Recently in Social media Category

I believe that governance is at the heart of effective Enterprise 2.0 implementation. While many shy away at the term, mainly because governance is usually focused on risk and limitations, I see it differently. True governance is just as much about ensuring that opportunities are taken as it is as about containing risk. Governance, done well, is an enabler of innovation, providing parameters, guidelines and policies that address risks, and allow the greatest possible scope for experimentation and value creation.

As such most of my client work on Enterprise 2.0 is helping executives to frame governance and develop effective strategies. Advanced Human Technologies doesn't do implementation; we work with partners for the nitty-gritty of larger projects. We believe that the greatest value creation is getting the frame right. Everything else flows from that.

The chapter on governance in my book Implementing Enterprise 2.0 is available for free download from the book website. However I thought it was also worth excerpting the chapter, as below. This section describes a typical Enterprise 2.0 governance process. Of course projects must be always tailored to the situation, addressing issues including organizational culture and existing processes.

SIX STEPS IN A TYPICAL GOVERNANCE PROCESS

1. Nominate a project leader and project sponsor

Creating a governance framework is a significant initiative that requires access to key stakeholders. A senior executive project sponsor should be named who will facilitate access to resources and people where required. The project leader can be either an internal manager with the appropriate skills and understanding of the organization, or an external consultant who has the benefit of independence from organizational politics.

I recently had a chat with R "Ray" Wang of Altimeter Group about what we're up to and our respective business models. Among other things, Ray said that Altimeter wants to work in new spaces that others aren't covering. ERP is boring. But Social CRM, for example, is on the leading edge of where value is being created, but traditional analyst firms are not working.

As a recent entrant to the market (the firm was founded in July 2008 by Charlene Li and now has 7 partners), Altimeter has the flexibility to use different approaches to the existing large firms. In this case, instead of charging in the thousands of dollars for a cutting-edge analyst report, it has launched Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management for free, enabling anyone to embed it on their own site, as I have below.

I was recently interviewed for a report created by the executive forum Vistage, titled 12 Trends That Will Define Business in the "New Normal".

One of the key trends covered in the report in which they drew on my thoughts is reputation management, excerpted below.

Trend 7: Reputation Management

I recently posted an excerpt from Chapter 17 of Implementing Enterprise 2.0 titled 8 Guiding Principles for Pilot Programs: A Key for Enterprise 2.0.

To follow up, here is an additional excerpt from Chapter 17 on pilots.

CHARACTERISTICS OF GREAT PILOT TEAM MEMBERS

The selection of pilot team members is a major factor not just in the success of the pilots, but also whether useful lessons are learned and the successful migration of the pilots into other parts of the business.

The reality is that there is usually limited choice in selecting pilot team members. However since it is such an important driver of success, it is important to understand the characteristics of great pilot team members, and to apply this to the degree possible in bringing the right people on board.

There are five key aspects to a great pilot team member.

1. Enthusiasm
There is no substitute for enthusiasm in a pilot. As such, in most cases the best pilot team members are those who are clamoring to try something because they think it will make them more effective in their work.

Enthusiastic team members will:
• Want to be involved in the pilot!
• Think there are better ways to do things than current approaches
• Be happy to try new things
• Put up with immature systems
• Put in extra time and energy now for the potential of worthwhile results later
• Actively suggest and try new ideas to make the pilot work better

This morning I did the opening keynote at IBM's Collective Intelligence BusinessSphere conference in Melbourne. It was designed as a brief and punchy opener to provide a big-picture context to what collective intelligence means for organizations and the key success factors.

Below are the slides. As always the slides are intended to provide visual support to my presentation, not to be useful by themselves. However there are a few visuals there that may be of interest even to those who didn't attend.

Crowdsourcing in the broadest sense will be one of the fundamental platforms of the emerging network economy. As such it’s pleasing to see that Australia is becoming a hub for a number of the most significant crowdsourcing platforms globally.

I caught up with Alec Lynch of DesignCrowd yesterday for an interesting conversation about the crowdsourcing space and thought it was worth giving a quick pointer to the three main platforms run out of Australia (though all are global in scope).

Freelancer.com, was founded in Sweden as getafreelancer.com in 2004. I first wrote about it in 2005 in an overview of the space. For many years it was the dominant online services exchange in Europe, and one of the top three globally. In May 2009 it was bought by Australian company Ignition Networks, which also acquired the domain Freelancer.com. The company is run by veteran tech entrepreneur Matt Barrie, who most recently founded and ran specialty processor firm Sensory Networks Inc.

Continuing my notes from the Media 2010 conference on the presentations by Jack Matthews, Richard Titus and Marc Frons, here are the notes I took from the presentations by Frederic Filloux and Russ Fradin.

I will be digesting what I've heard today and pulling into some upcoming content on the future of media.

FRÉDÉRIC FILLOUX, EDITOR - INTERNATIONAL, SCHIBSTED

1. Failure of ad model
- CPM lower than ever
- Clickthrough rate never took off
- endless inventories pushing prices down – ad networks are bottom feeders

I am at the Media 2010 conference in Sydney, where there is an extraordinary line-up of speakers through the day. I am here to get my head back into gear on future of media strategy, which will be a major theme for me through this year.

Below are my notes taken on-the-fly from the first few speakers. Hopefully I will get hold of some laptop power to be able to continue after this.

JACK MATTHEWS, CEO, FAIRFAX DIGITAL
We are at the point of singularity – beyond which we cannot see.

Highly recommend Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of Networks.

George Washington University and media relations software firm Cision have released a very interesting study of how journalists use social media and online tools.

