Learn when to disconnect

I think this is a potentially great idea by Alton Towers (spotted by David Hay), piloting a PDA-free zone in their parks. Whilst I fully embrace and evangelise about the ubiquitous connectivity that is now possible and work being something you do not somewhere you go - I find it maddening that some people simply cannot let go. I have several over-eager friends who on receiving their first Crackberry couldn't go out to dinner or to the pub without it. Often they would annoy everyone around them by breaking off social contact with people they were talking to in real life to pick up a message that simply couldn't wait for 2 hours.

The irony is that making it possible to communicate with anyone at almost any time by any medium stops us from communicating with people standing right in front of us. It drives me crazy when colleagues will tail off mid conversation with me because something has come up on their PDA which couldn't possibly wait a few hours - even if they don't reply the social flow is broken because their attention is distracted whilst they digest the all-important message. Worse, I've even seen people do it in front of customers!!

Email and social media on the go are fantastic tools - enabling not only increased productivity but also in terms of a social good by freeing people up from being chained to their desk. You can take the kids to the doctor, work from home to look after children and not have to make the sacrifices that went with a career only 10 years ago. However, it is just as important to be able to switch off, to let the phone go to voicemail and not immediately answer that email - all credit to Alton Towers in their attempt to enforce it, it will be interesting to see what happens!

Why are corporates scared of social software?

Great post by Sam Lawrence on how organisations have been scared of developments in collaborative software (email, instant messaging, and now social networking) over the years but now are regarded as mainstream. Could the same be true for Web 2.0/wikis/blogs?

What is the use case for Web 2.0

Spent some time talking with Eric Sauve of Tomoye last week. Was an interesting conversation around how he positions his product around "Communities of Practice". Often I find the problem with the way people position Web 2.0 products such as wikis is that they end up saying "you can use it for anything" - which may be true but not very helpful for people who want to buy from you. They need to buy it for a reason - and positioning social software as a "widget" that gives you a community of practice seems like a very good thing.

I've also noticed that Socialtext's re-launched site has four use cases on the right hand side - I can't really remember their last one but I'm pretty sure it was more of an "all things for all people" site, focus is definitely good when you can get it. I think the problem stems from the fact that people, especially if they're in start-up mode, don't want to alienate any sector or use case by defining specific scenarios. Problem is, you don't attract anyone either!

So why wouldn't you blog?

Was fortunate enough to have a brief email conversation with Ed Brill the other day. For those of you who don't know, Ed is the worldwide Notes/Domino sales leader for IBM. He's also on of, if not their most prolific blogger, and is well known in the IBM world for a) being passionate about his product and supporting his product on-line and b) writing his honest opinions on-line and not being any sort of mouthpiece for IBM marketing.

I was asking Ed about whether it was possible to quantify the value of his blog to IBM. The only number he could really put his finger on was that since he started blogging four years ago his business's revenue has increased by 40%! However, this clearly is not the only factor, (not only are other Lotus executives blogging, but the product has undergone significant enhancements in that time period) it certainly corrolates.

Blogging obviously hasn't hurt the Notes/Domino line, and the anecdotal evidence is that the Lotus community certainly appreciate Ed's blog (go and look at the comments for proof).

Whether it is a cause or not, if it has corollated with a 40% revenue increase over four years - why wouldn't you blog?

Corporate social computing guidelines

IBM has made their corporate guidelines for social computing available.  Of course, it was created via a wiki so that IBM's own employees could contribute to the content!  One comment is particularly telling:

"In 1997, IBM recommended that its employees get out onto the Internet—at a time when many companies were seeking to restrict their employees' Internet access." 

This is certainly true - I was working for IBM at the time, and can remember many friends outside of IBM being shocked that an organisation which had such a conservative public image would be so open to allowing staff access to this "internet-thing" which was seen as a time-wasting activity with questionable business value.  The parallels with social software are striking!  This is similar to a theme I noticed recently around the ROI debate - if the 'I' is small enough those companies which simply embrace the concept and get on with it without worrying about ROI will gain the advantages whilst their competitors spend time thinking about whether or not they should embrace social computing.

Anyway, back to IBM's guidelines.  There's some good detail which you can check for yourself but the executive summary is pretty good:

IBM Social Computing Guidelines: Executive Summary

1. Know and follow IBM's Business Conduct Guidelines.
   
2. IBMers are personally responsible for the content they publish on blogs, wikis or any other form of user-generated media. Be mindful that what you publish will be public for a long time—protect your privacy.
   
