Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web, has a great way of putting internet terminology into focus, from his unique vantage point. I reproduce some concepts here for simplification:
The Net aka: The Internet (http, nntp, ftp, email), International Information Infrastructure
Era: 1980s-1990s
Realisation:
It isn’t the cables, it is the computers which are interesting
The Web aka: World Wide Web
Era: 1990s-2000s
Realisation:
It isn’t the computers, but the documents which are interesting
The Social Graph aka: Web 2.0, semantic web, now
Era: 2000s -
Realisation:
It’s not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important” or “its not about the social networking sites, its about the social network itself
Tim has put things nicely into perspective. I especially agree with the last point: I don’t care about Facebook, but I like what Facebook has taught us thus far and wrote a little ditty about it.
He goes on to say “The less inviting side of sharing is losing some control. Indeed, at each layer — Net, Web, or Graph — we have ceded some control for greater benefits.”
IBM announced today their version of cloud computing, Blue Cloud. This comes shortly after Amazon’s announcement of Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
“As more Web 2.0-style applications, which include lots of content contributed by end users, come online, companies will need to have better tools to handle them”, said Dennis Quan, chief technology officer of high performance on demand solutions at IBM.
“What’s at the heart of this is the realization that this technology is not restricted to universities or academic institutions. There’s a broad applicability for this technology,” Quan said.
Cloud computer primer
Cloud computing is essentially the harnessing of computer power to scale to a massive size, which allows for the following:
replicating the size of the internet or a part thereof
testing application viability (esp Web 2.0 apps) by simulating user adoption across the internet
crunching numbers on a massive, scientific scale. Think the Genome Project, SETi@Home, scanning pictures of Space or the desert. Apparently, in the 50s-80s academics used to book time on a computer to perform data analysis (like calculating pi) and they can now buy time on Blue Cloud or EC2/S3.
Web 2 has always been about communication, not technology. About using all different methods of getting accurate information, collaboration, dissemination. What better time to put it to the test in an organic, non-rational, human situation: the california fires.
Mashups of maps, microblogging and user-generated video are some of the uses. Remember the London bombings 2 years ag, where mobile phone images where the first used? Virginia Tech bloggers? This is not mall-meetup technology.
Love it or hate it, Facebook and other social media are here and they’re changing the online habits of your employees and customers. It would be churlish to dismiss social media as a fad with no impact on your organisation other than being a tool for employees to squander their billable time; at the same time, Facebook is not going to propel your company into an early listing just because it has the undivided attention of tens of millions of users. Right about now, you have a IT policy in place regarding use of social media or are undecided about what action to take.
Time to take a step back and do a business case on this phenomenon. The purpose of this article is for you to realise what lessons and habits your employees and online customers have learned in the last few months while being introduced to social media. Consider these , and then discuss them within your own organisations. Don’t be stuck on Facebook, your employees are probably using other Web 2.0, or social media, applications on an hourly basis.
1Web publishing is simple
Ten years ago the message was “anyone can publish a web page. Learn a little HTML, some Photoshop, some odds and ends about HTTP and web hosting and there you go!”. This spawned a cottage industry of web designers and web design courses, but lets face it: it required a steep learning curve in languages and standards that were changing every few months.
Blogs are far easier to set up, but people from non-creative industries or non-media types have to think long and hard about design, posting, commenting and plug-ins. Its no surprise that most blogs reference “web 2.0″ or “social media”. While blogging is a tsunami, it doesn’t get everyone publishing.
Enter Facebook. A simple setup process, no level design playing field, click-n-play plugins and publishing in a manner more similar to text or instant messaging than email or word processing.
The business case: employees will finally be able to take short cuts and ask questions like: wouldn’t it be simpler to put this online? Can’t we create a mash up of our sales figures and geographical areas like the travel apps in Facebook? (The answer to both is Yes).
2Facebook is a start page
Enterprise applications like SAP and Microsoft Sharepoint allow one to set personalised home pages on their intranet start pages or as their default browser pages. Facebook is similar, except the information on it is mostly of a personal nature.
