What So.Me must the UK deliver in 2012?

What is our role in designing a first-class So.Me service for 2012?

Well, that is a real humdinger, isn’t?

Apophenia took time off writing-up her PhD to describe what she would like NOW in the way of Olympics 2.0.  I want pretty much the same (and I am not getting it).  What do you think?

Apophenia is a serious commentator on new media, so check out her blog.  “For you convenience”  - to save you a click - here is a summary.

Too much to ask?

Apophenia says she would be happy to have adverts.  What she would lose happily are commentators adding ‘padding’ [my words].  We only want commentary if it adds an expert view of spectactular value.

I agree.  What do you think?

Are we up to the task?

Addendum:   Challenge from Chris.  is this #So.Me or complex broadcasting?  We want the ingredients to do our own mashups.  Look at NY Times coverage.  How much is user generated?

August 20, 2008 | Filed Under Jo Jordan | Leave a Comment 

Should Olympic competitors be allowed to blog?

I was shocked to see that Olympic competitors may not blog or even transmit photos down their mobile phones.  It appears that professional journalists have a monopoly on news.

I am not comfortable with that.

What do you think?  What has the 2012 committee assumed about the review they will get from media organizations?  Was this discussed openly?

August 12, 2008 | Filed Under Jo Jordan, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment 

What do you think of McCain’s comment strategy?

Tell me, is McCain’s So.Me strategy legal in Europe?

According to this post

McCain webmasters check what is done.

Isn’t this posing as a ‘consumer’.  The consumer may have left the comment but as a ‘hired hand’ and agent of the ‘vendor’??

Would this strategy now be illegal in Europe?

Update: Mashable defends McCain?

August 9, 2008 | Filed Under Jo Jordan | 3 Comments 

First report on using blogging to teach

Context

I’ve just started a post-grad class.  Most of the students are international and are new to the UK and in 4 months they will write an external exam.  I don’t set it - I just prepare them for it. So it is quite important, IMHO, that they get their writing skills up to scratch.

I obviously don’t want to spend my weekends marking and as I live out of town, I thought a good solution was to get them to blog.  Regular writing up of notes would increase their confidence, raise their fluency, and help them network with each other in a strange city.  And I could give them immediate feedback from 100 miles away.

Login rate

Only one had blogged before.  In the first week, two students of 20 managed to get a public email address, wordpress account, contact me to be included as an author, find out how to blog, and post.   It’s still a complicated business, isn’t it?

3 or so sent me a public email address and I invited them to join from within the blog, but that proved unfruitful.

6 or so had a public email address and joined up to wordpress.  So I was able to add them in as authors during class.

So after one week 1 out of 10 were up and running and 3 out of ten had potential access.  I am quite happy with these figures and will let you know when and if I get to 100%.

Quality of posts

The first student to get in and post is in IT, BTW.  Her post on HRM was perfect.  She wrote one paragraph and summarized the strategic position of her previous company and what it severe discontinuous competition in SaaS in Nigeria meant for recruiting the right staff and maintaining their loyalty.

The second student to get in delighted me by posting a series of experiments on how to post.  This will greatly reassure the more timid who are terrified ‘they will do something wrong’.  He had spoken to me after the first class and indicated that he didn’t really want to go back to his family business of insurance broking.  I had reassured him that he could write about any industry.  He picked video games.  Inevitably the post wasn’t that good substantively but I am still delighted that he picked up the zeitgeist: write on something that interests you and learn from the conversation.

After one week

So after one week, I am beating the 1:9:90 ratio on a small group of international students who arrived in London two weeks ago.  They are jet lagged, tired, befuddled and had barely heard of blogging before they arrived.  Some had never heard of Gmail (though most have at least hear of Facebook or Orkut).

Their writing is good and playful.

Any predictions?

As to when I will get all 22 signed up and writing?  And how many will cross-comment?  And whether they will find each others’ comments useful?

And whether the college will find that the blogging has strengthened the community of students, and enhanced both their performance in other classes and their experience in London?

We need a future’s market here!

August 6, 2008 | Filed Under Jo Jordan | 2 Comments 

Social media and HR strategy

Time for formal HR policies on social media

I have been meaning to sketch out the bones of an social media policy for HR and the time seems to be right to get on with it!

First, the HR strategy

The real issue when we talk about social media and employees is that many HR departments don’t really have a strategy. Not to be too unkind but they haven’t the foggiest clue what it takes to make money in their industry or to out compete the competition. I saw a report today from India that about 90% of HR managers are left speechless if you ask them about the business model of their company. From that platform of ignorance, well everything that follows is random.

What should already be in place and why

That said, firms “should” have a clear idea of what they are “buying in” when they hire some one, and what precautions should be taken for the sake of the business.

