Monthly Archives: December 2008

Do you overlap or divide?

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Conquer the newcomer problem by dividing people into groups of 150, suggests Richard Millington, online community builder. This is to literally dividie into 150-strong cells. This could work, depending on the niche involved, but if they don’t like the idea of being divided in this way (ie its counter-cultural) then maybe not. Forrester’s social technographic profile tool, using 2008 data, below could be useful for this if they could suck in more granular data say for individual professions?

The Social Technographics Profile Of Your Customers

The Social Technographics Profile Of Your Customers

Two views & one after thought on this. Firstly,  that from a wider community perspective many small communities make a larger community. And this is true of the offline world. Plus from individual pov the influence of person with membership of many small communities can equal that of a person with a few large communities (see earlier post). This in turn crosses over to Forresters recent social techographic point from the groundswell blog that user metrics can be counted across social networks, not just within one network — ie the obverse point about the power of overlap compared to division in community strategy.

Of course simply treating each customer (aka community member) with care can also do wonders!

Is it strange that Facebook is the top UK search term?

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“The first six months of the year were particularly Facebook crazy, but that still doesn’t entirely explain why Facebook would be the most searched term of 2008 in the UK. It’s not like the URL – Facebook.com – is particularly hard to remember, so perhaps Google is the homepage and people like my Mum forget to type the address into the address bar instead of the Google search box…” (Posted by the Guardian’s Jemima Kiss on Wednesday December 10th).

Hmm, what I like to do is turn the puzzle the other way round, and take the fact that people searched for Facebook, rather than remembered the url seriously. After all didn’t Bob Pearson (Twitter at bobpdell) Vice President, Communities & Conversations at Dell say in an interview with Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang that the ‘corporate homepage’ for them is not Dell.com but Google, MSN or Yahoo? Makes a bit more sense in that context? See 03:40+ mins in.

First BA in social technology

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“The first complete undergraduate course to offer special education and training for those wishing to make a career in the exciting new field of social technologies.” (London South Bank University; pdf Social Technology BA)

Hmm, looks good. be interesting to know who they have lined up as guest lecturers. Perhaps Headshift will contribute?

 

Confessions of a CEO blogger

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Five of the best from the CEO of Forrester Research. Like the point about the relationship between the time it takes and views on the site. The more the views the more time is likely to be taken up. BTW the CEO of Forresters complains he had a ‘cheat sheet’ 6 pages long. Bet I could have got that down to 3 pages with a bit of effort! I mean if you can produce a new web content style sheet for the General Medical Council, anything else is pretty manageable.

Le Web 08 here we come

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Looking forward to start of Le Web 08, especially as it’s being carried online (programme pdf here), some great looking sessions. Free live webstreams on ustream.tv. I see one of the official bloggers is IT Counts very own Dennis Howlett, who recently gave me a nice hat tip in relation to starting a poll on the VAT reduction.

Have a great Le Web 08 Dennis.

Reconciling social technographics and 90-9-1

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Useful thoughts from the groundswell blog:

Forrester’s Social Technographics surveys show that when it comes to social content 21% of online US consumers are Creators, 37% are Critics (those who react to content created by others), and 69% are Spectators.

The 90-9-1 principle, recently publicized by Community Guy Jake McKee at 90-9-1.com, says that in a community, the rule of thumb is that 90% of visitors only view the content, 9% only comment or react to it, and 1% create it.

This confuses people, and I often get questions about who’s right. In fact, there is no contradiction between these two statements. Let’s examine why.

First of all, the 90-9-1 principle applies to a single site or community. Let’s suppose we are talking about tivocommunity.com, for example. 90-9-1 says that 1% of its members create content. But our surveys might detect a TiVo community member who just reads the Tivo posts, but who is an enthusiastic Barack Obama supporter at myBO.com. Forrester’s surveys would call her a Creator. But with regard to tivocommunity.com, Jake’s rule says she’s in the 90% or lurkers. No contradiction, it just depends on whether you’re looking at a single site or across all sites. Since Creators (in the Forrester sense) include people who create content at any site, they add up to a lot more than 1%

Second, our groups are designed to overlap. Since we also identify Collectors (who organize content) and Joiners (who join social networks), there’s no strict hierarchy. Some Joiners are Creators, some Creators are Joiners, but neither group is a subset of the other. (When creating Social Technographics I attempted to create a hierarchy of behaviors, but carefully examining the data convinced me that was a mistake.) So we allow our categories to overlap. 90-9-1, which examines fewer activities, can accommodate mutually exclusive categories.

Third, 90-9-1 is a rule of thumb. For example, according to 90-9-1.com, only 0.16% of YouTube visitors upload content, far less than 1%. A community of Webmasters will have a lot more contributors than a community of senior citizens. Our surveys are actual data independent of site-to-site variation. (So I don’t get to create a nice neat rule, while Jake can.)

