Ross Mayfield's Weblog

The Need for FriendFeed

Many bloggers, and those who haven't staked a portion of their livelyhood on it, are currently asking questions about how to deal with how attention is fragmenting.  Everything splinters when splicing is so easy.  As attention shifts to Twitter and a thousand things this creates opportunities.

Like hosting the comments on microcontent elsewhere.  Tis' natural.  But it fragments conversation, which hosts want to own.

And then it creates a new opportunity of aggregating all these disparate conversations, and making them relevant for participants, which is hard when they are across so many modalities.  Jeff Nolan noted to me today that we need a standard, at least in practice, for making comment threads discoverable and manageable.  Oh, what a fractured web we weave without it.

The pattern is a creation of a modality, prompting more opportunity for conversation if not part of the modality, which can be anywhere, which prompts the need for aggregation in a way that makes sense to the originator of the message, at the least.  As we struggle to find solutions to all this experimentation, the inbox is again overloaded while we search for the right serendipity feed.

Such creates the need for FriendFeed, which people mention here for often reasons they don't understand.  Lifestreaming, like what we found in Dandelife and Jaiku, has already tested that what matters is what you do with it.  Most don't know what we do with it and pretend its a new thing they do.  But what does it do for attention, iterations from now, and memory, and sparking conversation?

Business Applications for Social Networking, Live and Streamed

Tomorrow I'm honored to keynote the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs & Executives' Business Applications for Social Networking half-day event at the Computer History Museum.

Social Networking can be a powerful ally to professionals and businesses. This conference will highlight the value of Social Networking in fostering meaningful business relationships that benefit individuals both personally and professionally. It will provide examples of specific applications where Social Networking can be used to communicate with personal networks AND to accelerate company visibility. After all, who isn’t interested in hearing about strategies that can maximize their growth and the growth of their business.

If you can't attend in person, it will be on Ustream beginning at 8:45am.

My presentation:

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Vacation Email Page

Luis Suarez is on week six of giving up on work email.  Not entirely, but constraining its use to the proper while moving other communications to social software.  This week he found the reliability of those other tools made people default back to email.  While he doesn't mention what services went down on him, its an obvious distinction between consumer and enterprise.  Jon Mell builds upon his experiment to explore ROI and I can add that its common for our customers to reduce email volume by 30%, eliminating occupational spam.

Ironically enough, I find myself using Twitter, Facebook, and wikis of course, to help close a couple of deals this quarter.  The modality choices perhaps say more about the customers, but its a way to cut past the noise of the inbox and stay within peripheral vision.

Late next week I'm heading to LA for spring break with the kids.  I'm going to set up an vacation autoresponder with this message:

I'm on vacation March 26th-31st and will scan email when I return.  If you need immediate Socialtext assistance, contact info@socialtext.com or 1-877-GET-WIKI.  If it really is an emergency and you have my mobile number, use it.

But if you really want to help me with email overload, edit my vacation page if you are a Socialtext employee or edit my public Vacation Message Page.  You may find its okay to communicate in public and the communication can be group and summarized with others.  Thanks in advance!

I have a feeling this is either a really great or really bad idea.

LinkedIn Company Profiles: Group Identity Gone Wild

LinkedIn launched Company Profiles today, something I've been looking forward to for some time.  This could not only be a great research tool for users, but I think is a sign of things to come. 

We haven't seen great expressions of group identities within social networking.  With this example you can see the potential of aggregating individual activity, profiles and external sources around a group identity.  Hack the URL's number to discover others until the full release.

Recall that Reed's Law of Group forming says that the value of the network is the number of groups (2 to the Nth), because of all the combinatorial connection potential between members of those groups.  Providing a group identity and exposing individuals for potential connection accelerates weak tie discovery and group forming.

We may get an new PR issue to explore with this.  The profiles are trademarked brands that have been created not by the company, but by individuals.  In part by employees, in part by past employees.  Brand Managers will have to get used to the role employees have in brand definition. 

