From the Tram

In thinking about my question from Tuesday I found myself thinking about two words: value and barriers.

Value is a word I have blogged about quite a lot over the past few months, I have a tendency to talk about the need to articulate a clear value proposition. We have conducted a lot of research that tells us that our audience are interested, they want to connect, they want to be able to learn from each other. But will they truly value this ability? Will access to a pool of people working in a similar industry, facing similar problems be enough to distract someone from the work they are doing and go online? Will their employers allow them time to get online to connect?

I believe we need to figure out how will users extract value from these applications. They say they want it, but how are they going to use it, and what impact will it have on the way they work? If we can figure these things out at least in fairly general terms, we go a long way to achieving that goal of articulating a clear value proposition.

In order to figure this out I’ll go back to some market research that was done early this year (it seems a long time ago now) and refresh myself with what our customers said to us.

Second I’ll put a survey out to those already participating in our existing social media initiatives. I’m not sure how many responses we’ll get but it seems to have worked for Jeremiah Owyang so we might as well give it a try.

Third I’ll get out and speak to the audience face o face. When I spend so much time communicating online it is very easy to forget how valuable a discussion with a real person can be.

With all of that hopefully I come up with a few clear points that our customers can relate to, or is this an impossible task? Do I just have to put it out there and see what happens?

Next up -thoughts on barriers to adoption….

I’ve had a bunch of thoughts to do with encouraging social media adoption and community building swirling around in my head of late. Mostly they have been driven by my current work situation. As I mentioned a week or so ago, we secured our wiki agreement and are moving into the content / community phase. We’re also moving into this phase on the conference social network project I have been working on. This means I’m hitting a rather scary time, I’m moving out of the familiarity (and boringness - I know it isn’t a word but I am going with it!) of IT system evaluation and selection and charging into the neverland that is online community building.

I’ve got a few ideas about how to go about it, but these are based off experience building a sense of team in a training room; I get the feeling online will be a very different beast. Interestingly ( I love it when the web does this) @NathanealB posted recently on the importance of early adopters. This post has stayed with me as the early adopters are the people I need to engage with right now!

Following that post I discovered Michelle Martin’s post on ‘the second wave’. I really like this phrase as it sums up the people we will be trying to engage with very soon. If we get the second wave of users involved we start to be able to offer real value. The early adopters are great but we want to build a financial knowledge sharing community, the pool of early adopters in our very specific niche just isn’t big enough! We need the next wave to get involved to make our community viable in the long term.

Michelle finishes her post by asking how we engage with these people, I might have a think about this and put some thoughts up tomorrow.

I went down to check out Melbourne Pubcamp 08 yesterday, it proved to be an interesting experience on a couple of fronts.

First I caved and joined Twitter (micktleyden), the appeal of watching and potentially joining the back channel twitterstream was just a bit too tempting. I’m on there now and I must admit I am not sure what to do. I think I’ll play around for a couple of weeks and see what I can come up with .

Second, Pubcamp was really focused on the ‘media’ side of social media. There was a lot of discussion around the role of ‘old’ media in ‘new’ media. Being someone who spends all their time looking at social media from a learning or enterprise collaboration perspective, I found it a little difficult to connect with much of the discussion. It was still interesting to watch and listen.

The formal conference session was broken into several ‘bite sized’ presentations. Before I go on I would like to provide one piece of advice to anyone presenting a 5 - 10 minute session:

Take your 20 - 30 minute session and delete half of it! Do not just try to say it faster!!!

Here are some bits I found interesting from a few of the presenters:

Jed White kicked off the session, he spoke about the interesting paradox we encounter more and more frequently, we can be physically isolated in a crowd of people yet hyper-connected via a mobile device. He gave the example of sitting on a silent crowded train, tapping away on a laptop or PDA…

Stephen Collins filled the keynote role and spoke very quickly about the value of loose ties in a network. I think main guts of the presentation was that loose ties (defined as ‘loose’ connections with people e.g. those connected to via blogs or twitter) act as a bridge between different closely tied networks. He argues that this can support problem solving as closely tied networks are prone to group think. Bringing a loosly tied contact into a situation can provide a fresh perspective and connect the network with other contacts who may be helpful.

Mark Jones spoke about the value of social media in creating a soft persona for an organisation citing Robert Scoble (MS) and Jonathon Schwartz (Sun) as examples.

Janine Cahill spoke about future directions and talked up virtual worlds. She did point out that they will evolve and become more usable and immersive.

There were a bunch of other presenters mostly talking about journalism and advertising. All in all it was a pretty interesting experience. I didn’t hang around for the unconference segment, so I’ll be keen to hear from other participants.

As for twitter, not sure how it will go for me but it was fun sending messages to the screen behind the discussion panel. A final question to put out there is whether presenters should engage with the twitterstream during their presentations. There are arguments for and against but we will definitely see more presenters attempt to do so.

