40 Plus Social Lenses

Lately, I've been getting asked what I am working on beyond client work, as there have been things popping up here and there that hint something is brewing. Well, there is and there isn’t something new, but something (one of my things has been drawing my attention). It started in Summer or early Fall 2010 with a blow off comment from me to someone else who was stating how difficult working with 3D was, and I blurted something like “try social software, which is 6D or 7D or more”. That was tweeted as an overheard (OH) and people started asking what the 6D or 7D were. At the time I blurted it I could roughly name six of seven different dimensions of social interaction that needed to be considered and design for. But, with each stating of the six or seven, the list started growing. This list of six of seven dimensions were coming from the frameworks, models, and lessons learned I have picked up since 1996 working with social software inside organizations and out on the web. By late October I was finally putting these social elements I used into a list, which quickly was into 20 high-level items and by November was about 40 items. I was also fleshing out the list for each item. I started calling the list my “40 Plus Social Elements”, but recently I have changed it to “40 Plus Social Lenses” as that is a much better term for how I have been using them over the past 15 years to see the “it depends” inflection points and enable thinking through them.

This is Needed?

Nearly every organization I talk to (or even web start-up working for on social interactions) I talk to is getting stuck or is hitting things they hadn’t expected a few months into their use with these tools. It does not matter if it is a platform improve internal communications and collaboration, a social CRM program, and/or a social media (marketing) effort everybody seems to be running into issues they did not see coming. Often I will start by asking how they are dealing with something (based on program type and tools) and I hear, “How did you know we had this problem? Who did you talk to?” They affirm they have these issues, some are manageable and at times they are really problematic. But, the big question is why did they not know these issues could arrive or would potentially arise. I have kept these lenses separate for years, rather than building into one big approach as each organization or services is different enough and has different enough influences that it is really tough to have one big singular approach. Taking small steps, monitoring, and then adapting or iterating is a really helpful approach, but so are mixing and matching lenses to get an improved perspective. Building solutions that address needs and having an overall big vision are helpful. Most often with social tools is it a more connected and free flowing means of doing things.

Lessons Learned

The continual problem for anybody who has been responsible for long-term management of social systems and/or communities who use them, development, design, and/or iteration of social software solutions is painfully confronted with, “is what I am seeing happen (often framed as a problem or issue to be solved) an issue with individual people, how humans are social, the culture(s) where the system is being used, the organization's needs and requirements or structure, or the tools themselves that are being used?” Often the answer is “yes”. These personal, social, organizational, and tools issues all interweave and quickly create a complicated, if not complex system where isolation of individual elements is really difficult. There is also a counterweight to this, which is we know that for use and adoption of these tools and services they need to be simple to use and get started (it doesn't mean they need to stay that way, Lithium's Community Platform is wonderful proof of this model and a I really need to devote a piece to why as it isn't plainly seen by most).

This thinking really started jelling in 2004 at Design Engaged with Mike Kuniavsky's lead-off monologue on complexity, which in his 10 minutes he focussed on the complexity in interaction design and urged us to “run toward the light of complexity”. This is an essential understanding for interaction design as the designer is working to make things that are rather complicated yet rather simple to use, which requires the designer to embrace the complicated and complex to master it so to work to make it simple. Where interaction design hits the individuals and their interaction with systems, social interaction design adds more layers with people interacting with others through the tools, which can be rather complicated just on its own and now you are throwing software in the middle. In 2007 or so I hit another big wake up call. I was working on the folksonomy book (no, it didn't get published, nor finished being written) and a couple months in I hit a sticking point. What I found was many of the common social models and foundations for Web 2.0 couldn’t explain the strong value that people were finding in places where Web 2.0 thinking would not lead one to believe it existed, nor could it explain the problems that I was repeatedly seeing. It took 12 or more months of deconstructing and reassembling the Web 2.0 models, the lessons I learned from years working with and building social software, as well as my formal education (in communication theory, organizational communication, grad school with economics, and social analytics) to identify the variables and components that had value and then build frameworks for thinking how this worked and why. I have blogged many of these as well have been presenting them publicly as well as using them in workshops and client engagements. They have proven to be really valuable, with feedback from many that is has saved them tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in cost avoidance and value derived from improved decisions.

What is This List of Lenses?

The list is essentially what I have been using and building upon for 15 years dealing with social software and the hurdles and headaches that can come from it. These 40 plus lenses (sometimes nearly 50) are questions, models, and frameworks I use when working with clients or in workshops. I hadn’t realized there were as many elements in the list as I often work conversationally and one answer from a client will trigger 2 or 5 more questions that are relevant based on that answer or insight. This progression gives better understanding not only to me, but also to them to see potential options, the possible benefits as well as possible detractors, and then think through them sanely. Knowing potential problems or issues, helps keep an eye out for them and be prepared, all while using lenses to know that these decisions may bring.

I have shared the list with some others with quite long backgrounds in social software on production, management, or research sides and all (well not the researchers) have the first response of, “Thomas, you are over thinking this there is no way there are that many.” But, as they go through the list they often find all of it is very familiar and things they think through and consider as well so to help their organizations, services, or clients. Many of us have built up this trove of tacit knowledge and I'm working on making it more explicit.

Where I am finding the list is having value is using the components as lenses to see the “it depends” inflection points and be able to think through them to solid results that match each organization as best as possible. Often there isn’t an optimal solution, but knowing a gap exists and to keep an eye on it has made a huge difference for organizations as well as those building products.

The list is still in flux a little but, but it is firming up and getting it organized in to a nice flow will help. Once that is done it is writing time. I have been presenting many of the items on the list in workshops and in client engagements and honing the understanding and getting solid feedback from real experience and use over the years.

I have been having many discussions around the list and thinking that is behind them, which has surfaced in Dave Gray's Connected Company and a Gordon Ross’ post on Connected companies, complex systems, and social intranets. There is good thinking and understanding that is needed so we can get more value and better understanding out of social software used in organization and on the web, but importantly it can help the products and services improve as well.

There are quite a few posts around here that are included in the lenses as part of them or the whole of a lens:

• Social Maturity and Scaling
• On Fire with Social Progressions
• Removing Trust
• A Conversation on Social Interaction Design with Adrian Chan
• Enterprise Social Tools: Components for Success
• Explaining the Granular Social Network
• Denning and Yaholkovsky on Real Collaboration
• Selective Sociality and Social Villages
• Getting to Know Collective and Collaborative
• The Elements in the Social Software Stack
• 5 Enterprise 2.0 Myth Mantras that Must Die
• Model of Attraction
• The Come to Me Web

What am I Doing with This List?

What I am doing with this list of lenses has been a big question. The list very quickly started looking like a book outline, so I am taking steps in that direction. Presenting on this, I have been using a lot of these lenses in presentations for the last 8 years and mix and match them based on subject of the presentation. Dave Gray has put together a really good presentation on the Connected Company that I have helped with and will be presenting that puts a nice wrapper around the ideas. But, being able to get the full list of lenses in front of people and help them use them practically, I think may be best done in a workshop model. I have done internal workshops using many of these lenses (I get very positive feedback about how much this has benefitted organizations and has saved them from selecting tools that didn't fit their needs and/or helped them realize they had a gap in their approach they had not foreseen), but I have yet to put one on that are open to the public. If there is interest in public workshops I have the material and they would likely be a two day for a full view and use, but also could be a one day intensive seminar approach. Please contact

Social Relevance in KM

Last week Luis Suarez posted a fantastic piece KM, Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business: One and The Same, which was not only dead on, but also brought to the forefront many discussions I have been having over the past  few years. The discussions revolve around depth of understanding the social tools inside organizations and the troubles many organizations run into about 6 months to 18 months in (I’ve had many long discussions with Stewart Mader about this, which he calls the One Year Club). This One Year Club continually triggers organizations to consider what tools and practices around them and deeply question if they made the correct choices. Often they selected tools based on initial interaction patterns with the tools and how the tools and services are considered in popular circles and memes.

Luis piece triggers these discussions as I have been coming back to some of my knowledge management (KM) foundations laid in the late 90s. By then I had a few years dealing with social software in organizations running into the usual headaches and questions around, “is it people, humans being social, the organization, and/or the tools interwoven into all of this that are the crux of the problem” needed to be asked with every bump and hurdle. When touching on KM I was finding solid thinking on not only information management issues (that echoed under graduate work in my major of organizational communication and communication theory, but also social networking and social interactions that were the underpinnings of my masters degree in public policy), but the intersection of how humans are social and how they communicate.

