by Jim McGee
July 14, 2009 at 10:18 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
I have got to meet danah boyd in real life one of these days. Her work, as revealed through her blogging, shows what can happen when you drop a well-trained, smart, and articulate observer into new environments. We all learn from her sharp attention to what is really going on. So much better than listening to what others think is going on.
She’s just posted an illuminating perspective on her recent experience at an academic conference in Italy that brought together a combination of young Turks and old farts. It’s a reflection on the slow emergence of new habits and behaviors in shared public settings; a look at how and why blackberries, twitter, backchannels, laptops, and iphones might actually be making meetings better for all concerned. Here are just a couple of quick excerpts. Go read the whole thing.
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There’s no doubt that I barely understood what the speaker was talking about. But during the talk, I had looked up six different concepts he had introduced (thank you Wikipedia), scanned two of the speakers’ papers to try to grok what on earth he was talking about, and used Babelfish to translate the Italian conversations taking place on Twitter and FriendFeed in attempt to understand what was being said. Of course, I had also looked up half the people in the room (including the condescending man next to me) and posted a tweet of my own.
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Blackberries and laptops are often frowned upon as distraction devices. As a result, few of my colleagues are in the habit of creating backchannels in business meetings. This drives me absolutely bonkers, especially when we’re talking about conference calls. I desperately, desperately want my colleagues to be on IM or IRC or some channel of real-time conversation during meetings. While I will fully admit that there are times when the only thing I have to contribute to such dialogue is snark, there are many more times when I really want clarifications, a quick question answered, or the ability to ask someone in the room to put the mic closer to the speaker without interrupting the speaker in the process.
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My colleagues aren’t that much older than me but they come from a different set of traditions. They aren’t used to speaking to a room full of blue-glow faces. And they think it’s utterly fascinating that I poll my twitterverse about constructs of fairness while hearing a speaker talk about game theory. Am I learning what the speaker wants me to learn? Perhaps not. But I am learning and thinking and engaging.
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What will it take for us to see technology as a tool for information enhancement? At the very least, how can we embrace those who learn best when they have an outlet for their questions and thoughts? How I long for being connected to be an acceptable part of engagement.
I want my cyborg life
zephoria
Mon, 13 Jul 2009 18:16:26 GMT
by Rob Paterson
July 14, 2009 at 7:11 am · Filed under
Adoption, CRM, Twitter
Here is a large snip on Virgin from an excellent post by Brian Solis on Techcrunch.
Look at the staffing – tiny and the results – huge.
“Porter revealed that the Virgin America team is small and applies roughly the equivalent of 1.5 people to monitoring and engaging on Twitter and other social networks. To her and the team, social media is representative of not only a listening system, but also a complete engagement channel. The word “marketing” doesn’t even enter the mix.
With more than 20,000 followers on Twitter, Virgin America
is galvanizing a vibrant and active community of people who will respond in “Twitter time,” thus alleviating the modest team from having to engage in every discussion, whether it’s positive or negative.
The most common example Porter shared was a response to the question, “Should I fly Virgin?”
“The community closes the sale,” exclaimed Porter.
She also shared a story of how Virgin America invests in the good will of customers, simply by publicly acknowledging and supporting them in the same channels where they’re communicating.
During one flight, a woman who just graduated medical school to become a doctor, had tweeted her excitement about graduating and also flying @virginamerica. Instead of simply responding with a congratulatory Tweet, Porter and her team retweeted and asked someone on the flight to buy her a drink (the benefits of offering inflight wifi).
To her surprise, Porter triggered an immediate response, “Row 11 is going to buy her a drink.” And, to her further astonishment, the person who sent that Tweet was live in the audience at the Real-Time stream event.
Alexia Tsotsis, tech writer at the LA Weekly, shouted from the first row, “That was me!”
Everyone in the audience was a witness to a vivid demonstration of how interaction online extends into real world experiences.
