The value of social media

In harsh economic times, organisations exercise tighter control. Control over costs is the obvious example. However, the means by which tighter control is exercised can often(but not always) be more centralisation, and consequentially less freedom. This can in turn impact the amount of freedom people are given to engage in social media activity, or can create an environment where they are afraid to. This scenario means it is even more compelling that we are able to articulate the value that an organisation can derive from social media. Otherwise we’ll be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Accepting that there is value in social media is one thing, but unless we can articulate and quantify that vlaue, the days are numbered.

Dissolving boundaries.

I’ve written about blending before, so here’s a quick reminder.

o business & personality

o inside & outside

o home & work

o collaboration & fun

They’re all going to be blurred in future. That’ll impact technology, our work lives, our home lives, and attitudes to work in general.

Work really is no longer a place, it's just one of the things we do during our daily lives. And it's mixed in with all the other things.

Organisations think big.

Organisations think big. They think in terms of enterprise solutions, signing enterprise agreements with big vendors. Organisations also like to claim agility. Are these two things compatible? As we move to smaller devices, like the iPhone, with consequentially smaller apps, will this have a knock-on effect in the way CIOs view their technology platforms and procurement choices? Not for a long time I predict. Which is unfortunate as lots of small steps often brings benefits much faster than waiting for one big step.

Pace of change 2

Change is constant. We all know that. But in a fast moving world, change takes much longer than we expect. I remember in the mid-1990s talking at conferences about how, with intranets, the paperless office was almost with us. Yet today, for many organisations that is still not reality. When social media started to gain traction three or four years ago, we all said it was going to have a fundamental impact on business. But when? In my experience, what we think will happen quickly, takes much longer.

Not long ago adoption of technology used to lag behind the technology – we’d have a new system, but persuading people to use it was often the hard part. However, now we often find the technology we want is struggling to keep up with the way we use it. Which is great because it gives us the opportunity to drive technology developments from real, not imaginary, demand.

Social media adoption curve

A while back I read a report from Gartner which outlined three phases of social media adoption – denial; don’t ask, don’t tell; embracing. It made the assertion that the mid stage – don’t ask, don’t tell – is the most dangerous place as organisations hadn’t banned social media (therefore couldn’t stop worrying about it), nor had they embraced it (so they weren't getting value from it). However, I feel there is an additional step between stage two and three, which I call ‘reality/recoil’. This is characterised as a knee jerk reaction once the organisation is on the way to acceptance. I think this moment is short term and transitory and comes when the reality of the change becomes clear to individuals and they start to realise there are implications that will affect both them as individuals and their organisation.

The pace of change

Melrum asked me today if they could reprint an article of mine first published in one of their reports 'How to use social media to engage employees'. It was first published in summer 2007 and I've just re-read it and realised that, although things have moved on a bit, it's not a hugely different picture than it was two years ago. This illustrates quite nicely my assertion that change in business communications always seems to take longer than we all expect. I think one of the contributory factors is the resistance and reluctance we face from the traditionalists who still far outnumber the progressives in the employee communications industry.

Intranet Futures

Last week I was invited by Paul Miller, founder of the IBF to be ‘in conversation’ with him in front of an audience at an IBF meeting. The idea was that we’d have a conversation about the future of intranets and then turn it into an open forum. And it worked very well. There was an audience of about 25 people, from a range of different organisations. It was also good to catch up with some people in the audience whom I interact with on Twitter etc., but had never actually met.

We had a wide ranging discussion, covering a variety subjects and we certainly stimulated a useful debate amongst the audience.

One subject we discussed was senior awareness and ownership of the intranet – where many organisations are moving to more of a shared ownership model, to replace the single ownership model that existed up to now. This is happening because of the continued elevation up the criticality scale of intranets and an increasing role in business process and change, rather than being exclusively the domain of comms activity. At present, I think most intranets are managed out of communications – primarily because they’ve been communications led, not because of any underpinning logic. However, the changing role of the intranet does not seems to be putting pressure on communications people to relinquish their role and I think that may be because we’re adapting into this new, broader, business focused role.

We also discussed why some organisations with excellent intranets give poor customer service and whether the intranet could be an enabler for improvement. This opened up an interesting discussion around the difference between intranet, internet and extranet. Although I’ve been saying this for some time and it is yet to happen, I firmly believe the distinction is breaking down and that in future we’ll just have The Net and people will be able to access any information that is relevant to them no matter where it sits, or where they are. There are one or two technical challenges with that approach however, and there’s also a usability challenge as people take comfort in knowing where they are. In other words, knowing that a particular piece of content is ‘inside’ an organisation (and therefore may be privileged) is important in terms of how people view it and use it.

Platform wars

When will technologists stop arguing amongst themselves about which platform is best, and start to think about what is going to be best for users? When will technologists realise their platforms are a means to an end, not an end in themselves?

Please!

Change is happening

1. From communications to engagement

2. We can do stuff without IT…..

….. and they don’t like it.

3. Uses are emergent, and business benefit is emergent…..

….. so business case processes are inappropriate.

