Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Expertise Location and Social Sofware

Today's Wall Street Journal has an article on How to Find In-house Experts in a Big Company by researchers Izak Benbasat, Dorit Nevo and Yair Wand. The traditional approach is the centralized credentialing of experts, which fails with dynamic organizations adapting to change. Expertise-location systems also fail to share less formal attributes of expertise such as trustworthiness, communication skills and propensity to help.

They believe the answer to this problem is, no surprise, enterprise social software:

Activities and interactions that occur in blogs, wikis and social networks naturally provide the cues that are missing from current expertise-search systems. A search engine that mines internal blogs, for example, where workers post updates and field queries about their work, will help searchers judge for themselves who is an expert in a given field. Wiki sites, because they involve collaborative work, will suggest not only how much each contributor knows, but also how eager they are to share that knowledge and how well they work with others.

Tags and keywords, which are posted by employees and serve as flags for search engines, can reveal qualities in an expert that are far from transparent in any database or directory. And social networks can help employees use existing relationships to not only reach out to distant experts but also trust them more than they would complete strangers.

In what follows, we explain in more detail why social computing can help companies manage their in-house expertise more effectively.

To build upon their conclusions, it is important to note the role of Microblogging and Activity Steams in social software platforms. Microblogging offers a lower threshold for participation that both helps onboard new people to social software and allows more granular social signaling. Activity Streams help pull together events not just from social software, but other enterprise systems where experts are active.

From a systems point of view, social software out performs traditional expertise-location systems. But the important point is it doesn't create byproducts for getting things done, waste at the center and can be transformational for organizations beyond expertise.

UPDATE: A more detailed article by the above researchers is available in the MIT-Sloan Management Review, including this infographic:

Web 2.0 Square

The theme of this year's Web 2.0 Summit is web squared (pdf). That is, its time to focus on impact in the real world. Fred Wison says the big trends driving this space are social, mobile and real time -- to form a golden triangle.

I'd suggest geo, or location, provides as big of a vector for exploration and impacts the others. Geo has always been the missing dataset of the web, but very soon all mobile devices, browsers, laptops and specialized devices will provide geotagging. Geo will become a facet of the other three trends, becoming ubiquitous in existing services, and the founding opportunity for new ones.

But tech trends alone don't make a big opportunity for entrepreneurs, solving big problems does. Which should be at the center of your thinking. And its all still made of people

The Spreadsheet gets a (Revision) History

Today marks the 30th anniversary of VisiCalc, the spreadsheet that sparked the PC Revolution. You can read on Dan Bricklin's blog the evolution of the spreadsheet from then to now, the day Socialtext took SocialCalc out of beta.

To help celebrate, today people are tweeting their first spreadsheet experiences.

During the beta period we got some great feedback that led to improvements like better handling of revision history cell-by-cell. We also discovered use cases we didn't anticipate. Like how Epitaph Records manages and collaborates around their release schedules. Or how Meredith Corporation works across organizational boundries for cross-marketing:

"I used to get 10 e-mails a day from different people with these reports," said Dave Ball, Meredith's vice president of consumer marketing. "Now, with SocialCalc, I can go in at one point in the day and see what's going on in all our active campaigns right now. It helps us distribute information and knowledge faster, so we can react more quickly."

Here's a short introduction to SocialCalc:

You can try SocialCalc yourself for free.

Slideshare for Business

I'm an advisor to Slideshare, the world's largest sharing community for professionals.  Today they launched Slideshare for Business, a new way for businesses to promote themselves with direct business results:

Introducing SlideShare Business

View more documents from Rashmi Sinha.

You may not know that 80% of Slideshare's members are business decision makers. With over 20M unique visitors per month, that's a lot of business people presenting themselves. The Slideshare team picked up on some of the patterns of promotion within their community and developed two new Slideshare Business products to make them more efficient and effective: AdShare and LeadShare.

I've been using both AdShare to promote my content and LeadShare to generate leads through my content for about two months now with great results. With AdShare, my presentations are the ad content, and are displayed according to how the community ranks their effectiveness by clicking through them. 

Typically, B2B marketers produce "assets" like whitepapers, webinar recordings, presentations and other collateral. Then they make them available to sales prospects on a landing page which describes it, but you have to fill in a form with your contact information to get it. You can't engage with content or socialize around it to foster trust.  

LeadShare inverts this lead generation model. You can request or require that a user fill in the lead gen form at the end, middle or front of the document or presentation. It is presented in the context of the community, but can also be extended to your site through embeds.

Businesses are engaging and fostering trust more than ever with Social Media, but its difficult to directly tie these activities to the Lead Generation that feeds the business. Advertising is seeing growth in new interactive formats with contextual relevancy, but are fighting an uphill battle against sensitized decision makers. For these two world to get along, incentives must be aligned for quality creative production and community participation.

I believe SlideShare for Business represents a new ad format and self-service network that can help Social Media drive direct and measurable business results. And I know Slideshare members will develop creative and compelling ways of using it I can't predict.

Coverage: Slideshare blog, TechCrunch, San Jose Mercury News, VentureBeat, GigaOm, Dave McClure, Mashable; and InternetNews quotes me:

"Services like Twitter are popular but they still lack the tools that drive actions and the kind of measurable business results that SlideShare has developed," he said.

Hire Monday #hiremonday

Follow Friday is a fun trend on Twitter that helps bring attention to people. Why not do so for one of the better causes -- getting them jobs? Today I suggested we start Hire Monday. Simply mention someone you recommend that needs a job, and the hashtag #hiremonday.

Will be interesting to see if it catches on.