Uses of Blogs reviewed

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 2008

Read those reviews at

http://rccs.usfca.edu/bookinfo.asp?BookID=366&AuthorID=135

It's a good overview of the many faces of blogging.

The Transactive Memory Systems Approach to Social Capital

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 billion dollars. That’s a powerful 400-person virtual team! Sun itself is no slacker at being a virtual organization.)

TMS has three coordination mechanisms: Recognizing, trusting, and coordinating specialized knowledge in teams. It is a means of analyzing the processes of knowledge sharing. The TMS variables are seemingly ways to mobilize social capital

Their longitudinal study found that early on in the life of the team, frequency and volume of task-oriented communication were important to building cognition-based trust and forming knowledge of expertise location. Toward the end of the team projects, just knowledge coordination communication was the only significant TMS variable related to performance.

The paper’s findings support the proposition that companies would be wise to invest the modest sums to support social media use. Build the networks before you need them.

Time for Employee Surveys to Go Open Source

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 the company performing as claimed in public statements?
4. Are the HR systems rewarding excellence and culling under-
performance?
My hypothesis is that social media use in and outside the business promotes the values that contribute to performance. These include trust and knowledge sharing, for examples.
The Welch's probably would less happy with the organizational climate variables in my study but I would claim that the proven ones are as well linked to firm performance as the Welchs'.
One of the big challenges for researchers like me with employee surveys is that they are most often done by contractors claiming proprietary questions and techniques. I'll bet that the proprietary questions are build on the open literature. Academic studies are necessarily open and subject to challenge. I could potentially piggyback on employee surveys and get de-identified data but it could not pass review.
In Hawaii for example, SHRM is running a state-funded employee survey in 40 firms but not even the companies get their de-identified, i.e. anonymous, raw data. In a perfect world I could have an optional few questions on social media use after the 'required' part.
So I continue to look for businesses that would like an employee survey with most questions built on the published literature. I should ask the Welch's too!

It's Conference Season in Hawaii

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 usual the opportunity to keep in touch with the people and their work was wonderful. HICSS is most academic researchers but big companies like Microsoft and IBM also present papers by a few of their researchers. Nobody presented a paper that would make my dissertation obsolete so one outcome was a reminder to me to speed up!

PTC is the reverse -- more from industry and fewer academics. The researcher group is expanding and completely filled the researcher lunch meeting room yesterday. Telecom policy papers, whether from regulators or academics, have been particularly strong at PTC. There are several good papers today and an important session on organizing research on ICTs and development. I get to pursue both the day-job interest in internet aboard aircraft with vendors in town, and research interests.

The New de Young Museum

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.