Do you whip out your smartphone in the middle of a conversation without even thinking about it? It would seem to send the message:

You’re really not worth my attention, so instead I’ll focus on someone/something that is.

Are we sending the wrong message to our kids?

We seem to prefer our connections over our relationships.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my smartphone, but I have to wonder what it’s doing to me as well.

Is this just normal evolution, or are we choosing a path that will have longer term impacts on our future?

In traditional enterprise change initiatives, you tend to start with a defined set business requirements to address a given problem or opportunity. Socially-driven enterprise change, however, is different because parts of the organization are already changing prior to full articulation of a problem or solution. Companies find their employees using social technologies without any formal support within the organization. People are finding value, but may not be focused on quantifying that value into a business case that can be used to support the effort.

Once a company finds itself in the midst of groundswell of social adoption, it needs to determine how to effectively integrate it into its culture and operations.  And a key consideration is; “How pervasive must adoption be?”  To determine the answer, the organization must understand the scope of the solution:  is it a global one or targeted to a specific department?  We can then start to map the population to the Adoption Curve to best predict when users will start using the solution.

Effort/Cost of Adoption

If we look at the effort it takes to achieve widespread adoption in a large enterprise, the further you get along the curve, the more effort (and cost) is needed to get people on board. This typically means engaging smaller groups that may have very specific individual reasons for not adopting social, and may require things such as small team meetings, printed collateral, travel and other off-line channels. At the extreme, this may include classes and/or mentoring programs to help people get up to speed.

The ROI of Adoption

As we start to examine the ROI of social inside an organization, we must start with the value and then subtract out any cost to achieve this value. The further along in the adoption curve the higher the cost of getting people on board. This increased effort has an impact on your ROI and can significantly decrease the ROI without significant gain in adoption.   (Note: This assumes that each individual contributor provides potentially equal value). The actual value to the organization can only be answered if you determine where your stakeholders and use cases fall on the adoption curve. This can be achieved by performing a Stakeholder Analysis to determine where the various stakeholders fit along the adoption curve and the potential value each represents. For example, Sales may be late adopters because they are too busy focusing on customers to experiment with new tools and processes but may offer great value by shortening the sales cycle.

When to stop?

Knowing when to stop focusing on adoption is difficult, but I would offer that once you reach the point where the costs are starting to impact the ROI in a negative way, that you should give up on adoption and focus your efforts elsewhere. In an average large organization getting 100% adoption is very unrealistic. Usually complete adoption falls in the 60-70% range due to many factors.  This doesn’t necessarily mean that you are reducing the value that your solution provides, but instead that you are reducing the cost component of the ROI equation, leading to higher efficiency. This is something IT has been doing for years.

What about the rest?

Focusing on getting the Late Majority and Laggards to adopt social technologies may not be your best use of effort initially, but eventually they may become participating members of your network. Keep focusing on the people who drive value out of the solution and the others will eventually catch on (or not). It is through recognizing the success that the solution creates, that the others will participate. Even with that being said, there is a small fraction of your employee base that will never use a solution. Their reasons in many cases are valid. I would encourage you to try to understand why people don’t want to use the solution, but not put a lot of effort into trying to change their minds.

Where to focus?

Knowing where you effort can be best realized is a challenge as it may be different for every company, but in general, you should look to areas where you can increase the value with the least amount of effort.

One area would be to help to ensure the people who are using the solution are leveraging it to the maximum. I cannot begin to tell you how often I see solutions (both social and non-social) implemented where people are only using 10-15% of the capability. When I asked to better understand their jobs, I often come across many more ways they could realize value, but they seemed to lack the understanding of how they could do this. A good way to do this may be through a capability blog, where you take one capability and demonstrate how it works and how people are using it to make their jobs easier.

Another area of focus could be around bringing new employees on board. Since these individuals are new, they are much more likely to adopt something new and can be brought up to speed using these new methods of getting their jobs done faster and better. One thing to keep in mind is that as a community matures, the rules of engagement for new users will also change; you should be periodically checking to ensure that the new user experience remains easy.

