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.

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.

Digital Divide

I spent a fair amount of time thinking about digital futures. I have recently been looking at the take up of social media in the organisation where I work. In the early days of social media, people used to talk about 95% of people reading, 5% of people contributing and 0.1% of people originating. However, as social media have matured and found its place in many organisations, I think we need to re-think this. I witness a fair proportion of people who simply don't engage at all. Look at Facebook. How many people do you know who have "no friends", or who signed up once and never went back, or just can;t be bothered? And who never read a blog. Or don't really know what Twitter is. Or Wikipedia. It's not that they don't have the technology - the traditional Digital Divide - it's more that they don't see any need to engage. There's nothing in it for them. Translate that into the workplace and you can quickly see how the 'transformational effects' many commentators say will come from these services may take a little longer to deliver than we think.

But then, isn't that always the case?

Territoriality

Technology has allowed us to become flexible workers. It has released us from our fixed desks. It has turned work from somewhere we go, to something we do. And those of us (and I include myself) who have embraced this new way have reaped real benefits in terms of productivity and work life balance. This is been proven through many pieces of research. However, human nature doesn’t give in that easily. During recent office moves at the work place I go to most, I was surprised about how territorial people can still be and I was given a sharp reminder that even in organisations which are truly world leaders in flexible working, it is far too easy to overlook the seemingly fundamental human need for security, stability and territory. Making the transition from office based to fully flexible requires coaching, support and a little time. It doesn't always happen naturally.

Enterprise 1.0 won’t let go easily

I spend much of my time talking to people about Enterprise 2.0. Indeed yesterday I was the chief ‘provocateur’ on a virtual round table organised by Career Innovation, facilitated by Jonathan Winter, the CI founder. With colleagues from organisations like Boeing, Marriott, and Allen & Overy we spent an interesting 90 minutes discussing the impact of social media in the workplace, and how that might take business to the state known as Enterprise 2.0. It was a stimulating discussion. Thinking about it afterwards though, I wonder how much is hyperbole, and how much is real. Our business language is full of words like ‘innovation’ and ‘revolutionary change’. But do those things ever really happen? I doubt it, and if they do, it’s in rare cases. Very rare cases. The fact is Enterprise 1.0 cultures have been built up (and been successful) over many generations. In big organisations particularly, the culture stems from the vary roots of the bureaucracy. Changing it is never going to be possible in a hurry. Even when there’s a ‘survive or die’ crisis. Revolution is not possible; it’s always going to be evolution. And the same will be true of the transition from Enterprise 1.0 to Enterprise 2.0. It’ll be a long slow process, requiring a huge amount of perseverance, some luck, and some real long term visionary thinking.

An example to get you thinking. There’s much talk of Generation Y (those born with a mouse in their hand) stimulating major changes to the way businesses work. Indeed, I have myself stood up at conferences and suggested the same. GenY people don’t use email. Email is Enterprise 1.0. They use social networks, text messages, instant messenger etc. to organise their lives. And, so the argument goes, they’ll want to do the same when they arrive in the workplace, and this will change the way we do business. Forever. But will it? Or will the organisation grind them down first? Especially as email is the infrastructure on which business is actually run. The Gen Y people might find they have to use email just to get things done at all. So revolutionary change is unlikely.

I hope I’m wrong as these are exciting times, but as we come down from the peak of inflated expectations, those of us involved in deployment activities need to put on our pragmatic hats, be realistic about the prospects, and try and speed up the evolution rather than trying to stimulate the revolution.

Employee Engagement Conference

A couple of weeks ago I spoke at Osney Media’s Employee Engagement conference. I was talking about some of the practical considerations when deploying social media into a large organisation, and why doing so is a good idea.

A couple of things interested me about the conference. Bearing in mind the audience – mostly people involved in internal communications in the UK in one way or another – I was very surprised (read: startled) about how few read blogs, hardly anyone writes a blog and only two people out of about a hundred had even heard of Twitter. Like it or not, user generated content is a great way to ‘engage’ with the people in an organisation, and beyond. So why the lack of interest? Perhaps it’s symptomatic of the confusion amongst internal communications people about what the future holds and what their role might be. We seem to be working harder and harder, with less and less effect. And with the global downturn now really beginning to bite, maybe there’s some concern over job security, particularly as it’s so hard to demonstrate the direct link between engagement activity and the bottom line. I’ve blogged before that the seniors won’t need us in the future in the same way as they have done in the past. But they will still need us, and the longer we take to assume these new roles, the more vulnerable we’ll become.

