social media

Social Media

Will 2012 be the end of email?

/ Sharon O'Dea / 3 Comments

end of email

2012 begins with a slew of predictions that this year will see the back of email. Back in November, multibillionaire foetus Mark Zuckerberg declared “email is dead”.

It must be true, I read it on Twitter. However, Zuckerberg is hardly an impartial observer; he’s got his Facebook Messenger to flog (a system which, ironically, has a user experience akin to using Yahoo webmail in the late 90s).

ATOS boss Thierry Breton is taking the whole business more seriously; he’s making it his personal mission to end the use of internal email by 2014, arguing that 85% of his staff’s time spent on email is unproductive.

Breton noted that his new graduate hires didn’t use email; they’d grown up on social tools such as Facebook. It was only on starting work, he claims, that this cohort were introduced to mail – and found it wanting.

Research by ComScore reckons younger people don’t use email, eschewing it in favour of IM and social networks which provide “instant gratification”. This is precisely the kind of meaningless statistic regularly used to prop up claims that email is on the way out (usually peddled by people with a messaging system of their own to promote). Until I joined the workforce I’d never participated in a meeting, made a round of tea, or heard the word Action used as a verb. Yet all of these things are still going strong in the most digital of workplaces. That people don’t adopt common workplace practices until they join the workforce should hardly come as a surprise.

Let’s get this straight right now: Facebook messenger, Twitter and Yammer aren’t about to see off a communication medium which has been going strong since 1972. Not now, and probably not for a long time.

Claims that one type of new technology will swiftly usurp established practice are nothing new; Plato claimed that the spread of writing would destroy humans’ ability to remember.

The ComScore research found visits to mail sites such as Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo fell by 6% in the past year. Crucially, however, it doesn’t find that that volume of email received and sent has actually fallen. And as more and more if us are using smartphone and tablet clients to manage our personal emails, it kind of follows that this should impact on the number of visits to webmail sites.

In the workplace, things are different. People are attached to their Outlook. This has long been a source of bafflement to intranet managers and others working in enterprise tech. Outlook, as we all know, is rubbish.

Well, it is; it’s particularly rubbish at the things it wasn’t supposed to be used for, like collaboration and archiving. But this is like moaning that a hammer is crap at cutting a piece of wood in two.

What Outlook is mostly quite good for is emailing. As a program for reading and writing emails, facilitating communication between two or more people, it’s really not bad at all. It integrates with Office. It has folders and a calendar, and if you’re very clever you can add voting buttons, which at least half of the recipients will miss.

And the fact is, people like email. They know what to do with it. They can attach stuff to it. Crucially, at some future date they can retrieve their email from the bowels of their Personal Folders in order to cover their own back. Granted, it does mean that disk space is optimally used, or that versions aren’t ordered, or that they’ll definitely be able to find what they’re looking for, but for most this is a small price to pay.

The times, however, are a-changin’. Attached though users are to Outlook, the fact is that IT teams are not. If 2012 is anything, it looks set to be the year of the cloud. Usability and functionality of cloud-based office apps has now improved to the point where they present a genuine alternative, while at the same time budgets are being squeezed. For many IT departments, switching to cloud based email is fast becoming a no-brainer.

It’s this, together with the increasing use of smartphones as the primary means of reading emails, which may finally break the office’s addiction to Outlook.

And that, my intranet-loving friends, is an opportunity. If people are – for other reasons – going to change their workplace tech habits, then for the first time ever they might be genuinely interested in your collaboration platforms and document management solutions.

If your organisation is aiming to move to cloud-based mail this year, then now is the time to get planning.  While we know the benefits of a social, collaborative intranet, in most organisations they haven’t yet taken off; 72% of employees use internal social functionality less than once a month.

This isn’t because they don’t know how. The same group of users will happily update Facebook daily. No: it’s because they haven’t figured out the point yet, and find your collaboration platform fiddly.

So what can you do about this?

First, make your internal social network better. Find out what people want and need and give it to them. What do they want to communicate about, and with who? What features do they need? File sharing, task management? These are all things people do (badly) in Outlook. For your internal social network to take off, it needs to be genuinely useful and help people to do their jobs better.

User experience is a vital component of this. Facebook has the traction it does because it’s intuitive and easy to use. Internal networks need to watch and learn. People won’t put up with a clunky interface simply because they’re being paid to be there.

