Anthony J. Bradley
GVP
3 years at Gartner
19 years in IT
Anthony J. Bradley is a group vice president in Gartner Research, managing teams that cover business process management, project and portfolio management, enterprise architecture, IT procurement, IT sourcing, and vendor management. Read Full Bio
by Anthony J. Bradley | October 3, 2011 | Comments Off
I’m very happy to announce that “The Social Organization” is now available for purchase. I co-authored the book with Mark P. McDonald, Group Vice President in Gartner’s Executive Programs. Harvard Business Review Press is our publisher.
So you may be asking, why write another book on social media?
We wrote it because, despite the number of social media books out there, there is still a significant hole. And that is, how, as an organization, do you actually do it? How do you use social media to identify, catalyze, empower, and derive value from a community and their mass collaboration? How do you, as a leader and manager, help your organization build a competency in using social media to foster productive collaboration—with your customers, your clients, your employees, and others along your value chain?
This book is not an introductory book. It assumes you have a basic understanding of social media, and its potential value and are now interested in strategically employing it for business or mission value. Also, it is not a technology book. It is a business book targeted at business leaders. We believe strongly that organizational success with social media is fundamentally a leadership and management challenge, not a technology issue.
And real success is far more than creating a marketing presence on Facebook, Twitter, QZone, etc. This is a book dedicated to the bigger question of how to achieve broad and sustainable success, as an organization, using social media. It addresses the leadership, management, and operational capabilities you must build to achieve meaningful, repeatable, and significant business value with these powerful new technologies.
We created this book based on extensive experience working with business leaders around the world and observing social media successes and failures. In 2009 we began an extensive study of more than four hundred social media initiatives to further explore and analyze findings from our regular Gartner client interactions. We focused on how “traditional” (in other words, non–Web-based) companies are using social media to create collaborative communities that include their customers, their employees, their suppliers, etc. We intentionally avoided initiatives that used social media simply as additional marketing communication channels. It’s not that social media communications aren’t important to business. But much greater value comes from the mass collaboration—both inside and outside the enterprise—that social media technology now makes possible.
I don’t want to spend too much time here describing the book. The Amazon.com “Look Inside” capability provides a wealth of information including the Table of Contents, Preface and Chapter 1. I encourage you to check it out.
Here are some other good resources for the book:
Gartner’s “The Social Organization” Web site
Our “The Social Organization” Facebook page
We spent almost three years researching and writing this book. Our goal is to provide you with guidance, techniques, and tools to accelerate your progress and dramatically increase your chances of success in strategically employing social media. We hope you find it enlightening and highly useful. We also hope you enjoy it but we know this is asking a lot of a business book 
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by Anthony J. Bradley | July 26, 2011 | Comments Off
I work with far too many clients who don’t realize that, with social media and mass collaboration, popularity matters.
So what do I mean by this? For effective mass collaboration, and certainly for scalable mass collaboration, you simply must provide the capability for participants to express that they like or support a post. And it needs to also have a way to aggregate that feedback. This can be functionality such as “like,” star ratings, point system, thumbs up etc. This relates back to transparency, one of the six core principles of social media/mass collaboration.
The community needs the capability to easily pass collective judgment on posts with those that are deemed more valuable accumulating status and increased visibility. Without this capability you are not capitalizing on the communities ability to vet its own content. You also are not enabling the community to self-learn from its own successes and missteps. As contributions gain status they help the community see what is considered valuable and other participants can learn from this and contribute more productively. Some ideas, comments, etc. can more easily gain momentum.
Of course, this is predicated on the sponsors of the social media environment actually believing that the contributions and feedback of participants has value.
If you don’t empower the collaborative community with collective judgment then you can end up with a morass of content that you must manually sift through for value. Do you have those resources lying around?
Also, if participants feel their contributions will just get lost in a big hairball of feedback then you will discourage input.
Popularity is a critical aspect of a healthy social media environment.
This may seem obvious but it must not be because I see organizations consistently make this mistake.
Thoughts?
