Tag Archives: social media

When Social Media Meets Social Intranet Part 3

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Continued from When Social Media Meets Social Intranet Part 2

How Social Intranet Delivers Value
Social Intranet is an intranet where all employees can author content and connect easily. Alternatively, you can think of Social Intranet as an internal social media for organisations.

Like Social Media, Social Intranet can provide many values to the organisation. But, mainly, Social Intranet can provide two main values: (1) A Platform for Internal Collaboration; (2) A Means to Reinforce Purpose and to Facilitate Change.

1. A Platform for Internal Collaboration
Internal Collaboration simply means making work “social.” For example, Vodafone, a telecommunication company, uses Social Intranet to boost productivity of their sales team. Before implementation of Social Intranet, the sales people used to handle difficult customers alone. But thanks to Social Intranet, the sales people can exchange tips and best practices on handling difficult customers.

2. A Means to Reinforce Purpose and to Facilitate Change
Social Intranet can also be used to facilitate change. For example, Farm Bureau Bank (FBB) in the United States, uses Social Intranet to communicate top management vision via internal blogs and discussion forums.

Other than blogs and discussion forums, Social Intranet provides a platform to launch a mock “internal social media” campaign. Yammer, one of twitter-like features, can be part of Social Intranet, and this feature can be used to further break down information silos in the organisation because it is essentially a platform for personal branding – which means employees can build their personal brand as they share knowledge via Yammer.

Social Intranet is pretty much like Social Media. A good Social Intranet has features like social networking, tagging, video repository, blogs, ratings, and wikis.

If your organisation is interested in building a social intranet, I have three products to recommend: (1) Microsoft Sharepoint and Yammer; (2) Jive Software; and (3) Thought Farmer. And if your organisation is an SME and can’t afford to invest in a social intranet, your organisation may want to try a free, cloud-based social intranet named bitrix24.

How Social Business Delivers Value

To recap, Social Media offers two values: (1) An effective platform for PR 2.0; and (2) A Platform to Emotionally Connect with Customers. And Social Intranet offers these values: (1) A Platform for Internal Collaboration; and (2) A Means to Reinforce Purpose and to Facilitate Change.

Consolidating values from Social Media and Social Intranet, we can immediately see values that Social Business can deliver: (1) Capability to deliver exceptional customer experience; (2) Collaborate better to improve productivity or to innovate; and (3) Be a more nimble organisation.

Two real-life examples illustrate the value of Social Business:
First, Samsung. By maintaining an active presence in Social Media and having a great Social Intranet, Samsung creates a service innovation called the smart care – which is a one-stop centre for servicing Samsung products.
Second, Xilinx who like Samsung, has an active presence in Social Media and a great Social Intranet. As a result, Xilinx raise engineers’ productivity by 25%.

Last slide. Three key take-away from this talk: (1) Organisations have to be in Social Media; (2) Social Media has to be supported by Social Intranet; and (3) Transform your organisation to be a Social Business to survive in today’s economy. Values are created, no longer through superior product or service, but through premium experience.

This blog post is part 3 of When Social Media Meets Social Intranet. Here are the links to all blog post:

When Social Media Meets Social Intranet Part 2

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Continued from When Social Media Meets Social Intranet Part 1

How Social Media Delivers Value
Social media can deliver many values to organisations. But the two main values are: (1) An effective platform for PR 2.0; (2) A platform to emotionally connect with the customers.

I’m sure you can agree with me that capability to effectively use social media is no longer a choice, because today’s customers are the most difficult customers ever! Today’s customers are citizen journalists – which means customers can voice out their displeasure through social media like blog posts, Facebook posts, or Twitter.

How many of you have heard of a gentleman by the name of Jeff Jarvis? He is a prominent tech blogger who in 2005, wrote a blog post titled: “Dell lies. Dell Sucks.” In the blog post, Jarvis ranted about how poor Dell customer service was, and the blog post attracted over 100 “Me Too” comments. Imagine a simple blog post gets multiplied 100 times.

The Need for Social Media Policy
The first step to ensure that social media delivers value, is to put social media policies in place. The right policies can help to protect the organisation’s reputation from misuse of the social media by the employee.

Let me give you two examples. First, Ashley Payne – a school teacher in the US – was sacked by the school because she posted a photo of herself drinking alcohol in her Facebook. Ashley Payne sued the school for unfair dismissal.

Second, in Singapore context, Straits Times was in hot water recently because a disgruntled employee tweeted profanity using their corporate Twitter account. Regardless of your opinion about the two cases, you don’t want a lawsuit filed against your organisation or your employees abuse the corporate social media account.