More impressive is Virgin America’s use of the social Web for real-time customer service. They’re actively monitoring issues, frustrations, and recommendations to solve challenges as they arise. In several such instances, Virgin America has used Twitter as a real-time guest service recovery system in flight to address concerns and problems by contacting service staff in the air to alert them to issues – again, the perils and associated benefits of offering inflight WiFi.
Earlier in the day, Peoplebrowsr (disclosure: I am an advisor) showed a demo in which airlines were ranked by the sentiment expressed about each brand on Twitter, and Virgin America was on top. Peoplebrowsr highlighted the ability to analyze conversational sentiment by industry through the alignment of positive, neutral, and negative conversations and perception by brand.
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by Paula Thornton
July 13, 2009 at 6:13 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0
Originally published July 6, 2007 the messages continue to be relevant and need repeating. Indeed, the comparison of now being 2 years later adds an interesting contrast (or not — have we really progressed that much?).
Author of the book Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel made the following remarks in a Gartner interview, earlier this year:
“When innovation becomes democratized, many traditional assumptions about innovation and the best ways to innovate are upended….When innovation resources are cheap and well diffused, what firms ought to do is let a thousand flowers bloom…then select the best flower. It no longer makes sense for corporate marketing researchers to go around asking passive consumers what kind of flower they would like, if only they could have it and then, after huge process efforts, decide to develop that flower.”
The same is true of technology solutions. Whereas von Hippel pointed this comment directly at manufacturing innovation, the IT floors of today are the machine factory floors of yesterday. In the information age, the medium of production and delivery are bits/bytes. The problem with most 2.0 discussions is that they cannot separate the product/service from the medium which facilitates the interaction.
Perhaps you disagree? Then mitigate, if you will, the divergence between the facts which the IDC collected and Forrester’s recent claim [pdf] that “IT Departments Generally View Web 2.0 in a Favorable Light” (pay less attention to the titles than to the stories being told). Let’s just say that if both Forrester and their clients see anything 2.0 as something sold by vendors then they’ll both soon be extinct.
Let’s put it another way: 2.0 is the same as experiences — they just happen. You don’t buy technology for them; you don’t get opinions as to whether or not you’re going to adopt them — they just ARE. You can stick your head in the sand about it and suggest that everything is the same, or you can embrace the fundamental differences that are alluded to by von Hippel’s comments.
Leery of that? Then try this one on:
“The ability of an organization to innovate is a pre-condition for the successful utilization of inventive resources and new technologies. Conversely, the introduction of new technology often presents complex opportunities and challenges for organizations, leading to changes in managerial practices and the emergence of new organizational forms. Organizational and technological innovations are intertwined.” Alice Lam
The reason we’re not seeing the potential of much of the technological innovations come to fruition is that the organizations have not formally embraced them. This is being repeated with 2.0. Of course, 2.0 is often also seen as just another fad/phase, not a collection of principles to express a reality already taking place. IT can choose to embrace those changes — nay, facilitate them via new methods (after all, methods and techniques are part and parcel to technologies…the origin of which Gk technología systematic treatment, or technique). Contrary to the beliefs of many CIOs most of the methods they believe are in place and are being followed, are part of the dirty little secret of most corporate operations: they actually get in the way of doing real work, and so everyone has a workaround to get stuff done. IT floors (and other operational areas) are far more replete with examples of adaptation that you’d ever find on some secluded island.
Adaptation is a beautiful thing and is something to be honored: it is, after all, a perfect synthesis of the realities. Changing a ‘bad’ reality must be done with respect to existing adaptations. Case in point: Verizon Call Centers.
A few years ago, still during the honeymoon period between GTE and Bell Atlantic, there was an initiative to make the desktop of the call center representatives more efficient/effective. Indeed, an entire year of visual design and architectural possibilities had progressed. The concepts were brilliant, but classically flawed. I spent very little time in the field talking to the call center people to know that the initiative was doomed, without change. The issue: facts, and perceived facts.
The design team was operating off of a number of facts that were not false, but weren’t exactly as they interpreted them.
