Third Idea Consulting

Maybe “brewing” isn’t the most comfy-sounding word right now, as it’s starting to get awfully hot outside. But you can’t make iced tea without brewing it first, and that’s sort of what I’m doing—adding heat to the pot so we can have something cool later.

At long last I’ve added something useful to my Services page. I intend to flesh it out with details of what I can actually do (and have done) for my clients, but now there’s a starting point. Chalk up the delay to my fear of saying the wrong thing.

Later this week, I’ve got another briefing scheduled with Sword Ciboodle, and you’ll have the details from that briefing as soon as they’re out from under embargo. I would tell you, but I’ve got friends at Ciboodle and their PR agency Dukas who will go all Jack Bauer on my butt if I talk out of turn.

More good news: I’ve managed to get an invite to Enterprise 2.0 later this month in Boston. I will have some pre-event details for you soon, and I will be running myself ragged at the show, trying to get the most benefit I can. In order to pass the awesomeness on to you, my dear readers and friends, please let me know (via email, Twitter, or comment) what sort of info you want to get from my time at the convention. I exist to serve. And to drink iced tea.

This is something I’ve had on my mind for a while, but haven’t found a convenient time to bring up. Of course, somebody else was able to do it first. Jason Perlow’s ZDNet blog, Tech Broiler, has his thoughts on the diminishing returns of an ever-expanding social network. I won’t summarize the post—it’s worth your time to read it yourself—but I will say that there’s more than enough frustration with Facebook’s security, permission structure, and communications model to inspire people to give up on it altogether. This doesn’t mean I intend to do so, but I understand.

Also, as a note to Mr. Perlow, one gaijin to another: Seppuku is traditionally performed with a knife (tanto) or short sword (wakizashi), not the katana.

That’s not really what I wanted to discuss, but it’s as good a segue as any. Perlow’s post made me think again about how the social media boom has affected the way we spend our time online. There are enough different social network services now that they don’t even really compete anymore—except in the sense that they all want you to spend more time with them than any other. Each has its own specific use profile, and most individuals would never consider using one for something other than its core value.

Let’s take me as an example. In addition to this blog, I actively use Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to varying degrees, as well as some old-school forums that match my interests; there’s some passive participation in other social media (gotta have YouTube access and various wikis), but that’s about it.

• Twitter is my other broadcast and communication channel, the one I use when writing a proper blog post isn’t the way to go.
• LinkedIn is my professional lifeline, the go-to option for exchanging ideas with subject matter experts, making sure I stay connected to people I don’t have regular contact with, and making myself available for hire.
• Facebook is for fun and time-killing. I use it to keep in touch with high school friends, to catch the occasional interesting article somebody posts in their feed, and to play games.

There isn’t a whole lot of overlap between these big three, integrations notwithstanding. I couldn’t imagine trying to maintain a professional presence solely on Twitter, and the entertainment options of LinkedIn pretty much end with the Answers page. This means that each social network requires separate attention, and their sheer number means networking can be a full-time job. My reaction to Google Buzz was basically “Oh crap, one more thing to add to the list.” It took more of my time, and didn’t have a clear niche of its own, so I eventually opted out.

Facebook might be next for me, assuming I can break the addictive hold of Mafia Wars and Viking Clan. This is not solely because of anything inherently wrong with Facebook (though there’s plenty)—I’ve fallen into the trap of bigger = better. I have over 600 “friends” on Facebook, and I honestly don’t know who most of them are. The games I play there require a large network to get maximum value, so I made and accepted lots of friend requests. They are not my friends (except the ones I already knew outside of Facebook). I couldn’t pick them out of a police lineup. Some of them have social and political views that I can’t stand. But I keep them around anyway because they serve a function and because it’s too much trouble to weed them out.

Still, the more FB friends you have, the more messages you get. I hate leaving messages unviewed; I regularly check my email spam so I don’t have the feeling there’s something waiting for me, and it’s this feeling that made Buzz such a burden.

Connections on Twitter or LinkedIn don’t require the same level of supervision. I follow the people I want to follow, and it’s easy enough to unfollow them—and there’s only good in having lots of followers myself. LinkedIn doesn’t get in my way unless it’s an opportunity of some sort for me. Facebook just keeps poking at me, asking me to get back in touch with Friend X whom I’ve never met, or buy Godfather Points for my mob, or install a toolbar, or expand my permissions, etc. etc.

Honestly, I don’t think I’d mind any of it if there was an easier way to manage it. What I really want is a central control panel for all my networks that lets me choose what information is available to each, with bulletproof security so I don’t have to worry about getting all my networks jacked at once. After that, all I have to do is work on my self-control so I don’t play Bejeweled all weekend.

