image from wikipedia

a friend and colleague asked me a question regarding some internal communications within our firm last week. during our conversation, she said, ‘i don’t know why [my team] won’t just ask everyone on yammer.’ i said it’s because on the internet, no one knows you’re a suit.

every day, in corporations all across the world, people go to work wearing a mask — sometimes more than one. like the billy joel song, they’re the faces of the stranger but we love to try them on. the marketing specialist. the associate. the senior vp of sales. but when you’re on the internet, no one can see that mask; all they can see are the contributions that you make. to put your ideas out in a public forum is to open yourself up to all kinds of criticism.

in business, you used to be able to hide behind your title. the senior tech said this is why we’re taking a certain approach, and that was the end of discussion because who would stand up to him? now the first-year analyst out of college can raise questions about, and disagree with, that approach. the person from accounting can share her thoughts on the marketing specialist’s ideas on the name of the redesigned newsletter. these enterprise 2.0 systems like yammer cause a flattening of the hierarchy and a cross-pollination of teams that we have never before seen in business.

and that scares the shit out of people.

but if we’re going to get the most out of our organizations — if we’re going to really excel in what we do — we’re going to have to become more agile and we’re going to have to look for solutions outside of our normal channels. each person has to pull on the same rope. the only way to really accomplish that is if we put down those masks, get over the fear, and go into work tomorrow as ourselves ready to work openly with each other.

i’m john scardino. i have a few ideas that i’d like to explore.

i hope i can explore them with you.

i got nothing.

after that failed, i sent a question out on our yammer network to my colleagues and friends asking the same question. roughly 2 minutes and 30 seconds later i had a colleague of mine forward along an example document with exactly everything i was looking for. this was a colleague whom i’d have never even known existed if it weren’t for social networking within the enterprise.

but here’s the kicker…

the enterprise system we’ve developed has cost the firm countless thousands of dollars (probably millions), meanwhile the yammer network we’re using is the free version — no cost at all to us. using this high-cost technology outfit provided me with no answers at all and was actually a time-suck when you look at it, meanwhile a free system available to anyone was able to connect the person who needed information with the person who had the information.

the moral of the story is this: business needs to rethink where it’s spending its money. high cost IT departments in organizations don’t have to be high cost anymore. there was once a time when machines could do things that we mere mortals couldn’t, and so we developed these new systems to supplant humans. the problem is that that paradigm has shifted.

the focus needs to not be on what the technology is capable of, but on what the technology enables us to do.

at the end of the day this change in focus is better, faster, cheaper, and more efficient.

not easier, but better.

monday morning was a morning like all the rest, for a little while at least. i woke up at my normal time — 6:40a — ate reese’s puffs for breakfast, and headed out the door to the office. (fear not; i did get showered, clothed, and brushed my teeth in between.) when i arrived at my desk and opened the screen on my laptop, that familiar “boop” from the internal speaker of my firm-issued lenovo thinkpad rang true just as it has every morning since 2009, and i quickly pulled up microsoft outlook to check my email.

as i scanned my inbox for unread items, i had an alarming feeling overwhelm me: “there’s not a single thing in here that i want to read.” that’s not to say that i don’t like my job — in fact, my current tasking is probably as rewarding as my current role has ever been and i’ve learned a great deal from it — but the emails clogging up my 675 megabytes of exchange server space really didn’t need to be there. i pondered for a moment: “how much of this is my own fault? how many of my emails are other people looking at right now thinking the same thing: ‘this is worthless’?” so right then and there i decided my goal for the week:

don’t send a single email.

one of my friends, astonished, asked, “…are you off all week?” nope. i just wanted to live more intelligently, so boom — i cured it with my brain. shortly after, my brother sends me an email about going to a phillies game in april and i promptly reply on my iphone. doh! i convince myself that was unfair, i mean… i just started this thing, so i pull a kramer, “alright. starting.. now!” and the rest of monday goes off without a hitch. one day in, this isn’t bad! i was able to coordinate what i had to do in work with some simple, more engaging, phone calls and face-to-face micro-meetings. any and all other communication happens via text message, yammer, twitter, facebook, and online forums.

tuesday comes along with its own challenges (namely the fact that it isn’t friday yet). now people are asking me for tangible things! ‘that file’ and ‘that sql statement’. woof! even still, with people asking for powerpoint presentations and txt files, i’m able to use our corporate enterprise 2.0 system — based on microsoft sharepoint — to upload and store files on our team site and verbally tell folks, or drop an instant message, about where to go in order to get to it. four phone calls, two uploads, a handful of face-to-face conversations, and a circumvention of the rule by asking a coworker to email one particular file for me instead (hey, i still didn’t send it.. delegation of duties ftw!) and i’m through my second day of the week. confidence grows. i can do this.

