A three year history of Web 2.0 - Business Week

Sometimes the Internet moves fast and sometimes it flutters and dances more like a butterfly making it almost impossible to figure out where it will go next. The May 22 issue of Business Week cover story is Beyond Blogs. It is a follow-up to a 2005 story, just three years ago. At that time they said: "'Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out,' we warned, adding: 'Catch up...or catch you later.'"

They took their own advice and created Blogspotting.net It is still in use. The current post is about a future BW article asking customers for ideas about what should be covered and asking for input. 0.1: We tell our readers what we think they want to know. 2.0: We work with our readers to assure our content is relevant to their interests.

Three years ago, we wrote a big story—but missed a bigger one. We focused on blogs as a new form of printing press, one that turned Gutenberg's economics on its head, making everyone a potential publisher. ... But blogs, it turns out, are just one of the do-it-yourself tools to emerge on the Internet. Vast social networks such as Facebook and MySpace offer people new ways to meet and exchange information. Sites like Linkedin help millions forge important work relationships and alliances. New applications pop up every week. While only a small slice of the population wants to blog, a far larger swath of humanity is eager to make friends and contacts, to exchange pictures and music, to share activities and ideas.

This can be disturbing for top management, who are losing control, at least in the traditional sense. ... But there's an upside to the loss of control. Ambitious workers use these tools to land new deals and to assemble global teams for collaborative projects. The potential for both better and worse is huge, and it's growing—and since 2005 the technologies involved extend far beyond blogs. So our first fix is to lose "blogs" from our headline. The revised title: "Social Media Will Change Your Business."

We can relate to this. Our focus is Enterprise 2.0 but the interface between what's happening within enterprises and what is happening in the rest of the world is blurring. Executives are publicly blogging, McKinsey & Company is on Facebook and one of America's largest banks is represented on Facebook by a branch in the mid-west, not by headquarters PR. Social media with the emphasis on media rather than technology makes a lot of sense. On the other hand, there are productivity changes, HR changes and contractor interface changes that are as important to the enterprise as the more visible marketplace changes.

Since our story, major investors and corporations have focused on the profit potential of social sites. Like Baron's Twitter crowd writ large, they promise relationships, millions of them. Such media could be worth a fortune. Strike that: They'd better be. Over the past three years, tech and media companies have been opening up their checkbooks for these properties. Google gobbled up YouTube for $1.65 billion; NewsCorp bought MySpace for $588 million; and Microsoft bought a pricey slice of Facebook that put a $15 billion valuation on the company. Venture firms, meanwhile, have been racing to fund scores of social media startups.

Sometimes it is easier to guess where we are going when we have the perspective of history. When a three year period provides that kind of perspective, you know things are happening fast and fluttering in multiple directions. You can read the complete story at:Beyond Blogs

2.0 vs. 1.0 - The Amazing Money Machine

An article in the June 2008 Atlantic Monthly by Joshua Green describes Barack Obama’s Amazing Money Machine. We have selected only the parts that reflect Web and Enterprise 2.0 as contrast to the 1.0 approach of Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

In 2004, Mark Gorenberg, a key player in this story, started applying Silicon Valley’s networking strategies and, “By the end of the 2004 campaign, Gorenberg had surpassed all the old names to become Kerry’s biggest fund-raiser. Gorenberg teamed up with a friend, Nadine North, ... to pursue a new goal in 2006: helping Democrats win back the House of Representatives ... By November, Gorenberg and North were among the top Democratic fund-raisers nationwide.

“Barack Obama was new to most Americans when he entered the presidential race, in February 2007. … What ultimately transformed the presidential race—what swept Obama past his rivals to dizzying new levels of campaign wealth—was not the money that poured in from Silicon Valley but the technology and the ethos. The campaign’s focal point is My.BarackObama.com, which has made better use of technology than its rivals since the beginning.

"When My.BarackObama.com launched, at the start of the campaign, its lineage was clear. The site is a social-networking hub centered on the candidate and designed to give users a practically unlimited array of ways to participate in the campaign. You can register to vote or start your own affinity group, with a listserv for your friends. You can download an Obama news widget to stay current, or another one that scrolls Obama’s biography, with pictures, in an endless loop. You can click a “Make Calls” button, receive a list of phone numbers, and spread the good news to voters across the country, right there in your home. You can get text-message updates on your mobile phone and choose from among 12 Obama-themed ring tones, so that each time Mom calls you will hear Barack Obama cry 'Yes we can!' and be reminded that Mom should register to vote, too.