Many will claim to have already cracked step 1. Good. Then why aren’t people using it? Perhaps they don’t know it’s there, or don’t understand the benefits of using it.

Employees need to understand how internal social can improve their productivity, or they won’t see the point in using it. Make sure the benefits of using the system are clearly spelled out. As well as marketing the product, you need to cultivate the network.  Like any social network, internal ones need to reach a tipping point – a critical mass of users and a decent range of content – before they really become interesting and useful.

Here, 2012 provides another opportunity; with many being asked to work from home during the Olympics to reduce demand on the transport network, people are actively looking for solutions to support home and flexible working.  These newly homeworking employees could provide a valuable case study, demonstrating how intranet 2.0 can improve communication and collaboration, leading to more innovation, better knowledge-sharing and ultimately increased revenue.

Start talking to these people now and ensure they have the right tools in place by the time the Games come around. If the tools work for them, they’ll have an incentive to keep on using them after the Olympic flame is extinguished.

Email isn’t dying. If anything, it’s suffering from growing pains. But with the changes to workplace technology in the pipeline for 2012, this is the time to develop and promote the alternatives in order to make your organisation work more effectively. Your workforce needs you.

Gearing up for GovCamp

/ Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment

There’s less than 24 hours to go until UK GovCamp 2011 and I’m super-excited.

A year’s a long time, isn’t it? This time last year, I was just a couple of weeks into my new job at Parliament and a newbie on the central government geek scene. The sessions I attended at UKGC 2010, on socialising internal comms and the future of journalism, really reflected the work I was doing in my previous job rather than what I do now (while the session on Google Wave seems like another era altogether).

My first year in the job’s been a steep learning curve, and increasingly I find my work focussing less on communications – on the creation and distribution of communication messaging – and more on developing platforms, which enable people to find, share and do things.

So this year I’m likely to be attending sessions that focus more on technologies and methods. I’m a recent convert to Agile and really looking forward to the two planned sessions on it – one looking at its application as a software development methodology, and another on how we can apply Agile methods to policy formation.

As ever, though, my focus is internal, on making organisations work and communicate internally so they can better serve our real customers – the public.

And I do like a challenge, so I’ve agreed to liveblog the opening session so those who can’t make it can get a feel for what’s going on. I’ve never live blogged before, but I do live tweet from events a lot and am relishing the idea of doing so without the 140-character restriction. My live blog stream will be found on the UK Gov Buzz aggregation page which the lovely Steph has set up.

Thereafter, though, I’m aiming to tweet a bit less than I usually do from these things. Partly because not everyone who follows me wants to read 200 tweets on what a bunch of government technology nerds are doing on a Saturday, but also because I want to focus on participating rather than recording.

The Guardian’s Meg Pickard has blogged about the pros and cons of the (un)conference Twitter backchannel, arguing that “inserting a pause in usual social reporting activities/obligations provided time and mental space to listen to, reflect on and add to what was being said”.

And that’s what I’m aiming to achieve this time around. I’m not saying I won’t tweet at all (let’s be honest, that’s unlikely), but I’m going to stay ‘in the room’, making notes and blogging afterwards, after I’ve had time to think on it.

Plenty of blog posts to come after the event though, so watch this space.

Brands on Facebook: a cautionary tale

/ Sharon O'Dea / 7 Comments

Yesterday, staff at Bizarre Magazine found their Facebook page had disappeared. Not only that, but the personal accounts of all of the magazine’s editorial staff had disappeared too. This marked the latest twist in an ongoing battle in the social media sphere; for many months now, the magazine found its content deleted from sites like YouTube following claims of unspecified breaches of terms of service.

The motivation behind this isn’t clear – it could be a reader with a grudge, or a commercial rival or something else entirely. Social media sites don’t give you the details of allegations against your brand, nor are you given an opportunity to respond before your content is removed.

Now it’s true Bizarre has a reputation as, in the words of Dave Grohl, a “titty gore mag”. But Editor David McComb replies “Bizarre is an edgy brand, but still a mainstream one. You find us in Smiths alongside Kerrang and FHM. But we know social media sites have strict rules on content so we take an especially cautious line; there’s nothing on any of our social media pages which wouldn’t be permissible on British TV – before the watershed.”

