nuance intelligence

So you want to build a wiki. Of course you do – good wikis are great knowledge-sharing tools and are a fantastic way to use social media to measurably improve your organization’s capacity for collaboration.

Not so fast. Wikis have downsides.

Here’s a list of the top 5 problems faced by aspiring corporate wiki-builders.

1) Content vs. participation. A brand-new wiki is an empty box. There are no articles or topics, and nothing much to see. So you have to populate the wiki with good content. But it’s hard to get people to visit the wiki (and populate it) without having some reason for them to visit the wiki. Like good content. See the problem?

2) Maintenance.  Like a garden, wikis need someone to organize content, help users by adding internal links and structure, and ‘prune’ where necessary in the rare cases where inappropriate content ends up in the wiki (or in common cases where a bit of editing will offer clarity and brevity.) So you will need to add, if not head-count, then at least a new task for someone in the organization – the ‘wiki gardener.’ That person will have to have a rare hybrid combination of social, technical and writing skill. The more traffic the wiki gets, the busier the gardener gets.

3) Longevity. Wikis, like websites, lose their relevance if the information they provide isn’t kept up to date. Most organizations will have more wiki ‘readers’ than contributors, so if you want a diverse selection of content, you’ll have to go ask for it from time to time. You’ll also have ask knowledgeable people to read it for accuracy and quality.

4) The IT side can be messy. Your organization’s existing content management system might offer wiki functionality. If so, and you are only looking for an enterprise wiki, you can vastly simplify wiki construction by using what’s there (if the functionality meets your needs.) If not, you are looking at an IT challenge at some level.

5) Buy-in. If you’ve gotten this far, you’ve probably correctly concluded that you aren’t going to be able to do this by yourself. Correct! You will need willing participants in many parts of your organization who will be willing to contribute to the wiki, as well as buy-in from various departments (IT, corporate communications, legal, and sometimes HR.)

If you still want a wiki, Part III will talk about how to get started.

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?

1)      Knowledge is crucial for success, so share knowledge. Wikis are amazing knowledge-sharing tools. Be sure to encourage users to log in or sign their contributions in some way…anonymity breeds carelessness.

2)      There’s a Powerpoint deck around someplace on that topic. How many duplicative presentations, white papers, sets of instructions and so forth do you have cluttering up your servers? How many people enjoy re-inventing the wheel? The reason wikis are a cool place to store stuff like this is that once people get into the habit of checking the wiki on a topic, they will begin to remember to load stuff on the wiki…and then you have an efficient way to share without everyone having to try to remember who made that presentation on accounting trends last August. It’s right there in the wiki, under Accounting!

3)      That wicked smart but really quiet guy in the engineering department has a brilliant idea. Not everyone is an extrovert, and some of the world’s great introverts are more comfortable speaking up digitally than live and in person at the company town hall meeting. Wikis let you capture those ideas and share them broadly.

4)      It’s about time you tiptoed into social business. Wikis are social media tools if you build and manage them correctly. “Correctly” means everyone gets access and everyone can edit and comment, not just the management team. Even better, wikis are directed collaboration tools, as opposed to chat rooms or other vehicles that encourage ‘social’ but don’t have a clear business purpose.

There are probably more reasons your company needs a wiki. Got any additions?

When I first met Daniel Pinchbeck, about a year ago, and I heard he was working on a 2012 movie, I thought it would be another pedantic hand-wringing, or worse, like the recent The Portal, a Pink Floyd video gone horribly long.  However, Pinchbeck, the co-founder of Reality Sandwich and Evolver.net appears to have put together something more intelligent and practical, as this trailer suggests.

Perhaps you’re sick of the topic — it sure can be hard to take any given day.  But if you’re open to a rational discussion of the evolution of our species, this may be one channel to which you ought to stay tuned.

While I more fully organize my thoughts from the overwhelmsion of the energy of 1,200 buzzing brains at last week’s Social Capital Markets Conference (SOCAP), I came across my photos of the topics from what many people find to be the most interesting day of the conference, Day 3.

