users are humans

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Should this blog link to Twitter? (Part 3, last part)

09Nov08

In the last few posts I’ve introduced the issue of how one’s work and social life can collide in social networking applications, and reviewed a few of the UI controls that enterprise companies demand from social-media providers to make sure their populations behave appropriately.

But in this post I will argue that, by and large, the UI tools offered by social networks to “manage” your behavior are inadequate, and perhaps will NEVER be adequate. Why? Because people simply aren’t tuned to think outside the context of their synchronous environment.

A tragic example: Recently, a woman was killed by her husband after she changed her facebook profile to “single” and the news showed up in the husband’s activity stream.
A funny example: Recently, some dumb kid was fired from his job, when, after calling in sick, he set his Facebook status to “not going to work, fuck it.”
A personal example: My wife’s young cousin recently went off to college, got a tattoo, put it on her Facebook. My wife was then told: “But don’t tell her Mom and Dad, it’s a secret.” This is someone who’s grown up with social networks! Secret? Are you serious?

How many times is this repeated every day, now, out on the social networks. Someone records their interior monologue on the social network, and someone out there gets the news, and all hell breaks loose. People are pretty dumb about thinking beyond their synchronous context.

Social media apps have tried to figure out a way to allow you to partition your life, so that the right people are seeing the right stuff.

Flickr allows you to set photos to “public”, or for “friends” only, or for “family” only. But what about people who are kind of both?
Xing allows users to mark every line of their profile public or private. But really, who’s going to bother with that? (Most social networks have similar, if less complete, privacy controls on profiles.)
LinkedIn allows you to turn off pushing profile updating (that is: resume updating) activity out to your activity feed, just in case you’re linked to your boss. But will you remember to do it beforehand?

My point here isn’t that social media companies should stop trying to figure out how to allow users to manager the various personae the put on and take off each day. In fact, it’d be a killer app. But how can it possibly work? How, other than total social-network abstinence, can you be tuned to the negative consequences, waiting two days–or two years–down the road, of something you recorded in your Facebook this morning?

One of the reasons I’m glad to work at SelectMinds is that, as a business application, users really ought to know to behave themselves. If you slag your boss on one of our client networks, and get caught (as you surely will), I don’t have a lot of sympathy.

But I do sometimes really worry about the panopticon society that we’re building for ourselves with consumer social networks, where one’s multiple personae must be meticulously managed and guarded at all times.

So, my dear audience, there’s the make-a-billion-dollars challenge for you: the intelligent, easy personae manager that works across multiple social networks and data silos. An impossible dream?

Oh, and by the way, I’m leaving Twitter linked to this blog. Why? I hope (perhaps foolishly) that my occasional business-questionable post on Twitter will also help self-select the sorts of people I end up working with. If they don’t like what they see there, they may ultimately not like working with me. But, in this economy, we’ll see how long that attitude lasts.

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Related note… “Friend Fade”

04Nov08

Amusing article by Scott Brown in Wired discussing how maintaining constant contact with a ton of friends, and being meticulously updated as to all their activities on Facebook, isn’t necessarily a good thing. What about people you want to kind of fade away, like that kind of annoying guy from high school?

Scott Brown on Facebook Friendonomics (Wired Magazine)

Brown suggests a “Friend Fade” feature for Facebook that kind of lets those C-list friends disappear. In truth, Facebook does offer a “Less about [name]” feature in its activity feeds, which I myself have started using for people I have friended, but aren’t really my friends. Does it work? Still figuring that out. But it seems useful, and maybe the perception is all that matters.

Next post: other features / functions that social media might use to balance the business / private aspects of your life.

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Should This Blog Link to Twitter (Part 2): What the Enterprise Demands from Social Media

02Nov08

So last time around, I was wondering whether I should continue to link my Twitter (and Facebook), which tend to have personal-oriented (and possibly problematic) content, to this blog, which is much more of a business vehicle. Naturally that begs the larger question: how is social software in general, and enterprise social media in particular, coping with the blend of business and personal begat by social media?

It’s still very early days, but I’d like to explore three aspects: How the enterprise is responding to social media and what it demands; some of the features/functions that have arisen in social media to attempt to moderate behavior; and finally the inherent inability of technical solutions to provide a way asynchronously manage the appropriateness of one’s behavior. I’ll tackle the first two below, and the last in the next post. And but so…

What the enterprise demands from social media: control

Web 2.0 is about openness. It’s about the freedom to interact with others, unfettered by controls. Putting roadblocks around people or things only strangles the community. The old top-down hierachy of corporations is dead, and Web 2.0 will unshackle employee communities to let them communicate and collaborate free of any corporate controls.