In 2007 I had the fortune to speak at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference on the subject of folksonomy and I found a good connection with people in organizations trying social software deployments and running into the same issues I had in the mid-90s. Those who were speaking and presenting who were laying out solid methods for thinking through the issues and the potential path(s) forward had one similarity, they had a KM background. I also was finding similar with some vendors who grasped the complexity of the issues around information, people, social interactions, and organizations. Here too, many of them had backgrounds in KM either having built KM tools that didn’t work optimally (KM tools in the late 90s to mid-00s were miserable piles of technology that rarely enabled people to easily get what they knew out of their wonderful minds and into a system to share it with others - having been responsible for more than a few flavors of these beasts they all were far from easy and kept people from sharing easily - it wasn't KM that was bad it was the tools). But, finding this pocket of people I who grasped the difficulties around tools, humans being social, and business felt like home, a little bit more like home than the pure Web 2.0 slice of social tools, as it required dealing with mainstream as well as early adopters (who comprised much of the Web 2.0 fan base then).

You may notice I didn't mention consultants in that mix for Enterprise 2.0 in 2007, I didn't as most (a rare few exceptions) really didn't have deep understanding, nor seems to want it, as they were trying to figure out how to get a jump on this new term and potential pond of money around a buzzword. In 2007 the people in companies trying to do things had the best understanding of needs, problems, and potential way forward with the vendors following rather close behind.

KM, Really?

The core of this understanding and seeing potential and problems at hand was a foundation in KM. You ask, “Why is that important?” One of the things happening in the mid to late 90s in organizations along with this increasing buzz around KM as another buzz around the promise of e-groups and e-collaboration. These “e” tools (far from being an “E ticket” to anything) were often put under the purview of KM people as these tools not only were aimed helping people work together in a digital environment, but they were key to a key aim of KM, getting the tacit knowledge people have out of their minds and in shared making it explicit so it can be found and used by others. This core tenet of KM was one of the key gems that was going to solve the organization’s problems, but the problem was the tools were not up to the task. This gap around the tools (which got increasingly worse as the tech solution was not to ease use and map to how people were social and interact, but was to make more complex and structured interfaces (more form fields and hurdles)) lead nearly everybody working with this social tools to have the common headache around is it the people, how people are social (culture), business, and/or tools that are the problem.

This became an valuable experience of trying to sort out what is and where are the problems that are holding the social and KM solutions back from achieving their potential. One of the things that came out of it was a rather robust understanding of how people in organizations are social (or are not) and how important the existing culture is to tool selection and development of practices. Not only is culture valuable, but the need for different interfaces for different uses of the tools as well as breaking down the wide variety of different social interaction needs for different phases and stages of information sharing, use, and reuse.

KM World 2009

In 2009 I was asked if I would be one of the keynote presenters for KM World 2009, I was honored and felt a bit out of my depth at first as this was KM, which I still held a deep regard for the practices and foundations that were put in place more than a decade back. I was humbled as the two other keynote presenters were Andrew McCaffe and Charlene Li. Much of my presentation focussed on lessons learned from the One Year Club and problems that seem common from social software use in organizations, which I was fearing a bit would dampen the hope and promise and way forward presentations that McCaffee and Li provided. But, having spent a fair amount of time talking and listening to attendees, I was realizing that there are many in the KM community running into these issues today, but many that have been dealing with these issues going back to the 90s. There is depth in the KM community that has long been there and many in the KM community are still sharing their incredible depth and experience bringing the whole community forward that wishes to come a long. As I presented many of the stumbling blocks I have seen companies hit and try to work through, as well as “did we choose the right tool for our organization, needs, and culture?” I saw near ubiquitous waves of head nods across the whole of the conference. The attendees are not just new to social tools, but know enough about the hype memes to have been bitten by them or run across them enough to look for ways forward.

This last year I was back at KMWorld, which also co-hosts the Taxonomy Bootcamp (which I keynoted this past 2010), Enterprise Search Summit" (I did a workshop on Enterprise Social Search this past year and will be keynoting the conference in May in NYC this year(2011)), and SharePoint Symposium where I found the offerings for organizations considering and using social tools inside the organization to be incredibly robust, with presenters and workshops by some of the best and most experienced in the industry (oddly they have never been at Enterprise 2.0 Conference, that really must get fixed). The sessions I sat in on were getting to the heart of real problems and people were sharing years of experience and pointing out the “it depends” questions and how to work through them (in my opinion there is no better aid than that). But, also heard people talking in depth about tools, their gaps, and where good fits for them may be. I also spent time talking with vendors who were finding the attendees to be incredibly well informed and asking solid questions that showed they understood not only their organizations well, but the type of tools that would fit their organization’s culture and needs. A couple of the vendors said this is a rare occurrence at other conferences.

There is a There There in KM

What KM World highlighted for me was there is and long has been a core and deep value that exists in KM. The depth of understanding that has been building and iterating over 15 or more years of experience learned (often the hard way), deep long research, and tackling the hard problems by going deep has incredible value. This value is deeply needed in other communities. As I pointed out in my last post, Social Scaling and Maturity social software in the organization starts out simple and relatively easy, but that changes quite a bit as it gets used.

There isn't a KM 2.0 as there is no need for it. The practices of KM have iterated and matured deeply and wonderfully and not that social software for organizations have started getting out of the way to allow people to get what they know out of their minds and share it more broadly, as has always been the aim of KM, we could start seeing real progress. Understanding the needs around the organization, culture, practice needs, and the tools that can best map to these needs, as well as more easily enable people to be social as humans are social can only give a nice spark to that promise and long vibrant vision.

Social Scaling and Maturity

In 2006 I started using this graphic to explain social scaling and functionality around social tagging systems (then the x-axis was “times an object tagged”), as it helped bring to light the reality of what was to come from use. But increasingly I also used it to explain general social software maturation that echoed social software development work I was doing in 2002 and even patterns seen many years earlier in my work with social software.

As the number of people using a service increases over time and the number of activities in the system increases over time the system changes drastically. The needs, frameworks, and interactions (both social and services) change drastically. Not understanding what is coming has so many organizations making tool and service choices that have them quite stuck as they try to progress past the second stage. Not only did they not see this coming nor did those whom they paid handsomely to guide them through.

Lack of Understanding Begins Where?

“We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” ~Albert Einstein

Much of the lack of understanding with social software today is mistaking what seem like simple Web 2.0 tools and not understanding the depth of thinking and understanding from a technical, interaction design, and deeper understanding from a social science perspective of what is needed. Many Web 2.0 services rarely get into the 3rd stage of “Mature Social Tools”. When you bring this understanding into organizations and their needs for vastly improved communications, social interactions, collaboration, and efficiency needed the Web 2.0 model doesn't really get you far, nor help you prepare for what will come. (It is not that Web 2.0 offerings are not capable, it is that if they are even moderately successful they are dealing with many millions of users and keeping their offerings running with more simple social interactions and needs has them completely occupied).

Claiming your tools and services are like Web 2.0 tools and having them actually be rather equal to the lack of depth Web 2.0 products like Facebook have, becomes a pill filled with poison that once swallowed will release over time. The problem is less with to do with Web 2.0, but how things progress within fixed populations beyond the capabilities and needs (limited by volume and scale of resources needed to handle the volume of Web 2.0 services). Think of the fishing industry and the practices needed for fishing at massive industrial scale and optimizing skill of fly fishing and sustainability.

The Axis of This Model

Along the y-axis is the number of people participating in the service. As this increases the need for individuals to manage relationships and interactions increases. Along the x-axis are the number activities, which can be: Conversations, media shared, ratings, documents, short and long writings, annotations, organizing (curating) what exists in the system, etc.

Optimally the service will have growth that progresses in a relative balance between people participating and activities over time. If the balance has many people and few activities (or range or activities around subjects or tool types, see the differentiation between collective and collaboration, which doesn't include community/group distinct needs) the system will be really narrow and seem like their is little activity or action and perceived value dissipates and the usual result is decreasing visits and use. If the services has a relatively low number of people participating and a lot of activity the outcome is usually a very narrow view and lack of breadth of understandings, which limits the perception of what subject matter or activities types happen there.

What Are The Scaling Stages?

Personal

This stage is firmly set in the simple (a passing or deeper knowledge of Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework will understand the framing help). All social tools and services start their useful existence with personal value. They are offering where people place what they know or see where they can come back to it easily, as well as share with others, who will / may eventually find it. This clarity of understanding the personal impact was really clear when Delicious started. Joshua Porter actually called this the “Delicious Lesson”. The personal also helps initially frame what you have interest in and captures it, provides seeing others to connect with to initial share with and follow, provides a means to hold onto connecting with people, and hopefully allow people to see this in their own contextual lens. There is very little social interaction as things start out. It takes work of planning, engaging, and managing the initial social interactions. Community managers (instigator and evangelists) are essential for helping people into this first stage and get the whole moving toward the next stage. Problematically many services under provide for the needs and capabilities of the personal needs, not only for enabling initial uses, but for more valuable needs as the services mature. Seeing and managing who a person connects with and why along with actions taken in the system (accounting for time, cycles, and patterns) is a real need which helps people not only use the services but see the value they get from it.

