What would it be like if your business had a sales, marketing and support force that was 1.3 million strong that you did not have to pay for? What if you could source this leverage with a tiny central force? Sounds impossible? Do you have any idea of how this could work?

Now that everyone is using Social Media – what I am seeing mainly are people who using the new tool in the old way – trying to shout above the noise – “Look at ME!” “Aren’t I cool!” “Aren’t we good!”. I am seeing a Dilbert approach – “Let’s have a Facebook site” “Let’s get on Twitter”.

Most do what most do when a new technology arrives – they apply it in the old way and so get nothing in response.

So what then is the power and leverage that you can harness by using social media well?

Boingo are on their way to finding out how to do this. Oh yes and I am one of the people that are part of this and oh yes I am not being paid and nor do I in any way work for them. I am living the theory.

So how might this work and so how might you do this too?

Boingo have a class of people that are deeply committed to the enterprise that Baochi calls her “Super fans”. They and why they are connected to Boingo and each other is the core of the leverage potential. We will meet 4 of them in this post who agreed enthusiastically to be interviewed by me. As you will see, these Super Fans are attracted first of all to Boingo by the obvious:

• The service – easy one stop access to Wifi in Airports and Hotels – is now no longer a nice to have for travellers but an essential
• The support for the service is outstanding – got a problem – you get instant personal help

But a great product is not enough. Nor is good service. What is the differentiator for Boingo is the human nature of the relationship that Boingo has with its customers. Most organizations do not allow their people to be human. Service people are often ciphers working from a script. Boingo have set up an environment where their key point of contact is a real person who is allowed to be herself.

She has a name and a face and we are all in awe and a bit in love with her. We all feel her presence watching over us. It is way more than getting her help when we can’t sign on. She watches out for us. Have a problem – A quick tweet. In minutes she is there. She is like the guy who runs the old corner store who holds your keys when you go away, keeps an eye on your kids in the street, helps you find a new roommate.

As Nuno Montegro, a customer in Portugal says – It is not what she says but how she says things that is the difference.

Nuno is like me, a customer who actively refers others to the service.

Most of Social media is all about Weak Ties – They are very useful but Weak Ties don’t get people to do much – or risk much – or commit much – that is why they are Weak – they are easy.

If you want to do something – Civil Rights in the US – you need Strong Ties. (Nice new piece by Malcolm Gladwell that explores Weak and Strong Ties in depth)

The key to attracting Strong Ties is being human. It is NOT PIMPING your product. It is instead to show that you really do care about ME. It is instead to show that you can indeed be trusted.

How do you show this? Nuno makes the point that every service and product fails at times. The key is to offer the best possible response to the inevitability of a problem. The best possible response is to know from experience that if there is a problem, you can reach a real person quickly and that they will go the distance to help you get it fixed. “I felt as if I was the only customer in the entire world when she was helping me” Nuno told me. I had the same experience.

Attracting Strong Ties is all about “Giving”.

Aaron Strout is the CMO at social media agency, Powered Inc. and is also Super Fan. “Boingo is proactive and they don’t expect a direct return – they are not selling all day – so if they want an inch, I go the mile back. It’s Karmic! I know if I have a problem that they will look after me. If people are good and do good, then good comes back. Not necessarily directly but good gets attracted back. We talk about a wide range of things that affect me not just the product – which is great too – have to have that – they listen.”

What Aaron is talking about here is a very old model for an economy that was the centre of all tribal economies – the Gift Economy. In the Gift Economy, the Big Guy is not the man who has the most stuff but the person who gives the most.

This is the power in networks – this is how Open Source Works too.

Cliff Bremmer is a programmer who works for a company called Carley Corporation that bids on government contracts to develop instructional CD base/computer based training for the US military.  ”In my spare time I help companies understand and navigate the social media spectrum in a professional yet interactive way.  The company I’m currently helping is the one my father works for called the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel“.

The Gift?

