Longitudinal Study Finds Increased Blogging and Tweeting in the Fortune 500

December 15, 2010 at 3:05 am · Filed under Blogging, Enterprise 2.0, Twitter

Here is some new research by Nora Ganim Barnes and Eric Mattson at the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.  I have covered some of their earlier work (see Fortune 500 Blogging Study ), This new study builds on their 2009 study and expands to look at the Fortune 500’s usage of Twitter.

The main findings indicated that 180 (22%) of the 2009 Fortune 500 have a public-facing corporate blog with a post in the past 12 months. This is up from 81 companies (16%) in 2008. To no surprise IT companies have the most blogs. This includes Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle and Xerox. The specialty retail industry increased its blogging by from 4 companies on the 2008 list to 7 from the 2009 list. Included are companies such as Home Depot, Best Buy, Toys “R” Us and BJ’s Wholesale. This is perhaps because of the increasing awareness of social media marketing.

The big players seem to like blogs more. The top 100 companies on the list represent 39% of the 108 blogs in the 2009 F500.  In 2008, 38% of the total number of blogs came from the top 100. The top 200 companies in 2009 had 58% of the F500 blogs, while the bottom 200 (those listed 301-500) had 29% of the 2009 F500 blogs. They seem to be open to conversations as 90% percent of the Fortune 500 blogs take comments, have RSS feeds and take subscriptions. This is consistent with the 2008 findings.

Of the 108 blogs located, 93 (86%) are linked directly to a corporate Twitter account. This is a three-fold increase from 2008. Twitter usage is now running ahead of blogs as 173 (35%) of the 2009 Fortune 500 has a Twitter account with a post within the past thirty days.  Only 4 protected their tweets and these were not included in the total.

The insurance industry has the most Twitter accounts (13) with It and telecom following with 10 each.  Like blogs size matters as 47% of the 173 twitter accounts belong to Fortune 500 companies in the top 200 while 35% come from those listed in the bottom 200 (201-500) on the 2009 list.

While there is growth in blogging in the Fortune 500 they are still blogging at a lower rate than the smaller Inc. 500 firms where 45% now have a blog.   You can find a complete listing of those with blogs and twitter accounts in the research paper.

So it seems that blogs and Twitter are taking hold. I found it interesting, but not surprising, that Twitter usage is higher. However, if you only tweet and do not blog you are not able to get comprehensive messages out and are generally pointing to the messages of others. Perhaps those Twitter only firms are just interested in getting sound bytes out.

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Analysts: Enterprise 2.0 to Get Even More Affordable

November 3, 2008 at 9:25 pm · Filed under Blogging, Enterprise 2.0, Microsoft, SOA, SharePoint, Wikinomics, Wikis

One of the advantages Enterprise 2.0 approaches offer in many situations is the relatively low or incremental prices at which technology is made available to organizations. It looks like things will even get more affordable.

A recent report from Forrester Research predicts the Enterprise 2.0 market is about to see impending “price drops” on tools ranging from blogs to wikis to social networks. Forrester analysts cite three specific reasons for the price drops:

“Commoditization, bundling, and subsumption. Increased competition and slowing innovation means that there is less differentiation between blogging solutions. Further, many vendors, from Microsoft to Six Apart, now offer a complete, enterprise-oriented suites that bundle a mature set of essential tools, which drives down prices for individual tools and specialized solutions.”

The increasing ubiquity of SharePoint — which supports many Enterprise 2.0 features — also may help to drive down prices from many other vendors, Forrester predicts.

The only area that may see price increases is software for handling mashups, Forrester predicts. “IT departments will prioritize mashup technology as part of portal, business intelligence, and business process management software investments as well as a major component of SOA implementations.”

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Will Tools Like Twitter Change the Ways We Work With Flows of Information and Knowledge ?

September 28, 2008 at 12:28 pm · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Blogging, Change, Conferences, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Hylton Joliffe, Social Computing, Stuart Henshall, Twitter, User Revolution, Web 2.0

This is an edited version of a post I recently put up on the KMWorld 2008 blog (in blockquotes, below).  The KMWorld 2008 conference was interesting (FAST had an exhibitor’s booth) and the contrast with last year in terms of the tangible interest in and take-up of social computing tools was evident.

People everywhere are beginning to understand, and practice with, the utility of "watching" snippets and fragments of peoples’ thoughts (see Dave Snowden’s KMWorld article titled "Everything Is Fragmented") and being able to instantiate and jump into a possible conversation when something interesting to them flows by.

