This year some huge changes happened in the .TV landscape.  I won’t resummarize and I won’t restate because the internet is clogged enough with duplicate information.  If you’re interested just read about the Premium update.  If you want duplicate content then read theDotStop who is trying a corner the market on a new blog category called stealing… beware, he will steal your blog.  Points for originality… well in concept at least [he's not maliciously stealing, it's a joke - before you get the wrong idea].

But back to my point.  I’ve been reading a lot recently about people saying  “Mrs Dorothy Com (that’s Dot) the important big-wig in domaining stayed away from .TV because of the premiums and now they’re in, investing in .TV,  and in some cases holding the nuts. This is fantastic news for our portfolios!”  This seems to be immediately taken as fact by everyone – and I wonder why.  Some argue I’m a contrarian but I stand behind the fact that that is simply not true.  I genuinely don’t understand the concept of a handful of people being able to dictate an entire industry – economy and marketing be damned!

Here’s my analysis: the premiums were 55,000 domains that included some that would never be registered because they are seriously dated: “googoodolls.tv” ; flawed: “davidbeckham.tv” ; and others that are obviously priced for idiots “lol.tv @ 30K/yr” and “business.tv @ 500,000/yr”.  [I should point out that this is post the "last" landrush.]

This leaves approximately 600,000,000 (give or take) other words, combinations thereof that are meaningful and make sense.  Is the suggestion really that the the locking of say 20,000 decent keywords was enough to prevent the extension from making it big?  Is everyone blowing smoke or was there really a sea of change last March 19th 2010 when premiums were repriced?  From my future perch this was definitely a game changer for some – for those spending $22 on domains that are worth $1,000s it’s at least interesting! [Not me] For others it may have no impact.  It really will come down to desired accomplishments.  2010 is the year of the BRAND and .TV can very easily be branded… and that’s a huge advantage over less brandable extensions.

So, I’ve done my research and concluded that the premiums were NOT the actual issue, there were other far more influential issues.

One of the issues was just the level of control that as out of the hands of the free market.  Premiums were limited by price, and more significantly, by Vendor and this prevented some market penetration.  However, more significantly, the failure was in being unable balance two competing models – premiums vs non premiums.   The premiums somewhat, but the lack of outlets,  just prevented an atmosphere and ecosystem of growth to be developed.   The $40 registration charge didn’t help either.

The other issue IS resolving.  Video marketing WAS the future and now it IS the future.  Video has been available and accessible for a long time; however, it is now cheap, it is now ubiquitous, and it is now complementing TV.  TV is crossing over to the browser and the browser is crossing over into the TV.  The future is .TV if the owner of any given domain wants it to be – well for the next 5-10 years.  Beyond that? That’s a blog entry for another day… boy do I have a lot to tell you about that future!

But anyway, back to my analysis.  The reason I’m interested is because I search for parallels in everything and I see the same thing happening in todays sports market.

Charge Season Ticket holders premiums but give them the good seats.
Let regular guys buy the left overs.

When the team is winning and the economy is good this is a win-win for the sports franchises.  The season ticket waiting list grows and people go and find other avenues of entertainment.  If I can’t get a premium season ticket seat (.TV ) then I’ll just buy a more expensive entertainment center at home (.com or more likely a .biz).   Now.  The economy takes a turn for the worse and your local team is not winning and all of a sudden you look around and you wonder if you should drop the season tickets or continue to hold them for better days….

Now imagine that the sports franchise realizes that it no longer has a valid waiting list – they offer up new season tickets but no one comes – and then in a moment of marketing brilliance announces “Season tickets reduced for all new members” or “Special packages for ticket purchases”.

That’s where we are with .TV.

The question that I can’t seem to answer is :  what will make the person who sits in front of his brand new home-theater with cold  beer get up and go to the stadium that charges $8 for cheap domestic can?

In .TV land the general naysayer consensus is that people can’t get beyond dot com [they're mostly american].   Tell them that there’s an awesome site at brandy.TV and they’re going to somehow translate that to brandyTV.com or huh?!   That’s why they need the “dot commers” to show interest.  But whether big domainers and big”investors” get involved in .TV is irrelevant – they’re just the guys that sit in the luxury box. They pay big money, they get the best view, the best benefits and probably don’t care about the game!

So who does matter? The people filling the stands are important to build the atmosphere so that EVERYONE cares.  So people should stop worrying about the Frank Schilling or Rick Latona s of this world and just build an atmosphere.   If they don’t want to build an atmosphere… support the people that are because it’s hard to scalp tickets when there’s empty seats in the stadium.

So. Anyone still want to tell me why they matter?

For simplification I will split the world into three major demographic groups. I am going to completely ignore the differences in sex for purely unscientific reasons.

Technology Age Demographics

The generalizations below reflect less the people and more the dominant technologies of the generations.

