Collaborative Thinking

The State of the Media Democracy

Some interesting statistics from a recent study commissioned by Deloitte & Touche USA LLP’s Technology, Media and Telecommunications (TMT) practice. You can read more about the survey by clicking on the link below (which also allows you to download a summary in PDF format).

SURVEY HIGHLIGHTS:

High Demand for User-Generated Content

• 40 percent of all survey respondents are making their own entertainment (editing movies, music and photos)

  • 25 percent of Matures

  • 56 percent of all Millennials; leading Millennials (18–24) participate more

• More than one in 10 Millennials are actively uploading their own videos on the Internet

• 51 percent of all survey respondents are watching/reading content created by others

• 71 percent of Millennials watch/read content created by others; 56 percent of Xers do; Boomers/Matures participate less, but participation is noteworthy

• 53 percent of Millennials would download more videos if  connection speeds were faster

• One-third of online content viewing is done on user-generated sites

  • Almost ¼ for Matures, ½ for Millennials

Long Live Traditional Media!

• Favorite and promising new television shows beat the Web as the most frequent media conversation topics for all generations

  • Extensive amplification with the Millennials as they tell the most people about what they like

  • 52 percent of Xers are visiting television show Internet sites

• Printed magazines are an integral part of every generation’s life

  • 72 percent enjoy reading magazines over finding the same information online

  • 58 percent of Millennials agree magazines help them learn about what’s “in”

• Compared with online activities like surfing the Web and downloading music, all generations aspire to reading a book in the coming year

Advertising Insights

• 64 percent  tend to pay greater attention to print ads in magazines or newspapers than advertising on the Internet

• More than one-in-four would pay for online content vs. being exposed to ads

• Search engines and word of mouth are the most effective means for driving Web site traffic — 85 percent of Xers are influenced by someone’s recommendation

• 87 percent of respondents continually visit the same Web sites

• Generation Xers are a little more responsive to advertising

Future Products
Millennials are leading the way as far as embracing new technologies, games, entertainment platforms, user-generated content and communication tools:

• 64 percent want to easily connect their television to the Internet for viewing videos and downloading content to their television

• 60 percent want the ability to move their content to any device they own without any problems

• 57 percent want an entertainment and communication device that lets them do everything

• 49 percent want a computer or similar device that will be the center of their household media experience

The State of the Media Democracy: Are You Ready for the Future of Media? | Media Democracy | Future of Media | Survey - Deloitte & Touche USA LLP

Timeout For Something Different

For the most part, I keep this blog pretty much focused on my research efforts, related industry news, Burton Group activities and occasional posts that provide some insight to me personally. I'm passing this pointer along because (A) the product was created by a friend of mine and her sister-in-law, (B) the product is actually quite creative and really useful and (C) I always find it fascinating how things can become viral.

So here's the information: the web store is Jill-able and a short YouTube video is embedded below.

The Sociability Of Social Media

In the "thinking out loud" category, I've been trying to articulate how to discuss social media in a way that allows you to explore different topical areas that span business, organizational and technology domains. I also wanted to avoid anything that suggested specific tools and instead think about things a bit more abstractly. I kept coming back to the concept of "sociability". Although there does not seem to be a rich definition that I can grab onto. But if it could work, then can sociability of social media be broken down even further - can we express it in some notion of states, phases, etc. Thinking about that lead me to the diagram below (with the corny acronym of ACES):

• Awareness
• Connectedness
• Engagement
• Solidarity

That graphic might be fine, adequate enough to tell stories around perhaps, but then I wanted to break things down a bit more - is there any type of progression within these states or phases (a way to reflect one's current and future maturity). That lead to a more complex diagram below.

Right now this is a mental exercise and very much a first-cut work-in-progress. Hopefully it will evolve and simplify itself into a framework for thinking about issues related to planning/deployment/adoption of social media.

In any case, food-for-thought...

Enterprise 2.0 Report: Table of Contents

A few people asked for an executive summary of the report published recently on Enterprise 2.0 (availability of the report for Burton Group clients was posted here). I included the summary to the report (which basically is the executive summary, or synopsis as we call it) in that posting. Unfortunately, that's all I can share in terms of large excerpts from the document and I don't have time to write a separate summary at the moment. You can gleam aspects of the report from my blog postings and I have included the table of contents below to help non-clients gain a better understanding of what the document covers:

Synopsis	5
Analysis	6
A Perfect Storm Is Happening Now	6
Innovation = Survival	6
Growth Requires Productivity and Performance Gains	6
Still Relevant: Knowledge and Human Capital Management (HCM)	7
Why Enterprise 2 0?	8
Assessing Enterprise 2 0	9
Social Software and Emergence	10
Platform Environments	11
SLATES	11
Fine-Tuning E2 0 and SLATES	12
The Social Experience of E2 0	13
Personal Value	13
Emergent	14
Communal	14
Platform Centric	15
Market Impact	15
Evolution, Not Revolution	15
Understanding History Rather Than Rewriting It	16
Converged Collaboration and Content Platforms	18
Unified Communications Platforms	18
Common Integration, Infrastructure, and Networking Services	18
E2 0 Tools Emerging on All Fronts	18
Inevitable Consolidation	19
A Window of Opportunity	20
Gazing into the E2 0 Crystal Ball	21
Consumer Market as Incubation Lab	21
Innovation by Enterprise Software Vendors	21
Post-Hype Recovery Efforts	21
Market Alignment with IT Architecture	22
Recommendations	24
Understand the Business Value (or Not) of a Social Enterprise	24
Focus on HCM	25
Update and Refine Knowledge Management Efforts	25
Understand That Not All Collaboration Is E2 0 Collaboration	26
Re-Examine Collaboration Technology Strategies	26
Selling E2 0	27
Leverage a “Fine Tuned” E2 0 Conceptual Model	27
Explore, Learn, and Adapt	28
The Details	29
Growth and Innovation Trends	29
Influence of HR and Employee Relations	30
Multi-Generational Workforce Trends	31
Generations at Work	32
The Origins of Enterprise 2 0	35
A Refinement	35
E2 0 Technology Manifest	36
Wikipedia Confusion	36
Relation to Web 2 0	36
A Conceptual Model for Enterprise 2 0	37
Persona	38
Voice	39
Groups	41
Tags	44
Feeds	46
Networks	48
User Experience Design Goals	50
Conclusion	52
Notes	53
Author Bio	54

