derek abdinor

In an important body of knowledge, Thinking for a Living, Thomas Davenport argues that knowledge workers don’t respond to normal methods of management and extracting value from them. They demand the tools

Dimension Data recently published a paper, Seven Key Considerations for Deploying Unified Communications Successfully, by Gavin Hill. I wish their superlative research allowed one to comment or engage with it (missed opportunity), but to the 7 points:

1. Organisational Culture and Change Management
2. Environmental Considerations
3. Architecture
4. Security
5. Ongoing Support
6. Enterprise Integration
7. Project Management

Hill readily acknowledges the impact that IM is having on the enterprise, as well as Presence and collaboration servers (Sharepoint). If knowledge workers are to have the autonomy and tools made available to them to facilitate enterprise 2.0 behaviours, their CIOs and support staff would do well to read this paper.

Graphs by Forrester

The opportunity to make KM a byproduct of work was what got me excited about web 2.0 when I first encountered it – Bill Hives

Knowledge management (KM) is the new practice (1995?) of orchestrating a set of practices to capture, share and use information that comes into an organisation, in order to teach, make aware or compete.

It sounded a bit fuzzy when I read it in a Business 2.0 insert in 1998. I remembered the name and the great organograms and Adobe-type images they used, but I felt the whole thing was a bit too fuzzy. Granted, I didn’t know anything about corporate culture and competitive principles at that stage. Now I do.

Like many good ideas that were shelved post dot-bomb, KM makes so much sense know. Think about your employees coming across interesting information online and, with a click, bookmarking for all others to see. Or adding to the Wiki. Or posting about in their blog. Or sending a tweet (this verbage has to go).  Or tagging.

This has been big news in the US earlier this year,  and we’re on this late <sigh />

To the corporate, social media is both a threat and an opportunity. Let’s be real here: disgruntled or sly employees can and will shift sensitive information, get out of the VW camper bus and turn off that hippie compilation tape.

However, to ignore that social media allows employees to collaborate as never before, and engages thousands of a difficult target media-savvy target market (Gen X and Y) to sign up for permission marketing, for free, is a crime against reason. Please leave the Dros and take your buffalo wings to go.

Microsoft, that paragon of hitching onto good ideas to turn a buck, has pimped out Sharepoint (their intranet-portal-document management – content management-no design entity) to include Blogs and Wikis.

No Bill, those aren’t tribes in Lord of the Rings. They actually allow employees to share information and collaborate more than any other form of KM.

Have you noticed the skills shortage/brain drain? Do you know that you average Facebook user in any country is a college graduate with a three to four year degree and is internet savvy to boot, meaning they will look for books, cars, partners and …jobs online? Go ahead and block Facebook without thinking strategically about it, and while you’re at it shut down half your grad recruitment programme.

Finally got this working. The idea is that a pre-configured blog post is set up to receive comments via email. The option to receive SMS as comments works too. Why do this if a user can just leave a comment on the blog?

Consider an important business or organisational announcement. Oftimes the audience will watch this on niche financial TV stations or hear the announcement on the radio: essentially away from the desktop. We’re hoping the audience (analysts, investors, journalists) have a mobile device, and upon hearing the contact details, can comment there and then via email or sms (phones in this sector are still vastly incapable of watching the streaming presentation). The questions are received, relayed to the presenter and asked at the venue. Moderation is encouraged.

I did investigate microblogging for this event, however ran into the following problems with existing providers

• can not moderate
• can not drastically change interface
• in corporate presentation world, names like Twitter and Jaiku are brand-detractive

You would have to roll your own, and include the phone and IM additions to be able to comment.  Next time…

 The technical details
Using WordPress’ blog to email functionality, one can just hack around the existing scripts and get the email to write a comment to a pre-configured post (eg: post ID =4). Set up (in WP) your email address, and then call your new script every now and then (cron or manual refresh). It automatically goes into the moderation queue, where you can edit and filter out all the MIME netsam (would love someone to work on this).
Voila! any user can email a comment, from webmail as well as desktop mail. You can set up SMS to send to the email address too.

