Our recent announcements about Socialtext People and Socialtext Dashboard have given me the fun opportunity to demo and discuss our new social networking initiatives with a large number of existing and potential customers.  There’s some consistent themes that come up in these conversations, often unprompted by anything I say:

• Many companies have been thinking about the business potential of social networking at work.  Several have even built out complete strategies and visions of what they would like to see working inside of their environment – not just in terms of a technology suite or stack, but also in terms of “fitting in” to their existing way of working.  This is really exciting!
• At the same time many of them have a hard time explaining internally how the most commonly known and used public internet social networking tools show how this would really work “in the real world” of their environment.  “Facebook is just for fun” or “How is that relevant to getting stuff done” or “what problems does that solve for me at work” are frequent questions that people either ask or get asked.
• One nerve that runs deep that our demo often touches comes to the fore when I talk about how we at Socialtext think really deeply and differently about the value proposition of social software in the workplace vs. on the Internet.  We think that the point is to help people and organizations get stuff done, which is dramatically different from “staying in touch” or “showing off how big your network is” or “hooking up”.

What prompted me to write about this was a conversation I had yesterday with a new customer.  I was humorously talking about how the explicit “friending” gesture that’s at the core of almost every public social networking site just doesn’t work as is in the enterprise – after all we work for the same company, and the political ramifications of publicly visible “friend connections” is just subject to too much useless gamesmanship (“look how many execs I’m friends with”).  We think the real potential of social software in the work environment goes way beyond explict graphs of “who knows whom” (or really “who says they know whom”), and should address much more powerful things like “who works with whom” and “who knows what” and “who knows who knows what”.

My new customer told me I must watch a very funny video called “Facebook in the Real World” which is here for your enjoyment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrlSkU0TFLs

Meanwhile all of this thinking was strongly influenced by one of my most favorite recent reads – David Weinberger‘s book “Everything is Miscellaneous”.  I recommend this book to everyone – but in particular because of his chapter called “What Nothing Says”.  My key takeaway is that the implicit is much more powerful than the explicit, and that what I do is more meaningful that what I say about myself.  By extension, what others say about me is likely more relevant and trustworthy (usually) that what I say about me.  These social patterns are much more useful and relevant than explicit links between people who know that the links are explicitly public.

Anyway, enjoy the video.

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Justin Kistner of Voce Nation just posted an interview with me on How Social Media Changed PR.

I think what he said would be of interest to some of our other clients as well as to other PR professionals. There is some good fodder in here for further discussions about:

– What is the big shift in PR and why are people split about whether or not to be happy about it?
– What is the role of a modern PR firm?
– Tactically speaking, how has the PR process changed?

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When our CEO Eugene Lee joined us six months ago in almost every meeting he would remind us that “every time there is a new team member, its a new team.”  A key concept from The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni.

As a leadership team, there were a lot of approaches we could have taken for teambuilding — games, exercises, workshops, and other special events.  Instead, Eugene led us to learn how to become a team by working together. 

Good thing too, as we are a startup, otherwise known as a business that grows without perfect resources, especially time.  But for businesses of all shapes and sizes, I see an interesting trend — less side activities and more social interaction while getting work done.

Consider if you will the field of knowledge management systems, a relative failure which I parodied thusly:

Manage Knowledgement is a way of describing KM that’s backwards but works.  With KM, users were supposed to fill out forms as a side activity to extract their tacit knowledge.  Then some form of artificial intelligence would extract value.  Turns out, users resisted and the algorithms didn’t match reality.  With MK, through blogs and wikis, the principle activity is sharing, driven by social incentives.  Contribution is simple and unstructured, isn’t a side activity and there is permission to participate.  Intelligence is provided by participants, both through the act of sharing and simply leaving behind breadcrumbs of attention.

Every organization wants more knowledge and better teams.  And yes, some side activities are very effective towards these broad and fairly intangible goals.  However, when times get tight, like today’s recession, side activities get cut.

Wikis and Social Software offer an opportunity for sustainable team building.  Not just when you have gained adoption through effective practices so people share and connect while doing their daily work.  But specific team activities.

Team building begins with vocabulary — developing a shared language.  Eugene joked that half the team was wiki purists and the other half were old school emailers (which aside from language also meant we needed agreement on what modalities to use when).  There was five years of social software learnings documented in our wikis.  And a practical understanding of how most corporate users actual work.  Some of it meant learning other’s definitions and some new terms had to be developed.

Now all of that could have occurred in meetings, and some of it did, but this is where the wiki comes in.  Wikis ask users to share control over a commonly editable resource.  They also ask groups to gain agreement on how to use the tool to be effective.  And when there is a well defined goal for the collaboration it even generates value. 

Simple conversations occur that lead to simple agreements like “let’s use these four tags, for these four kinds of information — and lets agree to pay attention to pages and posts with this tag on a daily basis.”  While it seems mundane at first, the team not only develops a shared language, but a way of working with it.

A major automobile manufacturer customer used Socialtext for long term strategic planning.  Beyond effective lightweight collaboration, they valued how it made transparent the ideas and preferences of team members — but also enabled them to gain agreement faster.

What’s also interesting is how this scales into mass collaboration.  You can’t really call a group larger than 150 people a team, or pre-define the teams that really work at that scale.  But you can develop a shared language at scale.  One interesting facet of this way of working is what the inventor of the wiki, Ward Cunningham, calls “happy accidents.”  When a person creates a link to a page that they don’t think exists yet, but finds someone has already created a page by that name.  They not only discover existing work to build upon, but use of language to agree upon — and the people behind it.