 It works … for example, late last night I twittered a response to one of Jeremiah Owyang’s tweets pointing to his recent blog post about "What’s After The Social Web?", and shortly thereafter I had a Twitter direct message from Jeremiah in my email inbox saying "sounds interesting, I think you’re on to something .. tell me more".  A professional, potentially knowledge-building, conversation is brewing.

Here’s a summary of Stuart Henshall’s reflections on working with and in knowledge flows with the nascent micro-blogging

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A Master Strategist’s Take on a (Possible) Future of Knowledge “Management”

From the keyboard of Stuart Henshall, one of the most advanced thinkers about the “flows” of information combined with usability and innovation.

Stuart helped out with the blogging at the just-ended KMWorld and also gave a presentation on the last day about how people are beginning to use Twitter to connect, stimulate, catalyze and coordinate flows of information.

I thought he did a great job of outlining interesting possibilities .. but it seems he made some people nervous and some people stretch their minds. That may be because he has been immersed in the world of constant micro-flows of information and mobility for the last half-year while many of those at KMWorld are just now beginning to come to terms with blogging, using wikis and social computing. There may be one of those classic mismatches, the kind that lead to phrases like “You can always recognize the pioneers, they’re the ones walking around with arrows sticking out of their backs“.

Here’s Stuart’s post:.

Social Media or KM / KM or Social Media

I sat in earlier on a session on the Future of KM. There are three very different people on the panel. I’ve been listening with half an ear. This means what I write may have nothing to do with the context of the session. However, part of the reason we come to events like this is to spark other thoughts and tangents.

So far today I’ve not heard the word “flows”, I don’t hear “lifestreaming” I still feel what I am hearing is that knowledge is to be managed, moved, manipulated. Plus I just heard Dave Pollard say that SARS, 9/11, Katrina etc were all failures of classic knowledge management. I can’t quite put my finger on why KM isn’t learning and moving forward more quickly. It suggests to me that there remains a bigger problem.

Individuals are increasingly using personal tools, blogs, wikis, social networks, mobile phone, etc. As they move into this realm publicly they create more information about themselves. I’m increasingly seeing these tools being put to use by marketing / PR. KM seems to be missing these social media implications. Thus adoption of these tools is not being driven by the need to manage knowledge. Rather it’s driven by responding faster, being more adaptive, building on what others do, opening up systems so they can find that they need just in time. It’s a learning centric approach. I see it when I go to blogging sessions and talk to people there. The difference is they are believers.

[ Snip ... ]

I’m thinking more and more that the social media experts are likely to usurp or overturn many KM practices in time. The fact that SAP, Oracle and IBM are today all working with Twitter like updates is at least encouraging.

Maybe they can still sell a knowledge platform?

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It’s interesting that Stuart pointed out the directions large collaboration platforms are taking; Hylton Jolliffe, who manages this blog, just sent me an email a few days ago pointing out that Oracle’s developments with BeeHive may be signalling a new phase, while this ZDNet article (Did Oracle Burst The Enterprise 2.0 Startup Bubble?) suggest something similar.

At this very same conference one year ago (KMWorld 2007) Stuart wrote a post with which I agree 100% (link in the paragraph below) … while people in companies and business everywhere are looking for business case or ROI justification for using social media tools (while understanding semi-consciously that of course useful knowledge gets built in social interaction) they have to work (and experiment) at overcoming a lifetime of working in environments that divide and separate problems, responsibilities and challenges into discrete and divided bundles of tasks that are supposed to fit together like an orderly paint-by-numbers-like template (by which I mean an organizational chart).

To understand how using social media to increase effectiveness, responsiveness and innovation in an environment characterized by constant flows of information, you have to Use the Tools First; Then Talk To Me.

Read the whole post on a possible future for KM here ..

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The Human Voice – Leroy Sievers

August 18, 2008 at 6:00 am · Filed under Blogging, Cancer, Community, Death and Dying, Leroy Sievers, NPR, Public Media, Public Radio, Relationships, Web 2.0

Leroy Sievers died this weekend. This picture is one of him blogging for NPR on his cancer. His column on the NP Blog is called “My Cancer“.

I post about Leroy today not just to honor a great journalist and a courageous man but to make a point about voice. The human voice that is central to the relationship world that is struggling to emerge from the transactional world that we mainly inhabit today.

