Portals and KM

Twortex Provides Twitter Search through Darwin Ecosystem’s Awareness Engine™

It can be addictive. Twortex is a Montreal based company that offers a free Twitter search engine powered by the Darwin Awareness Engine™.  I now use it to discover new conversations on Twitter and sometimes find items related to my topics of interest that I did not anticipate were connected to these topics. The Darwin Scan Cloud™ provides the top hundred themes connected to an attractor, our term for a search topic of interest. As you scan over it you can see related themes. Here is a Twortex Scan Cloud™ covering the term – enterprise20 – for the past 24 hours on 9/10. The actual tweets connected to these terms are seen on the right of the screen. Clicking on the listed tweet can take you to the actual tweet.

 Here is the search on tweets for the past 120 hours on 9/10 on the same term – enterprise20 – for the past 120 hours on 9/10. You can see the changes on coverage.

In the screen below you can see some interrelated terms highlighted in red after mousing over one of the terms in the scan cloud shown above.  This provides an alternative to traditional Twitter search that presents topics in a liner order that can make it harder to see trends and more difficult to quickly scan over a large amount of content. You can go to the Twortex site and register and to use it at no cost.  

 
 

My App Gap Posts for September 2010

Here are my AppGap posts for September. I am also writing in another Corante blog, FastForward (see right side bar for links), The AppGap posts began toward the end of January 2008.  Here, I am primarily doing product commentaries with a few other things thrown in. Below are the ones for September. There will be more in October.

MindTouch 2010 Offers an Intelligent Platform for Product and Services Documentation

Vocus Offers a Comprehensive Brand and Topic Monitoring Platform for PR Professionals

The Race for Desktop Productivity Dominance

NetBase Provides an Expanding Set of Social Media Monitoring Measures

Coveo Provides Version 2.0 of Its Customer Information Access Solutions (CIAS)

Cisco Offers a Comprehensive Enterprise Collaboration Architecture

The Early Impact of Social Media After Hurricane Katrina

Last month there was a lot of coverage on Hurricane Katrina during its fifth anniversary. Marc Meyer contributed a nice post on Social Media Today, Social Media and Hurricane Katrina: What If?  He was there in the week after and experienced some of the sense of isolation as many traditional means of communication were down.  Now he wonders what would have happen if services like Twitter and Facebook would have been available?

We have seen how social media and enterprise 2.0 platforms have helped in more recent disasters such as the attacks in Mumbai. See for example, the post: US Military Enterprise 2.0 Platform is Helping Coordinate Haiti Relief on how the TISC (Transnational Information Sharing Cooperation) was used by the US Military for better communication knowledge sharing, and coordination. The main components of the system were online forums, wikis, chat and blogs. The objective is to a create system that not only helps with particular disasters but also builds an archive of best practices, key people/organizations and useful information to better handle future needs, as well as a platform for efficient cooperation.

It turns out that there were some uses of social media to help with Katrina. In this case it was blogs and wikis in the absence of Facebook and Twitter. The Katrina PeopleFinder Project was quickly organized through the Web by some people at Harvard’s Berkman Center. After Katrina many families were separated and left with no clear way to find each other. Hundreds of Web sites gathered thousands, of entries about either missing people or people who want to let others know that they were okay. The problem was that the data on these sites had no particular form or structure. So it was almost impossible for people to search or match things up.

The Katrina PeopleFinder Project enlisted virtual volunteers to enter data about missing and found people from the various online sources. It was promoted through blogs and the interface for administering the effort was a wiki. If I remember correctly over 20,000 volunteers were enlisted in a few days through the blog alerts. I did some work on this. You could do it anytime you wanted for as much time as you had available from your own office or home using your own computer. You took data from one of many separate databases and added it into a new central one with a common searchable structure. 

This work gave me a closer personal look at the displaced people from my home town of New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast. Some of the individual stories emerged. It is small thing to do but you saw the names of people directly impacted by Katrina and hopefully helped a few people find people or get notified of the status of these people close to them.  The social media tools have gotten more sophisticated and efficient since Katrina but they were in play there thanks to a few individuals at the Berkman Center and the thousands of volunteers they enlisted. 

The Social Enterprise: Next Practices in Social Networks and Media

Here is an interesting meeting with some of my favorite speakers. The Social Enterprise:
Next Practices in Social Networks and Media occurs in Dallas on October 8. Karl Wiig,
Chairman and CEO
Knowledge Research Initiative and Adriaan Jooste,
Chief Knowledge Officer
 Deloitte Financial Advisory Services start off with The Social Enterprise:
A Conversation.

Then Robin Hanson,
Chief Scientist at Consensus Point discusses Collective Intelligence: 
Leading Enterprise Knowledge Markets. Next Larry Proctor,
Researcher at IBM covers The Social Enterprise: 
Identifying Communities. After the morning break Valdis Krebs at orgnet.com discusses Organizational Network Analysis: 
Introduction to Enterprise Social Network Analysis using InFlow 3.1.

