Archive for December, 2008
by Rob Paterson
December 31, 2008 at 8:15 am · Filed under
Twitter, User Revolution, Video, Videos, War, YouTube
Increasingly war today is a matter of winning the “people’s war” Organizations such as Al Qaeda have become masters at using social media to both train people and also to tell their story. Often actions are in effect stage managed such as the Fallujah killing of Blackwater men that was filmed throughout and broadcast immediately.
Until now conventional forces have kept away from learning how to tell their side of the story. Maybe - as with business - their essential bureaucratic nature and need for control - inhibited the use of social media.
But the IDF have decided that they have to get their story out there and are agressively using YouTube and now Twitter. Here is a neat summary with links from Global Dashboard.
Two of my favourite blogs, MountainRunner and Danger Room highlight the IDF’s attempt to win over the blogosphere using Twitter and You Tube. Why? Because according to the head of the IDF’s press team: “The blogosphere and new media are another war zone, we have to be relevant there.”
The YouTube channel was created with the aim of distributing footage of precision airstrikes. Interestingly YouTube took down some of the ‘exclusive footage’ showing the IDF’s operational success in operation Cast Lead against Hamas extremists in the Gaza Strip, but appears to have returned some of the footage due to popular demand.
Elsewhere the Israeli consulate in New York hosted a press conference on Twitter in order to answer the public’s questions regarding the situation in Gaza. How one measures the success of the twitterference is difficult but, as both Matt and Nathan point out, reducing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to tweets of 140 characters or less makes for interesting reading:
‘We hav 2 prtct R ctzens 2, only way fwd through neogtiations, & left Gaza in 05. y Hamas launch missiles not peace?’,
‘we’re not at war with the PAL people. we’re at war with a group declared by the EU& US a terrorist org’.
I think that this is just the beginning
by Rob Paterson
December 24, 2008 at 4:07 pm · Filed under
Hubspot, Twitter
In 2008 Twitter came of age and has become a mainstream tool that is going to be very important in news, marketing and simply keeping friends attached. The Presidential Election, Mumbai and even fun things such as #snowmageddon have shown many the value.
Hubspot have released a very useful set of stats for where the users are with Twitter now. The full report is here on PDF and here is their web summary in full.
You can also read the TechCrunch article - State of the Twittershpere for more info.
Stowe Boyd thinks that you have to look more deeply into the numbers than this.
I have suggested for a longtime that to ‘get’ Twitter you need to follow 100 people at least, for several weeks. This cursory recitation of stats suggests that there are thousands of users out there happily communing with a handful of friends. I don’t buy it. I bet most of those accounts with small use, small links, and small time online represent a fringe of uninvolved people who aren’t getting much value from the service, if they login in at all. The sweet spot is far north of the center of some bell curve, I believe.
The real analysis of meaningful trands will have to wait, but here’s some cross tabs that would be interesting:
- What’s the distribution of perceived value? Does more use translate into higher perception of utility? My bet is yes.
- What’s the distribution of use? Do people with few connections use the service less? My bet is yes.
- Do people gain more followers based on hours online, and numbers of Tweets? I bet yes.
- Where is the magic dropout number? A lot of users abandon services like Twitter, but I bet that once you have a network of size N, the likelihood of dropping out decreased dramatically. What is N?
by Jon Husband
December 22, 2008 at 2:57 am · Filed under
Change, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Search, Social Computing, User Revolution
William Halal of George Washington University wrote this book in 1998, well before the advent of Web 2.0 and even longer before the term Enterprise 2.0 was coined. I remember speaking to Dr. Halal about the concept of wirearchy back in late 2000 … he was most encouraging, and it’s not hard to imagine why.
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Despite attempts at organizational change during the ‘90’s, the decade was notable for down sizing, top-down control, extravagant CEO pay, and other hallmarks of the Old Management. But a New Management is emerging that harnesses the knowledge lying unused among employees at the bottom of the firm and scattered outside its walls among customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders.
Drawing on hundreds of examples, a survey of 426 managers, technology forecasts, and economic trends, Bill concludes that the New Management is extending markets and democracy to create a self-organizing corporate community operating from the bottom-up and the outside in.
