Technology

Items about the technology that underlies online communication

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Easy come, easy go: Sprout “sunsets” its consumer widget service

I am seriously conflicted about how to feel about Sprout‘s decision to “sunset” its consumer widget-building software-as-a-service tool, Sprout Builder.

By “sunset,” of course, Sprout means “kill.” For a startup, they’ve certainly learned the corporate art of doubletalk.

I’ve been raving about Sprout Builder since its debut. Before Sprout Builder, dynamic, multimedia widgets were a costly undertaking requiring programming expertise. Sprout Builder made it drop-dead easy for anybody to create one and deploy it. I got myself a free account and created two for my podcast, For Immediate Release. Fans of the show were able to copy the embed code and add the widget to their own sites where any visitor could click the “play” button and hear the latest episode. All I ever had to do was log in after posting each episode and update the link to the podcast MP3 file.

Creating the widget was a simple drag-and-drop exercise, thanks to the AJAX-enabled website. The process went like this:

• Create a box to contain the widget, setting the size I wanted.
• Upload the graphics I want to use, pretty much the same way you upload a video to YouTube.
• Drag the graphics into the box.
• Drag an audio player from among the various assets Sprout Builder provides into the box.
• Link the audio player to the online location of the podcast MP3 file.
• Save.
• Publish.
• Copy the embed code and put it on the FIR site and my own blog so others can get the code for their own sites.
• (The service also let you create multiple tabs for a widget, link to video and do all manner of other very cool things.)

One version of the FIR widget was for websites. It’s a bit wider than the one I created specifically as an app for Facebook. I’ve also recommended the service to more than a few people and suggested to Dominic Jones that it would make it simple for companies to provide updated investor information.

I whined a bit when Sprout decided to start charging for the service, but opted to pay the lowest fee since these were the only two widgets I planned to create. (The fee ratchted up based on the number of widgets you wanted to maintain.) I felt I had little choice since the widgets already existed on other people’s sites.

I don’t have any idea how many people have added the widget to their sites, but I’ve seen it in at least a couple dozen places.

Then came word a few days ago that Sprout was abandoning—er, sunsetting—the service, opting to focus solely on its enterprise solution, which runs $2,999 per year. The email from Sprout CEO Carnet Williams begins:

One of the toughest decisions that a start-up faces is where to focus its efforts and resources. Sprout Builder was our first product and has always been near and dear to our hearts. More importantly, we value the customers who have gotten us to where we are today. However, we have made the hard decision to shut down the Sprout Builder subscription service to focus on our enterprise product lines.

So, on March 14, all those widgets fans and friends of FIR have put on their websites will vanish.

I said I was conflicted by Sprout’s move. On the one hand, I’m sympathetic to the fact that businesses need to make business decisions. And I certainly understand that the same outcome would have occurred had the company run out of money or if it had been acquired by another organization that wanted Sprout’s assets and talent, but not its service.

On the other hand, the company sought customers who built widgets that have been deployed to many other sites. All of us are left high and dry. Depending on what shows up where the widget is supposed to appear on those sites, we could all wind up being the target of some anger (or, at least, some eye rolling). More to the point, if I offer something like this in the future, who’s going to trust me? My credibility will suffer because Sprout didn’t keep its implicit promise to its customers.

Sprout also seems not to have opted for any actions to minimize the impact. They haven’t offerd to open-source the code for Sprout Builder. They haven’t pointed customers to an alternative. And if they tried to sell the service to somebody else, they haven’t said so.

I’ve tried finding a comparable service. Whoever staffs Widgetbox’s Twitter account provided half an answer to a question I posed, but never answered my follow-up question, even when I sent the query a second time.

Ultimately, then, I’m frustrated. I’m frustrated by the situation, the inability to find an alternative, the requirement to put the word out to bloggers and site managers who are hosting the widget, and the fact that I’m aggravated even as I recognize Sprout’s right to manage its business.

Is my aggravation justified? And if you ran Sprout, how would you have handled a decision like this?

Monday, February 08, 2010

Blocking access isn’t the only way to protect your company

In a comment left recently to a post I wrote for Stop Blocking back in October 2007 about malware on Facebook, David Jones with CommerceMicro wrote:

Stupid, out dated information.

We have users that repeatedly get infected with viruses and spyware no matter what level or type of antivirus and antispyware software we install. It’s rather odd that ONLY THOSE particular users get re-infected day after day and that they all have MySpace accounts, FaceBook accounts, or whatever. Their employers have to continually pay us to come and clean these infections.

