I’ve written a few times before about Facebook, and have recently started using Twitter (about which more later). I think these are fascinating, novel, and powerful technologies, but they’re also both vexing me a bit these days.
Facebook presents me with lots of ads, and even more applications. My FB friends have installed lots of apps and used them to reach out to me. I now have 3 (lil) green patch requests, 2 buy your friends requests, and one valentine kiss request. I have no idea what any of these are. I also have invitations for status competitions, speed racing, mob wars, zombies AND zombie, starcraft, wikimoto, and "i’m a masher!," among many others. Again, I have no clue what most of these are invitations to, and I haven’t bothered to find out. They just sit on the right side of my Facebook home page, taking up valuable screen real estate that I’d prefer to use to build, maintain, and exploit my network of weak ties.
I’ve really enjoyed learning what Twitter is and how to use it, and so becoming part of the Twitterverse. It is an interesting and valuable place. But at the risk of sounding like the neighborhood grouch, I have to say that I’m not that interested in what people just had for lunch, are contemplating having for lunch, or wish they could have for lunch. I also don’t much care what’s on their car radios at any point, or how bad traffic is in their part of the world. And I find it a little creepy to be wished good morning via tweets by many people first thing each day (I guess I should just not check Twitter until I’ve had my coffee…).
I want to be clear: I’m not saying that people who have Facebook and Twitter preferences different than mine are wrong or weird or bad. And I know that I can exercise some level of control over both environments. But with these technologies at present, users must to some extent take the rough with the smooth. If I want to use Facebook I have to put up with ads and silly viral apps. And if I want to follow someone on Twitter I’ve got to accept all of their tweets, even if most of them strike me as clutter.
Within an enterprise, however, the situation is very different. Ads can be eliminated, and application deployment can be controlled. And formal policies and informal norms can shape, if not dictate, what constitutes an acceptable contribution by a community member. I can easily imagine a boss saying "Gang, let’s not use EnTwitter (or whatever the enterprise version is called) to talk about how we felt about lunch. Let’s just use it to swap ideas on the Belle Jolie account." Because Twitter is largely a platform, compliance with this type of policy can easily be monitored.
Intranet versions of social networking software will clearly be different from their Internet ancestors. In some ways, I think, they’ll actually be better, because they’ll be less full of superfluous stuff that annoys many people, but that can’t easily be turned off or filtered out. Enterprise equivalents of today’s Facebook and Twitter will probably be more bland, but they might also be more addictive. Knowledge workers might visit them more often throughout the day if they know that when they do they’ll find content, rather than clutter.
Everyone agrees, I believe, that much of the value of the new social networking tools comes from the fact that they create and sustain large communities. Do they also have to let community members do whatever they want? I don’t think so. Social tools that are overlaid with norms and policies, in other words enterprise social tools, can still be highly freeform and foster emergence. They can still be fun to use and highly useful for individuals, and also generate value for the group or the organization as a whole.
Do you agree? Or do you think that norms and policies will by their very nature suck the joy out of using these tools? Leave a comment, please, and let us know.
{ 38 comments… read them below or add one }
Prof. McAfee,
Thank-you for an excellent blog entry, I enjoy your writing very much. In response to your question, please note that my comments are from personal experience and not broad based study. I have found social networks used on the fringes of business, not in core businesses. I’ll offer an example of the first and some reasons for the second.
Use in the Fringes of Business
Please note that my saying “Fringes” is not pejorative, but rather it refers to the outer edges of the network, which is where the really interesting things happen.
One of the great things about FB (Facebook) is that it allows people to create verifiable and yet pseudonymous users. Furthermore, it allows you to create private groups, where only people who are known and invited can participate. Might there not be groups who want to securely blog and discuss events who might find FB useful?