Serendipity

This second stage still has most of its focus on the simple, but toward the edges of the next stage that shifts. Once the service gets more people using it and the activities increase things move from a heavily personal focus to one that is more social. The social interactions are more serendipitous than planned interactions as people aggregate and interact mostly through stumbling onto are being guided to subject mater areas of interests, groups or areas where conversations and objects related to the subject are shared and conversations around them happen (social objects).

In this stage the interactions between people are often echo their connections to people and interests that exist prior to using the services. The information flows are still rather manageable, but start edging into flows with some serious volume and velocity at times, which creates and information density to me dealt with. As the activities increase, particularly across groups and subject matter affinities and needs the need for tools to help with various roles people have (either roles that emerged, take on out or need or adeptness, or are have been assigned) is needed. The roles, other than admin and guide, are still mostly light. The managing of information and connecting it to where it is needed is what surfaces here as activities grow.

As time increases and the people participating and activities increase (as expected) things shift to being simple to more complicated given the number and variance of people interacting with each other. Managing connection and what is shared with whom starts to be seen, as does the reality that open social platforms can greatly hinder social interactions (no matter the culture) as the realization that there is something to Robin Dunbar%s [magical] number. As this happens the impact of the organizations overarching culture starts to have an impact and the selection of the tools and services for the social interactions comes in to clarity, whether the right choices were made and implemented to easily integrate with it or clash.

Mature Social Tool

The mature social tool stage the complicated realities of human social interactions comes into play, as well as the need for managing and filtering information flows. Most often organizations hit this stage in 6 months to 2 years. The lovely “if information is important it will find you” theory falls from a working practice to myth here as does they never valid 1/9/90 rule. Information and connections with people get lost and fuzzy. Keeping what is needed and valuable near is essential. It is here most often that people managing the services and tools in organizations state, “What they hell did we do? Do we have the right tools and services?” Many times the answer is no they don't have what they need as they didn't see this part of the picture and reality coming. Also they didn't plan budget and resources for this (it was supposed to just work, right).

It is also in this stage that it is really clear different parts of the service have matured at vastly different rates. Some of it is individual people maturing at faster rates. The accelerated maturity is not only with individuals but groups, subjects, use patterns, roles, etc. This inconsistency of growth is normal, yet it continually seems to surprise people. The reality is there are various types of people, whom these tools hit a need and map tightly to their activities and perceived way forward. Rarely does accelerated maturity of use have much to do with age (the myth that it is young people who take to these tools really becomes clear here as well). Matching lack of resources and pain because that with other solutions is a much stronger driver when the services ease those pains.

The mature social stage is also where the “best practices” considered and possibly used earlier surface as possibly not the best way forward and may have lead to things more problematic than not optimal outcomes. Each organization not only has its own culture, but sub-cultures, but its own ways of doing business on top of the social environment and cultural behaviors. Understanding what the levers and myriad of potential options the possible outcomes that come from their use is an incredibly valuable approach. Combining approaches and methods from these many options will enhance the complications, which needs the ability to have people who can understand and see the components and break down what influences can be attributed to where. It is very much an iterate, test, monitor, and iterate practice all while realizing what doesn't work in one scenario may be brilliant in others.

The value from much of the social web understandings derived from what people thought they saw in Web 2.0 offerings runs out and the practice of copying features and functionality from that realm has run its course due to limitations mentioned above. The practices and services are similar, but the massive scale that Web 2.0 services handle has them focussing on volume and quantity of interactions, not the honed qualitative needs in organizations. Facebook doesn't care that people are sharing important knowledge for other to benefit from as long as people are interacting and using their service. Sharing and honing those understandings and being able to refind them as needed in an organization is an essential and has deep value over time.

The mature social tool stage is where search is needed to find things and social search (in theory) should work well (that often isn't the case as search for the most part hasn't caught up yet). There is enough content and enough people interacting to see a rich ecosystem ready to see the benefit of these service become really valuable. This can happen, but it becomes difficult. There are no best practices that work here, there are guides and series of “it depends” scenarios and lenses to work through to good (if not hopefully better) outcomes. The number or roles and tools matching those role's needs are needed for many using the service, but at the same time keeping the interfaces easy to use as they were in the earlier stages (think of most role playing games that start with simple interfaces that are easy to use to accomplish what is needed, but over time and proven adeptness at using them more complicated tools and interfaces slowly evolve that match the mastery, roles, and skills needed (Lithium community platform (for outside the firewall) does this amazingly well, but doing this is something that takes incredibly deep skill and understanding).

It is also in this stage that information overload really can kick in. Connecting the information and knowledge to people and areas in the system that need it can become a challenge. What seemed to be a reality of a single culture in the organization is seen as more complicated with the multitude of sub-cultures with their own understandings, contexts, terms/vocabularies, and expectations. Not only do non-emergent taxonomies have problems here, but search does if it doesn't account for the social implications and influences underlying the content and needs.

By this point the realization that an open social platform didn't work there are now many smaller groups that are fully or partly closed off. The key is to embrace this understanding and work to build synonym repositories and bridges of understanding between the sub-cultures and divergent practice areas. The collective whole that is emerging becomes difficult to work with, but it can be done. The scale and needs that emerge out of this can begin to look like enterprise resource management services, but the components are not as stable and as predictable, they are human and social.

Focussing on the complicated components in all of this is a task. It can be done and taking the multitude of complicated steps, conditions, and interactions (software and social, as well as social software interactions) into account and breaking them down into smaller more manageable components through depth of understanding and experience can be done. Having not only a good understanding of broader social network interactions helps greatly, but understandings at the social interaction design level for the much smaller scale interaction needs is essential as well. The interfaces and needs of the service will be drastically different than what is needed earlier in the stages.

Even with some mastery of this stage the growth of people and actions over time will shift from being complicated to complex. Hopefully, the complicated needs are being identified and needs relating to the complicated needs are helping to address the issues at hand. Longitudinal understandings of use and patterns is needed to help iterate and meet needs.

Complex Social System

The complex social system is where things move toward emulating actual social systems in the world around us. Understandings that are central to urban planning and understanding healthy societies at scale, as well as using well worn research and theories for how the complex organisms known as societies interact. (Dave Gray has picked up on this and included it in the Connected Company post, which is worth your time to read.) There are few universal understandings of what people do that will consistently apply. The use and emergent uses of the services that happen in this stage will be quite different and the tools and patterns for managing things that worked in earlier stages will not work as well. External influences (influences outside of the cultures or are emergent and not planned) will impact use and value. Often it is these emergent uses that have the highest value, but they can also be problematic. It is also essential to understand how modifying the whole of the system and service to embrace these emergent patterns will impact.

There are no best practices and never will be. It takes identifying and understanding the individual influences (there are often many) and their place in what is occurring in small samples (rarely do large emergent patterns behave or happen consistently across the organization (although it can)) to get better clarity.

Knowing this stage is coming and being aware of the patterns indicate this emergent and divergent stage is really helpful as early as the initial planning stages. Indications where and how these patterns are emerging can be seen very early and they can be confused for mainstream use, which changes the whole of the system and skews it against easy considered use in the earlier stages. This isn't something to understand and worry about later, it needs to be something that is firmly in mind with people who not only grasp it, but can ascertain its existence and work through the myriad of considerations that will be needed to work through to best prepare and adapt for it.

Tools and services are not exactly here just yet. There are some that could be close, but it all is dependent on need, problems, and the underlying complications that lead to the complexity. There are also many examples for services identifying emergent patterns and behaviors and adapting for them or just letting them be. Things like hashtags in Twitter are an example of embracing the emergent patterns, but it was and is an edge user pattern. This past week Socialcast took the steps to further adapt their system to take hashtag and enable design patterns that helped it be far more usable and understandable to mainstream core users (I think I may know some people who worked on that and bravo all around).

Removing Trust

About two years ago I made a conscious effort not to use the term “trust” and encouraged those I was engaging for work and social interactions not to use the term. The problem is not the concept of trust, but the use of the term trust, or more accurately the overuse of the term trust. Trust gets used quite often as it is a word that has high value in our society. There are roughly seven definitions or contextual uses of the term trust, which is problematic when trying to design, develop, or evaluate ways forward from understandings gaps and potential problems.

Initially, I started a deep dive into reading everything I could on trust to get a better grasp of the term and underlying foundations. I thought this may provide better understanding and bring me back to using the term and with more clarity of understanding. While, this helped increase my understanding of the use of trust as a term it also confirmed the broad fuzzy use of the term, even within attempts to clarify it.

