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The Social Organization

This blog is about how social media is changing organizations.

The Importance of Social Networking to Information WorkYesterday

Collaboration software was designed for the information worker and it has indeed, helped tremendously by giving people more ways and channels to communicate and work together on content.  However, collaboration - in its more traditional definition - is too limited for what information workers need because it doesn't acknowledge the entire work flow, it typically helps with different points along that process.  What instigates collaboration in the first place?  What is the actionable results from the collaboration?   Who and what are the actors in collaboration and how trustworthy are they?  When are formal processes appropriate and when are more informal processes needed?

I like to think of this information work process as a circular thing, one work flow impacting and influencing others.  The process is sometimes kicked off formally - through perhaps a executive strategy discussion - and other times the process is kicked of by an informal conversation between two colleagues.  To me, the process looks something like - each step informed by the information source:

The other thing about information work that sometimes goes unacknowledged is...if yo

You Can Count Your Money...and You Can Count Your Leads...November 12

...but you can't count on how much money your leads will turn into.  At this morning's Social Media Breakfast the topic was ROI in Social Media. Brian Halligan of HubSpot and Matt Cutler of Visible Measures gave great presentations about how they track social media efforts.  Andrew McAfee, however, dropped a bit of a bombshell in saying that ROI from enterprise software cannot actually be calculated. Not that enterprise software in not valuable mind you...just that its value is too complex to effectively calculate with models.

This was a very interesting line of thinking for me for a variety of reasons. 

First, with the financial meltdown there is a lot of conversation swirling around about whether there was enough good old fashioned experience and intuition governing the big financial firms or whether they had become subserviant to their models which, apparently, told them that lending to people who couldn't pay them back was a good idea.  I'm being a bit cheeky here and I can't begin to know all the factors tha

My Twitter ElectionNovember 4

For me, this election has been very different than previous elections.  Yes, there are historic choices to be made and our country is embroiled in crisis.  But I've felt in the past that those conditions were true too.  What's different for me?  Twitter. And for me, it has profoundly changed how this election felt and for me it reinvigorated my faith in the democratic and civil processes we have in the US.

Why?  Instead of feeling talked at and broadcast to and somewhat isolated, I was participating in a national - and indeed international - town hall conversation.  This discussion added a low latency hum to the entire election season but spiked around events such as the conventions and the debates. Red, blue, and purple it was great to be a part of a giant conversation around issues in which we should all be involved.  By having these huge online conversations we all took just a little more responsibility for the issues themselves and that made the election more relevant.

For those of you who know me, you've probably heard my soapbox around the need to teach civics in schools again.  Why?  Because government is not this far away concept that is only there when you need something; it is the rules by which we collectively decide to live.  The FCC controls information transmission. The Department of Agriculture regulates our food supply. The Social Security administration manages retirement benefits.  These are, in effect, the values that we have coll

Women & Leadership Cont.October 27

Dennis Howlett, an enterprise software expert, blogger at ZDNet and my favorite contrarian Brit, was kind enough to consider me worthy of inclusion in his recent post on 'Women and Leadership'. It was an interesting request of his - he wanted me to react to a recent McKinsey Quarterly piece titled Centered Leadership - and it got me thinking quite a bit.  I read the Centered Leadership article but really didn't relate to the perspective. It identified five dimensions that make women in business successful:

• Meaning
• Managing Energy
• Positive Framing
• Connecting
• Engaging

This all sounded a bit like a visit to a zen spa with lots of therapeutic self-awareness sessions.  I don't mean to completely pan it but who doesn't need to find meaning in their work?  And who doesn't need to manage their energy levels? To me, it wasn't exactly helpful and so what I gave Dennis was my own list of top 10 things to remind yourself of as a women. However, like the other women Dennis interviewed I am not entirely comfortable making generalizations across gender lines. I do believe that there are more men with certain traits then women and vise versa but it's not a clear line.

After I submitted my list to Dennis I had a reall

The Rise of Innovation in the HubOctober 18

I've worked in technology in Silicon Valley and Boston and the environments are pretty different.  In Boston you often get the inferiority vibe...I guess now that our sports teams have won their share of national titles we have to keep the inferiority complex going somewhere.  From my perspective, having worked in both places, Bostonian technology people are simply less social.  In Silicon Valley, whether you are an engineer starting out or a tech executive who has been in the business 20 years, the weeks are filled with happy hours, launch parties, breakfast meetings, impromptu office parties and the like. In Boston you tend to go to work and go home. Breakfast meetings and launch parties happen occasionally but more often than not, they are intra-company affairs.  Networks in Boston take a long time to develop and are based primarily on who you have worked with in the past.  This may be partly geography - there are a few more logical hubs of activity in Silicon Valley, San Francisco's SOMA district, Palo Alto, & San Jose but that seems like a poor excuse since Waltham, Burlington, & Kendall Square in Cambridge now have significant critical mass.

Now that I am back in Boston and working in the social media world things seem to have changed and I wonder if we are at a