In my first post in July of 2007, I asked myself  - What were all these new tools going to be about?. For when the steam engine arrived, I am sure the Steam Geeks, all talked about pressure, bearings etc. But steam changed the world. It forced us to use the clock. It meant that food could move long distance and so enabled vast cities pulling us from the country where we had lived for millenia.It changed war and enabled millions to be supplied and to move.

So back in July of 2007, that is the context that I asked the question “What’s it all about?”

I feel good and bad about how my question got answered by life.  What we have seen is an acceptance of the new tools in many cases. I wrote the Twitter Guide for FF in December of 2008. Then most could not spell Twitter let alone imagine how it would change media and how we get our news. While Facebook can be seen as silly with all its games and pictures that we might regret, Twitter and Facebook have made a difference in the emerging freedom movements in the world. Social Media, especially in the video context, has enabled new ideas to get traction way earlier than before. Web Based Video is surely the Gutenberg Press of our time?

Most people have made the new media part of their lives. Skype is how we old farts communicate with our kids and grand kids. Who does not have a Android or iPhone that enables us to navigate, read books, stay in touch in a way that was impossible to imagine back in 2007.

The area that I am sad about is business. Yes in some cases the tools have been adopted but not the culture that is the game changer. So most large enterprise is really no different than it was back in 2007. Less than half of small business has ven taken the first step! Government also keeps the lid on. Politicians have their twitter handle. Departments have a facebook account. But the need to control everything from the top remains the dominating pressure.

So for me there is this disconnect between the people – who are all of us – and when we get inside a traditional organization.

As the people, we are being empowered and liberated by this new technology. Like Steam in its day, it is starting to change everything. People now can work where they live and chose where they live based on what they want and not have to fit into an office and one place. Very small business now has access to a global market and has tools that are often better than those used by large firms. New food systems are emerging. You can buy Bison meat online. A new education system is emerging. You can participate in some of the best lectures given by the best people at the best universities. New approaches to health are emerging – witness the take off of Paleo and Ancestral Health.

But the establishment is entrenching. Newspapers are putting up paywalls. Politicians praise the use of social media in the Middle East, but want to halt its use at home. Business leaders talk about innovation but do all they can to prevent it.

I think we close the Fast Forward Blog at an important juncture. I and my colleagues have done our best to show you what is coming in a timely and thoughtful way. We have stressed adoption. But now I think a line has been drawn in the sand. It is clear to all that just as Henry Ford invented a model for the enterprise in 1905 that overwhelmed all the artisans, so all the artisans connected in a global network, will overwhelm the Ford model. There is nothing moral about this. It is Darwin. In 1905 the better model won. So it will be again today.

So here is my last exhortation to any of you who push back at the cultural work that comes with using social media to its potential, do you want to be on the right side of history or not?

I know I ask no small thing. For when we change ur core culture, a large art of us has to die and who can face that easily?

So in all humility, thank you for reading us here. Thank you Fast and Microsoft for being so generous as owners. I have never been told to toe a party line. Thank you my dear fellow FF writers. We have known each other for many years now. I will miss interacting with you so much.

Three years ago we embarked on a journey of hosting an Enterprise 2.0 discussion through the FASTForward Blog. The aim of this blog was to drive and deepen conversation about how today’s companies can use technology to put users in control of information. It was home to the ongoing discussion about Enterprise 2.0 opportunities and challenges.

The FASTForward Blog like the Enterprise 2.0 discussion has had many ebbs and flows. When we started the discussions were focused on Enterprise 2.0 adoption and today we are moving towards convergence.

The conversation has shifted and the focus we had at the beginning has changed. Just look at Rob Patterson’s post “Is Shutting Down Social Networks the best response to unrest”, a quick look at how community and the police are using social media to help with cope with the rioters in the UK or the post about Designing Mobile Apps by Bill Ives.

Those two posts indicate that our content has evolved and our initial purpose has been fulfilled with widespread discussion of E2.0 occurring in businesses and organizations of all sizes.

With that in mind, we will be closing the FASTForward Blog. Microsoft has hosted this discussion and we think you will agree that it has offered a forum for some stimulating, thought provoking and at times controversial conversations and for that we are thankful and hope that you have found value in your visits.
We have asked our most active bloggers over the last year to post closing comments for you. Thank you for the opportunity to host the conversation.

Jim Worth has done a very valuable service by setting up a wiki, Enterprise 20 Boston Social Web Coverage June 20 2011, to collect the coverage of the recent Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. It includes:

-       tweetlog transcripts of each day

-       conference links

-       the presentations

-       the blog posts

-       press coverage

-       pictures and videos

-       conference tweeters

I am amazed and grateful for what Jim has done. He has done this for other events see his complete listings. It was a great event and here is the record of what was done and the comments on what happen. I also enjoyed spending time with him at a number of sessions and events. Thanks, Jim.