Leroy’s column at NPR was unusual in two ways. First of all it was based on a journalist telling a story about himself – what it was like to to live with and die from a disease that had condemned him. Death in our society is itself one of the great taboos. We can talk of almost anything but this. Secondly Leroy did not allow any distance between his public voice and himself. So he could and did talk of his fears and uncertainties, of the days when he despaired and felt too weak to go on, of the joys of little things and the vital importance of friends and lovers.

For those of us in the “club”, his column was an immense comfort. For we too feel all these things. By bringing his voice to the ’sphere, he gave us ours.

And that my friends is the point. Here is the announcement of his death on the blog. Please have a look at the comments – there are hundreds and hundreds already – to see what I mean by him giving us a voice.

For when it all is stripped away, the great power of the 2.0 world is not to sell us more stuff but to help us regain our humanity.

If you would like to know more about Leroy Sievers and what he meant to many people - NPR have a wonderful tribute page here

I find this photo album especially moving as Leroy unlocks the unpspoken words in others and they alo offer a glimpse of themselves – the face tells so much

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Culture – The Secret to a 2.0 Organization

August 11, 2008 at 9:12 am · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Barriers, Blogging, Business Model, CPB, Community, Control, Culture, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Enterprise Software, Interaction, KETC, Measurement, Mortage Crisis, Network Effect, Public Media, Public Radio, Public TV, Relationships, Social Media, Social Networking

What is the secret of a 2.0 organization? Is it merely the mastery of the tools?

If your organization is all about control and top down – it is unlikely that having a Wordpress site will take you to the new world of networks. To make a 2.0 world work for those you serve means that you have to have such a world working inside your organization.

So what do you do to get this? It is clear to me that we have made this shift at KETC in St Louis.

The context of this story is a project that KETC is working on to find ways of activating the community in St Louis to help reduce the pain of the mortgage crisis.

In so doing we are testing the big idea that Public Media can do more than bring Jane Austen to your TV screen. The CPB is testing this idea in St Louis and if we have enough progress – will expand the test to many other cities and stations.

So an important task that we have to fulfill will be to help the system replicate what we have done.

The easy part of this task will be the “Whats”. The Content we created, what we did on air, on the web, in meetings with the community etc. But I don’t think that only talking of the “what” will be very helpful. I think that it will be the “how” that is the real secret. The “how” will be about the new culture – the new set of work and social norms that are behind becoming a convener.

We surely have to become a Convener inside the station before we can have much a of a chance of being the Trusted Convener outside. That is the really hard work. I know that KETC has pulled this off. But how can I tell you about the how. How do you tell another about a new way of being?

This weekend while watching the Olympics I had an aha about the “How” that I would like to try here with you.

Here is a picture of the Canadian men’s 8 at the Olympics yesterday.

When all the 8 in the boat and the cox are aligned – something magic happens. All the effort is applied to the work. When this happens, you feel it. It is almost a spiritual feeling. It’s a form of magic. The boat just flies. You dissolve into a field that is the boat, the 8 and the cox. You are ONE. All friction and resistance is gone.

With a big race and your reputation on the line – the pressure to get aligned is huge – you can feel if one person is not there with you.

This is what it feels like in our KETC project meetings now. It feels like the boat is flying – it feels so good to be with the other members of the boat.

The pressure is there. As the guinea pig for Public Media we feel the eyes of thousands upon us. Upping the pressure to perform seems to help with transformation. Like heat applied to water creates steam or heat applied to iron with other things creates steel.

So creating pressure about results, time and scale is a first step. You don’t go gradually into this – you have to go full tilt.

We had no time. the project is only 3 months long. So there was no time to be incompetent. In the early days we had to re-arrange the boat a bit to get the team that could do the work and do it with the others. We could not tolerate anyone in the boat who could not pull their weight. We acted immediately when it was clear that the mission was being threatened. This is not the pub media way but it is the real community way. Real communities see everything and expect a lot. Real communities are not soft.

But after this initial shift – we know we have the right team. With the right team we build energy and confidence over time. There is a trust and a confidence in each other that has been developed by publicly and transparently experiencing the abilities of the others.

To get this transparency – we have a process that is built around all involved making public commitments.

It has developed by a simple part of the Project Management process – the day starts with asking each other for help. Every day we meet for 30 minutes to talk about what is going on and all the cards are face up on the table. We have learned to be explicit. Not rude but very clear. A very different norm from the past or most organizations. Accountability is fully visible.

