We’ve had it wrong all along. It’s not social media, but “media, social”. What we consume is media first, social second. We still consume news, facts, tips, advice, marketing, videos and other media primarily but as a benefit, we now get a social aspect as well. Therefore, it’s Media, Social and not Social Media.

It’s Not About What People Had for Lunch

I still laugh when I hear someone suggest that Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms are all about personal “stuff”. My favorite is, “I don’t want to know what people are eating for lunch.”

Sure, there are people with too much time on their hands, sharing useless information. I can’t tell you how many there are though, because I don’t follow them. You probably should not follow them neither.

Consuming the Same Media with a Social Attribute

As I wrote almost 2 years ago, “social media” now makes the the computer one of the most personable mediums ever.  Ironically, this technology that was once bashed for depersonalizing the office, can now be hailed as one of the best methods to be more personal with stakeholders.

The same media, content, message, marketing or other communications you received before are now personalized, targeted, specific and therefore more relevant.

How You Use It Governs Your Perception

You’re right, social media can be useless at the office. However, have you tried Media, Social?

Before Online Reviews

In the old days, selling your product or service consisted of developing the item, selecting a market and screaming your message as loud and often as you could. Whether your message traveled on TV, Print or Radio, the model was consistent – a one-way message.

There was no real discussion or sharing of that information or individual experiences among consumers. Sure, word of mouth existed, but it was still one consumer to one consumer. There was no mass-channel. That has all changed. Welcome to the world of mass dialog.

Mass Dialog

Through online reviews, sentiments about you and your company are shared, substantiated and escalated. This happens at lightening-fast speeds. Releasing a new product that has a flaw? One user posts it, then overnight 100 others see it and many comment on it. The comment traffic escalates the page ranking on Google. Now, anyone who searches for your product online is immediately presented with your marketing page and the feedback by 100 users about this flaw.

In the old world, that one person would have called your support center, explained the problem and likely been satisfied with your response. You controlled the message and, to some extent, the consumer experience. End of story. In the new world the man behind the curtain is exposed for the world to see – ugly boxers, beer belly and all.

Will You Engage?

With this negative potential, why would you want customer reviews? Because this conversation will happen with or without you. If the feedback is not on your own website, it will be in other public forums. The only question is this: will you engage in the dialog? If you don’t, the result will not be positive. That much is guaranteed. If you do participate in the mass dialog, you have the ability to:

1. Learn and grow – improving your products and services.
2. Listen and hear – understanding your consumers better than ever before.
3. Respond and react – showing your consumers you care and choose to support them.
4. Inform and influence – educating your consumers and driving a more positive message.

Good News for Quality Products and Services

I hope you have a quality product. I hope you desire candor and transparency in your consumer messaging. If so, the new world is a great place to be. If not, your days are limited.

Those with the best products and services, supported by candid, transparent and consistent communication will benefit. After all, isn’t this the best way to serve your stakeholders anyway?

Question: How have customer reviews influenced your consumer behavior?

There’s a lot of conjecture online these days about whether or not Facebook is really in any trouble from Google+. In fact, I’m surprised how many of the experts seem to think Facebook has nothing to worry about. Here’s why I think Facebook has plenty to fear:

1. It’s Google: Yes, Facebook is huge in the social media circles. However, Google is huge in most online markets. Where they are not yet the dominant player, Google easily could be, with a strategic investment from their war chest.

2. Privacy Failures: Facebook has repeatedly upset their users with poor decisions regarding privacy policies and practices. Granted, Google could do the same, but there seems to be a greater trust of Google these days.

3. Messaging: Facebook’s messaging model is still clunky. Whether it is chat, wall posts, direct messages or other communications on Facebook, the solutions don’t integrate well with each other or, more important, external tools. Google+ already integrates with your gmail and chat.

4. Other Integrations: The possibilities are relatively endless. From apps to analytics, from storage to blogging, if you want your social media platform seamlessly integrated with other solutions, Google+ is liable to do it quicker, easier and in a more familiar format.

