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How can you tell if your Enterprise Network is Innovative?
One of the most commonly stated objectives for establishing online enterprise social networks (ESN) is to facilitate greater levels of innovation. But how do we know if we are being more innovative or not? One way is to wait to see what sorts of tangible outputs emerge from the cross enterprise communities within the network. This may result in some good individual cases, perhaps enough to claim an increase innovation capability. More likely these may be seen as random outcomes if the organisation doesn’t ‘feel’ like its being more innovative. In a recent article on behaviours that can create an innovation culture, Rob Shelton identifies five key behaviours that can lead to creating an innovating culture. The behaviours were: broad based collaboration, measuring and rewarding intrapreneurs, emphasising speed and agility, thinking like a venture capitalist and balancing operational excellence and innovation.
Seeing How You Work, Changes How You Work - What's Your Online Persona?
Our SWOOP Personas are having a much bigger impact than I expected. For a quick summary of the five personas see our previous posts: Observer, Broadcaster, Responder, Catalyst and Engager. In summary, these personas provide you with insights into your online behaviour on your enterprise social network.
Identifying Key Connectors/Informal Leaders at Scale
A recent article by Reid Carpenter on uncovering authentic informal leaders reminds us that in a post-industrial economy, the powerbrokers are less likely to be identified by their C-Level formal titles, and more likely to be identified through word of mouth. New emerging organisational forms like Holocracies and Business Networks will live and die by the strength of their informal leaders. The importance of the connector is nothing new. Seth Godin wrote a book about ‘linchpins’; we have also blogged about the Quiet Achiever. There are now many sources of advice on how to recognise a genuine connector/informal leader. The challenge exists however, on how we identify these new informal leaders at scale?
AirBnB vs Booking.com….your preference?
Having spent the last week immersed in ‘Platfirms’ (platform businesses) I now have some time to reflect as we leisurely wind our way through the French Pyrenees. In preparing for this trip I drew on my favourite accommodation platforms Airbnb and Booking.com. I’ll be up front and say I do have a preference for Airbnb. However, Booking.com tends to come into its own when looking for more affordable accommodation in the larger cities or towns. Putting this aside however, and reflecting on one of the key messages I have been making around relationship-centred measures over simple activity measures, I can see a subtle but clear difference between the two platforms when it comes to relationships. Both sites are B2C businesses looking to facilitate strong relationships between their suppliers (properties) and customers (consumers) through the social media they enable. I recently published this diagram to identify potential relationship connections being facilitated by platform businesses.
The Age of the ‘Platfirm’
Platfirm? Is this a made up word? Well actually, yes. It’s the term Open Knowledge has coined to describe businesses whose core business model is the platform. The ‘Platfirm Age’ is the theme of this year’s social business forum (#SBF16) held in Milan, Italy each year. Essentially a ‘platfirm’ is a firm that facilitates exchanges within a business ecosystem of suppliers and consumers. The popular examples of ebay, Airbnb, Uber and Amazon are regularly talked about in platform conversations. In opening the forum, Open Knowledge Co-founder Rosario Sica provided some compelling statistics to demonstrate that we are indeed in a new age of platform enabled business models. In Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook we now have 4 of the top 5 companies in the world, by market capitalisation, being ‘Platfirms’. The issue of ‘Platfirm immigrants’ (as opposed to ‘platfirm natives’) was highlighted as a continuing challenge for traditional businesses wanting to get on the ‘from foot’, in either protecting or enhancing their businesses though platform thinking.
If Europe had an Enterprise Social Network would we still have Brexit?
Whether you are pro or con #Brexit there is much that we can learn from this result regarding the effects of social networking and social media. The early headline was that social media failed to predict the result. Well actually there are several other social media analysts claiming otherwise. Perhaps the biggest criticism of social media analytics is that the sample is biased toward those more comfortable with it. Given that those most comfortable with social media are the younger generation, and that this demographic overwhelmingly wanted to stay, might explain the erroneous prediction. For those social media analysts who correctly predicted the result, the basis was essentially the size of the social media audience that they were able to attract. However, critics would say that this result is biased by the proponents for a change from the status quo, are naturally going to be noisier. Using social media trends to make predictions about an issue that is nearly equally divided is a perilous task. But what about the more actively engaging Enterprise Social networks?
The Smoke and Mirrors of Enterprise Social Networking Metrics
Carrie Basham Young issued an ominous warning to enterprise social network community managers in her 2013 CMSWire article. “It’s time to realize that the metrics and data displayed to you inside your analytics dashboard aren't creating value, and in fact, might be causing you harm," she wrote.