on wednesday, this article about reply-all storms from the wall street journal crosses my yammer feed (thanks, nathan!). i’m convinced now more than ever that what i’m doing isn’t just good for me, but good for the whole company. i also convince myself that being able to fly is probably the one superpower i’d really like to have if i could only have just the one. i spend the vast majority of my time at client site for the rest of the week where email isn’t really available to me in any normal capacity. the vast majority of my work continues to use shared network services, face-to-face, and telephone calls. my personal communications are strictly through facebook, micro-blogging, lunch with a friend and colleague at taco bell, text messaging, and xbox live.

and here, as i type this on sunday evening, i have yet to send a single email since the one i sent to my brother on monday morning. so to the question, “what’s it like to live life without email?” let me just answer with one word:

awesome.

in sum…

pros: it’s far more engaging to work with actual people and not an inbox; not having to worry about “how is this going to come across?” or “does this make sense?”; it actually takes less time to call someone than to email them; using shared resources and e2.0 platforms (a) keeps version control, (b) lets everyone connect, not just those folks on the to: line, (c) keeps everything organized.

cons: some information doesn’t need to be persistent but for a while. using a wiki or other 2.0 tool is overkill, and a phone call or face-to-face meetup doesn’t provide the kind of fall-back reference needed; i miss signing my emails “- dino”.

overall: i’m not saying that email is completely worthless, but it’s mostly worthless. there’s not much value you get from email that you can’t get from any other means. i won’t say that i’ll never send another email again, but i’m certainly going to keep moving forward with this new perspective on the ageless tool of the digital age: less is more. why don’t you join me? do what i did.. just try it out for a week.

image source: treycopeland.com

i have to say this right up front: malcolm gladwell is my boy. i’ve read his books, i’ve watched his talks, and i’ve read his other pieces in the new yorker (his article on concussions in football is a must-read). so, with that being said, it pains me to say this but i think gladwell was wrong in his assumptions about the inability of twitter and facebook to rally people around an idea to promote social change.

in his recent article for the new yorker, gladwell states: “the revolution will not be tweeted”. i say, if the revolution will not be tweeted, ask gap how their new logo redesign efforts went.

now i know that malcolm gladwell is talking specifically about social activism more so than he is about anything else. he even mentions that social media can be used quite well for other situations that don’t really require people to risk much of themselves in order to do it. but if that alone isn’t a revolution, then i don’t know what is. because if there’s one thing that we’ve seen from gap dumping their logo redesign (and from facebook bending to the will of the user community and making changes to their privacy settings on multiple occasions), it’s that the authority is no longer the authority anymore.

organizations are responsible to more than their boardroom now. they’re responsible to their clients; they’re responsible to their people; they’re responsible to just about anyone that owns an internet-connected device. public opinion has always been important, but even more so in such a web-integrated world where one person’s tweet can turn into a meme that instantly spreads across the globe. it’s a lesson that organizations are going to have to learn, and learn quickly, if they’re going to be successful in this new world.

the revolution will not be tweeted? think again, gladwell.

it already has.

i wanted to do a quick and dirty case study on the “i want to go to the zoo with roy halladay” brand to see if we can figure out how all of this national exposure came to a simple bolg that someone created on blogger.com (it has since been moved to its own domain).

1. the bolg is really fun.
i think the first thing to look at is of course the fun factor.  things go viral on the internet for only a few reasons: (a) they’re absolutely hilarious, (b) they’re extremely inspirational, (c) it involves justin bieber.  the whole bolg is predicated on wanting to spend a day at the zoo with the phillies right-handed ace, roy halladay.  if that’s not funny enough, just read some of the bolg posts and tweets (especially drunk zwr tweets).  i’m not saying that it’s hilarious to everyone, but it’s comedy certainly has found a market — even bringing sam rosen and tim mccarver to laughter in the fox broadcast booth.  people love to share laughter, and it’s easy to share zoowithroy.

2. it’s over the top.
not only is it funny, but it’s over the top.  is zwr serious about going to the zoo with roy halladay?  yes he certainly is.  but he has taken something serious and made a farce out of it.  it’s not just ridiculous, it’s so ridiculous.  (it’s not just cuttered, it’s so cuttered.)  it’s not a woody allen brand of humor, it’s a will ferrell movie.  certainly woody allen has a lot of fans, but do you walk into a bar on a saturday night and hear people quoting small time crooks?  no.  you hear them quoting talladega nights and anchorman.

