MythBusters: Debunking Enterprise Social Software Myths

Published
by
Jon
on May 16, 2008
in Technology
. 0 Comments

Inspired by an upcoming article in Digital Life which my company and I are working on, I’m going to attempt to start a new feature today on debunking common myths.

First up - Myths on using social software in the enterprise!

Myth: If you deploy social networking and other social software tools in an organization, people will spend too much time using them and productivity will fall.

Armchair Theorist: It is perfectly alright for employees to spend a lot of time using social networking tools in the organization, if it helps them be more efficient in finding information and more productive in collaborating with each another. And by most expert and analyst accounts, social software if properly deployed and utilized, can dramatically increase employee collaboration and productivity.

One obvious example is the use of blogging tools to allow individuals to capture and “push” ideas out in a nondisruptive way to a broad audience within the organization. Without blogging tools, it can easily take ten times the effort for an individual to write repetitive e-mails to broadcast out the same information to its intended audience. Another example is the use of social bookmarking tools for creating an information taxonomy based on the organization’s collective wisdom (a “folksonomy“, if you will) for employees to easily search for relevant information. This enables a colleague to do a search, locate experts and “look over their shoulders” at the industry articles, research or blogs those experts found useful—without interrupting them with an e-mail or instant message.

Myth: Corporate users are used to working via e-mail, so there’s no need for these new social software tools.

Armchair Theorist: That was also what people said about e-mail when it was first introduced, and now it is considered pretty much indispensable. Just like progressive companies today are realizing the tangible benefits of using instant messaging as a legitimate way of collaborating in the workplace, the same trend will hold true for social software and other Web 2.0 collaboration tools. I believe users will always welcome new tools which make their life easier. And besides, a good majority of the work force today already regularly use social networking tools outside of work, so they should already have a decent level of comfort and familiarity working with social software.

Myth: It is difficult to manage social software because the content that they generate is too unstructured.

Armchair Theorist: The reason why social software “work” is because of their ability to capture the unstructured ebb and flow of information at the grassroots level, and bring a tangible and usable structure to them. Thru the use of tagging, commenting, feeds and other mechanisms, social software can make this unstructured but useful content available to the entire organization in a seamless and organized way.

Besides leveraging the technology provided by social software in managing the corporate social networking environment, one aspect of social software that is often overlooked is the fact that it is also largely self-regulating. For example, just like on the consumer Internet, bloggers who write nonsense will quickly lose their credibility and their audience. Less and less people will bookmark and tag their blogs, and the inconsequential content will quickly be buried within the knowledge pool in favor of more credible content. The collective wisdom of the organization dictates that the wheat will be separated from the chaff, and only the best and most credible content will reach the widest audience within the organization.

Myth: My company is too small to be able to take advantage of social software.

Armchair Theorist: Although it is true that bigger organizations may benefit from social computing more than smaller organization simply due to the sheer number of participants, there have been cases where social software was being successfully deployed and used in organizations as small as 300 employees.

And tools like blogs, wikis and social bookmarking are generally useful even for small organizations. These tools provide employees a straightforward way to capture their tacit knowledge and expertise, which is useful for the business regardless whether there are five people or a thousand people using the tools.

Myth: Social software is irrelevant in the enterprise and there are no clear benefits for implementing it.

Armchair Theorist: Industry leaders and analysts will disagree that social software is irrelevant to the enterprise. In fact, a recent Forrester report by G. Oliver Young projects that the global enterprise Web 2.0 market will reach $4.6 billion dollars by 2013.

In addition, many social software vendors today help conduct business value assessments for organizations to demonstrate how one can tangibly reduce costs and increase top line revenue for companies by using social software.

Another often overlooked benefit of social software which may not be easily quantified is talent recruitment and employee retention. The fact is that the brightest new talent coming into the work force today have their choice of companies to join, and more often than not they will choose a company which provides them a work environment which they are comfortable and familiar with. This includes providing them with social software and Web 2.0 tools which they are used to using as they have grown up, and have shown proficiency and efficiency in using.

