Jeremiah Owyang, a web strategist / analyst at Forrester whom many know as an energetic voice in the area of Enterprise 2.0, points to a new initiative (Change.Force.com – A Citizen’s Briefing Book) by the Obama administration. In the first few paragraphs of his analysis, he states that in his exchanges with executives he is experiencing more openness to the use of social technologies, and hence of some greater degree of transparency with customers, employees and other stakeholders.
A Wisdom of Crowds tactic being adopted by the new administration … interesting idea, we’ll see how it plays out.
I just learned from Leverage’s Mike Walsh that Obama will receive a briefing from the top voted ideas that were submitted by the American people each evening see Change.Force.com (a play off) . This method of keeping in direct communication by ‘listening’ to the citizens leans on voting style technology similar to Dell’s Ideastorm. My colleague Josh Bernoff will be pleased, as he requested this feature a few months ago.
You’ll need to login and register (I suspect they can use IP addresses to determine point of origin within US) in order to confirm location but that’s not completely accurate. How can Obama extend this further? Make a similar site for all other nations to submit ideas for foreign policy. This doesn’t come without challenges of course, the system could be gamed, and there’s no promise he’ll make changes based on our feedback, we’ll see.
I talk to the executives of the world’s largest brands, after Obama won the election, I get a lot less push back –it’s rare I have to have discussions now about the validity of social technologies.
Of course, social technologies still come with risk, but for some reason this feels really good, we’re all a bit more connected and the internet helps to bring us together.
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I’m not surprised. if I were the leader of an organisation, I would just get on with it, as it seems clear to me that the permanent and ubiquitous presence of the Web in our lives is creating what is effectively a new sociology of expectation, namely of at least having a voice and to some degree being "heard" by hierarchical leaders in our societies’ institutions.
News of the Hudson River Crash was broken first on Twitter by Laura Conaway who works not for a mainstream news organization but for Planet Money, an economic web magazine on the NPR’s web. How and why did Laura scoop the street? She is one of the most plugged in news folks who use Twitter. Twitter was the core feed that built the story.
Whilst many people may be using Twitter, it only becomes really useful as a social media tool when it starts to meet mass adoption. Just like the first fax machine, or the first use of email, Twitter and other social media tools become more useful and more rewarding the more people that use them. They will only really come into their own when they stop being niche and start being popular. To date, I don’t think that Twitter has been ‘popular’ in this, and the common, meaning of the word. It has been something that a large group of people have used and got benefit from, but this group has to some extent been restricted or limited – people who share certain interests or common characteristics of some kind.
The fact that the Sun is now reporting about Twitter suggests that it is starting to gain the kind of mass, or popular, influence that will see it really come of age.
So to help Twitter come of age – to help those who know help others to feel comfortable about using it – we at fast Forward Blog offer you our first Guide for the Social Revolution – The Fast Forward Blog Guide to Twitter.
I have gone back over nearly three years of posting by the FF Blog team and I have combed the ’sphere for what I think are the best sources, stories and tools. My brilliant publisher Hylton has created a new format – a kind of Blog Book – a nested/hyperlinked/aggregated set of articles that pulls it all together.
Having done all of this, it helps to spend days and days doing nothing else but thinking about one thing – I have come to a few conclusions:
Twitter’s simplicity and ease of use added to the substantial return it offers is a reason why it may finally be the Trojan Horse that breaches the walls of the traditional institution – already if you claim to be a news organization and you don’t use Twitter well – you are really losing out. It infects. It is truly viral.
That the best way to use it is also within the reach of all of us – you don’t have to be a Scoble with 48,000 followers to have influence or to find stuff – what you need is to have between 30-100 people in your core group who care for you and you care for them. This core group is enough to open up the full power of the total ’sphere – This is not just my opinion – I include the science
Twitter is not only good for you because it is useful. It is good for you because it can offer you the endorphin high of grooming – laughter, friendship and yes love are are the heart of its appeal and impact. Nothing helps our health and stress like this – and this is the time for getting and giving strokes. Just as language itself enabled early humans to reduce the time and expand the space needed for grooming (45% for apes and 25% for us), so Twitter may enable us to groom across time and space.
As soon as Hylton – my brilliant publisher – has worked his technical miracles – we will be offering you the first Fast Forward Blog Guide. It will be all about Twitter – what it is, how it works, what it is doing and where it may be taking us. More on that later. Right now I would like to share with you the biggest take away I got from this assignment.
