All your customers, voters, members, suppliers - the public are now linked. Newsworthy events that are good and bad will spread like wildfire. Look at the “Good” event of Susan Boyle - as of this date 20 million views in less than a week!
The Rubicon is that - whether you like it or not - the public are now linked so well, that anything said about you will now spread everywhere and very quickly. This linkage, and hence the speed and immediacy of the spread, can only get wider and faster. Maybe, in a few months, events that affect you will spread instantly to everyone. What will spread the fastest of course will be the bad things.
So the new reality is that it is what others say that will matter not what you say. So your reputation - your brand - the trust you have - is now not longer easily or directly controlled by you.
You have to be swimming in this river to have any chance of protecting your name.
As with Dominos - using the new social media tools is not enough. You will have to understand and become a master of how to live and do well in thus new world.
Compared to many today, Dominos were somewhat ready. But even then - I think because they had only installed the tools but not the culture - they were awkward. They were late in catching their problem. Late in a their response. Stilted in their response - they did not understand that a scripted response is not going to help much.
They were still operating the new tools with the old culture.
They gave their CEO a script. He read from the prompter and did not make emotional contact with the audience. But Dominos still did well compared maybe to you! For do you even have the tools?
But of course it is not just about the tools. The issue is that you can no longer control. So their new plan is of course the old plan - “let’s control the store”. Their key response is to ban video cameras from their stores! This means a ban on cell phones really and how practical can that be?
The only effective response will be to get into the river with everyone else and get really good at how to behave in this new river. It will be to become so engaged that the conversation can be affected or shaped. You have to be a trusted part of the conversation to do this. You cannot just barge in.
Dominos and you will have to unlearn and put away all of what made old PR work. For all of PR up to now has used “Message” - a tightly controlled and scripted response where the text is key. Now you have to use “Presence” - an emotional message where the authenticity of the humanity of the “speaker” carries the point. Volts versus Amps.
This River will soon operate at the speed of light. To protect your name, you have to be a major presence in the river now. You have to merge with the river so that your nervous system is acutely attuned to the slightest hint of trouble. The leverage is Trust. Only a trusted player in the river will have any chance of settling down the ripples.
To have the Trust, you need to be known. To be known, you have to be a person and not an institution.The people that represent you in this river have to be free people who can be trusted. They have to have won the trust of the river. If trouble occurs, they have to respond immediately without a script. They have to be empathic and not controlled.
This role is foreign to institutions who are all about control. The answer are not the tools but the culture.
The error is to see your participation in Social Media as having the right Tools. “We use Twitter!” is a meaningless statement. Hey you can give me all the tools I would need to fix a car and I still will not be able to fix a car. Worse you can give me an airplane to fly and I will crash every time. The people who work for you in this field have to be the real deal. You would not hire a CFO who did not know her stuff?
Why simply tell your existing PR folks who know nothing about this - in fact who hate it - to take over? All of how PR, Research and Marketing has been done until now will have to be unlearned. Traditional PR, Research and Marketing folks will feel very uncomfortable and will do what all prior paradigm leaders do when confronted with the real future. They will undermine and fight it. They have to. For this is their nemesis.
The context for this decision is that the old world is dying. Here is how Coke is responding:
ATLANTA: Coca-Cola has created a new office of digital communications and social media within its public affairs and communications department. Clyde Tuggle, SVP of corporate affairs and productivity at Coke, noted “mass media is declining in importance,” when introducing the new department in a memo to staff, which the beverage manufacturer shared with PRWeek.
“Our future success depends on our continued ability to connect people to our brands and our Company all around the world, one person at a time,” Tuggle wrote. “Our new office of digital communications and social media will help us become even more comfortable and effective in these new spaces.”
The new unit will work in collaboration with global interactive marketing, IT, and consumer affairs, as well as legal and strategic security.
Adam Brown, digital communications director, and Anne Carelli, digital communications manager, will have oversight of corporate digital and social media communications efforts. Both Brown and Carelli will continue ongoing training programs, such as “Training Byte” online videos, in addition to “more robust” programs through its new PAC Institute.
The ideas in the new world that will have to be learned anew include these:
Listen before you Speak - The New Tools allow you to hear the slightest tremor. Last week I Tweeted that I had done my taxes and that I had used QuickTax. Within minutes QuickTax had responded with a thank you. A week earlier I Tweeted that I had had a problem with accessing Ning. Within minutes a customer service person from Ning contacted me and worked over the weekend to solve my problem. If you cannot do this - you are not in the game. In future, most of your research will operate in real time without you having to ask any questions. Your new job will be to listen minute by minute and to have tools and people that can make sense of the stream. Not only to make sense of what you hear but also to shape the stream. QuickTax is responding to every mention good or bad. An early and a personal response, can settle a problem that could become a crisis. Such a strategy dramatically reduces your costs in research and brand management. Such a strategy dramatically increases your effectiveness and reduces your risks. More for less.