The after lunch Valdis comes back to cover Organizational Network Analysis: 
Optimizing Enterprise Networks.  The Nancy Dixon talks about Conversation:
The Core Knowledge Transfer Technology. In conclusion Nancy, Adriaan, Valdis, Larry and Karl engage in a panel on Social Enterprise Leadership:
Harnessing Social Media and Networks.

Onset Blues Festival 2010

I went back to the Onset Blues Festival for the fifth straight time in August. It has become an essential part of summer for me. This year I saw the last three acts and they were all great in their own way. The appear in order below. First, there was Gil Correria, the MC, with his band, The Blue Gil Band. They are local perform very solid Chicago style blues. Catch them if they appear near you. Gil is on the left in the first photo

The next band, The Gas House Gorillas, is featured in most of the pictures below as they had a lot of fun and provided a lot of fun, mixing it up with audience. I talked with sax guy afterwards who said they enjoyed themselves. Note the gradual changes in the lead singer. 

The headliners was Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters. Ronnie is one of the legends of blues guitar and he put on a great show. It was all instrumental and bordered on jazz, which the audience, myself, included really loved. For one number, he even got into the audience.  If you click on a picture it will enlarge

                               







 
 
 
 
 

Micro-Landscapes: White on Brown #1

Here is a 20" x 24" acrylic painting in my micro-landscape series. It is close up of a portion of a white napkin on a brown paper covered table. 

 

Choosing the Best Enterprise 2.0 Tool for the Task – My Talk on Yakabod’s Collaboration Pizza Blogtalkradio Show

I had the pleasure of appearing yesterday on Yakabod’s blog radio talk show. Yakabod is a collaboration platform that I have covered before (see Yakabod Provides Robust Knowledge Management with a Social Side). In this session I discussed the impact of media on cognition and communication.  This was an area I looked at in my academic research years and the concepts still influence how I look at the new social media. 

Here is a link to a recording of the Yakabod show.  Examples I discussed include MIT’s Sloan’s School and the US Military All Partners Access Network.  The session lasts 15 minutes. I hope you find it useful.

Here is the summary that the Yakabod site provides:

"Are you tweeting when you could be microblogging? Emailing when wiki-ing makes more sense? With so many choices out there, it’s tempting to pick one social media tool and use it all the time. Don’t do it, says Bill Ives. You get better results if you choose a method based on the outcome you want. In today’s show, Bill talks about how the medium you choose for your message—words versus pictures, for example—influences the way people process information, draw conclusions and solve problems. He shares specific examples of how to use wikis, blogs and microblogs to get work done faster and better.”

China Pilots Major Web TV Phone Convergence

China launched a major pilot project in 12 cities nationwide this July to help converge the telecommunications, Internet and broadcast networks. Cities chosen for the pilot project include Beijing, Shanghai, Dalian, Hangzhou, Shenzhen and Wuhan.

It was reported in the People’s Daily that the project aims to make the three sectors compatible within China to allow users to make telephone calls, surf the Net and watch television through wireless gateway or one cable. It will enable telecom carriers, Internet companies and broadcasters to enter each other's fields and provide services, and is expected to create billions in investment in the coming years.

In China, the move to bring the three sectors together has been considered for more than a decade. However, it made little progress until now because of factors such as technological challenges and contention among stakeholders. It will be interesting to see how this move shakes out.  Will other countries be watching?

Traditional Media’s Move Away from Community has Opened Doors for Social Media

Mike Frey through Social Media Today provided an insightful post on How Traditional Media Created Social Media. Mike opens with this observation. “Prior to conglomeration there was a time that radio, television and print were local community outlets.  At one time the big three were locally owned, and concentrated on local community.  Now most decisions that are made for communities regarding their major media are made from thousands of miles away.  What music to play, what programming to air, and all the cuts made at the print level most stories come off the wore than actually written by reporters.”

I also remember this local control in the three traditional media and have been disappointed in its passing.  Now many people use social media to make up for this loss of community as Mike notes.  I certainly get much of my news through my Twitter friends and share back what I learn through Twitter and blogs. Like Mike, I stopped my subscription to our Boston print paper as it got smaller and, more importantly wrote about stores I had already heard through social media. I found myself often failing to walk down the driveway to pick it up. Now I still read the New York Times online for national and global stories. Even the TV news is a bit old and I watch more to see how they spin stories than to get new news.

Some traditional media outlets understand this trend and are looking for ways to become more connected to their community through social media. I have written about many of these efforts on the Darwin blog (for example, Foursquare Forging More Partnerships with Traditional Media and BBC Pushes Social Media for Its News Staff for Both News Collection and Impact Monitoring).

The Darwin Awareness Engine™ can help traditional media with both news collection and impact monitoring. For example, it can look at social media to bring forward stories for traditional media (see Tracking Social Media Buzz with Darwin Awareness Engine™). Here is the first of a three part series on how Darwin can help make traditional media better connected with its community: Creating a Sustainable Ecosystem for Community News Media - Part One: Providing Relevance and Creating Loyalty. 