Twitter enhances our ability to groom and to be groomed. So what does this mean?
It is this. I am reminded that we are Primates. The curse of being a Primate is that we have a social imagination. Zebras only worry about Lions when a lion is attacking them. We worry about stuff all the time. Where am I on the slippery pole? Will I keep my job? Does she like me? As a result, we get flooded with stress.
The way that all primates reduce their stress is that they Groom. By grooming they add oil to the society they live in and they cement alliances and deepen friendships. Baboons groom physically.
As primates, tThe best way for us to reduce stress is to groom as well. We call it hanging out, gossiping and cozying up with our friends. That is not how the workplace works. Hanging out with friends etc is a no no. Worse the workplace supports stress downloading. Your boss dumps on you. You dump on a colleague. Worse, you may now have no job or tribe and be on your own – no downloading and no grooming at all. You are in that worst of all places as a primate – on your own. You have too much time and you can fill it by worrying.
What I have started to see is that Twitter’s deep power is that it enables us to groom both at work and when we are on our own. It enables us to establish that small group of people who we offer friendship too and who love us back. All in a way that is not icky.
I think that it is this feature and this small group that then enables us to communmcate directly to the ends of the Twittersphere. For there is a pathway opened up along the route of trust and love.
So all the talk about authority and size of groups of followes is imprecise. The key is to have nurtured this small group of groomers.
If all this sounds like hogwash here is the expert Robert Sapolsky:
January 13, 2009 at 7:17 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
I found a post by Chris Brogan on What Facebook Fan Pages Taught Me About Relationships.Here he talks about the “problem” of reaching the 5000 friend Facebook limit and having to start a fan page. It does seem that 5000 friends is an oxymoron and a fan page is more appropriate at that level.
Now I also found a solution for Chris and those who are approaching the 5000 friend limit. Burger King has a promotion offering Facebook users a free Whopper (value: about $3.70) if they delete 10 of their friends. See the NYT – The Value of a Facebook Friend? About 37 Cents. Your friends can get you into the growing group of over weight Americans.I once read that it takes six glasses of a good Bordeaux to counter the cholesterol in a Whopper or Big Mac. Perhaps if they throw that in…
Another solution is to switch to Twitter which does not seem to have the same limits. Robert Scoble has 48,172 followers as I write this. AND he is following 20,756 which is more amazing but then he actually followed a lot of blogs. However, Guy Kawasaki has him beat with 47,826 followers and he is following 50,449. I am not going to ask how that focus can be accomplished. However, that could be a lot of Big Macs if McDonald’s went after the Twitter crowd with a counter offer to Burger King. But then Chris says that Twitter is now acting as his real social hub with his closer friends so people may be more reluctant.
Which application has more brand loyalty? Which one would be easier for you to give up 10 friends or followers for a Whopper or a good Bordeaux or some other prize of real interest? Somehow I do not think that all this addresses Jevon MacDonald’s excellent question – Is it time for Social Media to grow up? – or perhaps it confirms it. However, I remain interested in which has more loyalty Twitter or Facebook? Here is a take on the issue by Steve Thornton: Twitter versus Facebook: Should you Choose One?
Post Script – After 233,906 friends were removed by 82,771 people in less than a week to get Whoppers, Facebook shut down the application so it is too late if you have not already done so. See Tech Crunch - Facebook Blows A Whopper Of An Opportunity.
January 13, 2009 at 1:43 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Peter Kim had a coming-out post of sorts today. As one of the well known names in Social Media, his opinion matters a lot to that community. So, I was as surprised as anyone when I saw his post today in which he puts his foot down and says that Social Media needs “a bigger goal”.
I could not agree more.
Peter points out that a large amount of what takes place in the world of Social Media is simply an echo of what someone else in the community has said. It is just too much of the same old stuff.
The larger conversation about using Social Software to transform the enterprise is one we have been having here on the FastForwardBlog for over 3 years now (can you believe that?). I like to think that while the world of Social Media Consultants have been out there giving eachother back rubs, the Enterprise Social Software community has been hard at work. Progress has been slow, but we are starting to see value emerge.
