The FASTForward Blog » Adoption

Posterous – the power of simplicity

Rob Paterson — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 14:22:51 +0000

Here is a very special interview between Robert Scoble and the founders of Posterous. The interview I think highlights many issues that seem to escape most of us in North America and Europe as we think about the 2.0 world.

There are billions of people who are now connected but whose primary tools are handsets, texting and email.

These people are very poorly served by our western tool sets – computers, the web and social software.

While the uptake of Facebook is impressive at around 300 million – this is nothing compared to the universe who rely on the handset, text and email.

Like Twitter, Posterous is amazingly simple to use. It gets around many of the barriers for the hesitant. Billions know how to text or use email. Now they can have a place to share and show what interests them without having to learn anything new or to buy anything more.

I suspect that the Posterous guys have spotted something huge here. They have truly been thinking about the “underserved” Clay Christenson concept. They also know that it is best to start with “Good enough”.

But Posterous also helps the Western Hard Core Blogger.

As a long term blogger and user of the western tool set – my use of Posterous has transformed my own participation on the web. I find it sooooooooooo easy to use. In particular it enables me to aggregate the best material that I can find on my blog and to ensure that what I post gets the widest distribution.

Here I think is the nub.

Aggregation in focused areas - mine would include the emergence of the network (local and global) in all sectors – such as in organization of all kinds, food, media and energy – is where content value is enhanced. I have my own ideas but they are made better when I add related ideas of others – not just as links – but in large chunks – for after all I have a lot of real estate. You can see in a second whether you wish to read on or not. A set of links is more of a mystery ride.

I am finding that my blog has much more depth for very little added effort – my readership is up both in terms of views and time on the page. So others seem to agree.

The other part of the value is in giving me better distribution. With one simple action on Posterous – I not only post to my blog but to Twitter and to Facebook where I have overlapping but often different readers. As the social web becomes every more real time, I can throw a bigger rock into the river and cause more ripples.

These features I think can help those in media who are also seeking more focus on their web offerings and who seek a wider following. Posterous will enable hard pressed TV and Radio staff add more value and widen their reach.

Like Twitter, Posterous is deceptively simple. But also like Twitter, I think that we will see that this simplicity is key to its potential power.

Is this not a lesson for all adoption? To own a car in 1900 was to demand that you also had a mechanic. Over time, cars inside became ever more complex, but using them became ever more simple. The more simple, the cheaper, the more people adopted them.

Simple isn’t it!

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Adoption – 5 Stages of Media Grief

Rob Paterson — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:29:22 +0000

Scott Monty is the head of Social Media at Ford – he is really in the thick of it in terms of how best to adapt and adopt Social Media in a large corporate environment.

Here is a link to his brilliant post that shows the linkage for adoption to the Kubler Ross Stages of Grief. For to adopt SM, your old world view has to die. Do you see yourself along this continuum? Scott has much more in his post – please go there.

The 5 Stages of Social Media Grief

Read more: http://www.scottmonty.com/2009/09/fear-and-loathing-in-social-media.html#ixzz0SbVts5ER

(With apologies to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.)

Denial – first stage of social media grief in which the marketer refuses to acknowledge the existence of social media. This was the case early on in the industry’s development. Luckily, I don’t think there are many companies left that think like this.
Common phrases: “It’s just a kid’s thing,” or “It’s just a fad.”
Common behaviors: avoiding the Internet, putting hands over ears and singing “I can’t heeeeeaaaarr yoooouuuuu. La la laaaaa.”
Anger – In the second stage, jealousy and rage are misplaced and rage ensues.
Common phrases: “This is stupid,” “I’ve got better things to do with my time.”
Common behaviors: full-fledged slave to work email; increase in print or television media buy to show effectiveness and superiority.
Bargaining -Anger gives way to hope that incremental adoption of social media will be enough to make a difference.
Common phrases: “If we have a Facebook page, we should be covered,” “Let’s just create a blog,” or “Let the agency figure it out.”
Common behaviors: the use of social media only in time-limited campaigns; half-hearted efforts on a limited number of social sites.
Depression -The fourth stage manifests itself in an understanding that the inevitable cannot be delayed and the marketer becomes doleful.
Common phrases: “Twitter/Google/Facebook is taking over the world,” or “We’re overwhelmed with choices.”
Common behaviors: moping; pacing; complaining to friends on Facebook.
Acceptance -With the final stage, the marketer finally realizes that social media is here to stay and begins to determine ways to integrate activities and craft strategies that are truly integrated.
Common phrases: “Let’s craft a comprehensive social media strategy,” or “Let’s spend some time listening to what consumers are saying about us.”
Common behaviors: integration of marketing and communications functions, determination of measurement goals, online and offline alignment from the beginning of projects.