Looking at the Early Growth of Twitter

There has been a lot written about the growth of Twitter. Hubspot recently provided some nice visualizations of this growth in the US in a guest post by Pete Warden, the founder of OpenHeatMap, a service that allows you to turn your spreadsheet data into a map. Pete noted that nine months after the creation of the service in March 2006, Twitter only had a few thousand users. A year later there were an estimated 150,000 people using the service.  He offered a s series of US maps illustrating the growth of Twitter across the US from 2006 to 2009.

Now there are over 93 million global unique users according to Social Media Today on August 15, 2010. As they point out that does not mean the same as 93 million regular users.  They mention the research from RJ Metrics showing that 83% of Twitter accounts are dormant every month. There is a base of committed users who are often active in other social media channels that make up for the majority of activity. I do not see an issue with this as that is the case wit most media.

Pete looked at the early days and Twitter provides data on new users by day. You can see spikes and flat areas of growth.  With a single influential blog post adding 250 new users in one day when there were only 600 users.  However, the continuous growth shows a service that users loved and shared with their friends, instead of one where traffic was driven by high-profile articles and hype.

In March 2007 Twitter won the top award at South-by-Southwest, and Pete wrote that this was when the service really started getting attention. He looked at several cites in this time period. “Austin had a massive growth spurt, from 61 to 402 users in three months, but what's interesting is that almost every other town also went through a similar rise, with Los Angeles going from 88 to 474 twitterers, and Boise jumping from 6 to 30. That roughly five-fold increase over the 3 months was remarkably evenly spread.” What surprised Pete was how little geography mattered for adoption.

He concludes, “one heartening thing for me and any other starving entrepreneur is how eclectic the initial growth was. There were spurts and slowdowns in the beginning, and while it was clearly a success story even at the time, the magnitude of their long-term trajectory wasn't obvious through the noise.”

This is encouraging to us at Darwin.  While we growth spurts around events where we presented such as Enterprise 2.0 and Enterprise Search Summit, they continues to be steady interest.

 

Will 99¢ Change TV Like it Changed Music?

This is a question Stewart Mader asks in his blog Future Changes. He writes that Apple’s announcement of a new Apple TV device with 99¢ TV episode rentals could have the same impact on the cable TV industry as the impact that 99¢ songs had on the music industry. “When Apple introduced the iTunes store with songs priced at 99¢, it changed the “single” part of the music landscape, by allowing consumers to buy only the songs they wanted.” I do it all the time. This changed the buying paradigm.

Many people also want to get a single cable show or channel rather than the entire package they are forced to select by the cable industry.  With the right rental charges these offerings could be cheaper than the DVDs covering the series.  This becomes even more attractive if it spreads to the iPad and iPhone.  What do think will occur? What will you do?

Steamers and Fried Clams at Captain Al's Tiki Bar Buzzard's Bay MA

I had two great lunches at Captain Al's Tiki Bar in Buzzard's Bay MA when I was at the Onset Blues Festival. I highly recommend it for fresh seafood on an outdoor deck over looking the bay. First there were the steamers with onion rings, and butter for dipping. The next day was fried clams with rings, of course. Then I had clam fritters at the blues festival but forgot to take a picture. 

             

Cambridge Art Association Hosts 66th Annual Fall Salon

The Cambridge Art Association has an annual member show every Fall. I have participated in a number of them and have the micro-landscape shown below in this show. It is a 16’ x 20” acrylic painting that is part of a series I have done looking at a detail within a folded napkin.

The show is located at the CAA’s Kathryn Shultz Gallery at 25 Lowell Street in Cambridge, MA and at the University Place gallery at 124 Mt. Auburn Street. My painting is part of the University Place show. The show runs form September 10 to September 30.  The hours are Monday - Friday 9 – 6 and Saturday 9 – 1. 

 

My Favorite Tweets for September 1 - 15 2010

Here is another in a series of posts that provide access to my favorite tweets that contain links to useful information.  Some of these I did to link to things I found useful and others are RTs that I want to save for the same reason. Since Twitter archiving is an oxymoron, I am now going to post my favorite links for the month so they can be easily accessed later. I will repeat this once or twice a month depending on volume. There are a few from Aug 31 here that I did not include in my last listing.

I spot tested the reduced shortened urls and they all should work. I hope this is also useful for you.  Let me know your favorite tweets for the month.

Also see the Darwineco favorite tweets.