3. Identify yourself—name and, when relevant, role at IBM—when you discuss IBM or IBM-related matters. And write in the first person. You must make it clear that you are speaking for yourself and not on behalf of IBM.
   
4. If you publish content to any website outside of IBM and it has something to do with work you do or subjects associated with IBM, use a disclaimer such as this: "The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions."
   
5. Respect copyright, fair use and financial disclosure laws.
   
6. Don't provide IBM's or another's confidential or other proprietary information. Ask permission to publish or report on conversations that are meant to be private or internal to IBM.
   
7. Don't cite or reference clients, partners or suppliers without their approval. When you do make a reference, where possible link back to the source.
   
8. Respect your audience. Don't use ethnic slurs, personal insults, obscenity, or engage in any conduct that would not be acceptable in IBM's workplace. You should also show proper consideration for others' privacy and for topics that may be considered objectionable or inflammatory—such as politics and religion.
   
9. Find out who else is blogging or publishing on the topic, and cite them.
   
10. Be aware of your association with IBM in online social networks. If you identify yourself as an IBMer, ensure your profile and related content is consistent with how you wish to present yourself with colleagues and clients.
    
11. Don't pick fights, be the first to correct your own mistakes, and don't alter previous posts without indicating that you have done so.
    
12. Try to add value. Provide worthwhile information and perspective. IBM's brand is best represented by its people and what you publish may reflect on IBM's brand.
    

Fundamentally it seems to say "don't be stupid"!

Is social software or Web 2.0 for small companies?

One of my favourite quotes about the need for social software was from someone at Lotusphere who was talking about the integration of Bank of New York and Mellon Financial in the States.  He stated that the problem was he had 17,000 people over here and 23,000 people over there who didn't know each other and were supposed to drive synergies from the merger.  How was this going to happen?

Whilst a great example, I've found that when I talk about this to small and medium companies in the UK, the response tends to be that social software is only useful when talking about numbers in those scales.  This is unfortunate, as I am sure it is not the case.  When we started Trovus and there were just the three of us, we used instant messaging constantly, and have since deployed Lotus Quickr to manage wikis and documents.  We no longer send any attachments by email internally, everything is accessed through our intranet.  We even invite customers into our intranet to collaborate on documents on occasion.  We saw immediate value of working in a wiki-style environment just between the three of us.  Now we are seven full time members of staff, the returns are even greater.  We haven't done an ROI case on this because the price point is low enough that there is no ROI for doing an ROI!  Having a collaborative working environment around documents is as much a given as having mobile phones and email.

Social software or Web 2.0 can have two purposes.  One is to work more effectively with people you know.  The other is to find people who you didn't know but should (as in the merger example above).  In a small company where everyone knows each other, the Bank of New York/Mellon example won't apply directly, but there is still scope for using tools such as Twitter to find like-minded individuals and organisations outside of your current circle of contacts who are potential customer/partner/referral opportunities.  As long as there are two of you, Web 2.0 can be extremely valuable as we have found in terms of productivity and more mundane things like reducing the size of your email quota (which, as we run a hosted service, saves us money!)  The price point of tools like Lotus Quickr and Microsoft Sharepoint are so low these days that almost any company can afford them.  As Euan Semple said to me the other day, when thinking about ROI just keep the 'I' small enough that no-one notices!

Dinner with Headshift and SocialText

Had a great evening last night at a dinner in London organised by Headshift and SocialText.  Was great to meet everyone and some great discussions around social software (and other topics...!)

ROI of blogging

Continuing on a theme of ROI for various Web 2.0 tools, I started thinking about the ROI of blogging.

Part of the problem is that blogs, being tools, can be applied to multiple problems. So the ROI of 'blogs' is somewhat misleading. In the same way that wiki ROI studies get confused when they try to address the tool itself, they should instead address the problem the tool is trying to solve, and then do an ROI study on that problem. For example, a blog could:

• Show a different side to an organisation, or reinforce a current perception/image (eg Microsoft's Channel 9 or GM's Fastlane)
• Showcase expertise around an industry or subject matter (eg the English Cut)
• Generate an honest dialoge with customers (eg Ed Brill of IBM)
• Perform market research (Dell's IdeaStorm)

So, when organisations come to address the ROI of a blog they should look at its purpose, and use their traditional methods. For example, if GM is trying to change its public image using a blog, the same ROI methods should be applied as if they were engaging a consultancy on a re-branding or re-launch exercise. If market research is key, then the ROI follows the same pattern of how we measure the ROI of focus groups today. I worked with one customer who wanted to use their corporate blog to increase their brand awareness. So their measure of success was to sample brand awareness using phone polling before and then a few months after launching their blog. The ROI calculation was done on their traditional brand managment ROI metrics (so it could be compared with previous exercises). The fact that we are using an IT tool to get to the same end result shouldn't change how we measure ROI, it should (hopefully) help us end up with a better ROI result!