3. zwr lives his brand.  everyday.
this one is maybe the most important lesson that we can learn from zoowithroy.com.  its creator lives the brand he’s made.  he doesn’t have a name.  he doesn’t have a face.  he lives his brand — zwr — everyday.  when he tweets, when he writes his bolg posts, even when he’s on television.  it’s zwr 24/7.  everything you see and hear is consistent across every medium.

4. zwr has made his bolg a community.
there are a lot of key pieces to the zwr puzzle to be found in this arena.  everyone knows that a sense of community is really important for the success of a brand.  zwr builds a community around a central idea — going to the zoo with everyone’s favorite phillies pitcher — but he does so through the use of language and inside jokes.  terms like “donkey,” “so cuttered,” “so buttered,” and “moyer’d, yo” are common lexicon for phillies fans now.  the shirts he has created and sells in his online store only reinforce that sense of community.  you walk through the ticket gate and into a phillies game, see red zwr shirts all over the ballpark, and you think to yourself, “awesome, yo!  that donkey is a fan too.”

5. zwr interacts.
i’ll say this one until i’m blue in the face:  social media is supposed to be social.  if you’re not engaging your fans, then you’re not doing things the right way.  is it difficult?  it certainly can be, especially with the more fans you get.  you certainly can’t RT everything you see come across twitter from your followers, and you can’t post every email you get to your blog, but you can post enough that people still feel like they’re being heard.  the days of broadcasting information are over.  viewership includes feedback loops now, and if you’re not monitoring those channels and taking part in them then you’re only hurting yourself.

what can we learn from zwr?
we can learn a lot from zwr and the way he has built his brand.

• you need a good product, and — when talking about the internet especially — humor always wins out.
• don’t be afraid to take your content and your brand over the top because ordinary is nothing anymore, you have to be uncommon.
• building and maintaining your brand is an everyday thing.  to be really successful, your brand has to be on at all times.
• foster a sense of community through shared experiences, inside jokes, common language, etc.
• you have to be a part of your own community.  interact with your fans because they’re what make your brand successful.

i think that a lot of brands are afraid to go to some of these places for certain reasons.  they don’t want to use humor because that would seem unprofessional.  they don’t want to fully invest in their brand because they fear that they might appear to be ‘fake’ during those times they are willing to live their brand (or times when they’re not).  and they don’t like genuine, person-to-person, communication because they’re afraid of saying the wrong things.

if we take a look at those people that are successful, however, you’ll find the reasons why it’s worth taking chances and going to those places.  you’ll find the reasons why it’s worth going to the zoo with roy.

image by dharmabumx, flickr artist

i was listening in on a social media community of practice presentation today that a colleague of mine was giving about social media in the enterprise and individual performance.

while i feel that my colleague has done some great work — and really took a rather large bite to create a conceptual model for promoting participation in online networks which is itself valiant — i think it’s important to make the distinction between participation, and adoption.  it’s a distinction that i feel is greatly overlooked.

mike’s model talked about awareness, self-efficacy, organizational trust, and this notion of perceived improvement potential all being drivers of participation.  and i think that’s wrong.  in fact, i think it’s exactly backwards.

you might think that i’m splitting hairs right now; toe-may-toe, toe-mah-to, right?  but participation and adoption do have rather different connotations despite the fact that often times you’ll hear those two words used interchangeably.  i think, however, that you’ll find one is far more desirable (and much harder to come by) than the other.  in fact, one leads to the other.

of the two, participation is far easier to accomplish.  it’s really as simple as griping and grinning… virtually of course.  when many people join online communities, they are timid.  they appear to be introverted whilst they become acclimated to their new digital surroundings.  i’ve written about introversion before (see here, and here), so i won’t go into much detail in this post — but it’s important to realize that some introverts just need a little push and others just a little time.  so in using social media — twitter, yammer, blogs, wikis, etc. — just reaching out with a “hello and welcome..” is all that person may need.

you can raise participation through this ‘welcome wagon’ as we call it on our yammer network, and from involving people in conversations.  ”hey, jesse, i see you’re on the ___ team.  do you have any experience in ___?”  if you ask someone a question directly, chances are they’ll answer.  even if they answer with a, “i’m sorry, but i don’t have an answer for you,” it’s still a step in the right direction.  with some follow up discussion, you can begin to elicit active participation from users.  but you also have to remember that there are other kinds of participation, too.

you can passively participate as well.  there are plenty of people who sign up for twitter or subscribe to blogs and never post or comment, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not there paying attention.  passive users can also derive value from the conversations which unfold and the information that’s shared.

