Gas at $4/gal.: Time for TheBus

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

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” contrast in approaching social media.

I’ll start in the order in which I bought the books and read them on some recent long airplane trips. Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s Groundswell: winning in a world transformed by social technologies provides advice on selecting social media based on survey data that is used to construct “social technographics® profiles” of target demographics. The authors are analysts with Forrester Research, Inc. copyright holder for this Harvard Business Press book. Thus we have the benefit of both data and consulting experience, i.e. case studies, across many firms. The groundswell is defined as “A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than traditional institutions like corporations.”(p. 9) Mentioning blogs, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, eBay, Craigslist, MSN Messenger, and more, the central advice to companies is that they better get on board soon in a smart way – even jump on the moving train -- with the new way of communicating with customers and employees. Or lose them! This is the book about the bigger picture of social, collaborative media in business.

Groundswell is organized in three parts: Understanding the groundswell, Tapping the groundswell, and the groundswell transforms. Understanding provides the motivation paying attention to social media, calls for new approaches, and introduces the social technographics profile. More on that later.

Tapping’s first chapter is on strategic planning: POST – people, objectives, strategy, and technology. After planning, the company strategy would include elements – each a chapter -- of listening to (e.g. monitoring your brand on the ‘Net), talking with, energizing, helping the groundswell support itself, and finally, embracing the groundswell. Note that those are social phenomena, not technological ones. Each chapter is well-illustrated with case studies, practical advice on approaches and resources, and applications of social technographics. The goals is to learn about the firm’s audience and get prepared to use social media most appropriately. (I propose that we create non-proprietary acronym for a social use of media profile (SUMP) in place of social technographics. Alternatively, the more intuitive SMUP for social media use profile has some drawbacks because it is used in neurology and has some questionable associations on the Web.)

Transforms features chapters about outward-facing transformation, inward-facing transformation, and finally the future with some concluding advice. The outward-facing transformation is about becoming more customer-centric and using customer input to the advantage of the firm. The inward-facing transformation is about empowering employees, benefiting from their experience and knowledge, changing the culture, trusting employees and engaging workers at all levels. To paraphrase some of their key advice on getting started, “find and encourage the rebels” with small efforts that may fail fast but also fail inexpensively.

That said, the book is not about thinking small; numerous ROI estimates show that if the small initial experiments and risk-taking work out, hundreds of thousands of dollars may be required but with excellent returns.

The technographics or SUMP analytic approach is a definite contribution to social media measurement because appropriate, parsimonious measurement of social media usage is still a challenge to business and social science. Whether involving customers and/or employees, the authors’ technographics classify the target group as being creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators or inactives relative to some target demographic’s use of social media. Critics, for example, would have in the past 30 days done one or more of the following: Posted ratings or reviews of products or services, commented on someone else’s blog, contributed to online forums, and/or contributed to or edited articles in a wiki. As they describe it, “ . . . it’s similar to demographics and psychographics but focuses on technology behaviors.”(p. 41). People may fall into more than category. As an organization you then select a particular type(s) of social media appropriate to the group. For example, 25% (index = 100) of the U.S. respondents of all ages and genders in the Forrester database are critics. For females 18-24, 38% are critics, a relative index of 149 so you might try to engage them by inviting evaluations or to comment on a product blog.

For age group, country and gender, dynamically-created profiles are available on their website (Forrester Research, 2008). That’s a useful tool. (If you want more details or your own survey, talk to the sales department.) Three of the many case studies, for examples, compare Fujitsu (more active on social media) and NEC PC owners in Japan, Republicans and Democrats (a little above average in all categories but inactive), and Toys “R” Us (generally higher on all social media) and L. L. Bean shoppers. In a similar vein, the book’s literature references are linked through the Forrester website http://groundswell.forrester.com where of course comments are encouraged.

In summary, there is plenty of useful advice such as start small, educate your executives, get the right people, technology and plans, etc. But of course the essential elements are human relationships that happen to be facilitated by technology. So their concluding advice is how to be: Focused on person-to-person activity, a good listener, patient, opportunistic, flexible, collaborative, and humble.

In contrast to Groundswell, Wikipatterns is a smaller, more practical book by Stewart Mader (2008) primarily about adoption of one Web 2.0 technology, the wiki. The subtitle is “a practical guide to improving productivity and collaboration in your organization.” A website of the same name (wikipatterns.com) continues the discussion of and addition to the book’s content. Mader is a Wiki Evangelist for Atlassian Software Systems, a company that licenses or hosts its wiki software. Mader has practiced what he preached as he set up a wiki to write Wikipatterns as well as edit a prior book, Using Wiki in Education (2006), that is only available online for purchase in paper or PDF.

In my reading of the book, there are two main themes: The benefits of adoption and the patterns of adoption, growth and maintenance. The book, based on Mader’s experience and case studies, points out key benefits including shared knowledge and information on a wiki, facilitation of collaboration, reduction in email – particularly of multiple often differing copies of documents, encouragement of participation, and efficiency and speed in creating and editing documents.

