Objections

In this blog I look at some stylized objections to enterprise micro-blogging and begin to develop some potential counter arguments to overcome these. The majority of objections seem to follow some variant of the following:

1. (from average employee) There is too much noise, and not enough value, in this Twitter stuff — I really don’t care what you had for lunch
2. Or, I don’t have time to keep up with my email and voice-mail, how can I possibly make the time to also follow all this?
3. Or, If I have something to say, I’ll use email or the discussion groups. Why should I bother posting to this thing too?
4. (from the executive, although I’m glad this has not been the voice from my own) I don’t want my people wasting time on this social networking stuff, we have real work to do around here
5. (from IT) We already have email and instant messaging, why did we need yet another tool for employee-to-employee communication?
6. (from old-school knowledge management) We shouldn’t further splinter our knowledge-base. First it was the wiki versus the existing document repository, then blogs and social bookmarks, now micro-blogs too?  Is enterprise search really going to find all of this?

To overcome these objections: the value proposition needs to be clear, the signal-to-noise high, and splintering minimized.  Exploring each:

Value proposition

I’ve come to see the core value proposition of enterprise micro-blogging to be  nothing short of connecting employees and transferring ideas throughout an organization — quickly and with low overhead. Micro-blogging is not the end-all, be-all, solution to the knowledge management “knowledge transfer” goal mantra of the last decade-plus; but it is a lower-cost, more easily adopted, self-organizing; and as, or more, effective than many tactics and technologies deployed in the name of KM over the years.

An analogy I’ve begun to use is to ask the skeptic to visualize their 100,000+ person organization having a very unique cafeteria where the entire organization can take time out to have lunch together in physical space. Then imagine, instead of just setting down with your immediate work-group day after day, you take the initiative to set at a table with employees from a different part of the organization that you don’t already know. Now further imagine that  these newly met employees, day-after-day, always magically seem to be working on similar problems and have similar interests to your own…but with some unique insight and experience that you have been lacking. Think about what value these conversations would have for the organization and the individuals involved? This is the potential for enterprise micro-blogging that I now see. The ability to discover interesting ideas and people to build on and connect with that — especially within today’s increasingly virtual organization and restricted travel budgets that eliminate that chance for face-to-face interaction.

Relative to the time it takes to keep up with micro-blogging, can you afford the personal cost to your career associated with always (metaphorically) eating at your desk alone? Can you afford NOT to make the time to tap into what is going on in the organization, the latest ideas emerging, and the opportunity to make valuable cross-border connections?

When an employee sends an email or instant message, they have defined their audience and context in advance. Sure, the email will sometimes work its way through the organization (for better or worse), but it still has a fairly limited audience and shelf-life and will soon to be regulated to being buried inside individual inboxes and not accessible to others that may benefit immediately or in the future from the ideas expressed. Its like the lunch-time conversation amongst the immediate work group, setting at the same table day after day.

Further, what is the average length of emails you receive or send? Thankfully, mine are trending towards shorter, but still something way beyond Twitter’s 140 characters is the norm. What value would short bursts of more easily digestible ideas and links have?

If you blog, how long does it take you to craft your average blog? If you’re anything like me, longer than you’d like to really admit. Its called micro-blogging for a reason after all. Short ideas and sharing, quickly written — not carefully crafted tomes.

Topically oriented discussion forums (perhaps associated with communities of practice) are step better for accessibility and longevity (closer to truly a “knowledge”-base compared to email); however, tend to be silo-ed and isolated; especially if stuck within limited access team sites.