5. It’s Google: Yes, I already said this. But many people make the analogy to Facebook vs. MySpace and then discount Google+ because MySpace was so poorly managed and Facebook already has so many (750 Million) users. Well, Google search, alone, in 2010, had 350 Million users. Gmail was estimated at 100 Million in 2010 as well. Adjust for growth in the past several months, add in users from Google’s many other applications, and the argument of Facebook’s user base shrinks rapidly.

Now, do I think Facebook will vanish quicker than you can say “MySpace”? No. Do I think Facebook will deteriorate into poor quality, distasteful content like late night television B-Rated movies? No. However, I do believe Google+ will take a significant user base from Facebook. History has shown that a single geography really supports only one dominant, comprehensive social platform. Therefore, if Google+ eats into Facebook’s user base anywhere near 50%, the monolith that once was Facebook just may tumble.

Question: What do you think? Does Facebook need to worry about Google+?
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We all seek something different from social media. The author wants a method of getting the word out on their latest book. The corporation wants a way to keep customers informed and connected. The charity wants to reach potential contributors. The church wants a way to keep members informed of the latest events while reaching the lost with The Good News.  Whatever your goal though, consider, what does your Twitter Follower Ratio say about you and your organization?

Contributor vs. Consumer

Many people use social media primarily as a means of consuming information. In contrast, some accounts, especially organizations, use it as a tool for disseminating information more than consuming it. These accounts are greater contributors than consumers. Each approach suggests a different ratio. The contributor likely has a larger scale of followers, while the consumer likely follows more accounts.

Scale

The scale of your ratio also says a lot about your intent and use of Twitter:

Small Scale (1 to 100): If you have less than 100 followers then you are either just starting out, or very selective about who you follow and use Twitter primarily as a consumer. The small scale user generally is not viewed as a contributor so much as a person who knows how to leverage technology to keep in regular and frequent contact with a select group of individuals.

Medium Scale (100 to 1,000): Users with several hundred followers may be growing their account with an intent to be strong contributors, or be focused on acquiring as many followers as possible and still in the early stages of that plan. Either way, most individuals in this category are likely using the tool as more than a means of keeping in touch with a select group of individuals.

Large Scale (1,000 to 5,000): If your follower volume is in the thousands, you are either a liberal follower as well, or known for using an auto-follow back tool. These tools often drive people to follow you, simply to assure themselves of an incremental follow, regardless of their interest in your feed. It is unlikely you are legitimately following those listed as followers – at least not on a regular basis. After all, in order to read messages from thousands of people, you would need to invest entire days to keeping up with your twitter stream.

Huge Scale (5,000 or more): You are likely either aggressively following others with the simple objective of increasing your follower base as quickly as possible or, you are a strong influencer, admired by many. Even in the latter, you likely used an auto-follower at one time, which drove your numbers up. The exception to this rule is the celebrity, author or other public figure with a large following outside the Twitterverse.

Twitter Follower Ratio

I suggest the order of Following to Followers, based on an assumption that most accounts ultimately prefer a larger number of followers than followed. At least, most accounts that are interested in or concerned about what the ratio says about them would desire the higher number of followers.

More Followers Than Followed: This suggests you are an influencer and one who’s message is received well by others. You are selective in who you follow and frequently recommended by others. If your scale is large, this perspective is reinforced. If your scale is small though, it may also mean you simply use the account primarily to broadcast messages. In other words, you contribute more than you consume.

More Followed Than Followers: If your scale is small, this may mean you’re just getting started. However, if your scale is large, this likely means you’ve been aggressively following others with the intent of increasing your follower base. This may also mean you a re more of consumer than contributor to the conversation.

Examples

We’ll use my own account as an example. As I write this, I follow 250 people and I have 425 followers, a 250:425 ratio. Simplifying that number by the greatest common denominator (25), you get a 10:17 ratio (tip: if you don’t know the greatest common denominator, use the GCD function in Excel). As a result, I am in the medium scale (original figure, 250:425), with more followers than followed. This suggests I am contributing more than consuming, but likely still early in doing so.

