Join Me at a Free Webinar on Keeping a Team Connected in a Distributed Workplace

June 16, 2009 at 10:45 am · Filed under Communities, Culture, Distributed Work, Management, Tips for Tough Times, Webinar, Work Design, social networks

Please join me and my partner in crime Charlie Grantham, along with Eric Bensley of Citrix Online, and James Hilliard of BNet next Wednesday, June 24, for a free one-hour webinar called “Keeping Your Team Connected in a Distributed Workplace.”

The webinar is sponsored by  Citrix Online We’re very grateful for their continuing support of our research and ideas.

Again, the webinar will be on June 24, at 11 AM Pacific/2 PM Eastern. Register here.

We hope you’ll join us. We’re going to be talking mostly about the leadership and interpersonal principles for keeping members of a distributed team connected with each other, their tasks, and the company.

Security risks from social networking a big concern for businesses

June 8, 2009 at 6:35 am · Filed under Security, social networks

It’s well known that many employees have taken their social networking addiction to their offices. While loss in productivity is the biggest concern resulting from this trend, IT departments are quickly realizing that security is also an important issue.

Sophos conducted an online poll among system administrators last February, with 709 respondents from various companies. Asked whether they thought that employees’ activity on social networking sites endanger corporate security, two-thirds (66%) of them agreed this is a serious threat. With good reason, as popular sites like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter seem to be the new favorite target for hackers. A third of the respondents said they have been spammed on social networking sites, while 21% have been the victim of targeted phishing or malware attacks.

Basically, it’s the same tricks, different media. According to the report, “A typical method of attack is for hackers to compromise accounts by stealing usernames and passwords - often using phishing or spyware - and then, use this profile to send spam or malicious links to the victims’ online friends and colleagues.”

Despite the dangers, Sophos doesn’t believe in imposing total lock downs (that is, banning all access). They argue that whatever barriers you install, employees will find a way to open up holes, in turn compromising security all the more. Instead, Sophos is recommending the following strategies:

- Educate your workforce about online risks - make sure all employees are aware of the impact that their actions could have on the corporate network
- Consider filtering access to certain social networking sites at specific times - this can be easily set by user groups or time periods for example
- Check the information that your organisation and staff share online - if sensitive business data is being shared, evaluate the situation and act as appropriate
- Review your Web 2.0 security settings regularly - users should only be sharing work-related information with trusted parties
- Ensure that you have a solution in place that can proactively scan all websites for malware, spam and phishing content

It’s interesting to note that in the survey, 7% of system administrators who limit access to social networking sites admitted to doing so without knowing why. Just following orders? Then that’s a glaring communications breakdown. How will employees understand and cooperate with policies when even the enforcers aren’t sure why they’re doing what they’re doing?

The full report can be accessed here.

Big Ideas for Social Influence Marketing

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.

NutshellMail, a way to restore order in your social life

May 20, 2009 at 10:14 am · Filed under Reviews, social networks

The social networking landscape is evolving fast. Myspace used to be “IT” a few years ago, but now Facebook is taking over, and don’t forget LinkedIn if you’re out to do professional networking. Then there’s the surging popularity of Twitter (and God knows what’s next). It can be difficult to choose just one of them as your home on the web. Often, you sign up where your friends already are, and usually they’re scattered among these sites. If you sign up for everything, it can be tough to keep up.

Nutshellmail is a web tool that attempts to put some sanity back into your life. Instead of logging on to these sites one by one to check if there’s anything new, or sifting through a ton of email notifications on your inbox, Nutshellmail gathers all the updates for you. Friend requests, status updates, tweets, and more are summarized, then sent in one neat little email. No more cluttered inbox. This alone can save you a lot of precious time.

The great thing about it is that these summaries are interactive. For example, you can retweet, update your status, and reply to comments all without leaving your email client. You can also customize when you want to receive these updates by choosing particular days and hours. I’ve scheduled mine to be sent twice daily, once in the morning and another in the late afternoon.

If you have multiple email accounts, you can configure Nutshellmail to include new message summaries for these secondary emails. This way, your primary email serves as your central console, from which you have a bird’s eye view of all messages coming in. Only the subject lines and senders will be included in the Nutshellmail update. However, clicking on a “Get” link will provide the means to push an email of interest to your primary account. Within seconds, you can read it and take appropriate action from there.

You can open an account on Nutshellmail for free, and the whole process couldn’t be simpler. After using it for a little while, I’m sure it’s going to be part of my routine from now on (until something better comes along). It’s an excellent idea. The only thing that I wish was different is the number of compatible social networks. Right now, it only supports the Big Four (Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, Twitter), but there are many other notable players with their own strong regional user base. Let’s hope Nutshellmail expands their menu soon.

Book Review: Clara Shih’s “The Facebook Era”

April 29, 2009 at 10:58 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Management, Networks + Networking, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, Web Apps, productivity, social media, social networks

Subtitled  “Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff” the book is a must read, and especially useful as a primer for those still needing to understand the fundamental changes in doing business as the Internet has matured  from Web 1.0 to:

“an entirely new level with Web 3.0- an era that is entirely about innovation and collaboration.”     (Foreword page ix)                        

An excellent overview of the book, in author  Clara Shih’s  own words,  is in 2 parts at the Entrepreneur’s Journeys blog .   Not surprizingly the book’s home page is on Facebook and 24 x 5 star Amazon reviews indicate the book’s value.