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by Anthony J. Bradley | July 21, 2011 | 4 Comments
Back in February in my post “Social media is for Personas Not People” I explored Facebook’s competitive vulnerability due to the lack of support for social circles. Viola, in July Google launches Google+ which centers on social circle capabilities. Coincidence?
Simple and easy, Google+ is basically activity streaming to user defined social circles. You can add some pictures and video too. I am pleased to see that the user experience of creating social circles, inviting people to them and then posting or viewing content by social circles is quite easy. It also pulled in a few hundred people from my Gmail account for me to invite into my circles (literally by dragging and dropping them into a circle). In a heartbeat I had numerous people in my newly formed “Gartner” circle. I also created a very select “Circle of Trust” consisting of those people who’s advice I hold dear.
I’m going to give Google+ a good shot simply because I believe in social circles and want that level of control. I won’t be dumping Facebook as of yet and will continue using it for general public types of things. But when I want to network with a smaller circle, I’ll go to Google+.
This may give Google+ a chance against the Facebook machine. I’m not saying it will beat Facebook but it just might compete. Hey, Facebook trumped the MySpace incumbent.
Google needs to play up the social circle side and even target market around specific circles users should create, work friends, school friends, circle of trust 
…., something.
They might want to point to the Fired by Facebook group as evidence of the risk in not thinking in terms of social circles.
What do you think?
You can respond here, or just Goolge+ me
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by Anthony J. Bradley | July 15, 2011 | Comments Off
Yesterday Carol Rozwell and I did a free Webinar on “Taking a Strategic Approach to Social Media.”
This Webinar focuses on how organizations go about building a repeatable competency in using social media to form communities and engage them in mass collaboration for organizational gain. The practices are not theoretical they are empirical and practical. We analyzed over 400 enterprise 2.0 implementations for common successful and unsuccessful practices. We assembled these into techniques for building a discipline around how to catalyze mass collaboration, using social media, for business or mission value.
Comments welcome.
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by Anthony J. Bradley | July 12, 2011 | 7 Comments
Many, if not most, organizations addressing social media have an unhealthy bias towards marketing. When talk of social media arises it is often relegated to “That’s just about marketing.” or “Marketing handles all that social media stuff.”
This is dangerous since social media isn’t about marketing. Sure, it is relevant to marketing, but marketing is one of many areas where social media can have impact. Often marketing is the area where social media will have the least business impact potential for an organization. And yet if you look at the books published, the blog posts and the majority of punditry on social media you certainly could conclude that it is all about marketing.
If you relegate social media to marketing you are not only stifling its potential and missing out on big opportunities but you are even doing something worse. You are evolving your organization in the wrong direction. You are improperly setting strategy, developing incomplete competencies, and creating a leadership culture that is not conducive to social media.
Social media is about better collaboration. Specifically, better mass collaboration (see my post on mass collaboration). Look at any of the marquis social media properties on the Web. None of them are about marketing. Facebook is about easily sharing what you are up to with a whole bunch of people. Wikipedia is about collectively pooling our knowledge into the world’s largest and most dynamic encyclopedia. LinkedIn is about building and getting value from our professional network. YouTube is about sharing our video content. And on and on and on, if you look beyond the marquis social sites to the greater social Web, relatively few of them are about marketing. If you focus on marketing you will miss out on the real value of social media. It reminds me of a scene in the Bruce Lee movie “Enter the Dragon” where Bruce is with his martial arts student and explaining that he should feel not think and he says, “It’s like a finger pointing to the moon. If you concentrate on the finger you will miss all that heavenly glory.” If you focus on social media as “a marketing thing” then you are concentrating on the finger.
Instead, think of social media in the context of your overall business strategy. Examine your major business processes, your major business goals and your major collaboration challenges and look for how social media and mass collaboration can add significant value. See my post “Social-media: its about new behaviors not new technologies” for research on how some organizations are looking beyond marketing.
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by Anthony J. Bradley | March 30, 2011 | 8 Comments
Are you still challenging Wikipedia as a credible information source? If so you might as well get a dinosaur tattoo on your forehead.