Next time you have a new team member, and thusly, a new team, consider these simple practices for team building:

• Project shared notes in a wiki page while meeting
• Start an initiative to document best practices, kicking off with a conversation about basic language and how to structure information architecture.  Revisit as a group on a regular basis until it takes off on its own.
• Augment your next leadership offsite with an Wiki Eventspace to
  
• flush out the agenda beforehand
• have participants create profiles including answering topical questions
• organizer communication
• shared notes and in-session conversation
• structure new initiatives on the fly
  
• Look for major exceptions to business process to rapidly form an expert group focused not just on resolution in rapid time, but documenting learnings in the process
• Look for common editing exercises, from mission statements to press releases
• Encourage rich profiles, blog posts and wiki expression not just about work, but the things that help others understand the identities behind their words and work.  Even if its blogging about cats.  If you clamp down on tone, it wont be fun (especially compared to paintball).  This is not a directed side activity, and these conversations occur in the lunchroom and by the watercooler anyway, just with less distribution and persistence.
  

And if you are still looking for a directed side activity, there is of course, a Teampedia.

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Data sharing and privacy are seen as black and white opposites in conventional wisdom. Everything is locked down, private, non portable. Or everything is open, public, and free-flowing.  But data sharing and privacy are not black and white. In real life, people share and present information based on social context. There are gradations of privacy and information sharing.

At the recent Data Portability Summit, there was some excellent discussion about data sharing, privacy and context.

Truly Private information

There are times when it is right to share data in a way that preserves privacy. Family members use different photo services, and want to share photos with each other but not the rest of the world. A group working on mergers and acquisitions absolutely needs to keep information confidential. In these cases one give permission to family, friends, or business associates based on membership in a group.

Signal to noise, social context

There are many circumstances where information isn’t truly private. But people choose to share with smaller groups. Someone doesn’t want to bore all of their friends with information about knitting or rock climbing, when that information is relevant only to a few. Information about one’s political or religious affiliation isn’t a secret, but it may not be the information one chooses to share when meeting new people at a professional conference. In these cases, it would be useful to have the ability to create tags for the relevant groups, and share by tag. The tags can capture the nuances of subgroups: knitting hats vs. knitting sweaters, say.

Progressive disclosure

There are circumstances when people want to start by sharing with a smaller group, and invite more people. Or start by sharing a little bit of information about common interest, and later share more sensitive information.

Stream filter

The signal to noise and progressive disclosure patterns are about the person sharing information. Stream filtering is for the recipient. Sometimes one wants to “people watch” a diverse stream of information. And sometimes one wants to focus on the current work project, or upcoming social events. Stream filtering is used by individuals who want to apply a context to the information they receive.

Persona

People use identifiers — dress or email address — to represent more than one persona. The same person wears different clothes, with co-workers, at a customer meeting vs. a barbecue.

Personal vs. organizational control

In organizations, there are some things that an individual may want to control, and some things that admins want to control. A person might want to share soccer pictures with the soccer league. An admin may want to ensure that people aren’t sharing the sports illustrated calendar widget.

These ideas emerged from the session, co-moderated by Kevin Marks plus pre- and post-conversations with Joseph Smarr and Thomas Vander Wal

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I’m really pleased to be able to welcome Julie to Socialtext’s board of directors.  All the usual details are in the press release, but there’s a lot more to this than what you can fit into a news release.

Julie and I have been swimming in parallel lanes of the same swimming pools for, it seems, our entire careers.  We’ve both been through the email, collaboration software, and enterprise business models routines, and we both still share a passion for how tremendous customer value and businesses can be built by enabling companies to harness their greatest assets – their people.

We reconnected after I joined Socialtext and I was struck by her breadth of experience, the wisdom and learnings she’s gleaned through several different career moves, and the depth of her thinking and pattern-matching that is so important to real-world problem solving.  She’s already added significant value through her insights, recommendations, and most importantly her probing “have you thought about…” questions that help us as a team stay on our toes.

I also wanted to state that I had explictly wanted to add a woman to our board – not for PR reasons – but rather because I believe that diversity benefits decision-making.  I’ve always believed that it’s the best idea that should win, and that the best ideas usually emerge from a diverse range of inputs, models, experiences, and perspectives.  We’re proud to be able to add someone like Julie to our team.

Julie was honored last week as the Alumni of the Year at her alma mater, and she was the distinguished speaker at the U of Alabama commencement.  Apparently she rocked the house down!

Welcome to the Socialtext team Julie!

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Yesterday I gave a keynote at Van Web 2.0 naar Enterprise 2.0 in the Netherlands.  My slides are here:

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Tonight our London office is co-hosting a social software dinner with Headshift.  If you are there, I hope you can join us.

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Website redesigns are always a lot of work, but in this case we had a lot more moving parts than usual.  We upgraded our underlying content management system, integrated our trial signup process with our new salesforce.com implementation, and transitioned over to a new blogging platform.

 

We are trying to apply our core agile engineering principles to our website work as well – in other words we are now in position to update and respond to suggestions and feedback on a more iterative basis – so we welcome your feedback.

 

Our recent new product launches (Socialtext 3.0, Socialtext People, Socialtext Dashboard) have been received enthusiastically, and our 4 Solutions are now now front and center on our web presence.  We’ll be talking more about these more frequently, especially now that we’ve upgraded all of our machinery.

 

Feedback and suggestions on the new web site layout welcomed.

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