Core Businesses Concerned about Social Tools
Many executives and managers in core businesses are rightfully concerned about the time wasting that accompanies FB and other social tools. There is also a security threat, which is very real. Additionally, there is the bigger issue, that there isn’t a clearly defined business problem that social tools solve. Finally, there is the hurdle that many in IT view social networks, SaaS, etc as a threat. This is a valid concern, which, coupled with other issues, will probably keep social tools out of core business applications.
There are business leaders struggling to get blogging and other social/collaborative tools used in corporations. Their struggles are interesting to consider and offer interesting insights that the creators of social tools are not paying as much attention to as they should.
This is an area of great interest to me and I would love to know your insights.
Andy
Harrumph.
Although I have to admit I ignore most silliness on Facebook that comes in the way of viral apps, with Twitter, I think it’s necessary to include the noise.
Twitter gives us a 360-degree view of our social community. A (Twitter) friend said it best, “I was interviewed about my use of Twitter by our company recently. Someone asked me if my posts were a little too personal. I said, why? I’m a person.” (Abbie Lundberg, editor, CIO magazine.)
Through the connectedness of micro-blogging, we really get to know each other. It dramatically condenses the time it takes to build a trust relationship. The weak tie theory is predicated on trust and reliability.
To enforce a strictly business policy on an “enTwitter” would handicap the tool’s most beneficial advantage: our ability to create real relationships vs. interfacing with business contacts.
Twitter is most useful to facilitate (and reinforce ties among) an existing social network. Trying to build an all-Twitter social network of any utility from scratch is apt to be a frustrating experience unless you are already a person well known enough to attract followers.
I limit my following fairly strictly. About 60 % of my use of twitter revolves around contact with fellow national security/defense/Intel/foreign policy bloggers, some of whom I have met in person and others that
I have not. While there is much social chatter we also trade ideas, articles, posts and make arrangements to connect elsewhere. I find twitter to be highly useful in that regard ( when it’s working, that is)
The remaining 40 % is contact with experts in different fields, responding to inquiries, bloviating on trivia or linking.
It sounds like you are expressing a desire to use social networking channels, but want a higher degree of message salience and a lower level of noise. This is a problem because our current technical capabilities to sort, filter and present the information in the myriad of ways different users might desire remains primitive. This is why so many people are interested in semantic web ideas.
In the enterprise environment there is a risk that the verve and spontenaeity characterising online social networks will be lost. Thus the kind of corporate rules that will be imposed could crush emergence of community and the kinds of loose bonds that make social networks effective.
BTW, why would I use an internal corporate channel when I get really good quality crowdsourced answers from Twitter (or Identi.ca) & Friendfeed?
Since email / wiki / forums and other tools in an enterprise have norms and policies, providing similar policies will definitely be necessary. Of course, simple overall signal vs noise reporting will help the participants and encourage everyone to participate
Andrew,
I have gotten very much into using Twitter these past few months. And I have to say that I like the “what I’m having for lunch”-type messages.
I work from home. So I don’t have an office with people around me sharing minutia about their lives.
Twitter serves that purpose for me. I have a pretty small group of people I follow. I have a direct connection to these people, or at least an interest in their work. Knowing about where they are (near me? thousands of miles away?), what movies they like, etc., teaches me more about their full life, i.e., their life outside of work/academia.
I think this has use in the enterprise space as well. As colleagues increasingly work together without being in the same space, they will need tools to bring them closer.
Twitter is one.
regards, John
A general insight from practice is that information systems work better the less decisions the user has to make. Richness of a medium can on the other hand increase communication effectiveness.
So the question is more about what you want to reach with the tool at hand. I don’t think that the nature of the task can be left out of the discussion.
From an enterprise perspective I can only share your views. More condensed versions of the tools will certainly help. Only though if a critical mass is using them already. For introduction I assume freedom of expression (and may it be with a facebook werewolves invitation) to be a great concept. In the course some restriction or structuration will definitely not harm the outcome.