I’ll get around to putting this onto Codex. Until then, ask me a question if you want to install for self. Got some ideas about SMS comments from James Saunders.

Some top guys in this market (preaching Web 2.0 to established organisations) are independently realising the need for a new position in the company; titles vary from Geek Marketer, Community Evangelist and Community Manager.

Job description: able to interpret new Web trends and translate them into the Enterprise. Must be able to publish to the internet and monitor the internet for feedback. Developing digital strategies around formal and informal communities (also known as stakeholders) imperative. Must be able to interpret the needs of the Business to IT implementors, as well as to the community, and back.

Enter Geek Marketers. These cross-trained specialists are fluent in both worlds and bridge them. They are marketers by trade, yet they also have a hard-core interest in technology and social anthropology. As curious individuals, they are constantly studying how digital advances are changing our culture and media. Armed with these insights, they regularly apply them in a marketing context by working closely with brand teams to codify new best practices.

Want to know the progression of the ‘Net Web ‘sphere? Consider the titles of the day:

1. Webmaster (very IT, D&D reminiscent: pre-1999)
2. Web Producer (Hey, this things like TV! 1999-2000)
3. Internet Manager (Just run the damn thing, 2001-2005)
4. Digital Strategist (We’re nervous. Find out what it is and tell us)

Explaining Web 2 often goes like this. IT ran the corporate websites, and had to give that up in 2001 after management thought propellerheads and Venture Capitalists need to be separated. Marcoms got the job, and were slow on the uptake, but with most Web 2 tools being communication tools they are finally getting it.

I find many people in this field who were around in the early Naughties (1999-2001) and usually qualify for the above titles have the following in common:

• appreciation for new tools (RSS, bookmarking)
• acumen of a business unit manager
• mindset of a citizen journalist
• technical skills of a developer
• built-in crap detector when it comes to sentence ending in “…ship it and we’ll all be rich!!!”

Know them by their signs.

This article was first posted to BizCommunity in September 2007.

A microblog is a smaller version of a blog, usually limiting posts to 140 characters. Woo-hoo, so it’s a variation on the blogging theme, but less space to make an idiot of yourself. Why then is it one of the fastest-growing applications in the history of the Internet? Is there a place for it in your digital strategy?

A microblog is a smaller version of a blog, usually limiting posts to 140 characters. Woo-hoo, so it’s a variation on the blogging theme, but less space to make an idiot of yourself. Why then is it one of the fastest-growing applications in the history of the Internet? Is there a place for it in your digital strategy?

The size comparison is not sufficient to explain the power of having a smaller, pithy blog, so here’s the rest of the product list:

• You can view posts online, get SMS, email, RSS or Instant Message (IM) notifications of new posts
• You can SMS, email or IM posts
• You can phone in an update or leave a micro-podcast (these new developments occurred during the writing of this article)
• Many people can join a group or channel and add their updates and receive updates
• You can integrate microblog feeds into blogs, other websites or even into each other.

This looks like information if not acronym overload, but its actually information aggregation and simplification. Consider these three continuum (Continuae?)

1. Publishing: catalogues and reports >> website >> blog >> rss >> microblog
2. Written communication: letters >> memos & fax >> email >> IM >> microblog
3. Telephonic communication: telephone >> mobile >> VOIP and IPhone >> microblog

Microblogging is at the nexus of publishing and communication! A post is published, users are notified five different ways, and they respond to you in five different ways. At the same time, they are part of your social network and are subscribing for the news that you wish to send them. This is keeping US marketers up at night.

You could believe we’re in the nascent stage of aggregating our content together and tying up all the loose ends. A related application is when mobile phones serve up RSS feeds. Getting all your news headlines on your mobile phone (not Blackberry or PDA) as a feed (not SMS) has been widely available for some months now. Unlike the built-in camera, but like text messaging (SMS), RSS on your phone is the real killer app.

