Beaconhill NW

On Wednesday, Jive Software will host a live webcast titled:

Facebook for Spies:  Enabling Social Collaboration in a Community Trained not to Collaborate

In September 2008, the federal government introduced secure social networking capabilities to the US intelligence community to share insights, debate, and communicate. Called “A-Space” (Analyst Space), the initiative’s goal — like intelligence analysis in general — is to protect the US by assessing all the information available across the Department of Defense’s spy agencies.

DIA Program Manager Ahmad Ishaq will discuss the impetus behind A-Space and social software across an organization specifically trained not to share information, how A-Space was launched, the successes to date, future plans, as well as share best practices that are applicable to any industry or private company. He’ll also share how this secure community has helped unify a community to take advantage of intelligence, ideas, and innovations across multiple, globally distributed agencies.

Learn how to:

• Create low barriers to entry and improve adoption rates of Enterprise 2.0 initiatives
• Enable a governance model that works in the new social collaboration paradigm
• Align Enterprise 2.0 tools to speak the language of business
• Study community patterns and don’t be afraid to restart pieces that fail

Get free resources:

• Gartner, Inc. Report: 2009 Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workforce
• Forrester Wave Report: Community Platforms, Q1 2009

Get signed up here

I was having coffee with a friend recently and we were discussing funny things that we tweet and how we tend to tweet.  We are starting to see social media as part of everyday life for work, home, and even church.

How is social media changing what you do?

Here’s a video interview I did this morning with Guy Walker from ARC (Association of Related Churches)

About two years ago Forrester published a report on Social Technographics.

“At the heart of Social Technographics is consumer data that looks at how consumers approach social technologies – not just the adoption of individual technologies. We group consumers into six different categories of participation – and participation at one level may or may not overlap with participation at other levels. We use the metaphor of a ladder to show this, with the rungs at the higher end of the ladder indicating a higher level of participation.”

Forrester has now added a new rung, “Conversationalists”.

Conversationalists reflects two changes. First, it includes not just Twitter members, but also people who update social network status to converse (since this activity in Facebook is actually more prevalent than tweeting). And second, we include only people who update at least weekly, since anything less than this isn’t much of a conversation.

Conversationalists intrigue me. They’re 56% female, more than any other group in the ladder. While they’re among the youngest of the groups, 70% are still 30 and up.

The data from this survey continues the trends from the last two years — Spectators are maxing out at around 70%, Joiners are still growing rapidly, and Creators are still growing slowly.

Forrester suggests three ways you can use this info:

1. Convince your boss this stuff is for real, and that if you haven’t jumped on it, you’re late.

2. Profile your customer base, and see what they’re ready for, before planning a project to reach out to them. (After all, People is the first step in the POST process.)

3. Segment your audience; build different strategies for different segments. (Social is so prevalent now that a single approach for your company is probably too broad.)

How will you use it?

We now find the experts (i.e., social media consultants and lawyers) saying, “Businesses Need to Formalize Their Social Media Policies.” According to one study,

Only 1 in 7 companies have formalized a process for adopting and deploying these tools, however. Only 1 in 5 of the interviewed companies have created internal policies that govern the use of these tools by their employees. As the researchers noted, quite a few companies struggle with finding the right balance between ‘the social and personal nature of these tools while maintaining some amount of corporate oversight.’”

According to Michael Hyatt, this is  “hogwash.” This is a solution in search of a problem.

Your company doesn’t need a social media policy and here are five reasons why:

1. Your people can be trusted.
2. Social media are just one more way to communicate.
3. More rules only make your company more bureaucratic.
4. Formal policies only discourage people from participating.
5. You probably already have policies that govern inappropriate behavior. This is the real kicker. You likely already have an employee handbook in place that speaks to what is appropriate and what is inappropriate. At Thomas Nelson, for example, our handbook provides various examples of “Personal Conduct Violations.” We specifically forbid:
   • Insensitivity to customers
   • Spreading false statements about other employees or the company
   • Profanity
   • Abusive language about a supervisor or co-worker
   • Unauthorized release of confidential information
   • Disruptive or inappropriate behavior
   • Discriminating or harassing behavior towards a co-worker
   • Indecent or immoral behavior

   You can commit any of these violations in whatever media you choose: in person, over the phone, via email, and yes, via social media. Why do we need one more policy to regulate this particular technology? The short answer is, “we don’t.”

If you really must have a policy, Mr. Hyatt suggests this one:

Use whatever social media you want. Feel free to use it on company time. Just use common sense and remember that if you publicly identify yourself with the company’s brand then act in a manner consistent with that brand. It’s in all of our best interests to do so.

I got quite a few laughs from these cartoons.

What do you remember from Social Media in 2009?

-Phishing Scams on Twitter

-The lame ReTweet feature

-Twitter Spam…bleh…

What else can you remember?

[ht to ReadWriteWeb]

Last night I had a dream that I was visited by the online ghosts of Christmas past, present and yet to come…

Unfortunately, social media and blogging was so new that the Marley brothers were asking me questions about whether there was an app they could use to update their statuses while in the afterlife…

The Ghost of Online Past…

The ghost  of the past took me to Christmas last year at my in-law’s house.