Many of you know that I come from a print media background—mostly magazines, with a few books shuffled in. While I’ve moved on in my career to a place where most of my work seems to be electronic in nature—blogging, ebooks, social networking—I still have a soft spot for words on dead trees. So whenever somebody says that books, magazines, or newspapers are dying forms of media, I have to speak up.

Of course, nobody’s actually said that to me recently, so I need to stretch a bit. Just the other week, this brilliant video posted all over the Interwebs. While it turns out that it was prepared by a unit of Penguin Publishing, the message is no less valid. Make sure you watch and listen to the whole thing before you make up your mind.

Yes, it’s on YouTube. Yes, social networking has been a big deal long enough to go from fad to trend to established communication form. But there still has to be something to talk about. One can only get so deep into philosophy, current events, science, and art with Facebook or Buzz status updates. There will always be a place for physical media. These are major sources for big ideas.

New media can be the start of great print too. Social networking is a thousand different sociology experiments writ large, all happening at once. Good information on human behavior is there for the observing. Journalists get leads from Web sources all the time. And who’s to say that a hot exchange of tweets won’t inspire the next great novel—or that a blog won’t help us find out about it?

Sure, circulation and ad revenue are down, but that’s just good news for the trees. Executives must learn that the socialverse isn’t going away, and adjust print’s business practices to reflect this fact. I don’t have the answer yet, nor do they, but we’re working on it.

I’ve never been the most social guy, which makes it ironic that I make my living through consulting on social media. I’ll be saying as much in my June Pint of View column for CRM magazine, but I wanted to get out in front of it with this. Social CRM and community software vendor Lithium—specifically Dr. Michael Wu, Lithium’s principal scientist of analytics—just released a study of Lithium customers that sheds light on just who participates in online communities.

Conventional wisdom states that 90 percent of online community members are passive participants, or lurkers; they monitor the content and events but don’t contribute. The next 9 percent are active participants who post and engage with some regularity. But the majority of activity in the community comes from just 1 percent of members, called hypercontributors (or grognards, to some). This is sometimes known as the 1-Percent Rule. Conventional wisdom isn’t always wise, so Wu set about putting numbers to the theory.

It’s hard to get decent data on how non-participants contribute to a community—it’s like proving an unbounded negative—so the study focuses on the top 10 percent of community contributors. Lurkers aside, it turns out that conventional wisdom is actually wise: The hypercontributors in the top 1 percent create an average of 56 percent of community content, with the rest coming from regular contributors in the next 9 percentiles.

There’s more to it than this brief outline, and I recommend reading the study results in depth. Knowing your audience is key to serving it.

There’s been a slight change of plans, readers: I was all set to give you a rundown of the great stuff that happened at Paul Greenberg’s recent SCRM Summit in Herndon, VA, but a funny thing happened on the way to the Capitol Region. Somebody mentioned snow, and all the DC-area airports rolled up their runways. I didn’t get to go, and neither did a lot of people. Sad.

However, while I was sulking over my misfortune, a couple of new developments in the world of social networking caught my attention. (Yeah, there were probably more than two, but these are the ones I feel like mentioning.)

First, Facebook just changed its home page, and not for the better in my opinion. Many things aren’t where I expect them to be, and my bookmarked apps (mostly games, I admit) seem to have been randomized—I never quite know what I’ll have available. Everything requires more clicks. I am not as vehement a Facebook-basher as some people I know, but a little warning about this change would have been nice. As it stands, Facebook has traveled through time to an era before UI design was considered important on the Interwebs.

Second, and equally jarring, Google surprised us (or at least me) with the launch of Google Buzz, a built-in social networking function for users of Gmail and presumably any other piece of the Google empire. Mashable has this to say about it, if you want full coverage. I say that it’s a good thing there’s a way to turn Buzz off, because I wasn’t looking for yet another social media environment to integrate with my daily explorations. It’s already far too easy to get lost in the things we do; Buzz might have legs—it’s a network for people you actually know and correspond with, as opposed to weak-tie pseudofriends—but right now it feels like a “me-too” offering.

The lesson from these two news items is that I’m an extremely grumpy person when somebody moves my cheese. But the more applicable lesson is this: Don’t be content with your current approach to social media, because it can become obsolete in a day. New apps will replace old ones, and the conversation moves whether you like it or not.

In the event y’all don’t read ZDNet, I’d like to direct you to a report by security firm Sophos about the rise of malware on social networks. Basically speaking, the state of computer security in the social world is 70 percent worse than it was a year ago. According to the report, 57 percent of users surveyed in December 2009 reported being spammed on social networking sites, while 36 percent said they had been sent malware via one or more social channels; both represent a 70 percent increase from April of that year.

