Janus Boye recently provoked an indignant response from the Twitterati when he proclaimed that he unfollows anyone with more tweets than followers. You should read the comments to gauge the general feelings about that view. It provoked some reflection on my part — which I guess Janus will say was his aim — and I went back to look at how my use of Twitter has evolved over the last two years. And it went something like this: Bewilderment » Discovery » Catharsis » Promotion » Engagement

Bewilderment

Like most people first dipping their toes into a new service, I came to Twitter slightly perplexed. What do you tweet if you have no followers? The thing that first drew me was trying to find out how micro-blogging might be used in a business collaboration context. I’d already used SharePoint and Ning and I was intrigued by the broadcast nature of theses services. It was so Enterprise 2.0! It reminded me of how J.P. Rangaswami had made his emails public to all employees in the organisations he was working and I wondered what effect that had on an even more public scale.

Discovery

So I kept relatively schtum and decided to follow some people I know: @draml, @izahoor, @mcboof and see what they were saying. And they were talking about web content management and I thought, that’s cool: I can find out some new stuff. It’s quick to scan tweets and I’ll read up on a daily basis.

Then I followed the people they were following — which was easier then because Twitter used to show all replies. And I discovered CMS people well worth following, like @sggottlieb and @piewords, as well as people I knew about already like @irina_guseva and @TonyByrne.

So Twitter effectively became a recommendation engine for blogs, of which I amassed quite a few and continue to add to. That gave me plenty to read to keep me on the bleeding edge of the industry.

Catharsis

But then I realised I was saying nothing myself. Resolutely ignoring the adage that it’s better to stay silent and be thought the fool than to speak and remove all doubt, I started to tweet my frustrations at various projects. It was these tweets that put me in jeopardy of Janus’ Law. I was re-living Joachim du Bellay:

Je me plains à mes vers, si j’ay quelque regret,
Je me ris avec eulx, je leur dy mon secret,
Comme estans de mon coeur les plus seurs secretaires.

That was a mistake. Fortunately I never resorted to telling people I was on public transport or making toast.

Promotion

So I just started retweeting links to useful CMS resources and that got me some followers. And it dawned on me that there was a whole world of business leads out there, so I started searching for key CMS terms and following people who tweeted on the subject, trying to engage with them and see what they were after. It was a bit rough but drew some small successes. So then I just promoting my blogging instead.

Engagement

That was a turning point, because I could engage more with people on Twitter than through my website. And because I was following other people’s blogs, I could engage with them on Twitter more easily and involve other people through broadcast messaging, just like JP Rangaswami! Twitter has become a sounding board for my thoughts: I can test things out on the Twitterati and get feedback before I have to let my ideas loose on clients. I hope that it’s actually improved the quality of my work.

I had one big #unfollowfriday when it all got a bit too much, but I won’t generally unfollow unless you annoy me, and I’ve a pretty passive character. I also find some kind of moral obligation to follow people who’re following me and can’t bring myself to unfollow people I’ve known for a long time in the real world, no matter how much rubbish they spout. Those that I really like to follow are those who know stuff and are funny; although having now met @adriaanbloem I’m convinced he uses some kind of ghost tweeter.

But the best things are seeing people get involved in real conversations. Take a look at @jameshoskins‘ Paxman-esque interrogation of @iantruscott about the Alterian roadmap. Or the discussions around #cmshaiku. Twitter can be fun and informative.

So how do I use Twitter for work? I still haven’t figured out if Twitter has a place in the enterprise, but it does allow me to keep engaged with a continually-evolving industry whose ideas appear online in less than 140 characters.

Saying is easier than listening.

In many ways the collaboration was too real time. In a spoken conversation, talking across each other isn’t really possible. In the Wave, it’s the norm. Even with half a dozen participants, it seemed everyone was piling in trying to get their thoughts down rather than considering what people were writing elsewhere. There were multiple threads to the document that you couldn’t follow at once It was like being in the middle seat at a party: it seemed like a good place to be but you couldn’t figure out which conversation to jump into. This might say more about the participants than the platform, but it is a serious issue for collaborative working where listening to a conversation, being able to respond to the speaker and draw out more information is crucial to constructive dialogue.

