Social Networking

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

The irrelevance of the broken conversation

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I was standing among a group at a gathering of communicators, chatting about this and that. During the course of the conversation, a colleague raised an interesting point and the discussion veered off into opinions and analyses of the issue he raised. Later, I found myself in another group, where I brought up the earlier topic of discussion. This group was somewhat less interested; we chatted about it for a few minutes, then digressed into something else. One member of that group, however, apparently brought it up over drinks with his girlfriend, who passed it along in the ladies room where she and some friends were touching up their makeup during a girl’s night out.

Ultimately, the topic raised initially in the first conversation was addressed in many different places. But is it one conversation? And while the word-of-mouth may ultimately lead a lot of people to form some opinions about the issue, is it important for anyone to be able to connect the dots?

The scenario never actually happened to me. I made it up to illustrate a point. On the other hand, it has probably happened to me hundreds of times. Organizations at the heart of such word-of-mouth relays are, of course, interested in what people are saying and how it affects them. They may even want to know if somebody influential is shaping the opinion and spreading it beyond the reach of the average Joe. But knowing exactly who said what to whom and how the word spread? That knowledge just won’t make any difference.

And, I suspect, it won’t make any more of a difference when these word-of-mouth baton handoffs occur online.

Several recent posts have lamented the lack of cohesion to conversations taking place in the ever-fragmenting social media space. Discussions that used to be confined to blogs and message boards are now dispersed through several distinct categories of social media. As Todd Defren put it:

You write a blog post.  You tweet about it.  It gets posted to your FriendFeed profile.  You share it via Facebook.  You save it to del.icio.us. Your friends, followers and colleagues comment on the blog. Or they say something nice via Twitter (where a conversation related to your post ensues). Or, they comment directly via your FriendFeed profile.  Or they comment on your Facebook post. Or they save the post to their own del.icio.us account and add a comment there.

This, Todd suggests, means the conversation is disjointed and unthreaded. It’s broken. Brian Solis agrees:

As the host of any given conversation, it is almost impossible to expect your community to discover or congregate around your content in any one given place, especially the point of origin. It’s both the challenge and the promise of micromedia and social networks. The comments section of your blog, for example may not truly represent the community response or reaction because it may thrive across other disparate networks and communities, whether you’re aware of it or not.

There is no denying Todd and Brian—and others who have commented on the issue—are right about the fragmentation. There is also no question that the fragmentation makes it difficult to figure out where the conversation started. But that’s also the case offline, and always has been. It may not be fair that I don’t get credit for a conversation I kicked off because someone who read it took the story to a Facebook group instead of confining herself to my blog. But life’s not fair, and life never had the equivalent of a blog, where every conversation was contained in a single place, except maybe group therapy. The fragmentation of social media, then, is an evolution into something more like the real world, with which we must cope the same way we do in the real world.

At the conclusion of his post, Todd says he doesn’t have the answer and wonders who does. I’m not sure there is one. More to the point, I’m not sure there needs to be one. Somebody may create an application or site that somehow manages to piece all the threads together, but to what end?

In a comment on the meme, Daniel Riveong wondered if the concern over the broken conversation is targeting the forrest or the trees. Katie Delahaye Paine (author of the terrific new book, ”Measuring Public Relationships”) commented that Daniel rasied an important point. “The point for all measurement is to figure out what the program is doing for the business or the organizational mission (if its a non-profit),” she wrote. “Until people stop worrying about capturing every blog mention, and look instead at what impact it’s having on the business, we’re all wasting our time.”

So the conversation is fragmented. So what else is new?

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Is a corporate website/social network mashup inevitable?

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What is the evolutionary path of social networks? Blogs might hold the answer. In the early days of blogging, blogs were independent units, unafilliated with other web content. Sure, you could link to your blog from elsewhere, but they didn’t integrate into websites. Today, it’s not uncommon to see “blog” listed as a core element of a website (like this) or even serving as the home page of a site.

