Social Business Design: a social psychologist's take

If a social psychologist were to design a business, as an experiment of course, she would take all the information she knows about a) person b) environment and c) their interaction and design a system to account for it all.

Aware of people's fundamental need to belong, she might conceive of the organization as a vast network of groups; understanding differences in culture, and cultural perceptions, she might afford a more collective orientation by priming team goals and rewarding participation; knowledgeable about interpersonal dynamics she might enable real-time communication and meta-communication to promote team awareness and smooth interactions; lastly, with a deep knowledge of statistics as the backbone of social science, she would empower participants with individual methods of making sense of information and would constantly measure any changes.

With good Gestalt, the sum of these parts would equal greater than the whole. That is, each one of those four maneuvers would lead to incremental differences, leveraging more people to communicate more fluidly. Together, these would lead to emergent outcomes - new ideas, new directions, unexpected, unforeseen results.

For the past nine months plus, my colleagues and I have been building a business not too dissimilar from this. Specifically we've been figuring out what it takes to design a social business.

In the image above, you'll start to get a sense of the four cornerstones, or archetypes of Social Business Design:

• Ecosystem - a community of connections
• Hivemind - the socially calibrated mindset of individuals
• Dynamic Signal - the constant multi-faceted means of collaboration
• Metafilter- a method of finding signals in vast amounts of noise

Social Business Design, although new terminology, is rooted in much of the classic thinking about how naturally social we are. It's newly possible because of advances in technology that now support our social ways. It's timely, given changes in work and society, like globalization and our expectations to be intimately involved in various business decisions.

I'm part of a team that's building a social business of our own, to help others design theirs. We've developed consultative and technology implementation services to do so.

We've been working with a few clients already, helping them solve pieces of the overall social business equation. We've also been sharing pieces of our vision over the past few months: Jeff, here; Pete, here; Jevon, here; David, here; and I do, here; although we haven't officially launched or named ourselves yet.

Today, each of my colleagues and I are sharing our perspectives on the gestalt: Social Business Design:

• David Armano: From Social Media to Social Business Design
  
• Peter Kim: Reflections on Social Business
  
• Jevon MacDonald: Taking the Leap: Social Business Design

If you want to know more, tune into our panels this week at Enterprise 2.0, livestreamed, with chat. If you're in Boston for E 2.0 and want to talk more about Social Business Design, especially the measurement side of things, shoot me an email or leave a comment below.

consistency, connectivity, and consequences

When consistency and connectivity are at odds, it seems particularly paradoxical.

A while back, the NY Times ran an article about taking advantage of the anonymity of text messaging to help teens get sex education. One of the sex ed volunteers interviewed pointed out the importance of consistency.

"In offering this service to teenagers, he said, “you can’t say ‘I’ll be honest except or until.’ ” That’s often what happens with parents, he added, “when the child brings up something shocking, the parents tend to shut down.”

This is often what happens in business, actually. Particularly when it comes to connectivity: You can connect in this way (e.g. Outlook), but not this way (e.g. Facebook)…

Ironically, the article concluded with the idea that help, as offered through this service, stops at connectivity.

"I don’t want them to feel connected to me,” she said, “because I’m never going to be real to them. I’m a texter. I want them to find someone real to talk to.”

It makes me question the more literal sense of connection people have through technology and whether its dependent on the possibility of “real” connections.

Beyond services like Match.com or meetup.com which have explicit goals of live connections, we know virtual worlds can be deeply emotional, whether or not you go to the Second Life Community Convention. I’ve experienced firsthand how certain flow applications can give you an awareness of your team you can’t have in the office. Neither of these happen in anticipation of live communication.

But then time and again you read about virtual relationships coming to fruition – the fulfillment, closure, and surprises.

Sandy Pentland’s research illustrates the differential value of face-to-face vs. email communication. Whereas email is optimized for brainstorming, face to face is required for integration and decision-making. Is this another way of saying connectivity without live consequence leads to limited intimacy?

Can we fully achieve the leverage of mass connectivity without a sense of consequence? Does consequence better afford consistency?

Straddling

Despite an unruly travel schedule, I was refreshed by my brief visit at ICWSM (International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media) where Sam Gosling and I gave a workshop on The Psychology of Social Media. Sam introduced me as someone who straddles psychological research and applied social media, hence the title of my post.


ICWSM, is exceptional in being able to use the term social media sans baggage. That alone was refreshing; as was the unique mix of people at the conference, all with hands on various vectors of social media, if you will. As Matt Hurst says,

These include: text mining, artificial intelligence (especially NLP/CompLing), psychology, graph algorithms, social network theory, data visualization/UI design and data mining. One of the major roles and purposes of the conference is to bring these areas together to better model, support and leverage social media.