Not only is he a fan but in interacting with Boingo he has learned a lot about how to use SM media well. “If there is anything I’m proud of lately it’s that I helped the Pegasus Hotel promote their brand with the help and support of @Boingo and other companies to become one of the most popular brands in Jamaica.” Boingo is  not only helping him with his travel and Wifi but is talking with him and helping him help his dad in his business with advice and Tweet Up prizes such as free access and bag tags. The Gift in action!

He can see the flaws of how most use SM – “They are stuck in self promotion versus communication. I can see through it all – it’s all about them.”

In the Gift Economy that drives Trust and so Strong Ties, the starting point is YOU. In the non network economy the starting point is ME. No small difference!

Shelby Rogers is a flight attendant, a serving soldier (in the active reserve) and the wife of a serving soldier. Travel is her life. When she is not working, she travels. Access to Wifi has made her travel better – “I now know more than the Gate Agent does about my flights!” and it has taken away much of the loneliness that travel brings with it. Who has not been alone eating room service and watching TV in our room? “I can stay in touch with my husband on Skype and every city seems to have a friend in it.”

For Shelby, Boingo is a service that truly meets her needs. But it is how Boingo is connected to her that has transformed a pleased customer into a Super fan.

How often has your service provider taken you out to dinner? “We have even had dinner recently. I am now a walking billboard for Boingo with winking bag tags!”

So what does this mean? What are the lesson for both Boingo and for you?

• Baochi is no accident – the Boingo senior leadership have created the role and given it the space to enable someone who is naturally humane to be herself inside it. This new way of using Strong Ties to be the centre of a network is all about culture. In most cases senior leadership is too scared to let go. But if you do let go and create this safe place then the power of the network effect can be yours
• A really powerful network has to have an inner core bound by Strong Ties. This is where the leverage is. One staff person like Baochi can without too much trouble have close ties with 34 people. That gives her an outer network of 1.3 million. If she can handle the Dunbar limit of 144 that creates an opportunity of 400 million! You can see that with the right person, you can have a vast reach – provided you realize that your goal is not to have thousands of relationships but a few Strong Ones
• The secret is the math of social leverage. Many of you know about the “Dunbar Number”. Some of you know about “Magic numbers – the hierarchy of trust in human groups. If you don’t here is a quick primer.

So what now?

I think that the next stage would be this:

• At the moment all the Super Fans have a strong relationship with Baochi – I think that the best next step might be to find a way to connect them to each other
• At the  moment most of the dialogue is still about the obvious and excellent service that Boingo provides – I think that some of the work that the Super Fans could do might be to deepen the conversation – Shelby touched on this in her interview with me – What is it that being easily connected while travelling does? In her case it helped her deal with isolation and loneliness – it helped her do her job better – it kept her in touch with her husband – these are deep issues that I think connect all of us who travel a lot

As I think about networks, I think about the laws of physics. All systems have order and attractors. Some force is needed to keep systems coherent.

Think of the Sun in our own local system. It has mass that provides a gravity that holds all the planets and asteroids and stuff in a pattern. It has energy that creates life in the system. I think that any healthy human social system has to have gravity and light.

At the very centre is the “Right Space” a Trusted Space created by the leadership. In this Space, the Right Person – Right being a person who as part of her natural persona truly cares about others. Connected to her is the fuel and the mass that makes up the Sun – the Super Fans. The closer they are to the centre and the closer they are to each other – the more mass and the more energy. The more mass and energy, the larger and more healthy the network of Weak Ties that form up around the Sun.

What gets in the way is our fear about losing control.

At Disney the surface of the Brand Icon never changes but inside the mask is a person who changes all the time and so is never allowed to speak.

But in the new world we have to take off the costume and let the person inside have conversations with the public – HARD to do.

Email usage has dropped 28% in the last 12 months! (Matt Forcey)

A recent study by Nielsen that focused on how Americans spend their time online, unexpectedly found that email usage has dropped by 28% over the last year.  Since we’re certainly not communicating any less, what are people doing as an alternative?  Not surprisingly, the data show that social networking use increased by 43% over the same time period.  A separate analysis determined that Mobile Internet use has also increased dramatically.