Imagine a new talented employee who is used to getting answers to questions quickly by broadcasting the question to his network of friends on Facebook. Now ask him to get information from people in your company by inefficiently sending email to many people and playing email tag with everyone. All else being equal, wouldn’t the person rather go to your competitor which provides him social software tools which make him more productive?

Finally, as Richard Dennison points out, “Did we measure the ROI of our telephone system or e-mail or were the benefits so blatantly obvious we just deployed them!?”

Myth: Social software poses a security threat to organizations.

Armchair Theorist: If anything, enterprise social software actually make organizations more secure by allowing organizations to set up a secure social computing environment for employees to capture and share confidential and sensitive information. One reason many companies are looking into enterprise-grade social software is because many employees driven by the need to collaborate and share, are either consciously or unconsciously putting confidential company information on public social networks and Web 2.0 destinations such as Facebook, MySpace and Friendster. By providing social networking tools, companies hope that employees can maintain their passion in sharing and collaborating with each other, but within a secured environment in the enterprise.

As an IT system, enterprise social software is generally built using the same technologies as many other business applications today, and therefore is no less secure than any other commonly used business application or collaboration tool such as company e-mail or the company Intranet.

Of course, no matter how secure an IT system is, the humans who use the system also have to be accounted for. Although social software generally provide tools to help manage and moderate content (e.g. “flag this as inappropriate”), a best practice for creating a comprehensive corporate social network policy should involve the users agreeing to a set of predetermined terms of usage or “Business Conduct Guidelines”. This “contract” will remind the employees that they are still expected to act within known company guidelines and ethics when using the social computing tools.

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The Rules of Social Media

Published
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Jon
on May 13, 2008
in Technology
. 1 Comment

My friend Julian started a blog on China’s energy policies just over six months ago. Today, it has garnered a sizable audience and many accolades, including being featured as an editor’s pick by the China Economic Review.

Besides the obvious plug for Julian’s blog, I also want to highlight that this is the beauty of social media and the inherent meritocracy at work in our Web 2.0 world today.

Julian is a very smart guy with a passion in a pretty niche subject (Chinese environmental policy). Just ten years ago, it would of been very tedious for him to create a web site to pen down his thoughts and to gather an audience. Even five years ago, he may have been able to manage his web site using blogging software, but it would still have been difficult to gather a sizable audience within a short amount of time.

Today, with linkbacks, aggregators, blog search engines, communities, social bookmarking and social networks, it is not only easy for Julian to create content, but easy for him to seek out and connect with his audience as well.

In other words, social media allows anyone with something interesting to say to have a very good chance to make oneself heard by others.

Being “interesting” is very important, because another elegant feature of social media in my opinion is its inherent self-regulation and meritocracy mechanisms.

It’s really quite obvious but often overlooked - If Julian writes nonsense, he loses his credibility and his audience, plain and simple. Joe may visit Julian’s blog once, but if Joe can’t relate to Julian’s message or thinks he is full of crap, then Joe will likely not visit Julian’s blog again.

However, if Joe likes the article Julian wrote on biodiesels, chances are that Joe will add Julian’s blog to his feed reader and Julian’s audience has more or less grown permanently by one.

(And even if Julian does lose Joe as a reader the first time, services like Digg and Reddit may still bring Joe back to Julian’s blog for a second or third time without Joe knowing it.)

When I talk to enterprise customers about using social media as a form of bottom-up knowledge management in their organization, they will almost always ask: “how can we govern the quality of the content created by social media?”

What most people don’t realize is that social media generally presents the best, most interesting, or most relevant content to whoever is looking. So not only does it automatically filter the wheat from the chaff, it also does it in a targeted way, because nonsense to Joe may be gospel to Mary.

And as an extension of the above, one can also agree that social media is inherently self-correcting. In the world of social media, no one creates content for a closed community or audience. Therefore, if Julian makes a factual error in his article, his audience will let him hear about it, especially if he has a big audience. And if he doesn’t respond or reciprocate to the feedback, Julian will either a) lose his audience, or b) lose his credibility.