RT @DearingGroup: Where your neighbors commute to and from // http://bit.ly/9xtKNn  Sept 15

How much is a Twitter follower really worth? http://bit.ly/9IkOYh via @SBoSM  Sept 14

RT @TheForumCorp: Interesting look at some top leadership challenges of 1st half of 2010 forum.com/blog/2010/09/1…  Sep 14th


via @tonykarrer: Two more posts around Voice-Over in eLearning http://bit.ly/aaW0xK  Sept 14

RT @dhinchcliffe: BTW, http://foodspotting.com is my location-based social network vote of the month. > looks great  Sep 13th

nice post on old and new media by @michellemanafy http://bit.ly/cxk843  Sep 13th

RT @socialwebabcs The 5 Essential Facebook Marketing Tips http://su.pr/7aFu0y  Sep 13th

RT @socialmedia2day: Dilbert: New Social Media Manager's First Day http://su.pr/1O8xdA  Sep 13th

RT @johnjambrose: new research into how mind learns. http://nyti.ms/dvjk7d #elearning #training #astd #lrnchat  Sep 12th

New York Times Is Preparing Social News Service Dubbed News.me http://bit.ly/cXW9df  Sept 10

RT @jonhusband: Social Learning : the video http://bit.ly/8XKJHS > nice! Sept 10

MIT Study Suggests Social Networks Influence Behavior http://bit.ly/cZf2Sk Sep 9th

Where In The World Is B2B Social Media ROI? http://bit.ly/drVyZq #socialmedia  Sep 9th

RT @LawyerKM: Appeals Court Rules Counsel May 'Google' Potential Jurors During Jury Selection http://ow.ly/2Brpq  Sep 8th

Travel industry uses Facebook and Twitter to reach customers http://bit.ly/b1f0cv via @SBoSM Sep 7th

RT @CommunispaceCEO: 10 Best TED Talks of all Time http://tinyurl.com/2edere6 Sept 6

RT @jbowles: RT @socialwebabcs 5 Most Essential Facebook Marketing Tips http://su.pr/1M7zb0 Sept 6

top 10 viral vidoes on YouTube http://bit.ly/9pDqez via @@socialmedia2day  Sep 4th

Twitter-Based Customer Service: How Best Buy Gets It Right http://bit.ly/bTfkmL via @SBoSM  Sep 3rd

RT @socialmedia2day: Do you have a comment policy? http://goo.gl/fb/SEZ9p #sm > I welcome all sincere on topic comments even disagrements  Sep 3rd

BBC News - First 'intelligent' stamp put on sale by Royal Mail http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11172864 Sept 3

Online television: Hogging the remote | The Economist http://bit.ly/aktOJ4 Sept 2

How Social Media Helped Cisco Shave $100,000+ Off a Product Launch http://bit.ly/dng5X5 via @SBoSM  Aug 31st

social media cases from @robpatrob Boingo http://bit.ly/ck8Yyj and Kotex http://bit.ly/9X1W4P Aug 31

RT @socialmedia2day: 4 Ways To Repurpose Your Blog Posts http://goo.gl/fb/LtNxD #sm  Aug 31st

Review of The New Social Learning

 I was very pleased to receive a review copy of The New Social Learning by Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner. Tony is President and Chief Executive Officer of the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD). Marcia is a Partner at Altimeter Group, founder of the Twitter chat #lrnchat, and writes the Fast Company column “Learn at All Levels.”

Getting a chance to read this timely work excited me for several reasons. First, I began my consulting career in the learning space in the 80s and have remained convinced of its importance for accelerating business performance. I presented at several ASTD session during this period. Second, Marcia was also a colleague of mine at Pistachio Consulting where we did some projects together. I had a chance to review an earlier version of one of the chapters of this book. But most importantly, it is the first book I have seen to help organizations understand and harness the huge workplace learning potential of social media and enterprise 2.0.

Tony and Marcia began with an acknowledgement that social learning has been around for a long time. While social media tools bring new power to social learning, it is not about particular tools as they will come and go. The book is about news ways that social media can enhance social learning and thus the book title. Much of the talk about social media has focused on marketing and while, there is great potential there, the authors bring forth a powerful additional use case. They also point out that social learning is not a new form of e-learning.  I would certainly agree and much of e-learning appeared to me to be disappointing watered down adoptions of technology–based learning from the 80s.

I remember studies in the 80s where people reported that 90% of what they learned that helped with their work came from informal conversations with fellow employees. Now social media can enable those conversations on a global basis across enterprises or in a secure manner within a select group in one enterprise.  When I first saw social media in 2004 the possibilities for knowledge management re-energized my interest in KM. I have began to see the same potential for learning and this book helps to put it in perspective and offers some excellent cases examples.

The book draws on some of my academic heroes, John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Peter Berger, and Thomas Luckman to set the stage of how people most effectively learn through active participation and social interaction. They define learning as “the transformative process of taking in information that, when internalized and mixed with what we have experienced, changes what we know and builds on what we can do.’ I certainly agree and it aligns directly with how Piaget would define learning. Jocelyn Davis, head of R&D at the Forum Corporation, recently suggested that learning might be a major motivational driver on the level of David McClelland’s three main drives achievement, affiliation, and power.  Social learning can draw on a number of these motivators.

The authors list some of the major concerns about using social media in a business context and then offer excellent ways to address these concerns. The book takes a very practical approach and is clearly written with concrete examples through out.

After setting the stage, the authors provide a chapter each covering online communities, the power of stories, micro-sharing, growing the collective intelligence, and immersive environments. Each chapter begins with a detailed case example. The book concludes with some useful tips of making the most of in-person events. I let you read the book to get the useful details.

