Anthony Bradley

I have been reading in the blogosphere and in the general press about the need for a better definition of social media. Indeed, my discussions with clients have validated this need. After having spent 10 months of 2009 hand collecting and analyzing 200 cases of successful social media implementations (I actually looked at over 400 cases but weeded out those that were not social in nature or were not successful), I feel that I have gained considerable insight into what is unique about social media. I recently published, “The Six Core Principles of Social-Media-Based Collaboration” (available to clients or for a fee) to help clients distinguish between social media and other forms of communications and collaboration. Here are some brief excerpts.

At its foundation, social media is a set of technologies and channels targeted at forming and enabling a potentially massive community of participants to productively collaborate. IT tools to support collaboration have existed for decades. But social-media technologies, such as social networking, wikis and blogs, enable collaboration on a much grander scale and support tapping the power of the collective in ways previously unachievable.

Six core principles underlie the value of social-media solutions, and, in combination, serve as the defining characteristics that set social media apart from other forms of communication and collaboration.

1. Participation
2. Collective
3. Transparency
4. Independence
5. Persistence
6. Emergence

Participation

Successful social-media solutions tap into the power of mass collaboration through user participation. The only way to achieve substantial benefits from social media is by mobilizing the community to contribute. You can’t capture the “wisdom of the crowds” if the crowds don’t participate. 

Collective

Varied definitions and applications of the term “collective” abound and cover a wide spectrum of meanings. Here, as a core principle of social media, the use of the term “collective” is tightly aligned with its root origins “to collect.” With social media, participants “collect” around a unifying entity. People collect around the Facebook social graph to contribute their profile information. People collect on Wikipedia to add encyclopedia articles. People collect on YouTube to share videos. In these examples, as in all social media, people collect around the content to contribute rather than individually create the content and distribute it.

Transparency

With social media, it is not enough to collect participant contributions. A social-media solution also provides transparency in that participants are privy to each other’s participation. They get to see, use, reuse, augment, validate, critique and rate each other’s contributions. Without transparency, there is no participant collaboration on content. It is in this transparency that the community improves content, unifies information, self-governs, self-corrects, evolves, creates emergence and otherwise propels its own advancement.

Independence

The principle of independence means that any participant can contribute completely independent of any other participant. This is also called anytime, anyplace collaboration. Participants can collaborate no matter where they are or whoever else may be posting content at that time. Generally, there is no workflow or document check-in/check-out that can bottleneck collaboration and impact the scalability required for mass collaboration. No coordination between collaborators is required.

Persistence

With social media, the fruits of participant contributions are captured in a persistent state for others to view, share and augment. This is one of the more obvious principles. It differentiates social media from synchronous conversational interactions, where much of the information exchanged is either lost or captured, most often only in part, as an additional scribing activity.

Emergence

The emergence principle embodies the recognition that you can’t predict, model, design and control all human collaborative interactions and optimize them as you would a fixed business process. It is the recognition that one benefit of social media is as an environment for social structures to emerge. These structures may be latent or hidden organizational structures, expertise, work processes, content organization, information taxonomies, and more.

I’m interested in your take on this definition and differentiating principles. BTW, I will spend the next few months publishing on my analysis of these 200 cases. I’ve put together some interesting social media use case patterns.

Clients should read the note (above link) for additional information such as comparisons, charts, case examples, references, and recommendations.

Came across this interesting article in the WSJ “Jillian Michaels on the Danger of Social Media.” She is the fitness guru of “The Biggest Loser” show in Australia. Apparently, her fame and fortune is skyrocketing.

The article states, “Ms. Michaels cites an incident in which someone asked her a question about caffeine via social media to which she responded with some of the health benefits of caffeine. She soon received a phone call from an unnamed company she’s working with on her supplement line, who said they’d need to consult an attorney; Ms. Michaels now limits her status updates on Twitter and Facebook to statements that won’t ruffle lawyers.”

Bad move. She may not have the stomach for social media. Bending your persona to appeal to sponsors at the expense of being “true to the community” is a recipe for eventual backlash and subsequent obscurity. If the community senses (and they will eventually) that you are a lackey for “the man” then you will lose them, and fast.  Are there health benefits to caffeine? If so, should she withhold or evade providing that information because it may conflict with the interests of a sponsor. This really isn’t a tough question. Always choose to be “true to the community” over supporting the interests of a sponsor. Even though money comes from a sponsor. The power comes from the community. Without the community there is no power to attract sponsors. Think of it this way:

• If you lose a sponsor but keep the community, you will get another sponsor.
• If you keep the sponsor but then lose the community, you will lose all sponsors (including the one you tried to keep)

The same philosophy applies to all social media implementations. Being “true to the community” is paramount. Here are some similar scenarios where community participation is at risk.