“Value” is an important factor here, and something that should not be ignored. What most people fail to understand is that Value is different from “ROI”, “conversations” and “engagement”. The measure of Value is brutal because unlike many other measures, Value has to be created. ROI is earned (row the boat) but value has to be shaped and made real.
Once you can create real value however, you are able to produce and scale. Learning how to generate simple returns just means that you have to keep working harder to keep returns coming.
And there is the difference for me. There is still a lot of work ahead, years of it probably, but once we start to solve the problems of creating an organization that is built on Social principals, we will have created something new, not simply incremental. This is not Marketing with “Social Media” tagged on the front of it, this is not “Change Management” using Web 2.0 tools. This is something completely new, yet unknown but with the promise of real change and real value.
You can get the President of the United States on twitter (I have no doubt he will be there) and you can have the marketing department of Exxon blogging all day long, but you have not changed the beast, she simply has a nice dress. He has put on some Manolos.
From Social Media to Social Enterprise
I believe that a lot of people who have cut their teeth in the world of Social Media will start to turn their energy in to the transformative work of creating the Social Enterprise and I am happy about it. The problem is so big, and the payoff so large that we need more brains on this thing.
It is, I have no doubt, how governments will change, how Army’s will be more effective, it will save Car Manufacturer’s and it will make life inside the corporation rewarding for everyone from the Chairman to the Cashier.
Nobody cares about how the Industrial Revolution changed marketing, we care about how it made our world (the western world) a better, richer, place. Nobody will care about how Social Media sold 50,000 Whoppers for Burger King, they will care about how it saved us from an unsustainable model in which people are worked as if slaved, indentured to a master and on a leash we call the Blackberry. Buzzing, beeping and screaming: we are ready for this.
Peter says “It is time to transform”. I agree. Do something that really matters. Do something that makes people happier and gives them fulfillment. Give people a chance to create, give them real control, not just a chance to consume — even if it is in a more personal way.
Join us for the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011 Oct 3-6, Anaheim CA
With over 240 sessions, SPC11 will provide you with the training, insight, and networking you need to develop, deploy, govern and get the most from SharePoint. You’ll also hear from Microsoft Engineers, Product Managers, MCMs and MVPs who will discuss topics such as cloud services, best practices and real world project insights. To see a preview of the sessions we will be presenting at SPC11, click here.
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RECENT EVENT
Christian Finn Keynotes 2011 Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston
Microsoft's Director of SharePoint Product Management Christian Finn, an Enterprise 2.0 keynote speaker, talks about SharePoint, the future of enterprise collaboration and the value of community.
To read more, visit, CMS Wire
Or view the video of the keynote below:
SharePoint 2010 SocialFest
A group of seven startups recently joined us at SharePoint 2010 SocialFest, an event hosted by the Emerging Business Team at the Microsoft Silicon Valley Campus.
The format: a week-long session focused on extending the SharePoint platform using their unique and innovative applications in the emerging social business space. In addition to intensive development time, the teams heard from various developer experts, SharePoint engineering, SharePoint product management and a panel of nventure investors.
The FASTforward blog periodically hosts webcasts - to hear a recent conversation with Denise Warren, general manager of NYTimes.com, and Alan Webber, author of "Rules of Thumb" and co-founder of Fast Company. The topic: how today's newspaper and magazine publishing companies are innovating to stay relevant (and profitable) click here.For the latest interview with Marty St.George, the CMO at jetBlue, click here
FASTforward 09: Video Interviews
Be sure not to miss our interview series with several dozen attendees of FASTforward'09, including all the contributors to this blog, as well as Clay Shirky, Charlene Li, and many other notable thinkers and doers. The interviews are tagged and can be accessed by topic.
Check out the first of a series of guides to the 2.0 world from the contributors of the FASTforward Blog. This and future FASTforward Blog guides aim to deepen understanding about topics we think critical to the future of the enterprise and how people and organizations communicate, collaborate, innovate, and more.
In this guide, Robert Paterson weaves together the many posts that have been written on the FASTforward blog about Twitter, the groundbreaking application that has attracted millions of users and is changing the way they provide, gather, and share information and insights.
This site is a companion blog to the FASTforward conference and summit series and is sponsored by FAST, A Microsoft Subsidiary. The blog, like the conference series, aims to drive and deepen conversation about how today’s companies can use technology to place users in control of information, and is home to ongoing discussion about the user revolution and Enterprise 2.0 opportunities and challenges. More info here...