When I used to have a real job, one of the things I hated about being on vacation was the dread of what woud face me in my email inbox. As it became easier to access email remotely, I began to check in every day just to keep the load and the surprises down. Today when accessing email remotely is commonplace nearly all my pals in the conventional workplace tell me that they do the same. (The full report is here)

The young, under 30, hardly use it at all – they don’t even use the phone.

But what about the rest of us who still work for and with organizations that make email the centre of the communications system? Can you push back and get more productive? Here are two well known people who have confronted this question and have won the battle.

My old pal Luis Suarez at IBM is best known for his war against email and the misuse of it that crushes productivity.

I have been consistently getting less and less email by the week, and, even more exciting, way below the 20 emails per week mark!, which surely is making a good progress from when I started 2.5 years ago. Remember, at the beginning, before starting this experiment, I used to receive 30 to 40 emails per day! And now, 2.5 years later, it’s just 17 emails per week! Yes, indeed, you are reading it right! I’m now averaging 17 emails received per week, while the majority of my online interactions are now happening through social software tools.

So, to me, it is not just a drop of 28% in the past 12 months, but way over 90% of the email I used to get! And, not sure what you would think, but that’s *huge!* Yes! Being able to state how email is no longer the only game in town for me, quite the opposite!, actually, is a good thing. It proves it can be done! It proves I am not the only one who can make it happen. And this is when it gets really exciting! When you see other folks increasingly paying more and more attention as to how they interact with their email Inboxes and how they effectively start looking for ways of reducing such email clutter.

Very exciting, indeed! Even more when you notice it’s folks around you who are starting to ask you how you can help them eliminate most of their incoming emails and instead progress towards a much more receptive adoption of social software tools for business. That’s why I’m pretty jazzed up about seeing a whole bunch of fellow co-workers who are continuing to make efforts to reduce their email workload. To the point where entire teams are figuring out strategies to make it work for them and over the last couple of weeks I have been working with a couple of them where there is plenty of promise ahead! Yay!

But it gets better! Because over the last few weeks as well I’m starting to notice how even customers want to figure out ways on how they themselves can get rid of, or reduce substantially, their incoming email. And they seem to keep finding me out there as they search how it can be done (Double yay for #lawwe), which is really good news, because I have been invited a couple of times already to go and present to them how they themselves could live “A World Without Email“.

Why and how did Luis do this? Here is a link to an excellent interview with Luis conducted by the Doyenne of the Social Media world in Canada, Nora Young at Spark (CBC Radio). The interview was almost exactly a year ago and as with this post was timed to appear as we all struggled back to work and a full email inbox.

Luis’ main issue with email is that it makes it too easy for someone else not to care or know if you are busy and to impose work upon you or to engage you in their politics at no real cost to themselves. For instance – if I was to send you a large document as an attachment – there are many steps that you must take to read it – and then it all gets even worse if you wish my comments etc. Far easier to share a document. For instance, how many times have you got a “Cover my ass” CC or BCC? When what was really needed was a real debate? How many tomes have you been really busy and have a colleague impose a deadline on their stuff on you? This is the kind of behavior that Luis objects to.

Or what about all those newsletters that you don’t have time to read? Or those missives from on high from senior management that tell you how great they are or how we all have to ull up our socks?

Luis is not the only person pushing back. Jason Fried CEO of 37 Signals has an impassioned plea about how the workplace itself crushes productivity.

Yeah, my feeling is that the modern workplace is structured completely wrong. It’s really optimized for interruptions. And interruptions are the enemy of work. They are the enemy of productivity, they are the enemy of creativity, they are the enemy of everything. But that’s what the modern workplace is all about, it’s interruptions. Everyone’s calling meetings all the time, everyone’s screaming people’s names across the thing, there’s phones ringing all the time. People are walking around. It’s all about interruptions. And people go to work today, and then they end up doing most of their real work after work, or on the weekends. So, people are working longer hours, people are tired – I’m working 50-60 hours this week. It’s not that there’s 50 or 60 hours worth of work to do, it’s because you don’t work at work anymore. You go to work to get interrupted.