I recommend reading the entire report, though it’s not a happy story. We can expect security threats to increase, and there’s no particularly good news in the entire document, but at least there are some suggestions for how to mitigate the dangers. Meanwhile, 72 percent of businesses surveyed indicate concern that employee activities on social networking sites puts company data at risk, and the majority name Facebook as their biggest single source of worry. Yet 49 percent allow unrestricted employee access to Facebook, up 13percent from last year.

My intent here is not to scare people away from social networks—career suicide for me—but to make them aware that security issues do exist. Social CRM is still fairly new, and it can be hard sometimes to tell the difference between a poorly executed marketing campaign and a phishing scam. It’s up to users, developers, and businesses to keep an eye on their activities as best they can, while security professionals work to plug holes in social coding. Let’s be careful out there.

While we’re talking about social networks, security, and ZDNet, I’d like to shine a light on a recent post by the inimitable Paul Greenberg about his recent security breach on Facebook. (Wow, this is a bad week for Marc Zuckerberg, huh?) Let it serve as a reminder that businesses shouldn’t forget the human side of their activities while dealing with computer security; making it difficult for legit users to reinstate their privileges after being hacked doesn’t make things harder for the hackers, but it does make it harder for users to want to come back.

One final note: I’ll be in Herndon, VA next week (February 8-9) attending Paul Greenberg’s seminar on social CRM. Look me up if you’re there, but make sure you pay most of your attention to Paul—he’s got some great advice.

The other day, I retweeted a short Social Media Today entry by Maggie McGary about some of the major effects social media are having on our lives. In it, she cited an accurate prediction and a side-by-side strategy comparison of Massachusetts’ senatorial election result; a report on how social networking is helping to save lives in Haiti; and news articles about how major brands are altering or outright abandoning the infamous 30-second spot during the Super Bowl broadcast in favor of social marketing. Now I’m going to add some opinion (about the first two things, at least; I love Super Bowl commercials and will miss them if they fade away).

The effect of social media on politics is nothing we haven’t heard before. Bloggers were important in swaying opinions during the 2004 U.S. presidential election, and Brent Leary and David Bullock’s excellent Barack 2.0 reveals how our current President made effective use of the immediacy and intimacy of social media to win a hotly contested race. The idea that the incumbent party could lose its Senate seat—despite a long history of success combined with sympathy for a fallen statesman—smacks not only of overconfidence but of ignorance.

Social technology has made it easier than ever before to spread word when disaster strikes, and to coordinate immediate relief efforts. Where it once might have taken weeks to arrange donations of money and essentials, motivated people and groups got it done in a matter of days—sometimes hours. Time saved equals lives saved when something as devastating as the Haiti quake hits.

In both cases, the technology is an important indicator and enabler rather than a deciding factor of its own. In both cases, technology is waving a great big flag that says, “This is where the people are!” Paying attention to that flag can have tremendous positive effects, whether in terms of electorate swayed, lives saved, or just business generated. Ignoring it means being ignored in turn. Social media is changing the world, my friends. It may evolve, but it’s not dying out any time soon.

Businesses are starting to understand the value and importance of a social media approach to CRM, if the calls I’ve been taking are any indication. That’s good, but sometimes I feel that for some people, the terms we use—social media, social CRM, Enterprise 2.0 and the rest—are just words hung onto a concept, their meanings ignored.

While letting “social CRM” exist merely as shorthand for a broader concept—like Paul Greenberg’s excellent and tweetable definition, “the company’s response to the customer’s control of the conversation”—I prefer for the concept to remain grounded in the words that describe it. In this case, the best definition of social itself is from Merriam-Webster: of or relating to human society, the interaction of the individual and the group, or the welfare of human beings as members of society; tending to form cooperative and interdependent relationships with others of one’s kind.

It’s great if your company is engaging its customers and partners in conversation through its own social networking tools. It’s beyond great, it’s necessary in most cases. But there must be more. You’ve got to reach out beyond your own circle, and start exchanging ideas with new people and organizations, ones in whom you don’t already have a financial interest.

This is not to say that you should abandon any current social efforts. Just make sure you’re sticking your corporate nose into somebody else’s as well. I’m not talking about corporate espionage—that’s bad. I mean participation in timely and topical discussion groups (the Answers section of LinkedIn is an excellent example), attending Webinars, and just letting your people explore where their interest takes them.

If our hunter/gatherer ancestors hadn’t been willing to meet other bands of like-minded people, we would never have gotten beyond tribes and clans, warring with one another for access to water, hunting grounds, and abundant vegetation. (You could make a decent argument that we still haven’t gotten beyond that, but I’m feeling generous to our insane species today.) Communication with “the other” brought trade, exchange of ideas, and the peace of mind that comes from knowing what those guys in the next cave are up to.

