I have enjoyed participating in the FastFoward blog for the four plus years it has been in existence. It have been a great place to meet interesting people and share ideas. At every conference I have met new people who said they were following us on this blog. All good things have their run and now ours is over. I hope you stay in touch with us through our individual blogs. I want to close with a look at an interesting study on the positive impact of Web 2.0. Ironically, the label the most tech savvy people in the study as the tech fast forward group.

Communispace, in partnership with Ogilvy & Mather, recently released findings from a joint research study that examines the impact technology has on the lives of today’s consumer, with a specific focus on the role technology plays on children and  family life in our society. The ‘Tech Fast Forward: Plug in to See the Brighter Side of Life’ study evaluates the optimistic outlook associated with tech-savvy kids and their respective families and draws direct correlations to the resulting implications for marketers and brands.

In two phases of research, they surveyed 1200 US parents with children aged 3–12 in the household and qualitatively explored key topics with 112 tech-savvy community members and their kids. In the first portion they identified 5 segments: tech backward 3%, tech neutral 36%, tech forward 42% , and tech fast forward 19%. Ten they looked more closely the last group. Here is a video of the qualitative portion of the research, including footage from Flip cameras given to participants (children ages 3-12 years old) tasked with recording in-home technology-related behavior.

The vast majority of all segments saw technology as a positive force in their lives (84%) with the tech fast forward slightly ahead (87%) on this measure. In a related question: Will technology make of break us? All segments respond make 72% of the time and 85% of the fast forward said make. When asked if technology better connect or creates more distance, 72% of all segments said better connect and 80% of the tech fast forward sided with this view.   This is an overall quite positive view and one that I share.  The tech fast forward group is also more optimistic about the future.

Some of the key implications identified in the study that enable brands to more effectively connect with and reach the Tech Forward consumer include (mostly in their words with some additional comments):

Mobilize tech optimism: Brands have the opportunity to capitalize on today’s tech optimism by helping consumers create the brighter world they want to see.

Mine the family mindset: As intergenerational attitudes converge, opportunities to market to the family as a unit increase. Purchase decisions are family decisions.

Curate unexpected connections: Brands have the opportunity to bring unimagined access to consumers across the globe and should harness the power of connections in more interesting ways. We like this idea at Darwin.

Put the world to work for you: Technology has unleashed the wisdom of the crowd and brands can build on tech optimism to channel their customers’ creativity.

Respect the mode: Consumers today switch between modes of separation and integration, and seek service and product solutions to help them feel in control.  Brands will benefit by providing a flexible feature set that speaks to the multi-modal life.

Un-connect the dots: Consumers want to interpret your brand—to make your brand’s story their own. So give them the building blocks and let them put the pieces together. I like this one. This is what we do at Darwin, enable people to better connect the dots themselves through content visualizations rather than prescriptive top down search.

Build gated communities: Safety and privacy create major barriers for self-expression online; private communities help consumers feel secure and confident when engaging with your brand online. This is what Communispace does quite well.

Let people mess with your brand: The creative impulse abounds, and today, any and all content is fair game for experimentation, adaptation and reinterpretation. This includes your brand!  Companies need to embrace this trend and enable consumers to reimagine and remix brand assets. I like this one best of all. There is much more in the report that is available for free.

Thanks for reading this blog over the past few years. I hope to stay connected to each of you.

I have been covering and reporting and analyzing the business technology scene for more than 25 years now.

And every couple of years or so, a new technology “revolution” would spring up. Not the stale, overhyped prior revolution that had just passed — but a new, exciting revolution.This time, things would be different. This new revolution would change the way we thought about technology. This revolution would change the business. This revolution would bring the power of information technology to the masses. A revolution unlike any other revolution that ever came before it.  The most incredible, unbelievable, paradigm-shifting revolution ever.  Yada, yada.  Promises, promises.  Here are a few revolutions:

• In the late 1980s, it was client/server computing — sticking a PC in front of a larger computer.
• In the late 1990s. it was Web computing — sticking a browser in front of a network.
• In the late 1990s, it was dot-coms — sticking a browser in front of a store.
• In the early 2000s decade, it was Web services and XML — sticking standardized code in front of an application.
• In the late 2000s decade, it was cloud — sticking a cloud in front of everything.
• And lots of revolutions in between — usually sticking something in front of something else.

