Why is social media so ... anti-social?

Perhaps this is a stupidly obvious question, but why is so much social media so anti-social? Let me expand that a bit before you deride my lack of Facebook ‘friends’, Twitter followers or Klout score (currently a healthy 46 thank you very much).

Sure, you can be social with your friends on these sites, and off-them thanks to mobile apps, but there are some key issues that I at least run into with them:

1. If we don’t share a network then my friends don’t see my updates, share my life or catch my drift.
2. Twitter and Facebook (at least), seem hell-bound on making third-party developers lives hard, they depend on you ending up on their apps, on their site to make advertising money.
3. If I like the features of a new network better, I need to bring across my friendships or contacts, and re-apply my privacy settings and do a bunch of other work before I can use it fully.

Recently people have been comparing social platforms to early email clients and networks. Albert Wenger (a VC, ex-President of del.icio.us) wrote:

It would (be) a huge benefit to society if we can get with social networking to where we are with email today: it is fundamentally decentralized with nobody controlling who can email whom about what, anyone can use email essentially for free, there are opensource and commercial implementations available and third parties are offering value added services.

Thomas Baekdal (social media commentator) writes about the future of social media and makes the same comparison to email:

In the early 1980s, email worked pretty much as social services do today. Each email provider used their own proprietary protocols and systems, and each system was unable to communicate with any other.
…
So email didn't take off because the process was simply too complicated. It wasn't until every email provider finally decided on an open, non-proprietary format, that email started to work and became the massively popular communication mechanism that we know today.
…
The question is then, what is the next step? What is the future of social media? And the answer is painfully obvious because we have already seen it happen with email. The future is when social becomes a protocol.

More than just anti-social, the current networks lock up our content as Scott Hanselman (Microsoft employee and prolific blogger) recently pointed out:

You are not blogging enough. You are pouring your words into increasingly closed and often walled gardens. You are giving control - and sometimes ownership - of your content to social media companies that will SURELY fail. These companies are profoundly overvalued, don't care about permalinks, don't make your content portable, and have terms of service that are so complex and obtuse that there are entire websites dedicate to explaining them.

Scott is more railing against social media than suggesting an alternative (FWIW, I think RSS is great, but it provably does not solve all the issues here). I do think he’s right about not stopping blogging, and I said it myself back in 2009 too.

So if the future of social is to be a protocol, how will this happen? Google tried something like this with Google Wave, which morphed into Google+, but nobody trusts them anymore it seems, so it kinda died before it could be really interesting.

How could this happen with social media?

• Facebook could die, and then people pick up the pieces with smaller shared networks. But Zuckerberg has nailed that one with the successful IPO.
• Twitter could die, and then on the way out offer its data and API to the world for free. More likely than Facebook going, but again not hugely likely.
• A dominant OS, browser or device vendor could introduce the ability to use such a protocol without caring about controlling it. Microsoft could give this a shot with WIndows 8, but that will have its own issues to face before then. Google+ as a service is trying to be this, and might just be there if they bake it into Android.
• Amazon could surprise everyone by creating a platform for it and being open about it. It would probably generate huge storage and bandwidth revenue for them.
• Yahoo! could be a surprise player in this area, Marissa Mayer needs to give them something to aim for, and they have form in creating useful technical solutions for others (Yahoo! Pipes, Yahoo! Developer Network, YUI Library).

Baekdal is the most bullish that social must become a protocol, but he doesn’t offer us a way forward, other than pointing to the need for social to be an activity we do, not a place we go.

I think there might be a surprising way forward, but that can wait for another post.

Using Enterprise 2.0

Continuing from my previous post, this one is more in line with the actual talk I gave on the 13th April at The Internet Show in Melbourne. We will be putting the actual transcript and slides of that talk (and video if the quality is good enough) up for people to download in the next week or so.

If you are interested in Web 2.0 and social software then you should have a look at Enterprise 2.0, which could be thought of as just Web 2.0 within the enterprise, although the originator of the idea, Andrew McAfee has a more precise definition for it:

“Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.”

He places particular emphasis on the idea that it should be emergent, and for this reason excludes traditional intranets as part of the Enterprise 2.0 toolset.

“Emergent means that the software is freeform, and that it contains mechanisms to let the patterns and structure inherent in people’s interactions become visible over time.”