Baby Boomers
Old time software engineers. Have a rigid demand for principled practices. Grew up with process, lived throught re-engineering and predominantly live in a waterfall (shit flows downhill) view. Often the understanding of process is greater than the adherence too process. A premise of much work was the idea of trust.

Worked when teams were teams and workplaces were workplaces.

Generation X/Y
This generation is the “middle” generation and have experienced the full technology shift – and often contributed to it. Understand process, appreciate the need for process. Live with the need for Knowledge Management and contributors to the social workplace. Combine the use of Social Media and E2.0.

Worked when teams were teams and multi-located.

Millenials
The new young guns. Were BORN into the technology shift. See opportunities for change in everything. Growth through experimentation. View process as a hurdle.

Worked within a globalized group

The transition from 1 to 2 to 3 has occurred with great speed in the last decade.  The Boomers lived through local teams, the X/Yers created and made the transition, and the millenials have usually lost the essence of a team unit.

Making Connections

So what’s the best way to create the connections?  Face to Face.  It’s a phrase uttered more than any other when it comes to the enterprise modernizations.

The Boomers are often in TEAM FORTRESS mode.  This is the hoarding of knowledge, the resentment of a changing landscape where the design choices of years past become less relevant as the enterprise shifts mode.

The Millenials are often not process driven and are encouraged more by potential technology introductions than fulfilling required tasks.

The key demographic are the X/Y generation – they are truly the link of understanding between the old and the new and can help bridge the divide.

Ultimately, the question of Social Media, and Enterprise management comes down to one simple and forgotten secret key – requirements managed as part of a program managed as part of a set of well defined strategies.  Not a single strategy but a set – a technology strategy, a data strategy, a business strategy, and a resource strategy.

Social and Enterprise tools need to unify their entire set of demographic through strategy management.

Leader Roles

The “leader” roles, the community managers and innovators, exist to purposefully engage and increase participation; however, the most common method used to engage is through the medium itself!  This of course means that much of the effort is spent trying to get active participation from people who already actively participate! It’s like selling cable on TV. Marketing should have taught us that in order to expand growth of a product, you need to advertise to the potential product users and not the product users.  You don’t advertise beer to an alcoholic and you do advertise cigarettes to children.  Bad example? Exactly!

There is, no doubt, some penetration into the overall organization but the simple fact is that if you analyze the contribution and creation of input into the social sphere, much of it is dominated by the Social Ambassadors and aimed primarily at each other.  One only has to witness the social scene when there is a Web or Social conference – there are lots of reciprocating links: I’ll vote your link if you vote mine.  There are lots of speakers speaking to each other and, less importantly and more discouragingly, targeting each other.   I believe it is safe to say that many Community managers – working to create a brand are not trained in marketing at all but rather work through the technology.

You will in fact often hear that Evangelists are in the trenches not in the Ivory Towers….. the question that should be answered though – from where can you see further ?  Moreover, what’s important here? That you are in a trench or tower or that you welcome people properly?  This isn’t a war.

Ultimately, and ironically,  it is very difficult to infiltrate these groups and get respect.  The silent majority does try and I’ve witnessed the results.  Ever been to an internal forum or blog? Ever tried evaluating the post to comment, or the ratings ? Either you’re in the crowd or you have to be damn persistent to get feedback.   These leaders often fail to recognize that sometimes the silent majority do not feel like they get heard, they then get despondent and then they leave.

Where’s the FEEL GOOD factor? Where’s the FEEDBACK LOOP?

Keeper Roles

Lack of NATURAL positive feedback is one of the biggest inhibitors to adoption of Social Media

The “keepers” exist to promote and maintain a level of decorum and organization to the system.  It’s about documented process, it’s about metrics, it’s about business feedback for executives, it’s about everything that’s not about the natural spread and growth of the overall enterprise and platform.  The roles are bestowed upon people as “extra-credit” which means over burdened management (who often don’t care for the laissez-faire nature of networking) or the resume whore.  Neither of these parties really has a natural drive or internal imperative to broaden and expand the participation.

In addition, the keepers follow the great rule of Kings (that is, management) and must have an equal capacity to FOLLOW and LEAD.  What do I mean by this?  It means that innovation and adoption is not the singular purpose of these roles.  It is to do what they’re told and pass it on.  Perhaps this is ivory tower ?  If you’ve ever had the pleasure of working with gatekeepers you will find that they have shared solutions that are either too grand in scope, or too small to be worthwhile reusable components.  Worse still is that by having keys and locking and monitoring there’s little work done to adapt and grow these resources.  Wiki’s, repositories, and document libraries get static, stagnant and unapologetically READ-ONLY.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we encourage E2.0 by building the collaboration room and then locking the door!

Executives

The single biggest problem was the lack of clear direction from the business.  Socializing and Work and Productivity are not recognized as overlapping within the business.  Billable time does not include fraternization (in general) so justification for socializing is non-existent.  While “being part of the culture” is an admirable achievement, a typical customer doesn’t care how its high paid consultants fit in to their consultant’s company!  The culture of the social enterprise needs to be embraced by ALL levels of management but in a participating manner.  Employees cannot and will not be open about topics unless there is an absolute trust and understanding that this openness will not be abused and the surest way to see this is frank open discussion from all.

