The Real Life Social Network v2

Thanks to Jeremy Althof for bringing Paul Adams' presentation to my attention via twitter. The presentation is a very useful overview of how social networks really work and is a rallying call for web designers to design for the complexities of social networks involving multiple groups (whereas most social networks on line assume one big group.) Paul has some really interesting analogies, such as trying to plan the seating chart at a wedding -- that particular one resonates especially for me as I'm getting married in late August! He also cites a bunch of interesting examples about how our usable network is typically capped at about 150 people and beyond that it's extremely weak ties. I also found his observation about overstating the power of "influencers" to be quite true -- it would be so convenient if it were true that all we have to do is reach one force magnifier and go home, but alas, it's much more complicated than that and influence tends to be diluted by multiple influencers. Anyway, check it out:

The Real Life Social Network v2

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Financial results and intranet editorial

A month or so ago I presented at two different conferences in Philadelphia -- the J. Boye conference and the Council for Communications Management annual meeting. I met great people at both events and a had a good time presenting. It's always fun to show off your work (or well, I find it fun anyway) to an engaged audience. and I got to ride Amtrak, which was fun too.

Anyway, the first presentation has the startling thesis that the way you manage your editorial team directly correlates with the kind of content you will have on your intranet. We have chosen, at IBM, to take a community approach to content management and have been able to scale the number of publishers to the thousands and have reached record levels of employee engagement (many of our articles will have, for example, lively discussions appended to the bottom of them and readers freely tag the content and rate it etc.)

The second presentation i an overview of financial reporting to employees. Again, a startling thesis: I believe companies should communicate and contextualize their financial results for their employees, which means doing more than posting the press release on the intranet (though that's a good start.)

So there you have it. A couple presentations for ya. Enjoy.

Intranet editorial or social? Both.

View more presentations from ethanmcc.

Communicating Financial results to Employees

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Walled Gardens

Just read a great article in the NYTimes about The Death of the Open Web by Virginaia Heffernan. As someone who runs a welled garden site (for former and current IBM employees, www.greateribm.com) I can speak to both the benefits and challenges. The high signal to noise ratio that I can provide for my users is worth its weight in gold -- and that's one of the things that an intranet provides an employer too (a way to crank down the volume of the ads, obscenity and other cyber detritus on the web for its employees.) Most intranets and marketing-run walled garden website don't run ads, though I have seen a few. I suppose you could argue that they are just one big advertisement, but if the value offered to the user is high enough, it isn't really an ad at all. What do you think?

KPIs for intranet news

IBF's Nancy Goebel has a good list for key performance indicators for intranet news in her blog post at the Intranet Benchmarking Forum. Depending on how your intranet is configured, you could certainly add things like 'action taken' to the KPIs...like, did the reader download something, click to the next action etc. This is, of course, assuming your have action-oriented content in your news....which you should, imho.

Alumni quote

Thanks to Rebecca Selvenis at Google for sending this link to Andy Shainldin quoting me about alumni programs my way...I am still flattered when someone quotes me on a blog. It's because I am, at heart, an old man who still thinks quotes matter :-)

City of brotherly love...and intranets

I'm doing two presentations in Philadelphia next month. The first will be at Janus Boye's conference on May, 6th. My spiel there will be called "Editorial or social media? Both!" Let's pretend for a moment you're riveted by this catchy title...lemme explain: most intranet content is driven by the need of the publisher (typically organizational announcements, executive stuff etc), but it doesn't have to be stiff and, in fact, integrating social media into the editorial can help employees find others with similar interest, get excited about their work and learn how to be better at what they do. I've been working on methods for doing this in a way that doesn't cause the organizational culture to self-destruct for a while and have a team of people I work with at IBM who re doing really nice work integrating social into editorial -- something that many external publications do too. It's clear to me that just because employees are "stuck" inside the firewall for most of the day doesn't mean yesterday's broadcast-oriented publishing models will work. Anyway.

The second spiel I'm doing is the following day at the Council for Communication Management's 2010 conference. I'm going to give a bit of an overview of how IBM's intranet editorial team is structured (yes, I'll be borrowing from my own pitch from the day prior)and then focus on the way we communicate financial performance to employees. Sounds boring, but I'll try to liven it up with some music and dance. Kidding. Maybe.

RE: What Social Media Will Look Like in 2012

My friend Naomi Gilbert sent me a link to AdvertisingAge's What Social Media Will Look Like in 2012. Not very controversial or mind-blowing predictions, but then again, the horizon that the author is talking about is pretty near (20 months.) Not sure I buy it on the googlewave thing...though that could come true if the google just starts integrating wave functionality into its email platform rather than asking people to migrate (they are already doing this, see: buzz.) The privacy piece is troubling for a number of reasons, but also a bit unrealistically gushing -- there are places in the world that privacy laws are much, much more strict than America's. The author is projecting a pretty American point of view (tho I don't know where he hails from). These laws are not going to change in a 20 month timeframe to accommodate even the most enthusiastic digital marketers. But it's true that they will change (when enough companies in those markets lobby for new laws because they begin to feel that they are operating at a disadvantage compared to companies in markets with more liberalized privacy laws.) Or maybe we will be surprised and citizens will realize that trading your privacy for $0.10 worth of free hosting and a little bit of amusing code isn't actually a good deal.