The whole idea of emergence is a tricky one, but a good example is the way Google assesses the relative merit of web pages based on the number (and quality) of inbound links, something which emerges over time as people find a page useful and link to it, rather than something pre-planned and orchestrated. A more concrete example is the idea of not placing paths in a garden up front, but allowing people’s actual movement to determine where paths should be placed – hence having them emerge as real patterns of use are known.

A point worth noting is that this means that the early structure or format of an Enterprise 2.0 tool can be expected to change over time. Initially it may seem somewhat useless, and not the sort of quality resource the business hopes it will be. This is a good thing as this quote from Art & Fear illustrates:

“The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the ‘quantity’ group: fifty pound of pots rated an ‘A’, forty pounds a ‘B’, and so on. Those being graded on ‘quality’, however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one - to get an "A". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the ‘quantity’ group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes – the ‘quality’ group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”

The point about emergence is that it usually leads to a more appropriate and higher quality result than something meticulously planned from “theorizing about perfection”.

It is important to realise that the interactions that will take place, and help the emergence of patterns and structure, will be around ideas and especially the communication of ideas. Any Enterprise 2.0 initiative must have as its basis the ability for people to express, challenge, endorse and modify their and other’s ideas.

It can seem that some of this is a waste of people’s time, creating yet more ideas (some rubbish) for them to have to trawl through and interact with. We should remember that what ultimately matters is how it helps to optimise overall organisational effectiveness, not necessarily the impact on individual efficiency. Efficiency is one of the items that gets addressed as complexity emerges in the unstructured content that Enterprise 2.0 deals with – good tools will help you deal with this complexity.

What Can Enterprise 2.0 Do?

One of the biggest differences in Enterprise 2.0 tools is that they bring broadcasting to the average employee. This means that everyone can take advantage of the virtues of pull versus push publishing. Instead of identifying who should see something, and then pushing it into their email inboxes, or onto their IM clients, pull publishing allows the idea to be pulled into someone’s attention when they want it to be. Key enablers for pull publishing are RSS feeds and feed-readers, easily browsable content and micro-blogging enterprise tools like Yammer.

Another key difference is that most Enterprise 2.0 tools have come out of the consumer marketplace. That means they are highly usable and are designed from the ground up to be easy to learn. It turns out that’s a really important point, because it makes adoption across an enterprise much easier than most enterprise software. One key point is that the tools should address security and legal concerns, unlike most Web 2.0 tools, the content being dealt with is commercially sensitive.

Here are some business problems that Enterprise 2.0 helps address better than many other tools:

• Bring new employees up to speed
  Wikis allow corporate knowledge to be easily captured, reviewed, edited and re-published as necessary so that new employees can quickly see the latest information. Internal blogs can operate the same way, but have the additional bonus of making it obvious who knows what, which gives the new employee someone to connect with.
• Accurately forecast something
  Some cutting edge applications of Enterprise 2.0 include crowd sourcing from within the organisation, using internal prediction markets to identify probable issues or forecasting delivery dates or prices.
• Help customers
  One of the oldest Enterprise 2.0 ideas, and something pre-dating Web 2.0, self-help community forums enable customers to be helped by other customers acting as a volunteer helpdesk.
• Make things findable
  Blogs (and intranets) that implement folksonomy tagging well allow users to easily tag things to find later and make content more browsable. Good enterprise search solutions that cover blogs, wikis, intranets and other Enterprise 2.0 tools also help make things more findable.
• Broadcast ideas (pull not push)
  As mentioned above, RSS and Yammer allow users to publish content in a way that broadcasts it outside their normal circle of influence, without creating disruptive interruptions as push publishing tends to.
• Transparent project progress
  Using a wiki, blog or a simple project management tool like Basecamp to track project progress both allows the emergence of patterns and can make those visible to people outside the immediate project team.
• Communicate to the rest of the organisation
  Department blogs can act as venues for communications between components of an organisation, and capture the discussions around those communications for future users to review and understand.
• Helping upcoming leaders network
  It is well established that upcoming leaders do better when their networks are more diverse and cross organisational boundaries. Internal blogs, the comments around them and a good flexible corporate directory tool can help upcoming leaders get noticed outside their existing teams and make the connections they will require to succeed.
• Enhance employee self-learning
  I’ve mentioned before David Maister’s opinion that most training is useless and the current focus of much etraining is actually on how to teach the individual to become a better learner, rather than pushing particular content at them. Wikis, blogs and social bookmarking all place a part in enabling better self-learning.
• Improve innovation
  Innovation is done by creative people, usually passionate creative people (see my previous post on passion) and Enterprise 2.0 helps them do this by making it easy for their ideas to be shared with internal audiences to inspire and call forth more ideas from them. Any Enterprise 2.0 tool can help innovation, but the best ones are often internal blogs.

