A few different friends recently pointed me to stories about terrorists’ use of Twitter, which were sparked by the appearance, on the website of the Federation of American Scientists, of a report titled "Sample Overview: al Qaida-Like Mobile Discussions & Potential Creative Uses." It was prepared by the Army’s 304th Military Intelligence Battalion. My friends pointed me to the stories because I’m interested in Twitter’s uses for different purposes, and have blogged about it a few times.

The 304th MI’s report "coverhs a few examples of terrorist use and potential use of mobile to web and web to mobile technologies and tactics" including "a red teaming perspective on the potential terrorist use of Twitter." (in a war game, the simulated enemy force is the red team). After briefly describing the service, the report notes that Twitter was used as a "counter-surveillance, command and control, and movement tool by activists at the Republican National Convention" and suggests three red team scenarios:

The third of these seemed at least plausible to me, but as the report says "this scenario is not new and has already been discussed for other social networking sites." And it immediately struck me that mobile phone text messages would be much better suited for the first two purposes, since text messages are inherently private and point-to-point, while Tweets are inherently public and broadcast to the world at large. Twitter allows members to protect their accounts so that their tweets are only visible to pre-approved followers, but would members of an actual terrorist cell consider this secure enough for updates about, as the report imagines, "the number of troops that are moving in order to conduct an ambush"? I am no military strategist or expert on terrorism, but I doubt it.

Cell members and terrorist masterminds seem to be going to great lengths to keep their conversations secret; the Christian Science Monitor reports that many messages from terrorist leaders are now being sent by donkey and camel, and that there is "an extensive network of handwritten messages extending across southern Afghanistan." Twitter is close to the opposite of such a network.

For the first two scenarios above I can’t see any advantages to using Twitter over text messaging (beyond perhaps the convenience associated with device independence), but I can see plenty of disadvantages. As I read the report I found myself thinking that Twitter would have great value as yet another tool to disseminate terrorist propaganda, but not as an aid to their loathsome operational activities.

But after thinking about it a bit more I came up with a scenario for Twitter-assisted terrorist operations that I found novel, realistic, and a bit scary. Here it is; please let me know what you think of it, and if I’m overlooking anything important.

In multiple parts of the world today, a segment of the population is sympathetic to the goals and methods of the terrorists in the country. These sympathizers aren’t all members of cells or active participants in past attacks, but let’s stipulate that at least some of them are looking for ways to get involved and help the terrorist cause.

Terrorist leaders, meanwhile, have to be careful about the people they recruit into their cells and attacks because of the constant risk of infiltration by agents. As a result, their caution probably forces them to turn away sincere and eager volunteers. From the terrorist point of view, this is a shame; they’d love to be able to put all willing people to use, as long as doing so was riskless and costless to them. In fact, they’d love to be able to enlist as much of the sympathetic segment as possible in their operations, again as long as it was riskless and costless to do so.

One last important aspect of this scenario is that many of today’s terrorist leaders seem to have very little of the military commander’s historic concern for his troops’ well-being. Modern terrorists have shown a willingness to train and equip suicide bombers and direct them toward civilian targets. It seems safe to say that they consider many types of people expendable.

In these circumstances Twitter can be a new and very powerful tool for terrorist leaders. They simply set up some Twitter accounts and start attracting followers from among the sympathetic segment. They don’t have to know in advance who all these followers are, or vet them carefully as they show up on Twitter and start following the leaders. In fact, the leaders wouldn’t want to be picky at all; they’d just want to build a big mass of followers, who they could turn into a mob when the time was right. In this scenario, Twitter a vehicle for terrorist leaders to do two things: assemble a large and self-selecting group of followers, and send this group messages and updates in real time using a convenient and mobile interface.

The terrorist leaders would probably use Twitter to broadcast propaganda most of the time, but their accounts could also be useful when operations are planned. For operations that consist of mob action, or that would benefit from the kind of large-scale chaos and paralysis that a mob –  especially a directed one — can sow, Twitter is a great orchestrator. It’s group-level, instantaneous, mobile, widely available, easy to use, and free. And becuase the terrorist leaders don’t care about the mob members’ welfare, they also don’t care if their orders to the mob are seen by the enemy (it would be a bit better if these orders could be kept private because of the advantage of surprise, but it’s not a deal-killer for the mob action if they are seen).

The same is not true of the communications they have with other terrorist leaders and orders they send about targeted activities such as suicide bombs. For these communications the older methods, including donkeys and camels, are better. But if the new style of asymmetric warface includes the formation and direction of ‘flashmobs,’ Twitter is an ideal tool. It would require no new investments and no real behavior changes by any participants, from the leaders to the sympathetic segment, and would conceivably augment terrorists’ ability to wreak havoc in many parts of the world.