“'We’ve tried to bring two principles to this campaign,' Rospars told me. 'One is lowering the barriers to entry and making it as easy as possible for folks who come to our Web site. The other is raising the expectation of what it means to be a supporter. It’s not enough to have a bumper sticker. We want you to give five dollars, make some calls, host an event. If you look at the messages we send to people over time, there’s a presumption that they will organize.'

"The true killer app on My.BarackObama.com is the suite of fund-raising tools. You can, of course, click on a button and make a donation, or you can sign up for the subscription model, as thousands already have, and donate a little every month. You can set up your own page, establish your target number, pound your friends into submission with e-mails to pony up, and watch your personal fund-raising 'thermometer' rise. 'The idea,' Rospars says, 'is to give them the tools and have them go out and do all this on their own.' … The Clinton campaign belatedly sought to mimic Obama’s Internet success, and has raised what in any other context would be considered significant money online—but nothing like Obama’s totals, in dollars or donors. John McCain’s online fund-raising has been abysmal.

“ 'What’s amazing,' says Peter Leyden of the New Politics Institute, 'is that Hillary built the best campaign that has ever been done in Democratic politics on the old model—she raised more money than anyone before her, she locked down all the party stalwarts, she assembled an all-star team of consultants, and she really mastered this top-down, command-and-control type of outfit. And yet, she’s getting beaten by this political start-up that is essentially a totally different model of the new politics.

"The alchemy of social networking and the presidential race has given Obama claim to some of the most fabulous numbers in politics: 750,000 active volunteers, 8,000 affinity groups, and 30,000 events. But the most important number, and the clue to how Obama’s machine has transformed the contours of politics, is the number of people who have contributed to his campaign—particularly the flood of small donors. Much of Clinton’s haul, and McCain’s, too, has come from the sort of people accustomed to being wooed in the living room, and Obama initially relied on them, too. But while his rivals continued to depend on big givers, Obama gained more and more small donors, until they finally eclipsed the big ones altogether. In February, the Obama campaign reported that 94 percent of their donations came in increments of $200 or less, versus 26 percent for Clinton and 13 percent for McCain. Obama’s claim of 1,276,000 donors through March is so large that Clinton doesn’t bother to compete; she stopped regularly providing her own number last year.

“'If the typical Gore event was 20 people in a living room writing six-figure checks,' Gorenberg told me, 'and the Kerry event was 2,000 people in a hotel ballroom writing four-figure checks, this year for Obama we have stadium rallies of 20,000 people who pay absolutely nothing, and then go home and contribute a few dollars online.' Obama himself shrewdly capitalizes on both the turnout and the connectivity of his stadium crowds by routinely asking them to hold up their cell phones and punch in a five-digit number to text their contact information to the campaign—to win their commitment right there on the spot.”

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A couple of lessons here:

• The people driving the Web 2.0 approach started early and learned fast. This is their third success and each built on the prior one.
• It is partly the technology but mostly it is a 2.0 relationship -- community, collaboration, conversation -- between the product – political candidate – and the market – voters .

This is not the complete story of the 2008 race to the Whitehouse. Complex undertakings almost never have just one story line. But two dominate players using 0.1 approaches are meeting unpredictable difficulty in dominating a 0.2 player. You cna read the complete article in the June 2008 Atlantic Monthly.

Is there a moral here for your enterprise?

Enterprise 2.0: Presentation

We like a combination of words and pictures so we put together a PowerPoint presentation. Enterprise 2.0 What is it? What's Next? in the sense of what is next for your organization.

| View | Upload your own

It is posted on slideshare.net and you can download the PowerPoint file from About in the right hand column of this post.

In a survey titled:How businesses are using Web 2.0: A McKinsey Global Survey, McKinsey & Company used a similar structure and found that among their respondents: 70% are using Web 2.0 to interface with customers, 51% to interface with suppliers and partners, and 75% to manage collaboration internally.