Sam and I framed the workshop with the question: "What can psychology tell us about the production and consumption of social media?"

Our talk began with the idea that all social media is created and consumed by psychological beings, beings with "psychologies" that evolved long ago. Naturally then, successful social media should tap into these basic needs. Businesses too, I would argue.

Whenever people talk about psychological needs, they immediately think Maslow. While his hierarchy is intuitively appealing, empirically it hasn't exactly panned out. It's always interesting to me what has and has not leaked out of psychology. Gladwell aside, could good visualizations be predictive? 

The framework of needs Sam and I chose to talk about comes from Robert Hogan, a personality psychologist whose ideas are rooted in evolutionary adaptation. You've heard about our "Stone Age minds' before... Gist is: we've always lived in groups and our groups have always had status hierarchies. So, our main psychological motivations are (a) to get along and (b) t0 get ahead. This results in us:

Wanting to know others; and, 

Wanting to be known by others (as Sam's research shows, sometimes).

Sam discussed his research on personality perception based on Facebook profiles, websites, bedrooms, and offices; and I talked about my research defining personality with everyday behaviors and language. We both agree, one of the more interesting questions that stems from all this research is what do you need to know in order to really know someone? And now, how much of this do we get in social media? Is anything systematically missing?

Understanding psychological needs is important in designing a system, well beyond the UX. Thanks to groups like ICWSM, we can advance in applying information about how psychological information is conveyed and made sense of, at a systemic level- whether we're designing an application or a business.

Culture: subject to change

It's hard to change.

But not impossible.

I'm reacting late, but vehemently to the idea that "there is no such thing as culture change." I readily acknowledge the subtleties clarified in the ensuing commentary, but I feel strongly that talking about "the people" and the complementary or, in my mind, superordinate class of change that accompanies shifts toward social technology in the enterprise is tangible and important to address systematically.

I like Susan Scrupsi's comment:

The technology is liberating, but unless every vested member in the org chart is willing to be freed from industrial age convention, it’s unlikely change will come soon. These are corporate culture issues and they’re pervasive in the adoption story.

It's not lazy thinking to call it out, as Venkat suggests. Instead, it's that we 'the people' - not the catalysts of social media adoption, but the people per se - are lazy. Routined. Tied to our ways, or perhaps so much as addicted, leaning on technology, processes, and beliefs like crutches.

The more I read the commentary, the more nuances I find. I admit, genuine structural issues in different sized organizations loom large. But I propose enterprise size acts as an important moderating variable in what would be our systematic address of attitude and behavior change.

Let me be clear: individuals are capable of making drastic changes.

For enduring change, we tend to change our thinking, and then our behaviors align (in time). Sometimes, we witness behavior change preceding attitude change, usually rooted in self-justification.

Changing our ways takes courage, commitment, and the very effortful ability to take alternative views of data (or situations), and then the foresight that a given, alternate, perspective has merit.

One way to parse the snake oil out of a 'culture-enthusiast' is to think about measurement - measuring the abstract culture, and then the efficacy of any culture-change program. For those who are interested, I refer you to a classic paper in psychology (Smith & Glass, 1977), largely credited for starting the trend of comparing outcomes of different types of psychotherapy. I think there are many lessons to be learned there-- not only about the ability to change behavior (efficacy), but the ability to measure and compare outcomes.

Ph.D., schmee-H-D

As I handed my web 2.0 co-presenter, Marc Smith, my new business card, I realized I had forgotten to include “Ph.D.” next to my name. My hard-earned qualifier that I was so proud to display on all previous business cards, all of a sudden invisible, even to me… I suggested it was probably better that way; Marc was shocked (horrified?). My justification—so often people see/hear Ph.D. and fear you’re going to be too theoretical; full of hot air:




…that your sense of time is warped; your awareness of the bottom line, null.

Ironically, one of the questions that came up at our session (echoed below in a comment from Neil Beam) was “Do you need a Ph.D. to heed [our] advice on going beyond buzz. Can a practitioner go it alone?” (paraphrased)

My answer: No you don’t; Yes you can!

By no means do I want to downplay my own background or denigrate the blood, sweat, tears, qualifying exams, torturous peer review process, or any other aspect of the training involved in earning a Ph.D., but in the same way you don’t need an MBA to be a CEO, or ‘do strategy’, a Ph.D. isn’t necessary to analyze a conversation.

You need a framework (a sound foundation), an open mind (open to letting the data speak), and a willingness to explore the depth of data.