More is easier than less.

Anyone can add to the document, but there are no commenting features and a social reluctance to delete what someone else has written. The effect is that assertions are qualified rather than challenged or deleted, meaning that you end up saying in thirty words what you could have said in ten. The compound effect of this writing style is that you layer meaning on top of meaning to the point that — as Julia Kristeva might have pointed out — as a group you’ve said something different to the individual’s original point. That’s not collaboration.

You get more than you need.

I couldn’t quite figure out what we got from the Wave that we couldn’t get from just a Google document combined with chat or a similar tool. It was less the case of the glass being half full or half empty than the glass being twice as big as we needed. There were too many features. Nearly everyone experienced serious browser issues — except Ian, whose virtual shoulder I was peering over— whose Chrome held out where Firefox faltered. Wave might run in a thin client, but it’s a fat piece of technology.

So was Wave a total washout? No, but I think it will take a lot of adapting to. If only there were some browser-based tool out there that wasn’t reliant on Ajax, that was near real-time but forced you to refresh so that you listened before you spoke and which encouraged you to be as brief as possible when you did speak up.

Where could we find a tool that met those requirements? I’ll have to ask the good people of Twitter.

Read more

• Things We Hate About Content Management
• A Collaborative Google Wave Blog Post.
• I Predict A (CMS) Riot: 1 hour, 6 People, 1 Wave, 1 Post
• Wave experiment: Things We Hate About Content Management
• The people who contributed to the post were: @irina_guseva, @justincormack, @iantruscott, @andrew_liles @adriaanbloem, @McBoof

It appears to me that organisations try to introduce too much web 2.0 culture into these projects while continuing to have rigid expections.

The objectives for social media on the web are emergent: they are the result of uncoordinated initiatives, with the benefits only becoming apparent as the site is used. Business change on the other hand is typically vision-led: there’s a clear idea of the business benefits before work starts and these are based on evidence derived from organisational learning. Moreover, on the web, adoption of new tools is viral. Within organisations, adoption is typically enforced.

Many organisational social media projects are sold to the business by middle management, early adopters who use similar tools outside the office. They believe that because a tool is widely used externally, it will be rapidly adopted internally too. This is rarely the case. The web provides a user base that far outstrips any organisation’s and staff have more pressing priorities than trying out a new technology. Moreover, executives need a concrete business case to approve a project. Saying “Twitter’s great” simply doesn’t cut it. The differences in approach are transparent:

Promoters of social media within organisations must meet pre-agreed objectives and promote the tool from the lower rungs of the management ladder. This guarantees frustration all round: project advocates believe executives are being obstructive, but executives wonder why the project isn’t achieving its business case.

You need to shift the axis. Don’t focus on the problems social technologies will solve. Compel your staff to use them as a communications channel and find out what benefit they bring. You can reduce the risk of failure by constraining your spending, so the tool is less painful to throw away, but you need top-down leadership to drive the programme or people will just focus on their day job.

A few practical steps:

1. Choose something that’s familiar and frequently used.
   Staff need to grasp the tool’s basics quickly. If it’s overly complicated, your efforts will be invested in training rather than measuring benefits. It’s also got to be something that’s used on a daily basis. If you have a wiki on best practice, for example, it’ll get contributions for a week or two then just become forgotten about.
2. Make sure it’s throw-away.
   To prove the concept, select something cheap or hosted, with low start-up costs. And make sure that you don’t put content or data in it that’s critical to your business strategy that you then can’t get out again.
3. Don’t customise it!
   The world is littered with pilot projects that thought they knew better than the software before they’d used it, or tried to integrate it with other tools and turned into never-ending testing. Just run the technology as it is, in the simplest way possible. If it works, then consider how to improve it.
4. Engage key users.
   Your trial should certainly get the executive to put their mouth where their money is. If they lead others will follow. Your sample group of users — you weren’t going to roll it out to everyone at once were you? — should include different departments so that it’s not seen as anyone else’s “baby” when you finally roll it out.
5. It’s a trial people must follow.
   Using the new tool is not optional. Ideally, they’ll use it instead of something else, so a wiki instead of a file system, blog instead of broadcast email, micro-blog instead of instant messaging. If you think of how CRM software is typically rolled out in a business, you’ll see how important this kind of enforcement is to making adoption of the software a success.