Participate not Pontificate - To be heard, you have to participate. To speak, you have to lose your corporate voice. You have to lose the official tone of voice. You have to regain a human voice. This can only be done if you allow your social media staff to be themselves. They cannot be the highly controlled drones that are the standard in the corporate or bureaucratic world - many people in your organization will not be able to lose this voice. They even use it at home. Simply training old staff will not be enough. For how can you have trained people in the Shetl to be Americans? You have to live in the New World to become a citizen. To have the new voice is to be a native of the new culture that is the very opposite of the norms of the old country. As with immigrants, it will be the kids who will get it first and they will train the others. But the Bubbies will never get it. This aspect of having the new strategy work or not is the most challenging part of all of this. In the end it means, that the old culture has to die too. Maybe in the interim, you set your unit up apart from the rest and have it report to the CEO for protection. Clayton Christenson has a lot to say about this problem. For to respond to this new reality demands that you disrupt your culture. The most difficult of all acts for a leader.
Importance - Life or Death: This is not an add on or a side show as Newspapers found - This is all about whether you are going to live or die - As the Coke folks say but more gently than I - Mass Media is dying. So then is the entire Mass Media approach to PR and Broadcast - the God-like Voice and Moses with the Text of God from on high does not work. So how important is your reputation? How important is your business or enterprise? Adopting this new way is one of the most important decisions you will make. So also having the RIGHT PEOPLE to do this for you is the second decision you will make after deciding to cross the River. Ideally you have to have them report to the CEO. Ideally the CEO needs to become immersed as well. If I can do this, aged 59 and having spent most of my working life in institutions. Then so can you. The only issue is will. Do you have the will as a CEO to move into the future?
Caesar made the call by crossing the Rubicon to end the Republic and to begin the Empire. He had the will to stake it all. There was then no going back.
Actually it is society that has crossed the Rubicon. The new interactive and participative world is now here.
Will you cross too? This is a life or death decision for you. It’s also a winning choice. Many will not be able to make this choice. Their own culture will be too powerful. If you can, you have the advantage. The earlier you move, the better you will get at this.
In November of 2008, Stowe Boyd and I were invited to speak at the soft launch of blueKiwi 2009, an innovative collaboration platform which is one of the leading European providers of Enterprise 2.0 social computing business software. Stowe began the evening’s presentation with an overview of the high-level impacts of the web on human activities, I brought that down somewhat closer to the ground by providing a perspective on the impacts of interconnection and networks on organizational and management dynamics, and Carlos Diaz, the President and CEO of blueKiwi, gave the audience an excellent overview of blueKiwi’s value proposition and the design and new features offered by the 2009 version.
blueKiwi has now revamped its web site to signal the launch of the bK 2009 version and value proposition, and is “coming out” with bK 2009 at this week’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.
Last week I caught up with Carlos and co-founder Christophe Routhieau, CTO and software architect, in order to go into deeper detail as to why blueKiwi promises both innovation and pragmatic value as a social business collaboration platform.
We started off by covering a bit of history about blueKiwi’s roots and how the platform came into being just as the Web began to have major impact on the knowledge-based workplace. Carlos and Christophe were already successful web entrepreneurs in France. Carlos and his brother Manuel co-founded the web agency groupeReflect and Christophe joined the agency in 2000, and the team managed it successfully through several business cycles, eventually selling it to Emakina, an interactive marketing agency. Carlos and Christophe said it was useful and important to the early success of blueKiwi that they are coming to the issues of collaboration and social computing from the web rather than from a starting point in the pre-web information technology world (the traditional software world).
The initial version of blueKiwi was conceived and built prior to the advent of the domain known as Enterprise 2.0 in response to client organizations that wanted to use Web 2.0 capabilities inside their organizations to communicate more spontaneously and efficiently. So they and their early clients understood that people were growing into using the Web, and wanted to use that knowledge and understanding to inform the core design principles, functionality and usability of the first version of blueKiwi, which was built and implemented at one of their key clients, Dassault Systems.
Given that all the serious Enterprise 2.0 platforms claim to focus on the sociality now seen as central to effective responsiveness and organizational agility and effectiveness, I asked them what differentiates bK2009 from some of the other leading Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platforms. For me, this is where things start to get really interesting and what I find exciting about what blueKiwi has to offer. Starting from the vantage point of the Web 2.0-savvy user, they have designed and built blueKiwi to be user-centric whilst responding to the business issues that require the building, distributing and and deploying of business-focused knowledge … the essence of social business computing, in my opinion.
bK2009 is centered on the building, nourishing and sustaining of business-focused relationships - building useful knowledge and getting things done. Carlos and Christophe pointed out that they had learned something important during the 2nd wave of blueKiwi’s adoption by clients … most collaboration systems start from the point of view of technical capabilities and do not make it easy, or overlook, the building and growing of relationships. In the past, users of collaborative platforms had to go about building their business relationships, both internally and externally, outside of the collaboration system / platform. bK2009 is first and foremost a means of building valuable and value-added relationships in the course of doing one’s work … it can enable, contain and manage all the activity in a business ecosystem.
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Digging a bit deeper, I asked them what they thought was unique about blueKiwi. Carlos and Christophe believe that not only is their product design different from competitors, but they are very enthused about breaking new ground with the “economic model” offered by blueKiwi. The feel that with bK 2009 they are breaking new ground in two ways.