I once ran a policy that all stationery was free, whatever purpose you wanted it for. My reasoning was that we dealt with confidential material and I didn’t want people taking paper home for their kids to draw on. The rule was that all paper was shredded and the quid pro quo was we will buy you whatever scrap pads and pens you want - no questions asked.

I’ve seen really slack security, questioned it and been laughed at. And I have seen the same people all over the newspapers as journalists added 2+2=5 on the basis of what was found in the rubbish bins. I have seen worse too. Security merges into safety.

Extending my current policy to include social media

So I am not concerned about employees chattering on line. My HR Strategy and the downstream policies of training, induction, and things like stationery use have taken care of all that. An in-house chat channel should be sufficient for people to discuss what they want to post on line, what is wise to post, etc. etc.

I would make computers available to staff at work BTW, as a matter of course. It is much more sensible to help your staff keep on top of their personal business than presume they can take care of it between 9pm and 6am, which is what they would be doing with British commute times.

Then think about social media and the potential for a punchier HR strategy

With social media, the interest for me is more on the value it may add. When we look at the interconnectivity, geographical scope and ability to shift our business model from service to platform (which applies to non-internet business’ too), then HR strategists need to go back to basics.

Social media can change the answer to all these questions, if not for us, then for our competitors. New technologies disrupt business models and first movers have a huge advantage. Second movers often go broke as they are left hanging on to lemon.

If our competitors are deriving value from the initiative and energy of their employees, can we afford not to?

July 31, 2008 | Filed Under Jo Jordan, Uncategorized | 2 Comments 

Google: your supplier, your utility or your one and only customer?

While you have been having fun thinking up SoMe, I’ve thinking about something much more dry or serious.

We all know that Microsoft landed in the court facing charges of monopoly. Google will be there eventually too, not because they are bad or evil, but because our economic system requires us to keep an eagle eye on the “big boys”.

While monopoly is illegal in our system, hegemony is not. At the NLabNetworks meeting in Leicester a few weeks ago, CJ asked a good question. If you could only have three social media tools, which ones would you choose? I was amused that no one listed Google. We are so accustomed to Google that we forget it is there. Go out onto the streets and ask people where Google gets its money from. People will be puzzled, not because they don’t know, but because they never thought to ask. That’s hegemony. Not only are we big and successful, but everyone assumes our way is the right way of doing things.

So how has this affected your business?

We all use Google, to be sure. Its a great way to brainstorm and make up a short list. What I mean is how has Google changed your business model and are those changes good for you in the long term?

It seems to me that Google is no longer supplier or even utility. It has become a customer. The one and only customer. Everything we do is geared up to pleasing Google, getting Google’s attention, and looking like Google.

Is Google even a utility? Or is it just a service on the utility of internet? Will Google come and go like other great firms, but a little faster, because on the internet firms come and go more quickly?

So what is the alternative? I’ll point you to a post which prompted this thinking and try to put my money where my mouth is on Thursday.

July 29, 2008 | Filed Under Jo Jordan, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment 

Emerging Technologies Managers

We do know this stuff, or at least we did

Chris is deeply concerned that social media might encourage people to segment into antagonist tribes and that have-nots will be increasingly disenfranchised. Coming in from an organizational design background, both in profits and not-for-profits, I am less concerned. Polarization and marginalization are risks, but not inevitable outcomes. We know the risks; they are old questions; and they are covered in basic training of “organizational scholars” as basics are in every profession.

‘Group think’, made famous by Kennedy’s failed invasion of Cuba, is 101 material - as are the trajectory to reach the point where groupthink is possible, and the manager’s role (as opposed to team leader’s role) when the group reaches that level. The protection of journalists as the fourth estate is critical to the management of group think, etc. etc. Pol Science 101.

What is a mystery, at least to me, is the apparent collapse of public administration in the UK. Missing computer disks, 20% tax on the minimum wage, crowds of people milling around a train station trying to find out about delayed trains - all beg the question “Where do people learn to manage in the UK? What do the learn? Who do they learn it from? What are the gradations in experience that a young person might expect?”

What I find more of an unknown, and therefore compelling, is the increasing split between consumers and producers.

In the media world, consumers have become producers, and producers have retreated, by-and-large, to making platforms. This is a complex issue that has taken place in other sectors too.

The hotel example is relatively easy to draw out into rules-of-thumb. If fine dining is to be replaced by a microwave, a hotplate, preprepared meals and packaged soup, the demand for skills changes. The call for what you and I think of as real skill, diminishes. The demand for chefs bifurcates. Top chefs need to be in restaurants where it is very clear we will pay for their skills in the price of our meal. Indifferent chefs are likely to be replaced with a management system such as we find at McDonalds. Now the skills are estimating the demand for chips, contracting for potatoes with farmers, persuading a lot of young people to do work where they learn little, etc.

From hotels to knowledge

The same pattern is being seen in the knowledge economy. We simply do not have a role if our consumers can “cook” better than us.

