Globally local - locally global

Corporations are WAY behind the curve in real-time social media

This article is a must-read for intranet managers: Is "Social Media" Really Changing the World? by Jared Cohen.

Here are some quotes to whet your appetite. Cohen says:

"'Social media' is merely a way to describe new tools in an old and narrow paradigm where we measure success by how many people are reached."

He talks about the organizations who participated in the recent Alliance of Youth Movements Summit in Mexico City and goes on to say:

"The groups who spoke at the summit were aware of their challenges: .... they used urls and websites instead of offices and leveraged open source platforms in the absence of budgets. In each of their cases, these technological tools are about more than the exchange and posting of information; they have also allowed them to organize and mobilize in real time to raise funds, circumvent restrictions on civil liberties, hold governments accountable, build tangible documents like petitions, orchestrate counter or parallel elections, and connect people with judicial and legal resources...."

"...The term 'social media' as we know it today appeared in July 2004 as a reference to participatory media like blogging, wikis, social networks, and related technologies. This is all well and good if technology was still primarily about connecting people to information, which is really the essence of media. However, this term has become obsolete in a world where technology has become a critical tool for connecting people not only to information and ideas, but also to other individuals, entities (NGOs, companies, governments, etc.), and more recently actual resources be they financial, medical, or judicial."

"The power of technology today will be determined not by web traffic and viewership, but by its ability to strengthen and more importantly facilitate connections in real time."

This speaks to my heart as I am currently working on one of the chapters in the "Global Intranet Trends for 2010" where I have identified the "real-time intranet"' as one of the emerging trends that is transforming the workplace web. The real-time intranet connects people to people in organizations where there is often no official means for making contact.

Micro-blogging is a good example. The use of Twitter or Yammer inside enterprises is extremely low today. However even the limited number of experiences described by the intranet managers who participated in the 2009 survey shows indications of what is coming.
One example is the intranet manager himself who said: "Micro-blogging has allowed me to build relationships with other members of the organization I would otherwise have no knowledge of or ability to influence."

I am convinced that micro-blogging has a critical role to play in organizations and in the workplace web.

Any experiences to share?

Intranet managers and web monitoring

In the open thread last weekend, Zeb asked the following question:

".... what tools, services, etc are available for companies to track trends such as mentions about their company, their competitors, what's popular and what people are looking for on sites like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo & Twitter."

I gave a brief answer in my post 30-30-30-10 Watch the Trends saying that that it is important for intranet managers to have part of their time focused on external issues.

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In the meantime I sent the question to one of my virtual colleagues with whom I have worked on numerous projects, Anthony Hamelle,VP of linkinfluence. Anthony blogs here (in French) but he is more than fluent in English as you see below in his response to my query.

Anthony's response to Zeb:

"There are two main kinds of online monitoring services out there.

(1) Those that seek to capture and track as much data in as many languages as possible about your brands or topics of interest. They are like smart clippings services and are useful in an e-CRM fashion (hearing everything everywhere and, inasmuch as possible, providing timely answers to everyone).

Some better-known ones are  Radian6 (leading paid-for monitoring service), Sysomos, Attentio, Twitter Search or Google Blogsearch (that latter two being leading free monitoring services ;-)

(2) Those that seek to make sense of the data they track and capture. These tools are akin to market research solutions and services, filtering and organising data so as to reveal interesting trends that help decide upon strategies.

Some better-known ones are linkfluence (disclosure, I am VP of linkfluence), TNS Cymfony or Nielsen Buzzmetrics.

Although almost all providers work with some form of text mining, a line might be drawn between those that provide NLP (natural language processing, i.e. automated sentiment detection) and those that choose to rely on human analysts to interpret the data.

I for one think that NLP is not yet suited for the complexity and the heterogeneous aspect of language on the social web, meaning that human analysts still have to interpret and extract insights from the data..."

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Many thanks to Anthony. Do not hesitate to raise questions to him directly, or via Globally Local here in comments.

30-30-30-10 Watch the trends

Open thread topics over the weekend got a couple of very relevant comments, the first from Zeb.

Zeb wants to know about tracking trends:

".... what tools, services, etc are available for companies to track trends such as mentions about their company, their competitors, what's popular and what people are looking for on sites like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo & Twitter."

Zeb is right in focusing on how companies can track trends.

Intranet managers need to be externally focused -  with at least 30 percent of their energy (why 30? less than half, but still significant!) in order to stay fresh, motivated and up to date on what's going on in the world. Trends on the web are impacting the intranet more than ever in the past.