I highly recommend this book if you want to make better use of social media and enterprise 2.0, if learning is a passion, or if you want to increase the productivity of your workforce.  It is one of the better business books I have seen recently.

Many Companies Hiring Social Media Director Without a Plan

Felix Gillette at Businessweek recently provided a comprehensive article on the social media director movement. Many firms are looking for them. Felix writes, “in Las Vegas, Harrah's Entertainment recently circulated a job listing for a "corporate social media rock star." In Chicago, Buick went looking for a handful of "social media ambassadors" to help manage Tweet to Drive, which allows customers to schedule test drives from home via Twitter. At the same time, traditional public relations and marketing powerhouses such as Ogilvy & Mather are bulking up their expertise to fend off social-media-focused startups.” I have seen first hand some of these defensive moves by traditional PR firms to protect their turf.

However, much of the ROI here is anecdotal. But the huge numbers of participants and the potential is seductive. I have also seen first hand some social media successes so I can add to the stories but not the stats.  Here the demand out paces the supply of experienced social media experts. So many firms are turning to, in Felix’s words, “a swarm of self-proclaimed social media rainmakers has appeared at job interviews, aiming to parlay a high number of Facebook friends or Twitter followers into salaried positions with benefits.” I would rather select seasoned people who know related skills like community management and have a proven track record in these related skills.

Part of this hiring rush is driven by fear. Nobody wants to become the next United Airlines which took a beating last year after ignoring a frustrated passenger over his damaged guitar. This musician got frustrated and posted a song on YouTube about the airline breaking his guitar. The video has been viewed more than 8 million times

Another infamous one involved James Andrews, a vice-president at the PR firm Ketchum flew to Memphis to talk to employees at FedEx, one of the agency's largest clients, about digital media. Shortly after landing in Memphis, he wrote on his Twitter account, @keyinfluencer: "True confession but I'm in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say, 'I would die if I had to live here.' " Someone at FedEx noticed the sideswipe and took offense, touching off a storm that resulted in an embarrassing public apology on behalf of Ketchum executives. Felix noted that Andrews did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment. I think this is yet another mistake on his part.

These two examples and similar stories have likely driven more than one queasy PR department to consider hiring a social media strategist. However, I think looking proactively with a positive strategy is a better way to guide such additions. 

US Consumers Really Want to Engage in Online Crowdsourcing

I have written about crowdsourcing a bit on this blog (see for example: GE Crowdsources Green Ideas Through its Open Innovation Challenge, Building Enterprise 2.0 into the Product Development Process, and Cisco Launches Second I-Prize Competition) but it has been largely from a company perspective. Now Forester presents data indicating that sixty-one percent of all US online adults are willing co-creators, and they are open to co-creating across a large range of industries. At the same time, Forrester reports that consumer product strategy professionals indicated that half of all companies are not using social media to engage their customers in product creation, design, or strategy.

Forrester said that many companies are hesitant to engage customers in co-creation because they are unsure how customer willingness and do not have a strategy. In the Forrester report, US Consumers Are Willing Co-creators, Douglas Williams outlines conditions for co-creation engagement. I was pleased to receive a review copy.

The majority of willing participants will help with most products but expect some type of incentive, which is only fair. There is wide spread interest across a variety of industries. The top two industries in terms of willing participation are personal computers (76%) and TV (75%) following by consumer packaged goods. This third place finishers has gotten some of the most press.

Thirty percent will only help their favorite brands and these are probably the strongest helpers. Time commitment is an issue for even these strong advocates so it needs to be manageable. The report suggests that if a company already directly communicates with certain consumers via social media, it makes sense to target fans or frequent visitors for co-creation. I would agree and all the more reason to use social media to promote your brand.

The report recommends product strategists begin by targeting consumers who they are already engaging with the brand. They should also recognize that participation will be stronger if the interaction is appealing from the consumer's point of view, in terms of the topic, incentive, and time commitment. These seem to be the important variables to consider. 

The Battle for TV’s Operating System

You may ask what does an operating system have to do with TV? With the convergence of TV and the Web is has lot to do with it. One of the latest Retrevo stories by Andrew Eisner covers this contest with Apple, Google, and Microsoft doing the battle here. Andrew writes that Microsoft does not have much of a chance of winning this battle for the TV OS. Google TV going for control of the living room like it controls Web search. Apple is countering with an updated version of their Apple TV that will put Apple iPhone/iPad apps firmly in the living room TV.

 Andrew writes that at the moment a TV OS vacuum exists and unfortunately for consumers, TV manufacturers appear to be filling it with their own proprietary offerings. He argues for standards and we agree. He concludes that the TV industry needs to move away from closed environments and let their connected TVs work with all the apps and streaming content that consumers are finding so appealing. True Web TV convergence needs to occur.

 

Sunrise at Point Independence Inn Onset MA

I was at the Point Independence Inn in early August for the Onset Blues Festival. The light there is always remarkable. Here is the sun rise.  Last Sunday I covered the sunset. You can enlarge the pictures by clicking on them.