After two days of an over-stuffed, mind-numbing agenda full of heady topics and full-tilt hobnobbing, roughly a third of the group returns for a day with the agenda collectively created by the participants.  This process, called Open Space, was expertly facilitated by Jerry Michalski, and the session draws out the topics people want to discuss.  From tightly huddled six-person intensives to ranging 40-person explorations, the day exemplifies the open source spirit of the community, a yin to the bustling yang of the previous 48 hours.  The next three photos are images of the wall of topics that got discussed.  Since each person had already presented their idea by standing up on a stage and speaking to the topic for something like 45 seconds, you’ll just get a snapshot of each discussion.  For the full benefit, well, you had to be there.  Nonetheless, this should provide a peek into what’s on the mind of the most collaborative third of the thought leaders at the edge of impact investing.

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In the world of sustainable enterprise, the tension between focusing on ‘mission’ (ie: do-gooding) and ‘business’ (ie: paying the bills) is extraordinary.  Whether the enterprise is for-profit or non-profit, these challenges bring leaders to the brink of their capacity, and pit employees and board members against one another across unnecessarily stark lines.

Further complicating the picture is the question of partnerships and collaboration.  Given the already uncertain organizational boundaries (how do we think about volunteers?), the intention of multple enterprises to share resources and align efforts to a common causes is a natural instinct.  Sadly, the results of these collaborations are often below expectations, and cause more experienced leaders to shy away from new partnerships.

In an important paper on this subject (PDF), the dynamic husband-and-wife team of Tonya (Exec Director of Center for Social Innovation) and Mark Surman (Exec Director of Mozilla Foundation) have documented their experience in creating successful cross-organizational collaborations, which they call “constellations.”

The constellation model is borne out of seven years of cross-organizational collaboration on children’s health issues in Canada. The network of related organizations overcame many hurdles and refined the model in a pracitical, working environment.

As the social innovation and social enterprise communities expand and address adjacent and overlapping goals, adoption of concepts like this one are going to be key to achieving more change faster.  We strongly recommend that anyone in the field review this paper not just once, but keep it handy for reference and guidance.

As we laid out last month, entrepreneurial activity in Colorado is in the middle of a renaissance. While the national corporate recession hits the headlines and gas and food prices reach for the sky, our local startup scene is rocking.

David Cohen, one of Boulder’s celebrity VCs, announces two new fundings today at his blog, ColoradoStartups.com:

Symplified recently raised $6M from Granite Ventures and Allegis Capital.

Rally Software just raised $16.8M from Mohr Davidow Ventures (MDV) and existing investors Vista Ventures, Boulder Ventures, and Mobius Venture Capital.

I was at Rally today, talking with their CTO, Ryan Martens, about how smaller companies (the core of the Colorado economy) measure (and ultimately improve) their operations to become more sustainable. He talks in software terms, about ‘expanding the scope’ of business operations to include externalities and bring more costs and benefits on the balance sheet.Our discussion crossed a wide range of topics, and landed on an interesting observation. Ryan pointed out, “most sustainability consultants can’t help us. Unless you know how computer hardware is built, how firmware works, and how software is developed, you can’t help me reduce my emissions any better than a junior at CU (Jack, who happened to be sitting in the room).”

What’s the nuance?

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Today, I went to check an old online workspace at Omidyar.net for Targeted Currencies, a project I co-founded back in 2004. And I found out that the Omidyar network had closed down.

The Omidyar Network (O/Net) was an early phase community collaboration site for progressive global activists, founded when Pierre Omidyar (founder of eBay and leading social venture financier) led the pack and switched his charitable giving from a .org to a .net (and for-profit) to allow the fund to invest in for-profits as well as non-profits, which was a major turning point in the evolution of social entrepreneurism. And I felt at the time that the network had an equally serious role. Continue reading

Interesting to see Microsoft’s open channel to the development community, Channel9. This isn’t your Ballmer’s MSDN (reference too obscure?). I like their manifesto. Continue reading