Archive for social media
by Patti Anklam
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.
by Matthew Hodgson
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:
- Creator — Publish a blog/web page, upload music and video
- Critic — Post ratings or a product, comment on a blog, contribute to a forum, edit a wiki
- Collector — Use RSS, vote for websites, add tags
- Joiner — Maintain a profile on a social media website, visit networking sites
- Spectator — Read blogs, listen to podcasts, watch video, read forums and ratings
- 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
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1. Source: Analysis of ABS cat no. 8146.0 and ABS cat no.3201.0
by Jenny Ambrozek
June 3, 2009 at 5:23 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Management, Web 2.0, government 2.0, productivity, social media
While Jim Ware’s recent post reminded us about Keeping Technology in Perspective listening to long term venture capitalist Fred Wilson speaking at Google about “Disruption” indicates technology change will continue, demanding that we as individuals, organizations and industries adapt.
Wilson’s Union Square Ventures current investments include Tumblr, Feedburner, Boxee, Twitter and Etsy. He blogs at www.avc.com and sought feedback on his Google talk before delivering.
Fred Wilson’s “Disruption Talk” begins with the media industry, the changes to which we’ve all watched and experienced as online and empowered individuals have emerged as driving forces and taken power from large institutions.
He proceeds to outline the industries seen as targets for future “disruption”: Consumer Finance, Education, Energy, Health Care and Government.
The presentation is an hour but recommended viewing if you are interested in what’s next.
How does your view of what’s ahead in technology and the industries to be “disrupted” jibe with Fred Wilson’s? Please share your reactions.
by Celine Roque
May 28, 2009 at 6:58 am · Filed under
Reviews, social media
I’ve recently featured the fantastic Nutshellmail, a social networking aggregator that keeps your social media life in control. It provides a simple yet effective way to manage your various accounts by sifting through everything and sending you scheduled summaries thru email. Definitely a great idea for people who want to stay connected but don’t fancy social networking taking over their lives.
The question is, how about those for whom social networking is not a mere diversion but an essential/central component of their work? These people might need to get real-time updates to be able to respond to clients, so having scheduled daily digests just won’t cut it. A desktop application called Digsby could solve the problem. It’s an even more feature-packed aggregator – one that combines social networking, Twitter, emails AND instant messaging in one program.
With it, you can stay updated on Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, and Twitter, as well as chat with your friends on Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, AIM, ICQ, MSN, Jabber, and Facebook Chat. It can also access your emails so you can be notified instantly of incoming messages. It’s free to download and I’m glad to say it installed on my Windows 7 Beta PC without any hitch. Adding different social network accounts was a simple matter of providing my credentials for each. So far, Digsby has been running smoothly without any errors.
There are chat clients out there like Trillian and Pigdin, but as of now only Digsby offers social media support. When it detects new updates from Twitter, for example, a small pop-up will appear at the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, flashing the tweet for a few seconds. You can also read a list of the most recent updates for each social networking and email account:
Be careful to uncheck some options during installation if you don’t like the program to change your homepage or install any other “freebies”. This being a desktop application and not a web app, you might need administrator rights on your office PC to install it. This limitation might make this tool more appropriate for telecommuters and other mobile workers who have full control over their workstations. Some people have complained that Digsby could have been more useful had the program included RSS support, and they have a point, but maybe that’s a little bit of overkill. Anyway, I’m happy to check my feeds via Google Reader, which has a lot of great features just for RSS. Lastly, anyone’s who has tried it will know that instant messaging can be time-waster, and along with constant updates from social networks, one might lose a lot of productive hours on Digsby. As in everything else, one must practice prudence and self-restraint.
by Jim Ware
May 26, 2009 at 10:49 am · Filed under
Collaboration, Distributed Work, Videoconferencing, social media
Yesterday was a national holiday in the United States: Memorial Day. We were all reminded of, and thinking of, our military veterans and active-duty soldiers, sailors, pilots, and marines (and all the others serving our country). We have to be incredibly grateful for their service.
