Wikipedia turned 10 this year. It’s fabulously useful. Wikipedia has upwards of 3.8 million articles, and that’s just the English version – if you don’t dig/read English, you can check out one of the 269 other languages in which Wikipedia is available. Wikipedia has also provided a shining example of how awesome crowdsourcing really is…and how much a dedicated bunch of volunteers can do. Wikipedia remains a non-profit, supported largely by the contributions of users (and some prescient foundations and companies.)
So, what lessons can a for-profit enterprise learn from Wikipedia’s success? How can we make wikis work for us?
Imagine giving your organization a multi-directional communications platform that is the ultimate resource on any topic related to your business that your people think is relevant enough to share and discuss. Now imagine that all the good stuff that everyone in your organization knows (or made or drew or wrote or videotaped) is all right there, ready to be used by other team members, and vendors and customers, depending on the goals of your wiki and who has access.
Wikis are an amazing knowledge-sharing tool that enable organizations to benefit from anyone who cares enough – or is ambitious enough – to contribute. Wikis should be set up to allow anyone inside the company to contribute. That way, they tap the intellectual capital available at all levels of the organization.
A well-trafficked wiki offers peerless research opportunities for the organization’s leaders. If you want to know what is interesting to your employees, look at what is going into the wiki. And wikis are one way to establish two-way communications within an organization, on a broader scale than email could ever accomplish.
Wikis have a few downsides, too – which I’ll cover in Part II.
I answered a question on Quora recently and it got me thinking about what companies using social media tools internally really need in terms of analytics.
So, your company decided to try out Chatter, or maybe you built a wiki. And naturally you want to measure your ROI. There are lots of great analytics tools out there, right?
Not so fast. What do you want to measure?
A successful social media ‘campaign’ within an enterprise can have outcomes quite dissimilar from those resulting from a successful external social media campaign. There are tools out there that do a great job of measuring transactions, sure. There are even good tools for measuring some subtler stuff, like reach and influence. But if you’re using social media tools inside an enterprise, you probably want to measure their effect on culture and performance. That means collecting and analyzing a different data set that the one you’d seek if you were, say, trying to figure out how many more widgets your Facebook page helped sell…or even, how much your brand awareness increased as a result of your Twitbookspace campaign.
What if you want to measure how your new tool or platform is doing driving internal collaboration? Or knowledge-sharing?
You can measure knowledge by quizzing participants on topics. But what if they’re sharing knowledge on topics you haven’t already identified? And how do you track increases in collaboration?
There’s a ton of room in this field, dear reader – are you entrepreneurial programmers listening? Sure, Jive bought Radian6, clearly someone is already thinking about these issues. But as far as I can see, there’s still plenty of opportunity out there to develop tools to do this kind of analysis. Because, as Rick Ridder likes to say, “If you can’t count it, it didn’t happen.” (I used to work for Rick. He’s forgotten more about research than I will probably ever know.)
So, get on it, IT people…we need more ways to figure out what kind of difference we’re making with these cool new toys.
Are you one of those people who is OUTRAGED when Apple sells out the iPad2 at the store, leaving you to buy one from scalpers at an exorbitant markup?
I can’t really get too worked up about scalping, myself. It seems to me that if the scalpers are willing to go to the trouble of standing on line all night to get their hands on the devices before they run out, they should be able to profit from it. Yes, it’s a drag to pay more, but did you really want to spend the entire night camped out in front of the Apple store? The scalpers actually added value. Pay up.
Part of the beauty of social media is that it makes it so easy to collaborate – on a wiki, on a document, even a co-authored blog. Enterprises that are trying to leverage Web 2.0 business tools need to figure out how to handle the ‘added value’ issue. Traditional companies are used to giving one department, or employee, or a well-defined set of participants, the ‘credit’ for a finished work product. But in an age when they are launching tools that lean towards crowdsourcing, better ways to allocate ‘credit’ have to be established.
People won’t want to add value if they’re seen as ‘scalpers’, just profiting off someone else’s work. So are you going to adapt your culture to a more collaborative model, where ‘credit’ is not as important as being engaged? Or are you going to build widgets into your social business suite that will track engagement and participation, so that credit can be spread equitably among all those who contribute to an outcome?
Jive does this brilliantly, and delivers the results in a way that ‘credit’ is given quite democratically. Search for a topic within Jive, and the search engine will return names (and profile photos!) of individuals within your organization that have contributed productively on that topic in the past.