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For those of you who are more deeply interested in the principles of KM (knowledge management), innovation and ways to "break down" silos of information, enhance idea flow and benefit from employees’ creativity and purpose, I can recommend one of Dr. Halal’s earlier books: Internal Markets - Bringing the Power of Free Enterprise Inside Your Organization.
I presume there’s a decent fit with these concepts and the ongoing evolution of enterprise search (actually, I don’t presume .. having read the book about a decade ago, and having paid attention to the evolution of enterprise search, I know there’s a lot of value in this book).
Interestingly, in the blurb on his web site about this 1993 book, he highlights the paradox that North American and western European corporations worship free enterprise principles excepting when it comes to running any given organization.
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One of the great ironies of capitalism is that while founded on the liberating principles of free enterprise, most corporations themselves are centrally-controlled, hierarchical systems, not too different from the centrally-planned economies that failed in the communist bloc.
This book brings together case studies describing the creative transformation of progressive corporations into the only feasible alternative to hierarchy - self-managed internal enterprise units forming an internal market economy.
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This (centralised control) is in some cases changing, more and more rapidly. But it remains an interesting issue … just look at the title of the most recent Fast Company cover article … provocative title, n’est ce pas ?
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How Cisco’s CEO John Chambers is Turning the Tech Giant Socialist
Power to the people — and profits to the company — is a bold tech promise we’ve heard before. If Chambers can pull it off, if he can prove that his model drives innovation at a market-beating pace, he will replace his pal Jack Welch as the most influential leadership guru of the modern era.
[ Snip ... ]
Trust and openness are words you hear a lot in the endlessly optimistic world of Web 2.0, but at Cisco, it seems to be more than a PowerPoint mantra, even to my jaundiced eye. As Mitchell and I settle down to our conversation in an open space not 25 feet from Chambers’s office, I can hear the CEO chatting on the phone with customers.
Mitchell, who is charged with encouraging the company’s rank and file to adopt new technology, is undistracted. "We want a culture where it is unacceptable not to share what you know," he says. So he promotes all kinds of social networking at Cisco: You can write a blog, upload a video, and tag your myriad strengths in the Facebook-style internal directory. "Everybody is an author now," he laughs. Blog posts are voted up based on their helpfulness. There are blogs about blogging and classes about holding classes — all gauged to make it easy for less-engaged employees to get with the program
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If I am not mistaken, the issue of centralised control remains one of the core issues in play (remember, the book above was published in 1993 !) when it comes to considering whether and how to engage with or commit to a path towards Enterprise 2.0 architecture, applications and dynamics.
I can only assume that Dr. Halal has watched the growth of the field called Enterprise 2.0 with enthusiasm, interest and perhaps some bemusement.
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Tags: hierarchy, wirearchy, internal markets for knowledge, innovation, new management
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by Bill Ives
December 21, 2008 at 9:41 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
The Economist Intelligence Unit reported that Web 2.0 has moved from buzzword to reality in many of the world’s largest corporations. They conducted a survey of 406 senior executives worldwide and found that 79% of respondents see the collaborative web as a way to boost revenues and cut costs. They said that, ╥perhaps the most interesting finding is that a full 85% of C-suite executives see the sharing and collaboration aspects of Web 2.0 as an opportunity to increase revenue and/or margins, versus 75% of middle management. Nothing like having top down sponsorship delivered to a largely already convinced group of middle managers. This top down effect also extend to the view that Web 2.0 is transformative, affecting all parts of the business (35% versus 28%) and is making a significant impact on the company╒s business model (41% versus 22%). They asked good questions.
The top perceived potential for Web 2.0 was to transform the way that companies interact with their customers. Many of these study participants were part of large companies already using Web 2.0 tools and methods. The most cited use was the creation of online communities to help with product marketing or product development. Next was the use of blogs or wikis to initiate conversations and share knowledge inside or outside the company.