Is corporate social media ethical? Is there a “Tom Sawyer syndrome” at work in which people are suckered into doing work thinking that it’s something to be enjoyed?

Those are the provocative questions raised by Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, at the recent South by Southwest Interactive confab. His argument: a key value proposition of social networking is crowdsourcing, in which an actively engaged community contributes new ideas for innovation, or even does some piecework, for little or no compensation. As reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Zittrain argues that these may be morally questionable ventures.

On these pages at FastForward, we have explored some of the opportunities social networking provides for businesses to improve customer interactions, including reliance on influencers to solve customer problems, as well as crowdsourcing. In the former case, a company essentially can be spared hundreds of thousands of dollars in customer service costs as proponents on the network take care of sticky problems with products or services.

As one observer recently summed up the economics of crowdsourcing:

“Penny-pinching companies are hiring specialists to plumb the vast resources of the Web in search of cheap expert help,” he writes. Crowdsourcing “is gaining momentum among businesses, non-profits and individuals who are getting work done at a fraction of the normal cost.”

Still, Zittrain argued that many social networked arrangements amount to digital sweatshops and opportunities to exploit distressed labor. As he was paraphrased as saying at SWSX:

“Fees paid for crowdsourced tasks are usually so meager that they could not possibly earn participants a living wage, Mr. Zittrain argued. He is familiar with one group drawn to the services: poor graduate students seeking spending money. In many cases, companies have persuaded people to complete simple tasks for no pay at all, instead offering recognition within the volunteer community or points in the guise of a game. Mr. Zittrain called it ‘a wonderful Tom Sawyer syndrome.’”

However, many crowdsourcing arrangements do have compensation at the end, since many are positioned as competitions. Corporations such as GE and federal agencies including NASA position their crowdsourcing efforts as such, with a cash prize at the end as incentive for the selected innovation.  As such, these activities may be as morally questionable as an essay contest.

A counterpoint raised at SWSX was that unlike digital sweatshops, efforts by participants are entirely voluntary, and end-users can log off at any time. In many cases, the work provides benefit to society.

Along these lines, consider the work of Digitalkoot (Digital Volunteers), which has marshalled more than 25,000 volunteers from across Europe and the globe have been partaking in the digitization of historical collections at the National Library of Finland. The Digitalkoot program enlists online volunteers, via crowdsourcing, to help digitize millions of pages of archive material. The project is catching all the text that optical character recognition technology misses, and therefore requires manual patching. Through two online games, volunteers complete small portions of work, or microtasks, to help correctly digitize historical content. The national library reports that the volunteers have already completed more than two million individual tasks, totaling 1,700 hours of work.

Also, while the idea of crowdsourcing labor sounds scary, it also is a huge opportunity for many workers as well. Drake Bennett, writing in the Boston Globe, observed that crowdsouring has opened up greater opportunities for workers and companies across parts of the globe. For example, txteagle, which distributes work to mobile cell-phone users across the globe to handle image, audio and text-based tasks. txteagle is now one of Kenya’s largest employers, employing a 10,000-strong workforce is a network of freelancers.

It appeared that the White House was blindsided by events in Egypt at first. The traditional intel sources failed to spot the undercurrents that suggested a revolt. NPR report today that this oversight is being corected – the Intellignce Community is going to learn how to scan the web for “smoke”.

Traditionally, intelligence agencies have relied on top-secret information to track changes in other countries. But wiretaps and secret intercepts didn’t help U.S. officials predict the Arab Spring that has brought revolution across the Middle East and North Africa.

In hindsight, officials say there could have found some clues about what was about to happen if they had read open sources more closely. Now they are searching for systematic ways to do that.

The uprisings in the region have shown intelligence officials that they need new ways to understand what motivates people around the world. While traditional intelligence tools can help, they are limited in their ability to put their fingers on the pulse of society or anticipate fickle human behavior.

“The traditional intelligence community is absolutely biased toward classified information,” said Lt. Col. Reid Sawyer, an Army intelligence officer and head of West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center. “I think that open source provides a critical lens into understanding the world around us in a much more dynamic way than traditional intelligence sources can provide.”

Isn’t this how all “intelligence” will work now?

In the past we have asked questions? Used artificial groups like focus groups. Our choices have influenced what we heard back. But now, we can listen and see patterns emerge. This is how we will also present the data – not in a linear report but as a pattern. Too weird an idea? Check this brilliant example of patterning and the Middle East designed by the Guardian. Here by taking a pattern perspective, we can see how momentum builds and broadens. We can see the dynamics!

We can all do this for any issue that we care about.