Features like New Hires and Promotions and Changes bring new transparency to HR that may be as shocking to certain corporate mindsets as when Facebook introduced Mini Feeds.  I've always said that while social software may get you laid, enterprise social software helps you get promoted.  Now it tells the world if you or your colleague does.

Interview with CIO Magazine

Chris Lynch interviewed me this week for CIO Magazine.  The Q&A is here.

Social Software's Culture Clash

Baseline has an at-length article on Social Software's Culture Clash.  With some great input from Andrew McAfee, Tom Davenport, Euan Semple and Joe Scheuller from P&G -- it explores how deploying social software is challenging -- because its, uh, social.  Creating solutions that engage people and reflect if not transform corporate culture isn't the core competency of most IT departments.  Its a good read and chock full of anecdotes (“With these new tools,” Davenport explains, “unless the right culture, behaviors and organizational structures are in place, they’re not going to be successful.”).  Here's an excerpt with results from Socialtext customers:

The most successful social software implementations emerge when there is a clear demand, as was the case at MWW Group, a public relations agency based in East Rutherford, N.J. Client teams there were accustomed to collectively editing press releases and other collateral, but their primary mode of editing was in file attachments sent by e-mail, according to Tom Biro, vice president of digital media. Version control was problematic, as was size and number of e-mail attachments. In August 2006, MWW Group implemented wiki software from SocialText.

Currently, about half of MWW’s 250 employees use the browser-based tool to collaborate on client documents. Account managers notify team members via e-mail when a document is ready for review. The server-based application, which costs $11,000 per year for the lease and licenses, can also be configured to automatically alert team members when updates are posted. Coworkers can edit the text, and a history of all changes is readily available.

The wiki has reduced e-mail attachments by 25 percent and boosted productivity, although Biro can’t say by how much. It’s faster and easier to search than a server, he says, and when employees travel to any of the company’s 10 offices, they don’t have to start up a laptop, log into the network and open a software application to view a document. Instead, they can hop on a conference-room computer and log into the wiki.

But wikis aren’t just for internal collaboration. In late 2006, call-center software maker Angel.com created a wiki for customers and business partners to exchange information about products, including likes and dislikes. Angel.com also posted technical documentation, including troubleshooting tips to which customers contributed, according to Sam Aparicio, the firm’s chief technology officer.

The unanticipated result has been a reduction in formal technical support and a 10 percent jump in productivity for the McLean, Va., company. The boost, Aparicio estimates, is equivalent to an annual saving of $500,000, while the hosted wiki cost less than $10,000 during the same period.

These results stem from our model of being engaged with customer deployments and continually cultivating best practices and solution sets.  Our VP of Professional Services, Michael Idinopolus, leads this effort.  He recently launched his own blog, so I'll quote a post in full:

One of the most common, and thanks to Wikipedia most visible, uses of a wiki is creating a participatory knowledgebase--a shared knowledge resource that is created and maintained by a distributed community. I've built quite a few of these, first at McKinsey, and in my current role at Socialtext. Here are three top-of-mind high-level best practices based on pitfalls I've seen some companies start to fall into:

Structure by topic, not by organization. Every participatory knowledgebase I've ever worked on has started with participants assuming that the wiki's structure would mirror their own internal organizational structure. Bad idea. The whole point of the wiki is its ability to bring people together and connect dots across organizational silos. That won't happen if you structure the wiki around those very silos.

Lead with what you want, not what you have. Many groups, especially research groups, tend to use the wiki as a dumping ground for research they've already done. This research typically takes the form of reports which were written for a specific audience to answer a specific question at a specific moment in time. So the value of the reports themselves isn't so great. What is valuable, however, is the insights embedded in those reports. That's what contributors should be encouraged to post to the wiki. Put differently, a page called "Trends in Retail Channel Marketing" is a better wiki page than "2006 Analysis of our Company's Channel Marketing Spend". (Of course, the report might be useful as backup--so include it as a link from the main page on trends).