First … all collaboration platforms offer spaces where people can connect, gather, share and exchange information. Thus far, the mainstream approach has been to offer spaces where people can connect and gather, and then share content … information about issues, problems, and areas of interest, and as people exchange and collaborate, useful knowledge is built. bK2009 turns this upside down, or around (you choose). It is designed on the principle that the collaborative space is there for content and its distribution, and the individual user then chooses which groups she or he wishes to engage with. Thus, any individual user can be a member of the groups they have chosen to interact with. And of course it has a Twitter clone as one of its features.
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What eventuates is a network of interaction around pertinent content, and thus over time an ecosystem around issues in which engagement is de facto defined by the users’ interest and willingness to engage. This then leads to the ability to watch and quantify the volume of interactions and obtain a better, and visible , understanding of the value that is being created (responsiveness, innovation, deepening understanding and so on).
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There are three key effects stemming from this approach:
1. there is an inherent, and ongoing, flexibility in creating and participating in (”on the fly”, said Carlos) any given group (reminiscent of Clay Shirky’s “ridiculously easy group-forming ) - the individual is always in a sense at the centre of an information ecosystem in which she or he is by definition an integral part,
2. thus, an organization’s productive social networks are developed out of the interactions between individuals (I call this the “natural sociology of knowledge work”), which in effect reproduces the dynamics of blogging or using LinkedIn or Facebook, and
3. bK 2009’s profiles reveal an individual’s contributions in a dynamic and interactive way … an user creates his or her profile, but others can add to it (a la reputation systems) and finally, the bK 2009 platform offers up various analytics on the types and foci of any user’s inter-activities.
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Second … as blueKiwi has evolved through its second wave of client installations, what it learned was the practical logic of Metcalfe’s Law of Networks, whereby the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected members of the network (debate continues, as you will note in the links and citations at the bottom of the Wikipedia entry). To date, the standard model of pricing for social computing / social business platforms involves fees based on the number of seats or users. The more users, the larger the fee, and the fewer the users, the less the fee. So, many organizations begin with pilots, or make decisions about enhancing collaborative capability that involve decisions about the difficulty and costs of customization of their installation of Sharepoint or IBM Lotus Connections.
Back to Metcalfe’s Law … blueKiwi believes that organizations should realize that collaboration in connected networks is the way work will be done all the time in the near future, and so organizations should seek to enroll and engage the entire organization in the use of the collaborative platform. Thus, the fees to use bK2009 are based on the levels of user activity each month. As activity increases the value to the organization increases, and accordingly blueKiwi’s revenues from that client increase. Conversely, if there is no activity, there is no revenue to blueKiwi.
This is essentially like pricing a utility, like paying for electricity or water … so, if eventually all or almost all knowledge work is going to happen on a collaborative platform, it makes sense that the platform and its capabilities be seen as one of the organization’s necessary utilities. As activity increases and the value to the organization increases, so should the price paid for the capabilities that help create the value. Technology is thus not a cost per se, rather the activity the technology enables reflects the price and value of the utility, and the users determine the ROI.
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Regarding its positioning in the Enterprise 2.0 market space, Carlos stated that bK 2009 is coming from the position of having “nothing to defend”. What does he mean ? He means that, for example, Sharepoint or IBM Lotus have fundamental technology assumptions and massive installations to defend, whereas blueKiwi is a new player, one that is coming from origins in / on the web as opposed to previous, pre-web IT design principles and architecture. They (blueKiwi) watched consumer behaviour on the web, Dassault Systems asked them to help build a system for more spontaneous, efficient and effective exchanges of information and knowledge, and the result after several years of intense design, development and deployment is a collaborative platform that in my opinion more closely mirrors the natural sociology of knowledge work than any other platform about which I know. The fundamental design principle stems not from the “technology” that supported existing work processes, whereby the design and architecture of the technology drives the way(s) users operate it (or try to do so), but from how people exchange and use information and knowledge.
bK 2009 is a “social technology” .. a couple of other capabilities reinforce this position. bK 2009 enables users to plug in and use a range of widgets so that they can take advantage of a wide range of pertinent socially-generated information and knowledge (this is closely aligned with some of my previous mutterings about mass customization / mass personalization of knowledge work). As both Carlos and Christophe stated, the ultimate goal is have organizations recognize that bK 2009 is effectively a layer over the organization’s existing IT architecture, and that it can and should operate as a strategic complementarity to existing databases, enterprise search engines, security functions and so on. It’s a social technology, and blueKiwi wants existing and future client organizations to see its design and capabilities as offering a “Social Hub” that complements an organization’s existing industrial-strength information technology architecture and investments.
Over and above the offering for large enterprises considering Enterprise 2.0 possibilities, blueKiwi is also now offering bK2009 Pro Edition for small and medium-sized organizations, for a flat (and affordable) fee. An interesting wrinkle … it allows such organizations to invite external members of its value web to join and interact. So, effectively it is providing these organizations with what they would today seek to accomplish by setting up a Facebook group (effectively side-stepping any potential hassles with Facebook privacy or Facebook owning all the member data). Neat !
I was impressed by this company and its people when I spent time with them, and I remain impressed. Can you tell ?
