The Social Factor

Around this time last year, I was asked to help some colleagues who were contributing to a book by IBM VP Maria Azua about innovation and collaboration in the workplace. In particular I spent some time reviewing a chapter by Laurisa Rodriguez, who I’d been working with for several years and had met up with along with many of the other contributors at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin a month or so earlier.

I was aware that the book was due to be published during 2009 but I’d been so busy with the day job that it had dropped off my radar. Then I noticed a couple of incoming links from others who were writing about it (and found Laurisa’s blog post about it)… and realised that it had hit the shelves. The book, The Social Factor (Amazon link), is published by IBM Press and features contributions from many of the IBMers I’ve come to know through our internal social networks and tools over the past five years. It contains perspectives which reflect many of our experiences adopting tools and techniques such as tagging, blogging, wikis and social bookmarking inside the enterprise. It also discusses something I’ve frequently referred to in my speaking engagements – IBM’s highly successful Technology Adoption Program (TAP), which Maria herself established, and which continues to drive a lot of innovations inside the organisation that feed out into software products and service offerings. There’s a good Redbook about TAP available, of course, but it’s worth reading more in chapter 10 of this book.

It’s always nice to see one’s name in print… despite being a blogger I’m not sure I’ve got an entire book to write, so this may be as much as I get… so for those interested, you’ll find a small quotation from Laurisa’s interview with me – about Twitter, of all things, imagine that! – on page 105.

So, if you’re interested in the impact of social media, crowdsourcing and technology on innovation in a large enterprise, check out The Social Factor. I may be biased because I’m mentioned and several of my friends contributed to it, but I purchased my own copy, I’m making nothing from the book myself, and I believe that it is a great read!

The future of enterprise collaboration

I have just finished talking to a group of university students who were invited to IBM Hursley today. I had about 15 minutes to discuss Enterprise Collaboration, and I used the time to take a quick tour through IBM’s size, diversity and organisation, and talked about how the way I operate has changed since I got engaged in blogging internally four years ago, and how I “broke through” the firewall.

Towards the beginning of the talk, I asked three questions to get some group discussion going, and asked the students to shout out some answers. Here’s a summary of the responses.

1. What kinds of tools do you think enterprises use to communicate internally today?
“Skype”, “online meetings”, “MSN” (email and phone came right at the end of the list)

2. What kinds of tools would you like to use in a work environment?
“Facebook”, “Skype”

3. Is it a good idea, or appropriate, to communicate and share through firewalls?
“It’s important, for networking”, “companies could have their own version of Facebook internally”

I didn’t seed any of these responses! Very interesting… I think I’d expected the answers to question 1 to be email, wiki, blog etc., but those are all old school (and possibly, irrelevant) as far as this group was concerned. I guess the outcome of this entirely unscientific survey will be old news to some people, but I found it fascinating.

Update 17th June:
Thanks for all the interest in this post! I should just reiterate that this is not new news – as @andysc said to me after the talk yesterday, the idea that “email is how I communicate with my parents” is as commonplace as the idea that some of us may have had that “snail mail is how we communicated with our grandparents”. The point here is about the expectation of speed of spread of technology within corporations. I found it a very interesting perspective, although I guess I’d half-expected some of the answers. I just hadn’t expected the “old tech” to be buried so far down in the consciousness. But then, when I left university, web browsers were just emerging and I had a desktop email client at home, but yet I suddenly found myself at work using a green-screen terminal emulator to access what was, to my mind at the time, a hideously hard-to-use mail system called MEMO which required the use of line-editing commands.

One other point, given my own interest in these two technology spaces – Andy C asks below about microblogging, and I certainly mentioned our use of these tools internally and externally, but it didn’t seem to be on the students’ radar; secondly, I spoke about attending meetings in virtual worlds and the relative effectiveness compared to a teleconference, but again that didn’t come up as an idea in the responses to the questions at the start. So it seems (again, based on a highly unscientific study of a limited pool of London MSc Management students) that the technologies that are “expected” in the enterprise are those that have reached widespread consumer adoption outside it.

The thorny question of social software ROI

One of my good friends from IBM UK moved out to New Zealand a few years ago. Since then, Chris Sparshott has been, as he puts it, “morphing into a Social Media Specialist within IBM” (aren’t we all!) “along with running the day job as a technical Sales consultant”.

