by Joe McKendrick
June 5, 2011 at 4:59 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0
Just a few years ago, engagement with social communities was an experiment that some bold individuals in bold organizations were conducting to boldly go where no one has gone before. Now, social or virtual communities are the fabric of day-to-day business. It is transforming the way information is disseminated outside and inside organizations as they connect with customers, partners, and industry players. But for some industries, it is disrupting or destroying — or if you look at it another way — enriching information gathering. Nowhere is this more evident than in the news business.
The question is then: Is the news business a victim or a beneficiary of the social media explosion?
That’s the question I and co-author Dr. Bill Gibbs of Duquesne University recently took up in a chapter in a new book on the implications of social networking, titled Handbook of Research on Methods and Techniques for Studying Virtual Communities: Paradigms and Phenomena.
The book, compiled and edited by Ben Kei Daniel of University of Saskatchewan, explores how over the last decade, virtual communities have evolved from massive experimental, educational, technological, business, and social environments to normal, day-to-day operations for a variety of organizations.
Chapters cover studies on various types of virtual communities, and in our chapter, we explore how global online communities now include hundreds of millions of members, able to communicate almost instantaneously.
Increasingly, traditional news organizations are finding they are being outpaced in coverage of world events by cadres of “citizen journalists” reporting in real time via social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. While there are valid concerns about the credibility of information being posted on social networking sites, there’s no question that contextual reports are being delivered much faster to global audiences than traditional outlets. In addition, recipients have a wide array of choices from which they can acquire this information.
The news providers that are on top of the game now offer interactive sources that engage people, enable them to build community, and to participate in the news. At the same time, the digital interfaces through which people access the news are continuously evolving, diverse, and oftentimes visually complex.
In the chapter, Bill and I explore trends and developments in news-oriented virtual communities. We review several data collection and analysis techniques such as content analysis, usability testing and eye-tracking and propose that these techniques and associated tools can aid the study of news communities. We examine the implications these techniques have for better understanding human behavior in virtual communities as well as for improving the design of these environments.
The book has an additional 43 chapters as well, intended as a guidebook for executives and corporate leaders concerned with the management of expertise, social capital, competence knowledge, and information and organizational development in different types of virtual communities and environments.
by Rob Paterson
April 23, 2011 at 6:06 am · Filed under
Adoption, Analytics, Business Intelligence, Innovation, Interaction, Marketing, Measurement, Media, Network Effect, Relationships, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Objects, journalism
description
Cascade allows for precise analysis of the structures which underly sharing activity on the web.
This first-of-its-kind tool links browsing behavior on a site to sharing activity to construct a detailed picture of how information propagates through the social media space. While initially applied to New York Times stories and information, the tool and its underlying logic may be applied to any publisher or brand interested in understanding how its messages are shared.
Cascade was developed by R&D using open source tools including Processing and MongoDB.
videos
Better measurement is coming – I really liked this video that shows how the NYT is looking at how their content is shared.
It offers of course an “organic” perspective – reinforcing for me that new reality that is based on the model of nature rather than on the mechanics of a machine.
Already it is showing the importance of influence nodes – we see this is the spread of disease as well – the Typhoid Mary issue. Understanding this then enables us to understand where the systemic leverage comes from.
This I think takes us back to the math of Magic Numbers – a very few people count a lot. Their influence and how they get this is then central – that brings us back to the work of Klout.
We are getting there.
by Joe McKendrick
April 22, 2011 at 5:55 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, FASTforward'09, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0
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.
by Joe McKendrick
March 25, 2011 at 10:40 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Web 2.0
In a previous post, we pondered the lack of social CRM in evidence, asking whether all CRM should be social anyway. In a new post, Umberto Milletti talks about the issues getting in the way of social CRM.
Milletti says marketing and customer service have actually been effectively engaging in social media, but sales has been missing the boat. Kind of ironic, since sales is the most social activity there is in the business.
- Salespeople are not techno-geeks: They see technology as a tool, nothing more, nothing less.
- Salespeople need to understand what’s in it for them: They know time is money, and don’t want to invest valuable time to learn technologies they don’t fully see a return on.
- Social media tools have not been integrated into the sales workflow.
- Salespeople rely on their employer for training on new sales processes and tools to support them.
by Joe McKendrick
March 15, 2011 at 9:59 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking
A recent article in Knowledge@Wharton asks if business-centric social networking is a “revolution” or a “ruse.” Since we’re inclined here at this site to pick the revolutionary option, it’s worth examining why some experts at UPenn’s Wharton School may be skeptical about its power to transform business.
First, there’s the still-uncertain ROI aspect. As Shawndra Hill, a Wharton operations and information management professor, put it: “Social networking in the enterprise sector is relatively new, and better tools can enable people to communicate across an organization. But before this really takes off, there needs to be some proof that these things are useful.” Kartik Hosanagar, Wharton professor of operations and information management, echos this sentiment: “I’m a little skeptical about usage, but I’m even more skeptical about benefits to corporations. Companies may use it, but I don’t think it will provide the productivity benefits vendors claim they will provide.”
Ultimately, the success of social networking in enterprises will not be employees and managers adopting sites such as Facebook and Twitter as a separate activity. Kendall Whitehouse, director of new media at Wharton, predicts that ultimately, social networking will simply be pervasive within enterprise software and processes. “Today, social networking is being thought of as a separate thing,” he says. “We’ll see that fade over time, and it will become just part of the way we interact.”