However, measuring return is not the only tricky part of measuring the ROI of a blog. The costs are pretty low in turns of financials, but the real cost is time. How many hours per week are you going to budget for blogging and how does this impact your ROI? It's even more difficult as it is not a one-off cost, as would an IT project to automate business processes where you pay a lump some for software, hardware and services and watch the returns come in. Blogging requires a certain time commitment every week, or sometimes every day. You need to work out the opportunity cost of your bloggers spending time blogging (or, more accurately, spending time performing market research, talking to customers or showcasing their expertise) into your calculations.

Of course, all the above only address external blogs. What about organisations which provide employees with blogs within the firewall? Again, go back to the problem that blogs are trying to solve.

If your internal blogging platform is meant to be a searchable knowledge repository, how have you previously measured the value of employees having speedy access to information?
If it is for employee feedback, what was the ROI of previous feedback schemes? One that I think will become increasingly important is retention. How much does it cost it replace an employee and how much will lack of blogging facilities be a reason for leaving as a new generation with new expectations comes into the workforce?

Let's try and put some numbers around this. Say we have a £20m turnover company with 100 employees. Let's say they have an industry speicalist, their super-star consultant who is usually chargeable but equally is expected to help close deals, which I hope is a fairly typical scenario. Let's say that he 'gets' blogging, is really keen, and spends four hours a week blogging. Assuming he charges at £150/hour that's £600/week = ~£30k per year lost revenue (0.15% of turnover). So his blog, showcasing his expertise and therefore giving his organisation authority, has to pull in probably between 1-2 clients per year to break even. How do you measure this? Quite simply the same way as you measure any marketing tool, you ask your customers whether it had an impact on their decision!

However, there's another way of looking at it. Blogging champions are funny people, the chances are that the consultant would blog out of hours, because they are so enthusiastic about what they do. Even if it is done during time which would be otherwise chargeable, the consultant would be expected to attened sales meetings to convince the client of the organisation's delivery capability anyway. By blogging, he or she is doing this for an unlimited audience, as opposed to the two or three people they might meet during a sales presentation. Because of the blog, it may not be necessary for the consultant to attend so many of these meetings. So the actual cost would be much lower than £30k per year, and it is still opportunity cost, not real cash going out the door. Anyway, all if this is measurable - hours spent on chargeable time, hours spent on sales presentations and hours spent blogging and number of new customers who recognised the blog as a factor in their decision (and number of customers who found the blog a value added service which they recognised, and decreased the likelihood of going elsewhere - this is a question that should be asked too). The key however, is not to look at the ROI of the blog, but the ROI of the business problem the blog is addressing (in this case increased sales) and treat the blog as an input into that ROI.

Finally, I noticed two great statements whilst looking at this, one from SearchCIO which suggested that the potential business upside of blogging was so great that we should expect to see a lot more attempt by analysts and MBA-types to formally calculate the ROI. My favourite though was from Jeremiah Owyang who is someone who sees the ROI as so obvious that there is little value in calculating it. This is an interesting observation when replayed at corporate level. If you see day to day the anecdotal and intangiable benefits of blogging (or any other Web 2.0 tool, wikis, instant messaging etc.) then why spell out the ROI for your competition? If they want to spend the next five years thinking about it while you get on with it and enjoy the benefits that is a distinct competitive advantage!

Corporate Facebook - should you use Facebook or a Facebook-type system?

Haven't posted about Facebook for a while but this comment from Emmanuele raised some interesting points which I felt deserved their own post.


When I wrote about how Facebook itself wasn't neccessarily a great intranet, but Facebook-type systems would be, Emmanuele pointed me toward Workbook, a Facebook application which creates a secure Facebook for the enterprise. The idea is that if you can create a secure Facebook area to connect with work colleagues, you get a social networking intranet with the look and feel of Facebook that users know and love, as well as a system pre-populated with all your contacts. Therefore Facebook can be used as a corporate intranet.