Note on the above list: some would call these techniques “putting lipstick on a pig.”

And when I would come home for dinner at night, or saw friends over the weekend, nobody would ask me what I was up to, and eyes would glaze over if I attempted to tell them. I wouldn’t even attempt to begin to explain to people what I had been writing about all day long. What’s so revolutionary about speeding up a purchase order process or building a rules engine that reduced exception reporting?  What’s revolutionary about displaying 3270 “green-screen” code within a terminal emulation window? (Good stuff every business should pursue — but not something that will make you the life of the party.)

Then, one day a couple of years ago, I came home — and found my daughters (tween and teen) actively participating in the revolution.  The social networking revolution.  An information-technology revolution had finally hit home, and in a big way.  Unlike the decades of vendor pronouncements about revolution, this one was real.  The old order was being driven out — by employees and children of employees.

I knew this time, it was different. So, my daughters may someday ask me: “What did you do in the Social Networking Revolution, Daddy”*? I will tell them about the writings my colleagues and I did here at the FastForward site. And where the revolution took us.

Social media was more than a platform or a new mode of computing — it was a new way of connecting, of doing business, of leading nations, of working, of making friends and renewing friendships.  But, for purposes of this site, first commissioned in December 2006, the theme was to explore to unfolding new world of Enterprise 2.0 in work and business settings.  Consider where the social revolution has taken us in just a few short years:

Personal outsourcing: For the first time, employees all up and down the line have access to information they need to do their jobs better, advance companies, and advance their careers.  John Schmidt so accurately described it as “personal outsourcing.” Unlike the traditional model for outsourcing — firms contracting out functions or processes to an outside firm — “individuals are starting to outsource their problem-solving and their own professional development,” he says. “They’re leveraging things like wikis, blogs, other collaboration events to collaborate in real-time with other individuals.” IT professionals go to Google, Wikipedia, and other online sources of support, Schmidt says. “They write out their question in their blog and look for their community to respond and help them. …they extended their network of peers to outside the four walls of their company. …they’re taking their problems and their professional challenges to the world.”

Economic revitalization and opportunity: Social networking and E2.0 provides a vast new array of tools for seeking out new markets, as well as managing through the tough times. Companies have means to better leverage the knowledge coursing through their corporate veins to turn around distressed lines of business. Employees have tools to ride through tough times, by staying well-connected with their professional networks and potential employers — even after they have been laid off. They no longer have to be powerless victims of recessions. (I called it the LIFT phenomenon — LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.) Employers have a resource to identify key talent to build their organizations.

Improving the quality — and joy — and therefore productivity — of work: The 9-to-5 rut had been withering on the vine for a number of years, and social networking is putting the final stakes in the industrialized, command-and-control model of management.  Productivity is not something that occurs in a cubicle between 9 and 5, it’s something that comes in “bursts.” Social networks and E2.0 give everyone the flexibility and connectivity to respond to those bursts. In the process, the lines between work and personal life have not only just blurred — they’ve disappeared completely. Some Gloomy Guses say that’s not a good thing, and that employers will exploit it. I say it’s a real good thing.  People should be proud of their work, and have the passion raging within them to want to pursue it, think about it, and embed it into their lives.  Good riddance, 9 to 5.

Return on investment: A hotly debated topic. But the ROI is there. McKinsey & Company, for one, did countless studies the past few years that proved it. A couple of years back for example, they published the results of a survey of nearly 1,700 executives from around the world which paints a highly positive picture of the business returns being seen from E2.0 deployments. Close to seven out of ten respondents (69%) report that their companies “have gained measurable business benefits [italics mine], including more innovative products and services, more effective marketing, better access to knowledge, lower cost of doing business, and higher revenues.”