I have always taken some comfort in knowing that technology enabled distant warriors to stay much closer to their loved ones than ever before. The combination of email, instant messaging, web cams, and all those social networking sites just had to be bridging the gaps and shortening those miles of separation. After all, overseas military service is the ultimate form of “distributed work.”
Well, it turns out it’s not that simple. There was a very poignant and candid first-person account in Monday’s New York Times of what it’s really like to try to maintain a marriage and a family with one spouse in harm’s way half way around the world (“One Husband, Two Kids, Three Deployments,” by Melissa Seligman).
Turns out that real-time video communication may not be the best way to maintain a distant relationship; Ms. Seligman and her military husband have come to rely on old-fashioned letters (snail mail!) to stay in meaningful touch with each other.
Please read the op-ed column; it’s a powerful statement about the stresses we put military families through. And it’s also a thought-provoking insight into the very real inadequacies of web-cams and real-time global communication.
What’s your reaction? Are we overenthusiastic about how technology “connects” us? How should we be assessing when and how to use which collaborative technologies?
by Shiv Singh
May 25, 2009 at 11:22 pm · Filed under
Change Management, Collaboration, Collective intelligence, Culture, Management, Web 2.0, social media, social networks, social tools
At the Razorfish 9th Annual Client Summit, I presented five big ideas for social influence marketing. These were ideas that I felt would matter in the next two years. The audience for the presentation was 600 senior marketers but the ideas I emphasized have relevance to all decision makers within an organization. Here’s the presentation with the five ideas. Let me know what you think.
by Celine Roque
May 20, 2009 at 6:50 am · Filed under
Communities, Culture, social media
On Mashable, MarketingProfs Editor-in-Chief Ann Handley wrote a guest post about the engaging results of a Twitter survey that she conducted. It was done to find out how “highly involved Twitter users” viewed activities that revolve around the tool, as well as their motivations behind using it. Because of how it was done, the survey cannot be said to be representative of the Twitter population as a whole, so let’s take it with a grain of salt.
A word on methodology: I solicited survey responses from people who follow me (@marketingprofs) on Twitter, where I have about 28,000 followers, and then I asked those followers to retweet the survey link. As far as I could tell, about 116 people retweeted the link to their own network of followers; the sizes of their networks varied greatly.
We didn’t specify that we were looking for any certain profile of user, but the information that came back from the 432 revealed that the majority were fairly involved with Twitter — at least, that’s our interpretation of someone who spends 2 3/4 hours a day interacting there. Maybe those motivated to respond to the survey are more involved with Twitter than those who didn’t. (That’s one possible was to look at it.)
The bottom line is that this is a snapshot, an insight into the minds of users.
Social media, with a stress on first word, means interaction – a lot of give and take. There seems to be a notion that to be a good Twitter netizen, you have to live by its version of the Golden Rule: “Follow others who follow you”. When the respondents were asked whether they agree or not with this statement, though, only 34% of them agreed, with 41.7% disagreeing, and 24.2% who didn’t take a side. The gap is even wider when they were asked whether those they follow should, in fact, follow them back. Only a total of 27.3% agreed while 41.9% thought it wasn’t necessary.
Some people use their large Twitter following for bragging rights, but what do fellow users really think about these bloated figures? Asked whether they would equate having a bigger number of followers to being more intelligent, an overwhelming 81.7% disagreed while a mere 5.6% nodded their heads. The same question, with respect replacing intelligence, resulted in a virtual split, with 45% unconvinced and 39.9% thinking it was a fair assumption.
Going back to being social and Twitter’s use as a communications tool, are users feeling unloved when their tweets get no response? A good 24% admit to feeling some form of disappointment, but a total of 52.7% say it’s not that big of a deal. Good on their EQ.
Finally, in terms of motivations for using Twitter, their reasons are varied. Most say they like it because they learn new things from others, closely followed by using the tool as an up-to-date information source. Many said they simply wanted to be connected with a lot of people, while others use it for lead generation, and lastly, because they fancy having some people follow them and read what they have to say.
It would be interesting if a similar study can be made with a more scientific approach, better sample size, and fairer distribution in the near future. For Twitter-holics out there, do you feel that these results match your own perceptions? Why or why not?
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