Upcoming Conference on "Leveraging Virtual Teams & Social Tools for Business Advantage: Blogs, Wikis, Twitter"

The Boston KM Forum is putting on a longer, more involved set of discussions around the business advantages of Web and Enterprise 2.0 tools, a subject near and dear to my heart, at Bentley College next Tuesday, March 31st. I'll be there.

The speakers and talk titles are:

• Soaring with Virtual Teams: How Working At-A-Distance and Across Boundaries Can Outperform Face-to-Face, Jessica Lipnack - CEO of NetAge and co-author of Virtual Teams; see her free webinar on the same subject.
  
  (I've enjoyed Jessica's presentations at Enterprise 2.0 Boston and elsewhere, with her trademark of "stand up and tell us who you are!")
  
• IBM’s Grounds-Up Social Software Transformation, recently married Suzanne Minassian (twitter)- Lotus Connections Product Manager, IBM
  
  (Lotus Connections is one of the leading Enterprise 2.0 products (or sets of products) and I look forward to hearing some more stories of its implementation.)
  
• Vital Catalyst: Social Media is Holding and Growing Audiences,
  Ken George, New Media Manager, and author of The Converstation, WBUR
  
  (I don't know Ken but WBUR has a quite sophisticated web presence and set of podcasts.)
  
• Give to Get: Real-World Dividends from Social Networking, Sadalit Van Buren, Knowledge Management Associates
  
  (Sadalit is the author of A Matter Of Degree and is a real expert in making the most of Sharepoint's Enterprise 2.0 features.)
  
  

"Emergence" at the Boston KM Forum

Last Thursday I attended a Boston KM Forum talk titled "Emergence—Get with it or fade away" by veteran social networker and knowledge worker Dan Keldsen (http://twitter.com/dankeldsen, blog at http://www.BizTechTalk.com). Dan is a good speaker as well as the only person I know of whose Twitter profile picture is skewed sideways.

He was also kind enough to share his interesting slides on Slideshare. Jack Vinson has also posted on the event, in a fashion that compliments what I do here.

What is Emergence?

Emergence is not a great term because people don’t necessarily know what it means. A better term might be “viral success.” The main focus of his talk was about social media applications that have enabled such success, and how you can either take advantage of those systems directly yourself, and perhaps even structure your next effort to try to make it "viral."

He mentioned at the outset Andrew McAfee's seminal article on Enterprise 2.0 titled "The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration." and its SLATES acronym of key features that allow knowledge workers to organize their work in the way that fits them best, i.e., that support and enable emergent behavior.

He recommends “Emergence” by Steven Johnson (reviewers on Amazon were not so kind, I have to point out).

One feature of "emergent" practice is, how easy is it people like customers, employees, and partners to understand what you’re doing and “spread the word.” Are you providing a path for community feedback?

Quantitative Analysis of Emergence

Dan explained the simple underpinnings of "viral loops" or other behavior that will multiply and spread over social networks. He drew on a presentation by "Arch Viral," http://www.slideshare.net/Startonomics/arch-viral-creating-social-apps-for-social-platforms-presentation .

First a user issues an invitation to participate to "friends" (in Facebook parlance) or others to whom that user is known. Some percentage of those friends accept (the "install flow"), and some percentage of those friends go on to issue additional invitations (as part of the "engagement flow"). If the average number of friends invited times the average percentage of acceptance with initial or later add-on activities is greater than 1, then you have a viral application.

(For the math-challenged, here's an example; if a new user asks 5 friends to join, and an average of 22% of them accept, then the "viral factor" is 1.1, and the application is viral. If only 18% accepted, the "viral factor would be less than 1, and the application would not be viral).

Multiple invites and “bites at the apple” will increase the rate of viral adoption. Small changes can have a big effect (like the wings of a butterfly).

This part of the presentation struck me as the most directly useful to my knowledge work. Correlating Facebook applications to the spread of Enterprise 2.0 is not at all intuitive.

But inside the enterprise, relatively small barriers to adoption of social adoption can potentially destroy the viral spread of potentially useful applications. It behooves us then to make the barriers that new groups and employees have to hurdle to get to the tools as low and as unbureaucratic as possible, and to find ways to get "second bites at the apple" that mimic the
continuous engagement and reward that the more successful social applications provide.

My other main takeaway was Jack Vinson's comment that one should be able to discover or uncover the networks and effects that could let power of emergence affect the enterprise.

Emergent Social Networks

In Dan’s last transition he was able to tap into a rich vibrant network because of his work with LinkedIn, his blog, etc. People could Google his name and find out a *lot* about him. He also leveraged his extensive LinkedIn connections in his last trip to Denmark.

Dan is another musician, albeit from the rock & roll side of the tracks. He showed Blip.fm as another social web application with excellent user feedbacks that enhance emergence. For instance, you get “props” for promoting things that people like. In turn you can give out “props" and you eventually get “badges” that show rank. You can also “reblip” someone's "blip" and if they do the same to you, you get more credit.

Slideshare is another emergent social tool that shows how many times each presentation has been viewed. Dan’s slideshare on “Maps, Concepts, Process” has been seen 9,423 times (actually 9,485 as of this writing!) His presentation “Who’s The Boss, MOSS?” has been seen 5,917 times after an initial audience of "only" 100.

How to Enhance Emergence and Make it "Go Viral"

Blip taps into people's interest in game-like interactions with personal rankings, and also the social need to give and get respect. Other applications might tap into the competitive instincts by showing daily, weekly, or "all-time" rankings.

Slideshare similarly gives its users feedback about how many times their presentations have been viewed, with feedback allowed at the contributor or presentation levels.

The more detail you provide in your online interactions, the more likely you will be able to connect with people of like mind and similar interests.