• If employees feel that the community is simply a way for managers to push their message and feign bottom up participation
• If an enterprise is insincere in gathering customer feedback by eliminating (or otherwise inhibiting) negative comments
• If content contributors feel their content is unjustifiably suppressed because it conflicts with the leadership’s preferred position

This article seems to be saying, be careful what you say or your sponsors may get upset (or even legal) with you. I think this is the wrong message. I’m not saying don’t be careful in what you say. I’m saying be more careful that what you say doesn’t compromise your integrity in supporting the best interests of the community. If you (or your enterprise) can’t be “true to the community” then you don’t have the stomach for social media and you should work on your digestive track prior to engaging the community. Or at least choose an area where engagement has a minimal chance of nausea I’ll halt the analogy here.  

As an aside, to those of you out there who are famous, make sure that your legal contracts reflect this “trueness to the community.” Unlike times past, with the aid of social media technologies, the community will sniff out and expose any perceived deception.

The Web is brewing with comments and controversy over Tiger Woods’ right to privacy concerning his recent transgressions. Here is one such article (note the controversy in the comments).

Some people think that Tiger Woods is no different than the mailman and is due the same right to privacy. In a perfect world maybe, and I say maybe, this would be the case. But in this world it is NOT. Tiger Woods, unlike my mailman, sells his image to the highest bidder. And they bid high, to the tune of millions upon millions a year. The fact of life today is that you can’t sell the good parts of your image and claim privacy on the bad. All your behavior becomes a part of your personal brand.

No matter where you fall on the question of personal privacy, this is the way of the world and it is unlikely to change because there are too many people who feel that if you sell your persona then then all your behavior is fair game. And certainly the demand for scandalous information is strong.

What does this have to do with enterprise social media policy? Everything. Tiger Woods is not the mailman. Tiger is the number one spokesperson and identifiable personality for “Tiger Woods International” (A business with a billion plus in assets). Effectively, Tiger Woods does not have a public personal persona. He only has a public professional persona. This means that any public information on Tiger Woods the person will impact “Tiger Woods International” the business.

Some people in your enterprise are in the same boat. I talk to clients regularly about social media governance strategies and advise them on the management of employee personas. Most employees will have both personal and professional personas and it is important that the enterprise respect those personal personas (within limits). However, a few (maybe the CEO and other high profile people) really don’t have personal personas. A solid understanding of personas is critical to effective social media policy formulation. Different persona types may need specialized policy. It also may impact your decision about featuring your CEO in the new advertising campaign  

As usual I like to point readers to some relevant Gartner content (available to Gartner clients or for a fee).

• Establishing Policies for Social Application Participation 
• Toolkit: Establishing Policy for Social Software Applications
• Use a Gartner Governance Model to More Safely Empower Grassroots Social Media Efforts 
• Comparing Social-Media Policies for Government

 

Back in 2007 and early 2008 I anticipated a rapid rate of enterprise mashup adoption. Just about everyone, including me was talking about enterprise mashups as a new paradigm for end user computing where business users would rapidly assemble and reassemble applications in a highly dynamic fashion. Users can “create applications as fast as the situation changes” was one of the lines I used. I talked about The MacGyver Principle and Tom Cruise’s character in the movie Minority Report. This was a truly revolutionary vision and the tremendous power of mashups to drive change.

Then the economic downturn hit us hard. Many enterprises curtailed investment in new systems to instead focus on how to get the most out of their current IT investments. The financial industry, an early adopter of mashups was obviously hit the hardest. Gartner client interest in mashups waned slightly but I was anticipating a significant escalation prior to the downturn. You may have noticed that enterprise mashups is not on Gartner’s top ten technologies to watch anymore.

Then a shift in the need began. Instead of asking about end user empowerment, clients began inquiring about how to reduce integration costs with mashups. Some organizations were trying to use mashups to clear out their application integration backlog more quickly and at less cost. Others were facing new integration challenges due to mostly unexpected mergers and acquisitions.

This new use case is now rippling through the enterprise mashup technology sector. Many mashup vendors were direct selling an end user based solution to business unit leaders. Now the main buyer is in the IT shop. several mashup vendors are now adapting their value proposition and marketing messaging to this new audience. Additionally, there is a movement to an indirect sales model that has mashup players working hard to establish relationships with systems integrators. All this takes time to build traction. 

