10 Advantages you'll gain through Social Media

Even though Social Media sites have been around for a couple of years, they are now hitting the mainstream in a big way. Often, it takes time for people to understand a new phenomenon and those who are late to the game often miss out on the biggest gains. If you're on the fence on Social Media, there are a number of great reasons you and your organization should be using them.

According to Wikipedia, Social media describes the online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other.

Companies, organizations, corporations--even the military are starting to realize the benefits of Social Media. Below are the top 10 advantages you'll gain through Social Media:

1. Gain intimate information about your customers and competitors
Social Media has an unprecedented ability to connect you to your customers in a very intimate fashion. If your customers feel that respected by their Social Media experience, they will speak openly and helpfully about what works and doesn't work well. And, not only will they speak openly about you have to offer, but they'll also share what they like and dislike about your competition. Organizations pay a tremendous amount of money for focus groups, test marketing, pilot programs, etc., but Social Media can offer similar results if you listen carefully to what you're being told. Generally speaking, in my opinion, most people want to help--let them help you to improve your company and your products.

2. Share information with those who are REALLY interested
The Internet has offered unprecedented opportunity for people with highly-specialized interests to find a forum, share their thoughts, and interact with others who share interest. If your Social Media efforts are well-placed, you can get your message to the exact group(s) that will sign-up, purchase, donate, contribute, share, or work with you on whatever your goal. Tread gently--be humble--and genuine because chances are high that the people you're interacting with may have far more experience on the subject than you.

3. Raw communication from your customers and potential customers
There are few better, faster, or cheaper opportunities to gain raw insight than from Social Media. The anonymity of the Internet offers some the needed "boost" to speak candidly about what you have to offer. They may be more inclined to write a post about something good or bad if they don't have to be concerned with hurting the feelings of your customer service representative or salesperson. That being said, be sure to *read* customer posts "in the best light". That is, posts or blog entries lack the tone or body language that would accompany a phone call, focus group, or other human-to-human interaction so it's easy to misunderstand the intent, agitation, or enthusiasm of the writer. When in doubt, assume that the person meant the post to be helpful and constructive, and respond accordingly.

4. Customers feel connected to "insiders" in your company
We've all felt it... that connection felt when an employee reveals something about an upcoming product or change in the organization or company. That knowledge has a certain "value" to it. You might call your friend, your mom, sometimes--anyone that will listen--and share it with them. When employees understand what they can share, and use that information strategically, it can benefit the company and the customer. In some cases, customers will develop a heartfelt bond simply by learning a little detail about the company, your products, or anything that strikes an emotional interest in them. For example, learning a little-known story that Ben & Jerry's named its newest flavor after comedian Stephen Colbert might mean something to a serious Colbert fan. It's hard to anticipate those connections, but it's not impossible.

5. Blazing-fast information sharing
Many people start their day by checking their favorite Social Media sites. When they do, they can be the best purveyors of information throughout the Internet. What used to be shared by phone, is now shared by hotlinks to postings and articles of interest. If you want to share something new--Social Media can make it happen at lightning speed.

6. Inexpensive public relations, advertising, and marketing
Compared to the cost of traditional print--even websites--you can't beat Social Media for spreading your message. A website may have a certain following of people, but a true Social Media network, wherein people share information and interact, and feel part of an online community can spread the message much less expensively, more successfully, and to the desired group better than any other media.

7. Customers feel like they're being heard
When customers see that members of your organization are responding in forums, comments, and posts, they know that their message has been heard. People want to be heard and know that their opinion is respected. That's not to say that you have to react or agree with their thoughts--in many cases--you've probably already heard their idea somewhere else. However, a kind response of "That's similar to something that we've explored in the past that we might have to reconsider." will go a long way to cementing a helpful bond with your customer.

8. Employees and organization members love to use Social Media amongst themselves
Social Media is also helpful to learn insight about products, employees, and other members of organizations. When employees feel comfortable sharing personal information about their hobbies, pets, experiences, aspirations, and interests, with other members of the organization, a lot can be gained. When a CEO blogs about upcoming challenges facing the company, and employees share information, i.e. Delta Airlines, Johnson & Johnson, McDonald's, Whole Foods, or Starbucks, everyone benefits.

9. Support your other marketing/media efforts
Social Media can [and should be] be an integral part of your overall marketing efforts. Connect to your customers on a personal level while supporting that connection through traditional media. Integrating the two can be a powerful combination. Consider launching blogs with specific topics in mind and, if necessary, with a limited lifetime.