What becomes interesting from an HR point of view are these questions?

I listened to Brad Smith of Intuit, the accounting software people, talking about the challenge of moving from providing accounting advice to a platform where consumers advise each other. As he put it, we have to move from

Note, McDonalds doesn’t go this far. You get what you get. There are some services in the States though that do all your shopping for you, and sometimes your chopping and slicing. You get to cook. This is a different space where people don’t do as they are told!

I might be carrying forward basic organization theory inappropriately and I’d be happy to know I am wrong. In current thought, we distinguish between

I’ve done a lot of assessment center work and we watch out for adequate transitions between levels 1 and 2 and 2 and 3 (and thereafter but this is a pyramid!)

When a highly skilled person is transitioning between 1 and 2, they often make 1 of 2 mistakes.

The psychologists will be looking for the ability to say this is the situation, this is my goal, this is your goal, these are your resources and authority, this is how we will coordinate. Within the context of their sector, military guys are taught this stuff and the agile can carry it over to other sectors.

Between 2 and 3, a highly trained junior manager or supervisor, has to make another transition. They need to remember that they are talking to people who will go out to manage another team (as above). Again we see some ‘cuffing it’ but more often we see micro-management where they start quizzing the subordinate about what they did or did not do.

The psychologists want to see the task positioned “at the right level”. A clever trick, for anyone interested, is to delegate to the whole team of managers on one piece of paper. What is the situation, what is your goal, what is the goal for each subordinate manager (one line each only!), what resources and authority vary from normal, and how will the team coordinate. That keeps you focused on coordinating managers and and understanding the nature of the management task, how much it varies from day-to-day, etc.

Going back to the bifurcation of skills, a run-of-the-mill chef who joins McDonalds has to learn a new swathe of management skills, beginning but not ending with some “man management”. They cannot approach the day as if they are going to do the work themselves. Other people have to figure out what they are on about, deal with their own demons, adjust to small details, etc.

If the customers persist in talking to each other, and deciding what recipes should be used, running that restaurant takes on a massively new dimension. The manager cannot do everything. Customer Mary talks to Waiter Johnny who liaises with Chef Sam who might be buying in food from Farmer Lucy. To manage this business, even as a manager at the bottom of the pecking order, we need a a capacity to anticipate and conceptualize what needs to be done, what may need to be done, etc. This level of know-how used to be the province of people who gained experience in a leisurely fashion, often spending years in jobs such as Assistant GM of a hotel.

Conceptualizing the complicated decisions made by other people is our business now. Fantasizing here, the hotel business becomes the art of allowing an owner to manage the business. You won’t manage the business directly. And you will survive if they survive and continue to buy your services and pay your bill! Franchising takes us part of the way, but not all of the way because our clients own their own businesses.

Yes we can!

I am not catastrophizing here. This is not beyond our knowledge set. Everything we need to know about managing in these situations has already been written down - quite often 50 to 100 years ago. And while some education is certainly dumbed down, in my experience, Gen Y picks up information very very fast.

But we do need experience. We do need to practice doing things at speed in real-time. My question is this: where are the universities who are systematically championing the skills we need to run the transition of social media from service to platform? Where is the process where we pass on the skills to design massive role play games such as Jane McGonigal designs?

And as I always keep my eye on the business ball, which businesses are ripe for taking over by people who understand the way things are going and the skills that are needed to run them?

So my two questions are:

July 22, 2008 | Filed Under Jo Jordan, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment 

Think that SM Marketing is electronic? Use the post!

Ta da!  Look at this marketing campaign by Unilever in Thailand.

Want to convince people that your washing powder works?  Wrap a sample in a white t-shirt and post it to a carefully selected “alpha” woman in each village.

Being a sensible woman, she’ll wash the now-dirty shirt in your washing powder, and tell everyone about it.

Because she is an influential person, her friends will copy her.

Five rules apply for this to work, of course:

We often present marketing as cute or cunning or even underhand.  This is solid and elegant.

July 6, 2008 | Filed Under Jo Jordan | Leave a Comment 

Ideological amplification or why you should not shout to hard

Thought this was my day off, but let’s respond to Chris’ doc on Ideological Amplification.

Chris’ concern

As I understand it, Chris’ concern is that the internet will lead to a world of divisions. Instead of living in a physical place where we know everyone within 50 miles and no one else, we will live in a world that is just as small and defined by our views and taste. Not only will it be dull. We also are more likely to clash violently with other groups when we compete for something we want.

Chris’ premise

The foundation of Chris’ argument is a paper showing the long term effect of small changes. If we chose, for example to live a little closer to people “like us”, and we all do that just slightly, in almost no time at all we have sorted ourselves into like-minded packs.