4. Communications people don’t understand it, so…..

….. they ignore it, or try to control it…

5. Users don’t understand it, so…..

….. they just use it….

What is an intranet

Whilst preparing to present to the Intranet benchmarking Forum the other day, I started to think about what an intranet actually is. Of course, it's many things to many people, and for sure our definition has changed over the 16 years or so since the term was first coined. However, here is my stab for what it is. It is:

• A critical part of your organisation's landscape
• A platform for the paperless office
• A place to collaborate
• A catalyst for change

All of which are pretty obvious and probably not too contentious.

However, and intranet is also:

• Taken for granted (or at least it should be)
  
• The battlefield between technology and business
• The place where people can have personality, opinions and express themselves.
  

These are not so obvious, and are certainly not so comfortable for the organisation. However, as has always happened, intranets are once again challenging the old paradigms - and that can be quite threatening for those affected. The one thing we can be sure of though, is that change in this space is pretty much unstoppable as an intranet world is a democtratised world and has an organic life of its own. The most successful intranet managers will be those who can harness that development and growth through the various phases.

Informalisation

Tomorrow I’m hosting the Intranet Benchmarking Forum meeting looking at our intranet. In putting together my 15 minutes of fame, I started to think about a potential clash between the increasing centralisation and formalisation we’re seeing in business right now, which is a natural consequence of the economic challenges many businesses face, and the increasing ‘informalisation’ of the intranet. We face a surge of user generated content via wikis, blogs, microblogs social networks and so on, most of which is spontaneous and informal. However, over the past 15 years or so, intranet professionals have focussed on governance of content, making sure it’s up to date, accurate, owned and so on. As the balance between this legacy ‘governed’ content and the new wave of informal content changes, so our governance approaches will have to change. Not only that, the governance we managed through the early days of intranet was necessary because users weren’t particularly savvy and we needed to take care of the content on their behalf. The user is much more aware these days and doesn’t need us to cosset them in quite the same way.

Does this therefore mean the end of intranet governance as an activity? Can we just leave it to the network to organise itself and the crowd to keep content up to date? Well, possibly yes, but also, no. Some form of governance will still be required – people in business still need reassurance that the information they are using is valid and accurate. That cannot be left to chance. However, as there will be many, many more content providers than before, we’ll see a few power users emerge in the information farmer role. They will assume responsibility themselves – in other words we won’t ‘appoint’ them – to look after content. These farmers will need our help and support. That will be a vital role for the intranet professional going forward.

The tools we use will also need to change. Content management systems have grown up supporting this formal world. They are entirely inappropriate for this new wave of less formal content, where users neither have the time, nor the desire to be trained on how to use a system. They’ll be looking for a user experience closer to that of Facebook, Blogger and the other social media platforms. They’ll just want to start using it. However, in our corporate worlds, change of this type is not comfortable for our programmes and projects. IT projects in particular have long lead times and there is a very real danger we won’t be able to reap the benefits of this greater knowledge base and collaboration because we can’t get the right platforms in place.

A final thought. We mustn’t get too precious about our governance processes. They are a means to an end. If we can achieve the same ends in a better, cheaper, faster way, then we should do so. Change affects us too!

Keep it simple, stupid

Intranets became powerful because they were simple. And they're still powerful things, but we seem to have lost the simplicity. Worse than that, we've created an industry around the simple things and in the process, made them un-simple. As so often happens, we've lost sight of the things that inspired us all at the beginning. Some intranet managers and technologists now look upon the next wave of technology as a threat to the comfortable status quo, not the fantastic opportunity it is. Oh, how easily the machine grinds us down. Shame on us.

Why is end to end so hard?

These are tough economic times. We notice it at home. We notice it at work. In business, we’re all focussing on costs. And we all have targets. The big risk with an objective led and target based reward approach is that we miss the bigger picture. This can be particularly damaging in the intranet space, where developers of online services become very focussed on their own objectives, usually at the expense of the user. In this insular world, there is a danger they will think the work is done and objective achieved when the application is switched on. It doesn’t seem to matter that it’s inaccessible, unusable, and results in the user having to invest huge amounts of time being trained or trying to find their way round a poorly designed interface.

So, instead of individually focussed targets, we should be looking at team targets that take an end to end view. The measurement should start at the point the customer or sponsor has an idea, and follow right through to the moment when the user becomes happy and competent with the system. That way things will get joined up and we’ll shorten production cycles.

Voices

In a world where everybody has a voice, those people working in corporate and employee communications face challenging times as they struggle to get their voices, or the voices of the people they write for, heard above the hub-hub. This is being brought into sharp focus on intranet news sites. More progressive organisations already allow comment on stories, or for people to submit their own stories. Up to now this ‘user generated content’ has generally been kept separate from the corporately provided news. And where an external view of company news is brought into the site, this is also kept separate.

I think this will have to change. Commenting on corporate stories; external views on the same stories; even the ordinary people providing their own interpretation of a news story are all going to be legitimate content on internal company news sites. All of that content will need to be aggregated around the story itself, not be consigned to a series of contributor-based ghettos, as it forms the context for the conversations which are so important. Conversations are a component of engagement. Corporate voices are not.