             

Painting of Blue Cloth on a Brown Table

I have been doing a series of micro-landscapes of folded cloths. In this 20" x 24" acrylic painting I backed up a bit so you can see the entire cloth on the table.

 
 

One Take on the Gory Detail on How Google Works

Recently the PPC blog posted an useful diagram giving their take on How Google Works: in Gory Detail.  It is interesting that they choose to display the information in a visual that does not have searchable text like a traditional blog post.  Where they trying to hide their content from Google?  They do say that Google is very secretive about their data centers. 

Gavin Heaton who writes the Servant of Chaos blog wrote a nice commentary on the PPC work on MyVenturePad, which he titles The Scary Truth About Search.  He notes the major search optimization that many sites use and then concludes with the thought that web sites need to think about what happens when you “throw “social” into the mix and see how you stack up. Scared? You should be.”  Google Page Rank was created before social media. Has this social media compromised Google’s approach? 

Spigit Offers Release S3 to a Maturing Market

I have been covering Spigit and the innovation management market for some time (see Spigit – Enabling Enterprise 2.0 Innovation Through Market Games (2008) and Spigit Increases Employee Engagement in Innovation (2009). I also continue to be a Spigit user as they provide the platform for the Enterprise 2.0 conference submission process. So it nice to see both Spigit and its market continue to grow.  Here is sample from the Enterprise 2.0 conference.

I recently spoke again with Spigit CEO and Co-founder Paul Pluschkell to catch up on their latest news. We began with conversation about the innovation management market. Paul said that the niche has now become a recognized market space like CRM and other genres. According to a Boston Consulting Group report on innovation from 2010, 72 percent of respondents said that their companies consider innovation a top-three priority, versus 64 percent in 2009. In addition, 84 percent of respondents said their companies consider innovation an important or extremely important lever in their ability to reap the benefits of an economic recovery. This need has helped to fuel the innovation market.

I have seen a number of high profile successes in innovation management like Cisco I-Prize (see for example my posts (Cisco Launches Second I-Prize Competition (2010) and Cisco I-Prize: The Cisco Co-Creation Contest (2007).  Spigit has become the platform for Cisco’s new I-Prize "Idea Market," which provides contest participants with the option to "invest" in the idea they deemed most deserving of the $250,000 grand prize. They are given investment points at the start and then can earn more through active participation in the event. This has helped achieve a three-fold increase in engagement in the second year of the contest.  

 Paul said creating greater engagement is a major focus of his firm.  They provide a dedicated community manager bundled with their enterprise SaaS fees and employ behavioral science techniques like offering incentives and rewareds to foster this engagement. They now also offer optional professional services for firms that want to create customized reports or extend the platform based in Boulder, CO.

We discussed some of the features in the new S3 release. There are greater analytic capabilities and they added Google Analytics as one step in this direction.  They used their own product to gain customer feedback for new ideas. Some of the ones they implemented include: auto-save at 20 second intervals, widget-based features, drag and drop administration capabilities to make use of these widgets, themes, and the more back end reporting. As part of S3, administrators now have the ability to move ideas across categories and communities. You can also host Spigit on Sharepoint or on its own platform.

Spigit collects a lot of data in the process of managing innovation. Now users can generate custom reports with just a few clicks. These reports are then dynamically updated. Examples include most popular ideas, most popular participants, and what is the stage were each idea is currently located.  This can be used for diagnosis as it can track why certain ideas are getting stuck in particular stages of the process. Spigit also allows clients to benchmark their idea generation process against others based on their aggregated data.

We discussed a few client examples. Met Life has launched 60-day employee idea events. From the hundreds of ideas submitted they have selected six and these have a projected ROI of over 4 million in revenue. Southwest Airlines is using Spigit to management its employee suggestion process. The platform encourages cross-functional collaboration by facilitating transparency and enabling discussions among all work groups. The Spigit platform helps dictate a path for an idea to best become implemented and identifies the most valuable and top participants on the platform. Through an enhanced logical flow of communication between all work departments, new ideas are created along with solutions to problems that executives never knew existed. The ability to define, measure, analyze and implement ideas created a better understanding of process and improvement. I like the effort spent on process, as well as technology here.

Paul said that Spigit had its largest growth of bookings in Q2 2010. They saw a growth of 287 percent compared to the previous quarter and solid growth of 308 percent compared to the same quarter last year. The company doubled their customer base and grew its employee base by 107% since January 1, 2010. This is even more impressive given the general state of the economy.  It shows to me that there is always market for good ideas.  Now there is a market for better ways to management the growth of these ideas.

 

 

 

KM World Selects Darwin Ecosystem as a Trend-Setting Product for 2010

 In this September issue of KM World, Darwin Ecosystem’s Awareness Engine was selected a trend-setting product of 2010. Found on page 19 of the print version, Darwin Ecosystem (darwineco.com) is defined as: Awareness Engine - an enterprise solution that fetches and correlates its own Web 2.0 information sources, as well as WWW selected sources, to provide timely awareness about what is happening in the enterprise and the internet.  