Social Applications: Leave The Rough Edges Alone

I recommend reading Danah Boyd's entire post. It raises some interesting points.

When I listen to clients and vendors discuss social software, the applications are frequently semi-formal where social structures are explicitly defined and employee participation is directed in some manner by a business process. Often, the need to be so purposeful when laying out the benefits of social applications is to support the need to deliver a business case with some expected ROI. Decisions on the design and deployment of social applications can be influenced by management's expectations of enabling certain outcomes (e.g., expertise location, communities of practice, professional support networks or improved talent management). I don't disagree with that approach, but I think we also need to think beyond the purposeful aspects of social applications. How do we create social contexts that catalyze emergent activities and serendipitous interaction?

Danah raises a valid point that clicked in my head as follows: will business analysts and IT groups involved in requirements gathering and design activities "take the social out of social applications" by trying to make them too efficient and too reliable? Should architects of social applications embrace some degree of imperfection, impermanence and incompleteness?    

valuing inefficiencies and unreliability

Two deeply embedded values in the world of technology development are efficiency and reliability. Companies pride themselves in maximizing efficiency and reliability and, for the most part, consumers agree. We like when our search engines produce results quickly and reliably. Yet, when it comes to social technologies, I suspect that efficiency and reliability are not the ideal metrics.

.....

Social technologies that make things more efficient reduce the cost of action. Yet, that cost is often an important signal. We want communication to cost something because that cost signals that we value the other person, that we value them enough to spare our time and attention. Cost does not have to be about money. One of the things that I've found to be consistently true with teens of rich and powerful parents is that they'd give up many of the material goods in their world to actually get some time and attention from their overly scheduled parents. Time and attention are rare commodities in modern life. Spending time with someone is a valuable signal that you care.

.....

I have a sneaking suspicion that tech architects never even think about the possibility of creating inefficiencies to enhance social good, but I'm not sure. Since many of you mysterious readers are passionate about social technology, let me ask you. What examples of intentional (or unintentional) inefficiencies do you see in social tech? How do users respond to these?

apophenia: valuing inefficiencies and unreliability

Designing & Enabling Communities

Very effective at getting some key concepts across - well worth viewing...

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PARC Forums: People & Social Technologies

Both presentations are worth viewing. What I find interesting is that we are "telling old stories in new ways" with much of the narrative around social software. If you have tracked this space for some time (for me, since the early nineties), much of the discussion around control, structure, participation, etc. is not all that new. This situation is actually a good thing - it reinforces that fact that, as an industry, we've largely failed to solve the historical challenges identified in these sessions with "pre 2.0" tools, methods and practices. And we're telling the story more effectively and the tools offer more compelling possibilities. 

Some comments:

• In Ross Mayfield's session re: the Gartner Magic Quadrant for team collaboration and social software: All this chart shows is that (1) it is incredibly difficult to accurately portray multiple spaces in a single model. I don't think any analyst firm has figured out how to effectively portray the complexity of multiple domains in chart that is easily understood. Given that all vendors are mashed into the lower part of the model, either the model is flawed or its too early to assess the market. I believe that the issue is more related to how these types of charts work - they are just not flexible enough to handle multiple domains. If you remove one term, say social software, then the entire collection of vendor assignments would change and some might even disappear. Take away team collaboration and all the assignments change again and more vendors are likely to show up. This leads to (2) mixing team collaboration and social software introduces some co-dependency and filtering issues. Depending on your definition of social software, it might include team collaboration - but not all team collaboration is necessarily social software. So you end up with some topic areas missing - like anything that is real-time collaboration is missing but some definitions of social software include that topic - also missing are vendors that have e-mail integrated within a team collaboration software suite - and some social tools are missing like those that deliver social bookmark systems or feed syndication platforms. So, I just don't find the vendor placement all that useful. It's just too much loaded into a plotting-centric approach that doesn't have enough dimensions to really handle compound technology domains. 
• Charlene does a  really nice job...

Made of People

Ross Mayfield, CEO and Co-Founder of Socialtext

All things 2.0 are made of people. The social software that powers the current wave of innovation takes a different approach of getting out of the way of people to unleash their abundant desire to share and collaborate. While these tools exhibit fantastic social dynamics on the public web, adapting them for the context of an organization is a challenge not only for tools, but practices. Sharing control to create value isn't exactly the instinct of the enterprise. This talk will explore the social software design and business patterns that might make us more human.

PARC Forum | November 15, 2007

Strategies for Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies

Charlene Li, Forrester

With the advent of social technologies like blogs and social networks, the world has transformed to one where people get what they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions. Companies are threatened by this new order, and need new frameworks and strategies for how to approach the groundswell of active, participating customers. This forum will address the following issues:
- What process should companies use to create a coherent social strategy?
- What business objectives and results can be achieved with Web 2.0 technologies?
- Who should lead and own the social strategy within an organization?
- How will social technologies transform your business in the future?

PARC Forum | December 6, 2007