Right now you might be saying to yourself, I don’t run a magazine, so why should I care? But this is a worrying tale for anyone who uses social media for work purposes. Whether you’re a publisher or a public sector body, no organisation is universally popular. That means that any brand using social media is at risk of similar malicious use of the ‘report this’ function on social media sites. Anyone can flag your content as breaching terms, and on many sites this will pull it down automatically.

This happened a couple of times in my previous role – someone with a grudge against the council had a video removed by claiming they breached copyright. And they were deleted, without warning.

Organisations are increasingly heeding the call to focus less on a single site which expects customers to come to them, and instead on fishing where the fish are – taking your own brand to where people are already. Confectionary brand Skittles has gone so far as to replace its entire site with links to its social media presence.

There’s a strong case for doing this. But as Bizarre’s experience shows, there are some significant risks attached to doing so too.

More and more organisations are hosting their rich media content on sites like YouTube and Vimeo then embedding it on their own site. This makes a lot of sense – it’s cheap, easy to do, and needs little tech support or hosting. But what happens if this content disappears? You’re left with The Big White Space in the middle of your webpage, that’s what.

A second risk is the loss of customer data. When Bizarre lost their Facebook Page, they lost all means to contact their hundreds of Facebook fans. They used their page to let readers know when the latest issue was released, and to invite them to their live events. If your company/council/department lost your Facebook fans, do you have an alternative means to contact these people?

Thirdly – and I didn’t know about this – is the problem of guilt by association. When Bizarre’s page was deleted, so too were the personal accounts of those listed as page admins. They’ve lost thousands of contacts, pictures, and personal messages, seemingly with no way of retrieving them. Are those currently managing your organisation’s Facebook page aware they could be risking their own account by managing yours? And if they did, would they be willing to do this?

Blogging today, Rich Millington argues it’s easier to build businesses around successful communities than communities around successful businesses. Bizarre was a great example of this in action; it positioned itself as one of the key players in the alternative scene, using its social media presence to really connect with readers in their own online environments. But they don’t own this community; it can be taken away without warning.

So what can you do about this? Well, you pays your money – or rather, you don’t – and you takes your choice. You company doesn’t pay for Facebook or YouTube, so has no Service Level Agreement to enforce when it goes wrong, and no protection against malicious attacks. This level of risk is acceptable to some, but for many household name brands certainly won’t be. The important thing is to be aware of those risks. Are those in your organisation pushing for greater use of social media sites aware of the potential pitfalls?

Some old thinking about new media

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

What a difference a week makes. Thursday’s televised debates could be said to put paid to suggestions this is  Britain’s first social media election. A whopping 9.4m Britons watched the debate,  demonstrating old media certainly still has its place in our political landscape.

Pundits took just minutes to announce who they believed to be the winners and losers in the debates, and within half an hour the first polls on audience reactions were out (but as my job is politically restricted, I’m not telling you what I think).

It’s estimated 36,483 people were Twittering about the debate as they watched. Now as I’ve blogged about before, Twitter isn’t always a great indicator of sentiment amongst the wider public.

But unlike the BNP/Question Time TV event I blogged about previously, what was interesting this time was how people on my social networks seemed to view the same events in widely varying ways.

In many ways, this reflects a longstanding debate within communication theory on how people are influenced by the media they consume. 

Discussion ahead of the debates focussed on how the leaders’ performance would influence the electorate; in the days since, commentators and pollsters have concluded the debates will have an unprecedented effect on the outcome of the election.  But this is a rather simplistic way of thinking about media influence, assuming that there’s a direct relationship between cause and effect. 

In the real world, we need to remember that people use the media they consume in different ways. We have different reasons for consuming media, and these fundamentally affect our experience of it.

Denis McQuail is one of many communications theorists to take a closer look at TV consumption. He found that in order to understand how media is recieved, you need also to consider why it is consumed in the first place.

With this is mind, he analysed TV viewers’ responses and motivations for viewing.  The result of his study is called the Uses and Gratifications Approach.

McQuail found there were four broad types of ‘media-person interaction’: surveillance (information-gathering), personal identity (resonates with who you are); personal relationships (swotting up on the big TV event in order to talk about it with others); and diversion (entertainment).