The headline news is that 56% of journalists consider social media to be important to some degree. This figure pushed up to 69% of journalists writing for online outlets, while just 48% of magazine writers found social media to be important.

Journalists on the importance of social media for reporting and producing their stories
Source: Cision

Social media is used extensively by journalists to publish and promote what they have written, with just 14% saying they don’t use social media at all for spreading word on their work. Almost two-thirds say they use blogs (presumably usually not their own), and 57% use Twitter or other microblogging sites to point to their articles.

Journalists on the social media tools they use to publish, promote and distribute what they write
Source: Cision

Gartner has released five interesting predictions for social software. Here are the predictions along with a few of my thoughts.

By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.

This is a transition that we’ve seen for a very long time, and looks finally ready to come to fruition. Coming from a financial markets background, I’d seen from as far back as the late 1990s that email as a primary medium was resulting in communication breakdown. I’ve long believed that shifting communication out of email was one of the main ways that social media would be valuable, as for example expressed in my 2005 white paper How Collaborative Technologies are Transforming Financial Services.

This prediction will play out very differently across organizations. Many companies will remain bound in email. Others, particularly those that are project-centric and effectively implement social software, could well see a substantially more than 20% of communication shift out of email. The development and evolution of new tools such as Google Wave will see email not quite die, but rapidly erode in the most innovative organizations.

By 2012, over 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging, but stand-alone enterprise microblogging will have less than 5 percent penetration.

Last week I was interviewed on Sky Business about recent data showing that Australia leads globally in use of social media, and the implications of such high levels of social media usage for business.

Here is the full interview, with major points noted below.

• It is surprising to see Australia at the top of the global charts in social media usage, given that just a few years ago it was significantly behind in uptake – this has been a dramatic acceleration in usage.
• It is a fascinating question why social media usage surged in Australia (see here for more detailed thoughts on the topic). Contributing factors include the sudden improvement in mobile data costs when the iPhone 3G was launched in July 2008, and the shift to more a conversational style of social media that suited the culture and dispersion of Australians.

A few months ago I wrote about The shift from corporate brands to personal brands, referencing Jeremiah Owyang's move from Forrester to the newly-founded Altimeter Group with former colleagues.

This is a long-term secular trend - in fact last week when I spoke at the Online Marketing by Design event I pointed to it as one of the three most important trends for this year. I was discussing it in the context of marketing, where companies must recognize that trust resides in individuals not institutions, and use this to shape their external engagement. However it is just as important in the context of attracting and retaining talented people. I wrote:

Now, as personal brands grow in relative strength, corporations need to consider how they can best reflect and tap the influence of the individuals working for them. As Jeremiah notes, social media means that personal brands are immensely portable, as are personal networks.

This is about power to the worker, absolutely, but those companies that understand this and tap this shift can do extremely well. They can attract those with strong personal brands and create immense value from their influence, simply by focusing on building the brands of their key staff as much as they do their corporate brand.

In this context, I find it striking that Forrester Group has decided to ban personally-branded research blogs by its staff, as reported by analyst-watchers SageCircle. It says:

I am not that keen on the word "crowdsourcing", because people mean many different things when they use the term. However since it is the word most used to describe tapping the power of distributed talent, which is one of the most important emerging themes in our hyper-connected world, I will embrace it, and hopefully soon draw up my own taxonomy of what crowdsourcing means to help clarify the conversation.

I was struck by a post by Steve Kelman on The dark side of crowdsourcing?. Kelman attended a presentation by Jonathan Zittrain (esteemed scholar and author of The Future of the Internet - and How to Stop It) in which Zittrain pointed to how crowdsourcing approaches could used for bad things. However Kelman came out primarily impressed with the vast potential of the field.

One of the best-known domains for crowdsourcing is getting contributions for inventors and innovators to contribute, using innovation markets such as Innocentive (which I described in Chapter 5 of Living Network on Innovation), and prizes such as the X-Prize Foundation.

An emerging domain is using large pools of people to monitor for crime:

Zittran then noted the growth of applications (this one from the U.K.) where people, for very small amounts of money, are apparently willing, from the comfort of their couches, to monitor crime surveillance cameras to look for suspicious activity and report it. Some companies are also getting people, again for micro-payments, to report in if they recognize photos of people participating in a mass marijuana smoke-in.

The downsides of these kinds of applications were then raised:

Well there are already plenty of opinions flying around and some excellent comments on my post yesterday Australians are #1 globally in usage of social media: Why?, which pointed to new research showing this startling result. I guess it’s time for me to offer some of my thoughts, helped along by the conversation so far. Be sure to read the insightful comments on the topic!

To my mind the question is less why Australians are such heavy users of social media, as why the uptake was so slow initially before a startling acceleration over the last couple of years. Here are a few initial thoughts.

Attitudes about the individual.
One of the most famed aspects of Australian culture is the ‘tall poppy’ syndrome (your head might get lopped off). This has tempered much over the years, but there has still been until recently a relative reticence to stand up and shout out personal opinions (with of course a number of notable exceptions). I felt this contributed to the initial slow uptake by Australians of blogging. Perhaps once enough people are expressing their views on social media, you no longer stand out by blogging and Twittering – you are in a majority and your self-expression is unleashed.

Some very interesting data just out from Nielsen on social media usage. The headline is that people in developed countries are spending 82% more time on social media than they were one year ago.

However the data point that struck my interest most is that...

Australia is #1 globally in usage of social media

This is a real news. For many years I was bemoaning the slow uptake of social networks in Australia. Research featured as late as our Future of Media Report 2007 showed that Australia was dramatically behind the US and UK in Facebook usage, though it was beginning to catch up on usage of MySpace usage and tools such as Photobucket.