Imagine an employee, consultant, or management guru making a presentation five years ago to Verizon’s senior executives on how that company should improve its customer service. And imagine that the plan presented relied heavily on an army of individuals, few if any of them Verizon employees, who would work from home and interact with customers via the Web. These individuals would not be vetted in advance about their knowledge or skill bases. They would work as much or as little as they wanted.  And they would work for free.

I have no doubt that the presenter would have been laughed out of the room.

Yet we learn from an April 25 article by Steve Lohr in the New York Times that this is exactly what’s happening at Verizon. The article profiles Texan retiree Justin McMurry, who spends up to 20 hours per week at the community forums section of the company’s website, “supplying answers online to customer questions about technical matters like how to set up an Internet home network or how to program a new high-definition television.”

He’s not the only person exhibiting this strange new form of corporate altruism; Verizon’s director of e-commerce says that Mr. McMurry and his fellow volunteer ’super-users’ answer thousands of questions that would otherwise go unanswered (thus decreasing customer satisfaction) or take up an employee’s time (and thus cost Verizon). Discussions between customers and super-users also “provide customer ideas for improvements in hardware and software for the company’s fiber optic service, as well as a large, growing and searchable knowledge base online.”

I’ve seen and heard of enough similar examples that I believe this is a trend rather than a blip. Companies in many sectors are catching on to the fact that these user communities have a bizarrely high ratio of advantages to drawbacks, and are trying to learn how to successfully establish them and keep them thriving.

The article states that one way to do this is to give super-users –  the most prolific and helpful contributors to online communities — perks including access to exclusive parts of the site, special privileges, and advance information about new products. But Lohr’s piece makes clear that what super-users value most is public acknowledgment of their… superlativeness. This takes the form of ratings systems, often multidimensional, that reflect a users’ cumulative contributions, helpfulness, expertise, etc., as assessed by their peers.

These ratings apparently matter a great deal to people, even if they’re not directly tied to economic benefit (as eBay seller ratings are). To build and manage its customer support community Verizon turned to startup Lithium Technologies, which came out of an online gaming world where people interact constantly with each other and assiduously build their reputations over time.

Lithium’s founders believed that people would behave similarly even in staid corporate online communities. It appears they were right. As co-founder Lyle Fung says in the article about including ratings in community sites, “That alone is addictive… [super-users] are revered by their peers.”

Part of the reason I  advocate Enterprise 2.0 ratings for knowledge workers (see this 3-post sequence) is to harness this addiction –  to find the Justin McCurrys of the world, take as much as they’re willing to give, and give them something they value in exchange, namely a persistent and visible reputation as an expert / maven / mensch / all-around-good-person-to-have-around.

I fail to see the downside in doing this. It makes no difference if I approach the issue from a ethical, intellectual, or empirical perspective — I still see a positive development taking place. Capitalists and communitarians can make common cause (OK, I’ll stop with the alliteration now) on this one; whether you’re interested in  money or in increasing the amount of human contact in society experiments like Verizon’s are interesting and encouraging.

Because management academics have been studying open source software communities for a while now, I stopped being surprised a few years back when I heard about technically-oriented young men (nerds) around the world organizing themselves to write complex pieces of code. I got surprised this last semester, though, when one my students told the class that his socially well-adjusted sister gets together with her friends each week to have a couple glasses of wine and…  edit Wikipedia entries. And I got surprised again when I read about Verizon’s successful experiment to draw in 68 year old retirees and get them to answer customer service inquiries for free on behalf of a giant corporation.

In the face of all these surprises, it’s worth taking a bit of time to stop and look at how far things have progressed in just a few years. Self-organizing communities, built on top of emergent social software platforms, have become common.  These communities have low or no barriers to entry, and are non-credentialist –  they don’t care what your job title is, where you went to school, or how many letters you have after your name. People build status, reputation, and authority within them based on how much they do and how well they do it. These reputational attributes become very important to many (if not most) members. The best of these communities become hugely valuable resources for everyone who visits them –  super-users and lurkers alike –  as well as for the organizations that host them. In most of the examples I’m familiar with trolls and other types of value-destroying member are rare, and most participants show themselves to be people of good will.