Looking at responses to the debate on the #leadersdebate twitter hashtag, it appears can be categorised in a very similar way. This isn’t a statistically sound study, of course. But communications researchers  – like ethnographers and anthropologists – look for patterns (of behaviour, language, etc) and try to relate these to their social and cultural contexts. Looking at hashtaged tweets there seemed to me to be some clear trends in types of participants, and in how they behaved.

Commentators have focussed particularly on those whose motivation for viewing was what McQuail would categorise as surveillance – ‘undecideds’ who watch in order to inform their own voting choice. A Guardian/ICM poll found one in four of those watching will change their vote as a result of watching.

The flip side of this, of course, is that three-quarters of those who watched didn’t change their mind at all. In my quick n’ dirty, unscientific analysis of the #leadersdebate hashtag , it appears a sizable proportion can be attributed to the personal identity category – that is, people who already have an opinion and watch in order to reinforce that pre-existing view. Many of these already sported a party Twibbon on their icon, indicating a clear, pre-held party allegiance. These tweeters – praising the leader they already liked and criticising those they disliked – came from the Twitterati across the three main parties and were not swayed by the content of the debates.

While this group comprised a small number of tweeters, they account for a disproportionate volume of tweets as they posted frequently during the 90-minute programme.

The third group were interested in personal interaction. Unlike the previous group, they’re not overtly political tweeters, but rather interested in the leadership as they would be another other televisual event, like finding out who killed Archie Mitchell in Eastenders. Their motivation is gaining social capital; they want to know about the debate in order to inform their on and offline interactions with others.

The smallest number of tweets could be summed up as motivated by diversion. This group watched, and tweeted, because… well, it’s something to do. They forgot to turn over after Corrie, or realised they’d already watched that episode of Have I Got Old News For You on G.O.L.D.

So what does this teach us? First, that noomedia isn’t (yet) proving to be the game changer it was talked up to be this election. The 36,483 people twittering about the debate represented just 0.004% of those watching. As I’ve said before, what people on Twitter say does not neccessarily reflect what the nation is thinking. That being the case, I would take Twitter sentiment analysis services with a pinch of salt.

But secondly – and somewhat conversely – while we talk about social media audiences being more actively engaged than those consuming mass media, it seems they don’t behave so differently after all. They have different reasons for consuming, producing and participating, and these reasons affect the outcome of that participation.

The field of communication studies has a rich vein of literature about mass media audience research. Those of us working in the field of digital engagement might learn a thing or two from looking at it again.

UKGC10 session four: The future of journalism

/ Sharon O'Dea / 4 Comments

Eve Shuttleworth proposed this session in response to a question that arose earlier in the day: Where is journalism heading, and how do press offices need to change in response?

The web professionals session I went to earlier touched on the same issue – how do we develop the skills we need within our web and communications teams to respond to changing media demands?

Journalism has changed enormously over the past decade or so. News organisations large and small have woken up to the web, and are developing a wider range of rich media content. Local papers as well as national ones are using audio, video and interactive graphics to enhance their stories.

This has led to a huge cultural shift in news, with print and web journalists being located together and badged as content producers. The overwhelming feeling in this session was that communicators need to adapt in a similar way.

Press officers can’t focus solely on writing and selling-in written press releases; we need to take a broader approach to content, producing material for the corporate website as well as complete asset packages for the media to use.

Several of the group gave examples of journalists accepting their video content, although there’s a clear divide between the specialist and local press and the big boys on the nationals.

Major national news organisations are reluctant to take video material from the government (and rightly so in my view). But local and regional press are poorly resourced and more inclined to accept PR material.

Someone asked: the budget-slashing job cuts and subsequent culture of ‘churnalism’ that one sees in much of the regional press is beginning to creep into the national press too, in response to the poor advertising market and declining sales. Does that mean even major news organisations will start accepting complete packages from us too?

There was deep unease about this from much of the group; while an under-resourced press makes PRs life easier, it’s not exactly indicative of a free press performing its fourth estate function of holding government to account.

Many of us said we’re troubled by the lack of critical analysis press releases get. All too often, journalists will take a press release, find any contrary opinion, and present this as reasoned analysis. This over-simplification of debate does neither communciator nor journalist credit; it’s rare that there are two sides to every story. Usually there are at least three or four, and sometimes there really is just one.

This isn’t the fault of journalists, but of proprietors who have cut editorial teams, merged titles and slashed budgets so there simply isn’t enough journalistic resources to get out and report the news. One press officer said “make life easier for journalists and they’ll bite your hand off”.