Your CEO and your CIO and your senior architects need to be involved, and not just involved, but involved  in an obviously honest manner.   What happened when satisfaction and morale reports show that the company’s employees are not happy?  Instead of shying away and then not asking the question next year acknowledge the issue and answer questions.  How can employees talk about business, job satisfaction, worries and concerns if their leaders aren’t?

This lack of trust exists on cultural lines – both the age culture and physical location culture.

All these things lead to an environment where the level of adoption is focused greatly on a specific group of people.  I would go so far as to say businesses almost create subcultures of participants.  Subcultures and cliques will not unite the single enterprise.

Executive Feedback

Ah, the great corollary.  How do the executives know that their efforts are worthwhile?

The single biggest measure is employee satisfaction coupled with employee honesty.    The metrics to provide for success of your enterprise and social media deployment already exist but they are fraught with lies.

The solution adds clarity and truth to the currently muddied waters.   This deserves a much lengthier discussion but I’m going to disappoint you by cutting it short.  The key to this is creating an environment where the employees can be candid, and moreover, want to be candid.

But what about Enterprise 2.0

The E2.0 part of the platform suffers from slightly different issues because adoption is not based on social interaction, interests, learning and sharing ideas, but is based on true business needs.  The truth is that large companies, heavily armed with legal teams, lawyers, IP protection requirements, necessary understanding and implementation of the licensing of shared public components cannot just open up the doors to the great outside.

There will be no internal cloud and external cloud – if you think there is, then you should rethink your world view; however, there will always be the data owned versus data governed and the distinction is huge.  This is something I will discuss in the future.

The enterprise solution cannot be built on a Social Media framework.   The Enterprise is built to solve business and business data problems and is built on an enterprise model.   The Social Media framework solicits, encourages bi-directional collaboration and feedback that feeds the enterprise solution.

It’s very simple, and why the winners of the social model were who they were…I will reveal all later..

Who are the social media team? Who are the Enterprise 2.0 team?

Isn’t it everyone? Well, yes, and no… but mostly no.

So why and how is the social workplace skewed?

The environment is skewed because the platforms naturally favor, to a certain extent, distinct personality traits such as outgoingness, friendliness, and self-esteem.  To a greater extent, it is skewed by defined role.  That is, of course, your job: I keep telling you it’s not SOCIAL.  None of this is to say that you won’t get broad spectrum participation; however, you won’t get full adoption or full benefits from each of those participating because each one of us is an individual.  What you will find is that you can develop a sense of belonging and trust very quickly in the right social framework.  Of course, the right social framework is hard to create because it’s based on trust and inclusion.  What roles are creating that trust to create the reach and encourage adoption?  What roles exist to stifle that trust yet remain intrinsically necessary?

Social Ambassadors / The Delphi

The most visible role within today’s social enterprises are that of the Community Manager.  This is, of course, no surprise as the primary roles of a Community Manager are to provide marketing, outreach strategies, public relations and brand visibility at the external corporate boundaries and internally really spearhead the adoption of the E2.0 environment.The major functions would be primarily to:

• Represent the customer through listening, monitoring, garnering and understanding feedback provided through social medium.
• Direct the feedback and discussion through supported and moderated forums (localizing the discussion)
• Promote the product, brand, idea.
• Provide trust, a face, a human lubricant. Transparency starts with a human!
• Seek advocate support and encourage a brand loyal feedback loop
• Embrace detractors

Evangelists

Along with these community managers, you will often find the peripheral role Social Evangelists. These evangelists are usually either directly involved in the development or deployment of some aspect of the overall platform or are simply keenly interested in technology.

There is an important sub-classification:

1. technology based
   Early adopters, technical details, specification, open-source, open-standards forget they work FOR a company.
2. people driven
   Engage with people at a personal level, help, interact, provide feedback loops, want to be part of the company they work for.
3. market driven
   It’s their job.  Usually a combination of the other two forms.

Advocates

Advocates are quite simply end users that have reach, enthusiasm for platforms with a desire to spread the software around.  They are the general populace’s ambassador.  Similar roles driven by varying targets.  They are similar to evangelists but have a more laissez-faire approach.

The Keepers

These are the individuals who have either volunteered, or been volunteered, to provide a level of oversight to the particular area.  These keepers can be loosely categorized into three main areas:

1. The Time Keeper
   responsible for managing the metrics that resolve into time benefits or project level targets (e.g. Project Managers)
2. The Gate Keeper
   Responsible for managing the access to the appropriate resource (e.g. manager of the code re-use initiatives)
3. The Porter
   secondary level access management who are responsible for managing direct access once the gates have been navigated (e.g. project/wiki owner).

The Innovators, the Followers, the Troll, and the Silent majority.