The business case: you may want to consider pulling Facebook’s notifications as an RSS feed into your existing employees’ start pages. In that way they can keep abreast of friend’s movements at a glance from within their business application. This may sound abhorrent to some policy makers, but ask your IT to do a test implementation for you and you’ll see how innocuous it is. Will it keep employees of the phone and emailing? I don’t know the answer to that question, but consider this option if you don’t want to ban Facebook outright.
3Social networking online
When you send your sales, marketing and client service to a conference, do you exhort them to network their buns off? Probably not in as many words, but that’s what you want. Surely your enterprising employees will use online social networks to initiate joint partnerships or get valuable information, perhaps even to disseminate your company news in this channel (for free). If you manage IT staff you would be foolish to discourage them from joining sites like Experts Exchange, Slashdot or Tech Republic. When they hit a coding snag they can submit the question online or nose around the forums for the answer, rather than spend two days trying to reinvent the wheel.
Facebook has most likely informed your employees about how to leverage their social network (even though some will only use Facebook to organise parties and send chain mail!)
The business case: Social networking online is a way to make customers gather around product (Amazon), supply you with invaluable ideas (Dell Ideastorm) and engage with approved demographically-selected profiles (eons).
4Naked communication
A person’s personality comes through on Facebook more so than in any other medium. Those who boast offline, boat on Facebook. Those who sent chain letters with Hello Kitty drawings at age 8 do the same on Facebook at a more advanced age. That is the power of the medium, people manage not only their relationships but their personas through it. This naked communication builds stronger online and offline relationships.
The business case: like Amazon’s recommendations, Digg’s articles and del.icio.us bookmarks, users trust content generated by their peers, known or unknown, more than what businesses tell them to believe. This is evidenced in Facebook and other social media, and your business ought to have a strategy in place to interact and monitor this channel.
5Friends
Can a22 year-old be friends with a multinational car manufacturing corporation? Can Barack Obama be friends with thousands of potential voters? In Facebook you can. You can even have stronger relationships with entities than with friends you see every weekend for dinner. It may be a perversion of the concept of friendship, but its the term we’re saddled with when we try and explain these relationships. Users and customers can be friends with your brand, usually around a competition, cause or campaign. This is free permission marketing, are you still complaining?
The business case: we learned that people trust the official line when published in a blog format more so than when it comes as a press release off the wires. In the same way, an intranet modified into more of a social network, a customer care section of your website or a graduate recruitment site will benefit from bringing your brand to the level of peer rather than patriarch.
6Always-on culture
Generally speaking, the last two generations in the workplace don’tlike the commitment of formal telephone calls. They weren’t taught telephone etiquette and the concept of “taking a message” is beyond them. Sometimes one uses a SMS or IM message as a status checker: are you in? can you make it? The pressure is taken off having to tell a white lie, which is not as easy when speaking to someone in real time over the telephone.
Facebook’s status updates allow you to mention in a brief, pithy manner about your whereabouts, mood and recent events in your life. Friends are notified immediately, and will act thereupon by contacting you directly, leaving you alone, or not bothering to schedule a meeting for you as you have stated that you’re ill or on leave.
The business case: Churches are increasingly blogging their sermons to their communities. Some people just don’t want to attend church but they want the information, much like workers who hate meetings but want to participate in the project nonetheless. What if your board gave brief updates to the other members or subordinates in a secure environment once a day? They could pass on critical leads or thoughts that others could action or research the merits thereof. Teams could get rapid updates rather than gathering in time-consuming meetings, analysts could offer rapid assessments of stock and send out to subscribers in all the various formats.
When getting approval from a client around some material or dealing with a supplier, you’ll find IM is faster than email. You can store the conversations for later reference. The stand out in this area is Rackspace, the hosting provider. After spending a few minutes on their site, a window pops up with a sales assistant asking if you need help. You can then ask questions and answers to them, with audio or simply through the IM interface.