IBM Social Computing Guidelines

One of the things we observed in our post about Facebook is that members are asked for the name of their employer. The same is true for Linkedin and a many other social networks and some multi-participant blogs. Your employees are representing you whether they intend to or not and whether you want them to or not. IBM addressed this head-on and a set of guidelines were developed and have been updated.

The most interesting aspect of the IBM guidelines is the context in which they were created:

[E]merging online collaboration platforms are fundamentally changing the way IBMers work and engage with each other, clients and partners.

IBM is increasingly exploring how online discourse through social computing can empower IBMers as global professionals, innovators and citizens. These individual interactions represent a new model: not mass communications, but masses of communicators. …

As an innovation-based company, we believe in the importance of open exchange and learning—between IBM and its clients, and among the many constituents of our emerging business and societal ecosystem. The rapidly growing phenomenon of user-generated web content—blogging, social web-applications and networking—are emerging important arenas for that kind of engagement and learning.

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IBM Social Computing Guidelines

Blogs, wikis, social networks, virtual worlds and social media

In the spring of 2005, IBMers used a wiki to create a set of guidelines for all IBMers who wanted to blog. These guidelines aimed to provide helpful, practical advice—and also to protect both IBM bloggers and IBM itself, as the company sought to embrace the blogosphere. Since then, many new forms of social media have emerged. So we turned to IBMers again to re-examine our guidelines and determine what needed to be modified. The effort has broadened the scope of the existing guidelines to include all forms of social computing.

Below are the current and official "IBM Social Computing Guidelines," which continue to evolve as new technologies and social networking tools become available. available here

For the skeptics in our audience, the final admonition is:

Don't forget your day job. You should make sure that your online activities do not interfere with your job or commitments to customers.

1.0 vs 2.0, History, and Security

The impact of Web 2.0

A great deal of what we are calling Web 1.0 will probably be around for a long time. But the current presidential primary campaign is beginning to show us how 1.0 will be impacted by 2.0 in some areas.

Senator Obama is running a 2.0 campaign whereas Senator Clinton is closer to 1.0. For the first quarter of 2008, Obama, “brought in nearly as much as the $26 million raised by Democratic front-runner Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York. But his base of 100,000 supporters was double that of Clinton, with a reported 50,000." People who are giving money are part of committed community which means his efforts got as much money and more commitment.

“Leading Silicon Valley insiders noted that Obama raised nearly $7 million on the Internet thanks to an aggressive effort involving bloggers, social networking and other activities that far outpaced the endeavors of other leading Democratic candidates. It includes 4,000 My.BarackObama.com groups, 9,000 Obama bloggers and 50,000 online donors.” SFGate

His Web site is a great example of EW2 with ways to engage the by-standers and the active participants. Lots of news. Want to show your support? You can click and have your own fundraising page on his site:

Your own personal fundraising page will put the financial future of this campaign in your hands. You set your own goal, you do the outreach, and you get the credit for the results. Your personal fundraising page can include your own photo and testimonial, and a thermometer that will show your progress toward your goal in real time.

The site also includes links to 16 Web 2.0 social networking sites including Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Digg and YouTube.

Background

For those of you who are interested in diving deeper into the changes that are occurring, we recommend an article that was written in 2005 – in our real lives that not very long ago but in this one it was just after the dawning: What Is Web 2.0. It was written by Tim O’Reilly who is credited with creating the term “Web 2.0.” A couple of quotes:

If an essential part of Web 2.0 is harnessing collective intelligence, turning the web into a kind of global brain, the blogosphere is the equivalent of constant mental chatter in the forebrain, the voice we hear in all of our heads. It may not reflect the deep structure of the brain, which is often unconscious, but is instead the equivalent of conscious thought. And as a reflection of conscious thought and attention, the blogosphere has begun to have a powerful effect.

The world of Web 2.0 is also the world of what Dan Gillmor calls "we, the media," a world in which "the former audience", not a few people in a back room, decides what's important.