Why the Use of the Term Trust is Problematic

When I was working with people to help improve their social software deployments or use of social sites, as well as engagements in B2B and B2C arena the term trust was used a lot. I would ask people to define “trust” as they were using it, and they would describe what they meant by trust, but with in a sentence or two they had moved onto a different contextual definition. Sometimes I would point this out and ask them to redefine what they meant, pointing out the shift in usage. When I asked one group I was talking with to use other words as proxy for the term trust things started moving forward with much more clarity and understanding. Also gone were the disagreements (often heated) between people whose disagreement was based on different use of the term.

Once I started regularly asking people to not use trust, but proxies for the term I started keeping rough track of the other words and concepts that were underlying trust. The rough list includes: Respected, comfort, dependable, valued, honest, reliable, treasured, loved, believable, consistent, etc. Many found the terms they used to replace trust were more on target for what they actually meant than when using the word trust. There are some sets terms that nicely overlap (dependable, reliable, consistent and valued, treasured), but one term that came up a lot and generated a lot of agreement in group discussions is comfort.

Social Comfort Emerges

Within a few months of stopping use of the term trust, comfort was the one concept that was often used that seamed to be a good descriptor for social software environments. It was a social comfort with three underlying elements that helped clarify things. Social comfort for interacting in social software environments was required for: 1) People; 2) Tools; and 3) Content (subject matter). I will explain these briefly, but really need to come back to each one in more depth in later posts.

(A presentation to eXention last year turned what was publicly one slide on the subject into a full 60 minute plus presentation.)

Social Comfort

View more presentations from Thomas Vander Wal.

Social Comfort with People

Social comfort with people is one essential for people interacting with others. Some of the key questions people bring up with regard to social comfort with people are: Knowing who someone is, how they will interact with you, what they will do with information shared, reliability of information shared, are they safe, can I have reasonable interaction with them, and why would I interact with this person. One of the biggest issues is, “Who is this person and why would I connect or interact with them?” But, most social software tools, particularly for internal organization use provide that contextual information or depth needed to answer that question in their profiles (even in the organizations where most people have relatively “complete” profiles, the information in the profiles is rarely information that helps answer the “Who is this person and why should I listen or interact with them?” question.

Social Comfort with Tools

Social comfort with tools is often hindered by not only ease of use, but ease of understanding what social features and functionalities do, as well as with whom this information is shared. There is an incredible amount of ambiguity in the contextual meaning (direct or conveyed) of many interface elements (ratings, stars, flags, etc.) fall deeply into this area. This leads to the social reticence of a click, where people do not star, flag, rate, or annotate as the meanings of these actions are not clear in meaning (to the system or to other people) as well as who sees these actions and what the actions mean to them. Nearly every organization has a handful if not many examples of misunderstanding of these interactions in actual use. The problems are often compounded as sub-groups in organizations often establish their own contextual understandings of these elements for their use, but that may have the opposite meaning elsewhere (a star may mean items a person is storing to come back to later in one group and another it means a person likes the item starred and can be construed as a light approval). Even services where this is well defined and conveyed in the interface this conflict in understandings occurs. (This is not to ward people off use, but the to understand lack of consistency of understanding that occurs, although the 5 star (or other variations) are really universally problematic and needs a long explanation as to why.)

Social Comfort with Content

Social comfort with content or subject matter can hold people back from using social software. People may have constructive input, but their lack of their own perceived expertise may be (and often is) what inhibits them from sharing that information. The means for gathering this constructive feedback is needed along with the ability for others to ask questions and interact, which usually rules out anonymous contributions (additionally anonymous contributions rarely help mitigate this problem as that doesn’t really provide comfort, as well inside most organizations it is quite easy to resolve who is behind any anonymous contribution, so it is false anonymity). People often have contributions they believe are helpful, but may not be fully fleshed out, or are need to have the information vetted for internal political reasons or put in context (terminology and constructs that are most easily understood and usable) through vetting of others (whom there is social comfort with).

Improving Outcomes with Focal Shift

One of the outcomes of this shift from the term trust to others, including social comfort is areas that need to be addressed are more easily seen, discussed, considered, and potential solutions identified. The end results are often improved adoption through improved community management, improved interfaces and interactions in the services, better tools through iteration, and improved adoption.

Thanks to Yi Tan Podcast on Dave Snowden's Cynefin

Last week Jerry Mikcalsky’s Yi Tan Technology Community podcast was a discussion with Dave Snowden regarding his Complexity Framework Cynefin may have been the epiphany of the year for me. Jerry’s e-mail announcement provided background information so the conversation would have some depth of understanding needed to frame a good understanding (the email content is on the podcast page).

I can not begin to explain the incredible value I derived from this session (oh, but I'll try). I have been a tangential fan of Dave Snowden’s blog and shared work at Cognitive Edge for quite a few years. A lot of my understandings for how people share information and interact with each other in face-to-face environments as well as in digital environments have reached conclusions that are quite near Dave Snowden’s frameworks. When I present, write about, or talk to others about my understandings formed around social and interactions (based on 22 years of working in tech environment, 16 years working with social software and services, and the education foundations set in liberal arts with a heavy focus on communication theory and organizational communications as well public policy in grad school with its social analytics and economic frames) I often get asked if I am familiar with Dave Snowden’s work. I have tried jumping in mid-stream reading many blog posts and articles pointed to, as well as following him on many social fronts. I have met him briefly at KM World events, but had never been able to sit in on one of his sessions.

The Yi Tan mailing and podcast finally gave me the foundation and understanding that made the last 6 to 8 years of my work click together. I understood why people asked if I was familiar with Snowden’s work. Much of where I have ended up seems like it is a perfect riff on Cynefin, but I was not fully familiar with it. But, the part I love the most is the framing of the visual model with unordered elements of chaos and complexity; ordered elements of simplicity and complicated; and disorder.

In 2005 I stumbled my way into an intellectual affair with complexity and agent based models as much of what I was seeing evolve in social tools and seemed wildly beyond the bounds of emergent fell neatly into complexity model thinking. But, I knew the world did not all fall into complexity modeling as and when including complexity (high level introduction to it) in presentations and workshops I used a social software example (see Social Software Design for One - slide 70) that progressed from a personal use service, a simple but not fully functional social tool that worked for serendipitous finding of things, to a mature social tool where search and social interactions would lead to finding and sharing of useful information and work optimally, and finally to a complex social system with edge models that were valuable, but outside of the core focus, functionality and use. With this in mind and at the core of my thinking I was predisposed to Cynefin.

Having seen Snowden’s YouTube introduction and having read the Harvard Business Review article “A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making” the podcast was the perfect thing to tip my understanding to bring not only Dave Snowden’s understanding into clear understanding, but also I could see my own understandings and what were fuzzy interconnections between things with razor sharp clarity of understanding. For the last 5 years or longer I have been working around the intersection of businesses and social software and social interaction design as my main focus. One frustration has been all the years of experience managing, building, maintaining, iterating, and living with the problems and pain of social tools built up over 16 years or so was it was very clear social software is anything but simple. For social software to work well it needs to be complicated to manage the complexity of not only human social interactions, but where it intersects with business it must embrace the multitudes of overlapping social interactions and cultures in an organization, all while keeping the interface as simple and easy to use as possible.

The last 5 years I’ve run across organization after organization looking at Web 2.0 services and wanting to bring that type of service in house, but most who come to this from a Web 2.0 understanding are thinking in terms of simplicity and have the impression that this stuff is relatively easy and any tool will suffice (vendors early into their offerings also commonly make the same mistake and don’t quite get around to doing the really hard work for 2 or 3 years to start getting their products closer to what is needed by social realities and business realities). Most organizations end up six months to one year in really baffled and concerned as the tools do not perform as they expected and how people are using them (or not) is drastically different and this is often when I get potential customers from a year prior coming to me for help (often very short on budget and short on tolerance). Stewart Mader calls this the “one year club” (this is turning into a podcast with Stewart, myself, Euan Semple, and Megan Murray) as this realization is very common as very few people grasp how complicated and complex this endeavor is as well as how important the tools are and need to map to filling in for an organizations needs. Yes, the tools do matter a lot and they are not all equals as they are all quite different.

Having had Dave Snowden’s work gel and has made all of this much clearer and more valuable. Thank you Jerry and Dave for the Yi Tan podcast!

Closing Delicious? Lessons to be Learned

There was a kerfuffle a couple weeks back around Delicious when the social bookmarking service Delicious was marked for end of life by Yahoo, which caused a rather large number I know to go rather nuts. Yahoo, has made the claim that they are not shutting the service down, which only seems like a stall tactic, but perhaps they may actually sell it (many accounts from former Yahoo and Delicious teams have pointed out the difficulties in that, as it was ported to Yahoo’s own services and with their own peculiarities).