In a recent post, Chris shares a slideshow where he attempts to demonstrate how it is possible to measure the value of Social Networking within an enterprise. The whole question of ROI has been a tricky one, and various people have dismissed the very notion of attempting to measure “investment value” in this space. Chris has come up with some other options – measuring time and effort, and measuring contribution. It’s an interesting discussion, and I think it works well.

By the way, Chris has some other great slideshows over on Slideshare. Well worth a look. He’s sparkbouy on Twitter.

IBM and the Twittersphere

This was one of those comments you start to write on someone else’s blog entry, which morphed into a post all of its own.

As an IBMer who Twitters, I’m pretty astonished that the company hit this list of “brands that suck on Twitter”… in common with Adam, Ed and Ryan’s comments on the post (which Ed follows up in a post of his own).

I’ve spoken about the organisation’s engagement with social media of all kinds before. Looking at my own Twitter usage, I would guess that of my current ~500 followers/followees, a fair percentage of them are folks from across the company I want to keep in touch with, or people that share common technology interests that I want to learn from or that are watching and listening to me. I have search feeds set up for topics of interest (products, brand names, etc.) in my feedreader and make an effort to check what people are saying about our stuff – where necessary I highlight those comments to people internally, or try to talk to the original commenter. I’ve observed IBMers using Twitter to build communities and connections across the company, and with both customers and others outside it too.

I guess that the original post bases the assessment on the @IBM account alone, and reaches the conclusions it does… but look at all the ways in which we use social media and you might arrive at a different endpoint. I’d say we’re listening, engaging, talking, and take these communities seriously.

Adam Christensen sums it up neatly in his comment on the original post, also re-quoted by Ed Brill:

IBM is nothing more than a collection of a gazillion individual IBMers. Really smart ones for the most part, I think. And thousands of those folks are on Twitter. So rather than have a centralized – yet generic – IBM account, we’ve opted for a decentralized approach and let those many individuals be the IBM face to the Twitter world.

Actually that has been our approach with social networks from the outset. If there was a single @IBM account that tweeted about everything that the company touches it would be pretty noisy – our business is diverse. Instead, you can choose to engage with individuals and what their individual voices offer. I think it’s a nice way of working, and I like that my company trusts us to be out there.

Youngsters, social media, and online privacy

While I was driving to work this morning I listened to a piece on Radio 4 about an Ofcom study published today (also reported on the BBC News website). The report and interview on the Today programme was essentially suggesting that children in the UK are routinely sharing too much personal information on social networking sites. One mother interviewed said that she didn’t really understand the privacy settings on the social networks her son used, that she trusted him, and then admitted that she had “abdicated responsibility” for his use of the sites.

It was another of those segments that made me gnash my teeth and make comments at the radio. While I very strongly believe that children (and their parents) do need to be well-informed about the ways to make effective use of social networks and how to protect themselves online, I wanted to share an interesting experience that may indicate that the problem may not be as bad as the media makes out.

During the Blue Fusion event we ran at IBM Hursley recently, I spent a day running an activity that was all about identity theft and online privacy. The idea of the game was that the students were given a single piece of information – someone’s name – and then had to see how much they could find out about them through social engineering: web searches, finding paper information, or passing themselves off as various official organisations in roleplays. It was entirely contrived, of course… the designers of the activity had deliberately setup a social network profile for the person with “just enough” data to put the youngsters on the right track, and then laid a bunch of other clues based on the individual being quite hapless (not shredding documents, giving out personal data entirely too freely, etc). It was a lot of fun to run, and also brilliantly put together.

At the end of the activity I made a point of bringing the teams together and talking to them about how careless use of social networks could theoretically provide openings to identity theft. We had a short Q&A session that revolved around what networks they used (interestingly, most of them were on Bebo or MySpace, and not Facebook), and what kinds of information they shared. Home addresses, telephone numbers and dates of birth were not generally on the list, which was a bit of a relief! The overriding impression I got from the exercise was that these students had a high degree of common sense… not that I’m saying that the sample group should be taken as indicative of every UK student, but their degree of online literacy was highly impressive.