adoption, however, is far more difficult to achieve.  the definition of “adopt” is to take by choice into a relationship.  people can participate here and there, or they can participate by doing nothing but listening.  for true adoption, though, a user must not just use the system or be part of the discussion — they have to push to better the system and take the discussion to more people.  true adoption happens when people take ownership of what’s going on.  it’s something that my colleague steve talks about all the time.  when you adopt something, you choose to make it your own.

i think participation is the catalyst for self-efficacy, organizational trust, and perceived improvement potential — not the other way around.  self-efficacy, organizational trust, and perceived improvement potential then help to lead to adoption.

that’s where i think the difference is between participation and adoption.  they’re not interchangeable; the one actually lays the foundation for the other.

image by hensever, flickr artist

i’ve made this argument before: social media is social.  you can’t just broadcast information; you have to listen to what’s coming back at you and respond.

recent conversation at work brought up the notion of pre-planning tweets for a client’s conference — or having pre-approved topics that one could tweet about.  while some purists might find fault with that, i don’t.

there’s no problem with pre-planning your tweets because the tweet is just the medium.  if you or a client are attending a conference or some kind of convention and you want to make sure that you capture certain topics or information in your tweets — go right ahead and do it.  would you make a phone call to a friend or a client without first planning that also?

imagine that you were planning a happy hour for your project team with a co-worker and you needed to call them to work out the details.  you know you want to talk about the location, finalize the date, and also the time.  you punch in the numbers, and they answer the phone: “hey, how’s your [insert day of the week] going?”

you: “i thought we could have the happy hour at paddy’s pub.”

them: “uhh, that sounds fine.. who else is coming?”

you: “we should go on thursday night because not everyone comes into the office on friday.”

them: “but they have better specials on wednesday nights..”

you: “4pm should work best for everyone, so parents can pick up their kids from daycare at 6.”

them: “… dude, have you even been listening to me?”

you: “awesome.  this was a great talk!!”

them: [click]

there’s nothing wrong with planning what you’d like to say to people in tweets, phone calls, email, or on any other medium.  what’s wrong is when you don’t respond to what people are saying to you because you ‘have a plan’ as to what you’re supposed to talk about.

this is the fundamental problem that i have with a lot of social media efforts.  if you own a bar, and someone asks in a tweet: “are you going to have the game on tonight?” and you don’t send a response to that person — that’s bad.  if you’re the source of updates from an nfl team’s twitter handle and you don’t RT or engage in conversation with fans who are following you — that’s bad.  if you constantly post links to news and blog posts about the newest apple product, or research into how virtual communications make the office space more collaborative and never reply to people who want to talk about those links — that’s bad.

just think: what would happen if your phone calls were like your social media?

how many people would hang up on you?

image by oliver widder, creator of geek and poke

people don’t fully understand social media, and part of it is our own fault — the social media mavens.  i don’t think we do a well enough job of explaining it to everyone.

most people aren’t very fond of change, because change is unpredictable.  am i going to be better, or worse off?  will i be able to adapt?  can i make the necessary changes in me to succeed in this new environment?

the problem with social media, though, is that it’s really not a change from one thing to this other.  in the end, we’re all still communicating.  how we communicate — the tools we use — do (as everything) evolve over time, however.  but it’s certainly not anything to be frightened over.

we need to find better ways to communicate the benefits of social media to yesterday’s enterprise 1.0 stalwarts.  how do you get someone who is so loyal to the old way of doing things to change?

i think it’s in the metaphors.

drawing connections between perfectly understood and generally accepted metaphors with social media may be the key to forming a level of trust that will enable the “old dinosaurs” (who may very well be young guns who just refuse to change) to ease into a social media transition.  the very simple fact remains: many people don’t use it because they don’t understand it.  but what do people understand?

the news.

the news used to be, very long ago, a newspaper that you bought at a newsstand or had delivered to your house.  you’d keep it and read it the whole week until the next week’s edition when you bought the newest paper with the newest news.  but then, the radio came along.  radio and television changed the way that you got your news.  it wasn’t weekly anymore, it became nightly… and then twice daily.  with weather and traffic reports!  it didn’t take a whole week before you learned about what was going on in the world anymore.  but then, the internet came along.  the web again changed the way you got your news.  it’s not twice daily anymore — it’s any time you want.  news is reported as fast as it happens.

in the end it’s all news!  you find out what’s going on in the world around you; the only thing that’s changed is how you get the news.  flash forward from the days of big weekend newspapers and radio programs and into the world of the 1980s.  let’s talk portable music now..

