Guest Blog by Imogen Reed.

Facebook, known of course as the world’s most popular social network for both business and personal purposes, officially became a public company on 18^th May, trading its stock on the Nasdaq Stock Market for the first ever time. For investors in the company, they could finally see if their initial investment had grown into something more profitable as finally a dollar sign will be placed in front of the company which changed the way we use social networking for good.

After its creation in 2004, Facebook has attracted over 900 million users and that’s just those considered active and it has become an important tool for both business networking and those using it on a personal level. The age of the webinar and online networking groups has meant face-to-face events have become much less relevant and you can arrange a fully functional and effective business meeting via your webcam and computer, using just Skype, Facebook and potentially other networks of your choice. The money saved on all manner of finer details, from stocking up on paper based business cards and flyers to hiring transport for all delegates and arranging mini bus insurance, can be used to further invest in your business or network. Online networking has changed the way we view the world and allowed for much wider, much more far reaching development and growth within many sectors. Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg are at least partially responsible for this and should be thanked.

The Impact of Facebook’s IPO

Facebook’s IPO is priced at $38 per share at present and this will have both indirect and direct consequences for companies using social networking business solutions. The network, now valued at around $104 billion boasts the largest technology IPO in living history and the repercussions of this should reverberate around the social business world in general.

Organisations rely upon business based social networking solutions to improve communications and collaboration, further brand awareness and engage effectively with their customer base locally and worldwide. It also allows for a streamlined and centrally controlled customer service base from which you can build and develop relationships with potential return customers. Social networking has become as much a business tool as a personal one.

Experts in the social business sector are convinced Facebook could add more strings to its bow by developing an enterprise and business version of their site, giving enterprises, growing businesses and their related networks a chance to specifically focus on brand development and separating their platform from the more personal currently out there.

Further Investments and Growth

With the company now having a value, there is no reason for it not to invest in further platforms, strategies and innovations to make its brand even stronger. The implementation of more specifically business orientated strategies would certainly be key to ensuring that growth takes a step in the right direction although predictions are suggesting that mobile technology is next on the hit list. There are rumours a Facebook smartphone may be in development. The development of robust hardware based products could be something to seriously develop the brand and make it even more easier to connect directly with our particular business networks.

A Facebook smartphone would ensure that your entire phone usage was linked directly to your profile or business page and running its own bespoke software it could genuinely be the only business phone deemed good enough within a few short years. In an attempt to reach more internet users, Zuckerberg and his team need to step towards those using alternative means to get online and that includes mobile users.

The growth and development of the network thus far has been solely based upon advertising and the strongest internet media markets are currently said to be in China, India and Brazil, not areas where Facebook is particularly strong and this is something that needs to be considered if their reign at the top of the social network tower is to be continued. Nobody is suggesting the brand will fade out like its predecessors as it has become an integral part of people’s lives and business but to remain strong and to keep its share prices high, growth and advancement have to continue.

Whilst networks like Linkedin have been developed solely for your business, Facebook has the potential to develop into something infinite in size and as a proactive and aware businessperson, keeping tabs on its development should be an essential part of your business intelligence.

Another interesting facet to the whole debate about the impact of social media in the workplace is the issue of the “disconnected workforce”, i.e. those that side-step the restrictions and limitations placed on use of corporate social software solutions by using of their own devices and applications to solve business problems.  In other words, the growing trend towards ‘bring your own device’, or BYOD, where smartphones and tablet applications can circumvent corporately approved systems and information management policies. Even where a BYOD policy has been approved, there can be repercussions, as IBM has recently found. I will be interested to get some views from the panel on this particular issue,

Speakers and Panel Members Include:

• Vic Okezie, Conference Director & Founder, Crexia
• Angela Ashenden, Principal Analyst, Collaboration, MWD Advisors
• Laurie Hibbs, Human Resources Director, LexisNexis
• Liz Pearce, Chief Operating officer, LiquidPlanner Inc
• George Reynolds, Managing Director, CloudsMatter (Qontext UKIE Partner)
• Neil Campbell, Head of Product & Marketing, brightsolid online Technology
• Lee Provoost, Head of Strategy & Transformation, Dachis Europe
• Priya Banati, Collaboration Strategy Lead, Accenture UK
• Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Principal Analyst, ECM & Enterprise Search
• Jens Schroeter, Snr Consultant, Social Media & Collaboration, Siemens AG
• Rita Chambers, e-Communications Manager, Sodexo UK
• Justin Hunt, Founder, ITSOPEN and Social Media Leadership Forum
• Leon Benjamin, Internal Collaboration Manager, Virgin Media
• Del Green, Group Internal Communications Manager, Bupa

It should be an interesting day, and I’ll be tweeting on the key discussions throughout the day (hashtag #swconf).

I look forward to perhaps meeting up with some colleagues and friends during the day – please come and say ‘hello’ if you know me

Creating the right environment for Social Business

Creating the conditions for a successful Social Business requires a strategic approach that focuses on establishing clear business objectives and strategies, understanding cultural considerations, developing frameworks and managing processes that adapt to the changing needs of the organisation, defining systems of governance, and enabling emerging collaborative tools that integrate with existing workflows.

Despite the benefits of taking an overall strategic approach to collaboration efforts that mix both structured and unstructured methods and techniques, many organisations are using emergent collaboration tools in an ad-hoc and tactical capacity that disconnects users from the other parts of the organisations and perpetuates siloed functions, groups, and people.

Clearly, Social Business is in an early market with much work to be done. However, steps can be taken to adapt to this newer way of working. In the area of adoption, organisations need senior leaders to champion and model the technology; to provide education on the benefits that can materialise from emergent collaboration – for the organisation and for themselves; to keep the lines of communication open, online and offline, horizontally and vertically, creating a more ‘networked’ approach to the internal company; and last but not least, to integrate collaboration tools into the day-to-day activities and workflows of its employees.

Organisations in the vanguard of emergent collaboration must continue to monitor, evaluate, and adapt to changing conditions. The benefits of emergent collaboration can be fully realised by taking a thoughtful look at all parts of the organisation, the business drivers across each department and the organisation as a whole, and the user types involved, all the while communicating and collaborating with all users in an open and trusted environment.

This will demand leadership’s decision-making and accountability as well as significant effort and responsibility on the part of all, however, the end result is a shared and aligned understanding and far more engaged workforce.

Slides used at the “Creating the Conditions for Social Business” event, held at the CBI Conference Centre, London.  

Better productivity, lower travel and communication costs, higher customer satisfaction, more innovation, increases in revenue and profit, faster access to knowledge, improved connection to internal experts and more.

Why wouldn’t every organisation flock to this vision of an agile, connected, transparent, people-centred and more efficient business?

Some organisations have glimpsed the future and recognised that survival and growth in an increasingly competitive environment requires new attitudes, new thinking, new business models that can adapt and change to a volatile environment. In short, they are tapping into the phenomenal rise of “social interaction”, where knowledge and information is freely exchanged and where new paradigms for employee and customer relationships can provide opportunities for innovation and co-production.

But what of the rest? There is only so long that an organisation can wait before it becomes too late. Competitors and customers have moved on.  Attracting new talent becomes more difficult; employees become moribund.

Doing nothing is the new business risk.

But it’s not always easy to make the necessary changes, particularly in large and well-established organisations. Some of the typical barriers that challenge large organisations include:

1. Fear of change. People are generally risk-averse. Organisations more so, after all they are accountable to shareholders and other stakeholders. “Don’t fix it if it isn’t broken” is the usual mantra.
2. Command-and-control. Who says every organisation wants to be transparent and flexible and invite participation from every quarter? What if senior management do not want a pluralist organisation where democracy rules?
3. Profusion of tools. The explosion of social software tools is a source of great innovation, but also a lot of confusion. Organisations can easily end up with several enterprise social networks used by different teams or departments, or for different purposes, along with social applications for purposes such as project management or employee recognition, each coming with their own user profiles and activity steams and notions of how connections are formed.
4. Lack of integration. A legacy patchwork of IT solutions that have only ever been superficially integrated and where every application has a threshold of “good enough” integration to make the system usable but never quite perfect.
5. Competition from free public social networks. Staff will inevitably compare their experience on an enterprise social network with the one they enjoy on consumer sites such as Facebook. This can be a problem if the enterprise experience suffers by comparison by being awkward to navigate, frustrating to use, or missing important features.
6. Compliance requirements. Regulated industries such as financial services and healthcare must pay particular attention to whether an enterprise social network meets compliance requirements such as data archiving. Moreover, they might tend to see more risk than benefit in a technology that makes it easy to share information widely when they have a responsibility to keep some categories of information under tight control.
7. Fit with business processes and workflows. Enterprise social software should ultimately make business and work processes more efficient and adaptable to a fast-changing environment (internal or external).  How will improved knowledge flows and opportunities for collaboration and co-production be channelled into the existing business/work processes.

These are just some of the issues that will be covered at the forthcoming Social Workplace Conference on 24^th May. There’s a great line-up of speakers and sponsors who will be sharing their experiences of building enterprise collaborative solutions and how they’ve addressed the barriers to organisational change.

A great opportunity to tap into the post-industrial age of “fluid knowledge”.

A Story To Tell

There are many people out there with a story to tell and with the many and variegated formats of expression available on the web those stories have a far higher likelihood of being told today than ever before. Whether it is a daring account of a money transfer which makes a mockery of current interest rates, or a detailed account of events over a lifespan, stories are cropping up in threads, posts and blogs with an ever increasing frequency.

The Skill of Telling a Story

There are many who still bemoan the death of oral tradition. That say social media has performed a death knell on the art form of human expression which was routinely performed at the water cooler, locker room or barstool. This skill of relating a tale with a mixture of suspense and expression which leaves the listener with a general sense of fulfilment, through the general babble of social media has been slowly ebbing away incoherently. Storify is a website which clearly seeks to redress this balance and allow users to tell stories by drawing in information, images, videos, podcasts and references from across the web to create stories with depth, dynamism and relevance. It allows users to create a new kind of story.

In Time Top 50

Launched in April 2011, Storify combines features or elements from a range of social media websites from the likes of Tumblr, Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter to create a story telling medium which allows users to draw on a range of resources to create a tale which can then be easily hooked up to all of the above. Although it has yet to become the latest trend, it has a plethora of users from across the globe and Time has placed it in the top 50 websites of 2011.

Two Sided Interface

The website operates in a two sided interface which allows you to compose your tale on one side and draw on existing resources from the web on the other. As is the current standard you can login using your Facebook or twitters account. The design is neat and easy to use with drag and drop handling which works equally well on a tablet, smartphone or laptop. You can search for and find content in the right-hand panels of the page and drag them across into the left-hand panel where you can compose your story.

Layout is Simple and Easy to Use

As stated the layout is simplicity itself. The interface includes a generous portion of whitespace and clear, easy to use functionality. On the right hand is the media panel which allows you to search for content using popular sources like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Flickr. The search panel is also linked to Google to allow for full web search for content. The layout is in a tabbed format which allows content specific searches for information such as comments or images. When your search is successful you simply drag in the content that you want and add it to your story. A neat feature is the inclusion of bookmarking through the ‘Storify this’ function. This will add selected items to the storypad which will remain there until you select it to include in a story. Completed stories can be distributed directly to inboxes via email, uploaded onto Facebook or Twitter, or embedded onto a website or blog.

Copyright Issues

As with all stories through the history of time the issue of source, origin and ownership is one which is often questioned. As such the developers of Storify have addressed the issue slightly differently than some other similar curation services like Pinterest. The company does not hold any of the content that users curate on its servers. Instead the content that you access is uploaded from its original location. Through significantly intriguing algorithms the pages are uploaded expediently and the out sourcing of page content generally does not slow down the loading of stories. All posted content is also attributed to the source of origin.