Signal-to-noise

Let’s face it, this can be a real problem with micro-blogging. Some strategies for minimizing include:

• Twitter or enterprise, the same holds relative to carefully selecting who you follow and being quick to unfollow. In a 100,000+ person organization it isn’t practical or desirable to Follow all.
• (at some risk of either the previous point of creating information islands, or the  next point of splintering) If the platform supports the functionality, take advantage of groups or separate streams within the micro-blog that you pay more attention to…while still have the “general” stream.
• Approaching micro-blogging knowing that there will be times that you let days go by without reading the general stream — without any guilt, or effort to go back later to “catch-up”. Sometimes, just like with the cafeteria, you really are too busy to take time out to have lunch with others. With this, also being aware that others may be skipping over your own posts, so if the immediate business need really depends on consumption, better to use time-honored email.
• Similarly, scanning and skimming is okay…and a good micro-blogging platform should make this easy. In addition to a well thought-out and sparse user interface, my own emerging opinion is that an enterprise micro-blogging platform should enforce a character limit; not as austere as Twitter’s 140, but not that far away from this either.
• Integration with enterprise search, so value from posts can be extracted simultaneously with other relevant content types for the query, even when not Following in the moment.
• The use of tags. Topics for a future blogs include: 1) how to gain more benefit and better new-user usability from what is accomplished with hashtags today, and 2) desirability of having one enterprise application for micro-blogging and social bookmarking within an enterprise.
• Social norms and good lead user modeling within an organization. At least at my own organization, the signal-to-noise has been much stronger than even my carefully selected Twitter following. Without any formal policy, everyone has kept to business, all-business, all the time.  Thinking that the Twitter norms will automatically transfer into the enterprise, just because the functionality is very similar is a mistaken assumption.

Splintering

Again, a real issue, but a manageable one. Some strategies here repeating or connected to the above:

• Enterprise search to bring all the disparate sources back together
• To extent practical, integrating micro-blogging with other existing applications. As noted above, I see no reason to not totally merge micro-blogging with social bookmarking — once the effective use of tags is in the micro-blogging platform. Additionally, tight integration with the employee profile / social network solution is a natural. And I sense opportunities for at least loose-coupling with wikis, traditional blog format, even traditional document repositories and email.
• Letting go of the notion that all information in the enterprise must be neatly structured and “captured”. Even without enterprise search, imagine how much more visible and discoverable a micro-blog post is compared to an impromptu lunch-time cafeteria or hallway conversation. The greatest value in knowledge is with flow, not with stocks. Let the micro-blogging conversation flow without stress of thinking that it must be organized, summarized, and made available in some formally packaged sense intended for reuse. Rather, the real value is in both the immediate transfer in the moment and the strengthening of connections — that can then be leveraged in future requests, on-platform, or more likely via the quick IM, phone call: or even God-forbid, email.

What do you hear as objections for inside the company micro-blogging? Have you been successful in overcoming those? If so, how?

I’ve been on Twitter for a bit over a year now and during the recent year-end holidays I paid a bit more attention to my Twitter stream than I had recently.  I even used Mr. Tweet to help guide  some over-due tuning of my Following list. I also found myself reflecting on the new or evolved Twitter usage patterns since I last blogged about Twitter in March 2008 with Twitter first impressions, use cases, and tips and Does Twitter fill a communication void?

Three of the most noticeable evolutions in Twitter since I last thought about it as a system are the retweet (RT) usage pattern, increased use of hashtags, and the more noticeable spam. All part of growing up I suppose.

Retweets

From Jeremiah Owyang in Retweet: The Infectious Power Of Word Of Mouth:

A retweet is when one individual copies a tweet from someone in their network and shares it with their network. It’s perhaps the highest degree of content approval, it means that the content was so valuable and important that they were willing to share it with their network –causing it to spread from one community to the next –retweets are the core essence of the viral aspect of content spreading

Shel Israel also sees retweeting favorably in The Power of Retweeting:

Retweeting allows the power of the network to take place, in pretty much the same way a blog link can extend the conversation from one blogger to a great many, sometimes at a very rapid rate.

As does Valdis Krebs in So many people, So little time:

If someone re-tweets what you posted/tweeted then that is a vote of attention/quality — if many people re-tweet you, or the re-tweet the person that already re-tweeted you, then better yet! In this sense Retweet Rank follows the example of Google’s very successful PageRank algorithm — people point to web content they find interesting/useful/valuable.

On the other hand, Steve Rubel in Re-Tweets Comprise Two Percent of All Twitter Volume opens with:

Back in January I wrote about the Lazysphere and it’s impact on blogging. My point then was that many tech bloggers have become lazy in simply re-blogging links rather than breaking news or writing essays that outline powerful new ideas or big questions. Now there are signs that the same is spreading to Twitter.