What other good widgets are out there that allocate credit for collaboration?
Why are so many big-company people, in every function, behind the curve in adopting social media and putting it to work in a business context?
Think about who the early adopters were: small businesses. New businesses. Entrepreneurs, consultants, agencies, non-profits, self-published authors, gamers. All these folks were out there experimenting with Twitter, building Facebook pages, blogging away, tinkering with all the new tools that popped up.
Meanwhile, corporate policymakers (yes, that’s YOU, IT and HR and corporate communications and C-suite!) were busy blocking access to social media or setting up their systems to tell internal users accessing those sites that their activity would be monitored.
Big Brother is watching you.
So of course the wise and ambitious stayed away from all that stuff at work. When they went off the clock, they mostly got interested in social media as a toy.
Cut your team some slack, and give them some extra time in their day to experiment, and to investigate the potentially useless as well as the obviously useful. Then remember the social media gap the next time you think about setting up an annoying, small-minded policy.
This was the year that social entrepreneurship crossed into the IT geek consciousness of South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi), with the advent of Good Capitalist party (info, report). Good Capitalist, attended by nearly 2000 people, by some reports, was created by social media / social entrepreneur crossover star-child Martin Montero, aka the ubiquitous @montero in the #socent world on Twitter. The party was celebrated with gusto by the social entrepreneurship community, heralding their acceptance by “the cool kids.”
Triple Pundit reported on a different angle of this intersection at SXSWi, and called it the “Big Green Disconnect” between tech and sustainability communities, saying “the few green related panels were under attended and often rudimentary,” suggesting that each community is talking a different language. Our friend and advisor Bill Shutkin had a similar, less politic rant over dinner a few weeks back, along the lines of “do we really need another Twitter app while our energy and financial systems are in crisis?.” Both comparisons were predated by Silicon Valley tech guru Tim O’Reilly’s call in 2008 to “work on something that matters,” where he beat a drum of “create more value than you extract.”
So, now the meme has been released, and some cool kids in technology (largely a comfortable-if-not-affluent crowd from a global perspective) think social entrepreneurship is the next big thing. Mostly, this is good. Right? Continue reading
Our great friends, the inspiring change agents at the Unreasonable Institute have been doing some excellent interviews with social entrepreneurs and impact investors on the SoCap blog ever since the event ended last August.
During what any humble, reflexively sarcastic entrepreneur would think of as a week with no other good interview candidates, we got an email from Teju Ravilochan, co-founder of Unreasonable, asking if we’d be game for the experience.
The results turn out pretty well, it seems (you might need to turn the volume up, or else the onboard speakers on this aging computer are loosing their umpf).
We’ve been party to lots of discussion about “who owns what” in the social enterprise space, from metrics to concepts, and from online profiles to the intellectual property within the discussions. And frankly, they have all been a little bit depressing.
With the advent of the new Denver section, word came around (big tip o’ the hat to @BrettGreene) that HuffPo needed bloggers on the local scene. Now, a couple weeks later, I’m a published HuffPo blogger. I’ll be focusing on what I focus on in general — sustainable enterprise, impact investing and transformative IT, with a deeper recognition of all that’s happening in the Front Range of Colorado.
First post is about the GSSE at CSU, an awesome program that I strongly endorse. If you’d be so kind, please head over and write a quick comment, to raise the profile of the sustainable enterprise in Colorado on their radar.
Colorado State University has an incredible program within the Business School — Global Social and Sustainable Enterprise — that “seeks to provide sustainable enterprise solutions to some of the most stubborn issues of our time including poverty, disease, malnutrition and environmental degradation… [equipping students] with the tools and network to become a global social entrepreneur, where the bottom lines are people, planet and profit. This concentration is in the business of creating a better world, improving the lives of people, while building profitable ventures.”
One of many laudable aspects of the program is the 50/50 ratio of US and domestic students in each cohort. As we learned recently at their annual kickoff celebration — hosted at sustainable business paragon New Belgium Brewery, this translates into teams with experience on multiple continents, often boasting 10 languages spoken on an individual project.
Six prospective companies presented their plans as the program’s second cohort. We expect one or two of these to become strong companies after graduation, if not before. Here are very brief summaries of the concepts: Continue reading