What happens is, is that you show up at work and you sit down and you don’t just immediately begin working, like you have to roll into work. You have to sort of get into a zone, just like you don’t just go to sleep, like you lay down and you go to sleep. You go to work too. But then you know, 45 minutes in, there’s a meeting. And so, now you don’t have a work day anymore, you have like this work moment that was only 45 minutes. And it’s not really 45 minutes, it’s more like 20 minutes, because it takes some time to get into it and then you’ve got to get out of it and you’ve got to go to a meeting.

Then when the meeting’s over, you’re probably pissed off anyway because it was a waste of time and then the meeting’s over and you don’t just go right back to work again, you got to kind of slowly get back into work. And then there’s a conference call, and then someone calls your name, “Hey, come a check this out. Come over here.” And like before you know it, it’s 4:00 and you’ve got nothing done today. And this is what’s happening all over corporate America right now. Everybody I know, I don’t care what business they’re in. Like when I talk to them about this, it’s like “Yeah, that’s my life.” Like, that is my life, and it’s wrong.

And so I think that has to change. If people want to get things done, they’ve got to get rid of interruptions.

Email is just part of this uncritical work culture that forces many to do their work after hours at home!

So what do Luis and Jason offer up as an alternative?

Luis still thinks that email has a place – in calendar management and in private one on one matters such as salary etc. But he has found that he can push back and negotiate a better way for nearly every category of work. Want me to work on your document – then share it with me! Have an issue to solve – open a conversation in public! Want to avoid being put upon by others – work in public so that people can see when you are busy – so if you use shared documents – people can see you are editing or drafting.

The whole point is to learn how to protect your time.

Jason has  the same advice.

So, this isn’t really a plug, but we use our product called Campfire, which is a real time chat tool. That is our office. Campfire is our office, and that’s a web based chat tool where there’s a persistent chat room open all the time. Anyone who has a question for anyone else in the company posts it there and in real time, everyone else can see it if they’re looking at it. But if they’re busy, they just don’t pay attention. And then if non one responds, then that means someone is busy. Not like, I’m going to keep calling their name until they turn around. That’s what it’s like in most offices. Or you ring someone and they’re not there and so you call their name, and they’re not there, so you go to their office and you bang on their door. If someone doesn’t respond in Campfire, it means they’re busy. And unless it’s a true emergency, where you really need an answer right now, then you just let them be and they’ll get back to you in three hours. And the truth of the matter is, there are almost no true emergencies in business. Everything can wait a few hours. Everything can wait a day. It’s not a big deal if you get back to me later in the day for me to know right now.

And the other thing about interruptions and calling people’s names, and ringing them on the phone and stuff, it’s actually really an arrogant sort of move because you’re saying that whatever I have to ask you is more important than what you’re doing. Because I’m going to stop you from doing what you are doing for me to ask you this questions that probably doesn’t matter anyway. So, we’re very cognizant of this, and we make sure that we only ping people, that’s what we call it, digitally and in ways that will not really get in their way if they’re really busy.

He uses his own tool but of course there are many tools that we can use – the tool is not the key it is the idea of working in public that is.

How do you get others to play? Well if you are Jason – it’s easy you are the CEO! But Luis is not the CEO. He publicly told the world that this was his intent. He pushes back and negotiated with his own team and colleagues – and the value of this spread out.

Here is a mind map from Luis that shows you his process and his results

If you’ve been tuning in to this blog over the past few days you’ve seen dozens of great interviews by Josh-Michele Ross fly by with interesting speakers and participants in FASTforward’09. As the conference winds down, we thought it would be helpful to gather up a list of the interviews to date. Be sure to check them out when you get a chance – there are tons of excellent insights and stories being shared from many of the conference’s keynote speakers, the contributors to this blog, executives at Microsoft, and other important thinkers and players in media, business, the enterprise, and social computing.