Sarah Lay gave a great example of how they did this during the local elections in Derbyshire. Making a wide range of material available to journalists online meant that they recieved more coverage than they’d normally expect, yet had to take fewer calls from journalists. That’s a win-win for everyone (especially Sarah and her team, who took home a PR Pride award for this).

89% of journalists are using blogs and social media to research their stories, and it follows that the public sector need to engage with these too. Communciations teams need to keep an eye on blogs, Facebook, etc so problems can be identified and dealt with early before they become more reputationally damaging.

Alastair Smith explainined how Newcastle City Council managed a story which sprung up on Facebook. By responding to the group and offering to meet and talk about their concerns, they managed to turn what was a negative story into a positive one that helped the campaign group get what they wanted.

Communications teams just aren’t set up to respond to social media. Reporting lines for press releases usually require signoff from senior staff and politicans, a process which can take days – a timescale incompatable with the demands of social media.

Neil Franklin told us how he used to manage the Twitter feed at Downing Street, arguing that communicators need to be realistic about responding in a timely manner.

I suggested we borrow the concept of ‘presumed competence’ used by the Foreign Office. Back when an ambassador was sent to Ouagadougou and not heard from for months at a time, their masters back home had to assume they were capable of getting on with it. Social media has the same disconnect between local demands and ability to get sign-off from the centre. We may find it easier to respond to social media if we have a set of agreed ‘lines to take’ that we trust our teams to deliver, and refer upwards only by exception.

Whatever you chosen approach, organisations need to develop a policy for dealing with social media comment. Michael Grimes adapted the well-known US army model into this very useful process model for dealing with social media comment.

Others said it was difficult and unhelpful to have two different approaches to responding: It’s just media, and media is social. We need to have a vision for content generally, and plan our resources accordingly.

Someone added that we need to think about tone, and “don’t treat citizens as journalists”. While it’s true we speak differently to journalists as customers, the rise of the citizen journalist – and initiatives like Talk About Local – mean the distinction between the two is blurring.

Someone talked about this Clay Shirky article, which argues “we will always need journalism, but we won’t have journalists”. The fourth estate is vital in a democratic system, so if we’re seeing less meaningful analysis of our work by the traditional media, then we should welcome it from non-traditional sources.

Online journalists, of the traditional as well as citizen variety, are becoming as much curators of content as creators, aggregating content from the wider web and bringing it to the attention of their networks. Communications teams should try and emulate this in what they produce, for instance by linking to related articles or useful background information.

Eve Shuttleworth said the Ministry of Justice is starting to monitor blogs and social media to get a feel for what the issues are, but has not yet made the decision to respond. One of the issues they’re grappling with is whether press officers should respond as the organisation, or as themselves.

Identifying individuals could have security implications, especially where issues are controversial.

All of this points to an urgent need to reassess the service we provide. We need to develop a vision for how we provide content, and ensure we can resource this in a way that meets the media’s diverse and changing needs, the needs of the audience and those of the organisation.

UKGC10 session three: Google Wave

/ Sharon O'Dea / 2 Comments

Shane Dillon led the post-lunch session on Google Wave. I’ve blogged about Wave a couple of times before, one a general overview and another looking specifically at what application it might have in internal communications. That being the case, I’m not going to repeat my comments here, but instead on my notes from the session itself.

Shane had set up a reasonably successful UKGovCamp wave ahead of the event, so those who attended the session had some practical experience of using Wave beforehand. It was perhaps telling that a few of us remarked this was the first time we’d logged on to Wave in weeks.

Shane is clearly a fan of Wave, and in many ways I can see why. It has some top notch features, enabling users to embed documents, maps, pictures and so on, and to play the conversation back.

In the context of the FCO it has particular relevance as it combines collaborative features with the asynchronicity of email – making it especially good for working across a number of time zones. In my earlier blog I made the same comment about its potential for use in the global charity where I previously worked.

Collaboration is good, and anything which makes collaboration easier should be applauded. But Wave doesn’t make collaboration easier, because the user experience is appalling, as everyone in the room agreed.

As one Tweeter remarked: if even geeks like us struggle to get to grips with Wave, what hope does anyone else have? Motivation is everything, and the effort vs. reward ratio is too low for Wave to make it worthwhile.