I'd say the smart intranet manager should be focused on:

• 30 percent web trends
• 30 percent user needs
• 30 percent business
• 10 percent organizational needs

Of course, the "user needs" and the "business needs' converge (hopefully); otherwise there's a serious problem in the organization.

The "organizational needs" are probably Corp Comm-driven, and, in most - but hopefully not all cases - very top-down.

In spite of all this so called "synergy", the way the intranet responds to these different needs is quite notable.

Lots of consultants push the "persona" approach: what does this type of user need?

"Let's define typical user profiles and identify their needs."

That's very good stuff, but hard to achieve in a meaningful way in a global organization with multiple business units, a variety of professional profiles and presence in a hundred countries (and cultures) or more.

Other more technology-oriented partners (agencies, solution providers) will push the "personalization" approach: let people decide what they need.

So, back to the smart intranet manager:

1. Watch the web trends

2. Listen to your end-users

3. Talk to your business managers and identify their pain points.

4. Talk to your senior management: you'll be surprised, I hope!

And back to Zeb, who originated the question, I've sent it on to someone who knows web technology and who will hopefully give us some leads....stay tuned.

Spacebook: government as a process

I often say that the intranet is a process, not a project. I did a slide 4 years ago that I used then quite often in workshops and still use today: "One slide worth a thousand words". I came across a printout of this slide a couple of months ago in the office of one of my clients where he had posted it on his wall.  He told me he referred to it often when "educating" his manager about intranets being more than technology and well-executed project plans.

 Government as a process was one of the tracks at Gov 2.0 Expo last week, and here is a link (YouTube) to a 5-minute presentation made by Emma Antunes, webmaster for NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, last week at Gov 2.0 Expo.

I met Emma several years ago at a conference in California where I was presenting the results from the very first Global Intranet Strategies survey, which takes us back to the fall of 2006. It's exciting to remember back 3 years and see how fast intranets have evolved since then.
I still remember giving a workshop at that conference and showing participants some numbers from the 2006 survey about 2.0 experimentation and some of the people saying "not in my intranet!". There was quite a strong resistance from some of the intranet managers. I remember one of them being very worried about "losing control of his intranet". Note the "his".  Those were the days where some intranet managers still thought the intranets "belonged" to them! I have not come across that thinking in some time now, thank goodness.

If you sometimes get discouraged about your intranet evolving at a snail's pace, think back a few years and reflect on the progress you've made. Remember that it's a process you're dealing with - a gradual change - and not a self-contained project.

Social media & the intranet, not a generational question

I was very interested in the New York Times article "Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teens"
I quote:
"Twitter’s unparalleled explosion in popularity has been driven by a decidedly older group. That success has shattered a widely held belief that young people lead the way to popularizing innovations."

And...
"The notion that children are essential to a new technology’s success has proved to be largely a myth."

What about Facebook?

Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder and chief executive says that Twitter is a “... one-to-many network and most of the content is public, it works for this better than a social network that’s optimized for friend communication.” (read Facebook)

Take look at this article and see how it could apply to your intranet. Are you looking for colleague-to-colleague communication, a real-time communication channel or both?

More intranet manager feedback

The Global Intranet Strategies Survey always closes with a final, open question: "Do you have any comments?"

So far this year, there have been a few suggestions for improvements for next year. One involved making it easier to use from a laptop (very good point!). It's really great to have participants contributing ideas for the 2010 survey.

Many participants have found the survey a stimulating trigger to thinking about their own intranets:

"This survey is not only thorough, but it has inspired us to starting thinking about new projects and how we can mature our Intranet strategy. It has been an educational tool - thank you!"

"Thank you for this valuable survey. I participated last year and learned a great deal from the experience and the results."

"Not only do I find receiving the results of this survey worth the time it takes to complete the questions, it offers a great learning experience just reading the material and thinking about whether or not we have considered those issues and topics in our organisation. Thank you!"

"This survey is good for us very isolated and not very visionary intranet workers as it gives us ideas!"

"Great survey. Very relevant for the online environment within organisations in 2009. Sign me up for 2010."

One participant used the final field to share his thoughts on the future of intranets:

"My overall feeling regarding the future of intranets:

• Greater time spent on 'social media literacy and training - consolidating rather than deploying
• Multi-layered communications and knowledge sharing will increase (html mixed with video, audio etc)
• Authentication will be the key - people want apps within the firewall that can be used and trusted
• Recession and swine flu will ensure intranet will be a port for knowledge sharing and virtual working
• Increasing demise of the 'newspaper' homepage for intranets. Now seen as a working task-based tool - not a newspaper
• Greater importance on finding, relating and engaging people within the intranet and invites to external users to enter controlled areas of the intranet"

You still have time to sign up. The survey closes at the end of August. (Requirements for participating.)

