In Blogs We Trust: Research

An Inspiring Education Story's Social Side

2011-11-13T20:12:00.005-10:00

60 Minutes continues to bring us stories that matter. Although the other two features Nov. 13 were significant, the one on the University of Maryland Baltimore County and its President, Dr. Freeman Hrabowski, was truly inspiring. To quote the lead-in:"Freeman Hrabowski, president of the University of Maryland Baltimore County, has an unusual name - and an even more unusual approach to

Sci Am Special Issue on Cities

2011-09-25T06:33:00.004-10:00

As always the September issue of Scientific American is a treat. The dynamism and innovation of cities, including or especially shanty towns, is a marvel. The size of the informal, off the books economy was a surprise to me. Can we capture that spirit of survival and entrepreneurship to improve health and education?The sale of phone cards is a significant component of the informal economy. To

David Brooks' Haimish Line

2011-08-30T00:09:00.003-10:00

Seek out David Brooks' recent column on the Haimish line. 'South of the Haimish line' we are more connected to those around us as in the neighborhood pub or coffee shop compared to the fancy hotel. Reminds me of the time I was "thrown out" of first class on an airline (it was an alleged pass travel issue, not bad behavior) and went to the back where the other passengers told me to take of my

Nisbett's Intelligence and How to Get It

2011-06-01T21:32:00.004-10:00

What an inspiring book! It provides convincing evidence that great things are possible for students of all ages who work hard and for whom high, realistic expectations are set. Contrary to the hereditarians, genetics, while important, are not the determining factor for those of us in the normal range of intelligence. Supportive parents, teachers and culture dominate. Intelligence and How to

Just Received The Social Animal

2011-04-18T05:58:00.005-10:00

My wife gets to read David Brooks' The Social Animal first. With the end of the semester looming, just as well. I see that, like Daniel Pink's Drive, it cites a lot of important social science research. Hey, it's affirmation of the significance of the science to which we contribute. (Brooks and Krugman alone may be worth the NYTimes' new fees.)Another science-based business is that of Glen

Support the Honolulu Diabetes Walk March 19, 2011

2011-03-13T09:56:00.002-10:00

It's a 7:30 a.m. walk at Kapiolani Park with the great view of Diamond Head.My team is Poprae Tonal. Tonal (pronounced tongal) is the Marshallese word for diabetes.Poprae means prevent.See www.tinyurl.com/popraetonal that links to the American Diabetes Association site.Walk or not, donations are welcome.Aloha, Dan

All you can eat may be over

2010-12-08T06:54:00.001-10:00

Do people in South Korea or Japan, places with very high percent of households with broadband, pay by the MByte? I believe that they get a low entry price. As long as my data packet gets sent just as fast as anybody else's packet regardless of content, that's net neutrality. Different ISP's will provide different pricing models.

Where does creativity come from?

2010-10-09T19:56:00.004-10:00

Thanks so much to Luis Suarez for this video post and commentary, "The Source of Creativity by John Cleese:"Grit comes in when people devote enough time to give serious thought to ideas. That is not at all to play down the advantages of social networking to test and refine ideas.

Another Book

2010-08-07T21:14:00.003-10:00

In another diversion, I'm reading Catherine Drinker Bowen's Miracle at Philadelphia that is about the draft of the Constitution. The debate about the rich vs. the middle class was going on then too.Another book I want to read is Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails by Tom Wheeler. It's about the role of the telegraph and Lincoln's use of it in the Civil War. But my book reviews of Pink's book and Li's book

Back to the Blog and Two Books

2010-08-01T09:00:00.004-10:00

Having neglected this for months, it's time to revive it.I highly recommend these recent books:Drive by Daniel H. Pink, andOpen Leadership by Charlene LiReviews in work. Both combine theory and practical advice.And the new grandson Keoki Jaki is a joyHere's a link for some good advice for me on writing by Nerma Moore.

"No Theory"

2010-01-25T22:34:00.003-10:00

Does the Public Relations Society of America really believe, as their mailer I received today says, that "No Theory" is a good idea? Somehow "measurable benefits" and "best practices" are supposed to be consistent with "no theory."