Creating social media policy is fast becoming a necessity for organisations. According to research, 47% of Facebook walls contain profanity, but should employers give a darn?

Yes! Absolutely. Because a simple social media policy is often sufficient to prevent the misuse of corporate social media account. Take for example: Ford who came out with a simple social media policy that says: “Play Nice, Be Honest.” But my favorite is Oracle’s social media policy that says: “Employees must establish that all opinions are their own and not Oracle’s, but at the same time, distinguish that they are indeed employees of Oracle.” It’s my favorite because it covers all angle, Singapore’s style.

Let’s return to how social media delivers value.

1. An Effective Platform for PR 2.0
Social media is an effective platform for PR 2.0. Facebook can be used to serve as the corporate magazine to update customers on the latest happenings in the organisation like what Zappos did on their corporate Facebook. Twitter can be used as a broadcasting tool to update customers on the latest products / promotions like what Starbucks did on their corporate Twitter. And Youtube can be used to serve as a repository for corporate videos to convince customers that the product/service is indeed the best out there, just like what Popeye Chicken did on their youtube account.

Furthermore, social media can be used as a means to showcase social proof. For example, Sony used Pinterest as a digital brochure that can showcase the number of likes that a product/service received. The number of likes is a social proof that some customers out there like the product/service.

2. A Platform to Emotionally Connect with the Customers
Social media can also be used as a platform to emotionally connect with the customers. What do I mean by connecting emotionally? A product/service is more than just what it is. A product/service means a tool to improve the standard of living of your customers, i.e. a way to make them happy. Connecting emotionally means highlighting the story behind a product/service, on how a product/service makes the customer happy.

Here are two stories to highlight this point: (1) University of Phoenix tells stories in Youtube about how online degrees improve the standard of living of their students; (2) Tom Shoes tells stories, using a corporate blog, about how the company helps disadvantaged children, in developing world, who have no shoes.

But no matter how well-crafted the social media policy is, and how good the creative content is, social media can still backfires as what McDonald and Nestle found out recently. McDonald’s Twitter campaign to collect positive stories backfires when it was swarmed by negative stories about McDonald’s product. While Nestle’s Facebook campaign backfires when a group of environmentalists posted modified logo of Nestle’s products. It got worse when Nestle staff tried to stop them from doing so.

So what can we do to prevent a social media campaign to turn against what it is intended to be?

Well, first things first, the organisation has to let go of control. There is no method or procedure that can 100% guarantee the success of a social media campaign. The next best thing your organisation can do is to use more of its internal knowledge (i.e. collective intelligence).

Let’s go back on McDonald and Nestle’s case. McDonald could have done better if they test their assumption internally, by conducting a mock internal campaign for example. While Nestle could have done better by testing the replies internally before posting them on their Facebook page. Nestle is so big – some of its staff could be environmentalists and could craft a better response.

So the use of Social Media has to be supported by Social Intranet, because Social Intranet provides a safe haven for testing ideas/assumptions within the organisation. But what is Social Intranet, really? Let’s discuss it in the next blog post.

This blog post is part 2 of When Social Media Meets Social Intranet. Here are the links to all blog post:

When Social Media Meets Social Intranet Part I

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I had fun giving a talk, titled When Social Media Meets Social Intranet, on 22 November 2012, at Max Atria, Expo, Singapore. The talk was part of Fuji Xerox Empowers 2012.

Here is the video:

When Social Media Meets Social Intranet from Roan Yong on Vimeo.

And here is the slides of my talk:

In addition to slides and video, I also provide the script below – so that you can have a preview of the content before you watch the video and can have an accompanying text while going through the slides. Happy reading!

Many organisations failed to make use of social media as a competitive strategy. For example: Goldman Sachs, a leader in banking industry, failed to make their corporate Facebook page thrive. Goldman Sachs’ Facebook page is devoid of any activity just like a ghost-town.

So too, SMRT, a leader in transportation industry in Singapore. SMRT, when they first started their corporate twitter account in 2011, put this statement: “We’re here, 9am – 6pm, Mon – Fri (Excluding public holiday)”. A statement which doesn’t suit the 24/7 nature of social media and reflect badly on SMRT’s capability to effectively use social media.

Organisations have to learn how to effectively use social media because millions of people are in the social media now. And the number keeps on growing day by day. Furthermore, according to research, 50% of web sales is going to occur by 2015 – less than three years from now.

But to effectively use social media, organisations need to also build a supporting infrastructure, i.e. social intranet, so that organisations can transform themselves to be a social business.

So what is a social business?

