SociaLens

IBM has a vested interest in all organizations using digital technologies to "become social," but they are also an interesting case study in using these technologies (and practices) themselves. 

He likens today's Facebooking, Tweeting, Flickr-ing, FourSquaring generation to our grandparents' generation. Imagine a small town where everyone knows everyone else: comings and goings, who's having babies, who's cancer is in remission, who's family is coming to town for Thanksgiving, and who's family is not (and therefore should have an invitation extended). We want people to know where we are, what we're doing, and whether we need help. It's more than just a megalomaniacal existence, it's a need for community. A virtual community, if you will.

A few notable thoughts here:  "as rare as these shifts are, the early predictions about [their impact] are usually underappreciated." "the number one way that customers get information today is through "personal interaction with an employee of the firm" which trumps all traditional sources that most organizations are heavily invested in such as analyst opinion, the Press, and advertising, and that gap has widened."

"Twitter is a great communication channel and as such, you do find a lot of self-promotion and name dropping. But there is so much more to Twitter. The comment got me thinking, would the critics feel the same if they could see more innovative ways to use it?"

Let us face it; we, as humans, are selfish, individualists, and undoubtedly clinging to any privileges associated with power. Goodwill and sharing among peers follow Nielsen's principle, and most of us wouldn't even imagine acting differently unless oblig

What are the results of the patent system itself? The results are distorted research, protectionism, wealth transfers, and enrichment of the patent bar. Large companies, such as IBM, amass giant patent portfolios.

Now television broadcasters are blocking Google TV from getting access to the content broadcasters put online to make sure they don't lose advertising dollars. But the cat is out of the bag. All information is nothing more than bits on one network - the I

At GeekDad we are always interested in the intersection where technology supports our children's learning and creativity. So, this new project that is taking

Five centuries years ago, a new technology swamped the world with data. What we can learn from the aftermath.

Brands and marketers have different levels of participation in the social media space, but many have similar goals and strategies. The "2010 Social Media Benchmarking Study" from Ketchum and FedEx fou

The formal idea of co-creation as a business practice has been around for at least 8 or 9 years now, and has been written about extensively by the late CK Prahalad, Venkat Ramaswamy and Francis Goullart. I have had conversations with the last two, and i think that the effective marriage of new media, co-creation and the rise of participatory culture are important things for organizations to pay attention to.

I had written this a while ago, but i think it is worth revisiting. Many of the core reasons for the replacement of "Rule of Thumb" practice with "Scientific Management" in the early 1900's have now changed, ushering in an era where we need both. In case you're wondering, scientific management is still the basis for much of today's management practice and organizational structures. 

The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell is a very smart writer with a knack for smart, provocative, "contrarian" statements. One such argument that gets digerati in a tizzy is the idea that social media actually doesn't help bring down oppressive regimes, despite all the hype. That debate is back in the news with the protests in Egypt. We'll say right off the bat that we're skeptics that social media can bring down oppressive regimes. We believe Twitter makes a tangible, positive difference in the real world, but probably not quite at the level of regime change. But Gladwell wrote a blog post yesterday on social media and Egypt that just doesn't make any sense.

The adoption of social software by organizations started with the tools, and has moved to focus on the purpose for the tools. The last piece of the puzzle with be the people: their skills with the technologies and the ways that those skills affect their relationships with each other.

During the week of February 14-18, private businesses and government agencies are encouraged to allow employees who normally make the trek into office each day to work from home instead. More than 35,000 companies and organizations have pledged to participate in the event. According to the official Telework Week Website, this would save an estimated $2,451,069 and more than 1,600 tons of pollutants from entering the atmosphere. Where these numbers come from is not entirely clear, but it stands to reason that fewer people commuting would help save money and reduce pollution to some extent.

Though this study is informative and interesting, there are some serious limitations that should be taken into account if we are to generalize its results to all situations of collective action (like organizations). We may do a longer writeup some time in the future, but here are a few questions that it raises: Oh, and here is a link to the original paper: http://ow.ly/3VaS4 -----Is this a problem of the technology, or of fluency with the technology?---- "This is the danger with lean media, and is especially frustrating because it implies that if a willingness to cooperate can be effectively conveyed to other group members-perhaps an easier problem to fix than curing opportunistic intent-the problems of non-cooperation..they just did not know if they could rely on others to reciprocate." (p. 119) These conclusions suggest that fluency with a medium and the norms of communication through that medium may play a significant role in trust. In other words, if i am not good at communicating my intent to cooperate within the limitations of any medium (including face-to-face speech), i will have a hard time building trust. ----Are all digital media still as "lean" as email was in 2005?--- This study bases its concept of "media richness" on 1986 work by Daft and Lengel which suggested a continuum of media richness that contains face-to-face on the "rich" end and things like reports on the "lean" end. The assumption that social media, MMORPG's, digital collaboration platforms, etc are also at the lower end with email is very, very questionable.  ----Can we generalize the behavior of business students to all situations of collective action?---- The participants were all upper-level business students from the early 2000's, who are socialized and train to deal with colle

----Norms of anonymity may have changed since 2005---- There seems to have been an increase in people using digital technologies (especially social media) as a way to build their identity, rather than anonymize it. In fact, services have sprung up to provide people with personal landing pages (http://lifehacker.com/#!5534456/five-best-personal-landing-pages). If this is true, then there is likely a corresponding pressure to build and maintain trust in a world of digital trails and easy search.

"Here is the latest in the very useful series of longitudinal studies on social media use by The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth led by Nora Barnes. This one covered Social Media Usage in the Inc. 500. In contrast here is their most recent one on Blogging and Twitter by the Fortune 500. In this case, there was a nationwide telephone survey of those companies named by Inc. Magazine to the Inc. 500 list. All interviews took place in October and November of 2010 and obtained 34% participation. "

In this post, we pick apart a conversation about the new PR skills to show how these relate to the six digital fluencies we have identified in our research. 

In his book, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Success, Karl Albrecht highlights the five dimensions of social intelligence. The trick is understanding how to translate those often nonverbal dynamics into the text-based world of blogging. Namely: Situational awareness, Presence, Authenticity, Clarity, and Empathy

Many businesses have invested in multi-channel campaign management systems, giving them the ability to execute campaigns across e-mail, direct mail, and the Web seamlessly. We classify our campaigns as transactional, promotional, and experiential, among others. When we look at reports, we often compare campaign performance against previous campaigns or similar programs running in parallel. While this focus on campaign management has made e-mail one of the most profitable direct channels in the marketer's arsenal, it has clouded our view of something more important: relationship management. If e-mail marketers are focusing on campaign-level strategy and execution, who is left to focus on the broader relationship between the brand and consumer and how content, cadence, and channel preference all come together to create a relationship of trust between the brand and the consumer? Let's look at some examples of how a focus on the relationship changes the way we look at the programs we run and inevitably makes e-mail campaigns more effective.