years ago, if you wanted to listen to music, you would have to put a record on the record player in the living room or drop a cassette into the stereo system in your bedroom and enjoy while you sat there (or danced when no one was looking).  but then sony introduced its walkman player in ’79 and you could bring the tunes with you wherever you were.  out for a jog?  riding on the subway?  van halen was never too far out of your reach.  but then the CD player came along with a larger capacity, gave you the ability to skip tracks instead of fast forwarding, and allowed you to easily fit multiple albums in your backpack with the CD’s slimmer profile.  but then, the ipod was born.  now, we can not only skip songs but actively search for a specific song, and with large capacity memories can even store entire music libraries in your pocket.  you get the music you want, when you want it, at any time.

in the end it’s all music!  you play the air guitar, you tap your toes, and you sing along.

social media is the same as the news.  it’s the same as portable music.  we’re finding newer ways of communicating, collaborating, and building virtual relationships that translate into real world benefits.  when we talk about blogs, twitter, youtube, and wikis — what we’re really talking about is just an evolution in communication.  the same way the radio didn’t reinvent the news, and the cd player didn’t reinvent what music is — social media isn’t reinventing collaboration, it’s enhancing it.

social media isn’t just the tool.  blogs, microblogs, wikis, forums, are all just the hammer.  you can’t build a foundation, much less an entire house with just a hammer.  there ought to be a plan, or a blueprint before you start using social media.  understand what it is, and what it’s about before setting out on this journey of ‘modernizing’ your organization.

don’t set up a blog because you want comments (first!1!!! lolz!), and don’t set up a twitter or facebook account because you want the most followers [seth's blog].  you should be setting up a blog and twitter account to communicate with your readers and followers.  remember that the whole premise behind social media is the social aspect of it.

before you start building, you should have an overall communications plan or strategy (your foundation), and know what your end state is (the blueprints).  what are you trying to accomplish?  an increase of 10% in your sales?  an increase of 20% in brand loyalty?  to increase your workforce by 5% in each region?.. to decrease your workforce by 5% in each region?

just like any good construction firm, you better have inspections along the way.  identify the metrics you want to follow, and measure them throughout the process so you can tell if things are actually working or not.  not getting the results you expected? is the third bathroom costing too much money?  it could be time to change your approach (or at least lower your expectations).

you can’t show up to the job site with nothing but a hammer — and you can’t integrate social media into your organization just because you ‘know twitter’.  a lot goes into building a house, just like a lot should go into your social media and enterprise 2.0 plans.

image copyright the walt disney company, all rights reserved

i’m a big pixar fan.

i love everything about their company.  john lasseter’s drive to pursue his dream until it was fulfilled is something that we should all admire and look up to.  then, there’s the unsung heroes of pixar — the animators. every pixar movie made is 100% animation. that means there’s no help from motion-capture tools or other technological devices. the animation is done 100% by hand on computers.

and, of course, there’s the stories!  there’s a reason pixar wins year after year at the oscars for best animated movie despite competition from dreamworks animation, blue sky studios, and disney animation studios.  that reason is their ability to tell fantastic stories that appeal to young and old alike.  they’re stories that we all can learn from.

one of those stories is finding nemo.  we all know the story, so i won’t go into it in much detail.  but after recently watching it, and with certain conversations still in mind, the story hit me in a different way than it had before.  this time around, it seemed to speak directly towards social media.

anyone who is a proponent of social media knows the common stance held by its opponents: social media has many dangers surrounding it.  i — and i think i speak for every social media advocate when i say this — never deny that fact.  much like “the drop-off” in finding nemo, there are perils that you have to be knowledgeable about and cautious of.

but i come back to a quote that happens towards the end of marlin’s journey to find his son.  while in the mouth of the whale — with his hopes seeming entirely crushed — he is talking to dory about why he needs to find nemo:

marlin: “i promised i’d never let anything happen to him.”
dory: “hmmm.. that’s a funny thing to promise…”
marlin: “what?”
dory: “well, you can’t never let anything happen to him. then nothing would ever happen to him… not much fun for little harpo.”

it’s after this exchange with dory that you begin to see a real change in marlin’s character.  he realizes what dory says is the truth: life is not living if you’re not actually living.  if you avoid experiences because of the fear of bad consequences, not only will you avoid those bad consequences but you’ll also avoid any potential good as well.

it’s the same story for social media.  yes — there are risks — but if you’re afraid to use it, to be open and transparent, to be connected to your clients, customers, friends, and colleagues then you’re going to miss out on a lot of good.  if you’re thinking of using social media within your organization, i ask you to do your homework.  don’t make decisions based on overprotectiveness.  seek out the experts, understand the benefits, find out how social media can help you, but don’t say no just because it’s the safe thing to do.

you could end up preventing your kids from growing into the person they were meant to be.