According to IBM, social business is a business that embraces networks of people to create business value. Networks of people are referring to employees, customers, and partners. This definition obviously makes sense because, employees and partners are actually internal customers! It’s impossible to make your customers happy while neglecting your internal customers at the same time.

To understand how social business deliver value for organisations, let’s look at its two components: Social Media and Social Intranet. Let’s first zoom-in to social media in the next blog post.

This blog post is part 1 of When Social Media Meets Social Intranet. Here are the links to all blog post:

In Defense of Facebook Timeline: 5 User Adoption Lessons

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Facebook Timeline is awesome! That’s the first thing that runs through my mind when I tried the new feature in Facebook. Essentially, Facebook Timeline is a beautiful storytelling tool that helps you to lay-out milestones in your life. Isn’t this cool?

Oh wait, perhaps Facebook Timeline is not so cool when you have dirty little secrets. You know, stuff that you don’t want people to know (read: private stuff, e.g. partying hard, getting drunk).

But then again, you shouldn’t let people to be your Facebook friends if you don’t want them to know about your life. Better still, don’t post anything stupid in your Facebook – especially if your boss is your Facebook friend (*silent panic*).

If you are still concerned about your privacy, then consider these options: “un-friend” people you don’t trust, or adjust your Facebook privacy settings. It’s that simple. You have complete control over what to share on Facebook.

I don’t understand why a lot of people aren’t happy about Facebook Timeline. Yes, Facebook forced it down our throat and gave us only seven days prior notice to do some profile clean up. This is a rather insignificant inconvenience, considering Facebook Timeline is a vast improvement to the current Facebook profile.

5 Things Facebook Can Teach You About User Adoption

The truth is people want to maintain status quo as much as possible. In physics, this is called inertia. In business, this is called “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality. In intranet / technology lingo, this is called user-adoption challenge.

Many times in our daily course of work, you and I (KM-ers) have to deal with user-adoption issues. We usually face it when we are introducing new features, or new collaborative tools in the social intranet.

We can definitely learn from Facebook. I really like how Facebook roll out its Timeline. Despite what the critics say, I think Facebook has a sound understanding on how people behave.

Here are five takeaways from the roll-out of Facebook Timeline:

1. Leave them no choice but to adopt the new feature. Are you thinking to persuade your way to get people to adopt the new feature? (*cynical smile*) Let’s get real. There is no way you can get 100% user adoption using persuasion alone. Even the best demagogue in the world, Barrack Obama, can’t get all Americans to agree with him.

2. Explain what the new feature is using one-liner and creative contents, e.g. video, visual illustration. Check out Facebook Timeline page. Facebook describes Timeline in one simple sentence: Tell your life story with a new kind of profile. And Facebook illustrates Timeline using great videos and visuals. Neat!

3. Use Social Proof. At the bottom of Facebook Timeline page, you can see how many of your friends are using the new feature. Nothing is more persuasive than “peer pressure”.

4. Make the transition easy. To use Facebook Timeline, you only need to click Get Timeline button. In one click, you can instantly see the preview of your Timeline page. You can then fine-tune further and publish your page.

5. Give “opt-out” function to hide (sensitive) information.You can’t not force people to share information that they don’t want to reveal. People will resist fiercely to protect their information. So provide an “opt-out” function so that people can choose not to share (sensitive) information. See how Facebook does it.

Thoughts? Do you like Facebook’s user adoption method? 

Further Readings:

DailyMuse. (2 Feb 2012). Just Friends? What to Consider Before Befriending Your Boss. Forbes.

Winter, L. (27 Jan 2012). Facebook Timeline: what’s the fuss about?. The Telegraph.

Kristo, K. (23 Jun 2010). 6 Things You Should Never Reveal on Facebook. CBSNews.

Desmarais, C. (29 Jan 2012). Facebook Timeline Looms: What You Need to Know. PC World.

Social Organisation – Definition and Three Advantages

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It’s 2012 folks! This year marks the end of era where “average-joe” intranet rules, where SOP is preferred over empowerment and engagement, and where customers keep mum about their dissatisfaction. And this year means screw business-as-usual! Organisations have to transform themselves to be social organisation or face slow-painful-death.

What is Social Organisation (a.k.a. Social Business/Enterprise)?

So what is social organisation anyway? You probably heard of the term and confuse it with social business (social enterprise) - a term made popular by a nobel price winner, Muhammad Yunus. According to Yunus, social business is a cause-driven business ala Tom Shoes (Tom Shoes commits itself to give a free pair of shoes to those in need, for every pair of shoes purchased).