It’s been close to five years that we have been covering the revolution — a real revolution — at this site. And it’s only just begun.

(*By the way, the title of this post is a paraphrase of the 1966 movie “What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?” in which a bunch of soldiers in World War II hosted a street festival in an Italian town.  One could say social networking is a global festival of sorts.)

I had not been paying too much attention to Klout until I saw this article in the New York Times, Got Twitter? You’ve Been Scored. I skimmed it and tweeted about it to save the link for further reading. I often use my Twitter, @billlives, as a social bookmarking tool so I remember and have access to posts and articles I want to save. I then go through my tweets twice a month and it gives me an overview of what I thought was important during this time. Then I do a blog post that lists the tweets I found really important as a way archive these tweets. I am sure there are more efficient ways to archive Twitter but I find this practice a useful exercise.

Well, the tweet on Got Twitter? You’ve Been Scored got retweeted six times within a few hours so this action caused me to look more closely at the article. I then tweeted that I was inspired by the RTs to write a blog post on the article and I got two replies for the six who said they were looking forward to the post. I was pleased as this type of exchange is how Twitter is supposed to work. I also met a few new Twitter friends in the process.

The article itself exposed me more to the growing movement behind such tools as Klout and Peerindex. It is about all of us getting a number, similar to Robert Parker’s quantification of wine. While there is more objectivity here that with Parker, the underlying motive is the same, the quantification of the world. This is a topic I have covered several times.  I did a four part series on this blog that began with Rising Above the Over Quantification of Content: Part One: Parker vs. Piaget.

In this post I quoted, Adam Gopnik in the September 6, 2004 issue of the New Yorker, “(Parker) was uncannily successful because (he was an) apostle of a radical American empiricism – an insistence that facts and numbers could show you what was really going on, against everything tradition told you…The debate is not about whether the numbers are right but whether it is right to have numbers.”

In a similar perspective, Nick Carr quotes Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, in his Atlantic article, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, that it is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Carr adds that what Fred Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind. I would add: and what Robert Parker did for wine.  Nick goes on to write, “in Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed.”

Personally, I think a little ambiguity and complexity is good. So how does this relate to someone’s reputation on the Web? Personally, I follow people for many different reasons so a single score is not going to help too much. I also follow people related to three different twitter accounts I am connected with (@billives, @darwineco, and @outstart). The fact that Klout does offer the top ten topics a person is known for helps but there is still a gap between the complexity of why I follow people and a score, in the same way I might like a wine for many different reasons, occasions, and food parings.

I look at the Klout scores of people I know and there is a rough correlation with my views of what works for me but certainly not a precise one. Like wine, I think this is an area best left to the full range of human cognitive abilities and the multiple associations the human mind can make.  The Klout score of someone I do not known might help except for the fact that I know it is not completely accurate for my needs, only a clue about what to pursue in more depth. For the record, I did check my scores on two of these tools and my Klout score is 55 and my Peerindex score is 59 but I am not really sure what this means.

Recently, I received a review copy of Business Goes Virtual: Realizing the Value of Collaboration, Social and Virtual Strategies by John P. Girard, Cindy Gordon, and JoAnn L. Girard.  I have known Cindy for some time and we have done work together on several occasions, including several writing efforts so I had high expectations for this work. The book argues that after some false starts, four critical enablers have converged to make virtual business opportunities a reality: social technology, visionary leadership, an increasing recognition of the value of a collaboration culture, plus virtual worlds. They define virtual business as follows: “A virtual business provides innovative solutions to new and traditional business challenges by exploiting social technology, leadership, and collaboration in both the real and virtual words.”

The book examines four virtual business strategies that are showing promise. The “any place, any time” strategy provides high quality service 24/7 through bypassing traditional geographic challenges. The “people know best” strategy looks at crowd-sourcing the wisdom of every-day people. The “everyone has a stake” strategy allows organizations to take advantage of their stakeholders’ views. Finally, the “real in the virtual world” strategy enables real businesses to sell their wares in the virtual world.