For social media to be effective in your organisation, you can’t expect it just to be taken up by the user base. You have to drive it through. But you do need to be open-minded about what it will achieve. Hopefully, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Some further reading:

• Janetti Chon – Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Survey
• James Robertson – Implementing enterprise 2.0 in the real world
• Shawn Callahan – Collaboration consulting—fostering a collaboration culture
• Dion Hinchcliffe – 12 Rules For Bringing ‘Social’ To Your Business
• Erik Larson – The Future of Work
• Anne Berkowitch – Private Social Networks (podcast)

Wikis, forums and other collaboration technologies provide the tools for organisations to get the most out of their staff. For public websites, ratings features, comments and social bookmarking enable authors to see which aspects of their content attract positive interest.

If your website ignores its public’s needs, or your systems deny their users the opportunity to add their feedback, they’ll just go somewhere else. If you’re lucky. Mencius also advocated the just overthrow of despots and one of my favourite Chinese stories, Outlaws of the Marsh, also known as the Water Margin very much follows this code.

So the message is clear. You can learn from your audiences and stakeholders, inside or outside your organisation. Provide them with the tools that will enable them to enhance your systems, and you will flourish with them.

A previous project I ran was to implement an internal knowledge management portal for a company that had been through several rapid mergers of some pretty small companies into a pretty large one. The company’s success is based on its staff expertise and wealth of project experience, but the full range and depth of this knowledge lay fragmented across a few people from the various entities that constituted the new whole. As a consequence, the sales team didn’t know that they could use staff who’d already engaged with a particular client, or that there were case studies for similar projects including case studies and lessons learned. The wheel was being reinvented. It was obvious that some kind of networking tool that enabled staff to identify expertise in people and projects would lend the business a helping hand and could be implemented with relative ease.

Instead, the directors decided that a search engine that could span all the company’s file servers would be more cost-effective. But how many useful results did the staff get from keyword searches? For all the typical reasons – little classification, poor naming conventions, poor security, inappropriate technology – close to none. The content was there but the information wasn’t.

Just as art only becomes art once you place it in a gallery, content only becomes information when you identify it as useful. The quality of the information, like art, is debatable, but it has no chance of being used if you don’t suggest to people that it’s useful information. Following a merger, staff need to know: these are the kind of people who work here and this is what they know about. To find out more, ask them.

Yet even in the most obvious of cases for implementing simple information management tools, their raison d’être can be by-passed. The company in question didn’t implement a networking tool and nearly two years later still doesn’t know some of its clients, the skills of many of its staff or the scope of most of its past projects. Many staff have left. Yet is the company bothered? Absolutely not.

The directors simply changed the strategy. If the sales team weren’t paying attention to certain clients or types of projects, it’s because they weren’t important enough. The strategy dictated that employees focus on bigger and better in their portfolio, as befitted the newly-merged company status. Who needs the past when you have the future?

It’s a bullish policy in a bullish market, but when things inevitably turn bearish, there’ll be a scramble to avoid repeating the mistakes of previous engagements, find people with relevant knowledge, return to reliable clients who weren’t in the big league. By then, both employees and clients could be long gone, and gleaning information from fragmentary content may well prove impossible.

While your work is easy, information has little value. As soon as your work gets tough, it’s the people and companies with the information who’ll profit.

Updated: Alan Pelz-Sharpe has also written about ECM technologies and recession.

As a pure document repository it is mostly harmless. It follows Microsoft security models so will only show users documents from file systems and folders they should have access to. Unless you’ve been unbelievably rigorous and consistent in your file naming and metadata conventions, however, its search will be utterly useless. Just search a MOSS intranet for “agenda” if you don’t believe me. The search is also hampered by some strange behaviour when looking at external systems with case sensitive URLs, so try before you buy. No wonder Microsoft have bought Fast.

There are some nice collaboration features: user homepages, instant messaging; but these are bound up in inaccessible HTML. So are the Web Parts, Microsoft’s equivalent of Java-based portlets. This is also true of many Java portals which are heavily dependent on JavaScript functionality and HTML table layouts.