Security

In a February 2007 article, titled Most Business Tech Pros Wary About Web 2.0 Tools In Business, Information Week addressed a number of concerns. The concerns security were summed up in one paragraph:

Wells Fargo employees are embracing hundreds of blogs to brainstorm with one another and interact with customers. Yet on another Enterprise 2.0 front, integrated search, the company has limited employees' ability to search across data repositories because of the complex authorization schemes needed to keep people from accessing information they shouldn't. About 80% of development and deployment time for customer-facing and internal tools is spent on security measures such as authentication and authorization, says Steve Ellis, executive VP of Wells Fargo's wholesale solutions group.

What’s in Your [Corporate] Facebook?

A couple of weeks ago we got a message from Mckinsey & Company regarding our online subscription to The McKinsey Quarterly that also mentioned that the company now has a page on Facebook. If Facebook has come of age for a prestigious company like McKinsey, we needed to check it out.

Facebook is an example of a Web 2.0 application that is being embraced by enterprises which makes it part of EW2. McKinsey is an outstanding example of this adoption.

One thing led to another and we did some research. We began with a list of the Fortune 1000 companies by industry plus lists of accounting, management consulting, and law firms. We looked at about 75 Facebook pages; just the largest firms in their respective industries.

Facebook started on college campuses which are communities of your future employees. Many former members of those communities are now in your company. When they registered for Facebook they were asked to list where they work. We only looked at large companies, but we didn’t find a single site where a company had fewer than 100 employees on Facebook.

Several companies had excellent examples of conversations for future employment, but we were surprised by how few. All of your employees on Facebook are communicators and probably proud to be affiliated with your company; the kind of employees you would like to keep. They’re one of your internal communities.

One major accounting firm only has a careers page but it includes information about and links to their corporate responsibility activities, inclusion programs, key questions applicants want answered, and a discussion board about working at the firm that has 132 topics. They have 14,099 fans; that is a large community by any measure.

We found several page sponsored by a subsidiary. Two were from South Africa and one from Hong Kong – these were all American based companies. In none of these cases did the US company have a page. For one of the largest banks, the closest thing they had to a corporate page was one sponsored by a branch in the mid-west.

A common application (provide by Facebook) is a place to list corporate events like trade shows where friends and fans can meet you and get more information. A couple of these offered opportunities to raise questions the company would like to have addressed at presentations and one even had a discussion area to collect opinions and help address some anticipated questions.

Enterprise 2.0, particularly relates to public communities. It looks like it would be a natural for public relations firms to be participating. We did not find a single large firm with a Facebook page other than the one from a Hong Kong office.

A games manufacturer has a list of release dates for new and updated games beyond the end of 2008 and provides downloads of some of the art work. In an earlier assignment we helped a credit card company deal with providing art work for their retailers’ Web sites to protect the card company’s image because Web site developers were borrowing artwork wherever they could find it and the quality was often unacceptable. The games company has a solution.

There was one linked page that is part of a worldwide communication strategy for the company’s 5,000 dealers around the world. The site appears to have been developed by the dealers, not the company.

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One thing we have learned very fast is you cannot get up to speed in EW2 quickly. It is simply too different, too varied, and too extensively to understand and apply quickly. The companies that are in the shallow end of the pool today are learning and some of them are applying what they are learning very well. Perhaps the two best examples we found were Symantec and Ernst & Young Careers.

There are communities out there that are using your name. Most of them to your advantage, but none as well as they could. What’s in your [Corporate] Facebook pages?

Where do you start?

First, Link to Facebook at http://facebook.com and then put your company’s name in the search box and see what you find. Second, get a list of your competitors and collaborators in terms of your public markets and your contract relationships (dealers, suppliers, etc.) Find out what they are doing on Facebook and see what you can learn. Third, pick your targets. This should involve collaboration between marketing, public relations, HR, and IT with a bit of legal and strategic planning thrown in. Fourth, establish a presence on Facebook; this is not high tech. Let your employees know what you are planning and seek their collaboration. Fifth develop a strategy for each area and begin to execute it.

Facebook is a process, not an event. If you are not willing to stay with it, don’t start. Stale pages say “We don’t care about you any more.”

Enterprise 2.0 is 20% technology and 80% culture. You cannot put old wine in new bottles and succeed. You need to focus on communities, participate in conversations and collaborate with your communities to produce results that work for them and you. Facebook is one of the places you can begin to do this.