Conclusion

While there are no hard and fast rules for determining when to shift your focus, by understanding where your key stakeholders fall on the adoption curve, you can better understand the timing. The cost of adoption will eventually cut into your ROI — this realization should drive your actions. By continuing to share the success that your adopters are realizing inside the organization, you will eventually draw the others in. Behavior change always takes a long time; it is always best to be patient and focus on activities where you can have greater impact.

1. We still won’t agree what to call it

This debate really started in 2010, but has continued to a point where people have stopped debating it and just call it different things. Enterprise 2.0, Social Business, Enterprise Social, Social Media for Business just to name a few. There are so many marketing stakes in the ground that we will probably never agree what it’s called. The interesting  part is that most business folks don’t even care, what they want is a clear concise message on how social makes their jobs easier and their companies better. In today’s economy, people are more worried about staying employed.

2. We’ll finally figure out that social’s value is measured by existing process metrics

Since I started in enterprise social back in 2008, there has been a consistent question around the ROI of social technologies. The industry and practitioners have been trying to provide metrics from the tools that indicate that social does indeed have a positive impact on business, with limited success. This past year, I saw quantitative ROI being tied to existing metrics. For example, social has reduced employee turnover by x% or by leveraging social our sales cycle has decreased by y weeks. In 2012, these existing metrics will be how social gets measured, across the board.

3. We’ll stop focusing so much on adoption and instead focus on solutions

“Adoption” and “Engagement” are the social buzzwords. While some see this as revolutionary, others just see this as simply picking up the ball that gets dropped in many organizations. I strongly believe that every technology deployment going forward should have an adoption component, but it’s a phase of a cycle (right after deployment), not a method. Now that Gartner & Forrester are talking more about social to mainstream audiences, it will be more about “Here’s what you can do with social” as opposed to “Here’s how you adopt social.”

4. The average large company will have no less than 4 social networks…unintentionally

Social by far has been one of the biggest surprises to large software vendors such as Oracle, SAP and Microsoft. The trend that Salesfoce.com has started will be copied by every large legacy system in the enterprise from ERP to HR to Finance. Each vertical solution will try to implement its own social layer (turned on by default) in hopes to sell more licenses for their core offering and spread to other organizations besides it’s specialty. This will lead to user fatigue inside the enterprise, as people will be either forced to choose or have to try to keep up with many. Integration will help, but it will still be difficult for most users to manage.

We are already starting to see stories of how people are leaving Facebook and feeling better about it. As the battle for the social layer heats up inside of companies, people will begin to get overwhelmed at the amount of information that is available to them inside their organization. We see that people are great at following people and things, but there are many stigmatisms around un-following people (many caused by Facebook and public social networks) which will lead to what many believe is “Information Overload”.

5. Big Data struggles with unstructured information

There will be a lot of noise about Big Data being used to replace the “Follow” model employed by many social solutions, but we are still a ways away from Big Data being able to effectively filter and correlate unstructured data. In these early stages, users will get mad at the immaturity of the algorithms and may even cause implementation failures.

While these predictions are hardly prophetic, I think that 2012 is the year where whatever we call it grows up and finds its proper place inside the enterprise. What predictions do you think will happen in 2012?

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 7,000 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 6 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

My previous post about Why Google+ is a -1 for me covers part of my reasoning. It seems that in order to have any enterprise penetration that Identity and Access Management is a key component that is missing today. You have to assume at some point Google will figure out how to integrate Google+ into it’s Google Apps suite. This will no doubt make Google+ available to many small companies who figure it’s “good enough”. But, there’s a more fundamental issue that really makes Google+ a bad fit for companies.

As many have argued, Google+ seems to have its sights on Facebook. We are already seeing the battle of the titans in feature 1-upsmanship. In a consumer social network this is all good, as it really forces each company to bring it’s “A” game. But, now let’s look at how Enterprise Social Networks are different than consumer social networks.

One of the biggest values in Enterprise Social Networking is opening up conversations through transparency and the serendipity that is discovered by being aware of these conversations even if they are not a core focus. Let’s start at the core of Google+; the circle.

Think of circles as bi-directional distribution lists. They allow a user to consume content from people who they have classified in a specific circle. On the other hand, you have the ability to target information you share to only users in a given circle. This is where the issue lies. It’s just like sending an e-mail. One of the biggest problems with e-mail is that you may not have insight into who needs to know the information you are sharing. In e-mail, this leads to forwards and introduces the chance of information gaps in the conversation. Google+ does eliminate that by having 1 copy that is shared and comments are added to the main feed, but does not eliminate the chance of people who need to know the content not being aware of it. One way around this limitation is to share everything as “Public”, but this can lead to a low signal to noise ratio resulting in frustration and loss of productivity.

How about the scenario where someone shares something with you that is not in your circle? In that case, the content goes into a feed called “incoming”. While in a public network, this may seem manageable (or not), in an enterprise, this is clearly not manageable. For example, if you are a VP or CxO, it’s a challenge to manage circles for everyone in your company if you company is as small as a few hundred people. In large enterprises where the numbers can be in the tens of thousands, it’s impossible.

Now let’s look at true Enterprise Social Networks. In most of these solutions, you have groups and perhaps a main feed for general updates. Each group has the capability of being “public” or “private”. If you share to a group, it’s now there for anyone who is a member of that group to see. If it’s a public group, you are relying that the people who are interested in the group is a member. In a private group, you know the audience that you are sharing with. Even after the fact, you can join a group and see all the content that’s been shared there.

If you share in the main feed via a status update, by adding appropriate tags to your content there is a high probability that your content will be discovered by people that are interested in it. Either by following you, or the hashtag. This makes it much easier to discover content that is relevant to you since you are better positioned to make that determination than the person who produced it.

While Google+ is definitely a step in the right direction over Wave and Buzz, it’s far from being a solution that will work inside the company.

Google Apps

One of the big draws to Google for me initially was being able to host my domain and use Google Apps for my family. Yes, I am sort of a geek, but it was so easy, and enabled my family to have whatever e-mail addresses they wanted, share calendars and documents. I used the standard edition, so was able to fit my family use case very well. As Google started rolling out more services, I felt like a second class citizen, I still had to keep a separate Google account to access services like, Google Reader, Picasa, Google Voice, etc.

New Job, New Google Apps account

In February this year, I joined Yammer. Yammer uses Google Apps for its employees. This made a ton of sense, but now I have yet another Google account. This was a business account and was also tied to a single sign-on solution further complicating things.

Summer of 2011

In June 2011, I received an e-mail from Google saying they were migrating my domain to a new infrastructure that would allow me to access many of the Google Services with a single account. I was told if I do nothing, my domain would be automatically migrated on July 11, 2011. This date seemed to be cast in stone and my only course was to do the migration manually before the date. Despite the very painful migration process for my family, I saw a benefit to the process. I would finally be able to have a single personal account to access all the Google services.

Bad timing/bad planning

At almost exactly the same time, Google released Google+ and I was fortunate to get an early invite, only issue was my newly consolidated Google Apps was not compatible with Google+, so I had to re-enable my regular Google account.

On the surface, this didn’t seem too bad until I realized the complexity of it all. In order to access all of my services, I had to go into each account and configure the setting to allow multiple logins and then login to my accounts in a specific order:

1. regular Google Account
2. Personal Google Apps
3. Business Google Apps

This also created many problems for me with existing services I’ve come to rely on.

Google Reader – Subscribe button sent feeds to the wrong account. If I logged in in the wrong order, I would get the wrong Reader account and was unable to switch

Picasa - Unable to switch accounts to access pictures associated with my Google Apps account (All of them)

Even the +1 button became a challenge.

With all things considered, I decided to abandon my Google+ account until this authentication issue is resolved in a way that makes for a good user experience. I need things that make my life simpler, not more complex.  Until that time, continue to catch me on Twitter.

There has been some great blogging over the last week, mostly spurred by Laurie Buczek’s wonderful post, The Big Failure of Enterprise 2.0 Social Business. This has inspired many reactions, from the likes of Denis Howlett, Dion Hinchcliffe and even Andrew McAfee re-tweeted the piece. But, I think people are missing the point, we are very early in the game. It’s roughly equivalent to having a baby and knowing they’re going to be a doctor at age 3.

Reflection of History

As we look back historically to the evolution of communications, the inventions that are truly revolutionary were not overnight successes. Why? People do not accept change very well overall. They would ask questions like, “Why would I ever want to do that?” Instead of going back through every discovery, such as the printing press, the telegraph, telephone, etc., let’s focus in on the one some of us may even have been a part of: e-mail.

The Early Days

The first e-mail system to be known was MIT’s CTSS mail which was created back in 1965, although Unix mail was unveiled in 1972 which was generally more available. These text-based systems meant you could send electronic mail to anyone on the system with an account. It was not until 1978 that Unix mail was network-enabled so you could send messages to people on other Unix systems.

Even after people started to be able to communicate across the network, they were mainly limited to people on the same server infrastructure because it wasn’t until the mid-90′s that the SMTP protocol was ratified as the standard for systems to interact.

Taking it on the road

Research in Motion is largely responsible for the next large innovation in e-mail when they introduced the BlackBerry in 1999, enabling you to take your e-mail on the road wherever/whenever you wanted. This was followed up by Apple releasing the first iPhone in 2007 which basically enabled mobile e-mail to the masses.

Not without its cost

Let’s not overlook some of the inherent problems with e-mail that have sprung up along the way. Viruses, Spam, Spyware, Scams and the like. Not to mention this information travels across the internet in clear text form making it easy for people to intercept e-mails intended for other people.

During this time, it was in 2007, where people were starting to blame e-mail for Information Overload. The New York Times, wrote, Is Information Overload a $650 Billion Drag on the Economy? This was focused on all of the invasive communications that we are forced to deal with in our daily jobs, but focused a lot on e-mail.

A lifetime

E-mail, which we all take for granted, took over 20yrs to gain mainstream adoption and interoperability, yet I can’t imagine a business today that doesn’t rely on it as a business critical function. In hindsight, we can look back at e-mail and finally answer the value question, although this won’t be without pauses, guffaws, etc. E-mail has improved the way we communicate and helped us communicate faster.

Enter Enterprise 2.0

Andrew McAfee is credited with Enterprise 2.0 in 2006, although many credit Web 2.0 with the capabilities that are being used behind the firewall. Andrew talked about using Web 2.0 technologies to streamline business processes. What’s different, is we are changing the way we consume information from that of what others think you need to know, to what you feel you want to know. We go from “push” technology, to “pull” technology.

Early successes

Even back at my first Enterprise 2.0 conference in 2008 (the 2nd year under that name), the focus was on success and use cases. In those days, it was around the CIA and it’s Intellipedia (a wiki). The message was clear, if an intelligence organization was able to improve results via sharing, then anyone can. In subsequent years, there were more and more case studies which could be cited from companies such as Booz Allen Hamilton, CSC, even Alcatel-Lucent where I worked. But, these are indeed companies that are visionary, the “early adopters”.

Here come the settlers

In early 2011, Jeffrey Mann and Carol Roswell from Gartner declared we are on the brink of mainstream adoption. I must admit, it was through my attending the Gartner Portal, Content & Collaboration conference back in March, that reminded me of the fact that not everyone understands the possibilities of social computing. What I love about the mainstream audience, is they are pushing for the things early adopters kind of glossed over: analytics, integration & standards. Today, there are emerging standards that will lead to tighter integration between platforms. Both Open Graph Protocol and activitystrea.ms promise to make it easier to develop systems that can talk to each other.