Patterns of adoption are the key theoretical and practical contributions distilled from the case studies. The key word in the title is patterns. There are four large classes of patterns: People patterns, people anti-patterns, adoption patterns and adoption anti-patterns. Here are just a few examples:

People Patterns	People Anti-Patterns	Adoption Patterns	Adoption Anti-Patterns
90-9-1 Theory Champion Welcoming Wiki Charter . . . and more	Bully Do it all OverOrganizer Vandal	Agenda Overview pages New Starter SingleProblem	All wiki all the time Empty pages PageOwnership Training

Of course not all patterns are of equal significance. My list, particularly to get started would highlight Champion, Sponsor, Wiki Charter, Single Problem, Fly under the radar, New Starter, Clean Permissions, and the like. Mader is in full agreement with Li & Bernoff about the importance of pilot projects – they usually take about six months -- and clear goals and policies. He is much less optimistic that an ROI for a wiki can be calculated. (There are plenty of other people knowledgeable on social media who also are willing to calculate ROI’s for email reduction. See the websites of Jon Mell, or Luis Suarez for examples. Jon Mell points out that for a pilot the ROI for email reduction may be enough but for a big effort, more dramatic evidence such as innovative ideas emerging may be required to justify the wiki.)

Other important discussions include the differences between your upstart corporate wiki and Wikipedia and the importance of people in managing knowledge and feeling in control. Ward Cunningham, creator of the first wiki in 1995, wrote the Foreword noting among other ideas, “It’s natural, after all, for people to collaborate. The wiki will serve as your community’s short-term memory.”

I recommend both books for people implementing or studying social media. Li & Bernoff cover more types of media and applications with more data – they are more “quantitative.” Mader is more “qualitative” getting into some detail about the sociology and organizational experiences of wiki adoption.

References

Forrester Research, I. (2008). Profile tool. Retrieved June 8, 2008, from http://www.forrester.com/Groundswell/profile_tool.html

Li, C., & Bernoff, J. (2008). Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. Boston MA: Harvard Business Press.

Mader, S. (2006). Using Wiki in Education. from http://www.lulu.com/content/2175253.

Mader, S. (2008). Wikipatterns. Indianapolis IN: Wiley.

Mell, J. (2008). Wiki ROI. Retrieved June 8, 2008, from http://jonmell.co.uk/2008/03/wiki-roi-final-thoughts.html

Suarez, L. (2008). Email reduction. Retrieved June 8, 2008, from http://www.elsua.net/

wikipatterns.com. Wikipatterns. Retrieved June 8, 2008, from http://www.wikipatterns.com

groundswell arrived

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

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 running computations.
Here's the latest:
In the current pilot study phase with senior college students and a few MBA students, the scales for trust in fellow employees, trust in management, knowledge exchange & combination, and job satisfaction have satisfactory reliability.
There is a positive correlation between time spent posting to social media away from work and trust in fellow employees. Otherwise nothing reaches statistical significance.
Lesson learned so far in the pilot: My "social media use index" needs some work so I'm revising and shortening the questionnnaire.
Comments are always welcome.

Trust in our government?

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

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.

Outstanding NPR Series on Blogging

See http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17613637

It'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 . . .

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 social media and organizational climate.
I’m looking for opportunities for surveys in US firms to add to my surveys of MBA students. There is no conflict between research and theory on the one hand, and practical employee attitude surveys on the other.

The reference is
Biswas, Soumendu & Varma, Arup (2007). Psychological climate and individual performance in India: test of a mediated model. Employee Relations, 29(6), pp. 664 – 676.

Listening to customers

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 neglect employees too in the focus on customers. Follow the Southwest philosophy: Treat (and listen to) your employees well and they will take care of the customers well.

FedEx’s Rob Carter is quoted about customers wanting services that span several companies. Reminds me of an experience I had this past week pleading with some vendors for a unified proposal that did not force me to do a lot of work putting together a multi-vendor solution in which nobody would take responsibility.

She also wrote about one highly-resourced blog that few people read – a reminder that just because it’s a blog or online community does not mean that it’s useful.

New Article: Trust & Empower

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 productivity. Both qualitative interviews and surveys were used.
I would put it as, clarify the mission, set clear goals, set high expectations then trust and empower the employees. Inexpensive facilitating technologies include social media. Sure it takes courage but less than say 360 evaluations in which employees evaluate upwards anonymously.

Mathew, Jossy (2007). The relationship of organisational culture with productivity and quality: A study of Indian software organizations. Employee Relations, 29 (6), 677-695.

Free organizational climate surveys

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 example on evaluation of your employee blogs.

Blog Conferences Galore!

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. With limited space at the good sessions, it is indeed a gamble.

A better bet seems to be the Executing Social Media Conference in Atlanta Nov. 14-15. Pricey for students even after the big discount but you know what you will get to hear and that you will be able to interact with substantial industry people.

My excursion to Atlanta last week to learn about Iridium satcom left me with lots of information but many new questions about the data service.

Catching Up on Iridium Satcom

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

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 . . .

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 dimensions such as mobilizing social resources. Following Lin (2000), we may find instrumental and expressive returns to blogging.
The scales can be used to construct a "blogging index" or a "social media usage" index.

Dissertation Proposal Approved

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 Research site with a classification scheme from a German-language paper by Zerfass. It's suggestive but I don't think that it illustrates the full overlap of information and social purposes of blogs.
My proposal did suggest some dimensions of blogging experience for individual respondents. I'll be refining my definition and in the process I may define a blogging index.
I'm grateful to be "launched"