by Bill Ives
March 26, 2010 at 4:14 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Microblogging
I recently read an interesting study by my friend Kate Ehrlich at IBM and her colleague Sadat Shami, It is titled, Microblogging Inside and Outside the Workplace and looks at how corporate employees use microblogging tools. This effort conducted a content analysis comparing over 5,000 posts between March and June 2009 from individuals who were using an internal proprietary tool and Twitter simultaneously. Within these 5,000 plus posts, 58% were done with twitter and 42% were done with the internal tool so there is a reasonable balance for the comparison.
The abstract reports that in “both settings, posts that provided information or were directed to others were more common than posts on status. Within these categories, it was more frequent to provide information externally than internally but more common to ask questions either through broadcast or directed posts internally than externally.” In other words, questions were more likely asked of colleagues within the trusted environment of the enterprise. This makes sense and it is nice some empirical evidence to support this assumption.
The users reported that Twitter was a great source to learn about and share breaking news that other sources, However, they were more likely to ask a question with their work community and more likely to proactively look for questions to answer within this same community. The study reported that “participants talked of using Twitter as an alternative to an RSS feed or feed reader, because the information was already filtered to match their interests and they knew enough about the people providing the information to be confident in the quality of the information they provided.” This resonates well as it is exactly one of my main uses is Twitter.
On the other hand, people inside the enterprise used micro-blogging, in part, to enhance their reputation as someone who is knowledgeable and helps the community. In contrast many of the external posts were done to enhance the reputation and awareness of the organization by providing company news. In keeping with the differences in usage, 15% of the internal posts had links and 26% of the external ones did.
I think this is very useful study and more systematic work needs to be done in this space to supplement our intuition and anecdotal observations.
by Paula Thornton
February 22, 2008 at 2:33 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Emergent, FASTForward '08, Microblogging, Twitter
As I commented to my colleagues as we were wrapping up on Wednesday, we truly experienced Conference 2.0. What we accomplished and how we participated in FASTforward ’08 embodied key elements of 2.0. Moreso, what we experienced/achieved via the conference could/should be a repeatable model for other conferences (not just FASTforward ones).
Some of the elements:
- The blog itself. With Sandy being quite prolific, she had posts up faster than most of us could take notes, let alone synthesize and edit them into pieces (and as Rob mentioned in his interview, there are others of us who need time to digest it all).
- The myff08.com. While we struggled with some of the interaction elements, one high-value deliverable was having the pdfs of the keynote presentations available the same day. Someone’s checking on more ‘public’ availability of these.
- Video interviews that were available the same day. While they are a bit large I immediately noticed a huge difference in both the audio and video quality over last year. Not to mention Jerry’s impeccable skill as an MC (not to diminish David’s efforts last year). Jerry effortlessly made us all look/sound better. [Not to forget, although I did, the tireless effort of behind-the-scenes work for videography/lighting/sound, scheduling and editing.]
- Microblogging (Twitter) and photojournaling. The latter could have used a little collaborative instigation by requesting photos from the at-large crowd and suggesting a tag to post on Flickr (and I obviously need a larger memory chip in my camera). We’re also looking to get an account (or syndication) to flow related tweets through the FASTforward blog space.
- [On a negative note, the tracking devices were nearly useless – I would not recommend the effort to do that again…the bloggers had some pretty strong offline commentary about them.]
Having wireless available makes a huge difference, as does not having it when trying to facilitate near-instantaneous sharing. I had to laugh at myself as I was trying to tweet on my phone, drop it to take a photo, start typing some notes in Word when I couldn’t type fast enough on my phone and/or grabbed a pen and threw a note on paper (my thanks to facilities planning for putting power strips on the front tables of every room). If I’d continued as I had in the first session and also had my audio stick running I would have been trying to operate on 5 channels simultaneously. I can tell you – it doesn’t work. But they were all just my experiment – not something I’d been specifically asked to do. They were my way of being engaged and contributing.
The critical point here is, while we had shared a couple of ‘blogger’ calls among ourselves before the event, they were mostly about the logistics of the event. Not much more. We did not have specific assignments or even any charters – it just evolved.
Even slightly more ‘formal’ actions evolved. For a panel luncheon on Wednesday, the panelist list was firmed up that morning. The ‘intended’ blogger participants ended up with schedule conflicts and new resources were put in place.
As I had stepped up to ‘facilitate’ (a format I simply recommended and was adopted), I felt some onus to check on the room early (not asked, not planed, just seemed reasonable). The room was found to not be staged for a panel at all. Kudos to FAST, the travel group they engaged for event logistics and to the hotel staff for quickly pulling together a SWAT team to reconfigure the room in 20 minutes. For some, all of these elements stacked together, let alone any one of them, could have turned into a nervous mess or frantic disaster. Everyone simply stepped up and gave it their ‘get it done’ best and no one else noticed. [Although in the frantic mess, I did leave my cell phone in the podium afterward, and yet 3 hours later it was safely found at the Registration Desk – exactly where an event logistics person suggested I might look first.]
I had earlier shared my observations (to someone who suggested they hadn’t noticed) as to FAST’s careful staging of the ‘welcome’ experience with the:
- Wash of orange color through the grand hallway
- Greeting attendees with refreshments, served graciously and enthusiastically before reaching the registration desk
- Lively visual impressions of the drinks in the neon orange tumblers with the FAST logo on the side
- Careful positioning of the vendor booths within the normal traffic flow (although for all of that careful staging, I still didn’t find time to get to more than 1 booth the whole time).
And where did I miss the whole contest for a car? Having that on the floor with the winner’s name on the roof, was a very STRONG association to the benefits of registering early. What were those rules, terms & conditions?
I’m sure there are other conferences we could take some leads from, but this one did just nicely, thank you.
Any other 2.0 experiences/observations to report?
Postscript: See related microblogging reference.