Twitter Assessment Services

There are plenty of services out there that will conduct an automated assessment of your account. These services will consider more than just your ratio and look into items like how many tweets you sent, how long your account was active, the number re-tweets and times you are included in lists. Two of the most popular services are Klout and Twitter Grader.

Match Your Intent

The point here is not to worry if your ratio suggests you are using Twitter for something other than the purpose you claim. Instead, just know that this is becoming an increasingly addressed concern by some of the world’s leading social media advocates. As social media analytical tools like those mentioned above evolve, I believe auto-follow tools, individuals perceived to do anything possible to increase followers and the like will be frowned upon. Therefore, now is the time to look at these numbers and determine for yourself if action is needed to align your ratio with your message and intent.

Question: So what does your Twitter Follower Ratio say about you?

January 2011 could not pass without sharing my appreciation for these Tweeters. The list below are the top 5 Twitter accounts for servant leadership content in 2010. I’ve gained a lot from these sources and recommend them to anyone interested in new content and ideas for the only real form of leadership. You can follow these and many servant leadership practitioners, in my Twitter Servant Leadership List.

5. Kelvin Redd (@KelvinRedd)

Twitter Bio: Author, Speaker, Servant Leadership Consultant and Certified Emergenetics Associate
http://www.iLead2Serve.com

Kelvin is the Director of the Center for Servant Leadership at the Pastoral Institute in Columbus, Georgia. He is the author of the book “Stand Tall: Essays on Life and Servant Leadership.” Kelvin’s Twitter posts include content from his personal blog as well as updates on Servant Leadership from the Pastoral Institute and Greenleaf Centers.

4. The Greenleaf Center (@GreenleafCenter)

Twitter Bio: The Greenleaf Center promotes the awareness, understanding, and practice of servant leadership by individuals and organizations. www.greenleaf.org
http://greenleaf.org

The Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership and is the non-profit named after the man who coined the term, “servant leadership”. The updates from their Twitter account include news from the organization and servant leadership updates in general. For the latest on events, publishing and the center’s other activities, follow this account.

3. Ken Blanchard (@KenBlanchard)

Twitter Bio: Speaker, Business Guru, and Author of over 50 books, including The One Minute Manager.

http://www.kenblanchard.com

Dr. Ken Blanchard is the cofounder and Chief Spiritual Officer of The Ken Blanchard Companies®, an international management training and consulting firm. Blanchard is also the author of many great leadership books, including “The One Minute Manager” and “The Servant Leader“. His Twitter posts span a variety of servant leadership, spiritual and motivational topics.

2. JT Jackson (@ServantTweeter)

Twitter Bio: Servant First, Leader Always; Life Coach; Inspirational Speaker; Good Guy

Mr. Jackson is an excellent example of a servant leadership proponent who practices what he preaches. He wins the award for the most creative leadership Twitter name (ServantTweeter) and introduced me to a key phrase I’ve referenced many times – “Serve first, serve always.” The updates from his Twitter stream encompass a variety of servant leadership topics, good management practices and motivational topics.

1. Dr. Jack King (@DrJackKing)

Twitter Bio: We are put in this world not to be better than the next man but rather help him be better than he was when we met. HS Dad (4 little ladies). Love is the answer.
http://www.NorthForkCSL.org

Where to begin? Dr. King is a great proponent of servant leadership and the founder of the NorthFork Center for Servant Leadership (link above). In his work at the center, King established Servant Hearts Thursdays - a program of guest blog posts from servant leadership proponents in different circles. Specific to Twitter though, he is a regular re-tweeter of great content from many sources. He’s also famous for his positive rants – when he gets something on his mind, you will receive a great flow of quotes, links and original insights into a given topic, such as motivation, selflessness and love. Thank you, Jack, for all you contribute to servant leadership awareness and adoption through Twitter.

My thanks to all of you for your great many contributions!

Question: Is there anyone you would add to this list?