The book provides case examples and best practices. They look at both successes and failures in this new market and make some bets on the future. They conclude that virtual business is here to stay and firms need to develop a strategy to take advantage of this new market or risk their demise.

One strong example is the transformation from printed books to e-books. I am reading a virtual version of their book now. The authors report that on Christmas Day 2009, consumers purchased more Kindle books than physical books through Amazon, a virtual store itself. Now the iPad is booming with Apple selling more tablets than PCs both in terms of volume and revenue – and the iPad is much cheaper. It takes e-reading to new heights and provides connectivity to so many other possibilities. For example, it becomes that much easier to sharing insights from what you are reading or look up related information from other sources.  Publishers who recognize this trend will be in position to ride the new wave and those that do not will be ridden over.

This new world will change many things including jobs. The authors note that many of the top jobs of 2010 did not exist in 2004. We are now faced with preparing our children for jobs that do yet exist and to solve problems that are yet unknown.  This uncertainty has always been the case to some extent but it has become a much stronger factor.  I saw from another source that in 1986 75% of the knowledge that a worker needed was stored in workers’ heads but by 2006, that number was estimated to be 9%. We need new ways of providing the remaining 81% and the virtual world opens up an opportunity for this also through social software.

Mobile collaboration is an increasingly important topic as two-thirds of the information workforce already work remotely, according to Forrester data. With the adoption of tablets such as the iPad and the proliferation of smart phones in the enterprise, that number figures to grow significantly. It is a matter of when, not whether that mobile devices exceed desktops. The new Forrester Wave™: Mobile Collaboration, Q3 2011 by Ted Schadler for Content & Collaboration Professionals offers some useful advice on how mobile collaboration requires a new app approach.

We are now living in a work everywhere world. I have noticed that even most small vacation inns have free wifi as a standard offering. Forrester notes that your most productive employees m now use four devices to get work done. This means that “client/server solutions with on-premises servers are inadequate, simply not responsive or agile enough for escalating user requirements and expectations.”

They note that mobile apps need to be designed to run well on any mobile device because of the proliferation of devices. With so many different mobile platforms and form factors to target, app developers will have to organize differently, code differently, and execute differently. In this new environment design skills grow ever-more important (and scarce). There will be new abstraction layers that separate presentation from interaction from back-end services. Teams now must design for mobile first.

Mobile apps must be delivered as a cloud service. Forrester notes that latency is already a problem for distributed organizations and even waiting for email to upload or download to a remote site can be painful. I see this with my iPhone. For me this wait time is mitigated by the fact that I mostly use the iPhone to check for messages when I am killing time. It would be very frustrating in normal use. In addition, access to team sites and even the file system from a hotel room over a virtual private network (VPN) can be excruciatingly slow. Fortunately this is no longer an issue for me but I remember it well. Forrester states that the problem is the lack of capacity, bandwidth, and data close to the device. The solution is cloud suppliers with data centers around the world and points of presence in every major city. The cloud is simply better for delivering good mobile app experiences. I would agree.

Here is another perspective on mobile app creation from the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference. This session discussed three components that any mobile strategy should have, which includes deciding what goes mobile, understanding how to mobilize applications and services, and designing a framework for managing mobility. On a related note here are some thoughts from the 2011 mLearn Mobile Learning Conference.

As we’ve been discussing here at this site for some time, there are tangible business benefits being realized from adoption of social media platforms as part of a comprehensive Enterprise 2.0 strategy.

However, this is a message that is not getting through to small businesses.

Hiscox, an insurance company. recently surveyed US small business leaders on their social media usage and found that many weren’t using these important channels to promote their businesses and products.  Only 12% of businesses described social media promotion as a must and nearly 50% of respondents aren’t using social media at all.

