No, I am not going to share them here

We met through Chris McGrath (your CTO) commenting on one of my Wirearchy blog posts about implementation of E2.0 and org change issues, about 2.5 years ago. I noticed you were in Vancouver, had lunch with Chris one of the times he was here in town, and then he connected me to you and Darren.

You and Darren and I then had lunch, and then I interviewed the two of you re: ThoughtFarmer for a FASTForward blog post (one of the first, I think, that was played out to a larger audience).

Picking up on Krebs' fourth metric, do you have any thoughts on how the increase in projects resulting from network stimulation should be measured? How would you attempt to track that new project and those new social links through the tools, in order to attribute that project to the tool? ROI looks for cause & effect type relationship after all: we did this, it produced this saving or gained efficiency. It strikes me that the whole point of the weak-ties type value derived in networks is in their latency – they exist only when they need to exist and are dormant for long periods of time. If we connect through a social tool initially, but are then inactive for a period of months or even years, but then re-engage when required to form a new cluster within the network, coming together to work on a project or solve a problem and do so outside of the context of the tool through which we connected (say we connected on Twitter initially), then it becomes murky to me on how to attribute our original connection and therefore the value.

We've met in person, had lunch, exchanged emails, commented on each other's blogs, etc. Do you remember how we met? I don't (apologies in advance!). But I know who you are and how we keep track of what each other is doing.

Hope this is making sense. Thinking out loud a bit here.

Cheers,

Gord.

my sense is that social software is condemned to death without tangibly impacting efficiency in an organization.

Yes, demonstrable impacts just as cost reduction or reduced cycle time and so on are critical. I think that for this stage of still-very-early adoption and our being somewhere in the middle of vast changes in how we understand knowledge work to be done, you are right.

What I wonder about often (and don't have a clear answer for yet, just some perhaps-informed questions) is whether or not what we understand as "efficiency" today may come to re-defined and differently understood over time.

I can imagine that my POV may sound like heresy, but I am not sure that what we define as "efficiency" today is necessarily the most efficient way to operate in the midst of continual flows of information and more-or-less constant change in markets, etc.