Redundancy

Never the less, this brings-up an important point: Redundancy. One lesson I learned many years ago related to the web (heck, related to any thing digital) is it will fail at some point. Cloud based services are not immune and the network connection to those services is often even more problematic. But, one of the tenants of the Personal InfoCloud is it is where you keep your information across trusted services and devices so you have continual and easy access to that information. Part of ensuring that continual access is ensuring redundancy and backing up. Optimally the redundancy or back-up is a usable service that permits ease of continuing use if one resource is not reachable (those sunny days where there's not a cloud to be seen). Performing regular back-ups of your blog posts and other places you post information is valuable. Another option is a central aggregation point (these are long dreamt of and yet to be really implemented well, this is a long brewing interest with many potential resources and conversations).

With regard to Delicious I’ve used redundant services and manually or automatically fed them. I was doing this with Ma.gnol.ia as it was (in part) my redundant social bookmarking service, but I also really liked a lot of its features and functionality (there were great social interaction design elements that were deployed there that were quite brilliant and made the service a real gem). I also used Diigo for a short while, but too many things there drove me crazy and continually broke. A few months back I started using Pinboard, as the private reincarnation of Ma.gnol.ia shut down. I have also used ZooTool, which has more of a visual design community (the community that self-aggregates to a service is an important characteristic to take into account after the viability of the service).

Pinboard has been a real gem as it uses the commonly implemented Delicious API (version 1) as its core API, which means most tools and services built on top of Delicious can be relatively easily ported over with just a change to the URL for source. This was similar for Ma.gnol.ia and other services. But, Pinboard also will continually pull in Delicious postings, so works very well for redundancy sake.

There are some things I quite like about Pinboard (some things I don’t and will get to them) such as the easy integration from Instapaper (anything you star in Instapaper gets sucked into your Pinboard). Pinboard has a rather good mobile web interface (something I loved about Ma.gnol.ia too). Pinboard was started by co-founders of Delicious and so has solid depth of understanding. Pinboard is also a pay service (based on an incremental one time fee and full archive of pages bookmarked (saves a copy of pages), which is great for its longevity as it has some sort of business model (I don’t have faith in the “underpants - something - profit” model) and it works brilliantly for keeping out spammer (another pain point for me with Diigo).

My biggest nit with Pinboard is the space delimited tag terms, which means multi-word tag terms (San Francisco, recent discovery, etc.) are not possible (use of non-alphabetic word delimiters (like underscores, hyphens, and dots) are a really problematic for clarity, easy aggregation with out scripting to disambiguate and assemble relevant related terms, and lack of mainstream user understanding). The lack of easily seeing who is following my shared items, so to find others to potentially follow is something from Delicious I miss.

For now I am still feeding Delicious as my primary source, which is naturally pulled into Pinboard with no extra effort (as it should be with many things), but I'm already looking for a redundancy for Pinboard given the questionable state of Delicious.

The Value of Delicious

Another thing that surfaced with the Delicious end of life (non-official) announcement from Yahoo was the incredible value it has across the web. Not only do people use it and deeply rely on it for storing, contextualizing links/bookmarks with tags and annotations, refinding their own aggregation, and sharing this out easily for others, but use Delicious in a wide variety of different ways. People use Delicious to surface relevant information of interest related to their affinities or work needs, as it is easy to get a feed for not only a person, a tag, but also a person and tag pairing. The immediate responses that sounded serious alarm with news of Delicious demise were those that had built valuable services on top of Delicious. There were many stories about well known publications and services not only programmatically aggregating potentially relevant and tangential information for research in ad hoc and relatively real time, but also sharing out of links for others. Some use Delicious to easily build “related information” resources for their web publications and offerings. One example is emoted by Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb wonderfully describing their reliance on Delicious

It was clear very quickly that Yahoo is sitting on a real backbone of many things on the web, not the toy product some in Yahoo management seemed to think it was. The value of Delicious to Yahoo seemingly diminished greatly after they themselves were no longer in the search marketplace. Silently confirmed hunches that Delicious was used as fodder to greatly influence search algorithms for highly potential synonyms and related web content that is stored by explicit interest (a much higher value than inferred interest) made Delicious a quite valued property while it ran its own search property.

For ease of finding me (should you wish) on Pinboard I am http://pinboard.in/u:vanderwal

----

Good relevant posts from others:

• Why You Should have a Website - Jeremy Keith
• We can save Delicious, but probably not in the way you think
• Delicious in Purgatory :: TechCrunch

Bing Likes Like, But Does it Mean We Do

Last week Microsoft Bing and Facebook announced Facebook is now part of Bing search. The part that has been touted the most is Bing's inclusion of Facebook Likes.

For me this is really surprising as Like has very little value, what little value is has is confounded by it lacks any explicit understanding of intent. Search is about finding what is being sought, which is much harder than it sounds, particularly with massive amounts of information, or when searching across contexts and influences. Like really doesn't add much of anything of value to this. Why somebody likes something is really important to understand, or more importantly even if a person actually likes what they placed a like on, or if they were using it as a proxy for a bookmark to hold on to something so to return later, or even if the Like is a social statement.

One of my trips to California I was with friends and we were trying to sort out where to grab something to eat. One friend suggested In-N-Out, she figured it was well liked and even the guy who is vegetarian would be in on it as he liked it on Facebook (she remembered). The vegetarian in the group strongly preferred not to go there and wanted an option with better vegetarian offerings. When he was asked why he put a Facebook Like on it he said, "I like hanging out with my friends there as it makes them happy, but I usually have eaten before, or will after. Now I am hungry and wish to eat, so I really prefer something other than In-N-Out." This triggered everybody talking about their doing similar things with Like in Facebook, which really didn't mean they liked what they clicked "Like" on.

Facebook Like, much like the often problematic star ratings, adds more ambiguity (or another value point that has no clear meaning that can be reliably used for search or predictors). My favorite recommendations from Facebook are those similar to "Those who like food also like sleep.", which gives me the option to like sleep. (We can cure cancer if we keep this intelligent thinking up.)

What is Next? The Past!

So, if this augmented ambiguity from using Facebook Like in search is problematic leads you to think, "What is better?" Well, a look back to 2005 or 2006 at Yahoo! is a very good place to start. Somewhere in this timeframe Yahoo Search did something smart, no freakishly smart (actually connecting two things together that made a giant difference for search). Yahoo! had its own social bookmarking service "My Web", which was somewhat similar to Delicious (which Yahoo acquired). The second version of MyWeb (MyWeb2) made it easy to see one's own bookmarks that you yourself tagged in your own context, your friends bookmarks they had tagged with their tag terms in their context, and everybody's. Yahoo! incorporated the tags and social connections from MyWeb2 into their search. This dramatically improved the search, if you were using MyWeb2 and particularly if you had stated people you were connected to.

At this point Yahoo! not only caught up to Google but passed it by a large margin for me. Why? Google was very good at finding good results, often good enough. Yahoo! with MyWeb2 built in and using my 60 to 70 people I was connected to started surfacing exactly what I was looking for. This was happening regularly. This was search Nirvana. Let's step back slightly to understand why.

Proper Social Understandings Improve Search Precision

One of the interesting things about people tagging content to store it in services like MyWeb2 or Delicious (or any other folksonomy tagging service) is people almost alway only tag things they have interest in. Based on the assumption (which holds up well) that people hold on to thing they like, but when they drift from that they usually will add tags that state that deference.

Search is difficult because of contextual influences and ambiguity. Having tagging done by people whom you know can help with that contextualization. People whom you know having tagged things around what you are seeking and use the terms in similar manner to the way you do has value. Well, no not really, it has insanely great value. The key is sorting out similar affinities (as close as possible) and similar term use helps to further remove ambiguity, which becomes clearer when you can parse things through the lens of a granular social network. With just 60 to 70 people my world of search was turned upside down in a very positive way. All search results that had been bookmarked and tagged by people I was connected to were annotated with their their name and often tags.

This giant step forward for Yahoo! did not last long as after a few months the experiment was over and Yahoo search returned to being not as helpful as Google search, which is just good enough.

The Yahoo experiment was not perfect, but it was much closer than most anything else to that point. Holding it back was the lack of people you were connected to. The more people you were connected to, to some degree, was helpful. Also, very few people knew about this experiment (it didn't seem like an experiment at the time, as it seemed it could only grow, but Yahoo really didn't seem to know how to get the word out or talk about this value, it was an information geek thing (yes, I could fall into that grouping). But, the piece missing that would have been most helpful, was the ability to garden and craft your relationships to those with whom you connected.