7The Internet is a raw document repository
Google taught us that you can find anything online. Wikipedia taught us that information about everything can be found online. Facebook taught us that anyone you would want to find is probably online. This is a simplification, as others have identified class differences between MySpace and Facebook, not to mention those who are not even online. If you are reading this, however, and can identify with the issues, then you know that your kindergarten playmates or high school sweethearts are a click away from discovery.
The business case: managers tried to block the internet and they tried to block IM. That was until they realised the benefits for productivity and communication inherent in both. Facebook and other social networks may have business applications that are not immediately apparent.
8Microblogging
I believe microblogging will be the preferred communication method of the near future. The current providers allow one to text, IM, email, blog or phone updates to your personal blog. The updates are then disseminated by notifications like RSS, email, IM, text etc. Publishing and dissemination are therefore combined in one medium through many devices, something which standard websites and phones cannot replicate. This is where Enterprise 2.0 will be focussing its attention right now.
The status updates of Facebook and the wall posts as well as the notifications of your friends are just as in microblogging.
The business case: microblogging allows for sending and receiving key updates through all technical devices. Project updates or urgent information release (See the LA Fire Department’s microblog) are native to microblogs.
9Fad
Sure, Facebook is also a fad. Remember at school you had fads like marbles, collecting cards, hairstyles and clothes styles? They were great, then the powers-that-were moved on them and banned them. The fad usually went underground and the fad mutated into a cult. Feelings against the school management were probably soured for a while. Things may or may have not been written on lavatory walls. Tongues in cheek aside, the same is happening in corporates world-wide.
The business case: everything in social media is, for the corporate, a threat and an opportunity. What usually tips the scale into the overall positive side is that everything is measurable. People can blog about you, but you can blog about yourself and respond to them too. And you can track when somebody mentions you in a blog post. The same principle applies to Facebook and other social media.
10Knowledge gathering
Since employees have been given internet access to perform their tasks better, they have usually been updated with links and jokes and websites and now Facebook. They’ve been exposed to more disparate information and interest groups than they would probably have found in that evening’s newspapers. This is a part of the great tradition of the Enlightenment, and as mentioned above, they will place worth in content not only coming from the traditional news sources.
The business case: if you are in a creative field, I would suggest giving employees limited or unlimited internet access, underpinned with a performance contract. I would also set aside two hours for a meeting at the end of the week where everyone has to report on what they found online that could contribute to the business aims of the organisation. A reward of more access could be considered? Then your internet and bandwidth can be assessed as a valid business tool, and you and your employees will be reaping the benefits that social media is infusing into our traditional media channels.
Corporations have had to react to the phenomenon, ranging from banning use of Facebook outright, through to limiting use thereof to the marketing departments, to creating an official presence on Facebook and tying the company profile into graduate recruitment and news dissemination.
Don’t base your Facebook decision on appearing cool to your employees or external stakeholders. Rather look at the points made above, distribute to staff and convene an open discussion with their own points of view. You could see financial or productivity rewards, or perhaps you may only establish a better dialogue with staff and your customer base.
Remember, this is social media. A top-down approach to information distribution usually lands bottoms up.
What better way than to get people to gather around Junk? Er, not talking about MySpace or FaceBook, but eBay who released eBay Neighborhoods the other day.
The design is great, coming hard on the heels of Amazon’s new redesign.
eBay was one of the companies that did really well really quickly in the 2000 – 2005 period, along with Amazon and Yahoo! I think some cumulative laurels were being sat on by Yahoo! and eBay while everyone else got an idea, an API and some numbers behind them.
Some pennies have dropped since then, and I think this is a network going places. eBay is addictive to many people, and thousands make their living from it. That’s an audience that you can’t buy. Now if you could integrate their other offerings Skype and StumbleUpon into this it would be worth joining, even if only to get rid of my 1970′s Bobby Locke set of woods.
Research firm Gartner have published a report underlining what many in the Enterprise 2.0 field, and what the previous post referred to: your organisation will have Web 2.0 technologies in it, some for business and some not, whether you like it or not. This change will come from your current and next generation of workers who grew up with internet technologies and will expect to find it waiting for them. If not, they will move on or create their own to the consternation of your IT policies and HR officers.