As the hypothetical meeting that opened this post indicates, very few people were anticipating this flowering of digital community spirit; I know I wasn’t. And I still find that lots of decision makers within corporations are unaware of what’s going on, or unconvinced that it is real and will endure. I try to show them why I believe that it is and it will, and I suggest to them three mantras that I keep repeating to myself to drive the point home: expertise is emergent; reputation matters; altruism is real.

My MBA class finished today, and the end of the semester is, as always, marked by a sense of relief. Not because an annoying academic responsibility had been discharged –  that’s not how I look at teaching — but because I’d held things together, assembled and delivered a course, and stayed about a half step ahead of my students one more time. I find teaching rewarding as hell, but also exhausting and stressful. The question “How am I going to pull this off?” is constantly in the background during teaching semesters, and it’s a blessing when it evaporates after the last class.

That class was especially bittersweet this year because it was the last one I’ll teach at the Harvard Business School. I’m taking up an appointment at MIT as a Principal Research Scientist within the Center for Digital Business at the Sloan School of Management starting in July of this year.

In virtually every way, this is a dream job. I’ll get to continue my research on the business impact of technology, and do so as part of the world’s greatest collection of technology scholars (yes, that is a strong and certainly biased statement…). It is an unimaginable luxury to have close at hand a top authority on almost any question I can think to ask related to my work. It’s also an embarrassment of riches to be able to concentrate on research full time.

But I know I’ll miss the classroom. Teaching in the MBA program at HBS has been one of the formative experiences of my adult life. It’s shaped how I approach situations, how I present myself, how I interact with others, and my self-image.

Trying to lead a productive discussion among a group of 60-90 smart and ambitious young people can be daunting, especially when you have to do it day after day, sometimes on material you’re not too sure about yourself. I have never in my life been as aware of my own subconscious as I was during my first teaching semester. I had an archetypal anxiety dream the night before almost every class, and I had them in a strange kind of chronological order. Early in the semester I had a child’s dreams of being pursued by monsters. These gave way to dreams in which I showed up to high school naked. A few weeks later I was in college, most of the way through a semester in which I hadn’t gone to math class once. Toward the end of the course I was finally an adult, having dreams about showing up late to the class I was supposed to be teaching. My morning routine that semester was to turn off my alarm clock, mumble “Well, that was weird,” and roll out of bed to shower off the clammy sweat.

The bad dreams abated over the years, but I always found the responsibility of teaching to be a heavy one. Not onerous, just heavy. It’s not a matter of life and death, but it’s still important to get it right. At the end of that first semester I told my class that the only thing I could compare the experience to was trying to learn to play squash well as an adult. I took lessons, worked out, and played a lot, and as a result my body ached most of the time. The only time it didn’t hurt was when I was on court with the muscles loose and blood flowing. The only time my brain didn’t ache, I told them, was when I was in the classroom with them.

I was lucky enough to be mentored at HBS by Warren McFarlan, one of the school’s living legends. Warren’s been on the faculty longer than I’ve been alive, and has served the school in every imaginable way. For members of my generation the term ‘organization man’ is somewhere between a joke and an insult; Warren showed me that it can also be an honorific.

I co-taught with him one semester, which was a great way to learn humility. I also learned a lot about teaching by observing him, even though he’s absolutely inimitable. He taught me that one of the deep secrets to being a good teacher is to convey that you’re the person who most wants to be in the room. He also showed me that a foolproof way to accomplish this is to actually be the person who most wants to be in the room.

That I could do. I loved teaching, and my failings as an instructor, while plentiful, did not include apathy. I hope my students over the years have forgiven me my poor lesson plans, unsuccessful cases, jokes that fell flat, unfair grades, and other shortcomings. And I hope it showed that I always wanted to be in the room.

As I walk out of the classroom I want to thank HBS for giving me the chance to work and teach there, and to thank my students. They put up with me, indulged me, pushed me, challenged me, and sometimes befriended me. I hope that somewhere along the way they also learned from me. I know I did from them.

Twitter grew by 131% in March alone, and Oprah started tweeting last week (and already has about 175,000 followers), so it seemed like the right time to discuss this technology/service/phenomenon/whatever-it-is in my MBA course. Laura Fitton came to class on Thursday the 16th (thanks, @pistachio!), and we spent more time today talking Twitter.

These were classes when I could really sense that students were grappling with the material in a positive way. They shared both what they knew and what they did not, and worked together to increase their understanding of a complex, unfolding phenomenon.

