Social should imply specificity

[This was originally posted on the Dachis Group Collaboratory]  

There’s an inherent problem with the word social. Not “social media” or “social business.” Just social. The problem is, it doesn’t incorporate any sense of specificity to it. People are left to think that all things social are massive connectivity festivals. Really, being social is about connecting with sensible, specific others, typically, for specific reasons.

It’s great to open things up and give people freedom, but specificity-- that is, some focus or structure- is what really unleashes talent. Specificity comes in many forms of social systems. As Tom Malone et al. point out, the “genome” of collective intelligence can be broken down into Who (staffing), What (goal), Why (incentives), and How (process). Each of these "genes" demand specificity.

Take the Netflix Challenge, for one: its success as a crowdsourced effort was attributed to connecting the right people only after some jockeying happened. It was not a result of all participants being connected, helter-skelter. Often throwing too many people into the mix leads to hasty and irrational outcomes due to groupthink or lazy free-loading, as a result of social loafing -- not to mention pluralistic ignorance where we incorrectly assume acceptance of a given norm.

A less oft-cited method of making a social system work has less to do with who is connected and more to do with what you ask of those connections. This is a critical focus as researchers migrate from surveys as our mainstay methodology. Good questions are the currency of social systems that flow between the focused connections discussed above.

The other day I noticed Rypple made an important change in this direction with its “Power of One” initiative. Rypple, as you might know, lets you give and receive feedback online (anonymously), to and from select others. All humans lack an inherent sense of psychometrics, so it’s hard to know precisely what to ask, especially when the stakes are high. That is, you’re asking *specific* trusted others for self-related feedback. The inclination is to ask open-ended questions. Logic being similar to the above: connect everyone // ask people to tell you anything and any number of things. Turns out, lack of specificity leads to confusion, and in most cases non-response. Rypple is alleviating this problem by encouraging users to ask “what’s *one thing* I can do to improve.”

It’s usually one question that makes or breaks a given finding. Gallup’s one question, “Do you have a best friend at work” is the biggest predictor of workplace engagement. Other research shows that one question self-assessments of health are better predictors of mortality than an extensive battery of objective health data. Reicheld told us six years ago that your Net Promoter score is “The One Number you Need to Grow.”

My point is not about measurement error and response bias, it’s about specificity. Being direct in order to make social systems effective. Finding the signal amidst the noise.

We can't go on idly talking about "social" initiatives. We must be focused in order to make social systems effective. This pertains to who is in your ecosystem, how they are connected, why they are connected, and how you measure those connections.

Being social is not necessarily complex. If you apply a lens of specificity, you can systematically simplify the situation.

Lab, Sweet Home(page)

Today we launch our laboratory on social business design: The Collaboratory.

It’s a work in progress, and today is the first step. When you arrive, you’ll notice a window on our world of work: a live stream of our communication-- sharing files, yamming, tweeting, and yes, emailing, since no one is perfect yet.

The Collaboratory moonlights as our web presence, offering more information about our company, curating readings about social business design, and eventually inviting clients to engage with us in social business. Rather than making it a static repository of knowledge, we’re testing out new ways to make it more dynamic and blur the lines of transparency and other notions, previously standards of how business has been done.

My favorite aspect of it is its experimental nature, so please participate and help us turn it into something really interesting. We've also posted our first piece of thought leadership, available for download. I hope this stimulates millions of questions from you, particularly about the interface of social science and business; I encourage you to engage, question, critique, comment. We've been thinking about these concepts for just over a year now and are excited to open our doors and engage with our ecosystem.

Think culture change, not brainwashing...

You might laugh, but as I’ve been thinking about the culture change associated with social business design, I’m reminded of the literature on coercive persuasion, aka brainwashing, in its ugliest form.

Only brainwashing has such negative connotations. Abandon those. The part I’m thinking about, the systematic methodology to get people to change their attitudes to drastically different ones, is not necessarily evil. 

I know it seems strong - or wrong - to compare culture change to brainwashing, but building the new collaborative culture we’re talking about takes a lot of work. Unless, of course you’re just asking people to use social technologies and not genuinely change their ways, their attitudes, their business processes. 

Most people aren’t-- they’re asking how we get hierarchical, silo-d, and competitive cultures to change to more democratic, participative, or hiveminded ones.

Enter “thought reform” methodology from reputable psychologists like Edgar Schein or Robert Jay Lifton, as deduced from extreme situations like American POWs in the Korean war. Of course, it requires slight adaptation to be more relevant to an organizational setting. 

The POW brainwashing tactics were complex, but there are three major phases that  are typically identified. Keep in mind, in the case of the POWs, which I don’t for a second endorse a direct analog to employees of corporate life, it was all about breaking down identity through abuse, starvation, isolation, sleep deprivation, etc.. Rather than breaking down who you are, I’ve adapted the process to be about how you work. I’ve also removed the need for undue conditions (managers take note). 

A loose adaptation: simplified steps to "induce" culture change:



Break it down. 