The following messages are all less than 140 characters (Twitter’s current limit):

Today will be a great day. Go to the US embassy and await instructions
Soldiers are gathering in the courtyard. Throw rocks at them
All children under 18 go to the intersection of x and y streets
Lie down in front of the vehicles
Turn the abc neighborhood into a giant traffic jam
The soldiers are heading south on z street.  Stay away
Erect barricades at the intersection of m and n streets
They are conducting searches in dfg neighborhood. Remove all weapons from houses
Do everything you can to make it difficult for them to move
All women go to checkpoint q
Everyone leave checkpoint q
This was a great day. Go home now

So my scenario is different than any of those put forward by the the 304th MI; my scenario is a mob attack executed by the sympathetic segment and initiated and coordinated by terrorist leaders using nothing more than a series of Twitter messages like the ones above. Such an attack has a few interesting properties. It’s simultaneously highly autonomous –  people only sign up with the mob if they want to, and are under no formal compulsion to obey commands –  and tightly centralized and coordinated. It’s self-organizing in some respects, but not in others. It’s easy to practice and experiment with. It marries crowd energy to a central will. Even though it’s tightly scripted, it requires little or no up-front planning. It also doesn’t require the leaders to identify the combatants in advance, or even during the attack itself; leaders just have to satisfy themselves that ‘enough’ combatants will participate. And this attack can be easily modified and redirected as events warrant.

An attack with these properties would be easy to design and carry out using Twitter. I also think that it would be difficult to organize and execute using other social or mobile technologies, although one could cobble together something similar with mobile blog updates, RSS feeds, and mobile feed readers. Finally, I think that it would suit the purposes of some terrorists quite well.

I feel the need to state that I’m not trying to get Twitter shut down, modified, or curtailed, nor am I hoping to educate, arm, or in any way abet terrorists or terrorism. My goals with this post are the same as those of the authors of the 304th MI’s report. I want to help us better understand how terrorists might use today’s technologies against us, so that we can figure out how to best combat them. I doubt that this post is telling terrorists anything they don’t know, but I hope it can stimulate some thinking on our side of the current conflicts.

If you have anything to contribute to this thinking, please leave a comment.

I received a wealth of insightful comments in response to my earlier post on Enterprise 2.0 ratings for knowledge workers. I thought I’d use some of them to continue discussing the topic, starting with the very basic question of whether measuring E2.0 participation is a good idea at all. A few commenters felt that it was not, and that the very act of measurement would pollute or drain enthusiasm from exactly the activities E2.0 enthusiasts are trying to encourage.

From Kevin Gamble:  I have no doubt that some organizations will attempt to quantify participation… As soon as you try to quantify it, however, you will kill the goose… This would be something akin to paying people to contribute to a KM system. You’ll get nothing but garbage.

From Bryan Labutta: As far as a rating system is concerned, I would be hesitant to implement one around Enterprise 2.0 because I would not want to stifle an individual’s willingness to contribute. As I mentioned above, I feel like the biggest benefits to Enterprise 2.0 should come when employees realize the benefits on their own and contribute at will. If a regular contributor sees that their personal feedback rating is very low will that reduce the amount of time they spend editing wikis and writing blog posts?

From Fenton Travers: E2.0 is about embracing the good, and not being afraid of the ‘bad’.  A rating, that your boss is going to look at and beat you up about is pretty pointless management activity.  Please GET IT GANG, E2.0 is not for the bosses it’s for you!

From Lim Boon Chuan: IMHO no, it is hard to quantify tradition work and services, till no there isn’t really a good measure of the current not to mention Enterprise 2.0 which is much more abstract.  Measurement can help gauge the level of effectiveness of an enterprise.  I qualify it by adding “accurate measurement”.  To date I do not see any accurate barometers or quantitative tools to measure Enterprise 2.0 performances.  Inaccurate measurements are worse than accurate measurements as it will bring uncertainty, frustrations and distrust which will work against the organization… It is certainly useful to be able to quantify some aspects of Enterprise 2.0.  But until we do have sufficiently accurate tools, lets not even try it.

From Samuel: But doesn’t KM research show KPI’s hurt knowledge sharing? Would measuring E2.0 contribution do the same? Furthermore there have been some interesting experiments trying to measure social media ROI. But it’s still hard to do this objectively. Will the comparison between my e2.0 contribution and that of my colleague be fair? Can’t we ‘just’ ask for stories and try to quantify them? Ask employees to tell managers how the tools helped them or others become more productive.

I imagine, though, that making E2.0 measurements and ratings visible, might instead do a couple positive things:

* Encourage friendly competition. Lots of people are fiercely proud of their PageRanks, TopCoder ratings, number of Wikipedia edits, etc. and work to keep them high only to preserve bragging rights. Slashdot, in fact, had to replace their numeric karma scores with text labels because people paid too much attention to the scores, treating them "like some sort of video game."
* Make people strive to improve their scores. I know I’ve been inordinately proud of my Technorati ranking, even though it has no direct bearing on my professional success. The desire to maintain it has definitely driven me to keep blogging regularly.