I started off class today by asking if Twitter really was something new under the sun, or if it was instead largely similar to previous collaboration technologies. After some back and forth, the class decided that while Twitter contained no single revolutionary technology, it was in aggregate pretty novel. This was because of its combination of attributes. Tweets and Twitter, we concluded, are:

• Concise. The 140 character limit constrains “how boring you can be,” in the words of one student.
• Hyperlinked. Tweets can include links to pages and pictures.
• Persistent. Tweets are not evanescent; they stick around over time and are easy to locate and point to.
• Searchable. Persistent tweets mean that Twitter as a whole is searchable
• Asynchronous. Users can dive into the Tweetstream whenever they wish, and can catch up on what they missed. This makes it feel different than a Web-based chat room, where you need to be present during a conversation to participate in it and benefit from it.
• Asymmetric. As Laura emphasized, Twitter’s publish-and-subscribe architecture is fundamentally different than Facebook’s friending mechanism. My Facebook friends by default send information to me about what they’re up to. My Twitter followers do not –  only the people I’m following pipe information to me. I perceive myself to be part of a single network of friends on Facebook, but I’m part of two very different networks on Twitter: the people I follow (I select these people because I want to get information from them), and those who follow me (these people select me because they want to get information from me).
• Largely public, but with a private option. Users can send private tweets (called ‘direct messages,’ or DMs) to each other, but all others are part of the public record; they persist in a user’s profile and can be found via search.
• Categorizable. Tweets can be categorized with hashtags (for example, this is how people identify themselves as answering my daily #andyasks question). This is a pretty weak mechanism, but it is useful.
• Open. users can contribute to Twitter from a wide variety of clients and devices, a phenomenon Laura refers to as “multi-facing”
• Universal. Anyone can sign up and start tweeting for free; the technology is open to anyone with Internet access.
• Monolithic. There are a huge number of email systems, bulletin boards, chatrooms, discussion groups, etc. in the world. And many of them are closed to outsiders, making them mutually inaccessible walled gardens. This fragmentation means that all these environments don’t “add up to anything;” they can’t be queried as a whole by any single user, and the beneficial interactions in one have difficulty spilling over into others. Twitter, in sharp contrast, is a single pool of digital content. It’s generated by a legion of people using a cohort of devices, but it all winds up in one place.

We spent a fair bit of time in the two classes trying to understand what this strange combination of characteristics meant –  what it added up to and what it was useful for. My favorite comment on this topic came in today’s class: a student said “Twitter’s not a substitute for anything we used to do.  It’s a combination of about 17 things we used to do.”

We jotted down some of these in class, and I added to the list afterward. I don’t have 17 items on it yet, but here’s what I came up with. These are Twitter use cases; things we’re doing with Twitter that we used to do (and still do) with other technologies:

• Chat
• Discussion boards
• Email
• Identifying trending topics
• Broadcasting breaking news
• Marketing and brand building
• Mining consumer sentiment
• Providing status updates to friends and family
• Communicating location, activity, mood, and other personal information
• Engaging in customer service
• Finding information on topics of interest
• Finding people who share an interest

So that’s twelve off the top of my head, and I’m sure we could come up with at least five more.

And I think that’s what intrigues me so much about this technology. Maybe it’s not that, as some people say, the use cases for Twitter haven’t yet settled down. Maybe it’s that they’re not going to –  that this is going to be a generally useful technology instead of a flash in the pan, or one-trick pony.  We’ll have to stay tuned and observe its progression.

What do you think?  Will Twitter settle down?  If so, to what?  Or will it fade away as we get tired of it and move on to something else, or as the spammers show up and destroy value? 50% of my students thought that they were going to walk away from Twitter after completing their class assignments; 50% thought they’d continue using it. Which group are you in, and why? Leave a comment, please, and let us know.

One last thought on the topic. Because Twitter is so open and frictionless, it has greatly lowered the barrier to contribution; people can and do fire off a tweet in a matter of seconds. I’ve written previously about some of the drawbacks associated with this, but I recently got firsthand evidence of the strong benefits of frictionlessness.

This past weekend I came back to my rental car to find that I couldn’t turn the ignition key at all. I tried the key while yanking on the steering wheel and the gear shift, but no luck. I was at a loss, and turned to Twitter to see if anyone knew anything about this undocumented feature of the Pontiac G5 (Detroit’s woes are easier for me to understand after this experience). I tweeted “Ignition key won’t turn at all in rented Pontiac G5. Anyone got any ideas – help!”

