Explaining the Mixed Mindset of a Social Organization

If you were not at my session at the Social Connections conference in Boston 2 weeks ago, you can still see and download my slides, but I don't think you will quite get the gist of the message I expressed.

A catch-22 of great magnitude that while your outside persona is free to post,  your "business" head is confused or full of fear.

Let me explain.

Email vs. Status Updates, or Single vs. Blended, is a metaphor for the way your organization works.

Collaboration or as the marketers call it, social business/media comes in many forms. Companies, or rather, executives, are trying to understand how to integrate this into their sales or internal efforts of transforming their companies into something new. Is email the old world or just a part of the new one? Are status updates the new way or just email by a new name?

One one hand you have a handful of people that "get it" and are always sharing, open and looking to help others be it via email or some other methods.

On the other side you have the opposite. The same employees want to help people, and they are Facebook active, but when it comes to work, they are not so forthcoming.

Why? What is the problem? If they share outside the office, why not in the office? Do they send one line emails or explanations regularly? are their status updates more like blog posts or just time stamps for their billing hours?

Setting aside the need to set goals for people (every employee should post once a day or twice a week,...) in order to prove to the executive that you are now a corporate social media titan, let's discuss the people factor.

People naturally share information with friends and family, some more than others, but inside all of us is a need to share, to bring people closer to us, or to help others understand us, and our unique worlds.

Facebook, Twitter, support forums, photography sites and numerous other examples are just some of the ways one can share their experiences. And it is great, usually for fun, but also for sad times as well and you do it from your home or while at a party or dinner.

Then you leave your home and go to work, your commute probably is not short or fun, and you arrive at the office and in some cases are told, by your immediate management, NOT to post anything about your work or the teams, even though the company itself is a strong proponent of social and collaboration.

Maybe this is a bit harsh of me.

Let us say instead, you believe that by posting a bunch of information on your company intranet or ESN (Enterprise Social Network) your manager will think you are not doing your work or billing enough hours. True, you are probably posting great content, or details that are needed, but that is not how some managers see it.

The corollary is the same, if you do not post anything, people think you are not working at all or maybe even left the company. And if we take the target/goals idea  you have not met your quota of posts!

There is also a numbers problem here. The data shows that about 15% of the people are posting over 85% of the content. Take a different view of numbers, direct marketing works on a 1-3% hit rate.

Before your company starts turning everyone into social drones, realize that it will never be an all or nothing effort. Are you prepared for this "failure"? Have you decided to congratulate those that would be social anyway, over the ones that are breaking out of their shells? How will you know the difference? Will there be different expectations? In the age of personalized everything, can you be so granular inside your company? If not, why not? If you need help, contact me to discuss it.

Many people will not post, tweet, update, podcast, video message or whatever you ask of them for many reasons and that is okay. Really, it is. It does not mean they will never do it, just they have not been exposed to the right thought process to help them along. Time of course is a big issue and we have so little of it but everyone can forgo something for 2 minutes to post a simple update or comment or to vote or like something posted.

Baby steps.

However, what if you are the only one who has certain information and you are part of a team or organization that should you not be able to work or be missing while traveling, could your team survive without you? Of course, some may say, if you have provided all this information, they could survive without you and fire you all because you were collaborating.

Yes, the corporate world does work this way sometimes, but also has greater need and respect for those that provide the data. Usually. But not every time.

Just like the first time you tell someone you love them. Maybe they love you back, maybe they don't, maybe you are 5 when you say it, maybe 18, maybe 25. The outcome and expectations are different at each age and level. So it is in the corporate world.

In the US where capitalism has reigned for all of our lives, it is very hard to suddenly change that mindset of me, mine and 1+1=1, to yours, ours and get to 1+1=3. A friend of mine suggested collaboration is the ultimate capitalism. I am not so sure, but I am willing to bet that a shared culture will be evolving over the next 10-15 years more so than we have seen in the years since 9/11. Post 9/11 we have seen some drastic changes that enable us to be more global, more open, more reliant on others for information and sharing more information while also becoming more insular at the same time.

This schizophrenia of the Enterprise will continue until the current levels of management evolve or get pushed out. The newer companies maybe better at sharing, while smaller, but the jury is still out if they stay the same or revert to Enterprise ways as they get older and larger.

I believe organizations can be more open and collaborative but we need to hep them realize there will be a mixed bag of engagement from within for a few years to come.

The IBM Ver, Ver, Ver, Ver, Ver, Ver, Verse

Sorry Duran Duran for taking liberties.

By now IBM has done their marketing show to bring you the “new” email client called Verse. Those from the outside and even within will say it is the new iNotes or Webmail. They would be correct in that description. It is. But it is also so much more.