What’s it mean? It means that 90-9-1 is a good rule of thumb for sites, while Social Technographics is a good way to look at populations. And it also means that you should check the Social Technographics Profile of your customers first, to see how many of them are likely to contribute if you put them in a community. 

Web 2.0 delivers new finance model for business?

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I was at a talk at the RSA last night for a sneak preview of a new film Us Now about the potential power of ordinary people using web 2.0 tools to change everything from the way government works to the ownership of football clubs. To quote internet guru Clay Shirky change happens not when we adopt new tools, but when we adopt new behaviours. And web technology can make this happen easier than ever before.

After the film I realised the film’s real power was in describing an alternative model for financing projects, based on web 2.0 technology, from BHO to banking. Fortunately as I work at the ICAEW this realisation came a little quicker, and I blogged it on the ICAEW’s IT Counts.

As you’d expect the US is way ahead of the game on this, it’s already got a catchy title ‘Finance 2.0′, with discussion at a recent Silicon Valley event including the US-version of Zopa called prosper.com.

My Jotspot’s (now) moved to Google

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I blogged in November 2006 that Google had bought the Jotspot wiki. Well, today I’ve completed the migration of my wiki to Google Sites, read more from Google here. There were no hitches, and it’s great I have a personal wiki on the same platform as Gmail. Thanks Google, as there are some great benefits:

  • Unprecedented scalability and availability
  • Significant improvements in performance
  • Unlimited pages for no cost
  • When used with Google Apps
  • Unlimited wiki creation
  • Significant increases in free storage
  • Improvements in wysiwyg editing
  • Improvements in ease of use
  • Tight integration with a product suite which includes enterprise class calendars, spreadsheets, video hosting, presentations, and documents
  • Internationalization support (38 languages)
  • Improved configuration over the site and page layout.

Twitterers are hair-trigger communicators?

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Criticisms of the value of Twitter post-Mumbai from the Independent’s Tom Sutcliffe:

“Twitterers are hair-trigger communicators, and presumably absolutely itching to get something of substance into their despatches. Whereas a journalist has a reasonably strong incentive not to broadcast misleading or dubious information, because such an eventuality would come with a professional cost, a Twitterer owes no duty except to their own impressions and their own state of mind. They’ll pass on rumour as readily as fact, and there’s absolutely no way of telling which is which.”

As someone who has been a journalist and is now a Twitterer this piece from Tom Sutcliffe is certainly worth a look. Fact is though journalists have their own form of built-in bias, of a more sophisticated sort no doubt.

How to trigger E2.0 genetic mutation in a 1.0 organization?

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The question “How to trigger E2.0 genetic mutation in a 1.0 Organization?” posed by Stefano Masciocchi in LinkedIn inspired my reply below. Thought it worth re-publishing as a blog post:

• Hmm, good question, it says on one of my recommendations on LinkedIn that I am expert on E2.0 and cultural change, thanks to my current E2.0 software partner, so I’ll try ang give an expert answer;-)
• I first must say that my previous role I brought in lighweight web 2.0 tools such as Im amd wikis and they helped improve the efficency of communication for offices worldwide, but that was not planned with ROI savings in mind.
• In current role again looking at it from purely ROI point of view I can’t really add anything if you are talking genetic mutation, as that’s an ambitious context. But looking at the question and leaving ROI out for now what I can say is of course it’s extremely difficult, even when money is no object, to achieve such a change.
• So what you really I think are trying to do is two things. Convince the boss using ROI that it’s worth the investment; and use ROI as the key to implement the plan which is effective with staff. In other words at every step the boss will ask ‘what the benefit to the business bottom line’ and the staff will ask ‘what the benefit to me?’. In both cases you are selling the benefits, with ROI at the core.
• I would have thought the best way to accomplish this is to start with where people are already. Thus to go back to my previous example you could argue for corporate wide use of internal messaging to improve effciency and reduce email overload. The cost is small so the boss likes it; you have to come up with a way of proving the ROI. Beware that with implementation you need a policy in place on proper use of IM, restricting personal use for example.
• If you are using new kit like wikis to improve collaboration for heaven sake don’t get hung up on calling it a ‘wiki’ in other words leave out the jargon. It may sound cool, but it puts a lot of people off.
• With something like a wiki along the same lines, start off with all the bells and whistles stripped out, it costs more and the ROI can drive extra functionality as and when it proves its value. Scalability in other words.

Stefano’s response is also worth quoting, “Thanks Stuart, some of your comments sound familiar. In fact, lots of us internal resources are already familiary with major social platforms, use IM even from desk-to-desk (sometimes I wonder what “social tools” really mean, huh?) and, even if most of them are unaware, they are probably willing to be part of a true holistic agency.

“But, as you wisely pointed out, there’s an ogre in almost every tale. Since some of our working processes are already travelling in a 2.0 fashion, best politics is to underline the advantages, trying also to evolve this DIY way into something more company-integrated, proceeding step by step and, eventually, discover that ROI can turn from ogre to friend. Or, at least, a known face.”