Yunus’ concept on social business is beautiful. The world certainly needs Yunus’ social business model to beat poverty. Too bad, the IT and KM folks use the same term to mean organisations that use social technology, i.e. social media and social intranet, as competitive advantage (for examples, case studies, and definition, please read how IBM consulting describes social business).

For the sake of clarity, in this blog, I will use the term social organisation to refer to businesses empowered by social technology. I will avoid using the term social business/enterprise - unless I want to talk about Yunus’ version of social business (very unlikely as microfinance is not my passion. Social technology is). I suggest you do the same too.

Alas using the term social organisation doesn’t end the confusion. Some experts like two Gartner analysts: Anthony J. Bradley and Mark P. Mcdonald, use the term to refer to organisations empowered by social media application to business. Others like a Forbes contributor: Fred Cavazza, use the term to refer to organisations empowered by both social media and social intranet.

So, which version of social organisation is correct? It depends on what you believe in. I believe corporate (internal) and consumer communications are converging, and thus I think social organisations have to be supported by social media and by social intranet. So I agree with Fred Cavazza’s definition of social organisation.

I also think the main purpose of social technology is to build communities. Combining these thoughts, I get the following definition of social organisation:

Social Organisation is organisation that maximises the use of social media (technology) and social intranet, to improve consumer and employee engagement and to build communities for innovation.

Why Organisations Have to Be Social Organisations?

Three big benefits underpin the need to become social organisations:

First, improved ability to engage employees, esp. the gen-Ys. Gen-Ys are moody bunch. This generation was brought up with a belief that the sky is the limit. They have a high (often unrealistic) sense of entitlement to pursue their dream/passion. The Millennials demand empowerment and bask in entrepreneurship working environment. Social organisation offers them such environment – an environment where they can be engaged and have the freedom to pursue their passion.

Second, improved ability to build communities. Social technologies are great community-building tools. They allow people with similar passion to “gather” and connect beyond the physical limitation, i.e. geographical boundaries and time difference. In other words, social technology is a catalyst for community-building. And we all know that passionate communities are breeding grounds for collective learning and innovation.

Third, ability to build relationship with social customers. Many people use social media like Facebook, Twitter, not only to improve the way they interact and live, but also to give recommendations and voice-out displeasure. Organisations would be wise to maintain presence in social media, to engage the social customers, to capture their testimonials, and to address their concern real-time.

Any thoughts? Write them down in the comment box below.

Recommended Readings:

Bradley, A., J., and McDonald, M., P. (2011). The Social Organisation – Chapter 1: The Promise of Social Organisations. Harvard Business Press.

Cavazza, F. (2012). The What and How of Social Business. Forbes.

N.A. (n.d.). Social Business. IBM.

Neisser, D. (2011). Move Over Social Media; Here Comes Social Business. Fast Company.

Why Civic Groundswell Is Pure Madness

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Leaderless civic movement (civic groundswell) shows that social technology is an effective tool to get attention, but it isn’t the right tool to produce a strategic comprehensive plan. What really blunts the groundswell’s strategic edge, however, is the lack of means to resolve conflicts. That’s the main drawback of being leaderless.

Slutwalk, Cook-a-pot-of-curry, and Occupy Wall Street (and its franchises). What do they have in common? Yes, you are right. These are leaderless social movement empowered by social technology like Facebook and Twitter. In other words, these are groundswells.

Groundwell is a term coined by two Forrester researchers, Charlene Li and John Bernoff, who wrote a book with the same title: Groundswell in 2008 (they have since published a revised edition in 2011).

In essence, groundswell is a spontaneous movement of people, who use online tools to:

  • connect with like-minded people
  • influence each other’s opinion (as opposed to getting information from organisations)
  • and express the collective opinion, often by encouraging collective action such as boycotting a product, organising a mass protest or a strike.

In the book, Groundswell, Li and Bernoff argued that groundswell is increasing in numbers – thanks to the endless social media tools at customers’ disposal. And they offered advices on how to use groundswell as organisations’ competitive advantage.

Though the two authors are clearly defining groundswell in organisational context, it can also be used to illustrate the phenomenon of leaderless civic movements / active citizenry.

We are seeing an increasing trend of activists / citizens, using social technology to spread a message and to connect with like-minded folks, and expressing their opinion by taking a stand over social problem.

Does civic groundswell excite you? Are you fascinated by leaderless movement? To be frank, I’m not excited nor impressed, and neither should you. Let me tell you why.

In his article, Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted, Malcolm Gladwell brilliantly pointed out that Social Technology is useful when you want to bring the world’s attention to the social problem that you are championing, but it is less useful when you want everybody to collectively solve that social problem.