Therefore… surprise, surprise - the quality and accuracy of one’s content is positively correlated to the reach and size of one’s audience.

So to summarize, here are the rules of social media:

  1. Social media allows anyone with something interesting to say to have a very good chance to make oneself heard by others
  2. Social media generally presents the best, most interesting, or most relevant content to whoever is looking
  3. Social media is inherently self-correcting

In the future, perhaps I will explain why social media can be invaluable in an enterprise setting as a means of knowledge management… or if you live in a country whose press freedom is ranked 153rd in the world.

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Microsoft Knows PR

Published
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Jon
on May 10, 2008
in Technology
. 6 Comments

A few days ago I read from Singapore Entrepreneurs that the Singapore PHP User Group is holding their monthly meeting next week.

That in itself is unremarkable. But you know what is interesting?

The venue.

The meeting is being held at Microsoft Singapore’s offices on the 22nd floor of the NTUC Centre. And it’s not the case where a member’s brother or spouse or house mate is working at Microsoft and is just booking a conference room after hours as a favor or convenience to the user group.

No - this appears to be at least a partially Microsoft-sponsored event. How do I know? Well, refreshments are provided and sponsored by… you guessed it. Microsoft.

And this is not a one-off thing either. I have seen notices for similar open source community gatherings held at Microsoft premises before.

Look through the agenda - none of the talks involve any Microsoft software or solution. Yahoo merger or not, proliferating the use of PHP (or Ruby on Rails, or Apache, or whatever) will likely not generate one single cent of revenue for Microsoft. So why is Microsoft doing this?

I believe it’s pretty obvious - it’s for PR and community goodwill.

Now, Microsoft has had more than its fair share of detractors over the years. However, one thing that Microsoft is genius at is to mitigate that by investing and reaching out to the very same communities which may have a beef with Microsoft.

This willingness to invest resources and money into PR with no immediate ascertainable ROI distinguishes them from many other companies in the IT industry today. Well, and the fact that Microsoft is swimming in cash from its few cash cows doesn’t hurt either. :)

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Good night of “relationship”

Published
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Jon
on May 7, 2008
in Oddities
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This is a sign I saw on the wall of a toilet in a Kuala Lumpur restaurant:

For those who don’t know, Petai is a plant that bears bright green beans, which are also known as stink beans. :)

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Why I am giving LinkedIn a second chance

Published
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Jon
on May 6, 2008
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Like most people, I started my foray into social networking by joining Friendster when it was first launched in 2002. Then, when LinkedIn arrived the next year, I also joined. LinkedIn was positioned as a “serious” social network for businesses, which I found pretty boring at the time, compared to all of the cool stuff that Friendster could do.

Later on, Facebook came along, and it quickly became the mother of all modern social networking innovation. I was promptly swept up into Facebook Mania, and signed up last year. I thoroughly enjoyed using Facebook, even until today, and marveled at all the applications and possibilities that a social networking platform provided. Imagine the possibilities! From one single set of social graph data, you can have applications ranging from the frivolous (Vampires vs. Werewolves) to the semi-useful (Visual Bookshelf) to the outright indispensable (Marketplace).

I decided that I don’t need any other social network besides Facebook, and promptly deleted my Friendster and LinkedIn accounts.

And last week I reinstated my LinkedIn account again. Why?

The simple answer is that I realized that Facebook just isn’t conducive in fulfilling my business needs. I think there are a couple reasons for this:

Different Culture

Although the Facebook platform is incredibly versatile and can theoretically be purposed into any type of social network, the truth is that the applications that live in Facebook (which gives Facebook its identity and defines its culture) are overwhelmingly on the frivolous side rather than the utility side.

A chart speaks a thousand words, and by now, many people would have seen this chart:

As one can see, most people use Facebook applications for fun, and very few for business. Ben Rattray gives an excellent analysis on Andrew Chen’s blog which explains why this is so, but I think the following quote sums it up best:

Just because something can fit inside Facebook from a functionality standpoint doesn’t mean it will fit the site’s culture, and culture on social sites matters.

