Being Peter Kim

Information overload > filter failure

Source: "Push to exploit an ocean of information," Financial Times, December 9, 2012.

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sCRM: Stop me if you think you've heard this one before

Two weeks ago Oracle acquired social media management (SMM) tool Vitrue and yesterday Salesforce.com's $689 million acquisition of Buddy Media was confirmed.

Although these deals may be great for the acquired companies and the start of an era of social software consolidation, I can't shake the feeling that this matters very little, if at all, to client-side marketers.

Tools for herding cats

My company Dachis Group has a tool called Social Portfolio Insight to help brands manage their social presences.

Today, Jeremiah at Altimeter Group has released a report looking into 27 social media management tools used by brands to activate their social media accounts - 178 on average at each company.

The report is embedded below.

Social Media Mythbusters

Last week I was at Web 2.0 Expo in New York. You can read a summary of the presentation at Portfolio.com and see the slides below.

Social Media Mythbusters

View more presentations from Dachis Group

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Charlene Li on Open Leadership

Last week I discussed the updates to Groundswell and I'd be remiss if I didn't highlight the continuing work of co-author Charlene Li.

Charlene has been a trusted advisor to marketing leaders for over a decade, helping make sense of search and portals in the early days and then building awareness and understanding of social media.

After co-authoring Groundswell, Charlene followed up with Open Leadership. I asked her some questions about both books.

Q: Business books run the risk of becoming outdated before they get from concept to print. Yet Groundswell has retained its relevance after three years in print. Why?

When Josh and I wrote the book, we designed it around frameworks and stories, which can withstand the test of time. We had a three year time horizon, but for a Forrester analyst, our three years actually stretch out longer than that! But more importantly, while technology and the current business trend of social media is a foundation for Groundswell, it is not the focus. People and the relationships with them are the focus. And you can see it reflected in the very human stories that begin each and every chapter.

Q: What is the best story you've heard of Groundswell's impact on a company or business professional?

Countless organizations have used the book as a foundation for how to use social media. But it's the personal stories that stay with me. One person recently came up to me and shared that Groundswell was the reason why he changed careers, moved his entire family across the country, and became a top executive at a hot social media start-up. He and many others said that reading Groundswell was like having a new world revealed to them. As an author, there is nothing more rewarding or humbling than knowing that your words had an impact.

Q: You wrote a book after Groundswell, Open Leadership. How do those work together?

While I was speaking about the ideas in Groundswell, people started "getting it". But they were troubled by the idea of having to give up control and asked, "How open do I need to be in these new relationships?" This is an especially tough problem for people in leadership positions, who are essential in getting support for a relationship-based social media strategy. So often, people start with either Groundswell or Open Leadership depending on what the problem is. Many executives today are pretty well read, so they will skim Groundswell for the frameworks, and then read Open Leadership for the deeper, more relevant questions. My Groundswell co-author Josh Bernoff also wrote a follow-on book, Empowered, as he saw similar questions arise around how to implement the concepts in Groundswell. 

Q: As you say early in Open Leadership, "being open is hard." What are the best ways to get a company started down an open leadership path?

The most important thing that an open leader does is share, so companies need to create a culture of sharing. Rather than hold information close to the vest, they seek out opportunities to connect with customers, employees, and partners. The key difference is that today, it's no longer done by walking around or sending personal notes. Social technologies allow you to share at scale. To create a more open culture, Premier Farnell CEO Harriet Green created an internal video sharing site called "OurTube" and encouraged employees to share their best practices. To support this, they placed several thousand handheld video recorders all over the company. 

One of the things I do with top executives is to get them more comfortable with sharing in the channels they already use. If it's email, that's fine! They have to master a mindset of openness first, rather than have to do that AND contend with juggling a new technology at the same time. 

Q: Social technologies are being adopted in many workplaces today, while their use in personal lives are impossible to ignore. Are open employees a good thing for companies?

Open employees can be a very good thing, but only if you can structure and guide that use. Being more open isn't about throwing open the doors -- in fact, I believe companies actually have to be very disciplined about defining how open employees can be. At Best Buy, they have the confidence to let 2,500 of their employees answer questions openly on Twitter. That didn't happen overnight -- it required years of the organization inching towards this point, and happened only after repeated smaller successes where employees showed they could be responsible with greater openness. The reality is that your employees can say something every day and any day about your company. And for the most part, they exercise tremendous judgement -- and don't. Imagine the power that could come if you could harness that employee good will and direct it toward a purpose and goal. The impact could be immense. 