Part of Twitter’s appeal is that you can be up and running in seconds, and it’s so intuitive you can get to grips with it right away. Wave on the other hand, had a hour-long instruction video.

Wave also has heavy demands on technology, requiring an up to date browser and broadband connection. This could prove a barrier to adoption in the public sector, many of whom are still running IE6. Our customers and residents may find connection speed a barrier to adoption too, as broadband connections are unavailable in many rural areas, for instance.

One participant asked if Wave was something young people would be interested in. Whilst there’s evidence young people use the internet in different ways from older ones – eschewing email in favour of instant messenger and social networks, for example – I’m not sure this is something that would appeal to Generation Y, not least because it doesn’t (yet) work on mobile.

Wave’s apparent lack of success is seen by many to be a sign Google has lost it. The success of Google Search and Gmail – which totally changed the game in the respective sectors – means we forget that Google do fail occasionally, and should be allowed to if it encourages innovation. Who remembers Google Lively?

Perhaps we shouldn’t see Wave as it currently exists as a finished product, but rather a sandbox for potential features to be used elsewhere. If these are adopted on other platforms, they could become altogether more useful and user-friendly. Similarly, Waves could become more attractive once they can be embedded within other web content.

Wave is undoubtedly a powerful tool, and one Shane would argue is worth spending some time getting to grips with. Get you head around the clunky interface and strange public wave search, he contends, and you’ll find thousands of debates and discussions on subjects from climate change to Pakistani politics.

But while I can’t say I have such a yearning to relive early 90s ICQ chatrooms, I can see Wave functionality having some useful business applications – for online meetings, document sharing, newsgathering or planning, perhaps – if the user experience improves considerably.

So while Wave isn’t a roaring success, it may be too early to write it off as complete a failure either.

Intranets are key to recovery in 2010, say surveys

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Each January, Jakob Neilsen’s annual intranet design annual is released. This showcases the top ten intranets of the year, and is a good indicator of trends in intranet design and usability.

This year’s Neilsen report found intranets are becoming a higher priority for organisations, intranet teams are growing in size, and increasing numbers feature mobile accessibility and social networking.

On the face of it, the improved functionality comes as no surprise. Mobile internet and social media has grown exponentially over the past few years. Our experience of using the web creates expectations of the kind of content and functionality we want at work too; as we rely on our iPhones to do everything for us when we’re out and about, we expect to be able to use our intranet on it too.

That intranet budgets and teams have continued to grow despite the long recession reflects a growing realisation that intranets can deliver real return on investment for organisations.

Significant and measurable returns can be made by making information easier to find – quite simply, less time spent searching for things is more time people can spend doing something worthwhile. Functionality like self-service HR can see sizable reductions in administration costs.

Less easy to measure, though, is the value of the intranet in improving engagement. Last year’s MacLeod Review on Employee Engagement (from the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills) found that more widespread adoption of employee engagement approaches could impact positively on UK competitiveness and performance, and meet the challenges of increased global competition.

Good intranets not only make life a little easier for colleagues, they improve communication, facilitate collaboration, enable people to connect and have their say, and help workers feel part of their organisation. This, in turn, encourages employees to say, stay, and strive.

Another study out this month, from communication research specialists Melcrum, would suggest organisations have heeded Macleod’s call for greater focus on engagement.

In the survey of 2,212 senior communicators, 40% said the business case for social media within internal communication was clear and that there is visible return on investment, while 53% of those who responded said they were planning to increase investment in their organisation’s intranet in 2010.

The results of this study show that not only are organisations investing in good intranet design, but also in functionality and content. When asked about channels used for internal communication, the intranet ranked as the most effective channel by 73% of senior communicators worldwide, with a clear majority believing webcasts and video would grow in importance in 2010.

Respondents highlighted a wide range of business benefits from investment in internal social media. These included improved levels of employee engagement (21%), better communication with remote workers (16%), knowledge management and collaboration (25%), improving employee feedback (20%) and making business leaders more visible and accessible (14%).

Both the Neilsen and Melcrum studies show intranets are maturing. Increasingly they’re moving away from being a simple repository of information and becoming instead a platform for communication, collaboration and engagement.

Victoria Mellor, CEO of Melcrum said: “There is a fundamental shift happening with how information flows inside an organization. Peer-to-peer online networks are enabling real-time feedback from employees to inform decision-making, not to mention facilitating collaboration between remote workers.”

