Trust Barometer survey results are out, with trust in business, governments and NGOs up, whilst trust in the media continues its three year decline. However:

Although trust in business is up, the rise is tenuous. Globally, nearly 70 percent of informed publics expect business and financial companies will revert to “business as usual” after the recession.

Interestingly, trust in “credentialed experts” is up, compared to a drop in trust in “[people] like me”, perhaps because in a recession people become aware that their friends don’t have better information than they do. I don’t think this necessarily points to a decline in word-of-mouth and would expect this metric to bounce back once we’re out of recession. But then, your word-of-mouth is only as good as people’s experience of your actual product or service and businesses do need to understand that you if you put lipstick on a pig, people will still see that it’s a pig.

Edelman also found that:

A vastly different set of factors – let by trust and transparency – now influences corporate reputation and demands that companies take a multi-dimensional approach to their engagement with stakeholders.

Another good reason to use social media to engage with customers, clients and other stakeholders!

I’m slightly surprised it’s taken us this long to see this happen. People are much more aware now that businesses can act deceptively towards them. There are many examples of deception (whether deliberate or through incompetence) and subsequent climb-down that persist in the public consciousness because the story has been so efficiently transmitted via the internet. It’s hard not to view business in general with a certain level of mistrust these days.

Businesses that are deliberately transparent, on the other hand, counter this background mistrust by laying their cards on the table and emphasising that they are made up of human beings with whom we can interact, rather than corporate droids who only know how to say their equivalent of Computer Says NO! It is, after all, much harder to mistrust a real person for no reason than a faceless megacorp.

Here, Robert Phillips, UK Ceo for Edelman, talks about how trust pans out in the UK:

As usual, Edelman’s report provides us with much food for thought.

02.09.10
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Report: Pew’s Social Media and Young Adults

Pew’s Internet & American Life Project has recently published their report Social Media and Young Adults, which looks at social media usage by teens and young adults.

Two Pew Internet Project surveys of teens and adults reveal a decline in blogging among teens and young adults and a modest rise among adults 30 and older. Even as blogging declines among those under 30, wireless connectivity continues to rise in this age group, as does social network use. Teens ages 12-17 do not use Twitter in large numbers, though high school-aged girls show the greatest enthusiasm for the application.

The report goes on to say that whilst blogging amongst teens and young adults has dropped since 2006, down to 14% of online teens compared to 28%, it has risen amongst the over 30s from 7% in 2007 to 11% in 2009. 73% of online teens use social networks now, compared to 55% in 2006 and 65% in 2008. 47% of online adults use social networks, up from 37% in 2008. Furthermore, adults are “increasingly fragmenting their social networking experience” as 52% have two or more different profiles.

There’s lots more information, about Twitter, connectivity and gadget use. I haven’t yet had a chance to read the whole thing, but none of the above statistics should surprise anyone.

Teens never were particularly into blogging and if they were going to blog anywhere it was going to be on LiveJournal. Different blogging tools had radically different profiles in 2006, with tools like Typepad having a middle-aged, white male demographic and LiveJournal attracting mainly teens, 75% female, with a focus on cultural minorities. The blogging landscape has changed a lot since then, and the tool-specific cultures have grown or receded along with the tools themselves. LiveJournal, which had just been bought by SixApart was sold to SUP, a Russian media company and now has 11.6 million users. Movable Type/Typepad seem to have decreased in popularity. WordPress has developed is now one of the most usable and extensible platforms available. It currently has 202 million users.

Culturally, blogging has moved into the mainstream – a good enough reason for many teens to see it as ‘something old people do’ and that they should, therefore, avoid. And those teens who were on LJ in 2006 are growing up, hitting 20 and going to university or getting jobs. And I can say from experience that blogging really is easier when you’re underemployed!

The wider social media landscape has changed too. Facebook had started off as a closed, school-/university-only site, accessible only to those with an educational email address. In 2006 is opened its doors and so all of those teens/early-20-somethings who were facing having to leave their friends behind as they lost their university email address could continue their activities into the workplace. MySpace, which in 2006 was the most popular social network, became a lot less cool. In 2008, Facebook took MySpace’s crown and it is now pretty much seen as Facebook’s ugly little brother (even though MySpace is a year older).

Twitter, of course, barely existed in 2006, and whilst it’s still not hugely popular amongst teens, plain ol’ SMSing is. Teens have greater access to mobile phones now than they did, with 75% of American teens between 12 and 17 owning one. I’d suspect the pattern is the same in the UK and Europe. Text bundles are now very generous, so teens have no need of Twitter – their social circle is based on their school friends and neighbours for whom texts work well enough.(In most cases, they have yet to develop geographically scattered networks that tools such as Twitter are useful for sustaining.)

As for adults using more social networks, but fragmenting their social experience, well again, there are a lot more networks to join now than their were, and they don’t all do the same thing. I can’t do on Twitter what I do on Flickr or Dopplr. So I would expect to see usage and fragmentation continue to increase.

I love the Pew reports. We don’t have anything like this in the UK, although we desperately need this sort of research to be done. As I’ve said before, Ofcom and the Office for National Statistics do some work, but it lacks the focus and detail that business and government need if they are to base decisions on evidence instead of anecdote. However, it is important when we read these reports to remember that the digital landscape is continually shifting, and we can’t separate out the changes we see in online behaviour from the development of the web. As such, I’d say there is nothing that surprises me in this report, nothing that seems out of place within the wider context of technology change and adoption.