Q: What should employees not at the top of the food chain do? Are the principles of OL different when you're early in your career?

It's a question of whether and when you see yourself as a leader. I define a leader as a person with followers, and the principles apply no matter where you are on the org chart. More than half the examples in Open Leadership are of people not in top executive positions specifically for that reason. The key difference is that earlier in your career, especially if you are at the front lines, your source of influence and leadership comes from the relationship you develop directly with your followers, not because of a title or designation bestowed upon you by the organization. Those followers may be inside your company or outside of it. 

For example, Salesforce.com recognized the top users of it's internal social sharing tool, Chatter, giving them the name "Chatterati". CEO Marc Benioff brought the Chatterati to his leadership offsite, along with 300 of the top executives of the company because he recognized that the Chatterati had influence and power within Salesforce. In fact, he saw them as a key way for the company to move quickly by breaking down hierarchies and silos. 

Q: Groundswell, then Open Leadership. Any hints on what's next?

My favorite chapter in Open Leadership is Chapter 9 which discusses how organizations deal with Failure. As we work deeply with organizations at Altimeter Group, I see a lack of resilience in companies ability to incorporating new, disruptive technologies. It's one of the reasons I'm developing a framework to assess new technologies. The goal: to help companies figure out which technologies they should move quickly to adopt -- and which ones they can safely ignore. My hypothesis is that disruptive technologies are like the canary in the coal mine -- if your organization can be resilient in the face of technologies that you can see coming from far away, you'll have a better ability to respond quickly to other disruptive threats such as economic downturns. 

Many thanks to Charlene for sharing!

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Should you be checking in on Foursquare?

When I was writing the post yesterday about Foursquare users, I edited out a section that was related but off point. But it lives on here.

A while ago, Rohit Bhargava pondered aloud if announcing your travel locations was a privacy leak. About a month ago, Jennifer Leggio posted about privacy loopholes and considerations before checking in. A couple weeks ago, my colleague Tom Cummings asked "What company will be first to say that employees aren't allowed to check-in while on the job?"

So I wonder, just because you can check in on Foursquare, should you?

Consider these situations:

• The mayor of a busy airport who is a public transit bus driver
• A person who checks in to every train station along the journey of daily commuter rail trips
• A sales person checks in to a prospect's office during a sales call

Adam Cohen told me about a couple more:

• The mayor of a newly opened restaurant turns out to be the restaurant's manager
• The mayor of a bank branch is a teller

I'm not sure these use cases are what the founders had in mind. One set of behaviors appears to sabotage a loyalty mechanism. Another may breach competitive data. And the third is like dogs running through a neighborhood, marking the same territory one after the other.

Users do what they want and "unintended" uses often surface interesting emergent outcomes. So is there really ever a wrong way to be using Foursquare? Have you heard of any odd or intriguing check-in situations?

Simple thoughts on Facebook's complex plan

One of the biggest stories in social media this week is Facebook's plan to expand its platform availability and allow users to link disparate online activities into a single social graph. I see this as a case of "aggregate or be aggregated" - and the biggest question mark is how Google will respond.

There's some great writing out there already on Facebook's plan: Robert Scoble describes Facebook's ambition. Jeremiah Owyang calls it a Crusade of Colonization. Shiv Singh sees it as Social Glue.

Some of my quick thoughts:

• Network effects aren't unlimited. Facebook operates the universe's largest social network. We all know about the benefits of network effects - but unlike a theoretical hockey-stick graph, past a certain point network effects diminish. You don't have to search too hard for people who've gone through a "friend/follower purge" to reduce network noise. Bigger networks aren't always better from a user perspective.
• Natural monopolies have huge barriers to entry. Scoble uses a railroad analogy; earlier this week, Shawn Morton told me a story about a speaker who equated social media with the nuclear power industry. While Facebook's investment in technical and human resources is substantial, it's not exactly a natural monopoly on the scale of a railroad, electric utility, or airline. And the nature of social technologies tend to disrupt institutions; don't be surprised if a new entrant - comprised of staff who've departed Facebook - undercuts Ubiquitous Liking.
• This isn't free. Keep in mind that participating in this effort isn't free for anyone. Individuals gain recommendations from friends, so far on things like hockey players and jorts. The cost is a bit of privacy. Brands stand to gain referral traffic. The costs include sharing customer data. Whether individuals and brands decide to "pay" those latent costs, vis-a-vis personal experience or online business goals, will determine Facebook's success or not.