These are all one category because this blog entry is way too long anyway.  The innovators are the rare creatures that will create new resources, furnish new ideas and push forward practical and simple reusable solutions.  They will adopt message boards, social sites, forums and blogs and perform the functions that The Followers respect and follow.

Unfortunately, there will always be the silent majority.  That is, those people who have the mental acuity to really drive innovation, provide creative and interesting input but lack the social fortitude to risk the humiliation that can be faced by a few misplaced comments and responses from the evangelists (mostly the technology based evangelists).

The Resume Whore

I’m not going to spend time here but you know who they are.  Ever seen an incredibly complex design using lots of new technology that solved a rather simple problem?  These are the “we need and Enterprise Service Bus to replace this single encrypted file FTP” people.  Enough said. Really.  They exist. They pollute your workplace.

The End Users

Often overlooked and often forgotten is the end user.  These users are not evangelists, they are not ambassadors, they are employees who use the social /enterprise model to get their job done. They are marketing who have a need to get information out into the public to advertise specials AND need access to the operations team to ensure that the support capability is in place.  They are technical support who need help to knowledge databases.  They are developers looking for reusable solutions.

Given their role is to get work done the amount it is surprising how often they are ignored.

The Executives

They exist.  They are the funding source. With one wave of their hand they can grow or kill initiatives.  This ability runs contrary to the position of organic growth but I will reconcile that eventually.

1. Social Software – it’s not social at all .
2. Growth is/should be organic

These two facts left the community managers and social software evangelists with a huge adoption problem.  Adoption will not occur because of the ill-fated human need for companionship in the work place; after all, we do have a job to do, and that’s real work.  Neither will adoption work if it mandated through the enacting of metrics and an executive feedback loop.  In addition, it made it difficult to provide succinct feedback to the executives and funding resources.

The problems involved with the adoption of the social enterprise are not entirely unique and often have been solved if we know where to direct our searching eyes.

Before beginning to search for the solutions it was important to understand the different domains where businesses have what technical people will call interfaces and what project managers might call touch points. Of course, layman, would understand this best as what does social enterprise mean to me?

Social Domains

Skills, Knowledge and Experience Sharing

The transfer of skills and knowledge has become a PULL function of employees: the data, the mission is clear and it is the employee’s responsibility to take advantage. The following types of sharing are critical in today’s business.

1. General Knowledge Sharing How do enterprises get general skills, knowledge and experience transferred between their employees? This sharing is often described to the employees as increasing their deep knowledge or, if they are more agile inclined,  their adaptability.
2. Specific Knowledge Sharing How do enterprises get specific enterprise skills, knowledge and experience transferred between their employees?  This is the narrow, specific consultant based, Six Sigma, CMM, process engineered, rate-changing skill set.

Together these are what I call the company Skills Knowledge Experience ME (SKEME) because a good mnemonic is never amiss in the information technology landscape. The company SKEME is the idea that knowledge is power and that the normal siloed approach to work will not enable high productivity rates and high volume distribution will create better, quicker and more standard processes and procedures.

The technologies involved are  typically interactive and dynamic (Wiki’s), static (repositories).  Some variations can exist in terms of the technology being moderated (pure static or process managed)  or un-moderated/user-moderated (dynamic user rated).  In most instances there are the knowledge center is not the open field, blue sky model but the castle fortress model; that is, once you have found and passed the gatekeeper to the repository, you must then find the porter who will let you into the tower.  Protection of the asset is important but at what cost?

The old knowledge sharing model must be updated for your Enterprise 2.0 to work.  Knowledge needs to be dynamic within a process, and not process engineered to be constant.

Collaboration and Efficiency

The primary goal of any business in the 21st Century is to produce a positive net balance position.   This simply means increase revenue and/or decrease costs.   The semantic enterprise can link skills, link ideas, and link people to improve the overall level of innovation.  This linking is the innovation and driving center of the enterprise business: where sharing of knowledge reduces rework and encourages standardization, linking and collaboration is the corporate gateway for new ideas and new improvements.  Collaboration is part of the unofficial requirements pipeline.

Furthermore, the argument goes, people are empowered to put forward improvement suggestions (potentially with reward).  There is a think place, an idea box, an initiative address.  We’re all encouraged to look out for business opportunities and share them with our employer.  E2.0 is about effectively implementing the asset of collaboration and not just collecting ideas.

Transparency

I’m sure that you have heard through many outlets – transparency is the new black.  The idea is that the company has nothing to hide and opening up the windows and revealing the boudoir of the organization will somehow instill confidence and trust from your customers.  There are many voyeurs looking into your boudoir, how does your organization look naked?   The truth is that there is no company showing true transparency, there is only the appearance of something translucent.   The effective social business solution provides key access into what would be public information, scattered with a little self serving humble pie.  Outsiders, don’t be fooled!  The blinds are left strategically open, just a little business flirtation, you understand?