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UPDATE: If you want to know more about bK2009 or can’t see the detail on the screen shots well enough to understand as well as you’d like to, here are three short, well-produced video clips that help explain how bK2009 helps Foster Conversations, Build Efficient Networks and Bring People Together.
Phweet is a very interesting service on two (or maybe three) levels.
First, if you are a heavy Twitter user, with a little bit of practice you can work it into your Twitter workflow, thereby offering you and followers a means to "escalate" from connecting via a tweet to a more intimate voice conversation.
Second, the same basic technology can be enabled anywhere … for example, on Craigslist or eBay or other community driven sites. In effect, the Phweet capabilities can become part of the Web’s voice communications infrastructure.
And third, although I do not understand well the technical aspects, I think Phweet can become a central part of telephony on the web, doing away with the big telcos stranglehold on the dial tone.
A couple of days ago, as the FASTForward 09 conference opened, I had the opportunity to sit down with Clay Shirky, author of the book “Here Comes Everybody – the power of organizing without organizations” and a consultant, professor and writer. I wanted to bear down a little bit on some of the core ideas in his recent book and examine how his premises impact what management needs to understand and do with the new set of conditions created by an interconnected digital infrastructure that supports all communications and management of information – the lifeblood of an organization’s operations.
As a way to get into the issues, I asked Clay to offer his perspective about how the Web and its interconnectedness is affecting knowledge-based work.
Clay feels that it matters enormously how directed or undirected the knowledge work is. If the purpose of the knowledge work is to discover or extend something as directed by management, then the focus is on R&D. That of course is quite useful and goes on all the time (it’s a great example of what we think of as normal work, and can be highly collaborative or not so much, or anywhere in between).
But … Clay notes that this is not the really radical change that is coming to the interconnected knowledge-based workplace. The really radical changes become apparent when the work turns to finding or creating something new, something really different, when the direction is aimed directly at stimulating and supporting innovation.
Generally, knowledge work is designed to accomplish certain defined objectives, or accomplish specific purpose(s). And yet, particularly in today’s fast-moving world, conditions change like the weather and can strongly impact how accomplishing a purpose is addressed. Dave Snowden, a well-known complexity and knowledge work specialist, likes talking about how the notion of a ‘crew’ can operate well in complex conditions … the members of a crew know their roles, have specific knowledge at their disposal and can swing into action and deploy their knowledge in a wider range of configurations depending upon current and future conditions. However … the effectiveness of a crew structure depends upon the purpose or mission having boundaries; for example a start point, a destination, a flight of so many hours, favourable weather conditions, and so on … not straying into unbounded or undefined conditions
What about fast-moving and ever-changing flows of information, or being pushed by demanding clients and markets to stray into territory wherein an organization has not clearly thought through or designed the boundaries, and where accomplishing the purpose or mission is threatened by inadequate response ? This is where social networks come in … they make it possible to have crew-like work in less-well-defined, less bounded conditions. Social networks in a knowledge workplace provide a new foundation or substrate that enables crew-like work that is not so bounded at the edges … purpose-driven flow, much like gossip in social circles with the differentiation that the chatter, the back-and-forth exchanges, are aimed at the purpose of the work and the (eventual) accomplishment of objectives.
As Clay and I discussed the ways the Web and the new set of conditions are informing and impacting this less-bounded work, I offered the observation (with which Clay agreed); rather than following the long-established lines of reporting relationships on an org chart, in networked conditions “our agreements are our structures”.
Clay elaborated: The development of the first formal org chart is contentious, but one of the contenders is David MacCallum, whose initiative included five rules. Rule #5 begat the fundamental assumption about reporting relationships (upward), that information should only flow through hierarchical reporting relationships so as to avoid embarrassing people (typically upwards, as the embarrassment came from not knowing, not being up-to-date or using bad information to make decisions).
This led us into discussing the effectiveness and responsiveness of the traditional hierarchical structure. While the need and desire of the upper management to know what’s going on for their business as a whole and the need of line managers to know what to do is critical, in effect the traditional hierarchical model does not deal with today’s information flows fast enough or well enough. We don’t have to take a moral or an ethical view about whether hierarchy is “good” or “bad”, we just need to recognize that it is less and less efficient and effective in conditions of continuous and accelerating flows of information.
We delved into the subtitle of Clay’s most recent book … “organizing without organizations”. Clay stated that by using that phrase he did not mean the wholesale replacement of hierarchy. He clarified; we used to regard group action as a priori proof of someone instantiating and organizing the action. He offered an example, citing the case of the Chinese government’s concern about a widespread negative reaction in the blogosphere to the possibility of devaluing yuan, and its conclusion that someone must be behind this. There wasn’t … it was a case of a large-ish number of people noticing the issue and commenting on it and connecting and hyperlinking as only the “blogosphere” can. The point ? We need to start getting used to seeing and noticing organic organization around issues and content.