I still believe that end user empowerment is the nirvana for enterprise mashups. It seems we will just need to wait a while before the “MacGyver principle of applications” is a mainstream reality. In the meantime we will just have to settle for a better way to address some application integration challenges

I have created many successful software application pilots in my day. But these were more traditional process based applications that didn’t hinge on community adoption and participation. Pilot’s are intended to mitigate risk by basically validating that the process and software supporting that process will serve the needs of a “system actor.” This made sense because the process and software was usually complex and the user was mostly acting on that process-software independently.

This practice is not prudent for social media where the software complexity should be minimal and the primary goal is to get people interacting. Community participants are fickle and unforgiving (especially external communities). You may only get one shot at catalyzing community formulation. Don’t pilot, test, prototype, or experiment on the community. Don’t artificially restrict participation. The law of numbers is a critical factor in building a thriving and productive community. Why would you only go after a small subset of a target audience when mass adoption is a critical success factor? You will handicap success from the start. I have spoken with numerous organizations that failed to gain adoption only to find out that they restricted membership as part of a “pilot.” Others, “half bake” the social media environment functionality because it is a “pilot” and they are basically only experimenting. This is a great recipe for a poor user experience that can not only turn off a potential community participant for that pilot but also significantly impede any other social media efforts targeted at that audience.

Often, enterprises don’t execute on the rigor required for social media success under the moniker of a “pilot.” The most successful implementations I’ve seen don’t “pilot,” they execute on a planned increment. When you go to the community with a social media solution, go for real. So how do you mitigate risk? Mitigate risk with a carefully scoped purpose. Minimize the initial business purpose pursued but pursue that purpose with all the execution discipline it requires. Instead of deploying a social network for all your employees to collaborate more effectively (but only starting with a pilot for the “western region”) build a social media solution for your sales people to network specifically on how to successfully identify and overcome the top three sales objections.

I have spent the past few years researching and publishing on best practices (such as “Don’t Pilot”). But unfortunately I still see social media pilot efforts out there, that ironically, create rather than mitigate failure risk. Here are a few of the key reports (available to clients or for a fee).

• Seven Key Characteristics of a Good Purpose for Social Software 
• Toolkit: Planning for Social Software Applications Using a Purpose Road Map
• Ten Primary Design Considerations for Delivering Social Software Solutions: The PLANT SEEDS Framework 
• Use a Gartner Governance Model to More Safely Empower Grassroots Social Media Efforts 

 

There have been a slew of surveys and press recently that have indicated that social media is a security threat and a productivity drain and that many, if not most, enterprises are “banning” social media (examples; Half Survey, BBC, survey, Marines, Hollywood, WSJ, and NFL).

This may lead people to believe that enterprises are not pursuing social media. This is not the case. Although many organizations challenge the business value of the social Web, the vast majority are exploring social media. Social Web is a term that has evolved to include the social sites on the world wide web that are open to the general public. These are the sites such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Wikipedia. Enterprises are prudent to think hard about how to use these public sites for business value. But the social Web is also evolving to encompass specific community environments as well. See my blog post on the social Web and health care. Enterprises can’t ignore these sites.

However, social media is the broader term that covers just about any use of social software including workforce facing implementations (often called Enterprise 2.0) and more controlled communities. There exists a large set of social software technologies that are targeted at non-social Web implementations of social media. Gartner just last week published the 2009 Magic Quadrant for Social Software (available to clients or for a fee).

There are several social media options to explore including:

• Personal use of the social Web
• Business use of the social Web
• Internally facing (workforce) enterprise use of social software
• Open or closed community
• On-premises or SaaS
• Externally facing (e.g., social CRM) enterprise use of social software 
• Open or closed community
• On-premises or SaaS

Like much of life, social media is not as simple as “do” or “don’t do” but is a strategic examination of when the business value justifies the risks. Enterprises need to examine all these possibilities for their business value and potential need for governance.

Some Gartner research to help you includes (available to clients or for a fee):

• Establishing Policies for Social Application Participation
• Seven Key Characteristics of a Good Purpose for Social Software
• Ten Primary Design Considerations for Delivering Social Software Solutions: The PLANT SEEDS Framework

In response to a Computerworld citing a study finding that “54% of U.S. companies say that they have banned workers from using social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace while on the job, I did a little survey of my own with these results. I left the survey up to possibly collect more responses (only 22 people took the survey the first time). Now there are 40 responses. Still not exactly statistically relevant numbers but here are the new results:

Q1. Does your employer leave the decision on social media access up to you (i.e., there is no policy)? Yes. 59% No: 43%

Q2. Does your employer encourage the productive use of social media Web sites? Yes: 46% No: 54%

Q3. Does your employer restrict access to specific social media Web sites such as facebook and YouTube? Yes: 49% No: 51%

4. Does your employer restrict all access to the Web from work devices? Yes: 5% No: 95%

Though responses almost doubled, the numbers didn’t change dramatically. But they did get slightly more conservative across all questions. Some people left comments. Here are some interesting ones:

• documents are published presenting Social Networks ( without clear distinction ) as dangerous system both for preserving information asset and as place where virus could infect your PC
• No encouragement or discouragement [of social media], but because the company has fairly conservative culture, most are choosing not use social computing just to be on the safe side.
• Hasn’t been encouraging it [social media] but that’s because they didn’t really understand it. Part of my job (I’m new) is to start it going
• [Access restrictions] done under the guise of bandwidth management, but it’s really an attempt to control the message.