As we discussed in our presentation, analyzing a conversation is about appreciating the context – realizing that there are several layers (As Marc would say, micro-meso-macro) to analyze for a comprehensive understanding:

1. Signal – Finding the right means of detecting relevance
   
2. Person – Digging deep into attributes/orientation of the individual producing the signal
   
3. Role – Identifying, through patterns of communication, which role an individual plays in a community
   
4. Ecosystem – Cultivating the appropriate balance of relationships, which form the structure of your network(s)
   

I don't mean to suggest this as the gold standard in frameworks for online conversation analysis-- it is simply one you can use systematically, that has some empirical support behind it. 

I would love to hear others and am open to feedback on this one. One area we toyed with including spoke more to the flow or dynamic of a conversation- a different take on the interaction between person and environment (now Role). I know Lithium has an impressive, empirical approach to Community Health in which they assess Liveliness within a community - this might fit in here. 

Please find our slides here and keep Marc's NodeXL tool in mind as you get started.

Thanks to everyone who came to our talk and especially to Jen Pahlka for coordinating the event and allowing us to make a few key last minute changes. 

measuring socially

On Wednesday (4.01.09), Marc Smith and I are talking about social science in social media and the enterprise at the Web 2.0 Expo in SF. Drop by - we have an exciting story to tell. Beyond Buzz: On measuring a Conversation, 10:50am. 

People often confuse social psychology (my background) and sociology (Marc's) but we both approach the study of people quite differently. Whereas I'm interested in an individual's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and how they are affected by the presence (or implied presence) of others, Marc is interested in people's behaviors, en masse - groups within the context of even larger groups and social structures. We do, however, have a strong common thread of "things social" and above all, an intense focus on what to measure and how.

Social media are overflowing with opportunities for each of our goals and methods. Our talk proposes going beyond buzz-- getting people away from the flat and limited paradigms paradoxically used today in the rich, interactive context social technology affords. 

We'll be focusing on:

• Honing the signal amidst all the noise
  
• Knowing more about the individuals producing the signal
  
• Identifying the roles individuals play in communities
  
• Exploring the aggregated relationships that create a conversation ecosystem
  

Marc also is the pioneer of NodeXL, a free social network analysis tool, so you can leave our session empowered to proceed immediately.

We'll be showing some interesting data tying our perspectives together and, we think, pointing toward the future of measurement in the enterprise.

Let me know if there's a certain angle you're eager for us to pursue.

Twitter: help or hinder, our fleeting memories

I can't help but take the contrarian POV.

Twittering during SXSWi is the norm. In fact, for 2 years now, people have claimed the backchannel is where the action really is-- and I’m not making a snarky reference to the Lacy-Zuckerberg fiasco of ’08. Search #SXSW and you’ll find a pretty robust meta-conference-- quotes, comments, critiques, questions on all sessions.

But, in response to Peter Kim’s summary of SXSWi ’09, consensus is that the Twittering was "out of control."

Howlvenice comments:

“I found that the tweeting was voracious. i intentionally did not twitter and took notes instead at each of the important panels. i chose to absorb the information rather than react to it in real time. now some of the tweeters are asking for my notes.”

Is absorbing really at odds with reacting; listening vs. Tweeting? Why do people assume we can't seamlessly Tweet and take-in?

I’m the first to acknowledge multi-tasking is a competition of limited cognitive resources, but there are 3 things we know from the basic study of memory that lead me to believe that Twitter could actually help us better encode our experiences.

We’re more likely to remember things when:

1. we expend more cognitive effort (think: writing vs. reading)
   
2. information is self-relevant (think: adding your own 2 cents)
   
3. we doodle! (think: translating into something visual)
   

I used to lecture about memory tips in Intro Psych and went through numerous studies showing that depth of processing leads to better memory. Is Twittering not a means of deeper processing?

I’m not assuming that all Tweets were on-topic, or that Twitterers' motivations were committing content to memory. However, the process of documenting while listening and the personalized digital breadcrumbs left behind are, arguably, advantageous.

My issue was efficiency-- the signal in the noise more than the noise per se. To be most effective, I think the solution to 'out of control tweeting' is a system that tags not just the particular panel within the conference, but whether the tweet, for example, is a question (#q), rebroadcast (#rb), or relevant thought (#t). Because I was on-site, I was only interested in original thinking and builds, not redundent content. It would be great to see an empirical breakdown of the types of tweets that exist so we could create a useful taxonomy for future conferences.

In hopes of making presenters feel more comfortable with a Twittering audience, Olivia Mitchell (on Laura Pistachio's blog), does a nice job aggregating additional benefits to the audience, as well as tips for the presenters to cope!