More stuff that might show alternatives to Chris’ projections

Networking theory (and empirical research) shows that we are affected not just by our friends but by our friends’ friends. So you are more likely to be obese if quite a few of the friends of your friends are obese! It is weird. Your friend maybe skinny and you may not know the fatter friends, but their presence in your friends’ lives increase your chances of adopting similar lifestyle habits! And it works for smoking and everything else too! We are very sensitive to our surroundings and we tend to “fall in” with what is going on around us.

But, networks require maintenance, lots of maintenance

Networking theory also shows that networks fall apart easily. Links have to be recreated to keep them fresh. Otherwise they fade away.

Networks require replenishment

People also leave networks. And they have to be replaced. So we have to have ways of recruiting new people and assimilating them. If we aren’t good at finding new people and bringing them into the group successfully, then the network just fades away.

People leave networks that don’t deliver

What is more, if we don’t keep the network fresh and exciting, and if we don’t involve new people successfully, the network is not as valuable to its members, and people will leave at quicker rate. The end is near!

Networks need to trade with the outside world

What is more, if we live in a closed, stagnant community, we don’t keep up with the world changing around us. If we haven’t changed with the world, then we can’t get the resources from the external world that we need. And again the network becomes less valuable to its members, and they leave.

Closed networks don’t last.

Where does this take us?

I know Chris would agree that

I agree that there are groups that talk themselves into oblivion. Seen enough of those in my time on this planet.

Will the whole world break into pockets that will each talk itself into oblivion? It is a possibility but not a probability.

Active, energetic people in active, exciting networks will simply engage with other active, energetic people and rewrite the network map. It is happening all the time.

At a personal level, two things might happen, though, that are not so comfortable:

To sum up the phenomena Chris is talking about in words we have been using around, MediaCamp, I would say this. Social Media amplifies. It also amplifies the ability of the unreasoned and unreasonable to talk themselves into irrelevance!

If you are working in a network that is getting stuffy, then my advice would be to get more external influences. Send people on overseas holidays. Vary the daily routines. Get some fresh air into the system.

If the obvious doesn’t work, and you need to look at a deeper renewal, you will be pleased to know that this is increasingly the focus of ‘positive organizational scholarship’, the contemporary positive version of management theory. If you want to dig deeper, here is a link to a techy/academic slide show I put on my own blog a few days ago. It will give you an outline of how top organizational scholars are thinking, or just confirm for you that they are thinking!

July 6, 2008 | Filed Under Jo Jordan | 1 Comment 

3 steps to choosing your social media metric vendor

I found a really good blog about measuring the value or ROI of public relations and a post on selecting your metric vendor. I think it will answer many of the questions people have about metrics.

I have turned the blog around into 3 steps with some sub-steps to condense the issues.

1 How much do you want to pay?

Crass question, I know, but you can think in terms of three price points: 0, 500-1000 pounds a month, or 5000-10000 pounds a month. That’s pretty clear, isn’t it? Where do you fall?

Cost is determined by three things:

a) The span of your metrics - how many products, services, issues, communities are you watching?

If you are a giant firm like Coca-Cola, you may need to research several languages and several markets because you implicitly compete with coffee, fruit juice and water, too. Most firms have a much narrower field of interest and will be tracking fewer issues.

b) What needs to be done?

Sometimes it is enough to get some machine-counted numbers and a standardized report. You may need to spend more if you need

c) Who will do the work?

The fee for work is calculated using the following factors:

If you are a very large company, you may need to pay for all this to coordinate the work, but you may be buying what consultants call a “transactional” service - the same service that everyone is getting.

The difficulty with hiring independent consultants is that you feel unclear about how good they are. Perhaps you should put that question to them squarely. I want to see if I can hire you, but I don’t know this business well. Can you walk me through the issues? What will you do? What should I be looking for? Where must I speak up and give you information? Where do you have difficulties with clients and what can I do to make the relationship work?

So that is cost:

2 What’s the business that we are we talking about?

People who deliver social media metrics are typically trawling the web in one way or another. Some claim to cover 30 million sites; some 10 million. The real question is: do they cover sites of interest to you?

And that begs the million-dollar question, which sites interest you.

This lovely blog I found suggests you should list the top 100 sites that concern your customers, and make sure your vendor already has them in their list! You also need to check you have covered all the relevant categories: sites, blogs, newspapers, platforms, microblogs, etc.

If you cannot list the top 100 sites that interest you, then that is where you need to begin.

3 What does you vendor do?

Most vendors of social media metrics are marketers. I don’t know these firms at all because I am on the supply side - HR and people particularly. It’s useful though to scan the list and think of how vendors differ from each other.

So those are the three questions:

People who are really expert at this, I am counting on you to question, correct, clarify and elaborate. For my part, I am interested in the supply side.

Does anyone out there work on the metrics of people offering companies goods and services?

July 3, 2008 | Filed Under Jo Jordan, Uncategorized | 2 Comments 

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