On top of today’s Ofcom study, whilst I was at Male’ airport on the way back from vacation I caught a snippet on Sky News covering last week’s publication of the Byron Review. There’s a lovely statement in the Executive Summary of the review:

Children and young people need to be empowered to keep themselves safe – this isn’t just about a top-down approach. Children will be children – pushing boundaries and taking risks. At a public swimming pool we have gates, put up signs, have lifeguards and shallow ends, but we also teach children how to swim.

Again, from what I’ve read I think I broadly agree with some of the findings, but the point at which the teeth-gnashing comes in is where the report (and the media) start to talk about regulation, which just seems to me to indicate a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the Internet. Educate, don’t always seek to regulate.

The question is: just who needs educating here? The adults, the children, or the media? I think it’s obvious that today’s youngsters are streets ahead of most of their parents in terms of online literacy. I hope their parents can be persuaded to keep up, and not to attempt to crack down. And I hope the need for a weekly scare story about social networks can actually subside at some point this year – seriously, it’s getting old.

Apparently the Home Office is due to publish a set of recommendations later this week. I await their thoughts with a mixture of interest and dread.

Social bridgebuilding is about real world connections

It’s all about the groundwork

It was James Governor who coined the term “social bridgebuilder”, in response to my musings about what it is I do with all this social media. Here’s a good example of what I like to do: I enjoy connecting people.

One of the things about blogging is that good bloggers take the time to engage in conversations, explore the blogosphere, and make new connections. Read widely, read outside of your “subject area”, comment and establish new acquaintances. Sometimes, just click through to that linked article for the sake of broadening your interest. If it does strike a chord, comment and let the author know you liked it.

Probably about 18 months ago I randomly connected with Heidi Hansen… I’m fairly sure it was via Plazes, now I think about it, but I can’t really remember the reason… I started reading her blog, commenting on posts that I found interesting, and we’ve subsequently become friends through a multitude of different connections in social networks. We’re in very different spheres, both professionally and geographically, but it is one of those connections that I’m glad I’ve been able to make.

The scenario

A couple of weeks ago, Heidi contacted me to ask whether I had any ideas about areas of possible research into social networking and social software. As it happens, I have been involved in a number of research studies over the past couple of years, both inside and outside of IBM, so we got to talking about things that might be worth exploring. I was also able to recommend a number of good folks that I thought it would be worth her following, such as my colleagues Jasmin Tragas and Sacha Chua (sidenote: if I ever get around to updating my blogroll, I’m sure Heidi would find a bunch of others!).

At the same time, I realised that Sacha and Heidi would probably have a whole lot in common. I know Sacha through blogs, both internally and externally at IBM… Sacha is one of those people who is impossible to ignore, and a lot of IBMers will have encountered her infectious enthusiasm, particularly inside our firewall I also knew she had recently finished studying herself, so it seemed like a natural connection to make. I pinged Sacha on Sametime and dropped her an email to follow-up.

Without realising it, I’d pointed Heidi at Sacha only days before she was due to travel to Toronto, where Sacha is based.

Result? I was able to connect two friends I’ve never met, for a real-world meeting in Toronto last week… and it sounds like it was a successful encounter. With a couple of emails, Twitters and IMs, a new connection was made.

Why is social software valuable?

This isn’t about the “dollar value of a transaction”. A lot of folks seem to want to know what financial benefit they can gain from engaging in these new social media.

Forget that.

I’ve no idea whether Heidi will buy IBM software in the future as a result of knowing me (actually, I’m pretty certain she won’t, but who knows where the world will take her!). The point is that I’m enriching my own network by knowing her, and by knowing Sacha, and tapping into their skills and expertise; and of course my own network and knowledge is completely open to either of them. I don’t know what dollar value to place on that; but I know that to me, the personal connections and friendships I build using these social tools are invaluable.

Social networking with schoolfriends in Poland

One of the sites making waves in Poland at the moment is Nasza Klasa, or Our Class. When we were there at Christmas, the whole family was getting very excited about it – reconnecting with old friends and giggling at old pictures. A lot of fun.

It’s interesting that this social network is even needed. Lots of local / native language sites and networks do exist, not only in Poland, particularly in the Far East for instance… this is one area where sites like Facebook sometimes fail. Poland in particular has its own instant messaging network (Gadu-Gadu, on which I have an account but never seem to be able to login using Adium) and other reinventions of the otherwise English-speaking wheel. Although some of my family are on Facebook, they are also enjoying using the Polish alternatives.

