21st Century Organization

"Should Your Business Be Friends with Facebook?"

To find out please visit TheAppGap blog where slides and the audio of our rich June 25 webinar discussion are posted.

Sincere thanks to:

• TheAppGap and Intuit Quickbase for hosting the discussion of findings from our Facebook Groups in Business Investigation for which the initial invitation to participate was posted on this blog October 2007
• Our audience and their thought provoking questions
• Members of our investigation team who contributed including calling in from South Africa and Europe at late hours.

Now please join us at TheAppGap to continue the discussion and address answers to the excellent questions audience members contributed.

In opening the webinar discussion about:

"Should your business be friends with Facebook?"

my blogging colleague Victoria Axelrod overviewed recent research and cases of companies from FedEx to Serena Software and Salesforce integrating Facebook into their strategies and daily operations.

In addition to addressing the webinar audience questions posted at TheAppGap I'm interested to discuss:

"What's ahead"?

For example, our webinar slides include Alexa graphs showing Facebook growth versus Twitter.

"What does this suggest about the future of consumer social networks and platforms to come?"

Finally, our Facebook Groups In Business Investigation (FGIBI) starting premise was that while Facebook may or may not evolve as a significant business platform, history tells us consumer technologies drive enterpise adoption so we should understand it. Hence:

"What are the important lessons from consumer use of Facebook for enterprise technology development?

What does the future hold?"

and

"How do organizations adapt to the reality of tools transience?"

There's so much to discuss at TheAppGap.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Enterprise 2.0 Summit Hannover Report & References

Thanks to Bjoern Negellman, Kongress Media, (organizer) and Simon Wardley (event facilitator), I was a privileged presenter, in the inaugural European Enterprise 2.0 Summit convened as part of CEBIT, March 4 in Hannover.   (Given COMDEX no longer operates in the United States, experiencing the CEBIT scale and vendor commitment was eye opening.)

Blog reports from Emanuele Quintarelli, François Nonnenmacher, Martin Koser and Robbert Homburg tell the event story that began with Simon Wardley reminding us how technology forces drive change, followed by Dion Hinchcliffe's keynote and Euan Semple's BBC lessons. Scenes from the event are captured on Flickr.

For me the event nuggets came in descriptions of serious business wiki applications by:

• Kenneth Lavrsen, Motorola A/S, wiki-ing quality standards documentation
• Wieland Stützel, Fraport AG (Frankfurt Airport), cross organizational knowledge sharing
• Diego Gianetti, BTicino S.p.a. (an Italian producer of communication, distribution and energy control systems) describing "Sul Campo" a sales force community of practice
• Cedric Blum, Société Française de Radiotéléphone Service Client (a French mobile carrier) explaining how using a wiki helps customer service solve customer problems and get more from IT

For those who stayed late into the day here are the books mentioned in my session introduction:

• Yochai Benkler, Wealth of Networks
• Rob Cross & Andrew Parker, Hidden Power of Social Networks
• Ron Burt, Structural Holes
• Lowell Bryan & Claudia Joyce, Mobilizing Minds
• Dan Tapscott, Wikinomics

Also referenced were:

• Patti Anklam, Net Work author
• Valdis Krebs, pioneering ONA practitioner
• InnoCentive and Harvard researcher Karim Lakhani et al's investigation of factors in problem resolution
• Procter & Gamble's Connect & Develop program

My presentation builds on a co-authored article "Learning through Participation and Connecting Intelligence". and two Inside Knowledge Magazine articles, Broadcasting innovation: organising to connect intelligence and Prediction Markets: Co-creating an organization's future (to be published).

    

     The Valdis Krebs admonition cited:

"You do understand Metcalfe's law does not work for social networks, right?“

came in response to reading our "Connecting Intelligence" article and Valdis's concern we had not made this point clear enough.  Metcalfe has openly asked us all to better understand the power of his law applied to social networks here . Colleagues and I have just completed an investigation of Facebook Groups in Business that points to the complexity of social network growth as Metcalfe discusses.

Thank you to everyone involved with Kongress Media's Enterprise 2.0 Summit for the rich conversations that I look forward to continuing, especially with Simon Wardley regarding his newly minted term:

"STRUCTURACTION"

Slides from my presentation are posted to Slideshare here.

   ~ Jenny Ambrozek

Social Media Club Gathering 20071211: A Gorilla on YouTube

Howard Greenstein labelled the event "What worked and what didn't in Social Media in 2007?" and convened an impressive collection of entrepreneurs and people who work at helping traditional organizations adapt to the impact of social media upon them. 

The most interesting discussion thread for me came via Jack Myers, (CEO Myers Publishing, author of the Media Business Report and "Virtual Worlds: Rewiring Your Emotional Future" published in May).

With TV industry experience starting at CBS, Jack proposed a potential outcome of the current writers strike is fundamentally changing the traditional television broadcasting industry. Given the impact of digital technology on transforming the recording industry, an entirely reasonable prediction.

Also discussed was the bottomline for organizations. As participative technologies empower individuals to become publishers and broadcasters via the Web, how do traditional media companies engage and develop new revenue models to play and sustain in this environment? No doubt the arrival of Chris Anderson's new book "Free" late 2008 will promote that dialogue.

It was interesting looking around the room and seeing who was present and not. My limited survey found technology entrepreneurs, consultants striving to help companies find their way in a low-cost consumer-created content world, and publishing industry companies although not the industry leaders.  I hadn't realized that Business Wire, the event host, is a Berkshire Hathaway company.  I'm betting there was no company in the room with more than 1,000 employees. While new low cost participative media technologies are nipping at the heels of larger organizations, their ability to adapt and leverage the possibilities is so much harder.

Not to say of course that some companies, with support from outside agencies are not figuring it out. Today's Financial Times (print p17) carries a story headlined "Gorilla drums up sales for Cadbury" with a photo of their YouTube favorite video captioned: "Sweet music". The story indicates the company reported the Gorilla advertising company "had helped it recover market share in its UK confectionery business." Tellyads voted the ad number 1 in 2007 based on their 185,000 requests since September 2007.

The Youtube video is here with 1,449,759 views, 3216 ratings, 2,442 comments, 4 honors 5 links and favorited 7,824 times. Sites are linkng to the Youtube ad and there are a string of remixes.

Of course the FT Cadbury Schweppe's story goes onto mention other forces at work challenging the company to change including an oil funds backed activist investor and rising commodity prices.

No doubt leveraging and adapting to new low cost participative media technologies is just one dimension to making an organization 21st Century sustainable.  Much more challenging is changing organizational structures and business models that demands serious heavy lifting and will.

~ Jenny Ambrozek