Top 5 Social Media Myths

September 20, 2009 at 2:42 am · Filed under Talent Management, Web 2.0, social media, social tools

Social media holds great advantages, whether for improving internal collaboration, communication and social learning, or for building and enhancing trust through more responsive communications with key stakeholders and clients. Unfortunately, some organisations still hold onto a number of fears that hold them back from utilising these tools:

1. Employees will waste time

• Fear: Employees will waste time regardless of whether social computing tools are available to them or not.
• Fact: Research from MIT notes that 40% of employees productivity is directly explained by the amoung of communication they have with others to discover, gather and internalise information. Employees with the most extensive digital networks are 7% more productive than their colleagues. [1]

2. Social media is for kids

• Fear: Social media is used by a lot of kids, therefore it is only a toy and not to be taken seriously for assessment as a business tool.
• Fact: Use of internet technologies has its highest penetration rates in the 15-17 y.o. demographic — 83.9% in Australia. The next highest usage is by 35-44 y.o.’s with 74.1% penetration, followed by 18-24 at 72.8% and 25-34 at 71%. Overall, 76% of Australian adults use social media at least monthly [2]. Age demographics from the world’s hottest social media platforms also support this finding.Overall, the use of Web 2.0 technologies internationally has grown rapidly in the last few years with an increase in from approximately 0.5 billion to 0.67 billion participants between 2007 and 2008. Research by Nielsen in 2009 [3] showed that use of Web 2.0 websites is now more popular than email  with an estimated growth three times as fast as the pace of general online growth. Importantly, the survey shows that rather than the province of the young, the biggest increase in use of Web 2.0 websites in 2009 comes from the 35-49 year old age group – an increase in 11.3 million people.The highlights from Nielsen’s report:

Global share of time accounted for by people using social media increased by 38%.

Men and women aged 65 and above moving to social media websites grew by 7 per cent

The 17-and-under category dropped by 9 per cent

3. We will lose control to the ’nutters’

• Fear: If allowed to interact freely online, people will post spam and abuse online forums
• Fact: In the wiki forum FutureMelbourne, the Melbourne city council in Australia engaged citizens to discern their view of the city in order to contribute to planning for the future. Their results may surprise some:

“We received over 7000 individual visits to the site and several hundred edits to the plan by members of the public. Not a single instance of spam, offensive or off-topic content was recorded during the consultation period. We employed a process of direct community management, directly engaging with citizens as edits were made, answering questions, referring them to the appropriate area of expertise or correcting formatting errors should they occur.” [4]

Developing a clear social media strategy and plan is the best way to achieve success. Rather than automatically implementing a program on the four major social media avenues — blogs, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn — it’s important to first step back and see what makes sense to reach your stakeholders and customers. Ultimately, because social media is about relationships, it is important to thoroughly understand what matters to them, rather than what is easiest for you.

In the end, having good, simple, and easy-to-understand policies for managing online communities with dedicated, trained people, is key to ensuring control remains with you. The policy should also encompass how your employees should interact with clients. If everything has to be vetted by legal and corporate comms, though, before a conversation can take place, though, you’ll be dooming the venture before it begins.

4. Social media is a security risk

• Fear: Employees will share the organisations IP or say something that could land the company in legal trouble if they depart from their traditional editorial control processes. A study from Russell Herder and Ethos Business Law finds that 81% of companies believe social media is a corporate security risk. As a result, many organisations place a blanket ban on all social media platforms.
• Fact: [find the WW2 posters]Despite this fear from corporate heads, the study also found that 69 percent of those surveyed said they did not have a written social media policy in place. Of this group, 25 percent said they were unsure what the policy should include while 9 percent said it was unimportant.

5.  There is no clear ROI

• Fear: What we’ve done has worked til now, there’s no reason to change!
• Fact: With Baby Boomers about to retire from the workforce that leaves Gen-Xs to move into senior management and Gen-Ys into positions of power. One thing we know for certain about these later two demographics is that they’re very technology literate. This, of course, has its consequences for the workplace and how organisations communicate with their stakeholders.The importance of the adoption of these tools within organisations is highlighted by a Telindus survey of more than 1,000 European office workers. The survey found that employees have begun to expect that the Web 2.0 tools they use at home will now be available in their workplace:
  • 39% of 18 to 24 year-olds would consider leaving if they were not allowed to access sites like Facebook and YouTube
  • A further 21% indicated that they would feel ‘annoyed’ by such a ban
  • The problem is less acute with 25 to 65 year-olds, of whom just 16% would consider leaving and 13% would be annoyed

These expectations are generated because individuals use these tools in their personal lives to help them process data effectively and reduce information overload [5]. This need is all the more important in a work context, therefore, where business silos and network drives make it all the more difficult to share knowledge, communicate information, and collaborate. Web 2.0 tools can help essentially because they are designed to enable people to collaborate more efficiently, preserve and share corporate knowledge, and thereby reduce expenses.