With budgets tight, the pressure is on for organisations to demonstrate value for money. But with growing evidence of the business benefits of investment in intranets and internal social media, it’s clear they’ll play an even more important role in 2010.

Twitter is not a barometer of social attitudes

/ Sharon O'Dea / 4 Comments

Like a lot of people, on Thursday night I tuned in to the BBC’s Question Time to see how Nick Griffin came across.

As I watched, I tweeted my thoughts, which became part of the huge stream on the #bbcqt hashtag. Looking at the hashtag search, you’d easily come to the conclusion everyone thought Griffin came across very badly.  Tweetminster reported that 99.9% of tweets were negative about Griffin.

Yet 24 hours later, a poll for YouGov found support for the BNP had increased following the show.

So why was the Twitter barometer of social attitudes wrong?

Quite simply, that’s because Twitter hashtags only tell us what people on Twitter think about something.

The comments on the BBC’s own Have Your Say forum, or submitted by viewers hitting the Red Button on cable or satelite had a far less critical view of Griffin’s performance, with a sizable number saying they agreed with his views.

So what this demonstrates is that what people say on Twitter should not be taken as what people in general think or feel.

There’s been a lot of discussion lately on the value of real-time search, with social media monitoring services selling sentiment analysis as an accurate method of understanding what people think.

This isn’t strictly true. It merely tells you what people on Twitter think. People on MySpace might think differently, and people not on the internet at all might have different attitudes altogether.

This is what ethnographer danah boyd (she does not capitalise her name) describes as the Not So Hidden Politics of Class Online:

‘For decades, we’ve assumed that inequality in relation to technology has everything to do with “access” and that if we fix the access problem, all will be fine. This is the grand narrative of concepts like the “digital divide.” Yet, increasingly, we’re seeing people with similar levels of access engage in fundamentally different ways. And we’re seeing a social media landscape where participation “choice” leads to a digital reproduction of social divisions.’

So for instance, boyd found that while discussions about social media tended to focus on Facebook, as this was the platform used by social commentators themselves, at least as many young people were using MySpace.

Our choice of social network, boyd argues,  isn’t about features or functionality. It’s a result of what sociologists refer to as homophily, the social phenomenon which means we choose to socialise with people like ourselves.

Because of homophily, the platform on which we choose to socialise online is inextricably linked with factors such as race, education and socio-economic status. This is reflected in the stats, which consistently show Twitter users are older, wealthier and better educated than people participating elsewhere online.

The phenomenon of homophily is evident not just in choice of platform, but who you interact with once using that platform. In following people who are interested in the same things as us on Twitter, we inevitably choose to follow people who are quite a lot like ourselves.

This means it can be something of an echo chamber, with views and opinions like our own reflected back at us.

This makes it inherently unreliable as a social barometer. It only reflects a certain strata of society, while other platforms may vary from this considerably. Let’s not forget that 10m adults the UK are not online at all. They have views (and votes) too.

Those of us working in engagement (as well as lazy journalists) would do well to remember that the views that echo through our own Twitter streams do not neccessarily represent everyone.

Google Wave for Internal Communication

/ Sharon O'Dea / 4 Comments

After my first post about Google Wave, I asked if any other internal communicators would be interested in trying Wave to see what, if any, applications it could have in our field.

And so a couple of weeks back I was joined online by BlueBallRoom’s Jenni Wheller, and Mark Detre, who’s responsible for Google’s own internal communications across the EMEA region (good to see Google eating their own dogfood here).

The three of us began by having a simple play around with the features, adding maps and pictures to the discussion. Once we’d got the hang of it, we began to think about how we might be able to use it to improve internal communciation.

Jenni asked “‘I’m not sure what it adds to the mix – i understand that it integrates various platforms that we all use but do we like keeping them seperate? do we need them all together like this? I feel like i’m skyping!’

However, by combining the live aspect of chat with the option of playback (asynchronicity) of email, it beocmes useful for dispersed teams.   In my last job, working for global charity, we had people working in pretty much every time zone. A platform that allows for people to watch the discussion before adding to it themselves, could be a real benefit to small but global organisations.

We talked about the potential for organisations to use Wave for specific communications. It would work very well for something like a live online chat with the CEO, where people could post questions in advance of the live event, and join in at the time or play back afterwards.