Different Crowds

Most computer engineers like me are idealists, and most idealists enjoy the elegance provided by the model of every individual owning a single social graph, and having all your applications and interactions ride on top of that social graph.

Unfortunately, the real world is doesn’t work that way.

Like it or not, we all have different social graphs for different contexts. For example, some of my friends who are on Facebook may not even bother with LinkedIn because they may be in a profession (performance arts) that doesn’t require the type of business networking that LinkedIn provides.

Conversely, while there are folks who would not hesitate to connect to me in LinkedIn (headhunters and clients), but they may not bother with or connect to me in a more relaxed environment like Facebook.

Therefore, it is no wonder that if one does a job search in LinkedIn versus a job search in the Facebook marketplace, one should find the results from LinkedIn of higher quality and relevance than that of Facebook.

A social network’s crowd determines the culture, and the culture determines the identity. LinkedIn simply has an identity that makes it more conducive for business.

Someday, Facebook will have technology which allows us to take manageable subsets out of our primary social graph and be able to leverage them in different and isolated contexts.

Until then I will happily maintain both my Facebook and LinkedIn profiles.

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Shoplette: Twitter meets Shopping

Published
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Jon
on May 4, 2008
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. 0 Comments

When I first read from Singapore Entrepreneurs about this new startup called Shoplette, I was like, “geez, not again… not another social networking site.” However, after visiting this newest startup from Mobrick, I realize that this startup actually has some legs.

Yes, there are quite a few social shopping sites today, but while most sites today focus on building a community around online shopping, Shoplette wisely remembers that shopping is one activity that most people still prefer to do by physically visiting a store, instead of clicking away in their bedroom and awaiting the product to arrive in the mail.

Thus, instead of trying to act as a recommendation and review network to find the lowest possible online prices, Shoplette actually emphasizes on gathering information on which store the product was purchased, as well as the cost and other information like discounts and stuff. A nice Google Maps mashup shows you the physical location of the store as well.

As a social network, Shoplette’s simple user interface looks a lot like Twitter, with a concept of friends and followers as well as using tags to organize everything. Shoplette also lets you create wish lists, which is pretty much a standard and indispensable feature for social shopping websites nowadays.

A few more reasons why I feel Shoplette will go far:

  1. I hate walled gardens, and to its credit, Shoplette pretty much leaves all of its data in the open for the public to consume. Even though I didn’t sign up for an account, most of the important product and shopper information is still readily available for me to see.
  2. The Post by MMS feature is pretty killer, and Shoplette correctly understands that most people do not go shopping with a digital camera.
  3. There is great advertising and monetization potential for this service. Unlike other sites which caters for online shopping only, Shoplette can tap onto the much bigger pool of brick-and-mortar retailers and provide them a cost-effective and targeted way to do promotions, advertising and product placement.

And finally, here are a few things I think still needs to be done for Shoplette to take the next step:

  1. RSS Support - I was quite shocked when I didn’t see a single RSS feed on Shoplette. This is a non-negotiable feature for any Web 2.0 site created in 2008. Data portability is the next big thing, and you need to be able to get all those public feeds, product feeds, friend feeds, shopper feeds and what not into RSS so they can be consumed and remixed within other services like FriendFeed or whatever. This should be priority #1
  2. Intelligent Tagging - Using tagging to categorize products is a good idea, but can easily become unmanageable as data accumulates. The system should be able to at least help users auto-fill the tag field when they are creating a new product, or better yet, be smart enough to automatically consolidate tags and understand that CD == cds == cd.

Update: Hey, I just realized that one of the founders of Shoplette, Shannon Low, is one of my childhood friends! Great Job, Shannon! :)

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Jason Rakowski: Blog Spammer

Published
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Jon
on May 2, 2008
in Technology
. 0 Comments

As fledgling bloggers, what we crave the most is validation from the blogging community. Therefore, I nearly jumped through the roof in joy last week when I received my first ever blog comment:

Good Layout and design. I like your blog. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. .