I think you’re hitting on a couple of nerves here…
First, social media isn’t annoying in and of itself, it just gives people who are annoying the tools to do it faster, louder, and more broadly than ever before. This is early, people are doing a lot of silly stuff just to show/prove they can. Eventually, as the entire media matures, people will master the art of filtering and the art of not getting filtered by their target audience.
Culturally, the vast majority of the users are of a demographic or mindset where the lines between work/play are (at best) rather blurry. You’d have a hard time distinguishing between many of their “friends” and people they do business with/for. Working for a big company, we’ve often tried to help employees balance their work and personal lives, but increasingly, people believe work is what they do, not where/when they do it, or even who they do it for. As social media continues to grease away the friction of time/place collaboration, this is a trend that will only continue. It is going to get increasingly tough to separate the work life from the personal one (ie: I got the notice of this blog posting via Twitter while seeing what my friends/co-workers we’re doing today).
If that line is blurred, will you have to create parallel Twitterverses for work vs. personal, can there be room for 2 separate streams, or will there really only be 1? As I experiment with social tools here, I worry less about management sucking the “fun” out of them and much more about how do I “compete” with the habits, practices, and tools people are already adopting.
Thanks for the thoughtful post… a lot in here to chew on.
I look to Twitter as a means of sharing ideas and information I personally find interesting. Some might call it microblogging. I cull anyone that tweets about their macro/personal activities. To each their own but I don’t think that needs to be public / online, anywhere.
My FB profile is “I don’t play with Facebook crowds, you know where to find me…”
as a self-proclaimed twitter-holic, part of twitter’s “stream of consciousness” draw is the freedom of expression. yes it’s easy to get caught up in sharing the minutia of one’s day, but sometimes this offers the greatest insight into a person and more importantly the opportunity to build trust. i’ve benefited from and helped online friends, ones i’ve never met in person, solely based on a connection i’ve made with them (for example, sharing the same musical taste). from an intelligence perspective, i’d be just as interested in the minutia as the “big ticket” declarations and would be cautious to dismiss the finer, more personalized details.
i assume in the not-so-distant future we will see, in apps like twitter, levels and spheres (classification if you will) of sharing so you won’t have to hear what i or anyone else is eating for lunch.
After having received numerous vampire bites and being sold on facebook for the price of a Junior Bacon Cheeseburger and a small coke, I am starting to doubt if Facebook has made an unwise move to integrate all these silly applications and failing to provide applications of real substance. (There are certain interesting applications, yet none to make it the “operating platform of the internet” as I understand Facebook’s vision.)
In an enterprise context, I agree that the boss can verbally (or even electronically) control the use of the technology as much as he/she can control the writing on the wall with crayons. I am wondering when Facebook is going to integrate tools for online collaboration, as Facebook is frequently being banned in the corporate world. Maybe we will see an alliance between Google and Facebook to integrate their office software into the facebook platform?
I am a little ignorant as far as Twitter is concerned (twignorant?), but from what I have heard it is largely a tool to keep up to speed on other people’s trivialities.
I’m thinking I am going for sushi for dinner today. Most definitively. Prepare for my facebook status update.
I too just joined the Twitterverse (http://twitter.com/sradick), and am finding many of the same things to be true. However, I think that this post by Robert Scoble helps to explain some of that –
http://scobleizer.com/2008/05/18/why-google-news-has-no-noise/
Yes, there’s a lot of noise (ads, what people ate for lunch, etc.), but there is also a lot of value. If you take away the noise, I would argue that you would also be taking away a lot of the value. Once you start filtering things based on one person’s judgments, it’s a very slippery slope to those gatekeepers that have made traditional media so sanitized and boring. Take Facebook’s Beacon app – that’s an application that the community rebelled against, and it’s now in the scrap heap. So a group of people somewhere (a very weird group) has found value in these weird applications – that’s why they’re still around.
Spin this around to the Enterprise. Doesn’t that same slippery slope apply when your boss says that you’re only allowed using EnTwitter to discuss the Belle Jolie account? If the scope of such a tool gets defined by the “boss” rather than the community, would the community continue to use it?