Geoffrey Cubitt, CTO, Roundarch
Jeffrey Dachis, enterprise social technology startup
Jørn Ellefsen, CEO, Comperio
Sue Feldman, research vice president, Content Technologies Group, IDC
Rob Helm, director of research, Directions on Microsoft
Bill Ives, blog consultant and FASTforward blog contributor
Sandy Kemsley, BPM analyst
Kirsti Kierulf, Director, The Fast Innovation Center and Director, Innovation, Technology, and Learning, Accenture
Peter Kim, enterprise social technology startup
Venkat Krishnamoorthy, Head of Investment and Advisory Platform Development, Thomson Reuters
Charlene Li, Altimeter Group
Jevon MacDonald, founder of Firestoker and FASTforward blog contributor
Jim McGee, managing director of New Shoreham Consulting and contributor to the FASTforward blog
Joe McKendrick, author, independent analyst and contributor to the FASTforward blog
Lynda Moulton, lead analyst for enterprise search, The Gilbane Group
Bjørn Olstad, distinguished engineer, Microsoft and CTO, FAST
Robert Paterson, social media consultant and contributor to the FASTforward blog
Bhupesh Pattni, search specialist with News International
Daniel Rasmus, director of business insights, Microsoft Business Division, Microsoft
Valentin Richter, managing director and founder of Raytion
Tom Rizzo, director of SharePoint product management
Clay Shirky, author, consultant, professor
Matt Skone, senior software engineer, LexisNexis
Walton Smith, senior associate, Booz Allen
Perry Solomon, director, product management, Enterprise Search Group, Microsoft
Jared Spataro, director, Enterprise Search, Microsoft
Mark Stone, practice lead, Enterprise Search, EMC Consulting
Paula Thornton, experience design strategist and contributor to the FASTforward blog

On April 1st, we had the honor of recording a podcast of the esteemed Dr David Vaine, Senior Partner of Apparently KM PLC, who has finally revealed how to make 2.0 work in the most traditional organization.

The link to the “Phoric” is here. I must warn you that some of the material may not be workplace safe.

The ‘Phoric” is a site where well known people in the 2.0 world choose 3 clips from YouTube and discuss why these are important to them. You may find some of the other guests moving and funny. Guest include Matt Moore, Euan Semple, Alex Kjerulf (Chief Happiness Officer)

All fun aside, and there is lots of fun here, the “Phoric shows the “heart” of the 2.0 relationship explicitly and it shows how simple tools can have a huge impact.

Enjoy

Below is the full list of video interviews conducted over three days at FASTforward 08. We encourage you to find the time to listen in – those interviewed had many insightful things to say, as did Jerry Michalski, our excellent host for the series, about Enterprise 2.0, the user revolution, search, and much, much more.

• Liv Brahin: UBS
• Gerry Campbell: president, search and content technologies, Reuters
• Michael Cleary: Reuters
• Bob Coxe – chief information officer for Criterion Systems
• Tom Davenport – consultant, author
• Jorn Ellefsen – CEO of Comperio
• Sue Feldman – research vice president, content technologies group, IDC
• Charles Fiesel – Roundarch
• Brooks Gibbins: vice president and general manager, financial services at FAST
• John Hagel – consultant, author
• Clare Hart – EVP, Dow Jones & Company
• Jon Husband: author, blogger, consultant
• Bill Ives: consultant, blogger
• Sandy Kemsley: consultant and blogger
• Kiyosh Kurihara: President of Japanese analyst firm TechVisor JP, Ltd.
• John Markus Lervik: CEO, FAST
• Jevon MacDonald: blogger perspective
• Jim McGee: consultant, author, blogger
• Joe McKendrick – analyst, blogger
• Bjørn Olstad: CTO of FAST
• Robert Paterson - Robert Paterson, consultant, blogger
• Mark Pfeiffer: SAILLABS
• JP Rangaswami: CIO of British Telecom
• Safa Rashtchy: speaker at FASTForward’08
• Jan Paul Raven: Knowledge Concepts
• Benjamin Rudolph: Search Discovery
• Jared Spataro: group product manager, Microsoft
• Tim Stay: Perfect Search
• David Sutija – SVP of enterprise products, FAST
• Kyoko Suzuki: Computer World Japan
• Don Tapscott – strategist, author of “Wikinomics”
• Paula Thornton: experience design strategist
• Nate Treloar: SVP, Interaction Technology, FAST
• David Weinberger – speaker, consultant, author
• Zia Zaman: executive vice president, global marketing, FAST

Keynotes:

• John Hagel: The Impact of the User Revolution on Your Organization
• David Weinberger: The Information Mess – And Why You Should Love It

Below you’ll find links to the many great interviews we’ve posted so far. Tune in, pass them around, and feel free to follow up on the interviewee’s remarks in the comments.