There is a big difference between SharePoint and other portals, however. Java portal technology is built to the JSR standards, notably JSR168. This means that you can take pre-developed portlets and simply expose them through your portal. You can even send these to other portals through WSRP. But not with SharePoint. It doesn’t comply with Java Content Repository standards, so you’ll struggle to put develop a service oriented architecture around it. If you needed a single point of entry for web services that you can develop in .Net, you’d have to look at BEA’s AquaLogic, not SharePoint.

So what is SharePoint for? It doesn’t fit into a service oriented architecture, uses security models from file servers, doesn’t do federated search well and isn’t built to open standards. Do you really want to put that sort of technology at the hub of your organisation?

You can try out SharePoint through the Microsoft Online Customer Portal, although you’ll need a Windows Live ID.

Let’s refer to the Mirror Stage, a psychoanalytical concept developed by Jacques Lacan during the 1940s. The concept describes how infants imagine themselves to be at one with a mother who satisfies their every need. When a child cries, its mother will feed it, change it, put it to bed, or comfort it. When a child reaches between six and eighteen months old, it starts to realise that its identity is separate to its mother’s. It recognises itself in a mirror, has to learn to feed itself and will be told off by its father. In short, it enters a symbolic order where it now has to conform to social constraints in order to get what it wants. The early imaginary state provides gratification without context, while the symbolic order provides context but imposes boundaries.
Which psychological order do your contributors belong to? Do you want or provide an environment for them to express themselves freely, or do you need to contextualise them and the content they produce?
Collaborative tools assume a shared identity. Just as an infant considers its mother to be an extension of itself that responds to its every whim, users look to collaborative software as a personal tool that instantly fulfils their need for self-expression. In this imaginary order, contributors “write out their question in their blog and look for their community to respond and help them“. Compare this to a content management system, where you have both context and boundaries: contributors recognise that their content can only be published if it meets predetermined social criteria.
Some examples:

• Folskonomy vs. Taxonomy: The most obvious difference between imaginary and symbolic orders in content classification. In folksonomy, users enter terms that help them understand their content and they imagine that other users understand these terms. In taxonomy, these terms are given a context and only predefined terms can be used according to a preordained structure.
• Intranets: Is your intranet an environment for generating knowledge or enshrining it? If your staff use it to discover what’s going on across multiple locations and projects, they assume that content is representative of the work they do. If the intranet holds authoritative information that employees want to refer to (for example, HR policy), you need a tool that confirms their place in the organisation and that reasserts social context.
• Web 2.0 vs. Web 1.0 sites: People who use social networking sites subconsciously assume that what is valid for them is valid for others: that their tags make sense, that their ratings (of YouTube videos for example) are relevant, that people will follow their myspace page. These assumptions may well be right, but context is limited to these assumptions. If I put a photo of Sophie onto Flickr and tag it accordingly, this tells me that there are other photos of people called Sophie on the site, but doesn’t tell me that it’s Sophie Marceau and I’m interested in pictures of French film actresses. It’s not clear of course that this is the information people are looking for, but a content managed system would presume this in its design. So if you go to a report on a football match on the BBC news website, it will provide links to more news about each club involved, league tables, fixtures, weather forecasts for that area and so on. The contributor doesn’t elect to have all this correlated information: the CMS provides the context automatically and imposes an authoritative order.

Of course, collaborative environments aren’t completely without context: any user who logs into the system has a distinct identity within the organisation. But the mirror stage in content management comes when you start to impose structure and workflow. If you need your contributors to put content in a specific place for easier retrieval, or to have their contributions approved before they’re viewed by a wider audience, then you’re imposing a symbolic order.
So when choosing your approach, ask yourself are you a mother or father to your users? Are you coaxing them, encouraging them to express themselves freely, or are you imposing a paternalistic authority?
If your organisation is essentially the same thing as your contributors, then an unstructured wiki is a viable option. This covers social networking sites, or collaborative research intranets. But if your organisation represents something more than the people it comprises, in line with a Gestalt psychology, then you need a content management system that enforces a shared identity rather than assumes it.