I agree that there need to be rules within the Enterprise that govern the use of these tools, but at the same time, the people making the rules have to realize the ramifications of their decisions. Simply disallowing non-work activity on these tools doesn’t just eliminate non-work activity, it can also domino and impact actual work activity that may not get captured.
BTW…I actually came across this post via your recent Tweet about it.
I feel the same way about the overwhelming amount of strange and esoteric Facebook applications. I often use the Clay Shirky line “they are not talking to you” when people at work see esoteric blog and wiki titles and comment “who would read that, what a waste of time.” They are talking to their office, team, or colleagues interested in that topic—just ignore it. It’s very easy to ignore things that are not in email such as RSS aggregator content and Facebook application alerts because I can look at it on my time opposed to blasted in my face like email.
As you noted in the Facebook at Serena post, there are advantages to posting non-work related content because it can strike up a personal conversation that may lead to professional collaboration.
I recently helped write our organization’s guidance on non-work related social media posts and noted there are advantages to having fun and posting about Corvette car clubs at work. When workers don’t trust each other, which is the rule not the exception, they submit generic content to E 2.0 tools, especially wikis, because they think they “own” the analysis or ideas and their non-trusted colleagues will “steal” their ideas. Making things personal, light-hearted, or fun can help establish trust that can lead to “meatier” content and working on the hard problems rather than submitting generic content.
I’ll admit it, it annoys me when nerds post iPhone-worshiping blogs at work but they know the score—it’s ok to do it once and awhile.
As I like to say when people make unfair comparisons about social media at work, “If I post a Penthouse picture on my office door, you don’t ban the door, you deal with me.
I’d agree about the proliferation of strange Facebook apps, but differ about Twitter. I had same reservations about it at 1st: my first blog post (that was back when I used to blog 3-4 x a day — now I tweet 5-10 a day and almost never blog, alas) about it bemoaned the “wow, that was a great sandwich” or “sometimes it’s tough being a grownup” tweets I read. Now I find it invaluable, in part because I do learn about the personal lives and interests of people I respect, even though sometimes I’d rather hear a little less (and perhaps others feel the same about my tweets, I assume). I’ve found others in IT with mutual interest in “Square Foot Gardening,” for example, and others going through family health challenges. All in all, I’ll take the excess, thank you…
ps – we all know that the “significance” of an event can change based on future events. in the case of what, when and where someone eats for lunch, you might find this of great interest if a bout of food poisoning breaks out…
Andrew
I was one of your interviewees back with Sean and Don some months ago. I notice that in the enterprise there is some of the frivolity and “office joke” stuff but it seems to be at a minimum since there is so much accountability – ie Intellipedia. I haven’t found the need to twitter quite yet but I can see the power in the enterprise (microblogging on meaningful events germain to the enterprise). Again, I believe it will self correct to conform to the cultural character of the enterprise. I agree it might become “blander” socially but these tools will make the enterprise a much richer and substantive network.
BTW – I picked up on your link in your status update in FB.
You might want to look at the discovery aspects of some of these apps which is quite nice. For example, i had 6 of my friends join the fan club of a rock band when they saw it on my updates. This one’s not about applications, but the point remains the same.
Twitter, i would think, is a really cool one for what i like to call “thought of the moment”. Whatever you are thinking right now, you can just go and plug it in there.
Thanks, Atul.
Hopefully this puts to rest the theory that these consumer focused popular Web 2.0 applications can simply throw open a switch and make it work for the enterprise.
I’d personally, even go as far out and say that innovation in the consumer Web 2.0 world has almost stalled. Things are just going around in circles rather than in an upward trajectory (when it comes to new features and ideas in the consumer Web 2.0 world).
In the enterprise world, we’re just barely getting started. I believe the spectrum for innovation is much wider in the business world than in the consumer world, as there are many more types of use cases in the business world.