Nasza Klasa is suffering growing pains having gained several million users in a very short space of time… it’s particularly evident in the performance of the service, unfortunately. The site reminds me a lot of Friends Reunited, which I suppose was one of the earlier social networks. The idea is the same – reconnecting schoolfriends – and even the colours and layout are not dissimilar to the original Friends Reunited design. Looking at Friends Reunited now (part of the ITV empire, for some reason), it does look horribly dated. We complain about Facebook’s walled garden, but FR has absolutely no APIs or feeds, you have to visit the site to do anything, and you have to pay to be able to contact your friends. Thank goodness the web moved on.

Do you have an Effective Internet Presence?

My friend Ted Demopoulos pinged me recently to let me know about his new ebook, Effective Internet Presence. It’s a free (CC-licensed) PDF download, and worth a read. It’s short (less than 40 pages), highly readable, and contains some really useful ideas.

Without stealing Ted’s thunder – I really do encourage you to take a look at the full book – there were a number of snippets that resonated or made me think. Ted starts out by noting that:

A senior hiring manager at a Fortune 500 company trained all his people how to look up potential employees online last year, going well beyond a simple search engine lookup. The results affect who gets hired and who doesn’t.

…

People google you all the time. They google you before they meet with you, they google you if they may be working with you, they google you if you’re dating their sister.

These are excellent points. Ted isn’t (just) saying that it is important have a blog, for example – but he made me consider my personal brand across my entire online presence (something that people like Hugh MacLeod also lead me to think about about). Am I consistent? Do I have profiles in the right places? Can people find out who I am?

[ aside: I had a call from a recruiter the other day who had an opportunity for someone with WebSphere skills, and asked me "can you do that?". I should have just said "go look at andypiper.co.uk" or "google me". I'll try to remember to do that next time! ]

If you are thinking about starting a blog or otherwise building an online presence – for example in a social network like Facebook or LinkedIn – Ted suggests avoiding contentious subjects like religion and politics… which is probably a fair point, unless of course you are trying to make a name for yourself as a commentator on one of these topics! Talking of social networks, he covers both of those I’ve just mentioned, noting that he “expect[s] Facebook to become much more search engine friendly, but it doesn’t compare to LinkedIn today for developing a quick Effective Internet Presence”. I’m not so sure that I share his view on Facebook here, I’m not certain that it will open up quite that much; but overall the important point is that “… Facebook is a great networking tool if for nothing else because everyone seems to be on it.”. Absolutely – the same reason I use Twitter rather than Jaiku, and Flickr rather than Picasa, for example.

It’s a quick read and a handy reference to some of the more useful ways to build up an online presence. Read what Ted wrote about it on his blog, and then go take a look!

Stop Blocking

There’s a new campaign aimed at companies who obstruct employee access to the Internet (via Neville Hobson).

This is timely, given the recent hoo-hah about Facebook … see Dennis Howlett for some more balanced analysis.

So the blocking thing is something that affects me every day. One example – my blog is my CV. When I’m going to a new customer, and they want to know a bit about me, I point them here. Unfortunately, I recently found that some businesses block *.wordpress.com as a matter of course. That’s even more annoying when I’m trying to recommend that a customer reads some troubleshooting article on the Hursley on WMQ blog, for instance.

As a consultant, it is interesting to see how my different customers address the issue. The one that popped up today is that Dopplr is blocked under the category of “Personals and Dating”. Right. Clearly I’m trying to setup a date for next week, not share my travel plans.

After speaking at a conference last week, I was chatting to my colleague Karl on the way to the tube and we noted that we do have a huge degree of freedom in terms of our access to resources and information at IBM. That’s a good thing. It means we can share information and build relationships with one another, and others.

I’ll be following the Stop Blocking campaign with interest. I’m sure a lot of people will have contrary opinions, but I’d like to hope that a sense of responsibility can open up people’s access to useful resources on the Internet.

Technorati tags: Stop Blocking, Facebook, Dopplr, social software

IBM and Social Media

I’ve put my deck from yesterday’s conference up on Slideshare. I need to add some speaker notes too, please bear with me.

Not-so-live from the conference

OK, so the live updates were hampered both by the pace of the presentations, and lack of access.

