12 posts tagged “jeremiah+owyang”

If you/your organisation understands the importance of social media - despite some drawbacks - and you have plenty of reasons for your colleagues to have conversations, then you have the foundations for nurturing an online community.

Jeremiah's finished a piece of Forrester research that outlines online community best practice and charts the life process of a successful community. He points out: "Above all, remember that control is in the hands of the members, so put their needs first".

This is aligned to Hugh MacLeod's point about the axis of social media: social networks are built around social objects, where social objects are the reason that two people are talking to each other.

Forget whether people ask if Facebook is for business or for the older generation. Microsoft's investment shows that Facebook is not only for business, but can be viewed as the final proof of life for Web2.0.

The move was widely flagged, the reasons are fairly sound, and include this insight from Jeremiah Owyang:

"...imagine fluidity between enterprise collaboration tools. We already know that many Microsoft employees are using Facebook, and this is becoming an identity tool that Microsoft has always wanted (remember Passport?). Microsoft will experiment with connecting Facebook, looking for alignments to daily work and personal lifestyles, and combine where appropriate."

Hopefully, this move will add a little more credibility to the reasons why companies should allow Facebook-style networking into the enterprise.

And just in case there is any doubt that Microsoft doesn't get social media, have a look at this video.

Is E2.0 changing the base job of the internal communicator: getting the right information to the right audience via the right channel mix?

Doc Searls - co-author of the legendary Cluetrain Manifesto - talks in an interview with Jeremiah Owyang about his latest ideas, including 'The Intention Economy':

"In The Intention Economy, the buyer notifies the market of the intent to buy, and sellers compete for the buyer’s purchase. Simple as that."

With the increasing proliferation of RSS in particular, and the reshaping of ineffective corporate intranets using more collaborative, conversational systems, can a similar point be applied to internal communications? Instead of information being collated, filtered and then disseminated through internal communicators, let employees notify the company of what they want to know and then the various information sources can swing into action to provide the information. This could include the 'official' corporate response too.

In reposnse to Jeremiah's post, Kami Huyse, points out that the challenge to address is information overload. Agreed. But becasue the information in the corporation would be primarlily pulled, intention communication should not be seen as an additon to that overload. It is an addition to choice. As Seth points out - more choice who to listen to (and who to ignore). And that choice will allow staff to work things out.

Olivier at Headshift (props Euan) summarises in an excellent post the current state of E2.0 awareness, and says:

"If we live in a knowledge economy, we have to accept that employees are the ones who know how local things need and can be improved. Top down approaches have to give some space to Bottom up ones. We have to let them voice, converse and listen to them, as a minimum."

Maybe the base job of the internal communicator will always be to update the newsletter/intranet/magazine - but E2.0 will not stop and sign in at your company's reception desk. It is here, and it is bringing intention communication.

Jeremiah Oywang - Web Strategist - has been gotten to by Andrew Keen - the 'Social Media pessimist'.

Says Jeremiah: "After you develop your callous from his abrasiveness you can hear some very valid points, he often writes about the problems of social media, and authored the hell raising Cult of the Amateur."

Is the tide finally turning? I would love to discover one or two more can see beyond the well-documented gaps in Andrew's arguments and focus on the big picture.

He must be on to something, if only because one of the definitions of Web3.0 (I know, and it is the only time I will ever use it) says it "throttles the 'wisdom of the crowds' from turning into the 'madness of the mobs' we've seen all to often.'

A week may be a long time in politics, but trying to keep up with the pace of change in social media is just as mad. Even as mid-size companies get to grips with Web2.0, and corporate blogging reaches a tipping point, up pops an interesting look at what the blog of the future could be like!

The pace of change can be seductive and/or discouraging, yet really understanding what can help you, how and how to do it is critical. A few luminaries have shone their torches recently on information about systems that should help when considering these key questions:

• Chris Brogan on Facebook
• Jeremiah Oywang on Twitter
• Bill Ives on Wikis

You might be waiting for all of separate systems to be fully integrated, easy to update and simple to find. Maybe you are waiting for Microsoft's unified communications product Live Communication? In the meantime, social media is here and now, and no longer something that only your secretary should know about.

What do Wal Mart and A&P Supermarkets have in common? Both are seeing the impact of social media up close and personal.

Wal Mart authored their own fate by starting a Facebook page. Not everyone likes Wal Mart - and now they had an outlet for their views. What did Wal Mart do? Well, as Jerimiah Owyang reports here and here - not too much. They could have taken down the page, but haven't - so at least they know that you can't stop the interweb.