10. Social Media can radically change your organization
Adopting Social Media strategies and techniques can develop entirely new directions within your organization. Sharing and interacting with your customers and employees can enable you to move faster with less-expense, and react more quickly to changes. IBM launched a new exploration of Social Media called Beehive and, in just nine months, they've reached 30,000 users. If some of those 30,000 users become IBM customers as a result of their new direction, you can be sure that other companies will pick up on the trend.

Social Media can help you spread your message quickly, inexpensively, and surgically-right to the people you want to hear it.

Social Networked Municipal Wi-Fi

This is a totally different approach to Municipal Wi-Fi, it's all about communicty cooperation.

Meraki empowers individuals to build wireless Internet communities. Meraki provides a level of access that has never before been economically, geographically or technically possible. Instead of a traditional top-down wireless service approach (such as municipal wifi or carrier hot-spots), the company takes a progressive bottoms-up approach that allows everyday people to affordably and cooperatively build a wireless network. In addition, Meraki makes the Internet more universally accessible by providing access even in rural and urban situations where traditional broadband access has failed. Meraki offers accessible, easy, and affordable wireless connectivity for everyone.

How It Works

Meraki’s wireless networking products are based on revolutionary mesh technology. Individuals are able to easily and affordably build and operate cooperative wireless networks anywhere – whether in a home, apartment building, office complex, or across an entire city. With Meraki’s Mini routers and an online dashboard tool to monitor and manage networks, customers without technical expertise can quickly set up an entire wireless network. Plugging a Meraki Mini router into a DSL line instantly creates a gateway. As more Minis are added nearby, the signals stream back and forth to build a web of wireless connections. Known as a mesh, this fabric of signals makes it possible to use just one DSL line to create a cooperative wireless Internet network, bringing access to more people than ever before.

More info about Intellipedia and ASpace

Intellidpedia

• http://esenai.com/blog/intellipedia/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellipedia
• http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2006/11/72053

ASpace

• http://esenai.com/blog/intellipedia/2007/08/i_wonder_if_people_on_aspace_will_be_sending_blind_friend_requests_like_they_do_on_myspace_facebook_linkedin_or_name_your_favorite_social_network_or_move_over_intellipedia_here_comes_aspace.html
• http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6e2648ea-5014-11dc-a6b0-0000779fd2ac.html
• http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/aspace/aspace-myspace-for-feds-296943.php

Open-Source Spying

http://www.nytimes.com/
By CLIVE THOMPSON
Published: December 3, 2006

Excerpt from "Open-Source Spying"

. . . Intelligence heads wanted to try to find some new answers to this problem. So the C.I.A. set up a competition, later taken over by the D.N.I., called the Galileo Awards: any employee at any intelligence agency could submit an essay describing a new idea to improve information sharing, and the best ones would win a prize. The first essay selected was by Calvin Andrus, chief technology officer of the Center for Mission Innovation at the C.I.A. In his essay, “The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community,” Andrus posed a deceptively simple question: How did the Internet become so useful in helping people find information?

Andrus argued that the real power of the Internet comes from the boom in self-publishing: everyday people surging online to impart their thoughts and views. He was particularly intrigued by Wikipedia, the “reader-authored” encyclopedia, where anyone can edit an entry or create a new one without seeking permission from Wikipedia’s owners. This open-door policy, as Andrus noted, allows Wikipedia to cover new subjects quickly. The day of the London terrorist bombings, Andrus visited Wikipedia and noticed that barely minutes after the attacks, someone had posted a page describing them. Over the next hour, other contributors — some physically in London, with access to on-the-spot details — began adding more information and correcting inaccurate news reports. “You could just sit there and hit refresh, refresh, refresh, and get a sort of ticker-tape experience,” Andrus told me. What most impressed Andrus was Wikipedia’s self-governing nature. No central editor decreed what subjects would be covered. Individuals simply wrote pages on subjects that interested them — and then like-minded readers would add new facts or fix errors. Blogs, Andrus noted, had the same effect: they leveraged the wisdom of the crowd. When a blogger finds an interesting tidbit of news, he posts a link to it, along with a bit of commentary. Then other bloggers find that link and, if they agree it’s an interesting news item, post their own links pointing to it. This produces a cascade effect. Whatever the first blogger pointed toward can quickly amass so many links pointing in its direction that it rockets to worldwide notoriety in a matter of hours.