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Crowdsourcing for Employee, Customer and Stakeholder Engagement

Jon Husband — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 06:02:00 +0000

About three months ago Beth Kanter wrote about the Crowdsourcing of Vision at the Smithsonian Museum. In a comment I suggested that crowdsourcing for visioning purposes was reminiscent of the use of OD (organizational development) principles and methods often found in large-scale organizational or system change initiatives.

Beth asked me to elaborate. This blog post is my response.

Let’s look at why and where crowdsourcing can be useful when organizations (private, public or not-for-profit) are facing important new or emerging issues.

Crowdsourcing – Collective Wisdom and Collective Intelligence

When considering crowdsourcing in the above context as a method for obtaining pertinent information and perspective from relatively large numbers of people, it is useful to differentiate between it and collective intelligence, a related concept.

Collective intelligence refers to the outcomes generated by pooling knowledge from diverse groups, using it to research and debate and then refining the resulting understanding into useful and actionable information.

Crowdsourcing collective wisdom refers to the aggregation of anonymously produced data from groups of independent, diverse and decentralized people (crowds). The information gathered is typically summarized into a collective judgment or perspective – the “wisdom” expressed by the crowd.

Crowdsourcing as a technique for gathering useful information stems from the concepts outlined in The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki. With a nod to the definitions above, the practice of crowdsourcing can be useful for tapping into the attitudes, opinions and beliefs of the “crowd” represented by an organization’s employees, customers and other stakeholders.

Many nuances and constraints have been applied to Surowiecki’s original ideas, and examples advanced wherein the ideas work more or less effectively. Whether you agree or disagree with the concept, there’s a fundamental attraction, and empirical evidence, to its utility. A crowd made up of diverse people with as many perspectives as there are people can, when faced with a question, problem or idea, generate a coalescing of sense and thence a consensus.

Indeed, a number of processes for working with small or large groups stem from the same basic premise – organizational development, whole systems and socio-technical systems theory rest on significant input from a wide range of different actors. A crowd’s aggregated collective response to a question or challenge creates a perspective or a position. In Surowiecki’s terms this represents its collective wisdom.

Can Today’s Organizations Access The Collective Wisdom of Crowds?

The workforce and other stakeholders of any given organization is a form of crowd. An organization’s crowd is likely to be more homogenous than a general crowd, to be sure. In the context of crowdsourcing, this relative homogeneity becomes important. It provides boundaries or constraints that complexity theory tells us are useful for bringing focus to the reasons for and expected results from the crowdsourcing.

For quite a few years now there have been sustained clarion calls for the development of learning organizations, more responsive and flexible cultures and for changes to fundamental assumptions and models of effective leadership and management. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars have been spent on visioning, strategic planning, culture change initiatives, coaching and more effective internal communications.

There are competency models galore, climate and culture surveys, and a wide range of other assessment, diagnostic and developmental tools and processes aimed at “harnessing the employees’ and the organization’s potential“.

However, the structure of most organizations is still clearly hierarchical and relies on learned command-and-control leadership and management techniques. Most leaders, executives and senior managers have been steeped in industrial-era management science assumptions. Their mental models began with these fundamental assumptions during their education and their first jobs. They have reached senior decision-making and leadership levels with the help of models that preceded today’s digital hyper-linked and networked environment with its wide, deep and rapid access to large numbers of people and vast amounts of information.

It is the rare “authentic” or natural leader that possesses or grows in him-or-herself the wisdom to bring humility, purpose, values, clarity and inclusive decision-making to creating and leading a responsive, adaptable and effective organization. Jim Collins codified these rare qualities in “Level Five Leadership“, a featured article in the Harvard Business Review’s Breakthrough Leadership issue. If you want to harness collective intelligence of the organizational crowd, you must have humility and good listening skills.

From Today to Tomorrow

Enter social software .. blogs, Twitter, wikis and various widgets (like IM interfaces that help people connect, converse, swap ways of doing things and gather feedback from colleagues and customers). Using social software for purposeful activities tends to create gigantic, wide, always-coursing feedback loops that will not be stopped.