Accessibility

1. Accessibility to People and Knowledge Essentially the argument for accessibility can be two-fold based on the overall implementation.  The simple and direct solution provides internal, and potential partners, sales and marketing a method to bore through the bureaucratic layers of business and get direct answers, feedback and opinions in almost real time from the area’s experts be it software or hardware.  This is the often missed as a true business benefit that can have real visible returns.   Identification of the appropriate resources and skills attribution is a must.  It’s about guiding the horses to the appropriate well or they won’t drink.
2. Accessibility to Delivery and Supply Chain and Back Office As stated in the previous blog entry in the series this is the most overlooked and ignored segment of the business social software platform.  This isn’t about being social, it’s about being productive.

Marketing, Advertising and Customer Reach
This is the public face of your business and is where transparency is replaced my pure brand, recognition and public opinion.  It’s not about internal improvement it’s about sharing your integrity in terms of an overall dependability, capability, purpose and satisfaction targeting to the consumers of your product.   Customers and clients are voyeurs: they have been checking you out!  How you look to your voyeurs should be built into your operational model.

But which of those goals are Social Media and which are Enterprise 2.0?

Social Media and the Enterprise 2.0 platform are not the same platform or entity but are interlinked and are, in fact, two separate components of the overall platform that work together (a diagram would be nice but that takes work ).

Social Media is the publicly visible portion of your enterprise and it’s what your customers see and what your employees speak.  If you imagine the cloud that is your enterprise then look at the large landscape outside, social media is the lubricant that keeps everything moving freely. Firewalls are windows you can open.

Enterprise 2.0 is how the organization functions, how the internals link, how the components stay focused on common goals.  The overlaps, or touch points and interfaces, are at the intersections of these two concepts.  These interfaces are a key focus for area and it is the understanding of these fuzzy border lines, the inside/outside the cloud, the data ownership/stewardship issues, the accessibility and leverage of data that will ultimately define the social business software winners.   That said, are they social business software, or business software with social plug-ins?  Interesting, yes ?

What are the major challenges ?

So now I’ve outlined a couple of the main areas involved in the social business fabric of the company and now I will turn to the idea of the skewed dynamics of the social workplace.  What does that mean, exactly? Well what it means is that in order for any concept, idea, structure, or platform roll out to be successful, you have to understand not only the domains in which you are working but also the roles and personnel involved.  Simply put, and restating previously stated obviousness: any social business platform needs participation; moreover, that participation should be founded on natural and organic growth and feedback.  But still, the definition of the team is important.  Who are the social media team? Who are the Enterprise 2.0 team? And how do we tell executives that it is providing value?

Isn’t it everyone? Well, yes, and no… but mostly no.

So why and how is the social workplace skewed?

Organic Growth and Idea Value

Organic growth is critical to the success of an internal social platform because it provides the participants with real ownership.  Not ownership of code or objects but of ideas.  As ideas take root, they can be shared, picked up, and grow without inhibition. With a little care and a little pruning ideas can become real changes. People will wander into the fold, will acknowledge the value of ideas and add, use, and sprinkle a little knowledge. It is the basis for Microsofts campaign “Windows 7, it was my idea”.

Growth and Time Value

There is also the very simple fact that people are inherently lazy and will adopt whatever means and methods necessary to lessen the burden on their time –especially in those areas where time is rewarded. Consider sales commissions. The more business a salesperson can push through the more the financial reward.

It is easier to encourage participation by making participation available and free than to provide the need to fulfill some metrics based analysis prepared for the executives.

Ideas and societies grow much faster organically than through mandate.

No measurements, no commitments, no ratings based on participation.

When Socializing is Work

In the court of public opinion much of social software and enterprise software is seen as profligate and a waste of resource and some items are deemed “work worthy”. The following is a brief look at the more common type of apps:

1. Wikis.
   These are dynamic knowledge centers universally accepted as reasonable work centers. I, for one, have never heard… “These Wiki’s aren’t work; they’re just there for people to waste time.
   
2. Blogs.
   To the contrary arrive blogs which are considered personal. Personal implies one dimensional. I have often heard it said that there are key bloggers who are worth reading and the rest are just wasting time. Typically post to reply counts are appallingly low (as they are on this blog:)).

3. Congregational Sites/Serendipitous Network.
   The most social of the platforms. There are generally no limits to what is posted – families, pets, and hobbies. Generally these sites are about connecting on a personal level. Often considered frivolous use of time.
   
   
4. Micro blogging/messaging.
   This is generally the “what you had for lunch” platform. It will also incorporate internal versions of twitter, instant messaging, polling, “tapping” for help and IRC. This category gets the entire breadth of sentiment – from waste of resource through intelligent use of time as the platform enables filters to increase the signal to noise ratio.  For this reason IRC is often considered a better productivity tool than Twitter.  However, twitter is a better marketing tool than IRC precisely because of the low noise ratios.

5. Source and Asset libraries.
   This is the most enforced social software. This is typically considered and essential and fundamental prerequisite to improved efficiencies.