My reply was a bit terse. I asked Jones if he believed all the companies that don’t block access were lying about not encountering the problems he cited. (And no, I wasn’t snarky enough to point out that “outdated” is one word.)

The security issue does, however, appear to be supplanting productivity concerns as the main reason companies block access to Facebook and other social media sites. Among the dominant social networks, Facebook presents the biggest risk to company security, according to 60% of the respondents to a survey of 500 companies conducted by Sophos, an IT security organization. No other network comes close. MySpace ranks second, with 18% of companies identifying it as a concern, followed by Twitter (17%) and LinkedIn (4%).

The concerns are not illegitimate. The incidents of reported malware and spam attacks through social networks has jumped 70% since April of last year. Social networks have become common launching pads fore a couple of particularly nasty worms. The risk of infection, though, is not the only security issue that keeps IT staff up at night. Employees’ individual behavior represents a risk, particularly as web-unsavvy employees fall prey to phishing and other devious ploys. And then there’s the fear that employees will share information they shouldn’t.

Sarah Perez goes into considerable detail on the Sophos report in her post on ReadWriteWeb. Perez also notes that even Sophos isn’t advocating an outright block, despite the study’s findings:

Unfortunately for those in charge of enforcing corporate security, simply blocking Facebook and other social networks via URL is not a realistic solution anymore. The networks are often a large part of a company’s marketing and sales strategies, notes Sophos, meaning they cannot be blocked outright. Instead, companies are encouraged to use a unified approach for mitigating threats that combines data monitoring, malware protection and granular access for their employees.

A Financial Times article (free registration required) has the same advice, noting that organizations have too much to gain from employee interactions on social networks. The article, penned by the head of an information risk management and e-discovery firm, rightly notes that letting employees access social networks from work gives them “the ability to locate the right people, information and expertise quickly, but they also greatly aid external networking, sales and marketing activities.”

The article (which I discovered on the Idea Peepshow blog, notes that 89% of businesses in the UK have no policies governing employee use of social networks and calls for companies to establish and enforce such policies.

As I’ve noted before, protecting the company is a matter of ensuring the proper network safeguards are in place (such as anti-malware/spyware software and the latest virus definitions) and that employees understand their responsibilities.

It works in a lot of companies that don’t block access. It can work in yours.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Thanks, technology

The Microsoft keynote at CES last week in Las Vegas was preceded by this video from Saturday Night Live cast member Seth Meyers. Enjoy!

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Just how social can you be if your online content is exclusionary?

I spent some time today, while at the IABC Heritage Region Conference, with Amy Salmon. Amy is a business consultant based out of Oklahoma City. She’s wife and a mom to two young children.

She’s also blind, the result of macular degeneration that struck her as a young adult. She gets around with the help of friends and family, and her guide dog, Wilbur.

Amy’s consultancy (she’s part of The Rodgers Group, a longtime communications firm run by Amy’s sister, Vicci Rodgers) works to help companies make their online content accessible to the disabled. According to the U.S. Census, more than 54 million people in the U.S. are disabled, representing about 19% of the population. As baby boomers age, the percentage of people with disabilities—and blindness in particular—is poised to rise dramatically.

For a lot of the disabled, getting through a typical website is beyond challenging. It’s impossible. Amy, for example, prefers to shop for her kids online. It’s easier than getting someone to take her to the store and help her identify the products she needs. On the WalMart site, she is able to find products, but she can’t order; that requires a mouse click. A mouse is an essentially useless tool to a blind person, Amy told me.

(Incidentally, Amy won’t shop at Target at all. The only reason the iconic retailer’s site is compliant with the accessibility standards established by the World Wide Web consortium is that they were ordered to by a federal judge following a lawsuit filed by the National Federation of the Blind.)

In the U.K., a study determined that purchases the blind cannot make on inaccessible website account for tens of millions of pounds. I’d love to know the results of such a study in the U.S. with its considerably larger population.

Amy uses a tool called Wave—not the new Google communication tool everyone’s talking about, but a more established site for evaluating a website’s accessibility. I plugged in the URL for WalMart’s home page; Wave returned 10 accessibility errors, including Javascript that can’t be interpreted by a text-to-voice reader, hidden content, problematic link text (text that “does not make sense out of context”), headings that are not appropriately marked, event handlers, and more. And all this was just on the home page.

I was also struck by Amy’s stories about talking to companies about the inaccessability of their sites. She has been told, flat-out, “We don’t care about that part of the market.” A key reason: remediating sites to make them accessible could be costly, particularly for ecommerce-based sites with thousands or pages.