Groundswell is an emotional cauldron that has no place for critical thinking. People in groundswell, are usually expressing their emotionally-charged opinion that stokes more (usually negative) emotions. It is an effective conduit to make the collective opinion louder.

Alas, the collective action that spring from groundswell, sends mixed messages. Which one is Slutwalk’s message? (a) “women can dress what they want without getting raped”; (b) ”stop rape”; or (c) “let’s celebrate feminism”. And which one is Cook-a-pot-of-curry’s? (a) “immigrants should respect Singapore culture” or (b) “stop influx of foreigners”. Let’s not talk about Occupy Wall Street. I totally don’t understand what the protesters want (I’m with Herman Cain on this. Check out the video clip above).

What sorely lacking in these so-called leaderless movements is, well…leaders. In leaderless organisation, everyone has equal rights to interpret the purpose of the movement and to determine the best way to achieve that purpose.

Therein lies the problem. If everyone (translation: all leaders) has big differences of opinion on the movement’s purpose and strategic direction, then how to get everybody on the same page?

Yes people in groundswell may agree on the main theme of the movement. But that’s the easy part. People can agree on almost everything from birdeye view. However, to produce a strategic plan, these people have to scrutinise the details and to do a series of collective action. This requires high-level commitment to solve the problem – something that people in groundswell are lack of.

And if you can’t produce anything strategic, you don’t have a concrete plan to solve the problem that you are championing. In other words, you are just being noisy but not helping. To me, that is madness!

Further Readings

Flanagan, C. (4 Aug 2011). The Trouble with SlutWalks: They trivialize rape. NYDailyNews.com

n.a. (21 Aug 2011). Curry Smell Fuels Singapore Immigration Row. Reuters.com

Riaz, S., & Bapuji, H. (14 Oct 2011). Occupy Wall Street: What Businesses Need to Know. HBR.org

Why Smart Organisations Use Social Intranet

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To win in today’s business competition, you need a social intranet. I’m dead serious. The future belongs to organisations who can use the power of social intranet for employee engagement, productivity, collaboration, and innovation.

Yep, practically all the things that the management wants. So what is this social intranet?  Social intranet is an intranet with social technology tools like social networking, blog, discussion forum, comment box, wikis, etc.

If this sounds like social media stuff, it is! Social intranet is about using social media within the organisation. There is a subtle difference between social technology and social media. Social media is usually referring to Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, or any other web 2.0 tools in the internet. Social technology, on the other hand, is a more generic terms that cover the whole array of web 2.0 tools in internet and in intranet.

Smart organisations are investing in social intranet rather than simply allowing the use of social media in the organisation (I know it is difficult to stop people from using social media at work, thanks to the ubiquitous iphone and other smart-phone devices).

Here is why. Employees can make use of their free time to share ideas and to connect with their colleagues in social intranet – rather than in social-media sites. The big idea is, to contain the sharing of ideas and social networking within the organisation.

Why not use social media? Social media isn’t ideal because people can ”inadvertently” share sensitive information to the public. And it is impossible to link employees’ social activities in social media to the benefit of the organisation.

I know what you are thinking. You are probably going to criticise me for not embracing the concept of Open Innovation, i.e. collectively innovate through idea-sharing with the public, competitors, amateurs, etc. I gotta tell you this: I’m an advocate and ardent believer of open innovation. Yes, I’m.

But, I’m also a very practical person. I don’t think organisations can entirely open-up their business processes, or can crowdsource strategic decision-making to outsiders. Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing can be used in situations where the organisation is exploring something new that it has no expertise in.

Okay, enough of open innovation and crowdsourcing. Let’s get back to our discussion on using social intranet in organisations.

With social intranet, you can:

  • Increase employee engagement. Work is no longer boring, when part of your work is to pursue your professional interest/passion, and to build your personal brand within the corporate intranet. Plus, you get the chance to connect with cool people in the organisation (people who have similar interests with you).
  • Increase productivity. Looking for corporate information or contents owned by your colleagues? Well, it’s going to take awhile if you are using traditional intranet. But with social intranet? Seriously, you can get it within a blink. That’s because in social intranet, contents are tagged using corporate taxonomy and your own tags (social tagging or folksonomy) – which means you can retrieve contents faster by refining your search according to those tags. And if you have a very good social intranet like Sharepoint 2010 (Too bad microsoft don’t pay me for endorsing their hot-selling product), you can search contents based on social distance, i.e. your “friends’ contents” get prioritised in the search engine. So, you can jump straight to contents authored by people whom you trust.
  • Improve social collaboration. It’s hard to collaborate using email, because you are often get confused on which version is the latest and on whether the document has been vetted by the bosses. In social intranet, you can use collaboration space as one-stop centre for collaboration. You and your co-workers can add, edit, amend, or delete contents at easy because every changes made is recorded. You know which version is latest in collaboration space. Plus, you can create a workflow to route documents for approval.
  • Increase innovation. In social intranet, cultivating communities of practice (CoP) is easy. Employees have more opportunities to find like-minded colleagues and to start building a community around a shared-passion. When employees have supportive-environment (the CoP) and the means to experiment with their ideas, there will be more innovations in the organisations.