I believe figuring out applicability in the business world will drive forward innovation in the Web 2.0 world. An example would be, who’d a thought (in the consumer world) combining a digg or del.icio.us with a LinkedIn (social bookmarking, Tagging, with Social Networking) would make sense? Though, this combination seems to be working out reasonably well when applied to enterprises.
Andrew–
I agree with some of the earlier comments that suggest that filtering out the “lunch noise” would diminish the value of the network of weak ties.
I’ll give an actual example through a story, a la Prusak. At the Enterprise 2.0 conference where I met you, I also met a fellow knowledge management professional, a colleague at roughly the same level as I at another professional services firm. I started to follow her on Twitter, and learned a few weeks ago that she, like me, enjoys kayaking. We tweeted about the subject, and now have a ready topic to bond over in addition to our professional activities the next time we meet in person.
David
I’m not so much worried about norms or policies sucking the joy out of using these tools. They’re certainly not what someone in HR or Corp Comm might come up with, but there are norms when it comes to using twitter or facebook already.
I worry about the firewalled nature of the tools sucking the joy out of using them. As others have already asked in previous comments, why would I use an internal corporate channel for this stuff? Public twitter works for me — I’m not going to adopt an internal-use-only tool. I contribute bookmarks to my company’s installation of Dogear, but I import them in batches from my public del.icio.us account.
I’ll bring things of value back behind the firewall, but I’m not going to spend much time cultivating plants that can’t be easily transplanted.
Great subject. Your comments may be generalized to fit all social networking, Web 2.0, applications hosted outside the Enterprise. You pay for the value of the service by enduring the noise. Why would serious users endure the noise? They may not have any choice if they want the services; the Enterprise version of the tool may not be available, either by choice of the Enterprise decision makers, or by a lack of vision. Does this mean they should not be used?
To improve as a professional, to make headway in an organization, or to simply be recognized as a contributor, you need an edge. In my opinion, effectively using these social and business networking tools may provide that edge. If the organizations hasnÂ’t recognized the value of these tools, that may mean waiting until you get home from work to get online and get to work.
I agree with Puneet. We need to keep in mind that Enterprise 2.0 is not, and will never be, the same as Web 2.0. This is because the technology is more than the tool: it is also the culture of use surrounding the tool. Only strict determinists should expect that by plunking a tool in an enterprise we can bring about innovation, new work practices, and the like.
We forget that Facebook, Twitter, and such Web 2.0 tools do have a particular culture of use. They have a large audience, or user base, but these groups do have particular cultural values and norms. In the enterprise, the culture will necessarily be different. Therefore, these technologies will necessarily appear, and be, different than their similarly-tooled counterparts on the Internet.
In the early days, scholars explored the blog genre. I would argue that the blog is a medium, from which we have seen several genres evolve. The Intelligence Community blog genre, for example, is much different from the personal-memoirs-of-a-teenage-girl blog genre. I would venture that this applies to other technologies as well. Twitter has a different culture of use than the theoretical EnTwitter, and therefore is a different genre, and maybe even a different technology (if we define technology as tool + its use).
Andrew, if you’re interested, I wrote my master’s thesis on the genres and cultures of use of Web 2.0 tools in the US Department of State. It’s not published, but I would be happy to share it with you.
A true collaborative platform will have it’s social culture emerge based on the group that occupies it space. It will live with both the good and bad based on people, not technology.
If the physical work environment is full of stress and anxiety, this will probably translate to the online environment very quickly.
Conversely, a company who values their workforce and encourages social responsibility through leadership and positive reinforcement will likely thrive online.
In short, good people make for a good environment.