We then turned to talking about the major implications for leaders and managers when considering what they will need to do to develop and sustain effectiveness in the new set of conditions. Again Clay used a story to set out an example .. the day after Obama was elected and Change.gov went up (during meltdown, wars, etc.) the #1 question was re: medical marijuana. It is not the case that there is automatic legitimation just because a crowd voted it up to the top, as in a ”closed” ( for the purposes of this post a community in which a large majority of members are focused on a range of issues in defined domains) community like Digg, where the implication might be that Obama should be taking marching orders from the “community”. Rather, the legitimizing issue for leaders is demonstrating to the community an effective response to the community’s “are you listening ?” *
In these new condition, Clay suggests leaders need to listen (much more closely than before), clarify what needs to happen and why, and engage in real ways with their constituents. In effect, they need to state clearly “we have heard you, but that’s not the top priority for the following reasons - and here’s why”. These tending-towards-democratic conditions resulting from the mass adoption of the Web ensure that communities and leaders and managers will continue to wrestle with what makes a group outcome legitimate.
In the past and in traditional hierarchies, not responding or staying silent on difficult issues were often used as ways of controlling group action. Clay suggested, in closing, that leaders and managers will need to give up the fantasy that silence still provides effective control …
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* see Shirky’s discussion of the complex issues presented by the “09 F9″ digital key furor and the subsequent community leadership issues encountered by Digg / Kevin Rose, pp. 290-91, Here Comes Everybody - the power of organizing without organizations, 2008
During a recent business trip to France, I met with a range of business people interested in and involved with early Web 2.0 initiatives in the corporate arena. There’s a lot of interest in the area (as there is in North America) and it seems to be growing rapidly.
Martin and Stan introduced me to, and helped me understand, an interesting case study involving bringing a large and somewhat monolithic quasi-governmental organization (SNCF, the French national rail transportation company) into the 21st Century in terms of interaction with and listening to customers on the Web.
I also remember reading a Reuters or AP feed to the Globe and Mail a couple of years back in which Maurice Levy, Chairman and CEO of Publicis, clearly stated that he and his colleagues wholeheartedly believed that digital and the Web were the future. He mentioned in the news piece that Publicis would be giving priority to learning more about Web 2.0 and incorporating a range of the elements into its offerings and practices.
SNCF’s web site is the largest e-commerce site in France. The following graph gives you a sense of it’s presence on line and the amount of conversational activity it stimulates.
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In the last several years it has gone about updating it’s web site to reflect a growing range of content and opportunities for customers to communicate / interact with the company. Publicis is the digital branding / communications consulting agency that has helped it design and build these sites.
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2006 SNCF Site
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2007 SNCF Site
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The changes year over year reflect the increasing opportunities and demand for interaction, and in 2008 SNCF decided to test, in a pilot project, the much-ballyhooed listening to and speaking with customers with a new site, a section of which (at the URL http://debats.sncf.com) carries the tag line “Talk To Us” (or “Speak With Us”).
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2008 SNCF Site
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The growing awareness of the need for and utility of hosting conversations with customers led SNCF to realize that it “is a company that people talk about a lot on the Web without it being able to answer the criticisms“. They decided they wanted to explore “how can we create the conditions for dialogue with Web users?”
SNCF, with the help of Publicis, decided to take advantage of the launch of the newest version of the site to create an interactive space to stimulate and engage in conversation with (current and potential) customers who use the web site.
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2008 “Talk With Us”
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Creating this interactive and participative space involved the following steps:
SNCF recruited voluntary spokespeople within their staff
Web users ask the spokespeople their questions about the SNCF
They are able to vote and comment on other people’s questions
Every day, the “spokespeople” answer the questions elected by the Web users
Thus SNCF and the customer participants on the Web site co-create the content of this space. From what I learned in talking with Stan and Martin, an important additional effect has been the feedback from customers working its way back into some of SNCF’s core business processes. Are you surprised ? I’m not.
The short-term results of the pilot project seem to speak for themselves:
76,486 visits in a couple of months
An average of 2,000 visits a day
331,606 pages seen
Average time spent on the platform is 2.30 minutes
A community of 1,560 users
1,210 questions and 233 answers
Via debats.sncf.com customers asked questions mainly about services and pricing, and provided a wide range of feedback, while SNCF through its staff asked questions in order to solicit customers’ advice and better understand what kinds of new features and services customers were wanting or looking for.
It also became the de facto source for current information, such as:
Jan. 24 strikes announced
Users worried about the impact on their daily journey
Seeking for information on Google
Opinion & Debate is users’ first choice
Opinion & Debate at the 1st rank of Google query
Daily updated content
Free referencing campaign
A key source of official information from and about SNCF
Web users go to the platform
Find answers
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All in all, the pilot project was deemed successful enough to make it a permanent feature of the SNCF web site.
Now SNCF can legitimately state that it is a company that has experienced, appreciated and will continue to learn from being in dynamic interaction with its current and potential customers … thanks to the Web.
Here in point form are some thoughts about what I think has also happened in the social media context:
Twitter was huge and held together - was this not Twitter’s Performance Waterloo? - I found it a wonderful adjunct to my TV and my web watching. I limited my stream to those people that I knew and cared for and it was as if I was there side by side with them. This amplified the whole experience. Some were on the ground in Washington - their collective Tweets were like a composite eye - in aggregate they gave me a sense of being there.
So - if you wish to add more “experience” to your event and hence make it more “sticky” having a Twitter stream will do that.