Thanks to those who participated in the survey.

I just finished publishing a research note set on mobilizing the grassroots with social media initiatives to help our clients gain the benefits of grassroots while mitigating risks.

Enterprises are struggling to capitalize on social media and deliver collaborative solutions with high business value. Because there are so many ways to improve enterprise collaboration (among employees, partners, customers, prospects and so on) and a myriad of available social technologies, the path of least resistance is to simply provide a social technology in the hope that a grassroots effort will take hold and deliver business value. Unfortunately, this approach rarely succeeds. Enterprise IT organizations must determine when a grassroots movement has a high chance of success or when a more top-down approach is required. This involves building a decision model as part of the social media governance program that enables the enterprise (all levels) to understand the nature of the social media purpose in terms of its ability to succeed as a grassroots driven effort or where top-down involvement is required. Done correctly this can empower grassroots social media movements without undue risk. I have assembled the No-Go-Grow decision model to serve this purpose. No is, well, when you say no to a grassroots movement, go is when grassroots success is more probable, and grow is when the enterprise need to get involved (top-down) to nurture the solution. See “Use a Gartner Governance Model to More Safely Empower Grassroots Social Media Efforts” for detail on the No-Go-Grow decision model (available to clients or for a fee).

As part of the “No” analysis enterprises must determine whether social media is actually suitable for the collaboration need. Enterprises looking to capitalize on mass collaboration and the power of the community must understand the nature of community interactions and their affinity for social media. I have identified 18 collaboration scenario characteristics organized in nine-pair endpoints across a spectrum from highly authoritative to highly collective (such as Deep Analysis Versus Broad Observation and Ascertaining Facts Versus Ascertaining Perception). This provides a framework for assessing an enterprise collaboration need according to its affinity for a social media-type solution. This enhances the understanding of the core collaborative challenge, so enterprises can make better decisions on when and how to pursue a social media solution. See “How to Assess the Suitability of Social Media for Enterprise Collaboration Scenarios” for details on the framework (available to clients or for a fee).

Understanding and capitalizing on the grassroots is critical for both bottom-up- and top-down-driven social media efforts. Generally, the enterprise leadership forms a team to lead a top-down social media effort, while members of a potential social-media-based community drive a bottom-up approach. The need for grassroots is obvious for bottom-up success, but many enterprises fail to see the importance of grassroots mobilization in top-down social media solution initiatives. Regardless of how the initiative is driven, the enterprise needs to help activate and guide a grassroots movement. Because the potential is less obvious with a top-down effort, enterprises must take extra care to mobilize a grassroots movement. With a bottom-up approach, enterprises can experience a more natural grassroots movement, while a top-down effort can require proactive behaviors to encourage participation.

I have pulled together 12 key criteria (such as security, seeding, and integration) for assessing any potential social solution initiative’s affinity for grassroots success and how enterprises can use them to capitalize on grassroots mobilization without undue risk. Enterprises can use these criteria to determine if a bottom-up approach can succeed, or where grassroots efforts can support a top-down approach. See “12 Criteria to Assess Grassroots Risk and Potential in Social Media Solutions” for details (available to clients or for a fee).

Do you take a calculated approach to mobilizing the grassroots when you pursue a social media solution?

p.s. this seems like a good place for another survey

Indulge me a moment to set the storyline. The San Antonio International Piano Competition was last week. My wife and I had the pleasure of hosting one of the competing pianists Weiwen Ma. For five days she practiced on my piano from about 9:00 AM to Midnight with an amazing display of prowess and dedication interrupted only by periodic bio breaks. My Mother-in-law also hosted an Italian competitor named Angelo Arciglione. See him here playing a Chopin piece that he played for us on my piano. I am a huge Chopin fan and if you watch this video you may be able to imagine my awe and gratitude at the opportunity to sit three feet from these incredible artists. On top of it all they both were wonderful people. As great as the piano competition was, it can’t compare with the experience of forming relationships with these two beautiful artists. I will follow both their careers from this day forward.