The Walk

2009-12-22T19:56:00.003-10:00

Saturday, Dec. 19 was "The Walk" at the Stan Sheriff Center. It was a joyous occasion with everybody in good spirits. Virginia Pressler, MD gave a justly upbeat commencement address noting her varied path to her final career as a surgeon and now CEO of Hawaii Pacific Health. She overcame many obstacles, mainly gender discrimination, without complaint or bitterness. Similarly, Chancellor

Waste of Time?

2009-10-27T23:03:00.003-10:00

Thanks to socialmedia@smartbrief.com for the link to Forbes' story on social media as wasting billions in the UK. The survey they cite mentions 40 minutes per week per employee on personal social networking. Unfortunately the benefits are not so easy to quantify and may exceed the costs. The helpful point in the story is about the need for social guidelines at companies rather than bans. I

Social Media Use and Employee Engagement?

2009-08-20T21:42:00.006-10:00

Revisions done and out to the committee, day job back under control. It's time to catch up on the literature while awaiting advice on the final adjustments.Interesting article in BusinessWeek on the importance of employee engagement. We know employees who produce significantly less than others. Not necessarily bad employees but ones that are not working up to to their potentials. Of course

Social Media Correlates of Organizational Climate

2009-05-07T21:46:00.004-10:00

The dissertation was defended successfully today! My sincere thanks to the committee and the Univ. of Hawaii Communication and Information Sciences Program. I'll be posting a few findings here and of course the search is on for a traditional journal publication.Here is a sample: Those who use social media at work tend to be more trusting of top management. This is correlation not causality.BTW

Facebook the clear winner at work

2009-03-21T19:38:00.006-10:00

(Click to enlarge)Here's a tidbit from my research on organizational climate and social media use. Facebook is the clear winner at work over other social media sites. Does much better than the more business-oriented LinkedIn. I suspect that ease of use, huge membership and zero cost are the reasons. For many businesses Facebook is quite adequate for enhancing the external network of its

Sun's Blog Rules

2009-03-19T07:52:00.006-10:00

Another interest story from Ragan was the interview with Terry "tMac" McKenzie, senior director of employee communications at Sun. Sun is of course a leader in employee blogging starting with the COO, Jonathan Schwartz and the well-known policy. A couple of topics in the interview struck me as particularly interesting.Terry summarized the policy as1. Be interesting -- including be controversial

An Example of a Great Site

2009-03-17T23:10:00.003-10:00

Thanks to Lindsey Miller of Ragan Communications for the story on the employee blog at Children's Health Care of Atlanta. The site is called Strong Enough to Care Enough. It's got to be tough dealing with often very sick children.They spent a modest sum to set it up well and then have realistic costs going forward. Yes, it could have been done for less but employee time is valuable

Still need more data

2009-03-15T16:00:00.003-10:00

I've been busy analyzing my social media and organizational climate data. I can use more since the "3-10-87%" participation rule -- or an approximation thereto -- still applies. I've updated the link at the right. I'm debating donating a dollar to the Red Cross for each complete response. It's not compensation for your time but collectively -- a thousand completed questionnaires would be good

Organizational Climate and Social Media Use

2008-12-06T14:41:00.005-10:00

Over to the right is a link to a recent version of my survey on social media use and organizational climate. The organizational climate measures are very similar to those that I have used before. That's of course because they have been validated by prior research that I build on. What's new is the adaptation of the Groundswell social media use questions with some additions of my own. The

IBM Serious about Social Media & Corporate Culture

2008-12-04T21:44:00.004-10:00

Luis Suarez had a recent post about meeting with IBM customers concerning corporate culture and social media. That is, uses of the media beyond utilitarian purposes. Of course that's my hypothesis about an ROI for social capital that's an amplifier of productivity.I thought about some recent flaming email I saw recently -- yes it still goes on, amazingly -- and speculated that the author would

CSCW '08 & SNCR

2008-11-15T18:00:00.007-10:00

Two big social media (broadly construed) events happen this past week. The first was the ACM 2008 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in San Diego. I feel a little guilty for not being there but with dissertation behind schedule and the proceedings available on line, I'll try for next year. I was struck by the large presence of IBM researchers in the largely academic crowd.