Much of Amy’s consulting business comes her way via legal departments. Businesses are concerned about avoiding lawsuits. Accommodating nearly a fifth of the market? Not so much.

Accessibility is not a new issue. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the Web back in 1989 and heads up the Worldwide Web Consortium, has said, “The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.” (Here are more quotes from Berners-Lee about accessibility, an issue he clearly believes in.)

But considering all the proclamations by companies that they want to build relationships through social media, accessibility should be a more prominent goal. When companies establish Twitter and Facebook fan pages in order to be more accessible, isn’t it disingenuous—even hypocritical—to maintain online content that can’t be consumed by those whom life has handed the additional challenge of blindness, deafness, or cognitive or physical limitations?

Just how social can you claim to be if your online content excludes this segment of society, this potentially lucrative slice of your market? It’s hardly sincere to claim to be engaged while simultaneously proclaiming, “Sorry, the blind and deaf are not welcome.”

Part of the problem is that nobody wants to be accountable. Communications professionals tell Amy it’s not their problem; talk to IT, they say. (Wave detected 20 accessibility errors on the PRSA website.) But part of the problem is lack of attention. Tens of thousands of people can protest a Motrin video that offends them, but good luck finding a surge of indignation around a site that denies access to the disabled.

I’ll be talking with Amy for an interview segment on my podcast, “For Immediate Release. In the meantime, I just wanted to make the point: It should give you pause the next time you tout your social efforts if your own online content includes a huge “Go Away” sign for anybody who isn’t fortunate enough to be free of disabilities.

Wednesday, October 07, 2009

Why the 54% of companies blocking access to social media should knock it off

Cross-posted from Stop Blocking:

At least 10 of my colleagues have alerted me to a study released yesterday by Robert Half Technology, in which 54% of the sample of 1,400 CIOs of companies with 100 or more employees block employees from accessing any social media at work.

Mashable points out the Robert Half study is consistent with other reports. The trend is gaining momentum.

I even received an email today from a communicator who observed that she received a security notice that access to Stop Blocking was blocked at her organization. Right. God forbid anybody should be able to explore the arguments against this inane and counterproductive practice.

Given the publicity the Half study is getting, it’s worth reiterating the key arguments against blocking.

Well-communicated and consistently enforced policies will deal with most issues. The number of companies blocking access to social media sites is roughly on par with the number of companies without social media policies. Isn’t it possible that employees who knew what the rules were might actually follow them? Especially if they knew there were real and serious consequences for failing to do so?

Access to social media improves productivity. According to Dave Willmer, executive director of Robert Half Technology, “Using social networking sites may divert employees’ attention away from more pressing priorities, so it’s understandable that some companies limit access.” But multiple studies prove exactly the opposite.

Productivity concerns are based on fatally flawed assumptions. First, there is research to suggest that every hour an employee spends at work on non-work-related websites is compensated for by an hour spent away from work on work-related activities. Do you check your work-related email on your mobile phone before you even get out of bed? Most knowledge workers say they do. Second, there are work-related benefits to social media activities, including collaboration, mindsharing and professional social networking amongst employees, affiliates and partners, according to David Lavenda of WorkLight (drawing on results from a Gartner study).

Employees don’t need your network. I can access any social network I like on my iPhone and my Palm Pre. I have a laptop with built-in access to the Sprint network that gets me on any site I want. Employees can (and do) bring these tools to the workplace. Your blocks have no impact. Employees can still get to Facebook all they want.

Who died and put CIOs in charge of worker productivity anyway? I’m not sure when supervisors and HR abdicated this responsibility to IT, but IT is simply not qualified to address employee productivity.

Blocking kills engagement. There are plenty of studies that tie high levels of worker engagement to increased growth and profitability. Trust is a pillar of engagement. So what happens to engagement when all employees get the same message, “We don’t trust any of you, not a single damn one of you, as far as we can throw you, so we’re blocking all of you”? Bye bye, engagement.

Access to social media is not an automatic invitation to viruses and malware. Those companies that do permit employee access have found ways to protect their networks. For many of the companies blocking access based on the fear of infection, it’s just easier to block than to find ways to protect the network while providing access. Laziness is not an excuse for blocking.

Millenials will not work for companies that block. These workers—the ones you need to hire to replace the retiring boomers—are networked 24/7 and expect the company to accommodate them. Many simply won’t work for companies that block access, which means you’re left to hire your second and third choices. Is mediocrity actually a hiring goal in your organization?