I was having a discussion (a civil argument) with a coworker the other day and we engaged in a definitional dispute. So I pulled out my iPhone and went … as Microsoft would say, “to the cloud” (or what most of us call the internet) 
I pulled up Wikipedia and even before I began quoting, my debate opponent said, “You can’t use Wikipedia as a source” with palpable disdain in his tone. You simply can’t discount Wikipedia anymore. Even if you put aside the studies that show that Wikipedia is just as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica and that graffiti is usually corrected within minutes, there is one main reason why you can’t dismiss it. And that reason is transparency. Anyone can look at any Wikipedia article and examine the sources it is based upon. Anyone can look at the history of changes made to an article. It is all laid out before you.
Ok, so here’s the caveat. Although you can’t dispute Wikipedia as a credible information source you certainly can challenge any particular article. A wise user of Wikipedia always examines its referenced sources for their weight. If sources are lacking or outdated then the value of the article declines. But Wikipedia is also pretty good at flagging articles that are not well sourced.
So here is a tip for those who use Wikipedia but operate in a dinosaur filled environment. Don’t directly reference Wikipedia. Examine and reference the underlying sources of the Wikipedia article and use those. One of the very valuable aspects of Wikipedia is as an aggregator of source information by topic.
So here is a quiz for you. What are the three core aspects of Wikipedia that make it the information powerhouse that it is?
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by Anthony J. Bradley | March 23, 2011 | 2 Comments
A few weeks ago I posted on the importance of persona in social media and the challenges Facebook will face eventually unless they add in social circle capabilities.
Well, I was reading last week’s (I think) copy of Newsweek magazine (the one with all the actors on the front) and James Franco explains why he isn’t on Facebook with “I have, like, different—a lot of different aspects, or different kinds of people in my life, and I just hated the idea that they were all going to mix on my page. I didn’t want professors hearing from my stupid friends.”
It seems that James Franco agrees with me. So I’ve got that going for me.
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by Anthony J. Bradley | March 21, 2011 | 2 Comments
I just returned from a conference and client meetings in the UK. I met with the CIO of a large investment house to discuss social media.
This organization is moving out of the fear stage and into the flippant stage of social media (from my earlier work on prevailing attitudes toward social media including folly, fearful, flippant, formulating, forging, and fusing – available to clients or for a fee). They are wrapping up an effort to put in place a corporate policy on social media usage. The CIO’s thinking seemed to be that the social media work was done. I tried to press his thinking on how to move from reactive and tactical efforts (which is important) to proactive and strategic ones. With about 15 min left in our meeting he said, “Social media is like spreadsheets. I have no idea how they might use them so my job is to provide the technology and some policy on their use.” I clearly needed more than 15 minutes to address that statement. I did have time to talk to him about the prevalent “provide and pray” poor practice and how the organization will need help in building valuable business solutions using social media. Just because you assist in building some solutions doesn’t mean you preclude other more grass roots uses. In fact, I’ve seen them significantly improve grass roots adoption of new uses. Unfortunately, I don’t think I got through to this particular CIO. This also validated my concern that IT shops are treating social media more as a technology platform than a business solution.
It seems more and more that enterprise approaches to social media take two forms; 1. provide access to social media or social software with some general policy on how to use them (or more accurately how not to use them) and 2. a more strategic approach to how social media can help address the organization’s business challenges and opportunities (it is important to note that most organizations doing 2 also do one so it is more additive than exclusive).
What are you doing? Do you think social media is like spreadsheets? Are you more 1 or 2? If you are 2, did you first have to progress through 1?
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by Anthony J. Bradley | March 8, 2011 | 9 Comments
A little while back I posted a “New Definition of Social Media” where I defined six core principles that set social media apart from other forms of communication and collaboration. It got a pretty good response. But people have asked me for a more succinct definition that sits above the six principles that hammers home the differentiation.
So here it is:
Social media is an on-line environment established for the purpose of mass collaboration.
This definition is simple yet has some powerful constructs.
- Social media is the environment not the technology (i.e., Facebook is a social media environment built on social networking technology and Wikipedia is a social media environment built on wiki technology).