Whether you are a CEO, college freshman, pastor, domestic engineer or anywhere in between, social media is likely an increasingly important communication tool. In the future, social networking will become so integrated with all our communication tools that it will be just another part of our regular processes. Until that time though, we must struggle with a variety of platforms. We have one site for personal use, one professional and still others for jobs, hobbies or specific focus areas. Until we see the tightened integration of social media platforms though, I find that knowing your social media hierarchy and following some basic principles will keep your messages clear, effective and aligned with the right platform.

With so many platforms available to us, we spend too much time updating status messages and too little time interacting. To solve this problem, most tools have enabled integration with other services for status updates. This works well, provided you keep the status flow one-way and know your hierarchy. The image above reflects my own social media hierarchy. Here are the guidelines I followed in creating my own:

1. Twitter Feeds All: To keep it simple, I have Twitter feeding all social networks. Some tools offer the ability to update only sites identified by hashtags in your post (#fb for facebook and #li for linkedin, as an example). However, given the limited characters, I just feed them all and keep my twitter posts more professional.

2. Feed Twitter Selectively: To avoid any loops, I chose not to feed Twitter from other sites, unless the feed is intended to update all sites. For example, I enable Foursquare and my Blog to post to Twitter, because I like to update all sites with with these feeds.

3. Target Your Platforms: With the above exceptions, each platform I leverage has a primary purpose. I use Ning for the Servant Leadership Network (professional), Facebook for friends and family updates (Personal), LinkedIn for business networking (Professional), my blog for Servant Leadership content (professional) and other sites for similarly targeted areas.

One of the benefits of social media is to allow us to be ourselves more in professional settings. In fact, I enjoy that my colleagues can learn more about my personal interests as well – if they so desire. As a result, the intent here is not to say you have to be careful about crossing your messages. However, the more appropriate and focused your message is on each platform, the better I find the reception and resulting influence. Therefore, if you struggle with too many status updates or fear your messages are not as clear or strong as they could be, I suggest setting up your own social media hierarchy.

Question: Do you have a social media hierarchy? How do you leverage each platform?

The best leaders today understand the power of relationships, especially when it comes to business. As a result, most leaders have a strong network of colleagues that, over the years, become friends. These friendships and business partnerships extend online as well. However, many straggling organizations still insist upon blocking traffic to “social sites”. In contrast, the best led companies do not fear social media – they embrace it. The strongest leaders leverage the benefits of social technology while addressing the risks in a manner that empowers their teams but protects the company. Below are 5 reasons great leaders should not fear social media and a balanced reflection on the risks.

1. Best Friends At Work
Who still believes that work is impersonal? When was it necessary to ensure that your business contacts are not also friends? Need we remind some organizations of the Gallup Organization’s findings from their study of high performing organizations:

Gallup… observed that employees who report having a best friend at work were¹:

• 43% more likely to report having received praise or recognition for their work in the last seven days.
• 37% more likely to report that someone at work encourages their development
• 35% more likely to report coworker commitment to quality.
• 28% more likely to report that in the last six months, someone at work has talked to them about their progress
• 27% more likely to report that the mission of their company makes them feel their job is important
• 27% more likely to report that their opinions seem to count at work.
• 21% more likely to report that at work, they have the opportunity to do what they do best every day.

2. Companies Don’t Buy & Sell, People Do
When it comes to major agreements and long term commitments, people do not simply buy something from a company. Instead, they build partnerships and gain understanding from those partners about that company and their products. Then, business partners create mutually beneficial, value generating agreements together. The net result, after years of success on both ends of those deals is a stronger relationship, often extending into friendships. Those friendships can generate trust and efficiency which transcends employers, creates stronger networks and brings value to the next company by which either partner is employed. No longer does a person bring only their experience and skills to a company that hires them, but they bring the skills, experience and trust of their network as well.

3. Who Do You Want in Your Foxhole?
When times get tough, who do you want in your foxhole with you? Someone you only know based on their numbers, contracts, functional requirements and other formalities? Do you really think such an individual will stick their neck out for you or go that extra mile, unless the compensation is there? Or, do you want someone you’ve known well, whose family you know by name and whose favorite charity you supported last year? If nothing else, it helps to know your business partner’s spouse will yell at them if they screw up a deal they committed to you on.