Spies, Andrus theorized, could take advantage of these rapid, self-organizing effects. If analysts and agents were encouraged to post personal blogs and wikis on Intelink — linking to their favorite analyst reports or the news bulletins they considered important — then mob intelligence would take over. In the traditional cold-war spy bureaucracy, an analyst’s report lived or died by the whims of the hierarchy. If he was in the right place on the totem pole, his report on Soviet missiles could be pushed up higher; if a supervisor chose to ignore it, the report essentially vanished. Blogs and wikis, in contrast, work democratically. Pieces of intel would receive attention merely because other analysts found them interesting. This grass-roots process, Andrus argued, suited the modern intelligence challenge of sifting through thousands of disparate clues: if a fact or observation struck a chord with enough analysts, it would snowball into popularity, no matter what their supervisors thought.

A profusion of spy blogs and wikis would have another, perhaps even more beneficial impact. It would drastically improve the search engines of Intelink. In a paper that won an honorable mention in the Galileo Awards, Matthew Burton — the young former D.I.A. analyst — made this case. He pointed out that the best Internet search engines, including Google, all use “link analysis” to measure the authority of documents. When you type the search “Afghanistan” into Google, it finds every page that includes that word. Then it ranks the pages in part by how many links point to the page — based on the idea that if many bloggers and sites have linked to a page, it must be more useful than others. To do its job well, Google relies on the links that millions of individuals post online every day.

This, Burton pointed out, is precisely the problem with Intelink. It has no links, no social information to help sort out which intel is significant and which isn’t. When an analyst’s report is posted online, it does not include links to other reports, even ones it cites. There’s no easy way for agents to link to a report or post a comment about it. Searching Intelink thus resembles searching the Internet before blogs and Google came along — a lot of disconnected information, hard to sort through. If spies were encouraged to blog on Intelink, Burton reasoned, their profuse linking could mend that situation. “

Imagine having tools that could spot emerging patterns for you and guide you to documents that might be the missing pieces of evidence you’re looking for,” Burton wrote in his Galileo paper. “Analytical puzzles, like terror plots, are often too piecemeal for individual brains to put together. Having our documents aware of each other would be like hooking several brains up in a line, so that each one knows what the others know, making the puzzle much easier to solve.”

With Andrus and Burton’s vision in mind, you can almost imagine how 9/11 might have played out differently. In Phoenix, the F.B.I. agent Kenneth Williams might have blogged his memo noting that Al Qaeda members were engaging in flight-training activity. The agents observing a Qaeda planning conference in Malaysia could have mentioned the attendance of a Saudi named Khalid al-Midhar; another agent might have added that he held a multi-entry American visa. The F.B.I. agents who snared Zacarias Moussaoui in Minnesota might have written about their arrest of a flight student with violent tendencies. Other agents and analysts who were regular readers of these blogs would have found the material interesting, linked to it, pointed out connections or perhaps entered snippets of it into a wiki page discussing this new trend of young men from the Middle East enrolling in pilot training.

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Logged In and Sharing Gossip, er, Intelligence

http://www.nytimes.com/

By SCOTT SHANE
Published: September 2, 2007

AMERICA’S spies, like America’s teenagers, are secretive, talk in code and get in trouble if they’re not watched closely.
It’s hard to imagine spies logging on and exchanging “whuddups” with strangers, though. They’re just not wired that way. If networking is lifeblood to the teenager, it’s viewed with deep suspicion by the spy.

The intelligence agencies have something like networking in mind, though, as they scramble to adopt Web technologies that young people have already mastered in the millions. The idea is to try to solve the information-sharing problems inherent in the spy world — and blamed, most spectacularly, for the failure to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks.

In December, officials say, the agencies will introduce A-Space, a top-secret variant of the social networking Web sites MySpace and Facebook. The “A” stands for “analyst,” and where Facebook users swap snapshots, homework tips and gossip, intelligence analysts will be able to compare notes on satellite photos of North Korean nuclear sites, Iraqi insurgents and Chinese missiles.

A-Space will join Intellipedia, the spooks’ Wikipedia, where intelligence officers from all 16 American spy agencies pool their knowledge. Sixteen months after its creation, officials say, the top-secret version of Intellipedia has 29,255 articles, with an average of 114 new articles and more than 4,800 edits to articles added each workday.

A separate online Library of National Intelligence is to include all official intelligence reports sent out by each agency, offering Amazon.com-style suggestions: if you liked that piece on Venezuela’s oil reserves, how about this one on Russia’s? And blogs, accessible only to other spies, are proliferating behind the security fences.