Link link link. New contributors don't cross-link. They're not usually averse to it; they just don't think to do it. Encourage them to "linkify" any term (yes, I mean any term) in their entries that is either proprietary vocabulary, potentially unclear to some readers, or describes a strategic concept where the company might have proprietary insights. These three criteria cover a pretty broad range of terms, and in even a short (e.g., 1-2 paragraph) entry, you can probably find at least a half-dozen terms that should be links...even if the underlying pages don't exist yet.

One of the most common, and thanks to Wikipedia most visible, uses of a wiki is creating a participatory knowledgebase--a shared knowledge resource that is created and maintained by a distributed community. I've built quite a few of these, first at McKinsey, and in my current role at Socialtext. Here are three top-of-mind high-level best practices based on pitfalls I've seen some companies start to fall into:

Structure by topic, not by organization. Every participatory knowledgebase I've ever worked on has started with participants assuming that the wiki's structure would mirror their own internal organizational structure. Bad idea. The whole point of the wiki is its ability to bring people together and connect dots across organizational silos. That won't happen if you structure the wiki around those very silos.

Lead with what you want, not what you have. Many groups, especially research groups, tend to use the wiki as a dumping ground for research they've already done. This research typically takes the form of reports which were written for a specific audience to answer a specific question at a specific moment in time. So the value of the reports themselves isn't so great. What is valuable, however, is the insights embedded in those reports. That's what contributors should be encouraged to post to the wiki. Put differently, a page called "Trends in Retail Channel Marketing" is a better wiki page than "2006 Analysis of our Company's Channel Marketing Spend". (Of course, the report might be useful as backup--so include it as a link from the main page on trends).

Link link link. New contributors don't cross-link. They're not usually averse to it; they just don't think to do it. Encourage them to "linkify" any term (yes, I mean any term) in their entries that is either proprietary vocabulary, potentially unclear to some readers, or describes a strategic concept where the company might have proprietary insights. These three criteria cover a pretty broad range of terms, and in even a short (e.g., 1-2 paragraph) entry, you can probably find at least a half-dozen terms that should be links...even if the underlying pages don't exist yet.

Advice is a Conversation

Information has no value unless it informs a decision.  And you don't know the value until there is an outcome to that decision.  Michael Schrage is exploring how information informs, in the form of advice, and how it relates to technology:

    "While technology's future may not be the future of advice," says Schrage, "the future of advice can no longer be meaningfully divorced from the media and mechanisms that carry it. There's never been a time in history when 'advice' and 'device' have been so intimate, interdependent, and intertwined. Executive advice in the global enterprise is overwhelmingly mediated, automated, or augmented by some sort of technology." From Blackberrys to iPhones, there's no shortage of devices to enable streams of advice.

    There's also no stopping the "networkification" of advice, which has prompted new genres of digital counsel. As the variety of blogs expands, so too the number of wikis, shared online spaces that can be either communally or individually edited and updated. Together, they move advice beyond its mere giving and taking-it becomes interactive.

    Interactive advice is especially useful to those who need efficient recommendations now. For instance, at several Bangalore call centers, customer-service reps often instant-message each other while chatting with their help-line callers. As more companies adopt such practices, Schrage offers his thoughts on firms that don't. He ponders: "Perhaps some firms simply aren't getting good advice about good advice."

He makes the important distinction between advice and expertise:

Advice, however, is not the same as expertise. Whereas the latter focuses on being right, advice revolves around issues of good judgment. When it comes to advice, "there is no inherently right answer, but there are almost always questions and approaches that might facilitate desirable outcomes," explains Schrage. "As a result, experts and advisers have different goals and different roles."

Unfortunately the Conference Board article isn't available, but there is more in the press release.  I'm not sure how we lost our way with BI and decision support tools and forgot that advice is a conversation.