Ben Parr gets credit for my favorite comment: If you think of social media from a tool perspective, you’re going to be the tool…
From Online Slang Dictionary
Many great ideas and comments during the panel, but the tool one most vividly rang true to my systems savvy focus. The idea is that you shouldn’t focus on the technology. The technology is just one piece of the system. Whether your goal is enterprise marketing, personal branding, collaboration for project work or innovation; the technology is the medium, not the message. The panelists kept returning to “know your goal,” “know your audience,” (both where your audience is in the giant social media ecosystem and their skills and preferences), then work to develop organizational or personal practices, leveraging the technology, to reach your goal.
It was a great panel. We covered each of the topics mentioned above and could have talked for hours more. You can see the Twitter stream here and I’ll post a link to the video when it’s available. Would love to hear from people who were in the audience. Feel free to comment below.
Now you can discover, create, and share Microsoft Office documents with your Facebook friends. Built using Microsoft Office 2010 – Docs for Facebook provides the best possible document service for the Facebook environment. Seamless integration with Facebook means that the service is all about sharing your documents. Finally docs can be friendly too!
For me, this is all about going where my audience/teammates are. Technology is a tool and Microsoft and Facebook just gave me a new one. How I use the tool depends on the people (where they are and their skill set), and the organizational policies and procedures. TOP Management (technology, organization, and people) means I take all three into account as we build a workspace for a project. The idea of workspace is used broadly here, and will only get broader as time goes on.
The tricky part is how the rest of the world views “workspace.”
I’ve asked undergrad students if they use Facebook in support of homework or projects. The blank stares were interesting. I think the Doc.com/FB integration may change things. Not sure if students will like the work/social crossover, but I expect it will be a benefit in giving them a better space in which to work. No more missing the revision request because you’re on Facebook, it will find you there.
What about our corporate workspace? Many companies block Facebook and other social media sites. Rumor has that some even block sites that provide the option to use Facebook Connect as a logon – whether or not the user tries to use Facebook Connect. How do we, can we, separate a communication platform from its social uses? Consider this:
Play at work is substantively interesting in its own right. It also has obvious management implications. Some organizations prohibit employees from using electronic mail for “nonwork purposes,” presumably because such uses would consume network resources such as disk space and would interfere with peoples’ work activities. Conceivably extracurricular electronic groups might distract employees from their jobs and thereby reduce both the quality of their work and their affiliation with the organization. Alternatively such groups could ultimately increase the quality of work through providing new information resources and increase affiliation with the organization through providing new opportunities for employees to discover things they have in common with other employees. (Finholt & Sproull, 1990, pdf)
Yes, we’ve been working on these issues for over 20 years. It’s not an issue of email, Facebook, or whatever comes next, but rather how people and organizations design their workspace and work process either behind walls (physical or metaphorical) or not. The most powerful organizations will use all the tools at their disposal and they will help employees understand how to be productive – wherever they are and with whatever tools they have. Perhaps we need to demonstrate our systems savvy and systems responsibility to be earn this flexibility? Suggestions or examples of how to do this?
Yesterday was the beginning and the end of the DARPA Network Challenge. MIT’s Red Balloon Challenge Team won in less than 9 hours. (Press Release pdf) DARPA tested the power of social networking and found it powerful. According to CNN, DARPA will be interviewing the participating teams to understand how they built their networks, motivated participation, and collected their information. Realize that false positives were an issue (certainly you can ask people what they see — but how do you know if you can believe them?)
To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA has announced the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems.
The challenge is to be the first to submit the locations of 10 moored, 8-foot, red, weather balloons at 10 fixed locations in the continental United States. The balloons will be in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roads.
…and I missed seeing any of them (one was in San Francisco’s Union Square — so I had a shot).
The MIT strategy focused on the viral creation of a social network of support:
Sign Up, Invite Your Friends, Help Science, Win Money! We’re giving $2000 per balloon to the first person to send us the correct coordinates, but that’s not all — we’re also giving $1000 to the person who invited them. Then we’re giving $500 whoever invited the inviter, and $250 to whoever invited them, and so on…
It might play out like this. Alice joins the team, and we give her an invite link like http://balloon.media.mit.edu/alice. Alice then e-mails her link to Bob, who uses it to join the team as well. We make a http://balloon.media.mit.edu/bob link for Bob, who posts it to Facebook. His friend Carol sees it, signs up, then twitters about http://balloon.media.mit.edu/carol. Dave uses Carol’s link to join… then spots one of the DARPA balloons! Dave is the first person to report the balloon’s location to us, and the MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team is the first to find all 10. Once that happens, we send Dave $2000 for finding the balloon. Carol gets $1000 for inviting Dave, Bob gets $500 for inviting Carol, and Alice gets $250 for inviting Bob. The remaining $250 is donated to charity.
Brilliant.