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Way Beyond Sneakers

Know your product Wade is an athlete, so the marketing he does off court has to be tied to his success on court. In his Lincoln auto ads, Wade helps kids who play ball, though he doesn’t play in the spot.

Convey core traits Wade’s managers aim to position him as a competitive, contemporary, humble winner. In an upcoming Gatorade ad, Will to Win, Wade mentally runs through the obstacles that face him on the court.

Identify the target market For Wade it’s young adults, age 16 to 24. That’s why he’s partnering with T-Mobile on a new mobile device popular with youth.

Align authentically A big brand is not always best. Wade’s team chose T-Mobile over AT&T and Converse over bigger shoe companies because they fit his persona and what he uses himself.

Integrate marketing programs T-Mobile is an ideal partner because it’s also an NBA sponsor, allowing its ads to feature him in trademarked NBA gear.

Leverage Digital Media Wade is engaging Web giant Google to help create an online community with exclusive content via blogs, Webisodes, and podcasts.

With IT budgets slack, delivering business value is paramount

Platt, who has been doing some stellar thinking recently about this new way of looking an software architecture, goes on to note that:
The interesting use of Web 2.0 in business is in CRM or more specifically Customer

Lifecycle Management. Typically CLM is too expensive and long drawn out to be
able to do effectively so organizations have tried to do a cheap version which
fails. With the use of Web 2.0 social and community techniques however now CLM
can be done effectively and efficiently. This is where Web 2.0 will impact
organizations the most.

And use of Web 2.0 techniques to service customers is part of where a lot of thinking is currently aligning, around business value across efficiency, revenue generation, deep automation, and execution. And in my opinion, this is subtantially the subtext of the Gartner discussion on initiatives for sustaining IT:

• Control is moving to the business. No longer content or able to wait for IT to solve problems, business units are increasingly comfortable in self-service IT techniques. This is particularly true given a new wave of younger workers who expect more personal control over their IT systems and have both connection to the business and are generally highly tech-savvy.
  
• Smaller investments allow new problems to be solved. An business problem that was solvable using older, heavyweight IT techniques for $1M could only solve problems where the return on investment would be greater than $1M. If that problem can solved for $10K today using Web 2.0-style architectures, it opens up a whole new wave of IT value. I sometimes refer to this The Long Tail of IT Value. The mass self-service of these often untapped micromarkets within a business are potentially large.
  
• Relentless Transactional Automation. Rote business processes should be and will be automated extensively over the next few years, freeing up employees to be inserted into the most high-value processes that require human intelligence.
  
• Increasing Dynamic Decentralization of Execution. The new social, collaborative tools allow ad-hoc and emergent teams to network, form, and execute business processes as needed. This leads to the increased invovlement of people at the key points in the process, something Gartner emphasizes as well.
  
• Tacit Customer Relationship Management. Automated customer self-service is as critical for transactional business processes as ever, but this has been done in a relatively tone deaf fashion up to this point and it’s been an all-or-nothing process for the most part up until now. Traditional CRM and CLM hasn’t been responsive or malleable enough and often prematurely optimizes the process, fixing automation or personal interaction at the wrong places. Tacit CRM means being able to provider personal, effective customer solutions in a cost-effective way using a combination of automation and systems. Getting it right means getting or keeping the customer. Getting it wrong means handing your customers to your competitor. I’ve written recently about transactional vs. tacit business processes, and it’s one of the most important parts of Web 2.0 in the Enterprise.

Long Tail PR: how to do publicity without a press release (or the press)

I've been following the debate started by Brian Solis about "social media press releases" and other forms of doing PR in a way that both works in a conversational medium and doesn't demean and insult the intelligence of everyone involved. As far as traditional media goes, I suspect none of this matters much--most journalists have long ago figured how to quickly decide if they have any interest in a press release and how best to extract whatever value is in it. The system is no more or less broken than it's always been.

But what about the Long Tail of media--all those new influentials, from the micromedia of Techcrunch and Gizmodo to individual bloggers? And the social news aggregators like Digg and our own Reddit? They're where the most powerful sort of marketing--word of mouth--starts, but most of them don't want to hear from a PR person at all. Blogging is all about authenticity and the individual voice, not paid spin. Many bloggers seem just impedance mismatched with the preternaturally positive PR professionals, and woe to the flack who's busted trying to game Digg without revealing that they're paid to do so.