• While you don’t need to begin by attacking “wrong,” or unsocial ways, question current definitions and ways of working. Get all assumptions and beliefs on the table. In the coercive settings, here's where captors figure out what they're working with and build a foundation for change. Use caution here-- the emphasis is on questioning old ways, not mandating new ones. The anxiety you can provoke here could backfire if you aren't supportive and consistent. 
  

Provide a glimmer of hope. 

• As people, we’re full of biases that limit us to seeing and using things in the usual, traditional ways. Offer alternatives. Start with seemingly innocent pilots-- nothing back-breaking. Talk about the purpose behind the ways of old so you can rebuild strategically and not just address features. One of the more effective tactics used in POW coercion was to put newbies in groups with others who were more advanced, or further down the road in the desired change. They offered a comfortable model of tactical next steps.
  

Rebuild the new, social employee. 

• With a blank slate to work from, here’s where the vision comes in. The key here is introducing a new belief system, not just a new feature set. In coercive version, here’s where "the right way" is introduced, and is radically different from ways of old [Note: here's where it's introduced, not in stage 1, but in the final stage]. The trick here is to provide a completely new framework. Recall how easy it is to fall back on what we know; here, you have to go out of your way to offer up new ways to think about things.
  

Again, drastically oversimplified, but in my mind, remarkably instructive when thinking about genuine change. 

Dachis Group Ecosystem Expansion



As my readers will agree, when you hear someone talking about successful strategies to share hidden data and drive collective intelligence, you can’t help but be endeared. Throw a picture of Madonna into the same presentation (re: adoption challenges) and your interest skyrockets, no? Such was the case when I first heard Lee Bryant eloquently present on transition strategies for E2.0 adoption. 

Lee is the co-founder and director of Headshift, a company that we, the Dachis Group, excitedly announce today we have acquired. Headshift is a leader in the space who understands that social business is a new way of working, not just the use of new technology. Headshift, like us, realizes that organizations today need socially calibrated ideas and tools, and most importantly, strong strategy to implement them.

We believe global organizations will evolve their participation in social media into social business. When this happens, integration, scale, and adoption will become complex issues that can only be solved with a solid strategic foundation: social business design. Social business design is a systematic, comprehensive approach that spans three core areas: optimization, workforce collaboration and customer participation. 

These three areas of business present ripe opportunities for improved outcomes such as cost savings, new product/service innovations, and increased revenue streams. These outcomes occur when organizations connect and expand their ecosystems, evolve toward a more open culture, and empower employees, business partners and customers to actively participate in their business.  

Our acquisition of Headshift will allow us to service the increasing demand for global organizations to become social businesses. It will also allow us to attract the best talent internationally, create our own global, collaborative culture and do the absolute best work in this space. Headshift has done extensive work in Professional and Legal Services, Consumer Products, Media and Publishing, Health Care, and Government; and, worked with global companies including AXA, British Petroleum, and the BBC. 

I’m excited to expand our ecosystem to include Headshift as collaborators to help global organizations (and organisations) become social businesses. I’m also particularly eager to drink virtual tea with my new colleagues overseas. Welcome, Headshift!

For more information: 

• The official press release for this news can be found here.
  
• For more on the Dachis Group and our services, visit our company site and follow us on Twitter.

My colleagues' perspectives on our expansion can be found on their blogs:

• Peter Kim, Welcome, Headshift.
  
• David Armano, Dachis Group Expands Internationally with Headshift
  
• Jevon MacDonald, We are Growing: Dachis Group Expands with Headshift.
  
• Lee Bryant, Power up! Level completed

marking your social media territory

The other night, at Parents' night, the teacher explained how 2-3 year-old kids are really into the idea of "guarding." He proceeded to give me a handful of pebbles my son had asked him to "guard" that very day. Of course, after a brief moment of inexplicable pride, my immediate instinct was to question how I've raised him to be so territorial.

Then I realized he's far from alone; he's probably a social media maven in-the-making. 

Our social media behavior obviates how territorial we all are. Take hashtags on Twitter. What better way to say "guard this idea"? RT-ing, in this vein, is yet another defense mechanism-- that is, defending your intellectual territory. It's a way to show your association with an idea, if not partially own it. What about the race to pagerank? It's all about marking territory. Is oversharing yet another tactic? Increasing the probability that you'll be rewarded with authority, influence, and other forms of credit for any number of potential memes...

To me, hashtags on Twitter epitomize the idea of territory-marking. They seem inherently different from tags in other media, e.g. blogs. I have a feeling our hashtagging motivations go deeper than the universal need to classify and develop a taxonomy. There's something subversive and blatant about the ownership motive there. Maybe the ephemeral nature of Twitter encourages us to hoard more intensely than a longer-form, more enduring medium. 

Could the sheer scale and fast-growing nature of social media bring out this territorial instinct in all of us? It reminds me of the drastically different behavior we show when primed with mortality salience. I remember one study where men rated wholesome women to be more attractive than promiscuous ones when primed with their own mortality. I wonder if we use more hashtags when Twitter volume is particularly high-- as a strategy to manage the noise. This would be a nice microcosm of the increased territory-marking that seems to be going on as communication - messages and media -- proliferates. 