Which is more than A&P Supermarkets. They are asking for a parody video filmed by two teenagers in one of their stores to be taken down, and have filed a seven-figure lawsuit. B.L. Ochman and Shel Holtz cover the debacle well.

Shel also suggests that corporate blogging - one of the higher-profile forms of social media - may have reached its tipping point, as a company joining the conversation doesn't make massive headlines anymore. The flip of this normalizing is that attention shifts to companies - such as A&P Supermarkets - that get the even the basics horribly wrong.

Both Cadbury's and HSBC have got a wave of good press in the past couple of weeks for listening.

The global chocolate manufacturer is bringing back its Wispa bar after a concerted campagin (reported here by Shel Holtz) by those looking for a 'smoother, more velvety chocolate', while HSBC, the self-proclaimed 'world's local bank', has decided not to take away interest-free overdrafts from student's as soon as they leave university - again because of a campaign on Facebook.

Reading Jeremiah Owyang's post proclaiming that if you want a wave then drop a pebble, it seems that is what consumers did - and the wave caught both Cadbury's and HSBC.

The causal relationship is not too different for companies. If businesses really want to open up a two way conversation with their workforce, then let the employees drop a pebble. To kick-start matters, maybe internal communicators - who themselves should be early-adopters - can set up their own Eneterprise2.0 placeholder - a Twitter account, blog, Facebook page etc - for employees with different levels of adoption to come to you with thoughts and opinions. Yes, it bypasses the organisation, but it keeps the 'I' in ROI low and does mean that the ripples from more employees can reach you more quickly.

Social media is not like culture change. At some point companies will inevitably ask for more than theory and a plan - they will ask for delivery. So it is comforting to know that the great and the good are on it!

You have managed to convince your manager that social media should be part of your company's culture. Now, as Jeremiah Owyang outlines, it's time to get sophisticated. Start by experimenting with the various social media tools. It's easy to have a go at, say, Facebook, but have you used it in anger?! 

Scott Metzger in InformationWeek advocates identifying technologies that can be applied broadly in a business. These 'Swiss army knives' can help ensure that ROI criteria are met in a shorter time frame, as compared with technologies applicable to only a single project.

The more options that businesses have to seamlessly make Enterprise2.0 work for them, using what they have (i.e. Microsoft platforms) the quicker a tipping point will be reached. The ever-present fear of IT faliure is picked up by Joe McKendrick on FastForward.

True, the 'I' in ROI can be small when it comes to social media, but businesses need more than a list of hot apllications to convince them of longer-term benefits. Bill Ives talks about eProject - which not only hooks up with MS Office but also allows business users to create custom applications. When Facebook allowed the geeks to do this, some 1,800 were built in the first two months. That's more like it!

It can be a let down to come across a topic/title/headline that promises one thing and then fails to deliver. On an initial read of Jeremiah Owyang and Matt Toll's white paper on Social Media Metrics and Measurement, that could be the feeling you are left with.

Only if, however, you are expecting a definitive approach on how to assess social media ROI. The conclusion of the event - a round-table discussion arranged by Factiva of Dow Jones that took place in December 2006 - was that none of the methods looked at was particularly effective.

Yet that was not that aim of the discussion. Rather, it was to 'help further the conversation about what attributes are crucial to measure - not to mention the additional challenges of measuring them at all.'

This is where a very insightful white paper gets very interesting for me, as the group said that the most important attribute was 'Participation and Engagement'.

While the discussion looked through a marketing frame, this has relevance to internal communication as there are accepted methods to notionally 'measure' employee engagement. One of the rolls of Enterprise2.0 is to be a drop of oil on the workings of a company's culture, so a company should expect a well executed Enterprise2.0 plan to help improve employee engagement.

Jeremiah Owyang highlights a case of handbags at six yards in the blogosphere between data storage rivals EMC and StorageZilla.

Nice nod to the value of corporations nurturing organic bloggers, leading to a great reminder of how blogging can actually help a business - not least by overcoming an irrelevant internet site.

Overcoming a useless internet - or for that matter intranet - is where Andrew McAfee's SLATES comes in: companies looking at an Enterpise2.0 approach should, he posits (and summarised below by Dion Hinchcliffe) provide the combined use of

• effective enterprise search and discovery
• using links to connect information together into a meaningful information ecosystem using the model of the Web
• providing low-barrier social tools for public authorship of enterprise content
• tags to let users create emergent organizational structure
• extensions to spontaneously provide intelligent content suggestions similar to Amazon's recommendation system
• signals to let users know when enterprise information they care about has been published or updated, such as when a corporate RSS feed of interest changes