Comments on: Bad Advice Awards for Social Software Solutions

By: social software

social software — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 05:32:01 +0000

Despite the fact that most people on social bookmarking sites are there to promote their own online work, the sites are still widely used for the purpose of community and online sharing.

By: Anthony Bradley

Anthony Bradley — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:20:00 +0000

Andrea,
Maybe we have a different definition of consumer tools because the vast majority of externally facing enterprise implementations of social software for community building that I have seen are also enterprise v. consumer technologies. Consumer technologies include those such as facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Wikipedia, Ning, etc. The big, global strength enterprise external communities normally run on an enterprise platform such as Lithium, OneSite, Jive, Communispace, CustomerVision, LiveWorld, Neighborhood America, etc. Granted that some, such as Wordpress, are used by consumers as well as enterprises.

The list of vendors here is representative and not all inclusive. See http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?doc_cd=162146 for Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Social Software for a more complete list of vendors.

By: Andrea Di Maio

Andrea Di Maio — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 22:58:44 +0000

Anthony,
I assume the many success stories you are referring to concern internal collaboration (for which I also have a few horror stories with early deployment of entreprise tools that don’t get used). When you start crossing the boundaries, reaching out to external stakeholders or leveraging the combination id internal and external networks for each employee, then consumer tools are not only the least risky option but also the common denominator across those different constituencies.

By: Anthony Bradley

Anthony Bradley — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 19:05:22 +0000

Philippe,
I’m all for starting small and growing incrementally as a best practice. Overplanning and overengineering can be the death of social solutions but underplanning and underinvestment can also spell doom. But the malignant aspect of the “fail early, fail often” is that not only does it condone failure but it makes it seem that failure is a good and healthy part of a social solution effort. IME, this is dead wrong.

By: Anthony Bradley

Anthony Bradley — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 16:32:43 +0000

Andrea,
You know that these social efforts have a cost. We have discussed on a few occasions the time and effort it takes for us analysts to maintain active blogs here and the impact it may have on our other research efforts as well as our personal time. Just like with this blog, you get something out of it only if you put something in.

By: Philippe Parker

Philippe Parker — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 16:32:18 +0000

Fail once fail often isn’t a great catchphrase, but it does try to address the issue of strategic inertia that dogs many organisational cultures.
The key thing is to try to improve quickly, not strategise endlessly and ultimately fruitlessly. As Jay Deragon asks, is now too late? http://blog.contentmanagementconnection.com/Home/20001

But that also means spending differently: spending less in the short term in order to reduce risk but recognising that an iterative process means you’re likely to end up spending more in the long term.

The challenges for these kind of approaches are how you then rationalise your many projects without breaking the bank in order to bring them in line with a wider strategy.

By: Anthony Bradley

Anthony Bradley — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 16:30:11 +0000

John,

The risks do not outweigh the perceived benefits. Also, many organizations are investing in social media. For some organizations the perceived risks outweigh the perceived benefits and for others the perceived benefits outweigh the perceived risks. The trick is to assess the situation and figure out if the likely benefits outweigh the likely risks. Unfortunately, few organizations actually do a good risk/reward assessment.

By: Anthony Bradley

Anthony Bradley — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 16:24:40 +0000

I don’t think it is good advice to tell enterprises to spend a lot or to spend a little. Enterprises should spend appropriately to the social solution initiative minimizing costs as much as possible without risking success. Once the enterprise understands what is needed to succeed with any particular purpose then they can make a decision on consumer v. enterprise tools, on-prem v. off-prem technology, open-source v. proprietary, join 3rd party v. creating their own environment, out-of-box v. customization, etc.

Also, enterprises must factor in the non-technology costs around design, customization, tipping point, governance and moderating, ecosystem integration, content seeding, participant seeding, responding, analyzing participant behaviors for value, etc.

Leading enterprises to believe there should be no or highly minimal investment is misleading and will lead to underinvestment, disillusionment, and possibly failure.

Enterprises must examine the costs and benefits of each purposeful implementation of social software and make the decision to invest or not. If the enterprise can’t afford what it will take for success for a particular purpose then they shouldn’t do that one. Choose another purpose that requires less of an investment (even if there is less of a payoff). You pay what is necessary, no more and no less.

Your view is indeed contrarian. The vast, vast number of significant successes I’ve seen in government and private industry are those where the enterprise has invested and used enterprise tools (even if they started as grass roots movements). Letting people (employees or biz units) go out and do what they want with consumer tools often leads to numerous “social islands” that are not enterprise collaboration assets, don’t interoperate, require manual efforts to “integrate” them with existing systems, proliferate a multitude of solutions that at some point might need enterprise support (driving up support costs in the long run), etc. This isn’t to say that consumer tools aren’t valuable, they certainly are when used for appropriate social solution situations.

Social software is no “free lunch” and like everything else, to get something out of it, you need to put something into it. If you don’t put anything in then don’t expect much out.

By: Andrea Di Maio

Andrea Di Maio — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 09:36:08 +0000

Not a good start, Anthony. I think enterprises really need to take a close look at how far they can go with consumer toold before spending any extra dollar in “enterprise” tools (what are they, by the way)?
I may be skewed by my government focus, but research shows that those that have started spending on “enterprise tools” (with hefty bills attached) are now seeing the value of just leeting their folks use whatever is available out there.
As I recently wrote in my piece about “Governments in the Cloud: Much More Than Computing”, social apps will be more and more developed using cloud services – with “private” cloud computing emerging, I would argue that buying and installing enterprise 2.0 tools today is debetable.
I know this is a contrarian view, but to me closing the spending tap on enterpruise 2.0 tools today is far from a bad practice

By: John Goode

John Goode — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:34:34 +0000

I have seen bad analysis on the client side too. The fears around social media are both well founded and interesting. Well founded because it’s well understood that weak/poor products and services will get negative feedback once that channel is opened. Interesting then, that so many companies are avoiding the use of social media because the risks currently outweigh the perceived benefits.