- You must have a purpose for the technology for it to be social media other wise it’s just technology. Notice how I worked “purpose” into the definition
- Though you can do many things with social media (like 1:1 interactions and mass communications) it’s real and unique value comes from mass collaboration.
- Not just collaboration but mass collaboration. Never before have such large numbers of people been able to effectively collaborate. If I had the power to redefine a few things I would use the term “mass collaboration technology” rather than social technology (or the many permutations like social media technology, social computing technology, etc.) because social technology is too broad and doesn’t capture the unique value proposition of the new technologies (isn’t the telephone a social technology). If the technology you choose for your social media channel doesn’t support mass collaboration then you are in trouble.
Oh, what the heck, since I’m defining things why don’t I just add:
Social media channels are enabled by a new set of mass collaboration technologies.
And while were at it:
Mass collaboration is the ability of large numbers of people, who may have no preexisting connection, to effectively work against a common goal.
Now the six principles help define what it means to enable mass collaboration.
Thoughts? Do you like it? Loath it? Agree, disagree? Let’s test it under fire.
Help me out I’m trying to mass collaborate here! Should we add these to Wikipedia
The current Wikipedia definition is this, “Social media are media for social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable communication techniques.” This is lacking in my view. Again, wouldn’t the telephone qualify here? What about e-mail? Skype? No talk of channels or mass collaboration.
They follow this definition with “Social media is the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into interactive dialogue. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein also define social media as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, which allows the creation and exchange of user-generated content.”[1] Businesses also refer to social media as consumer-generated media (CGM). A common thread running through all definitions of social media is a blending of technology and social interaction for the co-creation of value.” Only a tech geek would understand and be inspired by this paragraph. They could preface this paragraph with the message [business people need not read any further].
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by Anthony J. Bradley | March 7, 2011 | 5 Comments
Or do they? Sure, at first thought it appears that social media and process management are total opposites. And in some ways they are. When using social media to engage and grow a community you certainly wouldn’t want to design out the processes by which participants would interact and “code” them into the collaborative environment. People don’t socialize and collaborate that way. With social media you focus on purpose and outcomes often letting the means to the end emerge naturally as people engage one another. Socializing and collaboration can be very messy and inefficient and designers of community collaboration environments must embrace, facilitate and illuminate that messiness. In fact, by doing these things we can make the messy interactions more efficient.
But does that mean that never the two shall meet? I have seen several ways social media and business process management are used harmoniously including:
- Social Process Design: A hospital that gets nurses (all of them) heavily involved in collaborating to design and modifying the processes they execute every day. The nurses “own” their processes.
- Process Change Socialization: A hotel chain that has grown a community of hotel managers who collaborate on propagating, refining and executing business process improvements rapidly in hotels across the globe.
- Process Support for Social: Social media and community collaboration can’t thrive outside of the rest of the business. Organizations that are really serious about social media success recognize that some business processes must be altered to create a more conducive environment for community collaboration to thrive.
- Social Support for Process: This is the whole structured v. unstructured process discussion. Where can social media as an enabler for unstructured processes benefit your organization? How can you use social media to support and shed light on unstructured business processes?
Have you been doing any of these? Are you engaged in other Social BPM efforts?
Carol Rozwell and Elise Olding have published on some of this in their Gartner research “Social BPM: Design by Doing” and “Social BPM: Techniques to Uncover Process Patterns” (available to clients or for a fee).
And it just so happens that I am monitoring the Gartner EMEA Business Process Management (BPM) conference over the next few days. I’m going to take the opportunity to look at the BPM content they provide this week through a social media lens. I’m particularly interested in a few sessions including (of course) Carol and Elise’s presentation on “Nexus of Opportunity: Social BPM, Organizational Liquidity, and Operational Resilience” but also Daryl Plummer’s “Dynamic BPM, From Reactive to Proactive,” John Dixon’s “Success With Business Process Performance Metrics” and Elise’s “First 100 Days of the BP Director.”
I’ll be tweeting any nuggets I glean from these and other sessions @BradleyAnthonyJ under #BPM11.
Category: social software Uncategorized Tags: BPM, process management, social media
