Oct 28th, 2007 | Corporate Blogging, ROI of Blogging, Social Web | 6 Comments
Originally this was meant to be a response to my friend and personal muse Katherine Ferranti, but as it sometimes happens a brief email grew into something rather lengthy and bloggish and since I’ve neglected CorpBlawg far too long anyway, I decided to post here instead. Katherine pointed me to this piece on GigaOM about social productivity that is both a relatively low-key sales pitch for Jive Software’s Clearspace collaboration package and a general discussion of social software in organizational environments. The basis is an entry in Jive’s own blog that outlines what the company’s Sam Lawrence calls social productivity. Here’s a snippet:
Social Productivity is different […] it’s about getting work done outside the team of like-minded people you work with everyday. With social productivity, an idea is introduced and all sorts of people get to chime in on it. These could be people you work with a lot, people you’ve never worked with or even people outside your company. Now all of a sudden your idea has been developed openly by all sorts of people who bring their own, valuable perspective. You can evolve those ideas into all sorts of collaborative or locked content but thanks to the social whetstone, your original idea is much stronger now. This isn’t just true “behind the firewall” within companies. Look at Wikipedia, the content has been built, written and organized more relevantly than any single or traditional team of authors could have done.
First of all - while I’m a huge fan of Wikipedia, it is objectively impossible to judge how relevant its content is and your judgment very much depends on several factors (What kind of information are you looking for? What article are you looking at? Are you looking for expert knowledge or just a brief introduction into a topic?). But let’s forget about Wikipedia for a moment and focus on social productivity.
With social productivity, an idea is introduced and all sorts of people get to chime in on it. These could be people you work with a lot, people you’ve never worked with or even people outside your company.
Wait - people outside of my company? What motive would they have to support a company project, assuming they aren’t getting paid for it? People outside my company don’t have any incentive to chime in - at least I have significant trouble imagining why they should want to.
The trouble is that the goal of a company isn’t to benefit a social network or community, it is to make money. This places severe limitations on social productivity, unless you assume that people enjoy working for free. With slight cynicism, one could contend that this is what the concept implies - let’s not be so uptight about who is paying whom, after all we’re all collaborating on everything anyway, right? Work is such a old-fashioned concept. Let’s just call everything collaboration and get people to give away their productivity for free and tada - there you have your ROI of social software.
I’m not implying that this is what Lawrence means. Clearspace is meant to make communication across departments and hierarchies easier and anyone who has ever worked for a large organization knows what a serious issue that is. But I think it’s important to note where the structure and purpose of a corporate entity are incompatible (or at least in conflict) with those of a social network and why the metaphor “let’s be just like Wikipedia” just doesn’t work.
Wikipedia exists for the sole purpose of creating a resource from which everyone will benefit in the same way, with the added perk that those who contribute are rewarded with social prestige among their peers. Some contributors are in it simply to improve the resource, others are in it because they feel rewarded by playing a role in the Wikipedia community. But in contrast to a company, people always work for some kind of personal gain, be it prestige or a feeling of achievement and they know that everyone else befits in the same way. Of course the employees of a company also work for personal gain, but for a monetary one and one that is built on the premise that not everyone benefits in the same way. In return for a salary and the perspective that I might increase some day they work for the good of the company - which should eventually translate into personal gain (more money). They accept hierarchical structures and persistent pressure to turn corporate goals into reality because there is a payoff. That isn’t a bad thing - it’s how organizations with paid employees work. And undoubtedly a large percentage of people loves their job and aren’t in it purely for the money. But it’s not the same way Wikipedia works, for obvious reasons.
Only after resolving the conflict between personal and organizational goals can the introduction of social soctware into the corporate world be successful. As long as employees feel that they have more to gain by competing than by collaborating they will do just that. Sharing makes sense when the playing field is perfectly level. Which it hardly is, out there in the corporate world.
Sep 7th, 2007 | Knowledge Blogging, Presentation, Research, Social Web | No Comments
I’ve been wrestling with several papers and the associated deadlines during the last few days, but all is well and under control now. On Wednesday I visited the Max Planck Digital Library - the Porsche of German public library & information services shops - to do a presentation on institutional blogging.
As usual, here are the slides.
A few interesting questions were raised after the talk, such as how wikis and blogs relate to one another in an organizational context and how researchers use blogs. I think it depends on the organization and the task, but both blogs and wikis can (and should) certainly be used side by side. At least in my mind, wikis are a little more information-centric, whereas blogs are more person-centric. Coherence and connectedness are essential in a wiki, whereas the structure in a blog is chronological and hard-coded. One item comes after the other and basically there is no assumption that there has to be a coherent structure at all, other than then one that is naturally imposed by time. This may mean more individual freedom to some and too little structure to others - it all depends on your personal point of view. I really can’t stress enough how extremely individual tastes are when it comes to information management. Blogs and wikis can both be used in great ways together and frankly I’m wondering more about those people and organizations that use neither than about those that use one of the two or both.Regarding researchers and blogs - the short answer, in my view, is that they don’t use them nearly enough. But then, from a purely egoistical point of view that’s nothing I should be complaining about. This morning I chatted with a good friend who uses blogs intensively for teaching at the university level. She started about a year ago and introduced all sorts of blog-based tasks into her students’ coursework. They absolutely love it. She’s a great teacher and using blogs has made her classes even more popular. Recently she was invited to do a course for educators on how to use blogs for teaching at another university. She is essentially an expert on the subject now, simply because she has recognized the potential of a new technology that many of her colleagues are still unaware of.