4. Innovation
Structured, internal, corporate innovation alone is too constrained for today’s global economy. Innovation does not work well in a vacuum. The more creative outlets and inlets you provide your entire staff, the greater the chance they will discover breakthrough innovations. As your staff listens to their friends complain about how the products your competitors make, fail to meet their needs, they will better understand the implications of your engineering, research & development. The more your teams hear their contacts mention the need for someone to invent a solution to xyz problem, the greater the chance your company will create and solve that new market problem.

5. Mass Dialogue
Never before in history, has the opportunity for mass dialogue existed in such a manner as what social media provides. Print media creates mass, one way communication. Television does the same. Static website are no better. Previous communications technologies equate to shouting at your customers. With social media, feedback mechanisms like rated reviews, number of views and frequency of comments provide a means by which leaders can proactively hear the unified voice that is their consumer mass. This creates, in essence, a platform by which leaders can carry on a mass dialogue, like never before.

Dark Side
Don’t get me wrong, their are risks inherent to social media as well. Yes, your employee could reveal some deep, dark, corporate secret. Or, someone claiming to speak on your organization’s behalf may slip and act unprofessionally in a business forum. There may even be a greater volume of technical risks, such as computer viruses, worms and social engineering in these mediums. However, the solution to these risks are the same they’ve always been: education, training, policy and appropriate network security. The solution is not cutting off your company from opportunities for fear of the unknown.

In the end, as technical leaders in your organization, it is up to you to set the expectations of the company with regard to innovative opportunities. This evolution in communication technology is no different. The next time you debate blocking the latest social media site, consider, instead, joining the site and putting your great staff to task in finding the right way to keep that channel open for the corporation to leverage all benefits, without exposing you to the usual risks.

1. http://gmj.gallup.com/content/511/Item-10-Best-Friend-Work.aspx July 10, 2009.

Social Networking

As the personal computer replaced typewriters and the Internet evolved into common use, more critics began to panic that we, as a society, would lose our human touch. After all, just how personal can interaction be through computer screens? One wonders if they thought the same of the telephone. Even a man I greatly admire, James A. Autry, a thought leader on servant leadership and remarkably successful business man, devoted an entire section in one of his books to the theme that technology negatively impacts the ability for personal interaction (and servant leadership) to be successful. James and many of these critics were right in their observations given the state of technologies at that time – the late 80′s and early 90′s. Before social technology hit rev 2.0, everything was static, there was limited conversation and nobody saw the Internet as a place for friends to connect. Instead, you had a mess of static webpages. The closest thing to a personal touch from these early websites was a bunch of personal data that was broadcast to anyone at all. The problem was, only a select network of individuals wanted to read these individual’s broadcasts but there was no easily defined audience or targeting mechanism. That was then, this is now.

Then
Before Social Technology evolved into common place, in times that predate digital social networks, we had direct personal relationships based primarily on physical interactions. Those you knew living close to you, working in your office or family that visited semi-regularly were all in the know about your life’s events. Even your closest friends from high school or college – the select few who kept you updated in Christmas letters or shared their updated contact information with each subsequent move. These individuals all provided “warm fuzzies” when you heard an update every couple of months.

If there were major life events, such as weddings, funerals or even the occasional reunion, you would even travel far to see those closest to you. You’d reconnect briefly, be amazed at how much had changed over the years and regret that you had not stayed in “closer contact”. You’d promise to “do better this time” and maybe you would, for a couple of months at least, before the status quo returned and you’d meet up again at the next major life event….

And so it went for most of us. Sure, there were exceptions, those who were friends for life, those that didn’t move far from home and made sure to visit everyone when they returned to visit, perhaps even the occasional high school “clique” that never ended. But as a whole, I suspect most of us experienced something like the above – only maintaining even semi-regular contact with a very small subset of friends and colleagues. However, modern evolutions in social technology have changed all this and flipped the coin completely. We now have the opportunity, through the technical empowerment of social technology, to make and maintain our relationships on a more personal level than ever before.