If you claim to be a new organization and you do not use Twitter thoughtfully - then you are no longer in the game
Streaming - I was joined by millions who wanted to make their computer the centre of their experience. I wanted this because I could add more layers to what was going on. I cannot do this with TV where all I can do is shift channels. I could use Twitter - I could have several streams open at the same time - I could chat - the list goes on. I think that this also was the Tipping Point for TV delivery - this is what the Tsunami was for blogging. This was the event that shifted the web as a delivery platform from being nice to being the most important. Of course it did not work as well as it was hoped. But the flaws in execution and in load management does not change the new reality. The Web is where TV will be seen. CNN’s excellent partnership with Facebook was a ramp up of this idea. I found it such fun to have the feed AND my peeps online on the same page. I started to think of BSG and a Twitter/Facebook combo. Not just news but more importantly to be able to watch whatever I wanted with my friends - a concert, a theatrical show, a documentary, a lecture content shared with friends is better than content watched alone. TV Web Stream PLUS my friends looks like a killer combination
So if you produce content for TV and you have not made up your mind that the web will be your primary arena you are no longer in the game.
Adding conversation with friends and enabling filtering of this group is the icing on the web TV cake
Making this easy is very important. On the one hand we have the CBC who use a very tricky stream delivery and who clearly want to pull you back to the TV offering - on the other hand we have CNN and Facebook - their set up was exceptionally well done. Now the stream overloaded but that is solvable. CNN also offered multiple views - there was not only one stream but 3. I was struck by that. I can see down the road the value of offering many many views - I then become the editor of my own view of the event. Now I have control. What a shift in power! One of the views that is worth having is the C - Span view by that I mean one without any commentary - with my peeps we can do that too.
So - It is clear to me that CNN have crossed the Rubicon - they have senior folks who no longer see the web as good or interesting but as the primary way forward
There is a new Media company out there. The White House is going to become a media powerhouse of its own. The Obama administration is going to do for social media what Teddy Roosevelt did for the Press and FDR did for radio but more so. The Roosevelts gave the new media worlds of their time a boost. But the press/media organizations were still always outside the Whitehouse. As the President showed us in the campaign, he is a master of being the media organization of the future - the White House will have massive conversations directly with the people - an not just the people of the US but with the people of the world. The 44th President is a master of the Cluetrain. Politics are all about Biological Markets.
So, just as he will show up all other elected leaders by his agenda so I think he will show up all others in mastery of how to use social media to do the great work of our time - how to engage people so that they no longer sit passively waiting to be saved but that they are brought into the conversation that encourages them to take responsibility for their own lives and their own communities.
This for me is my biggest aha - that our own conversation will soon move away from “cool” from the “Tech” to what this is all about. It is surely all about an awakening from the deep sleep, the passivity, the numbness, the dumbness - of the traditional mass media.
This where where responsibility replaces passivity. This is the great change and revolution of our time. The social use of media will wake us up and connect us to our real work.
Hot on the heels of our several posts on the article about Cisco in Fast Company, I just ran across this video from a presentation and Q&A he carried out at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
My emphasis below … I am reminded of Euan Semple’s classic post about implementing social computing (The 100% guaranteed easiest way to do Enterprise 2.0?), and I don’t doubt that one of, if not the, the hardest part is senior managers and executives getting used to the idea of less or different control.
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Cisco is undoubtedly a lab for E2.0, and Chambers is definitely in the pilot’s seat. His point about collaboration revolves around productivity and speed.
My attention was drawn by a couple of things he said, such as the new ability of the company to pursue 26 top priority projects at the same time instead of just one or two last year; or the fact that Chambers meets more customers now but less often face-to-face and more often virtually, less often one-on-one and more often as a group; or the fact that he had to get rid of 20% of his staff composed of control freaks who didn’t get it.
Chambers believes that communities are the very core of E2.0, and he admits that he had a hard time getting used to it.
-[ Snip ... ]
Based on Cisco’s own experience in the past several years, organizations will completely restructure around these new capabilities. Indeed, he offers up his company as a paradigm of this vision. Once a hierarchical, command and control-based organization, Cisco is now much flatter, a company running “off of social networking groups.” Councils with cross-functional responsibilities suggest and take on many more projects (from emerging markets, to video, and smart grid boards); from one to two major ventures per year, to this year’s 26 launches.
The next generation company is “built around the visual.” Cisco employees do non-stop teleconferencing with collaborators around the world. The company hosts 2500 such virtual meetings per week. It also employs Webex, Wikis and blogging to move work along.
With this kind of communication and carefully managed process to match, “operations can be turned on a head,” says Chambers. It’s the recipe for market-dominating speed and scale. Chambers is “loading the pipeline” with projects that assume other companies will want what Cisco has and makes.
“If we’re right, we’re developing a huge wave of revenue opportunity.” Perhaps this is one reason why he’s “an optimist on global productivity, global economy and our ability to handle the challenges.”
If we are to use the power of the network effect to gain more leverage - I think it will be essential to understand the underlying math. For like all things in the natural world - such as say Gravity - there is a mathematical framework that underlies their operations. When Newton could describe how Gravity worked, the modern world took off. When we can do the same for social networks, we will be on our way to solving the great dystopia of our time - that we have succumbed to a machine model.