The things you find vexing, I, in my other than politically correct world, find troubling. One can tune out the clutter and sometimes have fun with Facebook in the rackspace. But the amusement fades when one realizes he or she has, wittingly or unwittingly, become meat for someone’s online marketing plan to drive traffic and “monetize” their ROR (return on relationships). Twitter doesn’t seem to have a real business plan. And “what are you doing” is the most controlling question on the planet. If the early adoption badge of courage is taking abuse, then Twitter’s your place because it’s down so much. Ironic that the big downtime problems started when folks began touting the tweet as the future for homeland security and disaster communication. The US put a man on the moon with a rock solid communications infrastructure before DARPA was fronting points for the internet and it was funded by tax dollars; Twitter seeks to pass alot of the development costs and the aggro, on to investors, and folks who tweet sometimes, like me and you.
I use social networking sites strictly to find others that are working toward the same goals as I am. I don’t get involved in the “clutter” That is one of the good things about social networking – you can pick and choose whom you want to associate with. There are so many different types of social networks out there, if one doesn’t fit after giving it a fair try, move to another.
Still I don’t mind the cluttering or noise or what those kinds of nonsense entries should be called. Rather I see it as a kind of social stuph binding the group together. First it will allow me to learn to now the people on my twitter list better in terms of preferences. Also my personal experience from idea generation is that its hard to say what will be the catalyst for a great idea. It could as well be a post about what someone is wishing to have for lunch. I’m sort of a random thinker though and I’m certain there are plenty of strict techniques to generate an idea. They may however not be that effective or fun to work with.
I agree… Social networking and other web 2.0 intranet applications will be interesting. I am aware of a firm in Michigan developing these internal social networks for large employers. I love how Corporate America is embracing 2.0!
Your blog pre-dated mine by 2 days, and I was surprised by the parrelism. Though I suppose we are all hitting similar issues at about the same time. The concept I was pleading for in my Civility 2.0 Blog aimed to allow the sender to signal the “Loudness” of the message so that the reader could choose to “e-listen” or not.
http://e-trust.blogspot.com/2008/07/civility-20.html
I agree with many of your commenters; a key power of micro-blogs is the ambient-intimacy that they generate. However, that doesn’t mean the tools should not evolve mechanisms that allow us to be polite or civil on the web. This would allow one to tune into the “tweets” that you want to recieve, combined with topic hashtags one would be able develop the ability to e-listen similar to the way we can listen as humans.
The integration between the applications is where I find the greatest interest. Now when I Twitter it updates my Facebook status, so I’m relying on Facebook for overall gateway but enjoy the text from phone status updates to Twitter. I also enjoy ability to post status update from Twitter onto my blog. The challenge is finding the best way to put your internet life puzzle together.
I agree that the boss can verbally (or even electronically) control the use of the technology as much as he/she can control the writing on the wall with crayons. I am wondering when Facebook is going to integrate tools for online collaboration, as Facebook is frequently being banned in the corporate world. Maybe we will see an alliance between Google and Facebook soon!
Ads can be eliminated, and application deployment can be controlled. And formal policies and informal norms can shape, if not dictate, what constitutes an acceptable contribution by a community member.
Twitter is one of the best things that happend to Internet.
Regarding Twitter, it’s biggest I agree and disagree with you. The problem is I can’t filter the feeds in a way that works for me. I use TechCrunch, Gigaom, mashable etc. to keep up to date on what’s going on in the tech industry for example. It’s very useful but I have to accept other feeds among these. What Twitter needs to do is let me create my own Twitter channels so I can select the ones I want to see. Sometimes I do want personal tweets, but I agree I don’t want to have to filter through all of them to get to work related stuff.
Ways to make money
i think twitter is much more better than facebook. i am too much bothered with the facebook.
We have recently started using Facebook as part of our advertising program. We have been supprised and delighted with the resultes of that endeavor. We are in the process of learning more as to how we can better use FB for our Real Estate business. I think you are right on target.
Marc Sherron
http://www.sherronproperties. com
Facebook has proven to be a useful tool for me as a Real Estate Professional in the Texas Hill Country. In the short time using it I have already generated several leads and referrals.
Facebook has proven to be a useful tool for me as a Real Estate Professional in the Texas Hill Country. In the short time using it I have already generated several leads and referrals.