So now imagine that you're one of those PR professionals. What do you do? Stick with the world you know, and continue calling and emailing releases to the traditional press (trying not to notice that their ranks are shrinking and influence waning)? Start spamming bloggers, too, and hope for the best? Or just treat alpha bloggers like traditional press and shower them with love, while ignoring the rest?

I've seen all three of those paths taken, some of them even with modest success. Despite the culture mismatch, there certainly are plenty of bloggers who actually don't mind hearing from a PR person, as long as it's in the form of a personal email or comment that reflects that the flack actually reads the blog and gets what it's about. And companies such as Microsoft and Sun are now shifting their PR strategy to give special attention to influential bloggers, inviting them to private briefings and giving them early looks at new products.

But fundamentally social media is a peer-to-peer medium; bloggers would rather hear from someone doing something cool than from the paid promotional representative for that person. The problem is that the people doing that cool stuff are busy, which is why they pay PR people to do the outreach for them in the first place.

I wonder whether the solution to this is to evolve the role of PR from external relations to internal relations, from communications to coaching employees on how to effectively do the outreach themselves. Take Microsoft's 3,000 bloggers who are, for many of us, a welcome substitute for Microsoft PR. Internal project managers like Major Nelson of the Xbox 360 team are a trusted and timely source of information, and have largely replaced the formal press release with blog posts. He and other Microsoft bloggers like him are part of a transparency movement that grew out of the company's developer relations team, but it could have just as easily been driven by an enlightened PR team.

Here's a start at a curriculum for such in-house social media coaching:

Who's influential in our space (and how we know)
What/who influences them
How to get Digged
Effective blogging
Using beta-test invite lists as marketing
The art of begging for links
Stunts, contests, gimmicks, memes and other link bait.
Sharing versus oversharing. How to know when what you're doing is ready to talk about.
(cliched image of perky PR chick emailing some hapless reporter taken from Brian Solis' original post; crude rejection sign added by me)

Hezbollah's Network Centric Warfare

A New Enemy Gains on the U.S.

By THOM SHANKER
Published: July 30, 2006

“We are now into the first great war between nations and networks,” said John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, and a leading analyst of net warfare. “This proves the growing strength of networks as a threat to American national security.”

In a talk that Mr. Arquilla calls Net Warfare 101, he describes how traditional militaries are organized in a strict hierarchy, from generals down to privates. In contrast, networks flatten the command structure. They are distributed, dispersed, agile, mobile, improvisational. This makes them effective, and hard to track and target.

A net war differs from all previous wars, which were about brute confrontation of forces, mass on mass — what Matthew Arnold called bloody contests of “ignorant armies” meeting on the “darkling plain.”

Net war is the battle of the many, organized in small units, against conventional militaries that organize their many into large units. These network forces are not ignorant. They are computer literate, propaganda and Internet savvy, and capable of firing complicated weapons to great effect.

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Will Social Networks Replace the Water Cooler?

Will the 'Tail' Kill the Water Cooler?
Increasingly, we're eschewing blockbuster trends to pursue our own quirky interests.
By Steven Levy
Newsweek

July 17, 2006 issue - It used to be that taking a break from work to fill up our Dixie Cups at the water cooler was a ritual accompanied by harmless conversation about a predictably limited number of pop-culture subjects. We had access to only a few television stations. We listened to the same songs on Top 40 radio. We all read the local newspaper. So there was always something obvious to talk about. Now some people are saying that water-cooler talk is impoverished—or even endangered. Because the digital age lets us indulge our individual passions, the argument goes, we're losing the shared experience that fuels workplace chatter.

The Internet in particular has transformed a world from one of bounded choices to one where we can get anything imaginable. Increasingly, we're eschewing the blockbusters to pursue our own quirky interests. A good percentage of the vast inventory on e-commerce sites like Amazon, iTunes and Netflix isn't popular enough to be offered in brick-and-mortar stores. But online costs are low. In the aggregate, selling one or two units of many obscure items can reap big bucks. Example: the music service Rhapsody offers subscribers more than 2 million songs; in any given month, users stream 90 percent of the tunes. And a third of Amazon's book sales consist of tomes that you won't find on the shelves of even the biggest real-world superstore.

Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine, has dubbed this phenomenon "The Long Tail," in honor of the shape given to the curve resulting from a graph plotted by sales on these sites. (There's a huge bulge at the "head," representing best-selling products, and an extended, tapering tail at the end, wherein lie many niche products that are suddenly easy to find via search engines, blogs and filters.) In his new book, "The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More," Anderson makes a cogent case for how this new model encourages diversity, expands choice and strikes a blow against the megahit mentality. "There will always be hits, but the hits will be smaller," he said to me when we spoke by phone recently. (Disclosure: I sometimes contribute to Wired.)

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Unconference

Shaking up the industry

Welcome to the weird world of unconferences, a trend that is shaking up the $122 billion conference industry. These inexpensive, informal gatherings - like BarCamp, BrainJams, and Foo Camp – are conceived as little as weeks in advance. All were started in the past few years by Valley types bored with the usual calendar of confabs.

"We figured there was much more expertise in the audience than there possibly could be onstage," says BarCamp co-founder Ryan King.

Unconferences break the barrier between the two. Attendees write topics they're interested in on boards, consolidate the topics, and then break into discussion groups.

At traditional conferences, the most productive moments often occur in the corridor between meetings; at unconferences, attendees like to say, it's all corridor.

The result attracts engineers and executives from Adobe, eBay (Research), Google (Research), Microsoft (Research), and Yahoo (Research). Some companies are even comfortable enough to show upcoming products. Redwood City-based Riya, whose photo-recognition software won best of show this year at the prestigious Demo conference, actually unveiled it four months earlier at an unconference, TechCrunch Party 4.


HOW TO HOST AN UNCONFERENCE:

1) Create a wiki - a Web-based tool for knowledge sharing - so attendees can sign up and discuss proposed topics. See BarCamp.org and BrainJams.org for help with wiki setup.

2) Find sponsors that are willing to assist without interfering. Unconference sponsors have donated everything from lunch to the venue itself.

3) Post author Harrison Owen's Law of Two Feet: Any person neither learning from nor contributing to a group discussion must walk to another one.

UPCOMING

TEAM-O-NOMICS

How the office really worksImagine for a moment that you're O'BRIEN. You're a vice president, running a division; life looks good from your lofty perch in the hierarchy. But then the company surveys everyone about communication, collaboration, and backup options, and plugs the data into a network mapping program.

The results are startling: The software spits out a diagram that exiles you, O'BRIEN, to the outer corner of a very tangled web. At the center, meanwhile, is an underling: COLE. A technical specialist with no management responsibilities, COLE is still one of only two people with direct access to the boss, JONES - and has links to seemingly everyone else.

Official job title be damned, the network analysis shows that COLE is an influential hub of information. Managers need to identify office COLEs to prevent networks from collapsing when that key person leaves. Companies facing looming boomer retirements, take note. --By Eugenia Levenson

Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration

There is a new wave of business communication tools including blogs, wikis and group messaging software — which the author has dubbed, collectively, Enterprise 2.0 — that allow for more spontaneous, knowledge-based collaboration. These new tools, the author contends, may well supplant other communication and knowledge management systems with their superior ability to capture tacit knowledge, best practices and relevant experiences from throughout a company and make them readily available to more users. This article offers a paradigm that highlights the salient characteristics of these new technologies, which the author refers to as SLATES (search, links, authoring, tags, extensions, signals). The resulting organizational communication patterns can lead to highly productive and highly collaborative environments by making both the practices of knowledge work and its outputs more visible. Drawing on case studies and survey data, the article offers managers a set of ground rules for implementing the new technologies. First, it is necessary to create a receptive culture in order to prepare the way for new practices. Second, a common platform must be created to allow for a collaboration infrastructure. Third, an informal rollout of the technologies may be preferred to a more formal procedural change. And fourth, managerial support and leadership is crucial. Even when implanted and implemented well, these new technologies will certainly bring with them new challenges. These tools may well reduce management’s ability to exert unilateral control and to express some level of negativity. Whether a company’s leaders really want this to happen and will be able to resist the temptation to silence dissent is an open question. Leaders will have to play a delicate role if they want Enterprise 2.0 technologies to succeed.

Andrew P. McAfee is an associate professor with the Technology and Operations Management Unit at Harvard Business School. Visit the author’s blog for more commentary about Enterprise 2.0 and related topics.

Tags: web2.0 network-centric

Navigating the Waters of "Social Computing"

It turns out that all that talk in the early days of the Internet about an electronically driven "free market of ideas" wasn't just a lot of bunk.