Surveys and Transformational Leadership

2008-11-06T23:58:00.006-10:00

Transformational leadership is what we got this week with the election of Barack Obama. To quote one of my favorite articles on the subject, “Transformational leaders exhibit charismatic behaviors, arouse inspirational motivation, provide intellectual stimulation, and treat followers with individualized consideration.” (Dvir et al.2002, 735). That’s a report on a leadership experiment. Today I

Saddened by the passsing of Madelyn Dunham

2008-11-04T03:08:00.003-10:00

Life is not always fair. In a matter of hours I will go a few blocks to cast my (optical scan, please) ballot at Central Union Church. I will first look across Beretania St. to where Barack Obama's grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, or "Toots" as he called her, lived until only yesterday. It is where a likely president lived with her and his grandfather when he went to high school just up Punahou St

IBM Announces Center for Social Software

2008-09-23T22:08:00.004-10:00

I'm grateful for people pointing me to IBM's September 17th announcement of its Center for Social Software. The research program looks very exciting. Read more here. Their goals are toExplore, innovate and commercialize best practices in social networking.Work with forward-thinking businesses to pilot and customize enterprise social networks unique to their industry profile.

Sir Tim sees need for web trust rating system

2008-09-17T20:19:00.002-10:00

Who do you trust on the web? Warning sounded on web's future By Pallab Ghosh

Giving up on email -- a nod to Luis Suarez

2008-08-31T11:33:00.003-10:00

After some weeks of vacation in Majuro fixing up the house and working part time over the Internet (at 46.2 kbs), I have been playing catch-up in Honolulu. The catch up is both for research and day-job matters. In the latter I continue to remind people that if there is something important, phone me rather than email. By default, I have given up on much email with 2,900+ unread. Many more have

Therapeutic Value of Blogging

2008-07-07T05:51:00.002-10:00

Searching on blog* in the Web of Science always turns up lots of articles on blogging in the medical field both for research groups and for support groups. There are blogs and writing about them in other fields of science as well but its pretty clear that blogging has contributed significantly to medical collaboration. In the June 2008 Scientific American Jessica Wapner wrote about a line of

HR Advocacy via Communication

2008-06-17T04:05:00.003-10:00

Satish Kumar pointed out in a recent post that HR could and should be the advocate of employees as well as just serve the executives. Beyond processing documents (virtual or real), he recommends expanded roles:"Fostering effective methods of goal setting, communication and empowerment through responsibility, builds employee ownership of the organization. The HR professional helps establish the

Building Trust

2008-06-12T02:35:00.003-10:00

There are several references to trust in Wikipatterns, a book that I enjoyed reading recently and about which I posted some comments this blog. While I believe the claims wikis and trust are true, there is little if any research to support them. The importance is that social media – see my hypothesis – are worth investing in because they improve the organizational climate as well as share

Gas at $4/gal.: Time for TheBus

2008-06-10T22:09:00.002-10:00

No danger yet of not getting a seat starting at about 6:15 a.m. Bused to work putting the bicycle in the rack (on the front of all the buses in Honolulu) and then bicycled home after work Got an excuse to read some of another neglected book, Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World's Top Bloggers by Michael Banks. Details soon.

Social Media Guidance Big and Small

2008-06-08T23:23:00.003-10:00

Social Media Guidance Big and Small: Two Book Reviews Two recent good books on social media provide theoretical and practical advice while implementing the open source principle of giving away the ‘source code’ that attracts consulting business, and support sales. We may also see the books and the authors as providing a “bigger picture” and a “smaller picture”

groundswell arrived

2008-04-17T00:23:00.002-10:00

Got my copy in the mail today. I look forward to reading Charline Li and Josh Bernoff's book based on research at Forrester.

Research update -- signs of significance

2008-04-09T06:07:00.002-10:00

There has been lots going on personally here with the granddaughter's first birthday and visitors in town. Dissertation work continues and it is a pleasure to work with data even if the results are not as clear as one would like. I'm sure that there are other stat packages comparable to SPSS but I continue to be impressed by the ability to concentrate on the data and not the mechanics of

Trust in our government?

2008-03-24T21:51:00.002-10:00

It's hard to trust our government when it shies away from strong action in Darfur. Will we just standby and watch again? See the column by Mark Helprin in the NY Times entitled, "Make Sudan an Offer It Can’t Refuse."