Jason Rakowski

Cool! Someone likes my blog! Who is this guy? Let’s check out his blog… Not bad. He seems to write a pretty good blog on customer service. He looks a bit like a tool, but this guy seems legit.

But wait a second… Why is Akismet flagging this guy’s comment as spam then? Surely someone who spends all his time writing all those long customer service articles won’t let that hard work go to waste to be labeled as a spam source, would they?

Well, apparently they would. As it turns out, Jason Rakowski is not even a real person. As John Cow points out, this is an elaborate spam network perpetrated by some dude named Brian Fleming. Jason Rakowski is just one of many made-believe bloggers created by him for the purpose of spamming blogs for monetary gain. And the blogs he creates (like Jason Rakowski’s customer service blog) are so believable that unfortunately it has fooled many bloggers, even some smart folks.

What about the blog articles? How does someone have the time to write all those believable articles? Well, actually he doesn’t have to write any articles at all. Just do a Google search on article directory and you can see the tons of services offering readily-written articles of questionable quality which can be used to populate your otherwise content-less blog. Some are free, and some are paid services. This is a cottage industry that sprung up around the never-ending quest for content, especially for publishers who don’t (or more likely - can’t) write.

Check out this article by Jason Rakowski. Compare that to an article I found on an article directory by a Danny Thompson. They are identical. Word for word.

Folks, that’s how easy things have gotten on the Internet. You can basically start your own online publishing empire with a) no authors, b) no content, c) no creativity, d) no effort, and e) very little money.

Speaking for the rest of the bloggers who actually spend hours to write their own content - Do us a favor and give us some validation, will ya? Don’t be shy and drop us a comment!

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Trackback Problems with Windows Live Spaces

Published
by
Jon
on May 2, 2008
in Technology
. 0 Comments

I can’t believe I wasted so much time on this, but I truly believe blogs hosted on Windows Live Spaces can’t do trackbacks properly. Why do I think so? Let me show you.

Before we begin our ride, let’s first look through the official trackback specifications and review how trackbacks really work. Got it? Good.

According to the official specifications, all I need to do to do a trackback is to send a HTTP POST to the trackback URL, with a mandatory url parameter, and a few other optional parameters (blog_name, excerpt and title). Something like this, if I want to trackback to my last blog entry:

  1. POST http://armchairtheorist.com/2008/04/29/lotus-notes-sucks-outlook-sucks-everything-sucks/trackback/
  2. Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf-8
  3. title=Hello&url=http://www.myblog.com/hello&excerpt=Hello&blog_name=My+Blog

Easy right? Luckily this is so easy to test with a tool like cURL. So I try the following command:

  1. curl -d "title=Hello&url=http://www.myblog.com/hello&excerpt=Hello&blog_name=My+Blog" http://armchairtheorist.com/2008/04/29/lotus-notes-sucks-outlook-sucks-everything-sucks/trackback/

And hey, it works! I get back this:

  1. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><response><error>0</error></response>

So Wordpress handles it like a champ. How about Windows Live Spaces? Let’s try my friend Guppy’s latest blog entry:

  1. curl -d "title=Hello&url=http://www.myblog.com/hello&excerpt=Hello&blog_name=My+Blog"http://fatguppylive.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!F521B0C7664D5B30!202.trak
  2. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?><response><error>1</error><message>Unknown Error</message></response>

Unknown Error… well that’s not very helpful. OK, maybe Guppy forgot to change the Windows Live Spaces setting to Allow trackbacks from any public website to my blog? But it’s 3am in the morning, I don’t want to wake him up for my silly little experiment…

Fine, I’ll register my own Windows Live Spaces blog.

So after leaving all settings as default and making sure I changed the trackback setting above, I tried again:

  1. curl -d "title=Hello&url=http://www.myblog.com/hello&excerpt=Hello&blog_name=My+Blog"http://armchairtheorist.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!6CB04C4AD9363220!110.trak
  2. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?><response><error>1</error><message>Unknown Error</message></response>

Crap. I don’t believe this.