The gardening and contextualizing those with whom you are connected is really powerful. It doesn't need to be publicly exposed but the tools and service can make giant leaps forward if we have this. Most of this contextualization is assumed by tools and services, but having explicit crafting takes the guessing out. Being able to add fuzzy (roughly defined) semantic terms to attract what you value from that person closer while keeping the things of less of value at bey, can be helpful. This is core to the model of attraction (draft) idea that has been my frame for much around me for years. Being able to tag or annotate "Jim" with cycling, food, social search, design, and baseball will help search bring things roughly related to those topics or terms close to me, but may not give as high of relevance for his passion for early 1990s dot matrix printers nor Hobbits.

Next Step?

The next step for this as in terms of products and services also has happened. An enterprise social bookmarking service, Connectbeam (now gone) took the next step (Lotus Dogear, now Lotus Bookmarks in their Connections tools is somewhat similar) by bringing this same social tagging into the work environment and then surfacing that added value into search results. What set Connectbeam apart from others doing similar efforts was it helped people understand the social components better than most. They had some really good social interaction designs around the connecting people, that really started to get at some of the tough nuances that are really hard to crack outside the early adopter types using service (only 5 to 15% of most orgs will fall into that early adopter mindset, the rest are really lost with this). This crafting and understanding social interactions allowed Connectbeam to have the potential to drastically improve search, (search is a very expensive and painful proposition at every organization I have run across). The social interactions needed for comfort, familiarity, and producing value is central to getting any service right, but the hurdle is big but there is a large positive value if you get that right for social tagging. Sadly, Scuttle and thin not well thought through attempts at social tagging really do not add to much either.

Spending time to understand the keys to getting it right and selecting tools that do it well or working with vendors to get there will pay off.

On Fire with Social Progressions

When talking with organizations about social tools and logical social flows for information from ideas all the way to formal outcomes (white papers, process docs, product enhancement requirement documents, etc.) there have always been stated steps. Some of these steps have different incarnations and labels, depending on how things are done conventionally. But, there is a usual natural progression of how these flow that is rather common and universal across organization types (formal or not).

To these progression points there are classes/types of tools or services that map well to these, but very rarely is it one tool/service set crosses these, but whether it is all tools/services under one umbrella application or distinctly different instances, they really should be linked and integrated as seamlessly as possible.

The steps in the social progression are as follow:

Personal

The first step or home base, is more of a state for beginning, is the the personal space and repository. Sadly, this is the ugly step child that is very often missed in many tools/service offerings. The place were a person has a view of their resources, which is mapped in their context and needed representations to make sense with the least effort. This is the view with things they need to see surface (from their perspective and from others) and from where they jump to interacting with information, objects, tasks, and others.

Sparks (Ideas Shared)

The first step often comes from asking questions simply and easily and quick easy responses, or sharing quick notes and ideas that get feedback and interest. Many times this is done efficiently in micro sharing services like similar to Twitter but with a grasp of needs organizations have (Socialtext Signals or Socialcast are solid options to consider). But, other options, including blogs and discussion forums have the capability of doing this as well.

With sparks of ideas they need to have the ability to be found so to be responded to, aggregated, or even shared to ensure the right people see them and can interact. There is a wide breadth of types of things that flow through micro sharing services, but many will resonate, inform, or inspire others. But, quite often they get solid conversations flowing across a broad cross section of people and locations.

Campfire (Gathering of Others with Interest)

From the spark of inspiration many others with interest or affinity gather to discuss and the spark turns into a campfire. Stories are told and fuel is added to the fire. Honing of the ideas and gather inspiration, information, and content from broad sources and view is then curated and honed to some degree.

The tools needed for the campfire stage must allow from much broader conversation than the limited spark stage. Limiting the room around the campfire to those with strong interest and affinity helps keep the focus, but also these people will likely have the deepest reserves of fodder for the conversation and a wide variety of perspectives and resources they can tap ready at hand. Longer conversation and curating all that is gathers are the prime focus. Curation through tagging is often incredibly helpful (being able to tag so to aggregate and curate ideas from the sparks stage is highly important).

Bonfire (Broader Interest Gathering)

Once the ideas have been fleshed out and framed to some degree and curated to control scope the discussion turns into a bonfire. Bonfires, while much larger still need to be controlled and maintained or they get out of control and things get dangerous. At this stage broad viewing for healthy feedback and discussion, including highlighting things that have been missed, what works well, what doesn't work well, etc. are the key focus. This is the time to get understanding and direction that hones and shapes everything that is possible. It is also used to add to what has been gathered and curated in the campfire stage so to iterate on it.

Torch (Honing for Broad Use & Replication)

Lastly, is the torch stage. This is easy to handle, easy to replicate, and is safe. This requires Real Collaboration to work through the conflicting ideas and negotiate as well as intelligently work toward one final output. These final outputs can be white papers, new processes, new guidelines, new products, etc. But, the point is there is one (just like artists collaborating on a statue there is only one statue, not many and all through differences have been worked through to one salient solution).

5 Enterprise 2.0 Myth Mantras that Must Die

This week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston was quite good. It is one of the few conference I still won't miss. The conference is a good mix of vendors, implementers, and those who live with those results while working hard to improve upon this. This conference is a great place to talk with people who working through the gaps in Enterprise 2.0 tools and services, but still finding great improvements in their company from these tools and services.

Enterprise 2.0 tools and services comprise many different types of offerings that help groups of people share, communicate, interact, and even get to real collaboration. One big question in the halls outside the sessions was "Why is this all lacking standards? Why can't we choose best tools for our needs and get them in integrate?" This question is straight of of the content management system early days as well, but that ended up a rather huge mess with no picking and choosing of the best solutions for your needs from various vendors and easily assembling them together. The customers lost their bid to get best of breed for to solve their problems and have had to settle for mediocre components all from one vendor (nobody is happy with their CMS and never has been, we really must not repeat this bad pattern again). Right now Enterprise 2.0 has a variety of choices with some really good options depending on what a customer's need is (sadly too few educate the customer on what is really needed before they purchase).

On of the frustrating things at Enterprise 2.0 Conference this go around was there are still myth mantras that echo the podiums and halls. They really need to stop as they have never been proven to be right and are often proven to be incorrect (many times shown to be wildly incorrect). The last two years at Enterprise 2.0 Conferences (as well as other conferneces) I was presenting these myths and getting the whole room giving giant nods in agreement and standing up after in Q&A why people still make these statements. Part of the problem is the statements have been said so often they must be true (mantra), but as presenters we really must check these things not just repeat. Quite often this leads to disgruntled customers who make up, what Stewart Mader calls the "one year club", which are organizations that hit the 6 month to one year mark and have giant lessons learned from their tools and services, but wish somebody let them know this stuff up front.

So here are the mantra myths that bug me the most that have no foundation and when presented with any real world examples or research they are quickly (and always) disproven:

Millennials Needing and Leading the Way

Myth: It is believed that it is the Millennials (those recently out of university and roughly 22 to 27 years old) that are expecting or demanding these social tools.

Reality: Every year at Enterprise 2.0 Conference, since 2007, there are one or more sessions where this myth gets debunked. In the last 5 years or so I have never been in or talked to an organization what had actually ever had this request from Millennials (over 50 organizations at this point). In fact any Millennial that has been in any meeting I have been part of in an organization has stated very strongly, they can't find any reason for using the tools in the organization and they don't know anybody their age who thinks that either. They do think the existing tools (ECM, Portals, e-mail, etc. are absolutely horrid and nearly impossible to use). Often it is people in their late 30s to late 50s who see the solid value in these social tools inside the organization as solutions for the painful and unproductive tools they are forced to use.

In 2007 it was a lesson's learned panel that the panelist from Motorola claimed very few of their younger employees used the tools they put in place and challenged the other panelist to state differently and they could not do so. In 2008 it the same thing came up in a couple panels, one of which was Oracle's User Experience session which was heavy on the research they put into building their own tools and services. Oracle researchers were initially surprised that there were very few young workers who could understand why they would have these tools at work, but they found those older knew the need to more easily share, aggregate, curate, and collaborate with others. Most of these older workers found that their existing tools were keeping them from getting their work done efficiently, and some times keeping them from getting it done at all.

Another perspective that I found insanely helpful in thinking through this is talking with university professors who use social tools (blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, etc.) as part of their class participation. Most professors (not in computer sciences or information sciences) have a common experience in that their students fall get graded on in-class participation, homework, and digital tool participation and nearly all do well in one or two of the three, but almost none do well in all three. Different people have different comfort zones and strengths, so the teachers have been learning to grade accordingly to balance for this.

Web 2.0 as a Guide

Myth: Often people make the link from Web 2.0 to Enterprise 2.0 stating we must follow this path which is successful.

Reality: This myth is problematic as organization look at Web 2.0 services and want exactly what is on the web. The problem with this is they often see the Web 2.0 tools as successful because they have a few million people using them. To most people 20 million people looks like a lot, or 50 million, or even 500 million. But with well over 1 billion people on the web around the globe, these numbers get put in to rather small percentages. Even with Facebook's 500 million or so, we still don't have 100% adoption.