Social media on a global intranet - how do you choose?

An intranet manager asked me recently how to prioritise ideas about social media for the intranet. They are a global organization and are currently attempting to bring all the local intranets under the same umbrella.

They ran a workshop, and lots of ideas were proposed. People gave lots of examples and even ROI figures in many cases. (I need to say "alleged ROI figures" because some of them were familiar examples currently flung about on the internet with little or no detailed information.)

Their question to me: So now what do we do?

My response to them: Don't look at the others; look at yourself!

I suggested the following:

• List the 3 or 4 top goals of your organization (assuming your senior management have formulated and communicated them). If not, identify the top 3 or 4 goals of your intranet.
• Analyse each idea you've had so far, to see to what extent it supports the goals and what is involved in implementation.
• When analyzing, look at different aspects: 
  • How much value/what benefits can this bring to the organization? (A little, some, a lot).
  • Formulate what the value would be. Look at how it can enable people to do something new, something faster, or something more effectively than before.
  • Do this from the viewpoint of "the employee", "the business" and "the company as a whole".

• Identify what is required to implement it, and how fast you can do it?
  
  • (How much effort, what cost).
• Investigate whether or not you can build on something that exists already?
  
  • Do you have an internal champion for this idea?
  • Do you have an obvious place in the organization to do a pilot?
• Is this an idea that can work in other countries?
  
  • How would you involve them? At the beginning (highly recommended!) or later?
• What are the likely obstacles you will have to overcome to achieve our goal?
  
  • How can you manage these risks: what actions can you take to make success more likely?
• How will you know when you have achieved our goal?
  
  • What will have changed? What will be different?

I know there will be some of you out there who will say: Make the tools available and see what happens.

I disagree with this approach, to a large extent, mainly because there are so many tools, so many ideas, and such an obvious need to have a reason for what you do on the intranet.

Time is limited, resources are scarce, people are preoccupied with lots of other things these days.

I strongly recommend thinking about what you do and why, and finding the most "fertile" terrains for experimentation.

Let me know what you think, and what you've done!

A must-read for intranet managers: Twitter = 17 things

"Twitter makes altruism the work of a few seconds". This is a quote from Andrew McAfee's blog post "“17 Things we Used to Do”. Maybe "altruism" is not the right word for enterprises, but the spirit of the word is definitely right on.
This post is a must-read for intranet managers.

Andrew concludes his post with: "I think it’s important .... to keep in mind that not all exchanges are governed by incentives, mutual benefit, or economic rationality. Sometimes they’re governed by simple neighborliness, and Twitter is an awfully big neighborhood."

An enterprise is also "an awfully big neighbourhood" or should be!

I am still surprised that Twitter has not made a bigger entry into the enterprise neighbourhood. The data from the Global Intranet Strategies Survey from 2008 revealed that only 15 percent of the enterprises at Stage 3 (most advanced) intranets say that they are "testing" micro-blogging or "implementing it in some parts of the organisation". Zero % have optimised it or extended it to "general use".

Five percent of the enterprises with intranets at Stage 1 (least mature) are testing it, with 95 percent saying they are not considering it.

I expect the numbers to increase significantly this year. I sure hope they do!

Any of you out there with "Twitter behind the firewall" stories to share?

And, by the way, I should NOT be saying "behind the firewall". That's a concept that is changing rapidly as organisations are finally saying (out loud) that a lot of their project work involves external people, and that employees and external partners need to share information and therefore information systems.

So, any of you out there with "Twitter to help us do our jobs" stories to share?

How great ideas are killed

Many thanks to Bertrand Duperrin who pointed me to "How great ideas are killed", a too familiar story for many of us!

How Great Ideas Are Killed

View more presentations from someguy05896.

Bertrand publishes frequently in both English and French here: http://www.duperrin.com/english/ He's one of the top bloggers in France on the subject of enterprise 2 and I recommend adding his blog into your reader. (Bertrand is a consultant with BlueKiwi-software.)

Good speaker lineup for JBoye Philadelphia 09 conference

J.Boye has put together a wide-range of speakers for the inaugural J.Boye US conference.
Creator of one of the highly successful conferences in Europe for several years attracting speakers from both the US and Europe, the J.Boye group has set their eyes on the US, and are aiming to bring more European and North American expertise together on the other side of the ocean.

The dates are May 5 to 7, with an early bird discount available until March 15th.

I'll be there, along with some US-based participants in the Global Intranet Strategies survey who will be presenting case studies. I hope to see you there too. We'll definitely arrange a Global Intranet Strategies "meet physically" session since some of us have never actually met. Be sure to let me know if you are planning to attend the conference.