Nothing exemplifies the new idea marketplace better than two Web-based innovations that have gained headway in the last couple of years: blogs and wikis. Blogs are Web sites designed to let people post communication about events and other information, usually in chronological order. Wikis are sites that allow users to add and edit content on a given set of subjects.

Businesses shouldn't feel obligated to deploy blogs or wikis, but if they ignore them—and the trends they represent—they do so at their peril. And companies can, in fact, use blogs and wikis to their advantage. But not without risks.

As Forrester Research explained in a February paper on the blog and wiki phenomenon—which it calls "social computing"—individuals are increasingly taking their cues from one another online rather than from "institutional sources like corporations, media outlets, religions and political bodies." Inexpensive hardware, modular content and shared computing resources are making connections between people easier. The changes those connections bring are having an impact on both larger society and the business marketplace itself.

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Tags: blog wiki corporate blogging

Fans Fight for their Favorite Shows

Fans have always fought to save shows, but they used to be easier to ignore. Now, TV executives say text messaging, cellphones and the rise of fan Web sites have given rabid viewers an unprecedented ability to organize. There are at least 250 sites and Web logs devoted solely to saving the teen soap "Veronica Mars."

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Tags: network-centric self-organizing

Craigslist - The Power of Word of Mouth

Craigslist carries no corporate adverts on its site, there is no fee for registration, and most users would never know that it charges for anything. The company makes all its money by charging employers in three cities a fee for listing jobs: $75 in San Francisco, $25 in New York and Los Angeles. They even feel uncomfortable with this: Buckmaster is quick to justify the charge by saying it improves the level of jobs offered, and so improves the service Craigslist offers.

The company employs just 20 people, spends no money on ads, relying on word of mouth, and has been profitable since 1999. Craigslist doesn’t disclose how much money it makes, but industry estimates put 2005 revenues around $20m, and costs at no more than $5m. The site’s devoted users provide all the content for free.

It’s a business that has Silicon Valley venture capitalists and Wall Street bankers salivating. With its huge and loyal customer base expanding rapidly, so much more money could be made by adding adverts or by charging fees for other parts of the site. Every large media organisation has run the rule over Craigslist. Plenty have offered cash. They have all had the same reply: “No.”

(Craig) Newmark drives a Prius, a petrol-saving hybrid car. Buckmaster has never owned a car. They both take the bus to work in the morning. “I don’t really want a Rolls-Royce or a huge, fancy house,” says Buckmaster. “Money is important until you have enough of it to be comfortable with. Beyond that, I think it’s a very mixed bag.”

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Tags: word-of-mouth network-centric

Comments from Schoolcraft Community College Advisory Committee

“Preparing Employers and Workers for a 21st Century Economy”

What are the major trends will industry cluster/employer groupexperience over the next five to 10 years?

• Intranets – Instant message are common place
• Department communities on line as we well as physical
• Use of “BLOGS” in Business
• Mind Maps vs. Strategic Plans
• Network Centric Solutions™

What will your industry cluster/employer group (Advisory Group) need to do to respond?

• Train to use tools and apply in business environment
• Publish via internet
• More applied knowledge
• Find time to retrain and need to motivate learning

What kind of workforce will your industry cluster/employer group need to respond?

• Motivated to learn
• Applied experience
• Flexibility
• Problem Solver
• Passion / Commitment

How would you characterize the condition of the current labor pool?

• Short sighted
• Lack of creativity
• Lack survival skills
• Inflexible
• No “Specialization with passion”
• Someone else has answer
• Fear of change
• Fear of being wrong
• Value of being wrong

What can your industry cluster/employer do to help the college and faculty realign academic programs and services to appropriately prepare the workforce that will be needed by your industry cluster/employer group?

• Internships/Labs
• Program Level application
• Service Learning
• Fieldtrip/job shadow
• Mentor/Mentee
• “Just in time” learning

The New Wisdom of The Web

Interesting Experts from: The New Wisdom of The Web

The Live Web

What makes the Web alive is, quite simply, us. Our presence, most often conducted at the speed of broadband, is constant and mandatory. Thanks to our activity, the Web has replaced phone books, and is in the process of replacing phones. It's the place that answers our questions in four tenths of a second and ships us funny clips that mix the "Back to the Future" guys with the "Brokeback Mountain" soundtrack. It's the main news source for the non-arthritic population, and a megaphone for those who make their own media. As we keep offloading our activities to the Web and adding previously unmanageable or unthinkable new pursuits, it's fair to say that our everyday exist-ence is a network effect. That has made some splendid opportunities for smart, nimble new companies, and threatened the existence of old ones now afloat in the mainstream.