I don’t believe that education and science will change over night because of social software, simply because institutions are fairly resistant to change (people are). Often this isn’t because we’re lazy either, but because we see no need to meddle with a system that we think works. But of course the ways we learn and do research will change fundamentally in the next twenty years or so. Symptomatically, I just need to look at how I do research using Google Scholar, del.icio.us, Zotero and my blog and I can see the writing on the wall. I use these tools because they allow me to be better at what I do and others will eventually use them for the same reason. And who knows, maybe those of us who got into it early will have a little head start.
Apr 18th, 2007 | Corporate Blogging, PR, Social Web | 2 Comments
As I already noted in the last post, it seems that I missed a whole lot of interesting things in March. Since I enjoy the luxury of not having to breathlessly post about the newest fad six times per day, I can occasionally link to “old news” and pretend it’s hot stuff - especially since you may well have missed this one before.
Last month Philippe Borremans reported on the EuroBlog 2007 and about a survey that the organizers Philip Young, Swaran Sandhu and Ansgar Zerfass conducted among PR professionals (full report as PDF available here). A few important points noted by Philippe:
The 3 biggest challenges for PR Professionals to use blogs in their organisation are:
* having time to blog regularly (83%)
* reacting to comments/feedback from the audience (83%)
* creating content and ideas for posts (80% !)
The 3 biggest opportunities for PR Professionals are:
* environmental scanning, keeping a finger on the pulse (81%)
* fast reaction time to issues (74%)
* opportunity for authentic (!), personal communications (77%)
Two thoughts immediately popped into my head when looking at these points, especially the challenges. I’ll start with the less significant one.
PR professionals are generally experienced writers who can whip up a press release on the fly and know how to write informatively and economically. They are familiar with conventions and rules for the “right” way of writing and they know how to deliver a precisely tailored message in a predetermined format.
But that’s not what blogging is.
Now, before you’re worried that I’ll give you a tiring lecture on what (business) blogging is - I won’t do that because there is no one single answer (but have a look here if you’re curious). You can interpret blogging to be anything that’s published via Wordpress or on Blogger regardless of how it’s written or by whom, or you can associate a certain way of writing, comments, etc with blogging, regardless of the technology used to publish something. It comes as no surprise that the technology is usually the heavier indicator: if it’s on LiveJournal you’re more likely to call it a blog than if I spray paint it on a wall, irrespective of the words that I use.
But even if we accept that there are many different ways of writing a blog, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a typical way of blogging. And because the style and tone of that approach have evolved outside of PR and have not yet solidified into a fixed form, PR people have trouble adjusting to such a game, where the rules are suddenly different (or, even worse, where you make up your own rules). Publishing is not communicating. Text design changes drastically when you understand blogs as conversations (and yes, I know that metaphor has been used a thousand times) because the social component of an exchange is strongly emphasized in conversation, while it is usually de-emphasized in publishing.
Another issue relates to the origins of social media. The term social media implies a new or somehow special kind of media, but that is actually misleading, because it tempts us to see the whole thing in the familiar old media frame - new technologies, different and perhaps more contributors, but basically the same process. But it really isn’t, when you think about it. Social media at its core is an egoistic communicative behavior, in the sense that individuals do it (a) for themselves (b). It’s a combination of personal expression and social grooming and without the interpersonal dimension it is stone dead. The trouble is that the P in PR stands for PUBLIC, not for PERSONAL RELATIONS, and consequently the mode of expression that this industry has perfected has always been geared towards the mass, not towards the individual.
That can of worms is big enough, but let me finally get to the much simpler issue, one that relates to who is making social media.
What do people have who check for new messages in their countless groups on Facebook several times a day? Who redesign their MySpace profile every week? Upload hundreds of clips to YouTube and let us know that they are looking out of the window right now on Twitter?
Time. Lots of it.
And that is the main difference between college students and professionals in most industries - especially those with an 80-hour workweek. My personal impression is that having to learn how these things work is not nearly as effective as learning them naturally because you have the time to experiment with them. It’s not a question of age - at least I don’t think so. It’s a question of having the right amount of leisure time to adjust, adapt and come up with something original (when we’re talking about blogging, at least) and that is something you need more than five minutes for. It’s also not a question of “not getting it”, or of companies being generally incapable of integrating the social media into their communicative behavior. It’s about learning to socialize in public. And that is something you’re likely to have trouble with if you’re used to socializing privately in the little free time you have.
Now, I know that I’ve been equating business blogging with the much larger category of “the social media”, but even assuming that the goals in that area are more clearly defined, the problem remains the same. You don’t learn to waltz by downloading a ring tone. And you don’t learn to communicate effectively through a blog unless you spend a lot of time reading blogs and blogging.
Perhaps there should be blog-writing courses in subjects like MassComm and Economics to better prepare students for their future careers. Academics can be expected (hopefully!) to know a thing or two about blogging, at least if they’re in the Humanities.
After all, we get to lean back and think idle thoughts during our work hours a lot more than those PR people do…