It seems that so far executives are more convinced of external uses of Web 2.0 than internal enterprise 2.0 efforts. The study found that 68% of executives expect Web 2.0 methods and tools to be the single biggest factor changing the ways their company interacts with customers. While 49% said these tools will change how employees interact with each other and the company. This is not surprising given the current usage patterns within the sample reported above and the broader awareness of Web 2.0 marketing efforts than enterprise 2.0 collaboration efforts.
Building on this nearly 60% of those surveyed said that their companies are asking customers to contribute their product development and/or enhancement, or that they plan to do so within the coming two years. In addition, about half of companies say they are, or are planning to, treat customers as co-developers of products that are in a constant state of improvement. The wisdom of crowds has caught on.
It is appropriate that I learned about this work through social media, Jacob Morgan’s blog post, Companies Believe Social Media Can Increase Revenue!. It was one of the three most popular for the week on Social Media Today.
by Rob Paterson
December 19, 2008 at 2:18 pm · Filed under
CoveritLive
Toronto is facing “Snowmageddon” according to Environment Canada - who coined the phrase of the season!
From Friday to Sunday - the peak holiday period where Toronto is the main air hub for Canada - they expect an accumulation of up to 50CM of snow in repeating snow storms.
#snowmageddon has caught on big time on Twitter and is now the # 1 Trending item
The National Post are using CoveritLive a brilliant Canadian new 2.0 tool to provide second by second coverage from not only their own reporters and staff but ANYONE. This is the best coverage of a live event I have yet seen and this tool deserves every media outlets close attention.
CoveritLive allows the full power of a community to pitch in during a live event. The NP site is both fun and informative as the Wisdom and Humour of Crowds finds its voice.
This type of tool is perfect for this type of event - where millions are affected
by Bill Ives
December 18, 2008 at 4:00 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Four IBMers, Joan M. DiMicco, David R. Millen, Werner Geyer, Casey Dugan recently published, Research on the Use of Social Software in the Workplace. It focused on their Beehive social networking website behind IBM’s firewall. Beehive was launched in 2007 by IBM Research as an internal social network site for IBM employees designed to blur the boundaries of work and home, professional and personal, and business and fun. I briefly mentioned BeeHive as part of Looking Closely at Lotus Connections. At the time I wrote that the Beehive tools are exploring how to use Facebook features like fun walls, photo posting, and high 5 inside the enterprise.
IBM Research is looking at four main areas: understanding adoption, usage patterns, motivations, and impact. This position paper gives a brief overview of the key findings from last two: motivations and impact on the workplace. The found that within a company intranet╒s protected environment, employees choose to reach out on Beehive to new people rather than only connecting to those they know, which is different than behavior reported on Facebook. Now I have seen a lot of reaching out to new people who have connections to known people on Facebook but still, this is interesting. They also found that employees also share personal details that have not appeared with any significant frequency within IBM on other enterprise social software tools, such as intranet social bookmarking and blogging.
Looking further through in-depth interview they found three motivations: interacting with colleagues on a personal level, career advancement, and the ability to convince others to support ideas and projects. They wrote that, employees use Beehive to present themselves professionally and to network with those they believe can assist them in their career goals within IBM. Being part of large consulting organization in a past life, I can understand the internal marketplace dynamics that this system plays into. Social media is often used for viral marketing in the external marketplaces so it is not surprising that people would make use of its capabilities in a large organization with an active marketplace for people, ideas, and projects.
The researchers also looked at impact. They found that the more intensely someone uses Beehive (as measured by more frequent visits and stronger associations with the online community) the higher their reported social capital, across all measures. In other words, they have closer bonds to their network, they have a greater willingness to contribute to the company, they have a greater interest in connecting globally, have greater access to new people, and a greater ability to access expertise.
They said these results are only at the correlational level and they cannot make any casual inferences. However, I do think they are looking at some interesting ways to measure the effects of social software, independent of the effects of this particular software. In addition, I think that an interesting next step would be to look at the relationship of these measures to the bottom line business results. The IBM researchers at looking at sound level three behavioral changes. Now me needed to see if there are ways we can tie these behaviors to level four financial impacts. I feel confident that this can be done. Thanks to Tomoaki Sawada for pointing out this work to me.
by Jim McGee
December 16, 2008 at 4:54 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
The current issue of Fast Company has a cover article on Cisco and their ongoing efforts to reorganize into something that is an excellent case study of what Enterprise 2.0 may look like in an established organization. It shouldn’t be any surprise that the quintessential networking company is on the leading edge of network thinking applied to organizational design. At the same time, Cisco is a large, successful, hierarchical, engineering-centric organization that isn’t likely to be terribly interested in organizational fads.