We've long known that unpredictability and lack of control compel us to make our mark. When my son asks his teacher to guard things, he clearly perceives risk in losing them. Preservation and ownership claims make sense for the uncertainty that is life at age 2. If we, however, perceive a loss of control in social media, we might need to conjure up better strategies to establish order. 

Photo credit: Mrs. Logic on Flickr

SXSWi: voting is live

My hockey coach once told me you should always vote for yourself. If you have any hesitation, you shouldn't play, run for leadership positions, or in this case, submit ideas. 

In light of his sage advice, I wanted to ever so unhumbly show you what my team has submitted to SXSWi 2010, each of which I've confidently voted for. Take a look and see what you think. There are many, many other (2k+) great-looking submissions well worth checking out prior to September 4th. 

We'd appreciate your consideration.  

Social Business By Design (David Armano)

• Description:  The hype around social media has become deafening. Organizations are feeling pressured to "join the conversation” or risk being irrelevant. However, a “social business” has to be designed from the ground up and the top down in order to achieve transformation which scales. Are we ready to move beyond lip service?


• Will address:  What is "social business design"? Why is this important to me? What implications does social business design have for my organization? Why do I need a "social business strategy"? What technologies are relevant? How will this help me with my current social business initiatives? What should I be measuring? Why is this different from what I'm doing now? How will advancements in cloud computing, open source, and mobile factor? Where do I start?

Sponsored Conversations: Good Strategy or Spam? (Peter Kim)

• Description: Does sponsored social media content work? When it comes to pay-for-play, many bloggers see no issue with “sponsored conversations” and point out that it’s happened for years. Others decry this practice as payola and challenge the credibility of those who accept payments. Who’s right?


• Will address:  Should marketers support sponsored conversations? Do bloggers undermine their credibility by accepting payments? Will the FTC ruling have a material impact on this practice? How are large consultancies advising their blue chip clients on this issue? How do well-known bloggers see an impact on their approach? What standards should bloggers adhere to, especially vis-a-vis journalists? Can paying for conversation deliver unbiased content? Does this work as a form of advertising? From those who have participated, what's the ROI of sponsored conversations? Is this an inevitable trend, as Forrester claims? If so, how big will it get?

Stop the Insanity: Making Sense of the Social Web (me)

• Description:  As social technologies become woven into our lives, our breadcrumbs become more varied and dimensional. Making sense of this information is challenging- for users and marketers. Methods from social and personality psychology are potential antidotes. Enough with pages views to demonstrate value. How can analysis account for the rich depth of data?


• Will address:  How, besides traditional web analytics, can you demonstrate the value of social technology? Why is everyone obsessed with Influence and Engagement-- does either construct have any merit? What is a good framework to use when thinking about data available through social technology? Which constructs matter when you're "listening" online? As users, how can we make sense of the information we give and receive about ourselves everyday? Are there better ways to present myself online? Quicker ways to perceive others? What can you really know about someone based on their profile, blog, or tweets? What do marketers currently know about us, based on our online communication? What can social scientists tell us about social media? Are there any ways for marketers to go beyond buzz levels and sentiment?


• Potential panelists: Jonathan Carson - co-founder, BuzzMetrics; President International, Nielsen Online; Daniel Debow - co-founder, co-CEO Rypple; Sam Gosling - University of Teaxas at Austin Personality psychologist and author of Snoop: What your stuff says about you

Hopefully see you in Austin soon. And if we do get in, be sure to Tweet precisely!

Slow down: you appear to have a Socially Transmitted Disease

Peter Kim, coiner of terms such as the headfake and other online gems asked me about STDs: Socially Transmitted Diseases. 

We seem to all have different strands (memes?) of these STDs. My Sunday Styles folk will recall this is why Michael Malice developed Protocols, "fighting against this whole idea that everything people do has to be constantly chronicled."

But there's more to it. It's cliche to suggest we're excessively social because we can be. Insert stale joke here about someone blogging while you're disclosing a deep, dark secret, tweeting while they're eating breakfast, or Jeff Jarvising your customer service... STDs are multidimensional beasts. Gone are the days where attention, narcissism, or reputation-management drove our online behavior.

We're addicted to accruing followers and engaging with that community so much so that 2-hours of down-time on Twitter leads to fearful outcries that "social media is standing still" 

We're reinforced by the ability to cleanse our stream, for example getting huge rushes of adrenaline when you tap into the new ease of hiding irrelevant, yet active-sharers on Facebook. 

Dare I intervene with catchy labels for these STDs Engagamydia? Signaliasis?

Pete reminded me of the depression of unconfirmed friend requests and the exhilarating "whoosh" of sending an email on Mac Mail. Amazing how these new behaviors are toying with our brain chemistry... 

Sometimes we need to remember that social technology is actually enabling our organic, social instincts, not transforming us into a new breed of monsters. Remember: we're social animals. We strive to get along and get ahead, it's only natural to get excited about the increased amplification of our signals.

But like a pretty girl in college, take your time to develop and manage your ecosystem. Social media is a vehicle for social behavior, more Sedan than DeLorean.