ME:”Don’t you have anything older than this?”

GCP:”I’m here to take you back to when you started building your online prescence”

I was shown how I sat for hours on my laptop while the rest of the family played cards, watched movies, and spent time together.

The Ghost of the Online Present…

The Ghost of the Online Present took me on a blog tour…We ended up on a post on Michael Hyatt’s blog about the perfect moment…but Michael’s blog was getting an overhaul and we couldn’t read any of the posts.

The Ghost of Online Yet-To-Come

This ghost was still in beta and had a lot of bugs.  He had no idea what to show me.  We ended up over at John Saddington’s blog and read “Personal Web and Technology Goals for 2010″

NOTE: I’m a changed man.  I’m leaving the laptop and the Blackberry at home tonight while we spend two nights at the in-laws.

Merry Christmas to you all.

These are 7 questions that have been keeping me up at night since I read them this weekend on Chris Brogan’s blog:

What are the basic, bare-bones components of our business? – Use small words. Describe it as briefly as you can. No matter if you THINK you know the business, try it again.

How do we share? – Inside the business, outside the business, it’s important to figure this out. Think broadly about “share.” With social tools, there are lots of implications, but inside the company, it’s crazy and potentially bit.

How do we collaborate? – Similar but different to sharing, the question is: now that we have these amazing tools, how do we best apply them to collaborative efforts: business-to-customer, customer-to-customer, business-to-business, etc. The last of these, business-to-business, is harder than you think. Do you dare open your company up for external collaboration? Software companies do it all the time. Would it work for you?

How do we wire new networks? – Let’s accept that social software like Facebook and Twitter are part of what’s next. How do we tap these in concerted ways? How do we build interactivity for our own business purposes into these tools? And here’s one: what would happen if one of them went away? Do you have a plan b?

How do we make new distribution points? – I have a new favorite thing to say at conferences with regards to distribution: Walmart and the Mafia are both masters of it. In both cases, they learned how to bypass prior roadblocks, they learned how to shift materials faster into buyers’ hands. They know how to distinguish between buyers and non-buyers. Do you? And are you expanding your distribution? Are you jumping gates?

How do we develop relationships that yield? – It’s great to have 100,000 friends on Twitter. How many take action? Of the 36,000 folks who subscribe to my blog, I usually get between 50-100 comments per post. That’s less than 1/3 of 1%. If comments were my business, I’d say that stinks. Relationships that yield are how we separate “friends” or “community members” from “customers” in our various business buckets. They overlap, but for the sake of this question, think strongly about “yield” and what it means to you.

Where is that yield and how do we extract value? – You’ll note that I don’t ask you for much in the way of money. I like to ask big companies for it. You? I like to give things away for free, because it’s also a strong way to advertise what I know, because I want you to succeed, etc. But somewhere along the line, baby needs to eat. Where do you extract value from your efforts? (This one is particularly tricky and important.)

In his Fast Company article this week, Sam Ford used a quote about the death of the incomparable Capt. Lou Albano:

“Somebody once said that to understand America, you have to understand pro wrestling.”

Ford found

“wrestling often acts as a carnival mirror to our culture, stretching and magnifying the underlying fears, prejudices and tension points amongst us. However, I think wrestling provides all sorts of learning that corporate America should pay attention to as well.”

8 things companies can take away from Pro-Wrestling:

-An Appropriate Level of Spectacle Is Crucial: In pro wrestling, steel cages are always 15 feet high. Tall competitors are nearly 7 feet tall. Crowds are always “hanging from the rafters.” Wrestling shows pull out all the stops to make their shows as dramatic as possible. On the other hand, wrestling promoters can’t overdo it. Case-in-point: the now defunct-World Championship Wrestling put on a live three-hour television show every week, with the announcers constantly proclaiming it was “the biggest main event in the history of the show.” Eventually, nothing they did could feel special anymore. While corporate communicators may not want to be so guilty of exaggeration and hyperbole, big events should always be conducted with a dramatic flair. However, it’s also crucial to save that drama for the particularly “big” moments (in the case of the WWE, big pay-per-view events like Wrestlemania) so that it will be truly effective.

-Humor and Charisma Always Make a Connection: Many a wrestling villain has suddenly become a hero because of his gift of gab on the microphone. Even when audiences don’t want to, they often can’t help but be won over. Likewise, many wrestlers pushed to be fan favorites, or “faces” in wrestling parlance, are met with silence if they don’t have that natural connection. Corporate communicators have to value that human connection and cannot underestimate the importance of wit, charm and authenticity. As they say in WWE, the best performers are those who “play themselves, with the volume turned up.”

-Create a Serialized Connection with Your Audience

-Your Audience Uses You as an Excuse to Build Community

-Your Audience Is Always Performing

-Take Every Opportunity to Listen to Your Focus Group

-Your Audience Will Tell You What They Think

-Listening Could Lead to New Business Models

To see Ford’s full article click here