Here are my notes from the other sessions of the day. Again these may be in a stream-of-consciousness format.

Bryan Smith, Rio Tinto
Rio Tinto are a mining company who haved faced issues with activists.
Online reputation management – discussion of how to assess risks and decide how to respond to comments.
Rio Tinto map out who talks about them and how via visualisations. Analyse where clusters of bloggers are writing about them. Watch Technorati etc.

Part-time employees or those on placements can blog… and sometimes do with a potentially negative impact on the image but they are often young, gone before they appear on the radar that is tracking online reputation.

[ my own thought on this... if youngsters on placements do blog like this or act irresponsibly in social media, it could impact their own future prospects... although that may be hard to explain to them at a younger age ]

Bryan has previously posted on his own blog about the “Bill Marriott approach”. There’s a view that if a senior exec has content scripted and created like this, it is of no value. Equally, investors may sometimes question why senior execs blog at all.

Lee Bryant, Headshift
Use cases for social tools within the firewall
The ‘MySpace generation’ expect the same tools at work and at home [ this is one of my themes when I speak about virtual worlds, incidentally ]

Slide on enterprise social tools… broken out into individual blogging tools like MovableType and WordPress, wiki platforms like MediaWiki and Confluence, and RSS applications. Lee also listed Lotus Connections under the heading of “Combined Suites”, along with a couple of others.

Concept of the “social stack” – an interesting way of looking at how these things stack up – presented here from the bottom of the stack to the top.

• feeds and flows (RSS data)
• bookmarks and tags (link to the news items in RSS)
• blogs and networks (pick out individual items and comment on them)
• group collaboration (social filtering)
• personal tools (organise the blocks of information on personal portals, manage feeds and networks)

Contrast this new social stack with traditional static intranets where it has been hard to persuade people to publish and share.

How feeds and tools contribute to peripheral vision.
Attention metadata is the future – how do we gather information about what people look at in order to improve recommendations?

Use cases. Important to come up with some in order to avoid people starting to use new technologies purely for novelty value!

• knowledge sharing in teams
• business social networking – finding expertise internally (LinkedIn, Facebook)
• innovation using social networks – surface ideas through social conversations
• distributed learning communities – mentornet – wiki-based learning
• collaborating beyond the firewall – connect with partners
• internal comms

Re-inventing the intranet… “Intranet 2.0”… wiki-based publishing on intranets… blogs, profiles, tagging, social bookmarks (hey, sounds a lot like Connections!!)

… example … a wiki-based Intranet that Headshift built for a customer based on Confluence… doesn’t look like a Wiki though, graphics etc., mashups of Google maps.

Paul Squires, New Media Manager at eon
Paul talked about eon’s experiences with blogging and podcasting, internally and externally.

[ side note, I was amused that only a few people said that they had heard of The Cluetrain Manifesto, given that Robin mentioned it first thing... ]

Examples of eon’s use of podcasting – short (15 minutes), focused. Each episode split into short segments.
Discussion of the podcast production process.
Issues: some corporates limit downloading of MP3s through firewalls, people not allowed to plug in USB devices, etc.

Field staff can be great corporate advocates, and podcasts are a good way to reach them, especially when they are on the road all the time [ true - I dip into podcasts when I'm on the road, too ]

Currently using CommunityServer for their blogs.
Used Twitter for the Tour of Britain event sponsorship. Fed a newsfeed to Twitter. This Twitter feed ended up being the only place to get news on Tour of Britain, not even the BBC were carrying reports.

Interesting issue over regulated industries. Regulators want to see complaints being recorded and handled – so customer service reps wanting to help customers resolve issues via external blog comments can cause regulatory issues.

[ note: it's a shame that so few of the presenters have been here all day - there would be much less duplication and more conversations arising from the similar points being made ... for instance, Paul mentioned Cluetrain and a few other things that had been talked about earlier ]

Mark Harris, College Hill
Blogs in crisis management
Why monitor the blogosphere? Well, numerous companies have had issues. Range of stories about how some real examples panned out.
Your organisation may be under attack, but your competitors might be under attack too – and this matters as it may affect how your company might be seen. Are your employees blogging? Do you know about it?

Consider the scope of a crisis generated through blogs. Is the poster a prominent author, is the item heavily linked?
Need care in responding to a crisis. Lawyers letters get posted to blogs, don’t bring things to the mainstream media if it isn’t there already.