And I don’t really see how measuring an activity and publicizing the results will massivley discourage the activity in question. I imagine that some people will likely be turned off by the measuring and stop contributing, but are these people the majority or the minority of the population at large? Or of members of an online community? Of coworkers within an enterprise? My intuition and (admittedly not vast) experience tell me otherwise. They tell me that the simple act of publicly measuring E2.0 contributions will increase participation, not decrease it. A couple commenters seemed to share this view:

From Atul Rai:  I do quite agree with you that participation in social computing cannot be reduced to one number, but as you said, this could be treated as a set of numbers … some folks would be good at edits, others at authoring … In addition, this is making the entire idea of social computing what it should be … fun!

From (my former student) Alex Bain: I think a scoreboard can be extremely motivational. I remember the Cambrian House founder mentioning in your class that the virtual currency they created for their community lead to a surge in contribution…  I’ve also seen a scoring system work within a company. I know the designers that work at Zurb, and they boil down their contribution to their company’s blog to a single number, and keep track of who’s winning: http://www.zurb.com/article/88/team-motivation-for-us-its-just-a-game [they say this has lead to both more and better work]

Later posts will consider what will happen if an organization moves beyond simply measuring contribution and takes more active steps to encourage it, such as putting direct incentives in place. I wanted to start the discussion, though, by positing that public measurement of individuals’ E2.0 activities will, absent any direct incentives, encourage and increase participation and contributions, rather than decreasing them. Do you agree?  What else do you think?  Leave a comment, please, and let us know.

I spent last Friday talking about management with a bunch of ‘thought leaders’ — academics, writers, venture capitalists, executives, etc.. As I described in my last post, we were brought together by Gary Hamel and the Management Lab to brainstorm the experiments we’d like to run on any corporate guinea pigs that volunteer themselves.

I noticed a broad consensus among attendees that things are different now –  that the challenges and the opportunities facing large organizations and their leaders are not the same as they ever were. And they’re different in both degree (competition has always been nasty, but it’s getting nastier) and in kind (open source communities?  Huh?). We came from a broad range of disciplines and job titles, but none us said any form of "Hold on a minute, everyone. Things really aren’t all that different now for executives and companies. Let’s not oversell the current era."

So I just want to sanity check this belief, and then ask a follow-on question. First, the sanity check. Have corporations and other large organizations really entered a new period, one in which new things are happening and all things are happening faster? What evidence do we have that this is the case? I presented some evidence to this effect in the Harvard Business Review article I wrote with Erik Brynjolfsson this summer and in these blog posts. There’s also other evidence of ‘hypercompetition‘ (an upcoming special issue of the Strategic Management Journal will be devoted to this concept).

But are they any skeptics out there? If so, I’d love to hear from them, or about them. Are there reasonable and thoughtful people who believe that things aren’t all that different now than they were 40, or even 20 years ago? We have a constant tendency to overstate the importance of our own circumstances –  our time, our surroundings, etc. –  so it’s important to guard against that tendency, and to be sure that when it comes to organizations and competition it’s not the same as it ever was.

The follow-on question is a simple one: if things really are different now, why are they? It seems very unlikely to me that the leaders of organizations as a group suddenly said "You know all the books the management scholars have been writing for several decades now? Let’s all start putting that stuff into practice now." In other words, I don’t think that we reached any tipping point where the weight of writing and thinking about management actually started to influence management much more than it had done previously. In short, this isn’t about us.

So what is it about?  I can think of three things that have substantially changed in the world of business over the past 25 years (to pick a pretty arbitrary time period). The first is the market for corporate control –  the emergence of LBOs, private equity, and all the other alternatives to big public corporations in which executives are paid like bureaucrats. The second is the appearance of several huge new players into the game of modern capitalism. At the risk of saying something inexcusably obvious, China, India, Russia, Brazil, and others are a big deal.

The third, of course, is information technology. In 1983, US companies spent $32 billion on IT, which accounted for 9.8% of their total investment in fixed assets that year. By 2006, spending had risen almost tenfold, to $294 billion, and IT accounted for 21.1% of new fixed assets purchased that year in the US. To put it mildly, this is a big change in what companies are composed of, and it has to be having an impact (or several of them).

I believe that IT is the biggest of these stories, but I don’t want to argue that point here. Instead, I want to ask if this list of three big things that have changed the game of business is incomplete. Has anything else changed over the past quarter century that could plausibly account for or contribute to the widely-shared feeling that we’re in a new era now? If so, what is it, and why do you think it’s such a big deal?  What evidence do you have to support your belief? Leave a comment, please, and let us know. We’d love to hear what you think, and why.