Admittedly, that sounds dramatic. However, if you have juniors who are more adept at networking, real knowledge management and rapid turnaround times than your incumbents, you may find yourself with a hierarchical problem.
Vertigo
On that note, the research rings a bell with a favoured theme of mine: vertigo and the silo approach. Web 2.0 is as horizontal as you can get. I know vertical communities and vertical search sound sexy and practical and make easy Powerpoint slides, but reality is different. Information-seekers mill about your corporate website like indoor dogs on rainy day to get a feel, you can’t push them down silos.
Surprise! Investors, analysts, applicants, suppliers and journalists do the same. You would be a poor fool if you just took the official line, and didn’t probe a bit more.
If this current working generation is the multi-task generation, the ‘digital natives‘ must be the multi-source generation.
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.
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?)
Publishing: catalogues and reports >> website >> blog >> rss >> microblog
Written communication: letters >> memos & fax >> email >> IM >> microblog
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 2007http://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 $0.05http://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.
I read in the Business Day that Mervyn King explained the market cap of a listed company as highly inclusive of non-financial items such as
brands, goodwill, the reputation of management, a company’s sustainability and the quality of its governance.
He added that a company’s market cap was no longer just related to its book value, especially in an age where social and environmental concerns were growing. Corporate governance is integral to the value of a company.
Those of us who have experience in the sustainability reporting ethos and King Code will naturally agree, and take heart from King’s affirmation. I take further interest (while wearing my Web hat) because you could have substituted the words corporate governance with “Web 2.0″, “online reputation management”, “CEO’s weblog” etc.
You see, Web 2.0 as applied to investor relations is about dissemination of information, access to information in various locations, reputation, communication and accountability. A blog by a board member and the related spinoffs (RSS, social bookmarking, comments, trackbacks) goes a long way to addressing previous corporate policies that were found wanting. Monitoring of the blogosphere and reacting to it, dissemination of corporate presentations, texts, videos, imagery through web and mobile are what it’s all about. Its governance by laying oneself bare, or naked reporting.
I’ll address this topic further in one of my talks or an article, its really important; Mervyn ought to blog.
Explainer: Judge Mervyn King is the highly influential author of the King Code (I and II), advising to the World Bank and UN. He has dragged corporate South Africa and the JSE into being one of the leading exponents (as a country) in corporate governance reporting and the attendant practices of sustainability reporting and BEE.
Every listed company adheres to the JSE requirements of disclosing the practices by which they run the concern, and the trend of the last few years has been to examine the impact on the environment, social impact and economic impact (the triple bottom line) of their operations. In a resource-rich, large country like South Africa, one may think one can ravage the natural and human resources and damn the consequences (as evidenced in the last few centuries, the exploitation of the New World). Sustainability makes financial sense and moral safeguarding of an organisation’s impact.
spoiler: Seth Godin comes first, 349 follow. A South African appears at #106. A lot of PR blogs in there as well but no IR.
Criteria #1: Google PageRank (0 to 10): Google PageRank is a link-analysis algorithm that interprets web links and assigns a numerical weighting (0 to 10) to each site. High-quality sites receive a higher PageRank. The actual PageRank number was used in the Power 150 ranking algorithm.
Criteria #2: Bloglines Subscribers (1 to 20): Bloglines displays the number of feed subscribers. Subscriber ranges were determined (i.e., more than 20, more than 30, etc.) and each range was assigned a number (1 to 20) that was used in the Power 150 algorithm.
Criteria #3: Technorati Ranking (1 to 30): Technorati ranking analyzes the number of sites pointing to a particular blog. The more link sources referencing your blog, the higher the Technorati ranking. Similar to the Bloglines Subscribers value, Technorati ranking ranges were determined (i.e., top 9,000, top 10,000, top 20,000, etc.) and each range was assigned a number (1 to 30) that was used in the Power 150 algorithm.
One has to stop blogging as a method of storing info. Readers are not working for me, and I never get round to del.icio.us. I need my own intranet.