Change enablers, not drivers

We did some market research using Linkedin. The question: Most of what is described as Web 2.0 is happening in the public part of the Internet, e.g., FaceBook, MySpace, blogs and wikis. The capabilities are visible on the horizon and starting to move into the enterprise and then to expand to the extended enterprise. Is the culture ready to embrace wider collaboration?

We got a lot of good answers but two deserve wider distribution [Our notes in brackets]:

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… As an auditor, I like the natural documentation that occurs within these systems. But I can see where legal would struggle with them. In either case, I'd always opt to house them internally so controls can be implemented and personal privacy can be maintained. [That would probably work for material the auditors are interested in.] Allan

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My experience with "external" groupware solutions is somewhat mixed. Since most of my management has been of technical staff, bear in mind that my viewpoints are based upon this. To start answering your question, I believe it's important to subdivide "The Culture" into two groups: The Proletariat Culture and The Management Culture.

The Proletariat

At times, it seems that any time an organization imposes a collaborative tool upon the proletariat, the aforementioned tool is judged harshly by the proletariat and untrusted. Perhaps the feeling that big brother is watching them and recording their every interaction makes people less likely to engage in some of the witty banter which makes the social aspects of group activities more appealing. I doubt every meeting ever held has been 100% work-related. I can certainly recall a few from my distant past which were quite productive, but not entirely focused on work topics. These stress releases are an important part of the bonding experience that makes groupware the synergistic tool that it is.

Perhaps the feeling that the decision for the groupware tool was based upon pricing, invasiveness, politics, executive boondoggles, or "some new management fad" keeps the people from truly embracing it. Or, more insidiously, perhaps those people who intentionally hide their knowledge or actions, want to keep their knowledge or actions "off the record".

If your workforce is likely to experience any of these reactions to the selection of a collaborative tool, you absolutely need to address those issues before you could bother considering such an approach to improve collaboration. Software only automates what you already have and makes it happen faster. If your organization's social networks are diseased, social software will expedite its demise.

Management

If your goal is simply to give people a tool in which they could collaborate, have them just start considering, themselves, what they should use. This will most certainly foster its rapid adoption and widespread use. If remote, time-displaced, or part-time workers can get up to speed on current topics and offer their participation where they otherwise might not, it may catch on.

However, if management's goal is a universal "fix" for poor collaboration, to impose collaboration where there is none already, or to impose a given communication tool as THE tool for Knowledge Management (KM) knowledge bases and subsequent data mining, they are setting themselves up for a rude awakening.

Processes only work with the compliance of the people. And people MAY not feel that working in a collaborative tool is the best way for them to collaborate. Some may prefer the immediate, yet remote, interactions of Instant Messaging. Others, with the luxury of physical proximity to one another, may get up from their e-mails or IM window and actually go to someone's space and speak with them, at length, about the topic at hand. Still others will need to see things physically, and want to whiteboard their thoughts and ideas while they're still forming -- without the fear that their incomplete and perhaps partially flawed ideas will be committed, for all eternity, to an electronic storage facility.

So, the difficulty is most certainly NOT in the implementation of the technology -- that's simple. The difficulty is in getting what you want out of it. If you want very little out of it, why even bother? If you want a lot out of it, then it's worth it to spend some time understanding what the target is, before using a piece of software to accomplish it. Perhaps the answer is already in place, waiting to be used/hired/fired/promoted. David

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We agree with David that Enterprise 2.0 is an enabler, it will allow and encourage people to collaborate and communicate, it will not drive them to it.

It's about time

In an article in Forbes, George Gilder said: “In an age of affluence, life spans become the residual scarcity against which the values of policies, companies, and commodities are measured. The question becomes, Are you a life-span extender or a life-spam vendor? ... the Internet now casts a shadow over the entire established information economy. Just as the lightspeed limit opens large opportunities for companies supplying new network computers and topologies, so the life-span limit opens large opportunities for companies that focus on saving the customer's time.”

We like the acronym: ROTI – Return On Time Invested – to describe this.

The people you want to connect with have plenty to do. They are not looking for something to do in addition to what they are doing. They are looking for an alternative to what they are doing that will make them more effective, informed, entertained, connected, etc. One measure of the value of what you provide is how well you do that quicker.