I'd add a "like" button here but my blogging platform's not ready yet, so you'll have to do it the old fashioned way...in the comments below.

What happened to liveblogging?

We're Blogging This! on Flickr via Beth77

I spoke at a conference earlier this morning in Dublin, The Digital Festival. I'm still here and listening to the other presentations, Shel Israel earlier and Russell Davies now. These guys have interesting ideas and presentation styles.

And then it hits me - at a different point in social media history, I'd be liveblogging notes from these sessions. Today, there's no need for this as the technology has evolved and various attendees are taking notes on Twitter hashtagged #BFS10.

So what happened to liveblogging?

Probably a lot of things: new publishing tools (e.g. Twitter, Posterous, Tumblr), attention fragmentation, and value retention (e.g. reserving analysis for private application), among others. Wasn't live blogging always just a replacement for rich media experience (i.e. video) anyway?

I don't believe that blogging is "dead" but the act of liveblogging certainly seems to be.

Rising above

Atop the Manhattan Municipal Building

My company spent last week in New York and had dozens, if not hundreds, of interesting conversations regarding social business design.  One theme that Armano and I kept coming back to was signal vs. noise. How does someone rise above the huddled masses in today's social media world?  Quite frankly, it's a lot tougher now than it was four or five years ago.

How have things changed?

For starters, there are a lot of blogs out there today - which makes it very difficult to get noticed.

• Technorati reported 133 million blogs indexed in late 2008, up from 4 million in late 2004.
• Even Ad Age's Power 150 has expanded to over 1,000 blogs.
• A rising tide lifts all boats - and the ones at the top rise higher than the others. The numbers on Mack's list have gotten bigger week by week, but the usual suspects remain on the list.

Fragmentation of channels and attention has increased as well - just look for evidence that blogging is dead, replaced by tweets, real-time friendfeeds, and lifestreaming.

The global economic meltdown happened, driving two outcomes:

1. More people with more time on their hands found something free and potentially useful to do.
2. People who still had jobs prioritized direct value creation and focused efforts on proprietary content.

Along the way, perhaps caused by a combination of the factors above, the culture of social media changed.

• People have been stretched thin, failed to scale, and are close to burn out.
• Attention (e.g. links, retweets, comments) functions as currency in the socialsphere.  The influentials started to realize that their money was more valuable than others.  To retain value, many influentials have become stingy with their pocketbooks.
• On the other side of the coin, many participants are unashamed to beg for handouts.  Messages public and private that ask "link to me," "pls RT," and "comments appreciated" now come from complete strangers.

Perhaps this is just social media fulfilling its own self-prophesy.  These channels thrive on niche focus, thus it's an anomaly to rise above the masses. 

If not - then how can someone rise above the fray today?

Some thoughts on Twitter autofollowing

Six weeks ago, I got a note from Biz Stone at Twitter, as did an unspecified number of other users who had autofollowing enabled on our accounts.  The core of his message:  "We're going to discontinue autofollow because this behavior sends the wrong message. Namely, it is unlikely that anyone can actually read tweets from thousands of accounts which makes this activity disingenuous."

Users can still do this via third party services like Socialtoo and @hallicious asks if autofollowing is good or bad and if the ends justify the means.

Spam is clearly increasing on the site as new users open accounts with hopes of getting rick quick.  Autofollowing exacerbates the issue.

I wrote a response to Biz at Twitter, asking:

- What would happen if Twitter masked the actual numbers of following/followers displayed?  (Similar to LinkedIn's 500+) 

- What if Twitter enabled segmentation on-site (e.g. Facebook friend lists, Friendfeed rooms, or WeFollow tags) or filtered-only following?

- What if Twitter offered analytics?  Would user behavior change?  E.g. Mailana shows I only message 150 people anyway, so why follow more?

- What if Twitter charged users who apply a "reach and frequency" broadcast approach, for whom autofollow and stats are quite important?  (Hello, freemium.)