However, even with just three of us talking at once the conversation can be happening at several different points in the Wave, so it’s easy to miss bits of it.

Similarly, it’s quite easy to ‘zone out’ while on Wave. Tab over to an email, or answer a call, and it’s hard to remember where you left off.

Jenni, Mark and I agreed a Wave discussion, like a face-to-face meeting, would work a lot better with a chair or facilitator keeping participants on track.

You need different tools for different jobs, and this one would appear to work well for specific projects, allowing people to chat, email and share documents all in one place.  Mark said:

‘The main draw for me is that it brings everything together; for example, I do most of my drafting in Google docs, and I guess there’s also an easy way to insert those; it looks like Wave is best for businesses that do most of their work online or in the cloud’.

Few organisations are yet at that stage, though; this is a little premature for the rest of us, and would almost certainly be difficult to sell to colleagues. The potential is there, but we need resources as well as attitudes to catch up.

There’s still a long way to go before social media tools become the norm in the workplace. And even when they are, our existing channels remain useful. As I spotted when I visited Google recently, even in a high-tech environment the printed poster still remains effective.

Will it change the world? No. But will it help internal communicators? Possibly. We all have to make a call on what helps our own organisations to talk, listen and collaborate, and this is certainly a useful tool to add to the mix. Nonetheless, becoming more collaborative requires cultural change.

And that means changing our behaviours, not our tools.

If you’d like to read and join in the Internal Comms Wave, drop me a line and I’ll invite you in.

Will Twitter’s new terms call time on council feeds?

/ Sharon O'Dea / 10 Comments

Twitter’s new terms of service were launched last week, to general acclaim from users. The new terms aim to tackle the rising tide of spam that threatens to engulf Twitter, as well as prepare the ground for the arrival of advertising.

The refreshed Twitter Rules spell out a number of different reasons why you may find your Twitter account terminated. In calling time for inappropriate avatars,  squatting and multiple, near-identical accounts, the new rules turn into policy what was already established moderating practice.

The new terms emphasise the personal touch, stating that you’ll be in violation of the terms of service  “if your updates consist mainly of links, and not personal updates.”

Now this could cause a real headache for councils, the vast majority of whom use feeds to automatically tweet stories and releases. In banning all bots, the new terms would appear to call time  for many councils on Twitter.

Stuart Harrison suggests councils mitigate the risk by personalising their tweets, supplementing feed stories with replies and additional information.

Whilst I agree councils aren’t currently making the best use of Twitter – using it as a broadcast medium with which to distribute press releases – I’m not sure many councils will be able to do this.

I expect that over the coming months and years more councils will follow Brighton’s lead and recruit dedicated social media officers. But until that happens few have the resources to really put the social into social media.

Right now it’s not clear how – or indeed if – Twitter will police this. But if they do start banning all automated feeds, I’m not sure many councils will have the capacity  to change tack quickly and keep their feeds running.

That would be a real shame. As Liz Azyan found, more councils are using Twitter than any other social platform (30% at the last count). The relatively swift adoption of Twitter is a rare example of council officers embracing social media and, well, JFD-ing it.

If Twitter starts banning councils for automated feeds, it’s unlikely many will have the determination or resources to get their feeds running again. Councils are inherently risk-adverse, and if we get burned with this it could be a real setback for social media in local government.

The problem is, the new terms imply that all bots are bad. Yet plenty of users don’t think they are.

I think of Twitter as a one-stop information resource. The personal touch is part of what makes Twitter so useful (the ability to ask questions on seemingly any subject and get a string of useful answers in minutes is really invaluable). But announcements from companies and organisations are often genuinely useful too, and Twitter would be a poorer place without them.

Like bad pubs, bad feeds are easy to spot and easy to avoid.

Fortunately, it’s not just councils and PRs who might fall foul of the new rules; many news organisations, such as the Guardian and CNN, use RSS feeds to Twitter latest stories.

And this is where we’re likely to see some push-back. Many automated feeds are demonstrably popular, and Twitter is unlikely to want to get on the wrong side of the powerful media organisations currently using their service by banning their feeds.

That being the case, I suspect (and hope) Twitter will use their discretion and separate the good bots from the bad.

What do you think? Is Twitter right to ban bots?