The point here is the tremendous power of relationships.

Two weeks prior I attended the San Antonio Symphony performance of Beethoven’s 7th. I was struck, as I always am, by the advanced age of the audience and it makes me fear for the future of classical music. I have no relationship with the Symphony just the usual boring transactional interactions where they mail me their season’s programs and ask me to buy. Bottom line, the classical music performance business just like the music recording business is terrible at building relationships. They are squandering a great opportunity. In fact, I had a conversation with a former President of the San Antonio Symphony about their current “I’m with the Band” ad campaign (billboards and posters) and complimented the attempt to highlight the artists. He told me that he didn’t like the campaign because it “brought the Symphony down a level.” What, huh, did I misunderstand you? Unfortunately I didn’t.

In an even worse attitude, the music recording industry is threatening to and taking legal action against large portions of their customers and prospects. Who thinks this is a good idea? How would your business do with this approach? Again, the problem is lack of relationships. The record label and the Symphony are corporate organizations. The people don’t care about them and many don’t care about stealing from them. The people certainly don’t feel like these organizations care about them. People probably don’t want a relationship with the corporate organizations. So what can they do?

The answer is really simple. Record labels and Symphonies and the like need to get into the relationship building business. They need to become relationship enablers. Record labels should be developing a core competency in building community around their artists. Social media can help them do this. They need to connect with the audience through the artists. People are much less likely to steal from the artist than the corporation. Labels can drive music sales through these “artist communities”.

This represents a fundamental business shift from “distribution to collective.” The music business has historically been all about distributing music to the people (recorded or live) and it needs to shift to the collective approach of bringing people to the artists and music. Rallying the people around what they care about and then mining those relationships for mutual value is the future of business.

Hopefully at this point you have realized that this shift isn’t just about the music industry. This is about your industry, and mine. Most industries are all about distribution. Gartner is in the research distribution business. Months ago when pitching to Gartner executive leadership about this shift I talked about moving from distributing research to clients to collecting all IT professionals around our research and analysts. I stated that “every IT professional in the world should have a relationship with Gartner.” Notice I didn’t say “should be a paying client.” Gartner then can mine these relationships for mutual value (btw, I’m not saying that Gartner needs to give away all its research).

Earlier I blogged about IT shifting from providing collaboration platforms to delivering social solutions. This is a subset of the overall business shift from distribution to collective.

Right now the transactional interaction of moving someone from prospect to customer is the primary and dominant business interaction. In the years to come, collaborative interactions will dominate with transactional interactions as derivative behaviors.      

As always, I request your feedback.

Last week I blogged on a recent article out of Computerworld citing a study finding that “54% of U.S. companies say that they have banned workers from using social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace while on the job. This seems very high so I conducted my own survey via this blog (the first time I tried it) and promised to publish the results today. One finding is that my readers are lazy or maybe apathetic Over 500 people read the blog but only 22 people took the survey. Not exactly statistically relevant numbers but here are the results:

Q1. Does your employer leave the decision on social media access up to you (i.e., there is no policy)? Yes. 60% No: 40%

Q2. Does your employer encourage the productive use of social media Web sites? Yes: 50% No: 50%

Q3. Does your employer restrict access to specific social media Web sites such as facebook and YouTube? Yes: 36.4% No: 63.6%

4. Does your employer restrict all access to the Web from work devices? Yes: 4.5% No: 95.5%

As I already mentioned, these numbers are not large enough to be statistically valid but let’s do some analysis anyway just for fun. These numbers are actually more in line with what I’ve seen in my dealings with clients. Q1 has 60% where there is no explicit policy on social media. This seems like it might even be a little low. I am really just starting to see enterprises taking a hard look at good social media policy. My survey paints a better picture for social media than the Half survey cited in Computerworld but even my rosier survey results leave a great deal of room for improvement. Some people left comments. Here are some interesting ones:

• Our employer even discourages use of social media tools (wiki’s, discussion forums, even Sharepoint Sites) internally, by placing barriers to entry (massive approval chains, undersized infrastructure)
• [Access is restricted ] Frequently under the guise of “network performance” or “virus protection.” I actually think the business side would like to be more open, but we do have a strong engineering background that gives us nerds in I/T (and particularly info security) too much control. I give this company some credit for trying, but the initial reaction of most I/T gatekeepers is NO – which I attribute to being 1)troglodytes, and 2)too lazy to make it work in a secure manner and 3)to lawyers who are too scared to let people speak up.
• [About access restrictions] No, not yet. Some employees “sense” that it’s coming, though.

I’m going to leave the survey up for a little while longer and I’ll publish again if responses pick up.