No ROI? What price do you put on keeping your workforce?

Proceeding from fear to managing these aspects of social computing as risks is the obvious next step.

M

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1. Bulleit, B. 2006. Effectively managing team conflict. Cary, NC: Global Knowledge Training LLC

2. Analysis of ABS cat no. 8146.0 and ABS cat no. 3201.0

3. The Nielsen Company, 2009. Social networks & blogs now 4th most popular online activity, ahead of personal email, News Release. New York, NY. 9 March.

4. Dale Bowerman comments to Atkins, D. 2008. Using a Wiki to Improve Town Governance, 9 Jan. Online at: blog.davewrites.com/index.php/2008/01/09/using_a_wiki_to_improve_town_governance#c886

5. Robert Half Technology, 2009. CIOs Weigh in on most popular communication tools at work, 7 Aug. Online at: http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/portal/site/rht-us/menuitem.8e8f9ba1fb1aaad656932a0202f3dfa0/?vgnextoid=368b9926053d8010VgnVCM1000002d3ffd0aRCRD&javax.portlet.prp_392cb099d6a955fd8bbe7a8902f3dfa0_request_type=RenderPressRelease&javax.portlet.prp_392cb099d6a955fd8bbe7a8902f3dfa0_releaseId=2301

Experience Required

September 1, 2009 at 2:24 pm · Filed under Culture, Learning, Management, social media

Today’s juxtaposition:

• Via @mcafeee, a pointer to a NYT article by Stanley Fish, What should colleges teach, Part 2
• Tweets by @rhappe on the difficulty of filling executive-level social media positions in large corporations

Fish (@nytimesfish) argues for the importance of teaching English composition as a vital requirement for success in any profession. Happe is thinking that it’s hard to fill senior positions because many people who are skilled in social media lack experience navigating large organizations.

One of the questions these both raise for me is the effect of social media practices on our ability to think and communicate, and especially the need to be able to construct models of thought. Dr. Fish provides a wonderful example of how he teaches the “neither/nor” construct, not as a “rule,” but as an experience of learning the pattern. Similarly, I think that the ability to navigate large organizations comes from time spent experiencing the territory.

What is the experience, what are the learning patterns being developed as laptop-toting students express themselves using shorthand? Yes, they (and we who tweet, blog, and befriend) are learning to cope with fragments and put those pieces together. Yes, I believe that the primarly new skill of management is the ability to manage complex sets of interactions and set up boundaries and spaces for possibility to emerge. And yes, I know that the trajectory of my own career experience is based fundamentally on my ability to write.

How to backup your social media accounts

August 28, 2009 at 12:35 pm · Filed under AppGap Tips, social media

A few months ago I wrote articles on how to store a backup of Google Docs and Gmail accounts – both quite helpful as these services sometimes go down when you need them most. These are great for saving documents, but you might ask, what about your other data stored online, say on social media sites?

Here are various ways in which to keep a local copy for the most popular services’ contents:

TWITTER

Why create a backup: Twitter only archives your latest 3,200 tweets, and past this limit your earlier tweets are automatically discarded. If you’re a heavy user it’s easy to exceed this in a few months.

RSS – Simplest method is to grab your own tweet feed via a locally installed RSS reader like Feed Demon or RSS Captor.

Tweetake – Allows backup of followers, friends, favorites, and of course your tweets by compiling them into a CSV file.

Backup My Tweets – A free web app that does what its name says. It’s main advantage is that it allows you to export a summary of your tweets in HTML, PDF, and JSON.

FACEBOOK

Why create a backup: Just for posterity, or just in case your account gets deactivated. Plus, who knows if Facebook will still be around after 10 years?

Social Safe – A powerful paid application (just $3) based on Adobe AIR that it backs up most of the things inside your Facebook account, including your profile, pictures, and friend list. One glaring limitations is that it doesn’t (yet) provide a mechanism to backup status messages and their accompanying comments.

Photo Download – Photo Download allows you to get both tagged photographs and photo albums that you and your friends have uploaded to Facebook on to your own computer. Compatible with both Windows and Mac OS X.