Here’s the argument in a nutshell:
Chambers has greater ambitions, even now, in the midst of turmoil. Or, perhaps, especially now. He has been taking Cisco through a massive, radical, often bumpy reorganization. The goal is to spread the company’s leadership and decision making far wider than any big company has attempted before, to working groups that currently involve 500 executives. This move, Chambers says, reflects a new philosophy about how business can best work in a networked world. "In 2001, we were like most high-tech companies, with one or two primary products that were really important to us," he explains. "All decisions came to the top 10 people in the company, and we drove things back down from there." Today, a network of councils and boards empowered to launch new businesses, plus an evolving set of Web 2.0 gizmos — not to mention a new financial incentive system — encourage executives to work together like never before. Pull back the tent flaps and Cisco citizens are blogging, vlogging, and virtualizing, using social-networking tools that they’ve made themselves and that, in many cases, far exceed the capabilities of the commercially available wikis, YouTubes, and Facebooks created by the kids up the road in Palo Alto.
The bumpy part — and the eye-opener — is that the leaders of business units formerly competing for power and resources now share responsibility for one another’s success. What used to be "me" is now "we." The goal is to get more products to market faster, and Chambers crows at the results. "The boards and councils have been able to innovate with tremendous speed. Fifteen minutes and one week to get a [business] plan that used to take six months!" As storm clouds form for the rest of the business community, he says, "We’re going to gain market share." ["How Cisco's CEO John Chambers is Turning the Tech Giant Socialist", Ellen McGirt]
What makes this case study useful and interesting is its emphasis on organization not technology. There’s an undercurrent in the article that everything is all a bit "socialist" somehow and isn’t that a surprise, which I found annoying at points. The more interesting point is that a bunch of engineers and big-organization executives are essentially concluding that hierarchy isn’t scaling well enough to meet their goals.
More than anything else, this story provides a well-documented case study that is an existence proof to other skeptical executives that the combination of Enterprise 2.0 technologies and the right organizational principles and practices can succeed.
by Bill Ives
December 15, 2008 at 10:59 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
You knew this was going to happen. O’Reilly has come out with a book, YouTube: An Insider’s Guide to Climbing the Charts. As the ad states, if you want to be visible on YouTube or even go viral, then you’ve come to the right place. It is written by YouTube veterans Alan “fallofautumndistro” Lastufka and Michael W. Dean and provides easy-to-read instructions on getting a video of your cause, song, commercial, or unique point of view noticed by thousands. The book includes interviews with YouTube stars LisaNova, Hank Green (vlogbrothers), WhatTheBuckShow, nalts, and liamkylesullivan, as well as current YouTube staff. I heard that Joe the Plumber is autographing copies.
The book covers how to succeed in storytelling and directing, shooting, editing, and rendering, creating your very own channel, broadcasting user-generated content, re-broadcasting commercial content, cultivating a devoted audience, fitting into the YouTube community, and becoming a success story. It is the next best thing to American Idol. Actually, I think the book will make interesting reading and I have asked for review copy. If they honor this request you can see my review in coming weeks. So far they have not responded.
I wonder if they interviewed the Hey Clip producers. When I first wrote about them, their 3 minute lip synch video had 13,786.185 views (April 07). Recently the number had grown to 24,940,809 views and 54,289 ratings. Take a look, add to the total, and see a winning example. Their timeless piece is certainly doing better than the Bush Blair duet at 41,446 views.
by Joe McKendrick
December 13, 2008 at 10:56 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Geek & Poke’s Oliver Widder ponders the viability of a recently announced premium model for one of the social networking sites:
by Joe McKendrick
December 13, 2008 at 10:36 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
There’s no question that social networks are used by millions upon millions of people around the globe. What’s amazing — and inconceivable in times past — is that these services are available for free to anyone who wants to use them. Even entire companies are tapping into these offerings to drive their collaboration efforts.