This does not seem like the typical meeting that many of us have. It is very operational – what has to get done today and this week. But it is also very social. As trust has built there is also a lot of laughter and banter. The walls of the silos are coming down. We are finding that people who we did not know or trust much can be very helpful and that they can work miracles. Especially when the chips are down.

We have set major milestones and we have surpassed them all. Everyone has been tested in public. By being open – by being demanding in public – we are closer. Nothing is not unsaid anymore. You don’t have to whinge in the washroom. This is more than transparency – this is “clarity”.

So how does this happen? Well we are set up as I now see like an 8. The engine room is of course the department heads – they do the rowing. But it is the project management structure and discipline that makes the 8 go so well. So let’s look at this because all can replicate this.

First of all we have “Cox”. Not the project sponsor, not the President but the Cox (The Project Manager). In an 8, it is the cox – usually a very small person (Our PM is new and is very young but is an old soul) – who not only steers but who encourages and who works with the crew to respond to threats and opportunities as they happen on the water in the race. He is always pulling us back to the task. He is always asking the awkward question – he is always asking for more clarity. He uses humor and self-deprecation to get his way. But behind him is the power of the coach and the President. He can always use disappointment as power – “Do we really have to go to Jack about this?” usually settles most issues without escalation.

So the PM/Cox not only sets the process tone but also shows us how to use power as a convener. He uses personal power and almost never has to escalate because all the conversations are in the open – bad behavior – is obvious to all – social pressure ensures good behavior.

There is no doubt in my mind that Project Management is a key skill in the operation of a high performing organization. What it does is it keeps focus – it forces accountability – it manages the white space between the silos – for this is where the cooperation is demanded. For a while it all feels forced for this is new. But after 9 weeks it is our new normal.

Of course what is really happening is that the PM is “Convening”. He is holding the kind of open and trusted space that enables groups to work well with each other. The central process at KETC has become Convening.

We are also seeing that the project never ends. There is always complex work that is measured by outcomes to do. That raises another issue. Outcomes and measurement: in the old norm, we were soft on both. Now everything that we do has to have an objective and hence has to have a measure. This again was awkward at first but now is a new normal.

Which brings us to the “Coach”. The Coach in an 8 is not the cox. The coach’s work is all about ensuring that the goals are set and the capability is ready. We have such a role being played at KETC – the project Sponsor.

There is a lot of discipline in the role. The coach is not one of the guys. The coach pushes all the time. the coach has expectations.The coach sees the needs of the whole race/project. She sees how this race/project connects to others. She sees the development needs and she has an eagle eye on personnel. If someone is not working out, she has to deal with this.

Part of her power comes from her appointment. She has been selected by the “Club President”. She can escalate and does over personnel and budget issues. But she settles organizational issues from her position. But not all her power is delegated from the President. She has her own power based on her own achievements. For the coach is also rooted in their own talent. She has deep skills in a key area – Community Engagement. She has a track record of her own in getting tough jobs done well.

Finally we have the club president. He is responsible for the financial envelope – which provides the boat etc. This is a separate role to that of the Coach or the Cox. But in most organizations this person does all of this.

This is what I mean by Top Down organizations being political. They tend to be like medieval courts, where factions compete for influence and power. All the work happens in the corridors or in secret. Little is really visible. All in the end is decided by the King.

What is happening at KETC is that all the key work is now taking place in a process that is fully transparent. The President can look at the boat in the water and see all the workings. Accountability is clear.

• Each rower has his or her part and they have to be visibly working with the rest of the 8.
• The cox’s ability to get the boat running optimally in each race is clear to all – especially in the boat itself.
• The results of the boat belong to the coach – her role is clear.
• The resources for the club are the President’s role – and he is delivering and he also sets the tone.

The President in our case, asked the team for it all. He wants Gold in an Olympic setting and he asks for nothing less. In asking for all, he is getting it.

So that’s my metaphor. If you run your organization like a rowing team, if you set up the key roles as you find in a rowing team, you can make the shift inside from 1.0 to 2.0.

The irony is that the 2.0 world is more disciplined than the 1.0 world. But as you can see much of the discipline happens because of visibility and clarity. It’s like being in a small town. What you say and what you do can never be a secret. So your word and your actions define you. In a small town you also have to help each other.

In the 1.0 world of the huge city – there is little social pressure. All is anonimity. So there have to be rules and policemen and gaming the system.

Installing the kind of Project Management Process that we are using at KETC gives you a good shot at making this shift.

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