So .. in this new electronic networked environment, how can today’s leaders go about developing vision, values, and a range of other elements of strategy and tactics.

We know from pre-Web experience that there is indeed something tangible, observable and useful in the knowledge and intelligence contained in and offered up by crowds when faced with an issue. Four or five decades of organizational development and organization change theory, practice and results have shown us that.

Many of us have been paying attention to the evolution of the Web’s impact on our lives and work for some time now. We tend to believe that the adroit, open and sincere use of social software to tap into and listen to a given organization’s crowd can materially help leaders and managers evolve into people who do not rely on charisma, positional power, coercion or dishonest political manipulation. Acknowledging and seeking ways to use the crowdsourced wisdom typically requires humility, listening and servant leadership to face and embrace the responsibilty to lead and manage effectively.

An important caveat … in spite of much work by many organizations towards inclusive engagement, it only takes a little bit of perceived ambiguity, loss of perceived control, shifts in markets or constituents for control-oriented hierarchy to reassert itself very quickly.

Notwithstanding the apprehension of many of today’s more traditional or conservative leaders and managers, the possibilities of crowdsourcing useful vision and wisdom from employees, constituents and markets has been made much easier with the capabilities of today’s interconnected and interlinked Web. And, just as importantly, increasingly people want AND expect that their voices will be heard.

The job of a leader in today’s hyperlinked and transparent organizational world is to instantiate the crowd’s intelligence and / or wisdom with a clearly-stated and purposeful mission and objective, and then listen ! This is where social software and methods like crowdsourcing can shine. They can and I believe will, eventually, replace or augment even the most sophisticated culture change initiative or surveys and diagnostics.

It can help leaders and managers learn to really listen, and to respond in intelligent and mature ways to the conversations that carry the collective wisdom of an organization’s ‘crowd’.

These days (and certainly tomorrow) it’s less and less about charisma, command and control, and more and more about listening to conversations and championing, catalyzing and coordinating the collective wisdom of any given organizational crowd.

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NPR’s New Web Site will arrive July 28th – Preview

Rob Paterson — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 12:57:38 +0000

NPR continue to press ahead in their search for how to make the web work. Here is their wonderful new site – a masterpiece. Not simply visually but in how it contains all the relationships that are at the core of the new web world.

I am also profoundly affected by this work because I am now seeing that all the effort put into learning how to cope with the web by NPR, the system and me back in the day is paying off.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wok4JiFUdwQ

Back in 2005 NPR did something that I think is still unique. They hosted a mammoth engagement process, New Realities, that involved over 300 stations and over 1,000 people. The purpose was to discover what the web would all mean. You can see the results in so many of the actions that NPR and the radio system have taken since then. This new site is a pinnacle of that collective insight

But at first, at the end of the process, I and many who had been involved were disappointed. For the immediate result was not there – or so I thought. For two years, like seeds in the ground, there was little or nothing to see. But with NPR Music, the real green shoots began. Since then, the seedlings have grown and multiplied.

I had been foolish and naive. I thought that the conversation would produce results immediately.

But! Now – 4 years later – I am beginning to see the real result. And it is this. That NPR and the lead stations in the system are convinced and are committed to making the web work. They also have a common language.

This is simply not true for most others in the media world. They have not had this personal and deep experience with each other in an examination of what will come.

I think I see the true result of New Realities now. It is cultural readiness. For is not Culture the main barrier?

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Kevin Spacey Teaches Twitter to David Letterman

Rob Paterson — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 15:21:50 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z1aZ7Gs46A

Maybe some will never get it

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Virgin Shows the Way – United could learn from

Rob Paterson — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 12:11:53 +0000

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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Taylor Guitars – Response to Dave – 0 Cost brilliant Ad

Rob Paterson — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 17:29:13 +0000

Here is a great example of how to use Social Media to advance your brand – Bob Taylor of Taylor’s Guitars – cost nothing to make – captured a moment when millions will look – very personal – lots of good advice – offering a real service.

Why can’t you do this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n12WFZq2__0

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The New GM and Social Media

Rob Paterson — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 19:38:31 +0000

Bob Lutz – the father of the Volt and of the GM Blog and their work in Social Media will stay on – Already the GM Blog The FastLane is being presented as how GM will converse with the public. His new role – Connecting GM with the public.

Today the CEO, Fritz Henderson, had his key announcement about the future on the site as a webinar. Questions continue on the GM Twitter site @GMblogs. GM is going direct.