My own still forming views on retweets:

• Bottom-line up-front: Retweeting in moderation is a fine thing. In excess and you’ll get a ‘Remove’ from me as I’d rather follow someone closer to the source content than reading the log of a ‘relay station’.
• All the retweets of the recent phishing scheme (when there was already a warning put out by Twitter itself) reminded me of people emailing virus warnings in early PC virus days…or worse, sending around urban legends.
• I find my scanning visually impacted by the RT convention and would like it at the close of a Tweet versus the beginning — less obtrusive.
• On the more positive, I’ve discovered some new users I’ve decided to Follow via clicking on the user name for the original Tweeter. In this regard I appreciate RT’s versus just reposting a link that someone else tweeted.

Hashtags

A year ago I mainly noticed hashtags being used for conferences, e.g. #CES (Consumer Electronics Show) that begins later this week. More recently I’ve noticed users increasingly using hashtags as ongoing topical tagging, as in #KM for Tweets related to Knowledge Management, and also seeing more conversations to coordinate on the best hashtag, e.g. for learning content.

I don’t have much personal opinion on this one other than, like RT, I find hashtags can get visually in the way of my scanning…although at least this time the convention is to place them at the end of a Tweet. I have yet to extract much search/retrieve value from hashtags and have not embraced use in my own Tweets yet except at conferences.

Spam

Saving the worst for last. Fortunately, I’m not yet seeing the obscene or cheap prescription drug spam that infiltrated email and then blog comments — although I imagine it is only a matter of time before this starts sneaking through Twitter’s own filtering efforts. What I am experiencing is the Twitter account that Follows me along with literally thousands of others, has very few updates, and whose profile statement and web-site URL is blatantly commercial in an area of no interest to me. One of my more recent and less obnoxious examples: tigers1904. Folks, if you going to try to market to me via Twitter, pay attention to my very public disclosure of my interests, or get lumped into this spammer category.

Alas, this past weekend Twitter also saw a serious phishing attack.

Closing Notes

• Overall I’m not liking the move towards using Twitter as if it was a social bookmarking application, ala Delicious. If I want to follow your bookmarks I’d prefer to do that through FriendFeed (or other lifestream) or directly from your social bookmarking application (typically Delicious). I plan to do some further pruning of my Following list for a couple of folks I would really like to keep up with in social colleague sense, but I’m not interested in seeing every bookmark they declare.
• In this observation of the ongoing evolution in the Twitter microcosm I’m reminded of emergence as a formal theory and made some time to read and listen more seriously on this subject than I did during my my more casual look during the time of my What’s Emerging? post last April.
• Another sign of growing up: entire blogs now devoted to Twitter, e.g. TwiTip,  as earlier seen for blogging.  Who would have thunk 18 months ago when the most common reaction to Twitter seemed to be “why would you bother, what good is it?”
• And another: a Twitter application database, reference Twitter App Database: Will You Use It?
• Along with spam, another negative pattern on the increase in my Twitter network are users intentionally (or so it appears) repeating Tweets over the course of a day, some hours apart. Folks, think back to the earlier days of email…you have your caps key stuck on. Stop shouting.

Tom Davenport

Tom started by defining his context and interest as “mission critical collaboration,” saying he wasn’t interested in just ‘chatting’ or in Twitter.  The hot topic in innovation is ‘open’, e.g. with Linux or the Pharma industry using retired professors to solve problems; however, mission-critical collaboration doesn’t always work — for example Boeing’s Dreamliner schedule delays from challenges in designing and building in a very distributed environment.

To improve collaboration understanding and ultimately performance, Davenport advocated that collaboration should be studied and measured with scientific methods. Tom contrasted the amount of effort applied in analysis of customer insights to the paltry analysis applied to collaboration.  A secondary message was the degree of human intervention, e.g. user training and coaching, required for IT-enabled collaboration; with belief that more careful studies could come closer to making this dependency unarguable.