I’ve struggled to come up with something interesting to write this week, although I’ve been doing some reasonably interesting things.

Over the past 8 weeks of so I have been conducting the wonderfully fun task of evaluating wiki platforms for implementation in our organisation. It turns out that the bulk of them are more or less the same, the main difference seems to be in the text editor but even then I reckon that most of them share the same DNA.

In the end I chose a platform based on ability to grow with us, price and most important ability to integrate with our unique environment. We want to implement a Single Sign On function using an encrypted HTML string rather than an LDAP integation. It seems most of the major ‘Enterprise 2.0′ vendors are ready to hook up inside your building but can’t quite handle a smooth integreation with a website. Anyhue we found someone who is very keen and hopefully will provide us with a solid product!

It seems that we’re going to be able to make pretty broad use of the system, we’ve gone with a platform that can accomodate a range of spaces. This should allow us to use it in our customer facing environment and internally, either way the more successful uses we find the easier it’ll be to justify the expense for 2009!!

The next trick will be to get people into it. We’ve gone after a wiki to create our own knowledge base,  we already have quite a lot of content to go in but due to a range of existing copyright agreements we are not going to be able to make it editable. I actually don’t think this is going to be a problem as we’re going to have to go through a fairly hefty education process on two fronts:

1. Many internal stakeholders are terrified of allowing anyone outside the building to contribute to something that has our logo on it. We need to show them that with appropriate guidelines and access levels this will not be a problem and will in fact open many doors to us.
2. Many of out target audience probably have not had a lot of exposure to the ‘2.0 revolution’. We are going to have to build a level of comfort in the audience to contribute. I get the feeling that in a knowledge base situation the ‘fear’ factor may be larger than in some other work-based wiki applications. The risk of being labelled as wrong (particularly in our system which will not allow anonymous posting) is much greater than if you are using a wiki in an enterprise environment to host meeting minutes and spreadsheets.

Starting with locked content then slowly opening areas of the wiki up will allow us to gradully build interest and confidence, without the worry of conducting a grand opening only to find it left to crickets and tumbleweeds two months later.

In any case, the boring software selection stuff is done, so now I’m going to start planing for the people. I’ve had Stuart Mader’s Wikipatterns sitting on my desk for about 6 weeks now. I might bring it along for the tram ride tonight!

…well it was a big long rambling mess but turns out I can think of something to write….

A great article by Nicholas Carr has appeared in my reader three times in the last day or so. Nicholas laments the loss of our ability to read deeply. Google, Blogs, RSS, Podcasts and Wikipedia provide us with the ability to find out anything or say what we think about anything whenever we like. Is this bad?

Tony Karrer reckons it’s pretty good and we should blog about it, Tom Davernport says it’s inevitable and we’ll just evolve and Mind Hacks rejects the premise that anything other than out behaviour is changing.

I sit somewhere in the middle. I scan through 70 odd blogs in my reader every couple of days, only stopping to absorb or comment on those that particularly tickle my fancy. I scan the news headlines and read the first paragraph to get the gist of what is happening in the world. That said, I often crave analysis. I regularly find myself seeking out in-depth articles, podcasts and documentaries that discuss an issue at more than a superficial level. I sometimes get the feeling that while I have read 100+ articles in the last couple of days I have not really learned anything. At this point I agree with Tony, I really build my understanding of an issue when I blog about it, or if it doesn’t relate to my blogging ‘world’ sit down and discuss it.

Short, sharp updates are vital to keep up to date with what is going on in a rapidly changing world and while we may be spending less time on one article, we are now reading 5 articles on the same topic presenting a range of different perspectives. The nature of the reading and information consumption may be changing but will that result in a more sophisticated analysis of an issue?

I’ve been loving the blog lately! Well I always love the blog, I guess the difference is I have been thinking about why I am loving the blog. I’m beginning to understand how many different ways a blog can be used. It is such an incredibly flexible application, as such I have decided to call it the SUV of web applications! It can go almost anywhere, it has room for the dog and the snowboards and it doesn’t feel like a truck!

I thought I would jot down a few of the potential ‘uses’ for a blog.

Personal Learning

This is my favourite use, personal learning is what this blog is all about! I’ve really enjoyed being able to sit down on the tram and flesh out an idea I have been struggling with during the day. On many occasions the arguments I have put forward on blog posts have been referenced during the day in a range of different ‘real’ work situations.

Collaborative Learning

A recent post about Second Life really stirred up some discussion. I had a lot of different people providing their two cents, through this I was pointed to some interesting reading and was really challenged to think through my initial argument. As a personal learning tool it is fantastic, but to go a step further and have other people challenge those thoughts was very powerful.