It’s not just company news either.

New products such as the Volt are getting regular updates from the engineers in a transparent process.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4vKr5WLFGk

It’s quite a cultural revolution – so what is your organization doing?

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Adoption Can’t Be Driven

Paula Thornton — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 01:03:06 +0000

The wagons are circling…around the wrong campfire.

Clearly, adoption is an important part of Enterprise 2.0 efforts. The FASTforward Blog team believes it’s significant enough that we’re shifing our focus to the topic. But the language of adoption for 2.0 is broken:

“…coming up with innovative ways to address those three issues to drive end user adoption” Still Looking for End User Adoption

“Reach out to existing communities of interest to drive adoption…” Think Adoption, Not Deployment

“…how a user centric (rather than technology centric) approach to deploying Enterprise 2.0 technologies will drive adoption” Expanding Enterprise 2.0 Beyond the Early Adopters

While some of these authors have introduced critical elements to address — seamlessness via platforms, work specific, governance & roles — they all use the phrase “drive adoption”. This is the antithesis of 2.0 fundamentals.

If you have to “drive adoption” you’ve failed at 2.0 design and implementation. The fundamentals of 2.0 are based on design that is organic — meets the individual where they are and adapts based on feedback — it emerges. The ‘adoption’ comes from rigorous ‘adaptation’ — it continuously morphs based on involvement from the ‘masses’. If done right, you can’t keep them away…because you’ve brought the scratch for their itch.

Good design work includes research to identify the relevant itches and discovering the possibilities to deliver capabilities right from where individuals already ARE. If that hasn’t been done, even if you’re successful — it’s relative success, you could have done a LOT better. That’s the problem with success — it’s rarely evaluated for potential capitalization (there was X potential and only N% achieved).

From a physics perspective, “driving” is the same as “push” or “pull”. None of these are relevant language in 2.0, as they waste energy (e.g. resources). Tapping natural energies — existing activities — ARE fundamental to 2.0 designs.

Rather than worry about adoption, make sure there has been adequate investment in design with a focus on the ability to adapt.

Adoption follows adaptation (the solution to the individual, not the other way around).

Footnote: The language of living systems is critical to E2.0 efforts. If you’re not conversant in such language (esp. complexity, emergence, self-organizing), have a sit-down with Mother Nature — she’ll set you straight.

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Twitter – If going 2.0 is hard for you – This works

Rob Paterson — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 11:42:09 +0000

The other side of “Marketing” – head off problems immediately – solve problems immediately. The NYT offer a great case study today about what this means for the travel industry.

As hotels, airlines and other travel companies line up on Twitter to promote their brands, customers who voice their grievances in the form of tweets are getting surprisingly fast responses for everything from bad airplane seats to poor room service.

Take Tony Wagner, 34, a new-media director for an academic group in Washington. When he found out he wasn’t seated next to his wife and 2-year-old daughter on a JetBlue flight to San Francisco over the Memorial Day weekend, he first called up customer service. But the agent told him to take it up at the gate. So Mr. Wagner indirectly sent JetBlue a message, by posting a plea for help on his Twitter account: “@jetblue Advice to get both parents and 2 yr old seated next to each other on flight later today? Right now only one parent. Full flight.”

Exactly 19 minutes later, JetBlue tweeted back, suggesting they correspond privately, using Twitter’s “direct message” feature: “@tonywagner Please follow us so we may DM!” After a brief exchange, JetBlue flagged his tickets as a priority concern.

Mr. Wagner suspects he received better service because of Twitter’s viral nature. Twitterers habitually “re-tweet” one another’s posts, not unlike forwarding an e-mail message to everyone in your address book. Companies, he said, “want to head off the conversation as quickly as possible,” adding, that “it’s in their best interest to make people who have a pulpit happy.”

JetBlue puts a more positive spin on it. Disgruntled customers “tend to be the biggest opportunities,” said Morgan Johnston, a spokesman for the airline who helps manage its Twitter account, which has more than 770,000 followers. “We can take that person aside and kind of pull them in and say, ‘Hey, you seem to be really upset in front of several hundred or thousand people.’ ”

That might explain why some customers prefer Twittering over contacting customer service directly. “Their reaction time is speedier than being put on hold,” said Sydney Owen, 24, a public relations intern from Chicago who recently tweeted about a Southwest boarding pass she had misplaced and received a nearly immediate response from the airline.

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