For those that did use social media for their business,  19% use Facebook, 15% use LinkedIn, and 4% use Twitter.

Traditional modes dominate small business communication. Nearly two in five respondents said word-of-mouth was the main way they got business, and another 42% cited word-of-mouth in combination with other marketing promotions.

When all respondents were asked about how they felt about using social media for their business:  12% describe it as a must, they do it all the time; 24% do it when they have the time; and 14% indicated they don’t know enough about it.

I read an interesting article in the Neiman Labs blog, Is Twitter writing, or is it speech? Why we need a new paradigm for our social media platforms.   It asked the question: Is Twitter writing, or is it speech? It clarified the reason for this question as we treated these two forms of expression quite differently. Text is seen as stable and more permanent and this has legal implications.

The article compares the two as follows: “Text, we figure, is: conclusive, in that its words are the deliberate products of discourse; inclusive, in that it is available equally to anyone who happens to read it; exclusive, in that it filters those words selectively; archival, in that it preserves information for posterity; and static, in that, once published, its words are final. And speech, while we’re at it, is discursive and ephemeral and, importantly, continual.”

The article concludes: “The framework of text and speech falls apart once we recognize that Twitter is both and neither at once. It’s its own thing, a new category. Our language, however, doesn’t yet recognize that. Our rhetoric hasn’t yet caught up to our reality — for Twitter and, by extension, for other social media.”

I find it interesting that this debate occurred when text as we know it was first introduced through the Greek phonetic alphabet. Plato commented on this latest information technology breakthrough of his time. He said in The Republic that text is a better means, than the oral tradition, to convey and store information. Then he cautioned the limits of text in Phaedrus that meaning is better derived from the dialog of viewpoints.

When blogs first appeared similar discussions about the hybrid nature of social media arose. The researcher Alexander Halavais said that blogs offer “Discourse at the boundary between conversation and publication.” They can give greater context and connection.

Blogs took the conversational aspects part way through their informal style and the opportunity for comments. Now Twitter moves the dialog much further through its real time ease of use. The Neiman article noted and interesting twist in this direction. It commented that, “Wall Street Journal outreach editor Zach Seward talked about being, essentially, the voice of the outlet’s news feed on Twitter. When readers tweeted responses to news stories, @WSJ might respond in kind — possibly surprising them and probably delighting them and maybe, just for a second, sort of freaking them out.”  Now the Web talks back at you through Twitter, more so and faster than with blogs.

The article notes that text has been “considered an artifact and a construct, has generally been a noun rather than a verb, defined by its solidity, by its thingness — and, in that, by its passive willingness to be the object of interpretation by active human minds.” But now this could be changing as it becomes more dynamic.

They note that Twitter is not very good at the archival part yet but it should improve. This is one reason that I post my favorite tweets on this blog every two weeks so I can go back to them. I also find it an interesting recap of what I found useful in the past two weeks when I set up the post. One thing that is needed is better curation tools and they mentioned, Storify. It allows you to create stories using social media.

The article concludes that “our text-ordered world is resolving back into something more traditionally oral — more conversational and, yes, more ephemeral. ‘Chaos is our lot,’ Clay Shirky notes; ‘the best we can do is identify the various forces at work shaping various possible futures.’ One of those forces — and, indeed, one of those futures — is the hybrid linguistic form that we are shaping online even as it shapes us… A paradigm we might call “Twitter.

News has just broken that the people of Iceland have just produced a draft of a new constitution – developed collaboratively via social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

The Althing, Iceland's Social Media-Savvy Parliament. Photo: Wikimedia

Iceland had its share of financial debacles in recent years, and, as a result, decided it needed to re-invent its government to incorporate a better system of checks and balances. However, the new constitution isn’t being written by a group of men holed up in a room somewhere — it’s an open process involving the latest social networking tools and technology.