The permeable firewall

Richard Dennison talks in a recent post about how to create the right balance between recreating content and social media services on an intranet which already exists on the internet, and just integrating tools from the internet into the toolkit for employees.

I commented that the permeable firewall will not be a technology application in future, it’ll be the way organise these things in our heads. Commentators keep going on about work life balance. Business people keep saying a good work life balance is healthier both for the individual and for the business. And as I’ve posted before, these things are driving an increasingly blended existence. Different tools to do the same things in a blended world makes no sense. I predict most people will use a single tool to interact with those networks. Twitter is a good early example in the micro blogging space. I only use Twitter, but I am selective as to which of my networks I tweet to. Sometimes it’s everyone, mostly it’s a sub network. I know it’s a question of what we’re comfortable with, but our comfort zone is heavily influenced by the rules and behavioural norms set by the culture of the organisation we affiliate to and so on. Those things are changing. They are being changed by technology. They are being changed by the new generations arriving in the workplace. We are changing them.

It’s going to be a challenge. And there’s going to be conflict. Security and firewall people won’t like it. Power brokers won’t like it. But it’s going to happen.

IBF24

I took part in IBF24 over the past couple of days. A 24 hour global (follow the sun) online intranet conference. What a great idea. People joined from all over the world - over 700 people attended the conference, from 16 countries, saving tonnes of CO2. It was highly interactive fun and didn’t involve me sitting in airports for hours. Let’s hope it catches on.

Blending again

No sooner had I posted more thoughts about blending than I came across this from Hugh MacLeod. Just about sums it up.

What is an intranet?

Intranets in large organisations are fundamentally different in nature to intranets in small organisations. In fact I believe only large multi-site intranets can truly be called intranets. Single site intranets are not really intranets as they tend to be managed centrally, with content responsibilities detached from the processes that generate the information. However, I think the social media platforms - in particular wikis - offer a chance to change this. So, instead of going to expensive design and production agencies, these smaller organisations should deploy a wiki platform, tell people about it and then see what happens. I'm sure you'll then see a true intranet emerge - i.e. with distributed content responsibilities, with the added benefit of building in collaboration capability from the start. Just a thought.

Tomorrow's Intranet Is Already Here!

I was in a workshop the other day with my colleague Richard Dennison and we were thinking about the future of Intranet content. Richard summarises our findings nicely on his blog. The key consideration for me, was that we’ve now created a world inside the organisation where all content can now be classified as collaborative. Previously, we’d used words such as definitive, official and so on which implied it was owned and published by and individual, or very few. Official content is probably already a minority of the content we have available to us, and as a proportion of the total it will continue to shrink. What’s interesting about this new world is that this democratisation of publishing and crowd-sourcing of content is just the beginning of some fundamental changes we’ll see in the very fabric of organisations over the next decade. Businesses can no longer hold on to the top down structural models and processes constructed centuries ago during the age of empires. Big changes are foot!!

Blending

Yesterday I was interviewed by Marc Wright of Simply-Communicate.com for a ‘how did I get here’ feature on the site. It was most enjoyable, and quite rewarding to think back through the progress we’ve made on intranets in the UK.

Towards the end of the interview we started to discuss what the next ‘big thing’ might be. Of course, there are lots of things I could have talked about, but I have been thinking recently about blending.

Lots of boundaries seem to be breaking down and all our edges are blurring. What I mean (I think) is that things are increasingly being blended.

For example, people often go on about the need for a good home-life balance, but that implies having an amount of each at either end of scale or balance – in other words the two are kept separate. The reality of flexible working however is that home life and work life are increasingly blended. I access my email whenever I can, not just between 9am and 5.30pm. I don’t mind logging in and doing stuff at weekends or on a day off. Similarly, I have no qualms about popping out to attend to something in my home life on a work day. It’s totally flexible. And I’m measured by the contribution I make and whether or not I hit my targets, not by whether I’m at my desk or not. More about flexible working in a later post.

Also, with the definition of an organisation becoming more flexible – we have employees, contractors, partners, suppliers, even customers as part of our organisation – it’s difficult to know what constitutes inside and what outside. Employee or not. It’s become a blend of the two. This possibly means the end of intranets as we know them. Something I predicted a few years ago. It certainly means changes for the way we manage communications.

With the continued rise of user generated content, I think we’ll increasingly see this new kind of content become integrated with ‘traditional’ content - a blended solution. We’ll see much more commenting on news stories - like on the BBC site – directly within the story, rather than in a separate section. This could change the dynamic of who has the authoritative voice.

Similarly, as people get used to aggregating content for themselves, we’ll start to see content being blended with applications much more than now. I think this is particularly relevant inside an organisation. We used to talk about how we could put together web sites that were “sticky”. In the new world, people won’t come to the site, but will pull the content into their aggregator or portal. They’ll increasingly also be pulling applications into the same portal. Content is going to find it harder to get eye time.