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Trust

Friday, August 28, 2009

Revitalizing StopBlocking.org

With only so many hours in a day, I have to choose where to commit my energy. As a result, some projects take a back seat. But after pondering two sets of data, I’m recommitting myself to my Stop Blocking initiative.

But it won’t do any good if I do this by myself. I need help to keep the wiki updated.

Bear with me, and I’ll explain all.

First, the data

By themselves, both of these sets of data are intriguing. Juxtaposed, however, they’re startling. One one side, you have organizations warming up to social media, particularly as a channel for marketing. On the flip side, you have a surge in companies that are blocking their own employees’ access to social media.

Add to the mix the fact that internal social media—also known by names like enterprise web 2.0—is gathering steam, and you’re faced with a genuine conundrum.

Let’s review these stats, starting with business embracing social media. According to Equation Research’s “2009 Marketing Industry Trends Report,” reported by eMarketer, 59% of brand marketers use social media, and the ranks will swell to 82% in the next year. A mere 13% claim they have no plans at all to jump into social media marketing.

This data reinforces the results of other research, like a study from the Association of National Advertisers that shows 66% of marketers have used social media in one form or another this year.

Returning to the Equation Research study, the results indicate that only 7% of companies don’t see social media as a good use of employee time.

Clearly, the companies surveyed by Equation weren’t the same ones analyzed by ScanSafe, which earned a boatload of free publicity when it released a study reporting a 20% increase in the number of companies blocking access to social media in the last six months.

So, companies want to market through social media but they don’t want their employees using it? First, that means employees will have to go home to participate in their own companies’ efforts. And second, if everybody follows suit, the total pool of consumers engaged in those marketing efforts will plummet.

But it gets more interesting when you look at the results of the Nielsen Norman Group‘s recent study, “Enterprise 2.0: Social Software on Intranets: A Report From the Front Lines of Enterprise Social Software Projects.” This in-depth research revealed that social software adopted by companies that produce significant results are nearly always introduced as under-the-radar grass-roots initiatives by front-line employees. That is, once social software efforts prove their worth, the powers that be push their implementation.

Let’s be clear: Employees who are not permitted to innovate with social media will not be able to introduce beneficial tools to the enterprise, ultimately costing these companies in untold ways, from innovation and collaboration to increased market share and profitability.

Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman group nails it:

Social software is a trend that cannot be ignored. It is bringing about fundamental change to the way people expect to communicate with one another. Companies cannot use social tools with their customers and not also allow their employees to utilize them.

Yet, according to the data, that is exactly what’s happening.

So let’s summarize:

• Companies want to market using social media.
• Companies rely on employee grassroots efforts to identify social media that will pay off internally.
• Companies are blocking employee access to social media.

Is it just me or does the math just not add up here?

And now, the call to action

I started Stop Blocking a few years back out of frustration over the knee-jerk reasons company denied employees access to social media. The blog was meant to provide updates on research and news items related to the topic. The wiki was designed to provide an archive of resources people can use to make a case against blocking in their organizations.

There has been plenty of evidence to add to the wiki which I have neglected. For example, there’s the University of Melbourne study proving a 9% productivity increase among workers allowed to use social media at work. Or there’s the BizInfo/Blackline study that revealed 65.3% of business professionals claiming that web 2.0 services help them to achieve business objectives and 78.1% who believe social media increases collaboration among employees.

I’ve written extensively about this elsewhere on this blog and over at StopBlocking.org. I’ve catalogued and attempted to debunk the reasons companies implement blocks. None of them hold water in light of the evidence of the real business benefits that accrue to organizations that prudently allow their employees access to the Net. I could go review all of these, but this post is already running long enough.

I will add the latest studies to the wiki. I will cross-posting this item to the blog. And I am committed to getting back to maintaining the blog. But I need your help.

What can you do?

• Send me resources—When you find a study or survey that either related to employee use of social media, blocking access, corporate policies or anything else that helps build the body of knowledge, please send it my way.
• Link to StopBlocking.org—The only way this initiative will build into a movement is if it’s visible.
• Put the badge on your blog—There are several versions available.
• Share success stories—Blog about the benefits of access to an open web in the workplace, and let me know so I can link to your posts.
• Make the case—Use the information at StopBlocking.org to make a solid business case for open access in your organization.