With the old-fashioned saying in mind of “you can’t get something for nothing,” this begs the question of who is really paying to keep all these great services afloat and functioning. Can you imagine if the original phone network, Ma Bell, offered everything for free from day one? Remember, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube all require huge data centers staffed by highly competent IT professionals to keep things running 24 x 7.
The assumption has always been that advertising would support these services, in the same way it has provided us radio and television. Google, MSN, and Yahoo, for example, rely on the online ad model, which has proven effective.
However, research firm IDC questions if advertising can really work effectively in social networking environments such as Facebook and Twitter. In a new study, the consultancy suggests that it may not. “Advertising does not factor into consumer motivations” on social networking services. Social networking is used for communication, and that’s about it. “In fact, users are less tolerant of [social networking] advertising than the best-tolerated forms of online advertising,” IDC says. “Ads on SNS have lower click-through rates than traditional online ads (on the Web at large, 79% of all users clicked on at least one ad in the past year, whereas only 57% of SNS users did), and they also lead to fewer purchases (Web: 23%; SNS 11%).”
“Social advertising” — in which ads are targeted to users’ contacts — may ultimately be more effective than behavioral targeting, IDC suggests. However, it adds, “that idea is stillborn. Of all U.S. Internet users, only three percent would allow publishers to use contact information for advertising.”
There is a natural reflex to view intrusive ads with disdain — remember the visceral reactions to pop-up ads in the early days of the Web? However, attempting to charge for services may also run into opposition. Facebook, for example, has gotten flak on some initiatives. The blog-creation service Tumblr also recently announced it would offering a “premium” service to fund the venture.
Overall, however, advertising seems to be the only logical way to fund and monetize social networking services — if it can be done non-obtrusively, and with respect to privacy concerns. IDC suggests that this may work for social networking services if they “become more like portals, such as Yahoo! or MSN, and they will come closer to the audience reach of the top services.”
by Paula Thornton
December 10, 2008 at 10:11 pm · Filed under
Economics, Enterprise 2.0
Let me here suggest without any real evidence that Enron was the equivalent of ‘noise’ in a complex system — the squeak that portends a source of friction that is a sign of stress due to shift. Did anyone really consider ‘why’ Enron occurred — why, other than greed, individuals might have done what they did? By focusing on the ‘how’, everyone missed the real ‘why’ — because they could, catalyzed by unrealistic performance expectations, oh — and because business is just too darned complex to manage. The basics of complexity suggest that the ensuing legislative response — Sarbane-Oxley — was worse than a ruse (a complete waste of time and money), it added fuel to an already raging fire that everyone was, and still is, ignoring.
Now let me propose something even more apocalyptic: “because they could”. Don’t let the dimensions of greed and subversiveness cloud your understanding of this reality — each of us has the ability to leverage technology with access to resources that can, will and already is bringing down successful companies.
Here’s me, the individual often seen as the naysayer, extremely encouraged by all of this because of a natural law (well all natural laws really, but this one in particular): self-reference. A relevant fact I’ve had stuffed in my basket since I learned about it from Margaret Wheatley in the mid-90s:
In response to environmental disturbances that signal the need for change, the system changes in a way that remains consistent with itself in that environment.
Leveraging her interpretations of Ilya Prigogine (who ironically penned a book called “The End of Certainty” in August 1997, the same month illegal investments began at Enron) Margaret went on to explain that all natural organisms can only respond in ways that are consistent with current understanding and beliefs. To do otherwise requires the ‘death’ of the current identity (either literally or figuratively). In psychology to ’stuff down’ one’s identity causes mental disorder — is there any doubt that Enron’s downfall was enabled by its own cultural identity disorder?
While it’s hard for us to fathom how entire ancient civilizations fell, Rome is burning. Nero fanned the flames (draw any serendipidous conclusions you want from the date of this post) and the men in white coats are standing by.
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