Bandwidth is a bogus issue. Bandwidth is the paper of the digital era. Can you imagine a company 25 years ago telling workers, “We’d love to get memos and publications to you, but we don’t have enough paper”? The very notion is absurd. They’d buy more paper. Companies pinching pennies on bandwidth are doing themselves a disservice in many more ways than one.

Please suport the Stop Blocking initiative. Contribute research you’re aware of to the wiki. Share how your access to social networks and other web content has benefitted you at work. Share how blocking has restricted your ability to be as effective as possible at work. Link to Stop Blocking; feel fee to use the Stop Blocking badges on your blog or site. We must get the word out that blocking is a counterproductive, knee-jerk practice that must be stopped for the sake of the very companies that are implementing it.

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Social media is not a car

There’s an age-old analogy that keeps coming up in social media talks I hear. “You don’t need to know how it works,” the analogy goes, “just like you don’t need to know how internal combustion works to drive a car.”

It’s a fine analogy for a consumer using social media. It doesn’t wash for communicators.

The very fact that communicators need such knowledge shouldn’t surprise anyone. Most communicators working 20 years ago, for instance, knew how an offset press worked so they could manage the production of the best possible publication. The inner workings of social media are no different. If print is giving way to digital, we need to have as thorough an understanding of digital tools as we had of print tools.

Without this intimate knowledge, our use of social channels will be limited to the most common uses to which everybody puts them. With such knowledge, it becomes easier to innovate compelling commicatins that influence people and produce results.

RSS and Posterous are two examples.

RSS

An increasingly loud chorus has proclaimed that RSS is dead. “I don’t need RSS any more,” the argument goes; “I get updated on all the information I need with Twitter. Twitter has replaced my RSS reader.”

Twitter hasn’t replaced my news reader, but I can understand why a lot of people feel this way. Nevertheless, what these folks really mean is that the consumer use of RSS—subscription to feeds via a reader—is dead. RSS itself is very much alive, a vibrant protocol that has been woven into the infrastructure of the Web. News moves through the Web largely because of RSS. Even more noteworthy, RSS is undergoing an evolution to accommodate the shift of the Web to a real-time environment.

RSSCloud and PubSubHubbub are two protocols that turn the current RSS model on its head. RSS readers poll all of the feeds to which the user has subscribed on a regular schedule—usually every hour—to see if any of the feeds have been updated. RSSCloud and PubSubHubbub notify users of any updates to feeds instantly, pushing the update to the reader rather than having the reader pull it.

Several services have embraced PubSubHubbub while every blog on Wordpress.com (the hosted version of WordPress) produces RSSCloud-compatible feeds.

So far, there’s only one reader that can take advantage of RSSCloud, but these are early days. The use of these protocols will improve your ability to deliver news and information instantly, whereas today you may produce it instantly, but delivery waits for a user’s reader to check for updates.

Buying into the inaccurate “RSS is dead” meme simply limits your opportunities to find new and innovative ways to deliver content as quickly as possible.

But understanding RSS opens possibilities beyond those presented by the most nascent technological developments. I’ve been working with a client looking for an easy way to deliver news to employees globally that allows employees to tailor the kind of news they get form the company—personnel news, product and brand news, industry news, and so on. Without much budget for expensive server options, I advised that they use a simple WordPress blog as the back end, creating separate categories and delivering the posts through RSS feeds delivered via the employee portal. It’s a simple solution that lets employees select news by category as well as geographic region. It helped to know RSS could do that, and that portal technology makes it drop-dead easy to incorporate feeds into portlets.

Posterous

As for Posterous, most of the people I talk with who know about the service get that it’s a ridiculously easy way to post just about anything to the Web. Some also get its potential for distribution of information. For example, everything I publish to Posterous is automatically tweeted (the headline is the tweet while the shortened URL links to the rest of the item I’ve posted.) But the Austin American Statesman’s use of Posterous was eye-opening. The newspaper invited readers to email photos showing how they were spending a 100-degree-plus day. More than 70 photos were submitted that were repurposed into a gallery on the newspaper’s website and a page of photos in the print edition. The experiment left editors hungry for more; they shared ideas for using Posterous to chronicle a local sports team’s season, for instance. Again, the potential is huge for soliciting content from readers and then repurposing it in the paper’s other outlets.

How could communicators use Posterous on behalf of employers and clients? You won’t be able to figure it out if you’re not aware of its capabilities.