Uses of Blogs reviewed

2008-01-31T21:25:00.000-10:00

Several of us had the opportunity to review the book Uses of Blogs for the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies.Editor: Axel Bruns, Joanne Jacobs Publisher: New York: Peter Lang, 2006 Review Published: February 2008Read those reviews athttp://rccs.usfca.edu/bookinfo.asp?BookID=366&AuthorID=135It's a good overview of the many faces of blogging.

The Transactive Memory Systems Approach to Social Capital

2008-01-29T22:40:00.000-10:00

This is another in my occasional mentions of interesting literature related to social media and social capital. Kanawattanachai and Yoo publishing in the Dec. 2007 MISQ introduced me to the transactive memory systems (TMS) concept in virtual teams. Virtual teams of course are increasingly important in the modern global network organizations. (Note Sun’s recent purchase of MySQL for close to a

Time for Employee Surveys to Go Open Source

2008-01-25T22:59:00.000-10:00

Readers of BusinessWeek magazine know that Jack and Suzy Welch write an interesting management column on the last page. The January 28, 2008 column contrasts the value of good employee surveys with the polls of this political system. They cite four key questions for employee polls or surveys:1. Are employees buying into the company mission?2. Do managers walk the talk about company values?3. Is

It's Conference Season in Hawaii

2008-01-15T06:28:00.000-10:00

Last week it was the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences (HICSS41) on the Big Island and this week it's the Pacific Telecommunications Conference (PTC '08 -- or alternatively, PTC30) in Honolulu. HICSS now has several mini-tracks related to social media within the Collaboration and Digital Media & Communication tracks. The typical hard choices between sessions had to be made. As

The New de Young Museum

2008-01-06T14:25:00.000-10:00

If you get to San Francisco, get to the de Young. It was our first visit since one about a year before the closing of the old one. The exhibits concentrate more on quality than quantity. We had lunch and topped it off with a visit the tower with its great panoramic view of The City. We look forward to the completion of the Cal Academy too.

Outstanding NPR Series on Blogging

2007-12-31T10:44:00.000-10:00

See http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17613637It's a very interesting and valuable contribution. Very helpful to have the material in text with podcasts.Happy New Year -- May your blogging contribute to that happiness.

Psychological climate benefits . . .

2007-12-19T06:46:00.000-10:00

We can consider psychological climate as individual employees’ experiences of organizational climate. (I know there is a distinction.) Recent research in India by Biswas & Varma (2007) found that organizational citizenship behavior and job satisfaction mediated between psychological climate and employee performance. The survey questions and constructs are similar to ones in my investigation on

Listening to customers

2007-12-15T20:54:00.000-10:00

Marianne Kolbasuk McGee wrote a good article in the Nov. 26, 2007 Information Week about the efforts of Fedex, eBay, Schwab and others to get ideas from customers. Communities and networks are approaches frequently used to find out what the customers want and then make it easy to get the products and services. A relatively small group of active customers can provide lots of insight. But let’s not

New Article: Trust & Empower

2007-12-14T06:51:00.000-10:00

Another recent study is consistent with my hypothesis that blogging and other social, participatory media promote behaviors that increase productivity. Jossy Mathew (2007) found that mission, agreement, concern for employees and trust, customer focus, organizational learning, empowerment, and high performance work orientation all significantly correlated with perceptual measures of quality and

Free organizational climate surveys

2007-11-17T13:58:00.000-10:00

One of my dissertation surveys is now "on the street" so to speak. It feels good to be collecting data. If you would like a free, professionally-done organizational climate survey for your company, just contact me. You get anonymous results for your firm and I get de-identified data for my research on blogging and social media -- Web 2.0 -- use. Customized questions can easily be included, for

Blog Conferences Galore!

2007-10-28T13:32:00.000-10:00

There are social media, blog, and Web 2.0 conferences galore. It's like the California Gold Rush and like that event, the blogging infrastructure providers, including conference organizers, will be among the winners. A few miners got rich but the vast majority did not.At the Blog World Expo in Vegas (Nov. 8-9) you can take your chances on getting good workshops after you put your money down.