The bulk of the presentation reviewed some “results from various collaborative contexts”:

• Idea management — where Imaginatik study showed best results from discrete collaborative innovation, e.g a two-hour workshop versus the on-going “suggestion box.”
• Predication markets at Google — drawing out the absence of independence and relatively low participation rates…the idea is wisdom of crowds, but crowds are not participating.
• Morten T. Hansen and Martine R. Haas study showing that
  

  …document suppliers that occupied a crowded segment of the firm’s internal knowledge market gained less attention from employees (measured as monthly use of their database) but were able to combat this negative competitive effect by being selective and concentrated in their document supply. This result reveals a paradox of information supply in competitive information markets: the less information a supplier offered, the more it was used, because the supplier developed a reputation for quality and focus.

  Further motivation for me in my day-job content management duties.

• Tom’s own work with Rob Cross and others, as documented in The Social Side of Performance and Strategies for Preventing a Knowledge-Loss Crisis.

Karen Sobel Lojeski

(Stony Brook engineering professor and author of Uniting the Virtual Workforce: Transforming Leadership and Innovation in the Globally Integrated Enterprise)

Karen began with asserting that (1) we are all “virtual workers” — anyone with wireless and depending on electronic meditated communications, and (2) to our detriment we are still using the methods of Frederick Winslow Taylor in this world. She went on define a mathematical model for ‘virtual distance’ that has three primary factors: physical distance, operational distance, and affinity distance (e.g. extent of shared culture and interdependence). [Side note: given the factors and accompanying description, 'digital distance' would be a more memorable label for me.] Karen noted, Thomas Friedman aside, that although the world is getting ‘flatter’, our connections are not necessarily becoming more effective, including with those that we work with in physical space.

Also see Michael Krigsman’s 2006 ZDNet interview: Karen Lojeski on Virtual Distance.

David Millen

Of the three presentations, this one was the most interesting for me as it provided a further glimpse into IBM’s internal social media  journey that I have been actively following for going on ten years…being curious both as a former IBM-er and as someone playing catch-up in the subject area in two successive day-jobs.

David live demo-ed the following behind-the-firewall applications: Dogear social bookmarking,  Beehive social networking, and Cattail file-sharing .

With my day-job I’m still not fully settled with the more social aspects of social networking and I tend to fall into the camp that David mentioned regarding “most people would question the business value of photo-sharing”; however, David argued value derived in company culture building including enculturating new-hires, and institutional memory. I’m slowly warming to the idea of what starts as more social connections (employees that like the same movies?) can still lead to connections then leveraged for more business ends.

In category of “things I hadn’t thought about yet” was a brief side discussion regarding potentially conflicting objectives for recommendation engines; for example, the difference between extending the employee’s network into new unexpected but beneficial directions versus the filling in the already existing implicit network in the sense of the “you may also know” recommendations. I also found the concept of using a recommendation engine for queuing questions to answer in a profile an interesting and novel (to me) approach with likely additional use cases beyond profiles.

I asked if users gave push-back regarding maintaining multiple profiles/personas internally — something that I put up with (and occassionally want) in internet, but have hopes of avoiding inside the firewall. David acknowledged as some concern and that the answer was likely not a single profile even inside firewall.

Months ago, when I first started flirting with this return, fellow Boston blogger, Doug Cornelius (at the time just starting his own transition) asked “What is the focus?” At first, I wanted to type “I’ll let you know as soon as I know”…but I caught myself in time to offer a more serious reply that reflects what  I was thinking at the time: THE FUTURE — primarily (but not limited to) the future of work, of learning and education, and of technology in all its various forms. A wide road to navigate. More months have passed and even this wide road feels constraining. So, this is going to need to be one of those times to just jump in and see where things go.

What I am more clear on is that, as with my earlier blog, I plan to write first-most for myself, for my own learning. Next, to facilitate becoming part of a network of individuals interested in similar topics. And, lastly, to create an audience of readers. This time around my intention is to travel wider (as noted above), quicker, and more in the first person. More journal, less portfolio. More bookmarks and pointers to pieces I find interesting, less original analysis.

Well, let’s see how this goes. I’m again ‘in’.