Yeah, right. To quote Animal Mother from “Full Metal Jacket”: “Wake up, dreamboy.” Corporations may be buying into some of the advdertised benefits of Web 2.0 for employee collaboration, but many (seriously, many) of them will demand careful controls for how people can interact and the ability to control the conversation. Some will do so for regulatory reasons (Big Pharma and banks in particular), and some will do so because they’re big companies and that’s just the way they are. If the solution provider cannot offer a level of control appropriate to their risk-aversion, well then forget it.

Some features/functions that have arisen in social media which attempt to moderate behavior

SelectMinds has been working in this world for awhile, so I think we’ve got a pretty good idea of how the big, risk-averse organization is willing to approach Web 2.0. Some of the requirements are:

Contribution pre-approval. Every feature built must allow client-owners to moderate end-user-submitted content before it’s live to site. Does this slow down the conversation of the end users…even drive down usage a little? Sure. But the enterprise simply won’t buy the solution if they can’t have control. Eventually they’ll realize that end-users are behaving themselves and trust some of the other controls built in, including…
No anonymous posting. The enterprise social media system must have only approved, vetted members, and those members’ names will be attached to everything they post. You’re less likely to flame the company when you’re name will appear, bold and linked to your profile, at the bottom of your post.
Controls for who can post to what. The enterprise is naturally sensitive about ensuring that the “proper” people are submitting content into vetted areas, and will demand the ability to regulate who has the ability to contribute to which areas.
Naughty word filter. Sure, it’s easy to get around it by typing “f*ck”, but in every prospect meeting I’m in, to a one, a discussion of discussion-board functionality leads someone to ask “but what if someone uses a swear word?” It’s literally better to just have the ability to block certain words than to attempt to defuse the client’s fear of naughtiness.
Community policing. We’ve grown accustomed to seeing buttons reading “Report abuse” or “Flag as in appropriate”. This kind of community-self-policing is just as important in the enterprise social media context, especially when, eventually, you convince your client to trust the community and remove pre-approval requirements.

Now you know a bit more about what the enterprise is demanding from social media, and some of the features (both for enterprise, as well as consumer social networks) that help regulate behavior.

Next time, I’ll discuss why tech cannot completely save people from themselves: the inabilty of people to synch themselves to a persistent but asynchronous social environment.

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This is a Business Blog. Should I Link to My Twitter? (Part 1)

24Oct08

This simple, personal (and yes, self-absorbed) question has some pretty serious social-media dimensions. I’m not just navel-gazing! Let me explain.

The ascendence of social media has brought the private and business lives of individuals into increasing contact. In the past, appropriate behavior at the office and behavior (appropriate or otherwise) in one’s personal life was easily segmented. You answered “This is Steve” on the office phone, you answered “Hiyo!” on your home phone. You wore a tie at the office, you danced on the tables on a Saturday night. Regulating the appropriateness of one’s behavior was pretty easy: it’s a synchronous activity, actively tuned at all times to the context of who you’re with and the situation at hand.

Asynchronous social media changes all that. Your funny, but, shall we say, slightly off-color Facebook status is there in perpetuity, just waiting to be discovered by someone from a different context in your life. Ask any of the defrocked Miss New Jerseys or Miss Nevadas about those party photos on MySpace. They may be beauty queens, but they’re smart enough not to shotgun beers during the pageant’s Q&A portion. But the scandalous photos, asynchronously, come back to haunt. Do they wish they could take it back? Sure. But, being humans, they were only considering the appropriateness of their behavior to the synchronous context.

Okay, back to me. So, on the “About” page of this here blog, you’ll find links to my LinkedIn, Facebook, del.icio.us, my portfolio, and Twitter. LinkedIn is solidly business-appropriate, and del.icio.us is mostly design / business (and anyway, I can mark links as “private”). Facebook is mostly friends and thus personal (I do have one connection from a client, which i accepted after much hand-wringing). I could easily un-link Facebook, I suppose.

