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Links and Connections: Finding the Context

A provocative conversation broke out on one of the discussion groups I monitor last week. “I’m curious how you and others you know are using ‘LinkedIn.com.'” the person asked. “For me, I like who’s in my network, [and] keep asking others to join; but overall I find it to be very static.”
A static network — now there’s a new concept! But there’s a good deal of truth to wondering how these links work within the business environment. Sure I too have a modest network; I check out my Linked-in account once or twice a month to see who’s doing what. For me, this substitutes (poorly) for the water-cooler conversations earlier in my career, when I was surrounded by lots of co-workers. There was always the lunch-time gossip and the hallway exchanges . . . did I know that so and so was working on this new skunk-works project? Had I heard that another sales team just surpassed its revenue goals or that a particular key customer now had a new set of requirements?
While linking-in through Linked-in is a poor substitute for the chatter of the co-located workplace, it’s at least the beginning of a business conversation. It maintains its professional aura, boundaries, and rules, in part by continuing to stove-pipe its connections, and not (yet) mashing up its links and membership.
Not so with Facebook, now trying to take the “digital natives” (those who grew up with the Internet ant the Web) into the workplace. This move — blending the power of networks with mashups — is raising a number of eyebrows. “Friend? Not? It’s One or the Other” Rob Pegoraro, the personal technology columnist wrote provocatively in the Washington Post last week.

You could stay in touch with your drinking buddies at MySpace, then schmooze with your business partners at LinkedIn.
But life isn’t always that neat. And when the private and professional overlap at these sites, you can spend more time worrying about your image than building your network.

To be sure Facebook has a slew of privacy setting — at least 135 according to Pegoraro — but having to define how I want to expose some of my activities to one group of friends and other actions to business colleagues adds complexity to what should be cast as a rather fluid interchange.
What’s missing to my way of thinking is not simply privacy but context. We all have our business personas and our personal personas. We have certain expectations when in a business context, others when in a social context, and still others when “being personal.” Many of our social networks are, in fact, rather complex.
To make these networks useful within a collaborative (and online) business environment, we need to be able to add (and manage) our business contexts. We need to be able to describe (and map) the business purposes for our social networks.

Adobe Ships ColdFusion 8

Adobe announced the availability of the shipping version of ColdFusion 8. Designed for developers building dynamic Web sites and Internet applications, ColdFusion 8 targets day-to-day development challenges to increase developer productivity and integrate with complex enterprise environments. ColdFusion 8 uses Adobe Flex and Ajax-based components, and includes advanced Eclipse-based wizards and debugging to help developers build applications and identify and fix problems, while a new Server Monitor quickly identifies bottlenecks and tunes the server for better performance. It integrates with .NET assemblies, support for Windows Vista and new J2EE servers, for enhanced flexibility, interoperability, and scalability, and interacts with Adobe PDF documents and forms for a printable, portable way to capture information. ColdFusion 8 is available in two versions: ColdFusion 8 Standard and ColdFusion 8 Enterprise Edition. Each license is valid for 2CPUs. Adobe is also offering discounted upgrade pricing for customers who own ColdFusion MX 6.X or ColdFusion MX 7. www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion

Results: Growth in Language Translations Poll

The results to our poll on the Growth in Language Translations are in. Take a look:

language translation poll
A couple of data points jump right out:

  • There is clearly a significant decline in those who are currently translating to only 1-3 languages when we look at plans for 2008/2010.
  • In terms of changes from 2007 to 2008, the increase in language translations appears to be moving up from 3 languages maximum to 10 languages maximum. That’s more than doubling “translation capacity” over a relatively short period of time.

Adding to some of the stats in Mary’s blog on Emerging Markets: The Brass Ring?, economists agree that a revolution in the global economy is well underway. Donald Hepburn, corporate economist for Unilever, notes that “companies that do not understand the economics of developing nations will miss out,” and predicts a major shift in consumer consumption by 2010. The Economist concurs, noting that the shift is not just about China and India. And a Goldman Sachs study takes it a step further, predicting that by 2040, the world’s ten biggest economies will include Brazil, Russia, India and China, aka BRIC.

Begs the question, how are companies preparing for the increase in demand for translated content and localized user interfaces? Mary and I are on vacation next week, July 30 through August 4, but we’ll have more commentary when we return. Happy summer!

Counting How the Game is Changing

Nora Barnes (director of the Center for Marketing Research at UMass, Dartmouth) and Eric Mattson have a new survey report out on social computing — The Game Has Changed: College Admissions Outpace Corporations in Embracing Social Media. They compare how universities and companies in the Inc. 500 are using social media — blogging, social networking (whch I take to mean sites like Facebook and MySpace), message boards, online video, podcasting, and wikis. In a nutshell

Social media has arrived in college admissions. The ivory tower is innovating even faster than the elite Inc. 500. And the game has changed forever.

I cannot wait to see their detailed analysis.

Picking through their numbers so far, two things jump out. First, universities are almost as likely to use social networks as search engines when evaluating potential students (26% vs 21%).