Breaking down Twitter messages

August 24, 2009 at 9:39 pm · Filed under Culture, social media

What do people really tweet about? Is it what they had for breakfast? Is it the latest breaking news? corporate marketing? Do people talk to each other or do they just throw random stuff out there? Pear Analytics sought to answer these questions once and for all.

First, let’s look at the demographics. A previous study by Quantcast showed that Twitter reaches 27 million people every month in America. Of these, 55% are female, 43% are between 18 and 34, 78% Caucasian, and with an aaverage household income of $30K-$60K. A dedicated one percent of all users are responsible for 35% of the visits, 72% are passersby, while only 27% are regular users.

Pear’s methodology involved random sampling of the public timeline. Every weekday for two consecutive weeks from 11:00am-5:00pm, they took a look at 200 tweets – or a total of 2,000 tweets in 10 days. These were grouped into six different categories: News, Spam, Self-promotion, Pointless Babble, Conversational and Pass-along Value.

The result was that what they rather derisively defined as Pointless Babble comprised the biggest share of tweets at around 40%. This includes random musings and shares things without necessarily looking to get anyone engaged in a conversation. Coming in at a close second with 37.55% is actual Conversations. These are made up of @replies and questions that seek others to share their own thoughts. Pear Analytics says that if the sample size were bigger and the polling was held longer, these two categories would probably even out.

Pass-along Value, or retweets, came third with a far lower 8.7%, while Self-promotion (corporate marketing and the like) was at 5.85%. Spam came in at 3.75% and lastly 3.6% was mainstream-type News. According to the research firm, “We thought the News category would have more weight than dead last, since this seems to be contrary to Twitter’s new position of being the premier source of news and events. Self-promotion was also less than expected, [which] may be enlightening to some folks, as there appears to be a flurry of companies and businesses joining Twitter to promote products and services.”

Another interesting result from the study was that the best time to go viral with your tweet is to send it on Mondays, preferably at 11:30am CST. Meanwhile, news peaked around 2:00pm on Tuesdays. Conversations, on the other hand, really get going in the afternoon, and more so during Tuesdays. Pear surmises it may be due to people trying to catch up with work in the morning and on Mondays before freeing time to tweet for fun. Sadly, spam tweets are constant every hour of the day.

Pear Analytics will regularly repeat the study every quarter to spot emerging trends. I do hope that in the next iterations, they’ll be able to include weekends, expand the hours, as well as increase their sample size considerably.

The rise and rise of social media

July 23, 2009 at 1:50 pm · Filed under Communities, Web 2.0, social media, social networks

It’s been a great journey. The more I look into social media and report on its current use the more it seems that others, from corporates to government agencies, are starting to ‘get’ social media.

For those of you still lagging behind, here are some stats that might get you motivated to join in the conversation (… that means both listening and talking):

• 2/3 of the global internet population use social media [1]
• 3 in 4 Americans use social media [2]
• 4 in 5 Australians use social media at least monthly [3]
• People now visit social media websites more than they use personal email [1]
• Time spent on social media websites is growing 3x the speed of internet adoption [1]

What are they doing? In Australia, the statistics indicate:

• 39% – news feeds
• 29% – instant messaging
• 26% – social networking
• 22% – blogs

Hitwise reports that of all websites visited by Australians:

• 4.03% visit Facebook
• 1.44% visit YouTube
• 1.12% visit MySpace
• 0.81% visit Wikipedia

These are interesting numbers from a government information and communication perspective because of the 2,094 websites that Hitwise monitors the combined traffic only equates to 1.3% of which the Bureau of Meteorology attracts 0.36%. It suggests that people would rather go to YouTube and be one of the 100 million people who watch some of the 13 hours of video uploaded every minute. If you were to watch all the content on YouTube though make sure you’ve got lots of popcorn because it would take you about 412 years.

So what about other social media webistes? Some suggest that people arn’t engaged or maybe its only a small proportion, yet the statistics speak for themselves:

• 13 million articles in Wikipedia
• 3.6 billion photos on Flickr in June 2009 — roughly 1 photo for every 2 people on the planet (world population is est 6.7 billion by United States Census Bureau to be 6.7 billion)
• Twitter grew by 1382% from January to February 2009
• 3 million Tweets on Twitter per day
• 5 billion minutes spent on Facebook every day
• 1 billion pieces of content, from links and news to photos and blog posts, shared on Facebook each week
• If Facebook was a country it would be the 8th most populated in the world ahead of Japan which is 127.7 million according to the Japan Statistics Bureau

If you’re not part of this conversation, this collaboration, this community, then your stakeholders and your clients are obviously talking to other people.