- The number of applications available to a rep to support a call was upwards of 50. In IT, anything they’ve created is an ‘application’. The majority of these ‘applications’ were badly managed collections of content, and yet nowhere in this solution was there focus on freeing all of this content out of the ‘applications’ they were stuck in — something that would have added exponential value.
- The number of applications a rep typically engaged to support a call was a minimum of 3-5. This too was accurate, but watching this dance in motion was a true work of art. They had adapted their entire dialog to the dance that was going on behind the scenes. Indeed, they leveraged the delays to engage in more meaningful conversations with the customers, often uncovering unmet needs which they would then turn into upsells.
- The learning curve for these tools was costly. This too would have been relevant if it were applicable. These people were masters of adaptation. They worked the system (technical and financial) from every angle. The leaders among them made 6-figure salaries and annually went to some big blow-out (I met some of them at their sales conference at the Atlantis resort). Such salaries lead to high retention. Among the ‘youngest’ in seniority, they’d been with the company for 2 years. Turnover was not relevant and work-arounds are quickly learned in such high-paced environments. Indeed, anything ‘new’ would have slowed down the dance and would have only been worth changing dance steps over, if it added tremendous value elsewhere. It did not. [Last I heard, the initiative was never implemented. Another testament to the hidden productivity drains of large initiatives; the antithesis of 2.0.]
So let me repeat again, 2.0 is about embracing adaptive (or emergent). It is in the adaptive space that you leverage the inherent energy in the crest of the wave: energy for free. Or in the case of von Hippel, let the flowers bloom where they may, in all their varieties.
Caution: IT will likely insist they don’t have budget for dirt.
by Bill Ives
July 12, 2009 at 2:08 am · Filed under
FASTforward'09
As the use of social media grows within the enterprise and on the Web, the need for policies and guidelines to govern employee behavior becomes more essential. Effective use of social media requires that employees can act on their own to produce content without review by Corporate Communications or other groups. I remember in my past life with a large consulting firm and prior to the rise of social media every time I talked with the media, a PR person had to be on the call. Now customer and market communication is more and more handed over to individual employees.
However, to avoid violations of company security and such things as government regulations for publically traded companies, some guidance is necessary. I remember in the early days of blogging IBM relied on its standard rules of business conduct. Then in the spring of 2005, IBM used a wiki to create a set of blogging guidelines. Here is the latest version: IBM Social Computing Guidelines. It begins with the following.
“These guidelines aimed to provide helpful, practical advice, and also to protect both IBM bloggers and IBM itself, as the company sought to embrace the blogosphere. Since then, many new forms of social media have emerged. So we turned to IBMers again to re-examine our guidelines and determine what needed to be modified. The effort has broadened the scope of the existing guidelines to include all forms of social computing.”
You can find the details at the IBM site. Other companies have embraced this concept. Sun was another of the early adopters. Sun’s policy begins with this statement, “Many of us at Sun are doing work that could change the world. Contributing to online communities by blogging, wiki posting, participating in forums, etc., is a good way to do this. You are encouraged to tell the world about your work, without asking permission first, but we expect you to read and follow the advice in this note.” I think this captures the right spirit for these efforts.
Intel has released new social media guidelines. It has also created a Social Media department and offers training for employees who are interested in blogging and participating in online forums and other social media venues where they represent Intel (see Intel publishes social media guidelines for its employees). I like the addition of training.
These guidelines are not limited to the large players. RightNow provides a suite of CRM tools that I have covered on a number of occasions. The RightNow guidelines state that, “RightNow has an open participation policy for all employees. The choice to participate in social media is yours. If you decide to participate, you are making a commitment to following these guidelines.” I was told that RightNow’s guidelines were influenced by the work of Intel, IBM and Sun.
Social media guidelines should not be limited to market facing channels. Use inside the enterprise raises many adoption issues and they are no less important here. Some employee concerns can be clarified by a good set of guidelines. If done right these policies can actually encourage participation as employees are likely to feel more comfortable that their actions are sanctioned. They will also feel like they know the rules. I would be very interested in any other social media guidelines that you think are useful, especially those for activity within the enterprise.