Motivation: For you, your friends, for charity
Opportunity: The MIT Red Balloon homepage was built to easily accept the finds), DARPA made sure they weren’t hidden in invisible locations
Ability: MIT gave clear hints about how to do this — invite your friends (why didn’t anyone invite me?!), use Twitter, Facebook
Yes, this was a social networking story — but you can also look deeper to understand the value in the MIT approach. They didn’t just rely on social networking, they practiced TOP Management. Technology: They built a solid website enabled to take in exactly the information they needed and then certainly had some technical processing to manage and evaluate that data. Organization: They created clear organizational practices – “This is how to organize your friends,” “this is how you get paid.” People: They used tried and true foundations around the management of human performance — Motivation, Opportunity, Ability.
Well done! Other insights into MIT’s process (or those of any of the other teams’) appreciated.
I don’t generally make futurist-style statements, but the last two days are begging for one: A big piece of Web 3.0 is going to be the transition from “Live in your In-Box” to “Live in your Browser.” The quote “I live in my in-box” came from a participant in a workshop I co-presented with Scott Schnaars of Socialtext. We were talking about the value and methods of moving from an email centric workflow to one more focused on portals and collaboration workspaces (building from my Kill Email post). The idea isn’t that the work we do while “in our in-box” isn’t valuable — it is real work: we are often communicating about projects, ideas, etc. The idea is that the in-box work carries with it more overhead than the same work would if it were done within a project workspace.
Moving into your browser may be a more efficient place to be, and Gen Y may be there ahead of us. Gen Y doesn’t have to unlearn our (Baby Boomer) email habits.
The other event that pushed me to join the futurists was a discussion I had with Caleb Carter, CEO and Founder of ExistInts. ExistInts joins Google, Facebook, and many others in trying to provide you with a new web home. ExistInts adds a local flavor, while also striving to cross work and social boundaries — smart as many of us have woven our work and social networks and activities together already. Having a “home” that is built to support that model makes sense.
The organizational question is what is the right level? Your social network does provide you work value, and vice versa. These are going to be tied together in our workspace. Should organizations be building portal homes at a company level or at the level of the project? Should individuals be building their own portal homes with rooms for work and play?
I feel like we are at the stage of construction where the ground has been cleared and the materials are beginning to arrive. Google is gearing up (pun intended) with Google Wave and the Chrome OS:
We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.
.. while smaller firms like Socialtext and ExistInts are providing purpose-built capabilities.
We all need to consider what’s going to make the best neighborhood and architecture for getting our work done. I’m sure it’s going to be in the browser. Have you already moved? In my case, I think I’ve moved, but haven’t completely unpacked. Email still makes up the majority of my work communication and my organization has not yet taken the big step to a web-based workflow. Suggestions appreciated from those of you who’ve moved, unpacked, and finished putting up your pictures.
A few weeks ago I ran across this IdeasProject video of Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur. He opens with descriptions of how sharing changes everything — sharing versus protecting your ideas. Good points, but he really hooked me when he talked about the value of sharing ideas with social media friends, and how this gives you instant access to their thinking:
It has already changed the way I think. I feel like I live in a room, which is across the world, but I can just call a friend and there will always be someone to answer one of my questions, as long as I share as well with them. It’s two ways. It’s about living in a world with a community that can help you….
It changed me completely. I cannot think alone anymore. I need to think with my friends, all the time.
I think you can extend these ideas to blogging and other public writing. I blog and tweet to think with my friends (join with them in a virtual conversation). I gain from their comments as Loic mentions, and I benefit by having the goal of framing my thinking to join with that of my friends. Psychologists describe this as the “cognitive benefits of teaching.”
The opportunity to microblog, blog, and/or post to Facebook all also have the benefit of being motivational. My friend Leslie Coff and I were talking Monday about how we are often inspired by our friends to write a particular post. For her it is when she has had multiple similar questions from her patients (she’s an amazing acupuncturist and provides a blog as additional outreach). For me, it’s often when I’ve heard similar questions from my students or business colleagues. Our friends can inspire a more thoughtful response than we might be able to give that the end of an appointment or in a quick question and answer period. We are inspired to think, to think for the benefit of our friends, and hopefully for the benefit of engaging in a conversation on the topic.
Do you have time to tweet, blog, or post to Facebook? How do you not have time? If your job is to have ideas, and/or to find ways to share ideas, then enlisting your friends in the work — even if only by giving you a virtual audience — can speed the thought process. I also find great value in documenting my thought process. It took a while for me to be willing to share my alpha drafts with the world. As Loic says later in his interview, “The new way of doing it is getting feedback from the very beginning.” This has its risks, as Loic notes: your friends may tell you you’re wrong, your competition may see what your up to — but the benefits to your thinking win out.
My goal is to share observations about the perceptions and use of technology in organizations. My foremost audience is my students, but I hope colleagues and clients will find it interesting as well. I take a broad view of technology -- sometimes as broad as the Greek root implies. Terri L. Griffith, Ph.D.