Does your organisation use social intranet? Tell me whether it has made an impact to your work or how it has benefited the organisation.

Further Readings:

  1. Hinchcliffe, D. (2010). Social intranets: Enterprises grapple with internal change. ZDNet.
  2. Ward, T. (2010). The Rise of Intranet 2.0: The Social Intranet. CMSWire.
  3. Berg, O. (2010). The business case for social intranets.
  4. Lupfer, E. (2010). Creating a Social Intranet where Employees can Learn, Plan and Do

I Cheated on KM. I Slept With SM. Many Times.

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Before your imagination runs wild, I have to tell you that KM and SM are neither women nor men (I’m straight by the way and no, the SM here is not our (Singapore) Senior Minister). Just in case you don’t know, I’m talking about Knowledge Management (KM) and Social Media (SM).

What’s with the blog post title? Many KM purists would consider me as a heretic, for associating KM with SM. So I thought I would make fun of those who don’t consider me as a true KMer. Unlike those KM purists, I see SM as not just a marketing tool. I see it as a KM tool. In fact, I believe SM offers the best of both worlds of marketing and learning.

Every KMer should embrace SM. There is no point keeping the so-called “KM purity”. Just grab whatever that works – and that could be SM.

Consider the following benefits of SM:

  • SM offers 24/7 platform for conversations. You can’t manage knowledge without managing conversations. You know that. And you also know that there is a limit on how many times you can hold conversation cafes – or any other face-to-face conversation sessions – for staff. It is unlikely that the management would allow their staff to attend conversation cafes – as and when the staff need it. Don’t despair! You have a choice. You can let the conversations continue in the SM. Staff could discuss, read, share, and reuse contents (knowledge) in SM as and when they need it. Plus, whatever that they’ve discussed and shared in SM can be captured instantly.
  • SM provides real-time statistics. There is another issue with face-to-face conversation cafes. Once you hold those conversation cafes, the management would be breathing on your neck and asks you, “What’s your ROI for the conversation cafes?” If you have experienced this, you would know that it feels like someone puts a gun on your head, and tells you to cough out money that you haven’t earned. Again, SM can give you the solution. SM captures some statistics like number of visits, how many times a document has been downloaded, who the active knowledge sharers are. You can easily translate these into ROIs.
  • SM helps to filter contents (knowledge). Let’s dream for awhile, and assume that your KM initiative is a wild success. Everyone in the organisation codifies and shares what they know in the knowledge repository (corporate intranet).  So far so good, right? But when you are awake, you will be horrified. You have a mountain of contents – which complicates search and retrieval (knowledge reuse). The big problem is, how can you distinguish relevant and quality contents from the rest? SM can help in this regard. Filtering contents in SM works based on “word of mouth”. So if someone finds a content useful, that person will indicate it, for e.g. by using “like” button (in Facebook), or “retweet” button (in Twitter). Others could “amplify” the relevancy and the quality of the content by hitting “like” / “retweet” button as well. Such action enables SM to rank contents based on feedbacks.
  • SM offers opportunity for reputation-building. Sharing and learning require incentives. What better incentive is there, than reputation? SM rewards those who share knowledge, initially by awarding them some “self-gratifying” reputation like “top tweet”, number of likes that the content receives. Of course you gain little reputation when your content receives high number of likes / retweets once in awhile. But you can grow your reputation if you can consistently contribute quality contents. Sooner or later, you will be recognised as an “expert” – and people would be more willing to listen to what you have to say.
  • SM is an “open space”. You can’t arm-twist people to share their knowledge. Knowledge sharing has to be voluntary – which is why SM is the perfect platform. It allows people to contribute as and when they want to, and to seek knowledge as and when they need to – without obligations.