It is of course the Fibonacci sequence - the sequence that nature uses to order all relationships if they are to reach their full potential. You may know of the key number that seems to be the limit of Trust for humans of about 150 - called the Dunbar Number after Robin Dunbar.
Here is a summary post I made on my own blog 2 years ago that pulled together the field of knowledge that existed then. It is my hope, I am a Historian, that people with a sharper brain than I can add much more to this in the future. I am more convinced than ever that the true potential of the power of social media to get important things done will be revealed once our understanding of how all of this works improves.
Not just marketing and media - but the ideal groupings for work, for learning for health, for credit, for families and for all of our lives. A world reset to our natural design versus a machine world.
Dave Snowden posted this recently - I could not get Cognitive Edge to accept my comment so I post them here after his post and then add some comments and list of useful links that add to the topic.
Recognise it? Well of course, it’s the best-fit reduced major axis regression equation between neocortex ratio and mean group size for the sample of 36 primate genera taken from Dunbar’s 1992 paper which was popularised, and not unduly trivialised by Malcolm Gladwell into a natural limit on human group size of 150 (or 147.8 to be exact). The idea is a simple one. The human brain has co-evolved with social conditions and as a result there is a natural limit on the number of social relationships we can maintain. Dunbar linked the number to village, nomadic and military size over time. The number is exercising several people on the ever idea-stimulating value networks list serve. The argument there relates to if this is or is not a natural limit on a network or a virtual community.150 is not the only natural number. There are two others, so I could have titled this post The rule of 5,15 & 150. All of those numbers, plus a need to think more about identity than about individuals, should influence either evolutionary or engineering approaches to community/network design.
What I plan to do is elaborate the numbers and their origins. I then want to look at the way in which the debate around Dunbar’s law is limited by atomistic ontology. This all too common assumption, found in the anglo-saxon world assumes self sufficiency and moral autonomy of the person, and sees communities as assemblies, voluntary or otherwise of individuals. Moving away from social atomism allows to take a different view on communities, their limitations and possibilities, but that will be tomorrow’s blog.
Five is linked to the natural limits on the short term memory. This was first put forward by Miller’s 1956 paper and relates to time more than items (it is a common urban myth to see it as items). This means that it will vary a bit by language, different languages can compress more or less data into a defined time limit. If you have ever spoken through simultaneous translation then you will know that it takes 30% longer to say something in Spanish that it does in English. Given that the Welsh generally speak english 30% faster than the norm, this can present problems! Translation aside, the number is useful and it relates to common sense experience (always helpful). Think about how many directions you can remember, or how we organise telephone numbers. Another way to validate this is to think about models, or lists and see how many elements they have. More than five and you need a crib sheet. One of the reasons I restrict models in my own work to five elements is because of this. Less then five and they pass the paper napkin test which means they are sense making models as they can be drawn from memory, which means they can be used operationally without reference back to authority.
Fifteen comes from anthropology and relates to natural levels of deep trust. I define deep trust here as the ability to tolerate a degree of betrayal. The number varies a bit based on the average size of the extended family in a society and is probably an habituated pattern of behaviour learnt during key periods of plasticity for the human brain. Now readers might be able to help be here. I got this number from two sources several years ago. The number was actually an upper limit of thirty but I reduced it to fifteen for alliterative purposes as well as accepting the realities of modern civilisation compared with the tribal systems from which the number originated. Unfortunately I have lost the reference and I am trying to re-discover it to reference in the book. All help appreciated! Again this manages a common sense test. Think about the social groups to which you belong and which pass the relaxation test. This test is a simple one, its who do you feel able to relax with, without worrying too much how your are seen. I realise that this does not always apply to families! However other than in pre or post divorce situations the ideas is that it should. The size there is definitely under fifteen, and more typically is a small number of groups of around eight or nine on average.
One hundred and fifty is Dunbar’s law and in effect is the number if identities that you can maintain in your head with some degree of acquaints that an individual can maintain. It does not necessarily imply that you trust them, but it does mean that you can know something about them and their basic capabilities. In other words you can manage your expectations of their performance and abilities in different contexts and environments. For the moment lets consider this in terms of individuals (the switch to identity is for tomorrow’s blog). Consider your work groups and the size of your organisation. How many people do you know by name? How many people would you invite to a party? Again you can see the common sense experience coming though in the number. Now the assumption in Dunbar’s working and subsequent writing is that this level of knowledge requires physical proximity. However we now live in virtual as well as physical worlds so the nature of interactions change. The natural limit is probably in place, but its form, and the nature of its creation will have new variants for a new environment
Now these three numbers, 5, 15 & 150 have an alliterative quality which helps us remember and use them. They also have some fairly immediate and practical implications for communities and networks. That is what I want to look at in tomorrow’s blog which will come from Hong Kong. I am shortly leaving for the KMAP2006 conference at which I am keynoting for the second year, and I will also run workshop on uses of narrative in knowledge management. Hopefully I will meet up with some old friends and make some new ones, the conference has an interesting mix and looks less academic that last year when it was held in Wellington, New Zealand.