M

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1. Nielsen, Global Faces & Networked Places, 2009

2. Forrester, The Growth of Social Technology Adoption, 2008

3. Internet World Stats, 2008. Internet Usage Stats and Telecommunications Market Report

Adoption stories

July 17, 2009 at 3:59 pm · Filed under AppGap Tips, Change Management, Collaboration, Culture, Distributed Work, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, Web Apps, social media, social tools

I’d saved a wonderful story by Michael Idinopulos of Socialtext about how moving from a shared space to private offices (What my Granddaddy Taught me about Information Flow). In the days before computers, brokers worked in a large open space in which information moved vary rapidly from one end of the floor to another. When the office layout was changed to give more people private offices and people began focusing their attention on their PCs, people “…lost the ability to communicate, and nobody had the slightest idea what was going on.”

You can’t read the story, of course without catching on that the open office floor in which information moves in waves is a lot like Web 2.0. From our PC (and Mac!) silos, we are finally liberated and can catch the breath of new ideas rolling over our shared spaces.  This is happening, outside.

Inside, adoption of Web 2.0 tools is not so much of a wave as a trickle. Inside companies, managers think about technologies in terms of security (bring it inside) and cost (it costs money to maintain something inside, so we can’t let people use free tools. [Hat tip to John Bordeaux for pointing to the irony in this story.]).

Inside, we deal with a series of waves, incremental introductions of technology and Web 2.0 services and look for the best way to encourage adoption. I’m guilty myself of responding to clients’ reason for lack of adoption as “the culture” when it can often be the manner in which  the new tool was introduced, or a lack of attention to the user interface/experience.

Adoption and culture being very much on my mind, I was interested to see Hutch Carpenter’s post in the Social Computing Journal Enterprise 2.0: Culture is as Culture Does. He argues that most companies are ready for social software at least to the extent that they acknowledge that employees are their most important asset.

He goes on to put together a wonderful graphic illustrating two paths to adoption of social tool pilots. He anchors the flow chart by two decision points.

• Defined use case? is the determinant of whether adoption goes in an official or a viral flow. This assumes that a well-defined use case has proven business value and that undefined use cases may not.  I agree that for a successful pilot in an organization, the defined “use case” must be centered around teams or groups that are engaged in some joint activity that requires flow of information.
• Exceed expectations? is the measurement that occurs when the two flows come back together and employee feedback has been processed. This decision point really implies that there is a funding decision to be made at this point.

Enterprise 2.0: Pilot Deployment Flow

There’s some good stuff in this diagram, and it’s flexible enough for adapting to specific circumstances. I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if, at the dawn of the PC era, Michael’s Granddaddy had through to work through the use cases of how PCs would affect the information flow on the trading floor.

Social Media Stats: Who is doing what?

July 14, 2009 at 6:30 pm · Filed under social media

What are people actually doing when it comes to using social media?

Recently, noted social media evangelist and strategist Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research suggested that the reason Friendfeed was not taking off was because it relied on the “least used behaviour” in social media roles — the Collector.

Forrester neatly categorises the behavioural roles people adopt when using the web today:

1. Creator — Publish a blog/web page, upload music and video
2. Critic — Post ratings or a product, comment on a blog, contribute to a forum, edit a wiki
3. Collector — Use RSS, vote for websites, add tags
4. Joiner — Maintain a profile on a social media website, visit networking sites
5. Spectator — Read blogs, listen to podcasts, watch video, read forums and ratings
6. Inactive — None of the above

Even while [adult] Collector behaviour has increased over the last few years that Forrester have examined what people do online, the frequency of Collector behaviour is still very low as a proportion of all behavioural profiles.

The pattern of behaviour is similar in Australia with Collectors forming only 16% of online adult population in 2008. That is, approximately 11% or 1.8 million of the 16.3 million Australians 18 years or older [1].

 The lesson for Friendfeed and other social media projects? Famed social media commentator, Robert Scoble, suggests that a range of issues are at fault with Friendfeed’s approach to market, from unknowns in monetisation to no brand and no hype. Jeremiah’s comment, though, reminds us that there’s more to social media than just a solid marketing strategy. Ultimately, understanding people’s behaviour in online environments is a first important step in formulating a social media strategy — whether with clients and stakeholders or even within the organisation as a step toward Enterprise 2.0

M

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1. Source: Analysis of ABS cat no.  8146.0 and ABS cat no.3201.0