The second thing that interested me was that questions were being submitted via an electronic voting system. That’s fine, although personally I prefer some interaction with the audience and was pleased when we also had questions from the floor. The upshot was that on arriving back at the office I was faced with an email from the organisers with a long list of all the questions that had been submitted electronically, all of which required answers. So, in case you’re interested, you can find my answers below.

· I thought Sharepoint was a CMS system?!
It is, but it also has team collaboration capabilities, personal content capabilities – MySite – and document management capabilities. See Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SharePoint].

· How do you control entries on wikis or blogs to ensure content is correct, not misleading?
User generated content on the BT Intranet sits under a version of the global navigation bar which indicates that this is user generated, not officially published content, and therefore care should be taken with its use. BTpedia front page contains a disclaimer to the same effect. Each BTpedia page has a ‘report this post’ button which flags it to the central intranet team. Other than that, we rely on the ‘wisdom of crowds’ to keep the content up to date, plus the red/amber/green content governance approach I outlined at the conference.

· How do you ensure the normal courtesies are applied?
Sorry, don’t understand the question.

· How do you avoid information overload e.g. 10,000 birthdays going up?
This hasn’t been a problem, and it’s unlikely that out of a population of 106,000 that 10,000 people would be seeking to make the same announcement on the same day J. If they did, however, this would be picked up by the moderator.

· Have you experienced abuses of trust or neglect of other work and how did you deal with this?
I’m not aware of any cases of people posting inappropriate material. Any ’neglect of work’ type issues would be picked up through performance management and dealt with accordingly.

· What happens if people aren't responsible participants?
That depends upon how irresponsible they are. If it was serious, it would be handled as a disciplinary matter. However, in my experience most people don’t want to harm the organisation they work for. We have a long history of openness in BT. For example, we have had a letters column in our employee newspaper for years, and all our senior executives are very accessible. This has created an environment where people are able to raise issues without fear of retribution, and to do so responsibly.

· You mentioned trust, have you had a problem with inappropriate information being published? What about employer obligations to protect other employees from some messages?
No issues with inappropriate information being published. The owners of sensitive messages would be publishing them through the formal channels, not the user channels. Also, we have done a lot of work, including mandatory training, to ensure our people are aware of their regulatory responsibilities in respect of information sharing.

· In many companies they have banned facebook and other similar sites - labelling them as social NOT-working rather than social networking. Do you have an opinion on this ?
Collaboration is of critical importance to business going forward. The social networking behaviours and norms learned on site such as Facebook should be encouraged, not discouraged. However, it’s more than just ‘Facebook for the enterprise’. See the Gartner report on the three stages of social software acceptance. http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?id=746017

· Any advice regarding 'managing a negative message being shared through any of your channels' - did you 'remove' it and if so what damage did that do the 'open comms' approach?
Have the conversation. Removing a negative comment would kill the conversation. If people have these issues, then they should be heard, responded to and dealt with. It’s a great opportunity to engage.

· In our org we have had to discipline then fire 15 people in the last 6 months for defrauding the company through excessive use of the social network sites before they were banned. What can we do ?
Have clear policies, communicate them and set the behavioural norms.

· What has sharepoint added to your business? is it truly embedded in workflow?
Sharepoint is still in the early phases. However, it has the potential to be transformational as it is totally embedded into the tools we all use everyday. Not embedded yet, but it will be I’m sure.

· Would you say your employer brand matches your consumer brand?
Yes.

· What topics are included in your btpedia as opposed to your intranet
The two can sit side – the formal intranet is for formal content, clearly owned by an individual and not usually up for editing by anyone except that individual. Typically, that would be policy type content. Wiki content is available for editing by anybody. Entries include things such as awards won, acronyms, building information, ‘how to’ content. It’s less formal.

· How do you ensure that people don't waste loads of time when they should be working blogging, using facebook etc etc - isn't there a danger of this?
See above.

· How would you handle on-line harassment or bullying via blogs when BT will be legally responsible?
People cannot post anonymously. I’m not aware of any cases but if one did arise it would be dealt with through our disciplinary procedure. We take any form of bullying very seriously.