Now
It is easier than ever to stay connected or reconnect with friends and colleagues. A quick Google of someone’s name is likely to identify a Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Ning, Naymz or similar networking reference. Physical vicinity is almost irrelevant. When you meet at the life event, you exchange your preferred profile space, go home, link up and now you’re getting daily one-liner updates from Twitter or a similar service. You suddenly realize that their child is the same age as yours or slightly ahead and, trusting them from the common bonds of your youth, may rely on them for advice. How did they get that thumb-sucking under control?

Perhaps you discover that your old college roommate went back for his law degree. As luck would have it, you needed someone to go over that new contract before you sign. Again, the common bond of trust is pre-existing and new business is drawn up with old friends. In the end, it becomes easier and easier to make ties with your personal life and professional roles. For some this may not be what they seek. Many people prefer a work-life balance, vs. a work-life alignment. But even if for purely personal reasons, the daily status updates, photo sharing and routine communication with friends becomes more simplistic and readily accessible.

Still Room For Improvement
Of course, social technology solutions are still far from perfect. Many of the social technology services are awkward on mobile devices. The proliferation of these technologies is still relatively limited and standards have not yet matured. In fact, the lack of connectivity for a majority of mobile devices or even decent user interfaces for many of those that are connected, limit the adoption rate of mobile social technology. Meanwhile, the elders of our society, the age group most unlikely to adopt new technologies, remain virtually untouched by social technology. However, as we mature as a society and more youth become adults and adults become elders, all familiar with these systems and solutions, the adoption rate will naturally expand accordingly. Finally, there remains too many competitors and redundant solutions. As competitors battle for market share (user base) and systems settle into niches, these standards will pan out as they do for all technologies. Before long, all these roadblocks will become speed bumps and social technology adoption and proliferation will complete.

How Do We, As Technology Leaders, Respond?
Great, so we recognize that social technology is making relationships more personal than ever before. We understand this brings a human touch back to the office that may have been lacking in the last decade. In fact, we may even see our friends and colleagues are more connected than ever. So what does that mean for you, as a technology leader? It means first and foremost that this is not a battle, it means that we need to leverage these resources ourselves and it means we need to align our business plans with the social technology present and future.

Not a Battle
How are you structuring your policies and security around social networking? Are you completely blocking Facebook and Myspace? What about LinkedIn and the more generally considered “professional sites”? How do you handle Ning, which consists of a mix of both personal and professionaly-focused networks? Sadly, the reality is there may be some increased security threats from these sites and so proper precautions should be taken. But if you think that your staff could only possibly use social networking and media sites for purely personal reasons, think again. Whether you immediately open up access to these resources for your employees or you plan for it in the future, only you can decide. One thing is certain though, social technology is not going away and it is an excellent resource for your employees – both personally and professionally. Consider shifting your policies from one of absolute opposition, to one of moderated temperance. Of course, excessive personal use that abuses corporate assets should always be addressed, but the line between personal and professional networking is a very gray one and difficult to define. Otherwise, employees that are completely blocked from such resources, intending to use it for professional networking purposes will feel stifled, lacking the tools they need to complete their job effectively and not empowered to perform their best.

Leverage These Resources Ourselves
Are you connected with social technology? How many friends do you have online? When was the last time you connected with your old colleagues? You know that position that you’ve been trying to fill for months? Having a solid network on LinkedIn, empowering you to query your most trusted advisers and former employees sure would be helpful. Imagine, with one message you could immediately ping most of your former colleagues and know immediately how any referrals you receive are connected to you.

Aligning Business Plans with Social Technology
Does the marketing plan at your company encompass how they plan to leverage social technology? If not, why not? Social Technology should be considered as regularly, if not more so, than print, television, email and web alone. Viral marketing is best and most cost effective online, something everyone wants to hear nowadays. Leveraging YouTube, product watch sites and email campaigns that don’t stink of force-fed ads are all low cost solutions to their traditional counterparts. What about your hiring strategy? Be sure to know what the discussion boards say about you as a manager (check eBossWatch for example) and as an employer (what do the hiring site discussions say?). Are you polling your own network online for hiring? In every new major initiative, within your own department and beyond, consider how social technology can help (or even hurt, if not properly addressed) your plans.

