by Joe McKendrick
August 8, 2011 at 11:37 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Social Media
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.
by Bill Ives
August 2, 2011 at 3:10 am · Filed under
Social Media, Twitter
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.
by Joe McKendrick
July 31, 2011 at 1:07 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking
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.
by Joe McKendrick
July 31, 2011 at 12:45 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Social Media, Web 2.0
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:
- Experimentation
- Compartmentalization
- Integration
- Operationalization
- 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.
by Bill Ives
July 26, 2011 at 9:09 am · Filed under
Social Media, Web 2.0, Work 2.0
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.