We were fortunate to appear twice in this issue. There is also a front page article: Breakthrough from Darwin Ecosystem. It notes that Darwin “ applies chaos theory principles to reveal emerging patterns and correlations that accelerates the user’s understanding of what is happening about a given theme of interest regardless of popularity ranking.”  The Darwin Awareness Engine™ provides “a new and missing perspective. The Darwin interface provides an intuitive, interactive ScanClod (patent pending) that reveals correlated themes for contextual content filtering around the user’s topics of interest, a BuzzTape that displays themes that have high content acceleration within the past 24 hours, and the ability to save attractors(a term used in chaos theory) to monitor the evolution of favorite topics.”

We really appreciate this coverage. Thanks to KM World.

 

Enterprise Collaboration Architecture from Cisco that Goes Beyond Technology

Cisco provides a Collaboration Services Group that is not tied to Cisco products but helps clients with a vendor independent approach. Mark Eggleston, a member of this group I met at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference sent me a useful white paper by one of his colleagues, Joe Moran, Transforming Collaboration through Strategy and Architecture. The paper does not reference any Cisco products and is written to promote “an appreciation that technology is simply an enabler of collaboration, not the genesis of it.”

I found it full of good advice and very helpful for framing an enterprise collaboration effort. This is important since, as the paper mentions, Gartner predicts that through 2012 over 70 percent of these efforts will fail. Clearly help is needed. The paper begins with four trends that impact collaboration on an enterprise scale: borderless enterprises, workplace mobility, consumerization of IT, and information proliferation. In the latter case by 2020 digital data will grow to 44 times larger than it was in 2009. This is not surprising as I heard elsewhere that in 2009 more content was created than in the history of content and that the same thing had happen the year before.  So what can we do?

Most of what needs to be done is non-technical which was also a theme at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. Joe provides four key levers: strategy based on business issues, not technology, flexible architectural frameworks that can evolve with the organization, consideration of culture, and clear governance.  While these are good practices that have been around for a while, they are no less important now.  User adoption is a key success measure as the value of collaboration increase with the number of users.

Joe offers a detailed and comprehensive holistic collaboration architect that I will not attempt to convey here but it made sense to me. One of the issues I found helpful was the distinction between collaboration-enabled applications and collaboration-integrated applications. The former provide collaboration capabilities within the context of existing applications and likely require little training and have less adoption issues.  The latter are completely new applications created through mashups. The adoption curve is higher here but the impact may also be more meaningful.  Part of the strategy development process is to determine which of these options works best in what context. Joe goes on to suggest that planners ask if collaboration capabilities be exposed or embedded within other applications or services.

The three main steps of developing a collaboration strategy are defined as business alignment, process and organizational analysis, designing target business initiatives.  This makes sense, as does the rest of the paper.  If you are interested in enterprise collaboration, I suggest you take a look at this paper. There is much more detail that I conveyed here.

 

My Favorite Tweets for August 16 - 31 2010

Here is another in a series of posts that provide access to my favorite tweets that contain links to useful information.  Some of these I did to link to things I found useful and others are RTs that I want to save for the same reason. Since Twitter archiving is an oxymoron, I am now going to post my favorite links for the month so they can be easily accessed later. I will repeat this once or twice a month depending on volume.

I spot tested the reduced shortened urls and they all should work. I hope this is also useful for you.  Let me know your favorite tweets for the month.

Also see the Darwineco favorite tweets.

RT @lehawes: 15 Free Enterprise #Collaboration Tools http://is.gd/eM3HM. Good list, but, as always, there are some missing. Aug 30

RT @socialmedia2day: Social Media and Hurricane Katrina: What If? http://goo.gl/fb/ervVa #sm Aug 30

Does Your Language Shape How You Think? NYT http://nyti.ms/ccSh3y Aug 29

RT @jbowles: RT @humancapleague 25 Ways to Boost Workplace Brainpower in a Recession http://su.pr/553ZYX  Aug 29

RT @webtechman: RT @2cre8: 100 Sources of Blogging Inspiration http://ow.ly/2wlLs /via @ruhanirabin @LeyMarieCel @LXLEE  Aug 29

A photographer's perspective on New Orleans http://bit.ly/ctDzFL  Aug 28th

Applying the lessons of Enterprise 2.0 to Gov 2.0 by @amcafee and @digiphile great interview  Aug 27th

Useful post on creating a great customer experience? forum.com/blog/  Aug 27th

Top 19 Free Photo Sites For Bloggers http://bit.ly/c9wYNo  Aug 26th

good points from @roebot on Importance of context in Enterprise 2.0 mndt.ch/e20value  Aug 26th

Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime NYT http://nyti.ms/93iTla Aug 25

RT @ron_miller: For the record, I love @techmeme. It is hands down the best tech news aggregator around. Aug 24

Smart Companies Don’t Ignore Brand Mentions on Social Networks http://bit.ly/9RThoN via @SBoSM Aug 24

via @eric_andersen: #IBM'sanalytics helped Memphis PD reduce serious crime by 31%! http://j.mp/cYCuMe > saw this in 80s in Miami  Aug 24