· Do you 'manage' blogging or trust employees to manage it themselves? Any nightmare stories and how you resolved them?
It’s entirely self managed, but we do have content governance processes in place which are designed to ensure stale content is removed. No nightmare stories I’m pleased to say.

· Do you have any evidence (employee research or otherwise) that this is improving employee engagement or clarity of communications?
No research yet – that’s in the plan though. Plenty of anecdotal evidence that people are engaging in conversation with each other and collaborating. Also, it has opened up new channels for direct conversations with the people at the very top of the organisation. Disintermediating the internal comms people in the process.

· Do staff on the road (openreach for example) use these systems or is this just for office based staff?
They have access to them. I’m not sure what the take up level is amongst that community yet though.

· Do you monitor the usage of the BT social bits and see if someone's time is disproportionate to the time of their colleagues and what you think might be acceptable
See above.

· Would be interested to know the take-up of the different social media tools mentioned.
1300 articles on BTpedia and growing daily. Over 150 blogs and growing fast.

· Folksonomy??
User gernerated content classification. See Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy

· What were your mistakes?
Trying to introduce Web 2.0 tools using Web 1.0 processes.

· I know that you said no website demonstrations - but would love to see what some of this looks like!!
Call me.

· How has BT tangibly benefited as a business from this? Some examples please!
Faster projects and agile deliveries through better collaboration. Tangible benefits through better engagement are notoriously hard to measure, as we all know! Research is in the plan though. See above.

· You have talked a lot about the process, but you haven't touched on the output! can you give us some reference to the improvement in employee engagement and also on the bottom line of the business?
As above.

· Have issues on internal blogs made it into the public domain? If so, was it problematic internally and how did you manage it?
Not been an issue.

· How can you be sure that the information being posted publicly on the wikis is accurate? Could be spreading wrong info throughout organisation. Much of what is on Wikipedia is wrong or inaccurate!
See above. I disagree that Wikideia is inaccurate. See: http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2005/12/69844

· Could you please expand on the RSS comment - why is that critical?
RSS – really simple syndication. See - http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE for an explanation of why it is so important.

· What if people don’t have time or the inclination to contribute. perhaps in less innovative companies?
That’s the challenge. Creating a culture which encourages, recognises and rewards collaboration and contribution to the corporate knowledge space. However, don’t assume that more connectivity is always better. It can become overwhelming and people may end up spending all their time managing their relationships which can bog down the organisation. Make sure people know how to focus on valuable connections and reduce the unnecessary ones.

Number 10

A couple of weeks ago I went to a meeting at Number 10 Downing Street to discuss how social media is being used in communications. It was a fascinating afternoon, and I was very encouraged to see that Number 10 is using a battery of social media tools to engage with the great British public. The Number 10 website is hosted on a blog platform, and we’ve already seen the Number 10 YouTube channel, Flickr, web chats from politicians, Tweets and podcasts. However, the key thing that is missing is the ability for people to comment and enter into discussion and debate. It’s shame, but I can understand the nervousness and the need to comply with the Civil Service code. Leaving that aside, the progress that has been made would put many businesses to shame. I was impressed to see the real enthusiasm for these new ways of engaging people.

T-Shaped people

I was reading a document about how the culture of an organisation has changed over the past 10 years. It referred to “T-shaped” people. “T-shaped” because they are deep problem solvers in their own specialism but are capable of understanding and interacting with a wide range of other specialisms. These are the kind of people that will enable collaborative organisations to come to life and squeeze most life out the collaborative tools that we offer. I agree.

The Participation Gap

I’ve been persisting with Facebook, and my initial scepticism is beginning to fade as my network has grown. I’ve also noticed I’m using it differently than I initially set out to do. I started off by trying to connect with all the people I’ve ever known, focussing predominantly on those from the more distant past. And I did connect with them. However, those connections have faded (probably for the same reasons we’re not real life friends anymore) and the day to day value I derive comes from interactions with people I still have a relationship with and who I see on a reasonably regular basis.

A couple of observations though. Firstly, despite living a highly ‘blended’ life, I use Facebook almost exclusively for non-work related things. I think that’s been driven by a couple of factors – the fact that any work-related stuff would be open to my entire network, which would be inappropriate, and secondly that very few of my work colleagues have connected with me on Facebook, possibly because they themselves only use it for personal things. Clearly this is (potentially) a flaw in my blending theory which I need to think about some more. My second observation, is that not all my friends and contacts use Facebook, or any other kind of social networking site for that matter. Which means my Facebook activity only represents part of my life network. Some of those missing are from a different generation, but many are not. They simply have different priorities and a different mindset. Whatever the reason, they are missing. This is the participation gap.