Yes, not so long ago, the Internet was evil, out to destroy our society by disconnecting us from the human touch. As the underlying technology evolves, adoption rates grow and interfaces become more familiar though, it is clear that social technology solutions have made our relationships more personal than ever before. There remains opportunities for improvement, but the fears of the past are fading and the promise of the future for both personal and professional opportunities to connect with friends and colleagues is immense. As a technology leader in your organization, it is up to you to ensure your teams realize this wave and help make it work for you.

Those of you in customer service know that, historically, a happy customer tells 5 people, while an unhappy customer tells 100. While that was true in the past and likely remains true for verbal communication, Web 2.0 functionality is leveling the playing field. In particular, through Blogging your customers may tell the same number of people – whether they are happy or unhappy.

A recent posting from one of the country’s leading ITIL consultants rained down unsolicited praise for FedEx. Although the source was a personal blog, the estimated 400 member readership contained many IT consultants, contractors and industry professionals – all of whom rely upon carriers for their business.

Now I can hear the naysayers already: “one could complain just as quickly” – and you’re right. That is precisely the beauty of this evolution in communication mediums. Like it or not, your customers will hear all the big customer service stories. It used to be that each bad incident was relatively self-contained. However, this is no longer the case.

Now, emotional (favorably or negatively) customers will log onto any of the growing number of vendor-neutral customer complaint boards, the Better Business Bureau, or industry discussion forums and distribute their thoughts. If customers Blog about it, you will see that incident quickly broadcast to hundreds of readers. The internet is undiscriminating and the communication is immediate. What are you doing to manage this environment? Are you:

• Monitoring relevant industry and consumer discussion boards?
• Surveying your largest customer’s for preferred communication channels?
• Researching customer service incidents online for “vent-sessions”?
• Offering your customers a direct online forum through your own site?
• All of the above?
• Something else?

Today’s leading organizations understand these benefits and challenges. Web 2.0 savvy-leaders are addressing the response in many different ways. You must be aware of these concerns and opportunities – leveraging the processes and related technologies for your benefit and avoiding greater detriment.

Benefits of Enterprise 2.0

I recently had someone challenge the benefits of social networking for the enterprise, suggesting there was no real value for such technology in the workplace. I came up with a quick list and decided to post it here:

Examples of benefits to social networking in the workplace include:

1. Collaboration: The more your employees can find out about each other, the quicker they can share ideas. For example, if you have a large number of staff, there is a great potential for duplicating research efforts. Through digital networking, it will be easier for your staff to self-identify complimentary projects and align their efforts.
2. Innovation: Your staff may have a great deal of common interests outside the office that could transfer into a profitable new line of business. For example, perhaps you produce electronics and an office club forms around bicycling. The result may be the greatest electronic innovation for cyclists in generations, produced by your company and not the competition.
3. Resource Identification: Content Management systems are great, but what if your staff does not use the right search term? Identifying experts within your company can be much easier, quicker and more cost effective through networking tools than traditional, structured, data hierarchies.
4. Stronger Community: As the famous Gallup Poll pointed out, employees with friends at work are much happier and more productive. Social networking will empower your staff self-identify individuals with similar interests, resulting in larger and stronger community within the workplace.
5. Increased Communication: Industry experts have predicted that social networking is much like email or the web itself – another evolution in communication mediums. As a result, it is not a question of whether to adapt social networking, but when. Mechanisms like chat and forum discussions further empower your staff to communicate more effectively and in a manner that is easy to capture and compile.

These are very high-level and I suspect there will be more as I think about it. However, I will keep running list here as I come across them. If you have some to add, I welcome your comments.

Business Week (BW) recently updated one of their hottest pieces from 2005. The article was on the impact of Blogs in the workplace. As a result, the June 2nd edition of BW highlighted the positive and negative impact of this evolution in communication on the workplace.