Enron - The Smartest Guys in the Room - Not Ken Lay or Jeffrey Skilling, but Collective Intelligence

The smartest guy in the room is everybody. Tim O'Reilly, an early promoter of the Web 2.0 idea, says, "The central idea is harnessing collective intelligence."

The Wisdom of Crowds

It's clear that the Web is structurally congenial to the wisdom of crowds," says James Surowiecki, author of a book ("The Wisdom of Crowds," naturally) that argues that your average bunch of people can guess the weight of a cow or predict an Oscar winner better than an expert can.

The Genius of the Living Web

Once users supply content, Living Web sites ask them to organize it.

Two years ago Joshua Schachter began del.icio.us, a way for people to store and share their favorite Web-browsing bookmarks online. Instead of organizing them himself, or even creating a standard taxonomy of categories, Schachter used something called user tagging—people simply labeled the bookmarks by any name they wanted, and eventually the group as a whole effectively voted on them by either adopting those tags themselves or rejecting them. And now del.icio.us has been gobbled up by Yahoo, which hopes to extend the tagging principle to all sorts of its services.

Mashup

The purest expression of this free-for-all attitude is the wonderful mash-ups, where clever hackers take live information streams from two or more sites and blend them together for illumination or sometimes just for a laugh. An example is the mash-up that displayed vacant apartments offered on Craigslist on a local Google map.

Webarazzi

Before the Living Web, celebrities trying to get access to media had to cope with editors, television bookers and program directors. Now musicians, celebrities and fame wanna-bes start their own MySpace pages to get close to audiences (in early: R.E.M., Tommy Lee, Nine Inch Nails).

The Genius of Flickr

"With less than 10 people on the payroll, they had millions of users generating content, millions of users organizing that content for them, tens of thousands of users distributing that across the Internet, and thousands of people not on the payroll actually building the thing," says Yahoo exec Bradley Horowitz. "That's a neat trick. If we could do that same thing with Yahoo, and take our half-billion user base and achieve the same kind of effect, we knew we were on to something."

The Power of Weak Links

Excerpt from: Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Theory of Networks

Paul Erdos, one of the greatest mathematicians of our era, discovered that no matter how many points there might be [in a network], a small percentage of randomly placed links [weak links] is always enough to tie the network together into a more or less completely connected whole. More suprisingly the percentage required dwindles as the network gets bigger.

For a network of 300 points, there are nearly 50,000 possible links that could run between them. But if no more than about 2 percent of these are in place, the network will be completely connected. For 1,000 points, the crucial fraction is less than 1 percent. For 10 million points, it is only 0.0000016.

Network Centric Advocacy

Network-centric advocacy is the adaptation of advocacy and traditional grass roots organizing to the age of connectivity.

Network Theory

Over the last several years theorists and practitioners have been cross-pollinating the lessons learned from network theory and technologydevelopment to other disciplines. They’ve updated social network theory,marketing techniques, infrastructure planning, business models, warfaremodels and group dynamic theory. The discoveries have lead to newapproaches, including revolutionary leaps in problem solving, softwaredevelopment, computing, law enforcement, communications, marketing andsupply chain logistics.

Network-Centric Engagement

An individual acts as part of a coordinated network.Encouraging success means supporting each model for engagement andfinding the most effective investments to empower the individual. Network-centric advocacy is the least understood and least supported model fororganizing the people and resources involved in the pursuit of progressivepolicy. Implementation and support of network-centric approach complementscurrent models of engagement. Planning network-centric campaigns requiresunderstanding both the processes of activism and the support elements thatenable a network to function efficiently.

Network-Centric Advocacy

Finally, network-centric advocacy is a hybrid of the individualdetermination and participation typical of direct and grassroots models withthe efficiencies and strengths of the organizational model. The hybrid is onlypossible because of the increased density of communications connectionsamong potential participants and the ability to scale those connections tomeet demand. The network-centric advocacy focuses on supportingindividual engagement by connected grid resources (that may reside withindividuals or organizations). The network-centric approach relies on densecommunication ties to provide the synchronizing effects, prioritization anddeployment roles of the organization.

The potential for network-centric advocacy increases with eachadvancement in connectivity technology (web meetings, phone wi-fi,teleconference, voice mail, cell phones, voice over IP, etc.) and drop intransportation cost (flights, low cost shipping, etc.)