Within a few minutes I got 16 responses back. They all told me essentially the same thing –  that there was no trick specific to that car, and that the key was to keep cranking on the steering wheel while turning the key. I did so, and eventally got the damned thing to start.

My point with this story is not just to bust on GM, but also to highlight that I got 16 shots of altruism from people, most of whom I didn’t know, at a time when I could really use them.

They were willing to help me out not because I’m such a good friend of theirs (not the case) or such an obviously great guy (depends heavily on who you talk to), but because we humans like being altruistic, and Twitter makes altruism the work of a few seconds. The help I got cost each each sender virtually nothing, yet added up to a highly valuable resource for me. I think it’s important not to lose sight of that, and to keep in mind that not all exchanges are governed by incentives, mutual benefit, or economic rationality. Sometimes they’re governed by simple neighborliness, and Twitter is an awfully big neighborhood.

Intellipedia mavens Sean Dennehy and Don Burke were guests in my MBA course yesterday, and once again wowed my students. When they visit I always make sure to position myself near the door right after class so that I can soak up all the compliments; students say “Thanks, great class” to me as they leave, even though I didn’t do anything except get Don and Sean to show up.

Don, Sean, and a small group of their colleagues have been instrumental in deploying, growing, and maintaining a single instance of Mediawiki software across all 16 federal intelligence agencies. They’ve also been tireless in promoting its proper use, increasing awareness, and educating interested members of the US Intelligence Community (IC).

I describe the genesis, spread, and impact of Intellipedia and the IC’s other 2.0 technologies in my upcoming book Enterprise 2.0 (which will come out this fall from HBS Press). I find it a truly inspiring story, and one that gives me hope that even the most large, bureaucratic, and tradition-bound organizations can be changed by a combination of technology, innovative thinking, and tenacity. The work of the Intellipedians reminds me of Margaret Mead’s great quote ” Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

As Don and Sean spoke to my students, I was also reminded of an exhibit at London’s Tate Modern museum that I heard about, but unfortunately never saw. In 1990 the artist Yukinori Yanagi painstakingly created the flags of 170 nations by arranging colored sand inside clear plastic boxes (as craftsmen do when making sand art bottles.) He then mounted these boxes in a grid on the museum’s walls and interconnected them with plastic tubes.

Can you see what’s coming next? Yanagi released a population of ants into this grid, then let them go about their work. As they did so — as they foraged, built, explored, and expanded –  they literally eroded the flags. Sand of different colors moved among the boxes, and the elements of the grid became much less neat and sharply delineated over time. The piece, called “World Flag Ant Farm“, was not a particularly subtle political statement, but I find it a supremely clever idea. (for more on Yanagi and his work, see this page)

“World Flag Ant Farm” is not exactly the right analogy for Intellipedia; the sentiments behind them are too dissimilar. Sean, Don and their colleagues are not trying to eliminate all barriers and differencies within the IC, and are not advocating that the Community should become monochromatic.

But what they are doing is building effective digital connectors among the agencies and their people. Many intelligence analysts are using these connectors, because they realize that they can do their work better if they don’t have to stay within the same box all the time. And as they move around new connections get made and content gets distributed more widely, just as was the case in the exhibit.

Ant colonies are often held up as prime examples of emergent systems. Intellipedia and the IC’s other 2.0 tools are helping the Community organize itself in emergent ways, in addition to the hierarchical ways it’s deeply familiar with.

People can and do argue about whether it would be a good thing if the vision underlying “World Flag Ant Farm” came to pass –  if differences and barriers among nations disintegrated over time. But virtually every observer agrees that the US Intelligence Community needs to become less rigidly stovepiped and obsessed by current organizational boundaries, and to learn to operate in emergent ways to combat the dynamic and ever-changing threats America now faces. All of my work on Enterprise 2.0 and emergent social software platforms tells me that Intellipedia and its kin are the ideal technologies to help accomplish this transformation.

Don was talking to one of my ex-military students after class. He ended the conversation with “Thanks for your service,” which I thought was incredibly respectful and classy. It reminded me that, to my great discredit, I’ve never adequately thanked Don, Sean, and their colleagues for their work or expressed my appreciation.

So as a scholar and as an American I want to say thanks for your service. It means a great deal.