6. Application Reach.
   This is the most ignored aspect of the Enterprise 2.0 argument (and is, the major focal area that led to the greatest future success….remember this is a blog from the future). This is the level of direct reach into the application through the entire tool suite. Sales with access to technical subject matter experts is the social reach and accessing sales support data through a media phone is the data reach. Sometimes being social is just about awareness and not actual personal interaction.

I will evaluate the reality of these solutions in the conclusion as there is a striking separation from opinion and reality. It is clear however that the divide is split into very distinct black and white camps. There is WORK and there is SOCIALIZING.

Moreover, work is good, and socializing is acceptable sometimes in  strict moderation.

The successful platforms and companies of the future are the ones that were best able to remove the black stain of the implications of “socializing.”  Adding more white and more grey to the corporation and removing the black.

There is the clear white – collaborating and sharing specific work functions, and then a vast gray area which is the socialization of work. The idea that the socialization will ultimately grow into work value and productivity will come to fruition if, and only if, we let it mature in a sparsely managed and largely natural way.

We must let the structures and interactions from organically with guidance and with minimum interference to get quality long term results. It cannot be forced, it cannot be driven through mandate, and it certainly can’t be given milestones and deadlines as much as this is the modern executive approach.

When Work is  Socializing

In simple terms, Social Business Software needs to operate in a fashion that would be the organic foods equivalent of putting an allotment on each street corner. What I see for the past (your today) is the equivalent to the grocery store putting up a small shelf in the out of the way corner, charging extra and assuming that lack of sales indicates a lack of desire for organic food.

Interfering metrics yield bad metrics and this is far more serious an error than no metrics.

Be sure to understand that I’m talking social metrics. The cost and capacity management type metrics can be maintained; however, the cost burden should, ideally, not be used as a reason for abandonment of a tool or platform as this yields rather large discontentment among the advocates, and it is the advocates that generate the natural platform growth.

Those organizations that institutionalized collaboration metrics produced high volume, low yield, poor quality returns in the short term and social famine in the long term. Measuring “stars given”, “reuse of objects”, “wiki entries made”, “contributions to the knowledge repository” stifled the organic process.

Yes, stifled.

Mandates stifle creativity. People will naturally share; will naturally collaborate without being ordered to do so. Process is boring and process is an impediment. Process is never an improvement when it’s mandated and different to the existing rule-set. It’s that simple!

The most successful process engineering is the engineering you can’t see or feel.

The only metrics of value to the end users are access and knowledge that the access is unfettered, unregulated, and free of any strings. Participation is far too important to leave it to management enforcements.

The thought I’d like you to take away about Social Collaboration Software:

An organic approach may have a higher initial expense but it produced higher quality yields with better natural controls. Avoid over processing and overregulation and allow for natural and organic growth. The rewards are improved long term collaboration, quality, and most importantly health. Metrics can provide value, but only if they can be managed in a non-interfering manner and augmented by end user opinion free of executive will..

Measuring Success

The real value question remained, however: how did one effectively manage the metrics associated with the management, cost, expense, and deployment of many of the collaboration suites? What were the metrics that provided value to the executives and what provided value to the participants?

It is this last statement that I want to key in on. There was often a focus on providing real qualitative and analytical data feedback to support the social software initiatives to the executives but is this the area that you should really be spending time analyzing? Think about the success of any collaboration platform and ask who it is that really derives, and subsequently as a result, provides the benefit.

Should you not be measuring the success of the participants of the collaboration more than measuring the platform itself?

Evaluating the Growth

There is a base assumption that we must make – that employees represent a quality asset and provide returns to our investment. How often have you heard from management that “our people are our best asset?” Well, if this is the case, then the judgment of those employees should suffice for the entirety of the feedback. This measurement should be as simple as we can define for each tool we consider a part of the suite.

1. Are you aware of the following software? Yes/No
2. Have you participated in anyway using the following software? Yes/No
3. Has the Software has been of Value to you Personally? Yes/No
4. Has the Software has been of Value to you in your Course of Work? Yes/No
   
5. Would the loss of the Software have a significantly negative impact? Yes/No
   

Please continue to provide specific feedback through your continued participation.

Participation is encouraged by all management.

But why this simple? Why can’t we do better to measure the overall organization improvements?

The truth of the matter is that if you believe the content of the question is what mattered in the above then you are mistaken.  Employees rarely tell the truth in questionnaires unless there’s a compelling reason to and when there is not compelling reason they invent one. What matters is that the participation is encouraged.  In many ways the questions are irrelevant to the goal of creating opportunity for creative use of the platform.

Institutionalization of metrics and measurements destroys the very organic nature of ideas and creative and critical thinking. There is a striking parallel between organic food and the organic nature of ideas. Organic food has, for the most part, a higher cost burden but the reward comes in an enriched flavor and health benefits (allegedly)…but that’s not the parallel.

The parallel is the feel good factor of organic produce.

