Collaboration: June 2007 Archives

I was part of a Web 2.0 panel in New York City earlier this week, moderated by Bryant Shea, Director of Content Management at Molecular. It was an intimate affair - we had about thirty people in the room, drawn largely from media/entertainment, financial services, and insurance firms.

We wanted to encourage audience participation -- about five minutes into the event, one person piped up, "We know that Web 2.0 is all about user generated content. We certainly agree - we've put up a blog for our customers. Now what do we do with all this content?" Good question - we spent the rest of the evening trying to answer.

I'm not sure we ever reached a resolution but this got me thinking. What's equally important is the prior question - why put up a blog in the first place? Business strategies need to drive technology choices; technology options can then drive business opportunities.

Now there are certainly plenty of plausible reasons for companies to want to encourage blogging about their products and services. Building brand loyalty, supporting the fans, wanting to learn about customers experiences (both the good and the bad), facilitating a peer group who can support one another, perhaps even turning to loyal end users to help with product development – the list goes on. Companies have many options for engaging their customers. But they first have to be open to having the conversation with them, and have some inkling of how they'll use all the insights they acquire.

Note, an inkling is a clue or a hunch - it's not (yet) a plan. Allowing customers to blog back, blog about, and blog with one another is only the first step in a larger process. With Web 2.0, there's lots of room for experimentation - trying things out, and seeing what works, moving on. What's new is the ability to link things together.

Implementers and the business managers who support them need not have a formal plan about how they're going to use all the user generated content. What they do need, I believe, is the willingness and the time to listen, and then to figure out how best to join the conversation.

Here is a chart including the data from the poll described yesterday from 500 25-34 year old facebook users combined with the results from the same poll given to 500 18-24 year old facebook users. There is certainly a difference. But the most surprising results are the extremely low expectations about the use of blogs and wikis, and even social networking software. These findings, informal as they are, would make me very nervous if I were a start-up hoping to make it by capturing the facebook generation as they stream into the workforce.

I joined facebook a few days ago to check it out and to get an idea about the approach's relevance to enterprise applications. I need to use it some more before I reach any conclusions, but since I am at the Enterprise 2.0 Collaborative Technologies conference this week I decided to use the new facebook poll feature to see what the facebook crowd thinks about collaboration as they enter the workplace. The poll feature is limited (1 multiple choice question) but it provides direct access to the tens of millions of facebook users and you can choose from a couple of demographic options. Also, you can get the results very quickly - in my first poll I received 500 responses in about 9 hours!

I will blog about the results more later and will also include all the graphs, but in the meantime, everyone I mentioned the poll to at the conference has wanted the results, so here they are the basics:

Question: Which collaboration technologies will you use the most in your job in two years?

• SMS text messaging 6% (30)
• email will continue to dominate 66% (328)
• instant messaging 16% (53)
• facebook-like social networking tools for business 11% (53)
• blogs and/or wikis 2% (8)

Keep in mind that the 500 responses all came from the 25-34 age group who are presumably mostly in the workforce. I just started the same poll with the 18-24 age group and will provide those results for comparison later tonight. UPDATE: The combined poll results are now available.

Between the two age groups we will have some info direct from the generation that Don Tapscott, Andrew McAfee and others are making predictions about (we refer to some of this here). This is of course a very informal poll, but interesting nonetheless. I wish I had the results in time to provide Andrew and Tom Davenport for yesterday's debate!

At last week's conference in Washington (where Tony Byrne did a great job with the program), we had a lively discussion in the opening keynote panel after I made a disparaging comment about "Web 2.0". Of course I was referring to the term not to the various technologies or concepts that the term may or may not include depending on who is attempting to define it as a "thing-in-itself". But somehow I wasn't clear about that and, judging by the reaction, there appeared to be a generational-like difference of opinion, which was complicated by this classic problem of confusing a name with an object. In any case it was fun, and the debate carried on through some of the other conference sessions. I also brought up "Enterprise 2.0" which I've discussed before, but for some reason couldn't remember Andrew McAfee's name when I was recommending further reading, so here is his blog.

For those of you attending the Enterprise 2.0 conference next week, or who are local, there will be a debate between Andrew and Tom Davenport, who have different opinions on Enterprise 2.0. The debate itself is open to the public even if not registered for the conference. Here is more info. We are media sponsors of the conference and have a special discount available. Just register and use discount code MLQTEB16 when you register.

Also keep in mind our own annual Boston conference in November where we'll be continuing our coverage of "enterprise social software" technologies.