When I have been dealing with Enterprise 2.0 "one year club" customers (and potential customers) they are often very disappointed with their low adoption (they were some how dreaming of millions of users inside the firewall of their 30k employee organization). Nearly every time they had out performed the Web 2.0 tools with percentage adoption, but that is not comforting.

What Web 2.0 does is provide a glimpse of much easier to use services and tools to get the job done. Sadly most Web 2.0 sites have been honed and incrementally improved on early adopters, who are not representative of the remaining 90% to 95% of the population. The reality of Enterprise 2.0 is that organizations are comprised of everybody (the mainstream and the ear) and they are a fixed population (for the most part) and great strides have been made with many vendor's tools that enable their offerings to be used by much higher percentages of the population. We all still need to work with vendors to get this ease of use and mapping to the wide variety of needs and depths of use.

No Training is Needed

Myth: Often you hear no training is needed because the tools are so easy, or its related mantra "if you build it they will come".

Reality: Similar the ease of use mentions in the Web 2.0 myth above, the enterprise 2.0 tools are much easier to use than the really complex and human unfriendly tools many organizations have through out. While the older tools usually require days of training, 500 page binders, and a lot of bullet point ridden presentations. The Enterprise 2.0 tools still require training, but the training is much much lighter. The training is hours (usually if it is more than 2 or 3 hours you may have the wrong tools or the wrong training) not days.

Many organizations are now complaining that they have spent incredible amounts of information for a enterprise wide portal or enterprise content management (ECM) tool. But the tools are so complex that they have an insanely small number of people in their organization that are trained well enough to add or manage content. Many organizations are looking to Enterprise 2.0 tools to get information out of people's heads easily and shared with others (as one of many uses and valuable solutions the tools and services provide).

90-9-1

Myth: Many people believe that one percent create content, nine percent modify and interact with that content, and 90 percent just consume that information and are passive.

Reality: Sometimes this myth gets attributed to Bradley Horowitz presentations while he was at Yahoo! that used these percentages as estimates inside a pyramid. He often has said he wished he never put numbers in it as they numbers are not accurate and the percentages can be flipped and still be correct.

Any organization that deploys social tools, iterates them to improve to people's needs, and has community leadership almost always finds these adoption rates grow over time. Some organizations many organizations get 5% to 20% adoption and active use in the first year. Over two years this grows to be much more. E-mail saw nearly similar patterns and took 5 to 7 years to reach about 99% adoption. But, the best example is the BBC's greater than 110 percent adoption over 7 years, but as Euan Semple explains part of this is the employee base of BBC shrunk durning that time, but it still makes the 90-9-1 myth look horribly foolish (I know many companies grade their potential consultants on use of this myth and if stated they are immediately dropped a few ranking points).

In 1996 I was working for a legal professional organization and one of my roles was running their private professional Compuserve forums. They had been using Compuserve 2 years or so by the time I worked there, but they were already above 40 percent of the 3,000 members were on the service. Of those using Compuserve more than 50% were actively participating. We were finding those with 6 to 18 months of were actively contributing at a 60% or higher rate. Every intranet forum or groupware service I have run, built, managed, or iterated in jobs since has followed similar patterns, so that is 14 years of living with the reality that the 90-9-1 is a myth and all the lessons learned during that time as well.

People are Becoming Openly Social

Myth: People are moving to being more openly social as years go by. This is also tied to the youth myth (this combination myth really doesn't hold up at all either).

Reality: In every organization the adoption and broad use of social tools is almost always tied to closed groups, but we know those are problematic as information is shared but is can be nearly impossible to access and use. Right up there is the nearly global understanding that services that are openly shared to all in the organization by default (or only option) have very low adoption. There is no better way to hinder adoption than to opt for all interactions to be openly shared.

This follows the understanding had pounded into me over the last 14 years and lead to the rethinking of all of the social interaction models I used and knew of (particularly from Web 2.0) and started from scratch, with one of the results being Elements of the social software stack. I used stack because there is a distinct order to how people progress through sharing information and one of the most important parts is having action (blogging, annotating, tagging, notes, etc.) followed by the decision how broadly you want to share it. Most tools have this backwards by choosing the tool or action you have set how broadly it will be shared. Community managers who have pushed to have this switched or to have the capability to not share everything by default have seen the adoption rates jump drastically. These same community managers are usually rather angry that nobody put them onto this basic understanding earlier.

Many who use this myth mantra point to Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook as their proof. But, Facebook data doesn't seem to support Zuckerberg's assumptions, in fact it is quite the opposite. Many of the social computing researchers who work with this and similar data (danah boyd and Fred Stuzman among others) find there are no trends at all toward opening up social and in fact there are solid trends in the opposite direction in the past 3 to 5 years.

Fixing the Myth Mantras

We really need to stop using these myths and start surfacing all of the evidence that runs counter to all of these myths. I keep thinking these myths have died as there are so many people sharing their research, experiences, and evidence to these myths. But, some it seems many don't have experiences of their own and are still finding it viable to surface these myths as they sound good.

The reality of all of this is people use the Enterprise 2.0 tools when they are well understood, the social realities and complexities are understood to help form solutions that fill the gaps in the problems that organizations face, and we all more forward faster. We need to focus on the realities not the false myth mantras so we all get smarter and can all start addressing the real hurdles while embracing real advances that are out there.

Understanding the Cost of We Can't Find Anything

One problem I often hear when talking with any organization about new solutions is understanding the cost and inefficiency of their existing way solutions, processes, or general way of doing things. In the past year or two I have used various general measurements around search to help focus the need for improvement not only on search, but the needed information and metadata needed to improve search.

We Can't Find Anything

There is nothing more common that I hear from an organization about their intranet and internal information services than, "We can't find anything." (Some days I swear this is the mantra that must be intoned for an organization to become real.)

There are many reasons and potential solutions for improving the situation. Some of these involve improved search technologies, some improved search interfaces, or But, understanding the cost of this inefficiency is where I find it is valuable to start.

The first step after understanding you have this problem is to measure it, but most organizations don't want to pay for that they are just looking for solutions (we all know how this turns out). The best method I find is walking through the broad understandings of the cost of inefficiencies.

The Numbers...

At Interop 2009 I presented "Next Generation Search: Social Bookmarking and Tagging". This presentation started off with a look at the rough numbers behind the cost of search in the enterprise (see the first 16 slides). [I presented a similar presentation at the SharePoint Saturday DC event this past week, but evaluated SharePoint 2010's new social tagging as the analysis focus.]

Next Generation Search: Social Bookmarking and Tagging

View more presentations from Thomas Vander Wal.

Most of the numbers come from Google white papers on search, which gets some of their numbers from an IDC white paper. I also have a white paper that was never published and is not public that has slightly more optimistic numbers, based on the percentage of time knowledge workers search (16% rather than the Google stated ~25% of a knowledge workers time is spent searching). There are a few Google white papers, but the Return on Information: adding to your ROI with Google Enterprise Search from 2009 is good (I do not endorse the Google Search Appliance, but am just using the numbers used to state the problem).

I focus on being optimistic and have I yet to run into an organization that claims to live up to the optimistic numbers or total cost of inefficiency.

• Few organization claim they have 80 percent of or better success with employees finding what they need through search
• That is 80 percent success rate
• Or, 1 in 5 searches do not find what is they were seeking
• A sample organization with 500 searches per day has 100 failures
• An average knowledge worker spends 16% of their time searching
• 16% of a 40 hour work week is 1.25 hours spent searching
• 20% (spent with unsuccessful searches) of 1.25 hours a week is 15 minutes of inefficient productivity
• At an average salary of $60,000 per year that leads to $375 per person of inefficient productivity
• Now take that $375 per knowledge worker and multiply it by how many knowledge workers you have in an organization and the costs mount quickly
• An organization with 4,500 knowledge workers is looking at a inefficiency cost of $1,687,500 per year.
• Now keep in mind your knowledge workers are you most efficient at search
• Many organizations as a whole are running at 40% to 70% success rate for search

We Know We Have a Costly Problem

This usually is enough to illustrate there is a problem and gap with spending time resolving. The first step is to set a baseline inside your organization. Examine search patterns, look at existing taxonomies (you have them and use them to some degree, yes?) and work to identify gaps, look at solutions like tagging (folksonomy) to validate the taxonomy and identify gaps (which also gives you the terms that will likely close that gap). But get a good understanding of what you have before you take steps. Also understand the easy solutions are never easy without solid understanding.

Evaluating what, if any taxonomy you have is essential. Understand who is driving the taxonomy development and up keep. Look at how to get what people in the organization are seeking in the words (terms) they use intend to find things (this is often far broader than any taxonomy provides).