Why tap into emergent platforms?

You may find something rich that you wouldn’t have found otherwise, along with new ways to learn information that you can share. Having more connections expands the potential of what you can accomplish.

Normally professional organizations would serve some of the functions that LinkedIn is now. These organizations represent professional contact networks and may be in trouble unless they adapt.

Participant-driven platforms are another communication revolution. What kind of meaningful mechanisms will make them more useful and avoid us getting swamped?

Summary

• Enable easy sharing of posts, information, or whatever else your application addresses (Twitter, Facebook, "Add This" application)
• Set up reward systems that will draw on competitive instincts and show progress (any online game, Blip.fm)
• Count hits, downloads, views, and such to show people how much of interest others have taken in a piece of news or application (Youtube, Amazon)
• Enable a friend or follower system that will let people connect to each other, give them some idea of who else is around, and share their interests (Facebook, Youtube, etc.)
• Tags to let people identify for you, rather than coming up with your own terms (Facebook, Delicious, #twitter)

The best social information applications combine all of these characteristics.

As Jack says, let people "Find, Share and Compare."

My Boston KM Forum Presentation on Enterprise Tagging

It's been a busy couple of weeks. Right before I left on a week's vacation, split between a chamber music camp called "Heaven" and Cape Cod, I presented to the Boston KM Forum, which has a blog as well as its Web 1.0 website, on tagging inside the enterprise. My slides are also available there.

If you want to jump directly to other blogger's reactions, please see Sadie Van Buren's post and discussion about tagging as part of search activity and Suzanne Minassian's concise summary.

My main purpose was not to discuss how to implement tagging in the enterprise (my firm hasn't, so I can't), but rather to identify what I think are current business needs that could be met by tagging, some of the ways that enterprise tagging is different from tagging on the web, and to identify some of what I am looking for in tagging software.

I tied tagging to Prof. Andrew McAfee's SLATES paradigm of Enterprise 2.0, by which in my opinion any social software package needs to be assessed. SLATES=Search, Links, Authorship, Tagging, Extensions, and Signals; for more information, read the Dawn of Emergent Collaboration. In that paper McAfee focuses on tagging on the Web and the way that it enables people to assign their own context to web sites, which can then be shared with others. Looking back at the paper it is striking that McAfee focused on how intranet and internet sites might be tagged and leveraged inside the enterprise, but did not extend the concept of tagging to more typical inside-the-firewall content such as documents, matters, people, or tasks.

Tagging will help law firms provide context and enhance findability with respect to the large number of similar documents generated by legal work. By having tags linked to actual identified people (unlike Delicious) tagging should help us identify internal experts, either through their work being tagged or through their own tagging activity. My hope is that it may also enhance our ability to find out about new work, for instance, through having an internal RSS feed on a particular tag that would signal, for instance, when a new brief about civil rights was filed or finished.

Another driver of enterprise tagging may be employee engagement. One theme of the Enterprise 2.0 conference is that employees just entering the workforce, members of the "Millenial" and "Y" generations, enter the workforce with a great deal of enthusiasm but can get disillusioned by the difficulty of making measurable contributions inside a large and beureaucratic organization. Tagging, along with other social collaborative activities, may be a way to enhance engagement and derive value from these employees, in a fashion similar to that they may already be familiar with on the web.

That is not to say that tagging inside the firewall will be the same as it is on the web. Tagging must to adapt to the enterprise.

Professional service firms of all kinds have to be able to have ethical "walls" for all their content at the individual, matter, and client level. Such "walls" can prohibit a particular person from viewing a set of content, or can prohibit all but a very small set of people from viewing the content. That is, a tag might itself reveal the existence of a confidential client or matter, or show to someone who shouldn't know that a particular event has happened on a matter.

Ideally, enterprise tags will extend to more than "just" web sites. I would like to see tags (in descending order of importance) on 1) our document management system 2) the other document repositories in the firm 3) people 4) intranet pages and other content 5) matters and 6) tasks and projects. Ideally, external web sites would also be taggable.

While tagging people is third on the list, I believe that attribution of tags to people, either through their own activity or through others, will be a huge benefit to large professional services organizations. That's because finding the friendly experts is particularly important for us. One major difference of enterprise tagging is that there is no expectation of privacy within an organization as to one's activities; accordingly, authorship of a tag should definitely be exposed.

Some firms may experiment with somehow giving tags different weights depending on the seniorty or institutional position of the tagger. I'm not sure that's a good idea, but I would like to see some way to expose who made the tag, and exposing the role of the tagger could be quite beneficial. In evaluating work product, a first year associate's tag should not be accorded as much weight as the junior partner's tag in the mind of the person viewing the tag, but reflecting that in a system poses many obvious problems.

I also spoke about some features that should enhance enterprise adoption of tagging.
As with any new technology, providing help and guidance at the time that users need it will be key. Ideally there will be training features built right in, as you see on Amazon, ranging from a "What's this?" link, to a very basic description of tagging built in to the feature, to automatic feedback on a user's tags. This last might be something like "This is the 149th item you've tagged with the word "document". Do you want to try another word?"

There was an interesting discussion afterwards about the timing of tagging. Again, this is not an issue that I have addressed directly. The users I work for apply some metadata to the documents at the time they save them (principally a matter number and a document type), and we do our best to leverage that matter number to apply other metadata to the documents. Tagging could be applied to some extent at the time a document is saved, but typically our users don't want to actually have to think at that point as they need to print, file, or send it. It may be better to have tagging applied by other users at the time they search for and view the document, person, or other content. That would be a better approach where search is federated across many different content sources as it would be difficult to have "native" tagging in many different legacy systems.