Twitter’s harder. I post personal things, but also business thoughts, design criticism, promos for this blog, and whatnot to Twitter. Also, Twitter by its nature should resemble a stream-of-consciousness feed of what I’m thinking. I find it difficult to consistently apply a perfect “appropriateness” filter to Twitter. If I want to comment on a UI design, I will. If I want to quote a song lyric, I will. If I want to say something mean about Joe the Plumber, I will (and have, in rather colorful terms).

The problem is that, eventually, someone from the business side of my life will wander over to my Twitter and see something they don’t like. The ramifications could range from mild, unexpressed displeasure to a police escort from the office….who knows? The point is, what seemed synchronously appropriate to me became inappropriate when encountered asynchronously by another human in my life.

Okay, that’s the lay of the land. In the next post, I’ll dig deeper into this issue of the bleed between business and personal in social media. Specifically, I’ll look further at how the enterprise approaches social media and its behavioral aspects, and I’ll examine some technical/feature approaches to regulating behavior, and the difficulties those technologies have with regards to how people behave in synchronous / asynchronous contexts. Let me know if there’s anything else you think I should cover!

I’ll leave Twitter linked, for now.

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Tags: behavior twitter appropriate

Will People Use It?

15Oct08

As the enterprise increasingly adopts social media, one of the key skeptical questions from prospects or new clients is: “How Do We Get People to Use It?”

It’s a fair question. Whether the corporation is making the investment in a social media app for marketing outreach, employee collaboration and productivity, or closed-network communications, they’re typically spending real money. The bad taste from big-investment-low-usage portals and CMS systems still lingers on many IT buyers’ palettes.

At SelectMinds, how we answer that question is complicated somewhat by varying levels of risk-aversion in our clients concerning end-user freedom and contribution. Put simply, these clients are shy about the anything-goes aesthetic of the consumer social networks they’ve encountered, like MySpace or Facebook.

So, I look at driving user engagement in social media as a question of the right features (of course, I’m a product manager) and active community management (on which I have opinions, but our Services department is an active driver with our clients), all in the appropriate context of risk-aversion and control for the enterprise. More details below…

The Right Features

People of course come to social media apps to use features, to do stuff, and I think user-engagement features which are appropriate for the enterprise context can be grouped as follows:

Outbound communication tools. Unlike Facebook or MySpace, which are essentially platforms for end-user social interaction with little in the way of an ‘ownership’ voice, enterprise social media must allow for the broadcast (or narrowcast) communications which constitute the ‘voice’ of the sponsoring company. While the idea of top-down, ‘official’ news, events, etc., seems anathema for typical consumer Web 2.0 apps, it is still central to the needs of an enterprise with a brand to maintain and a message to communicate.

Profiles. Naturally any social media app must have some basic tool allowing end users to manage and display their identity: Displaying one’s self to the world is a core driver of engagement in these apps. What’s interesting in the enterprise realm is: how flexible is the profile in terms of the specific needs of a given enterprise? What controls are available to the enterprise to ensure the right information gets displayed to the right people?

Social networking. The ability to “friend” people is of course a central tenet of most social media apps, and our metrics indicate it is a strong driver of engagement with end users (compared to our clients who elect not to use the social networking capability of SelectMinds). But again, in the enterprise, questions of which populations should be allowed to interact with which are central concerns which the application must support.

User-contributed content. Just as site sponsors must be able to push their message, any real social media application must support substantive abilities for end-users to contribute as well. The ability for members to have their say is also a key driver of engagement. But, again, to what degree can the sponsoring enterprise maintain control? This is not simply the fear that someone will say “fuck” on the network; there are very real regulatory and governance concerns that the enterprise must be able to accommodate.

Alerts. Finally, alerting users to new content and new activity via the user interface, RSS feeds, and emails are obvious drivers of traffic to the application. But, as always, it is crucial for the enterprise to configure the availability of these alerting mechanisms to correspond with their risk-tolerance.

Active Community Management

So you’ve got a lot of nice features, cool. IT’S NOT ENOUGH! The final point we emphasize with our enterprise prospects and clients is that active and dedicated community management is required to grow traffic and grow the community. Admins need to post news, seed forums, encourage and compliment end-users that are engaged, highlight stars, etc. Just buying the technology, unfortunately, is not enough.