Marketing

To a certain extent there is a degree of personal branding going on here. I’ve got no plans to seek alternate employment, I really like my job (the bold is for the benefit of my boss :-)). However in the future, a collection of my thoughts such as this my prove to be useful (or otherwise!) when I do decide to find another opportunity. I also see a range of product marketing uses out there, ranging from communicating product examples to discussing challenges and providing updates.

Customer feedback

I believe providing customers with an opportunity to provide open and honest feedback about your products provides you with a wonderful chance to provide outstanding service and demonstrate to a broad audience that you provide outstanding service. Back your business, your product and your ability to respond to problems and invite feedback!

That’s the first four I can come up with, I reckon there are hundreds of other out there. I’d be keen to hear what anyone else can think of!

More second life stuff!! I know your thinking ‘Mick get over it!’ This month the LCB big question is all about how we can use Second Life for training? It’s been a couple of months since I have been able to find a way to come at a Big Question, so seeing as this is a bit different to my discussion of a couple of weeks ago I’ll give it a go! That conversation focused on uses in my own work environment, I’ll take this as an opportunity to try to be a bit creative, and think outside my own square.

I mentioned in my previous SL post that an ideal use in a corporate environment is OHS training. Everyone at some point in their careers has had the miss-fortune of sitting through a boring ‘lookout for everyday hazards’ type video. I reckon SL or similar would be ideal for this type of training!

Moving on to new ideas: Landscape design. My fiancé is keen to start working on a landscape design course of some description. Unfortunately due to her illness she is going to struggle with the manual side of the course. Workshops and activities conducted in SL could allow her to learn the principles of good design and experiment with ideas without needing to spend hours in a TAFE garden.

Media / journalism, Reuters and CNN already have a presence in second life, aspiring journalists could set themselves up in SL and observe what’s going on and hone their craft in the metaverse prior to migrating to the physical world.

Security training. I don’t know anything about security training but I would imagine there is a lot of procedural observation of behavior. It is possible that ’suspicious’ behaviors could be replicated in S recruits could then diffuse the situation in a safe environment.

There we go, that’s four ideas. Each will have hundreds of extra considerations and complications, but I would think given the right support they could develop into useful learning tools. I do believe virtual worlds have a lot of potential as training tools, however (check out my previous post to see my reasoning) they do require a lot of evolving before we see widespread adoption.

I really like CommonCraft’s videos they have produced some great short sharp explanations of new and emerging tools. Their latest effort aims to explain the rise and rise of social media… I reckon they have done a good job!

The blog has been more than a little quiet lately, life has been busy, busy busy!

My most exciting news happened on the weekend, my wonderful gorgeous partner, Ros and I became engaged!! woohooooo!!!!! - No e-Learning or social media link there…. just excited!

More on the topic and somewhat exciting, however much less so than the above. I have managed to land a ‘blog review’ copy of the hottest book in social media circles at the moment - Goundswell by Forrester Analysts Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li.

I’ve been waiting for a copy to land in our Library, now I won’t need to worry - cool! I’ll post my thoughts as I work my way through it.

I’ve felt a lot like a man of 1000 voices since deciding to give blogging a go in November last year. I’ve been through many different phases from trying to produce journal style articles on abstract L&D topics, to short, sharp link to posts. It wasn’t until about a month ago that I felt like I had really ‘found my voice’.

One of the projects I’ve been working on recently has been to launch a blog. The goal is to provide an information resource to our customers and hopefully start some discussion. We engaged a subject matter expert to write the content and pulled together a plan detailing the topics we wanted to cover in our first few weeks, nothing concrete but a guide to help us avoid writer’s block!

Over the last couple weeks I have been finding myself going through the whole voice finding process again. I have not been writing the content but I have been reviewing it. The author already has his own voice; he is a fairly accomplished academic and writes thoughtful articulate posts. My challenge is to do with the blog voice, is an academic voice going to engage a corporate audience? Will they embrace an argument developed over 1500 words or do they (as I do when reading a blog) want to get to the heart of the issue in the first line, then read the discussion if they choose? Finally, what will keep them coming back?

The biggest challenge of the lot has been to work out my feedback. My instant reaction is to put my voice over the top, but who am I to enforce my voice over that of a recognized expert. And who says people want to read my voice? I like to think that I’m at least little engaging but I’m not quite full enough of myself to expect that I work for everyone!! In the end I went down the collaborative path and chatted to colleagues (old school around the water cooler), we talked through the objectives of the blog (engage and inform) and the audience (corporate finance types) and still don’t have a definitive answer.

I guess that’s because there isn’t one, a voice is always going to evolve and change, we’ll find people respond to some posts and we’ll find that they don’t respond to others, the trick for us is to keep our eyes open and listen to the people who speak to us. Getting caught up in our own idea of what is right and wrong is a sure fire way to end up with an empty blog!!