The book section titles– starting with “A Brief History of Social Media’ through “Transforming the Way We Do Business’ to “Your Step-By-Step Guide to Using Facebook for Business”–  reveal the key themes.  Reflecting the author’s hands on experience as the developer of FaceConnector and head of Enterprise Social Networking Alliances and Product Strategy for Salesforce, the book is filled with lived experiences of companies using social networking to “build better products, reach new audiences and sell more stuff.”

If there are gaps in the book they reflect the state of the industry. For example, “The ROI of Social” is addressed in half a page (205) beginning:

“Understandably, a large number of you are focused on ROI and  might feel frustrated that there has been no clear quantifiable data around ROI”

and concludes suggesting;

“ROI will become much more quantifiable  and standardized”.

Have you read “The Facebook Era?”  What did you take away?

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Being social at work: which communications model to adopt for the enterprise?

April 28, 2009 at 9:05 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, social media, social networks

Web 2.0 technology presents the modern organisation with a plethora of means for communicating new information to staff. While some of us are now running to install wikis and blogs as a vehicle to achieve enterprise 2.0 nirvana there are some important considerations that need to be given time before we jump for, say, Yammer over Twitter, that go beyond the fear of our internal information being communicated outside the organisation.

A very interesting article by Sinan Aral, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Marshall Van Alstyne [1] on access to information through social networks provides some food for thought on this issue. It’s a fascinating examination of how information flows from one person to another and complements a number of other similar studies that look at how social relationships can either block access to information or enhance access to it.

Obviously, traditional communications models focus on the delivery of information as a top-down process, and as a result, limit the amount of shared knowledge that can be passed between the organisational silos. Because of the linear nature of knowledge transfer blockers can be a significant problem in accessing new information.

Some organisations, though, have adopted various collaboration tools as a means of complementing existing traditional communications channels in an attempt to break-down internal silos and blockers that can limit access to new information. In some instances, these tools also facilitate collaboration with clients and stakeholders outside the organisation.

While there are some obvious advantages with this approach it still doesn’t fully address modern research on how people access information. Aral and Brynjolfsson et. al.’s research notes that:

• Network diversity is associated with higher levels of productivity for task based information workers
• Network diversity is associated with performance, in part because diverse contacts provide access to novel information and resources
• Age, gender, industry experience, education have little effect on access to diverse information, highlighting the importance of network structure for information advantage.

These findings support a more expansive adoption of social media tools within the workplace to more efficiently leverage the social networks that individuals have both inside and outside the organisation, particularly given the homogenous nature of networks within an organisation due to the constraints and norming factors of culture.

The important take home message is simple — the more you leverage individual’s social networks the greater their access to information and the higher the levels of productivity that will result for them and the enterprise.

M

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1. Aral, S., Brynjolfsson, E. Marshall Van Alstyne, E. M., 2006. Network Structure & Information Advantage: Structural Determinants of Access to Novel Information. Workshop on Information Systems Economics.

Social architecture

April 9, 2009 at 8:08 am · Filed under Collaboration, Communities, Culture, Enterprise 2.0, Intranets, Web 2.0, Work Design, social media, social networks

I’ve been working lately on two projects with companies building social networking platforms with a purpose. While some aspects are clearly around technology, features, and the like, there are also the subtle aspects that go into understanding how these sites will be used. In a meeting with one of the clients, we talked about this difficult area of how to ensure that the use of the site aligns with its purpose: will people interact on the topics that we want them to, will the site discourage irrelevant content or social tourists from joining?

The word “social architecture” came into my head (or all of our heads simultaneously, it’s always hard to tell, isn’t it, when an idea emerges from the collective consciousness in a conversation?).

Like a good web 2.0 doo-bie, I tweeted that I was interested in using the term but needed to understand it more. My friend and colleague, Andrew Gent, tweeted back a definition, but then went on to do much more: he researched it, thought about, and has written a wonderful blog post, Social Architecture, that offers the definition that he tweeted back to me:

Social architecture is the conscious design of an environment that encourages certain social behavior leading towards some goal or set of goals.

Andrew’s blog details the current use of the term with respect to social media as well as its history in the field of architecture. When I began my own superficial search, the thread I followed was biased toward the design of the interaction of various social media (Sam Huleatt: “To me, social architecture is best thought of as a cross between three elements: interface design, social media functionality and user engagement strategy.”) which didn’t reflect what I needed. Andrew has, I think, hit on the more sociological and social engineering (without the negative connotations of that term) disciplines needed to shape a user’s experience.

While Andrew’s context is the corporate intranet, where it is possibly simpler to design intent and purpose into the environment, my work is currently leading me to social networks in the world, a case where an individual company wants to draw people into a network to expand its field of vision and expertise.  No answers yet, but Andrew’s exposition is a terrific start and I thank him very much.