Notification

In addition Storify does allow users the option to give the original creator notification when their content is being used. Currently this option is only enabled for content that has been curated from twitter. The creators have said that they wish to expand this feature to include a much wider range of content sources in the near future.

WordPress Plugin

WordPress users will be pleased to know that there is a Storify plugin that integrates all of Storify’s curation facilities within the WordPress dashboard.

Organisations rely on collaboration in order to be successful. Imagine your workplace without any knowledge-sharing or team working. What would happen? Probably very little, as most people rely on collaboration with others in order to be able to do their jobs. If every member of your team attempted to work without drawing on the knowledge of others, they would find themselves unable to do anything pretty quickly. Despite this heavy reliance on collaboration, many people find it difficult, and do it only reluctantly and sometimes ineffectively. How can workplace leaders help their teams to collaborate better?

Why People Don’t Collaborate

We live in a very individualist culture. Throughout our lives, we are encouraged to work towards personal goals, and to put our own needs before those of our community. It is therefore not surprising that many workplaces also encourage individualism. When we plan our careers, we do so as individuals. When we take a job, we are given a job description with a list of tasks that are assigned to us alone. Many job descriptions do include something on them about teamwork and collaboration, but it often usually couched in general terms and found towards the bottom of the list.

Individualism can be a very positive thing. It can help people achieve, particularly in jobs that are relatively solitary. For individualism to be positive, though, it needs to be supported by a culture of collaboration. This may seem more relevant in some businesses than others. Take a courier company like ParcelForce, for example. They rely heavily on collaborative working at each of the stages it takes to get a parcel from the Post Office, to depot, to delivery van, to the recipient. There is a long chain in which the success of each stage depends on the success of the previous stage. In another company, workers’ tasks might be much more discrete: take a proofreading business, for example: each worker has assigned tasks that they do alone, without the help of others.

Those who work in businesses that do not rely obviously on collaboration sometimes fail to recognise its value. Competitive workplace cultures can discourage collaboration, as team members are worried that it will mean their efforts are not recognised. Where team members lack trust in each other, collaboration suffers. People often feel they lack the time to collaborate, that it is just ‘one more thing’ on their to-do list. Workplace leaders sometimes fail to collaborate themselves, and so they fail to encourage a collaboration culture.

Encouraging Collaboration

Competition and lack of shared goals are barriers to collaboration. Mutual trust and shared goals help encourage it. Research shows that collaboration and co-operation in the workplace helps strengthen the business. It encourages innovation and helps the business meet its goals. Collaboration isn’t just a nice thing to do: it helps keep a business in profit. Sharing knowledge and ideas helps individuals to work better and more successfully. A collaborative workplace is greater than the sum of its parts.

Getting people to trust and believe in each other requires a change in culture. Easy to say, not so easy to do. Things like workplace social events and awaydays can help, but they need to be backed up by something more tangible. Use of social media in the workplace can be a great way to encourage collaboration. Because it works from the bottom up, rather than being imposed from the top down, social media helps create a shared body of knowledge that is open to all and that everyone can feel comfortable using. It helps encourage trust and understanding, as everyone can see the contributions made by everyone else. Rather than asking one individual to help with a question or task, a team member can log on to social media and get advice and help from various people, many of whom they might not have considered contacting. It can help encourage collaboration between seemingly unconnected areas of the business: improvements in the accounts system inspire project managers across the organisation, for example.

Leaders need to lead by example and work to encourage and reward collaboration across their organisations. Rather than only valuing individual achievement, team and organisational achievement should be valued. Some people will always feel more comfortable collaborating than others (either because of their personality or the nature of their job), but using social media or other media to demonstrate business benefits and show leadership can help encourage everyone to collaborate better.

BT’s move smells of both ambition and canniness; depending on one’s interpretation. The news should hardly come as a surprise however, given that they have already secured contractual rights for both Lancashire and Rutland, and look set to do so in Wales and the Highlands and Islands in Scotland.