Yeah, I know KM is about people. Technology doesn’t matter. blah blah…

Listen:

  1. I’m not saying that conversation cafes (face-to-face sessions) are not important. It’s centainly useful to hold face-to-face sessions regularly to build relationship. What I’m saying is, you can’t run face-to-face sessions as often as you’d like, because people are hired so that their bosses can see them working. You and I can have a debate on whether having conversation is considered work, but the fact is the bosses won’t consider it as work no matter what. That’s sad! but get over it and move on.
  2. Technology is KM enabler, but it doesn’t mean you can do KM without technology. I just don’t understand how some KMers can conclude that KM is possible without technology. They must be some dinosaurs. You see, in absence of technology: (i) you can only exchange / share knowledge with people near you; (ii) searching and retrieving knowledge / information are laborious; (iii) knowledge silos are everywhere; (iv) there are fewer opportunities to build reputation – which translates to fewer incentive to shares knowledge (and more incentives to hoard knowledge).

SM offers solution to many KM challenges. Open-up to possibilities that SM offers, or risk failing your KM initiative. The choice is yours.

What’s Your Crowdsourcing Strategy?

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Crowdsourcing is basically requesting others to collaborate with you to solve a problem. There are some controversy regarding the term. Jimmy Wales – the founder of Wikipedia – is not a fan of the term.

Nevertheless, the idea sticks. Before you can collaborate with others, you need to tell them the problem / challenge. So that they are clear on what’s the collaboration all about. It is also about attracting the right people to be the collaborators. Once people, i.e. the crowd, have a good understanding of the challenge lies ahead, those with ideas, time and the necessary skills will step forward, and those without – would pass the opportunity to get involved.

Here is a crowdsourcing process, for your reference:

Crowdsourcing is everywhere, especially in the social media. Youtube uses crowdsourcing to pick up good comments. Let me show you.

Crowdsourcing in Youtube

Crowdsourcing in Youtube

You see the Highest Rated Comments section? that is the result of crowdsourcing. So what is the problem that requires crowdsourcing? the problem is how to separate quality comments from the rest.

The crowdsourcing here is: Youtube asks the crowd to indicate which comment they like. Notice when you hover over a comment, you can see Vote Up and Vote Down button – depicted as thumb-up and thumb-down respectively. And there is some sort of behind-the-screen mechanism that keeps track of the number of thumb-up and thumb-down that each comment receives. This mechanism will then “surface” comment with highest number of thumb-up and lowest number of thumb-down. As you can see from the example above, the highest rated comment received 22 thumb-ups.

Crowdsourcing is not a “glorified” voting process. Please don’t degrade crowdsourcing as such. Voting is part of the crowdsourcing process. The other part is rewarding the crowd for participating in the crowdsourcing (refer to step 6 in the crowdsourcing process diagram above). This is what sets crowdsourcing apart from voting process.

Allow me to digress a little. People need incentive to collaborate (those who know me personally, would know that I’m a firm believer of this). I’m not talking about money here. This isn’t about monetizing collaboration. I’m talking about implicit reward such as reputation, or fame.

I think reputation is the currency for collaboration*. Let me ask you this: Why would people want to collaborate with you? (or why would people want to help you?) despite all altruistic reasons that you can think of, I think deep-down inside, those who help, want to be known (acknowledged) as knowledgeable, or nice fellow. Don’t believe me? See what happens if someone help you and you don’t say “thank you”. After a while, that person may stop helping you. So, that’s what I’m saying: reputation matters in collaboration. If you want collaboration, set-up a robust reputation system.

Okay, back to crowdsourcing. To use crowdsourcing, here is what you need to do:

1. Identify task to be crowdsourced. This sounds obvious and simple – but I can tell you it isn’t. You need to know the organisation culture. If your organisation is the place where staff don’t usually suggest solutions to other department’s problem – although it sometimes make sense to do so – then you shouldn’t try to crowdsource a department’s problem.  In other words, don’t fight the culture. It’s bad enough when you introduce a new term/process for staff, it becomes worse when you try to change the culture at the same time. Instead, why not you crowdsource a simple task – like that of Youtube, i.e. separating quality comments from the rest?

2. Design and Build the technology.  To do crowdsourcing, you need technology that can support it. This becomes a challenge, when you want to crowdsource your staff instead of the public. You may need to do customisation to your intranet. Make sure the vote/like button is intuitive and user-friendly. And users could get instant feedback on which comment has the most votes.

3. Setup a Robust Reputation System. As I mentioned earlier, people collaborate for a reason. That reason is reputation. You can’t divorce people’s self-interest from collaboration. You need to deal with it. The good news is, it is easy to setup reputation system using the social media. Let me give you an example. Linkedin uses a reputation system: “Manager’s Choice” and “Top Influencers This Week”.  See the following screenshot:

Reputation system in LinkedinThe idea here is to acknowledge individual’s contribution to the crowdsourcing effort. This is to motivate others to contribute as well. What you want to encourage is healthy competition among staff, so that there are sufficient quality responses to the crowdsourced problem.