Catching Up on Iridium Satcom

2007-10-22T01:46:00.001-10:00

I need to catch up on the physical technology that enables the social side. So I'm off to Atlanta and SITA for only two days to find out more about the Iridium communication satellite services. The voice quality is like a mobile phone. The data rate is low. But can it do text messaging? That may be enough. The networking side of the trip is key. But do they blog?

Informative seller of social media consulting

2007-10-18T05:53:00.000-10:00

This is not a commercial endorsement but www.vocecommunications.com certainly shows its competence and benevolence by all the interesting social media info, blogs and contacts on its web site.

Blogs are a subset of . . .

2007-10-04T20:27:00.000-10:00

We may recognize a blog when we read it. But what about in the future? My research may be dated if it is just about blogs. We are certainly well beyond the basic blogs of 5 -10 years ago. Perhaps "blogs and other social media" would be adequate.In a related concern, I'm working on some scales to rate the social and informational dimensions of blogging in organizations. There may be other

Dissertation Proposal Approved

2007-10-01T23:51:00.000-10:00

Got some good advice and approval 9/28/07. The main needs are to further narrow the focus and define the type of internal organizational blog that I ask about. Grudin & Efimova make the point in their HICSS 2007 paper about blogs at Microsoft that corporate blogs and employee blogs are different. Team blogs are were said not to be common. Juech & Stobbe have a 2005 paper on the Deutsche Bank

Organizational Climate and Blog Policy

2007-08-20T03:23:00.000-10:00

Blogger or not, please take a moment for one of my surveys. The links are in the left sidebar. Mahalo!

Uses of Blogs

2007-08-18T16:04:00.000-10:00

Coming soon -- my review of Axel Bruns & Joanne Jacobs (2006) Uses of Blogs book at the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies (http://rccs.usfca.edu/). I recommend it as a good overview of blogging from mainly academic perspectives.

Interaction and Trust

2007-06-19T22:43:00.000-10:00

Why blog in a company? My hypothesis: Builds trust. Similar idea athttp://www-03.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/rawn?entry=from_communities_to_encouraging_innovation

Edelman Trust Index 2007

2007-01-23T06:21:00.000-10:00

Edelman Trust Index Due Out this Week Was scheduled for last week. Edelman is a great site for PR and employee communication issues. It appears that they attract customers by sharing their research, demonstrating their competence. Mahalo!

In Blogs We Trust: Research

2007-01-20T20:33:00.000-10:00

See the Dec. 2006 Edelman(.com) study of internal communications -- "New Frontiers . . . " Very interesting data on internal blogs and wiki's. Today (Jan. 20) at the open source conference at UH I had the opportunity to talk with a Sun employee who started blogging recently. (Mahalo, Sun, for the lunch and Barton George's talk!) Sun is of course famous for its CEO blogger. Blogging

Blogs Underutilized by Schools?

2006-03-22T05:53:00.000-10:00

I hypothesize that schools and parents underutilize blogs as tools for parental & community involvement. This is based on a small sample involving public high schools on Oahu. Anybody know of any stories, good or bad?

Naked conversations build trust

2006-03-21T05:23:00.000-10:00

My copy of Naked Conversations arrived recently in Hawaii by boat. I 'm almost done. Great book! It is encouraging that my hypotheses about how blogs build trust are pretty consistent with the claims of Scoble & Israel. In the best academic tradition, I suspect that fleshing out the details proving some of the relationships will be a little more complicated. But then that's why we do research

Blogging gives your firm a "conversational human voice"

2006-03-16T20:51:00.000-10:00

See Tom Kelleher's paper just published in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication athttp://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue2/kelleher.htmlAbstractThis study develops and tests operational definitions of relational maintenance strategies appropriate to online public relations. An experiment was designed to test the new measures and to test hypotheses evaluating potential advantages of

Why we blog

2005-11-09T05:00:00.000-10:00

See this interesting survey of why people blog.http://media.timewarner.com/media/newmedia/cb_press_view.cfm?release_num=55254441

Research Proposal -- Comments

2005-11-01T21:35:00.000-10:00

I plan to do a careful study of organizational blogging policies, both internal and external.Overall hypothesis: Blogging can create a virtuous circle of trust and employee involvement when there is a favorable organizational climate.See http://www2.hawaii.edu/~smithdan/blogs&trust/blogpage1.htmlComments welcome here or at smithdan@hawaii.edu