Below is a list of the eight contracts available:

• Rutland
• Cumbria
• Hereford and Gloucester
• North Yorkshire
• Lancashire, Blackpool, Blackburn with Darwen
• Surrey
• Highlands and Islands
• Wales

The agreement of all eight contracts should be sorted by the end of the month. The question that then begs to be asked, is whether BT are efficient enough for them to take upon the responsibility of installing superfast broadband in any of these regions.

A recent broadband speed test has concluded that Virgin provide the fastest internet speeds in the UK. This is measured in download, upload and basic connectivity speeds. Virgin’s success is based upon the usage of coaxial cables linking to the crucial ‘last kilometre’. BT meanwhile still merely relies on the use of fibre optic cables throughout all points of their connection process, and it is this very reason that causes their service to lag behind Virgin’s.

However, BT remain intent on providing superfast broadband to their customers, and it is this drive and determination that raises confidence in the network being able to provide a speedy service to these regions. In fact, BT recently announced the doubling of the download and upload speeds in their Infinity Package Contracts; which though still fall short of Virgin Media’s main packages, definitely signal strong intent and a step in the right direction.

Meanwhile, the prohibition of a legal USO in Britain is probably a step in the right direction. This will ensure no single telecommunications network secures a monopoly in the UK, based on anything but superior quality service. It will also challenge network providers to keep trying to up their speeds and services in the broadband speed race.

Communities

One of the difficulties faced by remote workers is that the working world is still built around physical communities, rather than virtual ones. We expect that the norm is to work in an office for five days a week, and so working from home is an exception, not the rule. That means that remote workers are often overlooked when workplace communities are developed. Even basic things such as access to internal IT systems are not always extended to remote workers. Yet, to work effectively from home, workers need to be able to play a real and active part in their professional community or communities.

Knowledge

To progress in a career, we need to be involved in sharing knowledge, both giving and receiving it. Knowledge helps us develop as people and professionals, and helps us contribute to the professional development of others around us. Whether a social worker needing to find local rehab center listings for a client, or a stockbroker looking for inside investment information, we all rely on knowledge sharing to do our jobs. Working remotely does not need to mean lack of access to that knowledge, provided there is a community and culture that supports remote working in place.

There are two kinds of remote workers: those who work remotely for a company as an employee, and those who work as self-employed freelancers or consultants. The two groups can overlap, with some freelancers working wholly or mainly for one organisation. What all remote workers need to be effective is to be able to collaborate effectively with those they work with and for; to be able to contribute to and benefit from the communities in which they work; and to gain appropriate reward and recognition. Effective businesses are normally good at doing these things for their in-house staff, but do not always manage to extend the privilege to their remote workers.

Remote Communities

Remote workers need to be part of a day-to-day remote community. As they are working remotely, their primary community is a virtual. Basic things like access to intranet and inclusion on relevant email lists helps bring remote workers into the companies they work for. However, for remote workers to really be part of their professional communities, a more active approach to community building is needed. Internal social media can be a good way for remote workers to feel part of a workplace, as they can use it in just the same way as other workers can: they are not disadvantaged by not being physically present. Those who freelance for many different companies can often find online communities aimed at them. Social media is not just a ‘social’ community. When used in a professional context, it can be a great way to share opinions, reports and best practice. It can be more effective than personal interactions, which can tend to be more haphazard and have a smaller reach.

Physical Communities

While remote communities are essential, it is important for remote workers to have some face-to-face contact with others too. That might be with their direct colleagues and managers, and it might be with others in the same industry but working in different roles. Companies can help by including remote workers in conference and social events, and perhaps allow them use of hot desks. For those working freelance, joining networking groups and meeting other freelancers (even if in another industry) is important.

We all need to feel part of a community, at least some of the time. Simple steps to help remote workers make virtual and physical contact with colleagues and others can go a long way to helping them feel part of a profession and being able to contribute their knowledge to that profession.

The title of the event was “Getting maximum business value from your L&D activity”, which, for me, opened up an opportunity to discuss and describe what I see as the unprecedented opportunities and potential available through the Internet and the Social Web for learning and personal development (also referred to as “Personal Knowledge Management”).