The proof? A few quick points:

A recent study (180kb .pdf) by the Social Computing Lab at HP in Palo Alto indicated a strong correspondence between “attention” given to Youtube users and the number of videos they uploaded to the system. More attention generally yielded more participation. (Thanks to Pete for the link.)
The foundational story of photo-sharing site Flickr tells how during the first year of the site Flickr employees obsessively complimented users on their photos to get them to come back. It worked, and eventually Flickr reached the self-perpetuating tipping point where users were contributing on a massive scale.
Finally, our own metrics at SelectMinds clearly indicate that clients with more actual human beings employed in nurturing and developing the community are rewarded with higher engagement numbers.

So, will they use it? Yes, if you have the right set of features, but also, crucially for the enterprise, if you’re willing to further fund the personnel to nurture and encourage the network.

Rachel Happe at The Social Organization has more thoughts on community management and engagment. Check it out.

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Tags: engagement community

Web Science: Combining study of the algorithmic and the social

03Oct08

Quick note on an interesting article in the July/Aug Communications of the ACM (yeah, I’m a bit late on this).

“Web Science: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding the Web,” (430kb pdf link) calls for an approach studying and engineering the Web that is equally cognizant of its engineering mechanisms and protocols as it is of the social and interpersonal aspect of its everyday use by millions. This is an interesting approach from the usual hardcore tech approach of computer science.

Key qote:

It is also our contention that today’s interactive applications are
just very early social machines, and that they are limited by the
fact that they function largely isolated one from another. We
hypothesize that (a) there are forms of social machine that will be
significantly more effective than those we have today, (b) that
different social processes interlink in society and therefore must
be interlinked on the Web, and (c) that these are unlikely to be
developed in single deliberate effort in a single project or site –
rather, the technology must be developed that allows user
communities to construct, share and adapt social machines so that
successful models can evolve through trial, use and refinement.

In essence, the authors are concerned that development of the Web is too important to be left to ad-hoc development by tech-heads, on the one hand, and social scientists, on the other, without the thoughtful intervention of an interdisciplinary approach. Hence their paper, and the formation of their Web Science Institute.

Looking at this article with my enterprise-thinking-cap on, it’s interesting to think about how that kind of socially based, trial-and-error process will flourish (or be choked off) in the risk-averse environment of big companies.

The authors even point out that “Traditional cryptographic security research and well known access control policy frameworks have failed to” …give users the “ability to represent and reason over attributes such as trustworthiness, reliability, and tacit expectations about the use of information.” Sure, but: access control, security, and governance are baked into enterprise IT as a matter of government policy and litigated necessity as much as corporate CYA.

It would be interesting to also see their interdisciplinary approach include business thinking around organizational development, governance compliance, and the like. Perhaps they’re doing that as well. Anyway, I think the development of the computer-mediated social reality in which humans will increasingly spend their time would hopefully be as thoughtful in the work-realm as in the personal-realm.

Check out the article, it’s a good read.

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What is to be done?

01Oct08

Okay, welcome to usersarehumans. This blog will focus on the design and business of building social software, particularly with regards to large and risk-averse corporations.

Our title above, “What is to be done”, comes to us from more than 100 years ago courtesy of a fellow named Vladmir Lenin. Younger readers may not be intimately familiar with Mr. Lenin, but he was trying to figure out how to run a just society. Didn’t really work out. Let’s just say he has been figuratively and (as statuary) literally consigned to the scrap heap of history.

So why initiate my blog with this perhaps inauspicious quote? Because I also don’t know the answer. How do you build a just (polite, mutually beneficial, profitable, sustainable, fun) computer-mediated society? Has Facebook done it? MySpace? LinkedIn? Probably not quite, although they’ve all gotten this, and that, right. I can offer you 15 years of experience building social software, and I am capable of self-satisfaction as much as the next social-media guru. But my objective with this blog will be to raise questions as much as give answers. So, here are some questions I have around social software.

Does lack of control and hierarchy inevitably breed anarchy and abusiveness?
Does control inevitably breed inactivity and staleness?
Is there still a place for an authoritative voice?
Is conversation and end in itself?
Is it okay if most of us are silent followers?
Is it dishonest to suppress non-germane ephemera in social media?

You get the idea. I’ll try to mix the theoretical with the practical, the prescriptive with the helpless shrug. Once in a while I’ll probably, unwisely, give out IP that I should keep to myself. And occasionally I’ll shill for my company, SelectMinds, because I think what we’re doing is pretty interesting. Feel free to keep me honest.

Thanks for reading; more to come.

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Tags: social media, thoughts

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