It turns out, for whatever cyclical reason, which is beyond the space time continuum, Microsoft, Amazon(?!), IBM, Google and numerous others are presenting new ways and formats of email. Oddly enough Facebook dropped their pointless email program…only to come back at corporations with a “business” Facebook. As I said in Stockholm right before they announced it, who would trust Facebook with ANY business information? Evidently Facebook thinks someone would. Just. Say. NO.

Is this truly a reboot of email? Did J.J. Abrams put you all up to this?

At the same time as we, and you IBM, are trying to convince people that email is ubiquitous and passé in the social/collaboration space, you at the same time hedge your bets with a reborn email client?

As a long time messaging adviser I am excited by all the new efforts being put forth. Verse will be on premises and in the Cloud. V’ger is coming to a desktop near you. Email that knows what you want, when you want it, who you want to work with and all your history. Cool! Right? Baby Watson under the covers?

We've been here before, remember Actioneer? SwiftFile? Numerous other software sidetracks along the dead product highway. So this is the modern  version. All those bits and pieces were building blocks to get to this point.

There is a Freemium model which is 15 years to late to many of us that have been on Yahoo or Gmail for an eternity, but then see the second paragraph above and you wonder if IBM has an idea here. What I mean is, yes, this all looks on the outside like an odd solution, but from within IBM there is a movement afoot to gain a foothold while Microsoft sleeps. My competitive mind says Gmail should be the aim, and maybe it is, but it seems that the IBM teams have a plan to expand Watson, as well as the rest of the portfolio.

Could we really be n the cusp of a product so expansive  that it would dwarf the existing ecosystem around IBM Connections? Could this truly raise Notes and Domino from the moribund state it has been hanging out in lately?

I don’t know. As much as I love messaging, I don’t think it should be all encompassing. Do I need to know that I email my boss more than my wife? Shouldn't it also be saying to me, “Go outside and play ball with your son.” Or maybe it should be saying, “abstracts are open for a conference that would fit well for you”.  I want real information that is useful to me, not just to business.

As an entrepreneur I can see how insights could be helpful, after all I can only read 1/314159265359 of the internet, if that much, on any given year so who wouldn't want some genius mind helping us?

Hang on, one might be thinking, you are over thinking what Verse does or will do. I don’t think I am. I am extending what I want it to do for me and isn’t that what the whole point of an email client is? To work for me in the best way possible? IBM researchers, and newer designers re thinking about some of these ideas right now, or have been the last 2 years and they want your input as well.

No doubt many reading this post will question my thoughts, but if you will suspend the “email” discussion for a minute, how about this idea….can Verse replace one’s manager?

After all, if it can tell me what I should be doing, then why would one require a manager? Is this another nail 

in the coffin for the middle managers and lower managers? Will we finally be the masters of our domains and be independent contractors within our companies to provide our unique actions to the greater company at large?

Call it what it is, collaboration, knowledge, experiential, whatever other synonyms for analytics that provides HR the ability to finally reach Big Brother mythical status. Providing everyone to be on a new level of productivity. A double edge sword which could be just one of many outcomes. Maybe it really is just another mail client with some nice extras that will require too much effort to build or maintain? 

Is this even feasible today? If so, it would require some serious efforts, which are being done, to bring some of these ideas to fruition. Automation, Artificial Intelligence, programmatic cues to trigger functions…all very HAL/SkyNet like to me. IBM is trying to reboot themselves, Verse may not be the whole solution....yet, but it looks to be a step in the right direction.

So come on, you know you want to try it out, maybe it will help you even get on Jeopardy. That would be an awesome way to get a large amount of people to use it by the way, hint, hint IBM.

If you want to play with Verse, go here to sign up and getan account.

Don't Ship Shit! And Other Things learned from the #IBM #NewWayToWork LiveStream

If you spent the two hours online watching the video and speakers (link to watch the replay) during the IBM event today, you found yourself going back and forth across a spectrum from amazement to amusement.

The new name of the Mail.Next product is IBM Verse, no mention, that I recall, of the server name being changed. I am not going to try to explain the name, Alan Lepofsky did it quite well here.

This mobile/browser based communication portal unleashes the power of Watson to help you automate and analyze your communications. New and expanded UI to include easier file attaching and locations that used to be difficult are now a click away.

The IBM team did a nice job making sure the UX on mobile and browsers are complementary, instead of exclusionary.

When discussing writing and shipping code, the graphic above appeared on screen and it was probably a first, for IBM US at least, of cursing in public live. This is not your parents IBM, rather it is one which is recognizing the need to go beyond us old folks and find a new way with new voices. They brought in college students, designers, researchers, in short everyone they thought might have some ideas for now and the future. The plan is not to ship code that works, but instead serves a purpose by helping people work better, faster and more intelligently while still providing the utilitarian aspects that are required from communications, like accountability.

It is not available yet, beta coming soon, and will most likely first show up as part of the IBM Connections Cloud offering.