Here is a useful Gilbane research report on Smart Content in the Enterprise by Geoff Bock, Dale Waldt, and Mary LaPlante. It covers XML applications. As the authors note, these application have long proven value with reusable componentized content.  However, it has been hard for XML champions to get greater acceptance within the enterprise. The report explores this parado. Thr authors looked at both failures and successes to try and abstract common points that could be used by firms wanting to make greater use of the potential within XML.

To answer these questions, they talked with business and technology leaders connected with successful XML deployments and supplemented this with their own experience in XML implementations.  The key findings include a shift toward an outward facing customer impact view of content practices rather than a focus on internal operational efficiencies.

The authors write that this change in focus for finding value is causing a reversal in how applications are designed. Rather than starting with the content creation process for greater efficiency, successful applications of XML begin with the content delivery process to increase value to the user. Then they work backward to the creation effort.  This reversal has sparked a demand for new ways to enrich content with XML tags for better embedded metadata. The focus on the end state of content use has also broadened the range of contributors to its creation. It has also encouraged the additional of more social components.

The authors use the term “smart content” to describe this new use of XML.  It is granular at the right level, useful across applications, and supports collaboration.  All of these are traits that can be useful in the more social enterprises and Web sites that are emerging and, according to the research, benefits are there.  It makes sense to me and it seems that smarter use of XML is one way to ride the current wave of interest in social applications.  The report is addressed to both implementers and vendors in this space and should provide great value to both.

The report concludes that it is important to focus on four content factors: granularity, enrichment, interoperability, and collaboration. The built in granularity needs to be complex enough to support effective repurposing and simple enough to not make this repurposing too difficult. Enrichment guidelines follow this just enough advice. Interoperability is supported by rich tags. The report offers the example of combining directory listing with location information to offer localized content. Collaboration can be enhanced by getting the right content to the right users through smarter content.

The report offers a rich set of findings, case examples, practical advice, and addresses the change management issues required to make effective use of smart content. If you plan to make effective use of XML or you are building applications to address this market, this report should provide valuable insights. It is publicly available for download at the Gilbane web site.

Is ‘Social CRM’ (customer relationship management) too good to be true?

Houston Neal, who runs an advisory service for software buyers, has been watching the growing hype around “Social CRM,” and asks: is it for real?

The answer is, he opines, not yet, but organizations sure could use it.  The problem is, he says, nobody has a good definition for Social CRM yet, and this is creating confusion in the market.

As I mentioned in a previous post here at FastForward, “Social CRM” has a redundant ring to it. Think of the phrases “round circle” or “free gift” or “digital computer.”  The bottom line is that if a company has a non-social, closed-off CRM system, it really isn’t doing CRM at all, is it?

Any CRM implementation worth its salt these days need to blend social media data into the system. Otherwise, it’s a system that is completely missing an important and growing channel that involves many highly engaged customers. The key is to make all your CRM efforts “Social” CRM efforts.

Houston points to another issue that may hamper putting more social into CRM — a highly fragmented market. “The debate over Social CRM has been drawn out over the past couple of years and analysts are still at odds over how to define it. Depending on who you ask, social CRM will mean something different.”

For example, he points out, the social CRM landscape is comprised of several evolving software categories — including the following:

• CRM packages
• Social media monitoring
• Social platforms
• Social analytics

Each category has about 20 to 150 vendors, Houston says. The challenge is deciding which category of software to pursue. He offers the following advice for sorting out a Social CRM strategy:

Don’t look to buy ‘Social CRM’ solutions: “Instead, you need to decide what you are trying to accomplish and which categories [mentioned above]  are most likely to make a meaningful contribution to your strategy.”

Define your goals for a Social CRM strategy: “If you just want to track what customers are saying about your brand on the Web, then a social media monitoring application will suffice. But if you want to analyze that data, identify influencers, or spot trends, you should explore social analytics. Finally, if owning the community is strategically important, you will need a platform to build out that environment for your constituents.”

Look to traditional CRM vendors for enhanced enterprise functionality: “Social CRM vendors don’t offer the same level of sales, service and marketing functionality that traditional CRM vendors offer. So if you need capabilities like sales lead management, lead nurturing and a few social features on the side, then you should really be looking at CRM software.

What exactly is the difference between “Social Business” and “Enterprise 2.0,” if there is one?

The question came up at in a Quora discussion, and asked again by Ross Dawson in one of his latest posts.

It’s semantics, but important semantics. Many articles and papers are using the terms interchangeably.  You may recall it was Andrew MacAfee who first surfaced the term “Enterprise 2.0″ back in 2007 as a way to describe the application of Web 2.0 approaches and thinking to enterprise settings, but separate it from the consumerist fanfare.

For his part, Ross sees Social Business as an emerging way to describe the transformation that organizations are undertaking as part of their Enterprise 2.0 activities. Enterprise 2.0 as a term may have a more technical cast to it.