Technologies
The main microblog providers are Twitter (www.twitter.com), Jaiku (www.jaiku.com) and Pownce (www.pownce.com). I believe they’re currently fighting it out to be the standard and therefore are trying to be the microblog for all systems. Twitter has market share and a vocabulary (vb. to tweet), Jaiku allows users to setup and join a channel and some moderation of posts while Pownce is exclusive and about uploading music and video to your profile. Enterprises could wait for one of them to create an off-the-shelf package, or you can build your own. The technology is alarmingly simple.

Lawyer, social media consultant, blogger and The Times bloggumist Paul Jacobson uses Jaiku a lot.”The channel isn’t just a one way flow of links to posts and sites, it is also a forum for members of the channel to jump in and participate in conversations sparked by items posted to the channel or topics they may want to raise themselves. A Jaiku channel is a great way to let customers know what is going on in your space in a convenient and user friendly format.” His Jaiku channel at http://jaiku.com/channel/JacobsonLaw is such an example.

A similar paradigm is Tumblelogging, which for all intents and purposes has now become a feature of microblogging. It describes a stream of consciousness where multiple users add their one-liners (tumbling) either as posts, observations or breaking updates. Great for a teenage gang, you may snort into your Horlicks, but what about co-ordinating a team in disparate locations who are not all behind desktops? The Los Angeles Fire Department uses tumbling for their dispatchers: http://twitter.com/LAFD.

A social service
Will microblogging take off? Well, if you’ve heard of MXiT you either come to know it through your kid’s school principal threatening to ban it or your occupational therapist trying to wean you off it. Your FaceBook status that you update six times a day: you are “lifestreaming”, or communicating brief asides that sum up your feeling, outlook, personality and location in around 10 words or less. On the other hand, our mobile phones have prepped us into this “always on” culture where we can describe complex concepts using just a few glyphs.

Microblogging for the enterprise

The instant information retrieval nature of microblogs mean that companies can bypass traditional wire services. As Dominic Jones recently blogged:

In essence, [microblogs] can be a notification system and an editorial system. It can tell someone news is available and provide a link to it. For example: “Sun reports Results for Fourth Quarter and Full Fiscal Year 2007 http://tinyurl.com/2h5osq”

It can also be an information system by delivering the news in a concise format: “Sun Beats Profit Target Q4 Revenues $3.835 billion, EPS $0.09 vs consensus $0.05 http://tinyurl.com/2h5osq”

Sun’s recent decision to bypass PR wire services for its earnings releases is but a baby step in what is coming.

Imagine a presentation where you release run a microblog and make this available. Users can post to it through all the media mentioned above; they can even link to video feeds, picture slideshows and pull other content into the feed.

A global distribution concern, based in South Africa, had the problem of sharing information amongst its executives who were scattered over multiple continents. They hit on the idea of each member logging into a secure site, submitting business intelligence or a link to a related article. SMS notifications were the next step. This successful application was produced by us in 2006 when microblogging wasn’t even a Wikipedia entry.

Keeping touch

Some of the US presidential candidates have microblogs. I subscribed to Barack Obama’s as a follower of his posts, and get woken up at 2am to read this on my mobile phone: “BarackObama: In New York – heading to the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Be sure to watch it tonight.”

You get the point? If I needed to follow breaking information, I can have it delivered to phone, IM, email, RSS or go to the website. If I need to post breaking information, I do exactly the same. There is clearly application for intranets, collaborative groups, rapid dissemination of information. If email was instant, then microblogging is inst.

Like it or not, we (ourselves, groups and organisations) are being coached by our technologies into having a “persistent presence” online; a form of branding ourselves through all channels available. Maybe instead of the 15 minutes of fame we were promised in the TV era we’ll only be allocated 140 words and a thumbnail on our microblogs.

Go ahead, tweet yourself.