Social networks are like early blogs in that respect: isolated sites that don’t integrate with other web properties. When Toyota started a social network for hybrid car owners, it was given its own URL and its own distinct look and feel. Down the road, I think social networks will be integrated into other, broader websites.

The newly relaunched FastCompany website offers a glimpse of how this might work. FastCompany has always been on top of social networking, introducing its Company of Friends concept back in 1997, when MySpace only referred to that personal boundary you didn’t want anybody to invade. So it’s a natural step for the magazine to transform its online presence into a mashup of a website and a social network. I won’t be surprised to see other publications follow suit.

But what about businesses? For those companies with a large customer base made up partly of enthusiastic fans, why not extend the social network concept to the website at large? Unlike dedicated networks like Facebook, nobody would feel compelled to visit regularly. Because these networks would not be (in fact, could not be) walled gardens, RSS could be used to let members say up to date without visiting the site. The company’s most important customers would be in direct contact with the company, and vice versa, in a way that commenting on blogs could never achieve. Dell could do away with its IdeaStorm because customers would be generating ideas, commenting on them, engaging in conversations with employees about them, and ranking them directly on the site.

Clearly this wouldn’t work for every company. I don’t see the idea being a big success for Halliburton, for instance.

But take the auto industry as an example. Given General Motors’ commitment to social media, Toyota’s experiment with a social network, the moderate success of Edmunds’ CarSpace network, it’s obvious there are enough people passionate about cars—and passionate about the cars they own—to become members of a website where they can network with each other, car designers, product managers and other employees. The direct contact would create a tighter bond between company and customer. Groups could form around special interests. The intelligence generated for the company would be matched only by the sense of belonging that accrues to the members.

So, could GM’s website ever become part website, part social network, with the boundaries as blurred as they are between the network and the magazine content at FastCompany?

Why not?

Friday, December 14, 2007

Internal social networks not worth the money?

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Gartner analysts are warning companies to be wary of investing in internal social networking. With Facebook poised to license its developer platform and several companies offering proprietary intranet-based social networking applications, Gartner’s analysts caution that social networking isn’t mature enough to warrant status as a critical business tool. VoiP and instant messaging are more beneficial, they say.

Over at IBM, the Blue Pages were an early stab at social network-like profiles. While you couldn’t actually socialize with other employees through the Blue Pages, you could find other employees without actually knowing their last names. A search for somebody who coded in C and spoke Tagalog would reveal a list of employees whose profiles matched those criteria. Adding the social networking element means you can now create networks of people who share common expertise, are engaged in similar work, or serve the same customers.

Communities of practice are a great idea but have been a bitch for most organizations to actually create. In a community of practice, people in an organization who do the same kind of job for different business units are able to share knowledge and network with one another. Think about, for instance, regulatory affairs. Distinct business units in large companies each have regulatory affairs professionals. They work alone or with incredibly small staffs. A community of practices makes it easy for all of these people to share ideas and seek counsel rather than work in isolation.

A social network would make it a breeze for those regulatory affairs professionals (or, say, organizational communicators) to form a group and stay connected.

Meanwhile, the news feeds would keep you up to date with the goings-on of colleagues (the equivalent of “friends” in public social networks)—what conferences they’ve been to, what projects they’re working on, when they’ve been promoted or moved to a new assignment.

While there are challenges to implementing social networks on intranets—like getting employees to populate their profiles with useful information and keep them current—the software tends to be low-cost and the benefits could be huge. In any case, they’re certainly more valuable than existing employee directories, which require you to know the name of the employee you’re searching and the information you get back is limited to phone number, mail stop, email address and maybe a reporting relationship.

Gartner’s got it wrong on this one.

Thursday, November 08, 2007

My new hero

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Jeremy Burton is my new hero. The guy deserves a medal. At least some recognition.

Burton is CEO of Serena Software, a 800-employee company not too far from here in San Mateo, California. Serena provides a platform that lets businesses create application mashups without writing code or relying on IT. On November 2, Serena issued press release introducing “Facebook Fridays, which encourages employees to find fun and personal connections in the workplace. Each Friday, employees are granted one hour of personal time to spend on their Facebook profiles and connect with co-workers, customers, family and friends.”