So if social media software  is not social, then what is it? And does it have a place in the Enterprise ? To be fair, this question is deliberately misleading. It is, after all, less a question of whether social software has a place in the enterprise and more whether the enterprise has a use for social software. Furthermore, the question is ultimately who defines where the social software ends and enterprise software ends or are they actually extensions of the same thing.

What is social media software in a business context or is everything just enterprise software?

What is Social Software (this blog’s definition baseline)

Social software can loosely be defined as applications that allow for the sharing of data and have come to be most recognized as the sharing of highly irrelevant data such as you would find on Twitter, Facebook, Instant Messaging and of course the platform that brings you this blog (to emphasise the irrelevancy I include myself).

This unfocused social software doesn’t often fall into any categorization or purport to be of any particular use, which is not to say that it doesn’t ever achieve something, but that it’s generically just a vehicle for communication. It is this lackluster definition that provides for the overall head scratching on the defining value. This head scratching has become all the more relevant and pertinent given the new breed of software being created, marketed and sold with the promise of a more engaged and effective work-force.

But social software is and will be so much more.  It becomes the very foundation of doing business.  Its impact will be in every nook and cranny of every business.

Function Over Form

What exactly is relevancy? How do we measure the value of the contribution to business?

The question is important because the lack of this measurement was one of the underlying impediments to universal adoption of social software.  It took vision to put paid to question like – “Isn’t blogging at work wasting time?”; “Should we make sure the content of the blog is relevant?”;  “Who makes the decisions? Do we need editors? Is this editing censorship?”

The future of the enterprise society depended on careful balancing and reconciliation of social versus work. Hindsight, being 20-20, would have prevented anyone ever tagging the platforms and ideas with the word social. That was an unfortunate tag because we are employed to work, not socialize! People will claim that work is social but some words are attached to an immediate emotional meaning:  a lot of business is socialist in nature; however, we don’t use that to describe what we do!

So why did you have difficulty with adoption? The social evangelistas obviously saw the title of social software as one of the obstacles and one of the quick ways to imply relevance is a quick name change: they added extra words to the generic term of Social Software to garner some instant corporate karma:

Social Software + Business = Social Business Software

Now isn’t that better!

Somewhat, I think. I prefer Collaborative and Engaging Software Solutions (in part because no company has claimed ownership of that name like they have SBS….) but then what is collaboration….*sigh*… luckily a new name came along soon enough.

But along with the name change you would hear promises.  BIG promises along the lines of:

If you add layers of sophistication to the generic social software platforms you get collaborative social software solutions. Take a messenger and add some meeting capabilities, some file sharing, some idea sharing functions and you get the basis of sharing environment, a creativity sandbox if you will. Take that sandbox, integrate it into a dashboard, then profilize your employees and you have a collaborative platform. Not a software platform but a people platform. Your workers are plugged in and ready to work together. All those disparate processes and methodologies you have? Gone. Vanished. Disappeared into the ether of non-connectedness. You have created connections.

Your organizational chart had solid lines and dashed lines but now you have virtual lines and they cross all boundaries! You are modern, you are agile… you can sit back and watch the growth as your teams finally engage and work together. Your targets and goals can be unified and communicated clearly! You have enabled instant updates, feedback, and idea alliances. All these things are operating as part of the fabric of your enterprise… you have the seized the ability to increase cross silo productivity, enhance teamwork, infuse new ideas, increase skill and creative utilization.

With those enhancements you are Enterprise 1.5 !

Add customer and outside integration and you are 2.0 baby! Ahead of the curve, market leader, and the innovators innovator!

Well that’s how it’s supposed to work. That’s how you create the common treasury.

With hindsight, one can see that there were benefits that could have come from Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 transition (they coined it the Semantic Web at initiation) but what failed early on was the fruition of a world changing application, and more importantly, a business changing infrastructure. Fundamentally, the most importantly failure, was the inability to derive a marked and marketable improvement in productivity. The sales speak couldn’t be aligned with the perceived benefit. It would take many cycles to overcome the negative momentum to actual provide real benefit solutions.

In early days of the social media software revolution, there was always the “Uncertainty of Business Value Principle”.

ΔMΔC ≥ B/2

In short, this equation describes the notion that the more precise the measurement of monetization the less collaboration we can see, and vice versa. Any measurement of the position with accuracy ΔM collapses the collaboration state making the standard deviation of the collaboration ΔC larger than B/2ΔM where B is the Bohemian constant.

In layman’s terms, it was hard to measure how effective social software tools were.

That’s not to say that social software went away, it just didn’t evolve in the normal formulaic way: driven by requirements which were driven by business needs which were driven by marketing analysts. Institutions simply failed to capture the organic nature of ideas. Moreover, the necessary components for the growth of an idea were simply overlooked by software and process mandates. Fortunately, it was in fact impossible for social software to disappear because it had embedded in the consciousness of so many people. It was merely the effectiveness of these solutions that was repeatedly drawn into question. Interestingly, the evangelists didn’t solve the social software crisis and drive forward the practices that would ultimately survive, but they applied extended resuscitation to keep the dream alive long enough for the purposeful social software to be created.