• John Hagel – consultant, author
• Joe McKendrick – analyst, blogger
• Bob Coxe – chief information officer for Criterion Systems
• Robert Paterson - Robert Paterson, consultant, blogger
• Clare Hart – EVP, Dow Jones & Company
• David Sutija – SVP of enterprise products, FAST
• David Weinberger – speaker, consultant, author
• Tom Davenport – consultant, author
• Jorn Ellefsen – CEO of Comperio
• Charles Fiesel – Roundarch
• Don Tapscott – strategist, author of “Wikinomics”
• Sue Feldman – research vice president, content technologies group, IDC

Developing talent is one of the key magnets that large corporations can employ to keep their best employees, says John.

Bio: John Hagel, Co-Chairman of Deloitte’s new Center for Edge Innovation, author, speaker, and industry commentator, is a global strategist working at the intersection of business and technology. After a long and distinguished career at McKinsey, the leading management consultancy, he has authored multiple influential books, including Net Worth, Net Gain, and Out of the Box, each illuminating opportunities and challenges of the digital marketplace.

Rob on how search will help change radio and television and how one’s program guide will be enlarged.

Also see a related post from earlier in the day: Why is search so important and so valuable. From the post: “I will leave Fast 08 knowing one thing. That Search will be one of the key ingredients in the new business model.”

David discusses how the messy office turned into a message – what companies can do to take advantage of creative mess.

Bio: David Weinberger is a respected industry commentator, thought leader, and author widely recognized for his work on the emergence of the Internet as a revolutionary force in business and in society. David is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard. He published his most recent book, Everything is Miscellaneous, last year and is often seen and heard on such forums as National Public Radio in the U.S. and as a keynote speaker at Internet-related conferences.

This post is the fourth in a series in which we will be introducing keynote speakers who will be contributing to the conversation at the upcoming FASTForward 2008 conference at the Rosen Shingle Creek Resort in Orlando, Fl, February 18-20, 2008. Check here for more detail and registration info.

“A topic is not a domain with edges. It is how passion focuses itself.” – David Weinberger

For those who attended FASTforward 2007, David will be familiar from an exceptional series of video interviews he conducted with keynoters like Chris Anderson, Tim O’Reilly, and Bill Inmon, practitioners like David Watson of Disney/ABC and Dorothea Herrey of Dow Jones, industry analysts like Forrester’s Matt Brown and IDC’s Sue Feldman, and, of course blogging gurus like Euan Semple and Jim McGee.

But of course Weinberger has long been a highly respected industry commentator in his own right. He is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, writes a popular blog, and is often heard on such forums as National Public Radio in the US and seen presenting keynotes at Internet-related conferences.

Many are not aware that he was once a Vice President of an Internet search engine firm, and that background helps shed light on some of the core insights to be found in his latest book, Everything is Miscellaneous.

In Everything Is Miscellaneous, David’s third book (following Cluetrain Manifesto, 2002, and Small Things Loosely Joined, 2003), he once again takes up the challenge of interpreting the changes that the Internet is bringing to our personal lives, to our social lives, and to the core assumptions that have anchored many businesses. Six years on from the publication of Cluetrain Manifesto, this is the clearest account yet of the fundamentals behind the “webiness” of the web, and how what’s different about information on the Internet is turning many operating assumptions about knowledge and about business on their heads.

At FASTforward 2008, David will be sharing his views on the 2.0 transformation and some specific ways in which 2.0 user behaviors spawn new business opportunities in places you’d probably not expect. Don’t miss the chance to catch a deep and deeply funny mind at work.