OK fine, at least Windows Live Spaces blogs should be able to trackback the other direction to Wordpress right? After fiddling for an hour… no such luck either. Neither direction works as far as trackbacks are concerned.

Unless I’m missing something (and do leave me a comment to let me know if I did), trackbacks just don’t work in Windows Live Spaces blogs. Period.

That’s too bad, because this is an example where Microsoft has committed to supporting a certain standard specification, but they actually fail to do so, due to poor implementation or other factors.

Is anyone really surprised though? Remember Visual J++, or something more recent, like OOXML?

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Lotus Notes Sucks, Outlook Sucks, Everything Sucks!

Published
by
Jon
on April 29, 2008
in Technology
. 0 Comments

So my good friend Fat Guppy is at it again, this time with a scathing article on Lotus Notes. I have to say though, I definitely found this blog entry one of his more entertaining ones, so I recommend all of you to go and read it. Maybe it’s his use of colors and visuals or his feverish passion for anything anti-IBM, but I just couldn’t help myself but chuckle throughout as I was reading it.

Not calling you out Guppy, cuz you know we are cool. ;) I’m just using your post as an example to highlight a phenomenon I observe.

Let’s think about this a bit, shall we? I don’t believe any of the following can be reasonably disputed:

  1. For every CIO that swears by Outlook/Exchange, there is a CIO who swears by Notes/Domino.
  2. For every customer that migrates from Notes to Outlook, there is a customer that migrates from Outlook to Notes.
  3. For every community that thinks Microsoft technologies are “da bomb”, there is a community that thinks Lotus technologies are the best thing since sliced bread.
  4. For every Microsoft evangelist/geek/blogger engaging the community, there is a Lotus evangelist/geek/blogger engaging the community.
  5. For every reason that claims Exchange is better than Domino, there are reasons that can claim that Domino is better than Exchange.
  6. For every project like Live Mesh or Clearflow that shows Microsoft as an innovative and forward-looking company, there are projects like VirtualWorlds and BlueGene that shows IBM as an innovative and forward-looking company.
  7. And finally, my favorite: for every group of people on Twitter complaining about Lotus Notes, you can find a group of people complaining about Outlook/Exchange:

The bottom line is this - There is no point in debating whether Notes/Domino or Outlook/Exchange is better, because they are all about the same. Yes, I said it - They are all about the same. The technology is mature to the point that you will find thousands of customers happy that they are on Lotus Notes, just like you will find thousands of customers who are happy on Outlook. Customers move from Exchange to Domino all the time, and likewise from Domino to Exchange. Most customers move because of either a) political factors, b) cost, c) personal gain, or d) the old system was mismanaged to the point that it left a bad taste in their mouths.

In other words, just like most other enterprise software, e-mail and collaboration group ware has more or less been commoditized.

So what does that mean? In my opinion it means that there is very little chance that either Microsoft nor IBM would be able to overwhelmingly dominate the market and eliminate the other. Not that they shouldn’t continue trying though - just like we need prosecutors and defense attorneys to try their best in order to preserve the balance of the justice system, we need both IBM and Microsoft to continue maintaining this market balance to the benefit of CIOs around the world.

Focus the energy in tending to the customer’s needs and making sure their system doesn’t get screwed up by a poor implementation partner. And save the rhetoric and energy spent in proclaiming one product is so much better than the other, because deep down we all know that they are all about the same.

Bonus Link: It seems like nowadays everyone, from Guppy to Ed Brill, is using Tweet Scan to find complaints about Lotus Notes. How bout some love for a change? ;)

Last Word: As Joel Spolsky pointed out, economics dictate that as products get commoditized, the demand, and thus revenue, for their complementary products increase. So if server hardware and implementation services can be considered complements to enterprise software then, hmm… wait a second…

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Wanted: Muslim Cybertroopers

Published
by
Jon
on April 28, 2008
in Oddities
. 0 Comments

Found this on Facebook’s Marketplace today. Not a big deal, but it did cause me to do a double take:

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