A 25-member Constitution Council drafted the new constitution by engaging Iceland’s 318,000 citizens through social media sites, which helped keep everyone up to date on the document’s progress, as well as solicit feedback. The Constitutional Council posted daily interviews with delegates, and meetings were broadcast live on the council’s webpage and on Facebook. There were also schedules for all meetings, all minutes from meetings of groups, the Board and the Council as well as the Council’s work procedures. The webpage also has regular news from the Council’s work as well as a weekly newsletter.

If social networking tools can help transform a nation, imagine what it can do for a company.

In many aspects o technology business innovation, maturity models have served to define stages of development, serving as benchmarks for companies to see how far along they have progressed. The model serves as a guideline for process improvement. For example, the Capability Maturity Model Integration Framework (CMMI), first published at Carnegie-Mellon University, has served as a set of guidelines for software development.

Now. IDC has proposed a similar approach for social enterprise development, called the Social Business Maturity Model, which is intended to help companies that are growing in their adoption of social business and want to optimize their use of social tools.

IDC’s Social Business Maturity Model consists of 5 stages:

1. Experimentation
2. Compartmentalization
3. Integration
4. Operationalization
5. Optimization

Do these identified stages make sense for identifying where organizations stand on the social enterprise spectrum?  The final stage, optimization, suggests that it isn’t until this point that significant benefits are being delivered to the business.

Here is a recent study that reported digital distractions from Harmon.ie on what has become a major issue at work. It impacts both work and time outside work hours, often blurring the distinction between the two. For example, the majority of people under the age of 40 stay digitally-connected in bed, and 44% of people stay connected during a night out at the movies. Of course many of these connections are for personal reasons, but often work is involved.   In the following result summaries the bullets are in the words of the study. Here are some of the work related findings:

• Two out of three users will interrupt a group meeting to communicate with someone else digitally, either by answering email (48%), answering a mobile phone (35%), chatting via IM (28%), updating their status on a social network (12%) or tweeting (9%).
• Relatively few workers disconnect to focus on a task (32%) or during virtual meetings or teleconferences (30%), webcasts (26%) or lunch (12%).
• A majority of workers turn off their devices only when their boss asks them to (85%) or during one-on-one meetings (63%).

Most of the distractions are digital.

• Users reported getting sidetracked in email processing (23%), switching windows to complete tasks (10%), personal online activities such as: Facebook (9%), instant messaging (6%), text messaging (5%) and Web search (3%).
• Multiple devices on the desktop contribute to the problem, with 65% of respondents reporting that they utilize up to three additional monitors and/or mobile devices simultaneously with their main computer screen as they work.

Companies have responded with strategies to limit these distractions.

• 68% of respondents reported that their employers have implemented policies or technologies to minimize distractions, while 73% of end users have adopted self-imposed techniques to help maintain focus.
• The #1 corporate strategy used to discourage digital diversion is blocking access to public social networks such as Facebook and/or other non-business websites (48%).

A related, but different, problem is the difficulty in finding content. Respondents reported that they spend an average of 2-1/2 hours per week trying to find the documents needed in multiple local, corporate and cloud repositories.

• The user’s email inbox is the #1 location searched, with 76% of respondents reporting email as the first place they look. Other locations include the desktop (69%), file server (52%), shared workspace (34%), portable storage device (18%) and/or cloud storage (9%).
• The average user emails two or more documents per day to an average of five people for review, increasing email-based document volume by up to 50 documents per week. The fact that these attachments are stored on multiple local computers complicates the challenge of finding the latest document versions as well as merging feedback from multiple reviewers.

All of this points to a very disorganized workplace. The very tools that are supposed to help us are actually overwhelming us in some cases.  The solution starts with a unified strategy for digital communication and requires some smart policies, cultural issues and wise implementation of limited number of technologies. I wrote about this recently (see Taking Control of Our Knowledge Consumption and Our Social Presence). I quoted Nick Carr whose new book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains address this issue, “companies need to challenge the assumption that employees should always be available. Some people do their best work when they’re disconnected, and companies should create a work culture that encourages it.”  It sounds like they need to actually force many people to disconnect.