Below is a great slidedeck that illustrates how someone might use these tools:

Meet Charlie - what is Enterprise2.0?

View more presentations from Scott Gavin.

What Do I Need in an Enterprise 2.0 Tool?

What should you look for in an Enterprise 2.0 tool?

You want to start with one that is more of a toolbox than a single tool, a good start is to look for something that offers blogs, wikis and a well-integrated corporate directory. You want something that is expandable, so you have the option to add more tools later.

Any tool you choose should play nice with other enterprise software, so you should find something that offers single sign-on (SSO) with your particular network, for example Active Directory/LDAP integration and that satisfies your IT department’s security needs.

Playing nicely with other Enterprise 2.0 tools is also mandatory. In this case that is mainly done by providing (and consuming) RSS feeds and integrating with your chosen enterprise search tool, but integration with a corporate directory offering will become necessary.

Basic functionality to allow emergent behaviours is also necessary, at a minimum this requires tagging and the ability to comment on anything, but micro-blogging and social bookmarking are also good candidates for this.

If you want to try something without involving IT, then you can look at various hosted solutions (such as Yammer), but eventually you should make sure that IT is happy with your choice of tools – especially of it ends up being something that you need to host yourselves, or if it will contain content vital to the continuity of the organisation in the case of a disaster.

Do I Need It?

Small companies, or larger ones faced with large amount of routines tasks and few opportunities for passionate creative work, might find that Enterprise 2.0 offers less robust ROI than most IT purchases, but even they may benefit from using Yammer or similar low-cost, hosted tools.

Companies in highly competitive environments, where the ability to be agile and quick to react to change is important, or organisations seeking to ignite the passion of their employees and find more effective ways to work will find that these tools are indispensable in helping flatten the organisation and efficiently distribute ideas.

Goals, Behaviours, ROI and Testing Ideas

You're developing a great web application, training course or social software strategy. You cost it and it looks like a substantial piece of work, so you need to get executive approval. Putting together a list of the benefits you find to your dismay that the list is full of terms like "easier", "more efficient", "more usable" and "collaborative". You know your executive will ask questions this list doesn't answer, "How will you know you're successful?" and "What's it worth to us?".

There are two common (and wrong) approaches to this question:

1. It's Web 2.0/training/social, it's intangible and can't be measured.
2. It should add to the bottom line, so just measure revenue changes.

The first one incorrectly assumes that intangibles can't be assessed, but market analysts know that they certainly can, and indeed regularly are, just ask what Google's stock valuation is based on.

The second one jumps to the über-goal and ignores the fact that as everything the organisation does can potentially affect revenue, it will be nigh impossible to really know whether any change in the bottom-line is the result of this particular web application, training or social software strategy (you can easily have a great success in one area cancelled out by a horrible mess in another).

Fortunately this problem is well known. Unfortunately the answer is hard. That is, hard as in deciding what you want for your birthday, not hard as in needing a PhD in Applied Rocket Science.

Find your desired user behaviours

The bottom line is that you need to find what change in user/trainee behaviours will support your business goals and then use that to derive metrics that can be measured (and eventually valued).

David Maister talked about the importance of identifying desired behaviours in his article Why (Most) Training Is Useless.

There is no point putting on skills training if there is no incentive for the behavior; the people don’t believe in it and they don’t yet know exactly what it is they are supposed to be good at! ...

What behaviors by top management need to change to convince people that the new behaviors are really required, not just encouraged? If the behavior is going to be optional, then so should the training be.

In other words, if we don't know what behaviours we want training to encourage, or if we don't actually support the display of those behaviours (e.g. through measurement and feedback) then we can't expect our training to actually help our business goals.

In exactly the same way software applications (not just web or social ones!) are often built without thinking what change in user behaviours is really desired or how the change in user behaviours will be measured - thus guaranteeing that even if success is achieved there is no way of valuing it.

ROI for difficult stuff

Adaptive Path introduced a way of valuing user experience by reflecting on the change in behaviours we desire to solve our business problem. They gave us the graphic below as a way of envisaging how business problems map to user behaviours and how they in turn can be mapped to valuable financial metrics.