I commented on this enlighted approach over on the Stop Blocking blog, which drew a response from Serena CorpComm VP Kyle Arteaga directing me to an article Burton wrote for ZDNet Asia. In it, he makes the case for encouraging employee interaction on social networks instead of blocking them.

For most people, the human drive to connect and share is stronger than the duty to spend every possible moment “being productive”. No matter what, people will find ways to socialize and share during work hours. It might be best to treat this like sex education: If your employees are going to “do it” anyway, why not encourage them to channel their social-media impulses in smart, safe ways that can potentially help your business?

Burton provides concrete examples of how employees can help the business through their social networking activities and suggests that even though some problems are likely to arise, they’re minor compared to the benefits to the company.

I’ve put in a request to interview Burton for FIR. In the meantime, read this article. Print it out and pass it along. Email the link to people. If we can spread the smarts of enlightened people like this, maybe we can turn the tide on the current trend of blocking access, building employee resentment, curtailing trust and squashing employee engagement. 

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Allan Jenkins’ complaint has inspired me

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At dinner, followed by drinks at the famous BoBi bar in Copenhagen, my long-time friend and colleagueAllan Jenkins expressed some dismay at what has become a common occurrence. He’ll get a call or email from somebody asking, “Are you going to be at the XYZ social media conference in (name city here) next week?”

“It sonds like a great conference,” Allan would reply. “I might have planned to go if I’d learned about it more than a week in advance.”

I feel Allan’s pain. There are so many conferences on social media, and I learn about many of them either after the fact or just before they’re set to begin. What would be great, we agreed, is a single calendar somewhere listing all the upcoming social media conferences. I can’t find one (so if you know of one, please point me to it), so can we start one? I’ll be happy to set up a wiki if others think this is a good idea—and I’m open to alternative means of organizing a collaborative effort to list all these upcoming events (such as Podcamp Boston, BlogWorld, the list goes on...)

Incidentally, that’s Allan below, poking his head between me and Flemming Wiser; Bryan Wilder is on the right. We’re at the BoBi bar, where supposedly you’re not supposed to take pictures.

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

FIR geek dinner in Windsor Oct. 5

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Shel and Neville will be presenting two FIR episodes together next week during Shel’s UK visit.

Not only that, we’re planning an FIR Geek Dinner on Friday October 5. Both our wives will be there, too.

The dinner will be in Windsor starting at about 7.30pm. Venue not yet fixed—we’ll have it confirmed by the end of this week—but it will be within easy reach of the two train stations as well as by car.

If you’d like to join us for an informal and relaxed evening of good company and conversation, let us know. Or if you’re a member of the FIR Group on Facebook, just reply to the invitation sent to all members.

Hope to see you in Windsor on October 5!

(Cross-posted from the FIR blog.)

Thursday, September 06, 2007

Jott does just what it says it will

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At the recommendation of my friend Pete Shinbach, I’ve been playing with Jott, a new online service currently in public beta. So far, I love this service both for its simplicity and the fact that it meets a real need.

Once you have an account, which synchs with your cell phone number, you set up lists of people with whom you want to communicate. Let’s say you work for a department that meets each Tuesday at 8 a.m., but you’re stuck in traffic. Call Jott and record a message saying, “I’m late, but start the meeting without me.” That message will be transcribed and sent as a text message and/or email to the other members of the department.

You’re automatically set up as a group yourself. I can easily see myself driving somewhere and suddenly remembering something I need to do. I call Jott (which is already in my cell phone autodial listing), speak the message, and within seconds, it has arrived as a text message and an email, serving as a reminder once I get back to the office.

Jott has launched new functionality this week, allowing you to send your messages to services like Twitter and Jaiku. I tested it on Twitter, and it worked reasonably well, although it misspelled “Cisco.” Fortunatley, if you think the transcribing might err in spelling what you’ve said correctly, you can spell it out instead of simply speak it.

The service is free and, so far, I think it rocks.