This raised the following thoughts:

1. Irrespective of whether or not you use Facebook or an internal Facebook-type system, the point about seeding content is 100% valid. Adoption will significantly increase if a user's contacts are pre-loaded rather than requiring him or her to manually add them. As I'm sure Dvir will tell you, there is some great technology coming out of organisations such as IBM which not only would pre-populate a system from a corporate directory, but also would analyse users' email, instant messaging, SMS, phone and voicemail records to deduce a contact list (including external contacts), and pre-populate accordingly.
   
2. I'm still not entirely convinced that having a corporate system appear exactly as Facebook is a good idea. Whilst it may appear to Gen-Y, we still have a job to do in getting the digitial immigrant generation to use social networking tools. If the corporate version looks identical to Facebook, this may actually put them off! As long as the UI is intuitive, Gen-Y will get it. The compromise between Facebook functionality, but corporate branding I think is the best bet to get adoption from both sides of the digital divide.
   
3. Whilst the line between a professional and personal contact is blurring, some users still see value, and actively wish to keep the two separate. Again, this is important in keeping the digitial immigrants on board.
   
4. I still believe that the corporate-Facebook has different functionality than the social-Facebook. This is because they solve fundamentally different problems. Facebook is a way of keeping in touch with people with very low effort. I am in frequent touch with friends who have moved away or on to different lives where previously the relationship would be reduced to sending a Christmas card every year, "just to stay in touch". Corporate-Facebook is about finding expertise, reaching out to people you don't know and evaluating whether they are a trustworthy person with whom it is worth sharing knowledge and expertise. So where Facebook revolves around photos, corporate-Facebook systems revolve around link-sharing. Facebook focuses on "what you are doing right now" whereas corporate-Facebook focuses more on "what you know (and who you know ) right now". So whilst there are obvious functional similarities (embedded instant messaging for starters) their purpose is very different.

Thanks to Emanuele for raising these questions that made me revisit this topic! Whichever side of the fence you sit on whether corporates should use Facebook itself or systems such as IBM Connections or Microsoft Sharepoint which offer Facebook-style functionality, there's certainly a consenus growing that social software is useful!

Instant Messaging ROI - IBM case study

IBM have recently published an ROI study about their own internal use of instant messaging. I was initially quite excited about this, I am a huge instant messaging fan, and sometimes I think the fact that it seems like such a no-brainer to me in terms of corporate use I struggle to articluate why people should use it (almost like having to justify why phones are useful for businesses).

I was somewhat disappointed with their report. They reckon they have saved $16.5m per year "in phone usage alone". This is based on 380,000 users, 200,000 concurrent users and 4 million messages sent per day. They then estimate the number of times instant messaging is used instead of the phone, the average number of minutes per call and the phone rate.

So far, so good. But then we get the following which have also "factored into the calculation":

• Quick access to expertise
• Allow more employees to go mobile

And further cost savings are available from "the cost benefits of high productivity".

How did IBM measure the benefit of quick access to expertise and allowing employees to go mobile in a way that they managed to combine it into the $16.5m number? How would they go about measuring high producitivity? These are the really interesting metrics, measuring usage of instant messaging at the expense of phones is relatively easy and straightforward, but positions the corporate use of instant messaging firmly as a cost saver.

Now, from a sales point of view this may be the best way to get instant messaging into an organisation and past the CFO, but I am convinced that instant messaging can help generate revenue. For example:

• Did quick access to expertise allow IBM to get the right subject matter expert to contribute to a proposal which led them to win a multi-million dollar contract they would have otherwise lost?
  
• Did allowing employees to go mobile increase sales face time with customers by x% resulting in $y extra revenue?

This revenue generating activity is how instant messaging can help an organisation which embraces it fully (which I know that IBM does!) but is also where examples of ROI are sorely lacking. It would have been great if IBM could have provided some insight here, even if they were isolated examples rather than figures that could be applied across different industries.

More on using the long tail to fundraise

Following on from my post on Obama's fundraising

http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-05-02-smalldonorsside_N.htm

Off topic - New IBM Power Systems

Not exactly Web 2.0 put a great post by my former colleague Mandy Shaw of Logicalis on what IBM's new Power Systems announcement means to customers.

Thinkpad vs MacBook

As much as I love Mac's this made me laugh: