Social Media at work

I work for a small but growing government information technology solutions company called Pragmatics. I’m the “Enterprise Collaboration Lead” there.  Like many companies we are dipping our toe in the Social Media waters. We are all about IT and not media so I am the reluctant guru in this space as we try to use Social Media as a communications tool. Like many other companies, we have familiar questions: How do we use these tools to communicate?  What will we say? How do we know if its working?

Since I’m sure we’re not the only ones struggling with these questions, I thought I’d post a summary of our discussions so far.

First, we started with our goal. Our goal is to get our name out there – we are smaller than many of our competitors in this space but we do great work, so this is a way to tell potential customers, potential partners, and potential employees who we are.  Second, because we are a growing company we are hiring and recruiting new people to join us, our other goal is to be more friendly online and put a human face (or a few faces) to our recruitment efforts. Its pretty much an accepted fact that when people interview the first thing they do is google you, we hope that by getting to know us on sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter people feel like they actually ask questions and talk to us too. We still don’t have all the answers on how to accomplish our goals, but we decided that we could take a page from The Cluetrain Manifesto – we’re just here to have a conversation.

Even though we’re all very friendly (really!), our biggest fear is that no one wants to talk to us! In fact, Pragmatics has been active on Facebook and LinkedIn for a while now, and it doesn’t yet feel like a conversation. Its kinda like the cocktail party effect – the hardest part is starting the conversation. So far we’ve been a little shy, our new strategy is to say hello a little more.

We also realized we had to be (pun intended)  pragmatic  about the effort required to maintain our presence. Rather than have one single “Social Media Representative”, we’ve spread out our accounts and effort across a team. Having just one person seemed too corporate spokesperson-like.  Yet, standard rules of business says that to ensure success someone has to own it. So we assigned one person per ’system’, so I will be the voice of Pragmatics on Twitter, Beth will connect on Facebook, and Shannon will manage our LinkedIn group. We plan to invite and encourage other employees to participate and have conversations on these tools (Trust me, none of us  want to be the “spokesperson”) but assigning someone makes sure we don’t neglect sites either.

We’re open to any employee talking and conecting on social media, but on the other hand we don’t plan to make people talk either. Our number one job is to deliver exceptional value to our customers, and we don’t want anyone to feel like they have another chore to do – especially if it takes away from job one.

The last challenge  is measurement. How do we know if its working? Pragmatics takes great pride in our processes and as a company we are all about measurement and process improvement to deliver better results. We don’t just want to just “check a box”, we want to measure our use of Social Media and use what we learn to improve. We’re not really sure how to measure social media, or something as subjective as conversation. We’ll start by countinging mentions and connections. How many people follow us? How many people talk to us? How many people mention us (in any media). We plan to track weekly (for now) and see how it goes. As we use the tools more, we will improve the measuring part.

Being honest, – we’re making up our process as we go. But that’s ok. Our guiding principal is to be friendly, share who we are, and to engage in conversation. We’ll just be ourselves.

Facebook, UC, and Identity

(I made it my goal this summer to blog more – so here are my thoughts of the week…)

Last week I attended the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, MA. I was at one panel about Unified Communications and federation on the last day where I asked the panel the following question:

Identity is very important for Unified Communications and Collaboration. What is the future of identity? Is it the Facebook model – a single identity with extensive customizable security rules? Or multiple identities consolidated in a single client?

I’ve been an advocate, manager, policy maker, and implementor of Unified Communication and also collaboration and other syncronous tools as Instant Messaging/Chat for customers so this question has been top of mind for me.  The chat world has historically seen users have multiple accounts – one for each circle of IM/Chat partners. Email is the same – most of us have both work and personal accounts at a minimum.

Our onlines selves mirror our offline selves when it comes to identity and image – we all have multiple personality disorder. Culturally, we present ourselves differently to different social circles. Close friends and family may know every up and down, but to that loose ring of acquaintances we project only the image we want them to see, to our co-workers we focus on a professional image, and perhaps to our weekend softball team a separate person as well. We can have as many images and online identities as we have social circles.

Facebook has introduced an interesting perspective into the future of our online identities. Zuckerberg has mentioned in multiple interviews that he sees Facebook not just as a competitor to MySpace, but as a new platform for all communications – to replace email, IM, SMS and more. (Facebook is already on your phone – its not hard to imagine actually making a phone call to a friend through Facebook sometime down the road)

Facebook announced new privacy rules this week designed to let users micromanage each status post, photo update, and more. Already Facebook had included powerful privacy settings that let users structure groups and otherwise customize who is able to see various pieces of content ranging from fully public to a small ad-hoc list of friends. The new rules most notably add the ability to be fully public with an update – the analogy being twitter.

By integrating these privacy features more clearly in the basic interface facebook is continuing on feature path and philosophy of single-identity, manged by security. The idea is you can be all of your multiple personality disorders, all in one tool. No need to have separate accounts – if the whole world joins Facebook, we can all manage our online identities in a single place (Facebook, of  course).

Identity management is an important concern with Unified Communications implementations . This is because you can’t have unified communications and collaboration unless you are the ’same person’ on your email, IM, phone, video conference system, and web conference system. The concept of single-sign on is not new to the business world – many IT shops have this infrastructure already. Adding additional systems (such as web-conferencing or phone) is a relatively minor issue.

But Unified Communication(UC) using the Facebook model presents not a technical issue but a cultural one. Many UC tools talk about extending unified messaging or other features to the mobile or even home phone. The Palm Pre is targeting their advertisement campaign to be the phone to manage both your work life and your personal life. Its clear that telework and mobile devices have blurred the boundaries of personal and work life. And UC presents the case to integrate all communications devices in employees lives into a seamless platform for communication – does that mean we will have a single identity for both work and personal?

Certainly gives a new meaning to the idea of Facebook in the enterprise…

Twitter killed the blogstar

I keep thinking that this year I am really, really committed to the blog and I will post weekly. But I haven’t. I blame Twitter. Writing a clever (or not-so-clever) 16o characters is easy. Writing a blog post though…

I confess, I hate writing. I fuss over every blog post.  Right now I have 8 draft blog posts pending, a full double the number of published posts. (sigh)Perhaps the problem is perfectionism, perhaps it is the effort of blogging. Blogs are commitment. Twitter is a fling.

New goal: Less perfection, more flings.

Chief of Ideas Bureaucrats Ignore

Andrew McAfee’s tweet this morning asked if the proposed Obama administration US Chief Technology Officer position is a dream job. It may be the cynicism of a veteran beltway bandit, but I say no.

The executive branch wields important power, but pales in comparison to the occupants of that all-mighty building on the hill – congress.

Obama’s administration will be appointing approximately 2500 people to the plum list, and the proposed US CTO will be but one of them. From the bully pulpit the administration can set clear priorities and change the culture (and the shift from republican to democrat certainly will). An eloquent CTO will have a public forum to shape minds in government. But influence in Washington is trickier than that.

Each federal agency has a CIO today – the result of a grand initiative set forth during the Clinton administration.  The reality is the average CIO occupies the position less than 23 months – compared to an average of 5 years to their industry peers. Long-term strategic initiatives are nearly impossible. The CIO and CTO title is granted little authority – the nature of bureaucracy is that the money is controlled by a different person, the staff by a different person still, and the initiatives by congress — with little funds left for CIO-directed goals. Try anything too disruptive, and you risk annoying lifetime bureaucrats who will wait you out. Quote: “He too shall pass.”

The only power comes from the ability to inspire, as the future US CTO must inspire an estimated 19 million federal employees (and contractors) to follow his or her lead. Bureaucracy was designed to prevent power being centralized in the hands of any one individual, and in that respect it is perhaps the oldest form of “crowdsourcing”.

Grand initiatives by this new CTO are still achievable, but the art of the possible will be heavily tied to the art of the political.

Purpose-Driven Web 2.0

A mistake made in implementing many technologies is the lack of a purpose.

I think this is true of Web 2.0 technologies too. Blogs work better when they have a theme. Wikis work well when they have a purpose (Create the worlds largest free encyclopedia). Even Twitter works better when instead of answering “what are you doing” you answer a different, more specific question like “What are you blogging about?”

I am currently in conversations at my company to help us do more of that “web 2.0 thing” and I am struggling most with purpose. Why are we doing this? What problems are Web2.0 technologies going to solve?

I’m pretty sure purpose isn’t the only thing we’ll have to tackle to get our very Web1.0 company to implement Web2.0 ideas. But I do think the quickest path to failure is to slap a little of that Web2.0 paint everywhere. Better I think to be focused, and have purpose.

The art of innovation

I’m currently reading a book about Col. John Boyd, innovator in air force tactics, the inventor of the Observer-Orient-Decide-Act (OODA) Loop, and a master tactician. Boyd was a fan of Sun Tzu and the Art of War. Boyd promoted the idea to fight the person – not the landscape, not the technology.

Business is not war but strategies for outmanuvering your enemiescompetitors should follow this sage advice. Businesses shouldn’t worry about “the landscape” – the market, wall street, or other big immovable objects. Nor should they worry too much about technologies and the shiny next big thing.

Real strategy is personal. You have to change the situation faster than the competition can comprehend. The market is the same for everyone – ignore it. The technology is useless if you use it wrong. You need to enable the people in your company to collectively think faster and make better decisions than your competitors people.

To Boyd and the military this was the implicit guidance – the commanders intent. A true leader imparts his vision to the many people below him – then allows them to react quickly adapt, and outmaneuver on their own.  The agility of this approach can be staggering. The successful art of war is power means empowering the individual.

I know I am not the first person to compare business strategy to military strategy - but I was recently reminded of the importance of a people-first approach.  

I’m currently helping one of my customers develop a Unified Communications and Collaboration strategy, and we are speaking to leading vendors in the UC&C space. What has become clear having asked all these vendors to present to us one after another is this epic difference of those who are fighting the landscape and the technology – versus those who are using their people to fight, react, win. Those who have really aligned their people well seem to have the advantage.

The art of innovation – commanders intent, but individual execution.

It’s like Twitter, but longer!

I have finally decided to blog again. Twitter won me over with micro-blogging. It was a great fling – short and sweet. It fit my business schedule.  I could guiltlessly publish without agonizing about wording. But sometimes I have more than 160 characters of thoughts, so we’re back to a real blog once again.

My company has a anti-blog policy (they-who-shall-not-be-named) but I have lots to say about my adventures in social software both as a grassroots promoter and now in my ‘official’ capacity as head of Enterprise Social Technologies (I just renamed us – we were the Knowledge Management group before).

I have at least 10 things to say about how NOT to do social media. I hope to soon have 10 things to say about how to do it right (working it!).

Stay tuned!