Understanding the technology that makes communication channels work isn’t rocket science. Twenty years ago, it was no big deal to hear communicators talk about publications they were producing “going two-up, four over four, with spot varnish, embossing, and full bleeds.” None of these communicators worked in print shops, but they knew the technology of the offset press because that knowledge helped them plan the most effective publication possible.

If the Internet is the printing press of the digital age—if the world truly is shifting away from tangible to digital media—communicators need to develop the same level of understanding of the tools or our ability to innovate will be severely limited and clients will look to non-communication alternatives who are able to innovate.

I’m not suggesting we need to be able to write code, program RUby on Rails, or manage a server any more than we were expected to create negatives or burn plates for print. But we need to grasp all the capabilities of the tools we’re using to communicate.

Am I wrong?

Sunday, August 30, 2009

The real-world work of Enterprise 2.0

I was struck by two items that surfaced in my RSS feeds this morning.

(Yes, I still use RSS. RSS is nowhere near dead. I understand that armies of people are abandoning RSS for “better” tools but, like Dave Winer, I think people confuse Google Reader with RSS. And, like Marshall Kirkpatrick, I’m fine with the growing abandonment RSS. The more who dismiss it, the more I’ll be the one to uncover useful and relevant content. But I digress.)

The first item featured ZDNet columnist Dennis Howlett howling that “enterprise 2.0” is a crock. “Business has more pressing problems,” he argues,” adding that “the world is NOT made up of knowledge driven businesses.” He concludes…

Like it or not, large enterprises - the big name brands - have to work in structures and hierarchies that most E2.0 mavens ridicule but can’t come up with alternatives that make any sort of corporate sense. Therein lies the Big Lie. Enterprise 2.0 pre-supposes that you can upend hierarchies for the benefit of all. Yet none of that thinking has a credible use case you can generalize back to business types - except: knowledge based businesses such as legal, accounting, architects etc. Even then - where are the use cases? I’d like to know. In the meantime, don’t be surprised by the ‘fail’ lists that Mike Krigsman will undoubtedly trot out - that’s easy.

It was funny, then, that the very next item I read, from CIO magazine, chronicles how no less an organization than Procter & Gamble produced bottom-line business results through the systematic introduction of in-house social networking.

The goal was simple, and one that seems to have escaped Howlett in his rant: P&G wanted to expand the way its employees collaborate, “incorporating Web 2.0 tools into a single platform to unlock weak and potential ties—employees with common goals or interests who have little to no contact.”

While Howlett rails that most people “just want to get things done with whatever the best tech they can get their hands on,” P&G saw the potential for social tools to allow “users to create value beyond their usual circles.”

P&G’s systematic approach began with skunkworks projects involving the blogs and wikis Howlett insists nobody cares about. Once the use of those tools became part of the fabric of work, the company settled on a platform, PeopleConnect from Telligent, that employees use “to form and join groups and to interact through blogs, wikis, forums and document stores.” Nearly 12,000 employees opted into the network before the company even formally launched it.

P&G is tracking the results both with metrics the system produces but also with genuine business outcomes. For example, a 150-person team, made up of employees situated in P&G facilities throughout the world, normally came together in about six to 12 months under the hierarchy to which Howlett seems to believe organizations are bound. Using PeopleConnect, it took two. Presumably, that means the results of the team’s efforts will begin generating profits four to 10 months sooner than normal.

P&G’s experience, is not, of course, the only bottom-line benefit organizations can point to as a result of adopting enterprise 2.0. Best Buy has reduced turnover and increased retail worker participation in the company’s retirement savings plan. Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance has seen an increase in collaboration. Siemens USA is finding employees establishing knowledge contacts who might otherwise never have met.

Howlett asks, “Can someone explain to me the problem Enterprise 2.0 is trying to solve?”

In response, Hill & Knowlton’s Niall Cook—author of “Enterprise 2.0”—lists streamlining internal communication where overload has become the order of the day, getting sales people to share best practices, improving collaboration between people who otherwise would never connect, speeding the delivery of answers to questions.

When companies know the conditions that hinder speed to market, growth, innovation and collaboration, they can explore the options for overcoming those obstacles and adopt the strategies that move them forward. That’s what P&G and a growing number of companies have done—in fact, a study from AIIM notes that the number of companies embracing Enterprise 2.0 has doubled in the past year. I doubt most of them are jumping on a bandwagon, but rather introducing systems designed to improve the bottom line.

I hope that answer’s Howlett’s question.