Admission offices can find out all kinds of information about their prospects by googling them on the web. Tracking and tracing their social networks is close behind. Hum, I wonder what enterprises are going to be doing, both when reviewing job candidates and business partnerships, and when tracking performance. I can see it now — a new generation of “socially conscious” HR and business applications.

Second, we’ve been talking about blogs and wikis in almost the same breadth (thanks in part to Don Tapscott and Wikinomics and “how mass collaboration changes everything”). But not so fast. While blogging is more widely used in universities than in corporations (33% vs 19%), wikis are more widely deployed in corporations than in universities (17% vs. 3%). So we ought to take another breadth, turn down the hypemeter, and better understand how these different modes of collaboration are used in practice.

Here’s my vote. It’s all about the difference between self-publishing and supporting a business process. Blogging’s easy — I’m standing at my virtual Hyde Park corner (as in this blog), using my own time. Others who want to invest their time can read what I have to say. (Thank you, my readers!) But putting up a wiki is all about sharing information that’s part of a business process — I post, you modify, and our colleagues elsewhere in the world add their two cents. The outcome is a group project, the results of our “collective intelligence.” It’s a bit like co-authoring a report or developing a project plan for a group or . . . . you get the point — we share in the results through an interactive process.

Oh, one other thing. Business processes are tough to implement. They happen not by accident but by design. When the bloom is off the rose, we’re going to have to do a lot more work to make wikis really useful within the enterprise.

Atom is Finished

Tim Bray reports Atom 1.0 is complete. Atom is the XML app that is meant to be a better RSS. We have been using both in our newsfeeds for awhile, sometimes switching depending on various newsreader support issues, and have been reluctant to completely switch from RSS. But this will edge us closer.

WSJ on iPhone and Instant Messaging for Business

Today’s Wall Street Journal has 2 articles that relate to enterprise social computing: Instant Messaging Invades the Office, and iPhone Calls to Some Business Users. Our recent informal poll of Facebook users suggests they think instant messaging will be more dominant than some other “social software” in enterprises in the near future. The WSJ article indicates IMing is invading fast.

It is not surprising that iPhones, with their dramatically improved viewing experience, will find a lot more use in business environments. I love my Treo, but avoid viewing spreadsheets and using it with other web apps. The iPhone will make a huge difference to my interaction with our corporate information when I am out of the office. Of course, there are security issues, and no doubt other technical issues that may get in the way initially, but there is no going back. And if tomorrow’s numbers from Apple are less than expected they will merely reflect the initial velocity, not an inability to reach escape velocity.

Adobe Introduces Captivate 3

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) announced Adobe Captivate 3 software, an eLearning authoring tool for the delivery of computer-based simulations, scenario-based training, and interactive quizzes. Adobe Captivate 3 offers enhanced features including multi-mode recording, rerecording, new Microsoft Powerpoint import capabilities and support for rich media formats, such as Adobe Flash Player compatible .SWF, MP3, and AVI files. Adobe Captivate 3 allows learning professionals to create software training in a simple screen capture session. The screen capture generates multiple learner modes, including demonstrations with mouse movements and automated text descriptions of each recorded task, practice simulations with instructional automated or customized feedback, and assessments with scored user interactions. The enhanced Microsoft PowerPoint import functionality supports the conversion of slide animations into Flash Player compatible SWF format and allows authors to create interactive presentations incorporating audio and video. Adobe Captivate 3 software automatically generates Adobe Flash Player-compatible content, allowing files to be e-mailed, posted to Web sites, intranet sites, and online help systems. The new XML export and import feature simplifies the localization process of projects by exporting captions to the XML Localization Interchange File Format (XLIFF). Adobe Captivate 3 will be available for Microsoft Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Windows Vista and is expected to ship in August 2007 or later this summer at an estimated price of US$699. Localized versions in French, German, Japanese, Italian and Spanish are expected to be available in September 2007. Users of Macromedia Captivate 1 and Adobe Captivate 2 can upgrade to Adobe Captivate 3 for an estimated price of US$299. http://www.adobe.com/go/captivate

New Research: “College Admissions Outpace Corporations in Embracing Social Media”

UMass professor Nora Barnes has added to her earlier research on enterprise adoption of social software, this time focused on use by universities. Below is an intro with a link from her announcement. Also see our Collaboration & Social Computing Blog where Geoff comments on a new report by McKinsey.

Earlier this year, my research partner, Eric Mattson and I revealed that the fast-growing companies of the Inc. 500 are adopting social media faster than anyone would have predicted based on the previous research into corporate social media (summary). I sent you that announcement. Those findings were actually picked up and featured in Business Week in March!

For our most recent research, we followed up on that survey by examining the social media usage of the “marketing teams” (a.k.a. admissions departments) of 453 colleges and universities nationwide. The results are fascinating. I thought you’d be interested.

Generally, the “marketing teams” of academic institutions are more familiar with and adopting social media faster (especially blogs) than even the innovative companies of the Inc. 500. Even more importantly, they are using social media and search engines to research potential students. No longer can applicants behave irresponsibly online without potential consequences to their futures (and their parents’ sanity).

An executive summary of the results entitled The Game Has Changed: College Admissions Outpace Corporations in Embracing Social Media can be downloaded here from the website of the UMD Center for Marketing Research.

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