Monday, August 17, 2009

“Trust Agents” and the complexities of trust

If you think the quote above is a conclusion of the Edelman Trust Barometer or a quote from any of the flood of recent social media-focused books, guess again. It was a key finding of a study concluded in 2000 by the IABC Research Foundation titled “Measuring Organizational Trust” (link opens a PDF).

You would think, reading all the conversation about trust in the social space, that bloggers and others active in social media discovered trust. The researchers behind “Measuring Organizational Trust,” however, identified “spontaneous sociability” as an issue before anybody had ever uttered the term “social media.”

In fact, if most of today’s discussions of trust have a fatal flaw, it’s that they focus strictly on the social media dimensions of trust without contextualizing trust around broader relationships and issues. Social media is critical to business today, but trust does not exist in a vacuum. The very definition of organizational trust, according to the study, makes it clear that there’s more in play than blogs and social networks:

The organization’s willingness, based on its culture and communication behaviors in relationships and transactions, to be appropriately vunlerable if it believes that another individual, group or organization is competent, open and honest, concerned, reliable, and identified with common goals, norms and values.

In fact, according to the Foundation study, organizational trust is not a one-dimensional concept. Instead, it is…

• Multi-leveled—Trust results from interactions that span co-workers, teams, organizational and inter-organizational alliances
• Culturally-rooted—Trust is closely tied to the norms, values and beliefs of an organization’s culture
• Communication-based—Trust is the outcome of communication behaviors, including transparency, accuracy and responsiveness.
• Dynamic—Trust is constantly chaging as it cycles through phases of building, stabilizing and dissolving
• Multi-dimensional—Trust consists of multiple factors at the cognitive, emotional and behavioral levels, all of which affect a person’s perception of trust

The role of social media and online conversations should be clear in this characteristics, but so should other relationships and criteria. Clearly there is more to influence the degree to which you trust an organization than what a credible peer has to say. When you consider the five distinct dimensions of trust that emerged from the study, it becomes even more obvious that, while ignoring online interactions can be disastrous, relying solely on them can be equally damaging:

• Competence—Are the organization and its leaders and employees seen as effective? How strongly do we believe the organization will compete and survive?
• Transparency—How much information is shared, how accurate is it, and how sincerely and appropriately is it communicated?
• Concern for employees—When the organization is volunerable, does it abandon its feelings of caring, empathy, tolerance and safety toward employees? Did it ever have those feelings to begin with?
• Reliability—Does the organization and its employees do what they say they’ll do?
• Identification—How connected do we feel to the organization and its people?

A company’s overarching behavior will do more to inform online discussion and the perspectives of peer opinion leaders than any coordinated online communication effort.

These elements of trust were rattling around in my brain this morning as I flipped through my just-arrived copy of Chris Brogan and Julien Smith‘s “Trust Agents,” the new book from Wiley that went on sale today. Thanks to the popularity of the authors and an aggressive marketing effort, the book’s debut is getting a lot of attention; it’s currently ranked 43 among all books at Amazon.com. The 10 reviews on Amazon so far all award “Trust Agents” five stars, including what has to be a highly influential review from Seth Godin.

A couple of the reviews are particularly encouraging. According to Steven Waterhouse, for example, “Trust Agents” demonstrates “how trust is the foundation of any relationship, why trust is difficult to achieve via online interactions, and what to do to overcome these obstacles.” And Amber Naslund wrote that the book strips away the fog “from complex and intricate concepts like trust, reliability, and the importance of human behavior in a digitized world where attention is at a premium.”

The flyleaf of the book, though, asserts that a trust agent’s words “carry more weight than any PR firm or big corporate marketing department.” There’s truth in this statement, but as the Foundation study makes clear, trust is a multi-layered and complex beast. The sources of trust doesn’t simply shift from one medium to another. How much, for example, do the efforts of a corporate communications department to accurately tell the company’s story influence what trust agents believe and pass along?

I’m anxious to dive into “Trust Agents,” which I’ll do as soon as I finish Emanuel Rosen’s “The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited.” I admire the heck out of Chris (and if I knew Julien, I’m sure I’d admire the heck out of him, too; my only exposure to Julien so far is through the podcast, Media Hacks); Chris is a smart guy (and a nice guy) with a firm grasp on the impacts social media is having on business. I’d bet real money his book is worth the cover price, and then some. (It’s available from more places than just Amazon, by the way.)

I plan to review the book soon on “For Immediate Release.”