The metrics painted an interesting picture:

• 25% of U.S. adults online read a blog once a month (Forrester cited)
• IBM’s internal social network, “Beehive“, has 30,000 employees on it
• Twitter estimates 1 Million users now
• Dell’s service on Twitter has brought in $500k+, in new orders, in the last year
• Splogs (Spam Blogs) now account for 90% of all blog postings (though filters catch most)
• Technoratti now indexes 74 Million blogs (but only 5.2 Million are estimated as active)
• Best Buy’s social staff site, “Blue Shirt Nation” has 20,000 participants, most exited staff remain users

BW also had some good insights, both positive and negative, into the growing trends and impact at the workplace:

• “Millions of us are now hanging out on the Internet with customers, befriending rivals, clicking through pictures of our boss at a barbecue or seeing what she is reading at the beach. It’s as if the walls around our companies are vanishing and old org charts are lying on their sides”
• “This can be disturbing for top management who are losing control, at least in the traditional sense.”
• “…companies that don’t adapt are sure to get lots of (the downside)”
• “…we have developed top-down reflexes that are nearly Pavlovian. We have to reprogram ourselves.”
• “(employees) may see what technologies their competitors are putting into alpha tests and get the buzz on new rounds of financing.”
• “Work and leisure, colleague and rival; they all blend on these networks.”
• “…wikis raze traditional hierarchies: An intern can amend the work of a senior engineer.”
• “Managers have to make sure that quieter employees don’t lose out.”

The article sums things up nicely by stating “…the potential for both better and worse is huge, and it’s growing”. So not unlike other developments it is all about how each enterprise manages this evolution of communication. The question is, are you leveraging this evolution in communication for the benefit of your staff, customers and company? Your competitors are probably working on it now.

Whatever happened to those companies that didn’t put up a website anyway? Happy twittering.

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that my good friend Norman Reiss has a blog focused on Non-Profit IT and ePhilanthropy. Norman has worked in the non-profit space for many years now and has developed a wealth of knowledge in ePhilanthropy.

If you work in NPO technology and / or ePhilanthropy, I suggest adding his blog to your list. He’s now linked on this site as well.

Norman’s Blog: NonProfit Bridge
(Bridging Technology, Communications & Development to Implement ePhilanthropy Strategies for Nonprofit Organizations)

It seems like the topic of Mashups is getting a lot of press again lately. Conceptually, it’s nothing all that new and mashups have been around for several years. Wikipedia defines mashups as:

… a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool; an example is the use of cartographic data from Google Maps to add location information to real-estate data from Craigslist, thereby creating a new and distinct web service that was not originally provided by either source.”

With IBM’s announcement of the release of Lotus Mashups at Lotusphere in January, we have another example of how Web 2.0 and web-as-a-platform solutions are presenting solutions for the early adopting enterprises. Still, the majority of mashups today seem to focus on map overlays. This is where I liked IBM’s positioning at Lotusphere – while they covered the mandatory examples of map overlays, they also really emphasized data-to-data and other non-(geographic)map mashups.

I took a quick look around for some of the more innovative and popular non-map mashups and here some that stood out:

• Love-o-Graph: Don’t trust yourself, match.com or any other dating algorithms? Why not entrust the future of your love life to a mashup driven entirely off of your name and your prospective partner? I found the future for my wife and I is “open to interpretation”.
• LivePlasma: A cool visual representation of connections between musicians, actors, films, books and so on from the Amazon API.
• Secret Prices: A really cool site that combines data including online coupons and rebates with sales sites and opinion data.
• Similarity Web: This site takes Amazon.com’s “Customers Also Bought” logic and provides an impressive visualization of similar products.
• Google vs. Yahoo: With this mashup, you can compare the results of a search as reported by Google and Yahoo.

With IBM’s investment in enterprise mashups solutions, we move from one-offs and technically challenging solutions requiring programming expertise to a common business platform. Then we look at examples like those above that range from the entertainment to consumer focused. It is clear there are many great opportunities for mashups beyond the geographic maps and expanding solutions for average business person.

For more examples of mashups, check out Programmable Web. In particular, they have a somewhat dated article on increasing non-map mashups.