Enterprise 2.0 provides opportunities to reduce the time it takes customers and employees to find what they want, do what they need to, and move to the next item on their to-do list. We now rely on our email system to sort our mail, toss out the junk, and help us deal with what we have time for now. But the first time you do this you have to learn how to set up the filters and then you have to keep them current. That takes time. If you get a lot of mail, that’s time well spent. If not, the ROTI is too high.

In building this blog we have been eating from the EW2 candy bowl and the learning curve is making us a bit woozy. Each new tool takes some linear time to learn and tailor. The time to learn and tailor limits the pace of adoption, but those who invest their time wisely are empowered to do more. Life is full of trade-offs.

EW2 sites and other tools that are well built in terms of ease of use and value delivered will optimize ROTI and justify the time it takes the user to use it. Anything less will be resisted by employees or cast aside by customers.

Where do you start?

Don’t eat all the candy at once; you'll get sick.

Enterprise 2.0 (EW2) offers a large number of ways to collaborate and/or carry on a conversation. The technology is relatively simple. The culture that defines when and how to use the technology is evolving. Fortunately you can use the Internet to discover what works in the blogsphere and then select what will work for you and your specific communities of customers, team members, projects, etc.

Start at the shallow end

Like learning to swim, start at the shallow end, learn the basics, test the water. This blog is designed to help you learn something about swimming so at this point we are at the shallow end.

In our post about Definitions we drew distinctions between three types of EW2 applications: Internet or customer conversations, extranet or systems for collaboration with vendors, suppliers, business customers, etc. using secure connections, and intranet or internal systems for knowledge sharing and collaboration. Each has a different starting point.

You could start all three tomorrow but there is enough overlap that a wiser course is to start them sequentially. Your corporation’s circumstances will dictate what to do first and how fast you should proceed. When you took swimming lessons you probably didn’t try to swim from the shallow end to the deep end in your first lesson.

Internet

What’s happening in your market place? What are your direct competitors and others who may be competing for your customers’ dollars doing? You don’t have to be first but you do not want to be a follower who has to struggle to differentiate yourself from a pack.

Put together a team including IT, advertising, public relations, legal and any customer contact organizations like call centers or help desks. Find what they know about EW2, your competitors and customers. Have them look at Web 2.0 systems outside the corporate world and particularly at the ways corporations are using them, e.g., Facebook and MySpace. What are the opportunities to get useful feedback from our customers? Should we add simple feed back options to our Web site as a way to start exploring this. Task IT to explore the software systems you can acquire when you know what you want to do.

Extranet

What’s happening in your supply chain? Depending on which industry you are in it will range from not much to some rapidly developing solutions for orders, catalogs, payments, shipping, shipment management, returns, etc.

Have a meeting with IT, your buyers, your business-to-business sales people, your industrial advertising and PR group. Find out what is happening and their thoughts about what your corporation is doing and or should do. There may be things in place you don’t know about.

Look for ways to share knowledge between the Internet and the extranet group, particularly at the level of the technology and its care and feeding.

Intranet

What’s happening in your corporation? How could you do a better job of collecting knowledge that your people have about markets, systems, competitors, etc.?

Talk with your CIO. Ask her/him what is already in place? Of course you want to hear about the formal projects but it is a pretty good bet that there are informal and pilot applications already in place. The corporation already has the technology to support pilot level applications of EW2. Your employees can download the software and get set up I a matter of hours and some of them probably have. There is anecdotal evidence of this type of activity showing up in the blogsphere.

You may already have some demonstration projects you can use to help you understand the benefits. If you do, exploit them. If not, have your CIO or another C-level executive that is responsible for big projects identify a project team that has expressed interest. If they have identified the software they want, and there is no good reason not to, get that. If they do not, get the CIO to work with them to make a selection. Do two or three. They are cheap and this is the best way to learn what will work in your corporation. But NOT what is shown in the cartoon.

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Learn fast, learn cheap, stay in the shallow end of the pool until you know the conversations and/or collaborations you want to start and the actions you want them to produce.

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+ Short YouTube videos that explain [topic minutes:seconds]: RSS 3:43 Social Networking 1:47 Wikis 3:52 and Social Bookmarking 3:25 in plain English.

+ For more Web 2.0 cartoons go to Geek & Poke