Enterprise Social Networking’s Got Talent

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I’ve been at the HR Performance 2012 conference at the London ExCel centre this week, talking about the benefits of and implementation strategies for employee social networks, and HR’s role in these projects.  In a slightly surreal twist, elsewhere in the ExCel at the same time, the auditions for Britain’s Got Talent were taking place, so mingling with HR Directors were teenagers in leg warmers, and emanating from many of the bathrooms was the sound of singers rehearsing enthusiastically. To add further to the incongruity, there were reports of dancers performing their acts in front of the HR exhibitors in to earn company-branded pens.

But think a little harder, and these two colliding worlds are not so very different. Indeed, one of my presentations was entitled Nurturing your employee talent on an enterprise social network. HR professionals and BGT judges are all trying to identify, develop and harness talent.

It doesn’t take too long to exhaust that particular metaphor, and perhaps the biggest difference, is that BGT sets this talent against each other in competition, whereas HR strives to make it work together as a team. This is one of the reasons I have always been uneasy about the term gamification – it inherently aims to set teams members against each other. Some people do find this motivating, but many others consider it contrary to everything a good workplace should be.

However, I do think that members of enterprise social networks could learn a little from BGT hopefuls in the way they promote themselves and their work. Too many network members focus more on how they consume information from others, rather than how they display their knowledge and experience for the benefit of other members. They are too quick to complain about not finding others’ work while failing to present their own in a way that makes it easily consumable by other network members. Social network profile pages provide an ideal opportunity to lay out your work in a way that benefits other members, to narrate your work  to help your colleagues understand your current projects. 

Of course, nobody likes blatant self-promotion from colleagues, so there is a balance to be struck here. But everyone employed by an organisation is being paid for a reason and must have some skill, knowledge or experience of value to offer. Your social network’s got talent, so take a few moments to make sure you are using your profile to explain to other members what your particular talent is.

Beyond Adoption: Social Process Transformation at E2Innovate

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I’m at the E2Innovate conference in Santa Clara this week with the Clearvale team. Later today I’ll be presenting alongside Paul Karazuba of QuickLogic on the topic of Beyond Adoption.

I’ve been to several of the Enterprise 2.0 conferences over the last few years, and I’ve always noticed that most of the discussion around enterprise social networks concerns “adoption” – how to get your employees, partners and/or customers onto your network in the first place. Surprisingly little attention is typically paid to what is, in my mind, two rather harder questions – how do you keep them there? And what are they meant to use the network for? All too often, once the initial excitement has worn off, employee social networks become deserted wastelands, or just a place for office gossip. But for such networks to survive and prosper, they need to become a place where real work gets done. 

I’m delighted to be able present alongside Paul from QuickLogic, because his company has been using Clearvale for over 18 months now. He’s been through the initial excitement phase, the “can’t see the point of it” phase, and has got beyond that and demonstrated tangible benefits to a globally-distributed organisation.

If you’re at the E2Innovate conference, I hope you can join us at 1.30pm today. And if you’d like to know more about Clearvale, come and visit us in the Expo Hall between 12 and 6.

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Nate Silver, Life, The Universe and Enterprise Social Networks

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On Wednesday morning, a clear winner emerged from the US election. No, not him – I mean Nate Silver, the New York Times blogger and statistical wizard. In an election universally described as “too close to call”, Silver correctly predicted the result in every single state. Writing in The Guardian, Bob O’Hara asks:

But how did Mr Silver predict the presidential race so accurately? What was this dark magic that he used?

The answer, of course, is that darkest of all dark magics, “mathematics”. Prior to polling day, another article in The Guardian had suggested:

The question of who will emerge victorious depends on whether you ask the priests or the mathematicians

Whatever your religious persuasions, there was really only ever going to be one winner there.

In an unashamedly blatant piece of newsjacking, I can’t help but see parallels between this and the way organisations measure the success of their internal-facing social business initiatives. Social networks, like opinion polls, generate a massive amount of data, yet people are all too happy to ignore that data and rely on their instinct. They use subjective measures such as “does it feel like we are engaging with employees better?”,  rather than analysing the data they have and answering the question objectively. Why is this?

I believe there are two main reasons. Firstly, fear of getting an answer they don’t like – a kind of social business “don’t ask, don’t tell”. This is a natural instinct, especially when some organisations are still struggling to make a business case for social networking inside their company. Understandable, but really not justifiable.

Dan Lyons, writing on ReadWrite about Nate Silver, said:

This is about the triumph of machines and software over gut instinct. 

This is only partially true. Yes, “gut instinct” was the clear loser, but the real triumph was the way Silver described the problem to the machines, and represented his statistical model in software. The machine was simply doing what it was told. (Incidentally, this is why I refuse to use the term “smartphone” – I was always taught that computers are fundamentally stupid, but are very good at doing precisely what you tell them. Today’s phones are not “smart” at all – they are just more powerful, and better-programmed).

Many years ago, a customer said to me “I have a 6 million line activity log from our eCommerce site, what shall I do with it?”. I said, “what do you want to know?”. “I don’t know”, he replied. “Well delete it then” was my, rather flippant, advice. If you can’t describe the problem effectively, then all the Big Data in the world is not going to help you. (Big Data has always struck me as “running before you can walk” because so few people can handle Little Data effectively).

Of course, all this was presciently satirised by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, with the colossal  processing power of Deep Thought reaching an answer that merely highlighted how poorly the question was phrased. (Deep Thought was, however, clearly a much better consultant than I ever was, as it successfully sold a massive follow-on consulting engagement to define the question).

Getting back to social business, the point is that many projects start without really understanding which questions they should be asking, which measurements were most important. It is tempting to reel off a list of important things to measure (like this one I wrote), but the truth is that the most important metrics differ from project to project, depending on what the objectives are. The questions we ask need to be described scientifically and aligned to business goals in order to separate (to borrow the title of Nate Silver’s book) the signal from the noise. And that’s not a job for Big Data-chomping machines; that’s a job for humans. Hopefully Nate Silver’s success will inspire a few more humans to embrace this “dark magic” of mathematics.