4. Sell the crowdsourcing initiative. Last but not least, you need to promote the crowdsourcing platform. What you want here, is to create awareness in the organisation, about crowdsourcing. One good way is to publicise stories, anecdotes, testimonials about crowdsourcing.

The above four points are my crowdsourcing strategy. Any comments / thoughts? What’s your experience in crowdsourcing?

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*I’m writing a book on reputation as incentive for collaboration. I hope I can finish it by 2012.

Recommended Readings:

Howe, J. (2006). The Rise of Crowdsourcing. Wired Magazine. URL: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html

Castella, T.d. (2010). Should We Trust The Wisdom of Crowds. URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8788780.stm

Kessler, S. (2010). 5 Creative Uses for Crowdsourcing. URL: http://mashable.com/2010/05/26/creative-crowdsourcing/

Griner, D. (2009). 10 examples of how crowdsourcing is changing the world. URL: http://www.thesocialpath.com/2009/05/10-examples-of-crowdsourcing.html

Crowdsourcing news bank in Guardian.co.uk. URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/crowdsourcing

http://www.openinnovators.net/list-open-innovation-crowdsourcing-examples/

How Uprisings Happen

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This is not a hit list, although it looks like one: Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, Hosni Mubarak, and Col. Muammar Gaddafi (a.k.a. the Mad Dog of the Middle East). The first two names are the ex-dictator of Tunisia and Egypt respectively. While the latter is the Libya’s dictator – who is fighting hard to save his regime.

Yes, I’m talking about the so-called Arab awakening (the Middle East uprisings). The interesting thing about it, is that, it happens now - which inevitably begs the questions: why does it happen now – not earlier? why do the people of the Middle East wait until 2011?

Before I answer those questions, let me share my thoughts on how the uprisings happen:

  1. It began with a deeply emotional story that touches many people’s life. The Middle East uprisings was inspired, at least partially, by a story of Mohamed Bouazizi. He was a college graduate who worked as a fruit seller. He was harrassed by corrupt officials who demanded bribes. He refused to comply and burned himself to death. It’s a tragic story, I know. But that’s not the point. Who cares about a fruit seller? I can bet with you that most Tunisians don’t – unless they share Bouazizi’s frustration. Unfortunately in Tunisia – where 14% of the population is unemployed, many people could empathise with Bouazizi story and decided to rise againsts the government.
  2. The story went viral thanks to social media. Bouazizi story is not going to spark a movement, unless many people know about it. The new media is a perfect platform for this, where someone could post a powerful story, and others pass it on to their friends, and their friends send it to their friends’ friends and so on. Social media beats the other media platform, because people are more likely to read stories forwarded by their friends. And there is no censorship. So, stories can travel very, very fast in the social media.
  3. Influencers could find out who share their thoughts, using social media. A powerful viral story is still insufficient to start an uprising. It’s a matter of fear. Fear of being beaten to death by the police. Fear of being thrown to jail for opposing the government (this sounds familiar, doesn’t it?). But what happens if someone knows that there are others who want to start an uprising? the sense of fear goes down. And when more people know that there are many others who feel the same way, the fear-level goes down even further. And eventually, when there is enough “psychological safety”,  a collective action (an uprising) will happen.

Look closer to my point #3 above. I said the influencers, not the mass. Why? I think not everyone would be able to translate the meaning of a story to their personal lives. Those who are able to, are the influencers. I’m sure, in the case of Mohamed Bouazizi, there were influencers who interpreted the Bouazizi story, as a cause for a change. And the rest followed the influencers.

As a side note, mass collaboration / uprising / change is always started by a small group of passionate (dedicated) people. In Innovation lingo, these passionate people are called the early adopters. In KM lingo, they are called the influencers. In Design Thinking lingo, they are called – well – the designers or story interpreters.

So, to summarise, I think the uprisings happen now because:

  1. Many Arabs empathised with the Bouazizi story.
  2. A small group of influencers was able to share their interpretation of the story, over a censorship-less platform: the social media.
  3. The influencers attract followers. The best part is, social media makes it easy to know: (a) how many followers that you have; (b) who the other influencers are. This creates a “psychological safety” – where people feel safe to speak their mind and take a collective action.

Recommended Readings:

Yong, J.A. (2011). Uprisings Possible Without the Internet. Straits Times.

Anderson, C. (2010). Crowd Accelerated Innovation. Wired Magazine.

Branson, R. (2010). Make The Most of Social Media For Your Business. Today.