When posting… use clear and defensible facts, and link to source material; Be respectful; Correct your own mistakes and acknowledge them [ note: these things are embedded in IBM's blogging guidelines already ]
Mark is happy to hear from each of the presenters today that their companies have blogging guidelines… but what about new starters? Worth checking on existing electronic footprints, and tell new starters about blogging guidelines, find out if they have a blog etc.
Blogs can complement how an organisation responds to criticism.
If a blog is used to respond to an issue, keep it going, don’t drop it.

Summary – blogging “is part of the comunication tool kit”, but not all of a communications strategy. Blogs can play a part in crisis management.

Conclusions
Overall, a very interesting day. I was particularly pleased with the range of viewpoints on offer – every presenter had a slightly different take on social media, ranging from my probably full-on enthusiasm[1] at the start of the day, through the more cautious notes from legal and regulatory angles, to how to drive these technologies into enterprises. Fascinating stuff. I also really enjoyed talking to the attendees… most of whom are not already blogging, and had not heard of sites like Technorati… it was good to spread the word and (hopefully) contribute to a wider understanding of this space.

[1] so much so that I completely forgot how to form a sentence at one point – I’m blaming that on too much enthusiasm rather than lack of caffeine.

Technorati Tags: blogs, conference, eon, headshift, collegehill, riotinto

Live from Corporate Blogging Summit

I spoke this morning at the second European Corporate Blogging Summit at the Danubius Hotel in London. I’ll try to share my slides soon, but for now I’m listening to my fellow speakers. I’m here with Karl Roche.

Interesting to note that only a couple of attendees at the summit admit to having personal or corporate blogs either internally or externally… so it seems that a lot of people are here to learn, which is great.

Photo by Robin Hamman

Stream-of-consciousness follows…

Robin Hamman, BBC Blog Network
Robin was the chairman for the first part of the morning and kicked things off with a discussion about the evolution of online communities. Some excellent points about how sites like Flickr and Twitter can be used… I didn’t know that some BBC folk are Twittering around the Rugby World Cup (integrated into the BBC site… I just can’t locate it!), for instance.

There’s a cost associated with online applications – managing registration databases, the need for Data Protection laws to be applied, the need to moderate in some cases.
Robin made the useful distinction between hosts and moderators in online communities – hosts need to keep an overview of a community and keep things on track, before calling in the moderators or “police” if things get heavy… particularly important in some BBC properties where stuff needs to be watched. Companies need to think about the skills required for staff who are taking on these public-facing roles. Good point.

(Robin already posted some remarks about the first couple of presentations – he did have the advantage of being able to do that while I was speaking!)

Dan Cooper, Covington & Burlington LLP
Dan ran a discussion of a lot of the legalities companies need to be aware of… essentially it’s important to have a clear blogging policy. Useful review of some of the key legislation and how corporate exposure has potentially increased. I’m going to direct you back to Robin’s write-up since he clearly took much better notes than I did… but I was interested in a discussion about whether or not to pull content, and how libel laws can be applied.

Pete Cranston, Interactive Media Engagement Advisor, Oxfam
Excellent and enthusiastic discussion on “blogging to engage”

Oxfam found that they were able to engage with a young audience (via e.g. Oxjam). They did a ot of work last year through MySpace due to the music culture. Oxfam is involved in lots of networks – Trailwalker, festival campaigning.

Over two years ago Oxfam launched a youth website – generation why - which focuses around a collective blog. There’s a debate about whether this is a sub-brand or a product… Pete sees it as a product which can also be used to drive traffic to main site.

Lessons learned from generation why – “trade control for reach, feed the network”.

Oxfam experimented with a director’s blog – it didn’t really work – the directors are great managers but not bloggers – so they dropped that experiment.

Event blogging with live Twittering seems to work really well for Oxfam.
They are also using MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr
Example – Fairtrade Woman in MySpace… vodcast of someone trying to live on FairTrade food for a month (myspacetv.com)

Other lessons for getting started: video blogs can work well for people who can’t write or whose writing is too formal; possibly post photos and add slogans; take a photo at an event, come back and write about it.

More to come…

Technorati Tags: bbc, blogs, conference, oxfam, presentation