In the Quora discussion, our colleague Jevon McDonald also saw Enterprise 2.0 in terms of the tools and Social Business as the outcome:

“Enterprise 2.0 represents a set of technologies and methodologies for IT implementation inside the enterprise. A Social Business uses Enterprise 2.0 software to implement internal social process but also accounts for things such as: external social presence, supporting process, HR issues, policy development and governance.”

Stowe Boyd echoed similar sentiments:

“A social business is an organization designed consciously around sociality and social tools, as a response to a changed world and the emergence of the social web, including social media, social networks, and a long list of other advances. Enterprise 2.0 is generally used to represent the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies — like cloud computing, social media, wikis, and the like — and is, as such, principally a technology adoption issue, and not a reconceptualization of business operations.”

John Tropea, on the other hand, sees Social Business as the journey to reach Enterprise 2.0. E 2.0, he says, is more the idealized end state — Enterprise 2.0 is a concept and strategy to do business a different way…  a more transparent workplace, two-way communication, networked/activity centric overlayed on the present process-centric and blended with hierarchy.” As he puts it:

“With social business design we may reach a state of enterprise 2.0 eventually.”

So which comes first — Enterprise 2.0 or Social Business?

Consider the plight of the Web designer.  I saw a comic a couple of years back (author unknown) that really laid out quite well the hair-pulling process of designing, building, and maintaining a site.  It goes something like this:

1. “Everything is cool the beginning.  The client communicates their needs. You set expectations. Enthusiasm and excitement all ’round.”
2. “The client shows you their current Website. You both laugh at how terrible it is.”
3. “You redesign the Website. It looks nice and works well. This is the high point of the design.”
4. “Just a few ‘minor’ changes.”
5. “Minor changes start to add up.”
6. “The client gets others involved:  ‘Looks great, but I want feedback from my friends, co-workers, uncle, pet hamster, etc.’”
7. “All hope is lost.  You begin to fantasize about other careers… “
8. “You are no longer a Web designer. You are a mouse cursor inside a graphics program which the client can control by speaking, emailing and instant messaging.”
9. “An abomination is born. The client has completely forgotten that they hired you, the Web designer, to build them a great product.”

The process of Website design and management has turned up many, many abominations for businesses across the land. However, social networking may be sorting that all out.  In fact, the flight from Website abominations may now be fueling the social networking movement for many businesses.

IDC’s Frank Gens, for one, recently issued his predictions for the year ahead, and foresees social networking software growing at a 38% percent clip over the next five years. In addition, more than one-quarter of vendors could be gobbled up in 2011:

“We believe that — as a sure sign of social business mainstreaming — 2011 will be a year of consolidation and convergence for social business software vendors, as well as a year of adoption expanding into small and medium-sized businesses.”

The small to medium size business sector is an interesting and growing sweet spot for social enterprise. In fact, SMB adoption is likely to grow to 40 percent of these companies employing online services to better market their products and services, he predicts. The benefit to small businesses:  it’s cheaper and easier to use free online social media services than to go through the time and expense of setting up a customized Website.

In his 2011 report, Gens observes that Website development has topped out for many small and medium-size businesses. Instead, he says, “small and midsize firms will increasingly flock to Facebook and other social networks to establish a free online presence that improves their ability to acquire, engage, and retain customers without the hassle and cost of setting up a traditional Website. We predict that the percentage of SMBs using social networks for promotional purposes will exceed 40% by year-end 2011.”

Innovation is often looked at as a random acts of brilliance, but there are now ways to employ technology and services to capture and channel new ideas along the right course.

Some software tools — sometimes referred to as “ideation” platforms — have emerged to try to better systemize the innovation process. The idea is that ideas can be moved through a workflow of processes — just as projects are managed by project management software — from initial design to proposal stage, refinement, and funding.

How many ideas never get off the ground, languish, or are never even voiced, since enterprises usually don’t have formal systems to capture them and hold them up for possible conversion into new products and services?

Social networking can support this process every step of the way.  There’s plenty of excitement, of course around the formulation stage, which is often crowdsourced with awards and prizes to the brightest bulb.

There are other ways social networking plays roles throughout the idea lifecycle. Forrester’s Nigel Fenwick walks through the stages of moving ideas from inception to productization, and the role of social in a new post:

INVENT:  Ideation communities to propose and rank new ideas; discussion boards and wikis for exploring possibilities.

VALIDATE: Blogs and discussion boards to test concepts.

INCUBATE: Collaboration work groups; customer and partner communities.

IMPLEMENT: Promotion through social channels such as blogs, microblogs, videos, and communities.

MEASURE: Measure impact through social communities; reward idea contributors through community kudos.