 Source: Adaptive Path

via Marina Chiovetti at ThoughtWorks

• Business Problem = a specific problem you want to affect
• User Behaviour = a change in user behaviour that would introduce the effect desired
• Behaviour Metric = a way you can measure the change in user behaviour
• Value Metric = the dollar value we can apply to the behaviour metric
• Financial Metric = the expected amount of user behaviour change to come from the project, multiplied by the value metric and compared to the expected cost of the project

A specific example might help make this clearer. Imagine you want to increase leads and you decide to do this by improving your website's ability to elicit customer responses via the contact us form:

 Source: Adaptive Path

If we add some case studies to the website, and then place the contact us form at the bottom of each one as a call to action then we might expect some increase (assuming this was a new initiative for our website).

The behaviour metric for this is the number of leads received from the website contact form per month. Our sales team has estimated that 1 in 10 leads becomes a sale, worth on average $1,000 to us (whether revenue or profit depends on what you are most interested in - the smart money is on profit though).

Based on our website's traffic patterns we expect to increase our leads from 7 per month to 20 per month by implementing this measure. If we are happy to get a breakeven return on investment (ROI) over the next 3 months then we could invest $1,000 * (20 - 7) * 3 = $39,000 in the project.

Before someone tries to tell me I don't know how to value project returns, I know that you could use Net Present Value (NPV), Internal Rate of Return (IRR) or other methods to ensure this is comparing apples with apples across projects, time and investment opportunities - but that's not the point of this post.

Now we might well spend a fraction of that on case studies and a contact form, but if we wanted we could now justify getting a professional copywriter to help shape up our case studies and spend a bit on usability testing to ensure our contact forms get out of the way and give us the leads as easily as possible.

Okay, okay, this is a fairly simple example, with straightforward metrics. After all, we might well not know how much a lead is worth, and often we're asked to solve business problems far more complex than this one.

What if I’ve got no history (i.e. I’m a startup)?

We have used this process with startups to help them prioritise wildly diverse feature lists when they do not have the budget to afford to build it all in their launch timeframe.

(Aside: There is a lesson here about launching a simple, compelling product and then iteratively adding value to it based on user feedback, the problem is that in many startup ideas there is usually no simple, compelling offering. It's the fault of funding requirements, but more about that in another post.)

Startups do not have financial history to fall back on, and even with good financial modelling they might only have a guess to give you for their value metric. In this case we take the prioritisation this gives us and keep the rest of the information for analysis of the success of the startup down the track and (as importantly) for helping us identify which changes we should look at implementing later.

What if you don’t know what to change?

The methodology is still useful even when you have a complex situation with incomplete information. If nothing else it focuses your attention where it belongs, on the problem you are solving and the user/trainee behaviours that you think will help solve it rather than on the application technology or the subject matter of your training courses.

Of course you often don’t know what to do to create a particular desired behaviour. In this case a bit of prototyping and A/B testing can go a long way. Google Website Optimizer does a great job of helping you do this with content or separate functional pages, but it does require two separate pages exist, and sometimes you just want to tweak the way a particular feature works (e.g. adding a couple of extra fields to a form).

Assaf Arkin has created a plugin for Rails called Vanity that supports A/B testing in a rather unique way, by creating an easy way for developers to embed the tests into their code and then run them for a set number of iterations and/or exceed a set probability for one option over the other.

By using a simple API, and elegant admin functionality, Vanity provides a very viable way of testing one idea against another. While the time to make such a change is greater than not doing the A/B test – the marginal extra cost is small enough that you do it in order to find out which option really works better.

Assaf has a great post explaining how this is really Experimental Driven Development in action. He explains the cost/benefit tradeoff this way in the comments section:

“You start with an idea for a change that will improve your software. Your baseline cost of development is having both alternatives — before and after the change. Without EDD these alternatives will be separate in time, with EDD you’re going to have some overlap (the duration of the experiment).

For the experiment, you only need a skeletal implementation, you’re not committed to fully developing the feature until after it proves itself. For small changes it makes little difference, the cost is the same.

For complex changes, you can save a lot by not fully developing features that don’t matter. You’re going to know whether a feature matters or not quickly enough, and with data to back up, that you can make the decision to *not* develop it further.

You can also kill unused features early. So these are two ways to reduce development costs using EDD.”

Summary

Get behind whatever you are doing and try to understand the underlying business goals, the user behaviours that would support those and derive the ROI from that. If you are not sure what would best support the change in user behaviours, then try A/B testing to establish which way you should jump. Whatever you do, don’t allow yourself to be sucked into doing something just because your competitors did, or to be “simpler”, or more “usable” in some undefined, unaccountable, way.