The world of social interaction, fuelled by the plethora of social media tools, has opened up new opportunities to learn and share. Classroom training is no longer an essential part of learning and development. We can now tap into the collective wisdom of peers and experts as and when we need. Skilling ourselves for a challenging and volatile environment is a personal responsibility – we can’t rely on others, including the people and organisations we work for.

Sadly, for some, this is not as easy as it sounds. Workplace restrictions on what staff can see and do on the Internet are controlled and regulated by policies – and people – that have changed little since the 20^th Century. If you have a HR or L&D manager who has never blogged, does not use LinkedIn and refuses to engage with social media, it’s unlikely they will advocate the use of these facilities in the workplace, and consequently no business case will be made to provide access to social networks or social media tools. Consequently, more and more people find they need to use their smartphones in the workplace (unless these have also been banned) or revert to out-of-hours working to do the things they could and should have done at work.

This leads to some crazy anomalies, which really ought to be challenged more vigorously, such as the many public sector departments who use YouTube to promote their services but ban their own staff from accessing this medium. Or the NHS Trusts that prevent their staff from accessing networks such as Patient Opinion, and consequently don’t know what is being said about their hospital services and therefore unable to challenge or respond to complaints.

But this must surely change. Organisations (particularly public sector) can’t continue to trot out the same excuses as to why they restrict access to the social web. Yes, we know that anything “social” might mean time wasting, but that’s no different to misuse of the telephone, or attending one of those meaningless meetings that happen every Monday morning. Yes, there is a requirement for transparency and the need to comply with Freedom of Information, but these can’t be perennially used as obstacles to tools and networks that support collaboration and knowledge sharing. The day of the “lobotomised PC”, which limits access to company-approved applications and networks, must surely be coming to an end (as is the lobotomised staff who are not permitted to think and act for themselves!)

So, coming back to the main thrust of my presentation – that it is a personal responsibility to attain the necessary education and skills to survive and thrive in an increasingly unpredictable economy. Staff can’t (and shouldn’t) rely on the prescriptive nature of their company’s core training curriculum, which is more likely to be inward-focussed and heavily weighted toward policies, strategy and compliance rather than vocational training – unless of course you are fortunate enough to work for that rare breed of organisation that funds apprenticeship schemes. It is foolish to plan an entire career on the assumption that you’ll be working for the same organisation. Transferable skills should be the primary goal – which may not be the first priority for organisations that want to retain staff!  Specialism is all very well provided it’s not dependent on one specific industry or organisation. See wheeltappers for lessons learnt!

Perhaps the difference between ‘corporate’ learning and self-directed learning is best illustrated in this diagram:

In order to develop a true learning organisation, staff need to be given much more freedom to use the tools, facilities, applications and networks that they have chosen. After all they are far closer to the issues, problems and potential solutions associated with their work than a CIO, a CFO or head of L&D. It is my firm belief that social learning and personal development requires a shift from hierarchies to networks, and empowerment of the workforce to choose the tools they need to do the job. Organisation that can’t or won’t grasp this paradigm shift will struggle to attract and retain talent, and will struggle to survive against more agile and adaptable businesses that do.

What do you think?

• 43% of iPhone users would go without shoes for a week rather than temporarily be without the phone
• 73% of people sleep with the smarphone on their bed
• The average person checks their phone 150 times per day
• 53% feel anxiety if they run out of battery or credit or have no network coverage.

There’s also the problem of “nomophobia” (no mobile phone phobia) – fear of losing your phone. Not sure what treatment is available for this

I was also unaware that some companies (Microsoft and Apple are mentioned) that encourage tech-free getaways to resorts prohibiting technology. Wether or not the delegates benefit from the experience or return from their break as quivering heaps, with symptoms of nomophobia is anyone’s guess!

I think you can’t go too far wrong with the mantra “everything in moderation” – whether that’s food or mobile phones. But no doubt we’ll soon see the first clinics and treatments for mobile phone addiction springing up – or maybe they already have?

Created by: Online Masters Degree