The S Word - A Repsonse

Inspired by Andrew McAfee's post, The S Word about the use of "social" when talking to enterprise businesses, I am sharing my response I posted in the comments.

I have run into the connotation of social as a term that has associative connotations to the hippy movement (the slide image Andrew uses with his presentations), socialist (non-capatalist or anti-capitalist tendencies), redundant term to use with business, and more. While most of the people who I engage with inside organizations do not have the negative connotations of social, there is normally a senior manager with ability to veto a project or put it under great scrutiny who has such connotations. I hear many people say that it may be easier to get these individuals to change their definition, but that is as naive as saying they can get a Boston Red Sox fan to believe the New York Yankees are a lovable baseball team. This transformation is rarely possible, thanks to the Cold War, 60s anti-establishment, and years of reinforcing the associations of the term social to strongly negative connotations.

The response to Andrew's post (edited and slightly tweaked):

-----

The Problem with Social (the Term)

I deeply agree with the core problem of the use of the term social and its resonance inside businesses. The problem with social has a few facets to it, but using collaboration is just as if not more problematic.

The pairing of Social with enterprise or business is a bit redundant, as business by its nature is social with meetings, interactions, and communications at the core of what a company does to provide its products and/or services. Business is also social in how it interacts with its customers and potential customers. What has been problematic over the years (many tens of years) is technology has been less than optimal in mapping to how humans are social into technologies, which inhibits optimal social interactions inside and outside an organization. Communication and the efficiency of around this focal point is essential to understand and optimize around.

This often leads me to use social software, social tools, or social computing as a means to distinguish the tools that better map to how humans, in their life and work, need to interact with others. These optimized tools and services with lower levels of friction most often lead to greater efficiency. Distinguishing between tools and services that get in the way of eking out tacit knowledge to ones that ease this activity is essential, particularly in how it is shared, found, and used in the practice of an organization.

Having done this mapping, I usually find leaving social out of the rest of the conversation. Focusing on technology pain points and the inefficiencies inherent in many of the normal enterprise tools for communications and group interactions is where the focus belongs and how these newer classes of tools and services help resolve these problems.

Putting business (or enterprise) and social in close proximity is not only redundant, but rather lacking in insight into how businesses think of the term social at their core (normally the upper management and finance areas). The term social business is used within some circles of economics and finance as a euphemism for those industry segments often related with escorts and prostitution. Other understanding of the pairing of social enterprise, is in Europe with ethical and green policies as in the Social Enterprise Alliance, As well, the definition of social business in Wikipedia, as of 14 December 2009 states, "A social business is a non-loss, non-dividend company designed to address a social objective." All of these reinforce the use of social known connotations of social in business, which have very different intent than the discussion within the context of enterprise 2.0.

The solutions all of these energy is being put toward is not solving problems with business being social, but business tools and services they use as inhibiting the social interactions that are needed to most efficiently exist and survive. While not optimal, social software and social computing are rarely put into the contexts that just social or social business/enterprise conger up. Keeping understanding on a straight path and communications flowing as intended it is good to be clear and understand what what terms bring up. Many if not most organizations are currently looking into or deploying social business and/or social enterprise initiative along the lines of the Grameen Bank and reducing carbon footprint connotations these terms have been connected to in many recent years.

Collaboration as a Fuzzy Term

The second large problem is collaboration, which is equally if not more problematic. Collaboration is often a used a broad lazy term for any things were people work, interact, or share information. Denning and Yaholkovsky in regularly point out the severe problems with the broad use of the term collaboration and often focus on the term "real collaboration" to bring the focus of collaboration back to the original concept of people working together to accomplish a common goal and for a unified result, as in artist collaborating on creating a statue (not many versions, but one). I know you, Andrew, grasp this really well.

Over and over I see many organizations buying "collaboration" tools with out sorting out what sort of group or shared activity problem they are trying to solve or the type of services/tools that are needed to fill the gap. Often the collaboration tool is not matched to the problem space and need, which then needs framing the various types of interactions, collections, sharing, curating, co-creation, etc. that are there. The types of tools, interaction design, and solutions are different for each type of activity and one size does not fit all (I am continually amazed how foreign this is to many).

What do we call it? That is a tough problem as many of the terms are not precise and/or come with much baggage. Currently, we do not have a term with currency that fits the need perfectly.

Why I Do...

One question I continually get from many in the web design and dev community is, “Why do you spend so much time focusing on things inside the firewall? You know all the cool stuff is happening out on the open web.”

At times I get tired of answering that, but most who know me most of my 20 years doing dev and design work around tech tools and services has been on tools and services inside the firewall. While I love the web and the innovations that happen there and things get worked out early there, inside is where I see the real value.

Real Value

Having a fascination with economics and the “pure flow of information...” mantra I highly value information and the tools and services that provide the value chain of data, information, and knowledge. These digital tools were not the easiest things to work with for many people and it has always been a passion to have the tools and services work better. More optimally, so people could have better access to information so to help them make smarter decisions around things that matter(should we find a new supplier, do we have a problem, do I need a coat, does our packaging need to be weather resistant, etc.).

What matters and what is work and what is personal is a very blurry line, but having the information and ease to access it so we are smarter in making decisions it the key. It comes down to efficiency, which is highly related to ease of use.

Real Populations

What fascinates me most with inside the firewall and always has is the need to understand how people use (can’t use) the tools that have been built or deployed for their use. Things that are seemingly logical and intuitive from the developer and designer’s viewpoints are not on target with those in the organizations. When I started working managing, maintaining, building, and improving the tools and services people use it was inside the firewall as the web did not exist yet and the internet was still in its nascent stages, even if it had been around for 20 years already.

The groups of people I working with needed to use these tools and services to perform their job as the paper and non-technical means of performing their tasks were replaced by computers or were never possible with out the power of digital computations. What was true then with dealing with the populations of co-workers and others inside an organization using the the tools and services is still true now, success of a product is measured by its percentage of use from those who must use it, efficiencies gained, lack of bugs, and improved time to complete tasks.

Web projects seemed to lose these values as it was easy (relatively) to get a few thousand, hundred thousand, or few million (over time) using a product or service. But, those services were only a small slice of the population, even a small slice of the population who needed a service like the one being offered.

Real Social

In the last five to eight years or so that truth around small slices of the populations using tools and services is never more relevant than around the flood of interest in social web sites and tools. Having built, managed, and iterated on intranet groupware and community tools for tens of thousands of distributed employees and business partners, I had great interest in seeing what happened with social sites on the web.

It was no surprise to me when variants of the web’s social tools and services started coming inside the firewall that adoption was less than optimal, because these social tools were being honed and iterated on early adopters and assumptions that are very counter to the majority of the population (some 90% are outside of this early adopter trend using the tools).

Early on I learned the easiest means of getting adoption with tools and services is to emulate who things are done by people without technology mediating the tasks or flows. Regarding social interactions these is never more true.

Most of the social tools are not very social in the way that the majority of people are social. This is very problematic inside an organization because businesses and organizations are social by nature and must be to have any success. People must be social and interact with each other inside the organization (meetings, reviews, research, sharing findings, etc.) as well as to the outside with their customers and clients.

What many of these social tools, and business tools in general, have done is add friction to social interactions that are required by businesses to survive. These newer class of tools are moving towards emulating true human social interactions more closely, but we still have a long long way to go. Where the social web tools have fallen down is focussing on the early adopters, but in reality that is core group of people who come to these sites and services (services like AOL, Yahoo, and Facebook have over the years broken into more mainstream customer bases, but the customers are most often not using the really new “cool” stuff).  The lessons learned from most web social services often don’t work well inside organizations as they are not lessons learned from a full broad population, like the ones inside an organization.

Real Needs

Businesses and organizations have real needs for these social tools, as their organizations are quite inefficient and they know it. They know the value that these tools can bring and many have experimented with these tools in the past year or few, but have been stumped by lack of use and adoption.

Organizations are forever trying to optimally capture what they know (hence knowledge management interest), get information out easily to those who need it (portals), connect employees to each other (groupware), connect to customers and business partners more easily (B2B tools), and better connect the company to its employees (HR tools). All of these have received incredible funding and effort over the years. Some have decent payoffs to the organization (return on investment (ROI)), but rarely are they the large successes that had been promised or hoped for.  One of the big reasons is the tools got in the way.

Real Solutions

Getting the tools out of the way and allowing for people to interact as needed and as is comfortable is where success lies for tools and services in organizations. This is why I am passionate about this area and why I like focusing inside as not only do I see real solutions lurking in what has been done in what is called Web 2.0, but business and organizations see that same.

What is needed is using the understanding of organizations, the new tools, and marrying that to how real people are social and interact so to get to real optimal solutions.