It’s no different in modern society. Looking for new ideas and new associates to share them with is a major driver for the modern, socially-aware business. Does your desire for partnership and creativity outweigh your fear of competition? It should; competition is healthy. Social interaction means business doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. Your competitors may glean some ideas from you that they might otherwise not have, but you will do the same. You will each innovate, raising the standard for all. You will allow your entire industry to serve the customer better.

Take the next step. Get your company onto somebody else’s social network. It’s only natural.

I was planning to put this in my other post (see previous), but I was forced to clutter that space with live updates when I reached my Twitter limit. I’m not the only person who hit that particular wall-friend and respected blogger Esteban Kolsky got locked out as well, and I’m sure a number of others were as well. Look for Esteban’s post on why this is a bad thing, coming soon to a link near you once he posts it (and I update my blogroll-I’ve been a bit lax).

By now you’ve likely heard a fair amount about today’s biggest news, Salesforce Chatter. To sum it up nice and tight, Chatter is a new, more collaborative and intuitive interface for business applications. It’s the Collaboration Cloud. If Facebook and Twitter had a child, and that child grew up and got an MBA, it would be Salesforce Chatter. Feeds, status updates, groups, messaging-it’s all there, along with the dashboards and everything else we’ve come to expect from good CRM. Chatter can integrate social contacts from customers into the mix and provide context for it all. Even better, Chatter will be standard on all editions of Salesforce.com, Force.com, and related products. Outsiders can acquire access for $50 per user, per month.

At least, that’s what Chatter will be. It’s not due until the end of 2010, which is a long way off. Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff went out of his way to point out the portion of Salesforce.com’s safe harbor statement that says the company is not responsible for what might be vaporware. That’s out of character for Marc, who usually waves his hand in the general direction of the statement and makes a joke.

But the other thing that was out of character was the level of energy Marc brought to the event. This is not to say he’s usually laid back when presenting-far from it. Today’s level of bombast, though, was one step beyond. Either Marc Benioff is very excited about his new Collaboration Cloud (which is likely), or he wants us to believe he’s very excited about it (which is also likely, CEOs having certain responsibilities and whatnot). Chatter is a big deal, and it will change the way business gets done, once it’s released.

I asked about just how Chatter will change business processes, but Marc’s take on the situation is that business is already changing to accept this model, and Chatter is the first tool that allows companies to do so securely, in an orderly manner, and with scalability. However, as Kraig Swensrud (SVP of product marketing) said in a followup interview, Chatter is not Twitter or Facebook. Just as we use business email and personal email differently, the internal and external feeds of Chatter will have their own character. Surfing the Web was once a workplace taboo; now it’s how many of us do our jobs. Salesforce.com hopes that Chatter will be the same.

There’s plenty more to say about this Collaboration Cloud thing, but there’s also plenty more for me to learn before I go further. My next post will probably deal with Salesforce.com’s messaging, not its applications.

As usual, my patented, trademarked, hermetically sealed and hypoallergenic live coverage of this morning’s event (Dreamforce 09) will be appearing in the Twitter stream to your right. Follow @Lager if you don’t already, and I will be adding my analysis afterward in this space.

If you’re wondering why I don’t just liveblog it here, the answer is simple: I like words, and the temptation to editorialize is much easier to manage at 140 characters a pop.

UPDATE 11:40 am PST: Tweetdeck just crapped out on me, with the “recipient not following you” error message. I’m over my limit.

11:44 am PST: Generally speaking, Salesforce Chatter looks a whole lot like Facebook. There’s also Twitter embedded. It’s a secure social business interface. I want a lot of demo time with this.

11:48 am PST: Marc is wrapping up now. Force.com has been modified so you can build collaboration apps. Chatter collaboration cloud is an attempt to change the way we work and make it more like … well, how we kill time at work when we should be working. Your coworkers are now your community, with the closer contact that implies. The biz apps, dashboards, and workflows are still there, but social networking is now built in instead of layered on.

11:53 am PST: For those of you who are worried about security, Chatter is as secure as Salesforce.com in general. You can pull in info and interactions from outside the enterprise, but I assume that once it’s there it is shielded from malfeasance.

11:55 am PST: Sales Cloud 2 is built on Chatter. Service Cloud 2 has been rebuilt for Chatter (that two rebuilds of Service Cloud). It’s all mobile capable.

12:01 pm PST: True to social form, content can be followed or broadcast automatically-you don’t have to go into a group and post to it. Your content, your apps, and your people are all talking to you. And, to judge by this demo, they’re all talking about how bad Sharepoint is.

12:04 pm PST: Demo is over, now announcing pricing. Available early 2010 in all editions of Salesforce.com and Force.com-standard in all editions. If you want to bring outsiders into Chatter, there’s a $50/user/month product. Very nice, and a welcome departure. We’ve got Jason Goldman, from the board of directors of Twitter. @goldman if you want to know.