Is Bridging the Enterprise–Consumer Social Networking Divide a Bridge too Far?
On the surface, Facebook@Work looks a lot like consumer Facebook. We have news feeds, groups, shared social media, discussions, hashtags and the like. Familiarity with the interface is one of the strong selling points for Facebook, but since its soft launch in 2015, it’s hardly set the world on fire.
Does your Community have a Key Player Risk?
An important characteristic of networks is that some individuals are more important to the performance of the network than others. In fact, if we were to plot the relative influence of individuals in a network, the degradation from the most influential to the least follows a power-law distribution.
The Doctor Is In: Practicing Enterprise ‘Social Radiology’
As we become increasingly consumed in our digital world, a common question we hear is “does our online behavior mimic how we are offline?”
Rely on Activity Measures from your Enterprise Social Network at your Peril
For most people “Social Analytics” means understanding consumer online behaviours. For businesses it is about understanding how best to take advantage of the social networking channels of Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and the like, to enhance your brand perception. Enterprise Social Networks (ESN) have essentially evolved from public social networks, with the activity based metrics migrating as well, with little thought to their effectiveness. Activity measures are typically available “out of the box” with ESNs. This is a BIG problem though! It doesn’t take too much research to find out that the Enterprise objectives for ESNs and those for external brand building are substantially different.
How Cohesive is your Community?
Social cohesion is synonymous with ‘community’. Intuitively we experience social cohesion when we participate in high performing communities. Experienced ‘networkers’ lead these communities. New members are made to feel welcome. Community objectives are met through active engagement between members. High performing online communities are a fertile field for knowledge sharing amongst its members. While qualitatively we can experience and differentiate a good community from a poor one, what measures are available to assist leaders in monitoring social cohesion in their communities? How can these measures be used to help grow social cohesion?
Can Collaboration Personas work with Sports Teams?
Professional sport these days is rife with in-depth analyses and statistics on player and team performance. Players are now often equipped with wearable devices to monitor their health and fitness by the minute. Increased betting on sport has added a whole new dimension to the desire for predictive analytics and anything that might assist the punters in predicting the result of a game.
Is Being a ‘Lurker’ a Good or Bad Thing?
Lurkers are often painted in a negative context, as those that take but don’t give back. Sometimes, however, communities are designed for lurkers/observers e.g. Technical Support Forums. But even in this context one could argue that a lurker benefiting from some expert advice might still add value by acknowledging an expert contribution. So how should lurkers/observers be viewed?
Is There a Place for ‘Broadcasters’ on Conversational Platforms? SWOOP: Broadcaster Persona
This post continues the series the deeper dives into the specific measures included in the SWOOP Collaboration Framework #swoopframework. The ‘Broadcaster’ behavioural persona; is the fourth collaboration persona with the ‘Engager’, ‘Catalyst’ and ‘Responder’ personas.
Can You Squeeze Real Value from Artificial Intelligence?
It’s 1985 and I’m at UCLA, attending my very first International Joint Conference on artificial intelligence. As a young researcher tasked with pioneering AI in my corporate research lab, this is an exciting opportunity. We are at the very peak of the AI hype curve.
Marcus Dawe Joins SWOOP Board
We are thrilled to announce that Marcus Dawe has joined our SWOOP board. Here we have an exclusive interview with Marcus where he explains what attracted him to SWOOP and how he balances it all as a serial tech entrepreneur.
Are you a Responder?
This post continues the series the deeper dives into the specific measures included in the SWOOP Collaboration Framework #swoopframework. The ‘Responder’ Behavioural Persona is the third positive collaboration persona with the ‘Engager’ and ‘Catalyst’ personas.
Swoop Persona: Are you a ‘Catalyst’ for Innovation Online? Here’s how you can find out.
This post continues the series of deeper dives into the specific measures included in the SWOOP Collaboration framework #swoopframework. The ‘Catalyst’ behavioural persona, in our view, is the next most desirable collaboration persona after the ‘Engager’. Catalysts are regularly seen as change agents and innovators.
Swoop Persona: Are you an Online ‘Engager’?
This post is the first in a longer series of posts devoted to a deeper dive into the specific measures included in the SWOOP Collaboration Framework #swoopframework. We are starting with the ‘Engager’ Behavioural Persona; in our view the most desirable collaboration persona.