We’re getting better

What took e-mail almost 20yrs to accomplish is being done in 5yrs. Many vendors have mobile solutions out of the gate and have learned these are table stakes. We have learned much from e-mail’s success and its shortcomings. We are avoiding some of the mistakes, but are still repeating some just because many involved with e-mail in the early days have retired and taken their experience with them.

The timeline is shortening, but our lack of patience (or demand for instant gratification) seems to expect this to be instantaneous. Is this view overly simplistic? Perhaps, but the point remains, communications revolutions rarely happen overnight. What is clear is the Internet has created an environment where we have an unlimited number of announcers all trying to out analyze each other.We are still in the earliest innings. There will be hits, strike-outs and home runs and of course errors, but it is way too early to declare whether this a winner or a loser.

When all is said and done, I believe we will say that Social Computing has improved the way we communicate and helped us communicate faster.

Yesterday was one of those days. I had the pleasure to meet Steve Wylie for coffee and to catch up. We somehow got on the topic of the debate between Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business. Steve made one statement, “the debate hurts everyone.” What I walked away made me think. It was powerful.

Background

Andrew McAfee defined the term Enterprise 2.0 back in 2006 as “the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers” (source: Wikipedia). As with any forward looking statement, it seemed more a postulate then a proof.

I personally hate anything 2.0, because it perhaps sends the message that this is a new version. It seems to be so overused, it’s almost a joke. I knew it had gone too far when I heard Al qaeda 2.0 a few weeks ago. As a matter of fact, greg2dot0  was born perhaps a little sarcastically to exemplify that point. I’m the same guy just learning, growing and evolving.

Last year at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara, a new term started to emerge; Social Business. The implication was enterprises really are getting business done using social technologies. It started a debate about what to call this phase of evolution in the way companies achieve real business outcomes.

My way of rationalizing what to call it was based on the understanding that Enterprise 2.0 was really focused around technology and Social Business was a combination of tools and behaviors. I no longer believe this.

The Debate

Andy argued social business is “past retirement age“. The unfortunate thing is that he possibly was the one individual which has the most to lose if Enterprise 2.0 lost its shine in favor of Social Business. I believed, this actually hurt his case more than helped.

On the other side of the debate was primarily driven by Jive. Tony Zingale told attendees of the Enterprise 2.0 Santa Clara Conference about Jive’s “18 Social Business Imperatives“. In hindsight, it was good marketing, but possibly did more to hurt the industry than help Jive.

Many others have weighed in on the topic and each reached various conclusions (source: Google), but what’s clear is there is still no consensus.

Conclusion

We all are looking to help business leaders, management and users understand this new way of working, yet our inability to agree on what to call it confuses people and make our challenge more daunting. The reality is people hate ambiguity. This impacts us whether a we are a vendor, an evangelist, a practitioner or as a user. As a skeptic, it’s easy to hide behind statements like “Why should I use or buy this stuff, they can’t even agree what the heck ‘it’ is.”

What I believe is no definition will ever be perfect since what we are doing is constantly changing.  Perhaps Andy needs to revise his definition, but I believe labeling what we do as Enterprise 2.0 will make it clear to people what it is and not suffer the ambiguity and nebulousness of what exactly Social Business is.

Full Disclosure: I was a Jive customer in 2010 and now work for Yammer as a strategist. This blog is not a criticism or endorsement of any particular tool or solution but instead aims to raise awareness of the impact of the misalignment as an industry.

Why heuristics?

Collaboration requires many decisions to be made. It is a high cost transaction (in terms of brain power). What do I want to collaborate about? Who do I want to collaborate with? What am I hoping to get out of a collaboration? How should we collaborate? Just to name a few. As we look a little more closely we can probably prioritize the list.

What?
Who?
Why?
How (When & Where)?

Our brains tend to want to process these questions as quickly as possible and look for shortcuts (heuristics) to help us do that. We generally get very focused on the What  and want spend much less time on the rest. Do you really think about the who when you tweet a question? In some cases, this gives us the answer we need quickly and enables us to move on. Other times, our question goes unanswered and we get discouraged.

If your collaboration requires you to know who you are collaborating with, the decisions we need to make get much more complicated. It would do us very little good to tweet our question if we know the person we want to collaborate with isn’t on twitter. As a result, our heuristic usually tends to lead us back to e-mail. Our brains do all this processing almost automatically out of habit. Because of this complexity, it perhaps gives insight into why people don’t necessarily want to collaborate.

When we talk about habits, and apply that to collaboration, one thing quickly becomes clear. My habits and your habits may not be the same, in fact, there’s a very good chance they’re not. I may prefer to use Twitter or Google+ to share, and you may prefer e-mail, IM or some other platform. To effectively collaborate we should have a common set of rules or preferences which allows us to make collaborating as simple as picking up the phone (which has even become more complicated in recent years).

What is clear is the collaboration space has gotten much more complicated with new ways being introduced almost every day. There are often times 150 or more right answers. Our brains on the other hand want one right answer.

How cool would it be if we simply identified the people we want to collaborate with and perhaps a couple of other pieces of data and as a result  the appropriate how was identified? Today we are not there. We will need to continue to think through collaboration and deal with the intricacies it presents. By taking a little time to focus on answering all the questions before you begin collaborating, you will achieve better results.

What do you think? Did I get it right, or am I totally off base? I’m interested in continuing this discussion. Your feedback and comments are a vital component to keep it going.

I started to fundamentally look at what marketing is and feel that the word alone usually makes the hair on the back of people’s neck stand up.

According to Wikipedia: Marketing is the process by which companies determine what products or services may be of interest to customers, and the strategy to use in sales, communications and business development.^[1] It generates the strategy that underlies sales techniques, business communication, and business developments.^[1] It is an integrated process through which companies build strong customer relationships and create value for their customers and for themselves

Many people feel that Marketing is more interested in talking to us instead of engaging in conversation with us.

After talking to a few people about this in Boston, there are some things that become clear. Our organizational stereotypes cause us to place our personal bias on an individual in a company often times before we even talk to the person. This is true whether in Marketing, Finance, HR or IT. These biases usually devalue the message. For example, when talking to a person from marketing, do you feel like their single purpose in life is to get their message out? Do you feel they talk a lot and listen very little? Remember, these are stereotypes and don’t necessarily represent reality, but biases are often very strong (and misguided). These biases often make us here what we think we are going to hear regardless of what’s being said.

Meet your new Engagement Department

In companies today, there’s a lot of confusion where social business belongs, some may see parts in Marketing, parts in Communications, and maybe still other parts in IT, but most companies are struggling to see where this fits in. Some even say that “social” will be absorbed into the business and not be a stand alone thing. Bottom line is the capability doesn’t seem to “belong” anywhere. Another common thought is that to really have a Social Media strategy, it must be holistic, not fragmented. How about if the new Engagement department existed? It is feasible to say this group is responsible both for customer engagement as well as employee engagement without much of the political infighting that tends to happen in today’s companies? While I agree this isn’t perfect, I do feel this better aligns with the needs of the business.

The one thing I’ve learned about marketing over the years is you can’t simply re-brand something by changing a name. You must have the real change in operation that will make it clear this isn’t just a name change. But with the way social is forcing companies to evaluate ways of work, perhaps now is the perfect time to align a re-purpose of mission with a name change.

I am not trying to over simplify this, but instead call attention to the fact our existing brands for corporate organizations may indeed have outlived their usefulness and be ready for a make-over. Should we re-brand Marketing as Engagement? What am I missing? What other organizations could stand to be re-branded? I’d love to hear.