RT @socialmedia2day: Top 19 Free Photo Sites For Bloggers http://goo.gl/fb/lVpux #sm  Aug 22nd

RT @robpatrob: Is Evil real ?- Is Mainstream Media - its Agent? http://bit.ly/95K9fn > good pts to consider  Aug 21st

social media and restaurants via @SBoSM http://bit.ly/cUTuFH  Aug 20th

via @MarkEggleston great paper on Transforming Collaboration Through Strategy and Architecture http://bit.ly/bzmUBh  Aug 20th

Customer Service Web Tales: Are You Ready? good pts via @adobe http://bit.ly/9GrBWo Aug 19

7 Great Social Media Websites and Blogs for Insightful Advice and News http://bit.ly/9IgEqk Aug 19

RT @WebMarketTools: 1 in 10 UK web users visit Twitter http://ow.ly/2rIQd and 93M globally Aug 19

Brands Can Learn a Lot if They Keep Tabs on Their Rivals' Feeds http://bit.ly/ayoX9Q  Aug 18th

RT @GeorgeDearing: "43% of US companies will be blogging by 2012" -- most badly -- http://bit.ly/bxT1CP  Aug 18th

Making sense of social-media ROI with Olivier Blanchard http://bit.ly/aXxPly via @SBoSM  Aug 17th

RT @stangarfield: Recording of Marcia Conner on Social Learning is available at http://www.divshare.com/download/12301077-07e #KMers  Aug 17th

RT @DearingGroup: 50 Worst Inventions - TIME http://bit.ly/aW270K > I would put Spam closer to top  Aug 16th

Delta Monitors Twitter to Remedy Customer Complaints http://bit.ly/bAU90y via @SBoSM  Aug 16th

RT @VMaryAbraham: Reading: Studying the Brain Off the Grid, Professors Find Clarity http://j.mp/cJxsj9 > attention management is key  Aug 16th

3 Ways Sourcing Pros Can Serve An Innovation Agenda from CIO mag http://bit.ly/c6P11H  Aug 16th

BostonGlobe on @Pistachio: and @oneforty http://bit.ly/d7tkNJ great story  Aug 15th

Sunset at Point Independence Inn Onset MA

I was at the Point Independence Inn in early August for the Onset Blues Festival. The light there is always remarkable. Here is late afternoon into the sun set. The next Sunday will cover dawn. You can enlarge the pictures by clicking on them.

             

Micro-landscape: White on White #1

Here is another in my series on micro-landscapes. These are paintings of details in a folded cloth. This is a 20" x 24" acrylic.

 
 

My Fast Forward Posts for August 2010

Here is the monthly listing of my Fast Forward blog posts. I find it helps me with an archive and hopefully is also useful to you. There is a separate category for these summaries in my right side column on this blog. There will be more in September.

TEDxBoston Session Notes: Part One

TEDxBoston Session Notes: Part Two

TEDxBoston Session Notes: Part Three

The Failure of Traditional Intranets

TV May Be the Next Social Media Checkin Target After Location

Majority of US Consumers Say They Will Engage in Online Crowd-sourcing

 

Google TV Is Getting Snubbed

I earlier asked the question: Will Google Succeed with TV Where Apple and Microsoft Have Fallen Short? Well it seems that Google is also having a rocky road, at least according to Rick Munarriz at the Motely Fool.  Rick noted that the Wall Street Journal reported on how Google is meeting some serious resistance from media giants in its plan to converge television with online video.

Apparently Google had no problem lining up A-list hardware partners. Intel is making the chips and Sony making high-def TVs with the Web-savvy software pre-installed. Logitech is even making set-top boxes for those who don't want to pay up for a new Sony television and Best Buy has agreed to stock the enhanced TVs and Logitech's boxes.

However, as Rick notes, these partnerships will not succeed unless Google can get the major networks to participate. Google TV aims to change thee way we consume TV content.  Instead of passively going along with e broadcast schedules, the platform can search the Web to find previous episodes, clips, and related content that is available to stream right away. It's easier than TiVo as this approach eliminates the need for any kind of prep work such as loading up a hard drive.

The networks have many reasons to not play along.  They make less money on streaming and Google TV will only take more traffic from the live shows with the ads. The Google approach gives to much power to the people and, of course, Google.  They are going to have to figure out a way to get the networks to play along if they are going to succeed where apple and Microsoft have not. 

My App Gap Posts for August 2010

Here are my AppGap posts for August. I am also writing in another Corante blog, FastForward (see right side bar for links), The AppGap posts began toward the end of January 2008.  Here, I am primarily doing product commentaries with a few other things thrown in. Below are the ones for August. There will be more in September.

PBworks Offers Collaborative CRM

EchoSign Brings Multi-Language Support to e-Signatures

Cisco Successfully Concludes Second I-Prize Competition

Spigit Provides Version S3 as Market Matures for Idea and Innovation Management

RightNow Adds Enhanced Mobile Connections to its Customer Experience Suite

Perfect Search Addresses Major Issues in Enterprise Back Up Search