Great to find more discussion about these numbers. My bet is that by thinking only mechanistically we have “forgotten” their power and organize without any socially valid reason. This may surely be why so many organizations are so dysfunctional such as schools with say 1500 kids and no sub units. Why hospitals that merely have shifts of individuals are so unhappy. Why there is so much “stress” in most workplaces when the work itself is mundane.
The military however still keeps to these numbers. They have to - the task before them demands the full expression of what an organized group of people can do - they tend to use 8 as the base (8 men in a tent in the Roman army = a section) Sections “shrink” to 5 very quickly in action. Below 4, they are not very capable.
My bet is that 5-8 seems to work as the core unit of intimacy. Most sports teams fit this range. It enables you to pass the ball to a space knowing that the person will be there. It enables uspoken flow. It must have been the ideal hunting size.
Dave talks also about the limits to memory. You can remember a 7 number phone number but longer numbers, unless broken into sections of 3 and 4, are very hard to recall.
I recall other material suggesting that most “Tribes” in the hunter gatherer world (our cultural base) were about 35. 8 men and 8 women plus 16 youths and younger children. 35 is the platoon in the military which is the core organizing unit to get any serious work done. The Company would be about 200 as an paper ideal but would shrink in action to the 150 number which is the operational ideal.
VC friends of mine tell me that they get very concerned when they see new companies reach these staffing milestones of 8 -15 - 35 - 150. The hardest one being 15 -35 when you have to introduce some formal communication mechanisms. Complexity obviously does grow exponentially along a log scale.
Other work on gene pools suggests that 500 is the optimal number to keep enough variety. Hence tribal meetings for festivals etc that acted as genetic mixers as well.
A link to a brief survey of mine on the work of John Pfeiffer, author of the Emergence of Man (Out of print) on the numbers of conflict - why groups over 150 have to drive friction
Chris makes the point that while guilds have these total group numbers, it is rare to have more than 40 online at any one time. More on guilds by Chris here
He goes deeper and deeper into the friction that we feel inside organizations today because we do not consider the fall out from not understanding how these numbers work. I find this diagram very helpful -
This confirm my VC friends observation that going from a group of 7-8 to 50 plus is exceptionally difficult. Moving beyond 150 is also a chasm -
I’ve already noted the next chasm when you go beyond 80 people, which I think is the point that Dunbar’s Number actually marks for a non-survival oriented group. Even at this lower point, the noise level created by required socialization becomes an issue, and filtering becomes essential. As you approach 150 this begins to be unmanageable. Once a company grows past 200 you are really starting to need middle-management, but often you can’t afford it yet. Only when you get up past that, maybe at 350-500 people, does middle-management start really working, primarily because you’ve once again segmented your original departments, possibly again reducing them to Dunbar-sized groups.
Chris also asks in this age of social networking software “Is there an effective limit to the size of your personal network. He adds a comment by a VC friend of his -
Venture Capitalist Jeff Nolan relates similar concerns:
“It strikes me that the social networking theory holds that the more volume you have, the bigger your network will become by introducing degrees of separation roughly along the lines of Metcalfe’s Law. I disagree, human networks do not grow in value by multiplying, but rather by reduction. For me, it’s the quality of relationships that enhances my professional and personal life, not the sheer numbers.”
If you know of other good links please let me know.
RECENT WEBCAST: Innovating through the Storm: Insights on the Disruption in the Media Industry
On May 14th, the FASTforward Blog hosted a great discussion between Vivian Schiller, the CEO and president of NPR, and Scott D. Anthony, the president of Innosight and author of the forthcoming book: The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times.
Moderated by Renee Hopkins Callahan and sponsored by Microsoft, the discussion touched on topics ranging from:
* the challenges of today’s news business, NPR’s particular “business” and its need to “be its own disruptor”
* the “misalignment” of business models with real value in some of today’s media companies
* the role of technology in enhancing the user experience
* framing disruption as not just a threat, but also as an opportunity
* the need to experiment *and* be willing to fail often
* the importance of innovation even, sometimes, in the absence of a clear business model
Be sure not to miss our interview series with several dozen attendees of FASTforward'09, including all the contributors to this blog, as well as Clay Shirky, Charlene Li, and many other notable thinkers and doers. The interviews are tagged and can be accessed by topic.
FASTforward Blog Guide to Twitter
Check out the first of a series of guides to the 2.0 world from the contributors of the FASTforward Blog. This and future FASTforward Blog guides aim to deepen understanding about topics we think critical to the future of the enterprise and how people and organizations communicate, collaborate, innovate, and more.
In this guide, Robert Paterson weaves together the many posts that have been written on the FASTforward blog about Twitter, the groundbreaking application that has attracted millions of users and is changing the way they provide, gather, and share information and insights.
Be sure to catch dozens of great interviews from last year's FASTforward. Among the topics discussed between host Jerry Michalski and the speakers, panelists, attendees, and contributors to this blog: enterprise 2.0, search, the user revolution, the future of content, and much, much more.
This site is a companion blog to the FASTforward conference and summit series and is sponsored by FAST, A Microsoft Subsidiary. The blog, like the conference series, aims to drive and deepen conversation about how today’s companies can use technology to place users in control of information, and is home to ongoing discussion about the user revolution and Enterprise 2.0 opportunities and challenges. More info here...