As with many technologies, there’ll always be some ‘never adopters’, or ULAs - ‘ultra late adopters’, or those excluded for other social reasons – and this inevitably means the value I get from the network will not reach full potential. Will this gap eventually close, as it did with TV? Or will the network keep migrating to new platforms before the ULAs have a chance to catch up? Does it even matter? I guess we need to wait and see.

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.

Yet more blending

It seems it's not only me who talks about blending.... Here's an Ovum report about 'blended messaging'.

Blogger

There's a fairly small, tight knit, but vocal community who like to evangelise use of social media tools and who keep telling the rest of us how it is changing the web forever. However, when people start to actually use the tools, they are the first to complain about spam and then they promptly decamp to the next 'big' thing. And we all follow them and it starts all over. Very odd.

More twitterings

I've been thinking some more about Twitter now I’ve started to use it. I’ve been amused to see a few ‘tweets’ suggesting the blogosphere is irrelevant now, and Twitter is the only place to be. I wonder if that’s indicative of an early adopter pattern? I blogged some time ago about a possible social media herd mentality. You know, Friendsreunited, then MySpace, Facebook, and now Twitter. Perhaps I was wrong about the human herd. Maybe early adopters are a different species altogether and move to fresh pastures as soon as they see the herd moving in? If that is the case that would be a shame as it implies they are only ever having a conversation amongst themselves. Hmm.

Blending again

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

Social Media Panel

This week I took part in a panel session on Social Media at the British Library. I was on the platform with Euan Semple, ex-BBC and well known in social media circles, and Conrad Bird, Deputy Director of Government Communications.

It was an interesting morning. I still find it surprising how many organisations are still thinking about whether social media is important to them, or the theory and concepts. Few seem to be dealing with the practicalities of introducing and running blogs, wikis, social networks etc. on a day to day basis inside their organisation. I don’t understand why the delays.

Inevitably SharePoint came up in the discussion and I was interested in Euan’s view that SharePoint does not support transformation. It reaffirms the status quo. This is something I have felt for sometime. SharePoint is far too comfortable, it is not a disruptive technology. It integrates well with the way we do things, with the existing culture, and with the existing technologies. It doesn’t force change. In my view it is far better to go with an open source wiki type solution, or a Facebook type social network which causes an organisation to re-think many things, taking us out of our comfort zone.

We also discussed revolution or evolution - and whether fast evolution is the same as slow revolution. I think not. Revolution implies a radical shift in many things, whereas evolution is a much less challenging affair. Having said that, one of the keys to success when deploying social media tools into risk-averse organisations (and amongst risk averse colleagues such as HR and legal) has to be to emphasise the evolutionary dimensions. Even if the results are revolutionary.

Facebook on the slide ?

As suspected, the number of Facebook transactions has started to decline. See the BBC story this week. I guess we all knew that would happen. The quote from Nic Howell is most revealing though. Nic says "Social networking is as much about who isn't on the site as who is - when Tory MPs and major corporations start profiles on Facebook, its brand is devalued, driving its core user base into the arms of newer and more credible alternatives.” This is yet another example of where corporations, representing the status quo, try to move in everyone moves on. I predict this will keep happening as Generation Y people know instinctively when they’re being sold to and when the commercial boys have moved in. And so far , they’ve been able to stay one step ahead.

Holding Back The Tide

A colleague alerted me to this during the week. iReport.com really does make everyone a journalist. I know it’s being run by CNN who will be looking at it as a way to find a role in the new world, but it struck me as yet another example of how the connected world is changing things we’ve previously thought untouchable. I blogged a few weeks ago about how RSS and the blogosphere is threatening newsprint, this is another example of the same thing. And if you apply the same lessons inside an organisation, how long before we see the end of internal staff newspapers and new websites and move to an entirely user generated news structure? Those with corporate communications responsibilities will just be another user and it’ll be what they say, not their position in the organisation, that will determine their importance. Fortunately, a few are beginning to get it now.

Interview for Communicators in Business

I was recently interviewed for the CiB website as a pre-cursor to me speaking at thier annual conference. You can find the interview here.