The Business is Social Flaw

One of the main flaws of the social software movement was the implications of something being a social revolution. The digital divide was indeed narrowing – connectivity was ubiquitous, and technology accessible; however, where did social fit in? Jive Software called itself “The Social Business Software Leader” had a video called Now Business is Social which included text to such ideas as:

Work can be a drag…deflating…isolating….seems like you’re out there on your own..

and moving, in as positive a voice as possible to

But what if work was social AGAIN? when work felt good… job well done… trophies… atta boys… what if we were one big happy team… tear down cubicle walls… get to know each other… roll up our sleeves…

The question I was left with was when was work ever something someone would describe as social? During the Industrial Revolution? During the Great Depression? During the repressive 1960’s? During the greed fueled 80’s (or 90’s) ? Much of what people view as social is talking, communicating, sharing, and hopefully with an equal share of the rewards (but don’t you dare add an -ism to social!). Even during the one period of wanton social activism in the late 1990’s, the rewards were perks and meaningless benefits: free coffee, stock options, in-chair massages are simply not collaboration tools.

Much of the effectiveness of the workplace was in the pre-technology era– effectiveness was perhaps most recognizable in the form of the abhorrently misused metric of productivity. This metric was, to a certain extent based on community but the basis was a real community with an almost mandatory participation – not through edict, not through a mandate, but just in its very nature. You lived in a community. You supported your community. Social work was social work because that’s how life was. You worked with people and for people. There was an immediacy to contact and contribution with fellow members of the guild.  I’m not about to lose all credence by denying the obvious vast improvements in all standards of living, I’m simply stating that effectiveness has not been a measure of social tools as much as it has a social environment.

With technology, the idea of community was removed and rather than returning to that sense of communal belonging, the world tried to create a virtual community. It was not good enough: you simply couldn’t create virtual commitment. Work communities – the office – while not a community, was a sub community that bred loyalty, friendships, and even valuable conflict. With social software came work-at-home, off hours, remote working, non-regular hours and the isolation. Consider the line “tear down cubicle walls,” before the cubes came offices with doors that you could CLOSE. These offices did not act as a deterrent to conversation so neither would a cube, so what does this all mean to you looking forward? The issue is simple – the issue we need to solve is to prevent the ISOLATION of ideas and this can be partially achieved by tearing down the barriers of INTERACTION.

The ultimate irony, is the fact that if one searched the archives hard enough you might even have found the Business Consulting Evangelista of Jive Software complaining about the isolation of their work (via Twitter). If they found it isolating, what hope did everyone else have?

When work become social, the work life balance programs unbalanced work AND life – and you appreciated it. Rewards in the form of simple accomplishment, learning, and teaching were replaced with Thanks! and 110% clubs, and even financial awards (or ice cream in times of tight budget). These are fake rewards and do NOT understand the real motivations that drive and spur people to accomplish. Think about this fact: the single biggest benefit of working is simply financial compensation yet “I just work for the paycheck” is the most disparaging comment an employee will ever make about their job.

So Social Software – it’s not Social at all.

This is a leader post for a multi-part series featuring social media and the place of Enterprise 2.0 on the corporate landscape in the noughties and is completed just as we head into the next decade. It is a part of the “Blogging The Future, Now” series which will, in this instance, examine the dilemma that faced the proprietors of social software solutions. Social software being collaboration software, platforms and business tools aimed at productivity, marketing and brand growth. This social software has nothing to do with social responsibility; that is, as they say, a subject for another day. This series will discuss the battles and conflicts that were fought by social evangelists and how the survivors ultimately ended victorious. The title of this post has been stolen from a Jive Software video which is linked later in this post.

I was looking back at history and noticed that in the late noughties lots of rather clever individuals and their collectives (aka employers) were struggling to get social media embraced as a valid business tool. I wondered: if companies and evangelists were struggling to get something “social” embraced, then how on earth would they determine value or profit-ize social software?

So who ultimately survived, and more importantly, just how did they achieve it? An examination is what you have to look forward to:

Part II. Business is Social…again?
Brief examination of what social doesn’t mean in a business context.

Part III. Creating the Common Treasury
The promises of the Social E2.0

Part IV. Feeling Good About Being Social
Measuring success, one engaged user at a time.

Part V. Adopting and Adapting
Why are our targets and metrics so static?

Part VI. Social Domains
The domains, the boundaries of the Socialized E2.0 landscape

Part VII. Social and Enterprise Roles
Who’s your team?

Part VIII. Roles and their Skewed Dynamics
How the organization fits into the E2.0 world

Part IX Wrapping it Up.
Is social software really social or just a fabricated embellishment of an anti-social electronic universe? The conclusion, the winner, the survivors.

Enjoy, and please remember : Commenting is Not just for Losers, either.